Neuromancer (9 page)

“Boy,” the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, “I’m like them huge fuckin’
lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an’ one by the
tailbone, kept the hind legs
movin’. Hit that black stuff and ol’ tailbrain jus’ kept right on keepin’ on.”

The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost
a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace. . . .

And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in
a POW camp during the war. He’d refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its
particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly
had given him and made his way up the stairs.

Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few
millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises,
the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color,
ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its
fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast.

He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly
on the Flatline’s construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked
in.

It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.

He coughed. “Dix? McCoy? That you man?” His throat was tight.

“Hey, bro,” said a directionless voice.

“It’s Case, man. Remember?”

“Miami, joeboy, quick study.”

“What’s the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?”

“Nothin’.”

“Hang on.” He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it.
“Dix? Who am I?”

“You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?”

“Ca—your buddy. Partner. What’s happening, man?”

“Good question.”

“Remember being here, a second ago?”

“No.”

“Know how a ROM personality matrix works?”

“Sure, bro, it’s a firmware construct.”

“So I jack it into the bank I’m using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?”

“Guess so,” said the construct.

“Okay, Dix. You
are
a ROM construct. Got me?”

“If you say so,” said the construct. “Who are you?”

“Case.”

“Miami,” said the voice, “joeboy, quick study.”

“Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we’re gonna sleaze over to London grid and
access a little data. You game for that?”

“You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?”

“Y
OU WANT YOU
a paradise,” the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. “Check
Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.” The voice recited coordinates as he
punched.

They found their paradise, a “pirate’s paradise,” on the jumbled border of a low-security
academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators
sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that
shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties.

“There,” said the Flatline, “the blue one. Make it out? That’s an entry code for Bell
Europa. Fresh, too. Bell’ll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change
any codes they find posted. Kids’ll steal the new ones tomorrow.”

Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the
Flatline’s help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage’s.

“Here,” said the voice, “I’ll do it for you.” The Flatline began to chant a series
of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct
used to indicate timing. It took three tries.

“Big deal,” said the Flatline. “No ice at all.”

“Scan this shit,” Case told the Hosaka. “Sift for owner’s personal history.”

The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a simple lozenge
of white light. “Contents are primarily video recordings of postwar military trials,”
said the distant voice of the Hosaka. “Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.”

“Show it already,” Case said.

A man’s face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage’s.

T
WO HOURS LATER
, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him.

“You find anything?” she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.

“Tell you later,” he said, “I’m wrecked.” He was hungover and confused. He lay there,
eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto.
The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full
of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen,
too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments
were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.

Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses
over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto’s team
had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected
in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would
see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their
launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.

“They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,” Case said, and Molly stirred beside him.

The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console
operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus
in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for
three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went
off. The
Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered
systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.

Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent
assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell
and kept falling. . . .

There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight
of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as
it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre
of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of
Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter.
The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah,
blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional
aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington
and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being
Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on
Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.

He’d need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be
arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto’s shoulder through the sweat-damp
sheet.

Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was.

No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach
the voter. The aide coughed politely.

Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto’s subsequent testimony was
detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain
vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto
gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers
of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building
of the emp installations at Kirensk.

His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant,
over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking
to the wrong people. Corto crushed
the man’s larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide
strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington
September.

The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records, and news files.
Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed
to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians
he bought out for his employers. 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. Then as enforcer for
a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed
a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.

One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything
had gone gray.

Translated French medical records explained that a man without identification had
been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became
catatonic and was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He
became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through
the application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were provided
with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was
cured, the only success in the entire experiment.

The record ended there.

Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her.

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG
. He pulled it into bed. “Yeah?”

“We’re going to Istanbul,” Armitage said. “Tonight.”

“What does the bastard want?” Molly asked.

“Says we’re going to Istanbul tonight.”

“That’s just wonderful.”

Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.

Molly sat up and turned on the light.

“What about my gear?” Case asked. “My deck.”

“Finn will handle it,” said Armitage, and hung up.

Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even with the cast
on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile
beside his bag.

“You hurting?” he asked.

“I could do with another night at Chin’s.”

“Your dentist?”

“You betcha. Very discreet. He’s got half that rack, full clinic. Does repairs for
samurai.” She was zipping her bag. “You ever been to ’Stambul?”

