Count Zero s-2

by William Gibson

  “Shut up, Two-a-Day,” Beauvoir said. “Little education might do you some good—”

  “They used one to teach us our way around in the matrix, how to access stuff from the print library, like that…”

  “Well, then,” Lucas said, straightening up and brushing nonexistent dust from his big pink palms, “did you ever use it for that, to access print books?” He’d removed his immaculate black suit coat, his spotless white shirt was traversed by a pair of slender maroon suspenders, and he’d loosened the knot of his plain black tie.

  “I don’t read too well,” Bobby said. “I mean, I can, but it’s work. But yeah, I did I looked at some real old books on the matrix and stuff”

  “I thought you had,” Lucas said, jacking some kind of small deck into the console that formed the base of the tank. “Count Zero. Count zero interrupt. Old programmer talk.” He passed the deck to Beauvoir, who began to tap commands into it.

  Complex geometric forms began to click into place in the tank, aligned with the nearly invisible planes of a three-dimensional grid. Beauvoir was sketching in the cyberspace coordinates for Barrytown, Bobby saw. “We’ll call you this blue pyramid, Bobby. There you are.” A blue pyramid began to pulse softly at the very center of the tank. “Now we’ll show you what Two-a-Day’s cowboys saw, the ones who were watching you. From now on, you’re seeing a recording “ An interrupted line of blue light extruded from the pyramid, following a grid line Bobby watched, seeing himself alone in his mother’s living room, the Ono-Sendai on his lap, the curtains drawn, his fingers moving across the deck.

  “Icebreaker on its way,” Beauvoir said. The line of blue dots reached the wall of the tank. Beauvoir tapped the deck, and the coordinates changed. A new set of geometrics replaced the first arrangement Bobby recognized the cluster of orange rectangles centered in the grid. “That’s it,” he said.

  The blue line progressed from the edge of the tank, headed for the orange base. Faint planes of ghost-orange flickered around the rectangles, shifting and strobing, as the line grew closer.

  “You can see something’s wrong right there.” Lucas said. “That’s their ice, and it was already hip to you. Rumbled you before you even got a lock.”

  As the line of blue dots touched the shifting orange plane, it was surrounded by a translucent orange tube of slightly greater diameter The tube began to lengthen, traveling back, along the line, until it reached the wall of the tank…

  “Meanwhile,” Beauvoir said, “back home in Barrytown…” He tapped the deck again and now Bobby’s blue pyramid was in the center. Bobby watched as the orange tube emerged from the wall of the projection tank, still following the blue line, and smoothly approached the pyramid. “Now at this point, you were due to start doing some serious dying, cowboy.” The tube reached the pyramid; triangular orange planes snapped up, walling it in. Beauvoir froze the projection.

  “Now,” Lucas said, “when Two-a-Day’s hired help, who are all in all a pair of tough and experienced console jockeys, when they saw what you are about to see, my man, they decided that their deck was due for that big overhaul in the sky. Being pros, they had a backup deck. When they brought it on line, they saw the same thing. It was at that point that they decided to phone their employer, Mr. Two-a-Day, who, as we can see from this mess, was about to throw himself a party…

  “Man,” Two-a-Day said, his voice tight with hysteria, “I told you. I had some clients up here needed entertaining. I paid those boys to watch, they were watching, and they phoned me. I phoned you. What the hell you want, anyway?”

  “Our property,” Beauvoir said softly. “Now watch this, real close. This motherfucker is what we call an anomalous phenomenon, no shit…” He tapped the deck again, starting the recording.

  Liquid flowers of milky white blossomed from the floor of the tank; Bobby, craning forward, saw that they seemed to consist of thousands of tiny spheres or bubbles, and then they aligned perfectly with the cubical grid and coalesced, forming a top-heavy, asymmetrical structure,’ a thing like a rectilinear mushroom. The surfaces, facets, were white, perfectly blank. The image in the tank was no longer than Bobby’s open hand. but to anyone jacked into a deck it would have been enormous. The thing unfolded a pair of horns; these lengthened, curved, became pincers that arced out to grasp the pyramid. He saw the tips sink smoothly through the flickering orange planes of the enemy ice.

