COUNT ZERO

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 Vyéj 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 ba 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 them-selves 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, ru

“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 wa

Jammer looked at him. “No? Well, maybe you’re smarter than you look, there. I wouldn’t wa

“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 Al’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 whatever 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 entrance-way, ru