“Couple days, once.”

“Never changes,” she said. “Bad old town.”

“I
T WAS LIKE
this when we headed for Chiba,” Molly said, staring out the train window at blasted
industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion
plant. “We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we
got there, I played fantan in the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next
day I was playing ghost with you in Night City.” She took a silk scarf from the sleeve
of her black jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern Sprawl
woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted
slab of freeway concrete.

The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun
rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.

I
T WAS RAINING
in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and unlit windows of cautious
Greek and Armenian jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures
on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.

“This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ottoman Istanbul,” purred the
Mercedes.

“So it’s gone downhill,” Case said.

“The Hilton’s in Cumhuriyet Caddesi,” Molly said. She settled back against the car’s
gray ultrasuede.

“How come Armitage flies alone?” Case asked. He had a headache.

“ ’Cause you get up his nose. You’re sure getting up mine.”

He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against it. He’d used a sleep derm,
on the plane.

The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat incision, laying
the city open. He’d watched the crazy walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by,
condos, arcologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron.

The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting
sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour armchair in a sea of pale blue carpeting.

“Christ,” Molly said. “Rat in a business suit.”

They crossed the lobby.

“How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?” She lowered her bag beside the armchair.
“Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit, huh?”

The Finn’s upper lips drew back. “Not enough, sweetmeat.” He handed her a magnetic
key with a round yellow tag. “You’re registered already. Honcho’s upstairs.” He looked
around. “This town sucks.”

“You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just pretend it’s Brooklyn
or something.” She twirled the key around a finger. “You here as valet or what?”

“I gotta check out some guy’s implants,” the Finn said.

“How about my deck?” Case asked.

The Finn winced. “Observe the protocol. Ask the boss.”

Molly’s fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of jive. The Finn watched,
then nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, “I know who that is.” She jerked her head in the direction of the
elevators. “Come on, cowboy.” Case followed her with both bags.

T
HEIR ROOM MIGHT
have been the one in Chiba where he’d first seen Armitage. He went to the window,
in the morning, almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel across
the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways,
their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written
word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He watched
a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it disgorged
five sullen-looking Turkish officers in rumpled green uniforms. They entered the hotel
across the street.

He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness struck him. She’d left the
micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the
transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected part of the room’s light fixture.

He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice. “Glad you’re up,”
Armitage said.

“I’m just. Lady’s still under. Listen, boss, I think it’s maybe time we have a little
talk. I think I work better if I know a little more about what I’m doing.”

Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.

“You know as much as you need to. Maybe more.”

“You think so?”

“Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You’ll have a caller in about fifteen minutes. His
name is Terzibashjian.” The phone bleated softly. Armitage was gone.

“Wake up, baby,” Case said. “Biz.”

“I’ve been awake an hour already.” The mirrors turned.

“We got a Jersey Bastion coming up.”

“You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you’re part Armenian. That’s the eye Armitage
has had on Riviera. Help me up.”

Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and gold-framed, mirrored glasses.
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. He arrived with a black Hilton
tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick black coffee and three sticky,
straw-colored Oriental sweets.

“We must, as you say in
Ingiliz
, take this one very easy.” He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he
removed the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his
very short military-cut hair. He smiled. “It is better, this way, yes? Else we make
the
tunel
infinity, mirror into mirror. . . . You particularly,” he said to her, “must take
care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications.”

Molly bit one of the pastries in half. “It’s my show, Jack,” she said, her mouth full.
She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. “I know about you. Stool for the military,
right?” Her hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with the fletcher.
Case hadn’t known she had it.

“Very easy, please,” Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen centimeters
from his lips.

She extended the gun. “Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or maybe you get
a cancer. One dart, shitface. You won’t feel it for months.”

“Please. You call this in
Ingiliz
making me very tight. . . .”

“I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass out of here.”
She put the gun away.

“He is living in Fener, at Küchük Gülhane Djaddesi 14. I have his
tunel
route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli,
a modern place in the style
turistik
, but it has been arranged that the police have shown a certain interest in these
shows. The Yenishehir management has grown nervous.” He smiled. He smelled of some
metallic aftershave.

“I want to know about the implants,” she said, massaging her thigh, “I want to know
exactly what he can do.”

Terzibashjian nodded. “Worst is how you say in
Ingiliz
, the subliminals.” He made the word four careful syllables.

