3

Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta...

Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly... He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.

Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.

Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an expanse of very new pink temperfoam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chipboard, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane's fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's.

The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.

He was home.

He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred dream. Shopping. She'd taken him shopping.

He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim deck, clothing with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper.

The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell -to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.

`Souvenir,' Molly said. `I noticed you were always looking at 'em.' He turned and saw her sitting crosslegged on the bed, sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.

`Someone's coming later to secure the place,' Armitage said. He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned magnetic key in his hand. Molly was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took from her bag.

`I can do it,' she said. `I got enough gear already. Infrascan perimeter, screamers...'

`No,' he said, closing the door. `I want it tight.'

`Suit yourself.' She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black cotton pants.

`You ever the heat, Mr.~ Armitage?' Case asked, from where he sat, his back against a wall.

Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.

`Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate security,' Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a steaming mug of coffee. `That number you had them do on my pancreas, that's like a cop routine.'

Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of Case. `You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me.'

`Should I?' Case blew noisily on his coffee.

`You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.'

`Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.'

`Good, because you have a new one.'

`How's that?' Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage was smiling.

`You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis.'

Case blinked up at the smiling mask.

`You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter.'

Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.

`Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases you find there.' Armitage handed him the magnetic key. `Go on. You'll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning.'

Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.

He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his life. First a child with hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager, face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics. [ 13 ]

He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.

With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7. They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker. Armitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.

`Where'd he go?' Case had asked Molly.

`He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage it. Let's go down to the street.' She'd zipped herself into an old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored insets.

`You know about that toxin shit, before?' he asked her, by the fountain. She shook her head. `You think it's true?'

`Maybe, maybe not. Works either way.'

`You know any way I can find out?'

`No,' she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence. `That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a scan.' Then her fingers moved again: wait. `And you don't care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.' She laughed.