William Gibson "Count Zero", 1986

Count Zero

THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted
it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up
with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-
bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs
and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized
hexogene and flaked TNT.
 He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the
pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
 Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract.
Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour
after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon
liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of
Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first
flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support
vat
 It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put
Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for
him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-
charides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market
The eyes were green.
 He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated
simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of
the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn
dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his
secondfloor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs,
late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt
bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He
masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought
about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back
brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the
morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and
bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
 And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman
standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-
light that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner
We're done with you You're good as new

 He was good as new. How good was that? He didn't know.
He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of
Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.
 And the next. And ever was.
 He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black
mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when
they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels
left ferroconcrete, dnnks arrived, dinner was served.
 [n Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a
blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a
blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he amved
at the counter at the end of the comdor, he changed his
ticket.
 He flew to Mexico.

 And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of
brooms, a woman's body warm against his own
 The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected
sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of
the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf.
The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse cham-
bray, softened by countless washings.
 He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted
window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. He'd had to walk
twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the
sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on
runway concrete.
 He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek
of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plas-
tered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. He'd
ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink lucite
and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned
the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger
than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider
blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver.
Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus
through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-
aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was
there to welcome him back to Mexico.
 Among the dozen~odd microsofts the Dutchman had given
him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish,
but in Vallarta he'd fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a
dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square
of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus
had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy
pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures,
the
day's winning numbers in the national lottery.
 The woman beside him stirred in her sleep.
 He raised himself on one elbow to look at her A stranger's
face, but not the one his life in hotels had taught him to
expect. He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of
cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fash-
ion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of
the previous five years.
 Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and
Amencan. The blue sheets were nicked across her hips, the
sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her
long thighs with diagonals of gold. The faces he woke with in
the world's hotels were like God's own hood ornaments.
Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed
straight out to the void. But this one was different. Already.
somehow, there was meaning attached to it. Meaning and a
name.
 He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His soles regis-
tered the grit of beach-sand on cool tile. There was a faint,
pervasive smell of insecticide. Naked, head throbbing, he
stood. He made his legs move. Walked, tried the first of two
doors, finding white tile, more white plaster, a bulbous chrome
shower head hung from rust-spotted iron pipe The sink's taps
offered identical trickles of blood-warm water. An antique
wristwatch lay beside a plastic tumbler, a mechanical Rolex
on a pale leather strap.
 The bathroom's shuttered windows weie unglazed, strung
with a fine green mesh of plastic. He peered out between
hardwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and saw a dry
fountain of flower-painted tiles and the rusted carcass of a
VW Rabbit
 Allison. That was her name.

 She wore frayed khaki shorts and one of his white T-shirts.
Her legs were very brown. The clockwork Rolex, with its
dull stainless case, went around her left wrist on its pigskin
strap. They went walking, down the curve of beach, toward
Barre de Navidad. They kept to the narrow strip of firm wet
sand above the line of surf.
 Already they had a history together; he remembered her at
a stall that morning in the little town's iron-roofed mercado,
how she'd held the huge clay mug of boiled coffee in both
hands. Mopping eggs and salsa from the cracked white plate
with a tortilla, he'd watched flies circling fingers of sunlight
that found their way through a patchwork of palm frond and
corrugated siding. Some talk about her job with some legal
firm in L.A., how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle
pontoon towns tethered off Redondo. He'd told her he was in
personnel. Or had been, anyway. "Maybe I'm looking for a
new line of work
 But talk seemed secondary to what there was between
them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against
the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both
shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the
thing. She squeezed his hand.
 A blue figure came marching up the beach toward them, a
military policeman headed for town, spitshined black boots
unreal against the soft bright beach. As the man passed,
his face dark and immobile beneath mirrored glasses, Turner
noted the carbine-format Steiner-Optic laser with Fabrique
Nationale sights. The blue fatigues were spotless, creased like
knives.
 Turner had been a soldier in his own nght for most of his
adult life, although he'd never worn a uniform. A mercenary,
his employers vast corporations warring covertly for the con-
trol of entire economies. He was a specialist in the extraction
of top executives and research people. The multinationals he
worked for would never admit that men like Turner existed.
 You worked your way through most of a bottle of Her-
radura last night," she said.
 He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was
watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails
painted with chipped pink gloss.
 The breakers rolled in, their edges transparent as green
glass.
 The spray beaded on her tan.

 After their first day together, life fell into a simple pattern
They had breakfast in the mercado. at a stall with a concrete
counter worn smooth as polished marble. They spent the
morning swimming, until the sun drove them back into the
shuttered coolness of the hotel, where they made love under
the slow wooden blades of the ceiling fan, then slept. In the
afternoons they explored the maze of narrow streets behind
the Avenida, or went hiking in the hills. They dined in
beachfront restaurants and drank on the patios of the white
hotels. Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf
 And gradually, without words, she taught him a new style
of passion. He was accustomed to being served, serviced
anonymously by skilled professionals. Now, in the white
cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt
Pacific mixed with her own wet, her inner thighs cool against
his cheeks. Palms cradling her hips, he held her, raised her
like a chalice, lips pressing tight, while his tongue sought the
locus, the point, the frequency that would bring her home
Then, grinning, he'd mount, enter, and find his own way
there.
 Sometimes, then, he'd talk, long spirals of unfocused nar-
rative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very
little, but he'd learned to value what little she did say, and,
always, she held him. And listened.