“O
N OUR LEFT
,” said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy streets, “is Kapali Carsi,
the grand bazaar.”

Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in the wrong
direction. The right side of the street was lined with miniature scrapyards. Case
saw a gutted locomotive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble. Headless
marble statues were stacked like firewood.

“Homesick?” Case asked.

“Place sucks,” the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting to resemble a worn carbon
ribbon. There were medallions of kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new
suit.

“Hey, Jersey,” Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind them, “where’d this guy get
his stuff installed?”

“In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you say it? Anyone
might buy these implants, but this one is most talented.” The Mercedes swerved, avoiding
a balloon-tired dray stacked
with hides. “I have followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near
him, in a day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion
poised beside a brake lever. . . .”

“ ‘What you see is what you get,’ yeah,” the Finn said. “I seen the schematics on
the guy’s silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow
it to a pulse and fry a retina over easy.”

“You have told this to your woman friend?” Terzibashjian leaned forward between the
ultrasuede buckets. “In Turkey, women are still women. This one . . .”

The Finn snorted. “She’d have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if you looked at
her cross-eyed.”

“I do not understand this idiom.”

“That’s okay,” Case said. “Means shut up.”

The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of aftershave. He began to whisper
to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments
of English. The transceiver answered in French. The Mercedes swung smoothly around
a corner. “The spice bazaar, sometimes called the Egyptian bazaar,” the car said,
“was erected on the site of an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This
is the city’s central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs. . . .”

“Drugs,” Case said, watching the car’s wipers cross and recross the bulletproof Lexan.
“What’s that you said before, Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?”

“A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes.” The Armenian went back to the conversation
he was having with the Sanyo.

“Demerol, they used to call that,” said the Finn. “He’s a speedball artist. Funny
class of people you’re mixing with, Case.”

“Never mind,” Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket, “we’ll get the poor
fucker a new pancreas or something.”

O
NCE THEY ENTERED
the bazaar, the Finn brightened noticeably, as though he were comforted by the crowd
density and the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Armenian along a broad concourse,
beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and green-painted
ironwork out of the age of steam. A thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered.

“Hey, Christ,” the Finn said, taking Case’s arm, “looka that.” He pointed. “It’s a
horse, man. You ever see a horse?”

Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was displayed on a sort
of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing’s
legs had been worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. “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.”

The animal’s brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they passed. Terzibashjian
led them into a cafe near the core of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked
as though it had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled
white coats dodged between the crowded tables, balancing steel trays with bottles
of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses of tea.

Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The Armenian was muttering
to his Sanyo. “Come,” he said, “he is moving. Each night he rides the
tunel
to the bazaar, to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman is close. Come.”

T
HE ALLEY WAS
an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone. The pavement was
uneven and smelled of a century’s dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone.
“Can’t see shit,” he whispered to the Finn. “That’s okay for sweetmeat,” the Finn
said. “Quiet,” said Terzibashjian, too loudly.

Wood grated on stone or concrete. 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. Case shivered.

“Now,” Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white light, directed from the
rooftop of the building opposite the market, pinned the slender figure beside the
ancient wooden door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted left, right, and the man
crumpled. Case thought
someone had shot him; he lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his
limp hands white and pathetic.

The floodlight never wavered.

The back of the fallen man’s jacket heaved and burst, blood splashing the wall and
doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the
glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert,
bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood on two legs, and
seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had
a head, but no neck. It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. 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. It kicked the rags of clothing
and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved.

Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing, his arms spread
like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash
of a pistol from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past
Case’s head; the Finn jerked him down into a crouch.

The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mismatched afterimages of muzzle-flash,
monster, and white beam. His ears rang.

Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shadows. Terzibashjian was leaning
against a steel door, his face very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and
watched blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied,
lay at his feet.

Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in her hand.

“Use the radio,” the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. “Call in Mahmut. We must
get him out of here. This is not a good place.”

“Little prick nearly made it,” the Finn said, his knees cracking loudly as he stood
up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. “You were watching the horror-show,
right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well, help ’em get
his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage
is getting his money’s worth.”

Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. “A Nambu,” she said. “Nice gun.”

Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle finger was missing.

W
ITH THE CITY
drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take them to Topkapi. The Finn
and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley.
Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian, who seemed on the verge
of fainting.