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
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
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.
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."
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.