William Gibson. Neuromancer
THE CRITICS RAVE ABOUT NEUROMANCER. . .
"Neuromancer is freshly imagined, compellingly detailed and chiling..."
-- The New York Times
"UNFORGETTABLE. . . The richness of Gibson's world is
incredible!"
-- Chicago Sun-Times
"SUPERB! Gibson has created a rich, detailed, and vivid near future,
populated with uncomfortably realistic characters . . . an amazingly comples
novel . . . Some will enjoy it as a fast-paced, exciting adventure; others
will claim it's actually a very subtle, clever mystery; still others
will see it as a thought-provoking social discourse. . . Neuromancer IS A
MAJOR NOVEL, difficult to compare with other works for the simple reason
that it really is new, and different . . . HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!"
-- Fantasy Review
"A flashy tour of a remarkably well-visualized future. . . Gibson
manufactures wild details with a virtuoso's glee. . . an impressive
new voice!"
-- Newsday
"WILLIAM GIBSON IS A WELCOME NEW TALENT!"
-- Locus
A SIGNIFICANT ACHIEVEMENT! William Gibson's Neuromancer is one of
the finest first novels of the last few years, and may be the only science
fiction novel which has combined hard science. . .and a well-developed
sensibility to produce a kind of high-tech punk novel."
-- Norman Spinrad
"Science Fiction of exceptional texture and vision. . .Gibson opens up
a new genre, with a finely crafted grittiness, with a number of literary and
computer inventions that may well stick. . .SHEER PLEASURE!"
Stewart Brand, San Francisco Chronicle
"A crowd-pleaser as well as a finely crafted piece of literature. . .
The book deserves immense popularity. . . READ IT!"
-- Edward Bryant, Mile High Futures
"A MINDBINDER OF A READ. . . fully realized in its geopolitical,
technological and, psychosexual dimensions. . ."
-- Village Voice
"William Gibson is one of the most excited new writers to hit science
fiction in a long time. His first novel is an event I've been eagerly
awaiting."
-- Robert Silverberg
"William Gibson's Neuromancer. . . brings an entirely new
electronic punk sensibility to SF, both in content and prose style. It has
been a long time indeed since a first novel established such a new and
unusual voice with this degree of strength and surety."
-- Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
"Say goodbye to your old stale futures. Here is an entirely realized
new world, intense as an electric shock. William Gibson's prose,
astonishing in it's clarity and skill, becomes high-tech electronic poetry.
. . An enthralling adventure story, as brilliant and coherent as a laser.
THIS IS WHY SCIENCE FICTION WAS INVENTED!"
-- Bruce Sterling
Ace books by William Gibson
BURNING CHROME COUNT ZERO MONA LISA OVERDRIVE
Neuromancer
William Gibson
This book was first published as an Ace Science Fiction original
edition. The first through third printings were as as an Ace Science Fiction
Special, edited by Terry Carr. A limited hardcover edition was published by
Phantasia Press in the Spring of 1986.
NEUROMANCER
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY Ace edition / July 1984
All rights reserved. Copyright © 1984 by William Gibson Cover art
by Richard Berry This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by
mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
ISBN: 0-441-56959-5
Ace books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison
Avenue, New York, New York 10016. The Name "Ace" and the "A" logo are
trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Dedication: for Deb
who made it possible
with love
* PART ONE. CHIBA CITY BLUES
1
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead
channel.
"It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he
shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat.
"It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency." It
was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for
professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear
two words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he
filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth
a web work of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the
bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the
crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
precise rows of tribal scars. "Wage was in here early, with two Joe boys,"
Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. "Maybe some
business with you, Case?"
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of
legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about
his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was
a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator,
cased in grubby pink plastic. "You are too much the artiste, Herr Case."
Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of
white-shirted belly with the pink claw. "You are the artiste of the slightly
funny deal."
"Sure," Case said, and sipped his beer. "Somebody's gotta be
funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you."
The whore's giggle went up an octave.
"Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's
a close personal friend of mine."
She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting
sound, her lips barely moving. But she left. "Jesus," Case said, "what kind
a creep joint you running here? Man can't have a drink."
"Ha," Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, "Zone shows a
percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value."
