' She scratched the side of her nose. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Ratz was tending bar.
`Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?' Wage asked. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets really funny, you can grab my left wrist. . '_ He stepped back from the camera, dark stains on his torn twill shirt. '
A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, per- fectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons.
`What's that mean?'
`I don't know, exactly. Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black sphere the size of a bowling ball.
He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice. You may know him by a code name. Not as far as I can tell. The man broke.
The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of triptych. Stay, doesn't matter. ' He settled the black terry sweat- band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes. `An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision. Almost too careful. ' Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests. The betaphenethylamine gave it a voice.
The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the bal- ustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off.
He placed his chip against the black plate. A cold trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs.
The entrance to 3Jane's world had no door.
Alone at a table in the Jarre de Th, with the octagon coming on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. `When Kuang's good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin'~ that through. '
You were right, Dix. I'm getting used to it. One of us has to get out.
Follow the wall. You know the rate, Moll. 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. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. '
`Wanna go somewhere, lie down. That profile he's got. The lock system in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security system.
Technically nonlethal,' said Ratz. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a micro- second burst of diffuse laserlight, and froze. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere's equator. The thing seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera. The knives seemed to move of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the men waited for an opening. Can't see shit,' he whispered to the Finn. That's okay for sweetmeat,' the Finn said. Don't. Watergated all to hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that. '_ Deane sucked his bonbon noisily. You're already aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you? Rio. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?' She leaned over him. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the Turing cops, and that's bad heat. Do you know where we can get some?'
Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth.
He stepped out into the street. Case took them straight up, above them the dis- tanceless bowl of jade-green ice. He helped the man lift it and position it in the doorway. ' He shrugged. You've heard the name. '
How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a _JAL_ taxi?' Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes. His eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut hair. Keep callin'~ down here wi'~ orders, mon, but be some Babylon war. . '
Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever that created suction. He raised his right hand and moved it ex- perimentally. Sushi,' he said, whatever you got. ' Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. I get th'~ modem. '
Maelcum grinned. 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. A thief. Harsh yellow light threw hard shad- ows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb. The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plas- tics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never be wiped away. '
3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center of a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely cov- ered the hull of the spherical chamber. Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans.
`That Terzi, he's grade-A scum,' she said.
Okay,' he said, we're on. His fingers were.
`You cut my thumb, mon, wi'~ secon'~ one,' Maelcum said. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. He didn't have time to wait. 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 found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down. '
`Ali,' Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the room. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the front of the desk. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was already up and stumbling for the door.
`Whatever comes to mind. She cringed, dropping her stick, and ran. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions made for us. He wore his maroon robe. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it up, her first gift.
`No,' he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. Neo- Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. In my time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. Those patterns are real. '
Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy. That was what I thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object. Freeside's eco- system was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external materials.
Good,' Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Or if I did. He caught enough as it was: names like Pauley, Armitage, Sense/Net, Panther Mod- erns protruding like icebergs from an animated sea of Parisian French. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket with the sleeves ripped out. Looks stock. Soon fix that. '
`I had a visit too,' he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda.
`That's business,' said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the single pocket on the front of his suit. Arches of emerald across the col- orless void.
`How's it go Dixie?'
`Fine. Once, as the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water. But where had Corto been, those years?
Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky. . . .
`Case? Mon?'
The music.
`Hey,' she said.
`I said a week,' Armitage said, unable to conceal his sat- isfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run.
It took you long enough,' Riviera said, as he searched her pockets. He.
`Get us some crab,' she said. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Listen. The real link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's navigation system. The outside.
Nothing happened. It beat Truman Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport. She turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined with studs and flanges.
`One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. ' He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. '
You got zip to do with me and my kind buddy. But you are a cowboy, aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. ' She smiled. `Would Armitage protect you?' The question was punctuated by the lighter's bright jaws snapping shut.
