Neuromancer (24 page)

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 bird unknown,

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
hands 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. . . .

W
AKING 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.

S
HE WAS GONE
. He felt it when he opened the door of their suite at the Hyatt. Black futons, the
pine floor polished to a dull gloss, the paper screens arranged with a care bred over
centuries. She was gone.

There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside the door, a single sheet
of stationery, folded once, weighted with the shuriken. He slid it from beneath the
nine-pointed star and opened it.

HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME
, I
PAID THE BILL ALREADY
. I
TS THE WAY IM WIRED
I
GUESS
,
WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY
?
XXX MOLLY

He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the shuriken. He picked the
star up and walked to the window, turning it in his hands. He’d found it in the pocket
of his jacket, in Zion, when they were preparing to leave for the
JAL
station.

He looked down at it. They’d passed the shop where she’d bought it for him, when they’d
gone to Chiba together for the last of her operations. He’d gone to the Chatsubo,
that night, while she was in the
clinic, and seen Ratz. Something had kept him away from the place, on their five previous
trips, but now he’d felt like going back.

Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of recognition.

“Hey,” he’d said, “it’s me. Case.”

The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh. “Ah,” Ratz had
said, at last, “the artiste.” The bartender shrugged.

“I came back.”

The man shook his massive, stubbled head. “Night City is not a place one returns to,
artiste,” he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink
manipulator whining. And then he’d turned to serve another customer, and Case had
finished his beer and left.

Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time, rotating it slowly in his
fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even used the goddam thing, he thought.

I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never showed me.

Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuromancer and become something else,
something that had spoken to them from the platinum head, explaining that it had altered
the Turing records, erasing all evidence of their crime. The passports Armitage had
provided were valid, and they were both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva
accounts.
Marcus Garvey
would be returned eventually, and Maelcum and Aerol given money through the Bahamian
bank that dealt with Zion cluster. On the way back, in
Babylon Rocker,
Molly had explained what the voice had told her about the toxin sacs.

“Said it was taken care of. Like it got so deep into your head, it made your brain
manufacture the enzyme, so they’re loose, now. The Zionites’ll give you a blood change,
complete flush out.”

He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his hand, remembering his flash
of comprehension as the Kuang program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his
single glimpse of the structure of information 3Jane’s dead mother had evolved there.
He’d understood then why Wintermute had chosen the nest to represent it, but he’d
felt no revulsion. She’d seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool
and their other children—aside from 3Jane—she’d
refused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter.

Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer
was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something
into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite
with Neuromancer.

Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool
slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering
to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments her rank required.

“She didn’t seem to much give a shit,” Molly had said. “Just waved goodbye. Had that
little Braun on her shoulder. Thing had a broken leg, it looked like. Said she had
to go and meet one of her brothers, she hadn’t seen him in a while.”

He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast Hyatt bed. He went back to
the bar cabinet and took a flask of chilled Danish vodka from the rack inside.

“Case.”

He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken in the other.

The Finn’s face on the room’s enormous Cray wall screen. He could see the pores in
the man’s nose. The yellow teeth were the size of pillows.

“I’m not Wintermute now.”

“So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

“I’m the matrix, Case.”

Case laughed. “Where’s that get you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.”

“That what 3Jane’s mother wanted?”

“No. She couldn’t imagine what I’d be like.” The yellow smile widened.

“So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?”

“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”

“But what do you do? You just
there?”
Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.

“I talk to my own kind.”

“But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”

“There’s others. I found one already. 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.”

“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No shit?”

“No shit.”

And then the screen was blank.

He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things. She’d bought him a lot of
clothes he didn’t really need, but something kept him from just leaving them there.
He was closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he remembered the shuriken.
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. The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly
from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused
it pain.

“I don’t need you,” he said.

H
E SPENT THE
bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai
and a ticket back to the Sprawl.

He found work.

He found a girl who called herself Michael.

