He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm’s most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands endlessly with the bartender. And the pimps and the dealers would leave him alone, pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and carefull with his credit when he was. The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fiting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they’d carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filement. Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters, giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemend to know them. I heard the black one laugh. I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I’ve never got used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the geodesics above them. maybe that saved me. Ralfi kept walking, but I don’t think he was trying to escape. I think he’d already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against. I looked back down in time to see him explode. Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping foward as the little tech sidles out os nowhere, smilling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls of. It’a a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lighting yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connectingit to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pearshaped torso diaganally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity. Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched section rolling forwardon the tiled pavement. In total silence. I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wrist.
It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She’d just edged one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single Volks module in frond of the Drome, red lights fliashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions. I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. ‘I don’t see how the hell I missed him.’ ‘Cause he’s faxt, so fast.’ She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her bootheels. ‘His nervous system’s jacked up. He’s factory custom.’ She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. ‘I’m gonna get that boy. Tonight. He’s the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.’ ‘What you’re going to get, for this boy’s two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He’s a Yakuza assassin.’ ‘Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly’s been Chiba, too.’ And she showed me her hands, fingers slighly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, doubleedged scalpel in pale blue steel. *** I’d never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget. Generations of sharpsshooters had clipped away at the neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against faintest pearl. Where do you go when the world’s wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse. Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, cocentric ripples of raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own filmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips. She had another answer, too. ‘So you’re locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?’ She led me into the shadows that waited beyord the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration. ‘The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.’ I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. ‘Client’s code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don’t like to talk about, there’s no way to recover your phrase. Can’t drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don’t know it, never did.’ ‘Squids? Crawly things with arms?’ We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit. ‘Superconducting quantum interfence detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.’ ‘Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid’ll read that chip of yours?’ She’d stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors. ‘Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strenght of geomagnetic force; it’s like pulling a whisper out of cheering stadium.’ ‘Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.’ ‘But your data’s still secure.’ Pride in profession. ‘No government’ll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they’re too likely to watergate you.’ ‘Navy stuff,’ she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. ‘Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.’ ‘A junkie?’ ‘A dolphin.’ He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg. He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide. Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded doen the side of the tank. ‘What is this place?’ I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights. ‘Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. “talk with the War Whale.” All that. Some whale Jones is…’ Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye. ‘How’s he talk?’ Suddenly I was anxious to go. ‘Thta’s the catch. Say “Hi,” Jones.’ And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue.