Count Zero (23 page)

T
HE KNOTTED LINE
stretched on and on. At times they came to angles, forks of the tunnel. Here the line would be wrapped around a strut or secured with a fat transparent gob of epoxy. The air was as stale, but colder. When they stopped to rest in a cylindrical chamber, where the shaft widened before a triple branching, Marly asked Jones for the flat little work light he wore across his forehead on a gray elastic strap. Holding it in one of the red suit’s gauntlets, she played it over the chamber’s wall. The surface was etched with patterns, microscopically fine lines . . .

“Put your helmet on,” Jones advised, “you’ve got a better light than mine . . .”

Marly shuddered. “No.” She passed him the light. “Can you help me out of this, please?” She tapped a gauntlet against the suit’s hard chest. The mirror-domed helmet was fastened to the suit’s waist with a chrome snap-hook.

“You’d best keep it,” Jones said. “It’s the only one in the Place. I’ve got one, where I sleep, but no air for it. Wig’s bottles won’t fit my transpirator, and his suit’s all holes . . .” He shrugged.

“No, please,” she said, struggling with the catch at the suit’s waist, where she’d seen Rez twist something. “I can’t stand it . . .”

Jones pulled himself half over the line and did something she couldn’t see. There was a click. “Stretch your arms, over your head,” he said. It was awkward, but finally she floated free, still in the black jeans and white silk blouse she’d worn
to that final encounter with Alain. Jones fastened the empty red suit to the line with another of the snap-rings mounted around its waist, and then undid her bulging purse. “You want this? To take with you, I mean? We could leave it here, get it on our way back.”

“No,” she said, “I’ll take it. Give it to me.” She hooked an elbow around the line and fumbled the purse open. Her jacket came out, but so did one of her boots. She managed to get the boot back into the purse, then twisted herself into the jacket.

“That’s a nice piece of hide,” Jones said.

“Please,” she said, “let’s hurry . . .”

“Not far now,” he said, his work light swinging to show her where the line vanished through one of three openings arranged in an equilateral triangle.

“End of the line,” he said. “Literal, that is.” He tapped the chromed eyebolt where the line was tied in a sailor’s knot. His voice caught and echoed, somewhere ahead of them, until she imagined she heard other voices whispering behind the round of echo. “We’ll want a bit of light for this,” he said, kicking himself across the shaft and catching a gray metal coffin thing that protruded there. He opened it. She watched his hands move in the bright circle of the work light; his fingers were thin and delicate, but the nails were small and blunt, outlined with black, impacted grime. The letters “CJ” were tattooed in crude blue across the back of his right hand. The sort of tattoo one did oneself, in jail. . . . Now he’d fished out a length of heavy, insulated wire. He squinted into the box, then wedged the wire behind a copper D-connector.

The dark ahead vanished in a white flood of light.

“Got more power than we need, really,” he said, with something akin to a homeowner’s pride. “The solar banks are all still workin’, and they were meant to power the mainframes . . . Come on, then, lady, we’ll meet the artist you come so far to see . . .” He kicked off and out, gliding smoothly through the opening, like a swimmer, into the light. Into the thousand drifting things. She saw that the red plastic soles of his frayed shoes had been patched with smears of white silicon caulking.

And then she’d followed, forgetting her fears, forgetting the nausea and constant vertigo, and she was there. And she understood.

“My God,” she said.

“Not likely,” Jones called. “Maybe old Wig’s, though. Too bad it’s not doing it now, though. That’s even more of a sight.”

Something slid past, ten centimeters from her face. An ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to end.

She had no idea how long she’d been there, when the screen lit and began to flicker. Hours, minutes . . . She’d already learned to negotiate the chamber, after a fashion, kicking off like Jones from the dome’s concavity. Like Jones, she caught herself on the thing’s folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill . . . They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiautonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.

Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.

A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat . . . Endless, the slow swarm, the spinning things . . .

Jones tumbled up through the silent storm, laughing, grabbing an arm tipped with a glue gun. “Always makes me want to laugh, to see it. But the boxes always make me sad . . .”

“Yes,” she said, “they make me sad, too. But there are sadnesses and sadnesses . . .”

“Quite right.” He grinned. “No way to make it go, though. Guess the spirit has to move it, or anyway that’s how old Wig has it. He used to come out here a lot. I think the voices are stronger for him here. But lately they’ve been talking to him wherever, it seems like . . .”

She looked at him through the thicket of manipulators. He was very dirty, very young, with his wide blue eyes under a
tangle of brown curls. He wore a stained gray zipsuit, its collar shiny with grime. “You must be mad,” she said with something like admiration in her voice, “you must be totally mad, to stay here . . .”

He laughed. “Wigan’s madder than a sack of bugs. Not me.”

She smiled. “No, you’re crazy. I’m crazy, too . . .”

“Hello then,” he said, looking past her. “What’s this? One of Wig’s sermons, looks like, and no way we can shut it off without me cutting the power . . .”

She turned her head and saw diagonals of color strobe across the rectangular face of a large screen glued crookedly to the curve of the dome. The screen was occluded, for a second, by the passage of a dressmaker’s dummy, and then the face of Josef Virek filled it, his soft blue eyes glittering behind round lenses.

