`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, potentialentity. 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 masturbating 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.
10
He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly did most of the talking. Maelcum remained on board Garvey.Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise.
`Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne,' Molly said. `If you have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's a bitch, if you're not used to it.'
They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls. The light, here, was filtered through fresh green masses of vegetation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose above them. The sun...
There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them, too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets... But it made no sense to his body.
`Jesus,' he said, `I like this less than SAS.'
`Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month.'
`Wanna go somewhere, lie down.'
`Okay. I got our keys.' She touched his shoulder. `What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined.'
He shook his head. `I dunno, yet. Wait.'
`Okay. We get a cab or something.' She took his hand and led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the season's Paris furs.
`Unreal,' he said, looking up again.
`Nah,' she responded, assuming he meant the furs, `grow it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?'
`It's just a big tube and they pour things through it,' Molly said. `Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the well.'
Armitage had booked them into a place called the Intercontinental, a sloping glass-fronted cliff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. `Yeah,' he said, `lotta money.'
She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed. `Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in Europe.'
`We who?'
`Nobody,' she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. `You said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep.'
`Yeah,' Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheekbones. `Yeah, this is some place.'
The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered in abstract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of recorded cloud. `Yeah,' he said, `sleep.'
Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that were like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke repeatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equivalent to a case of beer.
Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.
Linda.
Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had her killed.
Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward... The Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told himself, lighting up. No reason.
Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth summer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a striped mattress with no sheets.
He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.
They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene. `Kill the fuckers,' she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, `burn 'em.' Drunk, Case rummaged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Marlene's previous -and, Case suspected at the time, still occasional -boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight. Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
The a
ir in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered.
`Shit!' Marlene behind him, swaying. `Stupid! You didn't burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!' Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.
In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.
When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump, taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental.
In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor would attract too much attention.
`Christ,' he said, standing naked in front of the mirror, `you think that looks real?' She was using the last of the tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
`Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn't enough to do your foot.' She stood, tossing the empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.
`What about you,' he said, `you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.'
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. `I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay.'
Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the mirror. `Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?' He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. `You sleep okay? You notice any lights?'
`You were dreaming,' she said.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow, studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd be doing it through Wintermute.
`And it was like real?' she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. `Like simstim?'
He said it was. `Real as this,' he added, looking around. `Maybe more.'
The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature, the girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba.
`What's that smell?' he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
`The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.'
Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
`Molly, love,' Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair, `you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I'm out.'
`Peter,' she said, `and what if I won't?' She smiled without showing her teeth.
`You will,' Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back.
`Give it to him,' Armitage said.
`Pig for it, aren't you?' She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. `He could off himself,' she said to Armitage.
`I have an audition this afternoon,' Riviera said. `I'll need to be at my best.' He cupped the foil packet in his upturned palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
`You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,' Armitage said. `On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours.'
`How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a JALtaxi?' Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes.
`Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.'
`How about me?' Molly asked. `I got chores today?'
`I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite direction.' Straylight, Case thought.
`How soon?' Case asked, meeting the pale stare.
`Soon,' Armitage said. `Get going, Case.'
`Mon, you doin'~ jus'~ fine,' Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. `Aerol say you doin'~ jus'~ fine.' Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it, Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle narrowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided, would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.
Aerol had ferried him out to Marcus Garveyin a skeletal scooter frame with a chemical engine.
`Two hour ago,' Maelcum said, `I take delivery of Babylon goods for you; nice Japan-boy inna yacht, mos'~ pretty yacht.'
Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Hosaka and fumbled into the straps of the web. `Well,' he said, `let's see it.'
Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts and carefully slit the plastic. He extracted a rectangular object and passed it to Case. `Thas part some gun, mon?'
`No,' Case said, turning it over, `but it's a weapon. It's virus.'
`Not on thisboy tug, mon,' Maelcum said firmly, reaching for the steel cassette.
`A program. Virus program. Can't get into you, can't even get into your software. I've got
to interface it through the deck, before it can work on anything.'
`Well. Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every what an'~ wherefore, you wanna know.'
`Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?'
Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, busying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn't sure why, but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS.
`What is this thing?' he asked the Hosaka. `Parcel for me.'
`Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, advises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems...'
`How about an AI?'
`Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.'
`Jesus Christ. What did you call it?'
`Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.'
`It's Chinese?'
`Yes.'
`Off.' Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into Zhongshan. `On,' he said, changing his mind. `Question. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?'
`Delay for interorbital transmission,' said the Hosaka.
`Code it. Standard commercial code.'
`Done.'
He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
`Reinhold Scientific A.G., Berne.'
`Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?'
It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-Ashpool.
`Dixie,' he said, jacking in, `what do you know about Chinese virus programs?'
`Not a whole hell of a lot.'
`Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?'
`No.'
Case sighed. `Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it'll cut an AI.'
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