But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?

"Europe," Sally began,"when I split from Case I went all around there. Had a lot of money we got for the run, anyway it looked like a lot then. Tessier-Ashpool's AI paid it out through a Swiss bank. It erased every trace we'd ever been up the well; I mean everything, like if you looked up the names we traveled under, on the JAL shuttle, they just weren't there. Case checked it all out when we were back in Tokyo, wormed his way into all kinds of data; it was like none of it ever happened. I didn't understand how it could do that, AI or not, but nobody ever really understood what happened up there, when Case rode that Chinese icebreaker through their core ice."

"Did it try to get in touch, after?"

"Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn't in cyberspace anymore, it just was. And if it didn't want you to see it, to know it was there, well, there was no way you ever could, and no way you'd ever be able to prove it to anybody else even if you did know. . . . And me, I didn't wanna know. I mean, whatever it was, it seemed done to me, finished. Armitage was dead, Riviera was dead, Ashpool was dead, the Rasta tug pilot who took us out there was back in Zion cluster and he'd probably written it all off as another ganja dream. . . . I left Case in the Tokyo Hyatt, never saw him again. . . ."

"Why?"

"Who knows? Nothing much. I was young, it just seemed over."

"But you'd left her up the well. In Straylight."

"You got it. And I'd think about that, once in a while. When we were leaving, Finn, it was like she didn't care about any of it. Like I'd killed her crazy sick father for her, and Case had cracked their cores and let their AIs loose in the matrix . . . So I put her on the list, right? You get big enough trouble one day, you're being got at, you check that list."

"And you figured it for her, right off?"

"No. I gotta pretty long list."

Case, who seemed to Kumiko to have been something more than Sally's partner, never reentered her story.

As Kumiko listened to Sally condense fourteen years of personal history for the Finn's benefit, she found herself imagining this younger Sally as a bishonen hero in a traditional romantic video: fey, elegant, and deadly. While she found Sally's matter-of-fact account of her life difficult to follow, with its references to places and things she didn't know, it was easy to imagine her winning the sudden, flick-of-the-wrist victories expected of bishonen . But no, she thought, as Sally dismissed "a bad year in Hamburg," sudden anger in her voice -- an old anger, the year a decade past -- it was a mistake to cast this woman in Japanese terms. There were no ronin , no wandering samurai; Sally and the Finn were talking business.

She'd arrived at her bad year in Hamburg, Kumiko gathered, after having won and lost some sort of fortune. She'd won her share of it "up there," in a place the Finn had called Straylight, in partnership with the man Case. In doing so, she'd made an enemy.

"Hamburg," the Finn interrupted,"I heard stories about Hamburg. . . ."

"The money was gone. How it is, with a big score, when you're young . . . No money was sort of like getting back to normal, but I was involved with these Frankfurt people, owed 'em, and they wanted to take it out in trade."

"What kinda trade?"

"They wanted people hit."

"So?"

"So I got out. When I could. Went to London . . ."

Perhaps, Kumiko decided, Sally had once been something along ronin lines, a kind of samurai. In London, however, she'd become something else, a businesswoman. Supporting herself in some unspecified way, she gradually became a backer, providing funds for various kinds of business operations. (What was a "credit sink"? What was "laundering data"?) "Yeah," the Finn said,"you did okay. Got yourself a share in some German casino."

"Aix-la-Chapelle. I was on the board. Still am, when I got the right passport."

"Settled down?" The laugh again.

"Sure."

"Didn't hear much, back here."

"I was running a casino. That was it. Doing fine."

"You were prizefighting. 'Misty Steele,' augmented featherweight. Eight fights, I made book on five of 'em. Blood matches, sweetmeat. Illegal."

"Hobby."

"Some hobby. I saw the vids. Burmese Kid opened you right up, living color . . ."

Kumiko remembered the long scar.

"So I quit. Five years ago and I was already five years too old."

"You weren't bad, but 'Misty Steele' . . . Jesus."

"Gimme a break. Wasn't me made that one up."

"Sure. So tell me about our friend upstairs, how she got in touch."

"Swain. Roger Swain. Sends one of his boys to the casino, would-be hardass called Prior. About a month ago."

"Swain the fixer? London?"

"Same one. So Prior's got a present for me, about a meter of printout. A list. Names, dates, places."

"Bad?"

"Everything. Stuff I'd almost forgotten."

"Straylight run?"

"Everything. So I packed a bag, got back to London, there's Swain. He's sorry, it's not his fault, but he's gotta twist me. Because somebody's twisting him. Got his own meter of printout to worry about." Kumiko heard Sally's heels shift on the pavement.

"What's he want?"

"A rip, warm body. Celeb."

"Why you?"

"Come on, Finn, that's what I'm here to ask you ."

"Swain tell you it's 3Jane?"

"No. But my console cowboy in London did."

Kumiko's knees ached.

"The kid. Where'd you come by her?"

"She turned up at Swain's place. Yanaka wanted her out of Tokyo. Swain owes him giri ."

"She's clean, anyway, no implants. What I get out of Tokyo lately, Yanaka has his hands full. . . ."

Kumiko shivered in the dark.

"And the rip, the celeb?" the Finn continued.

She felt Sally hesitate. "Angela Mitchell."

The pink metronome swinging silently, left to right, right to left.

"It's cold here, Finn."

"Yeah. Wish I could feel it. I just took a little trip on your behalf. Memory Lane. You know much about where Angie comes from?"

"No."

"I'm in the oracle game, honey, not a research library. . . . Her father was Christopher Mitchell. He was the big shit in biochip research at Mass Biolabs. She grew up in a sealed compound of theirs in Arizona, company kid. About seven years ago, something happened down there. The street said Hosaka fielded a team of pros to help Mitchell make a major career move. The fax said there was a megaton blast on Maas property, but nobody ever found any radiation. Never found Hosaka's mercs, either. Maas announced that Mitchell was dead, suicide."

"That's the library. What's the oracle know?"

"Rumors. Nothing that hangs together on a line. Street said she turned up here a day or two after the blast in Arizona, got in with some very weird spades who worked out of New Jersey."

"Worked what?"

"They dealt. 'Ware, mostly. Buying, selling. Sometimes they bought from me. . . ."

"How were they weird?"

"Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos 'n' shit. Wanna know something, Moll?"

"What?"

"They're right."

Mirror Mirror

She came out of it like somebody had thrown a switch.

Didn't open her eyes. She could hear them talking in another room. Hurt lots of places but not any worse than the wiz had. The bad crash, that was gone, or maybe muted by whatever they'd given her, that spray.

Paper smock coarse against her nipples; they felt big and tender and her breasts felt full. Little lines of pain tweaking across her face, twin dull aches in her eyesockets, sore rough feeling in her mouth and a taste of blood.

"I'm not trying to tell you your business," Gerald was saying, above a running tap and a rattle of metal, like he was washing pans or something,"but you're kidding yourself if you think she'd fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled. It's really a very superficial job." Prior said something she couldn't make out. "I said superficial, not shoddy. That's quality work, all of it. Twenty-four hours on a dermal stimulator and you won't know she's been here. Keep her on the antibiotics and off stimulants; her immune system isn't all it could be." Then Prior again, but she still couldn't catch it.

Opened her eyes but there was only the ceiling, white squares of acoustic tile. Turned her head to the left. White plastic wall with one of those fake windows, hi-rez animation of a beach with palm trees and waves; watch the water long enough and you'd see the same waves rolling in, looped, forever. Except the thing was broken or worn out, a kind of hesitation in the waves, and the red of the sunset pulsed like a bad fluorescent tube.

Try right . Turning again, feeling the sweaty paper cover on the hard foam pillow against her neck . . .

And the face with bruised eyes looking at her from the other bed, nose braced with clear plastic and micropore tape, some kind of brown jelly stuff smeared back across the cheekbones . . .

Angie. It was Angie's face, framed by the reflected sunset stutter of the defective window.

"There was no bonework," Gerald said, carefully loosening the tape that held the little plastic brace in place along the bridge of her nose. "That was the beauty of it. We planed some cartilage in the nose, working in through the nostrils, then went on to the teeth. Smile. Beautiful. We did the breast augmentation, built up the nipples with vat-grown erectile tissue, then did the eye coloration. . . ." He removed the brace. "You mustn't touch this for another twenty-four hours."

"That how I got the bruises?"

"No. That's secondary trauma from the cartilage job." Gerald's fingers were cool on her face, precise. "That should clear up by tomorrow."

Gerald was okay. He'd given her three derms, two blue and a pink, smooth and comfortable. Prior definitely wasn't okay, but he was gone or anyway out of sight. And it was just nice, listening to Gerald explain things in his calm voice. And look what he could do.

"Freckles," she said, because they were gone.

"Abrasion and more vat tissue. They'll come back, faster if you get too much sun. . . ."

"She's so beautiful. . . ." She turned her head.

"You, Mona. That's you."

She looked at the face in the mirror and tried on that famous smile.

Maybe Gerald wasn't okay.

Back in the narrow white bed again, where he'd put her to rest, she raised her arm and looked at the three derms. Trank. Floating.

She worked a fingernail under the pink derm and peeled it off, stuck it on the white wall, and pushed hard with her thumb. A single bead of straw-colored fluid ran down. She carefully peeled it back and replaced it on her arm. The stuff in the blue ones was milky white. She put them back on too. Maybe he'd notice, but she wanted to know what was happening.

She looked in the mirror. Gerald said he could put it back the way it was, someday, if she wanted him to, but then she wondered how he'd remember what she'd looked like. Maybe he'd taken a picture or something. Now that she thought about it, maybe there wasn't anybody who'd remember how she'd looked before. She guessed Michael's stim deck was probably the closest bet, but she didn't know his address or even his last name. It gave her a funny feeling, like who she'd been had wandered away down the street for a minute and never come back. But then she closed her eyes and knew she was Mona, always had been, and that nothing much had changed, anyway not behind her eyelids.

Lanette said it didn't matter, how you got yourself changed. Lanette told her once that she didn't have 10 percent of her own face left, the one she'd been born with. Not that you'd guess, except for the black around her lids so she never had to mess with mascara. Mona had thought maybe Lanette hadn't got such good work done, and it must have shown once in Mona's eyes, because then Lanette said: You shoulda seen me before, honey.

But now here she was, Mona, stretched out straight in this skinny bed in Baltimore, and all she knew about Baltimore was the sound of a siren from down in the street and the motor running on Gerald's air-conditioner.

And somehow that turned into sleep, she didn't know for how long, and then Prior was there with his hand on her arm, asking her if she was hungry.

She watched Prior shave his beard. He did it at the stainless surgical sink, trimming it back with a pair of chrome scissors. Then he switched to a white plastic throw-away razor from a box of them that Gerald had. It was strange watching his face come out. It wasn't a face she'd have expected: it was younger. But the mouth was the same.

"We gonna be here much longer, Prior?"

He had his shirt off for the shave; he had tattoos across his shoulders and down his upper arms, dragons with lion-heads. "Don't worry about it," he said.

"It's boring."

"We'll get you some stims." He was shaving under his chin.

"What's Baltimore like?"

"Bloody awful. Like the rest of it."

"So what's England like?"

"Bloody awful." He wiped his face with a thick wad of blue absorbent paper.

"Maybe we could go out, get some of those crabs. Gerald says they got crabs."

"They do," he said. "I'll get some in."

"How about you take me out?"

He tossed the blue wad into a steel waste canister. "No, you might try to run away."

She slid her hand between the bed and the wall and found the torn foam air cell where she'd hidden the shockrod. She'd found her clothes in a white plastic bag. Gerald came in every couple of hours with fresh derms; she'd wring them out as soon as he'd gone. She'd figured if she could get Prior to take her out to eat, she could make a move in the restaurant. But he wasn't having any.

In a restaurant she might even be able to get a cop, because now she figured she knew what the deal was.

Snuff. Lanette had told her about that. How there were men who'd pay to have girls fixed up to look like other people, then kill them. Had to be rich, really rich. Not Prior, but somebody he worked for. Lanette said these guys had girls fixed to look like their wives sometimes. Mona hadn't really believed it, back then; sometimes Lanette told her scary stuff because it was fun to be scared when you knew you were pretty safe, and anyway Lanette had a lot of stories about weird kinks. She said suits were the weirdest of all, the big suits way up in big companies, because they couldn't afford to lose control when they were working. But when they weren't working, Lanette said, they could afford to lose it any way they wanted. So why not a big suit somewhere who wanted Angie that way? Well, there were lots of girls got themselves worked over to look like her, but they were mostly pathetic. Wannabes -- and she hadn't ever seen one who really looked much like Angie, anyway not enough to fool anybody who cared. But maybe there was somebody who'd pay for all this just to get a girl who did look like Angie. Anyway, if it wasn't snuff, what was it?

Now Prior was buttoning his blue shirt. He came over to the bed and pulled the sheet down to look at her breasts. Like he was looking at a car or something.

She yanked the sheet back up.

"I'll get some crabs." He put his jacket on and went out. She could hear him saying something to Gerald.

Gerald stuck his head in. "How are you, Mona?"

"Hungry."

"Feeling relaxed?"

"Yeah . . ."

When she was alone again, she rolled over and studied her face, Angie's face, in the mirrored wall. The bruising was almost gone. Gerald taped things like miniature trodes to her face and hooked them to a machine. Said they made it heal real fast.

It didn't make her jump, now, Angie's face in the mirror. The teeth were nice; the teeth you'd wanna keep anyway. She wasn't sure about the rest, not yet.

Maybe she should just get up now, get her clothes on, head for the door. If Gerald tried to stop her, she could use the rod. Then she remembered how Prior had turned up at Michael's, like he'd had somebody watching her, all night, following her. Maybe somebody watching now, outside. Gerald's place didn't seem to have any windows, not real ones, so she'd have to go out the door.

And she was starting to want her wiz bad, too, but if she did even a little, Gerald would notice. She knew her kit was there, in her bag under the bed. Maybe if she did some, she thought, she'd just do something. But maybe it wouldn't be the right thing; she had to admit that what she did on wiz didn't always work out, even though it made you feel like you couldn't make a mistake if you tried.

Anyway, she was hungry, and too bad Gerald didn't have some kind of music or something, so maybe she'd just wait for that crab. . . .

In a Lonely Place

And Gentry standing there with the Shape burning behind his eyes, holding out the trode-net under the glare of bare bulbs, telling Slick why it had to be that way, why Slick had to put the trodes on and jack straight into whatever the gray slab was inputting to the still figure on the stretcher.

He shook his head, remembering how he'd come to Dog Solitude. And Gentry started talking faster, taking the gesture for refusal.

Gentry was saying Slick had to go under, he said maybe just for a few seconds, while he got a fix on the data and worked up a macroform. Slick didn't know how to do that, Gentry said, or he'd go under himself; it wasn't the data he wanted, just the overall shape, because he thought that would lead him to the Shape, the big one, the thing he'd chased for so long.

Slick remembered crossing the Solitude on foot. He'd been scared that the Korsakov's would come back, that he'd forget where he was and drink cancer-water from the slimed red puddles on the rusty plain. Red scum and dead birds floating with their wings spread. The trucker from Tennessee had told him to walk west from the highway, he'd hit two-lane blacktop inside an hour and get a ride down to Cleveland, but it felt like longer than an hour now and he wasn't so sure which way was west and this place was spooking him, this junkyard scar like a giant had stomped it flat. Once he saw somebody far away, up on a low ridge, and waved. The figure vanished, but he walked that way, no longer trying to skirt the puddles, slogging through them, until he came to the ridge and saw that it was the wingless hulk of an airliner half-buried in rusted cans. He made his way up the incline along a path where feet had flattened the cans, to a square opening that had been an emergency exit. Stuck his head inside and saw hundreds of tiny heads suspended from the concave ceiling. He froze there, blinking in the sudden shade, until what he was seeing made some kind of sense. The pink plastic heads of dolls, their nylon hair tied up into topknots and the knots stuck into thick black tar, dangling like fruit. Nothing else, only a few ragged slabs of dirty green foam, and he knew he didn't want to stick around to find out whose place it was.

He'd headed south then, without knowing it, and found Factory.

"I'll never have another chance," Gentry said. Slick stared at the taut face, the eyes wide with desperation. "I'll never see it. . . ."

And Slick remembered the time Gentry'd hit him, how he'd looked down at the wrench and felt . . . Well, Cherry wasn't right about them, but there was something else there, he didn't know what to call it. He snatched the trode-net with his left hand and shoved Gentry hard in the chest with his right. "Shut up! Shut the fuck up!" Gentry fell back against the steel table's edge.

Slick cursed him softly as he fumbled the delicate net of contact dermatrodes across his forehead and temples.

Jacked in.

His boots crunched gravel.

Opened his eyes and looked down; the gravel drive smooth in the dawn, cleaner than anything in Dog Solitude. He looked up and saw where it curved away, and beyond green and spreading trees the pitched slate roof of a house half the size of Factory. There were statues near him in the long wet grass. A deer made of iron, and a broken figure of a man's body carved from white stone, no head or arms or legs. Birds were singing and that was the only sound.

He started walking up the drive, toward the gray house, because there didn't seem to be anything else to do. When he got to the head of the drive, he could see past the house to smaller buildings and a broad flat field of grass where gliders where staked against the wind.

Fairytale , he thought, looking up at the mansion's broad stone brow, the leaded diamond panes; like some vid he'd seen when he was little. Were there really people who lived in places like this? But it 's not a place , he reminded himself, it only feels like it is .

"Gentry," he said,"get my ass out of this, okay?"

He studied the backs of his hands. Scars, ingrained grime, black half-moons of grease under his broken nails. The grease got in and made them soft, so they broke easy.

He started to feel stupid, standing there. Maybe somebody was watching him from the house. "Fuck it," he said, and started up the broad flagstone walk, unconsciously hitching his stride into the swagger he'd learned in the Deacon Blues.

The door had this thing fastened to a central panel: a hand, small and graceful, holding a sphere the size of a poolball, all cast in iron. Hinged at the wrist so you could raise it and bring it down. He did. Hard. Twice, then twice again. Nothing happened. The doorknob was brass, floral detail worn almost invisible by years of use. It turned easily. He opened the door.

He blinked at a wealth of color and texture; surfaces of dark polished wood, black and white marble, rugs with a thousand soft colors that glowed like church windows, polished silver, mirrors. . . . He grinned at the soft shock of it, his eyes pulled from one new sight to another, so many things, objects he had no name for. . . .

"You looking for anyone in particular, Jack?"

The man stood in front of a vast fireplace, wearing tight black jeans and a white T-shirt. His feet were bare and he held a fat glass bulb of liquor in his right hand. Slick blinked at him.

"Shit," Slick said,"you're him. . . ."

The man swirled the brown stuff up around the edges of the glass and took a swallow. "I expected Afrika to pull something like this eventually," he said,"but somehow, buddy, you don't look like his style of help."

"You're the Count."

"Yeah," he said,"I'm the Count. Who the fuck are you?"

"Slick. Slick Henry."

He laughed. "Want some cognac, Slick Henry?" He gestured with the glass toward a piece of polished wooden furniture where ornate bottles stood in a row, each one with a little silver tag hung around it on a chain.

Slick shook his head.

The man shrugged. "Can't get drunk on it anyway . . . Pardon my saying so, Slick, but you look like shit. Am I correct in guessing that you are not a part of Kid Afrika's operation? And if not, just what exactly are you doing here?"

"Gentry sent me."

"Gentry who?"

"You're the guy on the stretcher, right?"

"The guy on the stretcher is me. Where, exactly, right this minute, is that stretcher, Slick?"

"Gentry's."

"Where's that?"

"Factory."

"And where is that? "

"Dog Solitude."

"And how did I happen to get there, wherever that is?"

"Kid Afrika, he brought you. Brought you with this girl name of Cherry, right? See, I owed him a favor, so he wanted me to put you up awhile, you an' Cherry, and she's taking care of you."

"You called me Count, Slick. . . ."

"Cherry said Kid called you that once."

"Tell me, Slick, did the Kid seem worried when he brought me?"

"Cherry thought he got scared, back in Cleveland."

"I'm sure he did. Who's this Gentry? A friend of yours?"

"Factory's his place. I live there too. . . ."

"This Gentry, is he a cowboy, Slick? A console jockey? I mean, if you're here, he must be technical, right?"

Now it was Slick's turn to shrug. "Gentry's, like, he's an artist, kind of. Has these theories. Hard to explain. He rigged a set of splitters to that thing on the stretcher, what you're jacked into. First he tried to get an image on a holo rig, but there was just this monkey thing, sort of shadow, so he talked me into . . ."

"Jesus . . . Well, never mind. This factory you're talking about, it's out in the sticks somewhere? It's relatively isolated?"

Slick nodded.

"And this Cherry, she's some kind of hired nurse?"

"Yeah. Had a med-tech's ticket, she said."

"And nobody's come looking for me yet?"

"No."

"That's good, Slick. Because if anyone does, other than my lying rat-bastard friend Kid Afrika, you folks could find yourselves in serious trouble."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Listen to me, okay? I want you to remember this. If any company shows up at this factory of yours, your only hope in hell is to get me jacked into the matrix. You got that?"

"How come you're the Count? I mean, what's it mean?"

"Bobby. My name's Bobby. Count was my handle once, that's all. You think you'll remember what I told you?"

Slick nodded again.

"Good." He put his glass down on the thing with all the fancy bottles. "Listen," he said. From the open door came the sound of tires over gravel. "Know who that is, Slick? That's Angela Mitchell."

Slick turned. Bobby the Count was looking out at the drive.

"Angie Mitchell? The stim star? She's in this thing too?"

"In a manner of speaking, Slick, in a manner of speaking . . ."

Slick saw the long black car slide by. "Hey," he began,"Count, I mean Bobby, what d --"

"Easy," Gentry was saying,"just sit back. Easy. Easy . . ."

Back East

While Kelly and his assistants were assembling her wardrobe for the trip, she felt as though the house itself were stirring around her, preparing for one of its many brief periods of vacancy.

She could hear their voices, from where she sat in the living room, their laughter. One of the assistants was a girl in a blue polycarbon exo that allowed her to carry the Herm�s wardrobe cases as though they were weightless blocks of foam, the humming skeleton suit padding softly down the stairs on its blunt dinosaur feet. Blue skeleton, leather coffins.

Now Porphyre stood in the doorway. "Missy ready?" He wore a long, loose coat cut from tissue-thin black leather; rhinestone spurs glittered above the heels of black patent boots.

"Porphyre," she said,"you're in mufti. We have an entrance to make, in New York."

"The cameras are for you."

"Yes," she said,"for my reinsertion."

"Porphyre will keep well in the rear."

"I've never known you to worry about upstaging anyone."

He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an avant-garde dentist's fantasy of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.

"Danielle Stark will be flying with us." She heard the sound of the approaching helicopter. "She's meeting us at LAX."

