Count Zero

  She passed him the plastic mug, filled to the brim with hot black coffee.

  “How about you? You said you never knew your mother.”

  “I didn’t. They split when I was little. She wouldn’t come back in on the contract unless he agreed to cut her in on some kind of stock plan. That’s what he said anyway.”

  “So what’s he like?” He sipped coffee, then passed it back.

  She looked at him over the rim of the red plastic mug, her eyes ringed with Sally’s makeup. “You tell me,” she said. “Or else ask me in twenty years. I’m seventeen, how the hell am I supposed to know?”

  He laughed. “You’re starting to feel a little better now?”

  “I guess so. Considering the circumstances.”

  And suddenly he was aware of her, in a way he hadn’t been before, and his hands went anxiously to the controls. “Good. We still have a long way to go . . .”

  They slept in the hovercraft that night, parked behind the rusting steel lattice that had once supported a drive-in theater screen in southern Pennsylvania, Turner’s parka spread on the armor-plate floorboards below the turbine’s long bulge. She’d sipped the last of the coffee, cold now, as she sat in the square hatch opening above the passenger seat, watching the lightning bugs pulse across a field of yellowed grass.

  Somewhere in his dreams—still colored with random flashes from her father’s dossier—she rolled against him, her breasts soft and warm against his bare back through the thin fabric of her T-shirt, and then her arm came over him to stroke the flat muscles of his stomach, but he lay still, pretending to a deeper sleep, and soon found his way down into the darker passages of Mitchell’s biosoft, where strange things came to mingle with his own oldest fears and hurts. And woke at dawn to hear her singing softly to herself from her perch in the roof hatch.

  “My daddy he’s a handsome devil

  got a chain ’bout nine miles long

  And from every link

  A heart does dangle

  Of another maid

  He’s loved and wronged.”

  22

  JAMMER’S

  JAMMER’S WAS UP twelve more flights of dead escalator and occupied the rear third of the top floor. Aside from Leon’s place, Bobby had never seen a nightclub, and he found Jammer’s both impressive and scary. Impressive because of its scale and what he took to be the exceptional quality of the fittings, and scary because a nightclub, by day, is somehow inately unreal. Witchy. He peered around, thumbs snagged in the back pockets of his new jeans, while Jackie conducted a whispered conversation with a long-faced white man in rumpled blue coveralls. The place was fitted out with dark ultrasuede banquettes, round black tables, and dozens of ornate screens of pierced wood. The ceiling was painted black, each table faintly illuminated by its own little recessed flood aimed straight down out of the dark. There was a central stage, brightly lit now with work lights strung on yellow flex, and, in the middle of the stage, a set of cherry-red acoustic drums. He wasn’t sure why, but it gave him the creeps; some sidelong sense of a half-life, as though something was about to shift, just at the edge of his vision . . .

  “Bobby,” Jackie said, “come over here and meet Jammer.”

  He crossed the stretch of plain dark carpet with all the cool he could muster and faced the long-faced man, who had dark, thinning hair and wore a white evening shirt under his coveralls. The man’s eyes were narrow, the hollows of his cheeks shadowed with a day’s growth of beard.

  “Well,” the man said, “you want to be a cowboy?” He was looking at Bobby’s T-shirt and Bobby had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be about to laugh.

  “Jammer was a jockey,” Jackie said. “Hot as they come. Weren’t you, Jammer?”

  “So they say,” Jammer said, still looking at Bobby. “Long time ago, Jackie. How many hours you logged, running?” he asked Bobby.

  Bobby’s face went hot. “Well, one, I guess.”

  Jammer raised his bushy eyebrows. “Gotta start somewhere.” He smiled, his teeth small and unnaturally even and, Bobby thought, too numerous.

  “Bobby,” Jackie said, “why don’t you ask Jammer about this Wig character the Finn was telling you about?”

  Jammer glanced at her, then back to Bobby. “You know the Finn? For a hotdogger you’re in pretty deep, aren’t you?” He took a blue plastic inhaler from his hip pocket and inserted it in his left nostril, snorted, then put it back in his pocket. “Ludgate. The Wig. Finn’s talking about the Wig? Must be in his dotage.”

  Bobby didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. “Well,” Bobby ventured, “this Wig’s up in orbit somewhere, and he sells the Finn stuff, sometimes. . . .”

