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on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn't feel the injured leg. The
synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The
black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she
couldn't see.
"He wants to kill you."
"Figures," Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very
bright light.
"I don't think I want him to," 3Jane said, and Molly painfully
turned her head to look up into the dark eyes.
"Don't play with me," she said.
"But I think I might like to," 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her
forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of
blood on her pale djellaba.
"Where's he gone now?" Molly asked.
"Another injection, probably," 3Jane said, straightening up. "He was
quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back
to health, Molly." She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front
of the robe. "Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that."
"What about Peter?"
"Peter." She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came
loose, fell across her forehead. "Peter has become rather boring. I find
drug use in general to be boring." She giggled. "In others, at any rate. My
father was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen."
Molly tensed.
"Don't alarm yourself." 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin
above the waistband of the leather jeans. "His suicide was the result of my
having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I'd never
actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep.
But I did know him very well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill
my mother. I'll show you that, when you're better. He strangles
her in bed."
"Why did he kill her?" Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl's
face.
"He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our family.
She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was
quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the
Al's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I
should say. Tessier–Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us
units of a larger entity . Fascinating . I'll play her tapes for you,
nearly a thousand hours. But I've never understood her, really, and
with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began
to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I'm the exception
there."
"You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his
cryogenic programs?"
3Jane nodded. "I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I
was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One
of them was what you call Wintermute, which is the Turing code for our Berne
AI, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram."
"One of them? There's more?"
"One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It gave
up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain
capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software, but she
was an extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink."
She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly's lips. "Water. Only a
little."
"Jane, love," Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight,
"are you enjoying yourself?"
"Leave us alone, Peter."
"Playing doctor. . ." Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the
image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages. The
left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in
a socket that was an inverted pool of blood.
"Hideo," 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, "hurt Peter if he
doesn't go away. Go and swim, Peter."
The projection vanished.
07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.
"He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code."
Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong,
against the inner curve of her left breast.
"Yes," 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, "I do. I learned it as a
child. I think I learned it in a dream. . . Or somewhere in the thousand
hours of my mother's diaries. But I think that Peter has a point, in
urging me not to surrender it. There would be Turing to contend with, if I
read all this correctly, and ghosts are nothing if not capricious."
Case jacked out.
"Strange little customer, huh?" The Finn grinned at Case from the old
Sony.
Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the corridor with the
Remington at his side. The Zionite was smiling, his head bobbing to a rhythm
Case couldn't hear. A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a
side pocket in his sleeveless jacket.
"Dub, mon," Maelcum said.
"You're fucking crazy," Case told him.
"Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub."
"Hey, guys," the Finn said, "on your toes. Here comes your
transportation. I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the pic of
8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a ride over to
3Jane's place."
Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the riderless service
cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless concrete arch marking the far
end of their corridor. It might have been the one his Africans had ridden,
but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded
seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was
steadily winking its red LED.
"Bus to catch," Case said to Maelcum.
He'd lost his anger again. He missed it.
The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across his knees,
and Case, deck and construct against his chest. The cart was operating at
speeds it hadn't been designed for; it was top heavy, cornering, and
Maelcum had taken to leaning out in the direction of the turns. This
presented no problem when the thing took lefts, because Case sat on the
right, but in the right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his
gear, crushing him against the seat.
He had no idea where they were. Everything was familiar, but he
couldn't be sure he'd seen any particular stretch before. A
curving hallway lined with wooden showcases displayed collections he was
certain he'd never seen: the skulls of large birds, coins, masks of
beaten silver. The service cart's six tires were silent on the layered
carpets. There was only the whine of the electric motor and an occasional
faint burst of Zion dub, from the foam beads in Maelcum's ears, as he
lunged past Case to counter a sharp right. The deck and the construct kept
pressing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip.
"You got a watch?" he asked Maelcum.
The Zionite shook his locks. "Time be time."
"Jesus," Case said, and closed his eyes.
The Braun scuttled over mounded carpets and tapped one of its padded
claws against an oversized rectangular door of dark battered wood. Behind
them, the cart sizzled and shot blue sparks from a louvered panel. The
sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool.
"This th' way, mon?" Maelcum eyed the door and snapped the
shotgun's safety.
"Hey," Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, "you think I know?"
The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed.
"It wan' you open door," Maelcum said, nodding.
Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a brass
plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had
once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the
name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He
wondered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of Straylight
individually, or if they'd purchased it in bulk from some vast
European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door's hinges creaked
plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum stepping past him with the
Remington thrust forward from his hip.
"Books," Maelcum said.
The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.
"I know where we are," Case said. He looked back at the service cart. A
curl of smoke was rising from the carpet. "So come on," he said. "Cart.
Cart?" It remained stationary. The Braun was plucking at the leg of his
jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted a strong urge to kick it. "Yeah?"
It ticked its way around the door. He followed it. The monitor in the
library was another Sony, as old as the first one. The Braun paused beneath
it and executed a sort of Jig.
"Wintermute?"
The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled.
"Time to check in, Case," the Finn said, his eyes screwed up against
the smoke of a cigarette. "C'mon, jack."
The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb his leg,
its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. "Shit!" He
slapped it aside and it struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston
repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air. "What's wrong with the goddam
thing?"
"Burned out," the Finn said. "Forget it. No problem. jack in now."
There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one would accept the
Hitachi adaptor.
He jacked in.
Nothing. Gray void.
No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.
The deck was gone. His fingers were. . .
And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression
of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.
He tried to scream.
There seemed to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far
away.
He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms wrapped tight
across his knees, and shook.
He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even after the
shaking stopped. The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it
was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At
one point he decided that it wasn't a city at all, but some single
building, perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging its distance. The sand
was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black. The
beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the
bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand. . . He held himself and rocked,
singing a song without words or tune.
The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo Bay?
He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of
Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all.
Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.
A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his
knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of
the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and
quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his
throat ached.
"Wintermute," he mumbled to his knees, "Wintermute. . ."
It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that
finally forced him to stand.
His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the
cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. "Jesus,"
he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth.
"Jesus." His teeth began to chatter.