  “She said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” he heard himself say. “Then she asked me why they were doing that, doing it to me, killing me…”

  “Ah,” Beauvoir said, quietly, “now we are getting somewhere.”

  He didn’t know where they were going, but he was glad to be out of that chair. Beauvoir ducked to avoid a slanting gro-light that dangled from twin lengths of curly-cord: Bobby followed, almost slipping in a green-filmed puddle of water Away from Two-a-Day’s couch-clearing, the air seemed thicker. There was a greenhouse smell of damp and growing things.

  “So that’s how it was,” Beauvoir said, “Two-a-Day sent some friends round to Covina Concourse Courts, but you were gone. Your deck was gone, too.”

  “Well,” Bobby said, “I don’t see it’s exactly his fault, then. I mean, if I hadn’t split for Leon’s — and I was lookin’ for Two-a-Day. even lookin’ to try to get up here — then he’d have found me, right?” Beauvoir paused to admire a leafy stand of flowering hemp, extending a thin brown forefinger to lightly brush the pale, colorless flowers.

  “True,” he said, “but this is a business matter. He should have detailed someone to watch your place for the duration of the run, to ensure that neither you nor the software took any unscheduled walks.”

  “Well, he sent Rhea ’n’ Jackie over to Leon’s, because I saw ’em there.” Bobby reached into the neck of his black pajamas and scratched at the sealed wound that crossed his chest and stomach. Then he remembered the centipede thing Pye had used as a suture, and quickly withdrew his hand. It itched, a straight line of itch, but he didn’t want to touch it.

  “No, Jackie and Rhea are ours. Jackie is a mambo, a priestess, the horse of Danbala.” Beauvoir continued on his way, picking out what Bobby presumed was some existing track or path through the jumbled forest of hydroponics, although it seemed to progress in no particular direction. Some of the larger shrubs were rooted in bulbous green plastic trash bags filled with dark humus. Many of these had burst, and pale roots sought fresh nourishment in the shadows between the gro-lights, where time and the gradual fall of leaves conspired to produce a thin compost. Bobby wore a pair of black nylon thongs Jackie had found for him, but there was already damp earth between his toes. “A horse?” he asked Beauvoir, dodging past a prickly-looking thing that suggested an inside-out palm tree.

  “Danbala rides her, Danbala Wedo, the snake. Other times, she is the horse of Aida Wedo, his wife.”

  Bobby decided not to pursue it. He tried to change the subject: “How come Two-a-Day’s got such a motherhuge place? What are all these trees ’n’ things for?” He knew that Jackie and Rhea had wheeled him through a doorway, in the St. Mary’s chair, but he hadn’t seen a wall since. He also knew that the arcology covered x number of hectares, so that it was possible that Two-a-Day’s place was very large indeed, but it hardly seemed likely that a ’wareman, even a very sharp one, could afford this much space. Nobody could afford this much space, and why would anybody want to live in a leaky hydroponic forest?

  The last derm was wearing off, and his back and chest were beginning to burn and ache.

  “Ficus trees, mapou trees… This whole level of the Projects is a lieu saint, holy place.” Beauvoir tapped Bobby on the shoulder and pointed out twisted, bicolored strings dangling from the limbs of a nearby tree. “The trees are consecrated to different ba. That one is for Ougou, Ougou Feray, god of war. There’s a lot of other things grown up here, herbs the leaf-doctors need, and some just for fun. But this isn’t Two-a-Day’s place, this is communal.”

  “You mean the whole Project’s into this? All
like voodoo and stuff?” It was worse than Marsha’s darkest fantasies.

