`Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?'
`Bang on. Killer virus.'
`Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it.'
`You wanna tell me, maybe?'
`Don't have time.'
`Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway.'
`Fuck off,' Case said, and flipped, cutting off the torn fingernail edge of the Flatline's laughter.
`She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness,' 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own. `Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep.' She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the light at different angles. `Only in certain heightened modes would an individual -a clan member -suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness...'
Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill -his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impressions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise. If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be?
Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock, huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.
`Where'd he go?' Molly asked. `To take his shot?'
3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. `He told me when to let you in,' she said. `He wouldn't tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?'
Case felt Molly hesitate. `I would've killed him. I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you.'
`Why?' 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the djellaba's inner pockets. `And why? And what about?'
Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark, curiously opaque. `Because I hate him,' she said at last, `and the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am.'
`And the show,' 3Jane said. `I saw the show.'
Molly nodded.
`But Hideo?'
`Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a partner of mine, once.'
3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.
`Because I had to see,' Molly said.
`And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?' Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling. `Shall we talk now?'
`Take this off,' Molly said, raising her captive hands.
`You killed my father,' 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. `I was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes, he called them.'
`He killed the puppet. It looked like you.'
`He was fond of broad gestures,' she said, and then Riviera was beside her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he'd worn in the roof garden of their hotel.
`Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she? I thought so when I first saw her.' He stepped past 3Jane. `It isn't going to work, you know.'
`Isn't it, Peter?' Molly managed a grin.
`Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mistake. Underestimating me.' He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. `He talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case, whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature.' He drank.
`And what exactly is that, Peter?' Molly asked, her voice flat.
Riviera beamed. `Perversity.' He walked back to the two women, swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. `An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision.'
She waited, looking up at him.
`Oh, Peter,' 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation ordinarily reserved for children.
`No word for you, Molly. He told me about that, you see. 3Jane knows the code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither will Wintermute. My Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse way.' He smiled again. `She has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy's favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match, a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool.' He drank off the last of the mineral water. `No, you wouldn't do, Daddy, you would not do. Now that Peter's come home.' And then, his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.
Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened to the panels on either side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the thing's fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead. Marcus Garveywas groaning and ticking with g-stress.
`The Mute takin'~ I an'~ I dock,' the Zionite said, popping the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. `Maelcum pilot th'~ landin'~, meantime need we tool f'~ th'~ job.'
`You keep tools back there?' Case craned his neck and watched cords of muscle bunching in the brown back.
`This one,' Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped in black poly from the space behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a single hexhead to hold it in place. The black package had drifted aft before he'd finished. He thumbed open the vacuum valves on the workbelt's gray pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing he'd removed.
He kicked back, gliding over his instruments -a green docking diagram pulsed on his central screen -and snagged the frame of Case's g-web. He pulled himself down and picked at the tape of his package with a thick, chipped thumbnail. `Some man in China say th'~ truth comes out this,' he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, replaced with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and ganja.
`That the only one you got?'
`Sure, mon,' he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pistolgrip in his other hand, `I an'~ I th'~ Rastafarian navy, believe it.'
Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He'd never bothered to put the Texas catheter back on, at least he could take a real piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last.
He jacked in.
`Hey,' the construct said, `ol'~ Peter's totally apeshit, huh?'
They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the emerald arches had widened, grown together, become a solid mass. Green predominated in the planes of the Chinese program that surrounded them. `Gettin'~ close, Dixie?'
`Real close. Need you soon.'
`Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang's set itself up solid in our Hosaka. I'm going to have to jack you and my deck out of the circuit, haul you into Straylight, and plug you back in, into the custodial program there, Wintermute says. Says the Kuang virus will be all through there. Then we run from inside, through the Straylight net.'
`Wonderful,' the Flatline said, `I never did like
to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.'
Case flipped.
Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. When the optic chip flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink aura.
07:29:40.
`I'm very unhappy with this, Peter.' 3Jane's voice seemed to arrive from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized, then corrected himself. The simstim unit was intact and still in place; he could feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears registered the vibrations of the girl's voice. Riviera said something brief and indistinct. `But I don't,' she said, `and it isn't fun. Hideo will bring a medical unit down from intensive care, but this needs a surgeon.'
There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against the side of the pool.