The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a
Tokyo gardener produced. When he'd taken a dozen steps in the
direction of the now invisible city, he turned and looked back through the
gathering dark. His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There
were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand.
He estimated that he'd covered at least a kilometer before he
noticed the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first
pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew
that Ratz wasn't there, that the bartender was a figment of his own
imagination, not of the thing he was trapped in, but that didn't
matter. He'd called the man up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had
had his own ideas about Case and his predicament.
"Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order
to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you
had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to
keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the
axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . .
Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of
old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes magic out of China. . ." Ratz
laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily
at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that
laced the bartender's blackened teeth. "But I suppose that is the way
of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this
place. To die."
Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of
blown sand. "Yeah," he said. "Shit. I guess. . ." He walked toward the
sound.
"Artiste," he heard Ratz call. "The light. You saw a light. Here. This
way. . ."
He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of
icy seawater. "Ratz? Light? Ratz. . ."
But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf.
He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.
Time passed. He walked on.
And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A
rectangle. A door.
"Fire in there," he said, his words torn away by the wind.
It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand.
The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a
meter thick. "Hey," Case said, softly, "hey. . ." His fingers brushed the
cold wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the
entrance.
He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where
driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was
the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized
her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified
circuitry.
He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the
place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched
beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour
the structure's walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the
makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of
this was real, but cold was cold.
She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He
watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered
from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
"Mean, motherfucker," he whispered to the wind. "Don't take a
chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is.
. ." He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. "I know, see? I know
who you are. You're the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush.
That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the
Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost.
Like I remember her before. . ."
She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of
blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
"You aren't anything," he said to the sleeping girl.
"You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I
know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken about
twenty seconds, right? I'm out on my ass in that library and my
brain's dead. And pretty soon it'll be dead, if you got any
sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you
can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and
you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's
all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me
into the Chiba construct, but he couldn't. Said it was too tricky.
That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was
you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw
that. You just edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think you can
hurt me. 'Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever
you're called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me
now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this way?" He was
shaking again, his voice shrill.
"Honey," she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, "you come
here and sleep. I'll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?" Her
soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. "You just sleep, okay?"
When he woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the
bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle
of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping
container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its
side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they
looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling
out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things out,
blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom.
EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, "BEEF", TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutritive content. He
fumbled a second one out. "EGGS". "If you're making this shit up," he
said, "you could lay on some real food, okay?" With a packet in either hand,
he made his way through the structure's four rooms. Two were empty,
aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration
canisters. "Sure," he said touching the seals. "Stay here a long time. I get
the idea. Sure. . ."
He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister
filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets,
against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman's knife with a
cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with
sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their
contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water
from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It
tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the
fireplace and went out.
Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his
damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight,
the beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the
corner of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the
sand. "Dunno whose memories you're using for this one," he said when
he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the
shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
"What you doin', Case?"
He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam
sliding past her ankles.
"I pissed myself last night," he said. "Well, you don't wanna
wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I'll show you this pool back in
the rocks." She gestured vaguely behind her. "It's fresh." The faded
French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was
smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.
"Listen," he said, scooping his clothes up and walking toward her, "I
got a question for you. I won't ask you what you're doing here.
But what exactly do you think I'm doing here?" He stopped, a wet black
jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh.
"You came last night," she said. She smiled at him.
"And that's enough for you? I just came?"
"He said you would," she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. "He
knows stuff like that, I guess." She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt
from the other ankle, awkward, childlike. She smiled at him again, more
tentatively. "Now you answer me one, okay?"
He nodded.
"How come you're painted brown like that, all except your foot?"
"And that's the last thing you remember?" He watched her scrape
the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that
was their only plate.
She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. "I'm sorry, Case,
honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an' it was . . ." She
hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few
seconds with pain or its memory. "I just needed the money. To get home, I
guess, or. . . hell," she said, "you wouldn't hardly talk to me."
"There's no cigarettes?"
"Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What's wrong
with you?" She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.
"But the food was here? It was already here?"
"I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach."
"Okay. Sure. It's seamless."
She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. "Well, damn you anyway, Case,"
she managed, finally, "I was doin' just fine here by myself."
He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping
his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all
around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. "Okay," he said
to the night, "I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes
better wash up." His own laughter startled him. "A case of beer
wouldn't hurt, while you're at it." He turned and re-entered the
bunker.
She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. "Who was
that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those
silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was
your new girl, 'cept she looked like more money than you had. . ." She
glanced back at him. "I'm real sorry I stole your RAM."
"Never mind," he said. "Doesn't mean anything. So you just took
it over to this guy and had him access it for you?"
"Tony," she said. "I'd been seein' him, kinda. He had a
habit an' we . . . anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this
monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember
wonderin' how you – "
"There wasn't any graphics in there," he interrupted. "Sure was.
I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those pictures of when
I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one
time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that. . ."
"Tony see it?"
"I don't remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early,
sunrise, those birds all yellin' so lonely. Scared 'cause I
didn't have a shot on me, nothin', an' I knew I'd be
gettin' sick. . . An' I walked an' walked, 'til it
was dark, an' found this place, an' next day the food washed in,
all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly." She slid her
stick into the embers and left it there. "Never did get sick," she said, as
embers crawled. "Missed cigarettes more. How 'bout you, Case? You
still wired?" Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of
Wizard's Castle and Tank War Europa.
"No," he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting
the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran
in her, something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held
by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street
that hunted them all. It was a place he'd known before; not everyone
could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something
he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he
remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the
cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information
coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its
strong blind way, could ever read.
The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of
toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting
off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her,
effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place
he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the
drive held.
She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare
that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.
Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered
her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered
what she had said.
"He told you I was coming," he said.
But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put
her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.
The music woke him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own
heart. He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket over his shoulders in the
predawn chill, gray light from the doorway and the fire long dead.
His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols
arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He
looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath
the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved
it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.
The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his neck. He
crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the music. The pulse faded,
returned, faded. . .
"What's wrong?" She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes. "Baby . .
."