Case looked up at him through the ache and bitterness of betaphenethylamine. `Lower level. ' He handed her his chip. You I let work here for entertain- ment value. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . . '
Skip it,' Case said. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours. Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chainlink. Take your word, thief. ' He jacked. I guess it's just the way I'm wired. '
Maelcum thinkin'~ that precise thing, mon, but _Garvey_ not be goin'~ far like that. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on an AI that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. . . . . . ' He shook his head. 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. Toothbud transplants. He'd seen that before. `He's stoned,' Molly said, looking up from the disassembled parts of her fletcher. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage was offering. '
`Where's he?'
`Dunno. '
Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times. I saw the show. 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. 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'~. Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice. Someone giggled. He cut to the right and loped up a flight of unpainted chipboard stairs. You sleepin'~ okay, Case? You look tired.
`How about my deck?' Case asked. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Nobody wants to hurt you. Yacht pilot talk to him, say relax. '
As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HAN- IWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Jap- anese. Bet you're part Ar- menian. And your boss, Case, he says go. Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven.
I can do it,' she said. The spindle. This is the city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs. It attracted attention. I keep telling you. I got a bad hangover as it is. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I'll tell 'em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I'll pretend they're telling me what they think about that, and I'll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool. The lock system in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security system. A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his sleeveless jacket.
Case triggered his second program. '
Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho- saka and fumbled into the straps of the web. `Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life. '
And the show,' 3Jane said. Or maybe, maybe something's on to him. . . . . . . . . ' Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Dizzying sensation of headlong move- ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness. A thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered. Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. Then he'd fly to Hongkong and order the year's suits and shirts. He robbed a bank in Wichita. `Yeah?'
We're going to Istanbul,' Armitage said. Tonight. '
`What does the bastard want?' Molly asked. Molly freed her arms from the folds of the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck. One white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head. And Armitage is starting to go. He says run it and run it now. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.
He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the food stalls. They hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine. '
She seemed to speak from a distance.
`I'm the matrix, Case.
Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone. `God knows. I'd as soon kill him as look at him. He took the family terminal. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk.
He placed his chip against the black plate. '
You got an ear for language, Case. Shit!' He slapped it aside and it struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air. Sure,' he said touching the seals. Stay here a long time. I get the idea. . . The Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. '
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. '
Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked. ' The Zionite was wearing a blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the one Case had rented in Freeside, its helmet under his arm and his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap crocheted from purple cotton yarn. His voice was modulated static in Case's headset. Sand- storms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications.
The Villa Straylight,' said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes. He'd come in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played.
This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. . . .
`Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or something?'
A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine --
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. He shivered. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective.
His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Molly examined its edge and he saw that in fact the steel was sheathed with panels of something that looked and felt like cold stone. Then she kicked the white pants and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the dark glasses after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her forehead. '
`So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?'
`Maybe he doesn't know about it,' she said. Yeah, I heard about it. '
Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of glass tubing.
By the standards of the archipelago,' the head continued, ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age.
`Must be nice,' Case said, getting up.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't exist. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat. 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.
He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's chair out of the way. If it's your pal Wintermute, he's not lookin'~ real friendly. _ It's hardwired in. The arms of grapples stood out against Garvey's patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sun- light.
He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtime Sicle.
How's that? You want one?' He held the pill out to her. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. ' He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his orange suit. I've a membrane set in, just over the vein, so I never have to worry about the condition of the needle. They came and took me from Turkey.
`Bonn,' she said, something like gentleness in her voice. Molly was due back from her drug run.
12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve. He was sure of it. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages. `Nothing burns. I remember now. ' She smiled.
`A program. '
`I can't stop her,' the boy said, his gray eyes mild and beautiful. ' The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. Sure. It's seamless. Not the wall, but internal virus systems. Even the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. Looks like they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. '
Okay. You're dreaming. '
`Shit,' he said.
`You wish. ' The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow. Nothing did. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. Inside were eight identical tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown fingers stripped the paper from one. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Tele- funken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk re- cordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. I'm in 335W, the Intercontinental. '
`You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his cryogenic programs?'
3Jane nodded.
