Molly grasped one of the carved dragon’s forelegs and the door swung open easily.
The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers.
THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which was deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across one face of the coin. The other was blank.
“He told me,” she whispered. “Wintermute. How he played a waiting game for years. Didn’t have any real power, then, but he could use the Villa’s security and custodial systems to keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who’d brought it here. Kid was eight.” She closed her white fingers over the key. “So nobody would find it.” She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit’s kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. “They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the Finn, if I wasn’t careful.” Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests. “He said if they’d turned into what they’d wanted to, he could’ve gotten out a long time ago. But they didn’t. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That’s what he called her, but he talked like he liked her.”
She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
Case flipped.
KUANG GRADE MARK Eleven was growing.
“Dixie, you think this thing’ll work?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” The Flatline punched them up through shifting rainbow strata.
Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.
“That’s the sting,” the construct said. “When Kuang’s good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we’re ridin’ that through.”
“You were right, Dix. There’s some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he is under control,” he added.
“He,” the construct said. “He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you.”
“It’s a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever’s waiting for us behind that ice.”
“Well, you got time to kill, kid,” the Flatline said. “Ol’ Kuang’s slow but steady.”
Case jacked out.
INTO MAELCUM’S STARE.
“You dead awhile there, mon.”
“It happens,” he said. “I’m getting used to it.”
“You dealin’ wi’ th’ darkness, mon.”
“Only game in town, it looks like.”
“Jah love, Case,” Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the man’s dark arms.
He jacked back in.
And flipped.
MOLLY WAS TROTTING along a length of corridor that might have been the one she’d traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg. . . .
The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.
She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bundled cables hugged the stairwell’s ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. The walls were splotched with damp.
She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions.
LEFT.
She shrugged. “Lemme look around, okay?”
LEFT.
“Relax. There’s time.” She started down the corridor that led off to her right.
STOP.
GO BACK.
DANGER.
She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor’s field, her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her Fletcher. She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone.
“What’s this,” said the slurred voice, “fancy dress?” A trembling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. “Come visit, child. Now.”
She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man’s hand was steady enough, now; the gun’s barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.
He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtième Siècle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. “Slow, darling.” The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly’s eyes darted from a huge Telefunken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing.
“It would be customary,” the old man said, “for me to kill you now.” Case felt her tense, ready for a move. “But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?”
“Molly.”
“Molly. Mine is Ashpool.” He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.
“How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I’m curious.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs.
“I don’t cry, much.”
“But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?”
“I spit,” she said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.”
“Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young.” He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. “That is the way to handle tears.” He drank again. “I’m busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I’m busy. Dying.”
“I could go out the way I came,” she said.
He laughed, a harsh high sound. “You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.”
“It’s my ass, boss, and it’s all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece.”
“You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That’s what I’m doing, you understand. But perhaps I’ll take you with me tonight, down to hell. . . . It would be very Egyptian of me.” He drank again. “Come here then.” He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. “Drink.”
She shook her head.
“It isn’t poisoned,” he said, but returned the brandy to the table. “Sit. Sit on the floor. We’ll talk.”
“What about?” She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails.
“Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It’s my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and I was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely they didn’t need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but I’d been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren’t born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn’t dream, in that cold. They told us we’d never feel cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold. . . . Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset. . . . I’m old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.” The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The tendons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.
“You can get freezerburn,” she said carefully.
“Nothing burns there,” he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. “Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I’d deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?” The gun rose again. “There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.”
“Boss,” she asked him, “you know Wintermute?”
“A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that very bed. . . . But I wander.” He coughed wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near his one bare foot. “How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more. I’d ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one’s own daughter.” His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. “Marie-France’s eyes,” he said, faintly, and smiled. “We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.” His head swayed sideways, recovered. “I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded microchip.”
The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.
“The dreams grow like slow ice,” he said. His face was tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.
Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool’s automatic in her hand.
A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the patterned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl’s face to the light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant.
There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly’s simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl’s cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee.
Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck.
“I got your number, fucker,” Case said, feeling his own lips moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast. Molly hadn’t seen the dead girl’s face swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda’s deathmask.
Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool’s chair. The man’s breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.
It was still open when she turned and left the room.
SIXTEEN
“GOT YOUR BOSS on hold,” the Flatline said. “He’s coming through on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that’s riding us piggy-back. Called the Haniwa.”
“I know,” Case said, absently, “I saw it.”
A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.
“Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care of mine,” Case said.
Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his gaze. “You okay, Armitage?”
“Case”—and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue stare—“you’ve seen Wintermute, haven’t you? In the matrix.”
Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garvey would relay the gesture to the Haniwa monitor. He imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage.
“Case”—and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his computer—“what is he, when you see him?”
“A high-rez simstim construct.”
“But who?”
“Finn, last time. . . . Before that, this pimp I . . .”
“Not General Girling?”
“General who?”
The lozenge went blank.
“Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up,” he told the construct.
He flipped.
THE PERSPECTIVE STARTLED him. Molly was crouching between steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none larger than Garvey and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construction vehicle and stood beside one of the thing’s piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires.
CASE, flashed her chip.
“Hey,” she said. “Waiting for a guide.”
She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp
steady pain now. “I shoulda gone back to Chin,” she muttered.
Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her left shoulder. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a microsecond burst of diffuse laser-light, and froze. It was a Braun microdrone, and Case had once owned the same model, a pointless accessory he’d obtained as part of a package deal with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere’s equator. Its body was no larger than a baseball. “Okay,” she said, “I hear you.” She stood up, favoring her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse. It picked its methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet, pick up his console, and step back through the gap in the construction boat’s hull. There was a rising whine of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten-meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the hole left by the elevator panel.
Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on.
“How you doin’, Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I’ve always talked to myself, in my head, when I’ve been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I’ll tell ’em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I’ll pretend they’re telling me what they think about that, and I’ll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . .” She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. “I was expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something. I don’t like the way it looks, I don’t like the way it smells. . . .”