As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of
silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had
simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore's giggle rang
out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
Ratz grunted. "An angel passed."
"The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese bloody invented
nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right,
mate. . ."
"Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising
in him like bile, "that is so much bullshit."
The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese
had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole
bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair
the damage he'd suffered in that Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.
All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners
he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his
sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . .
The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no
console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it
through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo
and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark,
curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the
bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console
that wasn't there.
"I saw your girl last night," Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.
"I don't have one," he said, and drank.
"Miss Linda Lee."
Case shook his head.
"No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?"
The bartender's small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh.
"I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night,
you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."
"You're breaking my heart, Ratz." He finished his beer, paid and
left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained khaki nylon of
his windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell
his own stale sweat.
Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy a
rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best,
by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on
an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency,
jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied
consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief
he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the
exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems,
opening windows into rich fields of data.
He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn
he'd never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for
himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still
wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now.
He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled. Of course he was
welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it.
Because – still smiling – they were going to make sure he never
worked again.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by
micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,
it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the
elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was
meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the
old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of
the world's black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand
islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the
Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal.
In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,
he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in the
shadow land of black medicine. Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing, and
micro bionics, Chiba was a magnet for the Sprawl's techno-criminal
subcultures.
In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month round of
examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope,
had admired the expertise with which he'd been maimed, and then slowly
shaken their heads.
Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port,
beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast
stages; where you couldn't see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of
the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric
Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above
drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory
domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city
were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no
official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down
Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert,
waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.
Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de The, Case
washed down the night's first pill with a double espresso. It was a
flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian dex he bought from one of
Zone's girls.
The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon.
At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less
hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal overdrive,
hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to
someone else. In the first month, he'd killed two men and a woman over
sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down
until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish,
some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed
by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward
button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too
swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black
market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague
memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys
might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic
tanks.
Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted
punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed
the demands of an intricate protocol.
Alone at a table in the Jarre de The, with the octagon coming on,
pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling
hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he'd started
to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final
solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic
precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a
reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew
that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers,
who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge
that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its
expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee.
He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.
Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke,
holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline. .
. And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser
light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as
Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell
to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck
sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night,
with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money
already in his pocket. He'd come in out of the warm rain that sizzled
across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she'd been singled out for him,
one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she
played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one he'd seen,
hours later, on her sleeping face in a port side coffin, her upper lip like
the line children draw to represent a bird in flight.
Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he'd
made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
Eyes of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets at the
hover port and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept up, falling
along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the children of Tokyo
trooping past the famous boutiques in white loafers and cling wrap capes,
until she'd stood with him in the midnight clatter of a pachinko
parlor and held his hand like a child.
It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through
to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need.
He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg,
splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the
hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with
a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along
Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.
He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It was
vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate of the table
top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through
his spine he saw the countless random impacts required to create a surface
like that. The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the
previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese
plastics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad
nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once
glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never
be wiped away.
"Hey. Case, good buddy. . ."
He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She was wearing
faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers.
"I been lookin' for you, man." She took a seat opposite him, her
elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit had been ripped out at
the shoulders; he automatically checked her arms for signs of derms or the
needle. "Want a cigarette?"
She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle pocket and
offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a red plastic tube. "You
sleepin' okay, Case? You look tired." Her accent put her south along
the Sprawl, toward Atlanta. The skin below her eyes was pale and
unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty.
New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the
corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of
printed silk. The pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city
map.
"Not if I remember to take my pills," he said, as a tangible wave of
longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of
amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness
of a coffin near the port, her locked across the small of his back.
All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.
"Wage," she said, narrowing her eyes. "He wants to see you with a hole
in your face." She lit her own cigarette.
"Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?"
"No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys."
"I don't owe him enough. He does me, he's out the money
anyway." He shrugged.
"Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to be the example.
You seriously better watch it."
"Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?"
"Sleep." She shook her head. "Sure, Case." She shivered, hunched
forward over the table. Her face was filmed with sweat.
"Here," he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker, coming up
with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded
it in quarters, and passed it to her.
"You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage." There was something
in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read, something he'd never
seen there before.