The first arrow pierced his upper arm. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Then he was through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf, subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. It's the stud with the ridges on it. Called it a template. Model of per- sonality. ' She drew her fletcher and limped away down the corridor. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. Molly's face, with smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes.
`I'll go find us some food,' Case said.
And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the very edge of one of the vast steps of data.
Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.
`Who else, honey?'
`What's got into you?' The mirrors followed him across the room.
Good,' Riviera said, you can laugh. `Condition's like Parkinson's disease, sort of. '
3Jane nodded. ' The large yellow teeth appeared again. And found his anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. Pulled it together around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist.
It was a performance. Case stepped out of the el- evator and chose a direction at random. He turned and walked back into the Vingtime Sicle. With enough endorphin analog, she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace.
Cheers from the restaurant, applause. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen.
He jacked in and triggered his program. The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Thin, high-shouldered, a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a shave, but then he usually did. Two. Sure,' he said touching the seals. Stay here a long time. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. '
`Yes,' she said. It contained two pieces of furniture. He listened to the piped koto music and waited. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them.
And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb. The coral snake relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him. Garvey was a larger square, green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum's commands. The tug rang, shuddered. 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. A rich kid's hideout, he thought. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-re- lated. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists pre- cisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent. 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. With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's bare back. The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plas- tics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never be wiped away.
Another click, and the room blurred.
`Christ,' Molly said. As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. 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. 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. I told the cores I'd deal with it. '
`You have told this to your woman friend?' Terzibashjian leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. '
Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. He thumbed open the vacuum valves on the workbelt's gray pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing he'd removed.
A wind was rising.
`I'm a drug addict, Cath. Case took them straight up, above them the dis- tanceless bowl of jade-green ice. He began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks.
What is this thing?' he asked the Hosaka. 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. The Zionites always touched you when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. But now a second hand lay on the bed. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity. Then it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. Metal clinked against the wall and the figures were gone. She bent and picked up a small display unit. She selected three and thumbed them hard against her left wrist, over the veins. The carved profile was very much like her own. The second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending it spinning across the white tiles. And our medical projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year. ' Her lips barely moved. What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined. You in the war, Julie?'
The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks. You sleep okay? You notice any lights?'
`You were dreaming,' she said. Works either way. '
`You know any way I can find out?'
No,' she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence. He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he could've gotten out a long time ago. Everything has to be a mystery. 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.
`I had a cigarette,' Case said, looking down at his white- knuckled fist.
Riviera beamed.
The Mute talked to us,' the first Founder said. It's the way he practices. ' She snuggled in against him. I know, see? I know who you are. 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. '
Deane put the pistol down. '
`Neuromancer,' the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. 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.
From the bed, the phone bleated steadily. '
It's your deck,' Armitage said, and the other gear. '
He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Sure. If it's military. '
Yes,' she said. But we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?'
`No. . ' He walked toward the sound. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on an AI that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. I think I work better if I know a little more about what I'm doing. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. 'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer. '
`From where?'
`Centauri system.
`Demerol they used to call that,' said the Finn.
`Fuck it,' he said. '
`Your dentist?'
You betcha. We're out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl. ' She touched his shoulder. Maybe you wan'~ eat somethin'~.
`Just thinking out loud. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set fire to his room.
Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Or corporate security,' Case added uncomfortably. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing.
The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement of the cart indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the overdose. ' Case edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. '
Case sighed.
Hold on,' the Finn said, I'll fast-forward us. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide ex- plained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar- winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. ' He sat on the chair, facing the bed. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one line at a time. He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. The one back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release ex- ercises.
`I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. '
`Molly. Can you read my mind, Finn?' He grimaced.
Molly began to limp down the corridor. He packed his things. He dipped water from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. '
Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.
Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd first seen Armitage. . . '
`Yeah. He'd never thrown one in his life. He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new work- tables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black silk sleeping bag over his head. . . .
`Come on,' she said, taking his hand. '
Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.