  “No, man,” and Beauvoir laughed. “There’s a mosque up top, and a couple or ten thousand holyroller Baptists scattered around, some Church o’ Sci… All the usual stuff. Still” — he grinned — “we are the ones with the tradition of getting shit done… But how this got started, this level, that goes way back. The people who designed these places, maybe eighty, a hundred years ago, they had the idea they’d make ’em as self-sufficient as possible. Make ’em grow food Make ’em heat themselves, generate power, whatever Now this one, you drill far enough down, is sitting on top of a lot of geothermal water. It’s real hot down there, but not hot enough to run an engine, so it wasn’t gonna give em any power. They made a stab at power, up on the roof, with about a hundred Darrieus rotors, what they call eggbeaters Had them-selves a wind farm, see? Today they get most of their watts off the Fission Authority, like anybody else. But that geothermal water, they pump that up to a heat exchanger. It’s too salty to drink, so in the exchanger it just heats up your standard Jersey tap water, which a lot of people figure isn’t worth drinking anyway…”

  Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby looked back. Shallow pools on the muddy concrete floor caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf trees, the bare pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic fluid.

  “Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of shrimp. Shrimp grow real fast in warm water. Then they pump it through pipes in the concrete, up here, to keep this place warm. That’s what this level was for, to grow ’ponic amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into the catfish tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat the algae, and it all goes around again. Or anyway, that was the idea. Chances are they didn’t figure anybody’d go up on the roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room for a mosque, and they didn’t figure a lot of other changes either So we wound up with this space. But you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the Projects… Catfish, too”

  They had arrived at the wall. It was made of glass, beaded heavily with condensation. A few centimeters beyond it was another wall, that one made of what looked like rusty sheet steel. Beauvoir fished a key of some kind from a pocket in his sharkskin robe and slid it into an opening in a bare alloy beam dividing two expanses of window. Somewhere nearby, an engine whined into life; the broad steel shutter rotated up and out, moving jerkily, to reveal a view that Bobby had often imagined.

  They must be near the top, high up in the Projects, because Big Playground was something he could cover with two hands. The condos of Barrytown looked like some gray-white fungus, spreading to the horizon. It was nearly dark, and he could make out a pink glow, beyond the last range of condo racks.

  “That’s the Sprawl, over there, isn’t it? That pink.”

  “That’s right, but the closer you get, the less pretty it looks. How’d you like to go there, Bobby? Count Zero ready to make the Sprawl?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bobby said, his palms against the sweating glass, “you got no idea…” The derm had worn off entirely now, and his back and chest hurt like hell.

  14

  NIGHT FLIGHT

  AS THE NIGHT came on, Turner found the edge again.

  It seemed like a long time since he’d been there, but when it clicked in, it was like he’d never left. It was that super-human synchromesh flow that stimulants only approximated. He could only score for it on the site of a major defection, one where he was in command, and then only in the final hours before the actual move.

  But it had been a long time; in New Delhi, he’d only been checking out possible escape routes for an executive who wasn’t entirely certain that relocation was what he wanted. If he had been working the edge, that night in Chandni Chauk, maybe he’d have been able to dodge the thing. Probably not, but the edge would’ve told him to try.

  Now the edge let him collate the factors he had to deal with at the site, balancing clusters of small problems against sin-gle, larger ones. So far there were a lot of little ones, but no real ballbreakers. Lynch and Webber were starting to get in each other’s hair, so he arranged to keep them apart. His conviction that Lynch was Conroy’s plant, instinctive from the beginning, was stronger now. Instincts sharpened, on the edge; things got witchy. Nathan was having trouble with the lowtech Swedish hand warmers; anything short of an electronic circuit baffled him. Turner put Lynch to work on the hand warmers, fueling and priming them, and let Nathan carry them out, two at a time, and bury them shallowly, at meter intervals, along the two long lines of orange tape.

  The microsoft Conroy had sent filled his head with its own universe of constantly shifting factors: airspeed, altitude, attitude, angle of attack, g-forces, headings. The plane’s weapon delivery information was a constant subliminal litany of target designators, bomb fall lines, search circles, range and release cues, weapons counts. Conroy had tagged the microsoft with a simple message outlining the plane’s time of arrival and confirming the arrangement for space for a single passenger.