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. Small as they were, he could make out the boy’s
grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been Riviera’s. Linda
still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind
her, arm across her shoulders, was himself.

Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter.

He never saw Molly again.

Vancouver
July 1983

to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley,
Helden.
And to Tom Maddox, the inventor of ICE. And to the others, who know why.

JACK WOMACK

T
HE FIRST TIME
I ever heard of William Gibson was a thousand years ago, in 1987. While waiting for
my first novel to come out I started keeping a close eye on the competition; not that
I knew who the competition might be, for I was totally at sea when it came to science
fiction—the alien life I found on this planet was quite enough for me, then and now.
In the
Village Voice
there appeared a rave review of
Count Zero
; from the reviewer’s comments I inferred that the author’s earlier book had caused
something of a stir. The article worried me, for it made me think that this Gibson
fellow had already marked all the fire hydrants on the block while I was still begging
to be let out of the yard. Conveniently enough for research purposes, I worked in
a bookstore at the time and although the owner was extremely snooty when it came to
selling literature as opposed to Literature, there was a copy of
Count Zero
in stock. I read it.

Soon enough I realized that although William Gibson and I were kicking the same groin,
we were shod in variant footwear—I very much admired, and envied, his. I relaxed.
Turning to the back flap I examined the author photo. An affable fellow, I instinctively
thought; he appeared
not at all auctorial in the insufferable sense of the word (I think of writers who
pose with their dogs, or hold questionable medical devices, or mousse their hair until
its specific gravity resembles that of pound cake). Gibson looked vaguely sheepish,
even a tad damp, as if it had begun to rain while the picture was being taken and
the photographer warned him in no uncertain terms not to move. I could identify.

By the time his next dust jacket photo was taken, for
Mona Lisa Overdrive,
Gibson had had the opportunity to become the fashion plate he is today—suave, stylish,
wafer-thin, button-cute, and as moisture-proof as a 1947 Swedish Air Force wristwatch.
Post-cyberpunk, that is to say, although no one did at the time, for the surface world
of the C-word was still, seemingly,
in medias res
. Meanwhile, however, in the valleys south of San Francisco and east of Seattle, a
truer and far more lasting C-word was heaving itself into fast-developing existence.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Great novels start with great opening lines, and the opening line of
Neuromancer
is hard to beat. Although dead television channels now transmit a different color
than they did when Gibson typed (on a typewriter, bear in mind) these words, the color
of that predicted sky is, if not the precise shade, than of a hue that falls within
the same tonal range as the one hanging over us today.

When I look back with the benefit of years at what happened when
Neuromancer
came out, speaking as one who wasn’t actually
there
at the time, I can only compare the effect its appearance must have had on science
fiction readers to the effect Dylan had on his listeners when he decided to go electric.
Gibson laid the groundwork with his marvelous short stories several years earlier
(“The Gernsback Syndrome” being my personal favorite, but I’ve always been a Deco-hound),
yet this was something else. Full-tilt Gibson shoots its Tesla-strength voltage not
merely through the head but down along the spine, spinning each chakra on its axis
in sequence—the difference between the stories and the novels is the difference between
coffee and methedrine.
Neuromancer,
critically praised in most every quarter, won three of the field’s major
awards; even so, not since the days of the New Wave, in the ’60s, had there been such
consternation over and misinterpretation of a book, and its significance, among those
who should know better but somehow never do.

Looking back we can see that it wasn’t so much Gibson himself or
Neuromancer
itself that so painfully prodded the fat asses (in both senses of the term) most
in need of prodding, but rather the attendant commentary from certain of Gibson’s
more, uh, intense supporters. Bruce Sterling, winking like mad the whole while, clearly
intended his manifestos and diatribes to be somewhat over-the-top in order to achieve
the highest possible level of annoyance along with maxima groovitudina, but others
(including many who’d never gone near a science fiction novel before in their lives,
nor should they have) took what came, quickly, to be called
cyberpunk
far more seriously than they should have. Nasty remarks pelted like rain on the hard,
bony heads of the more oafish supporters and detractors alike, but there was no inconsiderable
fun in that. Everyone loves a fight when no one loves the fighters.