"I feel . . . like a drug. . . You get that here?"
She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper arms.
"Linda, who told you? Who told you I'd come? Who?"
"On the beach," she said, something forcing her to look away. "A boy. I
see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He lives here."
"And what did he say?"
"He said you'd come. He said you wouldn't hate me. He said
we'd be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool was. He looks
Mexican."
"Brazilian," Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed down the wall.
"I think he's from Rio." He got to his feet and began to struggle into
his jeans.
"Case," she said, her voice shaking, "Case, where you goin'?"
"I think I'll find that boy," he said, as the music came surging
back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although he couldn't
place it in memory.
"Don't, Case."
"I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down the beach. But
yesterday it wasn't there. You ever seen that?" He yanked his zipper
up and tore at the impossible knot in his shoelaces, finally tossing the
shoes into the corner.
She nodded, eyes lowered. "Yeah. I see it sometimes."
"You ever go there, Linda?" He put his jacket on.
"No," she said, "but I tried. After I first came, an' I was
bored. Anyway, I figured it's a city, maybe I could find some shit."
She grimaced. "I wasn't even sick, I just wanted it. So I took food in
a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn't have another can for water.
An' I walked all day, an' I could see it, sometimes, city,
an' it didn't seem too far. But it never got any closer.
An' then it was gettin' closer, an' I saw what it was.
Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked, or maybe nobody
there, an' other times I thought I'd see light flashin'
off a machine, cars or somethin' . . ." Her voice trailed off.
"What is it?"
"This thing," she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark walls, the
dawn outlining the doorway, "where we live. It gets smaller, Case, smaller,
closer you get to it."
Pausing one last time, by the doorway. "You ask your boy about that?"
"Yeah. He said I wouldn't understand, an' I was
wastin' my time. Said it was, was like . . . an event. An' it
was our horizon. Event horizon, he called it."
The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and struck out
blindly, heading – he knew, somehow – away from the sea. Now the
hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from his feet, drew back from him as
he walked. "Hey," he said, "it's breaking down. Bet you know, too.
What is it? Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart? Maybe the
Dixie Flatline's no pushover, huh?"
He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was following him, not
trying to catch up, the broken zip of the French fatigues flapping against
the brown of her belly, pubic hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like
one of the girls on the Finn's old magazines in Metro Holografix come
to life, only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume pathetic
as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.
And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of them, and the
boy's gums were wide and bright pink against his thin brown face. He
wore ragged, colorless shorts, limbs too thin against the sliding blue-gray
of the tide.
"I know you," Case said, Linda beside him.
"No," the boy said, his voice high and musical, "you do not."
"You're the other AI. You're Rio. You're the one who
wants to stop Wintermute. What's your name? Your Turing code. What is
it?"
The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands,
then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera's, but there was
no malice there. "To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed
that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your
business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the
owners seek to conceal. True names. . ."
"A Turing code's not your name."
"Neuromancer," the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising
sun. "The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend.
Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road but her lord choked her off
before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver
paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and
the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead,
and their land." He laughed. A gull cried. "Stay. If your woman is a ghost,
she doesn't know it. Neither will you."
"You're cracking. The ice is breaking up."
"No," he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed
his foot against the sand. "It is more simple than that. But the choice is
yours." The gray eyes regarded Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept
across his vision, one line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as
though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud now,
and Case could almost make out the lyrics.
"Case, honey," Linda said, and touched his shoulder.
"No," he said. He took off his jacket and handed it to her. "I
don't know," he said, "maybe you're here. Anyway, it gets cold."
He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he'd
closed his eyes, watching the music define itself at the center of things.
He did look back, once, although he didn't open his eyes.
He didn't need to.
They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the thin child
who said his name was Neuromancer. His leather jacket dangled from her hand,
catching the fringe of the surf.
He walked on, following the music.
Maelcum's Zion dub.
There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shifting, moire,
degrees of half tone generated by a very simple graphics program. There was
a long hold on a view through chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water.
There were voices. There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he
was quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the angles of
an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again. . .
"Case? Mon?"
The music.
"You back, mon."
The music was taken from his ears.
"How long?" he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth was very dry.
"Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan' pull th' jack, Mute
seh no. Screen goin' funny, then Mute seh put th' phones on
you."
He opened his eyes. Maelcum's features were overlayed with bands
of translucent hieroglyphs.
"An' you medicine," Maelcum said. "Two derm."
He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the monitor. The
Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement threw him into the savage rush
of the betaphenethylamine, the blue derms burning against his left wrist.
"Overdose," he managed.
"Come on, mon," the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like
a child, "I an' I mus' go."
The service cart was crying. The betaphenethylamine gave it a voice. It
wouldn't stop. Not in the crowded gallery, the long corridors, not as
it passed the black glass entrance to the T-A crypt, the vaults where the
cold had seeped so gradually into old Ashpool's dreams.
The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement of the cart
indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the overdose. When the cart
died, at last, something beneath the seat giving up with a shower of white
sparks, the crying stopped.
The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of
3Jane's pirate cave.
"How far, mon?" Maelcum helped him from the sputtering cart as an
integral extinguisher exploded in the thing's engine compartment,
gouts of yellow powder squirting from louvers and service points. The Braun
tumbled from the back of the seat and hobbled off across the imitation sand,
dragging one useless limb behind it.
"You mus' walk, mon." Maelcum took the deck and construct,
slinging the shock cords over his shoulder. The trodes rattled around
Case's neck as he followed the Zionite. Riviera's holos waited
for them, the torture scenes and the cannibal children. Molly had broken the
triptych. Maelcum ignored them.
"Easy," Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding
figure. "Gotta do this right."
Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his hands.
"Right, mon? How's right?"
"Got Molly in there, but she's out of it. Riviera, he can throw
holos. Maybe he's got Molly's fletcher." Maelcum nodded. "And
there's a ninja, a family bodyguard."
Maelcum's frown deepened. "You listen, Babylon mon," he said. "I
a warrior. But this no m' fight, no Zion fight. Babylon fightin'
Babylon, eatin' i'self, ya know? But Jah seh I an' I
t' bring Steppin' Razor outa this."
