“Okay,” said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow. They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals. “Jesus,” Case said, tumbling. “This is the front entrance,” the Finn said, his tweed flap- ping. “If this weren’t a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This’ll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don’t have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly….” Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral. “Hold on,” the Finn said, “I’ll fast-forward us.” The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong move- ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness. “Here,” the Finn said. “This is it.” They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass. “The Villa Straylight,” said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, “is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves….” “Essay of 3Jane’s,” the Finn said, producing his Partagas. “Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course.” “The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull’s inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan’s corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man’s hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.”
“That was her you saw in the restaurant,” the Finn said. “By the standards of the archipelago,” the head continued, “ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. “Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. “The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise. “At the Villa’s silicon core is a small room, the only rec- tilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool….” The head fell silent. “Well?” Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him. “That’s all she wrote,” the Finn said. “Didn’t finish it. Just a kid then. This thing’s a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That’s the catch. Doesn’t mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn’t hear the magic word.” “So what’s the word?” “I don’t know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don’t know, because I can’t know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn’t know. It’s hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.” “What happens then?” “I don’t exist, after that. I cease.” “Okay by me,” Case said. “Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go.” “What’s that mean?” But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos- sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.