“Vodou isn’t like that,” Beauvoir said. “It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In our system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Vodou says, there’s God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?” Bobby nodded, chewing thoughtfully. Another derm and two glasses of the red wine had helped a lot, and the big man had taken Two-a-Day for a walk through the trees and the fluorescent jackstraws, leaving Bobby with Beauvoir. Then Jackie had shown up all cheerful, with a big bowl of this eggs-and-rice stuff, which wasn’t bad at all, and as she’d put it down on the table in front of him, she’d pressed one of her tits against his shoulder.
“So,” Beauvoir said, “we are’ concerned with getting things done. If you want, we’re concerned with systems. And so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn’t be a cowboy and you wouldn’t have a handle, right?” He dunked what was left of the cigarette in a fingerprinted glass half full of red wine. “Looks like Two-a-Day was about to get down to serious partying, about the time the shit hit the fan.”
“What shit’s that?” Bobby asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You,” Beauvoir said, frowning. “Not that any of it is your fault. As much as Two-a-Day wants to make out that’s the case.”
“He does? He seems pretty tense now Real bitchy, too.”
“Exactly. You got it Tense Scared shitless is more like it.”
“So how come?”
“Well, you see, things aren’t exactly what they seem, with Two-a-Day. I mean, yeah, he actually does the kind of shit you’ve known him to; hustles hot software to the caspers, pardon me” - he grinned - “down in Barrytown, but his main shot, I mean the man’s real ambitions, you understand, lie elsewhere.” Beauvoir picked up a wilted canapé, regarded it with evident suspicion, and flicked it over the table, into the trees. “His thing, you understand, is dicking around for a couple of bigtime Sprawl oungans.”
Bobby nodded blankly.
“Dudes who serve with both hands”
“You lost me there.”
“We’re talking a professional priesthood here, you want to call it that. Otherwise, just imagine a couple of major dudes - console cowboys, among other things - who make it their business to get things done for people. ‘To serve with both hands’ is an expression we have, sort of means they work both ends. White and black, got me?”
Bobby swallowed, then shook his head.
“Sorcerers,” Beauvoir said “Never mind. Bad dudes, big money, that’s all you need to know Two-a-Day, he acts like an up-line joeboy for these people. Sometimes he finds something they might be interested in, he downloads it on ‘em, collects a few favors later. Maybe he collects a dozen too many favors, they download something on him. Not quite the same proposition, you follow me? Say they get something they think has potential, but it scares them. These characters tend to a certain conservatism, you see? No? Well, you’ll learn.”
Bobby nodded.
“The kind of software someone like you would rent from Two-a-Day, that’s nothin’. I mean, it’ll work, but it’s nothing anybody heavy would ever bother with. You’ve seen a lot of cowboy kinos, right? Well, the stuff they make up for those things isn’t much, compared with the kind of shit a real heavy operator can front. Particularly when it comes to icebreakers Heavy icebreakers are kind of funny to deal in, even for the big boys You know why? Because ice, all the really hard stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the matrix, is always the produce of an Al, an artificial intelligence. Nothing else is fast enough to weave good ice and constantly alter and upgrade it. So when a really powerful icebreaker shows up on the black market, there are already a couple of very dicey factors in play. Like, for starts, where did the product come from? Nine times out of ten, it came from an Al, and Al’s are constantly screened, mainly by the Turing people, to make sure they don’t get too smart. So maybe you’ll get the Turing machine after your ass, because maybe an Al somewhere wants to augment its private cash flow Some Al’s have citizenship, right? Another thing you have to watch out for, maybe it’s a military icebreaker, and that’s bad heat, too, or maybe it’s taken a walk out of some zaibatsu’s industrial espionage arm, and you don’t want that either You takin’ this shit in, Bobby?”
Bobby nodded. He felt like he’d been waiting all his life to hear Beauvoir explain the workings of a world whose existence he’d only guessed at before.
“Still, an icebreaker that’ll really cut is worth mega, I mean beaucoup. So maybe you’re Mr. Big in the market, someone offers you this thing, and you don’t want to just tell ‘em to take a walk So you buy it. You buy it, real quiet, but you don’t slot it, no. What do you do with it? You take it home, have your tech fix it up so that it looks real average. Like you have it set up in a format like this” - and he tapped a stack of software in front of him -”and you take it to your joeboy, who owes you some favors, as usual.
