PART ONE. CHIBA CITY BLUES

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. «It's not like I'm using,» Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. «It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency.» It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a web work of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with Joe boys,» Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. «Maybe some business with you, Case?» Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged

The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. «You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.» Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. «You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.» «Sure,» Case said, and sipped his beer. «Somebody's gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you.» The whore's giggle went up an octave. «Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's a close personal friend of mine.» She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left. «Jesus,» Case said, «what kind a creep joint you running here? Man can't have a drink.» «Ha,» Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, «Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value.» As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria. Ratz grunted. «An angel passed.» «The Chinese,» bellowed a drunken Australian, «Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate….» «Now that,» Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, «that is so much bullshit.»

The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that Memphis hotel. A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…. The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

«I saw your girl last night,» Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin. «I don't have one,» he said, and drank. «Miss Linda Lee.» Case shook his head. «No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?» The bartender's small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. «I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.» «You're breaking my heart, Ratz.» He finished his beer, paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat. Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data. He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.

Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because-still smiling— they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal. In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty, he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in the shadow land of black medicine. Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing, and micro bionics, Chiba was a magnet for the Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures. In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads. Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.

Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de The, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double espresso. It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls. The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon. At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks. Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol. Alone at a table in the Jarre de The, with the octagon coming on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee. He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline…. And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a port side coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight. Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets at the hover port and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white loafers and cling wrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a child. It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo. He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random impacts required to create a surface like that. The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plastics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never be wiped away. «Hey. Case, good buddy….» He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers.

«I been lookin' for you, man.» She took a seat opposite him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked her arms for signs of terms or the needle. «Want a cigarette?» She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle pocket and offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a red plastic tube. «You sleep in' okay, Case? You look tired.» Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta. The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map. «Not if I remember to take my pills,» he said, as a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her locked across the small of his back. All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. «Wage,» she said, narrowing her eyes. «He wants to see you with a hole in your face.» She lit her own cigarette. «Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?» «No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys.» «I don't owe him enough. He does me, he's out the money anyway.» He shrugged.

«Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to be the example. You seriously better watch it.» «Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?» «Sleep.» She shook her head. «Sure, Case.» She shivered, hunched forward over the table. Her face was filmed with sweat. «Here,» he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker, coming up with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her. «You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage.» There was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read, something he'd never seen there before. «I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more coming,» he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a zippered pocket. «You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick.» «I'll see you, Linda,» he said, getting up. «Sure.» A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her pupils. Sanpaku. «You watch your back, man.» He nodded, anxious to be gone. He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him, saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.

Friday night on Ninsei. He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right hand. Was it authentic? if that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic. The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was a gaijin crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species. of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire and commerce. There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? Would Wage have him killed to make an example? It didn't make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that. But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case's primary insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman's business is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had beep cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble, he felt the edge of a strange euphoria. The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He knew Wage hadn't liked that. Wage was his primary supplier, nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd Managed to forge links with the rigidly stratified criminal establishment beyond Night City's borders. Genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace something back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a dozen cities. Case found himself staring through a shop window. The place sold small bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flicknives, lighters, pocket VTRs, Sims Tim decks, weighted man— riki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against scarlet ultra suede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fish line, their centers stamped with dragons or yin yang symbols. They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome. «Julie,» he said to his stars. «Time to see old Julie. He'll know.»

Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he'd fly to Hong-Kong and order the year's suits and shirts. Sex-less and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of garments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian doll house. His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger. «You seem to be clean, old son,» said Deane's disembodied voice. «Do come in.» Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century, the office itself seemed to belong to its start. Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced behind a vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, drawer Ed cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes, scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get around to reassembling. «What brings you around, boy?» Deane asked, offering Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked paper. «Try one. Tins Ting Djahe, the very best.» Case refused the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg. «Julie I hear Wage wants to kill me.» «Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?» «People.» «People,» Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. «What sort of people? Friends?» Case nodded. «Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?» «I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to you?» «Haven't been in touch, of late.» Then he sighed. «If I did know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they are, you understand.» «Things?» «He's an important connection Case.» «Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?» «Not that I know of.» Deane shrugged. They might have been discussing the price of ginger. «If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore.» «Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?» «Loose lips, old son!» Deane grinned. The steel desk was jammed with a fortune in debugging gear. «Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage.»

Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his pale silk tie.

He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical boutique, closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a sub-cutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry the thing around in your pocket? Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied the reflection of the passing crowd. There. Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored glasses, dark clothing, slender. . . And gone. Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.

«Rent me a gun, Shin?» The boy smiled. «Two hour.» They stood together in the smell of fresh raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall. «You come back, two hour.» «I need one now, man. Got anything right now?» Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once been filled with powdered horseradish. He produced a slender package wrapped in gray plastic. «Taser. One hour, twenty New Yen. Thirty deposit.» «Shit. I don't need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna shoot somebody, understand?» The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horseradish cans. «Two hour.» He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the display of shuriken. He'd never thrown one in his life. He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank chip that gave his name as Charles Derek May. It beat Truman Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport. The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she had a few years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit of science. He took his slender roll of New Yen out of his pocket and showed it to her. «I want to buy a weapon.» She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives. «No,» he said, «I don't like knives.» She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight identical tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of tightly wound coil spring slid out and locked. «Cobra,» she said.

Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray. The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks. Case had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd settled for tucking the handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it made him feel better. The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it attracted a related clientele. Fridays and Saturdays were different. The regulars were still there, most of them, but they faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed on diem. As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight. Lonny Zone, the bar's resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud Dancers. Catching the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his long face slack and placid. «You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?» Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head. «You sure, man?» «Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago.» «Got some Joeboys with him? One of 'em thin, dark hair, maybe a black jacket?» «No,» Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail. «Big boys. Graftees.» Zone's eyes showed very little white and less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and enormous. He stared into Case's face for a long time, then lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip. «Cobra,» he said, and raised an eyebrow. «You wanna fuck somebody up?» «See you, Lonny.» Case left the bar.

His tail was back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else. You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy. Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a high-speed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market…. Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck 'em in. Last thing they'll expect. He was half a block from the games arcade where he'd first met Linda Lee. He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sailors. One of them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf, subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. Someone scored a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated air burst drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight of unpainted chip board stairs. He'd come here once with Wage, to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man called Matsuga. He remembered the hallway, its stained matting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles. One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a travel poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined ideograms. «Get your security up here,» Case told her. Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-lacquered composition door at the far end. It popped, cheap hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness there, the white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob, leaning in with everything he had. Something snapped, and he was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Matsuga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind the arcade, filtering in through soot blown plastic. He made out a snake like loop of fiber optics protruding from a wall socket, a pile of discarded food containers, and the blade less nacelle of an electric fan. The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched. It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame. Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle, triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head of the corridor. Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to full extension. With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume he'd gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges. The cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel shaft amplifying his pulse. Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm, the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was. This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He might die here. They might have guns…. A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man's voice, shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. Another crash. And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer. Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid beats of his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel scraped the matting. The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window, blind with fear, his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and falling, all before he was conscious of what he'd done. The impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins. A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch framed a heap of discarded fiber optics and the chassis of a junked console. He'd fallen face forward on a slab of soggy chip board, he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The cubicle's window was a square of faint light. The alarm still oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the games. A head appeared, framed in the window, back lit by the fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he still couldn't read the features. Glint of silver across the eyes. «Shit,» someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern Sprawl. The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long count of twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was. He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.

Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22 long rifle, and Case would've preferred lead azide explosives to the simple Chinese hollow points Shin had sold him. Still it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across in the dark. He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon. The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, he'd decided, was gone and that was fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and it wouldn't wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick. Its windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideograms. If the place had another name, Case didn't know it; it was always referred to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an afterthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked length of rigid magnetic tape. Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he'd arrived in Chiba, but he'd never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places. The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistol grip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served the place as some combination of lobby and lawn. Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a lapanese teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side.

Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open without a key. The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot and waited for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated the manual latch. There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown temper foam slab that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from his pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his jacket. The coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall, opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages. Case took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hong-Kong number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung up. His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn't taking calls. He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku. A woman answered, something in Japanese. «Snake Man there?» «Very good to hear from you,» said Snake Man, coming in on an extension. «I've been expecting your call.» «I got the music you wanted.» Glancing at the cooler. «I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you front?» «Oh, man, I really need the money bad….» Snake Man hung up. «You shit « Case said to the humming receiver. He stared at the cheap little pistol. «Iffy,» he said, «it's all looking very iffy tonight.»

Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands in the pockets of his jacket; one held the rented pistol, the other the aluminum flask. Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh tilted against the wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly silent drunks. Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. «You look bad, friend artiste,» he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth. «I'm doing just fine,» said Case, and grinned like a skull. «Super fine.» He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands still in his pockets. «And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?» «Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?» «Proof against fear and being alone,» the bartender continued. «Listen to the fear. Maybe it's your friend.» «You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz? Somebody hurt?» «Crazy cut a security man.» He shrugged. «A girl, they say.» «I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I. . .» «Ah.» Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single line. He was looking past Case, toward the entrance. «I think you are about to.» Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. The speed sang in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery with sweat. «Herr Wage,» Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manipulator as if he expected it to be shaken. «How great a pleasure. Too seldom do you honor us.» Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face. It was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vat grown sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was flanked by his Joe boys, nearly identical young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.

