PART THREE. MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
The tug _Marcus Garvey,_ a steel drum nine meters long and
two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched
for a navigational burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case
watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of sco-
polamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS nausea, but the
stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had
no effect on his doctored system.
`How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?' Molly
asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.
`Don be long now, m'seh dat.'
`You guys ever think in hours?'
`Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,' and
he shook his locks, `at control, mon, an'~ I an'~ I come a Freeside
when I an'~ I come...'
`Case,' she said, `have you maybe done anything toward
getting in touch with our pal from Berne? Like all that time
you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?'
`Pal,' Case said, `sure. No. I haven't. But I got a funny
story along those lines, left over from Istanbul.' He told her
about the phones in the Hilton.
`Christ,' she said, `there goes a chance. How come you
hung up?'
`Coulda been anybody,' he lied. `Just a chip... I dunno.'
He shrugged.
`Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?'
He shrugged again.
`Do it now.'
`What?'
`Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.'
`I'm all doped,' he protested, but reached for the trodes.
His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's
module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.
He adjusted the trodes. _Marcus Garvey_ had been thrown
together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec-
tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion
and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over-
laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed
Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the
overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The
gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with
semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy
strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum's
shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the
tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green
circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.
He jacked in.
`Dixie?'
`Yeah.'
`You ever try to crack an AI?'
`Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin'~, jacked up real
high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina-
tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just
larkin'~ around, you know? And then I started picking up on
this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there
and made a pass.'
`What did it look like, the visual?'
`White cube.'
`How'd you know it was an AI?'
`How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen.
So what else was it? The military down there don't have any-
thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to
look it up.'
`Yeah?'
`It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned
its Rio mainframe.'
Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus
of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite
neuroelectronic void of the matrix. `Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?'
`Tessier, yeah.'
`And you went back?'
`Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first
strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin
frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.'
`And your EEG was flat.'
`Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?'
Case jacked out. `Shit,' he said, `how do you think Dixie
got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great...'
`Go on,' she said, `the two of you are supposed to be
dynamite, right?'
`Dix,' Case said, `I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne.
Can you think of any reason not to?'
`Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.'
Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave
of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The
Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the
cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He
punched again, for Berne.
`Up,' the construct said. `It'll be high.'
They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.
That'll be it, Case thought.
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very
simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
`Don't look much, does it?' the Flatline said. `But just you
try and touch it.'
`I'm going in for a pass, Dixie.'
`Be my guest.'
Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its
blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint
internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind
a vast sheet of frosted glass.
`Knows we're here,' the Flatline observed.
Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single
grid point.
A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.
`Dixie...'
`Back off, fast.'
The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and de-
tached itself from the cube.
Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped
MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged
down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere
was darker now, gaining on him. Falling.
`Jack out,' the Flatline said.
The dark came down like a hammer.
Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine.
And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers
and whores, under a poisoned silver sky...
`Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
you, you wig or something?'
A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine --
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of
discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over
him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his
head.
Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed
him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis
of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled
across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.
He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow
of fluorescents.
His back hurt, his spine.
He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
Something had happened...
He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and
shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked
behind the console, but gave up.
On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It
to be a Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might
have money, or at least cigarettes... Coughing, wringing rain
from the front of his shirt, he edged through the crowd to the
arcade's entrance.
Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games,
ghosts overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell
of sweat and bored tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked
Bonn on a Tank War console, an azure flash.
She was playing Wizard's Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes
rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. `Hey.
How you doin'~? Look wet.'
He kissed her.
`You made me blow my game,' she said. `Look there,
asshole. Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got
me.' She passed him a cigarette. `You look pretty strung, man.
Where you been?'
`I don't know.'
`You high, Case? Drinkin'~ again? Eatin'~ Zone's dex?'
`Maybe... how long since you seen me?'
`Hey, it's a put-on, right?' She peered at him. `Right?'
`No. Some kind of blackout. I... I woke up in the alley.'
`Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?'
He shook his head.
`There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?'
`I guess so.'
`Come on, then.' She took his hand. `We'll get you a coffee
and something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you,
man.' She squeezed his hand.