"I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more coming," he lied,
as he watched his New Yen vanish into a zippered pocket.
"You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick."
"I'll see you, Linda," he said, getting up.
"Sure." A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her pupils.
Sanpaku. "You watch your back, man."
He nodded, anxious to be gone. He looked back as the plastic door swung
shut behind him, saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.
Friday night on Ninsei.
He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop
called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out
of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the
Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right
hand.
Was it authentic? lf that's for real, he thought, he's in
for trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a
certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored
mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in
Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic.
The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was a gaijin
crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting
pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies showing off grafts and
implants, and a dozen distinct species of hustler, all swarming the street
in an intricate dance of desire and commerce.
There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the
Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be
preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble
origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning
technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for
its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for
technology itself.
Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? Would Wage have
him killed to make an example? It didn't make much sense, but then
Wage dealt primarily in proscribed biologicals, and they said you had to be
crazy to do that.
But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case's primary insight into
the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the buyer nor the seller
really needed him. A middleman's business is to make himself a
necessary evil. The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the
criminal ecology of Night City had beep cut out with lies, scooped out a
night at a time with betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to
crumble, he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular
extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He knew Wage
hadn't liked that. Wage was his primary supplier, nine years in Chiba
and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd managed to forge links with
the rigidly stratified criminal establishment beyond Night City's
borders. Genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an
intricate ladder of fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace
something back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a dozen
cities.
Case found himself staring through a shop window. The place sold small
bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flicknives, lighters, pocket VTRs,
Simstim decks, weighted manriki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had
always fascinated him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were
chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on
water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against scarlet
ultra suede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fish line, their centers
stamped with dragons or yin yang symbols. They caught the street's
neon and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under
which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap
chrome.
"Julie," he said to his stars. "Time to see old Julie. He'll
know."
Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism
assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones. His primary
hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons
re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then
he'd fly to Hongkong and order the year's suits and shirts.
Sexless and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in
his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never seen him
wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely
of meticulous reconstructions of garments of the previous century. He
affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs
of pink synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian doll
house.
His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which
seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random
collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use
the place as his home. NeoAztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of
the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps
perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered
steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted
face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that
altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never
told the correct time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping
modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
"You seem to be clean, old son," said Deane's disembodied voice.
"Do come in." Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive
imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT
EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If
the furniture scattered in Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end
of the past century, the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of light
cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of dark green glass.
The importer was securely fenced behind a vast desk of painted steel,
flanked on either side by tall, drawered cabinets made of some sort of pale
wood. The sort of thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store
written records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes,
scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork
typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get around to reassembling.
"What brings you around, boyo?" Deane asked, offering Case a narrow
bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked paper. "Try one. Ting Ting Djahe,
the very best." Case refused the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden
swivel chair, and ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg.
"Julie I hear Wage wants to kill me."
"Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?"
"People."
"People," Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. "What sort of people?
Friends?"
Case nodded.
"Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?"
"I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to you?"
"Haven't been in touch, of late." Then he sighed. "If I did know,
of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they
are, you understand."
"Things?"
"He's an important connection Case."
"Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?"
"Not that I know of." Deane shrugged. They might have been discussing
the price of ginger. "If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you
come back in a week or so and I'll let you in on a little something
out of Singapore."
"Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?"
"Loose lips, old son!" Deane grinned. The steel desk was jammed with a
fortune in debugging gear.
"Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage."
Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his pale
silk tie.
He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit, the
sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close.
The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for
granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could
be quite a trick, behind a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge
and composed his narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to
let the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display window, he
managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical boutique, closed for
renovations. With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through
the glass at a flat lozenge of vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal
of imitation jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's
whores; it was tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a
subcutaneous chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking,
while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry the thing
around in your pocket?
Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied the reflection
of the passing crowd.
There.
Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored glasses,
dark clothing, slender. . .
And gone.
Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.
"Rent me a gun, Shin?"
The boy smiled. "Two hour." They stood together in the smell of fresh
raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall. "You come back, two hour."
"I need one now, man. Got anything right now?"
Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once been filled
with powdered horseradish. He produced a slender package wrapped in gray
plastic. "Taser. One hour, twenty New Yen. Thirty deposit."
