He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.
They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene. `Kill the fuckers,' she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, `burn 'em.' Drunk, Case rummaged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Marlene's previous -and, Case suspected at the time, still occasional -boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight. Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered.
`Shit!' Marlene behind him, swaying. `Stupid! You didn't burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!' Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.
In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.
When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump, taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental.
In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.
Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor would attract too much attention.
`Christ,' he said, standing naked in front of the mirror, `you think that looks real?' She was using the last of the tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
`Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn't enough to do your foot.' She stood, tossing the empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.
`What about you,' he said, `you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.'
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. `I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay.'
Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the mirror. `Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?' He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. `You sleep okay? You notice any lights?'
`You were dreaming,' she said.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow, studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd be doing it through Wintermute.
`And it was like real?' she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. `Like simstim?'
He said it was. `Real as this,' he added, looking around. `Maybe more.'
The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature, the girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba.
`What's that smell?' he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
`The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.'
Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
`Molly, love,' Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair, `you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I'm out.'
`Peter,' she said, `and what if I won't?' She smiled without showing her teeth.
`You will,' Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back.
`Give it to him,' Armitage said.
`Pig for it, aren't you?' She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. `He could off himself,' she said to Armitage.
`I have an audition this afternoon,' Riviera said. `I'll need to be at my best.' He cupped the foil packet in his upturned palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
`You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,' Armitage said. `On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours.'
`How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a JALtaxi?' Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes.
`Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.'
`How about me?' Molly asked. `I got chores today?'
`I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite direction.' Straylight, Case thought.
`How soon?' Case asked, meeting the pale stare.
`Soon,' Armitage said. `Get going, Case.'
`Mon, you doin'~ jus'~ fine,' Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. `Aerol say you doin'~ jus'~ fine.' Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it, Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle narrowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided, would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.