Count Zero (13 page)

The Wig sat on the beach at Cannes for two years, ingesting only the most expensive designer drugs and periodically flicking on a tiny Hosaka television to study the bloated bodies of dead Africans with a strange and curiously innocent intensity. At some point, no one could quite say where or when or why, it began to be noted that the Wig had gone over the edge. Specifically, the Finn said, the Wig had become convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace
was
God, or some new manifestation of same. The Wig’s ventures into theology tended to be marked by major paradigm shifts, true leaps of faith. The Finn had some idea of what the Wig was about in those days; shortly after his conversion to his new and singular faith, Wigan Ludgate had returned to the Sprawl and embarked on an epic if somewhat random voyage of cybernetic discovery. Being a former console jockey, he knew where to go for the very best in what the Finn called the hard and the soft. The Finn provided the Wig with all manner of both, as the Wig was still a rich man. The Wig explained to the Finn that his technique of mystical exploration involved projecting his consciousness into blank, unstructured sectors of the matrix and waiting. To the man’s credit, the Finn said, he never actually claimed to have met God, although he did maintain that he had on several occasions sensed His presence moving upon the face of the grid. In due course, the Wig ran out of money.
His spiritual quest having alienated the few remaining business connections from his pre-African days, he sank without a trace.

“But then he turned up one day,” the Finn said, “crazy as a shithouse rat. He was a pale little fucker anyway, but now he wore all this African shit, beads and bones and everything.” Bobby let go of the Finn’s narrative long enough to wonder how anyone who looked like the Finn could describe somebody as a pale little fucker, then glanced over at Lucas, whose face was dead grim. Then it occurred to Bobby that Lucas might take the Africa stuff personally, sort of. But the Finn was continuing his story.

“He had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell. Decks, peripherals, software. It was all a couple of years old, but it was top gear, so I gave him a price on it. I noticed he’d had a socket implant, and he kept this one sliver of microsoft jacked behind his ear. What’s the soft? It’s blank, he says. He’s sitting right where you are now, kid, and he says to me, it’s blank and it’s the voice of God, and I live forever in His white hum, or some shit like that. So I think, Christ, the Wig’s gone but good now, and there he is counting up the money I’d given him for about the fifth time. Wig, I said, time’s money but tell me what you intend to do now? Because I was curious. Known the guy years, in a business way. Finn, he says, I gotta get up the gravity well, God’s up there. I mean, he says, He’s everywhere but there’s too much static down here, it obscures His face. Right, I say, you got it. So I show him the door and that’s it. Never saw him again.”

Bobby blinked, waited, squirmed a little on the hard seat of the folding chair.

“Except, about a year later, a guy turns up, high-orbit rigger down the well on a leave, and he’s got some good software for sale. Not great, but interesting. He says it’s from the Wig. Well, maybe the Wig’s a freak, and long out of the game, but he can still spot the good shit. So I buy it. That was maybe ten years ago, right? And every year or so, some guy would turn up with something. ‘The Wig told me I should offer you this.’ And usually I’d buy it. It was never anything special, but it was okay. Never the same guy bringing it, either.”