 A week passed, then another. He woke to their final day
together in that same cool room, finding her beside him. Over
breakfast he imagined he felt a change in her, a tension.
 They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot
the faint edge of anxiety.
 In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach,
toward Barre, the way they'd gone that first morning.
 Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his
ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Span-
ish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates
hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect.
Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered
the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer,
sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair
of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida.
 His tan was dark and even The angular patchwork left by
the Dutchman's grafts was gone, and she had taught him the
unity of his body Mornings, when he met the green eyes in
the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman
no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry
cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a
country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the
smell of dust and fried breads

 The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way
down the bay's arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a
detonation.
 Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the
corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came
hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty
doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure's
fa~ade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three
levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of
finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and
pattern of tile
 HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capi-
tals above one concrete arch. "Mar," he said, completing it,
though he'd removed the microsoft.
 "It's over," she said, stepping beneath the arch, into
shadow.
 "What's over?" He followed, the straw basket rubbing
against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between
his toes.
 "Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future."
He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed-
springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls.
"It smells like piss," he said. ``Let's swim.

 The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between
them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner's room and ate,
silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved
her sun-streaked hair.
 "You make me think about horses," he said finally
 "Well," she said, as though she spoke from the depths of
exhaustion, "they've only been extinct for thirty years."
 "No," he said, "their hair. The hair on their necks, when
they ran."
 "Manes," she said, and there were tears in her eyes.
"Fuck it." Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep
breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the
beach. "It, me, what's it matter?" Her arms around him
again. "Oh, come on, Turner Come on"
 And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed
something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen,
where the water met the sky.

 When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the
yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white
riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall
away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the
surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did,
back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn't survived. The
waves had licked away its foundation.
 "Give me the basket
 She was buttoning her blouse. He'd bought it for her in one
of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue
Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the
shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. "I said give me
the basket."
 She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon,
finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple
slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled
them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He
snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad-
ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the
Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung
toward the beach.
 ``Turner, I''

 "Get up." Bundling the blanket and her towel into the
basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the
basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her
quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands.
"Maybe I'm wrong," he said. "If I am, get out of here. Cut
for that second stand of palms." He pointed. "Don't go back
to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home~~
He could hear the purr of the outboard now
 He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she
turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stum-
bling in a drift of sand. She didn't look back.
 He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflat-
able was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named
Tsushima, and he'd last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He'd
seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck.
 He didn't need the glasses to know that the inflatable's
passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka's ninjas.
He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his
last can of Mexican beer.

 He looked back at the line of white hotels, his hands inert
on one of Tsushima's teak railings Behind the hotels, the
little town's three holograms glowed: Banamex, Aeronaves,
and the cathedral's six-meter Virgin.
 Conroy stood beside him. "Crash job," Conroy said. "You
know how it is." Conroy's voice was flat and uninflected, as
though he'd modeled it after a cheap voice chip. His face was
broad and white, dead white. His eyes were dark-ringed and
hooded, beneath a peroxide thatch combed back from a wide
forehead. He wore a black polo shirt and black slacks. "In-
side," he said, turning. Turner followed, ducking to enter the
cabin door. White screens, pale flawless pineTokyo's aus-
tere corporate chic.
 Conroy settled himself on a low, rectangular cushion of
slate-gray ultrasuede. Turner stood, his hands slack at his
sides. Conroy took a knurled silver inhaler from the low
enamel table between them. "Choline enhancer?"
 "No."
 Conroy jammed the inhaler into one nostril and snorted.
"You want some sushi?" He put the inhaler back on the
table. "We caught a couple of red snapper about an hour
ago"
 Turner stood where he was, staring at Conroy.
 "Christopher Mitchell," Conroy said. "Maas Biolabs. Their
head hybridoma man. He's coming over to Hosaka."
 "Never heard of him."
 "Bullshit. How about a drink?"

 Turner shook his head.
 Silicon's on the way out, Turner. Mitchell's the man who
made biochips work, and Maas is sitting on the major patents.
You know that. He's the man for monoclonals. He wants out
YOU
and me, Turner, we're going to shift him."
 "I think I'm retired, Conroy. I was having a good time,
back there."
 "That's what the psych team in Tokyo say. I mean, it's not
exactly your first time out of the box, is it? She's a field
psychologist, on retainer to Hosaka."
 A muscle in Turner's thigh began to jump.
 "They say you're ready, Turner. They were a little wor-
ried, after New Delhi. so they wanted to check it out. Little
therapy on the side. Never hurts, does it?"
2
MARY

