Neuromancer (5 page)

“Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is definitely armed,
aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head. What is this about, exactly?”
Deane’s ghostly cough seemed to hang in the air between them.

“Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I’ll be coming in alone.”

“You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Okay,” she said. “Go. But five minutes. Any more and I’ll come in and cool your tight
friend permanently. And while you’re at it, you try to figure something out.”

“What’s that?”

“Why I’m doing you the favor.” She turned and walked out, past the stacked white modules
of preserved ginger.

“Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?” asked Julie.

“Julie, she’s gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?”

The bolts worked. “Slowly, Case,” said the voice.

“Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,” Case said, taking his place
in the swivel chair.

“It’s on all the time,” Deane said mildly, taking a gun from behind the exposed works
of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun,
a magnum revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger-guard
had been cut away
and the grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked
very strange in Deane’s manicured pink hands. “Just taking care, you understand. Nothing
personal. Now tell me what you want.”

“I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody.”

“What’s moving, old son?” Deane’s shirt was candy-striped cotton, the collar white
and rigid, like porcelain.

“Me, Julie. I’m leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?”

“Go-to on whom, old son?”

“Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.”

Deane put the pistol down. “Sit still, Case.” He tapped something out on a lap terminal.
“It seems as though you know as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to
have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum
have ways of screening their allies from the likes of me. I wouldn’t have it any other
way. Now, history. You said history.” He picked up the gun again, but didn’t point
it directly at Case. “What sort of history?”

“The war. You in the war, Julie?”

“The war? What’s there to know? Lasted three weeks.”

“Screaming Fist.”

“Famous. Don’t they teach you history these days? Great bloody postwar political football,
that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass
in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that . . . great scandal. Wasted
a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology. They knew
about the Russians’ defenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse
weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.” Deane shrugged. “Turkey shoot
for Ivan.”

“Any of those guys make it out?”

“Christ,” Deane said, “it’s been bloody years. . . . Though I do think a few did.
One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov gunship. 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. Special Forces types.” Deane sniffed. “Bloody hell.”

Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.

“I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,” Deane said, putting the gun down. “Lovely place,
Lisbon.”

“In the service, Julie?”

“Hardly. Though I did see action.” Deane smiled his pink smile. “Wonderful what a
war can do for one’s markets.”

“Thanks, Julie. I owe you one.”

“Hardly, Case. And goodbye.”

A
ND LATER HE
’
D
tell himself that the evening at Sammi’s had felt wrong from the start, that even
as he’d followed Molly along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of
ticket stubs and styrofoam cups, he’d sensed it. Linda’s death, waiting. . . .

They’d gone to the Namban, after he’d seen Deane, and paid off his debt to Wage with
a roll of Armitage’s New Yen. Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and
Molly had grinned at Case’s side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously
longing for one of them to make a move. Then he’d taken her back to the Chat for a
drink.

“Wasting your time, cowboy,” Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket
of his jacket.

“How’s that? You want one?” He held the pill out to her.

“Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed
to bypass that shit.” She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. “You’re biochemically
incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.”

“Shit,” he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.

“Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing’ll happen.”

He did. Nothing did.

Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.

“Sammi’s,” Ratz said.

“I’ll pass,” Case said, “I hear they kill each other down there.”

An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai in a white t-shirt and baggy
rugby shorts.

Sammi’s was an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse, taut gray fabric reinforced
with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude
airlock preserving the pressure
differential that supported the dome. Fluorescent rings were screwed to the plywood
ceiling at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close
with the smell of sweat and concrete.

None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the towering puppets
of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage,
a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear. No light but
the holograms that shifted and flickered above the ring, reproducing the movements
of the two men below. Strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until
it struck currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the
muted purring of the blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters.

Reflected colors flowed across Molly’s lenses as the men circled. The holograms were
ten-power magnifications; at ten, the knives they held were just under a meter long.
The knife-fighter’s grip is the fencer’s grip, Case remembered, the fingers curled,
thumb aligned with blade. 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. Molly’s upturned face was smooth and still,
watching.

“I’ll go find us some food,” Case said. She nodded, lost in contemplation of the dance.

He didn’t like this place.

He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet.

The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd. Techs down
from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate
recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your
life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.

He’d made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the food stalls. He bought
yakitori on skewers and two tall waxy cartons of beer. Glancing up at the holograms,
he saw that blood laced one figure’s chest. Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers
and over his knuckles.

