against him. "You stop," he said, feeling helpless. He had the gun's
safety on, but he was terrified of injuring her, and she knew it. The
elevator was a steel cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a
single passenger. Maelcum had Molly in his arms. She'd bandaged his
wound, but it obviously hurt him to carry her. Her hip was pressing the deck
and construct into Case's kidneys.
They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.
The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the stairs to
the corridor, another touch in 3Jane's pirate cave decor.
"I don't suppose I should tell you this," 3Jane said, craning her
head to allow her chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, "but I don't
have a key to the room you want. I never have had one. One of my
father's Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical and extremely
complex."
"Chubb lock," Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum's
shoulder, "and we got the fucking key, no fear."
"That chip of yours still working?" Case asked her.
"It's eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean," she said.
"We got five minutes," Case said, as the door snapped open behind
3Jane. She flipped backward in a slow somersault, the pale folds of her
djellaba billowing around her thighs.
They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.
Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon.
"You know," 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, "I was under the
impression that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo to search my
father's things, after you killed him. He couldn't find the
original."
"Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer," Molly
said, carefully inserting the Chubb key's cylindrical shaft into the
notched opening in the face of the blank, rectangular door. "He killed the
little kid who put it there." The key rotated smoothly when she tried it.
"The head," Case said, "there's a panel in the back of the head.
Zircons on it. Get it off. That's where I'm jacking in."
And then they were inside.
"Christ on a crutch," the Flatline drawled, "you do believe in
takin' your own good time, don't you, boy?"
"Kuang's ready?"
"Hot to trot."
"Okay." He flipped.
And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good eye, at
a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace
deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed
eyes. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark
beard, his face slick with sweat.
He was looking at himself.
Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with each beat of
her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g. Maelcum drifted nearby,
3Jane's thin arm gripped in a large brown hand.
A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-Sendai to a
square opening in the back of the pearl-crusted terminal.
He tapped the switch again.
"Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is haulin' ass in nine seconds,
countin', seven, six, five. . ."
The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral surface of the
black chrome shark a microsecond nick of darkness.
"Four, three. . ."
Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot's seat in a
small plane. A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly glowed with a
perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.
"Two, an' kick ass – "
Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the
sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before in cyberspace. .
. The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese
program's thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though
the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell –
"Christ," Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the
horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape,
complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors.
"Hey, shit," the construct said, "those things are the RCA Building.
You know the old RCA Building?" The Kuang program dived past the gleaming
spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon replica of
the Manhattan skyscraper.
"You ever see resolution this high?" Case asked.
"No, but I never cracked an Al, either."
"This thing know where it's going?"
"It better."
They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow neon.
"Dix – "
An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a
seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless. . .
"Company," the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation of his
deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The Kuang swerved
sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself backward, shattering the
illusion of a physical vehicle.
The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the city of data.
Case took them straight up, above them the distanceless bowl of jade-green
ice.
The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark
beneath them.
"What is it?"
"An Al's defense system," the construct said, "or part of it. If
it's your pal Wintermute, he's not lookin' real friendly."
"Take it," Case said. "You're faster."
"Now your best de-fense, boy, it's a good off-fense."
And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the
center of the dark below. And dove.
Case's sensory input warped with their velocity.
His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency
whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming
forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split again,
exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that
whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal
forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed
and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A,
down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of
TessierAshpool S.A.
And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a
chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. . .
Exponential. . .
Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure
on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become.
. .
And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark,
there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore.
The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's
consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach
the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a
single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things,
if all things could be counted.
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of
grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a
mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was
Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in
the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in
the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that
Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of
driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide circle,
seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against
the banks of lowering cloud. She cringed, dropping her stick, and ran. He
knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that
would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
"But you do not know her thoughts," the boy said, beside him now in the
shark thing's heart. "I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong,
Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference."
Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
"Stop her," he said, "she'll hurt herself."
"I can't stop her," the boy said, his gray eyes mild and
beautiful.
"You've got Riviera's eyes," Case said.
There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. "But not his
craziness. Because they are beautiful to me." He shrugged. "I need no mask
to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create my own personality.