SHE'D WORN HER BEST for the interview, but it was raining in
Brussels and she had no money for a cab. She walked from
the Eurotrans station.
 Her hand, in the pocket of her good jacketa Sally Stanley
but almost a year oldwas a white knot around the crumpled
telefax. She no longer needed it, having memorized the ad-
dress, but it seemed she could no more release it than break
the trance that held her here now, staring into the window of
an expensive shop that sold menswear, her focus phasing
between sedate flannel dress shirts and the reflection of her
own dark eyes.
 Surely the eyes alone would be enough to cost her the job.
No need for the wet hair she now wished she'd let Andrea
cut. The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone
could read, and most certainly these things would soon
be revealed to Herr Josef Virek, least likely of potential
employers.
 When the telefax had been delivered, she'd insisted on
regarding it as some cruel prank, another nuisance call. She'd
had enough of those, thanks to the media, so many that
Andrea had ordered a special program for the apartment's
phone, one that filtered out incoming calls from any number
that wasn't listed in her permanent directory. But that, An-
drea had insisted, must have been the reason for the telefax.
How else could anyone reach her?
 But Marly had shaken her head and huddled deeper into
Andrea's old terry robe. Why would Virek, enormously weal-
thy, collector and patron, wish to hire the disgraced former
operator of a tiny Paris gallery?
 Then it had been Andrea's time for head-shaking, in her
impatience with the new, the disgraced Marly Krushkhova,
who spent entire days in the apartment now, who sometimes
didn't bother to dress. The attempted sale, in Paris, of a
single forgery, was hardly the novelty Marly imagined it to
have been, she said. If the press hadn't been quite so anxious
to show up the disgusting Gnass for the fool he most as-
suredly was, she continued, the business would hardly have
been news. Gnass was wealthy enough, gross enough, to
make for a weekend's scandal. Andrea smiled. "If you had
been less attractive, you would have gotten far less attention."
 Marly shook her head.
 "And the forgery was Alain's. You were innocent. Have
you forgotten that?"
 Marly went into the bathroom, still huddled in the thread-
bare robe, without answering.
 Beneath her friend's wish to comfort, to help, Marly could
already sense the impatience of someone forced to share a
very small space with an unhappy, nonpaying guest.
 And Andrea had had to loan her the fare for the Eurotrans.
 With a conscious, painful effort of will, she broke from the
circle of her thoughts and merged with the dense but sedate
flow of serious Belgian shoppers.
 A girl in bright tights and a boyfriend's oversized loden
jacket brushed past, scrubbed and smiling. At the next inter-
section, Marly noticed an outlet for a fashion line she'd
favored in her own student days. The clothes looked impossi-
bly young.
 In her white and secret fist, the telefax.
 Galerie Duperey, 14 Rue au Beurre, Bruxelles
Josef Virek.

 The receptionist in the cool gray anteroom of the Galerie
Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely
poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble
inlaid with an enameled keyboard. She raised lustrous eyes as
Marly approached. Marly imagined the click and whirr of
shutters, her bedraggled image whisked away to some far
corner of Josef Virek's empire.
 `Marly Krushkhova," she said, fighting the urge to pro-
duce the compacted wad of telefax, smooth it pathetically on
the cool and flawless marble. "For Herr Virek."
 "Fraulein Krushkhova," the receptionist said, "Herr Virek
is unable to be in Brussels today."
 Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of
the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was
learning to take in disappointment. "I see."
 "However, he has chosen to conduct the interview via a
sensory link. If you will please enter the third door on your
left .