`What was that you were telling her, when I came back?' Riviera was very close now.
`About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside from Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to her?'
`I wanted to see if they would break.'
`One did. When she comes around -if she comes around -we'll see what color her eyes are.'
`She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't been here to distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo to draw her little bomb, where would you be? In her power.'
`No,' 3Jane said, `there was Hideo. I don't think you quite understand about Hideo. She does, evidently.'
`Like a drink?'
`Wine. The white.'
Case jacked out.
Maelcum was hunched over Garvey's controls, tapping out commands for a docking sequence. The module's central screen displayed a fixed red square that represented the Straylight dock. Garveywas a larger square, green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum's commands. To the left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of Garveyand Haniwaas they approached the curvature of the spindle.
`We got an hour, man,' Case said, pulling the ribbon of fiberoptics from the Hosaka. His deck's back-up batteries were good for ninety minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be an additional drain. He worked quickly, mechanically, fastening the construct to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micropore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rectangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other. He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever that created suction. With the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder strap suspended in front of him, he struggled into his leather jacket, checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him, the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued when he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he'd bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over his shoulders, heard it click off the Russian scrubber. He was about to do the same with the steel star, but the rebounding credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck the ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum's left shoulder. The Zionite interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.
`You missin'~ th'~ Mute, mon,' Maelcum said. `Mute say he messin'~ th'~ security for Garvey.Garveydockin'~ as 'nother boat, boat they 'spectin'~ out of Babylon. Mute broadcastin'~ codes for us.'
`We gonna wear the suits?'
`Too heavy.' Maelcum shrugged. `Stay in web 'til I tell you.' He tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed the worn pink handholds on either side of the navigation board. Case saw the green square shrink a final few millimeters to overlap the red square. On the smaller screen, Haniwalowered her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared. Garveywas still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang, shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender wasp shape. Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle that curved, groping past Haniwafor Garvey.
There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trembling fronds of caulk.
`Mon,' Maelcum said, `mind we got gravity.' A dozen small objects struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a magnet. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration. The deck and construct had fallen painfully to his lap.
They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.
Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and removed his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. `Come now, mon, if you seh time be mos'~ precious.'
19
The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself, as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through Marcus Garvey's forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem of its own.
The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elaborate version of the one he'd tumbled through to reach Haniwa,designed for use in the spindle's rotation gravity. A corrugated tunnel, articulated by integral hydraulic members, each segment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip plastic, the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had snaked its way around Haniwa;it was horizontal, where it joined Garvey's lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb around the curvature of the yacht's hull. Maelcum was already making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left hand, the Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of baggy fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles. The gangway shifted slightly, each time he climbed to another ring.
The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. All he felt now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to replay Armitage's lecture on the spindle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside's ecosystem was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
`Mon,' Maelcum said quietly, `get up here, 'side me.' Case edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch, two meters in diameter. The hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible housings set into the frame of the hatch.
`So what do we --'
Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.
Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of the Remington's safety being released. `You th'~ mon in th'~ hurry...' Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Then Case was beside him.
The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall. On the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. `Very sorry, sir,' said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced up. `Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please.' On the monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently.
Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at the monitor. Blank.
`Who?' the man managed.
`The Rastafarian navy,' Case said, standing up, the cyberspace deck banging against his hip, `and all we want's a jack into your custodial system.'
The man swallowed. `Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It must be a loyalty check.' He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of
his orange suit.
`No, mon, this a real one.' Maelcum came up out of his crouch with the Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. `You move it.'
They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlapping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case. `Pretty rugs,' Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back. `Smell like church.'
They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted above a console with a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of Metro Holografix. `Okay,' he said, `Maelcum takes this guy down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there, I'll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel. There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.' As Maelcum nudged his captive along, Case knelt and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.
`Do you have to look like that, man?' he asked the face on the screen. The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese posters.
`Anything you want, baby,' Zone drawled, `just hop it for Lonny...'
`No,' Case said, `use the Finn.' As the Zone image vanished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his forehead.
`What kept you?' the Flatline asked, and laughed.
`Told you don't do that,' Case said.
`Joke, boy,' the construct said, `zero time lapse for me. Lemme see what we got here...'
The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey,a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.
`Right on,' the Flatline said.
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