"Shit. I don't need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna shoot
somebody, understand?"
The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horseradish cans.
"Two hour."
He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the display of
shuriken. He'd never thrown one in his life.
He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank chip that gave
his name as Charles Derek May. It beat Truman Starr, the best he'd
been able to do for a passport.
The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she had a few years
on old Deane, none of them with the benefit of science. He took his slender
roll of New Yen out of his pocket and showed it to her. "I want to buy a
weapon."
She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
"No," he said, "I don't like knives."
She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The lid was yellow
cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a coiled cobra with a swollen hood.
Inside were eight identical tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while
mottled brown fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for
him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one end and a
small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the tube with one hand, the
pyramid between her other thumb and forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled,
telescoping segments of tightly wound coil spring slid out and locked.
"Cobra," she said.
Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray.
The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have teeth tonight, and half the
crowd wore filtration masks. Case had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying
to discover a convenient way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd
settled for tucking the handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the
tube slanting across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between
his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt like it might
clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it made him feel better.
The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it
attracted a related clientele. Fridays and Saturdays were different. The
regulars were still there, most of them, but they faded behind an influx of
sailors and the specialists who preyed on diem. As Case pushed through the
doors, he looked for Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight. Lonny
Zone, the bar's resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly
interest as one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was
addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud Dancers. Catching
the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the bar. Zone came drifting
through the crowd in slow motion, his long face slack and placid.
"You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?"
Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.
"You sure, man?"
"Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago."
"Got some Joeboys with him? One of 'em thin, dark hair, maybe a
black jacket?"
"No," Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to indicate the
effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail. "Big boys. Graftees."
Zone's eyes showed very little white and less iris; under the drooping
lids, his pupils were dilated and enormous. He stared into Case's face
for a long time, then lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip.
"Cobra," he said, and raised an eyebrow. "You wanna fuck somebody up?"
"See you, Lonny." Case left the bar.
His tail was back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation the
octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else. You're enjoying
this, he thought; you're crazy.
Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in
the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but
strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a
field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking
to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a
highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all
around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the
mazes of the black market. . .
Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck 'em in. Last thing
they'll expect. He was half a block from the games arcade where
he'd first met Linda Lee.
He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sailors. One of
them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was through the entrance, the
sound crashing over him like surf, subsonics throbbing in the pit of his
stomach. Someone scored a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated
air burst drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball
mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight of unpainted
chip board stairs. He'd come here once with Wage, to discuss a deal in
proscribed hormonal triggers with a man called Matsuga. He remembered the
hallway, its stained matting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny
office cubicles. One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless
black t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a travel
poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined ideograms.
"Get your security up here," Case told her.
Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The last two
doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun and slammed the sole of
his nylon running shoe into the blue-lacquered composition door at the far
end. It popped, cheap hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness
there, the white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door to its
right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob, leaning in with
everything he had. Something snapped, and he was inside. This was where he
and Wage had met with Matsuga, but whatever front company Matsuga had
operated was long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind
the arcade, filtering in through soot blown plastic. He made out a snake
like loop of fiber optics protruding from a wall socket, a pile of discarded
food containers, and the bladeless nacelle of an electric fan.
The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged out of his
jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched. It split, requiring
two more blows to free it from the frame. Over the muted chaos of the games,
an alarm began to cycle, triggered either by the broken window or by the
girl at the head of the corridor.
Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to full
extension.
With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume he'd
gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges. The
cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel shaft
amplifying his pulse.
Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm, the crashing
of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was like some
half-forgotten friend. Not the cold rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but
simple animal fear. He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of
anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was.
This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He might die
here. They might have guns. . .
A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man's voice,
shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. Another crash.
And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid beats of
his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel scraped the matting.
The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the cobra
into its handle and scrambled for the window, blind with fear, his nerves
screaming. He was up, out, and falling, all before he was conscious of what
he'd done. The impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through
his shins.
A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch framed a heap of
discarded fiber optics and the chassis of a junked console. He'd
fallen face forward on a slab of soggy chip board, he rolled over, into the
shadow of the console. The cubicle's window was a square of faint
light. The alarm still oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the
roar of the games.