  “No shit? Well, you coulda fooled me. I woulda told you the Wig was either dead or drooling. Crazier than your usual cowboy, you know what I mean? Batshit. Gone. Haven’t heard of him in years.”

  “Jammer,” Jackie said, “I think it’s maybe best if Bobby just tells you the story. Beauvoir’s due here this afternoon, and he’ll have some questions for you, so you better know where things stand. . . .”

  Jammer looked at her. “Well. I see. Mr. Beauvoir’s calling in that favor, is he?”

  “Can’t speak for him,” she said, “but that would be my guess. We need a safe place to store the Count here.”

  “What count?”

  “Me,” Bobby said, “that’s me.”

  “Great,” Jammer said, with a total lack of enthusiasm. “So come on back into the office.”

  Bobby couldn’t keep his eyes off the cyberspace deck that took up a third of the surface of Jammer’s antique oak desk. It was matte black, a custom job, no trademarks anywhere. He kept craning forward, while he told Jammer about Two-a-Day and his attempted run, about the girl-feeling thing and his mother getting blown up. It was the hottest-looking deck he’d ever seen, and he remembered Jackie saying that Jammer had been such a shithot cowboy in his day.

  Jammer slumped back in his chair when Bobby was finished. “You wanna try it?” he asked. He sounded tired.

  “Try it?”

  “The deck. I think you might wanna try it. It’s something about the way you keep rubbing your ass on the chair. Either you wanna try it or you gotta piss bad.”

  “Shit yeah. I mean, yeah, thanks, yeah, I would . . .”

  “Why not? No way for anybody to know it’s you and not me, right? Why don’t you jack in with him, Jackie? Kinda keep track.” He opened a desk drawer and took out two trode sets. “But don’t do anything, right? I mean, just buzz on out and spin. Don’t try to run any numbers. I owe Beauvoir and Lucas a favor, and it looks like how I’m paying it back is by helping keep you intact.” He handed one set of trodes to Jackie, the other to Bobby. He stood up, grabbed handles on either side of the black console, and spun it around so it faced Bobby. “Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Thing’s ten years old and it’ll still wipe ass on most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight up from scratch. He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist, once. The two of ’em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born.”

  Bobby already had his trodes on. Now he looked at Jackie.

  “You ever jack tandem before?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay. We’ll jack, but I’ll hang off your left shoulder. I say jack out, jack out. You see anything funny, it’ll be because I’m with you, understand?”

  He nodded.

  She undid a pair of long, silver-headed pins at the rear of her fedora and took it off, putting it down on the desk beside Jammer’s deck. She slid the trodes on over the orange silk headscarf and smoothed the contacts against her forehead.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer’s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he didn’t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the nonplace that was cyberspace. “Slow it down, Bobby.” Jackie’s voice low and sweet, beside him in
the void.

  “Jesus Christ, this thing’s slick!”

  “Yeah, but damp it down. The rush isn’t any good for us. You want to cruise. Keep us up here and slow it down . . .”

  He eased off on forward until they seemed to coast along. He turned to the left, expecting to see her there, but there was nothing.

  “I’m here,” she said, “don’t worry . . .”

  “Who was Quine?”

  “Quine? Some cowboy Jammer knew. He knew ’em all, in his day.”

  He took a right-angle left at random, pivoting smoothly at the grid intersection, testing the deck for response. It was amazing, totally unlike anything he’d felt before in cyberspace. “Holy shit. This thing makes an Ono-Sendai look like a kid’s toy . . .”

  “It’s probably got O-S circuitry in it. That’s what they used to use, Jammer says. Takes us up a little more . . .”

  They rose effortlessly through the grid, the data receding below them. “There isn’t a hell of a lot to see up here,” he complained.

  “Wrong. You see some interesting stuff, you hang out long enough in the blank parts . . .”

  The fabric of the matrix seemed to shiver, directly in front of them . . .

  “Uh, Jackie . . .”

  “Stop here. Hold it. It’s okay. Trust me.”

  Somewhere, far away, his hands moving over the unfamiliar keyboard configuration. He held them steady now, while a section of cyberspace blurred, grew milky. “What is—”

  “Danbala ap monte l,” the voice said, harsh in his head, and in his mouth a taste like blood. “Danbala is riding her.” He knew, somehow, what the words meant, but the voice was iron in his head. The milky fabric divided, seemed to bubble, became two patches of shifting gray.

