She gestured to her empty glass as a waiter passed. “I still find it difficult to see my part in this, my value. To Virek, I mean.”

“Don’t ask me. You are the philosopher, here. I merely execute Señor’s orders, to the best of my ability.”

“Would you like a brandy, Paco? Or perhaps some coffee?”

“The French,” he said, with great conviction, “know nothing about coffee.”

“MAYBE YOU CAN RUN that one by me again,” Bobby said, around a mouthful of rice and eggs “I thought you already said it’s not a religion.”

Beauvoir removed his eyeglass frames and sighted down one of the earpieces. “That wasn’t what I said. I said you didn’t have to worry about it, is all, whether it’s a religion or not It’s Just a structure. Lets you an’ me discuss some things that are happening, otherwise we might not have words for it, concepts”

“But you talk like these, whatchacallem, lows, are”

“Loa,” Beauvoir corrected, tossing his glasses down on the table He sighed, dug one of the Chinese cigarettes from Two-a-Day’s pack, and lit it with the pewter skull. “Plural’s same as the singular.” He inhaled deeply, blew out twin streams of smoke through arched nostrils. “You think religion, what are you thinking about, exactly?”

“Well, my mother’s sister, she’s a Scientologist, real orthodox, you know? And there’s this woman across the hall, she’s Catholic. My old lady” – he paused, the food gone tasteless in his mouth -” ‘she’d put these holograms up in my room sometimes, Jesus or Hubbard or some shit. I guess I think about that.”

“Vodou isn’t like that,” Beauvoir said. “It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In our system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Vodou says, there’s God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?” Bobby nodded, chewing thoughtfully. Another derm and two glasses of the red wine had helped a lot, and the big man had taken Two-a-Day for a walk through the trees and the fluorescent jackstraws, leaving Bobby with Beauvoir. Then Jackie had shown up all cheerful, with a big bowl of this eggs-and-rice stuff, which wasn’t bad at all, and as she’d put it down on the table in front of him, she’d pressed one of her tits against his shoulder.

“So,” Beauvoir said, “we are’ concerned with getting things done. If you want, we’re concerned with systems. And so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn’t be a cowboy and you wouldn’t have a handle, right?” He dunked what was left of the cigarette in a fingerprinted glass half full of red wine. “Looks like Two-a-Day was about to get down to serious partying, about the time the shit hit the fan.”

“What shit’s that?” Bobby asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You,” Beauvoir said, frowning. “Not that any of it is your fault. As much as Two-a-Day wants to make out that’s the case.”

“He does? He seems pretty tense now Real bitchy, too.”

“Exactly. You got it Tense Scared shitless is more like it.”

“So how come?”

“Well, you see, things aren’t exactly what they seem, with Two-a-Day. I mean, yeah, he actually does the kind of shit you’ve known him to; hustles hot software to the caspers, pardon me” – he grinned – “down in Barrytown, but his main shot, I mean the man’s real ambitions, you understand, lie elsewhere.” Beauvoir picked up a wilted canapé, regarded it with evident suspicion, and flicked it over the table, into the trees. “His thing, you understand, is dicking around for a couple of bigtime Sprawl oungans.”

Bobby nodded blankly.

“Dudes who serve with both hands”

“You lost me there.”

“We’re talking a professional priesthood here, you want to call it that. Otherwise, just imagine a couple of major dudes – console cowboys, among other things – who make it their business to get things done for people. ‘To serve with both hands’ is an expression we have, sort of means they work both ends. White and black, got me?”

Bobby swallowed, then shook his head.

“Sorcerers,” Beauvoir said “Never mind. Bad dudes, big money, that’s all you need to know Two-a-Day, he acts like an up-line joeboy for these people. Sometimes he finds some thing they might be interested in, he downloads it on ‘em, collects a few favors later. Maybe he collects a dozen too many favors, they download something on him. Not quite the same proposition, you follow me? Say they get something they think has potential, but it scares them. These characters tend to a certain conservatism, you see? No? Well, you’ll learn.”

Bobby nodded.

“The kind of software someone like you would rent from Two-a-Day, that’s nothin’. I mean, it’ll work, but it’s nothing anybody heavy would ever bother with. You’ve seen a lot of cowboy kinos, right? Well, the stuff they make up for those things isn’t much, compared with the kind of shit a real heavy operator can front. Particularly when it comes to icebreakers Heavy icebreakers are kind of funny to deal in, even for the big boys You know why? Because ice, all the really hard stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the matrix, is always the produce of an Al, an artificial intelligence. Nothing else is fast enough to weave good ice and constantly alter and upgrade it. So when a really powerful icebreaker shows up on the black market, there are already a couple of very dicey factors in play. Like, for starts, where did the product come from? Nine times out of ten, it came from an Al, and Al’s are constantly screened, mainly by the Turing people, to make sure they don’t get too smart. So maybe you’ll get the Turing machine after your ass, because maybe an Al somewhere wants to augment its private cash flow Some Al’s have citizenship, right? Another thing you have to watch out for, maybe it’s a military icebreaker, and that’s bad heat, too, or maybe it’s taken a walk out of some zaibatsu’s industrial espionage arm, and you don’t want that either You takin’ this shit in, Bobby?”

Bobby nodded. He felt like he’d been waiting all his life to hear Beauvoir explain the workings of a world whose existence he’d only guessed at before.

“Still, an icebreaker that’ll really cut is worth mega, I mean beaucoup. So maybe you’re Mr. Big in the market, someone offers you this thing, and you don’t want to just tell ‘em to take a walk So you buy it. You buy it, real quiet, but you don’t slot it, no. What do you do with it? You take it home, have your tech fix it up so that it looks real average. Like you have it set up in a format like this” – and he tapped a stack of software in front of him -”and you take it to your joeboy, who owes you some favors, as usual.

“Wait a sec,” Bobby said. “I don’t think I like -”

“Good. That means you’re getting smart, or anyway smarter. Because that’s what they did. They brought it out here to your friendly ‘wareman, Mr. Two-a-Day, and they told him their problem. ‘Ace,’ they say, ‘we want to check this shit out, test-drive it, but no way we gonna do it ourselves It’s down to you, boy.’ So, in the way of things, what’s Two-a-Day gonna do with it? Is he gonna slot it? No way at all. He just does the same damn thing the big boys did to him, ‘cept he isn’t even going to bother telling the guy he’s going to do it to. What he does, he picks a base out in the Midwest that’s full of tax-dodge programs and yen-laundry flowcharts for some whorehouse in Kansas City, and everybody who didn’t just fall off a tree knows that the motherfucker is eyeball-deep in ice, black ice, totally lethal feedback programs. There isn’t a cowboy in the Sprawl or out who’d mess with that base first, because it’s dripping with defenses; second, because the stuff inside isn’t worth anything to anybody but the IRS, and they’re probably already on the owner’s take