“What about you,” he said, “you gonna dye yourself brown? Don’t exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.”
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. “I’m an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who’s up for what he can get, so the instant tan’s okay.”
Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the mirror. “Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?” He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. “You sleep okay? You notice any lights?”
“You were dreaming,” she said.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow, studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he’d be doing it through Wintermute.
“And it was like real?” she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. “Like simstim?”
He said it was. “Real as this,” he added, looking around. “Maybe more.”
The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy’s sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel’s guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he’d seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl’s small hard breasts, one boy’s wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who’d crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he’d seldom seen in Chiba.
“What’s that smell?” he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
“The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.”
Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
“Molly, love,” Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair, “you’ll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I’m out.”
“Peter,” she said, “and what if I won’t?” She smiled without showing her teeth.
“You will,” Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back.
“Give it to him,” Armitage said.
“Pig for it, aren’t you?” She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. “He could off himself,” she said to Armitage.
“I have an audition this afternoon,” Riviera said. “I’ll need to be at my best.” He cupped the foil packet in his upturned palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
“You’ve got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,” Armitage said. “On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You’ve got about three hours.”
“How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a JAL taxi?” Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man’s eyes.
“Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.”
“How about me?” Molly asked. “I got chores today?”
“I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite direction.” Straylight, Case thought.
“How soon?” Case asked, meeting the pale stare.
“Soon,” Armitage said. “Get going, Case.”
“MON, YOU DOIN’ jus’ fine,” Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. “Aerol say you doin’ jus’ fine.” Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it, Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle narrowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he’d decided, would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.
Aerol had ferried him out to Marcus Garvey in a skeletal scooter frame with a chemical engine.
“Two hour ago,” Maelcum said, “I take delivery of Babylon goods for you; nice Japan-boy inna yacht, mos’ pretty yacht.”
Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Hosaka and fumbled into the straps of the web. “Well,” he said, “let’s see it.”
Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller than Case’s head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts, and carefully slit the plastic. He extracted a rectangular object and passed it to Case. “Thas part some gun, mon?”
“No,” Case said, turning it over, “but it’s a weapon. It’s virus.”
“Not on this boy tug, mon,” Maelcum said firmly, reaching for the steel cassette.
“A program. Virus program. Can’t get into you, can’t even get into your software. I’ve got to interface it through the deck, before it can work on anything.”
“Well, Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here’ll tell you every what an’ wherefore, you wanna know.”
“Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?”
Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, busying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn’t sure why, but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS.
“What is this thing?” he asked the Hosaka. “Parcel for me.”
“Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, advises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems. . . .”
“How about an AI?”
“Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.”
“Jesus Christ. What did you call it?”
“Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.”
“It’s Chinese?”
“Yes.”
“Off.” Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly’s story of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into Zhongshan. “On,” he said, changing his mind. “Question. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?”
“Delay for interorbital transmission,” said the Hosaka.
“Code it. Standard commercial code.”
“Done.”
He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
“Reinhold Scientific A. G., Berne.”
“Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?”
It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-Ashpool.
“Dixie,” he said, jacking in, “what do you know about Chinese virus programs?”
“Not a whole hell of a lot.”
“Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?”
“No.”
Case sighed. “Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it’ll cut a
n AI.”
“Possible. Sure. If it’s military.”
“Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on an AI that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe’s in Berne, but it’s linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the spindle, and we’re supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute’s backing the whole show, it’s paying us to burn it. It’s burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Armitage. What goes?”
“Motive,” the construct said. “Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?”
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“Nope. I mean, it’s not human. And you can’t get a handle on it. Me, I’m not human either, but I respond like one. See?”
“Wait a sec.” Case said. “Are you sentient, or not?”
“Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess. . . .” The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case’s spine. “But I ain’t likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain’t no way human.”
“So you figure we can’t get on to its motive?”
“It own itself?”
“Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.”
“That’s a good one,” the construct said. “Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.”
“So it’s getting ready to burn itself?” Case began to punch the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine.
“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”
Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.
“Okay,” he said, finally, “I’m slotting this virus. I want you to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.”
The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a few seconds, then returned. “Hot shit, Case. It’s a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.”
“Or an AI.” He sighed. “Can we run it?”
“Sure,” the construct said, “unless you got a morbid fear of dying.”
“Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.”
“It’s my nature.”
MOLLY WAS SLEEPING when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its triangular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system.
“I wanna buzz,” he said to the blue artifice of the sky. “I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver; little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.”
He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.
On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate. “Sushi,” he said, “whatever you got.” Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. “Christ,” he said, to his tuna, “I’d go nuts.”
“Don’t tell me,” someone said, “I know it already. You’re a gangster, right?”
He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.
She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. “Cath,” she said.
“Lupus,” after a pause.
“What kind of name is that?”
“Greek,” he said.
“Are you really a gangster?” The melanin boost hadn’t prevented the formation of freckles.
“I’m a drug addict, Cath.”
“What kind?”
“Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants.”
“Well, do you have any?” She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
“No. That’s my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?”
Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. “What’s your taste?”
“No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up.” And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
“Betaphenethylamine,” she said. “No sweat, but it’s on your chip.”
“YOU’RE KIDDING,” SAID Cath’s partner and roommate, when Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. “I mean, can’t you sue them or something? Malpractice?” His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles.
“Well,” Case said, “it’s just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that.” But Bruce’s eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy’s brown eyes.
Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Cibachromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency.
“They’re def triff, huh?” Cath asked, seeing him eye the transparencies. “Mine. Shot ’em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled, so natural. And it was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?”
“Yeah,” Case said, suddenly uneasy, “terrible thing.”
“Well,” Bruce cut in, “about this beta you want to buy. . . .”
“Thing is, can I metabolize it?” Case raised his eyebrows.
“Tell you what,” the boy said. “You do a taste. If your pancreas passes on it, it’s on the house. First time’s free.”
“I heard that one before,” Case said, taking the bright blue derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.
“CASE?” MOLLY SAT up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.
“Who else, honey?”
“What’s got into you?” The mirrors followed him across the room.
“I forget how to pronounce it,” he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
“Christ,” she said, “just what we needed.”
“Truer words were never spoken.”
“I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.” She shook her head. “I hope you’re gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too.”
“Yeah,” Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, “beau
tiful.”
“Man,” she said, “if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad-ass shape when it wears off.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” he said, unbuckling his belt. “Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear.” He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. “I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state.” He looked down. “I mean, look at this unnatural state.”
She laughed. “It won’t last.”
“But it will,” he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam, “that’s what’s so unnatural about it.”
ELEVEN
“CASE, WHAT’S WRONG with you?” Armitage said, as the waiter was seating them at his table in the Vingtième Siècle. It was the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants on a small lake near the Intercontinental.
Case shuddered. Bruce hadn’t said anything about aftereffects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands were shaking. “Something I ate, maybe.”
“I want you checked out by a medic,” Armitage said.
“Just this hystamine reaction,” Case lied. “Get it when I travel, eat different stuff, sometimes.”
Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine and sipped. “I’ve ordered for you,” he said.
Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.
“Jesus,” Molly said, her own plate empty, “gimme that. You know what this costs?” She took his plate. “They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.” She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
“Not hungry,” Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain.
“You look fucking awful,” Molly said cheerfully.
Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylamine made it taste like iodine.