“Was that it, Finn, just software?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, mainly, except for these weird sculpture things. I’d forgotten that. I figured the Wig made ’em. First time a guy
came in with one of those, I bought the ’ware he had, then said what the fuck do you call that? Wig said you might be interested, the guy said. Tell him he’s crazy, I said. The guy laughed. Well, you keep it, he says. I’m not carrying the Goddamn thing back up with me. I mean, it was about the size of a deck, this thing, just a bunch of garbage and shit, stuck together in a box . . . So I pushed it behind this Coke crate fulla scrap iron, and forgot it, except old Smith—he’s a colleague of mine in those days, dealt mostly art and collectibles—he sees it and wants it. So we do some dipshit deal. Any more of these, Finn, he says, get ’em. There’s assholes uptown go for this kind of shit. So the next time a guy turned up from the Wig, I bought the sculpture thing, too, and traded it to Smith. But it was never much money for any of it . . .” The Finn shrugged. “Not until last month, anyway. Some kid came in with what you bought. It was from the Wig. Listen, he says, this is biosoft and its a breaker. Wig says it’s worth a lot. I put a scan on it and it looked right. I thought it looked interesting, you know? Your partner Beauvoir thought it looked pretty interesting, too. I bought it. Beauvoir bought it off me. End of story.” The Finn dragged out a cigarette, this one broken, bent double. “Shit,” he said. He pulled a faded pack of cigarette papers from the same pocket and extracted one of the fragile pink leaves, rolling it tightly around the broken cigarette, a sort of splint. When he licked the glue, Bobby caught a glimpse of a very pointed gray-pink tongue.

“And where, Finn, does Mr. Wig reside?” Lucas asked, his thumbs beneath his chin, his large fingers forming a steeple in front of his face.

“Lucas, I haven’t got the slightest fucking clue. In orbit somewhere. And modestly, if the kind of money he was getting out of me meant anything to him. You know, I hear there’s places up there where you don’t need money, if you fit into the economy, so maybe a little goes a long way. Don’t ask me, though, I’m agoraphobic.” He smiled nastily at Bobby, who was trying to get the image of that tongue out of his mind. “You know,” he said, squinting at Lucas, “it was about that time that I started hearing about weird shit happening in the matrix.”

“Like what?” Bobby asked.

“Keep the fuck out of this,” the Finn said, still looking at Lucas. “That was before you guys turned up, the new hoodoo team. I knew this street samurai got a job working for a
Special Forces type made the Wig look flat fucking normal. Her and this cowboy they’d scraped up out of Chiba, they were on to something like that. Maybe they found it. Istanbul was the last I saw of ’em. Heard she lived in London, once, a few years ago. Who the fuck knows? Seven, eight years.” The Finn suddenly seemed tired, and old, very old. He looked to Bobby like a big, mummified rat animated by springs and hidden wires. He took a wristwatch with a cracked face and a single greasy leather strap from his pocket and consulted it. “Jesus. Well, that’s all you get from me, Lucas. I’ve got some friends from an organ bank coming by in twenty minutes to talk a little biz.”

Bobby thought of the bodies upstairs. They’d been there all day.

“Hey,” the Finn said, reading the expression on his face, “organ banks are great for getting
rid
of things. I’m paying
them.
Those motherless assholes upstairs, they don’t have too much left in the way of organs . . .” And the Finn laughed.

“You said he was close to . . . Legba? And Legba’s the one you and Beauvoir said gave me luck when I hit that black ice?”

Beyond the honeycomb edge of the geodesics, the sky was lightening.

“Yes,” Lucas said. He seemed lost in thought.

“But he doesn’t seem to trust that stuff at all.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lucas said as the Rolls came into view. “He’s always been close to the spirit of the thing.”

T
HE PLANE HAD GONE
to ground near the sound of running water. Turner could hear it, turning in the g-web in his fever or sleep, water down stone, one of the oldest songs. The plane was smart, smart as any dog, with hard-wired instincts of concealment. He felt it sway on its landing gear, somewhere in the sick night, and creep forward, branches brushing and scraping against the dark canopy. The plane crept into deep green shadow and sank down on its knees, its airframe whining and creaking as it flattened itself, belly down, into loam and granite like a manta ray into sand. The mimetic polycarbon coating its wings and fuselage mottled and darkened, taking on the colors and patterns of moon-dappled stone and forest soil. Finally it was silent, and the only sound was the sound of water over a creekbed . . .