 The room was bare and white. On two walls hung un-
framed sheets of what looked like rain-stained cardboard,
stabbed through repeatedly with a variety of instruments.
Katatonenkunst. Conservative. The sort of work one sold to
committees sent round by the boards of Dutch commercial
banks.
 She sat down on a low bench covered in leather and finally
allowed herself to release the telefax. She was alone, but
assumed that she was being observed somehow.
 "Fraulein Krushkhova." A young man in a technician's
dark green smock stood in the doorway opposite the one
through which she'd entered. "In a moment, please, you will
cross the room and step through this door. Please grasp the
knob slowly, firmly, and in a manner that affords maximum
contact with the flesh of your palm. Step through carefully.
There should be a minimum of spatial disorientation."
 She blinked at him "I beg"
 "The sensory link," he said, and withdrew, the door clos-
ing behind him.
 She rose, tried to tug some shape into the damp lapels of
her jacket, touched her hair, thought better of it, took a deep
breath, and crossed to the door. The receptionist's phrase had
prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim
signal routed via Bell Europa. She'd assumed she'd wear a
helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a
passive viewer as a human camera.
 But Virek's wealth was on another scale of magnitude
entirely.
 As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed
to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and
temperature in the first second of contact.
 Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping
out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she
grasped now in wonder.
 A few drops of rain blew into her face.
 Smell of rain and wet earth.
 A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken
art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek's
illusion.
 Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona,
smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada
Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well,
fighting vertigo. She knew this place She was in the Guell
Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise be-
hind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of
crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of
rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.
 "You are disoriented. Please forgive me."
 Josef Virek was perched below her on one of the park's
serpentine benches, his wide shoulders hunched in a soft
topeoat. His features had been vaguely familiar to her all her
 she remembered, for some reason, a photograph of
life. Now
Virek and the king of England. He smiled at her. His head
was large and beautifully shaped beneath a brush of stiff dark
gray hair. His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he
sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce. His eyes, very
large behind the round, rimless glasses that were a trademark,
were pale blue and strangely soft.
 "Please." He patted the bench's random mosaic of shat-
ftered pottery with a narrow hand. "You must forgive my
reliance on technology. I have been confined for over a
decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stock-
holm. Or perhaps of hell. I am not a well man, Marly. Sit
beside me."
 Taking a deep breath, she descended the stone steps and
crossed the cobbles "Herr Virek," she said, "I saw you
lecture in Munich, two years ago. A critique of Faessler and
his autisuches Theater. You seemed well then
 "Faessler?" Virek's tanned forehead wrinkled. "You saw
a double. A hologram perhaps. Many things, Marly, are
perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become
autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one
I another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities. However, for
reasons so complex as to be entirely occult, the fact of my
illness has never been made public."
She took her place beside him and peered down at the dirty
pavement between the scuffed toes of her black Paris boots.
She saw a chip of pale gravel, a rusted paper clip, the small
dusty corpse of a bee or hornet. "It's amazingly detailed.
 "Yes," he said, "the new Maas biochips. You should
know," he continued, "that what I know of your private life
is very nearly as detailed. More than you yourself do, in sox~~e
instances."
 "You do?" It was easiest, she found, to focus on the city,
picking out landmarks remembered from a half-dozen student
holidays. There, just there, would be the Ramblas, parrots
and flowers, the taverns serving dark beer and squid.
 "Yes I know that it was your lover who convinced you
that you had found a lost Cornell original .
 Many shut her eyes.
 "He commissioned the forgery, hiring two talented student-
artisans and an established historian who found himself in
certain personal difficulties . . . He paid them with money
he'd already extracted from your gallery, as you have no
doubt guessed. You are crying .
 Marly nodded. A cool forefinger tapped her wrist.
 "I bought Gnass. I bought the police off the case. The
press weren't worth buying; they rarely are And now, per-
haps, your slight notoriety may work to your advantage."
 "Herr Virek, I"
"A moment, please. Paco! Come here, child."
 Marly opened her eyes and saw a child of perhaps six
years, tightly gotten up in dark suit coat and knickers, pale
stockings, high-buttoned black patent boots. Brown hair fell
across his forehead in a smooth wing. He held something in
his hands, a box of some kind.
 "Gaudi began the park in 1900," Virek said "Paco wears
the period costume. Come here, child. Show us your marvel."
 "Sefior," Paco lisped, bowing, and stepped forward to
exhibit the thing he held.
 Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects.
 "Cornell," she said, her tears forgotten. "Cornell?" She
turned to Virek.
 "Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a
Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist."
 "There are more? More boxes?"
 "I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The
Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The unnatu-
ral density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works
of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I
ordinarily take little interest in    
 But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossi-
ble distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle,
and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
 The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely
from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit
boards, faced with mazes of gold A smooth white sphere of
baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-
length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human
wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a
small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the
surface of the skinbut the thing's face was seared and
blackened.
 The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries
of human experience.
 "Gracias, Paco."
Box and boy were gone.
She gaped.
 "Ah. Forgive me, I have forgotten that these transitions are
too abrupt for you. Now, however, we must discuss your
 assignment .
 "Herr Virek," she said, "what is `Paco'?"
 "A subprogram."
 ``I see.''
"I have hired you to find the maker of the box
"But, Herr Virek, with your resources"
 "Of which you are now one, child. Do you not wish to be
employed? When the business of Gnass having been stung
with a forged Cornell came to my attention, I saw that you
might be of use in this matter." He shrugged. "Credit me
with a certain talent for obtaining desired results."
 "Certainly, Herr Virek! And, yes, I do wish to work!"
 "Very well You will be paid a salary. You will be given
access to certain lines of credit, although, should you need to
purchase, let us say. substantial amounts of real estate"
 "Real estate?"
 "Or a corporation, or spacecraft. In that event, you will
require my indirect authorization. Which you will almost
certainly be given Otherwise, you will have a free hand I
suggest, however, that you work on a scale with which you
yourself are comfortable. Otherwise, you run the risk of
losing touch with your intuition, and intuition, in a case such
as this, is of crucial importance." The famous smile glittered
for her once more.
 She took a deep breath. "Herr Virek, what if I fail? How
long do I have to locate this artist?"
 "The rest of your life," he said.
 Forgive me," she found herself saying, to her horror,
"but I understood you to say that you live in aa vat?"
 "Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I
should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh.
Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can
no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body
having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I
imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would
have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of
some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine
net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something
like a tenth of my annual income. Making me, I suppose, the
world's most expensive invalid. I was touched, Marly, at
your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from
which they unfold."
 And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue
eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that
the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
 A wing of night swept Barcelona's sky. like the twitch of a
vast slow shutter, and Virek and Gdell were gone, and she
found herself seated again on the low leather bench, staring at
torn sheets of stained cardboard.
3
~I~y
`3IJIi~
A WI[~IiN

IT WAS sUCH an easy thing, death. He saw that now: It just
happened. You screwed up by a fraction and there it was, some-
thing chill and odorless, ballooning out from the four stupid
corners of the room, your mother's Barrytown living room.
 Shit, he thought, Two-a-Day'll laugh his ass off, first time
out and I pull a wilson.
 The only sound in the room was the faint steady burr of his
teeth vibrating, supersonic palsy as the feedback ate into his
nervous system. He watched his frozen hand as it trembled
delicately, centimeters from the red plastic stud that could
break the connection that was killing him
 Shit.
 He'd come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the
icebreaker he'd rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in. punch-
ing for the base he'd chosen as his first live target. Figured
that was the way to do it; you wanna do it. then do it. He'd
only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but he
already knew he wanted to be more than just some Barrytown
hotdogger. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, but it was
already over. Shows never ended this way, not right at the
beginning. In a show, the cowboy hero's girl or maybe his
partner would run in, slap the trodes off, hit that little red
ore
stud. So you'd make it, make it through.
 But Bobby was alone now, his autonomic nervous system
overridden by the defenses of a database three thousand kilo-
meters from Barrytown, and he knew it. There was some
magic chemistry in that impending darkness, something that

