Neuromancer (22 page)

“Listen,” he said, scooping his clothes up and walking toward her, “I got a question
for you. I won’t ask you what
you’re
doing here. But what exactly do you think
I’m
doing here?” He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh.

“You came last night,” she said. She smiled at him.

“And that’s enough for you? I just came?”

“He
said
you would,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. “He knows stuff like that,
I guess.” She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt from the other ankle, awkward,
childlike. She smiled at him again, more tentatively. “Now you answer me one, okay?”

He nodded.

“How come you’re painted brown like that, all except your foot?”

“A
ND THAT
’
S THE
last thing you remember?” He watched her scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash
from the rectangular steel box cover that was their only plate.

She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. “I’m sorry, Case, honest to God. It was
just the shit, I guess, an’ it was . . .” She hunched forward, forearms across her
knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or its memory. “I just needed
the money. To get home, I guess, or . . . hell,” she said, “you wouldn’t hardly talk
to me.”

“There’s no cigarettes?”

“God
dam
, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What’s wrong with you?” She twisted a strand
of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.

“But the food was here? It was already here?”

“I
told
you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.”

“Okay. Sure. It’s seamless.”

She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. “Well, damn you anyway, Case,” she managed,
finally, “I was doin’ just fine here by myself.”

He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping his wrist on
rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness.
His jeans were tight and clammy.
“Okay,” he said to the night, “I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes
better wash up.” His own laughter startled him. “A case of beer wouldn’t hurt, while
you’re at it.” He turned and reentered the bunker.

She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. “Who was that, Case, up
in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather.
Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, ’cept she looked like
more money than you had. . . .” She glanced back at him. “I’m real sorry I stole your
RAM.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy
and had him access it for you?”

“Tony,” she said. “I’d been seein’ him, kinda. He had a habit an’ we . . . anyway,
yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics
stuff, and I remember wonderin’ how you—”

“There wasn’t any graphics in there,” he interrupted.

“Sure was. I just couldn’t figure how you’d have all those pictures of when I was
little
, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood,
and you had a picture of
that
. . . .”

“Tony see it?”

“I don’t remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds
all yellin’ so lonely. Scared ’cause I didn’t have a shot on me, nothin’, an’ I knew
I’d be gettin’ sick. . . . An’ I walked an’ walked, ’til it was dark, an’ found this
place, an’ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves
of hard jelly.” She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. “Never did get
sick,” she said, as embers crawled. “Missed cigarettes more. How ’bout you, Case?
You still wired?” Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of Wizard’s
Castle and Tank War Europa.

“No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her
mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d
known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time
and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known
before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget
it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged,
he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked.
It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone,
infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon
clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the wall
as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the
old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of
some stranger’s memory, the drive held.

She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that threw their
locked shadows across the bunker wall.

Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered her on the
beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered what she had said.

“He told you I was coming,” he said.

But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put her hand over
his, and muttered something out of dream.

T
HE MUSIC WOKE
him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own heart. He sat up beside
her, pulling his jacket over his shoulders in the predawn chill, gray light from the
doorway and the fire long dead.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging
themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs
of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable
code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading
trail of strobed afterimages.

The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his neck. He crouched there with
his teeth bared and felt for the music. The pulse faded, returned, faded. . . .

“What’s wrong?” She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes. “Baby . . .”

“I feel . . . like a drug. . . . You get that here?”

She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper arms.

“Linda, who told you? Who told you I’d come? Who?”

“On the beach,” she said, something forcing her to look away. “A boy. I see him on
the beach. Maybe thirteen. He lives here.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said you’d come. He said you wouldn’t hate me. He said we’d be okay here, and
he told me where the rain pool was. He looks Mexican.”

“Brazilian,” Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed down the wall. “I think he’s
from Rio.” He got to his feet and began to struggle into his jeans.

“Case,” she said, her voice shaking, “Case, where you goin’?”

“I think I’ll find that boy,” he said, as the music came surging back, still only
a beat, steady and familiar, although he couldn’t place it in memory.

“Don’t, Case.”

“I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down the beach. But yesterday
it wasn’t there. You ever seen that?” He yanked his zipper up and tore at the impossible
knot in his shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes into the corner.

She nodded, eyes lowered. “Yeah. I see it sometimes.”

“You ever go there, Linda?” He put his jacket on.

