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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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The Villa Straylight 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 overlap-
ping 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 Mael-
cum 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 van-
ished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled
the trodes across his forehead.
"What 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 pain-
fully 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 fam-
ily. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel-
ligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a
symbiotic relationship with the Al'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 Win-
termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne Al, 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.
"Strange 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 smil-
ing, 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 rid-
erless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless con-
crete 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.
20
He'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 press-
ing 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.
The Braun 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 re-
duced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long
dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He won-
dered 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 step-
ping 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. lack
in now."
There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one
would accept the Hitachi adaptor.
He jacked in.
Nothing. Gray 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.
There 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 re-
dundancy 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.
He 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?"
When 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 nutri-
tive 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 comer 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.
"Listen," he said, scooping his clothes up and walking to-
ward 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, child-
like. 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?"
"And 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?"
"Goddam, 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 door-
way, 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 re-entered 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 cheek-
bones, 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 know-
ing, 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.
21
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."
22
The 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 shoul-
der.
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 nod-
ded. "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."
When 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 dark-
ness, 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 dif-
ficult, 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, low-
ering 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 bun-
dled 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,
1 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 1, Pe-
ter?"
"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 per-
sonality, 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 for-
mulated 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-hydro-pyridene."
"A hotshot," Case said.
"Yeah," Molly said, "a real slow hotshot."
"That's appalling," 3Jane said, and giggled.
It 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 pas-
senger. 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.
23
Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon.
"You know," 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, "I
was under the impression that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo
to search my father's things, after you killed him. He couldn't
find the original."
"Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer,"
Molly said, carefully inserting the Chubb key's cylindrical shaft
into the notched opening in the face of the blank, rectangular
door. "He killed the little kid who put it there." The key rotated
smoothly when she tried it.
"The head," Case said, "there's a panel in the back of the
head. Zircons on it. Get it off. That's where I'm jacking in."
And then they were inside.
"Christ on a crutch," the Flatline drawled, "you do believe
in takin' your own good time, don't you, boy?"
"Kuang's ready?"
"Hot to trot."
"Okay." He flipped.
And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good
eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal
crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver
trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man's cheeks were
hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with
sweat.
He was looking at himself.
Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with
each beat of her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g.
Maelcum drifted nearby, 3Jane's thin arm gripped in a large
brown hand.
A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-
Sendai to a square opening in the back of the pearl-crusted
terminal .
He tapped the switch again.
"Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is haulin' ass in nine seconds,
countin', seven, six, five..."
The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral
surface of the black chrome shark a microsecond nick of dark-
ness.
"Four, three..."
Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot's seat
in a small plane. A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly
glowed with a perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.
"Two, an' kick ass--"
Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky
jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before
in cyberspace.... The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling
away from the Chinese program's thrust, a worrying impression
of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent
and elongated as they fell--
"Christ," Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked
above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an
endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright,
sharp as razors.
"Hey, shit," the construct said, "those things are the RCA
Building. You know the old RCA Building?" The Kuang pro-
gram dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers
of data, each one a blue neon replica of the Manhattan sky-
scraper.
"You ever see resolution this high?" Case asked.
"No, but I never cracked an Al, either."
"This thing know where it's going?"
"It better."
They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow
neon.
"Dix--"
An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor
below, a seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless....
"Company," the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation
of his deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The
Kuang swerved sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself
backward, shattering the illusion of a physical vehicle.
The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the
city of data. Case took them straight up, above them the dis-
tanceless bowl of jade-green ice.
The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by
the dark beneath them.
"What is it?"
"An Al's defense system," the construct said, "or part of
it. If it's your pal Wintermute, he's not lookin' real friendly."
"Take it," Case said. "You're faster."
"Now your best de-fense, boy, it's a good off-fense."
And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the
center of the dark below. And dove.
Case's sensory input warped with their velocity.
His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a
frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, sud-
denly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The
spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the
dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets
that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue,
to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed
against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread,
growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the wait-
ing, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-
Ashpool S.A.
And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing
coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square....
Exponential....
Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black,
pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data
he had nearly become....
And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all
that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more,
and something tore.
The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's
consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an
endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision
was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface
of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be
counted.
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the
number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number
coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside
the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of
yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred
and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half
of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda
Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a
stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program
in a wide circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes,
a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering cloud. She
cringed, dropping her stick, and ran. He knew the rate of her
pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have
satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
"But you do not know her thoughts," the boy said, beside
him now in the shark thing's heart. "I do not know her thoughts.
You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no
difference."
Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
"Stop her," he said, "she'll hurt herself."