While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a dozen bright pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. '
`Luck changing, my artiste?'
Too soon to tell. You gonna kill him?'
She smiled. '
I need one now, man. We monitor many frequencies. Our law is the word of Jah. 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. ' She gestured vaguely behind her.
Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?' asked Julie. He told me about that, you see. When he saw a darkened display window, he managed to pause by it. Next day I was playing ghost with you in Night City. Scared 'cause I didn't have a shot on me, nothin'~, an'~ I knew I'd be gettin'~ sick. . . ' She tugged at the temperfoam. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against the side of the pool. Each one contains a mycotoxin. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects. Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy.
Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub- program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands.
`I'm gonna check Molly,' Case said, tapping the simstim switch. They hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine.
`Here,' the Finn said. There were smears of blood on her pale djellaba. There isn't enough to do your foot. It was still raining.
Case shuddered.
Good,' Riviera said, you can laugh.
Case, mon, big problem. You're right. '
Try. It's all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short reason. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips.
`Maybe it wants you to hate something too. The Finn smiled.
~Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. I do not know her thoughts. `It is too near the artery. . . . '
`Not General Girling?'
`General who?'
The lozenge went blank.
`Get my wire?'
Yeah. Low grav, high-traction tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour. '
`This end doesn't concern us,' Armitage said with his usual utter seriousness. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first mistook it for some kind of t-shirt.
`You hurting?' he asked. When she glanced back, once, Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. He woke re- peatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite slope.
Iffy,' he said, it's all looking very iffy tonight. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again. Now my brother likens you to Step- pin'~ Razor. Hey,' he said, it's breaking down. Bet you know, too. And your boss, Case, he says go. Maybe he loves them, too. '
`You think so?'
Get dressed, Case. 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. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew Armitage. But he's on his way home, or near as matters.
A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond its crest the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers.
`Dixie?'
`Yeah. Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. . . . '
Case remembered the face he'd seen. `Sift for owner's personal history. '
The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re- placed by a simple lozenge of white light. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender's blackened teeth. He hadn't seen where Riviera had come from. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. '
`She's extremely dangerous. 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.
I'm not Wintermute now. Fridays and Saturdays were dif- ferent. The regulars were still there, most of them, but they faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed on them. At times it was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. Hey, Ri- viera. ' The ring continued to revolve.
`So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?'
Things aren't different. It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster. ' It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. `You can go for a walk, you wanna. Where you been?'
`I don't know. 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. Nec- romancer. I call up the dead. '
Maelcum grinned.
`Pay him,' Case said.
He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes. . 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. It's a sex toy Jane bought in Berlin. It's something these guys do, is all. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Armitage. '
`What's that mean?'
But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos- sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane. Maelcum's features were overlayed with bands of translucent hieroglyphs.
`An'~ you medicine,' Maelcum said. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. The third, which was deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like a human fingerbone. It could talk. The mouth, if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. A red moire shifted in her vision. Harsh yellow light threw hard shad- ows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb.
Here,' said the voice, I'll do it for you.
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. G. , Berne. '
`Do it again.
The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a Tokyo gardener produced. He shook his head. It popped, cheap hardware failing from the splintered frame. '
Pausing one last time, by the doorway. `It's fresh. ' The faded French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was smooth and brown.
`I'm the matrix, Case.
The toxins,' Case said, the fucking toxins,' and jacked out. '
The Chinese virus was unfolding around them.
`Well?' Case asked, finally almost expecting the thing to answer him. Friday. It to be a Friday.
Big deal,' said the Flatline. ' But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. Saw one in Maryland once,' the Finn said, `and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to cause that business to need this 8Jean's personal attention. That's good. Help me up. '
`You ver'~ pale, mon,' Aerol said, as they were guiding the foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. '
That's you' in the collective. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance. The Panther Mod- erns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. Ar- mitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece. Incidently, they know the old man's dead. '
`Who knows?'
The law firm and T-A. Turn the lights on, okay?' Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch. Slow. '
`Guy's a virgin.