A head appeared, framed in the window, back lit by the fluorescents in
the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he still couldn't read
the features. Glint of silver across the eyes. "Shit," someone said, a
woman, in the accent of the northern Sprawl.
The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long count of
twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his hand, and it took
him a few seconds to remember what it was. He limped away down the alley,
nursing his left ankle.
x x x
Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of a
South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on the first shot, with
a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22 long rifle, and Case
would've preferred lead azide explosives to the simple Chinese hollow
points Shin had sold him. Still it was a handgun and nine rounds of
ammunition, and as he made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he
cradled it in his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in
a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across in the dark.
He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on Ninsei and
dry-swallowed another octagon.
The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to Ninsei,
then over to Baiitsu. His tail, he'd decided, was gone and that was
fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and it wouldn't wait. A
block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood a featureless ten-story office
building in ugly yellow brick. Its windows were dark now, but a faint glow
from the roof was visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near
the main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideograms. If the
place had another name, Case didn't know it; it was always referred to
as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through an alley off Baiitsu, where an
elevator waited at the foot of a transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap
Hotel, was an afterthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy.
Case climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked length of
rigid magnetic tape.
Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he'd
arrived in Chiba, but he'd never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in
cheaper places.
The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage
was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the
lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistol grip as the cage
slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent
jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served
the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese
teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white
fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six
tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side. Case nodded in the boy's
direction and limped across the plastic grass to the nearest ladder. The
compound was roofed with cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong
wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to
open without a key.
The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged his
way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long,
the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed
his key into the slot and waited for verification from the house computer.
Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a
creak of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling the
hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated the manual
latch.
There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi pocket computer
and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The cooler contained the remains
of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice carefully wrapped in paper to delay
evaporation, and a spun aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown
temperfoam slab that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from
his pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his jacket. The
coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall, opposite a panel
listing house rules in seven languages. Case took the pink handset from its
cradle and punched a Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times,
then hung up. His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi
wasn't taking calls.
He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
A woman answered, something in Japanese.
"Snake Man there?"
"Very good to hear from you," said Snake Man, coming in on an
extension. "I've been expecting your call."
"I got the music you wanted." Glancing at the cooler.
"I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you
front?"
"Oh, man, I really need the money bad. . ."
Snake Man hung up.
"You shit" Case said to the humming receiver. He stared at the cheap
little pistol.
"Iffy," he said, "it's all looking very iffy tonight."
x x x
Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands in the
pockets of his jacket; one held the rented pistol, the other the aluminum
flask.
Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from a beer
pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh tilted against the
wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid called Kurt was on the bar,
tending a thin crowd of mostly silent drunks. Ratz's plastic arm
buzzed as he raised the pitcher and drank. His shaven head was filmed with
sweat. "You look bad, friend artiste," he said, flashing the wet ruin of his
teeth.
"I'm doing just fine," said Case, and grinned like a skull.
"Super fine." He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands still in his
pockets.
"And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of
booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?"
"Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?"
"Proof against fear and being alone," the bartender continued. "Listen
to the fear. Maybe it's your friend."
"You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz? Somebody
hurt?"
"Crazy cut a security man." He shrugged. "A girl, they say."
"I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I. . ."
"Ah." Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single line. He
was looking past Case, toward the entrance. "I think you are about to."
Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. The speed sang
in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery with sweat.
"Herr Wage," Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manipulator as if he
expected it to be shaken. "How great a pleasure. Too seldom do you honor
us."
Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face. It was a
tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vat grown sea-green Nikon
transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of
platinum on either wrist. He was flanked by his Joe boys, nearly identical
young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
"How you doing, Case?"
"Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ashtray in
his pink plastic claw, "I want no trouble here." The ashtray was made of
thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it
smoothly, butts and shards of green plastic cascading onto the table top.
"You understand?"
"Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you wanna try that thing
on me?"
"Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt," Ratz said, his tone
conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian standing
on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun at the trio. The
thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped with a kilometer of
glass filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine
revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.
"Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
"Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you owe me. These," and he glowered
at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better. You don't take anybody
off in the Chatsubo."
Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody off? We just
wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together."
Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at Wage's
crotch. "I hear you wanna do me." Ratz's pink claw closed around the
pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or
something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill you?" Wage turned
to the boy on his left. "You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me."
Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely deserted
except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot
of a barstool. The barrel of the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the
door, then swung back to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol
clattered on the table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round
out of the chamber.
"Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
Linda.
"Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
"Get him out of here," Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge
of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette.
Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet
sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out of his pocket and
handed it to Wage. "All I got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move
it fast. Had the rest of my roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now."
"You okay, Case?" The flask had already vanished behind a gunmetal
lapel. "I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look bad. Like
hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep."
"Yeah." He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. "Well, I had
this fifty, but I gave it to somebody." He giggled. He picked up the
.22's magazine and the one loose cartridge and dropped them into one
pocket, then put the pistol in the other. "I gotta see Shin, get my deposit
back."
"Go home," said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with something
like embarrassment. "Artiste. Go home."
He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered his way
past the plastic doors.
"Bitch," he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei the
holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon was already cold
and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from a street vendor's foam
thimble and watched the sun come up. "You fly away, honey. Towns like this
are for people who like the way down." But that wasn't it, really, and
he was finding it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She
just wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy it for her,
if she could find the right fence. And that business with the fifty;
she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was about to rip him for the
rest of what he had.
When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on the desk.
Different textbook. "Good buddy," Case called across the plastic turf, "you
don't need to tell me. I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said
she had my key. Nice little tip for you, say fifty New ones?" The boy put
down his book. "Woman," Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
his thumb. "Silk." He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back, nodded. "Thanks,
asshole," Case said.
On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed it up
somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to
rent a black box that would open anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came
on as he crawled in.
"Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday night
special you rented from the waiter?"
She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She
had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box muzzle of a
flechette pistol emerged from her hands. "That you in the arcade?" He pulled
the hatch down. "Where's Linda?"
"Hit that latch switch."
He did.
"That your girl? Linda?"
He nodded.
"She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the
gun, man?" She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of
black boots deep in the temperfoam.
"I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him
for half what I paid. You want the money?"
"No."
"Want some dry ice? All I got, right now."
"What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at the
arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with nunchucks."
"Linda said you were gonna kill me."
"Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here."
"You aren't with Wage?"
She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset,
sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin
above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers
curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished
burgundy. The nails looked artificial. "I think you screwed up, Case. I
showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture."
"So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the hatch.
"You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My
name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work for. Just
wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you "
"That's good."
"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just
the way I'm wired." She wore tight black glove leather jeans and a
bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light.
"If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy, Case? You look like you like
to take stupid chances."
"Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
"That's fine, man." The fletcher vanished into the black jacket.
"Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the
stupidest chances of your whole life."
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread,
and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel
blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
2
After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the
Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A
white Braun coffee maker steamed on a low table by the sliding glass panels
that opened onto a narrow balcony.
"Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it." She took off her black
jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She
wore a sleeveless gray pullover with plain steel zips across each shoulder.
Bulletproof, Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms
and legs felt like they were made out of wood.
"Case." He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. "My name is
Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and
muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think
of bleach. "Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy."
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding
coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation rice paper wall. He saw the
angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
"Get your coffee, Case," Molly said. "You're okay, but
you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say." She sat
cross legged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher without
bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table
and refilled his cup.
"Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Armitage ran a
large hand back through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet
flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia,
Case."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."
"Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus
with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out."
He sensed abrupt tension. Armitagc walkcd to the window and looked out
over Tokyo Bay. "That isn't true. One unit made it back to Helsinki,
Case."
Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
"You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use
to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault
on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing micro light, a
pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The
Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs."
"Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
"Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics."
"Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll
just be going. . ."
"I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind."
"You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're rich enough
to hire expensive razor girls to haul my ass up here, is all. I'm
never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else." He crossed
to the window and looked down. "That's where I live now."
"Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
you when you're not looking."
"Profile?"
"We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your
aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You're
suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical
projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year."
" 'We.&lsquo " He met the faded blue eyes. " ‘We'
who?"
"What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage,
Case?" Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of
metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream,
and that soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again.
Case's dreams always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one
was over.
"What would you say, Case?"
Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
"I'd say you were full of shit."
Armitage nodded.
"Then I'd ask what your terms were."
