Neuromancer (20 page)

M
AELCUM WAS PRONE
against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the trodes. A nylon sling around his
waist was fastened to the panels on either side with shock cords and gray rubber suction
pads. He had his shirt off and was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking
zero-g wrench, the thing’s fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead.
Marcus Garvey
was groaning and ticking with g-stress.

“The Mute takin’ I an’ I dock,” the Zionite said, popping the hexhead into a mesh
pouch at his waist. “Maelcum pilot th’ landin’, meantime need we tool f’ th’ job.”

“You keep tools back there?” Case craned his neck and watched cords of muscle bunching
in the brown back.

“This one,” Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped in black poly from the space
behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a single hexhead to hold it in
place. The black package had drifted aft before he’d finished. He thumbed open the
vacuum valves on the workbelt’s gray pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing
he’d removed.

He kicked back, gliding over his instruments—a green docking diagram pulsed on his
central screen—and snagged the frame of Case’s g-web. He pulled himself down and picked
at the tape of his package with a thick, chipped thumbnail. “Some man in China say
th’ truth comes out this,” he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic
shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered forestock.
The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, replaced with a wooden pistolgrip wound
with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and ganja.

“That the only one you got?”

“Sure, mon,” he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red cloth, the black
poly wrapping bunched around the pistolgrip in his other hand, “I an’ I th’ Rastafarian
navy, believe it.”

Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He’d never bothered to put the Texas
catheter back on; at least he could take a real piss in the Villa Straylight, even
if it was his last.

He jacked in.

“Hey,” the construct said, “ol’ Peter’s totally apeshit, huh?”

They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the emerald arches had widened,
grown together, become a solid mass. Green predominated in the planes of the Chinese
program that surrounded them. “Gettin’ close, Dixie?”

“Real close. Need you soon.”

“Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang’s set itself up solid in our Hosaka. I’m going
to have to jack you and my deck out of the circuit, haul you into Straylight, and
plug you back in, into the custodial program there, Wintermute says. Says the Kuang
virus will be all through there. Then we run from inside, through the Straylight net.”

“Wonderful,” the Flatline said, “I never did like to do anything simple when I could
do it ass-backwards.”

Case flipped.

I
NTO HER DARKNESS
, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon,
wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her
dreams. When the optic chip flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed
with a faint pink aura.

07:29:40.

“I’m very unhappy with this, Peter.” 3Jane’s voice seemed to arrive from a hollow
distance. Molly could hear, he realized, then corrected himself. The simstim unit
was intact and still in place; he could feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears
registered the vibrations of the girl’s voice. Riviera said something brief and indistinct.
“But I don’t,” she said, “and it isn’t fun. Hideo will bring a medical unit down from
intensive care, but this needs a surgeon.”

There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against the side of
the pool.

“What was that you were telling her, when I came back?” Riviera was very close now.

“About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside from Hideo’s injection.
Why did you do that to her?”

“I wanted to see if they would break.”

“One did. When she comes around—if she comes around—we’ll see what color her eyes
are.”

“She’s extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn’t been here to distract her,
to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo to draw her little bomb, where
would you be? In her power.”

“No,” 3Jane said, “there was Hideo. I don’t think you quite understand about Hideo.
She does, evidently.”

“Like a drink?”

“Wine. The white.”

Case jacked out.

M
AELCUM WAS HUNCHED
over
Garvey’s
controls, tapping out commands for a docking sequence. The module’s central screen
displayed a fixed red square that represented the Straylight dock.
Garvey
was a larger square, green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum’s
commands. To the left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of
Garvey
and
Haniwa
as they approached the curvature of the spindle.

“We got an hour, man,” Case said, pulling the ribbon of fiberoptics from the Hosaka.
His deck’s back-up batteries were good for ninety minutes, but the Flatline’s construct
would be an additional drain. He worked quickly, mechanically, fastening the construct
to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micro-pore tape. Maelcum’s workbelt drifted past.
He snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rectangular
suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other. He held the pads
against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever that created suction. With
the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder strap suspended in front of him, he struggled
into his leather jacket, checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage
had given him, the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he’d been issued when
he’d entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he’d bought from Bruce,
a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the shuriken. He tossed the Freeside
chip over his shoulders, heard it click off the Russian scrubber. He was about to
do the same with the steel star, but the rebounding credit chip clipped the back of
his skull, spun off, struck the ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum’s left shoulder.
The Zionite interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at the shuriken,
then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.