“Hello, Marly,” he said. “I can’t see you, but I’m sure I know where you are . . .”

“That’s one of Wig’s sermon screens,” Jones said, rubbing his face. “Put ’em up all over the Place, ’cause he figured one day he’d have people up here to preach to. This geezer’s linked in through Wig’s communication gear, I guess. Who is he?”

“Virek,” she said.

“Thought he was older . . .”

“It’s a generated image,” she said. “Ray tracing, texture mapping . . .” She stared as the face smiled out at her from the curve of the dome, beyond the slow-motion hurricane of lost things, minor artifacts of countless lives, tools and toys and gilded buttons.

“I want you to know,” the image said, “that you have fulfilled your contract. My psychoprofile of Marly Krushkhova predicted your response to my gestalt. Broader profiles indicated that your presence in Paris would force Maas to play their hand. Soon, Marly, I will know exactly what it is that you have found. For four years I’ve known something that Maas didn’t know. I’ve known that Mitchell, the man Maas and the world regards as the inventor of the new biochip processes, was being fed the concepts that resulted in his breakthroughs. I added you to an intricate array of factors, Marly, and things came to a most satisfying head. Maas, without understanding what they were doing, surrendered the
location of the conceptual source. And you have reached it. Paco will be arriving shortly . . .”

“You said you wouldn’t follow,” she said. “I knew you lied . . .”

“And now, Marly, at last I think I shall be free. Free of the four hundred kilograms of rioting cells they wall away behind surgical steel in a Stockholm industrial park. Free, eventually, to inhabit any number of real bodies, Marly. Forever.”

“Shit,” Jones said, “this one’s as bad as Wig. What’s he think he’s talking about?”

“About his jump,” she said, remembering her talk with Andrea, the smell of cooking prawns in the cramped little kitchen. “The next stage of his evolution . . .”

“You understand it?”

“No,” she said, “but I know that it will be bad, very bad . . .” She shook her head.

“Convince the inhabitants of the cores to admit Paco and his crew, Marly,” Virek said. “I purchased the cores an hour before you departed Orly, from a contractor in Pakistan. A bargain, Marly, a great bargain. Paco will oversee my interests, as usual.”

And then the screen was dark.

“Here now,” Jones said, pivoting around a folded manipulator and taking her hand, “what’s so bad about all that? He owns it now, and he said you’d done your bit . . . I don’t know what old Wig’s good for, except to listen to the voices, but he’s not long for this side anyway. Me, I’m as easy for out as not . . .”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t. He’s found his way to something, something he’s sought for years. But nothing he wants can be good. For anyone . . . I’ve seen him, I’ve felt it . . .”

And then the steel arm she held vibrated and began to move, the whole turret rotating with a muted hum of servos.

T
URNER STARED AT
Conroy’s face on the screen of the office phone. “Go on,” he said to Angie. “You go with her.” The tall black girl with the resistors woven into her hair stepped forward and gently put her arm around Mitchell’s daughter, crooning something in that same click-infested creole. The kid in the T-shirt was still gaping at her, his jaw slack. “Come on, Bobby,” the black girl said. Turner glanced across the desk at the man with the wounded hand, who wore a wrinkled white evening jacket and a bolo tie with thongs of braided black leather. Jammer, Turner decided, the club owner. Jammer cradled his hand in his lap, on a blue-striped towel from the bar. He had a long face, the kind of beard that needed constant shaving, and the hard, narrow eyes of a stone professional. As their eyes met, Turner realized that the man sat well out of the line of the phone’s camera, his swivel chair pushed back into a corner.

The kid in the T-shirt, Bobby, shuffled out behind Angie and the black girl, his mouth still open.

“You could’ve saved us both a lot of hassle, Turner,” Conroy said. “You could’ve called me. You could’ve called your agent in Geneva.”

“How about Hosaka,” Turner said, “could I have called them?”

Conroy shook his head, slowly.

“Who are you working for, Conroy? You went double on this one, didn’t you?”

“But not on you, Turner. If it had gone down the way I
planned it, you’d have been in Bogotá, with Mitchell. The railgun couldn’t fire until the jet was out, and if we cut it right, Hosaka would have figured Maas took the whole sector out to stop Mitchell. But Mitchell didn’t make it, did he, Turner?”

“He never planned to,” Turner said.

Conroy nodded. “Yeah. And the security on the mesa picked up the girl, going out. That’s her, isn’t it, Mitchell’s daughter . . .”

Turner was silent.

“Sure,” Conroy said, “figures . . .”

“I killed Lynch,” Turner said, to steer the subject away from Angie. “But just before the hammer came down, Webber told me she was working for you . . .”

“They both were,” Conroy said, “but neither one knew about the other.” He shrugged.

“What for?”

Conroy smiled. “Because you’d have missed ’em if they weren’t there, wouldn’t you? Because you know my style, and if I hadn’t been flying all my usual colors, you’d have started to wonder. And I knew you’d never sell out. Mr. Instant Loyalty, right? Mr. Bushido. You were bankable, Turner. Hosaka knew that. That’s why they insisted I bring you in . . .”

