for Deb

        who made it possible

        with love

PART ONE

CHIBA CITY BLUES

        1

  The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned

to a dead channel.

  `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he

shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the

Chat.  `It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-

ciency.'  It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.  The Chatsubo

was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there

for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.

  Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto-

nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin.  He saw

Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel

and brown decay.  Case found a place at the bar, between the

unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval

uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with

precise rows of tribal scars.  `Wage was in here early, with two

joeboys,' Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his

good hand.  `Maybe some business with you, Case?'

  Case shrugged.  The girl to his right giggled and nudged

him.

  The bartender's smile widened.  His ugliness was the stuff

of legend.  In an age of affordable beauty, there was something

heraldic about his lack of it.  The antique arm whined as he

reached for another mug.  It was a Russian military prosthesis,

a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby

pink plastic.  `You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.'  Ratz

grunted; the sound served him as laughter.  He scratched his

overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw.  `You are

the artiste of the slightly funny deal.'

  `Sure,' Case said, and sipped his beer.  `Somebody's gotta

be funny around here.  Sure the fuck isn't you.'

  The whore's giggle went up an octave.

  `Isn't you either, sister.  So you vanish, okay?  Zone, he's

a close personal friend of mine.'

  She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible

spitting sound, her lips barely moving.  But she left.

  `Jesus,' Case said, `what kinda creepjoint you running here? 

Man can't have a drink.'

  `Ha,' Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag,

`Zone shows a percentage.  You I let work here for entertain-

ment value.'

  As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange

instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated

conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. 

Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.

  Ratz grunted.  `An angel passed.'

  `The Chinese,' bellowed a drunken Australian, `Chinese

bloody invented nerve-splicing.  Give me the mainland for a

nerve job any day.  Fix you right, mate...'

  `Now that,' Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly

rising in him like bile, `that is _so_ much bullshit.'

  The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than

the Chinese had ever known.  The black clinics of Chiba were

the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,

and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that

Memphis hotel.

  A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading

nightly.  All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the

corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in

his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless

void...  The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the

Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cow-

boy.  Just another hustler, trying to make it through.  But the

dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo,

and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the

dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands

clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fin-

gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

  `I saw your girl last night,' Ratz said, passing Case his

second Kirin.

  `I don't have one,' he said, and drank.

  `Miss Linda Lee.'

  Case shook his head.

  `No girl?  Nothing?  Only biz, friend artiste?  Dedication to

commerce?'  The bartender's small brown eyes were nested

deep in wrinkled flesh.  `I think I liked you better, with her. 

You laughed more.  Now, some night, you get maybe too ar-

tistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.'

  `You're breaking my heart, Ratz.'  He finished his beer,

paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-

stained khaki nylon of his windbreaker.  Threading his way

through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.

  Case was twenty-four.  At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy,

a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl.  He'd been trained by

the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the

biz.  He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a

byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cy-

berspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness

into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.  A thief,

he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who pro-

vided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls

of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.

  He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd

never make.  He stole from his employers.  He kept something

for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. 

He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it

mattered now.  He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled. 

Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the

money.  And he was going to need it.  Because -- still smiling --

they were going to make sure he never worked again.

  They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian

mycotoxin.

  Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning

out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

  The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.

  For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber-

space, it was the Fall.  In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy

hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt

for the flesh.  The body was meat.  Case fell into the prison of

his own flesh.

  His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat

sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through

the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells

of the Trobriand islanders.  It was difficult to transact legitimate

business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already

illegal.

  In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,

he'd find his cure.  In Chiba.  Either in a registered clinic or in

the shadowland of black medicine.  Synonymous with implants,

nerve-splicing, and microbionics, Chiba was a magnet for the

Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures.

  In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month

round of examinations and consultations.  The men in the black

clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which

he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.

  Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the

port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all

night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of

Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering

hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay

was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals

of white styrofoam.  Behind the port lay the city, factory domes

dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies.  Port and

city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an

area with no official name.  Night City, with Ninsei its heart. 

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless,

the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned

silver sky.

  Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre

de Th, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double

espresso.  It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Bra-

zilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls.

  The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in

red neon.

  At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money

and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal

overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had

seemed to belong to someone else.  In the first month, he'd

killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before

would have seemed ludicrous.  Ninsei wore him down until the

street itself came to seem the externalization of some death

wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.

  Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-

winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb

permanently on the fast-forward button.  Stop hustling and you

sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd

break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either

way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague

memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or

lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger

with New Yen for the clinic tanks.

  Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the

accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace,

the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.

  Alone at a table in the Jarre de Th, with the octagon coming

on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware

of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at

some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very

ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire.  He no longer

carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions.  He ran

the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation

for being able to get whatever you wanted.  A part of him knew

that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his

customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him

basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time.  And

that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that

most hated the thought of Linda Lee.

  He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.

  Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigar-

ette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa,

the New York skyline...  And now he remembered her that

way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to

a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned,

forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank

War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck

sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.  He was riding

high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way

to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket.  He'd come

in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement

and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of

the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she

played.  The expression on her face, then, had been the one

he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a portside coffin,

her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in

flight.

  Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal

he'd made, he saw her glance up.  Gray eyes rimmed with

smudged black paintstick.  Eyes of some animal pinned in the

headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

  Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets

at the hoverport and his first trip across the Bay.  The rain kept

up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the

children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white

loafers and clingwrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the

midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a

child.

  It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved

through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of

reflexive need.  He'd watched her personality fragment, calving

like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen

the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction.  He'd watched

her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him

of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of

blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.

  He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup.  It

was vibrating with the speed he'd taken.  The brown laminate

of the tabletop was dull with a patina of tiny scratches.  With

the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random

impacts required to create a surface like that.  The Jarre was

decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century,

an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plas-

tics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though

the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked

the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface

fogged with something that could never be wiped away.

  `Hey.  Case, good buddy...'

  He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick.  She

was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneak-

ers.

  `I been lookin'~ for you, man.'  She took a seat opposite

him, her elbows on the table.  The sleeves of the blue zipsuit

had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked

her arms for signs of derms or the needle.  `Want a cigarette?'

  She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle

pocket and offered him one.  He took it, let her light it with a

red plastic tube.  `You sleepin'~ okay, Case?  You look tired.' 

Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta. 

The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but

the flesh was still smooth and firm.  She was twenty.  New lines

of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the

corners of her mouth.  Her dark hair was drawn back, held by

a band of printed silk.  The pattern might have represented

microcircuits, or a city map.

  `Not if I remember to take my pills,' he said, as a tangible

wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the

wavelength of amphetamine.  He remembered the smell of her

skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her

fingers locked across the small of his back.

  All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.

  `Wage,' she said, narrowing her eyes.  `He wants to see

you with a hole in your face.'  She lit her own cigarette.

  `Who says?  Ratz?  You been talking to Ratz?'

  `No.  Mona.  Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys.'

  `I don't owe him enough.  He does me, he's out the money

anyway.'  He shrugged.

  `Too many people owe him now, Case.  Maybe you get to

be the example.  You seriously better watch it.'

  `Sure.  How about you, Linda?  You got anywhere to sleep?'

  `Sleep.'  She shook her head.  `Sure, Case.'  She shivered,

hunched forward over the table.  Her face was filmed with

sweat.

  `Here,' he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker,

coming up with a crumpled fifty.  He smoothed it automatically,

under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her.

  `You need that, honey.  You better give it to Wage.'  There

was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read,

something he'd never seen there before.

  `I owe Wage a lot more than that.  Take it.  I got more

coming,' he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a

zippered pocket.

  `You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick.'

  `I'll see you, Linda,' he said, getting up.

  `Sure.'  A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her

pupils.  Sanpaku.  `You watch your back, man.'

  He nodded, anxious to be gone.

  He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him,

saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.

  Friday night on Ninsei.

  He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised

coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an

arcade.  He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman

by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the

back of the man's right hand.

  Was it authentic?  If that's for real, he thought, he's in for

trouble.  If it wasn't, served him right.  M-G employees above

a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors

that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream.  Gear like

that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a

black clinic.

  The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was

a gaijin crowd.  Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary

tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies

showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species

of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire

and commerce.

  There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City

tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea

that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of

historical park, a reminder of humble origins.  But he also

saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies

require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its in-

habitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for

technology itself.

  Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? 

Would Wage have him killed to make an example?  It didn't

make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed

biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.

  But Linda said Wage wanted him dead.  Case's primary

insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the

buyer nor the seller really needed him.  A middleman's business

is to make himself a necessary evil.  The dubious niche Case

had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City

had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with

betrayal.  Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble,

he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.

  The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glan-

dular extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual.  He

knew Wage hadn't liked that.  Wage was his primary supplier,

nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd

managed to forge links with the rigidly stratified criminal es-

tablishment beyond Night City's borders.  Genetic materials and

hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of

fronts and blinds.  Somehow Wage had managed to trace some-

thing back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a

dozen cities.

  Case found himself staring through a shop window.  The

place sold small bright objects to the sailors.  Watches, flic-

knives, lighters, pocket VTRs, simstim decks, weighted man-

riki chains, and shuriken.  The shuriken had always fascinated

him, steel stars with knife-sharp points.  Some were chromed,

others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on

water.  But the chrome stars held his gaze.  They were mounted

against scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon

fishline, their centers stamped with dragons or yinyang sym-

bols.  They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came

to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his

destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

  `Julie,' he said to his stars.  `Time to see old Julie.  He'll

know.'

  Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his

metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums

and hormones.  His primary hedge against aging was a yearly

pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code

of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba.  Then he'd fly

to Hongkong and order the year's suits and shirts.  Sexless and

inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in

his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship.  Case had never

seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe

seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of gar-

ments of the previous century.  He affected prescription lenses,

framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic

quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian dollhouse.

  His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part

of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before,

with a random collection of European furniture, as though

Deane had once intended to use the place as his home.  Neo- 

Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room

where Case waited.  A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps

perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in

scarlet-lacquered steel.  A Dali clock hung on the wall between

the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete

floor.  Its hands were holograms that altered to match the con-

volutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct

time.  The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping

modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.

  `You seem to be clean, old son,' said Deane's disembodied

voice.  `Do come in.'

  Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive

imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases.  JULIUS

DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in

peeling self-adhesive capitals.  If the furniture scattered in

Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century,

the office itself seemed to belong to its start.

  Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of

light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of

dark green glass.  The importer was securely fenced behind a

vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, draw-

ered cabinets made of some sort of pale wood.  The sort of

thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written

records of some kind.  The desktop was littered with cassettes,

scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of

clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get

around to reassembling.

  `What brings you around, boyo?' Deane asked, offering

Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked pa-

per.  `Try one.  Ting Ting Djahe, the very best.'  Case refused

the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and

ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg.  `Julie,

I hear Wage wants to kill me.'

  `Ah.  Well then.  And where did you hear this, if I may?'

  `People.'

  `People,' Deane said, around a ginger bonbon.  `What sort

of people?  Friends?'

  Case nodded.

  `Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?'

  `I do owe him a little money, Deane.  He say anything to

you?'

  `Haven't been in touch, of late.'  Then he sighed.  `If I _did_

know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you.  Things

being what they are, you understand.'

  `Things?'

  `He's an important connection, Case.'

  `Yeah.  He want to kill me, Julie?'

  `Not that I know of.'  Deane shrugged.  They might have

been discussing the price of ginger.  `If it proves to be an

unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and

I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore.'

  `Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?'

  `Loose lips, old son!'  Deane grinned.  The steel desk was

jammed with a fortune in debugging gear.

  `Be seeing you, Julie.  I'll say hello to Wage.'

  Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his

pale silk tie.

  He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit,

the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass,

and very close.

  The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something

Case took for granted.  The trick lay in not letting it get out of

control.  But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of

octagons.  He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his

narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let

the crowd carry him along.  When he saw a darkened display

window, he managed to pause by it.  The place was a surgical

boutique, closed for renovations.  With his hands in the pockets

of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of

vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade. 

The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was

tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous

chip.  Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking,

while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry

the thing around in your pocket?

  Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied

the reflection of the passing crowd.

  There.

  Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki.  Dark hair, mirrored

glasses, dark clothing, slender...

  And gone.

  Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.

  `Rent me a gun, Shin?'

  The boy smiled.  `Two hour.'  They stood together in the

smell of fresh raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall. 

`You come back, two hour.'

  `I need one now, man.  Got anything right now?'

  Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once

been filled with powdered horseradish.  He produced a slender

package wrapped in gray plastic.  `Taser.  One hour, twenty

New Yen.  Thirty deposit.'

  `Shit.  I don't need that.  I need a gun.  Like I maybe wanna

shoot somebody, understand?'

  The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horse-

radish cans.  `Two hour.'

  He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the

display of shuriken.  He'd never thrown one in his life.

  He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank

chip that gave his name as Charles Derek May.  It beat Truman

Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport.

  The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she

had a few years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit

of science.  He took his slender roll of New Yen out of his

pocket and showed it to her.  `I want to buy a weapon.'

  She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.

  `No,' he said, `I don't like knives.'

  She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter.  The

lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a

coiled cobra with a swollen hood.  Inside were eight identical

tissue-wrapped cylinders.  He watched while mottled brown

fingers stripped the paper from one.  She held the thing up for

him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one

end and a small bronze pyramid at the other.  She gripped the

tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and

forefinger, and pulled.  Three oiled, telescoping segments of

tightly wound coilspring slid out and locked.  `Cobra,' she said.

  Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean

shade of gray.  The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have

teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks.  Case

had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient

way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd settled for tucking the

handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting

across his stomach.  The pyramidal striking tip rode between

his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker.  The thing felt

like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it

made him feel better.

  The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it

attracted a related clientele.  Fridays and Saturdays were dif-

ferent.  The regulars were still there, most of them, but they

faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed

on them.  As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for

Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight.  Lonny Zone, the bar's

resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as

one of his girls went to work on a young sailor.  Zone was

addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud

Dancers.  Catching the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the

bar.  Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his

long face slack and placid.

  `You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?'

  Zone regarded him with his usual calm.  He shook his head.

  `You sure, man?'