He came awake like a machine, eyes opening, vision plugged in, empty, remembering the red flash of Lynch’s death out beyond the fixed sights of the Smith & Wesson. The arc of the canopy above him was laced with mimetic approximations of leaves and branches. Pale dawn and the sound of running water. He was still wearing Oakey’s blue work shirt. It smelled of sour sweat now, and he’d ripped the sleeves out the day before. The gun lay between his legs, pointing at the jet’s black joystick. The g-web was a limp tangle around his hips and shoulders. He twisted around and saw the girl, oval face and a brown dried trickle of blood beneath a nostril. She was still out, sweating, her lips slightly parted, like a doll’s.

“Where are we?”

“We are fifteen meters south-southeast of the landing coordinates you provided,” the plane said. “You were unconscious again. I opted for concealment.”

He reached back and removed the interface plug from his socket, breaking his link with the plane. He gazed dully around the cockpit until he found the manual controls for the canopy. It sighed up on servos, the lacework of polycarbon leaves shifting as it moved. He got his leg over the side, looked down at his hand flat against the fuselage at the edge of the cockpit. Polycarbon reproduced the gray tones of a nearby boulder; as he watched, it began to paint a hand-sized patch the color of his palm. He pulled his other leg over, the gun forgotten on the seat, and slid down into earth and long sweet grass. Then he slept again, his forehead against the grass and dreamed of running water.

When he woke, he was crawling forward on his hands and knees, through low branches heavy with dew. Finally he reached a clearing and pitched forward, rolling over, his arms spread in what felt like surrender. High above him, something small and gray launched itself from one branch, caught another, swung there for an instant, then scrambled away, out of his sight.

Lie still, he heard a voice telling him, years away. Just lay out and relax and pretty soon they’ll forget you, forget you in the gray and the dawn and the dew. They’re out to feed, feed and play, and their brains can’t hold two messages, not for long. He lay there on his back, beside his brother, the nylon-stocked Winchester across his chest, breathing the smell of new brass and gun oil, the smell of their campfire still in his hair. And his brother was always right, about the squirrels. They came. They forgot the clear glyph of death spelled out below them in patched denim and blue steel; they came, racing along limbs, pausing to sniff the morning, and Turner’s .22 cracked, a limp gray body tumbling down. The others scattered, vanishing, and Turner passed the gun to his brother. Again, they waited, waited for the squirrels to forget them.

“You’re like me,” Turner said to the squirrels, bobbing up out of his dream. One of them sat up suddenly on a fat limb and looked directly at him. “I always come back.” The squirrel hopped away. “I was coming back when I ran from the Dutchman. I was coming back when I flew to Mexico. I was coming back when I killed Lynch.”

He lay there for a long time, watching the squirrels, while the woods woke and the morning warmed around him. A crow swept in, banking, braking with feathers it spread like black mechanical fingers. Checking to see if he were dead.

Turner grinned up at the crow as it flapped away.

Not yet.

He crawled back in, under the overhanging branches, and found her sitting up in the cockpit. She wore a baggy white T-shirt slashed diagonally with the
MAAS-NEOTEK
logo. There were lozenges of fresh red blood across the front of the shirt. Her nose was bleeding again. Bright blue eyes, dazed and disoriented, in sockets bruised yellow-black, like exotic makeup.

Young, he saw, very young.

“You’re Mitchell’s daughter,” he said, dragging the name up from the biosoft dossier. “Angela.”

“Angie,” she said, automatically. “Who’re you? I’m bleeding.” She held out a bloody carnation of wadded tissue.

“Turner. I was expecting your father.” Remembering the gun now, her other hand out of sight, below the edge of the cockpit. “Do you know where he is?”

“In the mesa. He thought he could talk with them, explain it. Because they need him.”

“With who?” He took a step forward.

“Maas. The Board. They can’t afford to hurt him. Can they?”

“Why would they?” Another step.

She dabbed at her nose with the red tissue. “Because he sent me out. Because he knew they were going to hurt me, kill me maybe. Because of the dreams.”

“The dreams?”

“Do you think they’ll hurt him?”

