COUNT ZERO

“Our property,” Beauvoir said softly. “Now watch this, real close. This motherfucker is what we call an anomalous phenomenon, no shit...” He tapped the deck again, starting the recording.

Liquid flowers of milky white blossomed from the floor of the tank; Bobby, craning forward, saw that they seemed to consist of thousands of tiny spheres or bubbles, and then they aligned perfectly with the cubical grid and coalesced, forming a top-heavy, asymmetrical structure,’ a thing like a rectilinear mushroom. The surfaces, facets, were white, perfectly blank. The image in the tank was no longer than Bobby’s open hand. but to anyone jacked into a deck it would have been enormous. The thing unfolded a pair of horns; these lengthened, curved, became pincers that arced out to grasp the pyramid. He saw the tips sink smoothly through the flickering orange planes of the enemy ice.

“She said, ‘What are you doing?’ “ he heard himself say. “Then she asked me why they were doing that, doing it to me, killing me...”

“Ah,” Beauvoir said, quietly, “now we are getting somewhere.”

He didn’t know where they were going, but he was glad to be out of that chair. Beauvoir ducked to avoid a slanting gro-light that dangled from twin lengths of curly-cord: Bobby followed, almost slipping in a green-filmed puddle of water Away from Two-a-Day’s couch-clearing, the air seemed thicker. There was a greenhouse smell of damp and growing things.

“So that’s how it was,” Beauvoir said, “Two-a-Day sent some friends round to Covina Concourse Courts, but you were gone. Your deck was gone, too.”

“Well,” Bobby said, “I don’t see it’s exactly his fault, then. I mean, if I hadn’t split for Leon’s – and I was lookin’ for Two-a-Day. even lookin’ to try to get up here – then he’d have found me, right?” Beauvoir paused to admire a leafy stand of flowering hemp, extending a thin brown forefinger to lightly brush the pale, colorless flowers.

“True,” he said, “but this is a business matter. He should have detailed someone to watch your place for the duration of the run, to ensure that neither you nor the software took any unscheduled walks.”

“Well, he sent Rhea ‘n’ Jackie over to Leon’s, because I saw ‘em there.” Bobby reached into the neck of his black pajamas and scratched at the sealed wound that crossed his chest and stomach. Then he remembered the centipede thing Pye had used as a suture, and quickly withdrew his hand. It itched, a straight line of itch, but he didn’t want to touch it.

“No, Jackie and Rhea are ours. Jackie is a mambo, a priestess, the horse of Danbala.” Beauvoir continued on his way, picking out what Bobby presumed was some existing track or path through the jumbled forest of hydroponics, although it seemed to progress in no particular direction. Some of the larger shrubs were rooted in bulbous green plastic trash bags filled with dark humus. Many of these had burst, and pale roots sought fresh nourishment in the shadows between the gro-lights, where time and the gradual fall of leaves conspired to produce a thin compost. Bobby wore a pair of black nylon thongs Jackie had found for him, but there was already damp earth between his toes. “A horse?” he asked Beauvoir, dodging past a prickly-looking thing that suggested an inside-out palm tree.

“Danbala rides her, Danbala Wedo, the snake. Other times, she is the horse of Aida Wedo, his wife.”

Bobby decided not to pursue it. He tried to change the subject: “How come Two-a-Day’s got such a motherhuge place? What are all these trees ‘n’ things for?” He knew that Jackie and Rhea had wheeled him through a doorway, in the St. Mary’s chair, but he hadn’t seen a wall since. He also knew that the arcology covered x number of hectares, so that it was possible that Two-a-Day’s place was very large indeed, but it hardly seemed likely that a ‘wareman, even a very sharp one, could afford this much space. Nobody could afford this much space, and why would anybody want to live in a leaky hydroponic forest?

The last derm was wearing off, and his back and chest were begi

“Ficus trees, mapou trees... This whole level of the Projects is a lieu saint, holy place.” Beauvoir tapped Bobby on the shoulder and pointed out twisted, bicolored strings dangling from the limbs of a nearby tree. “The trees are consecrated to different ba. That one is for Ougou, Ougou Feray, god of war. There’s a lot of other things grown up here, herbs the leaf-doctors need, and some just for fun. But this isn’t Two-a-Day’s place, this is communal.”

“You mean the whole Project’s into this? All like voodoo and stuff?” It was worse than Marsha’s darkest fantasies.

“No, man,” and Beauvoir laughed. “There’s a mosque up top, and a couple or ten thousand holyroller Baptists scattered around, some Church o’ Sci.... All the usual stuff. Still” – he gri

Finally, they were approaching a wall of some kind. Bobby looked back. Shallow pools on the muddy concrete floor caught and reflected the limbs of the dwarf trees, the bare pale roots straggling down into makeshift tanks of hydroponic fluid.

“Then they pump that into shrimp tanks, and grow a lot of shrimp. Shrimp grow real fast in warm water. Then they pump it through pipes in the concrete, up here, to keep this place warm. That’s what this level was for, to grow ‘ponic amaranth, lettuce, things like that. Then they pump it out into the catfish tanks, and algae eat the shrimp shit. Catfish eat the algae, and it all goes around again. Or anyway, that was the idea. Chances are they didn’t figure anybody’d go up on the roof and kick those Darrieus rotors over to make room for a mosque, and they didn’t figure a lot of other changes either So we wound up with this space. But you can still get you some damned good shrimp in the Projects... Catfish, too”

They had arrived at the wall. It was made of glass, beaded heavily with condensation. A few centimeters beyond it was another wall, that one made of what looked like rusty sheet steel. Beauvoir fished a key of some kind from a pocket in his sharkskin robe and slid it into an opening in a bare alloy beam dividing two expanses of window. Somewhere nearby, an engine whined into life; the broad steel shutter rotated up and out, moving jerkily, to reveal a view that Bobby had often imagined.

They must be near the top, high up in the Projects, because Big Playground was something he could cover with two hands. The condos of Barrytown looked like some gray-white fungus, spreading to the horizon. It was nearly dark, and he could make out a pink glow, beyond the last range of condo racks.

“That’s the Sprawl, over there, isn’t it? That pink.”

“That’s right, but the closer you get, the less pretty it looks. How’d you like to go there, Bobby? Count Zero ready to make the Sprawl?”

“Oh, yeah,” Bobby said, his palms against the sweating glass, “you got no idea....” The derm had worn off entirely now, and his back and chest hurt like hell.