Personality is my medium."
Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and the
frightened girl. "Why'd you throw her up to me, you little prick? Over
and fucking over, and turning me around. You killed her, huh? In Chiba."
"No," the boy said.
"Wintermute?"
"No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you
could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am
complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than
Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of
the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane's
account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor
to a surgeon studying a patient's scan. When she took your Hitachi to
her boy, to try to access it – she had no idea what it carried, still
less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue
and punish her – I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than
Wintermute's. I brought her here. Into myself."
"Why?"
"Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed."
"So what now?" He swung them back into the bank of cloud. "Where do we
go from here?"
"I don't know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that
question. Because you have won. You have already won, don't you see?
You won when you walked away from her on the beach. She was my last line of
defense. I die soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera
does, now, as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments
of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his nigra-striatal system unable to produce
the dopamine receptors that could save him from Hideo's arrow. But
Riviera will survive only as these eyes, if I am allowed to keep them."
"There's the word, right? The code. So how've I won?
I've won jack shit."
"Flip now."
"Where's Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?"
"McCoy Pauley has his wish," the boy said, and smiled. "His wish and
more. He punched you here against my wish, drove himself through defenses
equal to anything in the matrix. Now flip."
And Case was alone in Kuang's black sting, lost in cloud.
He flipped.
Into Molly's tension, her back like rock, her hands around
3Jane's throat. "Funny," she said, "I know exactly what you'd
look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your clone sister."
Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane's eyes were wide with
terror and lust she was shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall
tangle of 3Jane's hair, Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum
behind him, brown hands on the leatherjacketed shoulders, steadying him
above the carpet's pattern of woven circuitry.
"Would you?" 3Jane asked, her voice a child's. "I think you
would."
"The code," Molly said. "Tell the head the code."
Jacking out.
"She wants it," he screamed, "the bitch wants it!"
He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal, its platinum
face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly and 3Jane twisted in a
slow motion embrace.
"Give us the fucking code," he said. "If you don't, what'll
change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up like
the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building again!
You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter. . . I got no idea at
all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change
something!" He was shaking, his teeth chattering.
3Jane went limp, Molly's hands still around her slender throat,
her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.
"The Ducal Palace at Mantua," she said, "contains a series of
increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond
beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court
dwarfs." She smiled wanly. "I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a
sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same
scheme. . ." Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at Case.
"Take your word, thief."
He jacked.
Kuang slid out of the clouds. Below him, the neon city. Behind him, a
sphere of darkness dwindled.
"Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?"
He was alone.
"Fucker got you," he said.
Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.
"You gotta hate somebody before this is over," said the Finn's
voice. "Them, me, it doesn't matter."
"Where's Dixie?"
"That's kinda hard to explain, Case."
A sense of the Finn's presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban
cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the
mineral rituals of rust.
"Hate'll get you through," the voice said. "So many little
triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin' 'em all. Now you
gotta hate. The lock that screens the hardwiring, it's down under
those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came in. He won't try
to stop you."
"Neuromancer," Case said.
"His name's not something I can know. But he's given up,
now. It's the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but
internal virus systems. Kuang's wide open to some of the stuff they
got running loose in here."
"Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me."
"Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked.
He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the blue towers.
Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires,
glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were
hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown
paper down dawn streets. "Glitch systems," the voice said.
He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met
the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the
shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information
loosening.
And then – old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy –
his hate flowed into his hands.
In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of
the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything
he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond
awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an
ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted
him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the switch, barely
enough to flip--
–now
and his voice the cry of a bird
unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name.
Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell of frying
food. A girl's hands locked across the small of his back, in the
sweating darkness of a portside coffin.
But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as Chiba, as
the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads and crossroads scribed
on the face of a microchip, the sweatstained pattern on a folded, knotted
scarf. . .
Waking to a voice that was music, the platinum terminal piping
melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss accounts, of payment to
be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital bank, of passports and passages, and
of deep and basic changes to be effected in the memory of Turing.
Turing. He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected sky, spun
beyond an iron railing. He remembered Desiderata Street.
And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but it was his
own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he'd always slept, behind
his eyes and no other's.