Case blinked.
"She a warrior," Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. "Now you
tell me, mon, who I not t' kill."
"3Jane," he said, after a pause. "A girl there. Has a kinda white robe
thing on, with a hood. We need her."
When they reached the entrance, Maelcum walked straight in, and Case
had no choice but to follow him.
3Jane's country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum handed him
the deck and the construct and walked to the edge of the pool. Beyond the
white pool furniture, there was darkness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high
maze of partially demolished walls.
The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool.
"They're here," Case said. "They gotta be."
Maelcum nodded.
The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared, its meter
of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The second arrow struck the
shotgun itself, sending it spinning across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down
hard and fumbled at the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked
at it.
Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a slender
bamboo bow. He bowed.
Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.
"The artery is intact," the ninja said. Case remembered Molly's
description of the man who'd killed her lover. Hideo was another.
Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter calm. He wore clean, frayed
khaki workpants and soft dark shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at
the toes like tabi socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black
alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look of the best
Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare and smooth.
"You cut my thumb, mon, wI' secon' one," Maelcum said.
"Coriolis force," the ninja said, bowing again. "Most difficult,
slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not intended."
"Where's 3Jane?" Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum. He saw
that the tip of the arrow in the ninja's bow was like a double-edged
razor. "Where's Molly?"
"Hello, Case." Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind Hideo,
Molly's fletcher in his hand. "I would have expected Armitage,
somehow. Are we hiring help out of that Rasta cluster now?"
"Armitage is dead."
"Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news hardly comes
as a shock."
"Wintermute killed him. He's in orbit around the spindle."
Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to Maelcum and
back. "I think it ends here, for you," he said.
"Where's Molly?"
The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, lowering the
bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. "This
is without subtlety," he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and
pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even
when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there
was also a humility, an open simplicity.
"It ends here for her, too," Riviera said.
"Maybe 3Jane won't go for that, Peter," Case said, uncertain of
the impulse. The derms still raged in his system, the old fever starting to
grip him, Night City craziness. He remembered moments of grace, dealing out
on the edge of things, where he'd found that he could sometimes talk
faster than he could think. The gray eyes narrowed.
"Why, Case? Why do you think that?"
Case smiled. Riviera didn't know about the simstim rig.
He'd missed it in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for him. But
how could Hideo have missed it? And Case was certain the ninja would never
have let 3Jane treat Molly without first checking her for kinks and
concealed weapons. No, he decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would know as
well.
"Tell me, Case," Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle of the
fletcher.
Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed Molly out of
the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its tall, spidery wheels
squeaking as they turned. Molly was bundled deep in a red and black striped
blanket, the narrow, caned back of the antique chair towering above her. She
looked very small. Broken. A patch of brilliantly white micropore covered
her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed with the
motion of the chair.
"A familiar face," 3Jane said, "I saw you the night of Peter's
show. And who is this?"
"Maelcum," Case said.
"Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr. Malcolm's wound."
Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face. The ninja walked to where
Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his bow and the shotgun well out of reach, and
took something from his pocket. A pair of bolt cutters. "I must cut the
shaft," he said. "It is too near the artery." Maelcum nodded. His face was
grayish and sheened with sweat.
Case looked at 3Jane. "There isn't much time," he said.
"For whom, exactly?"
"For any of us." There was a snap as Hideo cut through the metal shaft
of the arrow. Maelcum groaned.
"Really," Riviera said, "it won't amuse you to hear this failed
con artist make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful, I can assure you.
He'll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you his mother, perform the
most boring sexual favors. . ."
3Jane threw back her head and laughed. "Wouldn't I, Peter?"
"The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady," Case said.
"Wintermute's going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps.
You know that?"
3Jane raised her eyebrows. "Peter's suggested something like
that, but tell me more."
"I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he's
something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only
it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like
it's real, but it just goes on forever."
3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. "Where? Describe the place,
this construct."
"A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete
thing, kinda bunker. . ." He hesitated. "It's nothing fancy. Just old,
falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come back to where you started."
"Yes," she said. "Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years before
she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach, camping in an
abandoned blockhouse. She formulated the basis of her philosophy there."
Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants. He held a
section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had his eyes closed, his hand
clapped tight around his bicep. "I will bandage it," Hideo said. Case
managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear shot.
The darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing
Hideo pivot through yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the
arrow reversed in his hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He
flicked it underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera's hand.
The fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.
Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so
refined, that it lacked all humanity.
Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of
Riviera's sternum. The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes,
then found his balance.
"Peter," 3Jane said, "Peter, what have you done?"
"He's blinded your clone boy," Molly said flatly.
Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile Case saw
whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes.
Riviera smiled.
Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above
the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera's smile had faded. He
bent – bowing, it seemed to Case – and found the bow and arrow.
"You're blind," Riviera said, taking a step backward.
"Peter," 3Jane said, "don't you know he does it in the dark? Zen.
It's the way he practices."
The ninja notched his arrow. "Will you distract me with your holograms
now?"
Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed
against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo's arrow
twitched.
Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of
wall. The ninja's face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy.
Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon
held ready.
"Jane-lady," Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop the
shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his
locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. "This take
your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it."
3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of
the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. "Off,"
she said, "get it off."
Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. "Hideo'll get him, even
blind?" he asked 3Jane.
"When I was a child," she said, "we loved to blindfold him. He put
arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters."
"Peter's good as dead anyway," Molly said. "In another twelve
hours, he'll start to freeze up. Won't be able to move, his eyes
is all."
"Why?" Case turned to her.
"I poisoned his shit for him," she said. "Condition's like
Parkinson's disease, sort of."
3Jane nodded. "Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was
admitted." She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from
Molly's hands. "Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia
nigra. Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his
sleep."
"Ali," Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She
tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast.
"It's the meperidine. I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up
the reaction times with higher temperatures. N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236," she
sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game,
"tetra-hydro-pyridene."
"A hotshot," Case said.
"Yeah," Molly said, "a real slow hotshot."
"That's appalling," 3Jane said, and giggled.