  “Legba,” she said, “Legba and Ougou Feray, god of war. Papa Ougou! St. Jacques Majeur! Viv la Vyèj!”

  Iron laughter filled the matrix, sawing through Bobby’s head.

  “Map kite tout mizé ak tout giyon,” said another voice, fluid and quicksilver and cold. “See, Papa, she has come here to throw away her bad luck!” And then that one laughed as well, and Bobby fought down a wave of sheer hysteria as the silver laughter rose through him like bubbles.

  “Has she bad luck, the horse of Danbala?” boomed the iron voice of Ougou Feray, and for an instant Bobby thought he saw a figure flicker in the gray fog. The voice hooted its terrible laughter. “Indeed! Indeed! But she knows it not! She is not my horse, no, else I would cure her luck!” Bobby wanted to cry, to die, anything to escape the voices, the utterly impossible wind that had started to blow out of the gray warps, a hot damp wind that smelled of things he couldn’t identify. “And she calls praise on the Virgin! Hear me, little sister! La Vyèj draws close indeed!”

  “Yes,” said the other, “she moves through my province now, I who rule the roads, the highways.’

  “But I, Ougou Feray, tell you that your enemies draw near as well! To the gates, sister, and beware!”

  And then the gray areas faded, dwindled, shrank . . .

  “Jack us out,” she said her voice small and distant. And then she said, “Lucas is dead.”

  Jammer took a bottle of Scotch from his desk drawer and carefully poured six centimeters of the stuff into a plastic highball glass. “You look like shit,” he said to Jackie, and Bobby was startled by the gentleness in the man’s voice. They’d been jacked out for at least ten minutes and nobody had said anything at all. Jackie looked crushed and kept gnawing at her lower lip. Jammer looked either unhappy or angry, Bobby wasn’t sure.

  “How come you said Lucas was dead?” Bobby ventured, because it seemed to him that the silence was silting up in Jammer’s cramped office like something that could choke you.

  Jackie looked at him but didn’t seem to focus. “They wouldn’t come to me like that if Lucas were alive,” she said. “There are pacts, agreements. Legba is always invoked first, but he should have come with Danbala. His personality depends on the loa he manifests with. Lucas must be dead.”

  Jammer pushed the glass of whiskey across the desk, but Jackie shook her head, the trode set still riding her forehead, chrome and black nylon. He made a disgusted face, pulled the glass back, and downed it himself. “What a load of shit. Things made a lot more sense before you people started screwing around with them.”

  “We didn’t bring them here, Jammer,” she said. “They were just there, and they found us because we understood them!”

  “Same load of shit,” Jammer said, wearily. “Whatever they are, wherever they came from, they just shaped themselves to what a bunch of crazed spades wanted to see. You follow me? There’s no way in hell there’d be anything out there that you had to talk to in fucking bush Haitian! You and your voodoo cult, they just saw that and they saw a setup, and Beauvoir and Lucas and the rest, they’re businessmen first. And those Goddamn things know how to make deals! It’s a natural!” He tightened the cap on his bottle and put it back in the drawer. “You know, hon, it could just be that somebody very big, with a lot of muscle on the grid, they’re just taking you for a ride. Projecting those things, all that shit . . . And you know it’s possible, don’t you? Don’t you, Jackie?”

  “No way,” Jackie said, her voice cold and even. “But how I know that’s not anything I can explain . . .”

  Jammer took a black slab of plastic from his pocket and began to shave. “Sure,” he said. The razor hummed as he worked on the line of his jaw. “I lived in cyberspace for eight years, right? Well, I know there wasn’t anything out there, not then. . . . Anyway, you want me to phone Lucas, set your mind at ease one way or the other? You got the phone number for that Rolls of his?”

  “No,” Jackie said, “don’t bother. Best we lay low till Beauvoir turns up.” She stood, pulling off the trodes and picking up her hat. “I’m going to lie down, try to sleep. You keep an eye on Bobby . . .” She turned and walked to the office door. She looked as though she were sleepwalking, all the energy gone out of her.