«How you doing, Case?» «Gentlemen,» said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ashtray in his pink plastic claw, «I want no trouble here.» The ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of green plastic cascading onto the table top. «You understand?» «Hey, sweetheart,» said one of the Joe boys, «you wanna try that thing on me?» «Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt,» Ratz said, his tone conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun at the trio. The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies. «Technically nonlethal,» said Ratz. «Hey, Ratz,» Case said, «I owe you one.» The bartender shrugged. «Nothing, you owe me. These,» and he glowered at Wage and the Joe boys, «should know better. You don't take anybody off in the Chatsubo.» Wage coughed. «So who's talking about taking anybody off? We just wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together.» Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and level led it at Wage's crotch. «I hear you wanna do me.» Ratz's pink claw closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp. «Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill you?» Wage turned to the boy on his left. «You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me.» Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot of a barstool. The barrel of the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol clattered on the table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out of the chamber. «Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?» Wage asked. Linda. «Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?» The sailor moaned and vomited explosively. «Get him out of here,» Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette. Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out of his pocket and handed it to Wage. «All I got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move it fast. Had the rest of my roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now.» «You okay, Case?» The flask had already vanished behind a gunmetal lapel. «I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look bad. Like hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep.» «Yeah.» He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. «Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody.» He giggled. He picked up the .22's magazine and the one loose cartridge and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the other. «I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back.» «Go home,» said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with something like embarrassment. «Artiste. Go home.» He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered his way past the plastic doors.

«Bitch,» he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon was already cold and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from a street vendor's foam thimble and watched the sun come up. «You fly away, honey. Towns like this are for people who like the way down.» But that wasn't it, really, and he was finding it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy it for her, if she could find the right fence. And that business with the fifty; she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was about to rip him for the rest of what he had. When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on the desk. Different textbook. «Good buddy,» Case called across the plastic turf, «you don't need to tell me. I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key. Nice little tip for you, say fifty New ones?» The boy put down his book. «Woman,» Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with his thumb. «Silk.» He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back, nodded. «Thanks, ass hole,» Case said. On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to rent a black box that would open anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came on as he crawled in. «Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday night special you rented from the waiter?» She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands. «That you in the arcade?» He pulled the hatch down. «Where's Linda?» «Hit that latch switch.» He did. «That your girl? Linda?» He nodded. «She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the gun, man?» She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temper foam. «I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him for half what I paid. You want the money?» «No.» «Want some dry ice? All I got, right now.» «What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at the arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with nun chucks. « «Linda said you were gonna kill me.» «Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here.» «You aren't with Wage?» She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial. «I think you screwed up, Case. I showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.» «So what do you want, lady?» He sagged back against the hatch. «You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work for. Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you « «That's good.» «'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired.» She wore tight black glove leather jeans and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light. «If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy, Case? You look like you like to take stupid chances.» «Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem.» «That's fine, man.» The fletcher vanished into the black jacket. «Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life.» She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffee maker steamed on a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow balcony. «Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it.» She took off her black jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof, Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and legs felt like they were made out of wood. «Case.» He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. «My name is Armitage.» The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. «Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy.» Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation

rice paper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled. «Get your coffee, Case,» Molly said. «You're okay, but you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say.» She sat cross legged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table and refilled his cup. «Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?» Armitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. «Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case.» «What's that supposed to mean?» «Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name.» «Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out.» He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window and looked out over Tokyo Bay. «That isn't true. One unit made it back to Helsinki, Case.» Case shrugged, sipped coffee. «You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing micro light, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.» «Icebreakers,» Case said, over the rim of the red mug. «Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics.» «Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just be going….» «I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind.» «You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're rich enough to hire expensive razor girls to haul my ass up here, is all. I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else.» He crossed to the window and looked down. «That's where I live now.» «Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing you when you're not looking.» «Profile?» «We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year.» «We.» He met the faded blue eyes. «We who?» «What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case'?» Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again. Case's dreams always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one was over. «What would you say, Case?» Case looked out over the Bay and shivered. «I'd say you were full of shit.» Armitage nodded. «Then I'd ask what your terms were.» «Not very different than what you're used to, Case.» «Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,» Molly said from her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive puzzle. «He's coming apart at the seams.» «Terms,» Case said, «and now. Right now.» He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.

The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place from the round he'd made his first month in Chiba. «Scared, Case. You're real scared.» It was Sunday afternoon and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the bamboo. «It'll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do it. He'll put them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what that's worth?» She hooked thumbs in the belt loops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm. «You're street samurai,» he said. «How long you work for him?» «Couple of months.» «What about before that?» «For somebody else. Working girl, you know?» He nodded. «Funny, Case.» «What's funny?» «It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know how you're wired.» «You don't know me, sister.» «You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad luck.» «How about him? He okay, Molly?» The robot crab moved toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained. «What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass.» The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon righted it. Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for cigarettes. «In your shirt,» she said. «You want to answer my question?» He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an operating table. «Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something. He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he gets more all the time.» Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth. «Or maybe, maybe something's on to him….» She shrugged. «What's that mean?» «I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what we're really working for.» He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours . Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chain link. If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it. He'd avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Armitage's call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands. «If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet you.» The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.

Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine. Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given….

Hold still. Don't move. And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull. Goddamn don't you move. Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars. «Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!» She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one hand. «You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors.»

He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark. His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass…. «Case? It's Wednesday, Case.» She moved, rolling over, reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. «Here.» She put the bottle in his hand. «I can see in the dark, Case. Micro channel image-amps in my glasses.» «My back hurts.» «That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood too. Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff I dunno. Lot of injections. They didn't have to open anything up for the main show.» She settled back beside him. «It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve.» He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs. «I gotta punch deck, ' he heard himself say. He was groping for his clothes. «I gotta know….» She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. «Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor's orders. Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so.» He lay down again. «Where are we?» «Home. Cheap Hotel.» «Where's Armitage?» «Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl.» She touched his shoulder. «Roll over. I give a good massage.» He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temper foam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck. «How come you're not at the Hilton?» She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temper foam. His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down. «It's okay,» she said, «I can see.» Sound of the jeans peeling down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. «Don't,» she said, «fingerprints.»

Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.

On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar. «You seen Wage, Ratz?» «Not tonight.» Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly. «You see him, tell him I got his money.» «Luck changing, my artiste?» «Too soon to tell.»

«Well, I gotta see this guy,» Case said, watching his reflection in her glasses. «I got biz to cancel out of.» «Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight.» She stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips. «The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my people, you know?» Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.

«I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza, and they'll go down, understand?» he lied, his hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. «Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?» «Not what I'm paid for.» «What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is something else.» «Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to check us out with your smuggler.» She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table. «Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head . What is this about, exactly?» Deane ' s ghostly cough seemed to hang in the air between them. «Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone.» «You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any other way.» «Okay,» she said. «Go. But five Minutes. Any more and I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you're at it, you try to figure something out.» «What's that?» «Why I'm doing you the favor.» She turned and walked out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger. «Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?» asked Julie. «Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?» The bolts worked. «Slowly, Case,» said the voice. «Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,» Case said, taking his place in the swivel chair. «It's on all the time,» Deane said mildly, taking a gun from behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger-guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked very strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. «Just taking care, you Understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want.» «I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody.» «What's moving, old son'?» Deane's shirt was candy-striped cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.

«Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?» «Go-to on whom, old son?» «Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.» Deane put the pistol down. «Sit still, Case.» He tapped something out on a lap terminal. «It seems as though you know as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history. You said history.» He picked up the gun again, but didn't point it directly at Case. «What sort of history?» «The war. You in the war, Julie?» «The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks.» «Screaming Fist.» «Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that… great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology. They knew about the Russians' defenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.» Deane shrugged. «Turkey shoot for Ivan.» «Any of those guys make it out?» «Christ,'' Deane said, «it's been bloody years…. Though I do think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov gunship. Helicopter, you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. Special Forces types.» Deane sniffed. «Bloody hell.» Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.

«I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,» Deane said, putting the gun down. «Lovely place, Lisbon.» «In the service, Julie?» «Hardly. Though I did see action.» Deane smiled his pink smile. «Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets.» «Thanks, Julie. I owe you one.» «Hardly, Case. And goodbye.»

And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, waiting….

They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them to make a move. Then he'd taken her back to the Chat for a drink. «Wasting your time, cowboy,» Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket of his jacket. «How's that? You want one?» He held the pill out to her. «Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.» She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. «You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.» «Shit,» he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her. «Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen.» He did. Nothing did. Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights. «Sammi's,» Ratz said. «I'll pass,» Case said, «I hear they kill each other down there.» An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts. Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a port side warehouse, taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock preserving the pressure differential that supported the dome. Fluorescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close with the smell of sweat and concrete. None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear. No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters. Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men circled. The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten, the knives they held were just under a meter long. The knife-fighter's grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers curled, thumb aligned with blade. The knives seemed to move of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was smooth and still, watching. «I'll go find us some food,» Case said. She nodded, lost in contemplation of the dance. He didn't like this place. He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet. The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd. Teaks down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral. He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall waxy cartons of beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw that blood laced one figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers and over his knuckles. Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he'd see the matrix. Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance. Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn't worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy…. Hot tears blurred his vision. Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming-as one figure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering…. Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him her gray eyes blind with fear. She wore the same French fatigues.

