he 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 l 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 indicated
the location of the Dixie  Flat line's  construct. He wondered 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  separate  alarm systems were
convinced  that  they  were  still  operative.  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.
Checking 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  black box  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 black
box 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  barricades. 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 hesitated. 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 camera 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 blood
warm well, into silence and the dark.

     The  Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lupus  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 trench coat.
     "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 bundles of New
Yen  from the pockets of his  trench coat. "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 membranes wearing thinner  as he walked.  It
didn't  seem real. Neither  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 ought a be careful, Yonderboy."
     "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
GERALD 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 somehow 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
resignation.  He stood  up, brushing crumbs from  the front  of his battered
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  limited
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 Al  is  backing
Armitage."
     "I paid Larry to have the Modems  nose around Ammitage 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 Armitage?"
     "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, cloisonne  over  platinum, studded 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  perverse 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 discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
     Smith began to make preliminary  passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting
that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
     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 generation,  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  Moderns. 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  platform. 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, obsessions, 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  Scientists  from beneath lowered
metallic lids. The  girls  looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying
gracefully  and unconsciously  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 cowboy. 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 shirtsleeves, 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, replaced by  a
simple  lozenge of white  light. "Contents are primarily 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 moonlight,  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  suffered  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 cannon  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
underway.  The  Pentagon  and  the  CIA  were  being  Balkanized,  partially
dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused 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  preferred  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  interests in saving particular
portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. 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 explained 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 Washington September.
     The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records,
and news files.  Case watched Corto work corporate defectors  in Lisbon  and
Marrakesh, where he seemed  to grow obsessed with  the idea of betrayal,  to
loathe  the  scientists  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   Ottoman
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, arcologies,  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 armchair  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  Armenian.
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 thi