  `Maybe in the Namban.  Maybe two hours ago.'

  `Got some joeboys with him?  One of 'em thin, dark hair,

maybe a black jacket?'

  `No,' Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to

indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail. 

`Big boys.  Graftees.'  Zone's eyes showed very little white and

less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and

enormous.  He stared into Case's face for a long time, then

lowered his gaze.  He saw the bulge of the steel whip.  `Cobra,'

he said, and raised an eyebrow.  `You wanna fuck somebody

up?'

  `See you, Lonny.'  Case left the bar.

  His tail was back.  He was sure of it.  He felt a stab of elation,

the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else. 

You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy.

  Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was

like a run in the matrix.  Get just wasted enough, find yourself

in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and

it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the

matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish

cell specialties.  Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed

drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all

around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made

flesh in the mazes of the black market...

  Go it, Case, he told himself.  Suck 'em in.  Last thing they'll

expect.  He was half a block from the games arcade where he'd

first met Linda Lee.

  He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sail-

ors.  One of them screamed after him in Spanish.  Then he was

through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf,

subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach.  Someone scored

a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst

drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball

mushroomed overhead.  He cut to the right and loped up a flight

of unpainted chipboard stairs.  He'd come here once with Wage,

to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man

called Matsuga.  He remembered the hallway, its stained mat-

ting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles. 

One door was open now.  A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black

t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a

travel poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined

ideograms.

  `Get your security up here,' Case told her.

  Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight.  The

last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked.  He spun

and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-

lacquered composition door at the far end.  It popped, cheap

hardware failing from the splintered frame.  Darkness there, the

white curve of a terminal housing.  Then he was on the door

to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob,

leaning in with everything he had.  Something snapped, and he

was inside.  This was where he and Wage had met with Mat-

suga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was

long gone.  No terminal, nothing.  Light from the alley behind

the arcade, filtering in through sootblown plastic.  He made out

a snakelike loop of fiberoptics protruding from a wall socket,

a pile of discarded food containers, and the bladeless nacelle

of an electric fan.

  The window was a single pane of cheap plastic.  He shrugged

out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched. 

It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame. 

Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle,

triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head

of the corridor.

  Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to

full extension.

  With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume

he'd gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges.  The

cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel

shaft amplifying his pulse.

  Nothing happened.  There was only the surging of the alarm,

the crashing of the games, his heart hammering.  When the fear

came, it was like some half-forgotten friend.  Not the cold,

rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. 

He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd

almost forgotten what real fear was.

  This cubicle was the sort of place where people died.  He

might die here.  They might have guns...

  A crash, from the far end of the corridor.  A man's voice,

shouting something in Japanese.  A scream, shrill terror.  An-

other crash.

  And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.

  Passing his closed door.  Pausing for the space of three rapid

beats of his heart.  And returning.  One, two, three.  A bootheel

scraped the matting.

  The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed.  He

snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window,

blind with fear, his nerves screaming.  He was up, out, and

falling, all before he was conscious of what he'd done.  The

impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.

  A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch

framed a heap of discarded fiberoptics and the chassis of a

junked console.  He'd fallen face forward on a slab of soggy

chipboard; he rolled over, into the shadow of the console.  The

cubicle's window was a square of faint light.  The alarm still

oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the

games.

  A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the

fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished.  It returned, but he

still couldn't read the features.  Glint of silver across the eyes. 

`Shit,' someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern

Sprawl.

  The head was gone.  Case lay under the console for a long

count of twenty, then stood up.  The steel cobra was still in his

hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was. 

He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.

  Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of

a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on

the first shot, with a very rough pull.  It was chambered for .22

long rifle, and Case would've preferred lead azide explosives

to the simple Chinese hollowpoints Shin had sold him.  Still,

it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he

made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in

his jacket pocket.  The grips were bright red plastic molded in

a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across

in the dark.  He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on

Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.

  The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to

Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu.  His tail, he'd decided, was gone,

and that was fine.  He had calls to make, biz to transact, and

it wouldn't wait.  A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood

a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick.  Its

windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was

visible if you craned your neck.  An unlit neon sign near the

main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideo-

grams.  If the place had another name, Case didn't know it; it

was always referred to as Cheap Hotel.  You reached it through

an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a

transparent shaft.  The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an af-

terthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy.  Case

climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked

length of rigid magnetic tape.

  Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he'd

arrived in Chiba, but he'd never slept in Cheap Hotel.  He slept

in cheaper places.

  The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides

of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged.  As it passed the

fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei.  He drummed his fingers

against the pistolgrip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss. 

As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he

was ready for it.  He stepped out into the courtyard that served

the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.

  Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese

teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. 

The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of

industrial scaffolding.  Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side. 

Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic

grass to the nearest ladder.  The compound was roofed with

cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked

when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open

without a key.

  The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he

edged his way along the third tier to Number 92.  The coffins

were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just

under a meter and a half tall.  He fed his key into the slot and

waited for verification from the house computer.  Magnetic bolts

thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak

of springs.  Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling

the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated

the manual latch.

  There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi

pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest.  The

cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice,

carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun

aluminum lab flask.  Crouching on the brown temperfoam slab

that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from his

pocket and put it on top of the cooler.  Then he took off his

jacket.  The coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall,

opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages.  Case

took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hongkong

number from memory.  He let it ring five times, then hung up. 

His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi

wasn't taking calls.

  He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.

  A woman answered, something in Japanese.

  `Snake Man there?'

  `Very good to hear from you,' said Snake Man, coming in

on an extension.  `I've been expecting your call.'

  `I got the music you wanted.'  Glancing at the cooler.

  `I'm very glad to hear that.  We have a cash flow problem. 

Can you front?'

  `Oh, man, I really need the money bad...'

  Snake Man hung up.

  `You shit,' Case said to the humming receiver.  He stared

at the cheap little pistol.

  `Iffy,' he said, `it's all looking very iffy tonight.'

  Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands

in the pockets of his jacket: one held the rented pistol, the other

the aluminum flask.

  Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from

a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh

tilted against the wall on a creaking chair.  A Brazilian kid

called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly

silent drunks.  Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher

and drank.  His shaven head was filmed with sweat.  `You look

bad, friend artiste,' he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.

  `I'm doing just fine,' said Case, and grinned like a skull. 

`Super fine.'  He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands

still in his pockets.

  `And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter

built of booze and ups, sure.  Proof against the grosser emotions,

yes?'

  `Why don't you get off my case, Ratz?  You seen Wage?'

  `Proof against fear and being alone,' the bartender contin-

ued.  `Listen to the fear.  Maybe it's your friend.'

  `You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz? 

Somebody hurt?'

  `Crazy cut a security man.'  He shrugged.  `A girl, they

say.'

  `I gotta talk to Wage.  Ratz, I...'

  `Ah.'  Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single

line.  He was looking past Case, toward the entrance.  `I think

you are about to.'

  Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. 

The speed sang in his head.  The pistol in his hand was slippery

with sweat.

  `Herr Wage,' Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manip-

ulator as if he expected it to be shaken.  `How great a pleasure. 

Too seldom do you honor us.'

  Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face.  It

was a tanned and forgettable mask.  The eyes were vatgrown

sea-green Nikon transplants.  Wage wore a suit of gunmetal

silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist.  He was

flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men, their arms

and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.

  `How you doing, Case?'

  `Gentlemen,' said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ash-

tray in his pink plastic claw, `I want no trouble here.'  The

ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised

Tsingtao beer.  Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of

green plastic cascading onto the tabletop.  `You understand?'

  `Hey, sweetheart,' said one of the joeboys, `you wanna try

that thing on me?'

  `Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt,' Ratz said, his tone

conversational.  Case glanced across the room and saw the Bra-

zilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun

at the trio.  The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped

with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow

a fist.  The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges,

subsonic sandbag jellies.

  `Technically nonlethal,' said Ratz.

  `Hey, Ratz,' Case said, `I owe you one.'

  The bartender shrugged.  `Nothing, you owe me.  These,'

and he glowered at Wage and the joeboys, `should know better. 

You don't take anybody off in the Chatsubo.'

  Wage coughed.  `So who's talking about taking anybody

off.  We just wanna talk business.  Case and me, we work

together.'

  Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at

Wage's crotch.  `I hear you wanna do me.'  Ratz's pink claw

closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.

  `Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with

you, you wig or something?  What's this shit I'm trying to kill

you?'  Wage turned to the boy on his left.  `You two go back

to the Namban.  Wait for me.'

  Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now en-

tirely deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis,

who was curled at the foot of a barstool.  The barrel of the

Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back

to cover Wage.  The magazine of Case's pistol clattered on the

table.  Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out

of the chamber.

  `Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?' Wage asked.

  Linda.

  `Who told you, man?  Somebody trying to set you up?'

  The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.

  `Get him out of here,' Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting

on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his

lap, lighting a cigarette.

  Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a

bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes.  He took the flask out

of his pocket and handed it to Wage.  `All I got.  Pituitaries. 

Get you five hundred if you move it fast.  Had the rest of my

roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now.'

  `You okay, Case?'  The flask had already vanished behind

a gunmetal lapel.  `I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look

bad.  Like hammered shit.  You better go somewhere and sleep.'

  `Yeah.'  He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. 

`Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody.'  He giggled. 

He picked up the .22's magazine and the one loose cartridge

and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the

other.  `I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back.'

  `Go home,' said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with

something like embarrassment.  `Artiste.  Go home.'

  He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered

his way past the plastic doors.

  `Bitch,' he said to the rose tint over Shiga.  Down on Ninsei

the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon

was already cold and dead.  He sipped thick black coffee from

a street vendor's foam thimble and watched the sun come up. 

`You fly away, honey.  Towns like this are for people who like

the way down.'  But that wasn't it, really, and he was finding

it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal.  She just

wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy

it for her, if she could find the right fence.  And that business

with the fifty; she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was

about to rip him for the rest of what he had.

  When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on

the desk.  Different textbook.  `Good buddy,' Case called across

the plastic turf, `you don't need to tell me.  I know already. 

Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key.  Nice little tip

for you, say fifty New ones?'  The boy put down his book. 

`Woman,' Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with

his thumb.  `Silk.'  He smiled broadly.  The boy smiled back,

nodded.  `Thanks, asshole,' Case said.

  On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock.  She'd messed

it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought.  Beginner. 

He knew where to rent a blackbox that would open anything

in Cheap Hotel.  Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.

  `Close the hatch real slow, friend.  You still got that Saturday

night special you rented from the waiter?'

  She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. 

She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox

muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.

  `That you in the arcade?'  He pulled the hatch down. 

`Where's Linda?'

  `Hit that latch switch.'

  He did.

  `That your girl?  Linda?'

  He nodded.

  `She's gone.  Took your Hitachi.  Real nervous kid.  What

about the gun, man?'  She wore mirrored glasses.  Her clothes

were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temperfoam.

  `I took it back to Shin, got my deposit.  Sold his bullets

back to him for half what I paid.  You want the money?'

  `No.'

  `Want some dry ice?  All I got, right now.'

  `What got into you tonight?  Why'd you pull that scene at

the arcade?  I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with

nunchucks.'

  `Linda said you were gonna kill me.'

  `Linda said?  I never saw her before I came up here.'

  `You aren't with Wage?'

  She shook her head.  He realized that the glasses were sur-

gically inset, sealing her sockets.  The silver lenses seemed to

grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by

dark hair cut in a rough shag.  The fingers curled around the

fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. 

The nails looked artificial.  `I think you screwed up, Case.  I

showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.'

  `So what do you want, lady?'  He sagged back against the

hatch.

  `You.  One live body, brains still somewhat intact.  Molly,

Case.  My name's Molly.  I'm collecting you for the man I work

for.  Just wants to talk; is all.  Nobody wants to hurt you.'

  `That's good.'

  `'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case.  I guess it's just

the way I'm wired.'  She wore tight black gloveleather jeans

and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed

to absorb light.  `If I put this dartgun away, will you be easy,

Case?  You look like you like to take stupid chances.'

  `Hey, I'm very easy.  I'm a pushover, no problem.'

  `That's fine, man.'  The fletcher vanished into the black

jacket.  `Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be

taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life.'

  She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly

spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-

centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the

burgundy nails.

  She smiled.  The blades slowly withdrew.

        2

  After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor

of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous.  It was ten meters by

eight, half of a suite.  A white Braun coffeemaker steamed on

a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow

balcony.

  `Get some coffee in you.  Look like you need it.'  She took

off her black jacket; the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a

black nylon shoulder rig.  She wore a sleeveless gray pullover

with plain steel zips across each shoulder.  Bulletproof.  Case

decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug.  His arms and

legs felt like they were made out of wood.

  `Case.'  He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. 

`My name is Armitage.'  The dark robe was open to the waist,

the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and

hard.  Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach.  `Sun's

up, Case.  This is your lucky day, boy.'

  Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked

the scalding coffee.  Brown stain running down the imitation

ricepaper wall.  He saw the angular gold ring through the left

lobe.  Special Forces.  The man smiled.

  `Get your coffee, Case,' Molly said.  `You re okay, but

you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say.'  She sat

crosslegged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher

without bothering to look at it.  Twin mirrors tracking as he

crossed to the table and refilled his cup.

  `Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?'  Ar-

mitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair. 

A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist.  `Leningrad, Kiev,

Siberia.  We invented you in Siberia, Case.'

  `What's that supposed to mean?'

  `Screaming Fist, Case.  You've heard the name.'

  `Some kind of run, wasn't it?  Tried to burn this Russian

nexus with virus programs.  Yeah, I heard about it.  And nobody

got out.'

  He sensed abrupt tension.  Armitage walked to the window

and looked out over Tokyo Bay.  `That isn't true.  One unit

made it back to Helsinki, Case.'

  Case shrugged, sipped coffee.

  `You're a console cowboy.  The prototypes of the programs

you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming

Fist.  For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus.  Basic

module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a

jockey.  We were running a virus called Mole.  The Mole series

was the first generation of real intrusion programs.'

  `Icebreakers,' Case said, over the rim of the red mug.

  `Ice from _ICE,_ intrusion countermeasures electronics.'

  `Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just

be going...'

