There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
`Yeah?'
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
`Hello, Case.'
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
`Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk.'
It was a chip voice.
`Don't you want to talk, Case?'
He hung up.
On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.
PART THREE
MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
8
Archipelago.
The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data in the L-5 archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen.
Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.
On the THYliner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Armitage on the aisle. Once, as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once. `No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I likethat.'
Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger. `That's right, Peter. Don't.'
Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.
Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell instantly asleep.
Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.
`You been up, haven't you?' Molly asked, as he squirmed his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JALshuttle.
`Nah. Never travel much, just for biz.' The steward was attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
`Hope you don't get SAS,' she said.
`Airsick? No way.'
`It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g, and your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex, like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of adrenaline.' The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new set of trodes from his red plastic apron.
Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb.
He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a big airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane, like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened to the piped koto music and waited.
Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.
Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's description, but it passed quickly enough and he was able to sleep. The steward woke him as they were preparing to dock at JAL's terminal cluster.
`We transfer to Freeside now?' he asked, eyeing a shred of Yeheyuan tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to dance ten centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights.
`No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you know? We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster.' She touched the release plate on her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of the foam. `Funny choice of venue, you ask me.'
`How's that?'
`Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now.'
`What's that mean?'
`You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway, they'll let you smoke your cigarettes there.'
Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started building. They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. `Here,' Molly said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. `Grab the rungs. Make like you're climbing backward, right? You're going toward the hull, that's like you're climbing down into gravity. Got it?'
Case's stomach churned.
`You be fine, mon,' Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.
Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.
`Up,' Molly said, `you gonna kiss it next?' Case lay flat on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. `Gotta play house,' she said. `You help me string this up.' He looked around the wide, featureless space and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at random.
When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
`Good,' Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial gravity.
`Where were you when it needed doing?' Case asked Riviera.
The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek. `In the head,' Riviera said, and smiled.
Case laughed.
`Good,' Riviera said, `you can laugh. I would have tried to help you, but I'm no good with my hands.' He held up his palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
`Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?' Molly stepped between them.
`Yo,' Aerol said, from the hatch, `you wan'~ come wi'~ me, cowboy mon.'
`It's your deck,' Armitage said, `and the other gear. Help him get it in from the cargo bay.'
`You ver'~ pale, mon,' Aerol said, as they were guiding the foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. `Maybe you wan'~ eat somethin'~.'