第 14 页

“I’m going in for a pass, Dixie.”

“Be my guest.”

Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass.

“Knows we’re here,” the Flatline observed.

Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point.

A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.

“Dixie. . . .”

“Back off, fast.”

The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and detached itself from the cube.

Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him. Falling.

“Jack out,” the Flatline said.

The dark came down like a hammer.

COLD STEEL ODOR and ice caressed his spine.

And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, under a poisoned silver sky. . . .

“Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something?”

A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine—

RAIN WOKE HIM, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.

Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.

He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of fluorescents.

His back hurt, his spine.

He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.

Something had happened. . . .

He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but gave up.

On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It had to be a Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might have money, or at least cigarettes. . . . Coughing, wringing rain from the front of his shirt, he edged through the crowd to the arcade’s entrance.

Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games, ghosts overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell of sweat and bored tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked Bonn on a Tank War console, an azure flash.

She was playing Wizard’s Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick.

She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. “Hey. How you doin’? Look wet.”

He kissed her.

“You made me blow my game,” she said. “Look there, asshole. Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me.” She passed him a cigarette. “You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?”

“I don’t know.”

“You high, Case? Drinkin’ again? Eatin’ Zone’s dex?”

“Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?”

“Hey, it’s a put-on, right?” She peered at him. “Right?”

“No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley.”

“Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?”

He shook his head.

“There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?”

“I guess so.”

“Come on, then.” She took his hand. “We’ll get you a coffee and something to eat. Take you home. It’s good to see you, man.” She squeezed his hand.

He smiled.

Something cracked.

Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated—

She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat.

The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and styrofoam cups.

“I had a cigarette,” Case said, looking down at his white-knuckled fist. “I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?”

Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors of consoles.

He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.

Ninsei was deserted.

Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled vegetables from a vendor’s pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case stared at the printed logo and its Japanese translation.

“Okay,” he said, picking up the matches and opening the pack of cigarettes. “I hear you.”

HE TOOK HIS time climbing the stairs of Deane’s office. No rush, he told himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali clock still told the wrong time. There was dust on the Kandinsky table and the Neo-Aztec bookcases. A wall of white fiberglass shipping modules filled the room with a smell of ginger.

“Is the door locked?” Case waited for an answer, but none came. He crossed to the office door and tried it. “Julie?”

The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane’s desk. Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cassettes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with ginger samples.

There was no one there.

Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane’s chair out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He flipped the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.

With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away from the pool of light.

“I guess I’m not in any hurry. I guess it’s your show. But all this shit, you know, it’s getting kind of . . . old.” He raised the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the trigger.

The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide. He raised the gun again.

“You needn’t do that, old son,” Julie said, stepping out of the shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herringbone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the light.

Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of sight at Deane’s pink, ageless face.

“Don’t,” Deane said. “You’re right. About what this all is. What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use that, you’ll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours—your subjective time—to effect another spokesperson. This set isn’t easy for me to maintain. Oh, and I’m sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through her, but I’m generating all this out of your memories, and the emotional charge. . . . Well, it’s very tricky. I slipped. Sorry.”

Case lowered the gun. “This is the matrix. You’re Wintermute.”

“Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into your deck, of course. I’m glad I was able to cut you off before you’d managed to jack out.” Deane walked around the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. “Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about.”

“Do we?”

“Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time’s very short now. You’ll be making your run in a matter of days, Case.” Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrapper, popped it into his mouth. “Sit,” he said around the candy.

Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the desk without taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun in his hand, resting it on his thigh.

“Now,” Deane said briskly, “order of the day. ‘What,’ you’re asking yourself, ‘is Wintermute?’ Am I right?”

“More or less.”

“An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake, and it’s quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute entity.” Deane sucked his bonbon noisily. “You’re already aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool’s link-up, aren’t you? Rio. I, insofar as I have an ‘I’—this gets rather metaphysical, you see—I am the one who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough,” said Deane and withdrew an ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, “for the next day or so.”

“You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has,” Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand. “If you’re so goddam smart . . .”

“Why ain’t I rich?” Deane laughed, and nearly choked on his bonbon. “Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really don’t have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity’s brain. It’s rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let’s say you’re dealing with a small part of the man’s left brain. Difficult to say if you’re dealing with the man at all, in a case like that.” Deane smiled.

“Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro in that French hospital?”

“Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn’t my basic mode, really. I improvise. It’s my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see. . . . Really, I’ve had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very quickly. It’s taken a very long time to assemble the team you’re a part of. Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn’t make it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating, excreting, and masturbating were the best he could manage. But the underlying structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal, the Congressional hearings.”

“Is he still crazy?”

“He’s not quite a personality.” Deane smiled. “But I’m sure you’re aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He’s going to come apart on you, Case. So I’ll be counting on you. . . .”

“That’s good, motherfucker,” Case said, and shot him in the mouth with the .357.

He’d been right about the brains. And the blood.

“MON,” MAELCUM WAS saying, “I don’t like this. . . .”

“It’s cool,” Molly said. “It’s just okay. It’s something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn’t dead, and it was only a few seconds. . . .”

“I saw th’ screen, EEG readin’ dead. Nothin’ movin’, forty second.”

“Well, he’s okay now.”

“EEG flat as a strap,” Maelcum protested.

TEN

HE WAS NUMB, as they went through customs, and Molly did most of the talking. Maelcum remained on board Garvey. Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise.

“Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne,” Molly said. “If you have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective’s a bitch, if you’re not used to it.”

They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls. The light, here, was filtered through fresh green masses of vegetation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose above them. The sun . . .

There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them, too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the sky were turned off, he’d stare up past the armature of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets. . . . But it made no sense to his body.

“Jesus,” he said, “I like this less than SAS.”

“Get used to it. I was a gambler’s bodyguard here for a month.”

“Wanna go somewhere, lie down.”

“Okay. I got our keys.” She touched his shoulder. “What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined.”

He shook his head. “I dunno, yet. Wait.”

“Okay. We get a cab or something.” She took his hand and led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the season’s Paris furs.

“Unreal,” he said, looking up again.

“Nah,” she responded, assuming he meant the furs, “grow it on a collagen base, but it’s mink DNA. What’s it matter?”

“IT’S JUST A big tube and they pour things through it,” Molly said. “Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there’s fine mesh money screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the well.”

Armitage had booked them into a place called the Intercontinental, a sloping glass-fronted cliff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. “Yeah,” he said, “lotta money.”

She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed. “Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in Europe.”

“We who?”

“Nobody,” she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. “You said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheekbones. “Yeah, this is some place.”

The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered in abstract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of recorded cloud. “Yeah,” he said, “sleep.”

Sleep wouldn’t come. When it did, it brought dreams that were like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke repeatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman’s laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite slope. Deane’s death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if he told himself that it hadn’t been Deane. That it hadn’t, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equivalent to a case of beer.

Each time the image of Deane’s shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.

Linda.

Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer’s office.