  `I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your

kind.'

  `You got zip to do with me and my kind buddy.  You're

rich enough to hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here,

is all.  I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or

anybody else.'  He crossed to the window and looked down. 

`That's where I live now.'

  `Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing

you when you're not looking.'

  `Profile?'

  `We've built up a detailed model.  Bought a go-to for each

of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software. 

You're suicidal, Case.  The model gives you a month on the

outside.  And our medical projection says you'll need a new

pancreas inside a year.'

  ``We.''  He met the faded blue eyes.  ``We' who?'

  `What would you say if I told you we could correct your

neural damage, Case?'  Armitage suddenly looked to Case as

if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously

heavy.  A statue.  He knew now that this was a dream, and that

soon he'd wake.  Armitage wouldn't speak again.  Case's dreams

always ended in these freezeframes, and now this one was

over.

  `What would you say, Case?'

  Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.

  `I'd say you were full of shit.'

  Armitage nodded.

  `Then I'd ask what your terms were.'

  `Not very different than what you're used to, Case.'

  `Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,' Molly said from

her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk

like some expensive puzzle.  `He's coming apart at the seams.'

  `Terms,' Case said, `and now.  Right now.'

  He was still shivering.  He couldn't stop shivering.

  The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster

of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens.  He re-

membered the place from the round he'd made his first month

in Chiba.

  `Scared, Case.  You're real scared.'  It was Sunday afternoon

and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard.  White boulders,

a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. 

A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the

bamboo.

  `It'll work Case.  You got no idea, the kind of stuff Ar-

mitage has.  Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing

you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do

it.  He'll put them three years ahead of the competition.  You

got any idea what that's worth?'  She hooked thumbs in the

beltloops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the

lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots.  The narrow toes

were sheathed in bright Mexican silver.  The lenses were empty

quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.

  `You're street samurai,' he said.  `How long you work for

him?'

  `Couple of months.'

  `What about before that?'

  `For somebody else.  Working girl, you know?'

  He nodded.

  `Funny, Case.'

  `What's funny?'

  `It's like I know you.  That profile he's got.  I know how

you're wired.'

  `You don't know me, sister.'

  `You're okay, Case.  What got you, it's just called bad luck.'

  `How about him?  He okay, Molly?'  The robot crab moved

toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel.  Its

bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old.  When

it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then

froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.

  `What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet

ass.'  The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked

it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the

carapace.  The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon

righted it.

  Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry

of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes.  He began to

search his pockets for cigarettes.  `In your shirt,' she said.

  `You want to answer my question?'  He fished a wrinkled

Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab

of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an op-

erating table.

  `Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something. 

He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he

gets more all the time.'  Case noticed a certain tension around

her mouth.  `Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...' 

She shrugged.

  `What's that mean?'

  `I don't know, exactly.  I know I don't know who or what

we're really working for.'

  He stared at the twin mirrors.  Leaving the Hilton, Saturday

morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours. 

Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's

security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the

chainlink.  If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it. 

He'd avoided Night City.  He'd waited in the coffin for Ar-

mitage's call.  Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this

girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.

  `If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to

meet you.'  The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the

clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.

  Cold steel odor.  Ice caressed his spine.

  Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image

fading down corridors of television sky.

  Voices.

  Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves,

pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given...

  Hold still.  Don't move.

  And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone,

a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and

whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chainlink

and the prison of the skull.

  Goddamn don't you move.

  Where the sky faded from hissing static to the noncolor of

the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.

  `Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!'

  She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one

hand.  `You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat.  You're

still full of endorphin inhibitors.'

  He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.

  His neck was brittle, made of twigs.  There was a steady

pulse of pain midway down his spine.  Images formed and

reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and

ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the

shade beneath a bridge or overpass...

  `Case?  It's Wednesday, Case.'  She moved, rolling over,

reaching across him.  A breast brushed his upper arm.  He heard

her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink.  `Here.' 

She put the bottle in his hand.  `I can see in the dark, Case. 

Microchannel image-amps in my glasses.'

  `My back hurts.'

  `That's where they replaced your fluid.  Changed your blood,

too.  Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. 

And some new tissue patched into your liver.  The nerve stuff,

I dunno.  Lot of injections.  They didn't have to open anything

up for the main show.'  She settled back beside him.  `It's

2:43:12 AM, Case.  Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve.'

  He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle.  Gagged, coughed,

lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.

  `I gotta punch deck,' he heard himself say.  He was groping

for his clothes.  `I gotta know...'

  She laughed.  Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. 

`Sorry, hotshot.  Eight day wait.  Your nervous system would

fall out on the floor if you jacked in now.  Doctor's orders. 

Besides, they figure it worked.  Check you in a day or so.'  He

lay down again.

  `Where are we?'

  `Home.  Cheap Hotel.'

  `Where's Armitage?'

  `Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something.  We're

out of here soon, man.  Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the

Sprawl.'  She touched his shoulder.  `Roll over.  I give a good

massage.'

  He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his

fingers against the walls of the coffin.  She settled over the

small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather

jeans cool against his skin.  Her fingers brushed his neck.

  `How come you're not at the Hilton?'

  She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs,

and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. 

She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him,

her other hand on his neck.  The leather of her jeans creaked

softly with the movement.  Case shifted, feeling himself harden

against the temperfoam.

  His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed

to retreat.  He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back

against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small

hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek.  He found the zip on

the leather jeans and tugged it down.

  `It's okay,' she said, `I can see.'  Sound of the jeans peeling

down.  She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. 

She threw a leg across him and he touched her face.  Unexpected

hardness of the implanted lenses.  `Don't,' she said, `finger-

prints.'

  Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it

over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers

spread across the labia.  As she began to lower herself, the

images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriv-

ing and receding.  She slid down around him and his back arched

convulsively.  She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping

down on him again and again, until they both had come, his

orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the

matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down

hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet

against his hips.

  On Ninsei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went

through the motions of the dance.  Waves of sound rolled from

the arcades and pachinko parlors.  Case glanced into the Chat

and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smell-

ing twilight.  Ratz was tending bar.

  `You seen Wage, Ratz?'

  `Not tonight.'  Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at

Molly.

  `You see him, tell him I got his money.'

  `Luck changing, my artiste?'

  `Too soon to tell.'

  `Well, I gotta see this guy,' Case said, watching his re-

flection in her glasses.  `I got biz to cancel out of.'

  `Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight.'  She

stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.

  `The guy won't talk to me if you're there.  Deane I don't

give two shits about.  He takes care of himself.  But I got people

who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold.  It's my people,

you know?'

  Her mouth hardened.  She shook her head.

  `I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku

and Asakuza, and they'll go _down,_ understand?' he lied, his

hand on the shoulder of her black jacket.  `Five.  Five minutes. 

By your clock, okay?'

  `Not what I'm paid for.'

  `What you're paid for is one thing.  Me letting some tight

friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is

something else.'

  `Bullshit.  Tight friends my ass.  You're going in there to

check us out with your smuggler.'  She put a booted foot up

on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.

  `Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion

there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of

silicon in her head.  What is this about, exactly?'  Deane's ghostly

cough seemed to hang in the air between them.

  `Hold on, Julie.  Anyway, I'll be coming in alone.'

  `You can be sure of that, old son.  Wouldn't have it any

other way.'

  `Okay,' she said.  `Go.  But five minutes.  Any more and

I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently.  And while

you're at it, you try to figure something out.'

  `What's that?'

  `Why I'm doing you the favor.'  She turned and walked

out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.

  `Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?' asked Julie.

  `Julie, she's gone.  You wanna let me in?  Please, Julie?'

  The bolts worked.  `Slowly, Case,' said the voice.

  `Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,' Case

said, taking his place in the swivel chair.

  `It's on all the time,' Deane said mildly, taking a gun from

behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and

aiming it carefully at Case.  It was a belly gun, a magnum

revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub.  The front of the

trigger guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with

what looked like old masking tape.  Case thought it looked very

strange in Dean's manicured pink hands.  `Just taking care, you

understand.  Nothing personal.  Now tell me what you want.'

  `I need a history lesson, Julie.  And a go-to on somebody.'

  `What's moving, old son?'  Deane's shirt was candy-striped

cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.

  `Me, Julie.  I'm leaving.  Gone.  But do me the favor, okay?'

  `Go-to on whom, old son?'

  `Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.'

  Deane put the pistol down.  `Sit still, Case.'  He tapped

something out on a lap terminal.  `It seems as though you know

as much as my net does, Case.  This gentleman seems to have

a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the

neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from

the likes of me.  I wouldn't have it any other way.  Now, history. 

You said history.'  He picked up the gun again, but didn't point

it directly at Case.  `What sort of history?'

  `The war.  You in the war, Julie?'

  `The war?  What's there to know?  Lasted three weeks.'

  `Screaming Fist.'

  `Famous.  Don't they teach you history these days?  Great

bloody postwar political football, that was.  Watergated all to

hell and back.  Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in,

where was it, McLean?  In the bunkers, all of that... great

scandal.  Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to

test some new technology.  They knew about the Russians'~ de-

fenses, it came out later.  Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse

weapons.  Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.'  Deane

shrugged.  `Turkey shoot for Ivan.'

  `Any of those guys make it out?'

  `Christ,' Deane said, `it's been bloody years...  Though

I do think a few did.  One of the teams.  Got hold of a Sov

gunship.  Helicopter, you know.  Flew it back to Finland.  Didn't

have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish

defense forces in the process.  Special Forces types.'  Deane

sniffed.  `Bloody hell.'

  Case nodded.  The smell of preserved ginger was over-

whelming.

  `I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,' Deane said, putting

the gun down.  `Lovely place, Lisbon.'

  `In the service, Julie?'

  `Hardly.  Though I did see action.'  Deane smiled his pink

smile.  `Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets.'

  `Thanks, Julie.  I owe you one.'

  `Hardly, Case.  And goodbye.'

  And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had

felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly

along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket

stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it.  Linda's death, wait-

ing...

  They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and

paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. 

Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had

grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity,

obviously longing for one of them to make a move.  Then he'd

taken her back to the Chat for a drink.

  `Wasting your time, cowboy,' Molly said, when Case took

an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.

  `How's that?  You want one?'  He held the pill out to her.

  `Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. 

Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.'  She tapped

the octagon with one burgundy nail.  `You're biochemically

incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.'

  `Shit,' he said.  He looked at the octagon, then at her.

  `Eat it.  Eat a dozen.  Nothing'll happen.'

  He did.  Nothing did.

  Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.

  `Sammi's,' Ratz said.

  `I'll pass,' Case said, `I hear they kill each other down

there.'

  An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai

in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.

  Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse,

taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables.  The

corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock pre-

serving the pressure differential that supported the dome.  Flu-

orescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals,

but most of them had been broken.  The air was damp and close

with the smell of sweat and concrete.

  None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the

tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome. 

Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised

circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear.  No

light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the

ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below.  Strata

of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck

currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome.  No

sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified

breathing of the fighters.

  Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men

circled.  The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten,

the knives they held were just under a meter long.  The knife-

fighter's grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers

curled, thumb aligned with blade.  The knives seemed to move

of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through

the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the

men waited for an opening.  Molly's upturned face was smooth

and still, watching.

  `I'll go find us some food,' Case said.  She nodded, lost in

contemplation of the dance.

  He didn't like this place.

  He turned and walked back into the shadows.  Too dark. 

Too quiet.

  The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese.  Not really a Night

City crowd.  Techs down from the arcologies.  He supposed that

meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational

committee.  He wondered briefly what it would be like, working

all your life for one zaibatsu.  Company housing, company

hymn, company funeral.

  He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found

the food stalls.  He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall

waxy cartons of beer.  Glancing up at the holograms, he saw

that blood laced one figure's chest.  Thick brown sauce trickled

down the skewers and over his knuckles.

  Seven days and he'd jack in.  If he closed his eyes now,

he'd see the matrix.

  Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.

  Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders.  A cold

trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs.  The

operation hadn't worked.  He was still here, still meat, no Molly

waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage

waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and

money.  It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy...  Hot

tears blurred his vision.

  Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light.  And

now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming -- as one fig-

ure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering...

  Raw edge of vomit in his throat.  He closed his eyes, took

a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him,

her gray eyes blind with fear.  She wore the same French fa-

tigues.

  And gone.  Into shadow.

  Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down

and ran after her.  He might have called her name, but he'd

never be sure.

  Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light.  Seared

concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.

  Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now,

and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye,

bobbing in his vision as he ran.

  Someone tripped him.  Concrete tore his palms.

  He rolled and kicked, failing to connect.  A thin boy, spiked

blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning

over him.  Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high,

to the cheering crowd.  The boy smiled and drew something

from his sleeve.  A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked

past them into the dark.  Case saw the razor dipping for his

throat like a dowser's wand.

  The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic

explosions.  Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. 

The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's

legs.

  He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows.  He

looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from

his chest.  Nothing.  He found her.  She was thrown down at the

foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed.  There was a smell of

cooked meat.  The crowd was chanting the winner's name.  A

beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag.  One white

sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.

  Follow the wall.  Curve of concrete.  Hands in pockets.  Keep

walking.  Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's

image above the ring.  Once a seamed European face danced

in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a

metal pipe.  Tang of hashish.  Case walked on, feeling nothing.

  `Case.'  Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow.  `You

okay?'

  Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.

  He shook his head.

  `Fight's over, Case.  Time to go home.'

  He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where some-

thing was dying.  She stopped him with a hand on his chest. 

`Friends of your tight friend.  Killed your girl for you.  You

haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you?  We

got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. 

He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones.  The one back there

said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM. 

Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it.  Save a little

money...  I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about

it.  Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure.'  Her

mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.

  Case felt as though his brain were jammed.  `Who,' he said,

`who sent them?'

  She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. 

He saw that her hands were sticky with blood.  Back in the

shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

  After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him

to the port.  Armitage was waiting.  He'd chartered a hovercraft. 

The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcol-

ogies.  Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting

shoals of waste.

        PART TWO

        THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION

        3

  Home.

  Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Met-

ropolitan Axis.

  Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every

thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. 

Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white.  Then they start to

pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. 

Your map is about to go nova.  Cool it down.  Up your scale. 

