William Gibson - Count Zero

THE JAL STEWARD offered her a choice of simstim cassettes: a tour of the Foxton retrospective at the Tate the previous August, a period adventure taped in Ghana (Ashanu!), high-lights from Bizet’s Carmen as viewed from a private box at the Tokyo Opera, or thirty minutes of Tally Isham’s syndicated talk show Top People.

“Your first shuttle flight, Ms. Ovski?”

Marly nodded. She’d given Paleologos her mother’s maiden name, which had probably been stupid.

The steward smiled understandingly “A cassette can definitely ease the lift-off. The Carmen’s very popular this week. Gorgeous costumes, I understand.”

She shook her head, in no mood for opera She loathed Foxton, and would have preferred to feel the full force of acceleration rather than live through Ashanti! She took the Isham tape by default, as the least of four evils. The steward checked her seat harness, handed her the cassette and a little throwaway tiara in gray plastic, then moved on. She put the plastic trode set on, jacked it into the seat arm, sighed, and slotted the cassette in the opening beside the jack. The interior of the JAL shuttle vanished in a burst of Aegean blue, and she watched the words TALLY ISHAM’S TOP PEOPLE expand across the cloudless sky in elegant sans-serif capitals.

Tally Isham had been a constant in the stim industry for as long as Marly remembered, an ageless Golden Girl who’d come in on the first wave of the new medium. Now Marly found herself locked into Tally’s tanned, lithe, tremendously comfortable sensorium. Tally Isham glowed, breathed deeply and easily, her elegant bones riding in the embrace of a musculature that seemed never to have known tension. Accessing her stim recordings was like falling into a bath of perfect health, feeling the spring in the star’s high arches and the jut of her breasts against the silky white Egyptian cotton of her simple blouse. She was leaning against a pocked white balustrade above the tiny harbor of a Greek island town, a cascade of flowering trees falling away below her down a hillside built from whitewashed stone and narrow, twisting stairs A boat sounded in the harbor.

“The tourists are hurrying back to their cruise ship now,” Tally said, and smiled; when she smiled, Marly could feel the smoothness of the star’s white teeth, taste the freshness of her mouth, and the stone of the balustrade was pleasantly rough against her bare forearms. “But one visitor to our island will be staying with us this afternoon, someone I’ve longed to meet, and I’m sure that you’ll be delighted and surprised. As he’s someone who ordinarily shuns major media coverage.”

She straightened, turned, and smiled into the tanned, smiling face of Josef Virek.

Marly tore the set from her forehead, and the white plastic of the JAL shuttle seemed to slam into place all around her Warning signs were blinking on the console overhead, and she could feel a vibration that seemed to gradually rise in pitch.

Virek? She looked at the trode set. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you are a top person.”

“I beg your pardon?” The Japanese student beside her bobbed in his harness in a strange little approximation of a bow. “You are in some difficulty with your stim?”

“No, no,” she said. “Excuse me.” She slid the set on again and the interior of the shuttle dissolved in a buzz of sensory static, a jarring mélange of sensations that abruptly gave way to the calm grace of Tally Isham, who had taken Virek’s cool, firm hand and was smiling into his soft blue eyes. Virek smiled back, his teeth very white “Delighted to be here, Tally.” he said, and Marly let herself sink into the reality of the tape, accepting Tally’s recorded sensory input as her own. Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.

Virek wore a soft white shirt, cotton duck trousers rolled to just below the knee, and very plain brown leather sandals.

His hand still in hers, Tally returned to the balustrade “I’m sure,” she said, “that there are many things our audience”

The sea was gone. An irregular plain covered in a green-black growth like lichen spread out to the horizon, broken by the silhouettes of the neo-Gothic spires of Gaudi’s church of the Sagrada Familia. The edge of the world was lost in a low bright mist, and a sound like drowned bells tolled in across the plain.

“You have an audience of one, today,” Virek said, and looked at Tally Isham through his round, rimless glasses. “Hello, Marly.”

Marly struggled to reach the trodes, but her arms were made of stone. G-force, the shuttle lifting off from its concrete pad… He’d trapped her here.

“I understand,” said Tally, smiling, leaning back against the balustrade, her elbows on warm rough stone. “What a lovely idea. Your Marly, Herr Virek, must be a lucky girl indeed…” And it came to her, to Marly, that this wasn’t Sense/Net’s Tally Isham, but a part of Virek’s construct, a programmed point of view worked up from years of Top People, and that now there was no choice, no way out, except to accept it, to listen, to give Virek her attention. The fact of his having caught her here, pinned her here this way, told her that her intuition had been correct: The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will…

“I’m sorry,” he said, “to learn that you are upset Paco tells me that you are fleeing from us, but I prefer to see it as the drive of an artist toward her goal. You have sensed, I think, something of the nature of my gestalt, and it has frightened you As well it should. This cassette was prepared an hour before your shuttle was scheduled to lift off from Orly. We know your destination, of course, but I have no intention of following you. You are doing your job. Marly. I only regret that we were unable to prevent the death of your friend Alain, but we now know the identity of his killers and their employers…

Tally Isham’s eyes were Marly’s eyes now, and they were locked with Virek’s, a blue energy burning there.

“Alain was murdered by the hired agents of Maas Biolabs,” he continued, “and it was Maas who provided him with the coordinates of your current destination, Maas who gave him the hologram you saw. My relationship with Maas Biolabs has been ambivalent, to say the least. Two years ago a subsidiary of mine attempted to buy them out. The sum involved would have affected the entire global economy.

They refused. Paco has determined that Alain died because they discovered that he was attempting to market the information they had provided, market it to third parties. “He frowned. “Exceedingly foolish, because he was utterly ignorant of the nature of the product he was offering.”

How like Alain, she thought, and felt a wave of pity. Seeing him curled there on the hideous carpet, his spine outlined beneath the green fabric of his jacket.

“You should know, I think, that my search for our boxmaker involves more than art, Marly.” He removed his glasses and polished them in a fold of his white shirt; she found something obscene in the calculated urbanity of the gesture. “I have reason to believe that the maker of these artifacts is in some position to offer me freedom. Marly. I am not a well man.” He replaced the glasses, settling the fine gold ear-pieces carefully. “When I last requested a remote visual of the vat I inhabit in Stockholm, I was shown a thing like three truck trailers, lashed in a dripping net of support lines… If I were able to leave that, Marly, or rather, to leave the riot of cells it contains… Well” — he smiled his famous smile again — “what wouldn’t I pay?”