Neuromancer (14 page)

The voice came from the Braun’s speakers.

“Wintermute,” Case said.

The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.

“Where’s Molly?”

“Never you mind. You’re screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline’s ringing bells all
over Freeside. I didn’t think you’d do that, man. It’s outside the profile.”

“So tell me where she is and I’ll call him off.”

Zone shook his head.

“You can’t keep too good track of your women, can you, Case? Keep losin’ ’em, one
way or another.”

“I’ll bring this thing down around your ears,” Case said.

“No. You aren’t that kind, man. I know that. You know something, Case? I figure you’ve
got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba.”

“Don’t,” Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the window.

“But I didn’t. What’s it matter, though? How much does it really matter to Mr. Case?
Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a
generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So
you’d give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little
she was worth, she loved you. You couldn’t handle it. She’s dead.”

Case’s fist glanced off the glass.

“Don’t fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck.”

Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of the condos. The Braun
shut off.

From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.

“Case?” The Flatline was waiting. “Where you been? I got it, but it isn’t much.” The
construct rattled off an address. “Place had some
weird ice around it for a nightclub. That’s all I could get without leaving a calling
card.”

“Okay,” Case said. “Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to disconnect the modem. Thanks,
Dix.”

“A pleasure.”

He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure.

Rage.

“H
EY
. L
UPUS
. H
EY
, Cath, it’s friend Lupus.” Bruce stood naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils
enormous. “But we’re just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?”

“No. Thanks. I want some help.” He pushed the boy’s arm aside and stepped into the
room.

“Hey, really, man, we’re . . .”

“Going to help me. You’re really glad to see me. Because we’re friends, right? Aren’t
we?”

Bruce blinked. “Sure.”

Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.

“I knew he was a gangster,” Cath called cheerfully from the shower.

“I gotta Honda trike,” Bruce said, grinning vacantly.

“We go now,” Case said.

“T
HAT LEVEL
’
S THE CUBICLES
,” Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed
back into the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell exhaust as the red
fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks. “You be long?”

“No saying. But you’ll wait.”

“We’ll wait, yeah.” He scratched his bare chest. “That last part of the address, I
think that’s a cubicle. Number forty-three.”

“You expected, Lupus?” Cath craned forward over Bruce’s shoulder and peered up. The
drive had dried her hair.

“Not really,” Case said. “That’s a problem?”

“Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend’s cubicle. If they let you
in, fine. If they don’t wanna see you . . .” She shrugged.

Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns and he’d reached
a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan, looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly
made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local
action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce.
The dance. The crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents
of the islands.

“Downstairs,” he said to a passing waiter, “I want to go downstairs.” He showed his
Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club. He walked quickly past
the crowded tables, hearing fragments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.

“I want a cubicle,” he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a terminal on her
lap. “Lower level.” He handed her his chip.

“Gender preference?” She passed the chip across a glass plate on the face of the terminal.

“Female,” he said automatically.

“Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn’t satisfactory. You can access our special services
display beforehand, if you like.” She smiled. She returned his chip.

An elevator slid open behind her.

The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the elevator and chose a direction
at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.

He found his cubicle. He’d been looking for Molly’s; now, confused, he raised his
chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath the number plate.

Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.

The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking.
Automatic pilot. A neural cutout. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.

The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The silence of the
hallway said that the cubicles were soundproof. It was pointless to try the chip.
He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb
the sound.

He placed his chip against the black plate.

The bolts clicked.

She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he’d actually gotten the door open. He was
on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering
centimeters from his eyes. . . .

“Jesus Christ,” she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. “You’re an idiot
to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?” She leaned
over him.

“Chip,” he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his chest. She helped
him up and shoved him into the cubicle.

“You bribe the help, upstairs?”

He shook his head and fell across the bed.

“Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count.”

He clutched his stomach.

“You kicked me,” he managed.

“Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I’m meditating, right?” She sat beside him.
“And getting a briefing.” She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite
the bed. “Wintermute’s telling me about Straylight.”

“Where’s the meat puppet?”

“There isn’t any. That’s the most expensive special service of all.” She stood up.
She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. “The run’s tomorrow, Wintermute
says.”

“What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?”

“ ’Cause, if I’d stayed, I might have killed Riviera.”

“Why?”

“What he did to me. The show.”

“I don’t get it.”

“This cost a lot,” she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible
fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. “Costs to go to Chiba, costs
to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you’ll have
the reflexes to go with the gear. . . . You know how I got the money, when I was starting
out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ’cause
once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake
up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when
it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . . .”
She cracked her knuckles. “Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out
and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren’t compatible. So the worktime started
bleeding in, and I could remember it. . . . But it was just bad dreams, and not all
bad.” She smiled. “Then it started getting strange.” She pulled his cigarettes from
his pocket and lit one. “The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had
the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way
I was ready to give up puppet time.” She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping
it with three perfect rings. “So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom
software cooked up. Berlin, that’s the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean
kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was
based on all the classics.”

“They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were
working?”

“I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain. . . .
You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space.
But I was starting to
remember
. Like dreams, you know. And they didn’t tell me. They switched the software and started
renting to specialty markets.”

She seemed to speak from a distance. “And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed
the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I’d tell myself that at least some
of them
were
just dreams, but by then I’d started to figure that the boss had a whole little
clientele
going for me. Nothing’s too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit
raise.” She shook her head. “That prick was charging
eight
times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn’t know.”

“So what was he charging for?”

