Count Zero
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Next page 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 balconies at night, amid red smudges of charcoal, little kids in their underwear swarming like monkeys, so small you could barely see them. Sometimes the wind would shift, and the smell of cooking would settle over Big Playground, and sometimes you'd see an ultralight glide out from some secret country of rooftop so high up there. And always the mingled beat from a million speakers, waves of music that pulsed and faded in and out of the wind. Two-a-Day never talked about his life, where he lived. Two-a-Day talked biz, or, to be more social, women. What Two-a-Day said about women made Bobby want to get out of Barrytown worse than ever, and Bobby knew that biz would be his only ticket out. But now he needed the dealer in a different way, because now he was entirely out of his depth. Maybe Two-a-Day could tell him what was happening. There wasn't supposed to be any lethal stuff around that base Two-a-Day had picked it out for him, then rented him the software he'd need to get in. And Two-a-Day was ready to fence anything he could've gotten out with. So Two-a-Day had to know. Know something, anyway. "I don't even have your number, man," he said to the Projects, letting the curtains fall shut. Should he leave some- thing for his mother? A note? "My ass," he said to the room behind him, "out of here," and then he was out the door and down the hall, headed for the stairs. "Forever," he added, kicking open an exit door. Big Playground looked safe enough, except for a lone shirtless duster deep in some furious conversation with God. Bobby cut the duster a wide circle; he was shouting and jumping and karate-chopping the air. The duster had dried blood on his bare feet and the remnants of what had probably been a Lobe haircut. Big Playground was neutral temtory, at least in theory, and the Lobes were loosely confederated with the Gothicks; Bobby had fairly solid affiliations with the Gothicks, but retained his indie status. Barrytown was a dicey place to be an indie. At least, he thought, as the duster's angry gibberish faded behind him, the gangs gave you some structure. If you were Gothick and the Kasuals chopped you out, it made sense. Maybe the ultimate reasons behind it were crazy, but there were rules But indies got chopped out by dusters running on brainstem, by roaming predatory loonies from as far away as New Yorklike that Penis Collector character last summer, kept the goods in his pocket in a plastic bag . Bobby had been trying to chart a way out of this landscape since the day he was born, or anyway it felt that way. Now, as he walked, the cyberspace deck in the pack-pocket banged against his spine. Like it. too, was urging him to get out. "Come on, Two-a-Day," he said to the looming Projects, "get your ass down outa there and be in Leon's when I get there, okay?" Two-a-Day wasn't in Leon's. Nobody was, unless you wanted to count Leon, who was probing the inner mysteries of a wall-screen converter with a bent paper clip. "Why don't you just get a hammer and pound the fucker |
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