`I don't cry, much.'

`But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?'

`I spit,' she said. `The ducts are routed back into my mouth.'

`Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one so young.' He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. `That is the way to handle tears.' He drank again. `I'm busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I'm busy. Dying.'

`I could go out the way I came,' she said.

He laughed, a harsh high sound. `You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.'

`It's my ass, boss, and it's all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece.'

`You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That's what I'm doing, you understand. But perhaps I'll take you with me tonight, down to hell... It would be very Egyptian of me.' He drank again. `Come here then.' He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. `Drink.'

She shook her head.

`It isn't poisoned,' he said, but returned the brandy to the table. `Sit. Sit on the floor. We'll talk.'

`What about?' She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails.

`Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It's my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and I was needed. Were you the something Molly? Surely they didn't need me to handle you, no. Something else... but I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren't born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn't dream, in that cold. They told us we'd never feel cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold... Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset... I'm old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.' The barrel of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The tendons in her thighs were drawn tight as wires now.

`You can get freezerburn,' she said carefully.

`Nothing burns there,' he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. `Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I'd deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would you know, Molly?' The gun rose again. `There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.'

`Boss,' she asked him, `you know Wintermute?'

`A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that very bed... But I wander.' He coughed wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near his one bare foot. `How I do wander. Through the cold. But soon no more. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one's own daughter.' His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. `Marie-France's eyes ,' he said, faintly, and smiled. `We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.' His head swayed sideways, recovered. `I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded microchip.'

The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.

`The dreams grow like slow ice,' he said. His face was tinged with blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.

Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool's automatic in her hand.

A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the patterned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl's face to the light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant.

There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly's simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl's cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee.

Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck.

`I got your number, fucker,' Case said, feeling his own lips moving, somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast. Molly hadn't seen the dead girl's face swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda's deathmask.

Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool's chair. The man's breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.

It was still open when she turned and left the room.

`Got your boss on hold,' the Flatline said. `He's coming through on the twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that's riding us piggy-back. Called the Haniwa.'

`I know,' Case said, absently, `I saw it.'

A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.

`Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care of mine,' Case said.

Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his gaze. `You okay, Armitage?'

`Case' -and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue stare -`you've seen Wintermute, haven't you? In the matrix.'

Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garveywould relay the gesture to the Haniwamonitor. He imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage.

`Case' -and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his computer -`what is he, when you see him?'

`A high-rez simstim construct.'

`But who?'

`Finn, last time... Before that, this pimp I...'

`Not General Girling?'

`General who?'

The lozenge went blank.

`Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up,' he told the construct.

He flipped.

The perspective startled him. Molly was crouching between steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none larger than Garveyand all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construction vehicle and stood beside one of the thing's piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires.