Neuromancer (8 page)

“That’s business,” said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the single pocket on the
front of his suit.

The phone rang. Case answered.

“Molly,” he told Armitage, handing him the phone.

T
HE
S
PRAWL
’
S GEODESICS
were lightening into predawn gray as Case left the building. His limbs felt cold
and disconnected. He couldn’t sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone,
then Armitage, and Molly was in surgery somewhere. Vibration beneath his feet as a
train hissed past. Sirens dopplered in the distance.

He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather jacket, flicking
the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and lighting another. He tried to
imagine Armitage’s toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes
wearing thinner as he walked. It didn’t seem real. Neither did the fear and agony
he’d seen through Molly’s eyes in the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself trying
to remember the faces of the three people he’d killed in Chiba. The men were blanks;
the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered tricycle-truck with mirrored windows
bounced past him, empty plastic cylinders rattling in its bed.

“Case.”

He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.

“Message for you, Case.” Lupus Yonderboy’s suit cycled through pure primaries. “Pardon.
Not to startle you.”

Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a head taller than the Modern.
“You oughta be careful, Yonderboy.”

“This is the message. Wintermute.” He spelled it out.

“From you?” Case took a step forward.

“No,” Yonderboy said. “For you.”

“Who from?”

“Wintermute,” Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of pink hair. His suit
went matte black, a carbon shadow against old concrete. He executed a strange little
dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone. No. There. Hood up to hide
the pink, the suit exactly the right shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk
he stood on. The eyes winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone.

Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers, leaning back against peeling
brickwork.

Ninsei had been a lot simpler.

T
HE MEDICAL TEAM
Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of
Baltimore. The building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel, each
coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately
worked logo of one GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.

“He says if I kick anything, it’ll fall off.”

“I ran into one of your pals,” he said, “a Modern.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message.” He passed her a paper napkin with W I N T E R M
U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. “He said—” But her hand
came up in the jive for silence.

“Get us some crab,” she said.

A
FTER LUNCH IN
Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease, they tubed into New York.
Case had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Her
leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke.

A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven tightly into her
hair opened the Finn’s door and led them along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the
stuff had grown somehow during their absence. 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.

Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.

Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and
passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from
his body as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn’t know, one that conveyed
a mixture of impatience and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the
front of his battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table
beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts
of Partagas.

“Wait,” the Finn said, and left the room.

Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and speared a grayish
slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear
on the pylons as he passed.

Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile.
He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the
door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn took a flat
little console from his pocket and punched out an elaborate sequence.

“Honey,” he said to Molly, tucking the console away, “you have got it. No shit, I
can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?”

“Yonderboy,” Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. “I did a deal with
Larry, on the side.”

“Smart,” the Finn said. “It’s an AI.”

“Slow it down a little,” Case said.

“Berne,” the Finn said, ignoring him. “Berne. It’s got limited Swiss citizenship under
their equivalent of the Act of ’53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe
and the original software.”

“What’s in Berne, okay?” Case deliberately stepped between them.

“Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I’ve got the Turing Registry numbers.
Artificial intelligence.”

“That’s all just fine,” Molly said, “but where’s it get us?”

“If Yonderboy’s right,” the Finn said, “this AI is backing Armitage.”

“I paid Larry to have the Moderns nose around Armitage a little,” Molly explained,
turning to Case. “They have some very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they’d
get my money if they answered one question: who’s running Armitage?”

“And you think it’s this AI? Those things aren’t allowed any autonomy. It’ll be the
parent corporation, this Tessle . . .”

“Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,” said the Finn. “And I got a little story for you about them.
Wanna hear?” He sat down and hunched forward.

“Finn,” Molly said. “He loves a story.”

“Haven’t ever told anybody this one,” the Finn began.

T
HE
F
INN WAS
a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in software. In the course of his
business, he sometimes came into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in
the more traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins,
gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case
and Molly began with another man’s story, a man he called Smith.

Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer. He was
the first person the Finn had known who’d “gone silicon”—the phrase had an old-fashioned
ring for Case—and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables
of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith’s knowledge of
the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But
Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman
to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to
be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing
the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation
was definitely required. “It smelled,” the Finn said to Case, “smelled of money. And
Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful.”

Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other
things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things
back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his
swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonné over
platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket
microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique,
and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal,
he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement
of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed,
a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity.
Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice
piped the figures of last year’s tax return.

Smith’s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata
approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture
old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it.

When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain
hallmarks. Eventually he’d been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between
two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California
chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.

Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was
on the track of something noteworthy.

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. A small man, Japanese, enormously
polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still,
staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood.
Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to
find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken
from the house of his master. It had come
to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this
object.

Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much,
his visitor asked, did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith
named a figure far lower than the price he’d intended to set. The ninja produced a
credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who,
the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned
of Jimmy’s death.

“So that was where I came in,” the Finn continued. “Smith knew I dealt a lot with
the Memory Lane crowd, and that’s where you go for a quiet go-to that’ll never be
traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was
careful. He’d just had a very weird business experience and he’d come out on top,
but it didn’t add up. Who’d paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got
a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always.
Was it spook stuff? Smith didn’t think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can
smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool
in litigation. The case wasn’t anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the
lawyer’s ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us.”

Case raised his eyebrows.

“Freeside,” the Finn said. “The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing.
The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on
the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure.
Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn’t been a share of Tessier-Ashpool
traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know.
You’re looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-orbit family,
run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law’s
a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it’s hard to keep track of which generation,
or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.”

“How’s that?” Molly asked.

“Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you’re legally dead for the
duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though
nobody’s seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died
in some lab accident. . . .”

“So what happened with your fence?”

“Nothing.” The Finn frowned. “Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of
powers of attorney the T-A’s have, and that was it. Jimmy must’ve gotten into Straylight,
lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget
about it. Maybe he was smart.” He looked at Molly. “The Villa Straylight. Tip of the
spindle. Strictly private.”

“You figure they own that ninja, Finn?” Molly asked.

“Smith thought so.”

“Expensive,” she said. “Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?”

“Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.”

“Okay,” Case said, “we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute.
Where’s that get us?”

“Nowhere yet,” Molly said, “but you got a little side gig now.” She drew a folded
scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates
and entry codes.

“Who’s this?”

“Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Moderns. Separate deal. Where
is it?”

“London,” Case said.

“Crack it.” She laughed. “Earn your keep for a change.”

C
ASE WAITED FOR
a trans-BAMA local on the crowded platform. Molly had gone back to the loft hours
ago, the Flatline’s construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily
ever since.

It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette
replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses. . . . The local
came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in
the tunnel’s ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers
as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a
trio of
young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink
glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously
and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked
like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement
of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the
car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train
reached Case’s station.

He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the
wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked
printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing.
WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and
radiators, docks, domes. He’d seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times.
It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as
easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a neat thing. But now he noticed the
little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad’s
fabric of light: T-A.

He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He’d spent most of his
nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the
cowboys. He’d never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at
least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working
joeboy for some cowboy. No other way to learn.

They’d all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the ’Lanta fringes, who’d survived
braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine—slender, street level, and the only one
going—had little to say about Pauley, other than that he’d done the impossible. “It
was big,” another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, “but who knows what?
I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.”
Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirt-sleeves, something leaden
about the shade of his skin.