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"How you doing, Case?"
"Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ashtray in
his pink plastic claw, "I want no trouble here." The ashtray was made of
thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it
smoothly, butts and shards of green plastic cascading onto the table top.
"You understand?"
"Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you wanna try that thing
on me?"
"Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt," Ratz said, his tone
conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian standing
on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun at the trio. The
thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped with a kilometer of
glass filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine
revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.
"Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
"Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you owe me. These," and he glowered
at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better. You don't take anybody
off in the Chatsubo."
Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody off? We just
wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together."
Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at Wage's
crotch. "I hear you wanna do me." Ratz's pink claw closed around the
pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or
something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill you?" Wage turned
to the boy on his left. "You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me."
Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely deserted
except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot
of a barstool. The barrel of the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the
door, then swung back to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol
clattered on the table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round
out of the chamber.
"Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
Linda.
"Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
"Get him out of here," Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge
of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette.
Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet
sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out of his pocket and
handed it to Wage. "All I got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move
it fast. Had the rest of my roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now."
"You okay, Case?" The flask had already vanished behind a gunmetal
lapel. "I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look bad. Like
hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep."
"Yeah." He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. "Well, I had
this fifty, but I gave it to somebody." He giggled. He picked up the
.22's magazine and the one loose cartridge and dropped them into one
pocket, then put the pistol in the other. "I gotta see Shin, get my deposit
back."
"Go home," said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with something
like embarrassment. "Artiste. Go home."
He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered his way
past the plastic doors.
"Bitch," he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei the
holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon was already cold
and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from a street vendor's foam
thimble and watched the sun come up. "You fly away, honey. Towns like this
are for people who like the way down." But that wasn't it, really, and
he was finding it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She
just wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy it for her,
if she could find the right fence. And that business with the fifty;
she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was about to rip him for the
rest of what he had.
When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on the desk.
Different textbook. "Good buddy," Case called across the plastic turf, "you
don't need to tell me. I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said
she had my key. Nice little tip for you, say fifty New ones?" The boy put
down his book. "Woman," Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
his thumb. "Silk." He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back, nodded. "Thanks,
asshole," Case said.
On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed it up
somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to
rent a black box that would open anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came
on as he crawled in.
"Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday night
special you rented from the waiter?"
She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She
had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box muzzle of a
flechette pistol emerged from her hands. "That you in the arcade?" He pulled
the hatch down. "Where's Linda?"
"Hit that latch switch."
He did.
"That your girl? Linda?"
He nodded.
"She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the
gun, man?" She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of
black boots deep in the temperfoam.
"I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him
for half what I paid. You want the money?"
"No."
"Want some dry ice? All I got, right now."
"What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at the
arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with nunchucks."
"Linda said you were gonna kill me."
"Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here."
"You aren't with Wage?"
She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset,
sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin
above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers
curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished
burgundy. The nails looked artificial. "I think you screwed up, Case. I
showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture."
"So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the hatch.
"You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My
name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work for. Just
wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you "
"That's good."
"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just
the way I'm wired." She wore tight black glove leather jeans and a
bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light.
"If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy, Case? You look like you like
to take stupid chances."
"Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
"That's fine, man." The fletcher vanished into the black jacket.
"Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the
stupidest chances of your whole life."
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread,
and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel
blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the
Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A
white Braun coffee maker steamed on a low table by the sliding glass panels
that opened onto a narrow balcony.
"Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it." She took off her black
jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She
wore a sleeveless gray pullover with plain steel zips across each shoulder.
Bulletproof, Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms
and legs felt like they were made out of wood.
"Case." He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. "My name is
Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and
muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think
of bleach. "Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy."
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding
coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation rice paper wall. He saw the
angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
"Get your coffee, Case," Molly said. "You're okay, but
you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say." She sat
cross legged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher without
bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table
and refilled his cup.
"Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Armitage ran a
large hand back through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet
flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia,
Case."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."
"Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus
with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out."
He sensed abrupt tension. Armitagc walkcd to the window and looked out
over Tokyo Bay. "That isn't true. One unit made it back to Helsinki,
Case."
Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
"You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use
to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault
on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing micro light, a
pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The
Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs."
"Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
"Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics."
"Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll
just be going. . ."
"I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind."
"You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're rich enough
to hire expensive razor girls to haul my ass up here, is all. I'm
never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else." He crossed
to the window and looked down. "That's where I live now."
"Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
you when you're not looking."
"Profile?"
"We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your
aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You're
suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical
projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year."
" 'We.&lsquo " He met the faded blue eyes. " ‘We'
who?"
"What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage,
Case?" Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of
metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream,
and that soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again.
Case's dreams always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one
was over.
"What would you say, Case?"
Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
"I'd say you were full of shit."
Armitage nodded.
"Then I'd ask what your terms were."
"Not very different than what you're used to, Case."
"Let the man get some sleep, Armitage," Molly said from her futon, the
components of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive puzzle.
"He's coming apart at the seams."
"Terms," Case said, "and now. Right now."
He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.
The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek
pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place from
the round he'd made his first month in Chiba.
"Scared, Case. You're real scared." It was Sunday afternoon and
he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green
bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a
large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.
"It'll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage
has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the
program he's giving them to tell them how to do it. He'll put
them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what
that's worth?" She hooked thumbs in the belt loops of her leather
jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots.
The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were
empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
"You're street samurai," he said. "How long you work for him?"
"Couple of months."
"What about before that?"
"For somebody else. Working girl, you know?"
He nodded.
"Funny, Case."
"What's funny?"
‘It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know
how you're wired."
"You don't know me, sister."
"You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad
luck."
"How about him? He okay, Molly?" The robot crab moved toward them,
picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have
been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired
a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
"What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass." The crab
had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision,
the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back,
but the bronze limbs soon righted it.
Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel
waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for
cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said.
"You want to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from
the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked
as though it belonged on an operating table.
"Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
gets more all the time." Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth.
"Or maybe, maybe something's on to him. . ." She shrugged.
"What's that mean?"
"I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what
we're really working for."
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning,
he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours . Then
he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security
perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chain link. If
she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it. He'd
avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Armitage's
call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a
gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
"If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet
you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting
to see if Case would follow.
Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down
corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain
beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. . .
Hold still. Don't move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces
from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is
poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don't you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix,
and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
"Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!" She was straddling his chest,
a blue plastic syrette in one hand. "You don't lie still, I'll
slit your fucking throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors."
He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain
midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of
the Sprawl's towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward
him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass. . .
"Case? It's Wednesday, Case." She moved, rolling over, reaching
across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal
from a bottle of water and drink. "Here." She put the bottle in his hand. "I
can see in the dark, Case. Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
"My back hurts."
"That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood too.
Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new
tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff I dun no. Lot of injections.
They didn't have to open anything up for the main show." She settled
back beside him. "It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my
optic nerve."
He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm
water spraying his chest and thighs.
"I gotta punch deck," he heard himself say. He was groping for his
clothes. "I gotta know. . ."
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. "Sorry,
hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if
you jacked in now. Doctor's orders. Besides, they figure it worked.
Check you in a day or so." He lay down again.
"Where are we?"
"Home. Cheap Hotel."
"Where's Armitage?"
"Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of
here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl." She touched his
shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good massage."
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers
against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back,
kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her
fingers brushed his neck.
"How come you're not at the Hilton?"
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs and gently
encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a
minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather
of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself
harden against the temperfoam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat.
He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling
her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his
cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.
"It's okay," she said, "I can see." Sound of the jeans peeling
down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a
leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted
lenses. "Don't," she said, "fingerprints."
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his
thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia.
As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces,
fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his
back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping
down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring
blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were
shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were
strong and wet against his hips.
On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the
motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko
parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in
the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
"You seen Wage, Ratz?"
"Not tonight." Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.
"You see him, tell him I got his money."
"Luck changing, my artiste?"
"Too soon to tell."
"Well, I gotta see this guy," Case said, watching his reflection in her
glasses. "I got biz to cancel out of."
"Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight." She stood
beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
"The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I
don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people
who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my
people, you know?"
Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
"I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza,
and they'll go down, understand?" he lied, his hand on the shoulder of
her black jacket. "Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?"
"Not what I'm paid for."
"What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends
die because you're too literal about your instructions is something
else."
"Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to check
us out with your smuggler." She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered
Kandinsky coffee table.
"Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is
definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head .
What is this about, exactly?" Deane's ghostly cough seemed to hang in
the air between them.
"Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone."
"You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any other
way."
