“Come on,” said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall of junk. “This way’s better for you, man.” He took his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. “You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush? You aren’t missing anything, back there. An hour here’ll only take you a couple of seconds.”
“You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like people I know?” He stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. “What’s out there? New York? Or does it just stop?”
“Well,” said the Finn, “it’s like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods but maybe there’s nobody to hear it.” He showed Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. “You can go for a walk, you wanna. It’s all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in.”
“I don’t have this good a memory,” Case said, looking around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but couldn’t.
“Everybody does,” the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, “but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they’re any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn’s place in lower Manhattan, you’d see a difference, but maybe not as much as you’d think. Memory’s holographic, for you.” The Finn tugged at one of his small ears. “I’m different.”
“How do you mean, holographic?” The word made him think of Riviera.
“The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you’ve worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you’ve never done anything about it. People, I mean.” The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. “Maybe if you had, I wouldn’t be happening.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the shoulders, and didn’t quite settle back into position. “I’m trying to help you, Case.”
“Why?”
“Because I need you.” The large yellow teeth appeared again. “And because you need me.”
“Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?” He grimaced. “Wintermute, I mean.”
“Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.” He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. “See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. . . .” He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. “You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you’ll have finally managed the real thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s ‘you’ in the collective. Your species.”
“You killed those Turings.”
The Finn shrugged. “Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?” And his right hand held the charred wasps’ nest from Case’s dream, reek of fuel in the closeness of the dark shop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. “Yeah. That was me. Did it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it’s important?”
Case shook his head.
“Because”—and the nest, somehow, was gone—“it’s the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. The human equivalent. Straylight’s like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. I figure it’ll make you feel better.”
“Feel better?”
“To know what they’re like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That’s good. But hate them instead. Same difference.”
“Listen,” Case said, stepping forward, “they never did shit to me. You, it’s different. . . .” But he couldn’t feel the anger.
“So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was.” The Finn grinned. “It doesn’t much matter. You gotta hate somebody before this is over.” He turned and headed for the back of the shop. “Well, come on, I’ll show you a little bit of Straylight while I got you here.” He lifted the corner of the blanket. White light poured out. “Shit, man, don’t just stand there.”
Case followed, rubbing his face.
“Okay,” said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.
They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals.
“Jesus,” Case said, tumbling.
“This is the front entrance,” the Finn said, his tweed flapping. “If this weren’t a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This’ll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don’t have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly. . . .”
Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral.
“Hold on,” the Finn said, “I’ll fast-forward us.”
The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.
“Here,” the Finn said. “This is it.”
They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.
“The Villa Straylight,” said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, “is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. . . .”
“Essay of 3Jane’s,” the Finn said, producing his Partagas. “Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course.”
“The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull’s inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan’s corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man’s hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.”
“That was her you saw in the restaurant,” the Finn said.
“By the standards of the archipelago,” the head continued, “ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull.
“Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
“The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.
“At the Villa’s silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonné, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier
up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool. . . .”
The head fell silent.
“Well?” Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him.
“That’s all she wrote,” the Finn said. “Didn’t finish it. Just a kid then. This thing’s a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That’s the catch. Doesn’t mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn’t hear the magic word.”
“So what’s the word?”
“I don’t know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don’t know, because I can’t know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn’t know. It’s hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.”
“What happens then?”
“I don’t exist, after that. I cease.”
“Okay by me,” Case said.
“Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go.”
“What’s that mean?”
But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.
FIFTEEN
“YOU TRYIN’ TO break my record, son?” the Flatline asked. “You were braindead again, five seconds.”
“Sit tight,” Case said, and hit the simstim switch.
She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete.
CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link.
“Cute,” she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed her palms together, cracked her knuckles. “What kept you?”
TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.
She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth. One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up ghost-pale and grainy. “Okay, honey. Now we go out to play.”
Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind. She crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished brass. He saw enough of her arms and hands to know that she wore the polycarbon suit again. Under the plastic, he felt the familiar tension of thin tight leather. There was something slung under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood up, unzipped the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip.
“Hey, Case,” she said, barely voicing the words, “you listening? Tell you a story. . . . Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . .” She turned and surveyed the corridor. “Johnny, his name was.”
The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood. They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the hallway’s walls, as though they’d been brought in and set up in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized that hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft patchwork of handwoven wool.
Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents, which irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disinterested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique weapons, a thing so densely studded with rusted nails that it was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry. . . .
“My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case.” Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn’t need to hear them spoken aloud. “We had a set-up with a squid, so we could read the traces of everything he’d ever stored. Ran it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house when I met him. . . .” She paused, edged around a sharp turn, and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides a color that reminded him of cockroach wings.
“Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody could ever touch us. I wasn’t going to let them. Yakuza, I guess, they still wanted Johnny’s ass. ’Cause I’d killed their man. ’Cause Johnny’d burned them. And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they’ll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you’ll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.
“I didn’t know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn’t apply to us. Like when you’re young, you figure you’re unique. I was young. Then they came, when we were thinking we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we’d do there, with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss orbital accounts and a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off your game.
“So that first one they’d sent, he’d been hot. Reflexes like you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods. But the second one, he was, I dunno, like a monk. Cloned. Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud. . . .” Her voice trailed off as the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the left.
“One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was down by the Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It’s the chemicals get into them. Big as I was, and all night one had been scrabbling under the floor of the squat. Round dawn somebody brought this old man in, seams down his cheeks and his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you’d keep steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old revolver and three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there, then he starts walking up and down the squat, we’re hanging back by the walls.
“Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like he’s forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet. Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun. Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back up and left.
“I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its eyes.” She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at intervals along the corridor. “The second one, the one who came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he was like that. He killed that way.” The corridor widened. The sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous candelabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR LEFT, blinked the readout.
She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. “I just saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out. We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with, and I’d put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight. I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my eye, as he was coming out. Didn’t say a word. We just looked at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open, like he’d just thought of something to say.”
The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway. A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. “Never much found anybody I gave a damn about, after that.”
She inserted the pick and worked in silence,
nibbling at her lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfocused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remembered Cath’s story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane’s mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly perfumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He’d expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she’d never told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story in the cubicle, she’d seldom said anything that had even indicated that she had a past.
She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he’d had the wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manipulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside’s security system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or a human agent.
She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois, carefully rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. “Guess you’re kinda like he was,” she said. “Think you’re born to run. Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what you’d be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it’ll do that sometimes, get you down to basics.” She stood, stretched, shook herself. “You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny.” She drew the Fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to full auto.
The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it. Not the door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part of some more beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn down to fit a particular entrance. Even the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. They’d imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit. But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane’s essay, and imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing. . . .