第 9 页

“C’mon, sister. We’re for out.” The eyes of the two Moderns stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that raged behind them. “You hurt? C’mon. Tommy’ll walk you.” Tommy handed something to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon.

“Chicago,” she said, “I’m on my way.” And then she was falling, not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some bloodwarm well, into silence and the dark.

THE PANTHER MODERN leader, who introduced himself as Lupus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case’s worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. His pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat’s. Case watched the suit crawl with color and texture.

“You let it get out of control,” Armitage said. He stood in the center of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an expensive-looking trenchcoat.

“Chaos, Mr. Who,” Lupus Yonderboy said. “That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with her. Not with you, Mr. Who.” His suit had taken on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale avocado. “She needed her medical team. She’s with them. We’ll watch out for her. Everything’s fine.” He smiled again.

“Pay him,” Case said.

Armitage glared at him. “We don’t have the goods.”

“Your woman has it,” Yonderboy said.

“Pay him.”

Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat. “You want to count it?” he asked Yonderboy.

“No,” the Panther Modern said. “You’ll pay. You’re a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name.”

“I hope that isn’t a threat,” Armitage said.

“That’s business,” said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the single pocket on the front of his suit.

The phone rang. Case answered.

“Molly,” he told Armitage, handing him the phone.

THE SPRAWL’S GEODESICS were lightening into predawn gray as Case left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. He couldn’t sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone, then Armitage, and Molly was in surgery somewhere. Vibration beneath his feet as a train hissed past. Sirens dopplered in the distance.

He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage’s toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner as he walked. It didn’t seem real. Neither did the fear and agony he’d seen through Molly’s eyes in the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself trying to remember the faces of the three people he’d killed in Chiba. The men were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty plastic cylinders rattling in its bed.

“Case.”

He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.

“Message for you, Case.” Lupus Yonderboy’s suit cycled through pure primaries. “Pardon. Not to startle you.”

Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a head taller than the Modern. “You oughta be careful, Yonderboy.”

“This is the message. Wintermute.” He spelled it out.

“From you?” Case took a step forward.

“No,” Yonderboy said. “For you.”

“Who from?”

“Wintermute,” Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of pink hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow against old concrete. He executed a strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone. No. There. Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The eyes winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone.

Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers, leaning back against peeling brickwork.

Ninsei had been a lot simpler.

FIVE

THE MEDICAL TEAM Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel, each coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.

“He says if I kick anything, it’ll fall off.”

“I ran into one of your pals,” he said, “a Modern.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message.” He passed her a paper napkin with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. “He said—” But her hand came up in the jive for silence.

“Get us some crab,” she said.

AFTER LUNCH IN Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease, they tubed into New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke.

A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven tightly into her hair opened the Finn’s door and led them along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places.

Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.

Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn’t know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of Partagas.

“Wait,” the Finn said, and left the room.

Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed.

Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an elaborate sequence.

“Honey,” he said to Molly, tucking the console away, “you have got it. No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?”

“Yonderboy,” Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. “I did a deal with Larry, on the side.”

“Smart,” the Finn said. “It’s an AI.”

“Slow it down a little,” Case said.

“Berne,” the Finn said, ignoring him. “Berne. It’s got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of ’53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software.”

“What’s in Berne, okay?” Case deliberately stepped between them.

“Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I’ve got the Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence.”

“That’s all just fine,” Molly said, “but where’s it get us?”

“If Yonderboy’s right,” the Finn said, “this AI is backing Armitage.”

“I paid Larry to have the Moderns nose around Armitage a little,” Molly explained, turning to Case. “They have some very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they’d get my money if they answered one question: who’s running Armitage?”

“And you think it’s this AI? Those things aren’t allowed any autonomy. It’ll be the parent corporation, this Tessle . . .”

“Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,” said the Finn. “And I got a little story for you about them. Wanna hear?” He sat down and hunched forward.

“Finn,” Molly said. “He loves a story.”

“Haven’t ever told anybody this one,” the Finn began.

THE FINN WAS a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another man’s story, a man he called Smith.

Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who’d “gone silicon”—the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case—and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith’s knowledge of the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. “It smelled,” the Finn said to Case, “smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful.”

Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonné over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year’s tax return.

Smith’s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it.

When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he’d been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.

Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.

And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith’s security as though it didn’t exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object.

Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked, did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he’d intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy’s death.

“So that was where I came in,” the Finn continued. “Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that’s where you go for a quiet go-to that’ll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He’d just had a very weird business experience and he’d come out on top, but it didn’t add up. Who’d paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn’t think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn’t anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer’s ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us.”

Case raised his eyebrows.

“Freeside,” the Finn said. “The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn’t been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You’re looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law’s a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it’s hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.”

“How’s that?” Molly asked.

“Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you’re legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody’s seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident. . . .”

“So what happened with your fence?”

“Nothing.” The Finn frowned. “Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A’s have, and that was it. Jimmy must’ve gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.” He looked at Molly. “The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private.”

“You figure they own that ninja, Finn?” Molly asked.

“Smith thought so.”

“Expensive,” she said. “Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?”

“Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.”

“Okay,” Case said, “we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute. Where’s that get us?”

“Nowhere yet,” Molly said, “but you got a little side gig now.” She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.