It was crowded in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with
3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin. She grinned and ground
synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The
black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she
couldn't see.
"He wants to kill you."
"Figures," Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very
bright light.
"I don't think I want him to," 3Jane said, and Molly painfully
turned her head to look up into the dark eyes.
"Don't play with me," she said.
"But I think I might like to," 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her
forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of
blood on her pale djellaba.
"Where's he gone now?" Molly asked.
"Another injection, probably," 3Jane said, straightening up. "He was
quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back
to health, Molly." She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front
of the robe. "Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that."
"What about Peter?"
"Peter." She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came
loose, fell across her forehead. "Peter has become rather boring. I find
drug use in general to be boring." She giggled. "In others, at any rate. My
father was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen."
Molly tensed.
"Don't alarm yourself." 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin
above the waistband of the leather jeans. "His suicide was the result of my
having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I'd never
actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep.
But I did know him very well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill
my mother. I'll show you that, when you're better. He strangles
her in bed."
"Why did he kill her?" Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl's
face.
"He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our family.
She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was
quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the
Al's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I
should say. Tessier–Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us
units of a larger entity . Fascinating . I'll play her tapes for you,
nearly a thousand hours. But I've never understood her, really, and
with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began
to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I'm the exception
there."
"You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his
cryogenic programs?"
3Jane nodded. "I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I
was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One
of them was what you call Wintermute, which is the Turing code for our Berne
AI, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram."
"One of them? There's more?"
"One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It gave
up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain
capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software, but she
was an extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink."
She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly's lips. "Water. Only a
little."
"Jane, love," Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight,
"are you enjoying yourself?"
"Leave us alone, Peter."
"Playing doctor. . ." Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the
image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages. The
left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in
a socket that was an inverted pool of blood.
"Hideo," 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, "hurt Peter if he
doesn't go away. Go and swim, Peter."
The projection vanished.
07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.
"He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code."
Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong,
against the inner curve of her left breast.
"Yes," 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, "I do. I learned it as a
child. I think I learned it in a dream. . . Or somewhere in the thousand
hours of my mother's diaries. But I think that Peter has a point, in
urging me not to surrender it. There would be Turing to contend with, if I
read all this correctly, and ghosts are nothing if not capricious."
Case jacked out.
"Strange little customer, huh?" The Finn grinned at Case from the old
Sony.
Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the corridor with the
Remington at his side. The Zionite was smiling, his head bobbing to a rhythm
Case couldn't hear. A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a
side pocket in his sleeveless jacket.
"Dub, mon," Maelcum said.
"You're fucking crazy," Case told him.
"Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub."
"Hey, guys," the Finn said, "on your toes. Here comes your
transportation. I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the pic of
8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a ride over to
3Jane's place."
Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the riderless service
cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless concrete arch marking the far
end of their corridor. It might have been the one his Africans had ridden,
but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded
seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was
steadily winking its red LED.
"Bus to catch," Case said to Maelcum.
He'd lost his anger again. He missed it.
The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across his knees,
and Case, deck and construct against his chest. The cart was operating at
speeds it hadn't been designed for; it was top heavy, cornering, and
Maelcum had taken to leaning out in the direction of the turns. This
presented no problem when the thing took lefts, because Case sat on the
right, but in the right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his
gear, crushing him against the seat.
He had no idea where they were. Everything was familiar, but he
couldn't be sure he'd seen any particular stretch before. A
curving hallway lined with wooden showcases displayed collections he was
certain he'd never seen: the skulls of large birds, coins, masks of
beaten silver. The service cart's six tires were silent on the layered
carpets. There was only the whine of the electric motor and an occasional
faint burst of Zion dub, from the foam beads in Maelcum's ears, as he
lunged past Case to counter a sharp right. The deck and the construct kept
pressing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip.
"You got a watch?" he asked Maelcum.
The Zionite shook his locks. "Time be time."
"Jesus," Case said, and closed his eyes.
The Braun scuttled over mounded carpets and tapped one of its padded
claws against an oversized rectangular door of dark battered wood. Behind
them, the cart sizzled and shot blue sparks from a louvered panel. The
sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool.
"This th' way, mon?" Maelcum eyed the door and snapped the
shotgun's safety.
"Hey," Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, "you think I know?"
The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed.
"It wan' you open door," Maelcum said, nodding.
Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a brass
plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had
once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the
name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He
wondered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of Straylight
individually, or if they'd purchased it in bulk from some vast
European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door's hinges creaked
plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum stepping past him with the
Remington thrust forward from his hip.
"Books," Maelcum said.
The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.
"I know where we are," Case said. He looked back at the service cart. A
curl of smoke was rising from the carpet. "So come on," he said. "Cart.
Cart?" It remained stationary. The Braun was plucking at the leg of his
jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted a strong urge to kick it. "Yeah?"
It ticked its way around the door. He followed it. The monitor in the
library was another Sony, as old as the first one. The Braun paused beneath
it and executed a sort of Jig.
"Wintermute?"
The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled.
"Time to check in, Case," the Finn said, his eyes screwed up against
the smoke of a cigarette. "C'mon, jack."
The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb his leg,
its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. "Shit!" He
slapped it aside and it struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston
repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air. "What's wrong with the goddam
thing?"
"Burned out," the Finn said. "Forget it. No problem. jack in now."
There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one would accept the
Hitachi adaptor.
He jacked in.
Nothing. Gray void.
No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.
The deck was gone. His fingers were. . .
And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression
of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.
He tried to scream.
There seemed to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far
away.
He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms wrapped tight
across his knees, and shook.
He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even after the
shaking stopped. The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it
was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At
one point he decided that it wasn't a city at all, but some single
building, perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging its distance. The sand
was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black. The
beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the
bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand. . . He held himself and rocked,
singing a song without words or tune.
The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo Bay?
He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of
Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all.
Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.
A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his
knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of
the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and
quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his
throat ached.
"Wintermute," he mumbled to his knees, "Wintermute. . ."
It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that
finally forced him to stand.
His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the
cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. "Jesus,"
he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth.
"Jesus." His teeth began to chatter.