“You missin’ th’ Mute, mon,” Maelcum said. “Mute say he messin’ th’ security for
Garvey. Garvey
dockin’ as ’nother boat, boat they ’spectin’ out of Babylon. Mute broadcastin’ codes
for us.”

“We gonna wear the suits?”

“Too heavy.” Maelcum shrugged. “Stay in web ’til I tell you.” He tapped a final sequence
into the module and grabbed the worn pink handholds on either side of the navigation
board. Case saw the green square shrink a final few millimeters to overlap the red
square. On the smaller screen,
Haniwa
lowered her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared.
Garvey
was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang, shuddered. Two stylized
arms sprang out to grip the slender wasp shape. Straylight extruded a tentative yellow
rectangle that curved, groping past
Haniwa
for
Garvey
.

There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trembling fronds of caulk.

“Mon,” Maelcum said, “mind we got gravity.” A dozen small objects struck the floor
of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a magnet. Case gasped as his
internal organs were pulled into a different configuration. The deck and construct
had fallen painfully to his lap.

They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.

Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and removed his purple
dreadbag, shaking out his locks. “Come now, mon, if you seh time be mos’ precious.”

T
HE
V
ILLA
S
TRAYLIGHT
was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself, as he stepped past the tendrils
of caulk and through
Marcus Garvey
’s forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem
of its own.

The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elaborate version of the one he’d
tumbled through to reach
Haniwa
, designed for use in the spindle’s rotation gravity. A corrugated tunnel, articulated
by integral hydraulic members, each segment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip plastic,
the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had snaked its way around
Haniwa
; it was horizontal, where it joined
Garvey
’s lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb around the curvature
of the yacht’s hull. Maelcum was already making his way up the rings, pulling himself
up with his left hand, the Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of baggy
fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair of ragged canvas sneakers
with bright red soles. The gangway shifted slightly, each time he climbed to another
ring.

The clips on Case’s makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with the weight of the Ono-Sendai
and the Flatline’s construct. All he felt now
was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to replay Armitage’s
lecture on the spindle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside’s ecosystem
was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without
the introduction of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but
relied on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil nutrients.
The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.

“Mon,” Maelcum said quietly, “get up here, ’side me.” Case edged sideways on the circular
ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex
hatch, two meters in diameter. The hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible
housings set into the frame of the hatch.

“So what do we—”

Case’s mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in pressure puffing
fine grit into his eyes.

Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of the Remington’s
safety being released. “You th’ mon in th’ hurry. . . .” Maelcum whispered, crouching
there. Then Case was beside him.

The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue nonslip plastic
tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall. On
the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing something
from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical
chamber. “Very sorry, sir,” said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case
glanced up. “Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please.” On the monitor,
the young man tossed his head impatiently.

Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A small Eurasian
in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He opened his mouth, but
nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at the monitor. Blank.

“Who?” the man managed.

“The Rastafarian navy,” Case said, standing up, the cyberspace deck banging against
his hip, “and all we want’s a jack into your custodial system.”

The man swallowed. “Is this a test? It’s a loyalty check. It must be a loyalty check.”
He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his orange suit.

“No, mon, this a real one.” Maelcum came up out of his crouch with the Remington pointed
at the Eurasian’s face. “You move it.”

They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose polished concrete
walls and irregular floor of overlapping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case.
“Pretty rugs,” Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back. “Smell like church.”

They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted above a console with
a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The screen lit as they halted, the
Finn grinning tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of Metro Holografix.
“Okay,” he said, “Maelcum takes this guy down the corridor to the open locker door,
sticks him in there, I’ll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left,
top panel. There’s adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-Sendai
twenty-point into Hitachi forty.” As Maelcum nudged his captive along, Case knelt
and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he needed.
With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.

“Do you have to look like that, man?” he asked the face on the screen. The Finn was
erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese
posters.

“Anything you want, baby,” Zone drawled, “just hop it for Lonny. . . .”

“No,” Case said, “use the Finn.” As the Zone image vanished, he shoved the Hitachi
adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his forehead.

“W
HAT KEPT YOU
?” the Flatline asked, and laughed.

“Told you don’t do that,” Case said.

“Joke, boy,” the construct said, “zero time lapse for me. Lemme see what we got here. . . .”

The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice.
Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the black-mirrored
shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were
gone now, and the thing looked real as
Marcus Garvey
, a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.

“Right on,” the Flatline said.

“Right,” Case said, and flipped.

“—
LIKE THAT
. I’
M
sorry,” 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged Molly’s head. “Our unit says no concussion,
no permanent damage to the eye. You didn’t know him very well, before you came here?”

“Didn’t know him at all,” Molly said bleakly. She was on her back on a high bed or
padded table. Case couldn’t feel the injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original
injection seemed to have worn off. The black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized
by soft straps she couldn’t see.

“He wants to kill you.”

“Figures,” Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright light.

“I don’t think I want him to,” 3Jane said, and Molly painfully turned her head to
look up into the dark eyes.

“Don’t play with me,” she said.

“But I think I might like to,” 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her forehead, brushing
the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of blood on her pale djellaba.

“Where’s he gone now?” Molly asked.

“Another injection, probably,” 3Jane said, straightening up. “He was quite impatient
for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.” She
smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. “Your leg will need
to be reset, but we can arrange that.”

“What about Peter?”

“Peter.” She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came loose, fell
across her forehead. “Peter has become rather boring. I find
drug use in general to be boring.” She giggled. “In others, at any rate. My father
was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen.”

Molly tensed.

“Don’t alarm yourself.” 3Jane’s fingers brushed the skin above the waistband of the
leather jeans. “His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins
of his freeze. I’d never actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last
went down to sleep. But I did know him
very
well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I’ll show you that,
when you’re better. He strangles her in bed.”

“Why did he kill her?” Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl’s face.

“He couldn’t accept the direction she intended for our family. She commissioned the
construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined
us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI’s, our corporate decisions made for us.
Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive,
each of us units of a larger entity. Fascinating. I’ll play her tapes for you, nearly
a thousand hours. But I’ve never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction
was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom
come out. I’m the exception there.”

“You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his cryogenic programs?”

3Jane nodded. “I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I was very young,
that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call
Wintermute, which is the Turing code for our Berne AI, although the entity manipulating
you is a sort of subprogram.”

“One of them? There’s more?”

“One other. But that one hasn’t spoken to me in years. It gave up, I think. I suspect
that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed
into the original software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she felt
it necessary. Here. Drink.” She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly’s lips. “Water.
Only a little.”

“Jane, love,” Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight, “are you enjoying
yourself?”

“Leave us alone, Peter.”

“Playing doctor. . . .” Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the image suspended
ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages. The left implant was shattered,
a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted pool
of blood.

“Hideo,” 3Jane said, stroking Molly’s stomach, “
hurt
Peter if he doesn’t go away. Go and swim, Peter.”

The projection vanished.

07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.

“He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code.” Case was suddenly
aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her
left breast.

“Yes,” 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, “I do. I learned it as a child. I think I
learned it in a dream. . . . Or somewhere in the thousand hours of my mother’s diaries.
But I think that Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it. There would
be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts are nothing if
not capricious.”

Case jacked out.

“S
TRANGE LITTLE CUSTOMER
, huh?” The Finn grinned at Case from the old Sony.

Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the corridor with the Remington at
his side. The Zionite was smiling, his head bobbing to a rhythm Case couldn’t hear.
A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his sleeveless jacket.

“Dub, mon,” Maelcum said.

“You’re fucking crazy,” Case told him.

“Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub.”

“Hey, guys,” the Finn said, “on your toes. Here comes your transportation. I can’t
finesse many numbers as smooth as the pic of 8Jean that conned your doorman, but I
can get you a ride over to 3Jane’s place.”

Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the riderless service cart swiveled
into sight, under the graceless concrete arch marking the far end of their corridor.
It might have been the one his Africans
had ridden, but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded
seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was steadily
winking its red LED.

“Bus to catch,” Case said to Maelcum.