William Gibson - Count Zero

“Jammer was a jockey,” Jackie said. “Hot as they come.

Weren’t you, Jammer?”

“So they say,” Jammer said, still looking at Bobby. “Long time ago, Jackie. How many hours you logged, running?” he asked Bobby.

Bobby’s face went hot. “Well, one, I guess.”

Jammer raised his bushy eyebrows. “Gotta start somewhere.” He smiled, his teeth small and unnaturally even and, Bobby thought, too numerous.

“Bobby,” Jackie said, ”why don’t you ask Jammer about this Wig character the Finn was telling you about?”

Jammer glanced at her, then back to Bobby. “You know the Finn? For a hotdogger you’re in pretty deep, aren’t you?” He took a blue plastic inhaler from his hip pocket and inserted it in his left nostril, snorted, then put it back in his pocket. “Ludgate. The Wig. Finn’s talking about the Wig? Must be in his dotage.”

Bobby didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. “Well,” Bobby ventured, “this Wig’s up in orbit somewhere, and he sells the Finn stuff, sometimes…”

“No shit? Well, you coulda fooled me. I woulda told you the Wig was either dead or drooling. Crazier than your usual cowboy, you know what I mean? Batshit. Gone. Haven’t heard of him in years.”

“Jammer,” Jackie said, “I think it’s maybe best if Bobby just tells you the story. Beauvoir’s due here this afternoon, and he’ll have some questions for you, so you better know where things stand…”

Jammer looked at her. “Well. I see. Mr. Beauvoir’s calling in that favor, is he?”

“Can’t speak for him,” she said, “but that would be my guess. We need a safe place to store the Count here.” “What count?”

“Me,” Bobby said, “that’s me.”

“Great,” Jammer said, with a total lack of enthusiasm. “So come on back into the office.”

Bobby couldn’t keep his eyes off the cyberspace deck that took up a third of the surface of Jammer’s antique oak desk It was matte black, a custom job, no trademarks anywhere. He kept craning forward, while he told Jammer about Two-a-Day and his attempted run, about the girl-feeling thing and his mother getting blown up. It was the hottest-looking deck he’d ever seen, and he remembered Jackie saying that Jammer had been such a shithot cowboy in his day.

Jammer slumped back in his chair when Bobby was finished. “You wanna try it?” he asked. He sounded tired.

“Try it?”

“The deck. I think you might wanna try it It’s something about the way you keep rubbing your ass on the chair. Either you wanna try it or you gotta piss bad”

“Shit yeah. I mean, yeah, thanks, yeah, I would…”

“Why not? No way for anybody to know it’s you and not me, right? Why don’t you jack in with him, Jackie? Kinda keep track.” He opened a desk drawer and took out two trode sets. “But don’t do anything, right? I mean, just buzz on out and spin. Don’t try to run any numbers I owe Beauvoir and Lucas a favor, and it looks like how I’m paying it back is by helping keep you intact.” He handed one set of trodes to Jackie, the other to Bobby. He stood up, grabbed handles on either side of the black console, and spun it around so it faced Bobby. “Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Thing’s ten years old and it’ll still wipe ass on most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight up from scratch He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist, once. The two of ’em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born.”

Bobby already had his trodes on. Now he looked at Jackie “You ever jack tandem before?”

He shook his head.

“Okay. We’ll jack, but I’ll hang off your left shoulder. I say jack out, jack out. You see anything funny. It’ll be because I’m with you, understand?”

He nodded.

She undid a pair of long, silver-headed pins at the rear of her fedora and took it off, putting it down on the desk beside Jammer’s deck. She slid the trodes on over the orange silk headscarf and smoothed the contacts against her forehead.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer’s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he didn’t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the nonplace that was cyberspace. “Slow it down, Bobby.” Jackie’s voice low and sweet, beside him in the void.

“Jesus Christ, this thing’s slick!”

“Yeah, but damp it down. The rush isn’t any good for us. You want to cruise. Keep us up here and slow it down.

He eased off on forward until they seemed to coast along. He turned to the left, expecting to see her there, but there was nothing.

“I’m here,” she said, “don’t worry.”

“Who was Quine?”

“Quine? Some cowboy Jammer knew. He knew ’em all, in his day.”

He took a right-angle left at random, pivoting smoothly at the grid intersection, testing the deck for response. It was amazing, totally unlike anything he’d felt before in cyberspace. “Holy shit. This thing makes an Ono-Sendai look like a kid’s toy.

“It’s probably got O-S circuitry in it. That’s what they used to use, Jammer says. Takes us up a little more…”

They rose effortlessly through the grid, the data receding below them “There isn’t a hell of a lot to see up here,” he complained.

“Wrong. You see some interesting stuff, you hang out long enough in the blank parts…”

The fabric of the matrix seemed to shiver, directly in front of them…”

“Uh, Jackie…”

“Stop here. Hold it. It’s okay. Trust me.”

Somewhere, far away, his hands moving over the unfamiliar keyboard configuration He held them steady now, while a section of cyberspace blurred, grew milky. “What is—”

“ Danbala ap monte I ,” the voice said, harsh in his head, and in his mouth a taste like blood. “Danbala is nding her.” He knew, somehow, what the words meant, but the voice was iron in his head The milky fabric divided, seemed to bubble, became two patches of shifting gray.

“Legba,” she said, “Legba and Ougou Feray, god of war. Papa Ougou’ St. Jacques Majeur! Viv Ia Vyéj! ”

Iron laughter filled the matrix, sawing through Bobby’s head.

“ Map kite tout mizé ak tout giyon ,” said another voice, fluid and quicksilver and cold. “See, Papa, she has come here to throw away her bad luck!” And then that one laughed as well, and Bobby fought down a wave of sheer hysteria as the silver laughter rose through him like bubbles.

“Has she bad luck, the horse of Danbala?” boomed the iron voice of Ougou Feray, and for an instant Bobby thought he saw a figure flicker in the gray fog. The voice hooted its terrible laughter. “Indeed! Indeed! But she knows it not! She is not my horse, no, else I would cure her luck!” Bobby wanted to cry, to die, anything to escape the voices, the utterly impossible wind that had started to blow out of the gray warps, a hot damp wind that smelled of things he couldn’t identify. “And she calls praise on the Virgin! Hear me, little sister! La Vyéj draws close indeed!”

“Yes,” said the other, “she moves through my province now, I who rule the roads, the highways.”

“But I, Ougou Feray, tell you that your enemies draw near as well! To the gates, sister, and beware”’

And then the gray areas faded, dwindled, shrank…

“Jack us out,” she said her voice small and distant And then she said, “Lucas is dead.”

Jammer took a bottle of Scotch from his desk drawer and carefully poured six centimeters of the stuff into a plastic highball glass. “You look like shit,” he said to Jackie, and Bobby was startled by the gentleness in the man’s voice They’d been jacked out for at least ten minutes and nobody had said anything at all. Jackie looked crushed and kept gnawing at her lower lip. Jammer looked either unhappy or angry, Bobby wasn’t sure.