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 car 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, children. 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 brochures. It was expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.
FREESIDE—WHY WAIT?
THE FOUR OF them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilköy 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. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop’s entrance.
 
; Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless 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, nodding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera 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 shouldered 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 anachronism 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 3
MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
EIGHT
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 exchange 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, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens 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 Armitage 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 instantly 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 description, 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 building. 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 reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate 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 random.
When they’d strung the cables, according to s
ome 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 Riviera.
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 supposed 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, Riviera.” 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.”