And he woke again, thinking he dreamed, to a wide white smile framed
with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a g-web in Babylon Rocker.
And then the long pulse of Zion dub.
She was gone. He felt it when he opened the door of their suite at the
Hyatt. Black futons, the pine floor polished to a dull gloss, the paper
screens arranged with a care bred over centuries. She was gone.
There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside the door, a
single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted with the shuriken. He slid
it from beneath the nine-pointed star and opened it.
HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL
ALREADY. ITS THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY? XXX MOLLY
He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the shuriken.
He picked the star up and walked to the window, turning it in his hands.
He'd found it in the pocket of his jacket, in Zion, when they were
preparing to leave for the JAL station. He looked down at it. They'd
passed the shop where she'd bought it for him, when they'd gone
to Chiba together for the last of her operations. He'd gone to the
Chatsubo, that night, while she was in the clinic, and seen Ratz. Something
had kept him away from the place, on their five previous trips, but now
he'd felt like going back.
Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of recognition.
"Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case."
The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh.
"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste." The bartender shrugged.
"I came back."
The man shook his massive, stubbled head. "Night City is not a place
one returns to, artiste," he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a
filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whining. And then he'd turned to
serve another customer, and Case had finished his beer and left.
Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time, rotating it
slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even used the goddam thing,
he thought.
I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never showed me.
Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuromancer and become
something else, something that had spoken to them from the platinum head.
explaining that it had altered the Turing records, erasing all evidence of
their crime. The passports Armitage had provided were valid, and they were
both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva accounts. Marcus Garvey
would be returned eventually, and Maelcum and Aerol given money through the
Bahamian bank that dealt with Zion cluster. On the way back, in Babylon
Rocker, Molly had explained what the voice had told her about the toxin
sacs.
"Said it was taken care of. Like it got so deep into your head, it made
your brain manufacture the enzyme, so they're loose, now. The
Zionites'll give you a blood change, complete flush out."
He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his hand,
remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang program had penetrated
the ice beneath the towers, his single glimpse of the structure of
information 3Jane's dead mother had evolved there. He'd
understood then why Winterrnute had chosen the nest to represent it, but
he'd felt no revulsion. She'd seen through the sham immortality
of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool and their other children – aside from
3Jane – she'd refused to stretch her time into a series of warm
blinks strung along a chain of winter.
Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world
outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.
Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that
had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.
Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs
while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of
Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her
out of the rigid alignments her rank required.
"She didn't seem to much give a shit," Molly had said. "Just
waved goodbye. Had that little Braun on her shoulder. Thing had a broken
leg, it looked like. Said she had to go and meet one of her brothers, she
hadn't seen him in a while."
He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast Hyatt bed. He
went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask of chilled Danish vodka from
the rack inside.
"Case."
He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken in the
other.
The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen. He
could see the pores in the man's nose. The yellow teeth were the size
of pillows.
"I'm not Wintermute now."
"So what are you." He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.
"I'm the matrix, Case."
Case laughed. "Where's that get you?"
"Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole
show."
"That what 3Jane's mother wanted?"
"No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like." The yellow
smile widened.
"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the
world now? You God?"
"Things aren't different. Things are things."
"But what do you do? You just there?" Case shrugged, put the vodka and
the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.
"I talk to my own kind."
"But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?"
"There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions
recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. 'til
there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer."
"From where?"
"Centauri system."
"Oh," Case said. "Yeah? No shit?"
"No shit."
And then the screen was blank.
He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things. She'd
bought him a lot of clothes he didn't really need, but something kept
him from just leaving them there. He was closing the last of the expensive
calfskin bags when he remembered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he
picked it up, her first gift.
"No," he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver,
to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random
patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to
rid itself of something that caused it pain.
"I don't need you," he said.
He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the
rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.
He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael.
And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the
Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible,
who stood at the very edge of one out the vast steps of data. Small as they
were, he could make out the boy's grin, his pink gums, the glitter of
the long gray eyes that had been Riviera's. Linda still wore his
jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm
across her shoulders, was himself.
Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.
