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The 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 ex-
perimentally. 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 he;
days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Nec-
romancer. 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.
There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shift-
ing, 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....
"Case? Mon?"
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 man-
aged.
"Come on, mon," the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like a child, "I an' I mus' go."