“No,” she said, “but I tried. After I first came, an’ I was bored. Anyway, I figured
it’s a city, maybe I could find some shit.” She grimaced. “I wasn’t even sick, I just
wanted it. So I took food in a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn’t have another
can for water. An’ I walked all day, an’ I could see it, sometimes, city, an’ it didn’t
seem too far. But it never got any closer. An’ then it
was
gettin’ closer, an’ I saw what it was. Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like
it was wrecked, or maybe nobody there, an’ other times I thought I’d see light flashin’
off a machine, cars or somethin’. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What is it?”

“This thing,” she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark walls, the dawn outlining
the doorway, “where we live. It gets
smaller
, Case, smaller, closer you get to it.”

Pausing one last time, by the doorway. “You ask your boy about that?”

“Yeah. He said I wouldn’t understand, an’ I was wastin’ my time. Said it was, was
like . . . an
event
. An’ it was our horizon.
Event horizon
, he called it.”

The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and struck out blindly, heading—he
knew, somehow—away from the sea. Now the hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from
his feet, drew back from him as he walked. “Hey,” he said, “it’s breaking down. Bet
you know, too. What is it? Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart?
Maybe the Dixie Flatline’s no pushover, huh?”

He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was following him, not trying to catch
up, the broken zip of the French fatigues flapping against the brown of her belly,
pubic hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like one of the girls on the Finn’s old
magazines in Metro Holografix come to life, only she was tired and sad and human,
the ripped costume pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.

And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of them, and the boy’s gums were
wide and bright pink against his thin brown face. He wore ragged, colorless shorts,
limbs too thin against the sliding blue-gray of the tide.

“I know you,” Case said, Linda beside him.

“No,” the boy said, his voice high and musical, “you do not.”

“You’re the other AI. You’re Rio. You’re the one who wants to stop Wintermute. What’s
your name? Your Turing code. What is it?”

The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands, then flipped
out of the water. His eyes were Riviera’s, but there was no malice there. “To call
up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in
another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs,
the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .”

“A Turing code’s not your name.”

“Neuromancer,” the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. “The
lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she
prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her
days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the
dead. But no, my friend,” and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the
sand, “I
am
the dead, and their land.” He laughed. A gull cried. “Stay. If your woman is a ghost,
she doesn’t know it. Neither will you.”

“You’re cracking. The ice is breaking up.”

“No,” he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed his foot against
the sand. “It is more simple than that. But the choice is yours.” The gray eyes regarded
Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one line at a time.
Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt.
The music was loud now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.

“Case, honey,” Linda said, and touched his shoulder.

“No,” he said. He took off his jacket and handed it to her. “I don’t know,” he said,
“maybe you’re here. Anyway, it gets cold.”

He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he’d closed his eyes, watching
the music define itself at the center of things. He did look back, once, although
he didn’t open his eyes.

He didn’t need to.

They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the thin child who said his
name was Neuromancer. His leather jacket dangled from her hand, catching the fringe
of the surf.

He walked on, following the music.

Maelcum’s Zion dub.

T
HERE WAS A
gray place, an impression of fine screens shifting, moire, degrees of half tone generated
by a very simple graphics program. There was a long hold on a view through chainlink,
gulls frozen above dark water. There were voices. There was a plain of black mirror,
that tilted, and he was quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking
the angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again. . . .

“C
ASE
? M
ON
?”

The music.

“You back, mon.”

The music was taken from his ears.

“How long?” he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth was very dry.

“Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan’ pull th’ jack, Mute seh no. Screen goin’ funny,
then Mute seh put th’ phones on you.”

He opened his eyes. Maelcum’s features were overlayed with bands of translucent hieroglyphs.

“An’ you medicine,” Maelcum said. “Two derm.”

He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the monitor. The Zionite helped
him sit up, but the movement threw him into the savage rush of the betaphenethylamine,
the blue derms burning against his left wrist. “Overdose,” he managed.

“Come on, mon,” the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like a child, “I
an’ I mus’ go.”

T
HE SERVICE CART
was crying. The betaphenethylamine gave it a voice. It wouldn’t stop. Not in the
crowded gallery, the long corridors, not as it passed the black glass entrance to
the T-A crypt, the vaults where the cold had seeped so gradually into old Ashpool’s
dreams.

The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement of the cart indistinguishable
from the insane momentum of the overdose. When the cart died, at last, something beneath
the seat giving up with a shower of white sparks, the crying stopped.

The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of 3Jane’s pirate cave.