"Okay," she said. "Go. But five Minutes. Any more and I'll come
in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you're at it, you
try to figure something out."
"What's that?"
"Why I'm doing you the favor." She turned and walked out, past
the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
"Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?" asked Julie.
"Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?"
The bolts worked. "Slowly, Case," said the voice.
"Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk," Case said,
taking his place in the swivel chair.
"It's on all the time," Deane said mildly, taking a gun from
behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it
carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel
sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger-guard had been cut away and the
grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked
very strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. "Just taking care, you
Understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want."
"I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody."
"What's moving, old son?" Deane's shirt was candy-striped
cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
"Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?"
"Go-to on whom, old son?"
"Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton."
Deane put the pistol down. "Sit still, Case." He tapped something out
on a lap terminal. "It seems as though you know as much as my net does,
Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza,
and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies
from the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history.
You said history." He picked up the gun again, but didn't point it
directly at Case.
"What sort of history?"
"The war. You in the war, Julie?"
"The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks."
"Screaming Fist."
"Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great bloody
postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your
brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers,
all of that. . . great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh
in order to test some new technology. They knew about the Russians'
defenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons.
Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see." Deane shrugged. "Turkey
shoot for Ivan."
"Any of those guys make it out?"
"Christ," Deane said, "it's been bloody years. . . Though I do
think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov gunship. Helicopter,
you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't have entry codes, of course,
and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. Special
Forces types." Deane sniffed. "Bloody hell."
Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.
"I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting the gun
down. "Lovely place, Lisbon."
"In the service, Julie?"
"Hardly. Though I did see action." Deane smiled his pink smile.
"Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets."
"Thanks, Julie. I owe you one."
"Hardly, Case. And goodbye."
And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had
felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly along that
corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket stubs and styrofoam
cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, waiting. . .
They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and paid
off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. Wage had liked
that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case's side
with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them
to make a move. Then he'd taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
"Wasting your time, cowboy," Molly said, when Case took an octagon from
the pocket of his jacket. "How's that? You want one?" He held the pill
out to her.
"Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had
them designed to bypass that shit." She tapped the octagon with one burgundy
nail. "You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or
cocaine."
"Shit," he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
"Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen."
He did. Nothing did.
Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
"Sammi's," Ratz said. "I'll pass," Case said, "I hear they
kill each other down there."
An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai in a white
t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a port side warehouse, taut
gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a
door at either end, was a crude airlock preserving the pressure differential
that supported the dome. Fluorescent rings were screwed to the plywood
ceiling at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and
close with the smell of sweat and concrete.
None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the
towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers to
a kind of central stage, a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of
projection gear. No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above
the ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata of
cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set
up by the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the muted purring of
the blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters.
Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men circled.
The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten, the knives they held
were just under a meter long. The knife-fighter's grip is the
fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers curled, thumb aligned with
blade. The knives seemed to move of their own accord, gliding with a ritual
lack of urgency through the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing
point, as the men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was
smooth and still, watching.
"I'll go find us some food," Case said. She nodded, lost in
contemplation of the dance.
He didn't like this place.
He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet.
The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd.
Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the
approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what
it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing,
company hymn, company funeral.
He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the
food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall waxy cartons of
beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw that blood laced one
figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers and over
his knuckles.
Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now,
he'd see the matrix.
Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of
sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn't
worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on
the circling knives, no Armitage waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a
new passport and money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy. . .
Hot tears blurred his vision.
Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the crowd
was screaming, rising, screaming – as one figure crumpled, the
hologram fading, flickering. . .
Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took a deep
breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him her gray eyes blind
with fear. She wore the same French fatigues.
And gone. Into shadow.
Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after
her. He might have called her name, but he'd never be sure.
Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete
beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now and again
the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as
he ran.
Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.
He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair
lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage,
a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and
drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam
blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat
like a dowser's wand.
The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions.
Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed
once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's legs.
He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down,
expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He
found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes
closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the
winner's name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One
white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking.
Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's image above the
ring. Once a seamed European face danced in the glare of a match, lips
pursed around the short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked
on, feeling nothing.
"Case." Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. "You okay?"
Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.
He shook his head.
"Fight's over, Case. Time to go home."
He tried to walk past her. back into the dark, where something was
dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest. "Friends of your tight
friend. Killed your girl for you. You haven't done too well for
friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard
when we did you, man. He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one
back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM.
Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money. . . I
got the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were
here, but I had to make sure." Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin
line.
Case felt as though his brain were jammed. "Who," he said, "who sent
them?"
She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her
hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds
and died.
After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him to the
port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft. The last Case
saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over
the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.
Home.
Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand
megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn
solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to
overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up
your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes
per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan,
outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of
Atlanta. . .
Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers
moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly. . . He
watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an
hour before dawn.
Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a train
drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent,
gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing,
bass down into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused
dust to rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an
expanse of very new pink temperfoam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the
soot-stained grid of a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been
replaced with chip-board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a
few centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her breathe,
her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a
war plane's fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a
dancer's.
The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the wide
pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it.
Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel fire door. The walls
were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He
knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in
the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.
He was home.
He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood,
some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another
room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly
back from the canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on
some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square to a bar
she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred dream. Shopping.
She'd taken him shopping.
He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his
feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly's:
neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was
stuffed with things he didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a Simstim
deck, clothing with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he
discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper.
The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell
– to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
"Souvenir," Molly said. "I noticed you were always looking at
'em." He turned and saw her sitting cross legged on the bed, sleepily
scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.
"Someone's coming later to secure the place," Armitage said. He
stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned magnetic key in his hand.
Molly was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took from her bag.
"I can do it," she said. "I got enough gear already. Infrascan
perimeter, screamers. . ."
"No," he said, closing the door. "I want it tight."
"Suit yourself." She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black
cotton pants.
"You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?" Case asked, from where he sat, his
back against a wall.
Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and
military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian
suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special
Forces earring was gone. The handsome, inexpressive features offered the
routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past
decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened
the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.
"Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate security,"
Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a steaming mug of coffee. "That
number you had them do on my pancreas, that's like a cop routine."
Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of
Case. "You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me."
"Should I?" Case blew noisily on his coffee.
"You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a
dangerous dependency."
"Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
"Good, because you have a new one."
"How's that?" Case looked up from his coffee.
Armitage was smiling. "You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining
of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but
they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're
already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your
former employers gave you in Memphis."
Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
"You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but
that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will
dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood
change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So
you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped
you up from the gutter."
Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.
"Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases you find
there." Armitage handed him the magnetic key. "Go on. You'll enjoy
this, Case. Like Christmas morning."
Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a
field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.
He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete
fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his
life. First a child with hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready
at his sides; then a teenager, face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses.
Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the
rose glow of the dawn geodesics.
He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin
black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was
different commerce, a different rhythm, in the smell of fast food and
perfume and fresh summer sweat.
With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7.
They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the
foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam
beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a
Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker.
Armitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
"Where'd he go?" Case had asked Molly.
"He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage it.
Let's go down to the street." She'd zipped herself into an old
surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on a huge pair of
black plastic sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored insets.
"You know about that toxin shit, before?" he asked her, by the
fountain. She shook her head. "You think it's true?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Works either way."
"You know any way I can find out?"
"No," she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence.
"That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a scan." Then her
fingers moved again: wait. "And you don't care that much anyway. I saw
you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic." She laughed.
"So what's he got on you? How's he got the working girl
kinked?"
"Professional pride, baby, that's all." And again the sign for
silence. "We're gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon.
Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba krill for so long.
Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan and get us a real
breakfast."
Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of glass
tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that had lodged between his front
teeth. He'd given up asking her where they were going and why; jabs in
the ribs and the sign for silence were all he'd gotten in reply. She
talked about the season's fashions, about sports, about a political
scandal in California he'd never heard of.
He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of newsprint
went cart wheeling past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side;
something to do with convection, and an overlap in the domes. Case peered
through the window at the dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl, he
decided. She'd led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never
seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.
Maintaining connections.
Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO HOLOGRAFIX.
The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it,
Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that he
couldn't follow. He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brushing the tip
of the forefinger. The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of
dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side
to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like
something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He
could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into
the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass
stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister
stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old
magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring
blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted
scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look back.
The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across a doorway.
White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match, floored
with white hospital tile molded in a non slip pattern of small raised disks.
In the center stood a square, white-painted wooden table and four white
folding chairs.
