Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity. She’d felt this way seven years earlier, in New Jersey, learning that others knew the ones who came to her in dreams, called them the loa, Divine Horsemen, named them and summoned them and bargained with them for favor. Even then, there had been confusion. Bobby had argued that Linglessou, who rode Beauvoir in the oumphor, and the Linglessou of the matrix were separate entities, if in fact the former was an entity at all. »They been doing that for ten thousand years,« he’d say, »dancing and getting crazy, but there’s only been those things in cyberspace for seven, eight years.« Bobby believed the old cowboys, the ones he bought drinks for in the Gentlemen Loser whenever Angie’s career took him to the Sprawl, who maintained that the loa were recent arrivals. The old cowboys looked back to a time when nerve and talent were the sole deciding factors in a console artist’s career, although Beauvoir would have argued that it required no less to deal with the loa. »But they come to me,« she’d argued. »I don’t need a deck.« »It’s what you got in your head. What your daddy did . . .« Bobby had told her about a general consensus among the old cowboys that there had been a day when things had changed, although there was disagreement as to how and when. When It Changed, they called it, and Bobby had taken a disguised Angie to the Loser to listen to them, dogged by anxious Net security men who weren’t allowed past the door. The barring of the security men had impressed her more than the talk, at the time. The Gentleman Loser had been a cowboy bar since the war that had seen the birth of the new technology, and the Sprawl offered no more exclusive criminal environment — though by the time of Angie’s visit that exclusivity had long included a certain assumption of retirement on the part of regulars. The hot kids no longer hustled, in the Loser, but some of them came to listen. Now, in the bedroom of the house at Malibu, Angie remembered them talking, their stories of When It Changed, aware that some part of her was attempting to collate those memories, those stories, with her own history and that of Tessier-Ashpool.
3Jane was the filament, Tessier-Ashpool the strata, her birthdate officially listed as one with her nineteen sibling clones. Becker’s »interrogation« grew more heated still, when 3Jane was brought to term in yet another surrogate womb, delivered by cesarean section in Straylight’s surgery. The critics agreed: 3Jane was Becker’s trigger. With 3Jane’s birth, the focus of the documentary shifted subtly, exhibiting a new intensity, a heightening of obsession — a sense, more than one critic had said, of sin. 3Jane became the focus, a seam of perverse gold through the granite of the family. No , Angie thought, silver , pale and moonstruck . Examining a Chinese tourist’s photograph of 3Jane and two sisters beside the pool of a Freeside hotel, Becker returns repeatedly to 3Jane’s eyes, the hollow of her collarbone, the fragility of her wrists. Physically, the sisters are identical, yet something informs 3Jane, and Becker’s quest for the nature of this information becomes the work’s central thrust. Freeside prospers as the archipelago expands. Banking nexus, brothel, data haven, neutral territory for warring corporations, the spindle comes to play an increasingly complex role in high-orbit history, while Tessier-Ashpool S.A. recedes behind yet another wall, this one composed of subsidiary corporations. Marie-France’s name surfaces briefly, in connection with a Geneva patent trial concerning certain advances in the field of artificial intelligence, and Tessier-Ashpool’s massive funding of research in this area is revealed for the first time. Once again the family demonstrates its peculiar ability to fade from sight, entering another period of obscurity, one which will end with the death of Marie-France. There would be persistent rumors of murder, but any attempt to investigate would founder on the family’s wealth and isolation, the peculiar breadth and intricacy of their political and financial connections. Angie, screening Becker for the second time, knew the identity of Marie-France Tessier’s murderer.