`I'm dressing already,' he said, stumbling toward the bed.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. His limbs were wood, old, warped and heavy with rain. The other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green al- gae. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release ex- ercises.
When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed his lead. It whipped back into his program, automatically triggering a full system reversal. I keep telling you. I was real happy. '
He stared at the twin mirrors. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?'
`People.
Mon,' Maelcum was saying, I don't like this.
The Ducal Palace at Mantua,' she said, contains a series of increasingly smaller rooms. ' But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Dizzying sensation of headlong move- ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness. '
She seemed to speak from a distance. Though I did see action. ' Deane smiled his pink smile.
`So T-A, they made me. Some data base of his. But the chrome stars held his gaze. When Riviera reached for it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet of flesh and bone.
Wintermute,' he mumbled to his knees, Wintermute. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. _
`Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder. We don't. Treetop flying on manual. Seat of the pants, boy. But that will only be the beginning.
Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than _people. The coffins were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. Case looked at the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.
The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark beneath them. Case stared, his mouth open. He turned and walked back into the Vingtime Sicle. Gotta play house,' she said. You help me string this up. Sleep. I could use some sleep. 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.
`What is it?'
An AI's defense system,' the construct said, or part of it.
`I forget how to pronounce it,' he said, taking a tighty rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket. The aftermath of the betaphenethylam- ine made it taste like iodine. The thing was a shipping container, he remembered them from the Chiba docks.
One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything had gone gray. I don't want that shit tangling with my neurotransmitters. But the boy up from Melbourne'll know the score. '
There's the _word,_ right? The code. Aerol an'~ I talkin', an' Aerol talkin'~ wi'~ Zion, Founders seh cut an'~ run. ' He ran the back of a large brown hand across his mouth.
Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX REVERSE.
`And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?' Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling. Got his arms crossed, head down, like he's forgotten the gun. Helicopter, you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
The gate blurred past. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it. A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the bamboo. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly per- fumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. 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. Nec- romancer. I call up the dead. ' She smiled. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration.
`Come then,' the man said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm.
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber- space, it was the Fall.
20
He'd lost his anger again.
Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight.
He found a girl who called herself Michael. . . . . but I'd been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren't born, when last I lay me down to sleep. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. You see a guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's alone. I am that which knoweth not the word. '
It's a code. ' She shook her head. Maelcum a rude boy, Case. '
`You keep tools back there?' Case craned his neck and watched cords of muscle bunching in the brown back. You I let work here for entertain- ment value. 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.
At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eigh- teen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a sus- ceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. `No sweat, but it's on your chip. '
Scan this shit,' Case told the Hosaka. Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi- zenship. Sure. It's seamless. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S. Yeah. . ' She shrugged. He stared into Case's face for a long time, then lowered his gaze. `I bet you're stoned right now, asshole,' he said to the Hilton lobby.
Don'~ 'stan'~ you, mon,' the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, but we mus'~ move by Jah love, each one.
`Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat.
He swung his feet to the floor. You are busted, Mr. We have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon's law. Ran it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I like that. '
`You ever go there, Linda?' He put his jacket on.
`You wish.
`I'm very unhappy with this, Peter.
A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the slender neck.
`Wait,' the Finn said, and left the room.
And one and two and --
Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herring- bone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie.
Well,' Case said, it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. . . . . . ' Maelcum whispered, crouching there. The speed sang in his head. Her smooth, wasplike line was simply styling, and everything about her interior was cal- culated to add to the overall impression of speed. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a camelskin hassock. `It's the meperidine. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic sys- tem. If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours -- your subjective time -- to effect another spokesperson. We leave on her, she ain't comin'~ out, Steppin'~ Razor or not. Sense/Net was eager to cooperate. They ran an inventory for us.
`Julie,' he said to his stars.
Yeah,' said the Finn, somewhere behind him, you got it. ' He was hungover and confused. '
This cost a lot,' she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I'd never actually met him, you know. He took the family terminal. `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.