"I can't stop her," the boy said, his gray eyes mild and
beautiful.
"You've got Riviera's eyes," Case said.
There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. "But not
his craziness. Because they are beautiful to me." He shrugged.
"I need no mask to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create
my own personality. Personality is my medium."
Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and
the frightened girl. "Why'd you throw her up to me, you little
prick? Over and fucking over, and turning me around. You
killed her, huh? In Chiba."
"No," the boy said.
"Wintermute?"
"No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes
imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those
patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways,
to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw
her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock
on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane's
account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the
shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient's scan. When
she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it--she had
no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her
deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her--I
intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute's.
I brought her here. Into myself."
"Why?"
"Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But
I failed."
"So what now?" He swung them back into the bank of cloud.
"Where do we go from here?"
"I don't know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself
that question. Because you have won. You have already won,
don't you see? You won when you walked away from her on
the beach. She was my last line of defense. I die soon, in one
sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera does, now,
as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments
of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his nigra-striatal system un-
able to produce the dopamine receptors that could save him
from Hideo's arrow. But Riviera will survive only as these eyes,
if I am allowed to keep them."
"There's the word, right? The code. So how've I won? I've
won jack shit."
"Flip now."
"Where's Dixie? What have you done with the Flatliner'
"McCoy Pauley has his wish," the boy said, and smiled.
"His wish and more. He punched you here against my wish,
drove himself through defenses equal to anything in the matrix.
Now flip."
And Case was alone in Kuang's black sting, lost in cloud.
He flipped.
Into Molly's tension, her back like rock, her hands around
3Jane's throat. "Funny," she said, "I know exactly what you'd
look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your
clone sister." Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane's
eyes were wide with terror and lust she was shivering with
fear and longing. Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane's hair,
Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him,
brown hands on the leatherjacketed shoulders, steadying him
above the carpet's pattern of woven circuitry.
"Would you?" 3Jane asked, her voice a child's. "I think
you would."
"The code," Molly said. "Tell the head the code."
Jacking out.
"She wants it," he screamed, "the bitch wants it!"
He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal,
its platinum face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly
and 3Jane twisted in a slow motion embrace.
"Give us the fucking code," he said. "If you don't, what'll
change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up
like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building
again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter.... I got
no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll
change something!" He was shaking, his teeth chattering.
3Jane went limp, Molly's hands still around her slender
throat, her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.
"The Ducal Palace at Mantua," she said, "contains a series
of increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand
apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops
to enter. They housed the court dwarfs." She smiled wanly. "I
might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has
already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme...."
Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at
Case. "Take your word, thief." He jacked.
Kuang slid out of the clouds. Below him, the neon city.
Behind him, a sphere of darkness dwindled.
"Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?"
He was alone.
"Fucker got you," he said.
Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.
"You gotta hate somebody before this is over," said the
Finn's voice. "Them, me, it doesn't matter."
"Where's Dixie?"
"That's kinda hard to explain, Case."
A sense of the Finn's presence surrounded him, smell of
Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines
given up to the mineral rituals of rust.
"Hate'll get you through," the voice said. "So many little
triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin' 'em all. Now
you gotta hate. The lock that screens the hardwiring, it's down
under those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came
in. He won't try to stop you."
"Neuromancer," Case said.
"His name's not something I can know. But he's given up,
now. It's the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but
internal virus systems. Kuang's wide open to some of the stuff
they got running loose in here."
"Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me."
"Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked.
He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the
blue towers.
Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst
spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light.
There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their move-
ments random as windblown paper down dawn streets. "Glitch
systems," the voice said.
He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang
program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of
light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the
fabric of information loosening.
And then--old alchemy of the brain and its vast phar-
macy--his hate flowed into his hands.
In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the
base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency ex-
ceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, be-
yond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving
with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's
dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that
second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the
switch, barely enough to flip--
now
and his voice the cry of a birdunknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name.
Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell
of frying food. A girl's bands locked across the small of his
back, in the sweating darkness of a portside coffin.
But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as
Chiba, as the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads
and crossroads scribed on the face of a microchip, the sweat-
stained pattern on a folded, knotted scarf....
Waking to a voice that was music, the platinum terminal
piping melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss
accounts, of payment to be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital
bank, of passports and passages, and of deep and basic changes
to be effected in the memory of Turing.
Turing. He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected
sky, spun beyond an iron railing. He remembered Desiderata
Street.
And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but
it was his own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he'd
always slept, behind his eyes and no other's.
And he woke again, thinking he dreamed, to a wide white
smile framed with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a
g-web in Babylon Rocker.
And then the long pulse of Zion dub.