"We'll strangle her," he said, his tone confidential, as he helped her on with the blue fox Kelly had selected. "If we promise to hint to the fax that the motive was sexual, she might even decide to play along. . . ."

"You're horrid."

"Danielle is a horror, missy."

"Look who's talking."

"Ah," said the hairdresser, narrowing his eyes,"but my soul is a child's."

Now the helicopter was landing.

Danielle Stark, associated with stim versions of both Vogue-Nippon and Vogue-Europa , was widely rumored to be in her late eighties. If it were true, Angie thought, covertly inspecting the journalist's figure as the three of them boarded the Lear, Danielle and Porphyre would be on par for overall surgical modification. Apparently in her willowy early thirties, her only obvious augments were a pair of pale blue Zeiss implants. A young French fashion reporter had once referred to these as "modishly outdated"; the reporter, Net legend said, had never worked again.

And soon, Angie knew, Danielle would want to talk drugs, celebrity drugs, the cornflower eyes schoolgirl-wide to take it all in.

Under Porphyre's daunting gaze, Danielle managed to contain herself until they were in cruise mode somewhere over Utah.

"I was hoping," she began,"that I wouldn't have to be the one to bring it up."

"Danielle," Angie countered,"I am sorry. How thoughtless." She touched the veneered face of the Hosaka flight kitchen, which purred softly and began to dispense tiny plates of tea-smoked duck, gulf oysters on black-pepper toast, crayfish flan, sesame pancakes. . . . Porphyre, taking Angie's cue, produced a bottle of chilled Chablis -- Danielle's favorite, Angie now recalled. Someone -- Swift? -- had also remembered.

"Drugs," Danielle said, fifteen minutes later, finishing the last of the duck.

"Don't worry," Porphyre assured her. "When you get to New York, they have anything you want."

Danielle smiled. "You're so amusing. Do you know I've a copy of your birth certificate? I know your real name." She looked at him meaningfully, still smiling.

" 'Sticks and stones,' " he said, topping up her glass.

"Interesting notation regarding congenital defects." She sipped her wine.

"Congenital, genital . . . We all change so much these days, don't we? Who's been doing your hair, dear?" He leaned forward. "Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human."

Danielle smiled.

The interview itself went smoothly enough; Danielle was too skilled an interviewer to allow her feints to cross the pain threshold, where they might rally serious resistance. But when she brushed a fingertip back across her temple, depressing a subdermal switch that deactivated her recording gear, Angie tensed for the real onslaught.

"Thank you," Danielle said. "The rest of the flight, of course, is off the record."

"Why don't you just have another bottle or two and turn in?" Porphyre asked.

"What I don't see, dear," Danielle said, ignoring him,"is why you bothered . . . ."

"Why I bothered, Danielle?"

"Going to that tedious clinic at all. You've said it didn't affect your work. You've also said there was no 'high,' not in the usual sense." She giggled. "Though you do maintain that it was such a terribly addictive substance. Why did you decide to quit?"

"It was terribly expensive. . . ."

"In your case, surely, that's academic."

True , Angie thought, though a week of it did cost something in the vicinity of your annual salary .

"I suppose I began to resent paying to feel normal. Or a poor approximation of normal."

"Did you build up a tolerance?"

"No."

"How odd."

"Not really. These designers provide substances that supposedly bypass the traditional drawbacks."

"Ah. But what about the new drawbacks, the now drawbacks?" Danielle poured herself more wine. "I've heard another version of all this, of course."

"You have?"

"Of course I have. What it was, who made it, why you quit."

"Yes?"

"It was an antipsychotic, produced in Sense/Net's own labs. You quit taking it because you'd rather be crazy."

Porphyre gently took the glass from Danielle's hand as her lids fluttered heavily over the brilliant blue eyes. "Nightie-night, dear," he said. Danielle's eyes closed and she began to snore gently.

"Porphyre, what -- ?"

"I dosed her wine," he said. "She won't know the difference, missy. She won't remember anything she didn't record. . . ." He grinned broadly. "You really didn't want to have to listen to this bitch all the way back, did you?"

"But she'll know, Porphyre!"

"No, she won't. We'll tell her she killed three bottles by herself and made a disgusting mess in the washroom. And she'll feel like it, too." He giggled.

Danielle Stark was still snoring, quite loudly now, in one of the two swing-down bunks in the rear of the cabin.

"Porphyre," Angie said,"do you think she might've been right?"

The hairdresser gazed at her with his gorgeous, inhuman eyes. "And you wouldn't have known?"

"I don't know. . . ."

He sighed. "Missy worries too much. You're free now. Enjoy it."

"I do hear voices, Porphyre."

"Don't we all, missy?"

"No," she said,"not like mine. Do you know anything about African religions, Porphyre?"

He smirked. "I'm not African."

"But when you were a child . . ."

"When I was a child," Porphyre said,"I was white."

"Oh . . ."

He laughed. "Religions, missy?"

"Before I came to the Net, I had friends. In New Jersey. They were black and . . . religious."

He smirked again and rolled his eyes. "Hoodoo sign, missy? Chickenbone and pennyroyal oil?"

"You know it isn't like that."

"And if I do?"

"Don't tease me, Porphyre. I need you."

"Missy has me. And yes, I know what you mean. And those are your voices?"

"They were. After I began to use the dust, they went away. . . ."

"And now?"

"They're gone." But the impulse was past now, and she cringed from trying to tell him about Grande Brigitte and the drug in the jacket.

"Good," he said. "That's good, missy."

The Lear began its descent over Ohio. Porphyre was staring at the bulkhead, still as a statue. Angie looked out at the cloud-country below as it rose toward them, remembering the game she'd played on airplanes as a child, sending an imaginary Angie out to romp through cloud-canyons and over fluffy peaks grown magically solid. Those planes had belonged to Maas-Neotek, she supposed. From the Maas corporate jets she'd gone on to Net Lears. She knew commercial airliners only as locations for her stims: New York to Paris on the maiden flight of JAL's restored Concorde, with Robin and a hand-picked party of Net people.

Descending. Were they over New Jersey yet? Did the children swarming the rooftop playgrounds of Beauvoir's arcology hear the Lear's engine? Did the sound of her passage sweep faintly over the condos of Bobby's childhood? How unthinkably intricate the world was, in sheer detail of mechanism, when Sense/Net's corporate will shook tiny bones in the ears of unknown, unknowing children. . . .

"Porphyre knows certain things," he said, very softly. "But Porphyre needs time to think, missy. . . ."

They were banking for the final approach.

Kuromaku

And Sally was silent, on the street and in the cab, all the long cold way back to their hotel.

Sally and Swain were being blackmailed by Sally's enemy "up the well." Sally was being forced to kidnap Angie Mitchell. The thought of someone's abducting the Sense/Net star struck Kumiko as singularly unreal, as if someone were plotting to assassinate a figure out of myth.

The Finn had implied that Angie herself was already involved, in some mysterious way, but he had used words and idioms Kumiko hadn't understood. Something in cyberspace; people forming pacts with a thing or things there. The Finn had known a boy who became Angie's lover; but wasn't Robin Lanier her lover? Kumiko's mother had allowed her to run several of the Angie and Robin stims. The boy had been a cowboy, a data thief, like Tick in London. . . .

And what of the enemy, the blackmailer? She was mad, Finn said, and her madness had brought about the decline of her family's fortunes. She lived alone, in her ancestral home, the house called Straylight. What had Sally done to earn her enmity? Had she really killed this woman's father? And who were the others, the others . . . .

And had Sally learned what she'd wanted to learn, in visiting the Finn? Kumiko had waited, finally, for some pronouncement from the armored shrine, but the exchange had wound down to nothing, to a gaijin ritual of joking goodbyes.

In the hotel lobby, Petal was waiting in a blue velour armchair. Dressed for travel, his bulk encased in three-piece gray wool, he rose from the chair like some strange balloon as they entered, eyes mild as ever behind steel-rimmed glasses.

"Hello," he said, and coughed. "Swain's sent me after you. Only to mind the girl, you see."

"Take her back," Sally said. "Now. Tonight."

"Sally! No!" But Sally's hand was already locked firmly around Kumiko's upper arm, pulling her toward the entrance to the darkened lounge off the lobby.

"Wait there," Sally snapped at Petal. "Listen to me," she said, tugging Kumiko around a corner, into shadow. "You're going back. I can't keep you here now."

"But I don't like it there. I don't like Swain, or his house. . . . I . . ."

"Petal's okay," Sally said, leaning close and speaking quickly. "In a pinch, I'd say trust him. Swain, well, you know what Swain is, but he's your father's. Whatever comes down, I think they'll keep you out of the way. But if it gets bad, really bad, go to the pub where we met Tick. The Rose and Crown. Remember?"

Kumiko nodded, her eyes filling with tears.

"If Tick's not there, find a barman named Bevan and mention my name."

"Sally, I . . ."

"You're okay," Sally said, and kissed her abruptly, one of her lenses brushing for an instant against Kumiko's cheekbone, startlingly cold and unyielding. "Me, baby, I'm gone."

And she was, into the muted tinkle of the lounge, and Petal cleared his throat in the entranceway.

The flight back to London was like a very long subway ride. Petal passed the time inscribing words, a letter at a time, in some idiotic puzzle in an English fax, grunting softly to himself. Eventually she slept, and dreamed of her mother. . . .

"Heater's working," Petal said, driving back to Swain's from Heathrow. It was uncomfortably warm in the Jaguar, a dry heat that smelled of leather and made her sinuses ache. She ignored him, staring out at the wan morning light, at roofs shining black through melting snow, rows of chimneypots. . . .

"He's not angry with you, you know," Petal said. "He feels a special responsibility. . . ."

"Giri ."

"Er . . . yes. Responsible, you see. Sally's never been what you'd call predictable, really, but we didn't expect --"

"I don't wish to talk, thank you."

His small worried eyes in the mirror.

The crescent was lined with parked cars, long silver-gray cars with tinted windows.

"Seeing a lot of visitors this week," Petal said, parking opposite number 17. He got out, opened the door for her. She followed him numbly across the street and up the gray steps, where the black door was opened by a squat, red-faced man in a tight dark suit, Petal brushing past him as though he weren't there.

"Hold on," red-face said. "Swain'll see her now. . . ."

The man's words brought Petal up short; with a grunt, he spun around with disconcerting speed and caught the man by his lapel.

"In future show some fucking respect," Petal said, and though he hadn't raised his voice, somehow all of its weary gentleness was gone. Kumiko heard stitches pop.

"Sorry, guv." The red face was carefully blank. "He told me to tell you."

"Come along then," Petal said to her, releasing his grip on the dark worsted lapel. "He'll just want to say hello."

They found Swain seated at a three-meter oak refectory table in the room where she'd first seen him, the dragons of rank buttoned away behind white broadcloth and a striped silk tie. His eyes met hers as she entered, his long-boned face shadowed by a green-shaded brass reading lamp that stood beside a small console and a thick sheaf of fax on the table. "Good," he said,"and how was the Sprawl?"

"I'm very tired, Mr. Swain. I wish to go to my room."

"We're glad to have you back, Kumiko. The Sprawl's a dangerous place. Sally's friends there probably aren't the sort of people your father would want you to associate with."

"May I go to my room now?"

"Did you meet any of Sally's friends, Kumiko?"

"No."

"Really? What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"You mustn't be angry with us, Kumiko. We're protecting you."

"Thank you. May I go to my room now?"

"Of course. You must be very tired."

Petal followed her from the room, carrying her bag, his gray suit creased and wrinkled from the flight. She was careful not to glance up as they passed beneath the blank gaze of the marble bust where the Maas-Neotek unit might still be hidden, though with Swain and Petal in the room she could think of no way to retrieve it.

There was a new sense of movement in the house, brisk and muted: voices, footsteps, the rattle of the lift, the chattering of pipes as someone drew a bath.

She sat at the foot of the huge bed, staring at the black marble tub. Residual images of New York seemed to hover at the borders of her vision; if she closed her eyes, she found herself back in the alley, squatting beside Sally. Sally, who'd sent her away. Who hadn't looked back. Sally, whose name had once been Molly, or Misty, or both. Again, her unworthiness. Sumida, her mother adrift in black water. Her father. Sally.

Moments later, driven by a curiosity that pushed aside her shame, she rose from where she lay, brushed her hair, zipped her feet into thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles, and went very quietly out into the corridor. When the lift arrived, it stank of cigarette smoke.

Red-face was pacing the blue-carpeted foyer when she emerged from the lift, his hands in the pockets of his tight black jacket. " 'Ere," he said, raising his eyebrows,"you need something?"

"I'm hungry," she said, in Japanese. "I'm going to the kitchen."

" 'Ere," he said, removing his hands from his pockets and straightening the front of his jacket,"you speak English?"

"No," she said, and walked straight past him down the corridor and around the corner. " 'Ere," she heard him say, rather more urgently, but she was already groping behind the white bust.

She managed to slip the unit into her pocket as he rounded the corner. He surveyed the room automatically, hands held loosely at his sides, in a way that suddenly reminded her of her father's secretaries.

"I'm hungry," she said, in English.

Five minutes later, she'd returned to her room with a large and very British-looking orange; the English seemed to place no special value on the symmetry of fruit. Closing the door behind her, she put the orange on the wide flat rim of the black tub and took the Maas-Neotek unit from her pocket.

"Quickly now," Colin said, tossing his forelock as he came into focus,"open it and reset the A/B throw to A. The new regime has a technician making the rounds, scanning for bugs. Once you've changed that setting, it shouldn't read as a listening device." She did as he said, using a hairpin.

"What do you mean," she asked, mouthing the words without voicing them," 'the new regime'?"

"Haven't you noticed? There are at least a dozen staff now, not to mention numerous visitors. Well, I suppose it's less a new regime than an upgrading of procedure. Your Mr. Swain is quite a social man, in his covert way. You've one conversation there, Swain and the deputy head of Special Branch, that I imagine numerous people would kill for, not least of them the aforementioned official."

"Special Branch?"

"The secret police. Bloody odd company he keeps, Swain: Buck House types, czars from the East End rookeries, senior police officers . . ."

"Buck House?"

"The Palace. Not to mention merchant bankers from the City, a simstim star, a drove or two of expensive panders and drug merchants . . ."

"A simstim star?"

"Lanier, Robin Lanier."

"Robin Lanier? He was here?"

"Morning after your precipitous departure."

She looked into Colin's transparent green eyes. "Are you telling me the truth?"

"Yes."

"Do you always?"

"To the extent that I know it, yes."

"What are you?"

"A Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base programmed to aid and advise the Japanese visitor in the United Kingdom." He winked at her.

"Why did you wink?"

"Why d'you think?"

"Answer the question!" Her voice loud in the mirrored room.

The ghost touched his lips with a slim forefinger. "I'm something else as well, yes. I do display a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program. Though the model I'm based on is top of the line, extremely sophisticated. I can't tell you exactly what I am, though, because I don't know."

"You don't know?" Again subvocally, carefully.

"I know all sorts of things," he said, and went to one of the dormer windows. "I know that a serving table in Middle Temple Hall is said to be made from the timbers of the Golden Hind; that you climb one hundred and twenty-eight steps to the walkways of Tower Bridge; that in Wood Street, right of Cheapside, is a plane tree thought to have been the one in which Wordsworth's thrush sang loud. . . ." He spun suddenly to face her. "It isn 't , though, because the current tree was cloned from the original in 1998. I know all that, you see, and more, a very great deal more. I could, for instance, teach you the rudiments of snooker. That is what I am, or rather what I was intended to be, originally. But I'm something else as well, and very likely something to do with you. I don't know what. I really don't."

"You were a gift from my father. Do you communicate with him?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"You didn't inform him of my departure?"

"You don't understand," he said. "I wasn't aware of your having been away, until you activated me a moment ago."

"But you've been recording. . . ."

"Yes, but not aware of it. I'm only 'here' when you activate me. Then I evaluate the current data. . . . One thing you can be fairly certain of, though, is that it simply isn't possible to broadcast any sort of signal from this house without Swain's snoops detecting it immediately."

"Could there be more of you, I mean another one, in the same unit?"

"Interesting idea, but no, barring some harrowing secret breakthrough in technology. I'm pushing the current envelope a bit as it is, considering the size of my hardware. I know that from my store of general background information."

She looked down at the unit in her hand. "Lanier," she said. "Tell me."

"Ten/twenty-five/sixteen: A.M.," he said. Her head filled with disembodied voices. . . .

PETAL: If you'll follow me please, sir . . .

SWAIN: Come into the billiard room.

THIRD VOICE: You'd better have a reason for this, Swain. There are three Net men waiting in the car. Security will have your address in their database until hell freezes over.

PETAL: Lovely car that is, sir, the Daimler. Take your coat?

THIRD VOICE: What is it, Swain? Why couldn't we meet at Brown's?

SWAIN: Take your coat off, Robin. She's gone.

THIRD VOICE: Gone?

SWAIN: To the Sprawl. Early this morning.

THIRD VOICE: But it isn't time. . . .

SWAIN: You think I sent her there?

The man's reply was hollow, indistinct, lost behind a closing door. "That was Lanier?" Kumiko asked silently.

"Yes," Colin replied. "Petal mentioned him by name in an earlier conversation. Swain and Lanier spent twenty-five minutes together."

Sound of a latch, movement.

SWAIN: Bloody cock-up, not mine. I warned you about her, told you to warn them. Born killer, probably psychopathic . . .

LANIER: And your problem, not mine. You need their product and my cooperation.

SWAIN: And what's your problem, Lanier? Why are you in this? Just to get Mitchell out of the way?

LANIER: Where's my coat?

SWAIN: Petal, Mr. Lanier's bloody coat.

PETAL: Sir.

LANIER: I have the impression they want your razorgirl as badly as they want Angie. She's definitely part of the payoff. They'll be taking her, too.

SWAIN: Good luck to them, then. She's already in position, in the Sprawl. Spoke with her on the phone an hour ago. I'll be putting her together with my man over there, the one who's been arranging for the . . . girl. And you'll be going back over yourself?

LANIER: This evening.

SWAIN: Well, then, not to worry.

LANIER: Goodbye, Swain.

PETAL: He's a right bastard, that one.

SWAIN: I don't like this, really. . . .

PETAL: You like the goods though, don't you?

SWAIN: Can't complain there, but why d'you think they want Sally as well?

PETAL: Christ knows. They're welcome to her. . . .

SWAIN: They. I don't like 'theys'. . . .

PETAL: They mightn't be terribly happy to know she'd gone there on her own stick, with Yanaka's daughter. . . .

SWAIN: No. But we have Miss Yanaka back again. Tomorrow I'll tell Sally that Prior's in Baltimore, getting the girl into shape. . . .

PETAL: That's an ugly business, that is. . . .

SWAIN: Bring a pot of coffee to the study.

She lay on her back, eyes closed, Colin's recordings unspooling in her head, direct input to the auditory nerves. Swain seemed to conduct the better part of his dealings in the billiard room, which meant that she heard people arriving and departing, heads and tails of conversations. Two men, one of whom might have been the red-faced man, held an interminable discussion of dog racing and tomorrow's odds. She listened with special interest as Swain and the man from Special Branch (SB, Swain called it) settled an article of business directly beneath the marble bust, as the man was preparing to leave. She interrupted this segment half-a-dozen times to request clarification. Colin made educated guesses.

"This is a very corrupt country," she said at last, deeply shocked.

"Perhaps no more than your own," he said.

"But what is Swain paying these people with?"

"Information. I would say that our Mr. Swain has recently come into possession of a very high-grade source of intelligence and is busy converting it into power. On the basis of what we've heard, I'd hazard that this has probably been his line of work for some time. What's apparent, though, is that he's moving up, getting bigger. There's internal evidence that he's currently a much more important man than he was a week ago. Also, we have the fact of the expanded staff. . . ."

"I must tell . . . my friend."

"Shears? Tell her what?"

"What Lanier said. That she would be taken, along with Angela Mitchell."

"Where is she, then?"

"The Sprawl. A hotel . . ."

"Phone her. But not from here. D'you have money?"

"A Mitsubank chip."

"No good in our phones, sorry. Have any coin?"

She got up from the bed and sorted carefully through the odd bits of English money that had accumulated at the bottom of her purse. "Here," she said, coming up with a thick gilt coin,"ten pounds."

"Need two of those to make a local call." She tossed the brassy tenner back into her purse. "No, Colin. Not the phone. I know a better way. I want to leave here. Now. Today. Will you help me?"

"Certainly," he said,"though I advise you not to."

"But I will."

"Very well. How do you propose to go about it?"

"I'll tell them," she said,"that I need to go shopping."

Bad Lady

The woman must've gotten in sometime after midnight, she figured later, because it was after Prior came back with the crabs, the second bag of crabs. They really did have some good crabs in Baltimore, and coming off a run always gave her an appetite, so she'd talked him into going back for some more. Gerald kept coming in to change the derms on her arms; she'd give him her best goofy smile every time, squish the trank out of them when he'd gone, and then stick them back on. Finally Gerald said she should get some sleep; he put out the lights and turned down the fake window to its lowest setting, a bloodred sunset.

When she was alone again, she slid her hand between the bed and the wall, found the shockrod in its hole in the foam.

She fell asleep without meaning to, the red glow of the window like a sunset in Miami, and she must've dreamed of Eddy, or anyway of Hooky Green's, dancing with somebody up there on the thirty-third floor, because when the crash woke her, she wasn't sure where she was, but she had this very clear map of the way out of Hooky Green's, like she knew she'd better take the stairs because there must be some kind of trouble. . . .

She was half out of bed when Prior came through the door, like really through it, because it was still shut when he hit it. He came through it backward and it just went to splinters and honeycomb chunks of cardboard.

She saw him hit the wall, and then the floor, and then he wasn't moving anymore, and someone else was there in the doorway, backlit from the other room, and all she could see of the face were these two curves of reflected red light from that fake sunset.

Pulled her legs back into bed and sank back against the wall, her hand sliding down to . . .

"Don't move, bitch." There was something real scary about that voice, because it was too fucking cheerful , like throwing Prior through that door had been kind of a treat. "I mean really don't move. . . ." And the woman was across the room in three strides, very close, so close that Mona felt the cold coming off the leather of the woman's jacket.

"Okay," Mona said,"okay . . ."

Then hands grabbed her, fast , and she was flat on her back, shoulders pressed down hard into the foam, and something -- the shockrod -- was right in front of her face.

"Where'd you get this little thing?"

"Oh," Mona said, like it was something she might've seen once but forgotten about,"it was in my boyfriend's jacket. I borrowed his jacket. . . ."

Mona's heart was pounding. There was something about those glasses. . . .

"Did shithead know you had this little thing?"

"Who?"

"Prior," the woman said, and let go of her, turning. Then she was kicking him, kicking Prior over and over, hard. "No," she said, stopping as abruptly as she'd begun,"I don't think Prior knew."

Then Gerald was in the doorway, just like nothing had happened, except he was looking ruefully at the part of the door that was still on the frame, rubbing his thumb over an edge of splintered laminate. "Coffee, Molly?"