“No, no, they wouldn’t do that. I’m going to climb up there now. Okay?”

She nodded. He had to run his hands over the side of the fuselage to find the shallow, recessed handholds; the mimetic coating showed him leaf and lichen, twigs . . . And then he was up, beside her, and he saw the gun beside her sneakered foot. “But wasn’t he coming himself? I was expecting him, your father.”

“No. We never planned that. We only had the one plane. Didn’t he tell you?” She started to shake. “Didn’t he tell you
anything?
”

“Enough,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “he told us enough. It’ll be all right . . .” He swung his legs over, bent, moved the Smith & Wesson away from her foot, and found the interface cable. His hand still on her, he raised it, snapped it into place behind his ear.

“Give me the procedures for erasing anything you stored in the past forty-eight hours,” he said. “I want to dump that course for Mexico City, your flight from the coast, anything . . .”

“There was no plan logged for Mexico City,” the voice said, direct neural input on audio.

Turner stared at the girl, rubbed his jaw.

“Where were we going?”

“Bogotá,” and the jet reeled out coordinates for the landing they hadn’t made.

She blinked at him, her lids bruised dark as the surrounding skin. ‘Who are you talking to?”

“The plane. Did Mitchell tell you where he thought you’d be going?”

“Japan . . .”

“Know anyone in Bogotá? Where’s your mother?”

“No. Berlin, I think. I don’t really know her.”

He wiped the plane’s banks, dumping Conroy’s programming, what there was of it: the approach from California, identification data for the site, a flight plan that would have taken them to a strip within three hundred kilometers of Bogotá’s urban core . . .

Someone would find the jet eventually. He thought about the Maas orbital recon system and wondered if the stealth-and-evasion programs he’d ordered the plane to run had done any real good. He could offer the jet to Rudy for salvage, but he doubted Rudy would want to be involved. For that matter, simply showing up at the farm, with Mitchell’s daughter in tow, dragged Rudy in right up to his neck. But there was nowhere else to go, not for the things he needed now.

It was a four-hour walk, along half-remembered trails and down a weed-grown, winding stretch of two-lane blacktop. The trees were different, it seemed to him, and then he remembered how much they would have grown over the years since he’d been back. At regular intervals they passed the stumps of wooden poles that had once supported telephone wires, overgrown now with bramble and honeysuckle, the
wires pulled down for fuel. Bees grazed in flowering grass at the roadside . . .

“Is there food where we’re going?” the girl asked, the soles of her white sneakers scuffing the weathered blacktop.

“Sure,” Turner said, “all you want.”

“What I want right now’s water.” She swiped a lank strand of brown hair back from a tanned cheek. He’d noticed she was developing a limp, and she’d started to wince each time she put her right foot down.

“What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Ankle. Something, I think when I decked the ’light.” She grimaced, kept walking.

“We’ll rest.”

“No. I want to get there, get anywhere.”

“Rest,” he said, taking her hand, leading her to the edge of the road. She made a face, but sat down beside him, her right leg stretched carefully in front of her.

“That’s a big gun,” she said. It was hot now, too hot for the parka. He’d put the shoulder rig on bareback, with the sleeveless work shirt over it, tails out and flapping. “Why’s the barrel look like that, like a cobra’s head, underneath?”

“That’s a sighting device, for night-fights.” He leaned forward to examine her ankle. It was swelling quickly now. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll want to walk on that,” he said.

“You get into a lot of fights, at night? With guns?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I understand what it is that you do.”

He looked up at her. “I don’t always understand that myself, not lately. I was expecting your father. He wanted to change companies, work for somebody else. The people he wanted to work for hired me and some other people to make sure he got out of his old contract.”

“But there wasn’t any way out of that contract,” she said. “Not legally.”

“That’s right.” Undoing the knot, unlacing the sneaker. “Not legally.”

“Oh. So that’s what you do for a living?”

