COUNT ZERO
FOR MY D
Quiero hacer contigo
lo que la primavera
hace con los cervezos
Neruda
COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Contents
34 A CHAIN BOUT NINE MILES LONG
1 Smooth-Running Gun
THEY SENT A SLAMHOUND on Turners trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didnt see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadnt made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market The eyes were green.
He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of the previous century. The Dutchmans visits were gray dawn dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his second floor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs, late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-light that hurt his eyes. You can go home now, Turner Were done with you Youre good as new.
He was good as new. How good was that? He didnt know. He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.
And the next. And ever was.
He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels left ferroconcrete, drinks arrived, dinner was served.
In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of the corridor, he changed his ticket.
He flew to Mexico. And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of brooms, a womans body warm against his own.
The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf. The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse chambray, softened by countless washings.
He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. Hed had to walk twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on runway concrete.
He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plastered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. Hed ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink Lucite and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver. Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was there to welcome him back to Mexico.
Among the dozen-odd Microsofts the Dutchman had given him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish, but in Vallarta hed fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures, the days winning numbers in the national lottery.