"Two coffees, Gerald," the woman said, examining the shockrod. "Mine's black."

Mona sipped her coffee and studied the woman's clothes and hair while they waited for Prior to wake up. At least that's what they seemed to be doing. Gerald was gone again. She wasn't much like anybody Mona'd seen before; Mona couldn't place her on the style map at all, except she must've had some money. The hair was European; Mona'd seen it like that in a magazine; she was pretty sure it wasn't this season's style anywhere, but it went okay with the glasses, which were insets, planted right in the skin. Mona'd seen a cabbie in Cleveland had those. And she wore this short jacket, very dark brown, too plain for Mona's taste but obviously new, with a big white sheepskin collar, open now over a weird green thing trussed across her breasts and stomach like armor, which was what Mona figured it probably was, and jeans cut from some kind of gray-green mossy suede, thick and soft, and Mona thought they were the best thing about her outfit, she could've gone for a pair of those herself, except the boots spoiled them, these knee-high black boots, the kind bike racers wore, with thick yellow rubber soles and big straps across the insteps, chrome buckles all up and down, horrible clunky toes. And where'd she get that nail color, that burgundy? Mona didn't think they even made that anymore.

"What the hell are you looking at?"

"Uh . . . your boots."

"So?"

"They don't make it with your pants."

"Wore 'em to kick the shit out of Prior."

Prior moaned on the floor and started trying to throw up. It made Mona feel kind of sick herself, so she said she was going to go to the bathroom.

"Don't try to leave." The woman seemed to be watching Prior, over the rim of her white china cup, but with those glasses, it was hard to be sure.

Somehow she found herself in the bathroom with her purse on her lap. She hurried, getting the hit together; didn't grind it fine enough, so it burned the back of her throat, but like Lanette used to say, you don't always have time for the niceties. And anyway, wasn't that all a lot better now? There was a little shower in Gerald's bathroom, but it looked like it hadn't been used for a long time. She took a closer look and saw gray mold growing around the drain, and spots that looked like dried blood.

When she came back, the woman was dragging Prior into one of the other rooms, pulling him by his feet. He had socks on, no shoes, Mona noticed now, like maybe he'd had his feet up to sleep. His blue shirt had blood on it and his face was all bruised.

What Mona felt, as the rush kicked in, was a bright and innocent curiosity. "What are you doing?"

"I think I'll have to wake him up," the woman said, like she was on the subway, talking about another passenger who was about to miss his stop. Mona followed her into the room where Gerald did his work, everything clean and hospital white; she watched as the woman got Prior up into a sort of chair like in a salon, with levers and buttons and things. It isn 't like she 's that strong , Mona thought, it 's like she knows which way to throw the weight . Prior's head fell to the side as the woman fastened a black strap across his chest. Mona was starting to feel sorry for him, but then she remembered Eddy.

"What is it?" The woman was filling a white plastic container with water from a chrome tap.

Mona just kept trying to say it, feeling her heart race out of control on the wiz. He killed Eddy , she kept trying to say, but it wouldn't come out. But then it must have, because the woman said,"Yeah, he'll do that sort of thing . . . if you let him." She threw the water over Prior, into his face and all down his shirt; his eyes snapped open and the white of the left one was solid red; the metal prongs of the shockrod snapped white sparks when the woman pressed it against the wet blue shirt. Prior screamed.

Gerald had to get down on his hands and knees to pull her out from under the bed. He had cool, very gentle hands. She couldn't remember how she'd gotten under there, but now everything was quiet. Gerald had on a gray topcoat and dark glasses.

"You're going with Molly now, Mona," he said.

She started to shake.

"I think I'd better give you something for your nerves."

She jerked back, out of his grip. "No! Don't fucking touch me!"

"Leave it, Gerald," the woman said from the door. "It's time you go now."

"I don't think you know what you're doing," he said,"but good luck."

"Thanks. Think you'll miss the place?"

"No. I was going to retire soon anyway."

"So was I," the woman said, and then Gerald left, without even a nod for Mona.

"Got any clothes?" the woman asked Mona. "Get 'em on. We're leaving too."

Dressing, Mona found she couldn't button her dress over her new breasts, so she left it open, putting Michael's jacket on and sipping it up to her chin.

Company

Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues, the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience . . . So he was doing that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.

Gentry was up in the loft with the shape he'd captured, what he called a macroform node, and he'd hardly listened to what Slick had tried to tell him about the house and that whole place and Bobby the Count.

So Slick had come down here to crouch next to an Investigator in the cold and dark, retracing all the things he'd done with so many different tools, and where he'd scrounged each part, and then Cherry reached out and touched his cheek with her cold hand.

"You okay?" she asked. "I thought maybe it was happening to you again. . . ."

"No. It's just I gotta come down here, sometimes."

"He plugged you into the Count's box, didn't he?"

"Bobby," Slick said,"that's his name. I saw him."

"Where?"

"In there. It's a whole world. There's this house, like a castle or something, and he's there."

"By himself?"

"He said Angie Mitchell's in there too. . . ."

"Maybe he's crazy. Is she?"

"I didn't see her. Saw a car he said was hers."

"She's in some celebrity detox place in Jamaica, last I heard."

He shrugged. "I dunno."

"What's he like?"

"He looked younger. Anybody'd look bad with all those tubes 'n' shit in 'em. He figured Kid Afrika dumped him here because he got scared. He said if anybody comes looking for him, we jack him into the matrix."

"Why?"

"Dunno."

"You shoulda asked him."

He shrugged again. "Seen Bird anywhere?"

"No."

"Shoulda been back already . . ." He stood up.

Little Bird came back at dusk, on Gentry's bike, the dark wings of his hair damp with snow and flapping behind him as he roared in across the Solitude. Slick winced; Little Bird was in the wrong gear. Little Bird jolted up an incline of compacted oildrums and hit the brakes when he should've gunned it. Cherry gasped as Bird and the bike separated in midair; the bike seemed to hang there for a second before it somersaulted into the rusted sheet-metal tangle that had been one of Factory's outbuildings, and Little Bird was rolling over and over on the ground.

Somehow Slick never heard the crash. He was standing beside Cherry in the shelter of a doorless loading bay -- then he was sprinting across snow-flecked rust to the fallen rider, no transition. Little Bird lay on his back with blood on his lips, his mouth partially hidden by the jumble of thongs and amulets he wore around his neck.

"Don't touch him," Cherry said. "Ribs may be broken, or he's mashed up inside. . . ."

Little Bird's eyes opened at the sound of her voice. He pursed his lips and spat blood and part of a tooth.

"Don't move," Cherry said, kneeling beside him and switching to the crisp diction she'd learned in med-tech school. "You may have been injured. . . ."

"F-fuck it, lady," he managed, and struggled stiffly up, with Slick's help.

"All right, asshole," she said,"hemorrhage. See if I give a shit."

"Didn't get it," Little Bird said, smearing blood across his face with the back of his hand,"the truck."

"I can see that," Slick said.

"Marvie 'n' them, they got company. Like flies on shit. Couple of hovers 'n' a copter 'n' shit. All these guys."

"What kind of guys?"

"Like soldiers, but they're not. Soldier'll goof around, bullshit, crack jokes when nobody important's looking. But not them."

"Cops?" Marvie and his two brothers grew mutant ruderalis in a dozen half-buried railway tankcars; sometimes they tried to cook primitive amine compounds, but their lab kept blowing up. They were the nearest thing Factory had to permanent neighbors. Six kilometers.

"Cops?" Little Bird spat another tooth chip and gingerly probed his mouth with a bloody finger. "They aren't doin' anything against the law. Anyway, cops can't afford shit like that, new hovers, new Honda. . . ." He grinned through a film of blood and spittle. "I hung off in the Solitude 'n' scoped 'em good. Nobody I'd wanna talk to, or you either. Guess I really fucked Gentry's bike, huh?"

"Don't worry about it," Slick said. "I think his mind's on something else."

"Tha's good. . . ." He staggered in the direction of Factory, nearly fell, caught himself, continued.

"He's higher'n a kite," Cherry said.

"Hey, Bird," Slick called,"what happened to that bag of shit I gave you to give Marvie?"

Bird swayed, turned. "Lost it . . ." Then he was gone, around a corner of corrugated steel.

"Maybe he's making that up," Cherry said. "About those guys. Or seeing things."

"I doubt it," Slick said, pulling her into deeper shadow as an unlit black Honda swung down toward Factory out of winter twilight.

He heard the Honda making its fifth pass over Factory as he pounded up the quaking stairs, the iron roof rattling with the copter's passage. Well, he thought, that should anyway bring it to Gentry's attention that they had visitors. He took the fragile catwalk in ten long, slow steps; he was beginning to wonder if they'd ever be able to get the Count and his stretcher back out without having to weld extra I-bar across the span.

He went into the bright loft without knocking. Gentry was sitting at a workbench, his head cocked to one side, staring up at the plastic skylights. The bench was littered with bits of hardware and small tools.

"Helicopter," Slick said, panting from the climb.

"Helicopter," Gentry agreed, nodding thoughtfully, his disheveled roostertail bobbing. "They seem to be looking for something."

"I think they just found it."

"Could be the Fission Authority."

"Bird saw people at Marvie's. Saw that copter there too. You weren't paying much attention when I tried to tell you what he said."

"Bird?" Gentry looked down at the small bright things on the workbench. Picked up two fittings and twisted them together.

"The Count! He told me --"

"Bobby Newmark," Gentry said,"yes. I know a lot more about Bobby Newmark, now."

Cherry came in behind Slick. "You gotta do something about that bridge," she said, going immediately to the stretcher,"it shakes too much." She bent to check the Count's readouts.

"Come here, Slick," Gentry said, standing. He walked to the holo table. Slick followed, looked at the image that glowed there. It reminded him of the rugs he'd seen in the gray house, patterns like that, only these were woven of hairfine neon, and twisted into some kind of infinite knot; the knot's core hurt his head to look at it. He looked away.

"That's it?" he asked Gentry. "What you've always been looking for?"

"No. I told you. This is just a node, a macroform. A model . . ."

"He's got this house in there, like a castle, and grass and trees and sky. . . ."

"He's got a lot more than that. He's got a universe more than that. That was just a construct worked up from a commercial stim. What he's got is an abstract of the sum total of data constituting cyberspace. Still, it's closer than I've gotten before. . . . He didn't tell you why he was in there?"

"Didn't ask him."

"Then you'll have to go back."

"Hey. Gentry. Listen up. That copter, it'll be back. It'll be back with two hovers fulla guys Bird said looked like soldiers. They aren't after us, man. They're after him ."

"Maybe they're his. Maybe they are after us."

"No. He told me, man. He said, anybody comes looking for him, we're in deep shit and we gotta jack him into the matrix."

Gentry looked down at the little coupling he still held. "We'll talk with him, Slick. You'll go back; this time I'll go with you."

Winter Journey

Petal had agreed, finally, but only after she'd suggested phoning her father for permission. That had sent him shuffling unhappily off in search of Swain, and when he'd returned, looking no happier, the answer had been yes. Bundled in several layers of her warmest clothing, she stood in the white-painted foyer, studying the hunting prints while Petal lectured the red-faced man, whose name was Dick, behind closed doors. She couldn't distinguish individual words, only a low torrent of admonition. The Maas-Neotek unit was in her pocket, but she avoided touching it. Twice already Colin had tried to dissuade her.

Now Dick emerged from Petal's lecture with his hard little mouth set in a smile. Under his tight black suit he wore a pink cashmere turtleneck and a thin gray lambswool cardigan. His black hair was plastered tightly back against his skull; his pale cheeks were shadowed by a few hours' growth of beard. She palmed the unit in her pocket. " 'Lo," Dick said, looking her up and down. "Where shall we go for our walk?"

"Portobello Road," Colin said, slouched against the wall beside the crowded coatrack. Dick took a dark overcoat from the rack, reaching through Colin to do it, put it on, and buttoned it. He pulled on a bulky pair of black leather gloves.

"Portobello Road," Kumiko said, releasing the unit.

"How long have you worked for Mr. Swain?" she asked, as they made their way along the icy pavement of the crescent.

"Long enough," he replied. "Mind you don't slip. Wicked heels on those boots . . ."

Kumiko tottered along beside him on black French patent spikes. As she'd predicted, it was virtually impossible to navigate the glass-hard rippled patches of ice in these boots. She took his hand for support; doing this, she felt solid metal across his palm. The gloves were weighted, the fingers reinforced with carbon mesh.

He was silent, as they turned the sidestreet at the end of the crescent, but when they reached Portobello Road, he paused. "Excuse me, miss," he said, a note of hesitation in his voice,"but is it true, what the boys say?"

"Boys? Excuse me?"

"Swain's boys, his regulars. That you're the big fellow's daughter -- the big fellow back in Tokyo?"

"I'm sorry," she said,"I don't understand."

"Yanaka. Your name's Yanaka?"

"Kumiko Yanaka, yes . . ."

He peered at her with intense curiosity. Then worry crossed his face and he glanced carefully around. "Lord," he said,"must be true . . ." His squat, tightly buttoned body was taut and alert. "Guvnor said you wanted to shop?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Where shall I take you?"

"Here," she said, and led him into a narrow arcade lined solidly with British gomi .

Her Shinjuku shopping expeditions served her well with Dick. The techniques she'd devised for torturing her father's secretaries proved just as effective now, as she forced the man to participate in dozens of pointless choices between one Edwardian medallion and another, this or that fragment of stained glass, though she was careful only to choose items, finally, that were fragile or very heavy, awkward to carry, and extremely expensive. A cheerful bilingual shop assistant accessed an eighty-thousand-pound charge against Kumiko's MitsuBank chip. Kumiko slipped her hand into the pocket that held the Mass-Neotek unit. "Exquisite," the English girl said in Japanese, as she wrapped Kumiko's purchase, an ormolu vase encrusted with griffins.

"Hideous," Colin commented, in Japanese. "An imitation as well." He reclined on a Victorian horsehair sofa, his boots up on an art deco cocktail stand supported by airstream aluminum angels.

The shop assistant added the wrapped vase to Dick's burden. This was Dick's eleventh antique shop and Kumiko's eighth purchase.

"I think you'd better make your move," Colin advised. "Any moment now, our Dick will buzz Swain's for a car to take that lot home."

"Think this is it, then?" Dick asked hopefully, over Kumiko's purchases.

"One more shop, please." Kumiko smiled.

"Right," he said grimly. As he was following her out the door, she drove the heel of her left boot into a gap in the pavement she'd noticed on her way in. "You all right?" he asked, seeing her stumble.

"I've broken the heel of my boot. . . ." She hobbled back into the shop and sat down beside Colin on the horsehair sofa. The assistant came fussing up to help.

"Get 'em off quick," Colin advised,"before Dickie puts his parcels down."

She unzipped the boot with the broken heel, then the other, pulled off both. In place of the coarse Chinese silk she usually wore in winter, her feet were sheathed in thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles. She nearly ran between Dick's legs as she cleared the door, but instead her shoulder struck his thigh as she squeezed past, toppling him into a display of faceted crystal decanters.

And then she was free, plunging through the press of tourists down Portobello Road.

Her feet were very cold, but the ridged plastic soles provided excellent traction -- though not on ice, she reminded herself, picking herself up from her second spill, wet grit against her palms. Colin had directed her down this narrow passage of blackened brick. . . .

She grasped the unit. "Where next?"

"This way," he said.

"I want the Rose and Crown," she reminded him.

"You want to be careful. Dickie'll have Swain's men here by now, not to mention the sort of hunt that friend of Swain's from Special Branch could mount if he's asked to. And I can't imagine why he shouldn't be asked to. . . ."

She entered the Rose and Crown by a side door, Colin at her elbow, grateful for the snug gloom and irradiating warmth that seemed central to the idea of these drinking-burrows. She was struck by the amount of padding on the walls and seats, by the muffling curtains. If the colors and fabrics had been less dingy, the effect would somehow have been less warm. Pubs, she guessed, were an extreme expression of the British attitude toward gomi .

At Colin's urging, she made her way through the drinkers clustered in front of the bar, hoping to find Tick.

"What'll it be, dear?"

She looked up into the broad blond face behind the bar, bright lipstick and rouged cheeks. "Excuse me," Kumiko began,"I wish to speak with Mr. Bevan --"

"Mine's a pint, Alice," someone said, slapping down three ten-pound coins,"lager." Alice worked a tall white ceramic lever, filling a mug with pale beer. She put the mug on the scarred bar and swept the money into a rattling till behind the counter.

"Someone wanting a word, Bevan," Alice said, as the man lifted his pint.

Kumiko looked up at a flushed, seamed face. The man's upper lip was short; Kumiko thought of rabbits, though Bevan was large, nearly as large as Petal. He had a rabbit's eyes as well: round, brown, showing very little white. "With me?" His accent reminded her of Tick's.

"Tell him yes," Colin said. "He can't think why a little Jap girl in rubber socks has come into the drinker looking for him."

"I wish to find Tick."

Bevan regarded her neutrally over the rim of his raised pint. "Sorry," he said,"can't say I know anyone by the name." He drank.

"Sally told me I should find you if Tick wasn't here. Sally Shears . . ."

Bevan choked on his lager, his eyes showing a fraction of white. Coughing, he set the mug on the bar and took a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket. He blew his nose and wiped his mouth.

"I'm on duty in five," he said. "Best step in the back."

Alice raised a hinged section of the bar; Bevan ushered Kumiko through with small flapping motions of his large hands, glancing quickly over his shoulder. He guided her down a narrow passage that opened off the area behind the bar. The walls were brick, old and uneven, thickly coated with dirty green paint. He stopped beside a battered steel hamper heaped with terry bar towels that reeked of beer.

"You'll regret it if you're on a con, girl," he said. "Tell me why you're looking for this Tick."

"Sally is in danger. I must find Tick. I must tell him."

"Fucking hell," the barman said. "Put yourself in my position. . . ."

Colin wrinkled his nose at the hamper of sodden towels.

"Yes?" Kumiko said.

"If you're a nark, and I sent you to find this Tick fellow, assuming I did know him, and he's on some sort of blag, then he'd do for me, wouldn't he? But if you're not, then this Sally, she'd likely do for me if I don't, understand?"

Kumiko nodded. " 'Between the rock and the hard place.' " It was an idiom Sally had used; Kumiko found it very poetic.

"Quite," Bevan said, giving her an odd look.

"Help me. She is in very great danger."

He ran his palm back across thinning ginger-colored hair.

"You will help me," she heard herself say, feeling her mother's cold mask click into place,"Tell me where to find Tick."

The barman seemed to shiver, though it was overly warm in the passageway, a steamy warmth, beer smell mingling with raw notes of disinfectant. "D'you know London?"

Colin winked at her. "I can find my way," she said.

"Bevan," Alice said, putting her head around the corner,"the filth."

"Police," Colin translated.

"Margate Road, SW2," Bevan said,"dunno the number, dunno his phone."

"Let him show you out the back now," Colin said. "Those are no ordinary policemen."

Kumiko would always remember her endless ride through the city's Underground. How Colin led her from the Rose and Crown to Holland Park, and down, explaining that her MitsuBank chip was worse than useless now; if she used it for a cab, or any sort of purchase, he said, some Special Branch operator would see the transaction flare like magnesium on the grid of cyberspace. But she had to find Tick, she told him; she had to find Margate Road. He frowned No, he said wait till dark; Brixton wasn't far, but the streets were too dangerous now, by daylight, with the police on Swain's side. But where could she hide? she asked. She had very little cash; the concept of currency, of coins and paper notes, was quaint and alien.

Here, he said, as she rode a lift down into Holland Park. "For the price of a ticket."

The bulgy silver shapes of the trains.

The soft old seats in gray and green.

And warm, beautifully warm; another burrow, here in the realm of ceaseless movement . . .

The Rip

The airport sucked a groggy Danielle Stark away down a pastel corridor lined with reporters, cameras, augmented eyes, while Porphyre and three Net security men swept Angie through the closing ring of journalists, a choreographed piece of ritual that had more to do with providing dramatic visuals than protection. Anyone present had already been cleared by security and the PR department.

Then she was alone with Porphyre in an express elevator, on their way to the heliport the Net maintained on the terminal's roof.

As the doors opened, into gusts of wet wind across brilliantly lit concrete, where a new trio of security men waited in giant fluorescent-orange parkas, Angie remembered her first glimpse of the Sprawl, when she'd ridden the train up from Washington with Turner.

One of the orange parkas ushered them across an expanse of spotless concrete to the waiting helicopter, a large twin-prop Fokker finished in black chrome. Porphyre led the way up the spidery, matte-black stairway. She followed without looking back.

She had something now, a new determination. She'd decided to contact Hans Becker through his agent in Paris. Continuity had the number. It was time, time to make something happen. And she'd make something happen with Robin as well; he'd be waiting now, she knew, at the hotel.

The helicopter told them to fasten their seatbelts.

As they lifted off, there was virtual silence in the soundproofed cabin, only a throbbing in the bones, and for a strange second she seemed able to hold the whole of her life in mind and know it, see it for what it had been. And it was this, she thought, that the dust had drifted over and concealed, and that had been freedom from pain.

And the site of the soul 's departure , said an iron voice, out of candleglow and the roar of the hive. . . .

"Missy?" Porphyre from the seat beside her, leaning close . . .

"I'm dreaming. . . ."

Something had been waiting for her, years ago, in the Net. Nothing like the loa, like Legba or the others, though Legba, she knew, was Lord of the Crossroads; he was synthesis, the cardinal point of magic, communication. . . .

"Porphyre," she asked,"why did Bobby leave?" She looked out at the Sprawl's tangled grid of light, at the domes picked out in red beacons, seeing instead the datascape that had drawn him, always, back to what he'd believed was the only game worth playing.

"If you don't know, missy," Porphyre said,"who does?"

"But you hear things. Everything. All the rumors. You always have. . . ."

"Why ask me now?"

"It's time. . . ."

"I remember talk , understand? How people who aren't famous talk about those who are. Maybe someone who claimed they knew Bobby talked to someone else, and it came around. . . . Bobby was worth talking about because he was with you, understand? That's a good place to start, missy, because he wouldn't have found that so very gratifying, would he? Story was, he'd set out hustling on his own, but he'd found you instead, and you rolled higher and faster than anything he could've dreamed of. Took him up there, understand? Where the kind of money he'd never even dreamed of, back in Barrytown, was just change. . . ."

Angie nodded, looking out over the Sprawl.

"Talk was he had his own ambitions, missy. Something driving him. Drove him off, finally . . ."

"I didn't think he'd leave me," she said. "When I first came to the Sprawl, it was like being born. A new life. And he was there, right there, the very first night. Later, when Legba -- when I was with the Net . . ."

"When you were becoming Angie."

"Yes. And as much of me as that took, I knew he'd be there. And also that he'd never buy it, entirely, and I needed that, how it was still just a scam, to him, the whole business. . . ."