“How far, mon?” Maelcum helped him from the sputtering cart as an integral extinguisher
exploded in the thing’s engine compartment, gouts of yellow powder squirting from
louvers and service points. The Braun tumbled from the back of the seat and hobbled
off across the imitation sand, dragging one useless limb behind it. “You mus’ walk,
mon.” Maelcum took the deck and construct, slinging the shock cords over his shoulder.

The trodes rattled around Case’s neck as he followed the Zionite.
Riviera’s holos waited for them, the torture scenes and the cannibal children. Molly
had broken the triptych. Maelcum ignored them.

“Easy,” Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding figure. “Gotta do
this right.”

Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his hands. “Right, mon?
How’s right?”

“Got Molly in there, but she’s out of it. Riviera, he can throw holos. Maybe he’s
got Molly’s fletcher.” Maelcum nodded. “And there’s a ninja, a family bodyguard.”

Maelcum’s frown deepened. “You listen, Babylon mon,” he said. “I a warrior. But this
no m’ fight, no Zion fight, Babylon fightin’ Babylon, eatin’ i’self, ya know? But
Jah seh I an’ I t’ bring Steppin’ Razor outa this.”

Case blinked.

“She a warrior,” Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. “Now you tell me, mon,
who I
not
t’ kill.”

“3Jane,” he said, after a pause. “A girl there. Has a kinda white robe thing on, with
a hood. We need her.”

W
HEN THEY REACHED
the entrance, Maelcum walked straight in, and Case had no choice but to follow him.

3Jane’s country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum handed him the deck and the
construct and walked to the edge of the pool. Beyond the white pool furniture, there
was darkness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high maze of partially demolished walls.

The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool.

“They’re here,” Case said. “They gotta be.”

Maelcum nodded.

The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared, its meter of muzzle-flash
blue in the light from the pool. The second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending
it spinning across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down hard and fumbled at the black
thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked at it.

Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a slender bamboo bow. He
bowed.

Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.

“The artery is intact,” the ninja said. Case remembered Molly’s description of the
man who’d killed her lover. Hideo was another. Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet,
an utter calm. He wore clean, frayed khaki workpants and soft dark shoes that fit
his feet like gloves, split at the toes like tabi socks. The bamboo bow was a museum
piece, but the black alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look
of the best Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare and smooth.

“You cut my thumb, mon, wi’ secon’ one,” Maelcum said.

“Coriolis force,” the ninja said, bowing again. “Most difficult, slow-moving projectile
in rotational gravity. It was not intended.”

“Where’s 3Jane?” Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum. He saw that the tip of the
arrow in the ninja’s bow was like a double-edged razor. “Where’s Molly?”

“Hello, Case.” Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind Hideo, Molly’s fletcher
in his hand. “I would have expected Armitage, somehow. Are we hiring help out of that
Rasta cluster now?”

“Armitage is dead.”

“Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news hardly comes as a shock.”

“Wintermute killed him. He’s in orbit around the spindle.”

Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to Maelcum and back. “I think
it ends here, for you,” he said.

“Where’s Molly?”

The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, lowering the bow. He crossed
the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. “This is without subtlety,”
he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move was part
of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for
all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity.

“It ends here for her, too,” Riviera said.

“Maybe 3Jane won’t go for that, Peter,” Case said, uncertain of the impulse. The derms
still raged in his system, the old fever starting to grip him, Night City craziness.
He remembered moments of grace,
dealing out on the edge of things, where he’d found that he could sometimes talk faster
than he could think.

The gray eyes narrowed. “Why, Case? Why do you think that?”

Case smiled. Riviera didn’t know about the simstim rig. He’d missed it in his hurry
to find the drugs she carried for him. But how could Hideo have missed it? And Case
was certain the ninja would never have let 3Jane treat Molly without first checking
her for kinks and concealed weapons. No, he decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would
know as well.

“Tell me, Case,” Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle of the fletcher.

Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed Molly out of the shadows
in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its tall, spidery wheels squeaking as they turned.
Molly was bundled deep in a red and black striped blanket, the narrow, caned back
of the antique chair towering above her. She looked very small. Broken. A patch of
brilliantly white micropore covered her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as
her head bobbed with the motion of the chair.

“A familiar face,” 3Jane said, “I saw you the night of Peter’s show. And who is this?”

“Maelcum,” Case said.

“Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr. Malcolm’s wound.”

Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face.

The ninja walked to where Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his bow and the shotgun well
out of reach, and took something from his pocket. A pair of bolt cutters. “I must
cut the shaft,” he said. “It is too near the artery.” Maelcum nodded. His face was
grayish and sheened with sweat.