And gone. Into shadow. Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he'd never be sure. Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes. Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran. Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms. He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser's wand. The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's legs. He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner's name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head. Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking. Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's image above the ring. Once a seamed European face danced in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.

«Case.» Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. «You okay?» Something mewlcd and bubbled in the dark behind her. He shook his head. «Fight's over, Case. Time to go home.» He tried to walk past her. back into the dark, where something was dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest. «Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for you. You haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM. Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money…. I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure.» Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line. Case felt as though his brain were jammed. «Who,» he said, «who sent them?» She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him to the port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft. The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.

PART TWO. THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION

Home. Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .

Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly…. He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn. Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor. Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an expanse of very new pink temper foam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chipboard, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane's fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's. The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel fire door. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the inter zone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art. He was home. He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred dream. Shopping. She'd taken him shopping. He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a Simstim deck, clothing with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper. The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell-to stick upright in a crack in the parquet. «Souvenir,» Molly said. «I noticed you were always looking at 'em.» He turned and saw her sitting cross legged on the bed, sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.

«Someone's coming later to secure the place,» Armitage said. He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned magnetic key in his hand. Molly was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took from her bag. «I can do it,» she said. «I got enough gear already. Infrascan perimeter, screamers…» «No,» he said, closing the door. «I want it tight.» «Suit yourself.» She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black cotton pants. «You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?» Case asked, from where he sat, his back against a wall. Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question. «Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate security,» Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a steaming mug of coffee. «That number you had them do on my pancreas, that's like a cop routine.» Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of Case. «You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me.» «Should l?» Case blew noisily on his coffee. «You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.» «Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.» «Good, because you have a new one.» «How's that?» Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage was smiling. «You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis.» Case blinked up at the smiling mask. «You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter.» Case looked at Molly. She shrugged. «Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases you find there.» Armitage handed him the magnetic key. «Go on. You'll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning.»

Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind-blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification. He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his life. First a child with hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager, face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics. He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat. With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7. They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker. Armitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece. «Where'd he go?» Case had asked Molly. «He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage it. Let's go down to the street.» She'd zipped herself into an old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored insets. «You know about that toxin shit, before?» he asked her, by the fountain. She shook her head. «You think it's true?» «Maybe, maybe not. Works either way.» «You know any way I can find out?» «No,» she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence. «That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a scan.» Then her fingers moved again: wait. «And you don't care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.» She laughed. «So what's he got on you? How's he got the working girl kinked?» »-Professional pride, baby, that's all.» And again the sign for silence. «We're gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan and get us a real breakfast.»

Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of glass tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that had lodged between his front teeth. He'd given up asking her where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign for silence were all he'd gotten in reply. She talked about the season's fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in California he'd never heard of. He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of newsprint went cart wheeling past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side; something to do with convection, and an overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl? he decided. She'd led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod. Maintaining connections. Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO

HOLOGRAFIX. The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it, Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that he couldn't follow. He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brushing the tip of the forefinger. The door swung inward and sheled him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look back.

The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across a doorway. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it. Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match, floored with white hospital tile molded in a non slip pattern of small raised disks. In the center stood a square, white-painted wooden table and four white folding chairs. The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the doorway. Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He helped the man lift it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained fingers secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan began to purr. «Time,» the man said, straightening up, «and counting. You know the rate, Moll.» «We need a scan, Finn. For implants.» «So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape. Straighten up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full threesixty.» Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking stands studded with sensors. The man took a small monitor from his pocket and squinted at it. «Something new in your head, yeah. Silicon. coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic carbons. Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but that's your business, right? Same with your claws.» «Get over here, Case.» He saw a scuffed X in black on the white floor. «Turn around. Slow.» «Guy's a virgin.» The man shrugged. «Some cheap dental work, is all.» «You read for biologicals?» Molly unzipped her green vest and took off the dark glasses. «You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we'll run a little biopsy.» He laughed, showing more of his yellow teeth. «Nah. Finn's word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs, no cortex bombs. You want me to shut the screen down?» «Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we'll want full screen for as long as we want it.» «Hey, that's fine by the Finn, Moll. You're only paying by the second.» They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. «We talk now. This is as private as I can afford.» «What about?» «What we're doing.» «What are we doing?» «Working for Armitage.» «And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?» «Yeah. I saw your profile, Case. And I've seen the rest of our shopping list, once. You ever work with the dead?» «No.» He watched his reflection in her glasses. «I could, I guess. I'm good at what I do.» The present tense made him nervous. «You know that the Dixie Flatline's dead?» He nodded. «Heart, I heard.» «You'll be working with his construct.» She smiled. «Taught you the ropes, huh? Him and Quine. I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole.» «Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?» Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table. «I can't see it. He'd never have sat still for it.» «Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass.» «Quine dead too?» «No such luck. He's in Europe. He doesn't come into this.» «Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free. He was the best. You know he died brain death three times?» She nodded. «Flat lined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. 'Boy, I was daid.' « «Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing Armitage since I signed on. But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu, a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets orders. Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a pillhead who's making one last wobble throught the burnout belt, and trade a program for the operation that'll fix him up. We could a bought twenty world class cowboys for what the market was ready to pay for that surgical program. You were good, but not that good….» She scratched the side of her nose. «Obviously makes sense to somebody,» he said. «Somebody big.» «Don't let me hurt your feelings.» She grinned. «We're gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flatline's construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault uptown. Tighter than an eel's ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they got all their new material for the fall season locked in there too. Steal that and we'd be richer than shit. But no, we gotta get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird.» «Yeah, it's all weird. You're weird, this hole's weird, and who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?» «Finn's an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software. This privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage to let him be our tech here, so when he shows up later, you never saw him. Got it?» «So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?» «I'm an easy make.» She smiled. «Anybody any good at what they do, that's what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.» He stared at her. «So tell me what you know about Armitage.» «For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any Screaming Fist. I checked. But that doesn't mean much. He doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out.» She shrugged. «Big deal. And starters is all I got.» She drummed her nails on the back of the chair. «But you are a cowboy, aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around.» She smiled. «He'd kill me.» «Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real bad. Besides, you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him, sure.» «What else is on that list you mentioned?» «Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name of Peter Riviera. Real ugly customer.» «Where's he?» «Dunno. But he's one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile.» She made a face. «God awful.» She stood up and stretched, catlike. «So we got an axis going, boy? We're together in this? Partners?» Case looked at her. «I gotta lotta choice, huh?» She laughed. «You got it, cowboy.»

«The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,» said the voice-over, «in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.» On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals— cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con. trot circuits of tanks and war planes. «Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding….»

«What's that?» Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector. «Kid's show.» A discontinuous flood of images as the selector cycled. «Off,» he said to the Hosaka. «You want to try now, Case?» Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside him. «You want me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone….» He shook his head. «No. Stay, doesn't matter.» He settled the black terry sweatband across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center. closed his eyes. Found the ridged face of the power stud. And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information. Please, he prayed, now-

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Now-

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray. Expanding— And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new worktables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black silk sleeping bag over his head. The security package taped to the steel fire door bleeped twice. «Entry requested,» it said. «Subject is cleared per my program.» «So open it.» Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage. «Christ,» said a hoarse voice, «I know that bitch can see in the dark….» A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. «Turn the lights on, okay?» Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch. «I'm the Finn,» said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case. «Case.» «Pleased to meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing some hardware for your boss, it looks like.» The Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-Sendai. «Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here is your problem, kid.» He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket, flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rectangle from the envelope. «Goddamn factory prototypes,» he said, tossing the thing down on the table. «Cast 'em into a block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows what else. We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked, right?» He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it away in an inside pocket. «What is it?» «It's a flip flop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai here, you can access live or recorded Sims Tim without having to jack out of the matrix.» «What for?» «I haven't got a clue. Know I'm fitting Moll for a broadcast rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access.» The Finn scratched his chin. «So now you get to find out just how tight those jeans really are, huh?»

Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in progress in one corner of the monitor screen. Cowboys didn't get into Simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a Simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but Simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn't feel it. The screen bleeped a two-second warning. The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiber optics. And one and two and-

Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points.

Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. Then he keyed the new switch. The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color…. She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes. The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought. Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room. «How you doing, Case?» He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply. Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating. The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright. He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black, afterward…. Her destination was one of the dubious software rental complexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush. Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear. «Larry, you in, man?» She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail . «Hey, Larry.» «Molly.» He nodded. «I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.» Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sport shirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed. «Molly's got a rider,» he said, «and Larry doesn't like that.» «Hey,» she said, «I didn't know you were so . . . sensitive. I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.» «I know you, lady?» The blank look returned. «You looking to buy some softs?» «I'm looking for the Moderns.» «You got a rider, Molly. This says.» He tapped the black splinter. «Somebody else using your eyes.» «My partner.» «Tell your partner to go.» «Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.» «What are you talking about, lady?» «Case, you take off,» she said, and he hit the switch, instantly back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace. «Panther Moderns,» he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. «Five minute precis.» «Ready,» the computer said.

It wasn't a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Spraw] at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. «Go,» he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services. The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight one piece. Mimetic polycarbon. Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.

«Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,» someone said, «it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon isn't a form of terrorism.» Dr. RamBali smiled. «There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent….» «Skip it,» Case said.

Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the Hosaka's precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Moderns were a soft head variant on the Scientists. If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists. The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark— cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He'd seen that before. «You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you,» Molly said. Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net ice. This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice. It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days. And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for nine straight hours. The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. «I said a week,» Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. «You took your own good time.» «Balls,» Case said, smiling at the screen. «That's good work, Armitage.» «Yes,» Armitage admitted, «but don't let it go to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy.»

«Love you, Cat Mother,» whispered the Panther Modern's link man. His voice was modulated static in Case's headset. «Atlanta, Brood. Looks go. Go, got it?» Molly's voice was slightly clearer. «To hear is to obey.» The Moderns were using some kind of chicken wire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan. They chose to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly's signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall as the Sense/Net building. Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone managed to intercept Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her voice, the code would tip the Moderns. If she remained in the building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely she'd be coming out at all. Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place, and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diversion for the Sense/Net security people. His job was to make sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One. He jacked in and triggered his program. «Mainline,» breathed the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He hit the Simstim and flipped into her sensorium. The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micro pore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the Simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted. He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card. The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate' s code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived. He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby. 12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve. At midnight, synch Ed with the chip behind Molly's eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. «Mainline.» Nine Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure sub sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.

Case hit the switch as his program surged through the gates of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator. «Excuse me, but are you an employee?» The guard raised his eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. «No,» she said, driving the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man's solar plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator. Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a black box from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the lock that secured the panel's circuitry.

The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into the Sense/Net building's internal video system. At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash…. The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent. At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five minutes after midnight, as the Moderns' message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed. Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system, were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker's.

Case triggered his second program. A carefully engineered virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial commands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research materials. «Boston,» Molly's voice came across the link, «I'm downstairs.» Case switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet, exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with micro pore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she unfolded the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on over the white mesh top.

12:06:26. Case's virus had bored a window through the library's command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the non space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen:j

dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks. Here. This one. Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub— program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands. Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the window. Done.

In the Sense/Net lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly behind a low rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video camera. They both wore chameleon suits. «Tacticals are spray— ing foam barricades now,» one noted, speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. «Rapids are still trying to land their copter.»

Case hit the Sim-Stim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone. Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading in his left thigh. «What's happening, Brood?» he asked the link man. «I dunno, Cutter. Mother's not talking. Wait.» Case's program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of crimson neon extended from the center of the restored window to the shifting outline of his icebreaker. He didn't have time to wait. Taking a deep breath, he flipped again. Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on the corridor wall. In the loft, Case groaned. The second step took her over an outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve bright with fresh blood. Glimpse of a shattered fiberglass shock stave. Her vision seemed to have narrowed to a tunnel. With the third step, Case screamed and found himself back in the matrix. «Brood? Boston, baby. . .» Her voice tight with pain. She coughed. «Little problem with the natives. Think one of them broke my leg.» «What you need now, Cat Mother?» The link man's voice was indistinct, nearly lost behind static. Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against the wall, taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled through the contents of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of plastic studded with a rainbow of dermadisks. She selected three and thumbed them hard against her left wrist, over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back arched convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs. She sighed and slowly relaxed. «Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I'll need a medical team when l come out. Tell my people. Cutter, I'm two minutes from target. Can you hold?» «Tell her I'm in and holding,» Case said. Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced back, once, Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. One of them seemed to have no eyes. «Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat Mother. Foam barricades. Lobby's getting juicy.» «Pretty juicy down here,» she said, swinging herself through a pair of gray steel doors. «Almost there, Cutter.» Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his forehead. He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead with a towel, took a quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle beside the Hosaka, and checked the map of the library displayed on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through the outline of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indicated the location of the Dixie Flat line's construct. He wondered what it was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. With enough endorphin analog, she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness that held him in the chair and replaced the trodes. Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip. The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the materials stored here had to be physically removed before they could be interfaced. Molly hobbled between rows of identical gray lockers. «Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood,» Case said. «Five more and ten left, Cat Mother,» the link man said. She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between two lockers, her cheeks wet, eyes blank. Molly ignored her. Case wondered what the Moderns had done to provoke that level of terror. He knew it had something to do with a hoaxed threat, but he' d been too involved with his ice to follow Molly ' s explanation. «That's it,» Case said, but she'd already stopped in front of the cabinet that held the construct. Its lines reminded Case of the Neo-Aztec bookcases in Julie Deane's anteroom in Chiba. «Do it, Cutter,» Molly said. Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing down the crimson thread that pierced the library ice. Five separate alarm systems were convinced that they were still operative. The three elaborate locks deactivated, but considered themselves to have remained locked. The library's central bank suffered a minute shift in its permanent memory: the construct had been removed, per executive order, a month before. Checking for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian would find the records erased. The door swung open on silent hinges. «0467839,» Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit from the rack. It resembled the magazine of a large assault rifle, its surfaces covered with warning decals and security ratings. Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped. He withdrew the line through the library ice. It whipped back into his program, automatically triggering a full system reversal. The Sense/Net gates snapped past him as he backed out, subprograms whirling back into the core of the icebreaker as he passed the gates where they had been stationed. «Out, Brood,» he said, and slumped in his chair. After the concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and still retain awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days to discover the theft of the construct. The key would be the deflection of the Los Angeles transfer, which coincided too neatly with the Modern's terror run. He doubted that the three security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live to talk about it. He flipped. The elevator, with Molly's black box taped beside the control panel, remained where she'd left it. The guard still lay curled on the floor. Case noticed the term on his neck for the first time. Something of Molly's, to keep him under. She stepped over him and removed the black box before punching LOBBY. As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward out of the crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall with her head. Molly ignored her, bending over to peel the derm from the guard's neck. Then she kicked the white pants and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the dark glasses after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her forehead. The construct, in the suit's kangaroo pocket, dug into her sternum when she moved. She stepped out.

Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area. The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had surged for the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced that they were containing a horde of potential killers, were cooperating with an uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades. The hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant background for the sound the crowd made as it surged back and forth across the lobby's marble floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound. Neither, apparently, had Molly. «Jesus,» she said, and hesitated. It was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of MW and total fear. The lobby floor was covered with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled scrolls of yellow printout. «C'mon, sister. We're for out. « The eyes of the two Moderns stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that raged behind them. «You hurt? C'mon. Tommy'll walk you.» Tommy handed something to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon. «Chicago,» she said, «I'm on my way.» And then she was falling, not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some blood warm well, into silence and the dark.

The Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lupus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. His pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat's. Case watched the suit crawl with color and texture. «You let it getout of control,» Armitage said. He stood in the center of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an expensive-looking trench coat. «Chaos, Mr. Who,» Lupus Yonderboy said. «That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with her. Not with you, Mr. Who.» His suit had taken on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale avocado. «She needed her medical team. She's with them. We'll watch out for her. Everything's fine.» He smiled again. «Pay him,» Case said. Armitage glared at him. «We don't have the goods.» «Your woman has it,» Yonderboy said. «Pay him.» Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New Yen from the pockets of his trench coat. «You want to count it?» he asked Yonder boy. «No,» the Panther Modern said. «You'll pay. You're a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name.» «I hope that isn't a threat,» Armitage said. «That's business,» said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the single pocket on the front of his suit. The phone rang. Case answered. «Molly,» he told Armitage, handing him the phone.

The Sprawl's geodesics were lightening into predawn gray as Case left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. He couldn't sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone, then Armitage, and Molly was in surgery somewhere. Vibration beneath his feet as a train hissed past. Sirens Doppler Ed in the distance. He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage's toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner as he walked. It didn't seem real. Neither did the fear and agony he'd seen through Molly's eyes in the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself trying to remember the faces of the three people he'd killed in Chiba. The men were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty plastic cylinders rattling in its bed. «Case.» He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back. «Message for you, Case.» Lupus Yonder boy's suit cycled through pure primaries. «Pardon. Not to startle you.» Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a head taller than the Modern. «You ought a be careful, Yonder boy.» «This is the message. Winter mute.» He spelled it out. «From you?» Case took a step forward. «No,» Yonderboy said. «For you.» «Who from?» «Winter mute,» Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of pink hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow against old concrete. He executed a strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone. No. There. Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The eyes winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone. Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers, leaning back against peeling brickwork. Ninsei had been a lot simpler.

The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel each coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping. «He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off.» «I ran into one of your pals,» he said, «a Modern.» «Yeah? Which one?» «Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message.» He passed her a paper napkin with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. «He said-« But her hand came up in the jive for silence. «Get us some crab,» she said.

After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease, they tubed in to New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke. A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven tightly into her hair opened the Finn's door and led them along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence . Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's waste places. Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table. Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn't know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of Partagas. «Wait,» the Finn said, and left the room. Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed. Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an elaborate sequence. «Honey,» he said to Molly, tucking the console away, «you have got it. No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?» «Yonderboy,» Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. «I did a deal with Larry, on the side.» «Smart,» the Finn said. «It's an AI.» «Slow it down a little,» Case said. «Berne,» the Finn said, ignoring him. «Berne. It's got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software.» «What's in Beme, okay?» Case deliberately stepped between them. «Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence.» «That's all just fine,» Molly said, «but where's it get us?» «If Yonderboy's right,» the Finn said, «this Al is backing Armitage.» «I paid Larry to have the Moderns nose around Ammitage a little,» Molly explained, turning to Case. «They have some very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they'd get my money if they answered one question: who's running Armitage?» «And you think it's this AI? Those things aren't allowed any autonomy. It'll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . .» «Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,» said the Finn. «And I got a little story for you about them. Wanna hear?» He sat down and hunched forward. «Finn,» Molly said. «He loves a story.» «Haven't ever told anybody this one,» the Finn began.