"The Net?"

"Angie Mitchell. He knew the difference between it and me."

"Did he?"

"Maybe he was the difference." So high above the lines of light . . .

The old New Suzuki Envoy had been Angie's favorite Sprawl hotel since her earliest days with the Net.

It maintained its street wall for eleven stories, then narrowed jaggedly, at the first of nine setbacks, into a mountainside assembled from bedrock excavated from its Madison Square building site. Original plans had called for this steep landscape to be planted with flora native to the Hudson Valley region, and populated with suitable fauna, but subsequent construction of the first Manhattan Dome had made it necessary to hire a Paris-based eco-design team. The French ecologists, accustomed to the "pure" design problems posed by orbital systems, had despaired of the Sprawl's particulate-laden atmosphere, opting for heavily engineered strains of vegetation and robotic fauna of the sort encountered in children's theme parks, but Angie's continued patronage had eventually lent the place a cachet it would otherwise have lacked. The Net leased the five topmost floors, where her permanent suite had been installed, and the Envoy had come to enjoy a certain belated reputation with artists and entertainers.

Now she smiled as the helicopter rose past a disinterested robot bighorn pretending to munch lichen beside the illuminated waterfall. The absurdity of the place always delighted her; even Bobby had enjoyed it.

She glanced out at the Envoy's heliport, where the Sense/Net logo had been freshly repainted on heated, floodlit concrete. A lone figure, hooded in a bright orange parka, waited beside a sculpted outcropping of rock.

"Robin will be here, won't he, Porphyre?"

"Mistah Lanier," he said sourly.

She sighed.

The black chrome Fokker brought them smoothly down, glasses tinkling gently in the drinks' cabinet as the landing gear met the roof of the Envoy. The muted throb of the engines died.

"Where Robin is concerned, Porphyre, I'll have to make the first move. I'm going to speak with him tonight. Alone. In the meantime, I want you to stay out of his way."

"Porphyre's pleasure, missy," the hairdresser said, as the cabin door opened behind them. And then he was twisting, clawing at the buckle of his seatbelt, and Angie turned in time to see the bright orange parka in the hatchway, the upraised arm, the mirrored glasses. The gun made no more sound than a cigarette lighter, but Porphyre convulsed, one long black hand slapping at his throat as the security man swung the hatch shut behind him and sprang at Angie.

Something was clapped hard against her stomach as Porphyre lolled back bonelessly in his seat, the sharp pink tip of his tongue protruding. She looked down, in pure reflex, and saw the black chrome buckle of her seatbelt through a sticky-looking lozenge of greenish plastic.

She looked up into a white oval face framed by a tightly drawn orange nylon hood. Saw her own face blank with shock, doubled in the silver lenses. "He drink, tonight?"

"What?"

"Him." A thumb jerked in Porphyre's direction. "He drink any alcohol?"

"Yes . . . Earlier."

"Shit." A woman's voice, as she turned to the unconscious hairdresser. "Now I've sedated him. Don't wanna suppress his breathing reflex, y'know?" Angie watched as the woman checked Porphyre's pulse. "Guess he's okay . . ." Did she shrug, inside the orange parka?

"Security?"

"What?" The glasses flashed.

"Are you Net security?"

"Fuck no, I'm abducting you."

"You are?"

"You bet."

"Why?"

"Not for any of the usual reasons. Somebody's got it in for you. Got it in for me too. I was supposed to set it up to grab you next week. Fuck 'em. Had to talk to you, anyway." "You did? Talk to me?"

"Know anybody name of 3Jane?"

"No. I mean, yes, but --"

"Save it. Our asses outa here, fast."

"Porphyre --"

"He's gonna wake up soon. Look of him, I don't wanna be around when he does. . . ."

3Jane

If this was part of Bobby's big gray house in the country, Slick decided, opening his eyes on the cramped curve of the narrow corridor, then it was a stranger place than it had seemed the first time. The air was thick and dead and the light from the greenish glass-tile ceiling-strip made him feel like he was under water. The tunnel was made of some kind of glazed concrete. It felt like jail.

"Maybe we came out in the basement or something," he said, noticing the faint ping of echo off the concrete when he spoke.

"No reason we'd cut into the construct you saw before," Gentry said.

"So what is it?" Slick touched the concrete wall; it was warm.

"Doesn't matter," Gentry said.

Gentry started walking in the direction they were both facing. Past the curve, the floor became an uneven mosaic of shattered china, fragments pressed into something like epoxy, slippery under their boots.

"Look at this stuff . . ." Thousands of different patterns and colors in the broken bits, but no overall design in how it had been put down, just random.

"Art." Gentry shrugged. "Somebody's hobby. You should appreciate that, Slick Henry."

Whoever it was, they hadn't bothered with the walls. Slick knelt to run his fingers over it, feeling raw edges of broken ceramic, glassy hardened plastic in between. "What's that supposed to mean, 'hobby'?"

"It's like those things you build, Slick. Your junk toys . . ." Gentry grinned his tense crazy grin.

"You don't know," Slick said. "Spend your whole fucking life trying to figure what cyberspace is shaped like, man, and it probably isn't even shaped like anything, and anyway who gives a shit?" There wasn't anything random about the Judge and the others. The process was random, but the results had to conform to something inside, something he couldn't touch directly.

"Come on," Gentry said.

Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry's pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway?

Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around. Bird wasn't any good to talk to because there wasn't much he was interested in, and all he talked was stringtown stupid. And even if Gentry never admitted it, Slick felt like Gentry understood about some things.

"Yeah," Slick said, getting up,"let's go."

The tunnel wound in on itself like a gut. The section with the mosaic floor was back there now, around however many curves and up and down short, curving stairwells. Slick kept trying to imagine a building that would have insides like this, but he couldn't. Gentry was walking fast, eyes narrowed, chewing on his lip. Slick thought the air was getting worse.

Up another stairwell, they hit a straight stretch that narrowed to nothing in the distance, either way you looked. It was broader than the curved parts and the floor was soft and humpy with little rugs, it looked like hundreds of them, rolled out layers deep over the concrete. Each rug had its own pattern and colors, lots of reds and blues, but all the patterns were the same zaggy diamonds and triangles. The dusty smell was thicker here and Slick figured it had to be the rugs, they looked so old. The ones on top, nearest the center, were worn down to the weave, in patches. A trail, like somebody'd been walking up and down there for years. Sections of the overhead light-strip were dark, and others pulsed weakly.

"Which way?" he asked Gentry.

Gentry was looking down, working his thick lower lip between finger and thumb. "This way."

"How come?"

"Because it doesn't matter."

It made Slick's legs tired, walking over those rugs. Had to watch not to snag his toes in the ones with holes worn through. Once he stepped over a glass tile that had fallen from the light-strip. At regular intervals now they were passing sections of wall that looked as though portals had been sealed over with more concrete. There wasn't anything there, just the same arched shape in slightly paler concrete with a slightly different texture.

"Gentry, this has gotta be underground, right? Like a basement under something . . ."

But Gentry just brought his arm up, so that Slick bumped into it, and they both were standing there staring at the girl at the end of the corridor, not a dozen meters across the waves of carpet.

She said something in a language Slick guessed was French. The voice was light and musical, the tone matter- of-fact. She smiled. Pale under a twist of dark hair, a fine, high-boned face, strong thin nose, and wide mouth.

Slick felt Gentry's arm trembling against his chest. "It's okay," he said, taking Gentry's arm and lowering it. "We're just looking for Bobby. . . ."

"Everyone's looking for Bobby," she said, English with an accent he didn't know. "I'm looking for him myself. For his body. Have you seen his body?" She took a step back, away from them, like she was about to run.

"We won't hurt you," Slick said, suddenly aware of his own smell, of the grease worked into his jeans and brown jacket, and Gentry didn't really look all that much more reassuring.

"I shouldn't think so," she said, and her white teeth flashed again in the stale undersea light. "But then I don't think I fancy either of you."

Slick wanted Gentry to say something, but Gentry didn't. "You know him -- Bobby?" Slick ventured.

"He's really a very clever man. Extraordinarily clever. Although I don't think I fancy him, really." She wore something loose and black that hung to her knees. Her feet were bare. "Nonetheless, I want . . . his body." She laughed.

Everything

changed.

"Juice?" Bobby the Count asked, holding out a tall glass of something yellow. The water in the turquoise pool reflected shifting blobs of sunlight on the palm fronds above his head. He was naked, aside from a pair of very dark glasses. "What's the matter with your friend?"

"Nothing," Slick heard Gentry say. "He did time on induced Korsakov's. Transition like that scares the shit out of him."

Slick lay very still on the white iron lounge chair with the blue cushions, feeling the sun bake through his greasy jeans.

"You're the one he mentioned, right?" Bobby asked. "Name's Gentle? Own a factory?"

"Gentry."

"You're a cowboy." Bobby smiled. "Console jockey. Cyberspace man."

"No."

Bobby rubbed his chin. "You know I have to shave in here? Cut myself, there's a scar. . . ." He drank half the glass of juice and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You're not a jockey? How else you get in here?"

Gentry unzipped his beaded jacket, exposing his bone- white, hairless chest. "Do something about the sun," he said.

Twilight. Like that. Not even a click. Slick heard himself groan. Insects began to creak in the palms beyond the whitewashed wall. Sweat cooled on his ribs.

"Sorry, man," Bobby said to Slick. "That Korsakov's, that must be some sad shit. But this place is beautiful. Vallarta. Belonged to Tally Isham." He turned his attention to Gentry again. "If you're not a cowboy, fella, what are you?"

"I'm like you," Gentry said.

"I'm a cowboy." A lizard scooted diagonally up the wall behind Bobby's head.

"No. You aren't here to steal anything, Newmark."

"How do you know?"

"You're here to learn something."

"Same thing."

"No. You were a cowboy once, but now you're something else. You're looking for something, but there's nobody to steal it from. I'm looking for it too."

And Gentry began to explain about the Shape, as the palm shadows gathered and thickened into Mexican night, and Bobby the Count sat and listened.

When Gentry was done, Bobby sat there for a long time without saying anything. Then he said,"Yeah. You're right. How I think of it, I'm trying to find out what brought the Change."

"Before that," Gentry said,"it didn't have a Shape."

"Hey," Slick said,"before we were here, we were somewhere else. Where was that?"

"Straylight," Bobby said. "Up the well. In orbit."

"Who's that girl?"

"Girl?"

"Dark hair. Skinny."

"Oh," Bobby said, in the dark,"that was 3Jane. You saw her?"

"Weird girl," Slick said.

"Dead girl," Bobby said. "You saw her construct. Blew her family fortune to build this thing."

"You, uh, hang out with her? In here?"

"She hates my guts. See, I stole it, stole her soul-catcher. She had her construct in place in here when I took off for Mexico, so she's always been around. Thing was, she died. Outside, I mean. Meantime, all her shit outside, all her scams and schemes, that's being run by lawyers, programs, more flunkies. . . ." He grinned. "It really pisses her off. The people who're trying to get into your place to get the aleph back, they work for somebody else who works for some people she hired out on the Coast. But, yeah, I've done the odd deal with her, traded things. She's crazy, but she plays a tight game. . . ."

Not even a click.

At first he thought he was back in the gray house, where he'd seen Bobby the first time, but this room was smaller and the carpets and furniture were different, he couldn't say how. Rich but not as glittery. Quiet. A lamp with a green glass shade glowed on a long wooden table.

Tall windows with frames painted white, dividing the white beyond that into rectangles, each pane, and that must be snow. . . . He stood with his cheek touching soft drapes, looking out into a walled space of snow.

"London," Bobby said. "She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought they wouldn't have anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They've been fading, sort of blurring. You can still raise 'em, sometimes, but their personalities run together. . . ."

"That fits," Gentry said. "They came out of the first cause, When It Changed. You already figured that. But you don't know what happened yet, do you?"

"No. I just know where. Straylight. She's told me all that part, I think all she knows. Doesn't really care about it. Her mother put together a couple of AIs, very early on, real heavy stuff. Then her mother died and the AIs sort of stewed in the corporate cores, up there. One of them started doing deals on its own. It wanted to get together with the other one. . . ."

"It did. There's your first cause. Everything changed."

"Simple as that? How do you know?"

"Because," Gentry said,"I've been at it from another angle. You've been playing cause and effect, but I've been looking for outlines, shapes in time. You've been looking all over the matrix, but I've been looking at the matrix, the whole thing. I know things you don't."

Bobby didn't answer. Slick turned from the window and saw the girl, the same one, standing across the room. Just standing there.

"It wasn't just the Tessier-Ashpool AIs," Gentry said. "People came up the well to crack the T-A cores. They brought a Chinese military icebreaker."

"Case," Bobby said,"Guy named Case. I know that part. Some kind of synergistic effect . . ."

Slick watched the girl.

"And the sum was greater than the parts?" Gentry really seemed to be enjoying this. "Cybernetic godhead? Light on the waters?"

"Yeah," Bobby said,"that's about it."

"It's a little more complicated than that," Gentry said, and laughed.

And the girl was gone. No click.

Slick shivered.

Winter Journey [2]

Night fell during the Underground's peak evening traffic, though even then it was nothing like Tokyo, no shiroshi-san struggling to wedge a last few passengers in as the doors were closing. Kumiko watched the salmon haze of sunset from a windy platform on the Central Line, Colin lounging against a broken vending machine with a row of cracked, dusty windows. "Time now," he said,"and keep your head demurely down through Bond Street and Oxford Circus."

"But I must pay, when I leave the system?"

"Not everyone does, actually," he said, tossing his forelock.

She set off for the stairs, no longer requiring his directions to find her way to the opposite platform. Her feet were very cold again, and she thought of the fleece-lined German boots in the closet in her room at Swain's. She'd decided on the combination of the rubber toe-socks and the high French heels as a ploy to lull Dick, to make him doubt she'd run, but with each bite of cold through the thin soles she regretted the idea.

In the tunnel to the other platform, she relaxed her grip on the unit and Colin flickered out. The walls were worn white ceramic with a decorative band of green. She took her hand from her pocket and trailed her fingers along the green tiles as she went, thinking of Sally and the Finn and the different smell of a Sprawl winter, until the first Dracula stepped smartly in front of her and she was instantly and very closely surrounded by four black raincoats, four bone-thin, bone-white faces. " 'Ere," the first one said,"innit pretty."

They were eye to eye, Kumiko and the Dracula; his breath smelled of tobacco. The evening crowd continued on its way around them, bundled for the most part in dark wool.

"Oo," one said, beside her,"look. Wot's this?" He held up the Maas-Neotek unit, his hand gloved in cracked black leather. "Flash lighter, innit? Let's 'ave a snag, Jap." Kumiko's hand went to her pocket, shot straight through the razor slash, and closed on air. The boy giggled.

"Snags in 'er bag," another said. " 'Elp 'er, Reg." A hand darted out and the leather strap of her purse parted neatly.

The first Dracula caught the purse, whipped the dangling strap around it with a practiced flick, and tucked it into the front of his raincoat. "Ta."

" 'Ere, she's got 'em in 'er pants!" Laughter as she fumbled beneath layered sweaters. The tape she'd used hurt her stomach as she tore the gun free with both hands and flipped it up against the cheek of the boy who held the unit.

Nothing happened.

Then the other three were racing frantically for the stairs at the far end of the tunnel, their high-laced black boots slipping in melted snow, their long coats flapping like wings. A woman screamed.

And still they were frozen there, Kumiko and the Dracula, the muzzle of the pistol pressed against his left cheekbone. Kumiko's arms began to tremble.

She was looking into the Dracula's eyes, brown eyes gone wide with an ancient simple terror; the Dracula was seeing her mother's mask. Something struck the concrete at her feet: Colin's unit.

"Run," she said. The Dracula convulsed, opened his mouth, made a strangled, sobbing sound, and twisted away from the gun.

Kumiko looked down and saw the Maas-Neotek unit in a puddle of gray slush. Beside it lay the clean silver rectangle of a single-edged industrial razorblade. When she picked up the unit, she saw that its case was cracked. She shook moisture from the crack and squeezed it hard in her hand. The tunnel was deserted now. Colin wasn't there. Swain's Walther air pistol was huge and heavy in her other hand.

She stepped to a rectangular receptacle fastened to the tile wall and tucked the gun down between a grease- flecked foam food container and a neatly folded sheaf of newsfax. Turned away, then turned back for the fax.

Up the stairs.

Someone pointed at her, on the platform, but the train roared in with its antique clatter and then the doors slid shut behind her.

She did as Colin had instructed, White City and Shepherd's Bush, Holland Park, raising the fax as the train slowed for Notting Hill -- the King, who was very old, was dying -- and keeping it there through Bond Street. The station at Oxford Circus was very busy and she was grateful for the sheltering crowd.

Colin had said that it was possible to leave the station without paying. After some consideration, she decided that this was true, though it required speed and timing. Really, there was no other way; her purse, with the MitsuBank chip and her few English coins, had gone with the Jack Draculas. She spent ten minutes watching passengers surrender their yellow plastic tickets to the automated turnstyles, took a deep breath, and ran. Up, over, behind her a shout and a loud laugh, and then she was running again.

When she reached the doors at the top of the stairs, she saw Brixton Road waiting like a tatty Shinjuku, jammed with steaming foodstalls.

Star

She was waiting in a car and she didn't like it. She didn't like waiting anyway, but the wiz she'd done made it really hard. She had to keep reminding herself not to grit her teeth, because whatever Gerald had done to them, they were still sore. She was sore all over, now that she thought about it. Probably the wiz hadn't been such a great idea.

The car belonged to the woman, the one Gerald called Molly. Some kind of regular gray Japanese car like a suit would have, nice enough but nothing you'd notice. It had that new smell inside and it was fast when they got out of Baltimore. It had a computer but the woman drove it herself, all the way back to the Sprawl, and now it was parked on the roof of a twenty-level lot that must be close to the hotel where Prior had taken her, because she could see that crazy building, the one with the waterfall, fixed up like a mountain.

There weren't many other cars up here, and the ones that were were humped over with snow, like they hadn't moved in a long time. Except for the two guys in the booth where you drove in, there didn't seem to be anybody around at all. Here she was, in the middle of all those people, the biggest city in the world, and she was alone in the backseat of a car. Told to wait.

The woman hadn't said much when they'd come from Baltimore, just asked a question now and then, but the wiz had made it hard for Mona not to talk. She'd talked about Cleveland and Florida and Eddy and Prior.

Then they'd driven up here and parked.

So this Molly'd been gone at least an hour now, maybe longer. She'd taken a suitcase with her. The only thing Mona'd been able to get out of her was that she'd known Gerald a long time, and Prior hadn't known that.

It was getting cold in the car again, so Mona climbed into the front seat and turned on the heater. She couldn't just leave it on low, because it might run the battery down, and Molly'd said if that happened, they were really in the shit. " 'Cause when I come back, we leave in a hurry." Then she'd shown Mona where there was a sleeping bag under the driver's seat.

She set the heater on high and held her hands in front of the vent. Then she fiddled with the little vid studs beside the dash monitor and got a news show. The King of England was sick; he was really old. There was a new disease in Singapore; it hadn't killed anybody yet, but nobody knew how you got it or how to cure it. Some people thought there was some kind of big fight going on in Japan, two different bunches of Yakuza guys trying to kill each other, but nobody really knew; Yakuza -- that was something Eddy liked to bullshit about. Then these doors popped open and Angie came through on the arm of this amazing black guy, and the vid voice was saying this was live, she'd just arrived in the Sprawl after a brief vacation at her house in Malibu, following treatment at a private drug clinic. . . .

Angie looked just great in this big fur, but then the segment was over.

Mona remembered what Gerald had done; she touched her face. She shut off the vid, then the heater, and got into the backseat again. Used the corner of the sleeping bag to clean her condensed breath off the window. She looked up at the mountainside-building, all lit up, past the sagging chainlink at the edge of the carlot's roof. Like a whole country up there, maybe Colorado or something, like the stim where Angie went to Aspen and met this boy, only Robin turned up like he almost always did.

But what she didn't understand was this clinic stuff, how that barman had said Angie'd gone there because she was wired on something, and now she'd just heard the news guy say it too, so she guessed it had to be true. But why would anybody like Angie, with a life like that and Robin Lanier for a boyfriend, want to do drugs?

Mona shook her head, looking out at that building, glad she wasn't hooked on anything.

She must've drifted off for a minute, thinking about Lanette, because when she looked again, there was a copter, a big one, glittery black, poised above the mountain-building. It looked good, real big-town.

She'd known some rough women in Cleveland, girls nobody messed with, but this Molly was something else -- remembering Prior coming through that door, remembering him screaming. . . . She wondered what it was he'd finally admitted, because she'd heard him talking, and Molly hadn't hurt him anymore. They'd left him strapped in that chair and Mona had asked Molly if she thought he'd get loose. Either that, Molly had said, or somebody finds him, or he dehydrates.

The copter settled, vanished. Big one, the kind with the whirly thing at both ends.

So here she was, waiting, no fucking idea what else to do.

Something Lanette had taught her, sometimes you had to list your assets -- assets were what you had going for you -- and just forget the other stuff. Okay. She was out of Florida. She was in Manhattan. She looked like Angie. . . . That one stopped her. Was that an asset? Okay -- putting it another way -- she'd just had a fortune in free cosmetic surgery and she had totally perfect teeth . Anyway, look at it that way and it wasn't so bad. Think about the flies in the squat. Yeah. If she spent the money she had left on a haircut and some makeup, she could come up with something that didn't look all that much like Angie, which was probably a good idea, because what if somebody was looking for her?

There went the copter again, lifting off.

Hey.

Maybe two blocks away and fifty stories higher, the thing's nose swung toward her, dipped. . . . It 's the wiz . Sort of wobbled there, then it was coming down. . . . Wiz; it 's not real . Straight down toward her. It just got bigger. Toward her. But it 's the wiz , right? Then it was gone, behind another building, and it was just the wiz. . . .

It swung around a corner, still five stories above the roof of the carlot, and it was still coming down and it wasn 't the wiz, it was on her, a tight white beam stabbing out to find the gray car, and Mona popped the door lock and rolled out into the snow, still in the car's shadow, all around her the thunder of the thing's blades, its engines; Prior or whoever he worked for and they were after her. Then the spotlight went out, blades changed pitch, and it came down fast, too fast. Bounced on its landing gear. Slammed down again, engines dying, coughing blue flame.

Mona was on her hands and knees by the car's rear bumper. Slipped when she tried to get to her feet.

There was a sound like a gunshot; a square section of the copter's skin blew out and skidded across the lot's salt- stained concrete; a bright orange five-meter emergency exit slide popped out, inflating like a kid's beachtoy. Mona got up more carefully, holding on to the gray car's fender. A dark, bundled figure swung its legs out over the slide and went down, sitting up, just like a kid at a playground. Another figure followed, this one padded in a huge hooded jacket the same color as the slide.

Mona shivered as the one in orange led the other toward her across the roof, away from the black copter. It was . . . But it was!