Each pixel a million megabytes.  At a hundred million mega-

bytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in

midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial

parks ringing the old core of Atlanta...

  Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers

moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol,

Orly...  He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish

vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.

  Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a

train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel.  The train

itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but dis-

placed air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics. 

Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to

rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.

  Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach

across an expanse of very new pink temperfoam.  Overhead,

sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight. 

One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chip-

board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few

centimeters of the floor.  He lay on his side and watched her

breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the

functional elegance of a war plane's fusilage.  Her body was

spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's.

  The room was large.  He sat up.  The room was empty, aside

from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and

identical, that lay beside it.  Blank walls, no windows, a single

white-painted steel firedoor.  The walls were coated with count-

less layers of white latex paint.  Factory space.  He knew this

kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate

in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite

art.

  He was home.

  He swung his feet to the floor.  It was made of little blocks

of wood, some missing, others loose.  His head ached.  He

remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section

of the Centrum, buildings centuries old.  Molly back from the

canal's edge with orange juice and eggs.  Armitage off on some

cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square

to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare.  Paris was a

blurred dream.  Shopping.  She'd taken him shopping.

  He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that

lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags.  The first one he

opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expen-

sive-looking gadgets.  The second was stuffed with things he

didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim deck, clothing

with French and Italian labels.  Beneath a green t-shirt, he

discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese

paper.

  The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed

star fell -- to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.

  `Souvenir,' Molly said.  `I noticed you were always looking

at 'em.'  He turned and saw her sitting crosslegged on the bed,

sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.

  `Someone's coming later to secure the place,' Armitage

said.  He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned

magnetic key in his hand.  Molly was making coffee on a tiny

German stove she took from her bag.

  `I can do it,' she said.  `I got enough gear already.  Infrascan

perimeter, screamers...'

  `No,' he said, closing the door.  `I want it tight.'

  `Suit yourself.'  She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into

baggy black cotton pants.

  `You ever the heat, Mr.~ Armitage?' Case asked, from where

he sat, his back against a wall.

  Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoul-

ders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway.  He

wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase

of soft black calf.  The Special Forces earring was gone.  The

handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of

the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past

decade's leading media faces.  The pale glitter of his eyes

heightened the effect of a mask.  Case began to regret the ques-

tion.

  `Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean.  Or corporate

security,' Case added uncomfortably.  Molly handed him a

steaming mug of coffee.  `That number you had them do on

my pancreas, that's like a cop routine.'

  Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in

front of Case.  `You're a lucky boy, Case.  You should thank

me.'

  `Should I?'  Case blew noisily on his coffee.

  `You needed a new pancreas.  The one we bought for you

frees you from a dangerous dependency.'

  `Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.'

  `Good, because you have a new one.'

  `How's that?'  Case looked up from his coffee.  Armitage

was smiling.

  `You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various

main arteries, Case.  They're dissolving.  Very slowly, but they

definitely are dissolving.  Each one contains a mycotoxin.  You're

already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin.  It was the

one your former employers gave you in Memphis.'

  Case blinked up at the smiling mask.

  `You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but

that's all.  Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that

will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs.  Then you'll

need a blood change.  Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back

where I found you.  So you see, Case, you need us.  You need

us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter.'

  Case looked at Molly.  She shrugged.

  `Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases

you find there.'  Armitage handed him the magnetic key.  `Go

on.  You'll enjoy this, Case.  Like Christmas morning.'

  Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind-

blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies

of need and gratification.

  He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry

concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapi-

tulate the stages of his life.  First a child with hooded eyes, a

street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager,

face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses.  Case remembered

fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose

glow of the dawn geodesics.

  He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through

the thin black denim.  Nothing here like the electric dance of

Ninsei.  This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in

the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.

  With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai

Cyberspace 7.  They'd left the place littered with the abstract

white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic

film and hundreds of tiny foam beads.  The Ono-Sendai; next

year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a

dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.  Ar-

mitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.

  `Where'd he go?'  Case had asked Molly.

  `He likes hotels.  Big ones.  Near airports, if he can manage

it.  Let's go down to the street.'  She'd zipped herself into an

old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on

a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered

her mirrored insets.

  `You know about that toxin shit, before?' he asked her, by

the fountain.  She shook her head.  `You think it's true?'

  `Maybe, maybe not.  Works either way.'

  `You know any way I can find out?'

  `No,' she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive

for silence.  `That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a

scan.'  Then her fingers moved again: wait.  `And you don't

care that much anyway.  I saw you stroking that Sendai; man,

it was pornographic.'  She laughed.

  `So what's he got on you?  How's he got the working girl

kinked?'

  `Professional pride, baby, that's all.'  And again the sign

for silence.  `We're gonna get some breakfast, okay?  Eggs, real

bacon.  Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba

krill for so long.  Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan

and get us a real breakfast.'

  Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty

capitals of glass tubing.  Case picked at a shred of bacon that

had lodged between his front teeth.  He'd given up asking her

where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign

for silence were all he'd gotten in reply.  She talked about the

season's fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in

California he'd never heard of.

  He looked around the deserted dead end street.  A sheet of

newsprint went cartwheeling past the intersection.  Freak winds

in the East side; something to do with convection, and an

overlap in the domes.  Case peered through the window at the

dead sign.  Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl, he decided.  She'd

led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before,

taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod. 

Maintaining connections.

  Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO

HOLOGRAFIX.

  The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing.  In front of it,

Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that

he couldn't follow.  He caught the sign for _cash,_ a thumb brush-

ing the tip of the forefinger.  The door swung inward and she

led him into the smell of dust.  They stood in a clearing, dense

tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves

of crumbling paperbacks.  The junk looked like something that

had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic.  He

could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur

back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded

with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish an-

tenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of

alloy tubing.  An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded

into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as

he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted

scrap.  He heard the door close behind them.  He didn't look

back.

  The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across

a doorway.  White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.

  Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match,

floored with white hospital tile molded in a nonslip pattern of

small raised disks.  In the center stood a square, white-painted

wooden table and four white folding chairs.

  The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind

them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to

have been designed in a wind tunnel.  His ears were very small,

plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth,

revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, were canted

sharply backward.  He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held

a handgun of some kind in his left hand.  He peered at them,

blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket.  He gestured

to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the

doorway.  Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich

of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick.  He helped the man lift

it and position it in the doorway.  Quick, nicotine-stained fingers

secured it with a white velcro border.  A hidden exhaust fan

began to purr.

  `Time,' the man said, straightening up, `and counting.  You

know the rate, Moll.'

  `We need a scan, Finn.  For implants.'

  `So get over there between the pylons.  Stand on the tape. 

Straighten up, yeah.  Now turn around, gimme a full three-

sixty.'  Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking

stands studded with sensors.  The man took a small monitor

from his pocket and squinted at it.  `Something new in your

head, yeah.  Silicon, coat of pyrolitic carbons.  A clock, right? 

Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp is-

otropic carbons.  Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but

that's your business, right?  Same with your claws.'

  `Get over here, Case.'  He saw a scuffed X in black on the

white floor.  `Turn around.  Slow.'

  `Guy's a virgin.'  The man shrugged.  `Some cheap dental

work, is all.'

  `You read for biologicals?'  Molly unzipped her green vest

and took off the dark glasses.

  `You think this is the Mayo?  Climb on the table, kid, we'll

run a little biopsy.'  He laughed, showing more of his yellow

teeth.  `Nah.  Finn's word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs,

no cortex bombs.  You want me to shut the screen down?'

  `Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn.  Then we'll

want full screen for as long as we want it.'

  `Hey, that's fine by the Finn, Moll.  You're only paying by

the second.'

  They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of

the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed

forearms.  `We talk now.  This is as private as I can afford.'

  `What about?'

  `What we're doing.'

  `What are we doing?'

  `Working for Armitage.'

  `And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?'

  `Yeah.  I saw your profile, Case.  And I've seen the rest of

our shopping list, once.  You ever work with the dead?'

  `No.'  He watched his reflection in her glasses.  `I could.  I

guess.  I'm good at what I do.'  The present tense made him

nervous.

  `You know that the Dixie Flatline's dead?'

  He nodded.  `Heart, I heard.'

  `You'll be working with his construct.'  She smiled.  `Taught

you the ropes, huh?  Him and Quine.  I know Quine, by the

way.  Real asshole.'

  `Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley?  Who?' 

Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table.  `I can't see

it.  He'd never have sat still for it.'

  `Sense/Net.  Paid him mega, you bet your ass.'

  `Quine dead too?'

  `No such luck.  He's in Europe.  He doesn't come into this.'

  `Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free.  He was

the best.  You know he died braindeath three times?'

  She nodded.

  `Flatlined on his EEG.  Showed me tapes.  Boy, I was _daid.'_

  `Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing

Armitage since I signed on.  But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu,

a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary.  Armitage gets or-

ders.  Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a

pillhead who's making one last wobble through the burnout

belt, and trade a program for the operation that'll fix him up. 

We coulda bought twenty world class cowboys for what the

market was ready to pay for that surgical program.  You were

good, but not _that_ good...'  She scratched the side of her

nose.

  `Obviously makes sense to somebody,' he said.  `Some-

body big.'

  `Don't let me hurt your feelings.'  She grinned.  `We're

gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flat-

line's construct.  Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault up-

town.  Tighter than an eel's ass, Case.  Now, Sense/Net, they

got all their new material for the fall season locked in there

too.  Steal that and we'd be richer than shit.  But no, we gotta

get us the Flatline and nothing else.  Weird.'

  `Yeah, it's all weird.  You're weird, this hole's weird, and

who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?'

  `Finn's an old connection of mine.  Fence, mostly.  Software. 

This privacy biz is a sideline.  But I got Armitage to let him

be our tech here, so when he shows up later, you never saw

him.  Got it?'

  `So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?'

  `I'm an easy make.'  She smiled.  `Anybody any good at

what they do, that's what they _are,_ right?  You gotta jack, I

gotta tussle.'

  He stared at her.  `So tell me what you know about Armi-

tage.'

  `For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any

Screaming Fist.  I checked.  But that doesn't mean much.  He

doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out.'  She

shrugged.  `Big deal.  And starters is all I got.'  She drummed

her nails on the back of the chair.  `But you _are_ a cowboy,

aren't you?  I mean, maybe you could have a little look around.' 

She smiled.

  `He'd kill me.'

  `Maybe.  Maybe not.  I think he needs you, Case, and real

bad.  Besides, you're a clever john, no?  You can winkle him,

sure.'

  `What else is on that list you mentioned?'

  `Toys.  Mostly for you.  And one certified psychopath name

of Peter Riviera.  Real ugly customer.'

  `Where's he?'

  `Dunno.  But he's one sick fuck, no lie.  I saw his profile.' 

She made a face.  `Godawful.'  She stood up and stretched,

catlike.  `So we got an axis going, boy?  We're together in this? 

Partners?'

  Case looked at her.  `I gotta lotta choice, huh?'

  She laughed.  `You got it, cowboy.'

  `The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said

the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military ex-

perimentation with cranial jacks.'  On the Sony, a two-dimen-

sional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically

generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of log-

arithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab

animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con-

trol circuits of tanks and war planes.  `Cyberspace.  A consen-

sual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathe-

matical concepts...  A graphic representation of data abstracted

from the banks of every computer in the human system.  Un-

thinkable complexity.  Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of

the mind, clusters and constellations of data.  Like city lights,

receding...'

  `What's that?' Molly asked, as he flipped the channel se-

lector.

  `Kid's show.'  A discontinuous flood of images as the se-

lector cycled.  `Off,' he said to the Hosaka.

  `You want to try now, Case?'

  Wednesday.  Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with

Molly beside him.  `You want me to go out, Case?  Maybe

easier for you, alone...'  He shook his head.

  `No.  Stay, doesn't matter.'  He settled the black terry sweat-

band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai

dermatrodes.  He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing

it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed

shuriken burning with reflected neon.  He glanced up; on the

wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there

with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.

  He closed his eyes.

  Found the ridged face of the power stud.

  And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes

boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking

past like film compiled from random frames.  Symbols, figures,

faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

  Please, he prayed, _now --_

  A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

  _Now --_

  Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler

gray.  Expanding --

  And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the

unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent

3D chessboard extending to infinity.  Inner eye opening to the

stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Au-

thority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of

America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms

of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

  And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,

distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his

face.

  Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft

was dark.  He checked the time.  He'd been in cyberspace for

five hours.  He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new work-

tables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black

silk sleeping bag over his head.

  The security package taped to the steel firedoor bleeped

twice.  `Entry requested,' it said.  `Subject is cleared per my

program.'

  `So open it.'  Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up

as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.

  `Christ,' said a hoarse voice, `I know that bitch can see in

the dark...'  A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. 

`Turn the lights on, okay?'  Case scrambled off the slab and

found the old-fashioned switch.

  `I'm the Finn,' said the Finn, and made a warning face at

Case.

  `Case.'

  `Pleased to meecha, I'm sure.  I'm doing some hardware

for your boss, it looks like.'  The Finn fished a pack of Partagas

from a pocket and lit one.  The smell of Cuban tobacco filled

the room.  He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono- 

Sendai.  `Looks stock.  Soon fix that.  But here's your problem,

kid.'  He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket,

flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rec-

tangle from the envelope.  `Goddamn factory prototypes,' he

said, tossing the thing down on the table.  `Cast 'em into a

block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying

the works.  Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows

what else.  We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked,

right?'  He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it

away in an inside pocket.

  `What is it?'

  `It's a flipflop switch, basically.  Wire it into your Sendai

here, you can access live or recorded simstim without having

to jack out of the matrix.'

  `What for?'

  `I haven't got a clue.  Know I'm fitting Moll for a broadcast

rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access.'  The

Finn scratched his chin.  `So now you get to find out just how

tight those jeans really are, huh?'

        4

  Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his

forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that

filtered through the grid overhead.  A countdown was in pro-

gress in one corner of the monitor screen.

  Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it

was basically a meat toy.  He knew that the trodes he used and

the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were bas-

ically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a

drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms

of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous

multiplication of flesh input.  The commercial stuff was edited,

of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course

of a segment, you didn't feel it.