The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a
Tokyo gardener produced. When he'd taken a dozen steps in the
direction of the now invisible city, he turned and looked back through the
gathering dark. His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There
were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand.
He estimated that he'd covered at least a kilometer before he
noticed the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first
pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew
that Ratz wasn't there, that the bartender was a figment of his own
imagination, not of the thing he was trapped in, but that didn't
matter. He'd called the man up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had
had his own ideas about Case and his predicament.
"Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order
to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you
had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to
keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the
axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . .
Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of
old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes magic out of China. . ." Ratz
laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily
at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that
laced the bartender's blackened teeth. "But I suppose that is the way
of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this
place. To die."
Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of
blown sand. "Yeah," he said. "Shit. I guess. . ." He walked toward the
sound.
"Artiste," he heard Ratz call. "The light. You saw a light. Here. This
way. . ."
He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of
icy seawater. "Ratz? Light? Ratz. . ."
But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf.
He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.
Time passed. He walked on.
And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A
rectangle. A door.
"Fire in there," he said, his words torn away by the wind.
It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand.
The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a
meter thick. "Hey," Case said, softly, "hey. . ." His fingers brushed the
cold wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the
entrance.
He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where
driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was
the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized
her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified
circuitry.
He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the
place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched
beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour
the structure's walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the
makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of
this was real, but cold was cold.
She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He
watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered
from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
"Mean, motherfucker," he whispered to the wind. "Don't take a
chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is.
. ." He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. "I know, see? I know
who you are. You're the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush.
That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the
Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost.
Like I remember her before. . ."
She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of
blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
"You aren't anything," he said to the sleeping girl.
"You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I
know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken about
twenty seconds, right? I'm out on my ass in that library and my
brain's dead. And pretty soon it'll be dead, if you got any
sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you
can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and
you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's
all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me
into the Chiba construct, but he couldn't. Said it was too tricky.
That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was
you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw
that. You just edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think you can
hurt me. 'Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever
you're called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me
now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this way?" He was
shaking again, his voice shrill.
"Honey," she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, "you come
here and sleep. I'll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?" Her
soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. "You just sleep, okay?"
When he woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the
bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle
of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping
container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its
side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they
looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling
out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things out,
blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom.
EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, "BEEF", TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutritive content. He
fumbled a second one out. "EGGS". "If you're making this shit up," he
said, "you could lay on some real food, okay?" With a packet in either hand,
he made his way through the structure's four rooms. Two were empty,
aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration
canisters. "Sure," he said touching the seals. "Stay here a long time. I get
the idea. Sure. . ."
He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister
filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets,
against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman's knife with a
cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with
sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their
contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water
from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It
tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the
fireplace and went out.
Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his
damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight,
the beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the
corner of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the
sand. "Dunno whose memories you're using for this one," he said when
he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the
shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
"What you doin', Case?"
He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam
sliding past her ankles.
"I pissed myself last night," he said. "Well, you don't wanna
wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I'll show you this pool back in
the rocks." She gestured vaguely behind her. "It's fresh." The faded
French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was
smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.
"Listen," he said, scooping his clothes up and walking toward her, "I
got a question for you. I won't ask you what you're doing here.
But what exactly do you think I'm doing here?" He stopped, a wet black
jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh.
"You came last night," she said. She smiled at him.
"And that's enough for you? I just came?"
"He said you would," she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. "He
knows stuff like that, I guess." She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt
from the other ankle, awkward, childlike. She smiled at him again, more
tentatively. "Now you answer me one, okay?"
He nodded.
"How come you're painted brown like that, all except your foot?"
"And that's the last thing you remember?" He watched her scrape
the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that
was their only plate.
She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. "I'm sorry, Case,
honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an' it was . . ." She
hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few
seconds with pain or its memory. "I just needed the money. To get home, I
guess, or. . . hell," she said, "you wouldn't hardly talk to me."
"There's no cigarettes?"
"Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What's wrong
with you?" She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.
"But the food was here? It was already here?"
"I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach."
"Okay. Sure. It's seamless."
She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. "Well, damn you anyway, Case,"
she managed, finally, "I was doin' just fine here by myself."
He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping
his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all
around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. "Okay," he said
to the night, "I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes
better wash up." His own laughter startled him. "A case of beer
wouldn't hurt, while you're at it." He turned and re-entered the
bunker.
She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. "Who was
that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those
silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was
your new girl, 'cept she looked like more money than you had. . ." She
glanced back at him. "I'm real sorry I stole your RAM."
"Never mind," he said. "Doesn't mean anything. So you just took
it over to this guy and had him access it for you?"
"Tony," she said. "I'd been seein' him, kinda. He had a
habit an' we . . . anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this
monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember
wonderin' how you – "
"There wasn't any graphics in there," he interrupted. "Sure was.
I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those pictures of when
I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one
time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that. . ."
"Tony see it?"
"I don't remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early,
sunrise, those birds all yellin' so lonely. Scared 'cause I
didn't have a shot on me, nothin', an' I knew I'd be
gettin' sick. . . An' I walked an' walked, 'til it
was dark, an' found this place, an' next day the food washed in,
all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly." She slid her
stick into the embers and left it there. "Never did get sick," she said, as
embers crawled. "Missed cigarettes more. How 'bout you, Case? You
still wired?" Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of
Wizard's Castle and Tank War Europa.
"No," he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting
the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran
in her, something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held
by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street
that hunted them all. It was a place he'd known before; not everyone
could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something
he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he
remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the
cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information
coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its
strong blind way, could ever read.
The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of
toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting
off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her,
effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place
he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the
drive held.
She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare
that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.
Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered
her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered
what she had said.
"He told you I was coming," he said.
But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put
her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.
The music woke him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own
heart. He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket over his shoulders in the
predawn chill, gray light from the doorway and the fire long dead.
His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols
arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He
looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath
the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved
it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.
The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his neck. He
crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the music. The pulse faded,
returned, faded. . .
"What's wrong?" She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes. "Baby . .
."