  He wondered what Mitchell was doing, feeling. The Mans Biolabs North America facility was carved into the heart of a sheer mesa, a table of rock thrusting from the desert floor. The biosoft dossier had shown Turner the mesa’s face, cut with bright evening windows; it rode about the uplifted arms of a sea of saguaros like the wheelhouse of a giant ship. To Mitchell, it had been prison and fortress, his home for nine years. Somewhere near its core he had perfected the hybridoma techniques that had eluded other researchers for almost a century; working with human cancer cells and a neglected, nearly forgotten model of DNA synthesis, he had produced the immortal hybrid cells that were the basic production tools of the new technology, minute biochemical factories endlessly reproducing the engineered molecules that were linked and built up into biochips. Somewhere in the Maas arcology, Mitchell would be moving through his last hours as their star researcher.

  Turner tried to imagine Mitchell leading a very different sort of life following his defection to Hosaka, but found it difficult. Was a research arcology in Arizona very different from one on Honshu?

  There had been times, during that long day, when Mitch-ell’s coded memories had risen in him, filling him with a strange dread that seemed to have nothing to do with the operation at hand.

  It was the intimacy of the thing that still disturbed him, and perhaps the feeling of fear sprang from that. Certain fragments seemed to have an emotional power entirely out of proportion to their content. Why should a memory of a plain hallway in some dingy Cambridge graduate dormitory fill him with a sense of guilt and self-loathing? Other images, which logically should have carried a degree of feeling, were strangely lacking in affect: Mitchell playing with his baby daughter on an expanse of pale woolen broadloom in a rented house in Geneva, the child laughing, tugging at his hand. Nothing. The man’s life, from Turner’s vantage, seemed marked out by a certain inevitability; he was brilliant, a brilliance that had been detected early on, highly motivated, gifted at the kind of blandly ruthless in-company manipulation required by some-one who aspired to become a top research scientist. If anyone was destined to rise through laboratory-corporate hierarchies, Turner decided, it would be Mitchell.

  Turner himself was incapable of meshing with the intensely tribal world of the zaibatsumen, the lifers. He was a perpetual outsider, a rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of inter-corporate politics. No company man would have been capable of taking the initiatives Turner was required to take in the course of an extraction. No company man was capable of Turner’s professionally casual ability to realign his loyalties to fit a change in employers. Or, perhaps, of his unyielding commitment once a contract had been agreed upon. He had drifted into security work in his late teens, when the grim doldrums of the postwar economy were giving way to the impetus of new technologies. He had done well in security, considering his general lack of ambition. He had a ropy, muscular poise that impressed his employer’s clients,
and he was bright, very bright. He wore clothes well. He had a way with technology.

  Conroy had found him in Mexico, where Turner’s employer had contracted to provide security for a Sense/Net simstim team who were recording a series of thirty-minute segments in an ongoing jungle adventure series When Conroy arrived, Turner was finishing his arrangements. He’d set up a liaison between Sense/Net and the local government, bribed the town’s top police official, analyzed the hotel’s security system, met the local guides and drivers and had their histories double-checked, arranged for digital voice protection on the simstim team’s transceivers, established a crisis-management team, and planted seismic sensors around the Sense/Net suite-cluster.

  He entered the hotel’s bar, a jungle-garden extension of the lobby, and found a seat by himself at one of the glass-topped tables. A pale man with a shock of white, bleached hair crossed the bar with a drink in each hand. The pale skin was drawn tight across angular features and a high forehead; he wore a neatly pressed military shirt over jeans, and leather sandals.

  “You’re the security for those simstim kids,” the pale man said, putting one of the drinks down on Turner’s table. “Alfredo told me.” Alfredo was one of the hotel bartenders.

  Turner looked up at the man, who was evidently sober and seemed to have all the confidence in the world. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” Turner said, making no move to accept the proffered drink.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Conroy said, seating himself, “we’re in the same ball game.” He seated himself.

  Turner stared. He had a bodyguard’s presence, something restless and watchful written in the lines of his body, and few strangers would so casually violate his private space.

  “You know,” the man said, the way someone might comment on a team that wasn’t doing particularly well in a given season, “those seismics you’re using really don’t make it. I’ve met people who could walk in there, eat your kids for breakfast, stack the bones in the shower, and stroll out whistling. Those seismics would say it never happened.” He took a sip of his drink. “You get A for effort, though. You know how to do a job.”