let him glimpse the infinite desirability of that room, with its
carpet-colored carpet and curtain-colored curtains, its dingy
foam sofa-suite, the angular chrome frame supporting the
components of a six-year-old Hitachi entertainment module.
 He'd carefully closed those curtains in preparation for his
run, but now, somehow, he seemed to see out anyway, where
the condos of Barrytown crested back in their concrete wave
to break against the darker towers of the Projects. That condo
wave bristled with a fine insect fur of antennas and chicken-
wired dishes, strung with lines of drying clothes. His mother
liked to bitch about that; she had a dryer. He remembered her
knuckles white on the imitation bronze of the balcony railing,
dry wrinkles where her wrist was bent. He remembered a
dead boy carried out of Big Playground on an alloy stretcher,
bundled in plastic the same color as a cop car. Fell and hit his
head. Fell. Head. Wilson.
 His heart stopped. It seemed to him that it fell sideways,
kicked like an animal in a cartoon.
 Sixteenth second of Bobby Newmark's death. His hotdog-
ger's death.
 And something leaned in, vastness unutterable, from beyond
the most distant edge of anything he'd ever known or imag-
ined, and touched him.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING~ WHY ARE THEY DOING THAT TO YOU'
Girlvoice, brownhair, darkeyes
KILLING ME KiLLING ME GET if OFF GET if OFF
Darkeyes, desertstar, tanshirt, girlhair
BUT IT'S A TRICK, SEE? YOU ONLY THINK
IT'S GOT YOU. LOOK. NOW I FIT HERE AND
YOU AREN'T CARRYING THE LOOP.

 And his heart rolled right over, on its back, and kicked his
 lunch up with its red cartoon legs, galvanic frog-leg spasm
hurling him from the chair and tearing the trodes from his
forehead. His bladder let go when his head clipped the corner
of the Hitachi, and someone was saying fuck fuck fuck into
the dust smell of carpet. Girlvoice gone, no desertstar, flash
impression of cool wind and waterworn stone
 Then his head exploded. He saw it very clearly, from
somewhere far away. Like a phosphorus grenade.
White.
Light.
4
J[WKINI~

Thn BLACK HONDA hovered twenty meters above the octagonal
deck of the derelict oil rig. It was nearing dawn, and Turner
could make out the faded outline of a biohazard trefoil mark-
ing the helicopter pad.
 "You got a biohazard down there, Conroy?"
 "None you aren't used to," Conroy said.
 A figure in a red jumpsuit made brisk arm signals to the
Honda's pilot. Propwash flung scraps of packing waste into
the sea as they landed. Conroy slapped the release plate on
his harness and leaned across Turner to unseal the hatch The
roar of the engines battered them as the hatch slid open.
Conroy was jabbing him in the shoulder, making urgent
lifting motions with an upturned palm. He pointed to the
pilot.
 Turner scrambled out and dropped, the prop a blur of
thunder, then Conroy was crouching beside him. They cleared
the faded trefoil with the bent-legged crab scuttle common to
helicopter pads. the Honda's wind snapping their pants legs
around their ankles. Turner camed a plain gray suitcase
molded from ballistic ABS, his only piece of luggage; some-
one had packed it for him, at the hotel, and it had been
waiting on Tsushima. A sudden change in pitch told him the
Honda was rising. It went whining away toward the coast,
showing no lights. As the sound faded, Turner heard the cries
of gulls and the slap and slide of the Pacific.
 "Someone tried to set up a data haven here once," Conroy
said. "International waters. Back then nobody lived in orbit,
so it made sense for a few years. . ." He started for a rusted
forest of beams supporting the rig's superstructure. "One
scenario Hosaka showed me, we'd get Mitchell out here,
clean him up, stick him on Tsushima, and full steam for old
Japan. I told `em, forget that shit. Mans gets on to it and they
can come down on this thing with anything they want. I told
`em, that compound they got down in the D.F, that's the
ticket, right? Plenty of shit Mans wouldn't pull there, not in
the fucking middle of Mexico City . .
 A figure stepped from the shadows, head distorted by the
bulbous goggles of an image-amplification rig. It waved them
on with the blunt, clustered muzzles of a Lansing fldchette
gun. "Biohazard," Conroy said as they edged past. "Duck
your head here. And watch it, the stairs get slippery