The Finn was a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's story, a man he called Smith. Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who'd «gone silicon»-the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case-and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. «It smelled,» the Finn said to Case, «smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful.» Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year's tax return. Smith' s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it. When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.

And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object. Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's death. «So that was where I came in,» the Finn continued. «Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's where you go for a quiet go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird business experience and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add up. Who'd paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn't anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us.» Case raised his eyebrows. «Freeside,» the Finn said. «The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high— orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it's hard to keep track of which gen— eration, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.» «How's that?» Molly asked. «Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident….» «So what happened with your fence?» «Nothing.» The Finn frowned. «Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have, and that was it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.» He looked at Molly. «The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private.» «You figure they own that ninja, Finn?» Molly asked. «Smith thought so.» «Expensive,» she said. «Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?» «Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.» «Okay,» Case said, «we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute. Where's that get us?» «Nowhere yet,» Molly said, «but you got a little side gig now.» She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes. «Who's this?» «Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Mod— erns. Separate deal. Where is it?» «London,» Case said. «Crack it.» She laughed. «Earn your keep for a change.»

Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded plat— form. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since. It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses…. The local came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory— looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station. He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric of light: T-A. He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cowboy. No other way to learn. They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the 'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine-slender, street level, and the only one going— had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible. «It was big,» another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, «but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.» Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin. «Boy,» the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, «I'm like them huge fuckin' lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an' one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin'. Hit that black stuff and ol' tailbrain jus' kept right on keepin' on.» The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace…. And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs. Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast. He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder. He coughed. «Dix? McCoy? That you man?» His throat was tight. «Hey, bro,» said a directionless voice. «It's Case, man. Remember?» «Miami, joeboy, quick study.» «What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?» «Nothin'.» «Hang on.» He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. «Dix? Who am I?» «You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?» «Ca-your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?» «Good question.» «Remember being here, a second ago?» «No.» «Know how a ROM personality matrix works?» «Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct.» «So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?» «Guess so,» said the construct. «Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?» «If you say so,» said the construct. «Who are you?» «Case.» «Miami,» said the voice, «joeboy, quick study.» «Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?» «You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?» «You want you a paradise,» the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. «Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.» The voice recited coordinates as he punched. They found their paradise, a «pirate's paradise,» on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties. «There,» said the Flatline, «the blue one. Make it out? That's an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow.» Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's. «Here,» said the voice, «I'll do it for you.» The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries. «Big deal,» said the Flatline. «No ice at all.» «Scan this shit,» Case told the Hosaka. «Sift for owner's personal history.» The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re— placed by a simple lozenge of white light. «Contents are pri— marily video recordings of postwar military trials,» said the distant voice of the Hosaka. «Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.» «Show it already,» Case said. A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's. Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him. «You find anything?» she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs. «Tell you later,» he said, «I'm wrecked.» He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing. Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe. «They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,» Case said, and Molly stirred beside him. The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean. Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling…. There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter can— non manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already un— derway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto. He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet. Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was. No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely. Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk. His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September. The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set fire to his room. Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer. One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything had gone gray. Translated French medical records explained that a man without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire experiment. The record ended there.

Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her. The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. «Yeah?» «We're going to Istanbul,» Armitage said. «Tonight.» «What does the bastard want?» Molly asked. «Says we're going to Istanbul tonight.» «That's just wonderful.» Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times. Molly sat up and turned on the light. «What about my gear?» Case asked. «My deck.» «Finn will handle it,» said Armitage, and hung up. Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag. «You hurting?» he asked. «I could do with another night at Chin's.» «Your dentist?» «You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full clinic. Does repairs for samurai.» She was zipping her bag. «You ever been to 'Stanbul?» «Couple days, once.» «Never changes,» she said. «Bad old town.» «It was like this when we headed for Chiba,» Molly said, staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. «We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was playing ghost with you in Night City.» She took a silk scarf from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.

It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car. «This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ottoman Istanbul,» purred the Mercedes. «So it's gone downhill,» Case said. «The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi,» Molly said. She settled back against the car's gray ultrasuede. «How come Armitage flies alone?» Case asked. He had a headache. «'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine.» He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against it. He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane. The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat incision, laying the city open. He'd watched the crazy walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, arcologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron. The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour armchair in a sea of pale blue carpeting. «Christ,» Molly said. «Rat in a business suit.» They crossed the lobby. «How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?» She lowered her bag beside the armchair. «Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit, huh?» The Finn' s upper lips drew back. «Not enough, sweetmeat. « He handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. «You're registered already. Honcho's upstairs.» He looked around. «This town sucks.» «You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just pretend it's Brooklyn or something.» She twirled the key around a finger. «You here as valet or what?» «I gotta check out some guy's implants,» the Finn said. «How about my deck?» Case asked. The Finn winced. «Observe the protocol. Ask the boss.» Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of jive. The Finn watched, then nodded. «Yeah,» she said, «I know who that is.» She jerked her head in the direction of the elevators. «Come on, cowboy.» Case followed her with both bags.

Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd first seen Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers in rumpled green uniforms. They entered the hotel across the street. He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness struck him. She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected part of the room's light fixture. He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice. «Glad you're up,» Armitage said. «I'm just. Lady's still under. Listen, boss, I think it's maybe time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a little more about what I'm doing.» Silence on the line. Case bit his lip. «You know as much as you need to. Maybe more.» «You think so?» «Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You'll have a caller in about fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian.» The phone bleated softly. Armitage was gone. «Wake up, baby,» Case said. «Biz.» «I've been awake an hour already.» The mirrors turned. «We got a Jersey Bastion coming up.» «You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you're part Ar— menian. That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me up.» Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and gold-framed, mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first mistook it for some kind of t-shirt. He arrived with a black Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets. «We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy.» He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut hair. He smiled. «It is better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel infinity, mirror into mirror…. You particularly,» he said to her, «must take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications.» Molly bit one of the pastries in half. «It's my show, Jack,» she said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. «I know about you. Stool for the military, right?» Her hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with the fletcher. Case hadn't known she had it. «Very easy, please,» Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen centimeters from his lips. She extended the gun. «Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You won't feel it for months.» «Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight….» «I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass out of here.» She put the gun away. «He is living in Fener, at Kuchuk Gulhane Djaddesi 14. 1 have his tunel route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modern place in the style turistik, but it has been arranged that the police have shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir man— agement has grown nervous.» He smiled. He smelled of some metallic aftershave. «I want to know about the implants,» she said, massaging her thigh, «I want to know exactly what he can do.» Terzibashjian nodded. «Worst is how you say in Ingiliz, the subliminals.» He made the word four careful syllables.

«On our left,» said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy streets, «is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar.» Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The right side of the street was lined with miniature scrapyards. Case saw a gutted loco— motive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble. Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood. «Homesick?» Case asked. «Place sucks,» the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting to resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new suit. «Hey, Jersey,» Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind them, «where'd this guy get his stuff installed?» «In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented.» The Mercedes swerved, avoiding a bal— loon-tired dray stacked with hides. «I have followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion poised beside a brake lever….» «'What you see is what you get,' yeah,» the Finn said. «I seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina over easy.» «You have told this to your woman friend?» Terzibashjian leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. «In Turkey, women are still women. This one. . .» The Finn snorted. «She'd have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed.» «I do not understand this idiom.» «That's okay,» Case said. «Means shut up.» The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of after— shave. He began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in French. The Mercedes swung smoothly around a corner. «The spice bazaar, sometimes called the Egyptian bazaar,» the car said, «was erected on the site of an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs….» «Drugs,» Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and recross the bulletproof Lexan. «What's that you said before, Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?» «A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes.» The Armenian went back to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo. ' Demerol, they used to call that,» said the Finn. «He's a speedball artist. Funny class of people you're mixing with, Case.» «Never mind,» Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket, «we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something.»

Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened notice— ably, as though he were comforted by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Armenian along a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered. «Hey, Christ,» the Finn said, taking Case's arm, «looka that.» He pointed. «It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?» Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. «Saw one in Maryland once,» the Finn said, «and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak.» The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, bal— ancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses of tea. Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo. «Come,» he said, «he is moving. Each night he rides the tunel to the bazaar, to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman is close. Come.»

The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone. «Can't see shit,» he whispered to the Finn. «That's okay for sweetmeat,» the Finn said. «Quiet,» said Terzibashjian, too loudly Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered. «Now,» Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white light, directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the market, pinned the slender figure beside the ancient wooden door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted left, right, and the man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot him; he lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands white and pathetic. The floodlight never wavered. The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth, if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved. Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past Case's head; the Finn jerked him down into a crouch. The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mis— matched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang. Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shad— ows. Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and watched blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet. Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in her hand. «Use the radio,» the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. «Call in Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place.» «Little prick nearly made it,» the Finn said, his knees crack— ing loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. «You were watching the horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well, help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money's worth.» Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. «A Nambu,» she said. «Nice gun.» Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle finger was missing.

