COUNT ZERO

“No company,” she said, to the window.

“How’s that?”

“You don’t have a company, do you? I mean, you work for whoever hires you.”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t you get scared?”

“Sure, but not because of that.

“We’ve always had the company. My father said I’d be all right, that I was just going to another company...”

“You’ll be fine. He was right. I just have to find out what’s going on. Then I’ll get you where you need to go “To Japan?”

“Wherever.”

“Have you been there?”

“Sure.”

“Would I like it?”

“Why not?”

Then she lapsed into silence again, and Turner concentrated on the road.

“It makes me dream,” she said as he leaned forward to turn on the headlights, her voice barely audible above the turbine.”

“What does?” He pretended to be lost in his driving, careful not to glance her way.

“The thing in my head. Usually it’s only when I’m asleep.”

“Yeah?” Remembering the whites of her eyes in Rudy’s bedroom, the shuddering, the rush of words in a language he didn’t know.

“Sometimes when I’m awake. It’s like I’m jacked into a deck, only I’m free of the grid, flying, and I’m not alone there. The other night I dreamed about a boy, and he’d reached out, picked up something, and it was hurting him, and he couldn’t see that he was free, that he only needed to let go. So I told him. And for just a second, I could see where he was, and that wasn’t like a dream at all, just this ugly little room with a stained carpet, and I could tell he needed a shower, and feel how the insides of his shoes were sticky, because he wasn’t wearing socks... That’s not like the dreams...”

“No?”

“No. The dreams are all big, big things, and I’m big too, moving, with the others.”

Turner let his breath out as the hover whined up the concrete ramp to the Interstate, suddenly aware that he’d been holding it. “What others?”

“The bright ones.” Another silence. “Not people...”

“You spend much time in cyberspace, Angie? I mean jacked in, with a deck?”

“No. Just school stuff. My father said it wasn’t good for me.”

“He say anything about those dreams?”

“Only that they were getting realer. But I never told him about the others.

“You want to tell me? Maybe it’ll help me understand, figure out what we need to do...”

“Some of them tell me things Stories. Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around Then something happened, and it it knew itself. There’s a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the whole thing know itself... And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others, the bright ones. But it’s hard to tell, because they don’t tell it with words, exactly...”

Turner felt the skin on his neck prickle. Something coming back to him, up out of the drowned undertow of Mitchell’s dossier Hot burning shame in a hallway, dirty cream paint peeling, Cambridge, the graduate dorms... “Where were you born, Angie?”

“England. Then my father got into Maas, we moved. To Geneva.”

Somewhere in Virginia he eased the hovercraft over onto the gravel shoulder and out into an overgrown pasture, dust from the dry summer swirling out behind them as he swung them left and into a stand of pine. The turbine died as they settled into the apron bag.

“We might as well eat now.” he said, reaching back for Sally’s canvas carryall.

Angie undid her harness and unzipped the black sweatshirt Under it, she wore something tight and white, a child’s smooth ta

“How do you mean?”

“Well, there’s something... He drinks all the time, Sally said. Is he unhappy?”

“I don’t know,” Turner said, hunching and twisting the aches out of his neck and shoulders. “I mean, he must be, but I don’t know exactly why. People get stuck, sometimes.”

“You mean when they don’t have companies to take care of them?” She bit into her sandwich.

He looked at her. “Are you putting me on?”

She nodded, her mouth full Swallowed “A little bit I know that a lot of people don’t work for Maas. Never have and never will You’re one, your brother’s another. But it was a real question. I kind of liked Rudy, you know? But he just seemed so -”

“Screwed up,” he finished for her, still holding his sandwich. “Stuck. What it is, I think there’s a jump some people have to make, sometimes, and if they don’t do it, then they’re stuck good. And Rudy never did it.”

“Like my father wanting to get me out of Maas? Is that a jump?”

“No. Some jumps you have to decide on for yourself.

Just figure there’s something better waiting for you somewhere...” He paused, feeling suddenly ridiculous, and bit into the sandwich.

“Is that what you thought?”

He nodded, wondering if it were true.

“So you left, and Rudy stayed -”

“He was smart Still is, and he’d rolled up a bunch of degrees, did it all on the line. Got a doctorate in biotechnology from Tulane when he was twenty, a bunch of other stuff. Never sent out any resumes, nothing. We’d have recruiters turn up from all over, and he’d bullshit them, pick fights... I think he thought he could make something on his own. Like those hoods on the dogs I think he’s got a couple of original patents there, but... Anyway, he stayed there. Got into dealing and doing hardware for people, and he was hot stuff in the county. And our mother got sick, she was sick for a long time, and I was away.

“Where were you?” She opened the thermos and the smell of coffee filled the cabin.

“As far away as I could get,” he said, startled by the anger in his voice.

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 Pe

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.