COUNT ZERO

“That’s a nice piece of hide,” Jones said.

“Please,” she said, “let’s hurry...”

“Not far now.” he said, his work light swinging to show her where the line vanished through one of three openings arranged in an equilateral triangle.

“End of the line,” he said. “Literal, that is.” He tapped the chromed eyebolt where the line was tied in a sailor’s knot. His voice caught and echoed, somewhere ahead of them, until she imagined she heard other voices whispering behind the round of echo. “We’ll want a bit of light for this,” he said, kicking himself across the shaft and catching a gray metal coffin thing that protruded there. He opened it. She watched his hands move in the bright circle of the work light; his fingers were thin and delicate, but the nails were small and blunt, outlined with black, impacted grime. The letters “CJ” were tattooed in crude blue across the back of his right hand. The sort of tattoo one did oneself, in jail... Now he’d fished out a length of heavy, insulated wire. He squinted into the box, then wedged the wire behind a copper D-co

The dark ahead vanished in a white flood of light.

“Got more power than we need, really,” he said, with something akin to a homeowner’s pride. “The solar banks are all still workin’, and they were meant to power the main-frames... Come on, then, lady, we’ll meet the artist you come so far to see...” He kicked off and out, gliding smoothly through the opening, like a swimmer, into the light. Into the thousand drifting things. She saw that the red plastic soles of his frayed shoes had been patched with smears of white silicon caulking.

And then she’d followed, forgetting her fears, forgetting the nausea and constant vertigo, and she was there. And she understood.

“My God,” she said.

“Not likely,” Jones called. “Maybe old Wig’s, though.

Too bad it’s not doing it now, though That’s even more of a sight.”

Something slid past, ten centimeters from her face. An ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to end.

She had no idea how long she’d been there, when the screen lit and began to flicker. Hours, minutes... She’d already learned to negotiate the chamber, after a fashion, kicking off like Jones from the dome’s concavity. Like Jones. She caught herself on the thing’s folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unma

Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.

A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat... Endless, the slow swarm, the spi

Jones tumbled up through the silent storm, laughing, grabbing an arm tipped with a glue gun. “Always makes me want to laugh, to see it. But the boxes always make me sad.”

“Yes,” she said, “they make me sad, too. But there are sadnesses and sadnesses.”

“Quite right.” He gri

She looked at him through the thicket of manipulators. He was very dirty, very young, with his wide blue eyes under a tangle of brown curls. He wore a stained gray zipsuit, its collar shiny with grime. “You must be mad,” she said with something like admiration in her voice, “you must be totally mad, to stay here...”

He laughed. “Wigan’s madder than a sack of bugs. Not me.

She smiled. “No, you’re crazy I’m crazy, too.”

“Hello then,” he said, looking past her. “What’s this?

One of Wig’s sermons, looks like, and no way we can shut it off without me cutting the power . .

She turned her head and saw diagonals of color strobe across the rectangular face of a large screen glued crookedly to the curve of the dome. The screen was occluded, for a second, by the passage of a dressmaker’s dummy, and then the face of Josef Virek filled it, his soft blue eyes glittering behind round lenses.

“Hello, Marly,” he said. “I can’t see you, but I’m sure I know where you are.”

“That’s one of Wig’s sermon screens,” Jones said, rubbing his face. “Put ‘em up all over the Place, ‘cause he figured one day he’d have people up here to preach to. This geezer’s linked in through Wig’s communication gear, I guess. Who is he?”

“Virek,” she said.

“Thought he was older...”

“It’s a generated image,” she said. “Ray tracing, texture mapping... She stared as the face smiled out at her from the curve of the dome, beyond the slow-motion hurricane of lost things, minor artifacts of countless lives, tools and toys and gilded buttons.

“I want you to know,” the image said, “that you have fulfilled your contract. My psychoprofile of Marly Krushkhova predicted your response to my gestalt. Broader profiles indicated that your presence in Paris would force Maas to play their hand. Soon, Marly, I will know exactly what it is that you have found. For four years I’ve known something that Maas didn’t know. I’ve known that Mitchell, the man Maas and the world regards as the inventor of the new biochip processes, was being fed the concepts that resulted in his breakthroughs. I added you to an intricate array of factors, Marly, and things came to a most satisfying head. Maas, without understanding what they were doing, surrendered the location of the conceptual source. And you have reached it. Paco will be arriving shortly...”

“You said you wouldn’t follow,” she said. “I knew you lied...”

“And now, Marly, at last I think I shall be free. Free of the four hundred kilograms of rioting cells they wall away behind surgical steel in a Stockholm industrial park. Free, eventually, to inhabit any number of real bodies, Marly Forever.”

“Shit,” Jones said, “this one’s as bad as Wig. What’s he think he’s talking about?”

“About his jump,” she said, remembering her talk with Andrea, the smell of cooking prawns in the cramped little kitchen. “The next stage of his evolution “You understand it?”

“No,” she said, “but I know that it will be bad, very bad...” She shook her head.

“Convince the inhabitants of the cores to admit Paco and his crew, Marly,” Virek said. “I purchased the cores an hour before you departed Orly, from a contractor in Pakistan. A bargain, Marly, a great bargain. Paco will oversee my interests, as usual.”

And then the screen was dark.

“Here now,” Jones said, pivoting around a folded manipulator and taking her hand, “what’s so bad about all that? He owns it now, and he said you’d done your bit... I don’t know what old Wig’s good for, except to listen to the voices, but he’s not long for this side anyway Me, I’m as easy for out as not...”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t He’s found his way to something, something he’s sought for years. But nothing he wants can be good. For anyone... I’ve seen him, I’ve felt it...”

And then the steel arm she held vibrated and began to move, the whole turret rotating with a muted hum of servos.