“Bad dreams. Real ones. One night . . . one night, I’d just come back from Chiba.”
She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against
the wall. “Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out
chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. . . .” She dug her fingers
deep in the foam. “Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We
were both covered with blood. We weren’t alone. She was all . . .” She tugged at the
temperfoam. “Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’
’Cause we weren’t
finished
yet. . . .”

She began to shake.

“So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The shaking stopped.
She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. “The house put
a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while.”

Case stared at her.

“So Riviera hit a nerve last night,” she said. “I guess it wants me to hate him real
bad, so I’ll be psyched up to go in there after him.”

“After him?”

“He’s already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication
shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . .”

Case remembered the face he’d seen. “You gonna kill him?”

She smiled. Cold. “He’s going to die, yeah. Soon.”

“I had a visit too,” he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the
Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded.

“Maybe it wants you to hate something too.”

“Maybe I hate it.”

“Maybe you hate yourself, Case.”

“H
OW WAS IT
?” Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.

“Try it sometime,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Just can’t see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,” Cath said unhappily, thumbing
a fresh derm against her wrist.

“Can we go home, now?” Bruce asked.

“Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.”

R
UE
J
ULES
V
ERNE
was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle’s midpoint, while Desiderata ran
its length, terminating at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps.
If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you’d find
yourself approaching Desiderata from the left.

Case watched Bruce’s trike until it was out of sight, then turned and walked past
a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines
presenting the faces of the month’s newest simstim stars.

Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful
constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass.
The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the balconied
terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to the grassy tablelands of another
casino complex. Case watched a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the
green verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible
casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened
to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa’s edge. He’d seen
a wink of reflected
neon off glass, either lenses or the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the
spindle’s security system, controlled by some central computer.

In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer,
Shozoku Smith’s, Emergency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and most
crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that it was a tourist place.
No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless
club above Molly’s rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the
little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground plans
of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools?

He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall. Closing his eyes,
he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still.
Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming
in Memphis, nothing at all when he’d killed to defend his dealing interests in Night
City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda’s death under the inflated dome.
But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind’s screen, a semblance of Deane struck
a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the
rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda
Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But
he hadn’t become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.

It was a strange thing. He couldn’t take its measure.

“Numb,” he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his
nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug
deal. But now he’d found this warm thing, this chip of murder.
Meat,
some part of him said.
It’s the meat talking, ignore it.

“Gangster.”

He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair still wild from
the ride in the Honda.

“Thought you went home,” he said, and covered his confusion with a sip of Carlsberg.

“I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this.” She ran her
palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her wrist.
“Like it?”

“Sure.” He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked back at her. “What
do you think you’re up to, honey?”

“You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?” She was very close now, radiating heat
and tension, eyes slitted over enormous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a
bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz. “You get off?”

“Yeah. But the comedown’s a bitch.”

“Then you need another one.”

“And what’s that supposed to lead to?”

“I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the creamiest crib. People down
the well on business tonight, if you follow me. . . .”

“If I follow you.”

She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. “You’re Yak, aren’t you, Lupus?
Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza.”

“You got an eye, huh?” He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette.

“How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every
time you screwed up.”

“I never screw up.” He lit his cigarette.

“I saw that girl you’re with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares me.” She smiled
too widely. “I like that. She like it with girls?”

“Never said. Who’s Hideo?”

“3Jane’s, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer.”

Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he spoke. “Dee-Jane?”

“Lady 3Jane. She’s triff. Rich. Her father owns all this.”

“This bar?”

“Freeside!”

“No shit. You keepin’ some class company, huh?” He raised an eyebrow. Put his arm
around her, his hand on her hip. “So how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda
closet deb? You an’ Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?” He spread his
fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him.
Laughed.

“Oh, you know,” she said, lids half lowered in what must have been intended as a look
of modesty, “she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the party circuit. . . . It
gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long as
she brings Hideo to take care of her.”

“Where’s it get boring?”

“Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it’s pretty, all the pools and lilies.
It’s a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets.” She snuggled in against him.
“Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together.”

She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were bright pink
against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a
paperbacked bubble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor;
Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane.

“Hideo gave it to me,” she said. “He tried to show me how, but I can’t ever get it
right. The necks come out backwards.” She tucked the folded paper back into her purse.
Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing, and smoothed
it across his inner wrist.

“3Jane, she’s got a pointy face, nose like a bird?” He watched his hands fumble an
outline. “Dark hair? Young?”

“I guess. But she’s
triff
, you know? Like, all that money.”

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine
from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays
of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like
tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the
hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film
of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves
of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . .

“Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “You got it now. We got it. Up the hill, we’ll
have it all night.”

The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine
rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a
bar of lead. The faces around them in
Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving,
words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore
in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating,
the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the—something flared white behind
his eyes.

He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out of the way.

“Fuck you!” she screamed behind him, “you rip-off shit!”

He couldn’t feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone
pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets
of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.

And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips
curled, shaking. While he watched the loser’s zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations
of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like
live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually
and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate monochrome,
stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee.

When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every other face in the
street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with wonder. And when the lights
in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces
and ranked balconies of lunar concrete.

Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe.

Midnight.

H
E WALKED TILL
morning.

The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the
drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very
much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw:
a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener
striped diagonally with black and yellow.

A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid. He forced himself
to eat an omelette in a Desiderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his
cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed
it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and croissants beneath the striped umbrellas.

He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover
your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to
give it a name or an object.

He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the Freeside credit
chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To
lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again.

They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and
stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat
on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the
cushion.

“Turing,” she said. “You are under arrest.”