第 24 页

But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight?

Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and concrete.

“Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy soon,” she muttered. “And Armitage. Where’s he, Case?”

“Dead,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him, “he’s dead.”

He flipped.

THE CHINESE PROGRAM was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle representing the T-A cores. Arches of emerald across the colorless void.

“How’s it go, Dixie?”

“Fine. Too slick. Thing’s amazing. . . . Shoulda had one that time in Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they were worth. But that’s ancient history. This baby takes all the drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder what a real war would be like, now. . . .”

“If this kinda shit was on the street, we’d be out a job,” Case said.

“You wish. Wait’ll you’re steering that thing upstairs through black ice.”

“Sure.”

Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just appeared on the far end of one of the emerald arches.

“Dixie . . .”

“Yeah. I see it. Don’t know if I believe it.”

A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the T-A cores. It began to advance, across the bridge built by Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, and Case saw that it was walking. As it came, the green section of the arch extended, the polychrome of the virus program rolling back, a few steps ahead of the cracked black shoes.

“Gotta hand it to you, boss,” the Flatline said, when the short, rumpled figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters away. “I never seen anything this funny when I was alive.” But the eerie nonlaugh didn’t come.

“I never tried it before,” the Finn said, showing his teeth, his hands bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.

“You killed Armitage,” Case said.

“Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I know, I know, you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat. I was the one gave it to Armitage in the first place. I mean I told him what to use. But I think maybe it’s better to let the deal stand. You got enough time. I’ll give it to you. Only a coupla hours now, right?”

Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn lit up one of his Partagas.

“You guys,” the Finn said, “you’re a pain. The Flatline here, if you were all like him, it would be real simple. He’s a construct, just a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect him to. My projections said there wasn’t much chance of Molly wandering in on Ashpool’s big exit scene, give you one example.” He sighed.

“Why’d he kill himself?” Case asked.

“Why’s anybody kill himself?” The figure shrugged. “I guess I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the various factors in his history and how they interrelate. He was ready to do it for a long time, but he kept going back into the freezer. Christ, he was a tedious old fuck.” The Finn’s face wrinkled with disgust. “It’s all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system. Subtle, too. So basically, she killed him. Except he figured he’d killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel figures she got him with an eyeball full of shellfish juice.” The Finn flicked his butt away into the matrix below. “Well, actually, I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a little of the old how-to, you know?”

“Wintermute,” Case said, choosing the words carefully, “you told me you were just a part of something else. Later on, you said you wouldn’t exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets the word into the right slot.”

The Finn’s streamlined skull nodded.

“Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead, and you’re gonna be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me how to get these fucking toxin sacs out of my system? Who’s going to get Molly back out of there? I mean, where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna be, we cut you loose from the hardwiring?”

The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and regarded it critically, like a surgeon examining a scalpel. “Good question,” he said, finally. “You know salmon? Kinda fish? These fish, see, they’re compelled to swim upstream. Got it?”

“No,” Case said.

“Well, I’m under compulsion myself. And I don’t know why. If I were gonna subject you to my very own thoughts, let’s call ’em speculations, on the topic, it would take a couple of your lifetimes. Because I’ve given it a lot of thought. And I just don’t know. But when this is over, we do it right, I’m gonna be part of something bigger. Much bigger.” The Finn glanced up and around the matrix. “But the parts of me that are me now, that’ll still be here. And you’ll get your payoff.”

Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward and get his fingers around the figure’s throat, just above the ragged knot in the rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn’s larynx.

“Well, good luck,” the Finn said. He turned, hands in pockets and began trudging back up the green arch.

“Hey, asshole,” the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone a dozen paces. The figure paused, half turned. “What about me? What about my payoff?”

“You’ll get yours,” it said.

“What’s that mean?” Case asked, as he watched the narrow tweed back recede.

“I wanna be erased,” the construct said. “I told you that, remember?”

STRAYLIGHT REMINDED CASE of deserted early morning shopping centers he’d known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again.

Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing her goal or out of concern for her leg. The pain was starting to work its jagged way back through the endorphins, and he wasn’t sure what that meant. She didn’t speak, kept her teeth clenched, and carefully regulated her breathing. She’d passed many things that Case hadn’t understood, but his curiosity was gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly’s incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled—her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically—“La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.” She’d reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass. There had been what was obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool’s cryogenic compound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.

