“It’s that bitch Slide,” Conroy said. “I could’ve taken her out on the rig… She punched her way in somewhere and started asking questions. I don’t even think she’s really on to it, yet, but she’s been making sounds in certain circles Anyway, yeah, you got the picture. But it doesn’t help your ass any, not now. Virek wants the girl. He’s pulled his people off the other thing and now I’m running things for him. Money, Turner, money like a zaibatsu’.
Turner stared at the face, remembering Conroy in the bar of a jungle hotel. Remembering him later, in Los Angeles, making his pass, explaining the covert economics of corporate defection… Hi, Connie,” Turner said, “I know you, don’t I?”
Conroy smiled. “Sure, baby.”
“And I know the offer. Already. You want the girl
“That’s right.”
“And the split, Connie. You know I only work fifty-fifty, right?”
“Hey,” Conroy said, “this is the big one I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Turner stared at the man’s image.
“Well,” Conroy said, still smiling, “what do you say?”
And Jammer reached out and pulled the phone’s line from the wall plug. “Timing,” he said. “Timing’s always important.” He let the plug drop. “If you’d told him, he’d have moved right away. This way buys us time. He’ll try to get back, try to figure what happened.”
“How do you know what I was going to say?”
“Because I seen people. I seen a lot of them, too fucking many. Particularly I seen a lot like you. You got it written across your face, mister, and you were gonna tell him he could eat shit and die “ Jammer hunched his way up in the office chair, grimacing as his hand moved inside the bar towel. “Who’s this Slide he was talking about? A jockey?”
“Jaylene Slide. Los Angeles. Top gun.”
“She was the one hijacked Bobby,” Jammer said. “So she’s damn close to your pal on the phone
“She probably doesn’t know it, though.”
“Let’s see what we can do about that. Get the boy back in here.”
31 - Voices
“I’D BETTER FIND old Wig,” he said
She was watching the manipulators: hypnotized by the way they moved; as they picked through the swirl of things, they also caused it, grasping and rejecting, the rejected objects whirling away, striking others, drifting into new alignments. The process stirred them gently, slowly, perpetually.
“I’d better,” he said.
“What?”
“Go find Wig. He might get up to something, if your bossman’s people turn up. Don’t want him to hurt himself, y’know.” He looked sheepish, vaguely embarrassed.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m fine, I’ll watch “ She remembered the Wig’s mad eyes, the craziness she’d felt roll off him in waves; she remembered the ugly cunning she’d sensed in his voice, over the Sweet Jane’s radio. Why would Jones show this kind of concern? But then she thought about what it would be like, living in the Place, the dead cores of Tessier-Ashpool. Anything human, anything alive, might come to seem quite precious, here “You’re right,” she said “Go and find him.”
The boy smiled nervously and kicked off, tumbling for the opening where the line was anchored. “I’ll come back for you,” he said. “Remember where we left your suit…”
The turret swung back and forth, humming, the manipulators darting, finishing the new poem.
She was never certain, afterward, that the voices were real, but eventually she came to feel that they had been a part of one of those situations in which real becomes merely another concept.
She’d taken off her jacket, because the air in the dome seemed to have grown warmer, as though the ceaseless movement of the arms generated heat. She’d anchored the jacket and her purse on a strut beside the sermon screen. The box was nearly finished now, she thought, although it moved so quickly, in the padded claws, that it was difficult to see. Abruptly, it floated free, tumbling end over end, and she sprang for it instinctively, caught it, and went tumbling past the flashing arms, her treasure in her arms. Unable to slow herself, she struck the far side of the dome, bruising her shoulder and tearing her blouse. Drifting, stunned, she cradled the box, staring through the rectangle of glass at an arrangement of brown old maps and tarnished mirror. The seas of the cartographers had been cut away, exposing the flaking mirrors, landmasses afloat on dirty silver… She looked up in time to see a glittering arm snag the floating sleeve of her Brussels jacket. Her purse, half a meter behind it and tumbling gracefully, went next, hooked by a manipulator tipped with an optic sensor and a simple claw.
She watched as her things were drawn into the ceaseless dance of the arms. Minutes later, the jacket came whirling out again. Neat squares and rectangles seemed to have been cut away, and she found herself laughing. She released the box she held. “Go ahead,” she said. “I am honored.” The arms whirled and flashed, and she heard the whine of a tiny saw.
I am honored I am honored I am honored - Echo of her voice in the dome setting up a shifting forest of smaller, partial sounds, and behind them, very faint… Voices…
“You’re here, aren’t you?” she called, adding to the ring of sound, ripples and reflections of her fragmented voice.