  The screen bleeped a two-second warning.

  The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin

ribbon of fiberoptics.

  And one and two and --

  Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points. 

Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough.  Have to work on

it...

  Then he keyed the new switch.

  The abrupt jolt into other flesh.  Matrix gone, a wave of

sound and color...  She was moving through a crowded street,

past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets

of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers.  Smells

of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill.  For

a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her

body.  Then he willed himself into passivity, became the pas-

senger behind her eyes.

  The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight al all.  He

wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically.  Blue

alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. 

Showing off, he thought.

  Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign.  She

seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone,

but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made

room.

  `How you doing.  Case?'  He heard the words and felt her

form them.  She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling

a nipple under warm silk.  The sensation made him catch his

breath.  She laughed.  But the link was one-way.  He had no way

to reply.

  Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory

Lane.  Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he

would have used to find his way.  He began to find the passivity

of the situation irritating.

  The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was

instantaneous.  He punched himself down a wall of primitive

ice belonging to the New York Public Library automatically

counting potential windows.  Keying back into her sensorium,

into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright.

  He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these

sensations with.  What did he know about her?  That she was

another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the

thing she did to make a living.  He knew the way she'd moved

against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of

unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black,

afterward...

  Her destination was one of the dubious software rental com-

plexes that lined Memory Lane.  There was a stillness, a hush. 

Booths lined a central hall.  The clientele were young, few of

them out of their teens.  They all seemed to have carbon sockets

planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them.  The

counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers

of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted

under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white card-

board.  Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. 

Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly

into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the

socket behind his ear.

  `Larry, you in, man?'  She positioned herself in front of

him.  The boy's eyes focused.  He sat up in his chair and pried

a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail.

  `Hey, Larry.'

  `Molly.'  He nodded.

  `I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.'

  Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red

sportshirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a

dozen others.  His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip

that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly

into his head.  His eyes narrowed.

  `Molly's got a rider,' he said, `and Larry doesn't like that.'

  `Hey,' she said, `I didn't know you were so... sensitive. 

I'm impressed.  Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.'

  `I know you, lady?'  The blank look returned.  `You looking

to buy some softs?'

  `I'm looking for the Moderns.'

  `You got a rider, Molly.  This says.'  He tapped the black

splinter.  `Somebody else using your eyes.'

  `My partner.'

  `Tell your partner to go.'

  `Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.'

  `What are you talking about, lady?'

  `Case, you take off,' she said, and he hit the switch, in-

stantly back in the matrix.  Ghost impressions of the software

complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cy-

berspace.

  `Panther Moderns,' he said to the Hosaka, removing the

trodes.  `Five minute precis.'

  `Ready,' the computer said.

  It wasn't a name he knew.  Something new, something that

had come in since he'd been in Chiba.  Fads swept the youth

of the Sprawl at the speed of light: entire subcultures could rise

overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. 

`Go,' he said.  The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries,

journals, and news services.

  The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case

at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's face

snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a

paint-scrawled wall.  Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the

result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow

cheeks.  The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flow-

ing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle

predator.  His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern

approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across

his tight onepiece.  Mimetic polycarbon.

  Cut to Dr.~ Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name,

faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanu-

merics.

  `Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal vi-

olence,' someone said, `it may be difficult for our viewers to

understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon

isn't a form of terrorism.'

  Dr.~ Rambali smiled.  `There is always a point at which the

terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt.  A point at

which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the

terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. 

Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-re-

lated.  The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists pre-

cisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness

of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from

the original sociopolitical intent...'

  `Skip it,' Case said.

  Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the

Hosaka's precis.  The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contem-

porary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens.  There

was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl,

something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived

subcults and replicated them at odd intervals.  The Panther Mod-

erns were a softhead variant on the Scientists.  If the technology

had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sock-

ets stuffed with microsofts.  It was the style that mattered and

the style was the same.  The Moderns were mercenaries, prac-

tical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.

  The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of

diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. 

His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark- 

cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous.  It was one of

the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen.  When

Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large

animal, Case was actually relieved.  Toothbud transplants.  He'd

seen that before.

  `You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you,' Molly

said.  Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net

ice.

  This was it.  This was what he was, who he was, his being. 

He forgot to eat.  Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of

sushi on the corner of the long table.  Sometimes he resented

having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set

up in a corner of the loft.  Ice patterns formed and reformed on

the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious

traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice. 

It was good ice.  Wonderful ice.  Its patterns burned there while

he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red

dawn through the steel grid of the skylight.  Its rainbow pixel

maze was the first thing he saw when he woke.  He'd go straight

to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in.  He was cutting

it.  He was working.  He lost track of days.

  And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was

off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of

Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back.  Faces and

Ninsei neon.  Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda

Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant

to him.  When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for

nine straight hours.

  The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days.

  `I said a week,' Armitage said, unable to conceal his sat-

isfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run.  `You

took your own good time.'

  `Balls,' Case said, smiling at the screen.  `That's good work,

Armitage.'

  `Yes,' Armitage admitted, `but don't let it go to your head. 

Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an

arcade toy.'

  `Love you, Cat Mother,' whispered the Panther Modern's

link man.  His voice was modulated static in Case's headset. 

`Atlanta, Brood.  Looks go.  Go, got it?'  Molly's voice was

slightly clearer.

  `To hear is to obey.'  The Moderns were using some kind

of chickenwire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's

scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in

geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan.  They chose to regard

the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their

choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate.  Molly's

signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish

epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall

as the Sense/Net building.

  Atlanta.  The recognition code was simple.  Atlanta to Boston

to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city.  If anyone

managed to intercept Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her

voice, the code would tip the Moderns.  If she remained in the

building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely

she'd be coming out at all.

  Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place,

and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt.  He had only

a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diver-

sion for the Sense/Net security people.  His job was to make

sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the

Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to.  He watched the

countdown in the corner of the screen.  Two.  One.

  He jacked in and triggered his program.  `Mainline,' breathed

the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through

the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice.  Good.  Check Molly.  He

hit the simstim and flipped into her sensorium.

  The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly.  She stood

before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white

lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflec-

tion.  Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her

mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she

belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of

Tally Isham.  She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh

top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable

in Tokyo the previous year.  She grinned vacantly and popped

her gum.  Case felt like laughing.  He could feel the micropore

tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the

radio, the simstim unit, and the scrambler.  The throat mike,

glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic

dermadisk.  Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were

flexing systematically through a series of tension-release ex-

ercises.  It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar

sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as

they were partially extruded, then retracted.

  He flipped back.  His program had reached the fifth gate. 

He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of

him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck,

making minor adjustments.  Translucent planes of color shuffled

like a trick deck.  Take a card, he thought, any card.

  The gate blurred past.  He laughed.  The Sense/Net ice had

accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's

Los Angeles complex.  He was inside.  Behind him, viral sub-

programs peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready

to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.

  He flipped again.  Molly was strolling past the enormous

circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby.

  12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve.

  At midnight, synched with the chip behind Molly's eye, the

link man in Jersey had given his command.  `Mainline.'  Nine

Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl,

had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. 

Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted

out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves.  Nine different

police departments and public security agencies were absorbing

the information that an obscure subsect of militant Christian

fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced

clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as

Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. 

Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been

shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in

eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.

  Case hit the switch as his program surged through the gates

of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net

research library.  He found himself stepping into an elevator.

  `Excuse me, but are you an employee?'  The guard raised

his eyebrows.  Molly popped her gum.  `No,' she said, driving

the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man's solar

plexus.  As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt,

she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator.

  Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE

DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel.  She took a blackbox

from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the

lock that secured the panel's circuitry.

  The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first

move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared

dose of misinformation.  This time, they shot it directly into

the Sense/Net building's internal video system.

  At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eigh-

teen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a sus-

ceptible segment of Sense/Net employees.  Then something only

vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched

across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mer-

cator projection.  Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated

jaw moved.  Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish

clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred,

and vanished.  Subliminally rapid images of contamination:

graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands

manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down

into darkness, a pale splash...  The audio track, its pitch ad-

justed to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed,

was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military

uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing

the human skeletal growth factor.  Overdoses of HsG threw

certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors

as high as one thousand percent.

  At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net

consortium held just over three thousand employees.  At five

minutes after midnight, as the Moderns'~ message ended in a

flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed.

  Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the

possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system,

were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid.  They were running

full riot lights.  A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was

lifting off from its pad on Riker's.

  Case triggered his second program.  A carefully engineered

virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial com-

mands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research

materials.  `Boston,' Molly's voice came across the link, `I'm

downstairs.'  Case switched and saw the blank wall of the

elevator.  She was unzipping the white pants.  A bulky packet,

exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with

micropore.  She knelt and peeled the tape away.  Streaks of

burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she un-

folded the Modern suit.  She removed the pink raincoat, threw

it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on

over the white mesh top.

  12:06:26.

  Case's virus had bored a window through the library's com-

mand ice.  He punched himself through and found an infinite

blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight

grid of pale blue neon.  In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior

of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective di-

mension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen-

dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung

with a few basic commands.  Case began to key the sequence

the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with

severe drug problems.  He began to glide through the spheres

as if he were on invisible tracks.

  Here.  This one.

  Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above

him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub-

program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial

commands.

  Out now.  Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric

of the window.

  Done.

  In the Sense/Net lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly

behind a low rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video

camera.  They both wore chameleon suits.  `Tacticals are spray-

ing foam barricades now,' one noted, speaking for the benefit

of his throat mike.  `Rapids are still trying to land their copter.'

  Case hit the simstim switch.  And flipped into the agony of

broken bone.  Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of

a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven.  Case

was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading

in his left thigh.

  `What's happening, Brood?' he asked the link man.

  `I dunno, Cutter.  Mother's not talking.  Wait.'

  Case's program was cycling.  A single hair-fine thread of

crimson neon extended from the center of the restored window

to the shifting outline of his icebreaker.  He didn't have time

to wait.  Taking a deep breath, he flipped again.

  Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on

the corridor wall.  In the loft, Case groaned.  The second step

took her over an outstretched arm.  Uniform sleeve bright with

fresh blood.  Glimpse of a shattered fiberglass shockstave.  Her

vision seemed to have narrowed to a tunnel.  With the third

step, Case screamed and found himself back in the matrix.

  `Brood?  Boston, baby...'  Her voice tight with pain.  She

coughed.  `Little problem with the natives.  Think one of them

broke my leg.'

  `What you need now, Cat Mother?'  The link man's voice

was indistinct, nearly lost behind static.

  Case forced himself to flip back.  She was leaning against

the wall, taking all of her weight on her right leg.  She fumbled

through the contents of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew

a sheet of plastic studded with a rainbow of dermadisks.  She

selected three and thumbed them hard against her left wrist,

over the veins.  Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog

came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it.  Her back

arched convulsively.  Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs. 

She sighed and slowly relaxed.

  `Okay, Brood.  Okay now.  But I'll need a medical team

when I come out.  Tell my people.  Cutter, I'm two minutes

from target.  Can you hold?'

  `Tell her I'm in and holding,' Case said.

  Molly began to limp down the corridor.  When she glanced

back, once, Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net

security guards.  One of them seemed to have no eyes.

  `Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat

Mother.  Foam barricades.  Lobby's getting juicy.'

  `Pretty juicy down here,' she said, swinging herself through

a pair of gray steel doors.  `Almost there, Cutter.'

  Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his

forehead.  He was drenched with sweat.  He wiped his forehead

with a towel, took a quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle

beside the Hosaka, and checked the map of the library displayed

on the screen.  A pulsing red cursor crept through the outline

of a doorway.  Only millimeters from the green dot that indi-

cated the location of the Dixie Flatline's construct.  He won-

dered what it was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. 

With enough endorphin analog, she could walk on a pair of

bloody stumps.  He tightened the nylon harness that held him

in the chair and replaced the trodes.

  Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.

  The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the

materials stored here had to be physically removed before they

could be interfaced.  Molly hobbled between rows of identical

gray lockers.

  `Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood,' Case said.

  `Five more and ten left, Cat Mother,' the link man said.

  She took the left.  A white-faced librarian cowered between

two lockers, her cheeks wet, eyes blank.  Molly ignored her. 

Case wondered what the Moderns had done to provoke that

level of terror.  He knew it had something to do with a hoaxed

threat, but he'd been too involved with his ice to follow Molly's

explanation.

  `That's it,' Case said, but she'd already stopped in front of

the cabinet that held the construct.  Its lines reminded Case of

the Neo-Aztec bookcases in Julie Deane's anteroom in Chiba.

  `Do it, Cutter,' Molly said.

  Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing

down the crimson thread that pierced the library ice.  Five sep-

arate alarm systems were convinced that they were still oper-

ative.  The three elaborate locks deactivated, but considered

themselves to have remained locked.  The library's central bank

suffered a minute shift in its permanent memory: the construct

had been removed, per executive order, a month before.  Check-

ing for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian

would find the records erased.

  The door swung open on silent hinges.

  `0467839,' Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit

from the rack.  It resembled the magazine of a large assault

rifle, its surfaces covered with warning decals and security

ratings.

  Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.

  He withdrew the line through the library ice.  It whipped

back into his program, automatically triggering a full system

reversal.  The Sense/Net gates snapped past him as he backed

out, subprograms whirling back into the core of the icebreaker

as he passed the gates where they had been stationed.

  `Out, Brood,' he said, and slumped in his chair.  After the

concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and

still retain awareness of his body.  It might take Sense/Net days

to discover the theft of the construct.  The key would be the

deflection of the Los Angeles transfer, which coincided too

neatly with the Modern's terror run.  He doubted that the three

security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live

to talk about it.  He flipped.

  The elevator, with Molly's blackbox taped beside the control

panel, remained where she'd left it.  The guard still lay curled

on the floor.  Case noticed the derm on his neck for the first

time.  Something of Molly's, to keep him under.  She stepped

over him and removed the blackbox before punching LOBBY.

  As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward

out of the crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall

with her head.  Molly ignored her, bending over to peel the

derm from the guard's neck.  Then she kicked the white pants

and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the dark glasses

after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her

forehead.  The construct, in the suit's kangaroo pocket, dug

into her sternum when she moved.  She stepped out.

  Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.

  The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had

surged for the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades

of the Tacticals and the sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. 

The two agencies, convinced that they were containing a horde

of potential killers, were cooperating with an uncharacteristic

degree of efficiency.  Beyond the shattered wreckage of the

main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barri-

cades.  The hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant

background for the sound the crowd made as it surged back

and forth across the lobby's marble floor.  Case had never heard

anything like that sound.

  Neither, apparently, had Molly.  `Jesus,' she said, and hes-

itated.  It was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of

raw and total fear.  The lobby floor was covered with bodies,

clothing, blood, and long trampled scrolls of yellow printout.

  `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 cam-

era 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 Lu-

pus 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 bun-

dles 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 mem-

branes wearing thinner as he walked, it didn't seem real.  Nei-

ther 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, Yon-

derboy.'

  `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.

        5

  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 GER-

ALD 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 in to 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 some-

how 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 resigna-

tion.  He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his bat-

tered 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 lim-

ited 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 Armi-

tage?'

  `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, cloisonn over platinum, stud-

ded 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 per-

verse 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 dis-

covered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.

  Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo col-

lector, hinting that he was on the track of something notewor-

thy.

  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 gen-

eration, 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.

  `Who's this?'

  `Armitage.  Some data base of his.  Bought it from the Mod-

erns.  Separate deal.  Where is it?'

  `London,' Case said.

  `Crack it.'  She laughed.  `Earn your keep for a change.'

  Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded plat-

form.  Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's

construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily

ever since.

  It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a

hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, ob-

sessions, kneejerk responses...  The local came booming in

along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in

the tunnel's ceiling.  Case shuffled into the nearest door and

watched the other passengers as he rode.  A pair of predatory- 

looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young

office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their

wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting.  The techs

licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Sci-

entists from beneath lowered metallic lids.  The girls looked

like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and un-

consciously with the movement of the train, their high heels

like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. 

Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries,

the train reached Case's station.

  He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar

suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing

beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. 

He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying

the thing.  WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign.  A blunt white spindle,

flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. 

He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times.  It had

never appealed to him.  With his deck, he could reach the

Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta.  Travel was

a meat thing.  But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a

small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric

of light: T-A.

  He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. 

He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman

Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. 

He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. 

There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser,

that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cow-

boy.  No other way to learn.

  They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the

'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. 

The grapevine -- slender, street level, and the only one going --

had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the

impossible.  `It was big,' another would-be told Case, for the

price of a beer, `but who knows what?  I hear maybe a Brazilian

payroll net.  Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.' 

Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirt-

sleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.

  `Boy,' the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami,

`I'm like them huge fuckin'~ lizards, you know?  Had themself

two goddam brains, one in the head an'~ one by the tailbone,

kept the hind legs movin'~.  Hit that black stuff and ol'~ tailbrain

jus'~ kept right on keepin'~ on.'

  The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some

strange group anxiety, almost a superstition.  McCoy Pauley,

Lazarus of cyberspace...

  And his heart had done for him in the end.  His surplus

Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war.  He'd

refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular

beat to maintain his sense of timing.  Case fingered the slip of

paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs.

  Molly was snoring on the temperfoam.  A transparent cast

ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the

skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black

shading into ugly yellow.  Eight derms, each a different size

and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist.  An Akai

transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to

input trodes under the cast.

  He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka.  The crisp circle

of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct.  He slotted some

ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.

  It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his

shoulder.

  He coughed.  `Dix?  McCoy?  That you man?'  His throat was

tight.

  `Hey, bro,' said a directionless voice.

  `It's Case, man.  Remember?'

  `Miami, joeboy, quick study.'

  `What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you,

Dix?'

  `Nothin'~.'

  `Hang on.'  He disconnected the construct.  The presence

was gone.  He reconnected it.  `Dix?  Who am I?'

  `You got me hung, Jack.  Who the fuck are you?'

  `Ca -- your buddy.  Partner.  What's happening, man?'

  `Good question.'

  `Remember being here, a second ago?'

  `No.'

  `Know how a ROM personality matrix works?'

  `Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct.'

  `So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential,

real time memory?'

  `Guess so,' said the construct.

  `Okay, Dix.  You _are_ a ROM construct.  Got me?'

  `If you say so,' said the construct.  `Who are you?'

  `Case.'

  `Miami,' said the voice, `joeboy, quick study.'

  `Right.  And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze

over to London grid and access a little data.  You game for

that?'

  `You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?'

        6

  `You want you a paradise,' the Flatline advised, when Case

had explained his situation.  `Check Copenhagen, fringes of

the university section.'  The voice recited coordinates as he

punched.

  They found their paradise, a `pirate's paradise,' on the

jumbled border of a low-security academic grid.  At first glance

it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes

left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light

that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts

faculties.

  `There,' said the Flatline, `the blue one.  Make it out?  That's

an entry code for Bell Europa.  Fresh, too.  Bell'll get in here

soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they

find posted.  Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow.'

  Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a

standard phone code.  With the Flatline's help, he connected

with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's.

  `Here,' said the voice, `I'll do it for you.'  The Flatline

began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck,

trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. 

It took three tries.

  `Big deal,' said the Flatline.  `No ice at all.'

  `Scan this shit,' Case told the Hosaka.  `Sift for owner's

personal history.'

  The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re-

placed by a simple lozenge of white light.  `Contents are pri-

marily video recordings of postwar military trials,' said the

distant voice of the Hosaka.  `Central figure is Colonel Willis

Corto.'

  `Show it already,' Case said.

  A man's face filled the screen.  The eyes were Armitage's.

  Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let

the temperfoam mold itself against him.

  `You find anything?' she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep

and drugs.

  `Tell you later,' he said, `I'm wrecked.'  He was hungover

and confused.  He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the

various parts of a story about a man called Corto.  The Hosaka

had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it

was full of gaps.  Some of the material had been print records,

reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had

had to ask the computer to read them for him.  Other segments

were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.

  Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot

in the Russian defenses over Kirensk.  The shuttles had created

the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in

in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moon-

light, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and

Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. 

Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their

launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.

  `They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,' Case said, and

Molly stirred beside him.

  The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate

for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a

virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history

of cybernetics.  Corto and his team had been training for the

run for three years.  They were through the ice, ready to inject

Mole IX, when the emps went off.  The Russian pulse guns

threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suf-

fered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.

  Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out

the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his

dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky.  Fell and kept

falling...

  There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned

documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian

gunship that managed to reach Finland.  To be gutted, as it

landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter can-

non manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert.  Screaming

Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with

Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the

helicopter.  The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped

to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most

of his jaw.  It took eleven months for the Congressional aide

to find him there.  He listened to the sound of tubes draining. 

In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already un-

derway.  The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized,

partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had fo-

cused on Screaming Fist.  Ripe for watergating, the aide told

Corto.

  He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide

said, but that could be arranged.  New plumbing, the man added,

squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.

  Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping.  He said he pre-

ferred to testify as he was.

  No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised.  The

trials needed to reach the voter.  The aide coughed politely.

  Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's

subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely

the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested in-

terests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastruc-

ture.  Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave

was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly

responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of

the emp installations at Kirensk.

  His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. 

In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide ex-

plained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong

people.  Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers

of his right hand.  The Congressional aide strangled, his face

in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Wash-

ington September.

  The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espi-

onage records, and news files.  Case watched Corto work cor-

porate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed

to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the sci-

entists and technicians he bought out for his employers.  Drunk,

in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel

and set fire to his room.

  Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. 

Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a

paid killer in the ruins of Bonn.  He robbed a bank in Wichita. 

The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.

  One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical

interrogation, everything had gone gray.

  Translated French medical records explained that a man

without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health

unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic.  He became catatonic and

was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. 

He became a subject in an experimental program that sought

to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic

models.  A random selection of patients were provided with

microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to

program them.  He was cured, the only success in the entire

experiment.

  The record ended there.

  Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for

disturbing her.

  The telephone rang.  He pulled it into bed.  `Yeah?'

  `We're going to Istanbul,' Armitage said.  `Tonight.'

  `What does the bastard want?' Molly asked.

  `Says we're going to Istanbul tonight.'

  `That's just wonderful.'

  Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.

  Molly sat up and turned on the light.

  `What about my gear?' Case asked.  `My deck.'

  `Finn will handle it,' said Armitage, and hung up.

  Case watched her pack.  There were dark circles under her

eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. 

No wasted motion.  His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his

bag.

  `You hurting?' he asked.

  `I could do with another night at Chin's.'

  `Your dentist?'

  `You betcha.  Very discreet.  He's got half that rack, full

clinic.  Does repairs for samurai.'  She was zipping her bag. 

`You ever been to 'Stambul?'

  `Couple days, once.'

  `Never changes,' she said.  `Bad old town.'

  `It was like this when we headed for Chiba,' Molly said,

staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape,

red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion

plant.  `We were in L.A.  He came in and said Pack, we were

booked for Macau.  When we got there, I played fantan in the

Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan.  Next day I was

playing ghost with you in Night City.'  She took a silk scarf

from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets.  The

landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of

childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted

slab of freeway concrete.

  The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. 

Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on

broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.

        7

  It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past

the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian

jewelers.  The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated

figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.

  `This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ot-

toman Istanbul,' purred the Mercedes.

  `So it's gone downhill,' Case said.

  `The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi,' Molly said.  She

settled back against the car's gray ultrasuede.

  `How come Armitage flies alone?' Case asked.  He had a

headache.

  `'Cause you get up his nose.  You're sure getting up mine.'

  He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against

it.  He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.

  The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a

neat incision, laying the city open.  He'd watched the crazy

walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, ar-

cologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and

corrugated iron.

  The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was

waiting sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour arm-

chair in a sea of pale blue carpeting.

  `Christ,' Molly said.  `Rat in a business suit.'

  They crossed the lobby.

  `How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?'  She

lowered her bag beside the armchair.  `Bet not as much as you

get for wearing that suit, huh?'

  The Finn's upper lips drew back.  `Not enough, sweetmeat.' 

He handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag.  `You're

registered already.  Honcho's upstairs.'  He looked around.  `This

town sucks.'

  `You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. 

Just pretend it's Brooklyn or something.'  She twirled the key

around a finger.  `You here as valet or what?'

  `I gotta check out some guy's implants,' the Finn said.

  `How about my deck?' Case asked.

  The Finn winced.  `Observe the protocol.  Ask the boss.'

  Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker

of jive.  The Finn watched, then nodded.

  `Yeah,' she said, `I know who that is.'  She jerked her head

in the direction of the elevators.  `Come on, cowboy.'  Case

followed her with both bags.

  Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd

first seen Armitage.  He went to the window, in the morning,

almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay.  There was another hotel

across the street.  It was still raining.  A few letter-writers had

taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in

sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still

enjoyed a certain prestige here.  It was a sluggish country.  He

watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell

conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers

in rumpled green uniforms.  They entered the hotel across the

street.

  He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness

struck him.  She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in

their loft, beside the transdermal inducer.  Her glasses reflected

part of the room's light fixture.

  He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring

twice.  `Glad you're up,' Armitage said.

  `I'm just.  Lady's still under.  Listen, boss, I think it's maybe

time we have a little talk.  I think I work better if I know a

little more about what I'm doing.'

  Silence on the line.  Case bit his lip.

  `You know as much as you need to.  Maybe more.'

  `You think so?'

  `Get dressed, Case.  Get her up.  You'll have a caller in

about fifteen minutes.  His name is Terzibashjian.'  The phone

bleated softly.  Armitage was gone.

  `Wake up, baby,' Case said.  `Biz.'

  `I've been awake an hour already.'  The mirrors turned.

  `We got a Jersey Bastion coming up.'

  `You got an ear for language, Case.  Bet you're part Ar-

menian.  That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera.  Help me

up.'

  Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and

gold-framed, mirrored glasses.  His white shirt was open at the

collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first

mistook it for some kind of t-shirt.  He arrived with a black

Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick

black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.

  `We must, as you say in _Ingiliz,_ take this one very easy.' 

He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed

the silver glasses.  His eyes were a dark brown that matched

the shade of his very short military-cut hair.  He smiled.  `It is

better, this way, yes?  Else we make the _tunel_ infinity, mirror

into mirror...  You particularly,' he said to her, `must take

care.  In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such

modifications.'

  Molly bit one of the pastries in half.  `It's my show, Jack,'

she said, her mouth full.  She chewed, swallowed, and licked

her lips.  `I know about you.  Stool for the military, right?'  Her

hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with

the fletcher.  Case hadn't known she had it.

  `Very easy, please,' Terzibashjian said, his white china

thimble frozen centimeters from his lips.

  She extended the gun.  `Maybe you get the explosives, lots

of them, or maybe you get a cancer.  One dart, shitface.  You

won't feel it for months.'

  `Please.  You call this in _Ingiliz_ making me very tight...'

  `I call it a bad morning.  Now tell us about your man and

get your ass out of here.'  She put the gun away.

  `He is living in Fener, at Kchk Glhane Djaddesi 14.  I

have his _tunel_ route, nightly to the bazaar.  He performs most

recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modern place in the

style _turistik,_ but it has been arranged that the police have

shown a certain interest in these shows.  The Yenishehir man-

agement has grown nervous.'  He smiled.  He smelled of some

metallic aftershave.

  `I want to know about the implants,' she said, massaging

her thigh, `I want to know exactly what he can do.'

  Terzibashjian nodded.  `Worst is how you say in _Ingiliz,_ the

subliminals.'  He made the word four careful syllables.

  `On our left,' said the Mercedes, as it steered through a

maze of rainy streets, `is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar.'

  Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he

was looking in the wrong direction.  The right side of the street

was lined with miniature scrapyards.  Case saw a gutted loco-

motive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble. 

Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.

  `Homesick?' Case asked.

  `Place sucks,' the Finn said.  His black silk tie was starting

to resemble a worn carbon ribbon.  There were medallions of

kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.

  `Hey, Jersey,' Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind

them, `where'd this guy get his stuff installed?'

