`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, children. 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 brochures. It was expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.
FREESIDE -WHY WAIT?
The four of them were booked on a THYflight out of Yesilky airport. Transfer at Paris to the JALshuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop's entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless 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, nodding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera 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 shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JALshuttle. `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 anachronism 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
8
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 exchange of data in the L-5 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, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.
On the THYliner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Armitage 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 likethat.'
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 instantly 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 JALshuttle.
`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 description, 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 building. 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 reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate 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 random.
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 Riviera.
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 supposed 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, Riviera.' 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 relationship 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, I said, what's eatin'~ you? Goddam thumb's itchin'~, he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the othergoddam 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 algae. 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 extended 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. Riviera 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, h
is 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 gravity.'
`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.
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