They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the 'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine -slender, street level, and the only one going -had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible. `It was big,' another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, `but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.' Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.

`Boy,' the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, `I'm like them huge fuckin'~ lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an'~ one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin'~. Hit that black stuff and ol'~ tailbrain jus'~ kept right on keepin'~ on.'

The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace...

And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs.

Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast.

He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.

It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.

He coughed. `Dix? McCoy? That you man?' His throat was tight.

`Hey, bro,' said a directionless voice.

`It's Case, man. Remember?'

`Miami, joeboy, quick study.'

`What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?'

`Nothin'~.'

`Hang on.' He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. `Dix? Who am I?'

`You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?'

`Ca -your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?'

`Good question.'

`Remember being here, a second ago?'

`No.'

`Know how a ROM personality matrix works?'

`Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct.'

`So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?'

`Guess so,' said the construct.

`Okay, Dix. You area ROM construct. Got me?'

`If you say so,' said the construct. `Who are you?'

`Case.'

`Miami,' said the voice, `joeboy, quick study.'

`Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?'

`You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?'

`You want you a paradise,' the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. `Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.' The voice recited coordinates as he punched.

They found their paradise, a `pirate's paradise,' on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties.

`There,' said the Flatline, `the blue one. Make it out? That's an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow.'

Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's.

`Here,' said the voice, `I'll do it for you.' The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.

`Big deal,' said the Flatline. `No ice at all.'

`Scan this shit,' Case told the Hosaka. `Sift for owner's personal history.'

The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a simple lozenge of white light. `Contents are primarily video recordings of postwar military trials,' said the distant voice of the Hosaka. `Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.'

`Show it already,' Case said.

A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.

Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him.

`You find anything?' she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.

`Tell you later,' he said, `I'm wrecked.' He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.

Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.

`They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,' Case said, and Molly stirred beside him.

The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.

Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling...

There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.

He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.

Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was.

No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.