Seven days and he’d jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he’d see the matrix.

Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.

Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of sweat worked
its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn’t worked. He was still here,
still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage
waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and money. It was all some dream,
some pathetic fantasy. . . . Hot tears blurred his vision.

Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the crowd was screaming,
rising, screaming—as one figure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering. . . .

Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them,
and saw Linda Lee step past him, her gray eyes blind with fear. She wore the same
French fatigues.

And gone. Into shadow.

Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after her. He might
have called her name, but he’d never be sure.

Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete beneath the thin
soles of his shoes.

Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now, and again the ghost line
of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran.

Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.

He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair lit from behind
in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife
held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something from his sleeve.
A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the
razor dipping for his throat like a dowser’s wand.

The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly’s fletchettes,
at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across
Case’s legs.

He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down, expecting to see
that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down
at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The
crowd was chanting
the winner’s name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white sneaker
had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.

Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking. Past unseeing
faces, every eye raised to the victor’s image above the ring. Once a seamed European
face danced in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a metal
pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.

“Case.” Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. “You okay?”

Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.

He shook his head.

“Fight’s over, Case. Time to go home.”

He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where something was dying. She stopped
him with a hand on his chest. “Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for
you. You haven’t done too well for friends in this town, have you? We got a partial
profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. He’d fry anybody, for a few New
ones. The one back there said they got onto her when she was trying to fence your
RAM. Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money. . . . I got
the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I
had to make sure.” Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.

Case felt as though his brain were jammed. “Who,” he said, “who sent them?”

She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were
sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

A
FTER THE POSTOPERATIVE
check at the clinic, Molly took him to the port. Armitage was waiting. He’d chartered
a hovercraft. The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then
a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.

H
OME
.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single
pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start
to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is
about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At
a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown
Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta . . .

C
ASE WOKE FROM
a dream of airports, of Molly’s dark leathers moving ahead of him through the concourses
of Narita, Schipol, Orly. . . . He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish
vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.

Somewhere down in the Sprawl’s ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale
air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent,
gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing, bass down
into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to rise from
the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.

Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an expanse of very
new pink temperfoam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of
a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chipboard, a fat
gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few centimeters of the floor. He lay
on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with
the functional elegance of a war plane’s fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles
like a dancer’s.

The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab
and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows,
a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers
of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building;
the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not
quite art.

He was home.

He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood, some missing,
others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City
section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the canal’s edge
with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some cryptic foray, the two of them walking
alone past Dam Square to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred
dream. Shopping. She’d taken him shopping.

He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his feet, and
knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly’s: neatly folded clothing
and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he didn’t
remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim deck, clothing with French and Italian labels.
Beneath a green t-shirt, he discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese
paper.

The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell—to stick upright
in a crack in the parquet.

“Souvenir,” Molly said. “I noticed you were always looking at ’em.”
He turned and saw her sitting cross-legged on the bed, sleepily scratching her stomach
with burgundy nails.

“S
OMEONE
’
S COMING LATER
to secure the place,” Armitage said. He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned
magnetic key in his hand. Molly was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took
from her bag.

“I can do it,” she said. “I got enough gear already. Infrascan perimeter, screamers . . .”

“No,” he said, closing the door. “I want it tight.”

“Suit yourself.” She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black cotton pants.

“You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?” Case asked, from where he sat, his back against
a wall.

Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and military posture
he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he
held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The handsome,
inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative
amalgam of the past decade’s leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened
the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.

“Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate security,” Case added uncomfortably.
Molly handed him a steaming mug of coffee. “That number you had them do on my pancreas,
that’s like a cop routine.”

Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of Case. “You’re
a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me.”

“Should I?” Case blew noisily on his coffee.

“You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.”

“Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.”

“Good, because you have a new one.”

“How’s that?” Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage was smiling.

“You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main
arteries, Case. They’re dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving.
Each one contains a mycotoxin. You’re already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin.
It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis.”

Case blinked up at the smiling mask.

“You have time to do what I’m hiring you for, Case, but that’s all. Do the job and
I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs.
Then you’ll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you’re back where I
found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we
scraped you up from the gutter.”

Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.

“Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases you find there.” Armitage
handed him the magnetic key. “Go on. You’ll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning.”