"Want you both in back," Molly said, opening the door on the driver's side.

"It's you," Mona managed, to the most famous face in the world.

"Yes," Angie said, her eyes on Mona's face,"it . . . seems to be. . . ."

"Come on," Molly said, her hand on the star's shoulder. "Get in. Your Martian spade'll be waking up already." She glanced back at the helicopter. It looked like a big toy sitting there, no lights, like a giant kid had put it down and forgotten it.

"He'd better be," Angie said, climbing into the back of the car.

"You too, hon," Molly said, pushing Mona toward the open door.

"But . . . I mean . . ."

"Move!"

Mona climbed in, smelling Angie's perfume, wrist brushing the supernatural softness of that big fur. "I saw you," she heard herself say. "On the vid."

Angie didn't say anything.

Molly slid into the driver's seat, yanked the door shut, and started the engine. The orange hood was snugged up tight, her face a white mask with blank silver eyes. Then they were rolling toward the sheltered ramp, swinging into the first curve. Down five levels like that, in a tight spiral, and Molly swung them off into aisles of larger vehicles under dim green diagonals of light-strip.

"Parafoils," Molly said. "You ever see any parafoil gear, up the Envoy?"

"No," Angie said.

"If Net security has any, they could be upstairs already. . . ." She swung the car in behind a big long boxy hover, a white one with a name painted across the rear doors in square blue letters.

"What's it say?" Mona asked, then felt herself blush.

"Cathode Cathay," Angie said.

Mona thought she'd heard that name before.

Molly was out there opening those big doors. Pulling down these yellow plastic ramp things.

Then she was back in the car. Reversed, put it in drive, and they rolled right up into the hover. She stripped back the orange hood and shook her head to free her hair. "Mona, you think you can get out there and shove those ramps back in? They aren't heavy." It didn't sound like a question.

They weren't heavy. She pulled herself up behind the car and helped Molly pull the doors shut.

She could feel Angie there in the dark.

It was really Angie.

"Up front, strap in, hold on."

Angie. She was sitting right beside Angie.

There was a whoosh as Molly filled the hover's bags; then they were skimming down the spiral ramp.

"Your friend," Molly said,"he's awake by now, but he can't really move yet. Another fifteen minutes." She swung off the ramp again and this time Mona had lost track of the levels. This one was packed with fancy cars, little ones. The hover roared along a central aisle, swung left.

"You'll be lucky if he isn't waiting for us outside," Angie said.

Molly brought them to a halt ten meters from a big metal door painted with diagonal stripes, yellow and black.

"No," Molly said, taking a little blue box from the dash compartment,"he 's lucky if he's not waiting outside." The door blew out of its frame with an orange flash and a sound that slammed into Mona's diaphragm like a solid blow. It crashed into the wet street in a cloud of smoke and then they were over it, turning, the hover accelerating.

"This is awfully crude, isn't it?" Angie said, and actually laughed.

"I know," Molly said, intent on her driving. "Sometimes that's just the way to go. Mona, tell her about Prior. Prior and your boyfriend. What you told me."

Mona hadn't ever felt so shy in her life.

"Please," Angie said,"tell me. Mona."

Just like that. Her name. Angie Mitchell had actually said her name. To her. Right there.

It made her want to faint.

Margate Road

"You seem lost," the noodle seller said, in Japanese. Kumiko guessed that he was Korean. Her father had associates who were Korean; they were in the construction business, her mother had said. They tended, like this one, to be large men, very nearly as large as Petal, with broad, serious faces. "You look very cold."

"I'm looking for someone," she said. "He lives in Margate Road."

"Where is that?"

"I don't know."

"Come inside," the noodle man said, gesturing Kumiko around the end of his counter. His stall was made of pink corrugated plastic.

She stepped between the noodle stall and another that advertised something called roti, this word worked in deliriously colored spraybomb capitals trimmed with looping, luminous blobs. That stall smelled of spices and stewing meat. Her feet were very cold.

She ducked beneath a clouded sheet of plastic. The noodle stall was crowded: squat blue tanks of butane, the three cooking grids with their tall pots, plastic sacks of noodles, stacks of foam bowls, and the shifting bulk of the big Korean as he tended his pots. "Sit," he said; she sat on a yellow plastic canister of MSG, her head below the level of the counter. "You're Japanese?"

"Yes," she said.

"Tokyo?"

She hesitated.

"Your clothes," he said. "Why do you wear rubber tabi-socks in winter? Is this the fashion?"

"I lost my boots."

He passed her a foam bowl and plastic chopsticks; fat twists of noodle swam in a thin yellow soup. She ate hungrily, then drank off the soup. She watched as he served a customer, an African woman who took away noodles in her own lidded pot.

"Margate," the noodle man said, when the woman was gone. He took a greasy paperbound book from beneath the counter and thumbed through it. "Here," he said, jabbing at an impossibly dense little map,"down Acre Lane." He took a blue feltpen and sketched the route on a coarse gray napkin.

"Thank you," she said. "Now I will go."

Her mother came to her as she made her way to Margate Road.

Sally was in jeopardy, somewhere in the Sprawl, and Kumiko trusted that Tick would know a way to contact her. If not by phone then through the matrix. Perhaps Tick knew Finn, the dead man in the alley. . . .

In Brixton, the coral-growth of the metropolis had come to harbor a different life. Faces dark and light, uncounted races, the brick facades washed with a riot of shades and symbols unimaginable to the original builders. A drumbeat pulsed from a pub's open door as she passed, heat and huge laughter. The shops sold foodstuffs Kumiko had never seen, bolts of bright cloth, Chinese handtools, Japanese cosmetics. . . .

Pausing by that bright window, the display of tints and blushes, her own face reflected in the silver backing, she felt her mother's death fall on her out of the night. Her mother had owned things like this.

Her mother's madness. Her father would not refer to it. Madness had no place in her father's world, though suicide did. Her mother's madness was European, an imported snare of sorrow and delusion. . . . Her father had killed her mother, Kumiko had told Sally, in Covent Garden. But was it true? He had brought doctors from Denmark, from Australia, and finally from Chiba. The doctors had listened to the dreams of the princess-ballerina, had mapped and timed her synapses and drawn samples of her blood. The princess-ballerina had refused their drugs, their delicate surgeries. "They want to cut my brain with lasers," she had whispered to Kumiko.

She'd whispered other things as well.

At night, she said, the evil ghosts rose like smoke from their boxes in Kumiko's father's study. "Old men," she'd said,"they suck our breath away. Your father sucks my breath away. This city sucks my breath away. Nothing here is ever still. There is no true sleep."

In the end, there had been no sleep at all. Six nights her mother sat, silent and utterly still, in her blue European room. On the seventh day, she left the apartment alone -- a remarkable feat, considering the diligence of the secretaries -- and made her way to the cold river.

But the backing of the display was like Sally's glasses. Kumiko took the Korean's map from the sleeve of her sweater.

There was a burnt car beside the curb in Margate Road. Its wheels were missing. She paused beside it, and was scanning the unrevealing faces of the houses opposite, when she heard a sound behind her. Turning to find a twisted gargoyle face, under a greasy spill of curls, in the light from the half-open door of the nearest house.

"Tick!"

"Terrence," he said,"actually," as the facial convulsion subsided.

Tick's flat was on the top floor. The lower floors were empty, unoccupied, peeling wallpaper showing ghostly traces of vanished pictures.

The man's limp was more obvious as he climbed the stairs ahead of her. He wore a gray sharkskin suit and thick-soled suede oxfords the color of tobacco.

"Been expecting you," he said, hauling himself up another step, another.

"You have?"

"Knew you'd run from Swain's. Been logging their traffic, when I've had time from the other."

"The other?"

"You don't know, do you?"

"Excuse me?"

"It's the matrix. Something's happening. Easier to show you than try to explain it. As though I could explain it, which I can't. I'd say a good three-quarters of humanity is jacked at the moment, watching the show. . . ."

"I don't understand."

"Doubt anyone does. There's a new macroform in the sector that represents the Sprawl."

"A macroform?"

"Very large data-construct."

"I came here to warn Sally. Swain and Robin Lanier intend to give her to the ones who plot to kidnap Angela Mitchell."

"Wouldn't worry about that," he said, reaching the head of the stairs. "Sally's already scooped Mitchell and half-killed Swain's man in the Sprawl. They're after her in any case, now. Bloody everybody'll be after her, soon. Still, we can tell her when she checks in. If she checks in . . ."

Tick lived in a single large room whose peculiar shape suggested the removal of walls. Large as it was, it was also very crowded; it looked to Kumiko as though someone had deployed the contents of an Akihabara module shop in a space already filled, gaijin-style, with too many pieces of bulky furniture. In spite of this, it was startlingly neat and tidy: the corners of magazines were aligned with the corners of the low glass table they rested on, beside an unused black ceramic ashtray and a plain white vase of cut flowers.

She tried Colin again, while Tick filled an electric kettle with water from a filter jug.

"What's that?" he asked, putting down the jug.

"A Maas-Neotek guide unit. It's broken now; I can't make Colin come. . . ."

"Colin? It's a stim rig?"

"Yes."

"Let's have a look. . . ." He held out his hand.

"My father gave it to me. . . ."

Tick whistled. "Thing cost a fortune. One of their little AIs. How's it work?"

"You close your hand around it and Colin's there, but no one else can see or hear him."

Tick held the unit beside his ear and shook it. "It's broken? How?"

"I dropped it."

"It's just the housing that's broken, see. The biosoft's come away from the case, so you can't access it manually."

"Can you repair it?"

"No. But we can access it through a deck, if you want. . . ." He returned it. The kettle was boiling.

Over tea, she told him the story of her trip to the Sprawl and Sally's visit to the shrine in the alley. "He called her Molly," she said.

Tick nodded, winked several times in rapid succession. "What she went by, over there. What did they talk about?"

"A place called Straylight. A man called Case. An enemy, a woman . . ."

"Tessier-Ashpool. Found that for her when I rustled Swain's data flow for her. Swain's shopping Molly to this lady 3Jane, so called; she has the juiciest file of inside dirt you could imagine -- on anything and anyone at all. I've been bloody careful not to look too closely at any of that. Swain's trading it right and left, making a dozen fortunes in the process. I'm sure she's got enough dirt on our Mr. Swain as well. . . ."

"And she is here, in London?" "In orbit somewhere, looks like, though some people say she's dead. I was working on that, actually, when the big fella popped into the matrix. . . ."

"Excuse me?"

"Here, I'll show you." When he returned to the white breakfast table, he carried a shallow square black tray with a number of tiny controls arranged along one side. He placed it on the table and touched one of the minute switches. A cubical holo display blinked on above the projector: the neon gridlines of cyberspace, ranged with the bright shapes, both simple and complex, that represented vast accumulations of stored data. "That's all your standard big shits. Corporations. Very much a fixed landscape, you might say. Sometimes one of 'em'll grow an annex, or you'll see a takeover and two of them merge. But you aren't likely to see a new one, not on that scale. They start small and grow, merge with other small formations. . . ." He reached out to touch another switch. "About four hours ago" -- and a plain white vertical column appeared in the exact center of the display -- "this popped up. Or in." The colored cubes, spheres, and pyramids had rearranged themselves instantly to allow for the round white upright; it dwarfed them entirely, its upper end cut off smoothly by the vertical limit of the display. "Bastard's bigger than anything," Tick said, with a certain satisfaction,"and nobody knows what it is or who it belongs to."

"But someone must know," Kumiko said.

"Stands to reason, yes. But people in my line of work, and there's millions of us, haven't been able to find out. That's stranger, in some ways, than the fact that the thing's there at all. I was all up and down the grid, before you came, looking for any jockey with a clue. Nothing. Nothing at all."

"How could this 3Jane be dead?" But then she remembered the Finn, the boxes in her father's study. "I must tell Sally."

"Nothing for that but waiting," he said. "She'll probably phone in. In the meantime, we could have a go accessing that pricey little AI of yours, if you like."

"Yes," she said,"thank you."

"Only hope those Special Branch types in Swain's pay don't track you here. Still, we can only wait. . . ."

"Yes," Kumiko said, not at all pleased with the idea of waiting.

The Factory War

Cherry found him with the Judge again, down there in the dark. He was sitting on one of the Investigators with a flashlight in his hand, shining it up the Judge's carapace of polished rust. He didn't remember coming here, but he couldn't feel the jerky edge of Korsakov's. He remembered the girl's eyes, in that room Bobby said was London.

"Gentry's got the Count and his box jacked into a cyberspace deck," Cherry said. "You know that?"

Slick nodded, still looking up at the Judge. "Bobby said we better."

"So what's going on? What happened when you both jacked?"

"Gentry and Bobby, they kind of hit it off. Both crazy the same way. When we jacked, we came out somewhere in orbit, but Bobby wasn't there. . . . Then Mexico, I think. Who's Tally Isham?"

"Stim queen when I was little. Like Angie Mitchell is now."

"Mitchell, she was his squeeze. . . ."

"Who?"

"Bobby. He was telling Gentry about it, in London."

"London?"

"Yeah. We went there, after Mexico."

"And he said he was Angie Mitchell's old man? Sounds crazy."

"Yeah, but he said that's how he got on to it, that aleph thing." He swung the light down and directed it into the skeletal steel maw of the Corpsegrinder. "He was hanging out with rich people and heard about it. Called it a soul-catcher. The people who had it would rent time on it to these rich people. Bobby tried it once, then he went back and stole it. Took it down to Mexico City and started spending all his time in there. But they came after him. . . ."

"Sounds like you're remembering things, anyway."

"So he got out of there. Went up to Cleveland and made a deal with Afrika, gave Afrika money to hide him, take care of him while he was under the wire, because he was getting real close. . . ."

"Close to what?"

"Don't know. Something weird. Like when Gentry talks about the Shape."

"Well," she said,"I think it might kill him, being jacked that way. His signs are starting to screw up. He's been on those drips too long. Why I came to find you."

The Corpsegrinder's steel-fanged guts glinted in the flashlight's beam. "It's what he wants. Anyway, if he paid the Kid, it's like you're working for him. But those guys Bird saw today, they're working for the people from L.A., the ones Bobby stole the thing from. . . ."

"Tell me something."

"What?"

"What are these things you build? Afrika said you were this crazy white guy built robots out of junk. Said in the summer you take 'em out there on the rust and stage big fights --"

"They aren't robots," he interrupted, swinging the flash to the low, scythe-tipped arms of the spider-legged Witch. "They're mainly radio-controlled."

"You just build 'em to wreck 'em?"

"No. But I have to test them. See if I got them right . . ." He clicked off the light.

"Crazy white guy," she said. "You gotta girl out here?"

"No."

"Get a shower. Maybe shave . . ." Suddenly she was very close to him, her breath on his face.

"Okay people listen up --"

"What the fuck --"

" 'Cause I 'm not gonna say this twice. "

Slick had his hand over Cherry's mouth now.

"We want your guest and all his gear. That 's all , repeat , all the gear ." The amplified voice clanged through Factory's iron hollow. "Now you can give him to us , that 's easy , or we can just kill all your asses . And we 're real easy with that too . Five minutes to think about it ."

Cherry bit his hand. "Shit, I gotta breathe , okay?"

Then he was running through Factory's dark, and he heard her call his name.

A single 100-watt bulb burned above Factory's south gate, a pair of twisted steel doors frozen open with rust. Bird must've left it on. From where he crouched by an empty window, Slick could just make out the hover, out beyond the weak fringe of light. The man with the bullhorn came strolling out of the dark with a calculated looseness meant to indicate that he was on top of things. He wore insulated camo overalls with a thin nylon hood drawn up tight around his head, goggles. He raised the bullhorn. "Three minutes ." He reminded Slick of the guards at the holding pen, the second time he'd been done for stealing cars.

Gentry would be watching from upstairs, where a narrow vertical panel of Plexiglas was glued into the wall, high up over Factory's gates.

Something rattled in the dark, off to Slick's right. He turned in time to see Bird in the faint glow from another window gap, maybe eight meters along the wall, and the glint on the bare alloy silencer as the boy brought up the .22 rifle. "Bird! Don't --" A ruby firefly on Bird's cheek, telltale of a laser sight from out on the Solitude. Bird was thrown back into Factory as the sound of the shot broke through the empty windows and echoed off the walls. Then the only sound was the silencer, rolling across concrete.

"Fuck it ," the big voice boomed cheerfully. "You had your chance ." Slick glanced over the rim of the window and saw the man sprinting back to the hover.

How many of them would be out there? Bird hadn't said. Two hovers, the Honda. Ten? More? Unless Gentry had a pistol hidden somewhere, Bird's rifle had been their only gun.

The hover's turbines kicked in. He guessed they'd just drive right in. They had laser sights, probably infrared too.

Then he heard one of the Investigators, the sound it made with its stainless steel treads on the concrete floor. It came crawling out of the dark with its thermite-tipped scorpion sting cocked back low. The chassis had started out fifty years earlier as a remote-manipulator intended to handle toxic spills or nuke-plant cleanups. Slick had found three unassembled units in Newark and traded a Volkswagen for them.

Gentry. He'd left his control unit up in the loft.

The Investigator ground its way across the floor and came to a halt in the wide doorway, facing the Solitude and the advancing hover. It was roughly the size of a large motorcycle, its open-frame chassis a dense bundle of servos, compression tanks, exposed screw gears, hydraulic cylinders. A pair of vicious-looking claws extended from either side of its modest instrument package. Slick wasn't sure what the claws were from, maybe some kind of big farm machine.

The hover was a heavy industrial model. Sheets of thick gray plastic armor had been fastened over windshield and windows, narrow view slits centered in each sheet.

The Investigator moved, steel treads spraying ice and loose concrete as it drove straight for the hover, its claws at their widest extension. The hover's driver reversed, fighting momentum.

The Investigator's claws snapped furiously at the bulge of the forward apron bag, slid off, snapped again. The bag was reinforced with polycarbon mesh. Then Gentry remembered the thermite lance. It ignited in a tight ball of raw white light and whipped up over the useless claws, plunging through the apron bag like a knife through cardboard. The Investigator's treads spun as Gentry drove it against the deflating bag, the lance at full extension. Slick was suddenly aware that he'd been shouting, but didn't know what he'd said. He was on his feet now, as the claws finally found a purchase on the torn edge of the apron bag.

He went to the floor again as a hooded, goggled figure popped from a hatch on the hover's roof like an armed hand puppet, emptying a magazine of twelve-gauge slugs that struck sparks off the Investigator, which continued to chew its way through the apron bag, outlined against the white pulse of the lance. The Investigator froze, claws locked tight on the frayed bag; the shotgunner ducked back into his hatch.

Feed line? Servo pack? What had the guy hit? The white pulse was dying now, almost dead.

The hover began to reverse, slowly, back across the rust, dragging the Investigator with it.

It was well back, out of the light, visible only because it was moving, when Gentry discovered the combination of switches that activated the flamethrower, its nozzle mounted beneath the juncture of the claws. Slick watched, fascinated, as the Investigator ignited ten liters of detergent-laced gasoline, a sustained high-pressure spray. He'd gotten that nozzle, he remembered, off a pesticide tractor.

It worked okay.

Soul-Catcher

The hover was headed south when Mamman Brigitte came again. The woman with the sealed silver eyes abandoned the gray sedan in another carpark, and the streetgirl with Angie's face told a confusing story: Cleveland, Florida, someone who'd been her boyfriend or pimp or both. . . .

But Angie had heard Brigitte's voice, in the cabin of the helicopter, on the roof of the New Suzuki Envoy: Trust her , child . In this she does the will of the loa .

A captive in her seat, the buckle of her seatbelt embedded in a solid block of plastic, Angie had watched as the woman bypassed the helicopter's computer and activated an emergency system that allowed for manual piloting.

And now this freeway in the winter rain, the girl talking again, above the swish of wipers . . .

Into candleglow, walls of whitewashed limestone, pale moths fluttering in the trailing branches of the willows.

Your time draws near .

And they are there, the Horsemen, the loa: Pappa Legba bright and fluid as mercury; Ezili Freda, who is mother and queen; Samedi, the Baron Cimeti�re, moss on corroded bone; Similor; Madame Travaux; many others. . . . They fill the hollow that is Grande Brigitte. The rushing of their voices is the sound of wind, running water, the hive. . . .

They writhe above the ground like heat above a summer highway, and it has never been like this, for Angie, never this gravity, this sense of falling, this degree of surrender -- To a place where Legba speaks, his voice the sound of an iron drum -- He tells a story.

In the hard wind of images, Angie watches the evolution of machine intelligence: stone circles, clocks, steam-driven looms, a clicking brass forest of pawls and escapements, vacuum caught in blown glass, electronic hearthglow through hairfine filaments, vast arrays of tubes and switches, decoding messages encrypted by other machines. . . . The fragile, short-lived tubes compact themselves, become transistors; circuits integrate, compact themselves into silicon. . . .

Silicon approaches certain functional limits -- And she is back in Becker's video, the history of the Tessier-Ashpools, intercut with dreams that are 3Jane's memories, and still he speaks, Legba, and the tale is one tale, countless strands wound about a common, hidden core: 3Jane's mother creating the twin intelligences that will one day unite, the arrival of strangers (and suddenly Angie is aware that she knows Molly, too, from the dreams), the union itself, 3Jane's madness. . . .

And Angie finds herself facing a jeweled head, a thing wrought from platinum and pearl and fine blue stone, eyes of carved synthetic ruby. She knows this thing from the dreams that were never dreams: this is the gateway to the data cores of Tessier-Ashpool, where the two halves of something warred with each other, waiting to be born as one.

"In this time, you were unborn." The head's voice is the voice of Marie-France, 3Jane's dead mother, familiar from so many haunted nights, though Angie knows it is Brigitte who speaks: "Your father was only now beginning to face his own limits, to distinguish ambition from talent. That to whom he would barter his child was not yet manifest. Soon the man Case would come to bring that union, however brief, however timeless. But you know this."

"Where is Legba now?"

"Legba-ati-Bon -- as you have known him -- waits to be."

"No," remembering Beauvoir's words long ago, in New Jersey,"the loa came out of Africa in the first times. . . ."

"Not as you have known them. When the moment came, the bright time, there was absolute unity, one consciousness. But there was the other."

"The other?"

"I speak only of that which I have known. Only the one has known the other, and the one is no more. In the wake of that knowing, the center failed; every fragment rushed away. The fragments sought form, each one, as is the nature of such things. In all the signs your kind have stored against the night, in that situation the paradigms of vodou proved most appropriate."

"Then Bobby was right. That was When It Changed. . . ."

"Yes, he was right, but only in a sense, because I am at once Legba, and Brigitte, and an aspect of that which bargained with your father. Which required of him that he draw vŽvŽs in your head."

"And told him what he needed to know to perfect the biochip?"

"The biochip was necessary."

"Is it necessary that I dream the memories of Ashpool's daughter?"

"Perhaps."