“Yes.” Sneaker off now, she wore no sock, the ankle swelling badly. “This is a sprain.”

“What about the other people, then? You had more people, back there, in that ruin? Somebody was shooting, and those flares . . .”

“Hard to say who was shooting,” he said, “but the flares weren’t ours. Maybe Maas security team, following you out. Did you think you got out clean?”

“I did what Chris told me,” she said. “Chris, that’s my father.”

“I know. I think I’m going to have to carry you the rest of the way.”

“But what about your friends?”

“What friends?”

“Back there, in Arizona.”

“Right. Well,” and he wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, “can’t say. Don’t really know.”

Seeing the white-out sky, flare of energy, brighter than the sun. But no pulse of electromagnetics, the plane had said . . .

The first of Rudy’s augmented dogs picked them up fifteen minutes after they started out again, Angie riding Turner’s back, arms around his shoulders, skinny thighs under his armpits, his fingers locked in front of his sternum in a double fist. She smelled like a kid from the up-line ’burbs, some vaguely herbal hint of soap or shampoo. Thinking that, he thought about what he must smell like to her. Rudy had a shower—

“Oh, shit, what’s that?” Stiffening on his back, pointing.

A lean gray hound regarded them from a high clay bank at a turning in the road, its narrow head sheathed and blindered in a black hood studded with sensors. It panted, tongue lolling, and slowly swung its head from side to side.

“It’s okay,” Turner said. “Watchdog. Belongs to my friend.”

The house had grown, sprouting wings and workshops, but Rudy had never painted the peeling clapboard of the original structure. Rudy had thrown up a taut square of chainlink, since Turner’s time, fencing away his collection of vehicles, but the gate was open when they arrived, the hinges lost in morning glory and rust. The real defenses, Turner knew, were elsewhere. Four of the augmented hounds trotted after him as he trudged up the gravel drive, Angie’s head limp on his shoulder, her arms still locked around him.

Rudy was waiting on the front porch, in old white shorts and a navy T-shirt, its single pocket displaying at least nine pens of one kind or another. He looked at them and raised a green can of Dutch beer in greeting. Behind him, a blonde in
a faded khaki shirt stepped out of the kitchen, a chrome spatula in her hand; her hair was clipped short, swept up and back in a cut that made Turner think of the Korean medic in Hosaka’s pod, of the pod burning, of Webber, of the white sky . . . He swayed there, in Rudy’s gravel driveway, legs wide to support the girl, his bare chest streaked with sweat, with dust from the mall in Arizona, and looked at Rudy and the blonde.

“We got some breakfast for you,” Rudy said. “When you came up on the dog screens, we figured you’d be hungry.” His tone was carefully noncommittal.

The girl groaned.

“That’s good,” Turner said. “She’s got a bum ankle, Rudy. We better look at that. Some other things I have to talk to you about, too.”

“Little young for you, I’d say,” Rudy said, and took another swig of his beer.

“Fuck off, Rudy,” the woman beside him said, “can’t you see she’s hurt? Bring her in this way,” she said to Turner, and was gone, back through the kitchen door.

“You look different,” Rudy said, peering at him, and Turner saw that he was drunk. “The same, but different.”

“It’s been a while,” Turner said, starting for the wooden steps.

“You get a face job or something?”

“Reconstruction. They had to build it back from records.” He climbed the steps, his lower back stabbed through with pain at every move.

“It’s not bad,” Rudy said. “I almost didn’t notice.” He belched. He was shorter than Turner, and going to fat, but they had the same brown hair, very similar features.

Turner paused, on the stair, when their eyes were level. “You still do a little bit of everything, Rudy? I need this kid scanned. I need a few other things, too.”

“Well,” his brother said, “we’ll see what we can do. We heard something last night. Maybe a sonic boom. Anything to do with you?”

“Yeah. There’s a jet up by the squirrel wood, but it’s pretty well out of sight.”