`Details available?' Riviera asked. `I need to plan a wardrobe, you see.'
`Learn the streets,' Armitage said, returning to the center of the model. `Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules Verne.'
Riviera rolled his eyes.
While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a dozen bright pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even Molly laughed.
Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty eyes.
`Sorry,' Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.
Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware of Molly crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her tension. He lay there confused. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. She was up and through the sheet of yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize she'd slashed it open.
`Don't you move, friend.'
Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the plastic. `Wha...?'
`Shut up.'
`You th'~ one, mon,' said a Zion voice. `Cateye, call 'em, call 'em Steppin'~ Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan'~ converse wi'~ you an'~ cowboy.'
`What brothers?'
`Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know...'
`We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman,' Case whispered.
`Make it special dark, now,' the man said. `Come. I an'~ I visit th'~ Founders.'
`You know how fast I can cut you, friend?'
`Don'~ stan'~ talkin'~, sister. Come.'
The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center of a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely covered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with resinous smoke.
`Steppin'~ Razor,' one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber. `Like unto a whippin'~ stick.'
`That is a story we have, sister,' said the other, `a religion story. We are glad you've come with Maelcum.'
`How come you don't talk the patois?' Molly asked.
`I came from Los Angeles,' the old man said. His dreadlocks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel wool. `Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Steppin'~ Razor.'
Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air.
The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. `Soon come, the Final Days... Voices. Voices cryin'~ inna wilderness, prophesyin'~ ruin unto Babylon...'
`Voices.' The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. `We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.'
`Call 'em Winter Mute,' said the other, making it two words.
Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.
`The Mute talked to us,' the first Founder said. `The Mute said we are to help you.'
`When was this?' Case asked.
`Thirty hours prior you dockin'~ Zion.'
`You ever hear this voice before?'
`No,' said the man from Los Angeles, `and we are uncertain of its meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets...'
`Listen,' Case said, `that's an AI, you know? Artificial intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like to --'
`Babylon,' broke in the other Founder, `mothers many demon, I an'~ I know. Multitude horde!'
`What was that you called me, old man?' Molly asked.
`Steppin'~ Razor. An'~ you bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart...'
`What kinda message the voice have?' Case asked.
`We were told to help you,' the other said, `that you might serve as a tool of Final Days.' His lined face was troubled. `We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug Garveyto the Babylon port of Freeside. And this we shall do.'
`Maelcum a rude boy,' said the other, `an'~ a righteous tug pilot.'
`But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker,to watch over Garvey.'
An awkward silence filled the dome.
`That's it?' Case asked. `You guys work for Armitage or what?'
`We rent you space,' said the Los Angeles Founder. `We have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon's law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been mistaken.'
`Measure twice, cut once,' said the other, softly.
`Come on, Case,' Molly said. `Let's get back before the man figures out we're gone.'
`Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister.'
9
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 scopolamine. 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 Garveyhad been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows overlaying 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, multinationals, 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 anything 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 Au
thority, 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 detached 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 vegetables 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 cassettes, 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 herringbone, 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 Wintermute.'
`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 wrapper, 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 havean `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...'
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