The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yes- ilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Ar- mitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop’s entrance. Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English ac- centless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn. Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nod- ding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Ri- viera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job, nothing like Armitage’s blandly handsome blend of pop faces. The man’s forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture. Riviera didn’t act like a man who’d been attacked the night before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn’s examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team. Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Riviera again. “I bet you’re stoned right now, asshole,” he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shoul- dered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. “See ya lady,” he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and turned away. There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn’t relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones. He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anach- ronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang. Automatically, he picked it up. “Yeah?” Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind. “Hello. Case.” A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting. “Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.” It was a chip voice. “Don’t you want to talk, Case?” He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.
PART THREE. MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
Archipelago. The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity’s steep well like an oilslick. Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the ex- change of data in the L-S archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen. Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, bor- der town, and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gar- dens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.
On the THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Ar- mitage on the aisle. Once, as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water. Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera’s face, once. “No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I’ll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that.” Case turned automatically to check Armitage’s reaction. The smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger. “That’s right, Peter. Don’t.” Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome. Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell in- stantly asleep. Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window. “You been up, haven’t you?” Molly asked, as he squirmed his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle. “Nah. Never travel much, just for biz.” The steward was attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear. “Hope you don’t get SAS,” she said. “Airsick? No way.” “It’s not the same. Your heartbeat’ll speed up in zero-g, and your inner ear’ll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex, like you’ll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of adrenaline.” The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new set of trodes from his red plastic apron. Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb. He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a big airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane, like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened to the piped koto music and waited. Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.