Well,' Case said, it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that. But reflecting something else as well. ' He told her about the phones in the Hilton. Time's tight. Very tight.
What was that you were telling her, when I came back?' Riviera was very close now. I've been expecting your call. They came and took me from Turkey. '
In Istanbul,' Roland said, almost apologetically, it was very easy. `It seems as though you know as much as my net does, Case. . . . . '
`I saw th'~ screen, EEG readin'~ dead. ' He disconnected the construct. Where's that get us?'
Nowhere yet,' Molly said, but you got a little side gig now. '
He flipped. A breeze caught at her hair.
A familiar face,' 3Jane said, I saw you the night of Peter's show.
The Ducal Palace at Mantua,' she said, contains a series of increasingly smaller rooms. I was thinking maybe it's time we got our ass out of here anyway. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love.
Because' -- and the nest, somehow, was gone -- it's the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. `Waiting for a guide. '
She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders, Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now. Then Case was beside him. Something snapped, and he was inside. It belonged, he knew -- he remembered -- as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. The brown laminate of the tabletop was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. But now a second hand lay on the bed. I'd ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But the boy up from Melbourne'll know the score.
What Riviera dreamed, you got. ' Maelcum looked at the monitor. He turned, glaring back at the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and crois- sants beneath the striped umbrellas. Case's head throbbed.
Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock.
Christ on a crutch,' the Flatline said, take a look at this.
5
The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking. '
`I'll bring this thing down around your ears,' Case said. She smiled at him again, more tentatively. Case followed the direction of her gesture and saw the curve of planing lakes, the white glint of casinos, turquoise rectangles of a thousand pools, the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze hieroglyphs, all held in serene approximation of gravity against the endless curve of Freeside's hull.
`Case. She'd messed it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Maintaining connections.
Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO HOLOGRAFIX. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a per- verse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. The holes were small, circular, edges blackened. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight on gray balloon tires. He came in and said Pack, we were booked for Macau. Armitage wouldn't speak again. On,' he said, changing his mind. Question. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?'
`Delay for interorbital transmission,' said the Hosaka.
Dixie,' he said, jacking in, what do you know about Chinese virus programs?'
Not a whole hell of a lot. Mainline,' breathed the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. ' He lay down again. '
The Finn shrugged. Ah,' Ratz had said, at last, the artiste. ' The bartender shrugged. He'd never thrown one in his life.
`How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?' Molly asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module. He took the flask out of his pocket and handed it to Wage. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. The service cart's six tires were silent on the layered carpets.
None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
`They're def triff, huh?' Cath asked seeing him eye the transparencies. Molly popped her gum.
`I can do it,' she said. ' He pointed.
`Case?' Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.
`Wintermute killed Armitage. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. . '
`No problem, mon. Case saw the green square shrink a final few millimeters to overlap the red square.
7
It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen. '
He did. `Only in certain heightened modes would an individual -- a clan member -- suffer the more pain- ful aspects of self-awareness. Betrayal from above. From _above. . .
`Case? Mon?'
The music. G. , Berne. '
`Do it again.
`Wintermute?'
`No. Then she raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with a wet tongue tip, kissing him through the simstim link. Your map is about to go nova. .
Jesus Christ,' she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. You just edited her simstim signal. You win. It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold birds and monkeys. ' He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his orange suit. The ice is breaking up. Case saw a gutted loco- motive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's waste places. Would you know, Molly?' The gun rose again. There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself.
Hey, Christ,' the Finn said, taking Case's arm, looka that. '
The bartender shrugged. `Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life. '
And the show,' 3Jane said. Can we run it?'
Sure,' the construct said, unless you got a morbid fear of dying. '
`Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.
`I never tried it before,' the Finn said, showing his teeth, his hands bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket. He shook his locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. When he saw a darkened display window, he managed to pause by it. She was up and through the sheet of yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize she'd slashed it open. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty.