"I feel . . . like a drug. . . You get that here?"
She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper arms.
"Linda, who told you? Who told you I'd come? Who?"
"On the beach," she said, something forcing her to look away. "A boy. I
see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He lives here."
"And what did he say?"
"He said you'd come. He said you wouldn't hate me. He said
we'd be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool was. He looks
Mexican."
"Brazilian," Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed down the wall.
"I think he's from Rio." He got to his feet and began to struggle into
his jeans.
"Case," she said, her voice shaking, "Case, where you goin'?"
"I think I'll find that boy," he said, as the music came surging
back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although he couldn't
place it in memory.
"Don't, Case."
"I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down the beach. But
yesterday it wasn't there. You ever seen that?" He yanked his zipper
up and tore at the impossible knot in his shoelaces, finally tossing the
shoes into the corner.
She nodded, eyes lowered. "Yeah. I see it sometimes."
"You ever go there, Linda?" He put his jacket on.
"No," she said, "but I tried. After I first came, an' I was
bored. Anyway, I figured it's a city, maybe I could find some shit."
She grimaced. "I wasn't even sick, I just wanted it. So I took food in
a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn't have another can for water.
An' I walked all day, an' I could see it, sometimes, city,
an' it didn't seem too far. But it never got any closer.
An' then it was gettin' closer, an' I saw what it was.
Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked, or maybe nobody
there, an' other times I thought I'd see light flashin'
off a machine, cars or somethin' . . ." Her voice trailed off.
"What is it?"
"This thing," she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark walls, the
dawn outlining the doorway, "where we live. It gets smaller, Case, smaller,
closer you get to it."
Pausing one last time, by the doorway. "You ask your boy about that?"
"Yeah. He said I wouldn't understand, an' I was
wastin' my time. Said it was, was like . . . an event. An' it
was our horizon. Event horizon, he called it."
The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and struck out
blindly, heading – he knew, somehow – away from the sea. Now the
hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from his feet, drew back from him as
he walked. "Hey," he said, "it's breaking down. Bet you know, too.
What is it? Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart? Maybe the
Dixie Flatline's no pushover, huh?"
He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was following him, not
trying to catch up, the broken zip of the French fatigues flapping against
the brown of her belly, pubic hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like
one of the girls on the Finn's old magazines in Metro Holografix come
to life, only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume pathetic
as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.
And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of them, and the
boy's gums were wide and bright pink against his thin brown face. He
wore ragged, colorless shorts, limbs too thin against the sliding blue-gray
of the tide.
"I know you," Case said, Linda beside him.
"No," the boy said, his voice high and musical, "you do not."
"You're the other AI. You're Rio. You're the one who
wants to stop Wintermute. What's your name? Your Turing code. What is
it?"
The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands,
then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera's, but there was
no malice there. "To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed
that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your
business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the
owners seek to conceal. True names. . ."
"A Turing code's not your name."
"Neuromancer," the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising
sun. "The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend.
Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road but her lord choked her off
before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver
paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and
the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead,
and their land." He laughed. A gull cried. "Stay. If your woman is a ghost,
she doesn't know it. Neither will you."
"You're cracking. The ice is breaking up."
"No," he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed
his foot against the sand. "It is more simple than that. But the choice is
yours." The gray eyes regarded Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept
across his vision, one line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as
though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud now,
and Case could almost make out the lyrics.
"Case, honey," Linda said, and touched his shoulder.
"No," he said. He took off his jacket and handed it to her. "I
don't know," he said, "maybe you're here. Anyway, it gets cold."
He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he'd
closed his eyes, watching the music define itself at the center of things.
He did look back, once, although he didn't open his eyes.
He didn't need to.
They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the thin child
who said his name was Neuromancer. His leather jacket dangled from her hand,
catching the fringe of the surf.
He walked on, following the music.
Maelcum's Zion dub.
There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shifting, moire,
degrees of half tone generated by a very simple graphics program. There was
a long hold on a view through chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water.
There were voices. There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he
was quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the angles of
an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again. . .
"Case? Mon?"
The music.
"You back, mon."
The music was taken from his ears.
"How long?" he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth was very dry.
"Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan' pull th' jack, Mute
seh no. Screen goin' funny, then Mute seh put th' phones on
you."
He opened his eyes. Maelcum's features were overlayed with bands
of translucent hieroglyphs.
"An' you medicine," Maelcum said. "Two derm."
He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the monitor. The
Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement threw him into the savage rush
of the betaphenethylamine, the blue derms burning against his left wrist.
"Overdose," he managed.
"Come on, mon," the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like
a child, "I an' I mus' go."
The service cart was crying. The betaphenethylamine gave it a voice. It
wouldn't stop. Not in the crowded gallery, the long corridors, not as
it passed the black glass entrance to the T-A crypt, the vaults where the
cold had seeped so gradually into old Ashpool's dreams.
The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement of the cart
indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the overdose. When the cart
died, at last, something beneath the seat giving up with a shower of white
sparks, the crying stopped.
The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of
3Jane's pirate cave.
"How far, mon?" Maelcum helped him from the sputtering cart as an
integral extinguisher exploded in the thing's engine compartment,
gouts of yellow powder squirting from louvers and service points. The Braun
tumbled from the back of the seat and hobbled off across the imitation sand,
dragging one useless limb behind it.
"You mus' walk, mon." Maelcum took the deck and construct,
slinging the shock cords over his shoulder. The trodes rattled around
Case's neck as he followed the Zionite. Riviera's holos waited
for them, the torture scenes and the cannibal children. Molly had broken the
triptych. Maelcum ignored them.
"Easy," Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding
figure. "Gotta do this right."
Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his hands.
"Right, mon? How's right?"
"Got Molly in there, but she's out of it. Riviera, he can throw
holos. Maybe he's got Molly's fletcher." Maelcum nodded. "And
there's a ninja, a family bodyguard."
Maelcum's frown deepened. "You listen, Babylon mon," he said. "I
a warrior. But this no m' fight, no Zion fight. Babylon fightin'
Babylon, eatin' i'self, ya know? But Jah seh I an' I
t' bring Steppin' Razor outa this."
