Cerise doesn’t answer, because there’s nothing she can say. They stand silent for another moment, and then Ms. Cool says again, All right. The icon flickers and a mailcode appears; Cerise plucks it out of the air, feeling the numbers tingle against her fingers. She tucks it into her toolkit, carefully compartmentalizing just in case, and looks back at the icon.
You owe me, Ms. Cool says, softly, and Cerise nods.
I owe you, she agrees, and closes her mind to the consequences.
The blank sphere splits open around her, and the icon vanishes. Cerise steps backward, and is abruptly in the center of the rose-colored tent. The Tin Man sneers at her from a corner.
Get what you wanted?
Do you care? Cerise asks, with a grin, and adds, Ask your boss, if you really want to know. She walks past him without another word, brushes through illusory curtains that hum for an instant under her touch as though they held a swarm of bees. She steps out into the gaudy light and noise of the Bazaar, follows the meandering path between the heaped icons and the crude-drawn storefronts that lie behind the piles of advertising, and is aware again of the negative icon following her. Mabry is still with her. She keeps walking, wondering if she should try to lose him, but perhaps, she thinks, a witness would be advisable. She finds a sheltered spot, checks the mailcode Ms. Cool has given her—an unfamiliar string, an unfamiliar part of the net— and calls a new routine, lets it absorb the mailcode, and follows it as it runs.
The tracer leads her back out into the main highways of the net, as she had expected. She lets herself absorb the new perspective, the rivers of neon fire, streams and falls of light, here and there a flurry of white and red, lights tossed like water over rapids, then strides out into the nearest node, lets the force of the traffic carry her away. She can see, and feel, the tracer ahead of her, sorting through the junctions for her, follows its path that glows green to the eye and warm to the touch, and at the fourth node calls a halt. The tracer whines in protest—it, they, are nearing the end of its programmed road, and it seems almost eager to finish its work—but Cerise waits anyway, listening, sniffing, for a hint of the negative icon. It is there, as she had known it would be: Mabry, still with her, following at a distance just discreet enough. She sighs then, and steps from mainstream to local net, follows the tracer down the last wide road of light, until they emerge together at the mailcode’s volume. The tracer vanishes, and Cerise is left alone, except for the ghost of the invisible icon lurking in the distance.
There is IC(E), of course, both obvious spikes and coils of it, walling off all but a staging area, and subtler strands of it, hair-thin tripwires and delicate poison darts. She frowns for an instant, considering the problem, then evokes a routine from her toolkit. It spreads, slow and thick, meaningless codes and numbers oozing like molasses, clogging the more delicate traps, overloading the fine triggers until one by one the traps fire or fizzle, releasing payloads that are lost at once in the sea of garbage. Cerise watches carefully, recording the pattern of the traps— there’s always something to be learned from even amateur work, and this is good, better than a mere amateur—then steps across to the main barrier. She studies it for a moment—the same hand built it that forged the subtler traps—considering how to proceed. She has two choices, discreet and overt, and after only an instant’s thought chooses the obvious approach. Silk needs to know she’s pursued, that she has not acted, cannot act, with impunity—and besides, Cerise thinks, and smiles, she herself has watchdogs in her toolkit that can follow anyone. If Silk panics, and runs, the watchdog will follow, and with any luck Silk will run to newTrouble. She evokes the watchdog then, sets its chameleon routine and leaves it sleeping, less of a presence on the net than Mabry’s invisible non-icon, and turns her attention to the IC(E).
Under other circumstances she would take her time, thread the glittering razors’ maze of it, but she’s already betrayed her presence by neutralizing the first array of traps. She selects the best icebreaker she owns. She didn’t write the main structure, but she has modified it until it fits her hand, her style, like a velvet glove. She draws it on, feeling the power surge through it as the program wakes and tests the IC(E), then sweeps her hand across the first bright coil of program. The shock of it jolts her to her elbow, numb tingling as though she’d hit a nerve; she grimaces, calls more power. She touches it again, and this time the IC(E) cracks and shatters under her touch, falling away in chunks like broken glass. At the edges of the breach, the broken ends of the matrix flare, and then fade, like embers in the wind. She reaches out again, seizes another handful of the brittle glittering IC(E), enjoying the feeling as it cracks and falls like dust at her feet. Once more, and she is through, emerging into the echoing silence of an empty node.