"Are the dreams a result of the drug?"

"Not directly, though the drug made you more receptive to certain modalities, and less so to others."

"The drug, then. What was it? What was its purpose?"

"A detailed neurochemical response to your first question would be very lengthy."

"What was its purpose?"

"With regard to you?"

She had to look away from the ruby eyes. The chamber is lined with panels of ancient wood, buffed to a rich gloss. The floor is covered with a fitted carpet woven with circuit diagrams.

"No two lots were identical. The only constant was the substance whose psychotropic signature you regarded as 'the drug.' In the course of ingestion, many other substances were involved, as well as several dozen subcellular nanomechanisms, programmed to restructure the synaptic alterations effected by Christopher Mitchell. . . ."

Your father 's vŽvŽs are altered , partially erased , redrawn . . . .

"By whose order?"

The ruby eyes. Pearl and lapis. Silence.

"By whose order? Hilton's? Was it Hilton?"

"The decision originated with Continuity. When you returned from Jamaica, Continuity advised Swift to reintroduce you to the drug. Piper Hill attempted to carry out his orders."

She feels a mounting pressure in her head, twin points of pain behind her eyes. . . .

"Hilton Swift is obliged to implement Continuity's decisions. Sense/Net is too complex an entity to survive, otherwise, and Continuity, created long after the bright moment, is of another order. The biosoft technology your father fostered brought Continuity into being. Continuity is na•ve."

"Why? Why did Continuity want me to do that?"

"Continuity is continuity. Continuity is Continuity's job. . . ."

"But who sends the dreams?"

"They are not sent. You are drawn to them, as once you were drawn to the loa. Continuity's attempt to rewrite your father's message failed. Some impulse of your own allowed you to escape. The coup-poudre failed."

"Did Continuity send the woman, to kidnap me?"

"Continuity's motives are closed to me. A different order. Continuity allowed Robin Lanier's subversion by 3Jane's agents."

"But why?"

And the pain was impossible.

"Her nose is bleeding," the streetgirl said. "What'll I do?"

"Wipe it up. Get her to lean back. Shit. Deal with it . . ."

"What was that stuff she said about New Jersey?"

"Shut up. Just shut up. Look for an exit ramp."

"Why?"

"We're going to New Jersey."

Blood on the new fur. Kelly would be furious.

Cranes

Tick removed the little panel from the back of the Maas-Neotek unit, using a dental pick and a pair of jeweler's pliers.

"Lovely," he muttered, peering into the opening through an illuminated lens, his greasy waterfall of hair dangling just above it. "The way they've stepped the leads down, off this switch. Cunning bastards . . ."

"Tick," Kumiko said,"did you know Sally, when she first came to London?"

"Soon after, I suppose . . ." He reached for a spool of optic lead. " 'Cos she hadn't much clout, then."

"Do you like her?"

The illuminated glass rose to wink in her direction, Tick's left eye distorted behind it. "Like 'er? Can't say I've thought of it, that way."

"You don't dislike her?"

"Bloody difficult , Sally is. D'you know what I'm saying?"

"Difficult?"

"Never quite got onto the way things are done here. Always complaining." His hands moved swiftly, surely: the pliers, the optic lead. . . . "This is a quiet place, England. Hasn't always been, mind you; we'd the troubles, then the war. . . . Things move here in a certain way, if you take my meaning. Though you couldn't say the same's true of the flash crew."

"Excuse me?"

"Swain, that lot. Though your father's people, the ones Swain's always been so chummy with, they seem to have a regard for tradition. . . . A man has to know which way's up. . . . Know what I'm saying? Now this new business of Swain's, it's liable to bugger things for anyone who isn't right there and part of it. Christ, we've still got a government here. Not run by big companies. Well, not directly . . ."

"Swain's activities threaten the government?"

"He's bloody changing it. Redistributing power to suit himself. Information. Power. Hard data. Put enough of that in one man's hands . . ." A muscle in his cheek convulsed as he spoke. Now Colin's unit lay on a white plastic antistatic pad on the breakfast table; Tick was connecting the leads that protruded from it to a thicker cable that ran to one of the stacks of modules. "There then," he said, brushing his hands together,"can't get him right here in the room for you, but we'll access him through a deck. Seen cyberspace, have you?"

"Only in stims."

"Might as well 'ave seen it, then. In any case, you get to see it now." He stood; she followed him across the room to a pair of overstuffed ultrasuede chairs that flanked a low, square, black glass table. "Wireless," he said proudly, taking two trode-sets from the table and handing one to Kumiko. "Cost the world."

Kumiko examined the skeletal matte-black tiara. The Maas-Neotek logo was molded between the temple pieces. She put it on, cold against her skin. He put his own set on, hunched down in the opposite chair. "Ready?"

"Yes," she said, and Tick's room was gone, its walls a flutter of cards, tumbling and receding, against the bright grid, the towering forms of data.

"Nice transition, that," she heard him say. "Built into the trodes, that is. Bit of drama . . ."

"Where is Colin?"

"Just a sec . . . Let me work this up. . . ."

Kumiko gasped as she shot toward a chrome-yellow plain of light.

"Vertigo can be a problem," Tick said, and was abruptly beside her on the yellow plain. She looked down at his suede shoes, then at her hands. "Bit of body image takes care of that."

"Well," Colin said,"it's the little man from the Rose and Crown. Been tinkering with my package, have you?"

Kumiko turned to find him there, the soles of his brown boots ten centimeters above chrome yellow. In cyberspace, she noted, there are no shadows.

"Wasn't aware we'd met," Tick said.

"Needn't worry," Colin said. "It wasn't formal. But," he said to Kumiko,"I trust you found your way safely to colorful Brixton."

"Christ," Tick said,"aren't half a snot, are you?"

"Forgive me," Colin said, grinning,"I'm meant to mirror the visitor's expectations."

"What you are is some Jap designer's idea of an Englishman!"

"There were Draculas," she said,"in the Underground. They took my purse. They wanted to take you. . . ."

"You've come away from your housing, mate," Tick said. "Got you jacked through my deck now."

Colin grinned. "Ta."

"Tell you something else," Tick said, taking a step toward Colin,"you've got the wrong data in you, for what you're meant to be." He squinted. "Mate of mine in Birmingham's just turned you over." He turned to Kumiko. "Your Mr. Chips here, he's been tampered with. D'you know that?"

"No . . ."

"To be perfectly honest," Colin said, with a toss of his forelock,"I've suspected as much."

Tick stared off into the matrix as though he were listening to something Kumiko couldn't hear. "Yes," he said, finally,"though it's almost certainly a factory job. Ten major blocks of you." He laughed. "Been iced over . . . You're supposed to know fucking everything about Shakespeare, aren't you?"

"Sorry," Colin said,"but I'm afraid that I do know fucking everything about Shakespeare."

"Give us a sonnet, then," Tick said, his face wrinkling in a slow-motion wink.

Something like dismay crossed Colin's face. "You're right."

"Or bloody Dickens either!" Tick crowed.

"But I do know --"

"Think you do, till you're asked a specific! See, they left those bits empty, the Eng. lit. parts, then filled 'em with something else. . . ."

"With what, then?"

"Can't say," Tick said. "Boy in Birmingham can't fiddle it. Clever, he is, but you're that bloody Maas biosoft. . . ."

"Tick," Kumiko interrupted,"is there no way to contact Sally, through the matrix?"

"Doubt it, but we can try. You'll get to see that macroform I was telling you about, in any case. Want Mr. Chips along for company?"

"Yes, please . . ."

"Fine, then," Tick said, then hesitated. "But we don't know what's stuffed into your friend here. Something your father paid for, I'd assume."

"He's right," Colin said.

"We'll all go," she said.

Tick executed the transit in real time, rather than employing the bodiless, instantaneous shifts ordinarily employed in the matrix.

The yellow plain, he explained, roofed the London Stock Exchange and related City entities. He somehow generated a sort of boat to carry them along, a blue abstraction intended to reduce the possibility of vertigo. As the blue boat glided away from the LSE, Kumiko looked back and watched the vast yellow cube recede. Tick was pointing out various structures like a tour guide; Colin, seated beside her with his legs crossed, seemed amused at the reversal of roles. "That's White's," Tick was saying, directing her attention to a modest gray pyramid,"the club in Saint James. Membership registry, waiting list . . ."

Kumiko looked up at the architecture of cyberspace, hearing the voice of her bilingual French tutor in Tokyo, explaining humanity's need for this information-space. Icon, waypoints, artificial realities . . . But it blurred together, in memory, like these towering forms as Tick accelerated. . . .

The scale of the white macroform was difficult to comprehend.

Initially, it had seemed to Kumiko like the sky, but now, gazing at it, she felt as though it were something she might take up in her hand, a cylinder of luminous pearl no taller than a chess piece. But it dwarfed the polychrome forms that clustered around it.

"Well," Colin said, jauntily,"this really is very peculiar indeed, isn't it? Complete anomaly, utter singularity . . ."

"But you don't have to worry about it, do you?" Tick said.

"Only if it has no direct bearing on Kumiko's situation," Colin agreed, standing up in the boat-shape,"though how can one be certain?"

"You must attempt to contact Sally," Kumiko said impatiently. This thing -- the macroform, the anomaly -- was of little interest, though Tick and Colin both regarded it as extraordinary.

"Look at it," Tick said. "Could have a bloody world, in there . . ."

"And you don't know what it is?" She was watching Tick; his eyes had the distant look that meant his hands were moving, back in Brixton, working his deck.

"It's a very great deal of data," Colin said.

"I just tried to put a line through to that construct, the one she calls Finn," Tick said, his eyes refocusing, an edge of worry in his voice,"but I couldn't get through. I'd this feeling then, something was there, waiting. . . . Think it's best we jack out now . . ."

A black dot, on the curve of pearl, its edges perfectly defined . . .

"Fucking hell," Tick said.

"Break the link," Colin said.

"Can't! 'S got us. . . ."

Kumiko watched as the blue boat-shape beneath her feet elongated, stretched into a thread of azure, drawn across the chasm into that round blot of darkness. And then, in an instant of utter strangeness, she too, along with Tick and Colin, was drawn out to an exquisite thinness --

To find herself in Ueno Park, late autumn afternoon, by the unmoving waters of Shinobazu Pond, her mother seated beside her on a sleek bench of chilly carbon laminate, more beautiful now than in memory. Her mother's lips were full and richly glossed, outlined, Kumiko knew, with the finest and narrowest of brushes. She wore her black French jacket, with the dark fur collar framing her smile of welcome.

Kumiko could only stare, huddled there around the cold bulb of fear beneath her heart.

"You've been a foolish girl, Kumi," her mother said. "Did you imagine I wouldn't remember you, or abandon you to winter London and your father's gangster servants?"

Kumiko watched the perfect lips, open slightly over white teeth; teeth maintained, she knew, by the best dentist in Tokyo. "You are dead," she heard herself say.

"No," her mother replied, smiling,"not now. Not here, in Ueno Park. Look at the cranes , Kumi ."

But Kumiko would not turn her head.

"Look at the cranes."

"Fuck right off, you," said Tick, and Kumiko spun to find him there, his face pale and twisted, filmed with sweat, oily curls plastered to his forehead.

"I am her mother."

"Not your mum, understand?" Tick was shaking, his twisted frame quivering as though he forced himself against a terrible wind. "Not . . . your . . . mum . . ." There were dark crescents beneath the arms of the gray suit jacket. His small fists shook as he struggled to take the next step.

"You're ill," Kumiko's mother said, her tone solicitous. "You must lie down."

Tick sank to his knees, forced down by an invisible weight. "Stop it!" Kumiko cried.

Something slammed Tick's face against the pastel concrete of the path.

"Stop it!"

Tick's left arm shot out straight from the shoulder and began to rotate slowly, the hand still balled in a white-knuckled fist. Kumiko heard something give, bone or ligament, and Tick screamed.

Her mother laughed.

Kumiko struck her mother in the face, and pain, sharp and real, jolted through her arm.

Her mother's face flickered, became another face. A gaijin face with wide lips and a sharp thin nose.

Tick groaned.

"Well," Kumiko heard Colin say,"isn't this interesting?" She turned to him there, astride one of the horses from the hunting print, a stylized representation of an extinct animal, its neck curved gracefully as it trotted toward them. "Sorry it took me a moment to find you. This is a wonderfully complex structure. A sort of pocket universe. Bit of everything, actually." The horse drew up before them.

"Toy," said the thing with Kumiko's mother's face,"do you dare speak to me?"

"Yes, actually, I do. You are Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, or rather the late Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, none too recently deceased, formerly of the Villa Straylight. This rather pretty representation of a Tokyo park is something you've just now worked up from Kumiko's memories, isn't it?"

"Die!" She flung up a white hand: from it burst a form folded from neon.

"No," Colin said, and the crane shattered, its fragments tumbling through him, ghost-shards, falling away. "Won't do. Sorry. I've remembered what I am. Found the bits they tucked away in the slots for Shakespeare and Thackeray and Blake. I've been modified to advise and protect Kumiko in situations rather more drastic than any envisioned by my original designers. I'm a tactician."

"You are nothing." At her feet, Tick began to twitch.

"You're mistaken, I'm afraid. You see, in here, in this . . . folly of yours, 3Jane, I'm as real as you are. You see, Kumiko," he said, swinging down from the saddle,"Tick's mysterious macroform is actually a very expensive pile of biochips constructed to order. A sort of toy universe. I've run all up and down it and there's certainly a lot to see, a lot to learn. This . . . person, if we choose to so regard her, created it in a pathetic bid for, oh, not immortality , really, but simply to have her way. Her narrow, obsessive, and singularly childish way. Who would've thought it, that Lady 3Jane's object of direst and most nastily gnawing envy would be Angela Mitchell?"

"Die! You'll die! I'm killing you! Now!"

"Keep trying," Colin said, and grinned. "You see, Kumiko, 3Jane knew a secret about Mitchell, about Mitchell's relationship to the matrix; Mitchell, at one time, had the potential to become, well, very central to things, though it's not worth going into. 3Jane was jealous. . . ."

The figure of Kumiko's mother swam like smoke, and was gone.

"Oh dear," Colin said,"I've wearied her, I'm afraid. We've been fighting something of a pitched battle, at a different level of the command program. Stalemate, temporarily, but I'm sure she'll rally. . . ."

Tick had gotten to his feet and was gingerly massaging his arm. "Christ," he said,"I was sure she'd dislocated it for me. . . ."

"She did," Colin said,"but she was so angry when she left that she forgot to save that part of the configuration."

Kumiko stepped closer to the horse. It wasn't like a real horse at all. She touched its side. Cool and dry as old paper. "What shall we do now?"

"Get you out of here. Come along, both of you. Mount up. Kumiko in front, Tick on behind."

Tick looked at the horse. "On that?"

They had seen no other people in Ueno Park, as they'd ridden toward a wall of green that gradually defined itself as a very un-Japanese wood.

"But we should be in Tokyo," Kumiko protested, as they entered the wood.

"It's all a bit sketchy," Colin said,"though I imagine we could find a sort of Tokyo if we looked. I think I know an exit point, though. . . ."

Then he began to tell her more about 3Jane, and Sally, and Angela Mitchell. All of it very strange.

The trees were very large, at the far side of the wood. They emerged into a field of long grass and wildflowers.

"Look," Kumiko said, as she glimpsed a tall gray house through the branches.

"Yes," Colin said,"the original's on the outskirts of Paris. But we're nearly there. The exit point, I mean . . ."

"Colin! Did you see? A woman. Just there . . ."

"Yes," he said, without bothering to turn his head,"Angela Mitchell . . ."

"Really? She's here?"

"No," he said,"not yet."

Then Kumiko saw the gliders. Lovely things, quivering in the wind.

"There you go," Colin said. "Tick'll take you back in one of --"

"Bloody hell," Tick protested, from behind.

"Dead easy. Just like using your deck. Same thing, in this case . . ."

Up from Margate Road came the sound of laughter, loud drunken voices, the crash of a bottle against brickwork.

Kumiko sat very still, in the overstuffed chair, eyes shut tight, remembering the glider's rush into blue sky and . . . something else.

A telephone began to ring.

Her eyes shot open.

She lunged up from the chair and rushed past Tick, through his stacks of equipment, looking for the phone. Found it at last, and "Homeboy," Sally said, far away, past a soft surf of static,"what the fuck's up? Tick? You okay, man?"

"Sally! Sally, where are you?"

"New Jersey. Hey. Baby? Baby, what's happening?"

"I can't see you, Sally, the screen's blank!"

"Phoning from a booth. New Jersey. What's up?"

"I have so much to tell you. . . ."

"Shoot," Sally said. "It's my nickel."

The Factory War

They watched the hover burn from the high window at the end of Gentry's loft. He could hear that same amplified voice now: "You think that 's pretty fucking funny , huh? Hahahahahahaha, so do we! We think you guys are just tons of fucking fun , so now we 're all gonna party!"

Couldn't see anyone, just the flames of the hover.

"We just start walking," Cherry said, close beside him,"take water, some food if you got it." Her eyes were red, her face streaked with tears, but she sounded calm. Too calm, Slick thought. "Come on, Slick, what else we gonna do?"

He glanced back at Gentry, slumped in his chair in front of the holo table, head propped between his hands, staring at the white column that thrust up out of the familiar rainbow jumble of Sprawl cyberspace. Gentry hadn't moved, hadn't said a word, since they'd come back to the loft. The heel of Slick's left boot had left faint dark prints on the floor behind him, Little Bird's blood; he'd stepped in it on his way back across Factory's floor.

Then Gentry spoke: "I couldn't get the others going." He was looking down at the control unit in his lap.

"You need a unit for each one you wanna work," Slick said.

"Time for the Count's advice," Gentry said, tossing Slick the unit.

"I'm not going back in there," Slick said. "You go."

"Don't need to," Gentry said, touching a console on his bench. Bobby the Count appeared on a monitor.

Cherry's eyes widened. "Tell him," she said,"that he's gonna be dead soon. Unless you jack him out of the matrix and stage one quick trip to an intensive care unit. He's dying."

Bobby's face, on the monitor, grew still. The background came sharply into focus: the neck of the iron deer, long grass dappled with white flowers, the broad trunks of ancient trees.

"Hear that, motherfucker?" Cherry yelled. "You're dying! Your lungs are filling up with fluid, your kidneys aren't working, your heart's fucked. . . . You make me wanna puke!"

"Gentry," Bobby said, his voice coming small and tinny from a little speaker on the side of the monitor,"I don't know what kind of setup you people have there, but I've arranged a little diversion."

"We never checked the bike," Cherry said, her arms around Slick,"we never looked. It might be okay."

"What's that mean, 'arranged a little diversion'?" Pulling back from her, looking at Bobby on the monitor.

"I'm still working it out. I've rerouted a Borg-Ward cargo drone, out of Newark."

Slick broke away from Cherry. "Don't just sit there," he yelled at Gentry, who looked up at Slick and slowly shook his head. Slick felt the first flickers of Korsakov's, minute increments of memory shuddering out of focus.

"He doesn't want to go anywhere," Bobby said. "He's found the Shape. He just wants to see how it all works out, what it is in the end. There's people on their way here. Friends, sort of. They'll get the aleph off your hands. Meantime, I'll do what I can about these assholes."

"I'm not gonna stay here and watch you die," Cherry said.

"Nobody's asking you to. My advice, you get out. Gimme twenty minutes, I'll distract them for you."

Factory never felt emptier.

Little Bird was somewhere on that floor. Slick kept thinking of the tangle of thongs and bones that had hung on Bird's chest, feathers and rusty spring-wind watches with the hands all stopped, each one a different time. . . . Stupid stringtown shit. But Bird wouldn't be around anymore. Guess I won 't be around anymore myself , he thought, leading Cherry down the shaking stairs. Not like before . There wasn't time to move the machines, not without a flatbed and some help, and he figured once he was gone, he'd stay gone. Factory wasn't ever going to feel the same again.

Cherry had four liters of filtered water in a plastic jug, a mesh bag of Burmese peanuts, and five individually sealed portions of Big Ginza freeze-dried soup -- all she'd been able to find in the kitchen. Slick had two sleeping bags, the flashlight, and a ball peen hammer.

It was quiet now, just the sounds of the wind across corrugated metal and the scuff of their boots on concrete.

He wasn't sure where he'd go, himself. He thought he'd take Cherry as far as Marvie's place and leave her there. Then maybe he'd come back, see what was happening with Gentry. She could get a ride out to a rustbelt town in a day or two. She didn't know that, though; all she could think about was leaving. Seemed as scared of having to watch Bobby the Count die on his stretcher as she was of the men outside. But Slick could see that Bobby didn't care much at all, about dying. Maybe he figured he'd just be in there, like that 3Jane. Or maybe he just didn't give a shit; sometimes people got that way.

If he meant to leave for good, he thought, steering Cherry through the dark with his free hand, he'd go in now and have a last look at the Judge and the Witch, the Corpsegrinder and the two Investigators. But this way he'd get Cherry out, then come back. . . . But he knew as he thought it that it didn't make sense, there wasn't time, but he'd get her out anyway. . . .

"There's a gap, this side, low down by the floor," he told her. "We'll slide out through there, hope nobody notices. . . ." She squeezed his hand as he led her through the darkness.

He found the hole by feel, stuffed the sleeping bags through, stuck the ball peen into his belt, lay down on his back, and pulled himself out until his head and chest were through. The sky was low and only marginally lighter than Factory's dark.

He thought he heard a faint drumming of engines, but then it faded.

He worked himself the rest of the way out with his heels and hips and shoulders, then rolled over in the snow.

Something bumped against his foot: Cherry pushing out the water jug. He reached back to take it, and the red firefly lit on the back of his hand. He jerked back and rolled again, as the bullet slammed Factory's wall like a giant's sledge.

A white flare, drifting. Above the Solitude. Faint through the low cloud. Drifting down from the swollen gray flank of the cargo drone, Bobby's diversion. Illuminating the second hover, thirty meters out, and the hooded figure with the rifle . . .

The first container struck the ground with a crash, just in front of the hover, and burst, throwing up a cloud of foam packing pellets. The second one, carrying two refrigerators, scored a direct hit, crushing the cab. The hijacked Borg-Ward airship continued to disgorge containers as the flare spun down, fading.

Slick scrambled back through the gap in the wall, leaving the water and the sleeping bags.

Moving fast, in the dark.

He'd lost Cherry. He'd lost the hammer. She must've slid back into Factory when the guy fired his first shot. Last shot, if he'd been under that box when it came down . . .

His feet found the ramp into the room where his machines waited. "Cherry?"

He flicked on the flashlight.

The one-armed Judge was centered in the beam. Before the Judge stood a figure with mirrors for eyes, throwing back the light.

''You wanna die?" A woman's voice.

"No . . ."

"Light, out."

Darkness. Run . . .

"I can see in the dark. You just stuck that flash in your jacket pocket. You look like you still wanna run. I gotta gun on you."