With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take them to Topkapi . The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian who seemed on the verge of fainting. «You're an asshole,» Molly told the man, opening the car door for him. «You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights as soon as he stepped out.» Terzibashjian glared at her. «So we're through with you anyway.» She shoved him in and slammed the door. «Run into you again and I'll kill you,» she said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street. Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city woke. They passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris. «What is this thing?» he asked Molly, as the Mercedes parked itself on the fringes of the gardens that surround the Scraglio. He stared dully at the baroque conglomeration of styles that was Topkapi. «It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King,» she said, getting out stretching. «Kept a lotta women there. Now it's a museum. Kinda like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in there big diamonds, swords, the left hand of John the Baptist….» «Like in a support vat?» «Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch on the side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off the Christians about a million years ago, and they never dust the goddam thing, 'cause it's an infidel relic.» Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case walked beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept grass made stiff by an early frost. They walked beside a path of cold octagonal flagstones. Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans. «That Terzi, he's grade-A scum,» she said. «He's the secret police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage was offering.» In the wet trees around them, birds began to sing. «I did that job for you,» Case said, «the one in London. I got something, but I don't know what it means.» He told her the Corto story.

«Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in that Screaming Fist. Looked it up.» She stroked the rusted flank of an iron doe. «You figure the little computer pulled him out of it? In that French hospital?» «I figure Wintermute,» Case said. She nodded. «Thing is,» he said, «do you think he knows he was Corto, before? I mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time he hit the ward, so maybe Wintermute just. . .» «Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah…» She turned and they walked on. «It figures. You know, the guy doesn't have any life going, in private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for Wintermute.» «So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?» «Maybe he doesn't know about it,» she said. «Maybe it's just in his name, right?» «I don't get it,» Case said. «Just thinking out loud…. How smart's an Al, Case?» «Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let 'em get.» «Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat— out fascinated with those things?» «Well,» he said, «for starts, they're rare. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the Turing cops, and that's bad heat.» He looked at her. «I dunno, it just isn't part of the trip.» «Jockeys all the same,» she said. «No imagination.» They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled the stems of some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose pebble in and watched the ripples spread. «That's Wintermute,» she said. «This deal's real big, looks to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there, but not why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to Wintermute.» «I couldn't get near it,» he said. «You're dreaming.» «Try.» «Can't be done.» «Ask the Flatline.» «What do we want out of that Riviera?» he asked, hoping to change the subject. She spat into the pond. «God knows. I'd as soon kill him as look at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object of desire. That's what the file says. And they have to love him first. Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was easy for Terzi to set him up for us, because he's been here three years, shopping politicals to the secret police. Probably Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came out. He's done eighteen in three years. All women age twenty to twenty-five. It kept Terzi in dissidents.» She thrust her hands into her jacket pockets. «Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make sure she turned political. He's got a personality like a Modern's suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about human nature, I guess.» She stared at the white flowers and the sluggish fish, her face sour. «I think I'm going to have to buy myself some special insurance on that Peter.» Then she turned and smiled, and it was very cold. «What's that mean?» «Never mind. Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something like breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect his stuff from that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the bazaar and buy him some drugs….» «Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?» She laughed. «He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And it looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you better now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny.» She smiled. «So I'll go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha.»

Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton. «Time to pack,» he said, and Case tried to find the man called Corto behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask. He thought of Wage, back in Chiba. Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. But Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been rumored, chil— dren. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else. «Where to now?» he asked, walking past the man to stare down into the street. «What kind of climate?» «They don't have climate, just weather,» Armitage said. «Here. Read the brochure.» He put something on the coffee table and stood. «Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?» «Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home.» Armitage smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect's antenna. His gold bracelet clinked as he reached out to prod Case in the chest. «Don't get too smart. Those little sacs are starting to show wear, but you don't know how much.» Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod. When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the bro— chures. It was expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.

FREESIDE-WHY WAIT?

The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yes— ilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Ar— mitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop's entrance. Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English ac— centless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn. Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nod— ding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Ri— viera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job, nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop faces. The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture. Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team. Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Riviera again. «I bet you're stoned right now, asshole,» he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shoul— dered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. «See ya lady,» he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and turned away. There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones. He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anach— ronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang. Automatically, he picked it up. «Yeah?» Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind. «Hello. Case.» A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting. «Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk.» It was a chip voice. «Don't you want to talk, Case?» He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.

PART THREE. MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE

Archipelago. The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick. Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the ex— change of data in the L-S archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen. Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, bor— der town, and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gar— dens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.

On the THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Ar— mitage on the aisle. Once, as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water. Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once. «No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that.» Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger. «That's right, Peter. Don't.» Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome. Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell in— stantly asleep. Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window. «You been up, haven't you?» Molly asked, as he squirmed his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle. «Nah. Never travel much, just for biz.» The steward was attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear. «Hope you don't get SAS,» she said. «Airsick? No way.» «It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g, and your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex, like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of adrenaline.» The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new set of trodes from his red plastic apron. Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb. He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a big airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane, like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened to the piped koto music and waited. Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.

Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's de— scription, but it passed quickly enough and he was able to sleep. The steward woke him as they were preparing to dock at JAL's terminal cluster. We transfer to Freeside now?» he asked, eyeing a shred of Yeheyuan tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to dance ten centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights. «No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you know? We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster.» She touched the release plate on her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of the foam. «Funny choice of venue, you ask me.» «How's that?» «Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now.» «What's that mean?» «You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway, they'll let you smoke your cigarettes there.»

Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started build— ing. They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull re— minded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the ir— regular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders. Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case ne— gotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. «Here,» Molly said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. «Grab the rungs. Make like you're climbing backward, right? You're going toward the hull, that's like you're climbing down into gravity. Got it?» Case's stomach churned. «You be fine, mon,» Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors. Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air. «Up,» Molly said, «you gonna kiss it next?» Case lay flat on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. «Gotta play house,» she said. «You help me string this up.» He looked around the wide, featureless space and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at ran— dom. When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja. «Good,» Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial gravity. «Where were you when it needed doing?» Case asked Ri— viera. The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek. «In the head,» Riviera said, and smiled. Case laughed. «Good,» Riviera said, «you can laugh. I would have tried to help you, but I'm no good with my hands.» He held up his palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands. «Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?» Molly stepped between them. «Yo,» Aerol said, from the hatch, «you wan' come wi' me, cowboy mon.» «It's your deck,» Armitage said, «and the other gear. Help him get it in from the cargo bay.» «You ver' pale, mon,» Aerol said, as they were guiding the foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. «Maybe you wan' eat somethin'.» Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.

Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear what Riviera was sup— posed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like asking. A few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. «Hey, Ri— viera.» The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone back and told Armitage. «He's stoned,» Molly said, looking up from the disassembled parts of her fletcher. «Leave him be.» Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's ability to operate in the matrix. 'Don't sweat it,» Case argued, «I jack in and I'm not here. It's all the same.» «Your adrenaline levels are higher,» Armitage said. «You've still got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're going to learn to work with it. ' «So I do the run from here'?» «No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor….»

Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular re— lationship with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of data. «How you doing, Dixie?'' «I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.» «How's it feel?» «It doesn't.» «Bother you?» «What bothers me is, nothin' does.» «How's that?» «Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's tossin' all night. Elroy. l said, what's eatin' you? Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So l told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the other goddam thumb.» When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. «Do me a favor, boy.» «What's that, Dix?» «This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing.»

Case didn't understand the Zionites. Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. «Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga.» He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled. «It's the ganja,» Molly said, when Case told her the story. «They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?» Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that. «Hey, Aerol,» Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice run in the freefall corridor. «Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing.» He held out the trodes. Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green al— gae. He blinked mildly and grinned. «Try it,» Case said. He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out. «What did you see, man?» «Babylon,» Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the corridor. Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm ex— tended straight out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon, was coiled tightly a few millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract, tightening around Riviera's arm. «Come then,» the man said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm. «Come.» The scorpion swayed its brownish claws and scurried up his arm, its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of veins. When it reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate. Ri— viera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered, and sank into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him. Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic syringe in his left hand. «'If God made anything better, he kept it for himself. ' You know the expression, Case?» «Yeah,» Case said. «I heard that about lots of different things. You always make it into a little show?» Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical tubing from his arm. «Yes. It's more fun.» He smiled, his eyes distant now, cheeks flushed. «I've a membrane set in, just over the vein, so I never have to worry about the condition of the needle.» «Doesn't hurt?» The bright eyes met his. «Of course it does. That's part of it, isn't it?» «I'd just use derms,» Case said. «Pedestrian,» Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a short-sleeved white cotton shirt. «Must be nice,» Case said, getting up. «Get high yourself, Case?» «I hadda give it up.»