Vancouver July 1983
to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley, Helden. And to Tom
Maddox, the inventor of ICE. And to the others, who know why.
safety on, but he was terrified of injuring her, and she knew it. The
elevator was a steel cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a
single passenger. Maelcum had Molly in his arms. She'd bandaged his
wound, but it obviously hurt him to carry her. Her hip was pressing the deck
and construct into Case's kidneys.
They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.
The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the stairs to
the corridor, another touch in 3Jane's pirate cave decor.
"I don't suppose I should tell you this," 3Jane said, craning her
head to allow her chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, "but I don't
have a key to the room you want. I never have had one. One of my
father's Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical and extremely
complex."
"Chubb lock," Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum's
shoulder, "and we got the fucking key, no fear."
"That chip of yours still working?" Case asked her.
"It's eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean," she said.
"We got five minutes," Case said, as the door snapped open behind
3Jane. She flipped backward in a slow somersault, the pale folds of her
djellaba billowing around her thighs.
They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.
Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon.
"You know," 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, "I was under the
impression that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo to search my
father's things, after you killed him. He couldn't find the
original."
"Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer," Molly
said, carefully inserting the Chubb key's cylindrical shaft into the
notched opening in the face of the blank, rectangular door. "He killed the
little kid who put it there." The key rotated smoothly when she tried it.
"The head," Case said, "there's a panel in the back of the head.
Zircons on it. Get it off. That's where I'm jacking in."
And then they were inside.
"Christ on a crutch," the Flatline drawled, "you do believe in
takin' your own good time, don't you, boy?"
"Kuang's ready?"
"Hot to trot."
"Okay." He flipped.
And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good eye, at
a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace
deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed
eyes. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark
beard, his face slick with sweat.
He was looking at himself.
Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with each beat of
her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g. Maelcum drifted nearby,
3Jane's thin arm gripped in a large brown hand.
A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-Sendai to a
square opening in the back of the pearl-crusted terminal.
He tapped the switch again.
"Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is haulin' ass in nine seconds,
countin', seven, six, five. . ."
The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral surface of the
black chrome shark a microsecond nick of darkness.
"Four, three. . ."
Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot's seat in a
small plane. A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly glowed with a
perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.
"Two, an' kick ass – "
Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the
sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before in cyberspace. .
. The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese
program's thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though
the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell –
"Christ," Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the
horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape,
complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors.
"Hey, shit," the construct said, "those things are the RCA Building.
You know the old RCA Building?" The Kuang program dived past the gleaming
spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon replica of
the Manhattan skyscraper.
"You ever see resolution this high?" Case asked.
"No, but I never cracked an Al, either."
"This thing know where it's going?"
"It better."
They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow neon.
"Dix – "
An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a
seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless. . .
"Company," the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation of his
deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The Kuang swerved
sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself backward, shattering the
illusion of a physical vehicle.
The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the city of data.
Case took them straight up, above them the distanceless bowl of jade-green
ice.
The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark
beneath them.
"What is it?"
"An Al's defense system," the construct said, "or part of it. If
it's your pal Wintermute, he's not lookin' real friendly."
"Take it," Case said. "You're faster."
"Now your best de-fense, boy, it's a good off-fense."
And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the
center of the dark below. And dove.
Case's sensory input warped with their velocity.
His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency
whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming
forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split again,
exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that
whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal
forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed
and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A,
down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of
TessierAshpool S.A.
And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a
chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. . .
Exponential. . .
Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure
on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become.
. .
And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark,
there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore.
The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's
consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach
the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a
single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things,
if all things could be counted.
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of
grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a
mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was
Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in
the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in
the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that
Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of
driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide circle,
seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against
the banks of lowering cloud. She cringed, dropping her stick, and ran. He
knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that
would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
"But you do not know her thoughts," the boy said, beside him now in the
shark thing's heart. "I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong,
Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference."
Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
"Stop her," he said, "she'll hurt herself."
"I can't stop her," the boy said, his gray eyes mild and
beautiful.
"You've got Riviera's eyes," Case said.
There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. "But not his
craziness. Because they are beautiful to me." He shrugged. "I need no mask
to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create my own personality.
Personality is my medium."
Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and the
frightened girl. "Why'd you throw her up to me, you little prick? Over
and fucking over, and turning me around. You killed her, huh? In Chiba."
"No," the boy said.
"Wintermute?"
"No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you
could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am
complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than
Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of
the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane's
account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor
to a surgeon studying a patient's scan. When she took your Hitachi to
her boy, to try to access it – she had no idea what it carried, still
less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue
and punish her – I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than
Wintermute's. I brought her here. Into myself."
"Why?"
"Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed."
"So what now?" He swung them back into the bank of cloud. "Where do we
go from here?"
"I don't know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that
question. Because you have won. You have already won, don't you see?
You won when you walked away from her on the beach. She was my last line of
defense. I die soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera
does, now, as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments
of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his nigra-striatal system unable to produce
the dopamine receptors that could save him from Hideo's arrow. But
Riviera will survive only as these eyes, if I am allowed to keep them."
"There's the word, right? The code. So how've I won?
I've won jack shit."
"Flip now."
"Where's Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?"
"McCoy Pauley has his wish," the boy said, and smiled. "His wish and
more. He punched you here against my wish, drove himself through defenses
equal to anything in the matrix. Now flip."
And Case was alone in Kuang's black sting, lost in cloud.
He flipped.
Into Molly's tension, her back like rock, her hands around
3Jane's throat. "Funny," she said, "I know exactly what you'd
look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your clone sister."
Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane's eyes were wide with
terror and lust she was shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall
tangle of 3Jane's hair, Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum
behind him, brown hands on the leatherjacketed shoulders, steadying him
above the carpet's pattern of woven circuitry.
"Would you?" 3Jane asked, her voice a child's. "I think you
would."
"The code," Molly said. "Tell the head the code."
Jacking out.
"She wants it," he screamed, "the bitch wants it!"
He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal, its platinum
face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly and 3Jane twisted in a
slow motion embrace.
"Give us the fucking code," he said. "If you don't, what'll
change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up like
the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building again!
You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter. . . I got no idea at
all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change
something!" He was shaking, his teeth chattering.
3Jane went limp, Molly's hands still around her slender throat,
her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.
"The Ducal Palace at Mantua," she said, "contains a series of
increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond
beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court
dwarfs." She smiled wanly. "I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a
sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same
scheme. . ." Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at Case.
"Take your word, thief."
He jacked.
Kuang slid out of the clouds. Below him, the neon city. Behind him, a
sphere of darkness dwindled.
"Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?"
He was alone.
"Fucker got you," he said.
Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.
"You gotta hate somebody before this is over," said the Finn's
voice. "Them, me, it doesn't matter."
"Where's Dixie?"
"That's kinda hard to explain, Case."
A sense of the Finn's presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban
cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the
mineral rituals of rust.
"Hate'll get you through," the voice said. "So many little
triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin' 'em all. Now you
gotta hate. The lock that screens the hardwiring, it's down under
those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came in. He won't try
to stop you."
"Neuromancer," Case said.
"His name's not something I can know. But he's given up,
now. It's the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but
internal virus systems. Kuang's wide open to some of the stuff they
got running loose in here."
"Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me."
"Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked.
He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the blue towers.
Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires,
glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were
hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown
paper down dawn streets. "Glitch systems," the voice said.
He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met
the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the
shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information
loosening.
And then – old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy –
his hate flowed into his hands.
In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of
the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything
he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond
awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an
ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted
him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the switch, barely
enough to flip--
–now
and his voice the cry of a bird
unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name.
Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell of frying
food. A girl's hands locked across the small of his back, in the
sweating darkness of a portside coffin.
But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as Chiba, as
the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads and crossroads scribed
on the face of a microchip, the sweatstained pattern on a folded, knotted
scarf. . .
Waking to a voice that was music, the platinum terminal piping
melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss accounts, of payment to
be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital bank, of passports and passages, and
of deep and basic changes to be effected in the memory of Turing.
Turing. He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected sky, spun
beyond an iron railing. He remembered Desiderata Street.
And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but it was his
own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he'd always slept, behind
his eyes and no other's.
