Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing. “Dixie, you think this thing’ll work?” “Does a bear shit in the woods?” The Flatline punched them up through shifting rainbow strata. Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscop- ic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along trans- lucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relation- ship to the matrix around it. “That’s the sting,” the construct said. “When Kuang’s good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we’re ridin’ that through.” “You were right, Dix. There’s some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. How- ever much he is under control,” he added. “He,” the construct said. “He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you . ” “It’s a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever’s waiting for us behind that ice.” “Well, you got time to kill, kid,” the Flatline said. “Ol’ Kuang’s slow but steady.” Case jacked out..
Into Maelcum’s stare. “You dead awhile there mon.” “It happens,” he said. “i’m getting used to it.” “You dealin’ wi’ th’ darkness, mon.” “Only game in town, it looks like.” “Jah love, Case,” Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the man’s dark arms. He jacked back in. And flipped.
Molly was trotting along a length of corridor that might have been the one she’d traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg…. The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split. She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bun- dled cables hugged the stairwell’s ceiling like colorcoded gan- glia. The walls were splotched with damp. She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions. LEFT. She shrugged. “Lemme look around, okay?” LEFT. “Relax. There’s time.” She started down the corridor that led off to her right. STOP GO BACK. DANGER. She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor’s field, her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her fletcher. She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone. “What’s this,” said the slurred voice, “fancy dress?” A trem- bling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. “Come visit, child. Now.” She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man’s hand was steady enough, now; the gun’s barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string. He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtieme Siecle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. “Slow, darling.” The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pil- lows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly’s eyes darted from a huge Tele- funken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk re- cordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing. “It would be customary,” the old man said, “for me to kill you now.” Case felt her tense, ready for a move. “But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?” “Molly.” “Molly. Mine is Ashpool.” He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic en- velopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon. “How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I’m curious.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. “I don’t cry, much.” “But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?” “I spit,” she said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.” “Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young.” He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. “That is the way to handle tears.” He drank again. “I’m busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I’m busy. Dying.” “I could go out the way I came,” she said. He laughed, a harsh high sound. “You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.” “It’s my ass, boss, and it’s all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece.” “You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That’s what I’m doing, you understand. But perhaps I’ll take you with me tonight, down to hell…. It would be very Egyptian of me.” He drank again. “Come here then.” He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. “Drink.” She shook her head. “It isn’t poisoned,” he said, but returned the brandy to the table. “Sit. Sit on the floor. We’ll talk.” “What about?” She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails. “Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It’s my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and l was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely they didn’t need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but I’d been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren’t born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn’t dream, in that cold. They told us we’d never feel cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold . . . Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset…. I’m old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.” The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The ten- dons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now. “You can get freezerburn,” she said carefully. “Nothing burns there,” he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. “Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I’d deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?” The gun rose again. “There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.” “Boss,” she asked him, “you know Wintermute?” “A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that very bed…. But I wander.” He coughed wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near his one bare foot. “How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more. I’d ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one’s own daughter.” His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. “Marie-France’s eyes,” he said, faintly, and smiled. “We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.” His head swayed sideways, re- covered. “I understand that the effect is now more easily ob- tained with an embedded microchip.” The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet. “The dreams grow like slow ice,” he said. His face was tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore. Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool’s automatic in her hand. A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the pat- terned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl’s face to the light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant. There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly’s simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl’s cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee. Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck. “I got your number, fucker,” Case said, feeling his own lips moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast. Molly hadn’t seen the dead girl’s face swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda’s deathmask. Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool’s chair. The man’s breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly. It was still open when she turned and left the room.