Case stared at the face on the screen. `Us?'

`So who else?'

`Aerol,' Case said, `the guy on Babylon Rocker,Maelcum's pal.'

`No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle.'

`You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run, here. Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for...'

`Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's navigation system. You'll take Garveyinto a very private dock I'll show you. The Chinese virus has completely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum. You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera, get the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons.'

`Kill Riviera?'

`Kill him.'

Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Maelcum put his hand on his shoulder. `Hey. You forget something.' He felt the rage rising, and a kind of glee. `You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?'

The Finn nodded.

`So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked, man.' He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.

`Case, mon,' Maelcum said softly, `Garveya tug.'

`That's right,' said the Finn, and smiled.

`You havin'~ fun in the big world outside?' the construct asked, when Case jacked back in. `Figured that was Wintermute requestin'~ the pleasure...'

`Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?'

`Bang on. Killer virus.'

`Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it.'

`You wanna tell me, maybe?'

`Don't have time.'

`Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway.'

`Fuck off,' Case said, and flipped, cutting off the torn fingernail edge of the Flatline's laughter.

`She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness,' 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own. `Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep.' She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the light at different angles. `Only in certain heightened modes would an individual -a clan member -suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness...'

Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill -his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impressions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise. If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be?

Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock, huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.

`Where'd he go?' Molly asked. `To take his shot?'

3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. `He told me when to let you in,' she said. `He wouldn't tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?'

Case felt Molly hesitate. `I would've killed him. I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you.'

`Why?' 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the djellaba's inner pockets. `And why? And what about?'

Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark, curiously opaque. `Because I hate him,' she said at last, `and the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am.'

`And the show,' 3Jane said. `I saw the show.'

Molly nodded.

`But Hideo?'

`Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a partner of mine, once.'

3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.

`Because I had to see,' Molly said.

`And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?' Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling. `Shall we talk now?'

`Take this off,' Molly said, raising her captive hands.

`You killed my father,' 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. `I was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes, he called them.'

`He killed the puppet. It looked like you.'

`He was fond of broad gestures,' she said, and then Riviera was beside her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he'd worn in the roof garden of their hotel.

`Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she? I thought so when I first saw her.' He stepped past 3Jane. `It isn't going to work, you know.'

`Isn't it, Peter?' Molly managed a grin.

`Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mistake. Underestimating me.' He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. `He talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case, whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature.' He drank.

`And what exactly is that, Peter?' Molly asked, her voice flat.

Riviera beamed. `Perversity.' He walked back to the two women, swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. `An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision.'

She waited, looking up at him.

`Oh, Peter,' 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation ordinarily reserved for children.

`No word for you, Molly. He told me about that, you see. 3Jane knows the code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither will Wintermute. My Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse way.' He smiled again. `She has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy's favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match, a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool.' He drank off the last of the mineral water. `No, you wouldn't do, Daddy, you would not do. Now that Peter's come home.' And then, his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.

Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened to the panels on either side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the thing's fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead. Marcus Garveywas groaning and ticking with g-stress.

`The Mute takin'~ I an'~ I dock,' the Zionite said, popping the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. `Maelcum pilot th'~ landin'~, meantime need we tool f'~ th'~ job.'