Neuromancer (2 page)

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.

“Wage,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “He wants to see you with a hole in your face.”
She lit her own cigarette.

“Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?”

“No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage’s boys.”

“I don’t owe him enough. He does me, he’s out the money anyway.” He shrugged.

“Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to be the example. You seriously
better watch it.”

“Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?”

“Sleep.” She shook her head. “Sure, Case.” She shivered, hunched forward over the
table. Her face was filmed with sweat.

“Here,” he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker, coming up with a crumpled
fifty. He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed
it to her.

“You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage.” There was something in the gray
eyes now that he couldn’t read, something he’d never seen there before.

“I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more coming,” he lied, as he watched
his New Yen vanish into a zippered pocket.

“You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick.”

“I’ll see you, Linda,” he said, getting up.

“Sure.” A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her pupils. Sanpaku. “You watch
your back, man.”

He nodded, anxious to be gone.

He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him, saw her eyes reflected in
a cage of red neon.

F
RIDAY NIGHT ON
Ninsei.

He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called Beautiful
Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited
sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the
man’s right hand.

Was it authentic? If that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble.
If it wasn’t, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted
with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear
like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic.

The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was a gaijin crowd. Groups of
sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed,
Sprawl heavies showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species of hustler,
all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire and commerce.

There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave,
but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a
kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense
in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t
there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology
itself.

Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? Would Wage have him killed
to make an example? It didn’t make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed
biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.

But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case’s primary insight into the dynamics of street
dealing was that neither the buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman’s
business is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case had carved for
himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had been cut out with lies, scooped
out a night at a time with betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to
crumble, he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.

The week before, he’d delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular extract, retailing
it for a wider margin than usual. He knew Wage hadn’t liked that. Wage was his primary
supplier, nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who’d managed to forge
links with the rigidly stratified criminal establishment beyond Night City’s borders.
Genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of
fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace something back, once, and now
he enjoyed steady connections in a dozen cities.

Case found himself staring through a shop window. The place sold small bright objects
to the sailors. Watches, flicknives, lighters, pocket VTRs, simstim decks, weighted
manriki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated him, steel stars
with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow
surface like oil on water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against
scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fishline, their centers stamped
with dragons or yinyang symbols. They caught the street’s neon and twisted it, and
it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled
out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

“Julie,” he said to his stars. “Time to see old Julie. He’ll know.”

J
ULIUS
D
EANE WAS
one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly
fortune in serums and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage
to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable
in Chiba. Then he’d fly to Hongkong and order the year’s suits and shirts. Sexless
and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to
esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never seen him wear the same suit twice,
although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of
garments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery
gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors
in a Victorian dollhouse.

His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which seemed to have
been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random collection of European furniture,
as though Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-Aztec bookcases
gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled
table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered
steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging
to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions
of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time. The room was
stacked with white fiberglass shipping modules that gave off the tang of preserved
ginger.

“You seem to be clean, old son,” said Deane’s disembodied voice. “Do come in.”

Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive imitation-rosewood door
to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic
in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in Deane’s makeshift
foyer suggested the end of the past century, the office itself seemed to belong to
its start.

Deane’s seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of light cast by an ancient brass
lamp with a rectangular shade of dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced
behind a vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, drawered cabinets
made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of thing, Case supposed, that had once been
used to store written records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes,
scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork typewriter,
a machine Deane never seemed to get around to reassembling.

“What brings you around, boyo?” Deane asked, offering Case a narrow bonbon wrapped
in blue-and-white checked paper. “Try one. Ting Ting Djahe, the very best.” Case refused
the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and ran a thumb down the
faded seam of one black jeans-leg. “Julie, I hear Wage wants to kill me.”

“Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?”

“People.”

“People,” Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. “What sort of people? Friends?”

Case nodded.

“Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?”

“I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to you?”

“Haven’t been in touch, of late.” Then he sighed. “If I
did
know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they
are, you understand.”

“Things?”

“He’s an important connection, Case.”

“Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?”

“Not that I know of.” Deane shrugged. They might have been discussing the price of
ginger. “If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or
so and I’ll let you in on a little something out of Singapore.”

“Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?”

“Loose lips, old son!” Deane grinned. The steel desk was jammed with a fortune in
debugging gear.

“Be seeing you, Julie. I’ll say hello to Wage.”

Deane’s fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his pale silk tie.

H
E WAS LESS
than a block from Deane’s office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that
someone was on his ass, and very close.

The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. The
trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could be quite a trick, behind
a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his narrow features
in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let the crowd carry him along. When he saw
a darkened display window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical boutique,
closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through
the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation
jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone’s whores; it was tattooed with a
luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery,
he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just
carry the thing around in your pocket?

Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied the reflection of the passing
crowd.

There.

Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored glasses, dark clothing,
slender . . .

And gone.

Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.

“R
ENT ME A
gun, Shin?”

The boy smiled. “Two hour.” They stood together in the smell of fresh raw seafood
at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall. “You come back, two hour.”

“I need one now, man. Got anything right now?”

Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once been filled with powdered
horseradish. He produced a slender package wrapped in gray plastic. “Taser. One hour,
twenty New Yen. Thirty deposit.”

“Shit. I don’t need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna shoot somebody, understand?”

The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horseradish cans. “Two hour.”

H
E WENT INTO
the shop without bothering to glance at the display of shuriken. He’d never thrown
one in his life.

He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank chip that gave his name as
Charles Derek May. It beat Truman Starr, the best he’d been able to do for a passport.

The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she had a few years on old Deane,
none of them with the benefit of science. He took his slender roll of New Yen out
of his pocket and showed it to her. “I want to buy a weapon.”

She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.

“No,” he said, “I don’t like knives.”

She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The lid was yellow cardboard,
stamped with a crude image of a coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight
identical tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown fingers stripped
the paper from one. She held the thing up for him to examine, a dull steel tube with
a leather thong at one end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the
tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and
forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of tightly wound coilspring
slid out and locked. “Cobra,” she said.

B
EYOND THE NEON
shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray. The air had gotten worse;
it seemed to have teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks. Case had
spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient way to conceal his
cobra; finally he’d settled for tucking the handle into the waistband of his jeans,
with the tube slanting across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between
his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt like it might clatter
to the pavement with his next step, but it made him feel better.

The Chat wasn’t really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it attracted a related clientele.
Fridays and Saturdays were different. The regulars were still there, most of them,
but they faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed on them.
As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for Ratz, but the bartender wasn’t in
sight. Lonny Zone, the bar’s resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest
as one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was addicted to a brand of
hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud Dancers. Catching the pimp’s eye, Case beckoned
him to the bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his long face
slack and placid.

“You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?”

Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.

“You sure, man?”

“Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago.”

“Got some joeboys with him? One of ’em thin, dark hair, maybe a black jacket?”

“No,” Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to indicate the effort it cost
him to recall so much pointless detail. “Big boys. Graftees.” Zone’s eyes showed very
little white and less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and enormous.
He stared into Case’s face for a long time, then lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge
of the steel
whip. “Cobra,” he said, and raised an eyebrow. “You wanna fuck somebody up?”