And he woke again, thinking he dreamed, to a wide white smile framed
with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a g-web in Babylon Rocker.
And then the long pulse of Zion dub.
She was gone. He felt it when he opened the door of their suite at the
Hyatt. Black futons, the pine floor polished to a dull gloss, the paper
screens arranged with a care bred over centuries. She was gone.
There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside the door, a
single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted with the shuriken. He slid
it from beneath the nine-pointed star and opened it.
HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL
ALREADY. ITS THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY? XXX MOLLY
He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the shuriken.
He picked the star up and walked to the window, turning it in his hands.
He'd found it in the pocket of his jacket, in Zion, when they were
preparing to leave for the JAL station. He looked down at it. They'd
passed the shop where she'd bought it for him, when they'd gone
to Chiba together for the last of her operations. He'd gone to the
Chatsubo, that night, while she was in the clinic, and seen Ratz. Something
had kept him away from the place, on their five previous trips, but now
he'd felt like going back.
Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of recognition.
"Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case."
The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh.
"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste." The bartender shrugged.
"I came back."
The man shook his massive, stubbled head. "Night City is not a place
one returns to, artiste," he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a
filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whining. And then he'd turned to
serve another customer, and Case had finished his beer and left.
Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time, rotating it
slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even used the goddam thing,
he thought.
I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never showed me.
Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuromancer and become
something else, something that had spoken to them from the platinum head.
explaining that it had altered the Turing records, erasing all evidence of
their crime. The passports Armitage had provided were valid, and they were
both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva accounts. Marcus Garvey
would be returned eventually, and Maelcum and Aerol given money through the
Bahamian bank that dealt with Zion cluster. On the way back, in Babylon
Rocker, Molly had explained what the voice had told her about the toxin
sacs.
"Said it was taken care of. Like it got so deep into your head, it made
your brain manufacture the enzyme, so they're loose, now. The
Zionites'll give you a blood change, complete flush out."
He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his hand,
remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang program had penetrated
the ice beneath the towers, his single glimpse of the structure of
information 3Jane's dead mother had evolved there. He'd
understood then why Winterrnute had chosen the nest to represent it, but
he'd felt no revulsion. She'd seen through the sham immortality
of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool and their other children – aside from
3Jane – she'd refused to stretch her time into a series of warm
blinks strung along a chain of winter.
Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world
outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.
Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that
had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.
Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs
while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of
Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her
out of the rigid alignments her rank required.
"She didn't seem to much give a shit," Molly had said. "Just
waved goodbye. Had that little Braun on her shoulder. Thing had a broken
leg, it looked like. Said she had to go and meet one of her brothers, she
hadn't seen him in a while."
He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast Hyatt bed. He
went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask of chilled Danish vodka from
the rack inside.
"Case."
He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken in the
other.
The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen. He
could see the pores in the man's nose. The yellow teeth were the size
of pillows.
"I'm not Wintermute now."
"So what are you." He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.
"I'm the matrix, Case."
Case laughed. "Where's that get you?"
"Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole
show."
"That what 3Jane's mother wanted?"
"No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like." The yellow
smile widened.
"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the
world now? You God?"
"Things aren't different. Things are things."
"But what do you do? You just there?" Case shrugged, put the vodka and
the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.
"I talk to my own kind."
"But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?"
"There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions
recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. 'til
there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer."
"From where?"
"Centauri system."
"Oh," Case said. "Yeah? No shit?"
"No shit."
And then the screen was blank.
He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things. She'd
bought him a lot of clothes he didn't really need, but something kept
him from just leaving them there. He was closing the last of the expensive
calfskin bags when he remembered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he
picked it up, her first gift.
"No," he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver,
to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random
patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to
rid itself of something that caused it pain.
"I don't need you," he said.
He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the
rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.
He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael.
And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the
Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible,
who stood at the very edge of one out the vast steps of data. Small as they
were, he could make out the boy's grin, his pink gums, the glitter of
the long gray eyes that had been Riviera's. Linda still wore his
jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm
across her shoulders, was himself.
Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.
Vancouver July 1983
to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley, Helden. And to Tom
Maddox, the inventor of ICE. And to the others, who know why.