  `In Chiba City.  He has no left lung.  The other is boosted,

is how you say it?  Anyone might buy these implants, but this

one is most talented.'  The Mercedes swerved avoiding a bal-

loon-tired dray stacked with hides.  `I have followed him in the

street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day.  Find

the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same.  A scorpion

poised beside a brake lever...'

  ``What you see is what you get,' yeah,' the Finn said.  `I

seen the schematics on the guy's silicon.  Very flash.  What he

imagines, you see.  I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and

fry a retina over easy.'

  `You have told this to your woman friend?'  Terzibashjian

leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets.  `In Turkey,

women are still women.  This one...'

  The Finn snorted.  `She'd have you wearing your balls for

a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed.'

  `I do not understand this idiom.'

  `That's okay,' Case said.  `Means shut up.'

  The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of after-

shave.  He began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange

salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English. 

The transceiver answered in French.  The Mercedes swung

smoothly around a corner.  `The spice bazaar, sometimes called

the Egyptian bazaar,' the car said, `was erected on the site of

an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660.  This is the

city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs...'

  `Drugs,' Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and

recross the bulletproof Lexan.  `What's that you said before,

Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?'

  `A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes.'  The Armenian

went back to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo.

  `Demerol they used to call that,' said the Finn.  `He's a

speedball artist.  Funny class of people you're mixing with,

Case.'

  `Never mind,' Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket,

`we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something.'

  Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened notice-

ably, as though he were comforted by the crowd density and

the sense of enclosure.  They walked with the Armenian along

a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and

green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam.  A thousand

suspended ads writhed and flickered.

  `Hey, Christ,' the Finn said, taking Case's arm, `looka

that.'  He pointed.  `It's a horse, man.  You ever see a horse?'

  Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. 

It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a

place that sold birds and monkeys.  The thing's legs had been

worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands.  `Saw

one in Maryland once,' the Finn said, `and that was a good

three years after the pandemic.  There's Arabs still trying to

code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak.'

  The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as

they passed.  Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core

of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it

had been in continuous operation for centuries.  Skinny boys

in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, bal-

ancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses

of tea.

  Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the

door.  The Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo.  `Come,' he

said, `he is moving.  Each night he rides the _tunel_ to the bazaar

to purchase his mixture from Ali.  Your woman is close.  Come.'

  The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from

blocks of dark stone.  The pavement was uneven and smelled

of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone. 

`Can't see shit,' he whispered to the Finn.  `That's okay for

sweetmeat,' the Finn said.  `Quiet,' said Terzibashjian, too

loudly.

  Wood grated on stone or concrete.  Ten meters down the

alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. 

A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving

the narrow place in darkness.  Case shivered.

  `Now,' Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white

light, directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the

market, pinned the slender figure beside the ancient wooden

door in a perfect circle.  Bright eyes darted left, right, and the

man crumpled.  Case thought someone had shot him; he lay

face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands

white and pathetic.

  The floodlight never wavered.

  The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood

splashing the wall and doorway.  A pair of impossibly long,

rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare.  The thing

seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert,

bloody ruin that had been Riviera.  It was two meters tall, stood

on two legs, and seemed to be headless.  Then it swung slowly

to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck.  It

was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink.  The mouth,

if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined

with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black

chrome.  It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took

a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved.

  Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed

the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through

a window.  He went through it.  Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol

from the dark beyond the circle of light.  Fragments of rock

whizzed past Case's head; the Finn jerked him down into a

crouch.

  The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mis-

matched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. 

His ears rang.

  Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shad-

ows.  Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face

very white in the glare.  He held his left wrist and watched

blood drip from a wound in his left hand.  The blond man,

whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.

  Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her

fletcher in her hand.

  `Use the radio,' the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. 

`Call in Mahmut.  We must get him out of here.  This is not a

good place.'

  `Little prick nearly made it,' the Finn said, his knees crack-

ing loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of

his trousers.  `You were watching the horror-show, right?  Not

the hamburger that got tossed out of sight.  Real cute.  Well,

help 'em get his ass outa here.  I gotta scan all that gear before

he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money's worth.'

  Molly bent and picked something up.  A pistol.  `A Nambu,'

she said.  `Nice gun.'

  Terzibashjian made a whining sound.  Case saw that most

of his middle finger was missing.

  With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes

to take them to Topkapi.  The Finn and an enormous Turk named

Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. 

Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian,

who seemed on the verge of fainting.

  `You're an asshole,' Molly told the man, opening the ear

door for him.  `You shoulda hung back.  I had him in my sights

as soon as he stepped out.'  Terzibashjian glared at her.  `So

we're through with you anyway.'  She shoved him in and

slammed the door.  `Run into you again and I'll kill you,' she

said to the white face behind the tinted window.  The Citroen

ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.

  Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city

woke.  They passed the Beyoglu _tunel_ terminal and sped past

mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that

reminded Case vaguely of Paris.

  `What is this thing?' he asked Molly, as the Mercedes

parked itself on the fringes of the gardens that surround the

Seraglio.  He stared dully at the baroque conglomeration of

styles that was Topkapi.

  `It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King,' she said,

getting out stretching.  `Kept a lotta women there.  Now it's a

museum.  Kinda like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in

there, big diamonds, swords, the left hand of John the

Baptist...'

  `Like in a support vat?'

  `Nah.  Dead.  Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch

on the side so the Christians could kiss it for luck.  Got it off

the Christians about a million years ago, and they never dust

the goddam thing, 'cause it's an infidel relic.'

  Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio.  Case

walked beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept

grass made stiff by an early frost.  They walked beside a path

of cold octagonal flagstones.  Winter was waiting, somewhere

in the Balkans.

  `That Terzi, he's grade-A scum,' she said.  `He's the secret

police.  Torturer.  Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of

money Armitage was offering.'  In the wet trees around them,

birds began to sing.

  `I did that job for you,' Case said, `the one in London I

got something, but I don't know what it means.'  He told her

the Corto story.

  `Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in

that Screaming Fist.  Looked it up.'  She stroked the rusted

flank of an iron doe.  `You figure the little computer pulled

him out of it?  In that French hospital?'

  `I figure Wintermute,' Case said.

  She nodded.

  `Thing is,' he said, `do you think he knows he was Corto,

before?  I mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time

he hit the ward, so maybe Wintermute just...'

  `Yeah.  Built him up from go.  Yeah...'  She turned and

they walked on.  `It figures.  You know, the guy doesn't have

any life going, in private.  Not as far as I can tell.  You see a

guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's

alone.  But not Armitage.  Sits and stares at the wall, man.  Then

something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for

Wintermute.'

  `So why's he got that stash in London?  Nostalgia?'

  `Maybe he doesn't know about it,' she said.  `Maybe it's

just in his name, right?'

  `I don't get it,' Case said.

  `Just thinking out loud...  How smart's an AI, Case?'

  `Depends.  Some aren't much smarter than dogs.  Pets.  Cost

a fortune anyway.  The real smart ones are as smart as the

Turing heat is willing to let 'em get.'

  `Look, you're a cowboy.  How come you aren't just flat- 

out fascinated with those things?'

  `Well,' he said, `for starts, they're rare.  Most of them are

military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice.  That's

where ice all comes from, you know?  And then there's the

Turing cops, and that's bad heat.'  He looked at her.  `I dunno,

it just isn't part of the trip.'

  `Jockeys all the same,' she said.  `No imagination.'

  They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled

the stems of some white aquatic flower.  She kicked a loose

pebble in and watched the ripples spread.

  `That's Wintermute,' she said.  `This deal's real big, looks

to me.  We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't

see the rock that hit the center.  We know something's there,

but not why.  I wanna know why.  I want you to go and talk to

Wintermute.'

  `I couldn't get near it,' he said.  `You're dreaming.'

  `Try.'

  `Can't be done.'

  `Ask the Flatline.'

  `What do we want out of that Riviera?' he asked, hoping

to change the subject.

  She spat into the pond.  `God knows.  I'd as soon kill him

as look at him.  I saw his profile.  He's a kind of compulsive

Judas.  Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying

the object of desire.  That's what the file says.  And they have

to love him first.  Maybe he loves them, too.  That's why it was

easy for Terzi to set him up for us, because he's been here

three years, shopping politicals to the secret police.  Probably

Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came out.  He's done

eighteen in three years.  All women age twenty to twenty-five. 

It kept Terzi in dissidents.'  She thrust her hands into her jacket

pockets.  `Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make

sure she turned political.  He's got a personality like a Modern's

suit.  The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in

a couple of million.  Which anyway says something good about

human nature, I guess.'  She stared at the white flowers and

the sluggish fish, her face sour.  `I think I'm going to have to

buy myself some special insurance on that Peter.'  Then she

turned and smiled, and it was very cold.

  `What's that mean?'

  `Never mind.  Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something

like breakfast.  I gotta busy night again, tonight.  Gotta collect

his stuff from that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the

bazaar and buy him some drugs...'

  `Buy him some drugs?  How's he rate?'

  She laughed.  `He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart.  And

it looks like he can't work without that special taste.  I like you

better now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny.'  She smiled. 

`So I'll go to Ali the dealer and stock up.  You betcha.'

  Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.

  `Time to pack,' he said, and Case tried to find the man

called Corto behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask. 

He thought of Wage, back in Chiba.  Operators above a certain

level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew.  But

Wage had had vices, lovers.  Even, it had been rumored, chil-

dren.  The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.

  `Where to now?' he asked, walking past the man to stare

down into the street.  `What kind of climate?'

  `They don't have climate, just weather,' Armitage said. 

`Here.  Read the brochure.'  He put something on the coffee

table and stood.

  `Did Riviera check out okay?  Where's the Finn?'

  `Riviera's fine.  The Finn is on his way home.'  Armitage

smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some

insect's antenna.  His gold bracelet clinked as he reached out

to prod Case in the chest.  `Don't get too smart.  Those little

sacs are starting to show wear, but you don't know how much.'

  Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.

  When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the bro-

chures.  It was expensively printed, in French, English, and

Turkish.

  FREESIDE -- WHY WAIT?

  The four of them were booked on a _THY_ flight out of Yes-

ilky airport.  Transfer at Paris to the _JAL_ shuttle.  Case sat in

the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse

bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift shop.  Ar-

mitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape,

stood in the shop's entrance.

  Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English ac-

centless and fluid.  Molly said he was thirty, but it would have

been difficult to guess his age.  She also said he was legally

stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport.  He was

a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core

of old Bonn.

  Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nod-

ding politely to Armitage.  Armitage crossed the floor of the

shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera.  Ri-

viera turned and smiled.  He was very beautiful; Case assumed

the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon.  A subtle job,

nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop faces. 

The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and

distant.  His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted,

seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset.  The suggestion

of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of

his smile.  His teeth were small, even, and very white.  Case

watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of

sculpture.

  Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night

before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to

the Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining

their team.

  Case checked his watch.  Molly was due back from her drug

run.  He looked up at Riviera again.  `I bet you're stoned right

now, asshole,' he said to the Hilton lobby.  A graying Italian

matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche

glasses to stare at him.  He smiled broadly, stood, and shoul-

dered his bag.  He needed cigarettes for the flight.  He wondered

if there was a smoking section on the _JAL_ shuttle.  `See ya,

lady,' he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses

back up her nose and turned away.

  There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish

talking with Armitage or Riviera.  He left the lobby and located

a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of

pay phones.

  He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small

dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anach-

ronism of the process.  The phone nearest him rang.

  Automatically, he picked it up.

  `Yeah?'

  Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some

orbital link, and then a sound like wind.

  `Hello, Case.'

  A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled

out of sight across Hilton carpeting.

  `Wintermute, Case.  It's time we talk.'

  It was a chip voice.

  `Don't you want to talk, Case?'

  He hung up.

  On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he

had to walk the length of the ranked phones.  Each rang in turn,

but only once, as he passed.

        PART THREE

        MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE

        8

  Archipelago.

  The islands.  Torus, spindle, cluster.  Human DNA spreading

out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.

  Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the ex-

change of data in the L-5 archipelago.  One segment clicks in

as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen.

  Freeside.  Freeside is many things, not all of them evident

to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well.  Freeside is

brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, bor-

der town and spa.  Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gar-

dens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred

and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and

Ashpool.

  On the _THY_ liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class,

Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Ar-

mitage on the aisle.  Once, as the plane banked over water,

Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town.  And once,

reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a

giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.

  Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once. 

`No, baby.  No games.  You play that subliminal shit around

me, I'll hurt you real bad.  I can do it without damaging you

at all.  I _like_ that.'

  Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction.  The

smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no

anger.  `That's right, Peter.  Don't.'

  Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a

black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned

with bright chrome.

  Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell in-

stantly asleep.

  Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.

  `You been up, haven't you?' Molly asked, as he squirmed

his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the _JAL_

shuttle.

  `Nah.  Never travel much, just for biz.'  The steward was

attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.

  `Hope you don't get SAS,' she said.

  `Airsick?  No way.'

  `It's not the same.  Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g, and

your inner ear'll go nuts for a while.  Kicks in your flight reflex,

like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of

adrenaline.'  The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new

set of trodes from his red plastic apron.

  Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of

the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by

graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete.  The one nearest the

window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb.

  He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a

big airplane, one that flew very high.  It smelled like an airplane,

like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion.  He listened

to the piped koto music and waited.

  Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a

great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.

  Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's de-

scription, but it passed quickly enough and he was able to

sleep.  The steward woke him as they were preparing to dock

at _JAL_'s terminal cluster.

  `We transfer to Freeside now?' he asked, eyeing a shred

of Yeheyuan tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his

shirt pocket to dance ten centimeters from his nose.  There was

no smoking on shuttle flights.

  `No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you

know?  We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster.'  She

touched the release plate on her harness and began to free

herself from the embrace of the foam.  `Funny choice of venue,

you ask me.'

  `How's that?'

  `Dreads.  Rastas.  Colony's about thirty years old now.'

  `What's that mean?'

  `You'll see.  It's an okay place by me.  Anyway, they'll let

you smoke your cigarettes there.'

  Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to

return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started build-

ing.  They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before

rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus. 

Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull re-

minded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the ir-

regular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian

symbols and the initials of welders.

  Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case ne-

gotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus.  He'd

lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second

wave of SAS vertigo.  `Here,' Molly said, shoving his legs

into a narrow hatchway overhead.  `Grab the rungs.  Make like

you're climbing backward, right?  You're going toward the hull,

that's like you're climbing down into gravity.  Got it?'

  Case's stomach churned.

  `You be fine, mon,' Aerol said, his grin bracketed with

gold incisors.

  Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. 

Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding

a pocket of air.

  `Up,' Molly said, `you gonna kiss it next?'  Case lay flat

on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread.  Something struck

him on the shoulder.  He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of

elastic cable.  `Gotta play house,' she said.  `You help me string

this up.'  He looked around the wide, featureless space and

noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at ran-

dom.

  When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex

scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of

yellow plastic.  As they worked, Case gradually became aware

of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster.  It was

called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of

digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of

community.  Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing

was light but still awkward.  Zion smelled of cooked vegetables,

humanity, and ganja.

  `Good,' Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the

hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets.  Riviera followed, less

certain in the partial gravity.

  `Where were you when it needed doing?' Case asked Ri-

viera.

  The man opened his mouth to speak.  A small trout swam

out, trailing impossible bubbles.  It glided past Case's cheek. 

`In the head,' Riviera said, and smiled.

  Case laughed.

  `Good,' Riviera said, `you can laugh.  I would have tried

to help you, but I'm no good with my hands.'  He held up his

palms, which suddenly doubled.  Four arms, four hands.

  `Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?'  Molly stepped

between them.

  `Yo,' Aerol said, from the hatch, `you wan'~ come wi'~ me,

cowboy mon.'

  `It's your deck,' Armitage said, `and the other gear.  Help

him get it in from the cargo bay.'

  `You ver'~ pale, mon,' Aerol said, as they were guiding the

foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. 

`Maybe you wan'~ eat somethin'~.'

  Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.

  Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion.  Molly and

Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize

themselves to working in it.  He would brief them on Freeside

and the Villa Straylight.  It was unclear what Riviera was sup-

posed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like asking.  A few

hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow

maze to call Riviera out for a meal.  He'd found him curled

like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently

asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white

geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids.  `Hey, Ri-

viera.'  The ring continued to revolve.  He'd gone back and told

Armitage.  `He's stoned,' Molly said, looking up from the

disassembled parts of her fletcher.  `Leave him be.'

  Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's

ability to operate in the matrix.  `Don't sweat it,' Case argued,

`I jack in and I'm not here.  It's all the same.'

  `Your adrenaline levels are higher,' Armitage said.  `You've

still got SAS.  You won't have time for it to wear off.  You're

going to learn to work with it.'

  `So I do the run from here?'

  `No.  Practice, Case.  Now.  Up in the corridor...'

  Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular re-

lationship with the deck's physical whereabouts.  When Case

jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of

the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of

data.

  `How you doing, Dixie?'

  `I'm dead, Case.  Got enough time in on this Hosaka to

figure that one.'

  `How's it feel?'

  `It doesn't.'

  `Bother you?'

  `What bothers me is, nothin'~ does.'

  `How's that?'

  `Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb

was frostbit.  Medics came by and they cut it off.  Month later

he's tossin'~ all night.  Elroy, I said, what's eatin'~ you?  Goddam

thumb's itchin'~, he says.  So I told him, scratch it.  McCoy, he

says, it's the _other_ goddam thumb.'  When the construct laughed,

it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of

cold down Case's spine.  `Do me a favor, boy.'

  `What's that, Dix?'

  `This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam

thing.'

  Case didn't understand the Zionites.

  Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the

baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a

forest of hydroponic ganja.  `Ver'~ small baby, mon, no long'~

you finga.'  He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse

of brown forehead and smiled.

  `It's the ganja,' Molly said, when Case told her the story. 

`They don't make much of a difference between states, you

know?  Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to _him._ 

It's not like bullshit, more like poetry.  Get it?'

  Case nodded dubiously.  The Zionites always touched you

when they were talking, hands on your shoulder.  He didn't

like that.

  `Hey, Aerol,' Case called, an hour later, as he prepared

for a practice run in the freefall corridor.  `Come here, man. 

Wanna show you this thing.'  He held out the trodes.

  Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble.  His bare feet struck

the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand.  The

other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green al-

gae.  He blinked mildly and grinned.

  `Try it,' Case said.

  He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. 

He closed his eyes.  Case hit the power stud.  Aerol shuddered. 

Case jacked him back out.  `What did you see, man?'

  `Babylon,' Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and

kicking off down the corridor.

  Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm ex-

tended straight out, level with his shoulder.  A jewel-scaled

snake, its eyes like ruby neon, was coiled tightly a few

millimeters behind his elbow.  Case watched the snake, which

was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract,

tightening around Riviera's arm.

  `Come then,' the man said caressingly to the pale waxy

scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm.  `Come.' 

The scorpion swayed its brownish claws and scurried up his

arm its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of veins.  When it

reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate.  Ri-

viera made a soft hissing sound.  The sting came up, quivered,

and sank into the skin above a bulging vein.  The coral snake

relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him.

  Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a

milky plastic syringe in his left hand.  ``If God made anything

better, he kept it for himself.'  You know the expression, Case?'

  `Yeah,' Case said.  `I heard that about lots of different

things.  You always make it into a little show?'

  Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical

tubing from his arm.  `Yes.  It's more fun.'  He smiled, his eyes

distant now, cheeks flushed.  `I've a membrane set in, just over

the vein, so I never have to worry about the condition of the

needle.'

  `Doesn't hurt?'

  The bright eyes met his.  `Of course it does.  That's part of

it, isn't it?'

  `I'd just use derms,' Case said.

  `Pedestrian,' Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a

short-sleeved white cotton shirt.

  `Must be nice,' Case said, getting up.

  `Get high yourself, Case?'

  `I hadda give it up.'

  `Freeside,' Armitage said, touching the panel on the little

Braun hologram projector.  The image shivered into focus, nearly

three meters from tip to tip.  `Casinos here.'  He reached into

the skeletal representation and pointed.  `Hotels, strata-title

property, big shops along here.'  His hand moved.  `Blue areas

are lakes.'  He walked to one end of the model.  `Big cigar. 

Narrows at the ends.'

  `We can see that fine,' Molly said.

  `Mountain effect, as it narrows.  Ground seems to get higher,

more rocky, but it's an easy climb.  Higher you climb, the

lower the gravity.  Sports up there.  There's velodrome ring

here.'  He pointed.

  `A what?'  Case leaned forward.

  `They race bicycles,' Molly said.  `Low grav, high-traction

tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour.'

  `This end doesn't concern us,' Armitage said with his usual

utter seriousness.

  `Shit,' Molly said, `I'm an avid cyclist.'

  Riviera giggled.

  Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection.  `This

end does.'  The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and

the final segment of the spindle was empty.  `This is the Villa

Straylight.  Steep climb out of gravity and every approach is

kinked.  There's a single entrance, here, dead center.  Zero grav-

ity.'

  `What's inside, boss?'  Riviera leaned forward, craning his

neck.  Four tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage's

finger.  Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats.

  `Peter,' Armitage said, `you're going to be the first to find

out.  You'll arrange yourself an invitation.  Once you're in, you

see that Molly gets in.'

  Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight,

remembering the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head,

and the ninja.

  `Details available?' Riviera asked.  `I need to plan a ward-

robe, you see.'

  `Learn the streets,' Armitage said, returning to the center

of the model.  `Desiderata Street here.  This is the Rue Jules

Verne.'

  Riviera rolled his eyes.

  While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a

dozen bright pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin.  Even

Molly laughed.

  Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty

eyes.

  `Sorry,' Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.

  Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware

of Molly crouched beside him on the foam.  He could feel her

tension.  He lay there confused.  When she moved, the sheer

speed of it stunned him.  She was up and through the sheet of

yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize she'd slashed it

open.

  `Don't you move, friend.'

  Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the

plastic.  `Wha...?'

  `Shut up.'

  `You th'~ one, mon,' said a Zion voice.  `Cateye, call 'em,

call 'em Steppin'~ Razor.  I Maelcum, sister.  Brothers wan'~

converse wi'~ you an'~ cowboy.'

  `What brothers?'

  `Founders, mon.  Elders of Zion, ya know...'

  `We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman,' Case

whispered.

  `Make it special dark, now,' the man said.  `Come.  I an'~ I

visit th'~ Founders.'

  `You know how fast I can cut you, friend?'

  `Don'~ stan'~ talkin'~, sister.  Come.'

  The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with

the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many

years outside the embrace of gravity.  Their brown legs, brittle

with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected

sunlight.  They floated in the center of a painted jungle of

rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely cov-

ered the hull of the spherical chamber.  The air was thick with

resinous smoke.

  `Steppin'~ Razor,' one said, as Molly drifted into the cham-

ber.  `Like unto a whippin'~ stick.'

  `That is a story we have, sister,' said the other, `a religion

story.  We are glad you've come with Maelcum.'

  `How come you don't talk the patois?' Molly asked.

  `I came from Los Angeles,' the old man said.  His dread-

locks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel

wool.  `Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. 

To lead the Tribes home.  Now my brother likens you to Step-

pin'~ Razor.'

  Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the

smoky air.

  The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back.  `Soon

come, the Final Days...  Voices.  Voices cryin'~ inna wilder-

ness, prophesyin'~ ruin unto Babylon...'

  `Voices.'  The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at

Case.  `We monitor many frequencies.  We listen always.  Came

a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us.  It played

us a mighty dub.'

  `Call 'em Winter Mute,' said the other, making it two

words.

  Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.

  `The Mute talked to us,' the first Founder said.  `The Mute

said we are to help you.'

  `When was this?' Case asked.

  `Thirty hours prior you dockin'~ Zion.'

  `You ever hear this voice before?'

  `No,' said the man from Los Angeles, `and we are uncertain

of its meaning.  If these are Final Days, we must expect false

prophets...'

  `Listen,' Case said, `that's an AI, you know?  Artificial

intelligence.  The music it played you, it probably just tapped

your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like

to --'

  `Babylon,' broke in the other Founder, `mothers many de-

mon, I an'~ I know.  Multitude horde!'

  `What was that you called me, old man?' Molly asked.

  `Steppin'~ Razor.  An'~ you bring a scourge on Babylon, sis-

ter, on its darkest heart...'

  `What kinda message the voice have?' Case asked.

  `We were told to help you,' the other said, `that you might

serve as a tool of Final Days.'  His lined face was troubled. 

`We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug _Garvey_

to the Babylon port of Freeside.  And this we shall do.'

  `Maelcum a rude boy,' said the other, `an'~ a righteous tug

pilot.'

  `But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in _Babylon

Rocker,_ to watch over _Garvey.'_

  An awkward silence filled the dome.

  `That's it?' Case asked.  `You guys work for Armitage or

what?'

  `We rent you space,' said the Los Angeles Founder.  `We

have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no

regard for Babylon's law.  Our law is the word of Jah.  But this

time, it may be, we have been mistaken.'

  `Measure twice, cut once,' said the other, softly.

  `Come on, Case,' Molly said.  `Let's get back before the

man figures out we're gone.'

  `Maelcum will take you.  Jah love, sister.'

        9

  The tug _Marcus Garvey,_ a steel drum nine meters long and

two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched

for a navigational burn.  Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case

watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of sco-

polamine.  He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS nausea, but the

stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had

no effect on his doctored system.

  `How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?' Molly

asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.

  `Don be long now, m'seh dat.'

  `You guys ever think in hours?'

  `Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean?  Dread,' and

he shook his locks, `at control, mon, an'~ I an'~ I come a Freeside

when I an'~ I come...'

  `Case,' she said, `have you maybe done anything toward

getting in touch with our pal from Berne?  Like all that time

you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?'

  `Pal,' Case said, `sure.  No.  I haven't.  But I got a funny

story along those lines, left over from Istanbul.'  He told her

about the phones in the Hilton.

  `Christ,' she said, `there goes a chance.  How come you

hung up?'

  `Coulda been anybody,' he lied.  `Just a chip...  I dunno.' 

He shrugged.

  `Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?'

  He shrugged again.

  `Do it now.'

  `What?'

  `Now.  Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.'

  `I'm all doped,' he protested, but reached for the trodes. 

His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's

module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.

  He adjusted the trodes.  _Marcus Garvey_ had been thrown

together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec-

tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion

and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over-

laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script.  Someone had sprayed

Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the

overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade.  The

gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with

semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy

strands of imitation seaweed.  He glanced past Maelcum's

shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the

tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green

circle.  He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.

  He jacked in.

  `Dixie?'

  `Yeah.'

  `You ever try to crack an AI?'

  `Sure.  I flatlined.  First time.  I was larkin'~, jacked up real

high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector.  Big biz, multina-

tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree.  Just

larkin'~ around, you know?  And then I started picking up on

this one cube, maybe three levels higher up.  Jacked up there

and made a pass.'

  `What did it look like, the visual?'

  `White cube.'

  `How'd you know it was an AI?'

  `How'd I know?  Jesus.  It was the densest ice I'd ever seen. 

So what else was it?  The military down there don't have any-

thing like that.  Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to

look it up.'

  `Yeah?'

  `It was on the Turing Registry.  AI.  Frog company owned

its Rio mainframe.'

  Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus

of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite

neuroelectronic void of the matrix.  `Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?'

  `Tessier, yeah.'

  `And you went back?'

  `Sure.  I was crazy.  Figured I'd try to cut it.  Hit the first

strata and that's all she wrote.  My joeboy smelled the skin

frying and pulled the trodes off me.  Mean shit, that ice.'

  `And your EEG was flat.'

  `Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?'

  Case jacked out.  `Shit,' he said, `how do you think Dixie

got himself flatlined, huh?  Trying to buzz an AI.  Great...'

  `Go on,' she said, `the two of you are supposed to be

dynamite, right?'

  `Dix,' Case said, `I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. 

Can you think of any reason not to?'

  `Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.'

  Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave

of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled.  The

Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the

cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking.  He

punched again, for Berne.

  `Up,' the construct said.  `It'll be high.'

  They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.

  That'll be it, Case thought.

  Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very

simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.

  `Don't look much, does it?' the Flatline said.  `But just you

try and touch it.'

  `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 de-

tached 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

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 veg-

etables 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 cas-

settes, 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.