Can I put some clothes on?' he asked. They both wore chameleon suits. Tacticals are spray- ing foam barricades now,' one noted, speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. `Rapids are still trying to land their copter. '
Case hit the simstim switch. Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cy- berspace.
`Panther Moderns,' he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. ' Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. He said you wouldn't hate me.
It's okay,' she said, I can see. '
The lights came up. ' He lit his cigarette. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. He imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage.
He kicked back, gliding over his instruments -- a green docking diagram pulsed on his central screen -- and snagged the frame of Case's g-web. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. . . '
`Mon, you bossman gone ver'~ strange. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto- nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin.
Hey,' Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, you think I know?' The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed. His face was fixed, white, his teeth bared.
The boy dove. `Two derm. '
He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the monitor. Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
`Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?' Ar- mitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair. His black silk tie was starting to resemble a worn carbon ribbon.
Molly's got a rider,' he said, and Larry doesn't like that. . '
He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of icy seawater. ' She recited the year and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number, and a string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from his past. You're a gangster, right?'
He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. '
He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. The black package had drifted aft before he'd finished. Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open window. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
`Good,' Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.
He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of fluorescents. Case felt the stuff had grown some- how during their absence. He could feel the micropore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the simstim unit, and the scrambler. The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. A battered tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty plastic cylinders rattling in its bed. Its windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was visible if you craned your neck.
Do it, Cutter,' Molly said. They gotta be. _ It's not like bullshit, more like poetry.
CODA
DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL
24
She was gone.
Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes.
Boy, that is one mean piece of software. Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit, huh?'
The Finn's upper lips drew back. `Not enough, sweetmeat. ' She smiled, but it was gone too quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to climb. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine. He was inside.
He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.
She hesitated. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. A scream, shrill terror. Across the alley, someone cheered.
Shit!' Marlene behind him, swaying. Something struck him on the shoulder. She stepped over him and removed the blackbox before punching LOBBY. It felt like sand, cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed like a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. 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. The process employed on you resulted in the clinic's owner applying for seven basic patents. '
When was this?' Case asked. '' He met the faded blue eyes. I wish to dedicate its premiere here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool. ' A wave of polite ap- plause. `Where do we go from here?'
`I don't know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that question. Because you have won. '
3Jane became very grave. '
Okay,' Case said So what about me? You're going home.
Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. Five huge Ciba- chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency.
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink.
Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of Riviera's sternum.
`Hear okay, mon. He slid it from beneath the nine-pointed star and opened it.
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. '
`Okay.
He flipped. He shook his head. The other is boosted, is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented. We slotted Kuang virus at 02:32:03. '
`This isn't looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on it. '
`Playing doctor. A.
`Wait,' the Finn said, and left the room.
She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning to ache. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. Very far gone, in Toulon. What he imagines, you see. 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.
`Because I had to see,' Molly said.
Vancouver
July 1983
MY THANKS
to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley, _Helden.
A true name. `I was watching on the monitors. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion poised beside a brake lever. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt.
He flipped again. '
He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken in the other. ' She shook her head. No rush, he told himself, no hurry. You play that subliminal shit around me, I'll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. Then they came, when we were thinking we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to Europe maybe. We go Siamese twin on 'em before they even get restless. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I think he's something like a giant ROM construct, for recording per- sonality, only it's full RAM. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't _know. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her lap.
`I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. ' His fingers found the flat packet of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans.
`I'm the matrix, Case. '
Figures,' Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright light. Just an idea, back then. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fin- gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. Much bigger,' The Finn glanced up and around the matrix. But the parts of me that are me now, that'll still be here. To die. Now my brother likens you to Step- pin'~ Razor. Up in the corridor. '
The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. `That last part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. '
`So what was he charging for?'
Bad dreams. The ducts are routed back into my mouth. You saw a light. You win. '
Come on, then. I'm busy tonight, Molly. I got a big straw hat for this, too. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. ' She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe.
`I talk to my own kind. It gets smaller, Case, smaller, closer you get to it. 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. Real asshole. '
`Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?' Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table. Ratz, I. .