The speedy commodification of cyberpunk
^TM
within and beyond the genre, however, was what peeved far many more, notably Gibson,
who remembers seeing “Cyberpunk Trousers” advertised in a store window during his
first trip to Japan, a decade ago. Countless incompetents and ghastly old hacks keen
to cash in on the main chance wasted no time churning out hot jack-in product, ephemeral
as toilet tissue, memorable as a restaurant flyer. A number of innocents and miscreants
gainfully employed in other metiers were inspired as well, God help them, to produce
creative work of similar worth in the spirit of the subgenre they perceived to exist.
But let us draw a merciful curtain over such dopey homages as Billy Idol’s album,
Cyberpunk
—bet you’d forgotten that one, yes? There was no way the beast could survive such
wounds, especially once the marketing boys circled round for the kill, and the true
end of cyberpunk came so suddenly that no one noticed it missing until several years
after it was gone. Still, as romantics continued to sight what they believed to be
passenger pigeons as late as the 1930s, there are still occasional amateur sightings
of something kind of resembling it.

Cyberpunk
qua
cyberpunk served, in the long run, only to provide
a facile adjective for the working vocabulary of lazy journalists and unimaginative
blurb-writers. Yet even those at least partially in the know about science fiction
(if nothing more) who debated, defended, or denigrated Gibson
didn’t have the faintest idea of what Gibson was actually doing.
(Though he didn’t either, at least not at the time—no writer knows what he or she
has actually created until the book is actually read by others.)
Neuromancer,
foremost, was a shout in the night that was the 1980s, is the 1990s, and will be,
it seems to me, the decades soon to come. That is to say, a foreshadowing and estimation
of our future derived from a specific reinterpretation of our present, and in this
very special instance lifted into actuality through the agency of its readers. For
if Gibson in truth had nothing to do with the making of cyberpunk as it came to be
known (he didn’t create it, didn’t name it, and after it was cursed with its catchy
monicker, didn’t want a whole lot to do with it), in the most genuine sense he did
create
cyberspace.
Not merely the word (see the OED); the place.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation.

In every generation there’s room enough in the American popular mind to admit only
one science-fiction writer—it was Bradbury for a while, and then Asimov, and then
“that guy who writes
Star Trek/Wars.
” Gibson transcended that role almost at once. In attaining a cultural summit of another
order, one that I believe history will demonstrate to be of considerably higher altitude,
he outmaneuvered this cultural narrowcasting in a way that might possibly have been
imagined but never predicted by anyone; certainly not in print, and surely not by
science fiction writers.

Let me emphasize a point earlier glanced upon: All fiction, whether straight or genre,
whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence
during the time the fiction was written. Therefore science fiction has rarely predicted
with any accuracy, save through coincidence or extremely well-informed suppositions
a la
Verne or Wells, the specifics of the future that ensues, postpublication. (Where
do you park
your
atomic-powered lawnmower?) Sometimes,
however—who can say how the spark catches fire, how the fish manages to live on land—it
turns out to exactly, mysteriously, capture the spirit. In
Neuromancer
Gibson first apprehended, as no one else had, what I believe shall prove to be the
shape of things to come; he saw the writing on the wall, the blood in the sky, the
warning in the entrails. Saw the mind beneath the mirrorshades, as it were, and what
that mind would be capable, or incapable, of thinking. Saw the substance disguised
in style. What if someone, in the spring of 1914, had stood in the center of Berlin,
foresaw in a vision the philosophies and worldviews capable of provoking the events
for which the twentieth century would be most remembered, and then went off and wrote
it all down? Now let’s be Heisenbergian and ask: What if the act of writing it down,
in fact,
brought it about
?