Case looked at 3Jane. “There isn’t much time,” he said.

“For whom, exactly?”

“For any of us.” There was a snap as Hideo cut through the metal shaft of the arrow.
Maelcum groaned.

“Really,” Riviera said, “it won’t amuse you to hear this failed con artist make a
last desperate pitch. Most distasteful, I can assure you. He’ll wind up on his knees,
offer to sell you his mother, perform the most boring sexual favors. . . .”

3Jane threw back her head and laughed. “Wouldn’t I, Peter?”

“The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,” Case said. “Wintermute’s going up against
the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps. You know that?”

3Jane raised her eyebrows. “Peter’s suggested something like that, but tell me more.”

“I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he’s something like a giant
ROM construct, for recording personality, only it’s full RAM. The constructs think
they’re there, like it’s real, but it just goes on forever.”

3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. “Where? Describe the place, this construct.”

“A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete thing, kinda
bunker. . . .” He hesitated. “It’s nothing fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you
walk far enough, you come back to where you started.”

“Yes,” she said. “Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years before she married
Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse.
She formulated the basis of her philosophy there.”

Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants. He held a section of
the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had his eyes closed, his hand clapped tight around
his bicep. “I will bandage it,” Hideo said.

Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear shot. The
darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through
yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his hand,
shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He flicked it underhand, wrist blurring,
into the back of Riviera’s hand. The fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.

Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so refined, that
it lacked all humanity.

Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of Riviera’s
sternum.

The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found his balance.

“Peter,” 3Jane said, “Peter, what have you
done?
”

“He’s blinded your clone boy,” Molly said flatly.

Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile, Case saw whisps of steam
drift from the ruined eyes.

Riviera smiled.

Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above the bow, the
arrow, and the Remington, Riviera’s smile had faded. He bent—bowing, it seemed to
Case—and found the bow and arrow.

“You’re blind,” Riviera said, taking a step backward.

“Peter,” 3Jane said, “don’t you know he does it in the dark? Zen. It’s the way he
practices.”

The ninja notched his arrow. “Will you distract me with your holograms now?”

Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed against a white
chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo’s arrow twitched.

Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of wall. The ninja’s
face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy.

Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon held ready.

“Jane-lady,” Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop the shotgun from
the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his locks and lay the fat
barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. “This take your head off, no Babylon doctor
fix it.”

3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of the striped
blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. “Off,” she said, “get it
off.”

Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. “Hideo’ll get him, even blind?” he asked
3Jane.

“When I was a child,” she said, “we loved to blindfold him. He put arrows through
the pips in playing cards at ten meters.”

“Peter’s good as dead anyway,” Molly said. “In another twelve hours, he’ll start to
freeze up. Won’t be able to move, his eyes is all.”

“Why?” Case turned to her.

“I poisoned his shit for him,” she said. “Condition’s like Parkinson’s disease, sort
of.”

3Jane nodded. “Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was admitted.” She touched
the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from Molly’s hands. “Selective destruction
of the cells of the
substantia nigra.
Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his sleep.”

“Ali,” Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She tugged the blanket
away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast. “It’s the meperidine. I had Ali make
me up a custom batch. Speeded up the reaction times with higher temperatures. N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,”
she sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, “tetra-hydropyridene.”

“A hotshot,” Case said.

“Yeah,” Molly said, “a real slow hotshot.”

“That’s appalling,” 3Jane said, and giggled.

I
T WAS CROWDED
in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with 3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington
under her chin. She grinned and ground against him. “You stop,” he said, feeling helpless.
He had the gun’s safety on, but he was terrified of injuring her, and she knew it.
The elevator was a steel cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a single
passenger. Maelcum had Molly in his arms. She’d bandaged his wound, but it obviously
hurt him to carry her. Her hip was pressing the deck and construct into Case’s kidneys.

They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.

The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the stairs to the corridor,
another touch in 3Jane’s pirate cave decor.

“I don’t suppose I should tell you this,” 3Jane said, craning her head to allow her
chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, “but I don’t have a key to the room you want.
I never have had one. One of my father’s Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical
and extremely complex.”

“Chubb lock,” Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum’s shoulder, “and we got the
fucking key, no fear.”

“That chip of yours still working?” Case asked her.

“It’s eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean,” she said.

“We got five minutes,” Case said, as the door snapped open behind 3Jane. She flipped
backward in a slow somersault, the pale folds of her djellaba billowing around her
thighs.

They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.