Neuromancer (21 page)

H
E
’
D LOST HIS
anger again. He missed it.

The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across his knees, and Case, deck
and construct against his chest. The cart was operating at speeds it hadn’t been designed
for; it was top heavy, cornering, and Maelcum had taken to leaning out in the direction
of the turns. This presented no problem when the thing took lefts, because Case sat
on the right, but in the right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his gear,
crushing him against the seat.

He had no idea where they were. Everything was familiar, but he couldn’t be sure he’d
seen any particular stretch before. A curving hallway lined with wooden showcases
displayed collections he was certain he’d never seen: the skulls of large birds, coins,
masks of beaten silver. The service cart’s six tires were silent on the layered carpets.
There was only the whine of the electric motor and an occasional faint burst of Zion
dub, from the foam beads in Maelcum’s ears, as he lunged past Case to counter a sharp
right. The deck and the construct kept pressing the shuriken in his jacket pocket
into his hip.

“You got a watch?” he asked Maelcum.

The Zionite shook his locks. “Time be time.”

“Jesus,” Case said, and closed his eyes.

T
HE
B
RAUN SCUTTLED
over mounded carpets and tapped one of its padded claws against an oversized rectangular
door of dark battered wood. Behind them, the cart sizzled and shot blue sparks from
a louvered panel. The sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched
wool.

“This th’ way, mon?” Maelcum eyed the door and snapped the shotgun’s safety.

“Hey,” Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, “you think I know?” The Braun rotated
its spherical body and the LED strobed.

“It wan’ you open door,” Maelcum said, nodding.

Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a brass plate mounted
on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there
had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function
or functionary, polished into oblivion. He wondered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had
selected each piece of Straylight individually, or if they’d purchased it in bulk
from some vast European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door’s hinges creaked
plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum stepping past him with the Remington thrust
forward from his hip.

“Books,” Maelcum said.

The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.

“I know where we are,” Case said. He looked back at the service cart. A curl of smoke
was rising from the carpet. “So come on,” he said. “Cart. Cart?” It remained stationary.
The Braun was plucking at the leg of his jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted
a strong urge to kick it. “Yeah?”

It ticked its way around the door. He followed it.

The monitor in the library was another Sony, as old as the first one. The Braun paused
beneath it and executed a sort of jig.

“Wintermute?”

The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled.

“Time to check in, Case,” the Finn said, his eyes screwed up against the smoke of
a cigarette. “C’mon, jack.”

The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb his leg, its manipulators
pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. “Shit!” He slapped it aside and it
struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the
air. “What’s wrong with the goddam thing?”

“Burned out,” the Finn said. “Forget it. No problem. Jack in now.”

There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one would accept the Hitachi
adaptor.

He jacked in.

N
OTHING
. G
RAY VOID
.

No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.

The deck was gone. His fingers were . . .

And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something
rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.

He tried to scream.

T
HERE SEEMED TO
be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far away.

He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms wrapped tight across his knees,
and shook.

He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even after the shaking stopped.
The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it was obscured by banks of
mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At one point he decided that it wasn’t
a city at all, but some single building, perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging
its distance. The sand was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn’t gone entirely
black. The beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the
bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand. . . . He held himself and rocked, singing
a song without words or tune.

The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo
Bay? He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of Fuji
Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all.

Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.

A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his knees and wept,
the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of the searching gull. Hot
urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off the
water. When his tears were gone, his throat ached.

“Wintermute,” he mumbled to his knees, “Wintermute . . .”

It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that finally forced
him to stand.

His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the cuff of his jacket,
then searched one empty pocket after another. “Jesus,” he said, shoulders hunched,
tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth. “Jesus.” His teeth began to chatter.

The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a Tokyo gardener
produced. When he’d taken a dozen steps in the direction of the now invisible city,
he turned and looked back through the gathering dark. His footprints stretched to
the point of his arrival. There were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand.

He estimated that he’d covered at least a kilometer before he noticed the light. He
was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first pointed it out, an orange-red glow
to his right, away from the surf. He knew that Ratz wasn’t there, that the bartender
was a figment of his own imagination, not of the thing he was trapped in, but that
didn’t matter. He’d called the man up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his
own ideas about Case and his predicament.

“Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish
your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you
had
it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it
all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far
you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . . . Playgrounds hung in space,
castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little
boxes, magic out of China. . . .” Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink
manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark,
Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender’s blackened teeth. “But
I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you,
this beach, this place. To die.”

Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of blown sand.
“Yeah,” he said. “Shit. I guess . . .” He walked toward the sound.

“Artiste,” he heard Ratz call. “The light. You saw a light. Here. This way . . .”

He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of icy seawater.
“Ratz? Light? Ratz . . .”

But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf. He struggled
to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.

Time passed. He walked on.

And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A rectangle. A
door.

“Fire in there,” he said, his words torn away by the wind.

It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand. The doorway
was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a meter thick. “Hey,”
Case said, softly, “hey . . .” His fingers brushed the cold wall. There was a fire,
in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance.

He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.

A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where driftwood burned,
the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was the only light, and as his
gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed
with a pattern like magnified circuitry.

H
E REFUSED HER
arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the place beside her in the nest
of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her
sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure’s walls. Every hour or so, he rose
and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it.
None of this was real, but cold was cold.

She wasn’t real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched
her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from their trip
across the Bay, and that was cruel.

“Mean, motherfucker,” he whispered to the wind. “Don’t take a chance, do you? Wouldn’t
give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is. . . .” He tried to keep the desperation
from his voice. “I know, see? I know who you are. You’re the other one. 3Jane told
Molly. Burning bush. That wasn’t Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with
the Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like
I remember her before. . . .”

She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of blanket across
her shoulder and cheek.

“You aren’t anything,” he said to the sleeping girl. “You’re dead and you meant fuck-all
to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you’re doing. I’m flatlined. This has
all taken about twenty seconds, right? I’m out on my ass in that library and my brain’s
dead. And pretty soon it’ll
be
dead, if you got any sense. You don’t want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all,
so you can just hang me up here. Dixie’ll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can
second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that’s all been you, hasn’t it?
Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn’t.
Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn’t it?
That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool’s room. Molly never saw that.
You just edited her simstim signal. ’Cause you think you can hurt me. ’Cause you think
I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you’re called. You won. You win. But none
of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why’d you do it to me this
way?” He was shaking again, his voice shrill.

“Honey,” she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, “you come here and sleep.
I’ll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?” Her soft accent was exaggerated with
sleep. “You just sleep, okay?”

W
HEN HE WOKE
, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting
through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a fat
fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container; he remembered them from
the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow
packets. In the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened
with hunger. Rolling out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the
things out, blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom.
EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, “BEEF,” TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutritive content. He fumbled
a second one out. “EGGS.” “If you’re making this shit up,” he said, “you could lay
on some real food, okay?” With a packet in either hand, he made his way through the
structure’s four rooms. Two were empty, aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth
held three more of the ration canisters. “Sure,” he said touching the seals. “Stay
here a long time. I get the idea. Sure . . .”

He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister filled with what
he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap
red lighter, a seaman’s knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still
knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets,
dumping their contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped
water from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It tasted
vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the fireplace and went
out.

Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp nylon shoes
and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-gray.
The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the corner of the bunker and walked toward
the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand. “Dunno whose memories you’re using for
this one,” he said when he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them
into the shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.

“What you doin’, Case?”

He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam sliding past her
ankles.

“I pissed myself last night,” he said.

“Well, you don’t wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I’ll show you this pool
back in the rocks.” She gestured vaguely behind her. “It’s fresh.” The faded French
fatigues had been hacked away above the
knee; the skin below was smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.