«Freeside,» Armitage said, touching the panel on the little Braun hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly three meters from tip to tip. «Casinos here.» He reached into the skeletal representation and pointed. «Hotels, strata-title property, big shops along here.» His hand moved. «Blue areas are lakes.» He walked to one end of the model. «Big cigar. Narrows at the ends.» «We can see that fine,» Molly said. «Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher, more rocky, but it's an easy climb. Higher you climb, the lower the gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring here.» He pointed. «A what?» Case leaned forward. «They race bicycles,» Molly said. «Low grav, high-traction tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour.» «This end doesn't concern us,» Armitage said with his usual utter seriousness. «Shit,» Molly said, «I'm an avid cyclist.» Riviera giggled. Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. «This end does.» The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and the final segment of the spindle was empty. «This is the Villa Straylight. Steep climb out of gravity and every approach is kinked. There's a single entrance, here, dead center. Zero grav— ity.» «What's inside, boss?» Riviera leaned forward, craning his neck. Four tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage's finger. Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats. «Peter,» Armitage said, «you're going to be the first to find out. You'll arrange yourself an invitation. Once you're in, you see that Molly gets in.» Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight, remembering the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head, and the ninja. «Details available?» Riviera asked. «I need to plan a ward— robe, 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 cov— ered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with resinous smoke. «Steppin' Razor,» one said, as Molly drifted into the cham— ber. «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 dread— locks 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 Step— pin' 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 wilder— ness, 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 Al, 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 de— mon, 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, sis— ter, 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 Garvey, to 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.»

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, moo, 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. «lust 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, Lioos 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 Al?» «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. Al. 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 had 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 ass hole. Seventh level dungeon and the god dam 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 staled 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 her ing— 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— pcr, popped h 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 Winterrnute 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. 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 fiesh green masses of vege— tation 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 sea— son'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 Inter— continental, a sloping glass-fronted clff 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 cheek— bones. «Yeah, this is some place.» The narrow band of the Lado Acheson system smoldered in absract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of worded 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 re— peatedly, 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 equiv— alent 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 sum— mer, 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 con— tents 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 rum— maged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Mar— lene'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 air 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 l00 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 en— gulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green. In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the black— ened 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, re— vealing 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 him— self 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 unfal— tering 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 rec— tilinear 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 de— signers 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 ar— tificial 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 Ar— mitage. «I have an audition this afternoon,» Riviera said. «I'll need to be at my best.» He cupped the foil packd in his uptumed 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 JAL taxi?» 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 di— rection.» Straylight, Case thought. «How soon?» Case asked, meedng 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 nar— rowed, 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 Garvey in a skeletal scooter frame with a chemical engine. «Two hour ago,» Maelcum said, «I take delivery of Babylon goods for you; nice lapan-boy inna yacht, mos' pretty yacht.» Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho— saka 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 plasdc. 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 this boy 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, bus— ying 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, ad— vises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris fur— ther advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatdble and yields optimal penetradon 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. «Questdon. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?» «Delay for interorbital transmission,» said the Hosaka. «Code it. Standard commerical code.» «Done.» He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai. «Reinhold Scientdfic 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 Al.» «Possible. Sure. If it's military.» «Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Arrnitage seems to be setdng up a run on an Al that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe's in Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute's backing the whole show it's paying us to burn it. It's burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Annitage. What goes?» «Motive,» the construct said. «Real motive problem, with an Al. Not human, see?» «Well, yeah, obviously.» «Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?» «Wait a sec,» Case said. «Are you sentient, or not?» «Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess….» The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. «But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human.» «So you figure we can't get on to its motive?» «It own itself?» «Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.» «That's a good one,» the construct said. «Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi— zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.» «So it's getting ready to burn itself?» Case began to punch the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine. «Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are con— cerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard— wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in.» Again the nonlaugh. «See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the min— ute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electro— magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.» Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim. «Okay,» he said, finally, «I'm slotting this virus. I want you to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.» The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a few seconds, then returned. «Hot shit, Case. It's a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.» «Or an AI.» He sighed. «Can we run it?» «Sure,» the construct said, «unless you got a morbid fear of dying.» «Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.» «It's my nature.»

Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its tri— angular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system. «I wanna buzz,» he said to the blue artifice of the sky. «I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.» He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross be— tween a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what. On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate. «Sushi,» he said, «whatever you got.» Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. «Christ,» he said, to his tuna, «I'd go nuts.» «Don't tell me,» someone said, «I know it already. You're a gangster, right?» He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs. She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. «Cath,» she said. «Lupus,» after a pause. «What kind of name is that?» «Greek,» he said. «Are you really a gangster?» The melanin boost hadn't pre— vented the formation of freckles. «I'm a drug addict, Cath.» «What kind?» «Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants.» «Well, do you have any?» She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants. «No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?» Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. «What's your taste?» «No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up.» And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her. «Betaphenethylamine,» she said. «No sweat,but it's on your chip.»

«You're kidding,» said Cath's partner and roommate, when Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. «I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?» His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles. «Well,» Case said, «it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that.» But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes. Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Ciba— chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency. «They're def triff, huh?» Cath asked, seeing him eye the transparencies. «Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled, so natural. And it was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?» «Yeah,» Case said, suddenly uneasy, ' terrible thing.» «Well,» Bruce cut in, «about this beta you want to buy….» «Thing is, can I metabolize it?» Case raised his eyebrows. «Tell you what,» the boy said. «You do a taste. If your pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free.» «I heard that one before,» Case said, taking the bright blue derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.

«Case?» Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses. «Who else, honey? «What's got into you?» The mirrors followed him across the room. «I forget how to pronounce it,» he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket. «Christ,» she said, «just what we needed.» «Truer words were never spoken.» «I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.» She shook her head. «I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too.» «Yeah,» Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, «beautiful.» «Man,» she said, «if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad— ass shape when it wears off.» «Bitch, bitch, bitch,» he said, unbuckling his belt. «Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear.» He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. «I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state.» He looked down. «I mean, look at this unnatural state.» She laughed. «It won't last.» «But it will,» he said, climbing into the sand-colored tem— perfoam, «that's what's so unnatural about it.»

«Case, what's wrong with you?» Armitage said, as the waiter was seating them at his table in the Vingtieme Siecle. It was the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants on a small lake near the Intercontinental. Case shuddered. Bruce hadn't said anything about after ef— fects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands were shaking. «Something I ate, maybe.» «I want you checked out by a medic,» Armitage said. «Just this hystamine reaction,» Case lied. «Get it when I travel, eat different stuff, sometimes.» Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine and sipped. «I've ordered for you,» he said. Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing. «Jesus,» Molly said, her own plate empty, «gimme that. You know what this costs?» She took his plate. 'They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff.» She forked a mouthful up and chewed. «Not hungry,» Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain. «You look fucking awful,» Molly said cheerfully. Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylam— ine made it taste like iodine. The lights dimmed. «Le Restaurant Vingtieme Siecle,» said a disembodied voice with a pronounced Sprawl accent, «proudly presents the hol— ographic cabaret of Mr. Peter Riviera. « Scattered applause from the other tables. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. Soon a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and drinks were being poured. «What's happening?» Case asked Armitage, who said noth— ing. Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail. «Good evening,» Riviera said, stepping forward on a small stage at the far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort, he hadn't noticed the stage. He hadn't seen where Riviera had come from. His uneasiness increased. At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight. Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit the dark hangings behind the stage. He was projecting. Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel, blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fin— gernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting, an embrace for his audience. Case heard the shallow water lap against the side of the restaurant. «Tonight,» Riviera said, his long eyes shining, «I would like to perform an extended piece for you. A new work.» A cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand. He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up from the point of impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled. More applause. «The title of the work is 'The Doll.'» Riviera lowered his hands. «I wish to dedicate its premiere here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool.» A wave of polite ap— plause. As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table. «And to another lady.» The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds, leaving only the glow of candles. Riviera's holographic aura had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing with his head bowed. Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals, sketching an open cube around the stage. The restaurant's lights had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to quiver with concentration. Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled, had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing the audience to view its contents. Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but kept his eyes closed. «I'd always lived in the room,» he said. «I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room.» The room's walls were yellowed white plaster. It contained two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair, the other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped and flaked, revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed was bare. Stained ticking with faded brown stripes. A single bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire. Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper curve. Riviera opened his eyes. «I'd been alone in the room, always.» He sat on the chair, facing the bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower on his lapel. «I don't know when I first began to dream of her,» he said, «but I do remember that at first she was only a haze, a shadow.» There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone. «I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted to hold her, hold her and more….» His voice carried perfectly in the hush of the restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a glass. Someone giggled. Someone else asked a whispered ques— tion in Japanese. «I decided that if I could visualize some part of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in the most perfect detail….» A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers pale. Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer. A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei surgical boutique. Riviera was holding the hand to his lips, licking its palm. The fingers tentatively caressed his face. But now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera reached for it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet of flesh and bone. The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own. The arms were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful. Case's head throbbed. His throat was dry. He drank the last of the wine. Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it fade away. The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still seething with its blue inner flame. Then the torso formed, as Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect, sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat. Molly's body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn't Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands with their bright nails. The bed was thick now with folds of yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying, pinching, caressing hands. Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass, his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room. Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered. The head was there, the image complete. Molly's face, with smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Molly— image began to couple with a renewed intensity. Then the image slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades. With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was already up and stumbling for the door. He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his head like a vise had released him now. Kneeling, his cheek against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne. Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager in the Sprawl, they'd called it, ''dreaming real.» He remem— bered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet. What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head and spat into the lake. He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace. Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran his hands over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the Vingtieme Siecle. Molly's chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass between his fingers. «Where is she?» Case asked. «Gone,» Armitage said. «She go after him?» «No.» There was a soft tink. Armitage looked down at the glass. His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its measure of red wine. The broken stem protruded like a sliver of ice. Case took it from him and set it in a water glass. «Tell me where she went, Armitage.» The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing there at all. «She's gone to prepare herself. You won't see her again. You'll be together during the run.» «Why did Riviera do that to her?» Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. «Get some sleep, Case.» «We run, tomorrow?» Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away, toward the exit. Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware, muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on the ceiling. The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the bal— ustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of candles. As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young French— men and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the far shore and the nearest casino.

Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some beach after a retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for a note. There was nothing. Several seconds passed before the scene beyond the window registered through his tension and unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata, expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty. He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he hadn't bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope. He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony. «Get me a number for the Marcus Garvey,» he told the desk. «It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster.» The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. «Sir,» it added «the registration in question is Panamanian.» Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. «Yo?» «Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?» «Yo. On th' navigation comp, ya know.» «Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka. Then turn my deck on. It's the stud with the ridges on it.» «How you doin' in there, mon?» «Well, I need some help.» «Movin', mon. I get th' modem.» Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the simple phone link. «Ice this,» he told the Hosaka, when he heard it beep. «You are speaking from a heavily monitored location,» the computer advised primly. «Fuck it,» he said. «Forget the ice. No ice. Access the construct. Dixie?» «Hey, Case.» The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely. «Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get something for me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly's in here somewhere and I wanna know where. I'm in 335W, the Intercontinental. She was registered here too, but I don't know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone and do their records for me.» «No sooner said,» the Flatline said. Case heard the white sound of the invasion. He smiled. «Done. Rose Kolodny. Checked out. Take me a few minutes to screw their security net deep enough to get a fix.» «Go.» The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts. Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up on the temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up. A Japanese pop star reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen interviewer asked a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped with jags of blue interference. «Case, baby, you lose your mind, man?» The voice was slow, familiar. The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the interior of the Jarre de The, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.

Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray sharkskin slacks. «Really, man, you're lookin' very scattered.» The voice came from the Braun's speakers. «Wintermute,» Case said. The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled. «Where's Molly?» «Never you mind. You're screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd do that, man. It's outside the profile.» «So tell me where she is and I'll call him off.» Zone shook his head. «You can't keep too good track of your women, can you Case. Keep losin' 'em, one way or another.» «I'll bring this thing down around your ears,» Case said. «No. You aren't that kind, man. I know that. You know something, Case? I figure you've got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba.» «Don't,» Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the window. «But I didn't. What's it matter, though? How much does it really matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you'd give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn't handle it. She's dead.» Case's fist glanced off the glass. «Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck.» Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of the condos. The Braun shut off. From the bed, the phone bleated steadily. «Case?» The Flatline was waiting. «Where you been? I got it. but it isn't much.» The construct rattled off an address. «Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub. That's all I could get without leaving a calling card.» «Okay,» Case said. «Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to disconnect the modem. Thanks, Dix.» «A pleasure.» He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage.

«Hey. Lupus. Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus.» Bruce stood naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. «But we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?» «No. Thanks. I want some help.» He pushed the boy's arm aside and stepped into the room. «Hey, really, man, we're…» «Going to help me. You're really glad to see me. Because we're friends, right? Aren't we?» Bruce blinked. «Sure.» Case recited the address the Flatline had given him. «I knew he was a gangster,» Cath called cheerfully from the shower. «I gotta Honda trike,» Bruce said, grinning vacantly. «We go now,» Case said.

«That level's the cubicles,» Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell ex— haust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks. «You be long?» «No saying. But you'll wait.» «We'll wait, yeah.» He scratched his bare chest. «That last part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. Number forty— three.» «You expected, Lupus?» Cath craned forward over Bruce's shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair. «Not really,» Case said. «That's a problem?» «Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don't wanna see you . . .» She shrugged. Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan, looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents of the islands. «Downstairs,» he said to a passing waiter, «I want to go downstairs.» He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club. He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing frag— ments of half a dozen European languages as he passed. «I want a cubicle,» he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a terminal on her lap. «Lower level.» He handed her his chip. «Gender preference?» She passed the chip across a glass plate on the face of the terminal. «Female,» he said automatically. «Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can access our special services display beforehand, if you like.» She smiled. She returned his chip. An elevator slid open behind her. The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the el— evator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an expensive clinic. He found his cubicle. He'd been looking for Molly's; now confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath the number plate. Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel. The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut— out. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door. The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were sound— proof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb the sound. He placed his chip against the black plate. The bolts clicked. She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually got— ten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes…. «Jesus Christ,» she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. «You're an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?» She leaned over him. «Chip,» he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the cubicle. «You bribe the help, upstairs?» He shook his head and fell across the bed. «Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count.» He clutched his stomach. «You kicked me,» he managed. «Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I'm meditating, right?» She sat beside him. «And getting a briefing.» She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. «Win— termute's telling me about Straylight.» «Where's the meat puppet?» «There isn't any. That's the most expensive special service of all.» She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. «The run's tomorrow, Wintermute says.» «What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?» «'Cause, if I'd stayed, I might have killed Riviera.» «Why?» «What he did to me. The show.» «I don't get it.» «This cost a lot,» she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. «Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you'll have the reflexes to go with the gear…. You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for….» She cracked her knuckles. «Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't com— patible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could re— member it…. But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.» She smiled. «Then it started getting strange.» She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. «The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time.» She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. «So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.» «They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?» «I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain…. You can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn't tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.» She seemed to speak from a distance. «And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I'd tell myself that at least some of them were just dreams, but by then I'd started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me. Nothing's too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.» She shook her head. «That prick was charging eight times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn't know.» «So what was he charging for?» «Bad dreams. Real ones. One night . . . one night, I'd just come back from Chiba.» She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall. «Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer….» She dug her fingers deep in the foam. «Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all. ..» She tugged at the temperfoam. «Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, 'What's wrong. What's wrong?' 'Cause we weren't finished yet….» She began to shake. «So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?» The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. «The house put a con— tract out on me. I had to hide for a while.» Case stared at her. «So Riviera hit a nerve last night,» she said. «I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I'll be psyched up to go in there after him.» «After him?» «He's already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . .» Case remembered the face he'd seen. «You gonna kill him?» She smiled. Cold. «He's going to die, yeah. Soon.» «I had a visit too,» he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded. «Maybe it wants you to hate something too.» «Maybe I hate it.» «Maybe you hate yourself, Case.»

«How was it?» Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda. «Try it sometime,» he said, rubbing his eyes. «Just can't see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,» Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist. «Can we go home, now?» Bruce asked. «Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.» Rue Jules Verne was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle's midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps. If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you'd find yourself approaching Desiderata from the left. Case watched Bruce's trike until it was out of sight, then turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the faces of the month's newest simstim stars. Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass. The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa's edge. He'd seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle's security system, controlled by some central computer. In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer, Shozoku Smith's, Emer— gency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly's rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground plans of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools? He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall. Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he'd killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda's death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind's screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn't become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone. It was a strange thing. He couldn't take its measure. «Numb,» he said. He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it. «Gangster.» He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda. «Thought you went home,» he said, and covered his con— fusion with a sip of Carlsberg. «I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this.» She ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her wrist. «Like it?» «Sure.» He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked back at her. «What do you think you're up to, honey?» «You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?» She was very close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enor— mous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz. «You get off?» «Yeah. But the comedown's a bitch.» «Then you need another one.» «And what's that supposed to lead to?» «I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the cream— iest crib. People down the well on business tonight, if you follow me….» «If I follow you.» She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. «You're Yak, aren't you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza.» «You got an eye, huh?» He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette. «How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every time you screwed up.» «I never screw up.» He lit his cigarette. «I saw that girl you're with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares me.» She smiled too widely. «I like that. She like it with girls?» «Never said. Who's Hideo?» «3Jane's, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer.» Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he spoke. «Dee-Jane?» «Lady 3Jane. She's triff. Rich. Her father owns all this.» «This bar?» «Freeside ! « «No shit. You keepin' some class company, huh?» He raised an eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. «So how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet deb? You an' Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?» He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed. «Oh, you know,» she said, lids half lowered in what must have been intended as a look of modesty, «she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the party circuit…. It gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long as she brings Hideo to take care of her.» «Where's it get boring?' «Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it's pretty, all the pools and lilies.It's a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets.» She snuggled in against him. «Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together.» She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bub— ble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane. «Hideo gave it to me,» she said. «He tried to show me how, but I can't ever get it right. The necks come out backwards.» She tucked the folded paper back into her purse. Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing, and smoothed it across his inner wrist. «3Jane, she's got a pointy face, nose like a bird?» He watched his hands fumble an outline. «Dark hair? Young?» «I guess. But she's triff, you know? Like, all that money.» The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-cir— cuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sand— storms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding…. «Come on,» she said, taking his hand. «You got it now. We got it. Up the hill, we'll have it all night.»

The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the-something flared white behind his eyes. He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out of the way. «Fuck you!» she screamed behind him, «you ripoff shit!» He couldn't feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles. And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the loser's zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate mono— chrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee. When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with wonder. And when the lights in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete. Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe. Midnight.

He walked till morning. The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn't think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow. A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a De— siderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and crois— sants beneath the striped umbrellas. He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object. He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again. They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion. «Turing,» she said. «You are under arrest.»

PART FOUR. THE STRAYLIGHT RUN