“Wait a sec,” Bobby said. “I don’t think I like -”
“Good. That means you’re getting smart, or anyway smarter. Because that’s what they did. They brought it out here to your friendly ‘wareman, Mr. Two-a-Day, and they told him their problem. ‘Ace,’ they say, ‘we want to check this shit out, test-drive it, but no way we gonna do it ourselves It’s down to you, boy.’ So, in the way of things, what’s Two-a-Day gonna do with it? Is he gonna slot it? No way at all. He just does the same damn thing the big boys did to him, ‘cept he isn’t even going to bother telling the guy he’s going to do it to. What he does, he picks a base out in the Midwest that’s full of tax-dodge programs and yen-laundry flowcharts for some whorehouse in Kansas City, and everybody who didn’t just fall off a tree knows that the motherfucker is eyeball-deep in ice, black ice, totally lethal feedback programs. There isn’t a cowboy in the Sprawl or out who’d mess with that base first, because it’s dripping with defenses; second, because the stuff inside isn’t worth anything to anybody but the IRS, and they’re probably already on the owner’s take
“Hey,” Bobby said, “lemme get this straight”
“I’m giving it to you straight, white boy! He picked out that base, then he ran down his list of hotdoggers, ambitious punks from over in Barrytown, wilsons dumb enough to run a program they’d never seen before against a base that some joker like Two-a-Day fingered for them and told them was an easy make. And who’s he pick? He picks somebody new to the game, natch, somebody who doesn’t even know where he lives, doesn’t even have his number, and he says, here, my man, you take this home and make yourself some money. You get anything good, Ill fence it for you!” Beauvoir’s eyes were wide, he wasn’t smiling. “Sound like anybody you know, man, or maybe you try not to hang out with losers?”
“You mean he knew I was going to get killed if I plugged into that base?”
“No, Bobby, but he knew it was a possibility if the package didn’t work. What he mainly wanted was to watch you try. Which he didn’t bother to do himself, just put a couple of cowboys on it. It could’ve gone a couple different ways. Say, if that icebreaker had done its number on the black ice, you’d have gotten in, found a bunch of figures that meant dick to you, you’d have gotten back out, maybe with-out leaving any trace at all. Well, you’d have come back to Leon’s and told Two-a-Day that he’d fingered the wrong data. Oh, he’d have been real apologetic, for sure, and you’d have gotten a new target and a new icebreaker, and he’d have taken the first one back to the Sprawl and said it looked okay. Meanwhile, he’d have an eye cocked in your direction, just to monitor your health, make sure nobody came looking for the icebreaker they might’ve heard you’d used. Another way it might have gone, the way it nearly did go, something could’ve been funny with the icebreaker, the ice could’ve fried you dead, and one of those cowboys would’ve had to break into your momma’s place and get that software back before any-body found your body.”
“I dunno, Beauvoir, that’s pretty fucking hard to - “
“Hard my ass. Life is hard. I mean, we’re talkin’ biz, you know?” Beauvoir regarded him with some severity, the plastic frames far down his slender nose. He was lighter than either Two-a-Day or the big man, the color of coffee with only a little whitener, his forehead high and smooth beneath close-cropped black fizz. He looked skinny, under his gray sharkskin robe, and Bobby didn’t really find him threatening at all. “But our problem, the reason we’re here, the reason you’re here, is to figure out what did happen. And that’s something else.”
“But you mean he set me up, Two-a-Day set me up so I’d get my ass killed?” Bobby was still in the St Mary’s Maternity wheelchair, although he no longer felt like he needed it. “And he’s in deep shit with these guys, these heavies from the Sprawl?”
“You got it now.”
“And that’s why he was acting that way, like he doesn’t give a shit, or maybe hates my guts, right? And he’s real scared?”
Beauvoir nodded.
“And,” Bobby said, suddenly seeing what Two-a-Day was really pissed about, and why he was scared, “it’s because I got my ass jumped, down by Big Playground, and those Lobe fucks ripped me for my deck! And their software, it was still in my deck!” He leaned forward, excited at having put it together. “And these guys, it’s like they’ll kill him or some-thing, unless he gets it back for them, right?”
“I can tell you watch a lot of kino,” Beauvoir said, “but that’s about the size of it, definitely.”
“Right,” Bobby said, settling back in the wheelchair and putting his bare feet up on the edge of the table. “Well, Beauvoir, who are these guys? Whatchacallem, hoonguns? Sorcerers, you said? What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, Bobby,” Beauvoir said “I’m one, and the big fella - you can call him Lucas - he’s the other.”
“You’ve probably seen one of these before,” Beauvoir said, as the man he called Lucas put the projection tank down on the table, having methodically cleared a space for it.
“In school,” Bobby said.
“You go to school, man?” Two-a-Day snapped “Why the fuck didn’t you stay there?” He’d been chain-smoking since he came back with Lucas, and seemed in worse shape than he’d been in before.
“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.