  “Wonderful,” Jammer said, running the shaver along his upper lip. “You want a drink?” he asked Bobby.

  “Well,” Bobby said, “it’s kind of early. . . .”

  “For you, maybe.” He put the razor back in his pocket. The door closed behind Jackie. Jammer leaned forward slightly. “What did they look like, kid? You get a make?”

  “Just kind of grayish. Fuzzy. . . .”

  Jammer looked disappointed. He slouched back in his chair again. “I don’t think you can get a good look at ’em unless you’re part of it.” He drummed his fingers on the chair arm. “You think they’re for real?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t wanna try messing one around . . .”

  Jammer looked at him. “No? Well, maybe you’re smarter than you look, there. I wouldn’t wanna try messing one around myself. I got out of the game before they started turning up . . .”

  “So what do you think they are?”

  “Ah, still getting smarter. . . . Well, I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t think I can swallow them being a bunch of Haitian voodoo gods, but who knows?” He narrowed his eyes. “Could be, they’re virus programs that have gotten loose in the matrix and replicated, and gotten really smart . . . That’s scary enough; maybe the Turing people want it kept quiet. Or maybe the AI’s have found a way to split parts of themselves off into the matrix, which would drive the Turings crazy. I knew this Tibetan guy did hardware mod for jockeys, he said they were tulpas.”

  Bobby blinked.

  “A tulpa’s a thought form, kind of. Superstition. Really heavy people can split off a kind of ghost, made of negative energy.” He shrugged. “More horseshit. Like Jackie’s voodoo guys.”

  “Well, it looks to me like Lucas and Beauvoir and the others, they sure as hell play it like it was all real, and not just like it was an act . . .”

  Jammer nodded. “You got it. And they been doing damn well for themselves by it, too, so there’s something there.” He shrugged and yawned. “I gotta sleep, too. You can do whateve
r you want, as long as you keep your hands off my deck. And don’t try to go outside, or ten kinds of alarms will start screaming. There’s juice and cheese and shit in the fridge behind the bar . . .”

  Bobby decided that the place was still scary, now that he had it to himself, but that it was interesting enough to make the scariness worthwhile. He wandered up and down behind the bar, touching the handles of the beer taps and the chrome drink nozzles. There was a machine that made ice, and another one that dispensed boiling water. He made himself a cup of Japanese instant coffee and sorted through Jammer’s file of audio cassettes. He’d never heard of any of the bands or artists. He wondered whether that meant that Jammer, who was old, liked old stuff, or if this was all really new stuff that wouldn’t filter out to Barrytown, probably by way of Leon’s, for another two weeks. . . . He found a gun under the black and silver universal credit console at the end of the bar, a kind of fat little machine gun with a magazine that stuck straight down out of the handle. It was stuck under the bar with a strip of lime-green Velcro, and he didn’t think it was a good idea to touch it. After a while, he didn’t feel frightened anymore, just kind of bored and edgy. He took his cooling coffee and walked out into the middle of the seating area. He sat at one of the tables and pretended he was Count Zero, top console artist in the Sprawl, waiting for some dudes to show and talk about a deal, some run they needed done and nobody but the Count was even remotely up for it. “Sure,” he said, to the empty nightclub, his eyes hooded, “I’ll cut it for you. . . . If you got the money. . . .” They paled when he named his price.

  The place was soundproofed; you couldn’t hear the bustle of the fourteenth floor’s stalls at all, only the hum of some kind of air conditioner and the occasional gurgles of the hot-water machine. Tired of the Count’s power plays, Bobby left the coffee cup on the table and crossed to the entranceway, running his hand along an old stuffed velvet rope that was slung between polished brass poles. Careful not to touch the glass doors themselves, he settled himself on a cheap steel stool with a tape-patched leatherette top, beside the coat-check window. A dim bulb burned in the coatroom; you could see a couple of dozen old wooden hangers dangling from steel rods, each one hung with a round yellow hand-numbered tag. He guessed Jammer sat here sometimes to check out the clientele. He didn’t really see why anybody who’d been a shithot cowboy for eight years would want to run a nightclub, but maybe it was sort of a hobby. He guessed you could get a lot of girls, running a nightclub, but he’d assumed you could get a lot anyway if you were rich. And if Jammer had been a top jock for eight years, Bobby figured he had to be rich . . .