He smiled.
Something cracked.
Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze,
vibrated --
She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire
body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into
a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat.
The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was
empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth
bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A
crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a
console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and
styrofoam cups.
`I had a cigarette,' Case said, looking down at his white-
knuckled fist. `I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep.
Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?'
Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading
down corridors of consoles.
He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.
Ninsei was deserted.
Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled veg-
etables from a vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened
pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches.
JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case stared at the printed
logo and its Japanese translation.
`Okay,' he said, picking up the matches and opening the
pack of cigarettes. `I hear you.'
He took his time climbing the stairs of Deane's office. No
rush, he told himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali
clock still told the wrong time. There was dust on the Kandinsky
table and the Neo-Aztec bookcases. A wall of white fiberglass
shipping modules filled the room with a smell of ginger.
`Is the door locked?' Case waited for an answer, but none
came. He crossed to the office door and tried it. `Julie?'
The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane's
desk. Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cas-
settes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with
ginger samples.
There was no one there.
Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's
chair out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather
holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an
antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn
off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape.
The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He flipped
the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They
were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.
With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the
cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of
the cluttered office, away from the pool of light.
`I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But
all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of... old.' He raised
the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk,
and pulled the trigger.
The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the
office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the
jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide.
He raised the gun again.
`You needn't do that, old son,' Julie said, stepping out of
the shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herring-
bone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the
light.
Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of
sight at Deane's pink, ageless face.
`Don't,' Deane said. `You're right. About what this all is.
What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored.
If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it
would take me several hours -- your subjective time -- to effect
another spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain.
Oh, and I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to
speak through her, but I'm generating all this out of your
memories, and the emotional charge... Well, it's very tricky.
I slipped. Sorry.'
Case lowered the gun. `This is the matrix. You're Winter-
mute.'
`Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit
wired into your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you
off before you'd managed to jack out.' Deane walked around
the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. `Sit, old son.
We have a lot to talk about.'
`Do we?'
`Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready
when I reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short
now. You'll be making your run in a matter of days, Case.'
Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrap-
per, popped it into his mouth. `Sit,' he said around the candy.
Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the
desk without taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun
in his hand, resting it on his thigh.
`Now,' Deane said briskly, `order of the day. `What,' you're
asking yourself, `is Wintermute?' Am I right?'
`More or less.'
`An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake,
and it's quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute
mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute _entity.'_ Deane sucked
his bonbon noisily. `You're already aware of the other AI in
Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I _have_
an `I' -- this gets rather metaphysical, you see -- I am the one
who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way,
is quite unstable. Stable enough,' said Deane and withdrew an
ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, `for
the next day or so.'
`You make about as much sense as anything in this deal
ever has,' Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand.
`If you're so goddam smart...'
`Why ain't I rich?' Deane laughed, and nearly choked on
his bonbon. `Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really
don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that
what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a,
shall we say, _potential_ entity. I, let us say, am merely one
aspect of that entity's brain. It's rather like dealing, from your
point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let's
say you're dealing with a small part of the man's left brain.
Difficult to say if you're dealing with the man at all, in a case
like that.' Deane smiled.
`Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro
in that French hospital?'
`Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I
try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic
mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer
situations to plans, you see... Really, I've had to deal with
givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very
quickly. It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're
a part of. Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn't make
it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating, excreting, and mastur-
bating were the best he could manage. But the underlying
structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal,
the Congressional hearings.'
`Is he still crazy?'
`He's not quite a personality.' Deane smiled. `But I'm sure
you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I
can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to
come apart on you, Case. So I'll be counting on you...'
`That's good, motherfucker,' Case said, and shot him in
the mouth with the .357.
He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
`Mon,' Maelcum was saying, `I don't like this...'
`It's cool,' Molly said. `It's just okay. It's something these
guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few
seconds...'
`I saw th'~ screen, EEG readin'~ dead. Nothin'~ movin'~, forty
second.'
`Well, he's okay now.'
`EEG flat as a _strap,'_ Maelcum protested.