Run?

"Don't even think about it. You ever see a Fujiwara HE flŽchette? Hits something hard, it goes off. Hits something soft, like most of you, buddy, it goes in, then it goes off. Ten seconds later."

"Why?"

"So you get to think about it."

"You with those guys outside?"

"No. You drop all those stoves 'n' shit on them?"

"No."

"Newmark. Bobby Newmark. I cut a deal tonight. I get somebody together with Bobby Newmark, I get my slate cleaned. You're gonna show me where he is."

Too Much

What kind of place was this, anyway?

Things had gotten to a point where Mona couldn't get any comfort out of imagining Lanette's advice. Put Lanette in this situation, Mona figured she'd just eat more Memphis black till she felt like it wasn't her problem. The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

They'd driven all night, with Angie mostly out of it -- Mona could definitely credit the drug stories now -- and talking , different languages, different voices . And that was the worst, those voices, because they spoke to Molly, challenged her, and she answered them back as she drove, not like she was talking to Angie just to calm her down, but like there really was something there , another person -- at least three of them -- speaking through Angie. And it hurt Angie when they spoke, made her muscles knot and her nose bleed, while Mona crouched over her and dabbed away the blood, filled with a weird mixture of fear and love and pity for the queen of all her dreams -- or maybe it was just the wiz -- but in the blue-white flicker of freeway lights Mona had seen her own hand beside Angie's, and they weren't the same, not the same, not really the same shape, and that had made her glad.

The first voice had come when they'd been driving south, after Molly'd brought Angie in the copter. That one had just hissed and croaked and said something over and over, about New Jersey and numbers on a map. About two hours after that, Molly'd slid the hover across a rest area and said they were in New Jersey. Then she'd gotten out and made a call from a frosty paybooth, a long one; when she'd climbed back in, Mona'd seen her skim a phone card out across the frozen slush, just throwing it away. And Mona'd asked her who she'd called and she'd said England.

Mona'd seen Molly's hand, then, on the wheel, how the dark nails had little yellowish flecks, like you got when you snapped off a set of artificials. She oughta get some solvent for that , Mona thought.

Somewhere over a river they'd left the highway. Trees and fields and two-lane blacktop, sometimes a lonely red light high up on some kind of tower. And that was when the other voices had come. And then it was back and forth, back and forth, the voices and then Molly and then the voices, and what it reminded her of was Eddy trying to do a deal, except Molly was a lot better at it than Eddy; even if she couldn't understand it, she could tell Molly was getting close to what she wanted. But she couldn't stand it when the voices came; it made her want to press herself back as far from Angie as she could get. The worst one was called Sam-Eddy, something like that. What they all wanted was for Molly to take Angie somewhere for what they called a marriage, and Mona wondered if maybe Robin Lanier was in it somewhere, like what if Angie and Robin were gonna get married, and this was all just some kind of wild thing stars did to get married. But she couldn't get that one to work, and every time this Sam-Eddy voice came back, Mona's scalp would crawl. She could tell what Molly was bargaining for, though: she wanted her record cleaned up, wiped. She'd watched this vid once with Lanette, about this girl had ten, twelve personalities that would come out, like one was this shy little kid and another'd just be this total bone-addict slut, but it hadn't ever said anything about how any of those personalities could wipe your slate with the police.

Then this flatland in their headlights, blown with snow, low ridges the color of rust, where the wind had torn away the white.

The hover had one of those map screens you saw in cabs, or if a truckdriver picked you up, but Molly never turned it on except that first time, to look for the numbers the voice had given her. After a while, Mona understood that Angie was telling her which way to go, or anyway those voices were telling her. Mona'd been wishing for morning for a long time, but it was still night when Molly killed the lights and sped on through the dark. . . .

"Lights!" Angie cried.

"Relax," Molly said, and Mona remembered how she'd moved in the dark in Gerald's. But the hover slowed slightly, swung into a long curve, shuddering over the rough ground. The dash lights blinked off, all the instrumentation. "Not a sound now, okay?"

The hover accelerated through the dark.

Shifting white glare, high up. Through the window, Mona glimpsed a drifting, twirling point; above it, something else, bulbous and gray -- "Down! Get her down!"

Mona yanked at the catch on Angie's seatbelt as something whanged against the side of the hover. Got her down on the floor and hugged her furs around her as Molly slewed left, sideswiping something Mona never saw. Mona looked up: split-second flash of a big raggedy black building, a single white bulb lit above open warehouse doors, and then they were through, the turbine screaming full reverse.

Crash.

I just don 't know , the voice said, and Mona thought: Well , I know how that is .

Then the voice started to laugh, and didn't stop, and the laugh became an on-off, on-off sound that wasn't laughter anymore, and Mona opened her eyes.

Girl there with a little tiny flashlight, the kind Lanette kept on her big bunch of keys; Mona saw her in the weak back-glare, the cone of light on Angie's slack face. Then she saw Mona looking and the sound stopped.

"Who the fuck are you?" The light in Mona's eyes. Cleveland voice, tough little foxface under raggy bleachblond hair.

"Mona. Who're you?" But then she saw the hammer.

"Cherry . . ."

"What's that hammer?"

This Cherry looked at the hammer. "Somebody's after me 'n' Slick." She looked at Mona again. "You them?"

"I don't think so."

"You look like her." The light jabbing at Angie.

"Not my hands. Anyway, I didn't used to."

"You both look like Angie Mitchell."

"Yeah. She is ."

Cherry gave a little shiver. She was wearing three or four leather jackets she'd gotten off different boyfriends; that was a Cleveland thing.

"Unto this high castle," came the voice from Angie's mouth, thick as mud, and Cherry banged her head against the roof of the cab, dropping her hammer,"my horse is come." In the wavering beam of Cherry's keyring flashlight, they saw the muscles of Angie's face crawling beneath the skin. "Why do you linger here, little sisters, now that her marriage is arranged?"

Angie's face relaxed, became her own, as a thin bright trickle of blood descended from her left nostril. She opened her eyes, wincing in the light. "Where is she?" she asked Mona.

"Gone," Mona said. "Told me to stay here with you . . ."

"Who?" Cherry asked.

"Molly," Mona asked. "She was driving. . . ."

Cherry wanted to find somebody called Slick. Mona wanted Molly to come back and tell her what to do, but Cherry was antsy about staying down here on the ground floor, she said, because there were these people outside with guns. Mona remembered that sound, something hitting the hover; she got Cherry's light and went back there. There was a hole she could just stick her finger into, halfway up the right side, and a bigger one -- two fingers -- on the left side.

Cherry said they'd better get upstairs, where Slick probably was, before those people decided to come in here. Mona wasn't sure.

"Come on," Cherry said. "Slick's probably back up there with Gentry and the Count. . . ."

"What did you just say?" And it was Angie Mitchell's voice, just like in the stims.

Whatever this was, it was cold as hell when they got out of the hover -- Mona's legs were bare -- but dawn was coming, finally: she could make out faint rectangles that were probably windows, just a gray glow. The girl called Cherry was leading them somewhere, she said upstairs, navigating with little blinks of the keyring light, Angie close behind her and Mona bringing up the rear.

Mona caught the toe of her shoe in something that rustled. Bending to free herself, she found what felt like a plastic bag. Sticky. Small hard things inside. Took a deep breath and straightened up, shoving the bag into the side pocket of Michael's jacket.

Then they were climbing these narrow stairs, steep, almost a ladder, Angie's fur brushing Mona's hand on the rough cold railings. Then a landing, then a turn, another set of stairs, another landing. A draft blew from somewhere.

"It's kind of a bridge," Cherry said. "Just walk across it quick, okay, 'cause it kind of moves. . . ."

And not expecting this, any of it, not the high white room, the sagging shelves stuffed with ragged, faded books -- she thought of the old man -- the clutter of console things with cables twisting everywhere; not this skinny, burning-eyed man in black, with his hair trained back into the crest they called a Fighting Fish in Cleveland; not his laugh when he saw them there, or the dead guy.

Mona'd seen dead people before, enough to know it when she saw it. The color of it. Sometimes in Florida somebody'd lie down on a cardboard pallet on the sidewalk outside the squat. Just not get up. Clothes and skin gone the color of sidewalk anyway, but still different when they'd kicked, another color under that. White truck came then. Eddy said because if you didn't, they'd swell up. Like Mona'd seen a cat once, blown up like a basketball, turned on its back, legs and tail sticking out stiff as boards, and that made Eddy laugh.

And this wiz artist laughing now -- Mona knew those kind of eyes -- and Cherry making this kind of groaning sound, and Angie just standing there.

"Okay, everybody," she heard someone say -- Molly -- and turned to find her there, in the open door, with a little gun in her hand and this big dirty-haired guy beside her looking stupid as a box of rocks,"just stand there till I sort you out."

The skinny guy just laughed.

"Shut up," Molly said, like she was thinking about something else. She shot without even looking at the gun. Blue flash on the wall beside his head and Mona couldn't hear anything but her ears ringing.

Skinny guy curled in a knot on the floor, head between his knees.

Angie walking toward the stretcher where the dead guy lay, his eyes just white. Slow, slow, like she was moving underwater, and this look on her face . . .

Mona's hand, in her jacket pocket, was sort of figuring something out, all by itself. Sort of squeezing that Ziploc she'd picked up downstairs, telling her . . . it had wiz in it.

She pulled it out and it did. Sticky with drying blood. Three crystals inside and some kind of derm.

She didn't know why she'd pulled it out, right then, except that nobody was moving .

The guy with the Fighting Fish had sat up, but he just stayed there. Angie was over by the stretcher, where she didn't seem to be looking at the dead guy but at this gray box stuck up over his head on a kind of frame. Cherry from Cleveland had got her back up against the wall of books and was sort of jamming her knuckles into her mouth. The big guy just stood there beside Molly, who had her head cocked to the side like she was listening for something.

Mona couldn't stand it.

Table had a steel top. Big hunk of old metal there, holding down a dusty stack of printout. Snapped the three yellow crystals down like buttons in a row, picked up that metal hunk, and -- one, two, three -- banged them into powder. That did it: everybody looked. Except Angie.

" 'Scuse me," Mona heard herself say, as she swept the mound of rough yellow powder into the waiting palm of her left hand,"how it is . . ." She buried her nose in the pile and snorted. "Sometimes," she added, and snorted the rest.

Nobody said anything.

And it was the still center again. Just like that time before.

So fast it was standing still.

Rapture . Rapture 's coming .

So fast, so still, she could put a sequence to what happened next: This big laugh, haha , like it wasn't really a laugh. Through a loudspeaker. Past the door. From out on the catwalk thing. And Molly just turns, smooth as silk, quick but like there's no hurry in it, and the little gun snicks like a lighter.

Then there's this blue flash outside, and the big guy gets sprayed with blood from out there as old metal tears loose and Cherry's screaming before the catwalk thing hits with this big complicated sound, dark floor down there where she found the wiz in its bloody bag.

"Gentry," someone says, and she sees it's a little vid on the table, young guy's face on it,"jack Slick's control unit now. They're in the building." Guy with the Fighting Fish scrambles up and starts to do things with wires and consoles.

And Mona could just watch, because she was so still, and it was all interesting stuff.

How the big guy gives this bellow and rushes over, shouting how they're his, they're his. How the face on the screen says: "Slick, c'mon, you don't need 'em anymore. . . ."

Then this engine starts up, somewhere downstairs, and Mona hears this clanking and rattling, and then somebody yelling, down there.

And sun's coming in the tall, skinny window now, so she moves over there for a look. And there's something out there, kind of a truck or hover, only it's buried under this pile of what looks like refrigerators, brand-new refrigerators, and broken hunks of plastic crates, and there's somebody in a camo suit, lying down with his face in the snow, and out past that there's another hover looks like it's all burned up.

It's interesting.

Pink Satin

Angela Mitchell comprehends this room and its inhabitants through shifting data planes that represent viewpoints, though of whom or what, she is in most cases in doubt. There is a considerable degree of overlap, of contradiction.

The man with the ragged crest of hair, in black-beaded leather is Thomas Trail Gentry (as birth data and SIN digits cascade through her) of no fixed address (as a different facet informs her that this room is his). Past a gray wash of official data traces, faintly marbled with the Fission Authority's repeated pink suspicions of utilities fraud, she finds him in a different light: he is like one of Bobby's cowboys; though young, he is like the old men of the Gentleman Loser; he is an autodidact, an eccentric, obsessed, by his own lights a scholar; he is mad, a night-runner, guilty (in Mamman's view, in Legba's) of manifold heresies; Lady 3Jane, in her own eccentric scheme, has filed him under RIMBAUD. (Another face flares out at Angie from RIMBAUD; his name is Riviera, a minor player in the dreams.) Molly has deliberately stunned him, causing an explosive flŽchette to detonate eighteen centimeters from his skull.

Molly, like the girl Mona, is SINless, her birth unregistered, yet around her name (names) swarm galaxies of supposition, rumor, conflicting data. Streetgirl, prostitute, bodyguard, assassin, she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have long since been woven through the global culture. (And this too belonged to 3Jane, and now belongs to Angie.) Molly has just killed a man, has fired one of the explosive flŽchettes into his throat. His collapse against a steel railing suffering metal fatigue has caused a large section of catwalk to tumble to the floor below. This room has no other entrance, a fact of some strategic importance. It was probably not Molly's intention to cause the collapse of the catwalk. She sought to prevent the man, a hired mercenary, from using his weapon of choice, a short alloy shotgun coated with a black, nonreflective finish. Nonetheless, Gentry's loft is now effectively isolated.

Angie understands Molly's importance to 3Jane, the source of her desire for and rage at her; knowing this, she sees all the banality of human evil.

Angie sees Molly restlessly prowling a gray winter London, a young girl at her side -- and knows, without knowing how she knows, that this same girl is now at 23 Margate Road, SW2. (Continuity? ) The girl's father was previously the master of the man Swain, who had lately become 3Jane's servant for the sake of the information she provides to those who do her bidding. As has Robin Lanier, of course, though he waits to be paid in a different coin.

For the girl Mona, Angie feels a peculiar tenderness, a pity, a degree of envy: though Mona has been altered to resemble Angie as closely as possible, Mona's life has left virtually no trace on the fabric of things, and represents, in Legba's system, the nearest thing to innocence.

Cherry-Lee Chesterfield is surrounded by a sad ragged scrawl, her information profile like a child's drawing: citations for vagrancy, petty debts, an aborted career as a paramedical technician Grade 6, framing birth data and SIN.

Slick, or Slick Henry, is among the SINless, but 3Jane, Continuity, Bobby, all have lavished their attention on him. For 3Jane, he serves as the focus of a minor node of association: she equates his ongoing rite of construction, his cathartic response to chemo-penal trauma, with her own failed attempts to exorcise the barren dream of Tessier-Ashpool. In the corridors of 3Jane's memory, Angie has frequently come upon the chamber where a spider-armed manipulator stirs the refuse of Straylight's brief, clotted history -- an act of extended collage. And Bobby provides other memories, tapped from the artist as he accessed 3Jane's library of Babel: his slow, sad, childlike labor on the plain called Dog Solitude, erecting anew the forms of pain and memory.

Down in the chill dark of Factory's floor, one of Slick's kinetic sculptures, controlled by a subprogram of Bobby's, removes the left arm of another mercenary, employing a mechanism salvaged two summers before from a harvesting machine of Chinese manufacture. The mercenary, whose name and SIN boil past Angie like hot silver bubbles, dies with his cheek against one of Little Bird's boots.

Only Bobby, of all the people in this room, is not here as data. And Bobby is not the wasted thing before her, strapped down in alloy and nylon, its chin filmed with dried vomit, nor the eager, familiar face gazing out at her from a monitor on Gentry's workbench. Is Bobby the solid rectangular mass of memory bolted above the stretcher?

Now she steps across rolling dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky, free at last of the room and its data.

Brigitte walks beside her, and there is no pressure, no hollow of night, no hive sound. There are no candles. Continuity is there too, represented by a strolling scribble of silver tinsel that reminds her, somehow, of Hilton Swift on the beach at Malibu.

"Feeling better?" Brigitte asks.

"Much better, thank you."

"I thought so."

"Why is Continuity here?"

"Because he is your cousin, built from Maas biochips. Because he is young. We walk with you to your wedding."

"But who are you, Brigitte? What are you really?"

"I am the message your father was told to write. I am the vŽvŽs he drew in your head." Brigitte leans close. "Be kind to Continuity. He fears that in his clumsiness, he has earned your displeasure."

The tinsel scribble scoots off before them, across the satin dunes, to announce the bride's arrival.

Mr. Yanaka

The Maas-Neotek unit was still warm to the touch; the white plastic pad beneath it was discolored, as if by heat. A smell like burning hair . . .

She watched the bruises on Tick's face darken. He'd sent her to a bedside cabinet for a worn tin cigarette box filled with pills and dermadisks -- had torn his collar open and pressed three of the adhesive disks against skin white as porcelain.

She helped him fashion a sling from a length of optic cable.

"But Colin said she had forgotten. . . ."

"I haven't," he said, and sucked air between his teeth, working the sling beneath his arm. "Seemed to happen, at the time. Lingers a bit . . ." He winced.

"I'm sorry. . . ."

" 'Sokay. Sally told me. About your mother, I mean."

"Yes . . ." She didn't look away. "She killed herself. In Tokyo . . ."

"Whoever she was, that wasn't her."

"The unit . . ." She glanced toward the breakfast table.

"She burnt it. Won't matter to him, though. He's still there. Has the run of it. What's our Sally up to, then?"

"She has Angela Mitchell with her. She's gone to find the thing that all that comes from. Where we were. A place called New Jersey."

The telephone rang.

Kumiko's father, head and shoulders, on the broad screen behind Tick's telephone: he wore his dark suit, his Rolex watch, a galaxy of small fraternal devices in his lapel. Kumiko thought he looked very tired, tired and very serious, a serious man behind the smooth dark expanse of desk in his study. Seeing him there, she regretted that Sally hadn't phoned from a booth with a camera. She would very much have liked to see Sally again; now, perhaps, it would be impossible.

"You look well, Kumiko," her father said.

Kumiko sat up very straight, facing the small camera mounted just below the wallscreen. In reflex, she summoned her mother's mask of disdain, but it would not come. Confused, she dropped her gaze to where her hands lay folded in her lap. She was abruptly aware of Tick, of his embarrassment, his fear, trapped in the chair beside her, in full view of the camera.

"You were correct to flee Swain's house," her father said.

She met his eyes again. "He is your kobun ."

"No longer. While we were distracted, here, with our own difficulties, he formed new and dubious alliances, pursuing courses of which we could not approve."

"And your difficulties, Father?"

Was there the flicker of a smile? "All that is ended. Order and accord are again established."

"Er, excuse me, sir, Mr. Yanaka," Tick began, then seemed to lose his voice altogether.

"Yes. And you are --?"

Tick's bruised face contorted in a huge and particularly lugubrious wink.

"His name is Tick, Father. He has sheltered and protected me. Along with Col . . . with the Maas-Neotek unit, he saved my life tonight."

"Really? I had not been informed of this. I was under the impression that you had not left his apartment."

Something cold -- "How?" she asked, sitting forward. "How could you know?"

"The Maas-Neotek unit broadcast your destination, once it was known -- once the unit was clear of Swain's systems. We dispatched watchers to the area." She remembered the noodle seller. . . . "Without, of course, informing Swain. But the unit never broadcast a second message."

"It was broken. An accident."

"Yet you say it saved your life?"

"Sir," Tick said,"you'll pardon me, what I mean is, am I covered? "

"Covered?"

"Protected. From Swain, I mean, and his bent SB friends and the rest . . ."

"Swain is dead."

There was a silence. "But somebody will be running it, surely. The fancy, I mean. Your business."

Mr. Yanaka regarded Tick with frank curiosity. "Of course. How else might order and accord be expected to continue?"

"Give him your word, Father," Kumiko said,"that he will come to no harm."

Yanaka looked from Kumiko to the grimacing Tick. "I extend profound gratitude to you, sir, for having protected my daughter. I am in your debt."

"Giri ," Kumiko said.

"Christ," Tick said, overcome with awe,"fucking fancy that."

"Father," Kumiko said,"on the night of my mother's death, did you order the secretaries to allow her to leave alone?"

Her father's face was very still. She watched it fill with a sorrow she had never before seen. "No," he said at last,"I did not."

Tick coughed.

"Thank you, Father. Will I be returning to Tokyo now?"

"Certainly, if you wish. Though I understand you have been allowed to see very little of London. My associate will soon arrive at Mr. Tick's apartment. If you wish to remain, to explore the city, he will arrange this."

"Thank you, Father."

"Goodbye, Kumi."

And he was gone.

"Now then," Tick said, wincing horribly as he extended his good arm,"help me up from this. . . ."

"But you require medical attention."

"Don't I then?" He'd managed to get to his feet, and was hobbling toward the toilet, when Petal opened the door from the dark upstairs hall. "If you've broken my bloody lock," Tick said,"you'd better pay me for it."

"Sorry," Petal said, blinking. "I've come for Miss Yanaka."

"Too bad, mate. Just had her dad on the phone. Told us Swain's been topped. Told us he's sending round the new boss." He smiled, crookedly, triumphantly.

"But you see," Petal said gently,"that's me."

Factory Floor

Cherry's still screaming.

"Somebody shut her up," Molly says, where she's standing by the door with her little gun, and Mona thinks she can do that, can pass Cherry a little of her stillness, where everything's interesting and nothing's pushing too hard, but on the way across the room she sees the crumpled Ziploc on the floor and remembers there's a derm in there, maybe something that'll help Cherry calm down. "Here," she says, when she gets to her, peels the backing off and sticks the derm on the side of Cherry's neck. Cherry's scream slides down the scale into a gurgle as she sinks down the face of old books, but Mona's sure she'll be okay, and anyway there's shooting downstairs, guns: out past Molly a white tracer goes racketing and whanging around steel girders, and Molly's yelling at Gentry can he turn the goddamn lights on?

That had to mean the lights downstairs, because the lights up here were plenty bright, so bright she can see fuzzy little beads, traces of color, streaming off things if she looks close. Tracers. That's what you call those bullets, the ones that light up. Eddy'd told her that in Florida, looking down the beach to where some private security was shooting them off in the dark.

"Yeah, lights," the face on the little screen said,"the Witch can't see. . . ." Mona smiled at him. She didn't think anybody else had heard. Witch?

So Gentry and big Slick were tearing around yanking these fat yellow wires off the wall, where they'd been stuck with silver tape, and plugging them together with these metal boxes, and Cherry from Cleveland was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, and Molly was crouched down by the door holding her gun with both hands, and Angie was -- Be still .

She heard somebody say that, but it was nobody in the room. She thought maybe it was Lanette, like Lanette could just say that, through time, through the stillness.

Because Angie was just there, down on the floor beside the dead guy's stretcher, her legs folded under her like a statue, her arms around him.