"Not very different than what you're used to, Case."
"Let the man get some sleep, Armitage," Molly said from her futon, the
components of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive puzzle.
"He's coming apart at the seams."
"Terms," Case said, "and now. Right now."
He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.
The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek
pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place from
the round he'd made his first month in Chiba.
"Scared, Case. You're real scared." It was Sunday afternoon and
he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green
bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a
large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.
"It'll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage
has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the
program he's giving them to tell them how to do it. He'll put
them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what
that's worth?" She hooked thumbs in the belt loops of her leather
jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots.
The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were
empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
"You're street samurai," he said. "How long you work for him?"
"Couple of months."
"What about before that?"
"For somebody else. Working girl, you know?"
He nodded.
"Funny, Case."
"What's funny?"
‘It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know
how you're wired."
"You don't know me, sister."
"You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad
luck."
"How about him? He okay, Molly?" The robot crab moved toward them,
picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have
been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired
a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
"What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass." The crab
had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision,
the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back,
but the bronze limbs soon righted it.
Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel
waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for
cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said.
"You want to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from
the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked
as though it belonged on an operating table.
"Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
gets more all the time." Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth.
"Or maybe, maybe something's on to him. . ." She shrugged.
"What's that mean?"
"I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what
we're really working for."
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning,
he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours . Then
he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security
perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chain link. If
she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it. He'd
avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Armitage's
call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a
gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
"If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet
you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting
to see if Case would follow.
Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down
corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain
beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. . .
Hold still. Don't move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces
from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is
poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don't you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix,
and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
"Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!" She was straddling his chest,
a blue plastic syrette in one hand. "You don't lie still, I'll
slit your fucking throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors."
He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain
midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of
the Sprawl's towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward
him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass. . .
"Case? It's Wednesday, Case." She moved, rolling over, reaching
across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal
from a bottle of water and drink. "Here." She put the bottle in his hand. "I
can see in the dark, Case. Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
"My back hurts."
"That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood too.
Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new
tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff I dun no. Lot of injections.
They didn't have to open anything up for the main show." She settled
back beside him. "It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my
optic nerve."
He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm
water spraying his chest and thighs.
"I gotta punch deck," he heard himself say. He was groping for his
clothes. "I gotta know. . ."
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. "Sorry,
hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if
you jacked in now. Doctor's orders. Besides, they figure it worked.
Check you in a day or so." He lay down again.
"Where are we?"
"Home. Cheap Hotel."
"Where's Armitage?"
"Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of
here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl." She touched his
shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good massage."
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers
against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back,
kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her
fingers brushed his neck.
"How come you're not at the Hilton?"
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs and gently
encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a
minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather
of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself
harden against the temperfoam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat.
He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling
her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his
cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.
"It's okay," she said, "I can see." Sound of the jeans peeling
down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a
leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted
lenses. "Don't," she said, "fingerprints."
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his
thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia.
As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces,
fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his
back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping
down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring
blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were
shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were
strong and wet against his hips.
On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the
motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko
parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in
the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
"You seen Wage, Ratz?"
"Not tonight." Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.
"You see him, tell him I got his money."
"Luck changing, my artiste?"
"Too soon to tell."
"Well, I gotta see this guy," Case said, watching his reflection in her
glasses. "I got biz to cancel out of."
"Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight." She stood
beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
"The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I
don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people
who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my
people, you know?"
Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
"I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza,
and they'll go down, understand?" he lied, his hand on the shoulder of
her black jacket. "Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?"
"Not what I'm paid for."
"What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends
die because you're too literal about your instructions is something
else."
"Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to check
us out with your smuggler." She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered
Kandinsky coffee table.
"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 Dean'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."
x x x
And 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 port side 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 on to 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.
After 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.
* PART TWO * THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION
3
Home.
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. . .
Case 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 chip-board, 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 fire door. 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.
"Someone'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."
Summer 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 coffee maker.
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."
Lifeless 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 cart wheeling 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 non slip 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 threesixty." 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."
"Quine dead too?"
"No such luck. He's in Europe. He doesn't come into this."
"Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free. He was the
best. You know he died brain death three times?"
She nodded.
