COUNT ZERO

“Shit!” Bobby was off the bar “Beauvoir said! I wa

“Never mind, Bobby,” Jackie said, “you go on.”

“Okay,” Bobby said, sulkily, “so, sooner or later, the guys who hired the Gothicks and Kasuals to keep us here, they’re go

“I think that about covers it,” Jammer said, strolling across the carpet to the locked and curtained door. “I think that about sums it up.” He pressed his thumb against a coded latch plate and pulled the door half open. “Hey, you!” he bellowed. “Not you! You with the hat! Get your ass over here. I want to talk”

The pencil-thick red beam pierced door and curtain, two of Jammer’s fingers, and winked over the bar. A bottle exploded, its contents billowing out as steam and vaporized esters. Jammer let the door swing shut again, stared at his ruined hand, then sat down hard on the carpet. The club slowly filled with the Christmas-tree smell of boiled gin. Beauvoir took a silver pressure bottle from the bar counter and hosed the smoldering curtain with seltzer, until the CO2 cartridge was exhausted and the stream faltered. “You’re in luck, Bobby,” Beauvoir said, tossing the bottle over his shoulder, “ ‘cause brother Jammer, he ain’t go

Jackie was making clucking sounds over Jammer’s hand, kneeling down. Bobby caught a glimpse of cauterized flesh, then quickly looked away.

26 THE WIG

“YOU KNOW, REZ said, hanging upside down in front of Marly, “it’s strictly no biz of mine, but is somebody maybe expecting you when we get there? I mean, I’m taking you there, for sure, and if you can’t get in, I’ll take you back to JAL Term But if nobody wants to let you in, I don’t know how long I want to hang around. That thing’s scrap, and we get some fu

Marly, numb with the rainbow of derms Rez had pasted along her wrist to counteract the convulsive nausea of space adaptation syndrome, stared at the rose tattoo. It had been executed in a Japanese style hundreds of years old, and Marly woozily decided that she liked it. That, in fact, she liked Rez, who was at once hard and girlish and concerned for her strange passenger. Rez had admired her leather jacket and purse, before bundling them into a kind of narrow nylon net hammock already stuffed with cassettes, print books, and unwashed clothing.

“I don’t know,” Marly managed, “I’ll just have to try to getting’...”

“You know what that thing is, sister?” Rez was adjusting the g-web around Marly’s shoulders and armpits.

“What thing?” Marly blinked.

“Where we’re going. It’s part of the old Tessier-Ashpool cores. Used to be the mainframes for their corporate memory.

“I’ve heard of them,” Marly said, closing her eyes. “Andrea told me

“Sure, everybody’s heard of ‘em – they used to own all of Freeside. Built it, even. Then they went tits up and sold out. Had their family place cut off the spindle and towed to another orbit, but they had the cores wiped before they did that, and torched ‘em off and sold ‘em to a scrapper. The scrapper’s never done anything with ‘em I never heard anybody was squatting there, but out here you live where you can... I guess that’s true for anybody. Like they say that Lady Jane, old Ashpool’s daughter, she’s still living in their old place, stone crazy... She gave the g-web a last professional tug. “Okay. You just relax. I’m go

And Marly slid back into a landscape built all of boxes, vast wooden Cornell constructions where the solid residues of love and memory were displayed behind rain-streaked sheets of dusty glass, and the figure of the mysterious boxmaker fled before her down avenues paved with mosaics of human teeth, Marly’s Paris boots clicking blindly over symbols outlined in dull gold crowns. The boxmaker was male and wore Alain’s green jacket, and feared her above all things. “I’m sorry,” she cried, ru

“Yeah. Therése Lorenz, the Sweet Jane. You want the numbers? What? Yeah, sure we’re pirates. I’m Captain fucking Hook already... Look, Jack, lemme give you the numbers, you can check it out... I said already. I gotta passenger. Request permission, et Goddamn cetera... Marly Something, speaks French in her sleep...”

Many’s lids flickered, opened Rez was webbed in front of her, each small muscle of her back precisely defined. “Hey,” Rez said, twisting around in the web, “I’m sorry. I raised ‘em for you, but they sound pretty flaky. You religious?”

“No,” Marly said, baffled.

Rez made a face. “Well, I hope you can make sense out of this shit, then.” She shrugged out of the web and executed a tight backward somersault that brought her within centimeters of Marly’s face An optic ribbon trailed from her hand to the console, and for the first time Marly saw the delicate sky-blue socket set flush with the skin of the girl’s wrist. She popped a speaker-bead into Marly’s right ear and adjusted the trans-parent microphone tube that curved down from it.

“You have no right to disturb us here,” a man’s voice said. “Our work is the work of God, and we alone have seen His true face!”

“Hello? Hello, can you hear me? My name is Marly Krushkhova and I have urgent business with you. Or with someone at these coordinates. My business concerns a series of boxes, collages. The maker of these boxes may be in terrible danger! I must see him!”

“Danger?” The man coughed. “God alone decides man’s fate! We are entirely without fear. But neither are we fools...”

“Please, listen to me. I was hired by Josef Virek to locate the maker of the boxes. But now I have come to warn you. Virek knows you are here, and his agents will follow me...”

Rez was staring at her hard.

“You must let me in! I can tell you more...”

“Virek?” There was a long, static-filled pause. “Josef Virek?”

“Yes.” Marly said. “That one You’ve seen his picture all your life, the one with the king of England... Please, please...”

“Give me your pilot,” the voice said, and the bluster and hysteria were gone, replaced with something Marly liked even less.

“It’s a spare,” Rez said, snapping the mirrored helmet from the red suit. “I can afford it, you paid me enough.

“No,” Marly protested, “really, you needn’t ...” She shook her head, Rez was undoing the fastenings at the spacesuit’s waist.

“You don’t go into a thing like that without a suit,” she said. “You don’t know what they got for atmosphere. You don’t even know they got atmosphere! And any kinda bacteria, spores... What’s the matter?” Lowering the silver helmet.

“I’m claustrophobic!”

“Oh... Rez stared at her. “I heard of that... It means you’re scared to be inside things?” She looked genuinely curious.

“Small things, yes.”

“Like Sweet Jane?”

“Yes, but... She glanced at the cramped cabin, fighting her panic. “I can stand this, but not the helmet.” She shuddered.

“Well,” Rez said, “tell you what. We get you into the suit, but we leave the helmet off. I’ll teach you how to fasten it. Deal? Otherwise, you don’t leave my ship...” Her mouth was straight and firm.

“Yes,” Marly said, “yes...”

“Here’s the drill,” Rez said. “We’re lock to lock. This hatch opens, you get in, I close it. Then I open the other side. Then you’re in whatever passes for atmosphere, in there. You sure you don’t want the helmet on?”