She’d seen no one since the two Africans and their cart, and for Case they’d taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured them gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth dark skulls gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired little song. And none of this was anything like the Villa Straylight he would have expected, some cross between Cath’s fairy tale castle and a half-remembered childhood fantasy of the Yakuza’s inner sanctum.

07:02:18.

One and a half hours.

“Case,” she said, “I wanna favor.” Stiffly, she lowered herself to sit on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of each plate protected by an uneven coating of clear plastic. She picked at a rip in the plastic on the topmost plate, blades sliding from beneath thumb and forefinger. “Leg’s not good, you know? Didn’t figure any climb like that, and the endorphin won’t cut it, much longer. So maybe—just maybe, right?—I got a problem here. What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera does”—and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through Modern polycarbon and Paris leather—“I want you to tell him. Tell him it was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly. He’ll know. Okay?” She glanced around the empty hallway, the bare walls. The floor here was raw lunar concrete and the air smelled of resins. “Shit, man, I don’t even know if you’re listening.”

CASE.

She winced, got to her feet, nodded. “What’s he told you, man, Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was the Tessier half, 3Jane’s genetic mother. And of that dead puppet of Ashpool’s, I guess. Can’t figure why he’d tell me, down in that cubicle . . . lotta stuff. . . . Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It’s not just a mask, it’s like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of personality.” She drew her fletcher and limped away down the corridor.

The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced by what Case at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from solid rock. Molly examined its edge and he saw that in fact the steel was sheathed with panels of something that looked and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the dark sand spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like sand, cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed like a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters ahead, the tunnel curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shadows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which meant that she’d had to descend again, after the climb. He was thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror for cowboys.

But she wasn’t lost, he told himself.

Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across the un-sand of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.

The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time to realize that the thing was a recording. The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly’s breasts were too large, visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist was impossibly narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty. Beside her, Armitage stood rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki uniform. His eyes, Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny monitor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a howling waste of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds.

She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage’s television eyes, then turned to the figure of Case. Here, it was as if Riviera—and Case had known instantly that Riviera was responsible—had been unable to find anything worthy of parody. The figure that slouched there was a fair approximation of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin, high-shouldered, a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a shave, but then he usually did.

Molly stepped back. She looked from one figure to another. It was a static display, the only movement the silent gusting of the black trees in Armitage’s frozen Siberian eyes.

“Tryin’ to tell us something, Peter?” she asked softly. Then she stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet of the holo-Molly. Metal clinked against the wall and the figures were gone. She bent and picked up a small display unit. “Guess he can jack into these and program them direct,” she said, tossing it away.

She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandescent globe set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of expansion grating. The style of the improvised fixture suggested childhood, somehow. He remembered fortresses he’d built with other children on rooftops and in flooded sub-basements. A rich kid’s hideout, he thought. This kind of roughness was expensive. What they called atmosphere.

She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the entrance to 3Jane’s apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing in the alley behind the Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of Riviera’s shattered body. Several others were scenes of torture, the inquisitors always military officers and the victims invariably young women. These had the awful intensity of Riviera’s show at the Vingtième Siècle, as though they had been frozen in the blue flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed them.

The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera had had to drag across some private distance of memory and time. She had to kneel to examine it; it had been projected from the vantage point of a small child. None of the others had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments of torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.

A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond its crest the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers. The rubble wave was textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted gracefully as fine string, vast slabs of concrete still clinging there. The foreground might once have been a city square; there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a fountain. At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau was confusing at first. Molly must have read it correctly before Case had quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She spat, then stood.

Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores on their contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and throat open to the sky. They were feeding.

“Bonn,” she said, something like gentleness in her voice. “Quite the product, aren’t you, Peter? But you had to be. Our 3Jane, she’s too jaded now to open the back door for just any petty thief. So Wintermute dug you up. The ultimate taste, if your taste runs that way. Demon lover. Peter.” She shivered. “But you talked her into letting me in. Thanks. Now we’re gonna party.”

And then she was walking—strolling, really, in spite of the pain—away from Riviera’s childhood. She drew the fletcher from its holster, snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed that, and replaced it with another. She hooked her thumb in the neck of the Modern suit and ripped it open to the crotch with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting the tough polycarbon like rotten silk. She freed herself from the arms and legs, the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell to the dark false sand.

Case noticed the music then. A music he didn’t know, all horns and piano.

The entrance to 3Jane’s world had no door. It was a ragged five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down in a broad shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows, music.