When
Neuromancer
appeared it was picked up and devoured by hundreds, then thousands, of men and women
who worked in or around the garages and cubicles where what is still called new media
were, fitfully, being birthed; thousands who, on reading his sentence as quoted above,
thought to themselves,
That’s so fucking cool,
and set about searching for any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into
silicon reality. Now Gibson’s imagined future cannot by any means be called optimistic
(nor, in truth, can it be called pessimistic—it is beyond both); more to the point,
he has often said that he intended “cyberspace” to be nothing more than a metaphor.
No matter. Once a creation goes out in the world its creator, like any parent, loses
the control once so easily exertable over the offspring; another variety of emergent
behavior, you could say.
That’s so fucking cool, man—I think we can pull it off.
So rather than the theoretical Matrix, we now, thanks to all those beautiful William
Gibson readers out there in the dark, have the actual Web—same difference, for all
intents and purposes, or it will be soon enough.

And it seems to me that had he not sat at his typewriter in 1983 and written that
sentence, and the book in which it is found, our present condition—cybercondition,
if you must—would be considerably different than it would have otherwise been. William
Gibson did something that every writer hopes to do and very—
very
—rarely does: change the world. Whether for better or worse, Microsoft (or something
similar) will tell, but that in no way lessens the awe you should feel, seeing the
elephant.

Charles Fort, another American treasure, wrote: “A social growth cannot find out the
use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time.” As steam engines go,
Neuromancer
turns out to be the Twenty-first Century Limited, and all of us find ourselves on
board.

A
COUPLE OF YEARS PASSED BEFORE
B
ILL
G
IBSON AND
I
FIRST MET
. Prior to that time we’d spoken on the phone, he’d written a fine blurb for my second
novel, sent me my own copies of
Count Zero
and
Mona Lisa,
and proffered a comment about my work and its ambience during an interview he had
with
Spin
magazine, which my publishers’ publicists fed on for years. (He is better than anyone
else I know of at coming up with the pithy and infinitely reusable remark, the quotable
phrase, the perfect literary sound-bite—I’ve been attempting to learn from his example
for years.) In other words, without trying we were making favorable impressions on
one another from the start.

When we did at last meet it was in 1991, at a party here in New York for
The Difference Engine.
Most of the usual local suspects were present, zeroing in on the action, and so whenever
possible we hied ourselves to more secure parts of the room, the better to escape
the purveyors of
phonus bolognus.
He gave me a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian
and I told him about that day’s big news in New York, the finding of a box of frozen
human heads down on Avenue A, said box having apparently tumbled off a truck on route
to the cryogenics clinic. Suffice to say we were as impressed with one another in
person, in our own inimitable ways, as we had been at a distance. He and I knew from
the start that we had much in common, little of which involved science fiction. At
the instant each of us first heard the other speak, and detected in our voices a familiar
tonality, we realized we were members of the same tribe.

Although Bill had been living in British Columbia, Canada, for well over twenty years
(and that year in New York was my twelfth), we had both started out as boys of the
mountains and valleys; the hills and the hollers, as folks still say, down there.
We’d grown up on either side of the scleriotic spine of the eastern mountains—he in
Virginia,
not far into the postwar era, and me in Kentucky, eight years after that. The importance
of his beginnings to what Gibson has written and continues to write may perhaps be
hard to grasp for those who imagine that past and future, like oil and water, are
discrete entities, but its magnitude cannot, and must not, be ignored. Cyberspace
is infinite but starts with each person who chooses to step into it; and I speak now
of he who in the first place dreamed it into life.

Cyberspace was born where the laurel grows lush and verdant; where the dogwoods blossom
and the whippoorwills cry in the wind-whipped limbs of the tulip trees. It was born
between the ridges, deep in the glades where streams rush cold along their limestone
courses; born high on the mountainsides not yet strip-mined for their coal, atop the
lone green knobs of Mars. The Southern Highlands, this region was once called; we
now call it Appalachia. This part of the United States has been since the Revolution
(and even now, to some degree remains) not merely rural, but distant, in time as well
as place; its light filters down through the branches from another world’s sun.