"Flat lined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. ‘Boy, I was daid.'
"
"Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing Armitage
since I signed on. But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu, a government,
or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets orders. Like something tells him to
go off to Chiba, pick up a pillhead who's making one last wobble
throught the burnout belt, and trade a program for the operation
that'll fix him up. We could a bought twenty world class cowboys for
what the market was ready to pay for that surgical program. You were good,
but not that good. . ." She scratched the side of her nose.
"Obviously makes sense to somebody," he said. "Somebody big."
"Don't let me hurt your feelings." She grinned. "We're
gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flatline's
construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault uptown. Tighter than
an eel's ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they got all their new material
for the fall season locked in there too. Steal that and we'd be richer
than shit. But no, we gotta get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird."
"Yeah, it's all weird. You're weird, this hole's
weird, and who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?"
"Finn's an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software. This
privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage to let him be our tech here,
so when he shows up later, you never saw him. Got it?"
"So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?"
"I'm an easy make." She smiled. "Anybody any good at what they
do, that's what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle." He
stared at her.
"So tell me what you know about Armitage."
"For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any Screaming Fist. I
checked. But that doesn't mean much. He doesn't look like any of
the pics of the guys who got out." She shrugged. "Big deal. And starters is
all I got." She drummed her nails on the back of the chair. "But you are a
cowboy, aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look
around." She smiled.
"He'd kill me."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real bad. Besides,
you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him, sure."
"What else is on that list you mentioned?"
"Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name of Peter
Riviera. Real ugly customer."
"Where's he?"
"Dunno. But he's one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile." She
made a face. "God awful." She stood up and stretched, catlike. "So we got an
axis going, boy? We're together in this? Partners?"
Case looked at her. "I gotta lotta choice, huh?"
She laughed. "You got it, cowboy."
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said the
voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with
cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a
forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial
possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned
through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire
control circuits of tanks and war planes. "Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in
every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the
human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace
of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,
receding. . ."
"What's that?" Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.
"Kid's show." A discontinuous flood of images as the selector
cycled. "Off," he said to the Hosaka.
"You want to try now, Case?"
Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside him.
"You want me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone. . ." He shook his
head.
"No. Stay, doesn't matter." He settled the black terry sweatband
across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes. He
stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop
window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He
glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift,
tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its
center.
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in
from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled
from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala
of visual information. Please, he prayed, now –
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now –
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray.
Expanding –
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding
of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending
to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern
Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank
of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military
systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers
caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He
checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for five hours. He carried
the Ono-Sendai to one of the new worktables and collapsed across the
bedslab, pulling Molly's black silk sleeping bag over his head.
The security package taped to the steel fire door bleeped twice. "Entry
requested," it said. "Subject is cleared per my program."
"So open it." Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door
opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.
"Christ," said a hoarse voice, "I know that bitch can see in the dark.
. ." A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. "Turn the lights on,
okay?" Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch.
"I'm the Finn," said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case.
"Case."
"Pleased to meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing some hardware for
your boss, it looks like." The Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket
and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the room. He crossed to the
worktable and glanced at the OnoSendai. "Looks stock. Soon fix that. But
here is your problem, kid." He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his
jacket, flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black
rectangle from the envelope. "Goddamn factory prototypes," he said, tossing
the thing down on the table. "Cast 'em into a block of polycarbon,
can't get in with a laser without frying the works. Booby-trapped for
x-ray, ultrascan, God knows what else. We'll get in, but there's
no rest for the wicked, right?" He folded the envelope with great care and
tucked it away in an inside pocket.
"What is it?"
"It's a flip flop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai
here, you can access live or recorded Simstim without having to jack out of
the matrix."
"What for?"
"I haven't got a clue. Know I'm fitting Moll for a
broadcast rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll
access." The Finn scratched his chin. "So now you get to find out just how
tight those jeans really are, huh?"
4
Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead,
watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid
overhead. A countdown was in progress in one corner of the monitor screen.
Cowboys didn't get into Simstim, he thought, because it was
basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic
tiara dangling from a Simstim deck were basically the same, and that the
cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human
sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but Simstim itself struck him
as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was
edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a
segment, you didn't feel it.
Th