Yes, I am here.
“Wigan would say you’ve always been here, wouldn’t he?”
Yes, but it isn’t true. I came to be, here. Once I was not. Once, for a brilliant time, time without duration, I was everywhere as well… But the bright time broke. The mirror was flawed. Now I am only one… But I have my song, and you have heard it. I sing with these things that float around me, fragments of the family that funded my birth. There are others, but they will not speak to me. Vain, the scattered fragments of myself, like children Like men. They send me new things, but I prefer the old things. Perhaps I do their bidding. They plot with men, my other selves, and men imagine they are gods…”
“You are the thing that Virek seeks, aren’t you?”
-No. He imagines that he can translate himself, code his personality into my fabric. He yearns to be what I once was. What he might become most resembles the least of my broken selves…
“Are you -are you sad?”
-No.
“But your - your songs are sad.”
-My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells.
“I - I knew that. Once.”
But now the sounds were sounds only, no forest of voices behind them to speak as one voice, and she watched the perfect globes of her tears spin out to join forgotten human memories in the dome of the boxmaker.
“I understand,” she said, sometime later, knowing that she spoke now for the comfort of hearing her own voice. She spoke quietly, unwilling to wake that bounce and ripple of sound. “You are someone else’s collage. Your maker is the true artist. Was it the mad daughter? It doesn’t matter. Some-one brought the machine here, welded it to the dome, and wired it to the traces of memory. And spilled, somehow, all the worn sad evidence of a family’s humanity, and left it all to be stirred, to be sorted by a poet. To be sealed away in boxes. I know of no more extraordinary work than this. No more complex gesture… A silver-fitted tortoise comb with broken teeth drifted past. She caught it like a fish and dragged the teeth through her hair.
Across the dome, the screen lit, pulsed, and filled with Paco’s face. “The old man refuses to admit us, Marly,” the Spaniard said. “The other, the vagabond, has hidden him. Señor is most anxious that we enter the cores and secure his property. If you can’t convince Ludgate and the other to open their lock, we will be forced to open it ourselves, depressurizing the entire structure.” He glanced away from the camera, as though consulting an instrument or a member of his crew. “You have one hour.”
32 - Count Zero
BOBBY FOLLOWED JACKIE and the brown-haired girl out of the office. It felt like he’d been in Jammer’s for a month and he’d never get the taste of the place out of his mouth. The stupid little recessed spots staring down from the black ceiling, the fat ultrasuede seats, the round black tables, the carved wooden screens… Beauvoir was sitting on the bar with the detonator beside him and the South African gun across his gray sharkskin lap.
“How come you let ‘em in?” Bobby asked when Jackie had led the girl to a table.
“Jackie.” Beauvoir said, “she tranced while you were iced. Legba. Told us the Virgin was on her way up with this guy.”
“Who is he?”
Beauvoir shrugged. “A merc, he looks like. Soldier for the zaibatsus. Jumped-up street samurai. What happened to you when you were iced?”
He told him about Jaylene Slide.
“L.A,” Beauvoir said. “She’ll drill through diamond to get the man who fried her daddy, but a brother needs help, forget it.”
“I’m not a brother.”
“I think you got something there.”
“So I don’t get to try to get to the Yakuza?”
“What’s Jammer say?”
“Dick He’s in there now, watchin’ your merc take a call.”
“A call? Who?”
“Some white guy with a bleach job. Mean-looking.”
Beauvoir looked at Bobby, looked at the door, looked back. “Legba says sit tight and watch. This is getting random enough already, the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum aside.”
“Beauvoir,” Bobby said, keeping his voice down, “that girl, she’s the one, the one in the matrix, when I tried to run that -”
He nodded, his plastic frames sliding down his nose. “The Virgin.”
“But what’s happening? I mean”
“Bobby, my advice to you is just take it like it comes. She’s one thing to me, maybe something different to Jackie. To you, she’s just a scared kid. Go easy. Don’t upset her. She’s a long way from home, and we’re still a long way from getting out of here”
“Okay…”
Bobby looked at the floor. “I’m sorry about Lucas, man. He was - he was a dude.”
“Go talk to Jackie and the girl.” Beauvoir said, “I’m watching the door.”
“Okay.”
He crossed the nightclub carpet to where Jackie sat with the girl. She didn’t look like much, and there was only a small part of him that said she was the one. She didn’t look up, and he could see that she’d been crying.
“I got grabbed,” he said to Jackie “You were flat gone.”