 The rig smelled of rust and disuse and brine. There were no
windows. The discolored cream walls were blotched with
spreading scabs of rust. Battery-powered fluorescent lanterns
were slung, every few meters, from beams overhead, casting
a hideous green-tinged light, at once intense and naggingly
uneven. At least a dozen figures were at work, in this central
room; they moved with the relaxed precision of good techni-
cians. Professionals, Turner thought; their eyes seldom met
and there was little talking. It was cold, very cold, and Conroy
had given him a huge parka covered with tabs and zippers.
 A bearded man in a sheepskin bomber jacket was securing
bundled lengths of fiber-optic line to a dented bulkhead with
silver tape. Conroy was locked in a whispered argument with
a black woman who wore a parka like Turner's. The bearded
tech looked up from his work and saw Turner. "Shee-it," he
said, still on his knees, "I figured it was a big one, but I
guess it's gonna be a rough one, too." He stood, wiping his
palms automatically on his jeans. Like the rest of the techs,
he wore micropore surgical gloves. "You're Turner." He
grinned, glanced quickly in Conroy's direction, and pulled a
black plastic flask from a jacket pocket. "Take some chill
off. You remember me. Worked on that job in Marrakech.
IBM boy went over to Mitsu-G. Wired the charges on that
bus you `n' the Frenchman drove into that hotel lobby."
 Turner took the flask, snapped its lid, and tipped it. Bour-
bon. It stung deep and sour, warmth spreading from the
region of his sternum. "Thanks." He returned the flask and
the man pocketed it.
 "Onkey," the man said. "Name's Oakey? You remember?"
 "Sure," Turner lied, "Marrakech."
 "Wild Turkey," Onkey said. "Flew in through Schipol, I
hit the duty-free. Your partner there," another glance at
Conroy, "he's none too relaxed, is he? I mean, not like
Marrakech, right?"
 Turner nodded.
 "You need anything," Oakey said, "lemme know."
 "Like what?"
 `Nother drink, or I got some Peruvian flake, the kind
that's real yellow." Oakey grinned again.
 "Thanks," Turner said, seeing Conroy turn from the black
woman. Onkey saw, too, kneeling quickly and tearing off a
fresh length of silver tape.
 "Who was that?" Conroy asked, after leading Turner through
a narrow door with decayed black gasket seals at its edges
Conroy spun the wheel that dogged the door shut, someone
had oiled it recently.
 "Name's Onkey," Turner said, taking in the new room.
Smaller. Two of the lanterns, folding tables, chairs, all new
On the tables, instrumentation of some kind, under black
plastic dustcovers.
 "Friend of yours?"
 "No," Turner said. "He worked for me once." He went
to the nearest table and flipped back a dustcover. "What's
this?" The console had the blank, half-finished look of a
factory prototype.
 "Maas-Neotek cyberspace deck
 Turner raised his eyebrows. "Yours?"
 "We got two. One's on site. From Hosaka. Fastest thing in
the matrix, evidently, and Hosaka can't even de-engineer the
chips to copy them. Whole other technology."
 "They got them from Mitchell?"
 "They aren't saying. The fact they'd let go of `em just to
give our jockeys an edge is some indication of how badly
they want the man."
 "Who's on console, Conroy?"
 "Jaylene Slide. I was talking to her just now." He jerked
his head in the direction of the door. "The site man's out of
L.A., kid called Ramirez."
 "They any good?" Turner replaced the dustcover.
"Better be, for what they'll cost. Jaylene's gotten herself a
hot rep the past two years, and Ramirez is her understudy.

Shit' `Conroy shrugged' `you know these cowboys. Fuck-
ing crazy
 `Where'd you get them? Where'd you get Gakey for that
matter?"
 Conroy smiled. "From your agent, Turner."
 Turner stared at Conroy, then nodded. Turning, he lifted
the edge of the next dustcover. Cases, plastic and styrofoam,
stacked neatly on the cold metal of the table. He touched a
blue plastic rectangle stamped with a silver monogram: S&W.
 "Your agent," Conroy said, as Turner snapped the case
open. The pistol lay there in its molded bed of pale blue
foam, a massive revolver with an ugly housing that bulged
beneath the squat barrel. "S&W Tactical. .408. with a xenon
projector," Conroy said. "What he said you'd want."
 Turner took the gun in his hand and thumbed the batterytest
stud for the projector. A red LED in the walnut grip pulsed
twice. He swung the cylinder out. "Ammunition?"
 "On the table. Hand-loads, explosive tips."
 Turner found a transparent cube of amber plastic, opened it
with his left hand, and extracted a cartridge. "Why did they
pick me for this, Conroy?" He examined the cartridge, then
inserted it carefully into one of the cylinder's six chambers.
 "I dont know," Conroy said. "Felt like they had you
slotted from go, whenever they heard from Mitchell . .
 Turner spun the cylinder rapidly and snapped it back into
the frame. "I said, `Why did they pick me for this, Conroy?'
He raised the pistol with both hands and extended his arms,
pointing it directly at Conroy's face. "Gun like this, some-
times you can see right down the bore, if the light's right, see
if there's a bullet there."
 Conroy shook his head, very slightly.
"Ormaybeyoucanseeitinoneoftheothercham~~ .
"No," Conroy said, very softly, "no way."
"Maybe the shrinks screwed up, Conroy. How about that?"
 "No," Conmy said, his face blank. "They didn't, and you
won't."
 Turner pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty
chamber. Conmy blinked once, opened his mouth, closed it,
watched as Turner lowered the Smith & Wesson. A single
bead of sweat rolled down from Conroy's hairline and lost
itself in an eyebrow.
 "Well?" Turner asked, the gun at his side.
 Conmy shrugged. "Don't do that shit," he said.
 "They want me that badT'
 Conroy nodded. "It's your show. Turner."
 "Where's Mitchell?" He opened the cylinder again and
began to load the five remaining chambers.
 "Arizona. About fifty kilos from the Sonora line, in a
mesatop research arcology. Maas Biolabs North America.
They own everything around there, right down to the border,
and the mesa's smack in the middle of the footprints of four
recon satellites. Mucho tight."
 "And how are we supposed to get in?"
 "We aren't. Mitchell's coming out, on his own. We wait
for him, pick him up, get his ass to Hosaka intact" Conroy
hooked a forefinger behind the open collar of his black shirt
and drew out a length of black nylon cord, then a small black
nylon envelope with a Velcro fastener. He opened it carefully
and extracted an object, which he offered to Turner on his
open palm "Here. This is what he `sent
 Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the
thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft. one
end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation
unlike anything he'd seen. "What is it?"
 "It's biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was
output from an Al. It's sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a
message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it
yourself; you wanna get the picture fast . .
 Turner glanced up from the gray thing "How'd it grab
Jaylene?"
 "She said you better be lying down when you do it She
didn't seem to like it much."

 Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on
a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and
jacked Mitchell's dossier. It came on slow; he had time to
close his eyes.
 Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the
green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his
eyes. . . . It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlin-
ear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative con-
veyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely
like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence
at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, at-
tack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except
that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation,
but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol
system. The data had never been intended for human input.
 Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it,
his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a night-
mare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple,
terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturb-
ing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and
where everything is utterly wrong
The intimacy of the thing was hideous He fought down
waves of raw transference, bringing all his will to bear on
crushing a feeling that was akin to love, the obsessive tender-
ness a watcher comes to feel for the subject of prolonged
surveillance. Days or hours later, he knew, the most minute
details of Mitchell's academic record might bob to the surface
of his mind, or the name of a mistress, the scent of her heavy
red hair in the sunlight through
He sat up quickly, the plastic soles of his shoes smacking
the rusted deck. He still wore the parka, and the Smith &
Wesson, in a side pocket, swung painfully against his hip.
 It would pass. Mitchell's psychic odor would fade, as
surely as the Spanish grammar in the lexicon evaporated after
each use. What he had experienced was a Maas security
dossier compiled by a sentient computer, nothing more He
replaced the biosoft in Conroy's little black wallet, smoothed
the Velcro seal with his thumb, and put the cord around his
neck.
 He became aware of the sound of waves lapping the flanks
of the rig.
 "Hey, boss," someone said, from beyond the brown mili-
tary blanket that screened the entrance to the dorm area,
"Conroy says it's time for you to inspect the troops, then you
and him depart for other parts." Oakey's bearded face slid
from behind the blanket "Otherwise, I wouldn't wake you
up, right?"
 "I wasn't sleeping," Turner said, and stood, fingers reflex-
ively kneading the skin around the implanted socket.
 "Too bad," Oakey said. "I got derms'll put you under all
the way, one hour on the button, then kick in some kind of
righteous upper, get you up and on the case, no lie
 Turner shook his head. "Take me to Conroy"
S
TII[

MAIU..Y CHECKED iwro a small hotel with green plants in heavy
brass pots, the corridors tiled like worn marble chessboards.
The elevator was a scrolled gilt cage with rosewood panels
smelling of lemon oil and small cigars.
 Her room was on the fifth floor. A single tall window
overlooked the avenue, the kind of window you could actu-
ally open. When the smiling bellman had gone, she collapsed
into an armchair whose plush fabric contrasted comfortably
with the muted Belgian carpet. She undid the zips on her old
Paris boots for the last time, kicked them off, and stared at
the dozen glossy carrier bags the bellman had arranged on the
bed. Tomorrow, she thought, she'd buy luggage. And a
toothbrush.
 "I'm in shock," she said to the bags on the bed. "I must
take care. Nothing seems real now." She looked down and
saw that her hose were both out at the toe. She shook her
head. Her new purse lay on the white marble table beside the
bed; it was black, cut from cowhide tanned thick and soft as
Flemish butter. It had cost more than she would have owed
Andrea for her share of a month's rent, but that was also true
of a single night's stay in this hotel. The purse contained her
passport and the credit chip she'd been issued in the Galerie
Duperey, drawn on an account held in her name by an orbital
branch of the Nederlands Algemeen Bank.
 She went into the bathroom and worked the smooth brass
levers of the big white tub. Hot, aerated water hissed out
through a Japanese filtration device. The hotel provided pack-
ets of bath salts, tubes of creams and scented oils. She
emptied a tube of oil into the filling tub and began to remove
her clothes, feeling a pang of loss when she tossed the Sally
Stanley behind her. Until an hour before, the year-old jacket
had been her favorite garment and perhaps the single most
expensive thing she'd ever owned. Now it was something for
the cleaners to take away; perhaps it would find its way to
one of the city's flea markets, the sort of place where she'd
hunted bargains as an art-school girl.
 The mirrors misted and ran, as the room filled with scented
steam, blurring the reflection of her nakedness. Was it really
this easy? Had Virek's slim gold credit chip checked her out
of her misery and into this hotel, where the towels were white
and thick and scratchy? She was aware of a certain spiritual
vertigo, as though she trembled at the edge of some precipice.
She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one
had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the
Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they
were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would
be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water.
Yes, my dear, it's wet; yes, my child, it's certainly warm,
scented, scratchy-toweled. She stepped into the tub and lay
down.
 Tomorrow she would have her hair cut. In Paris.

 Andrea's phone rang sixteen times before Marly remem-
bered the special program. It would still be in place, and this
expensive little Brussels hotel would not be listed. She leaned
out to replace the handset on the marble-topped table and it
chimed once, softly.
 "A courier has delivered a parcel, from the Galerie
Duperey."
 When the bellmana younger man this time, dark and
possibly Spanishhad gone, she took the package to the
window and turned it over in her hands It was wrapped in a
single sheet of handmade paper, dark gray, folded and tucked
in that mysterious Japanese way that required neither glue nor
string, but she knew that once she'd opened it, she'd never
get it folded again. The name and address of the Galerie were
embossed in one corner, and her name and the name of her
hotel were handwritten across the center in perfect italic
script.
 She unfolded the paper and found herself holding a new
Braun holoprojector and a flat envelope of clear plastic. The
envelope contained seven numbered tabs of holofiche. Beyond
the miniature iron balcony, the sun was going down, painting
the Old Town gold. She heard car horns and the cries of
children. She closed the window and crossed to a writing
desk. The Braun was a smooth black rectangle powered by
solar cells. She checked the charge, then took the first holo-
fiche from the envelope and slotted it.
 The box she'd seen in Virek's simulation of the Guell Park
blossomed above the Braun, glowing with the crystal resolu-
tion of the finest museum-grade holograms. Bone and circuit-
gold, dead lace, and a dull white marble rolled from clay.
Marly shook her head. How could anyone have arranged
these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the
heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook? But then she
nodded. It could be done, she knew; it had been done many
years ago by a man named Cornell, who'd also made boxes.
 Then she glanced to the left, where the elegant gray paper
lay on the desktop. She'd chosen this hotel at random, when
she'd grown tired of shopping. She'd told no one she was
here, and certainly no one from the Galerie Duperey.