She has expected that, predicted the emptiness when there was no counter to her first assault on the volume’s defenses, but she checks anyway, letting her own countersecurity programs survey the area. There is nothing more than the routine maintenance programs, anonymous and mainstream, nothing to betray their owner’s hand, and she steps out into the empty space. It is flat, featureless, grey floor, white dome/ceiling, all standard, not even a hot-spot to trigger a new environment or a private stash of files. Which is all pretty much as she has expected: she scans anyway, and this time finds the button, dulled almost to invisibility. She checks for links to IC(E), finds none, but readies a defensive program anyway before she triggers whatever lies behind the routine.
Grass sprouts underfoot, and a pavilion shimmers into place: the scene of her earlier seduction. She makes a face, but lets the program run, until the stage is complete, if empty, no sign of Silk behind the clever trappings. She scans again, ignoring the demanding memory—better to have Trouble, in spite of everything—finds a storage cache and a single file. She studies the guard program carefully, selects a tool, and freezes the lock into immobility. It can neither close nor destroy its contents; she pries it gently open, and scans the file. It is a working draft of a program, a model for iconage, and she seals a copy carefully into her working memory. It could be bait, a poison trap that carries some unpleasant virus, and she doesn’t have the time to risk that now.
There is nothing else she needs, not here, and the mere fact that she’s been here is message enough for Silk. She hesitates, contemplating a message, and at last tosses a copy of her icon out into the empty space. It hangs in the air, the cartoon shape glowing against the blank walls: if Silk knows what’s good for her, she’ll contact me, Cerise thinks, and turns away. And if she doesn’t—there’s always the watchdog. She walks out through the shattered IC(E), feels the ghostly touch of the watchdog, warm against her ankle, reassuring her of its presence. Mabry, too, is still with her, but she ignores him, and turns again for home.
Trouble sat cross-legged on her chair, left hand still nursing the elbow that stung and tingled from the feedback of the IC(E) surrounding The Willows’ databases. Voices spilled in through the open window, kids’ shouts high and clear as they played basketball in the lot behind the Chinese restaurant, mixing with the periodic drone of runabouts’ engines, but she ignored them all, staring at the numbers that filled her display screen. It was bad enough that she hadn’t been able to break through the IC(E) on-line—not only did her elbow hurt, but the same pins-and-needles sensation trembled through her hands, slowing her fingers on the keyboard and controls. The numbers did not change, and she glared at them a moment longer before moving on to the next screen. The news was no better there: most of the Headlands apartments were controlled by The Willows, and the information on tenants’ names and rents and who actually paid the bills was buried in The Willows’ most secure databases. She had already proved that she couldn’t break that IC(E)—almost unconsciously, she ran her hand over her sore elbow, imagining a bruise beneath the skin even though she knew perfectly well that the tingling was in her nerves, in the brainworm itself—which left her only the slow, unreliable road through the city records. And that wasn’t even cracking, she thought, bitterly; it was more like panning for gold, sifting huge amounts of raw information through a datasieve in the hopes first that the information you wanted was actually there, and then that you’d built the sieve correctly to catch it. Most crackers didn’t have the patience for the technique—hell, she wasn’t sure she had the patience for it anymore—but she’d already exhausted all the other options.
She made a face at the screen, dumped the information back to the disk, then called up another file. This one contained the latest access codes for most of the East Coast city databases—it was one of those things the wannabes cracked out of the systems and posted, just to prove they could do it—and, as she had hoped, the Seahaven/Southbrook/Sands joint administrative district computer was on the list, less than twenty hours old. The codes indicated that it was an older machine, without the additional security packages that most of the larger cities had installed in the past year. She lifted an eyebrow at that—she would have expected The Willows either to provide the program or at least to insist that the town governments install it—but experience had taught her to be grateful for small mercies. She copied the code, and went looking for her datasieve. She found it at last, on a subsidiary disk, and brought it into working memory, opened it, then stared at the matrix, considering the parameters. This was something that Cerise was particularly good at, designing search routines, and she stood up
