COUNT ZERO

“No, that was just the first place I thought of. What I mean is, I guess, would you let me go?”

“No,” Lucas said, “not to put too fine a point on it. But you don’t have to think of yourself as a prisoner. More like a guest. A valued guest.”

Bobby smiled wanly. “Oh. Okay. Like what they call protective custody, I guess.”

“Right,” Lucas said, bringing the gold toothpick into play again. “And while we are here, securely screened by the good Ahmed, it’s time we have a talk. Brother Beauvoir has already told you a little about us, I think What do you think, Bobby. about what he’s told you?”

“Well,” Bobby said, “it’s real interesting, but I’m not sure I understand it.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Well, I don’t know about this voodoo stuff...”

Lucas raised his eyebrows.

“I mean, it’s your business, what you wa

“And what?”

“Horses,” Bobby said, his throat tight.

“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?”

“A component? Like a capacitor?”

“No. Never mind metaphor, then. When Beauvoir or I talk to you about the ba and their horses, as we call those few the ba choose to ride, you should pretend that we are talking two languages at once. One of them, you already understand. That’s the language of street tech, as you call it. We may be using different words, but we’re talking tech. Maybe we call something Ougou Feray that you might call an icebreaker, you understand? But at the same time, with the same words, we are talking about other things, and that you don’t understand. You don’t need to.” He put his toothpick away.

Bobby took a deep breath. “Beauvoir said that Jackie’s a horse for a snake, a snake called Danbala. You run that by me in street tech?”

“Certainly. Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a cyberspace deck, a very pretty one with nice ankles.” Lucas gri

“Okay,” Bobby said, getting the hang of it, “then what’s the matrix? If she’s a deck, and Danbala’s a program, what’s cyberspace?”

“The world,” Lucas said.

“Best if we walk from here,” Lucas said.

The Rolls came to a silent, silken halt and Lucas stood, buttoning his suit coat. “Ahmed attracts too much attention.” He picked up his cane, and the door made a soft chunking sound as it unlocked itself.

Bobby climbed down behind him, into the unmistakable signature smell of the Sprawl, a rich amalgam of stale subway exhalations, ancient soot, and the carcinogenic tang of fresh plastics, all of it shot through with the carbon edge of illicit fossil fuels. High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl’s patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. There was a stiff wind blowing, as Bobby followed Lucas down the street, a warm, gritty breeze that probably had something to do with pressure shifts in the Sprawl-long subway system.

“Remember what I told you,” Lucas said, his eyes nar-rowed against the grit. “The man is far more than he seems. Even if he were nothing more than what he seems, you would owe him a degree of respect. If you want to be a cowboy, you’re about to meet a landmark in the trade.”

“Yeah, right.” He skipped to avoid a graying length of printout that tried to wrap itself around his ankle. “So he’s the one you an’ Beauvoir bought the -”

“Ha! No! Remember what I told you. You speak in the open street, you may as well put your words up on a bulletin-board...”

Bobby grimaced, then nodded. Shit. He kept blowing it. Here he was with a major operator, up to his neck in some amazing kind of biz, and he kept acting like a wilson. Operator. That was the word for Lucas, and for Beauvoir, too, and that voodoo talk was Just some game they ran on people, he’d decided. In the Rolls, Lucas had launched into some strange extended number about Legba, who he said was the ba of communication, “the master of roads and pathways,” all about how the man he was taking Bobby to meet was a favorite of Legba’s. When Bobby asked if the man was another oungan, Lucas said no; he said the man had walked with Legba all his life, so close that he’d never known the ba was there at all, like it was just a part of him, his shadow. And this was the man, Lucas had said, who’d sold them the software that Two-a-Day had rented to Bobby...

Lucas rounded a corner and stopped, Bobby close behind. They stood in front of a blackened brownstone whose windows had been sealed decades before with sheets of corrugated steel. Part of the ground floor had once been a shop of some kind, its cracked display windows opaque with grime. The door, between the blind windows, had been reinforced with the same steel that sealed the windows of the upper floors, and Bobby thought he could make out some sort of sign behind the window to his left, discarded neon script tilted diagonally in the gloom. Lucas just stood there, facing the doorway, his face expressionless, the tip of his cane planted neatly on the sidewalk and his large hands one atop the other on the brass knob. “First thing that you learn,” he said, with the tone of a man reciting a proverb, “is that you always gotta wait...”

Bobby thought he heard something scrape, behind the door, and then there was a rattle like chains. “Amazing,” Lucas said, “almost as though we were expected.”

The door swung ten centimeters on well-oiled hinges and seemed to catch on something. An eye regarded them, un-blinking, suspended there in that crack of dust and dark, and at first it seemed to Bobby that it must be the eye of some large animal, the iris a strange shade of brownish yellow, and the whites, mottled and shot through with red, the lower lid gaping redder still below. “Hoodoo man,” said the invisible face the eye belonged to, then, “hoodoo man and some little lump of shit. Jesus...” There was an awful, gurgling sound, as of antique phlegm being drawn up from hidden recesses, and then the man spat. “Well, move it, Lucas.” There was another grating sound and the door swung inward on the dark. “I’m a busy man...” This last from a meter away, receding, as though the eye’s owner were scurrying from the light admitted by the open door.

Lucas stepped through, Bobby on his heels, Bobby feeling the door swing smoothly shut behind him. The sudden dark-ness brought the hairs on his forearms up. It felt alive, that dark, cluttered and dense and somehow sentient.

Then a match flared and some sort of pressure lamp hissed and spat as the gas in its mantle ignited. Bobby could only gape at the face beyond the lantern, where the bloodshot yellow eye waited with its mate in what Bobby would very much have liked to believe was a mask of some kind.

“I don’t suppose you were expecting us, were you, Fi

“You wa

“You know, Fi