`C
I~AIfY11JWN

HE STAYED OUT FOR something like eight hours, by the clock
on his mother's Hitachi. Came to staring at Its dusty face, some
hard thing wedged under his thigh. The Ono-Sendai. He
rolled over. Stale puke smell.
 Then he was in the shower, not sure quite how he'd gotten
there, spinning the taps with his clothes still on. He clawed
and dug and pulled at his face. It felt like a rubber mask.
 "Something happened." Something bad, big, he wasn't
sure what.
 His wet clothes gradually mounded up on the tile floor of
the shower. Finally he stepped out, went to the sink and
flicked wet hair back from his eyes, peered at the face in the
mirror. Bobby Newmark, no problem.
 "No, Bobby, problem. Gotta problem .
 Towel around his shoulders, dripping water, he followed
the narrow hallway to his bedroom, a tiny, wedge-shaped
space at the very back of the condo. His holoporn unit lit as
he stepped in, half a dozen girls grinning, eyeing him with
evident delight. They seemed to be standing beyond the walls
of the room, in hazy vistas of powder-blue space, their white
smiles and taut young bodies bright as neon. Two of them
edged forward and began to touch themselves.
 "Stop it," he said.
 The projection unit shut itself down at his command; the
dreamgirls vanished. The thing had originally belonged to
Ling Warren's older brother; the girls' hair and clothes were
dated and vaguely ridiculous. You could talk with them and
get them to do things with themselves and each other. Bobby
remembered being thirteen and in love with Brandi, the one
with the blue rubber pants. Now he valued the projections
mainly for the illusion of space they could provide in the
makeshift bedroom.
 "Something fucking happened," he said, pulling on black
jeans and an almost-clean shirt. He shook his head. "What?
Fucking what?" Some kind of power surge on the line? Some
flukey action down at the Fission Authority? Maybe the base
he'd tried to invade had suffered some strange breakdown, or
been attacked from another qu~er... But he was left with
the sense of having met someone, someone who . . . He'd
unconsciously extended his right hand, fingers spread, be-
seechingly. "Fuck," he said. The fingers balled into a fist.
Then it came back: first, the sense of the big thing, the really
big thing, reaching for him across cyberspace, and then the
girl-impression. Someone brown, slender, crouching some-
where in a strange bright dark full of stars and wind. But it
slid away as his mind went for it.
 Hungry, he got into sandals and headed back toward the
kitchen, rubbing at his hair with a damp towel. On his way
through the living room, he noticed the ON telltale of the
Ono-Sendai glaring at him from the carpet. "0 shit." He
stood there and sucked at his teeth. It was still jacked in. Was
it possible that it was still linked with the base he'd tried to
run? Could they tell he wasn't dead? He had no idea. One
thing he did know, though, was that they'd have his number
and good. He hadn't bothered with the cutouts and frills that
would've kept them from running a backtrack.
 They had his address.
 Hunger forgotten, he spun into the bathroom and rooted
through the soggy clothing until he found his credit chip.

 He had two hundred and ten New Yen stashed in the
hollow plastic handle of a multibit screwdriver. Screwdriver
and credit chip secure in his jeans, he pulled on his oldest,
heaviest pair of boots, then clawed unwashed clothing from
beneath the bed. He came up with a black canvas jacket with
at least a dozen pockets, one of them a single huge pouch
across the small of the back, a kind of integral rucksack.
There was a Japanese gravity knife with orange handles be-
neath his pillow; that went into a narrow pocket on the
jacket's left sleeve, near the cuff.
 The dreamgirls clicked in as he was leaving: "Bobby,
Bobb-y, come back and play. .
 In his living room, he yanked the Ono-Sendai's jack from
the face of the Hitachi, coiling the fiber-optic lead and tuck-
ing it into a pocket. He did the same with the trode set, then
slid the Ono-Sendai into the jacket's pack-pocket.
 The curtains were still drawn. He felt a surge of some new
exhilaration. He was leaving. He had to leave. Already he'd
forgotten the pathetic fondness that his brush with death had
generated. He parted the curtains carefully, a thumb-wide
gap, and peered out.
 It was late afternoon. In a few hours, the first lights would
start blinking on in the dark bulks of the Projects. Big Play-
ground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose
beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened
by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies,
catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous
chicken-
wire dishes.
 Two-a-Day would be up there now, sleeping, in a world
Bobby had never seen, the world of a mincome aicology.
Two-a-Day caine down to do business, mostly with the hot-
doggers in Barrytown, and then he climbed back up. It had
always looked good to Bobby, up there, so much happening
on the balcon