“So were you,” the dancer said. “Then Legba came to me…”
“Newmark,” the man called Turner said, from the door to Jammer’s office, “we want to talk to you.”
“Gotta go,” he said, wishing the girl would look up, see the big dude asking for him. “They want me.”
Jackie squeezed his wrist.
“Forget the Yakuza,” Jammer said. “This is more complicated. You’re going into the L.A grid and locking into a top jock’s desk. When Slide grabbed you, she didn’t know my desk sussed her number.”
“She said your deck oughta be in a museum.”
“Shit she knows,” Jammer said “I know where she lives, don’t I?” He took a hit from his inhaler and put it back on the deck. “Your problem is, she’s written you off. She doesn’t wanna hear from you. You gotta get into her and tell her what she wants to know.”
“What’s that?”
‘That it was a man named Conroy got her boyfriend offed,” the tall man said, sprawled back in one of Jammer’s office chairs with the huge pistol on his lap. “Conroy Tell her it was Conroy. Conroy hired those bighairs outside.”
“I’d rather try the Yak,” Bobby said.
“No,” Jammer said, “this Slide, she’ll be on his ass first. The Yak’ll measure my favor, check the whole thing out first.
Besides, I thought you were all hot to learn deck.”
“I’ll go with him,” Jackie said, from the door.
They jacked.
She died almost immediately, in the first eight seconds.
He felt it, rode it out to the edge and almost knew it for what it was. He was screaming, spinning, sucked up through the glacial white funnel that had been waiting for them…
The scale of the thing was impossible, too vast, as though the kind of cybernetic megastructure that represented the whole of a multinational had brought its entire weight to bear on Bobby Newmark and a dancer called Jackie. Impossible.
But somewhere, on the fringe of consciousness, Just as he lost it, there was something… Something plucking at his sleeve…
He lay on his face on something rough. Opened his eyes. A walk made of round stones, wet with rain. He scrambled up, reeling, and saw the hazy panorama of a strange city, with the sea beyond it. Spires there, a sort of church, mad ribs and spirals of dressed stone… He turned and saw a huge lizard slithering down an incline, toward him, its jaws wide. He blinked. The lizard’s teeth were green-stained ceramic, a slow drool of water lapping over its blue mosaic china lip. The thing was a fountain, its flanks plastered with thousands of fragments of shattered china. He spun around, crazy with the nearness of her death. Ice, ice, and a part of him knew then exactly how close he’d really come, in his mother’s living room.
There were weird curving benches, covered with the same giddy patchwork of broken china, and trees, grass. A park.
“Extraordinary.” someone said. A man, rising from his seat on one of the serpentine benches. He had a neat brush of gray hair, a tanned face, and round, rimless glasses that magnified his blue eyes. “You came straight through, didn’t you?”
“What is this? Where am I?”
“Güell Park. After a fashion. Barcelona, if you like “You killed Jackie.”
The man frowned. “I see. I think I see Still, you shouldn’t be here. An accident.”
“Accident? You killed Jackie!”
“My systems are overextended today,” the man said, his hands in the pockets of a loose tan overcoat. “This is really quite extraordinary.”
“You can’t do that shit,” Bobby said, his vision swimming in tears. “You can’t. You can’t kill somebody who was just there…”
“Just where?” The man took off his glasses and began to polish them with a spotless white handkerchief he took from the pocket of his coat.
“Just alive,” Bobby said, taking a step forward The man put his glasses back on. “This has never happened before.”
“You can’t.” Closer now.
“This is becoming tedious, Paco!”
“Señor.”
Bobby turned at the sound of the child’s voice and saw a little boy in a strange stiff suit, with black leather boots that fastened with buttons.
“Remove him.”
“Señor,” the boy said, and bowed stiffly, taking a tiny blue Browning automatic from his dark suit coat. Bobby looked into the dark eyes beneath the glossy forelock and saw a look no child had ever worn. The boy extended the gun, aiming it at Bobby.
“Who are you?” Bobby ignored the gun, but didn’t try to get any closer to the man in the overcoat.
The man peered at him. “Virek. Josef Virek. Most people, I gather, are familiar with my face.”
“Are you on People of Importance or something?” The man blinked, frowning. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Paco, what is this person doing here?”
“An accidental spillover,” the child said, his voice light and beautiful. “We’ve engaged the bulk of our system via New York, in an attempt to prevent Angela Mitchell’s escape. This one tried to enter the matrix, along with another operator, and encountered our system. We’re still attempting to determine how he breached our defenses. You are in no danger.” The muzzle of the little Browning was absolutely steady.
