�Did I say you�d sold us something that doesn�t work?�
Experiencing difficulties,� you said. And what else have you guys bought from me recently?�
�Sorry, Finn, but they�re not ours. You know it, too.�
�Yeah, I guess I do So what the fuck�s got you down here, Lucas? You know that stuff you bought wasn�t covered by the usual guarantees...�
�You know,� said the Finn, after listening to the story of Bobby�s abortive cyberspace run, �that�s some weird shit out there.� He slowly shook his narrow, strangely elongated head. �Didn�t used to be this way.� He looked at Lucas. �You people know, don�t you?�
They were seated around a square white table in a white room on the ground floor, behind the junk-clogged storefront. The floor was scuffed hospital tile, molded in a nonslip pattern, and the walls broad slabs of dingy white plastic concealing dense layers of antibugging circuitry. Compared to the storefront, the white room seemed surgically clean. Several alloy tripods bristling with sensors and scanning gear stood around the table like abstract sculpture.
�Know what?� Bobby asked. With each retelling of his story, he felt less like a wilson. Important. It made him feel Important.
�Not you, pisshead,� the Finn said wearily. �Him. Big hoodoo man. He knows. Knows it�s not the same. Hasn�t been, not for a long time. I been in the trade forever. Way back. Before the war, before there was any matrix, or anyway before people knew there was one.� He was looking at Bobby now. �I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice. Right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way � He lit his fifteenth cigarette of the evening, and smoke began to fill the white room.
�Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there�s been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don�t they. Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all of �em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got allies, don�t they, Lucas?�
Lucas took his gold toothpick out of his pocket and began to work on a rear molar, his face dark and serious.
�Thrones and dominions,� the Finn said obscurely. �Yeah, there�s things out there. Ghosts, voices Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?
Sure, it�s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it�s a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded, sounds like...�
�For us,� Lucas said, �the world has always worked that way.�
�Yeah� the Finn said, �so you guys could slot right into it, tell people the things you were cutting deals with were your same old bush gods...�
�Divine Horsemen...�
�Sure. Maybe you believe it. But I�m old enough to remember when it wasn�t like that. Ten years ago, you went in the Gentleman Loser and tried telling any of the top jocks you talked with ghosts in the matrix, they�d have figured you were crazy.�
�A wilson,� Bobby put in. feeling left out and no longer as Important.
The Finn looked at him, blankly. �A what?�
�A wilson A fuck-up. It�s hotdogger talk, I guess...� Did it again. Shit.
The Finn gave him a very strange look. �Jesus. That�s your word for it, huh? Christ I know the guy...�
�Who?�
�Bodine Wilson,� he said. �First guy I ever knew wound up as a figure of speech.�
�Was he stupid?� Bobby asked, immediately regretting it
�Stupid? Shit, no, he was smart as hell.� The Finn stubbed his cigarette out in a cracked ceramic Campari ashtray. lust a total fuck-up, was all He worked with the Dixie Flatline once The bloodshot yellow eyes grew distant.
�Finn,� Lucas said, �where did you get that icebreaker you sold us?�
The Finn regarded him bleakly. �Forty years in the business, Lucas. You know how many times I�ve been asked that question? You know how many times I�d be dead if I�d answered it?�
Lucas nodded. �I take your point. But at the same time, I put one to you.� He held the toothpick out toward the Finn like a toy dagger. �The real reason you�re willing to sit here and bullshit is that you think those three stiffs upstairs have something to do with the icebreaker you sold us. And you sat up and took special notice when Bobby told you about his mother�s condo getting wiped, didn�t you?�
The Finn showed teeth �Maybe.�
�Somebody�s got you on their list, Finn. Those three dead ninjas upstairs cost somebody a lot of money. When they don�t come back, somebody�ll be even more determined, Finn.�
The red-rimmed yellow eyes blinked. �They were all tooled up,� he said, �ready for a hit, but one of �em had some other things. Things for asking questions � His nicotine-stained fingers, almost the color of cockroach wings, came up to slowly massage his short upper lip. �I got it off Wigan Ludgate,� he said, �the Wig.�
�Never heard of him,� Lucas said.
�Crazy little motherfucker,� the Finn said, �used to be a cowboy�
How it was, the Finn began, and to Bobby it was all infinitely absorbing, even better than listening to Beauvoir and Lucas, Wigan Ludgate had had five years as a top jock, which is a decent run for a cyberspace cowboy. Five years tends to find a cowboy either rich or brain-dead, or else financing a stable of younger cracksmen and strictly into the managerial side. The Wig, in his first heat of youth and glory, had stormed off on an extended pass through the rather sparsely occupied sectors of the matrix representing those geographical areas which had once been known as the Third World.
Silicon doesn�t wear out; microchips were effectively immortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became obsolete, which was worse than wearing out; this fact was a grim and accepted constant for the Wig, like death or taxes, and in fact he was usually more worried about his gear falling behind the state of the art than he was about death (he was twenty-two) or taxes (he didn�t file, although he paid a Singapore money laundry a yearly percentage that was roughly equivalent to the income tax he would have been required to pay if he�d declared his gross). The Wig reasoned that all that obsolete silicon had to be going somewhere. Where it was going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously. The Wig punched himself through a couple of African back-waters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.
The Wig sat on the beach at Cannes for two years, ingesting only the most expensive designer drugs and periodically flicking on a tiny Hosaka television to study the bloated bodies of dead Africans with a strange and curiously innocent intensity. At some point, no one could quite say where or when or why, it began to be noted that the Wig had gone over the edge. Specifically, the Finn said, the Wig had become convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace was God, or some new manifestation of same. The Wig�s ventures into theology tended to be marked by major paradigm shifts, true leaps of faith. The Finn had some idea of what the Wig was about in those days; shortly after his conversion to his new and singular faith, Wigan Ludgate had returned to the Sprawl and embarked on an epic if somewhat random voyage of cybernetic discovery. Being a former console jockey, he knew where to go for the very best in what the Finn called the hard and the soft. The Finn provided the Wig with all manner of both, as the Wig was still a rich man. The Wig explained to the Finn that his technique of mystical exploration involved projecting his consciousness into blank, unstructured sectors of the matrix and waiting. To the man�s credit, the Finn said, he never actually claimed to have met God, although he did maintain that he had on several occasions sensed His presence moving upon the face of the grid. In due course, the Wig ran out of money.