Neuromancer (3 page)

“See you, Lonny.” Case left the bar.

H
IS TAIL WAS
back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation, the octagons and adrenaline mingling
with something else. You’re enjoying this, he thought; you’re crazy.

Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix.
Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind
of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix
had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you
could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart
from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made
flesh in the mazes of the black market. . . .

Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck ’em in. Last thing they’ll expect. He was half
a block from the games arcade where he’d first met Linda Lee.

He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sailors. One of them screamed
after him in Spanish. Then he was through the entrance, the sound crashing over him
like surf, subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. Someone scored a ten-megaton
hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst drowning the arcade in white sound as
a lurid hologram fireball mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a
flight of unpainted chipboard stairs. He’d come here once with Wage, to discuss a
deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man called Matsuga. He remembered the
hallway, its stained matting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles.
One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black t-shirt glanced up from
a white terminal, behind her head a travel poster of Greece, Aegean blue splashed
with streamlined ideograms.

“Get your security up here,” Case told her.

Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The last two doors were closed
and, he assumed, locked. He spun and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into
the blue-lacquered composition door
at the far end. It popped, cheap hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness
there, the white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door to its right,
both hands around the transparent plastic knob, leaning in with everything he had.
Something snapped, and he was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Matsuga,
but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was long gone. No terminal, nothing.
Light from the alley behind the arcade, filtering in through sootblown plastic. He
made out a snakelike loop of fiberoptics protruding from a wall socket, a pile of
discarded food containers, and the bladeless nacelle of an electric fan.

The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged out of his jacket, bundled
it around his right hand, and punched. It split, requiring two more blows to free
it from the frame. Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle, triggered
either by the broken window or by the girl at the head of the corridor.

Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to full extension.

With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume he’d gone through the
one he’d kicked half off its hinges. The cobra’s bronze pyramid began to bob gently,
the spring-steel shaft amplifying his pulse.

Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm, the crashing of the games,
his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not
the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. He’d lived
for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear
was.

This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He might die here. They might
have guns. . . .

A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man’s voice, shouting something in Japanese.
A scream, shrill terror. Another crash.

And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.

Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid beats of his heart.
And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel scraped the matting.

The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the cobra into its handle
and scrambled for the window, blind with fear,
his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and falling, all before he was conscious of
what he’d done. The impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.

A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch framed a heap of discarded
fiberoptics and the chassis of a junked console. He’d fallen face forward on a slab
of soggy chipboard; he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The cubicle’s
window was a square of faint light. The alarm still oscillated, louder here, the rear
wall dulling the roar of the games.

A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the fluorescents in the corridor,
then vanished. It returned, but he still couldn’t read the features. Glint of silver
across the eyes. “Shit,” someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern Sprawl.

The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long count of twenty, then stood
up. The steel cobra was still in his hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember
what it was. He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.

S
HIN
’
S PISTOL WAS
a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of a South American copy of a Walther PPK,
double-action on the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22
long rifle, and Case would’ve preferred lead azide explosives to the simple Chinese
hollowpoints Shin had sold him. Still, it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition,
and as he made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in his jacket
pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in a raised dragon motif, something
to run your thumb across in the dark. He’d consigned the cobra to a dump canister
on Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.

The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to Ninsei, then over to
Baiitsu. His tail, he’d decided, was gone, and that was fine. He had calls to make,
biz to transact, and it wouldn’t wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood
a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick. Its windows were dark
now, but a faint glow from the roof was visible if you craned your neck. An unlit
neon sign near the main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of
ideograms. If the place had another name, Case didn’t know it; it was always referred
to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator
waited at the foot of a transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an
afterthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case climbed into the
plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked length of rigid magnetic tape.

Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he’d arrived in Chiba, but
he’d never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places.

The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage were scratched
and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed
his fingers against the pistolgrip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss. As always,
it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out
into the courtyard that served the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.

Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese teenager sat behind
a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white fiberglass coffins were racked in
a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side.
Case nodded in the boy’s direction and limped across the plastic grass to the nearest
ladder. The compound was roofed with cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong
wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open
without a key.

The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged his way along the
third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter
wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot and waited
for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly and
the hatch rose vertically with a creak of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he
crawled in, pulling the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated
the manual latch.

There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi pocket computer and a small
white styrofoam cooler chest. The cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs
of dry ice, carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun aluminum lab
flask. Crouching on the brown temperfoam slab that was both floor and bed, Case
took Shin’s .22 from his pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off
his jacket. The coffin’s terminal was molded into one concave wall, opposite a panel
listing house rules in seven languages. Case took the pink handset from its cradle
and punched a Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung up.
His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn’t taking calls.

He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.

A woman answered, something in Japanese.

“Snake Man there?”

“Very good to hear from you,” said Snake Man, coming in on an extension. “I’ve been
expecting your call.”

“I got the music you wanted.” Glancing at the cooler.

“I’m very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you front?”

“Oh, man, I really need the money bad. . . .”

Snake Man hung up.

“You shit,” Case said to the humming receiver. He stared at the cheap little pistol.

“Iffy,” he said, “it’s all looking very iffy tonight.”

C
ASE WALKED INTO
the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands in the pockets of his jacket; one held the
rented pistol, the other the aluminum flask.

Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from a beer pitcher, his hundred
and twenty kilos of doughy flesh tilted against the wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian
kid called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly silent drunks. Ratz’s
plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher and drank. His shaven head was filmed
with sweat. “You look bad, friend artiste,” he said, flashing the wet ruin of his
teeth.

“I’m doing just fine,” said Case, and grinned like a skull. “Super fine.” He sagged
into the chair opposite Ratz, hands still in his pockets.

“And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of booze and ups,
sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?”

“Why don’t you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?”

“Proof against fear and being alone,” the bartender continued. “Listen to the fear.
Maybe it’s your friend.”

“You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz? Somebody hurt?”

“Crazy cut a security man.” He shrugged. “A girl, they say.”

“I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I . . .”

“Ah.” Ratz’s mouth narrowed, compressed into a single line. He was looking past Case,
toward the entrance. “I think you are about to.”

Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. The speed sang in his head.
The pistol in his hand was slippery with sweat.

“Herr Wage,” Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manipulator as if he expected it
to be shaken. “How great a pleasure. Too seldom do you honor us.”

Case turned his head and looked up into Wage’s face. It was a tanned and forgettable
mask. The eyes were vatgrown sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal
silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was flanked by his joeboys,
nearly identical young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.

“How you doing, Case?”

“Gentlemen,” said Ratz, picking up the table’s heaped ashtray in his pink plastic
claw, “I want no trouble here.” The ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic,
and advertised Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of green
plastic cascading onto the tabletop. “You understand?”

“Hey, sweetheart,” said one of the joeboys, “you wanna try that thing on me?”

“Don’t bother aiming for the legs, Kurt,” Ratz said, his tone conversational. Case
glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith
& Wesson riot gun at the trio. The thing’s barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped
with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist. The skeletal
magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.

“Technically nonlethal,” said Ratz.

“Hey, Ratz,” Case said, “I owe you one.”

The bartender shrugged. “Nothing, you owe me. These,” and he
glowered at Wage and the joeboys, “should know better. You don’t take anybody off
in the Chatsubo.”

Wage coughed. “So who’s talking about taking anybody off? We just wanna talk business.
Case and me, we work together.”

Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at Wage’s crotch. “I hear you
wanna do me.” Ratz’s pink claw closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.

“Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something?
What’s this shit I’m trying to kill you?” Wage turned to the boy on his left. “You
two go back to the Namban. Wait for me.”

Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely deserted except for Kurt
and a drunken sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot of a barstool. The barrel
of the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back to cover Wage.
The magazine of Case’s pistol clattered on the table. Ratz held the gun in his claw
and pumped the round out of the chamber.

“Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?” Wage asked.

Linda.

“Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?”

The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.