Count Zero by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

resin. “The Count, baby”—as an aside to his girl—“Count Zero Interrupt.” Long pale hand with a fresh scab across the back grabbing ass through the girl’s leather skirt. “Count, this is my squeeze.” The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she’d heard of but had no intention of buying.
    Bobby scanned the crowd. A few blank faces, but none he knew. No Two-a-Day. “Say, hey,” he confided, “how you know how it is ’n’ all, I’m lookin’ for this close personal friend, business friend”—and at this the Gothick sagely bobbed his crest—“goes by Two-a-Day. . . .” He paused. The Gothick looked blank, snapping his resin. The girl looked bored, restless. “ ’Wareman,” Bobby added, raising his eyebrows, “black ’wareman.”
    “Two-a-Day,” the Gothick said. “Sure. Two-a-Day. Right, babe?” His girl tossed her head and looked away.
    “You know ’im?”
    “Sure.”
    “He here tonight?”
    “No,” the Gothick said, and smiled meaninglessly.
    Bobby opened his mouth, closed it, forced himself to nod. “Thanks, bro.”
    “Anything for my man,” the Gothick said.
     
    Another hour, more of the same. Too much white, chalk-pale Gothick white. Flat bright eyes of their girls, their bootheels like ebony needles. He tried to stay out of the simstim room, where Leon was running some kind of weird jungle fuck tape phased you in and out of these different kinda animals, lotta crazed arboreal action up in the trees, which Bobby found a little disorienting. He was hungryenough now to feel a little spaced, or maybe it was afterburn from whatever it was had happened to him before, but he was starting to have a hard time concentrating, and his thoughts drifted in odd directions. Like who, for instance, had climbed up into those trees full of snakes and wired a pair of those rat things for simstim?
    The Gothicks were into it, whoever. They were thrashing and stomping and generally into major tree-rat identification. Leon’s new hit tape, Bobby decided.
    Just to his left, but well out of range of the stim, two Project girls stood, their baroque finery in sharp contrast with Gothick monochrome. Long black frock coats opened over tight red vests in silk brocade, the tails of enormous white shirts hanging well beneath their knees. Their dark features were concealed beneath the brims of fedoras pinned and hung with fragments of antique gold: stickpins, charms, teeth, mechanical watches. Bobby watched them covertly; the clothes said they had money, but that someone would make it worth your ass if you tried to go for it. One time Two-a-Day had come down from the Projects in this ice-blue shaved-velour number with diamond buckles at the knees, like maybe he hadn’t had time to change, but Bobby had acted like the ’wareman was dressed in his usual leathers, because he figured a cosmopolitan attitude was crucial in biz.
    He tried to imagine going up to them so smooth, just putting it to them: Hey, you ladies surely must know my good friend Mr. Two-a-Day? But they were older than he was, taller, and moved with a dignity he found intimidating. Probably they’d just laugh, but somehow he didn’t want that at all.
    What he did want now, and very badly, was food. He touched his credit chip through the denim of his jeans. He’d go across the street and get a sandwich . . . Then he remembered why he was here, and suddenly it didn’t seem very smart to use his chip. If he’d been sussed, after his attempted run, they’d have his chip number by now; using it would spotlight him for anyone tracking him in cyberspace, pick him out in the Barrytown grid like a highway flare in a dark football stadium. He had his cash money, but you couldn’t pay for food with that. It wasn’t actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it. He’d have to find a Gothick