Case blinked.
"She a warrior," Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. "Now you
tell me, mon, who I not t' kill."
"3Jane," he said, after a pause. "A girl there. Has a kinda white robe
thing on, with a hood. We need her."
When they reached the entrance, Maelcum walked straight in, and Case
had no choice but to follow him.
3Jane's country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum handed him
the deck and the construct and walked to the edge of the pool. Beyond the
white pool furniture, there was darkness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high
maze of partially demolished walls.
The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool.
"They're here," Case said. "They gotta be."
Maelcum nodded.
The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared, its meter
of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The second arrow struck the
shotgun itself, sending it spinning across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down
hard and fumbled at the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked
at it.
Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a slender
bamboo bow. He bowed.
Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.
"The artery is intact," the ninja said. Case remembered Molly's
description of the man who'd killed her lover. Hideo was another.
Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter calm. He wore clean, frayed
khaki workpants and soft dark shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at
the toes like tabi socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black
alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look of the best
Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare and smooth.
"You cut my thumb, mon, wI' secon' one," Maelcum said.
"Coriolis force," the ninja said, bowing again. "Most difficult,
slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not intended."
"Where's 3Jane?" Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum. He saw
that the tip of the arrow in the ninja's bow was like a double-edged
razor. "Where's Molly?"
"Hello, Case." Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind Hideo,
Molly's fletcher in his hand. "I would have expected Armitage,
somehow. Are we hiring help out of that Rasta cluster now?"
"Armitage is dead."
"Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news hardly comes
as a shock."
"Wintermute killed him. He's in orbit around the spindle."
Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to Maelcum and
back. "I think it ends here, for you," he said.
"Where's Molly?"
The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, lowering the
bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. "This
is without subtlety," he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and
pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even
when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there
was also a humility, an open simplicity.
"It ends here for her, too," Riviera said.
"Maybe 3Jane won't go for that, Peter," Case said, uncertain of
the impulse. The derms still raged in his system, the old fever starting to
grip him, Night City craziness. He remembered moments of grace, dealing out
on the edge of things, where he'd found that he could sometimes talk
faster than he could think. The gray eyes narrowed.
"Why, Case? Why do you think that?"
Case smiled. Riviera didn't know about the simstim rig.
He'd missed it in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for him. But
how could Hideo have missed it? And Case was certain the ninja would never
have let 3Jane treat Molly without first checking her for kinks and
concealed weapons. No, he decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would know as
well.
"Tell me, Case," Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle of the
fletcher.
Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed Molly out of
the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its tall, spidery wheels
squeaking as they turned. Molly was bundled deep in a red and black striped
blanket, the narrow, caned back of the antique chair towering above her. She
looked very small. Broken. A patch of brilliantly white micropore covered
her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed with the
motion of the chair.
"A familiar face," 3Jane said, "I saw you the night of Peter's
show. And who is this?"
"Maelcum," Case said.
"Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr. Malcolm's wound."
Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face. The ninja walked to where
Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his bow and the shotgun well out of reach, and
took something from his pocket. A pair of bolt cutters. "I must cut the
shaft," he said. "It is too near the artery." Maelcum nodded. His face was
grayish and sheened with sweat.
Case looked at 3Jane. "There isn't much time," he said.
"For whom, exactly?"
"For any of us." There was a snap as Hideo cut through the metal shaft
of the arrow. Maelcum groaned.
"Really," Riviera said, "it won't amuse you to hear this failed
con artist make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful, I can assure you.
He'll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you his mother, perform the
most boring sexual favors. . ."
3Jane threw back her head and laughed. "Wouldn't I, Peter?"
"The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady," Case said.
"Wintermute's going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps.
You know that?"
3Jane raised her eyebrows. "Peter's suggested something like
that, but tell me more."
"I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he's
something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only
it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like
it's real, but it just goes on forever."
3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. "Where? Describe the place,
this construct."
"A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete
thing, kinda bunker. . ." He hesitated. "It's nothing fancy. Just old,
falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come back to where you started."
"Yes," she said. "Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years before
she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach, camping in an
abandoned blockhouse. She formulated the basis of her philosophy there."
Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants. He held a
section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had his eyes closed, his hand
clapped tight around his bicep. "I will bandage it," Hideo said. Case
managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear shot.
The darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing
Hideo pivot through yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the
arrow reversed in his hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He
flicked it underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera's hand.
The fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.
Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so
refined, that it lacked all humanity.
Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of
Riviera's sternum. The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes,
then found his balance.
"Peter," 3Jane said, "Peter, what have you done?"
"He's blinded your clone boy," Molly said flatly.
Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile Case saw
whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes.
Riviera smiled.
Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above
the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera's smile had faded. He
bent – bowing, it seemed to Case – and found the bow and arrow.
"You're blind," Riviera said, taking a step backward.
"Peter," 3Jane said, "don't you know he does it in the dark? Zen.
It's the way he practices."
The ninja notched his arrow. "Will you distract me with your holograms
now?"
Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed
against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo's arrow
twitched.
Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of
wall. The ninja's face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy.
Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon
held ready.
"Jane-lady," Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop the
shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his
locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. "This take
your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it."
3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of
the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. "Off,"
she said, "get it off."
Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. "Hideo'll get him, even
blind?" he asked 3Jane.
"When I was a child," she said, "we loved to blindfold him. He put
arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters."
"Peter's good as dead anyway," Molly said. "In another twelve
hours, he'll start to freeze up. Won't be able to move, his eyes
is all."
"Why?" Case turned to her.
"I poisoned his shit for him," she said. "Condition's like
Parkinson's disease, sort of."
3Jane nodded. "Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was
admitted." She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from
Molly's hands. "Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia
nigra. Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his
sleep."
"Ali," Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She
tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast.
"It's the meperidine. I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up
the reaction times with higher temperatures. N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236," she
sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game,
"tetra-hydro-pyridene."
"A hotshot," Case said.
"Yeah," Molly said, "a real slow hotshot."
"That's appalling," 3Jane said, and giggled.
It was crowded in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with
3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin. She grinned and ground