“You haven’t answered my first question, Conroy. Who did you go double for?”

“A man named Virek,” Conroy said. “The moneyman. That’s right, same one. He’d been trying to buy Mitchell for years. For that matter, he’d been trying to buy Maas. No go. They’re getting so rich, he couldn’t touch them. There was a standing offer for Mitchell making the rounds. A blind offer. When Hosaka heard from Mitchell and called me in, I decided to check that offer out. Just out of curiosity. But before I could, Virek’s team was on me. It wasn’t a hard deal to cut, Turner, believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“But Mitchell fucked us all over, didn’t he, Turner? Good and solid.”

“So they killed him.”

“He killed himself,” Conroy said, “according to Virek’s moles on the mesa. As soon as he saw the kid off in that ultralight. Cut his throat with a scalpel.”

“Lot of dead people around, Conroy,” Turner said.

“Oakey’s dead, and the Jap who was flying that copter for you.”

“Figured that when they didn’t come back,” Conroy shrugged.

“They were trying to kill us,” Turner said.

“No, man, they just wanted to
talk
 . . . Anyway, we didn’t know about the girl then. We just knew you were gone and that the damn jet hadn’t made it to the strip in Bogotá. We didn’t start thinking about the girl until we took a look at your brother’s farm and found the jet. Your brother wouldn’t tell Oakey anything. Pissed off ’cause Oakey burned his dogs. Oakey said it looked like a woman had been living there, too, but she didn’t turn up . . .”

“What about Rudy?”

Conroy’s face was a perfect blank. Then he said, “Oakey got what he needed off the monitors. Then we knew about the girl.”

Turner’s back was aching. The holster strap was cutting into his chest. I don’t feel anything, he thought, I don’t feel anything at all . . .

“I’ve got a question for you, Turner. I’ve got a couple. But the main one is, what the fuck are you doing in there?”

“Heard it was a hot club, Conroy.”

“Yeah. Real exclusive. So exclusive, you had to break up two of my doormen to get in. They knew you were coming, Turner, the spades and that punk. Why else would they let you in?”

“You’ll have to work that one out, Connie. You seem to have a lot of access, these days . . .”

Conroy leaned closer to his phone’s camera. “You bet your ass. Virek’s had people all over the Sprawl for months, feeling out a rumor, cowboy gossip that there was an experimental biosoft floating around. Finally his people focused on the Finn, but another team, a Maas team, turned up, obviously after the same thing. So Virek’s team just kicked back and watched the Maas boys, and the Maas boys started blowing people away. So Virek’s team picked up on the spades and little Bobby and the whole thing. They laid it all out for me when I told ’em I figured you’d headed this way from Rudy’s. When I saw where they were headed, I hired some muscle to ice ’em in there, until I could get somebody I could trust to go in after them . . .”

“Those dusters out there?” Turner smiled. “You just
dropped the ball, Connie. You can’t go anywhere for professional help, can you? Somebody’s twigged that you doubled, and a lot of pros died, out there. So you’re hiring shitheads with funny haircuts. The pros have all heard you’ve got Hosaka after your ass, haven’t they, Connie? And they all know what you did.” Turner was grinning now; out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the man in the dinner jacket was smiling, too, a thin smile with lots of neat small teeth, like white grains of corn . . .

“It’s that bitch Slide,” Conroy said. “I could’ve taken her out on the rig . . . She punched her way in somewhere and started asking questions. I don’t even think she’s really on to it, yet, but she’s been making sounds in certain circles . . . Anyway, yeah, you got the picture. But it doesn’t help your ass any, not now. Virek wants the girl. He’s pulled his people off the other thing and now I’m running things for him. Money, Turner, money like a zaibatsu . . .”

Turner stared at the face, remembering Conroy in the bar of a jungle hotel. Remembering him later, in Los Angeles, making his pass, explaining the covert economics of corporate defection . . . “Hi, Connie,” Turner said, “I know you, don’t I?”

Conroy smiled. “Sure, baby.”

“And I know the offer. Already. You want the girl.”

“That’s right.”

“And the split, Connie. You know I only work fifty-fifty, right?”

“Hey,” Conroy said, “this is the big one. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Turner stared at the man’s image.

“Well,” Conroy said, still smiling, “what do you say?”

And Jammer reached out and pulled the phone’s line from the wall plug. “Timing,” he said. “Timing’s always important.” He let the plug drop. “If you’d told him, he’d have moved right away. This way buys us time. He’ll try to get back, try to figure what happened.”

“How do you know what I was going to say?”

“Because I seen people. I seen a lot of them, too fucking many. Particularly I seen a lot like you. You got it written across your face, mister, and you were gonna tell him he could eat shit and die.” Jammer hunched his way up in the office chair, grimacing as his hand moved inside the bar towel. “Who’s this Slide he was talking about? A jockey?”

“Jaylene Slide. Los Angeles. Top gun.”

“She was the one hijacked Bobby,” Jammer said. “So she’s damn close to your pal on the phone . . .”

“She probably doesn’t know it, though.”

“Let’s see what we can do about that. Get the boy back in here.”