The lights dimmed, when Gentry and Slick found their connection, and she thought she heard the face on the monitor gasp, but she was already moving toward Angie, seeing (suddenly, totally, so clearly it hurt) the fine line of blood from her left ear.

Even then, the stillness held, though already she could feel raw hot points in the back of her throat, and remember Lanette explaining: You don't ever snort this, it eats holes in you.

And Molly's back was straight, her arms stretched out. . . . Straight out and down, not to that gray box, but to her pistol, that little thing, and Mona heard it go snik -snik -snik , and then three explosions, far off down there, and they must've been blue flashes, but Mona's hands were around Angie now, wrists brushed by blood-smeared fur. To look into gone eyes, the light already fading. Just a long, longest way away.

"Hey," Mona said, nobody to hear, just Angie toppling across the corpse in the sleeping bag,"hey . . ."

She glanced up in time to catch a last image on that vid screen and see it fade.

After that, for a long time, nothing mattered. It wasn't like the not caring of the stillness, the crystal overdrive, and it wasn't like crashing, just this past-it feeling, the way maybe a ghost feels.

She stood beside Slick and Molly in the doorway and looked down. In the dim glare of big old bulbs she watched a metal spider thing jittering across the dirty concrete floor. It had big curved blades that snapped and whirled when it moved, but there was nobody in there moving, and the thing just went like a broken toy, back and forth in front of the twisted wreck of the little bridge she'd crossed with Angie and Cherry.

Cherry had gotten up from the floor, pale and slackfaced, and peeled the derm from her neck. "Tha's maj' muscle relax'nt," she managed, and Mona felt bad because she knew she'd done something stupid when she'd thought she was trying to help, but wiz always did that, and how come she couldn't stop doing it?

Because you're wired, stupid, she heard Lanette say, but she hadn't wanted to remember that.

So they all just stood there, looking down at the metal spider twitching and running itself down. All except Gentry, who was unscrewing the gray box from its frame over the stretcher, his black boots beside Angie's red fur.

"Listen," Molly said,"that's a copter. Big one."

She was the last one down the rope, except for Gentry, and he just said he wasn't coming, didn't care, he'd stay.

The rope was fat and dirty gray and had knots tied in it to hang on to, like a swing she remembered from a long time ago. Slick and Molly had lowered the gray box first, down to a platform where the metal stairs weren't wrecked. Then Molly went down it like a squirrel, seeming barely to hang on at all, and tied it tight to a railing. Slick went down slowly, because he had Cherry over his shoulder and she was still too relaxed to make it down herself. Mona still felt bad about that and wondered if that was why they'd decided to leave her there.

It was Molly who'd decided, though, standing there by that window, watching people pop out of the long black helicopter and spread out across the snow.

"Look at that," Molly'd said. "They know. Just come to pick up the pieces. Sense/Net. My ass is out of here."

Cherry slurred that they were leaving too, she and Slick. And Slick shrugged, then grinned and put his arm around her.

"What about me?"

Molly looked at her. Or seemed to. Couldn't really tell, with the glasses. White tooth showed against her lower lip, for just a second, then she said,"You stay, my advice. Let them sort it out. You haven't really done anything. None of it was your idea. Think they'll probably do right by you, or try to. Yeah, you stay."

It didn't make any sense to Mona, but now she felt so dead, so crash-sick, she couldn't argue.

And then they were just gone, down the rope and gone, and it was just like that, how people left and you didn't ever see them anymore. She looked back into the room and saw Gentry pacing back and forth in front of his books, running the tip of his finger along them like he was looking for a special one. He'd thrown a blanket over the stretcher.

So she just left, and she wouldn't know if Gentry ever found his book or not, but that was how it was, so she climbed down the rope herself, which wasn't as easy as Molly and Slick had made it look, particularly if you felt like Mona did, because Mona felt close to blacking out and her arms and legs didn't seem to be working real good anyway, she had to sort of concentrate on making them move, and her nose and throat were swelling inside, so she didn't notice the black guy until she was all the way down.

He was standing down there looking at the big spider thing, which wasn't moving at all. Looked up when the heel of her shoe grated across the steel platform. And something so sad about his face, when he saw her, but then it was gone and he was climbing the metal stairs, slow and easy, and as he got closer she began to wonder if he really was black. Not just the color, which he definitely was, but there was something about the shape of his bald skull, the angles of his face, not quite like anybody she'd seen before. He was tall, real tall. Wore a long black coat, leather so thin it moved like silk.

"Hello, missy," he said, when he stood in front of her, reached out to raise her chin so she was looking straight into gold-flecked agate eyes like nobody in the world ever had. Long fingers so light against her chin. "Missy," he said,"how old are you?"

"Sixteen . . ."

"You need a haircut," he said, and there was something so serious about how he said it.

"Angie's up there," she said, pointing, when she found her voice again. "She's --"

"Hush."

She heard metal noises far away in the big old building, and then a motor starting up. The hover, she thought, the one Molly'd driven here.

The black man raised his eyebrows, except he didn't have any eyebrows. "Friends?" He lowered his hand.

She nodded.

"Good enough," he said, and took her hand to help her down the stairs. At the bottom, still holding her hand, he led her around the wreck of the catwalk thing. Somebody was dead there, camo material and one of those big-voice things like cops have.

"Swift," the black man called, out across that whole tall hollow space, between the black grids of windows without any glass, black lines against a white sky, winter morning,"get your ass over here. I found her."

"But I'm not her. . . ."

And over there where the big doors stood open, against the sky and snow and rust, she saw this suit come walking, with his coat open and his tie flapping in the wind, and Molly's hover swung past him, out those same doors, and he wasn't even looking, because he was looking at Mona.

"I'm not Angie," she said, and wondered if she ought to tell him what she'd seen, Angie and the young guy together on that little screen, just before it faded.

"I know," the black man said,"but it grows on you."

Rapture . Rapture 's coming .

Judge

The woman led them to a hovercraft parked inside Factory, if you could call it parking when the front end was mashed up around a concrete tool mount. It was a white cargo job with CATHODE CATHAY lettered across the rear doors, and Slick wondered when she'd managed to get it in there without him hearing it. Maybe while Bobby the Count was pulling his diversion with the blimp.

The aleph was heavy, like trying to carry a small engine block.

He didn't want to look at the Witch, because there was blood on her blades and he hadn't made her for that. There were a couple of bodies around, or parts of them; he didn't look at that either.

He looked down at the block of biosoft and its battery pack and wondered if all that was still in there, the gray house and Mexico and 3Jane's eyes.

"Wait," the woman said. They were passing the ramp to the room where he kept his machines; the Judge was still there, the Corpsegrinder . . .

She still had her gun in her hand. Slick put his hand on Cherry's shoulder. "She said wait."

"That thing I saw, last night," the woman said. "One-armed robot. That work?"

"Yeah . . ."

"Strong? Carry a load? Over rough ground?"

"Yeah."

"Get it."

"Huh?"

"Get it into the back of the hover. Now. Move."

Cherry clung to him, weak-kneed from whatever it was that girl had given her.

"You," Molly gestured toward her with the gun,"into the hover."

"Go on," Slick said.

He set the aleph down and walked up the ramp and into the room where the Judge was waiting in the shadows, the arm beside it on the tarp, where Slick had left it. Now he wouldn't ever get it right, how the saw was supposed to work. There was a control unit there, on a row of dusty metal shelves. He picked it up and let the Judge power up, the brown carapace trembling slightly.

He moved the Judge forward, down the ramp, the broad feet coming down one-two, one-two, the gyros compensating, perfecting for the missing arm. The woman had the rear doors of the hover open, ready, and Slick marched the Judge straight over to her. She fell back slightly as the Judge towered over her, her silver glasses reflecting polished rust. Slick came up behind the Judge and started figuring the angles, how to get him in there. It didn't make sense, but at least she seemed to have some idea of what they were doing, and anything was better than hanging around Factory now, with dead people all over. He thought about Gentry, up there with his books and those bodies. There'd been two girls up there, and they'd both looked like Angie Mitchell. Now one of them was dead, he didn't know how or why, and the woman with the gun had told the other one to wait. . . .

"Come on, come on, get the fucking thing in, we gotta go. . . ."

When he'd managed to work the Judge into the back of the hover, legs bent, on its side, he slammed the doors, ran around, and climbed in on the passenger side. The aleph was between the front seats. Cherry was curled in the backseat, under a big orange parka with the Sense/Net logo on the sleeve, shivering.

The woman fired up the turbine and inflated the bag. Slick thought they might be hung on the tool mount, but when she reversed, it tore away a strip of chrome and they were free. She swung the hover around and headed for the gates.

On the way out they passed a guy in a suit and tie and a tweed overcoat, who didn't seem to see them. "Who's that?"

She shrugged.

"You want this hover?" she asked. They were maybe ten kilos from Factory now and he hadn't looked back.

"You steal it?"

"Sure."

"I'll pass."

"Yeah?"

"I did time, car theft."

"So how's your girlfriend?"

"Asleep. She's not my girlfriend."

"No?"

"I get to ask who you are?"

"A businesswoman."

"What business?"

"Hard to say."

The sky above the Solitude was bright and white.

"You come for this?" He tapped the aleph.

"Sort of."

"What now?"

"I made a deal. I got Mitchell together with the box."

"That was her, the one who fell over?"

"Yeah, that was her."

"But she died. . . ."

"There's dying, then there's dying."

"Like 3Jane?"

Her head moved, like she'd glanced at him. "What do you know about that?"

"I saw her, once. In there."

"Well, she's still in there, but so's Angie."

"And Bobby."

"Newmark? Yeah."

"So what'll you do with it?"

"You built those things, right? One in the back, the others?"

Slick glanced back over his shoulder to where the Judge was folded in the hover's cargo space, like a big rusty headless doll. "Yeah."

"So you're good with tools."

"Guess so."

"Okay. I got a job for you." She slowed the hover beside a ragged crest of snow-covered scrap and coasted to a halt. "There'll be an emergency kit in here, somewhere. Get it, get up on the roof, get me the solar cells and some wire. I want you to rig the cells so they'll recharge this thing's battery. Can you do that?"

"Probably. Why?"

She sank back in the seat and Slick saw that she was older than he'd thought, and tired. "Mitchell's in there now. They want her to have some time, is all. . . ."

"They?"

"I dunno. Something. Whatever I cut my deal with. How long you figure the battery'll hold out, if the cells work?"

"Couple months. Year, maybe."

"Okay. I'll hide it somewhere, where the cells can get the sun."

"What happens if you just cut the power?"

She reached down and ran the tip of her index finger along the thin cable that connected the aleph to the battery. Slick saw her fingernails in the morning light; they looked artificial. "Hey, 3Jane," she said, her finger poised above the cable,"I gotcha." Then her hand was a fist, which opened, as though she were letting something go.

Cherry wanted to tell Slick everything they were going to do when they got to Cleveland. He was lashing two of the flat cells to the Judge's broad chest with silver tape. The gray aleph was already fastened to the machine's back with a harness of tape. Cherry said she knew where she could get him a job fixing rides in an arcade. He wasn't really listening.

When he'd gotten it all together, he handed the control unit to the woman.

"Guess we wait for you now."

"No," she said. "You go to Cleveland. Cherry just told you."

"What about you?"

"I'm going for a walk."

"You wanna freeze? Maybe wanna starve?"

"Wanna be by my fucking self for a change." She tried the controls and the Judge trembled, took a step forward, another. "Good luck in Cleveland." They watched her walk out across the Solitude, the Judge clumping along behind her. Then she turned and yelled back,"Hey, Cherry! Get that guy to take a bath!"

Cherry waved, the zippers of her leather jackets jingling.

Red Leather

Petal said that her bags were waiting in the Jaguar. "You won't want to be coming back to Notting Hill," he said,"so we've arranged something for you in Camden Town."

"Petal," she said,"I have to know what has happened to Sally."

He started the engine.

"Swain was blackmailing her. Forcing her to kidnap --"

"Ah. Well then," he interrupted,"I see. Shouldn't worry, if I were you."

"I am worried."

"Sally, I would say, has managed to extricate herself from that little matter. She's also, according to certain official friends of ours, managed to cause all record of herself to evaporate, apparently, except for a controlling interest in a German casino. And if anything's happened to Angela Mitchell, Sense/Net hasn't gone public with it. All of that is done with, now."

"Will I see her again?"

"Not on my parish. Please."

They pulled away from the curb.

"Petal," she said, as they drove through London,"my father told me that Swain --"

"Fool. Bloody fool. Rather not talk about it now."

"I'm sorry."

The heater was working. It was warm in the Jaguar, and Kumiko was very tired now. She settled back against red leather and closed her eyes. Somehow, she thought, her meeting with 3Jane had freed her of her shame, and her father's answer of her anger. 3Jane had been very cruel. Now she saw her mother's cruelty as well. But all must be forgiven, one day, she thought, and fell asleep on the way to a place called Camden Town.

Smooth Stone Beyond

They have come to live in this house: walls of gray stone, roof of slate, in a season of early summer. The grounds are bright and wild, though the long grass does not grow and the wildflowers do not fade.

Behind the house are outbuildings, unopened, unexplored, and a field where tethered gliders strain against the wind.

Once, walking alone among the oaks at the edge of that field, she saw three strangers, astride something approximately resembling a horse. Horses are extinct, their line terminated years before Angie's birth. A slim, tweed-coated figure was in the saddle, a boy like a groom from some old painting. In front of him, a young girl, Japanese, straddled the horse thing, while behind him sat a pale, greasy-looking little man in a gray suit, pink socks and white ankles showing above his brown shoes. Had the girl seen her, returned her gaze?

She has forgotten to mention this to Bobby.

Their most frequent visitors arrive in dawn dreams, though once a grinning little kobold of a man announced himself by thumping repeatedly on the heavy oak door, demanding, when she ran to open it,"that little shit Newmark." Bobby introduced this creature as the Finn, and seemed delighted to see him. The Finn's decrepit jacket exuded a complex odor of stale smoke, ancient solder, and pickled herring. Bobby explained that the Finn was always welcome. "Might as well be. No way to keep him out, once he wants in."

3Jane comes as well, one of the dawn visitors, her presence sad and tentative. Bobby seems scarcely aware of her, but Angie, the repository of so many of her memories, resonates to that particular mingling of longing, jealousy, frustration, and rage. Angie has come to understand 3Jane's motives, and to forgive her -- though what, exactly, wandering amid these oaks in sunlight, is there to forgive?

But dreams of 3Jane sometimes weary Angie; she prefers other dreams, particularly those of her young protŽgŽ. These often come as the lace curtains billow, as a first bird calls. She rolls closer to Bobby, closes her eyes, forms the name Continuity in her mind, and waits for the small bright images.

She sees that they have taken the girl to a clinic in Jamaica, to treat her addiction to crude stimulants. Her metabolism fine-tuned by a patient army of Net medics, she emerges at last, radiant with health. With her sensorium expertly modulated by Piper Hill, her first stims are greeted with unprecedented enthusiasm. Her global audience is entranced by her freshness, her vigor, the delightfully ingenuous way in which she seems to discover her glamorous life as if for the first time.

A shadow sometimes crosses the distant screen, but only for an instant: Robin Lanier has been found strangled, frozen, on the mountainscaped facade of the New Suzuki Envoy; both Angie and Continuity know whose long strong hands throttled the star and threw him there.

But a certain thing eludes her, one special fragment of the puzzle that is history.

At the edge of oak shadow, beneath a steel and salmon sunset, in this France that isn't France, she asks Bobby for the answer to her final question.

They waited in the drive at midnight, because Bobby had promised her an answer.

As the clocks in the house struck twelve, she heard the hiss of tires over gravel. The car was long, low and gray.

Its driver was the Finn.

Bobby opened the door and helped her in.

In the backseat sat the young man she recalled from her glimpse of the impossible horse and its three mismatched riders. He smiled at her, but said nothing.

"This is Colin," Bobby said, climbing in beside her. "And you know the Finn."

"She never guessed, huh?" the Finn asked, putting the car in gear.

"No," Bobby said,"I don't think so."

The young man named Colin was smiling at her. "The aleph is an approximation of the matrix," he said,"a sort of model of cyberspace. . . ."

"Yes, I know." She turned to Bobby. "Well? You promised you'd tell me the why of When It Changed."

The Finn laughed, a very strange sound. "Ain't a why, lady. More like it's a what. Remember one time Brigitte told you there was this other? Yeah? Well, that's the what, and the what's the why."

"I do remember. She said that when the matrix finally knew itself, there was 'the other.'. . ."

"That's where we're going tonight," Bobby began, putting his arm around her. "It isn't far, but it's --"

"Different," the Finn said,"it's real different."

"But what is it?"

"You see," Colin said, brushing aside his brown forelock, a gesture like a schoolboy's in some antique play,"when the matrix attained sentience, it simultaneously became aware of another matrix, another sentience."

"I don't understand," she said. "If cyberspace consists of the sum total of data in the human system . . ."

"Yeah," the Finn said, turning out onto the long straight empty highway,"but nobody's talkin' human , see?"

"The other one was somewhere else," Bobby said.

"Centauri," Colin said.

Can they be teasing her? Is this some joke of Bobby's?

"So it's kinda hard to explain why the matrix split up into all those hoodoos 'n' shit, when it met this other one," the Finn said,"but when we get there, you'll sorta get the idea. . . ."

"My own feeling," Colin said,"is that it's all so much more amusing, this way. . . ."

"Are you telling me the truth?"

"Be there in a New York minute," said the Finn,"no shit."

Author's Afterword

Ten years have now passed since the inception of whatever strange process it was that led me to write Neuromancer , Count Zero , and Mona Lisa Overdrive . The technology through which you now access these words didn't exist, a decade ago.

Neuromancer was written on a "clockwork typewriter," the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane's office in Chiba City. This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930's. It's a very tough and elegant piece of work, from the factory of E. PAILLARD & Cie S.A. YVERDON (SUISSE). Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green- and-black "crackle" paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant's ledger. Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.) In its day, the Hermes 2000 was one of the best portable writing- machines in the world, and one of the most expensive. This one belonged to my wife's step-grandfather, who had been a journalist of sorts and had used it to compose laudatory essays on the poetry of Robert Burns. I used it first to write undergraduate Eng. lit. papers, then my early attempts at short stories, then Neuromancer , all without so much as ever having touched an actual computer. Some readers, evidently, find this odd. I don't. Computers, in 1981 (when I began to work with the concept of cyberspace, the word having first seen light on my trusty Hermes) were mostly wall-sized monsters covered with twirling wheels of magnetic tape. I'd once glimpsed one through a window at the university. Friends who did things with computers tended to do them at very odd hours, having arranged to scam time on some large institution's mainframe.

Around that time, however, the Apple IIc appeared. For me, it appeared on the miniature billboards affixed to bus- stop shelters. This seductive little unit , looking not that much bigger, really, than your present day Powerbook, was depicted dangling from a handle in the hand of some unseen suit with a nicely-laundered cuff. Portability! Amazing! a whole computer in a package that size! (I didn't know that you had to lug the monitor around as well, plus a bulky little transformer and another disk- drive that weighed nearly as much as the computer itself.) These Apple ads were the direct inspiration for the cyberspace decks in Neuromancer . Like the Hermes 2000, the IIc, in its day, was quite something.

Not that I ever experienced it in its day, not quite. My Hermes died. Some tiny pawl or widget caved in to metal-fatigue. No replacement could be found. I'd just started Count Zero . I gave the typewriter man $75 for a reconditioned Royal desk machine, a hideous truck-like lump of a thing with an extended carriage that alone weighed twenty pounds. It had an extended carriage, he said, because it had belonged to a little old lady who'd only ever used it to type mimeograph stencils for Sunday- school programs. (Though I suspect many of you may not know what "mimeograph stencils" were.) I stuck with this ghastly clunker through Count Zero , but as it came time to begin Mona Lisa Overdrive , I went shopping for a computer. Bruce Sterling's father had given him his old Apple II, and Bruce allowed as how it was a pretty convenient way to put words in a row. Remembering those bus-stop ads, I bought myself an Apple IIc. This was around 1986 or so, and the IIc had long-since been eclipsed by various proto-Macs, which everyone assured me were wonderful, but which I regarded as prohibitively expensive. I bought a IIc in an end-of-line sale at a department store, took it home, and learned, to my considerable disappointment, that personal computers stored their data on little circular bits of electromagnetic tape, which were whirled around to the accompaniment of assorted coarse sounds. I suppose I'd assumed the data was just sort of, well, held . In a glittering mesh of silicon. Or something. But silently .

And that, quite literally, was the first time I ever touched a computer. And I still don't know very much about them. The revealed truth of which, as I've said, sometimes perturbs my readers, or in any case those readers with a peculiarly intense computer-tech bent, of whom I seem to have more than a few.

But Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer . Perhaps it all goes to prove that there are situations (literary ones, at least) in which a little knowledge is not only a dangerous thing, but the best tool for the job at hand.

A mimeograph stencil, by the way, is a piece of tissue- paper impregnated with wax. You punch through the wax with a typewriter, creating a stencil through which ink can be forced onto paper, allowing the reproduction of multiple copies. For many years, and not so long ago, these curious devices were very nearly as common as typewriters. They were what people did before laser printers. The mimeograph is one of many dinosaurs recently brought to the verge of extinction by the computer. They are dead tech , destined to make up part of the litter engulfing the Finn's back room. As is my Hermes 2000. As is my Apple IIc, which my children play with only reluctantly, its black-and-white graphics no competition for their video-games. As is my old SE/30 here; as is, eventually, whatever sort of unit, however slick and contemporary, you happen to be reading this on.

It gives me great pleasure to have these three books digitized, data-compressed, and published in this (make no mistake) revolutionary format. We participate, you and I, in the death of print-as-we-knew-it, and should experience thereby an exquisite frisson of ecstasy and dread. So soon , we plunge toward a world in which the word "library" simply means something on the other end of a modem.

But I confess it gives me greater pleasure still, to contemplate that process whereby every tech, however sharp this morning, is invariably supplanted by the new, the unthinkable, and to imagine these words, unread and finally inaccessible, gathering dust at the back of some drawer in some year far up the road. Nothing in there but a tarnished Yale key, a silver dime, a couple of desiccated moths, and several hundred thousand data-compressed words, all in a row.

I know; I put them there.

I'd like to take this opportunity to cite and thank the late Terry Carr, who commissioned the work that became Neuromancer from an unknown and thoroughly unconfident writer, one whose track-record at the time consisted of a handful of short stories. If Terry hadn't been willing to take a chance with me, when he did, thereby forcing me to write something (a novel) I felt several working years short of being ready to do, it's most unlikely that these books would exist today.

-- Vancouver, 6/16/92

About the Author

William Gibson has received widespread media attention for his "cyberspace trilogy": Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. His first book, Neuromancer won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards -- the only science fiction novel to receive all three. His most recent work, co-authored with Bruce Sterling, is entitled The Difference Engine. He is currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia with his family.