S
UMMER IN THE
Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through
with sudden eddies of need and gratification.

He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete fountain, letting
the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his life. First a child with
hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager,
face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case remembered fighting on a rooftop
at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics.

He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin black denim.
Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different
rhythm, in the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.

With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7. They’d left the
place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled
plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year’s most expensive
Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.
Armitage had only waited for Case’s approval of each piece.

“Where’d he go?” Case had asked Molly.

“He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage it. Let’s go down to the
street.” She’d zipped herself into an old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets
and put on a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored
insets.

“You know about that toxin shit, before?” he asked her, by the fountain. She shook
her head. “You think it’s true?”

“Maybe, maybe not. 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. “That kind
of kink’s too subtle to show up on a scan.” Then her fingers moved again: wait. “And
you don’t care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.”
She laughed.

“So what’s he got on you? How’s he got the working girl kinked?”

“Professional pride, baby, that’s all.” And again the sign for silence. “We’re gonna
get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that
rebuilt Chiba krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we’ll tube in to Manhattan and get
us a real breakfast.”

L
IFELESS NEON SPELLED
out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of glass tubing. Case picked at a shred of
bacon that had lodged between his front teeth. He’d given up asking her where they
were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign for silence were all he’d gotten
in reply. She talked about the season’s fashions, about sports, about a political
scandal in California he’d never heard of.

He looked around the deserted dead-end street. A sheet of newsprint went cartwheeling
past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side; something to do with convection,
and an overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the dead sign. Her
Sprawl wasn’t his Sprawl, he decided. She’d led him through a dozen bars and clubs
he’d never seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.
Maintaining connections.

Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO HOLOGRAFIX.

The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it, Molly’s
hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that he couldn’t follow. He caught
the sign for
cash
, a thumb brushing the tip of the forefinger. The door swung inward and she led him
into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on
either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like
something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick
out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts
of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled
dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing.
An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers
staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap.
He heard the door close behind them. He didn’t look back.

The tunnel ended with an ancient army blanket tacked across a doorway. White light
flooded out as Molly ducked past it.

Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match, floored with white hospital
tile molded in a nonslip pattern of small raised disks. In the center stood a square,
white-painted wooden table and four white folding chairs.

The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket draping one
shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were
very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth, revealed
in something that wasn’t quite a smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient
tweed jacket and held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them,
blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to Case, pointed at
a slab of white plastic that leaned near the doorway. Case crossed to it and saw that
it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He helped the man
lift it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained fingers secured it
with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan began to purr.

“Time,” the man said, straightening up, “and counting. You know the rate, Moll.”

“We need a scan, Finn. For implants.”

“So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape. Straighten
up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full three-sixty.” Case watched her rotate between
two fragile-looking stands studded with sensors. The man took a small monitor from
his pocket and squinted at it. “Something new in your head, yeah. Silicon, coat of
pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp
isotropic carbons. Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but that’s your business,
right? Same with your claws.”

“Get over here, Case.” He saw a scuffed X in black on the white floor. “Turn around.
Slow.”

“Guy’s a virgin.” The man shrugged. “Some cheap dental work, is all.”

“You read for biologicals?” Molly unzipped her green vest and took off the dark glasses.

“You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we’ll run a little biopsy.”
He laughed, showing more of his yellow teeth. “Nah. Finn’s word, sweetmeat, you got
no little bugs, no cortex bombs. You want me to shut the screen down?”

“Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we’ll want full screen for
as long as we want it.”

“Hey, that’s fine by the Finn, Moll. You’re only paying by the second.”

They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white chairs around and
sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. “We talk now. This is as private as I
can afford.”

“What about?”

“What we’re doing.”

“What are we doing?”

“Working for Armitage.”

“And you’re saying this isn’t for his benefit?”

“Yeah. I saw your profile, Case. And I’ve seen the rest of our shopping list, once.
You ever work with the dead?”

“No.” He watched his reflection in her glasses. “I could, I guess. I’m good at what
I do.” The present tense made him nervous.

“You know that the Dixie Flatline’s dead?”

He nodded. “Heart, I heard.”

“You’ll be working with his construct.” She smiled. “Taught you
the ropes, huh? Him and Quine. I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole.”

“Somebody’s got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?” Now Case sat, and rested his elbows
on the table. “I can’t see it. He’d never have sat still for it.”

“Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass.”