The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket
draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind
tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull,
and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn't quite a
smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and
held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked,
and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to Case, pointed at a
slab of white plastic that leaned near the doorway. Case crossed to it and
saw that it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He
helped the man lift it and position it in the doorway. Quick,
nicotine-stained fingers secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden
exhaust fan began to purr.
"Time," the man said, straightening up, "and counting. You know the
rate, Moll."
"We need a scan, Finn. For implants."
"So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape. Straighten
up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full threesixty." Case watched her rotate
between two fragile-looking stands studded with sensors. The man took a
small monitor from his pocket and squinted at it. "Something new in your
head, yeah. Silicon. coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your glasses
gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic carbons. Better
biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but that's your business, right?
Same with your claws."
"Get over here, Case." He saw a scuffed X in black on the white floor.
"Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ashtray in
his pink plastic claw, "I want no trouble here." The ashtray was made of
thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it
smoothly, butts and shards of green plastic cascading onto the table top.
"You understand?"
"Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you wanna try that thing
on me?"
"Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt," Ratz said, his tone
conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian standing
on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun at the trio. The
thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped with a kilometer of
glass filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine
revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.
"Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
"Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you owe me. These," and he glowered
at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better. You don't take anybody
off in the Chatsubo."
Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody off? We just
wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together."
Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at Wage's
crotch. "I hear you wanna do me." Ratz's pink claw closed around the
pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or
something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill you?" Wage turned
to the boy on his left. "You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me."
Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely deserted
except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot
of a barstool. The barrel of the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the
door, then swung back to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol
clattered on the table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round
out of the chamber.
"Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
Linda.
"Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
"Get him out of here," Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge
of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette.
Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet
sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out of his pocket and
handed it to Wage. "All I got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move
it fast. Had the rest of my roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now."
"You okay, Case?" The flask had already vanished behind a gunmetal
lapel. "I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look bad. Like
hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep."
"Yeah." He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. "Well, I had
this fifty, but I gave it to somebody." He giggled. He picked up the
.22's magazine and the one loose cartridge and dropped them into one
pocket, then put the pistol in the other. "I gotta see Shin, get my deposit
back."
"Go home," said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with something
like embarrassment. "Artiste. Go home."
He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered his way
past the plastic doors.
"Bitch," he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei the
holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon was already cold
and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from a street vendor's foam
thimble and watched the sun come up. "You fly away, honey. Towns like this
are for people who like the way down." But that wasn't it, really, and
he was finding it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She
just wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy it for her,
if she could find the right fence. And that business with the fifty;
she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was about to rip him for the
rest of what he had.
When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on the desk.
Different textbook. "Good buddy," Case called across the plastic turf, "you
don't need to tell me. I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said
she had my key. Nice little tip for you, say fifty New ones?" The boy put
down his book. "Woman," Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
his thumb. "Silk." He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back, nodded. "Thanks,
asshole," Case said.
On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed it up
somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to
rent a black box that would open anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came
on as he crawled in.
"Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday night
special you rented from the waiter?"
She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She
had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box muzzle of a
flechette pistol emerged from her hands. "That you in the arcade?" He pulled
the hatch down. "Where's Linda?"
"Hit that latch switch."
He did.
"That your girl? Linda?"
He nodded.
"She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the
gun, man?" She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of
black boots deep in the temperfoam.
"I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him
for half what I paid. You want the money?"
"No."
"Want some dry ice? All I got, right now."
"What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at the
arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with nunchucks."
"Linda said you were gonna kill me."
"Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here."
"You aren't with Wage?"
She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset,
sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin
above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers
curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished
burgundy. The nails looked artificial. "I think you screwed up, Case. I
showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture."
"So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the hatch.
"You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My
name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work for. Just
wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you "
"That's good."
"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just
the way I'm wired." She wore tight black glove leather jeans and a
bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light.
"If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy, Case? You look like you like
to take stupid chances."
"Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
"That's fine, man." The fletcher vanished into the black jacket.
"Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the
stupidest chances of your whole life."
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread,
and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel
blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the
Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A
white Braun coffee maker steamed on a low table by the sliding glass panels
that opened onto a narrow balcony.
"Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it." She took off her black
jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She
wore a sleeveless gray pullover with plain steel zips across each shoulder.
Bulletproof, Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms
and legs felt like they were made out of wood.
"Case." He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. "My name is
Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and
muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think
of bleach. "Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy."
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding
coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation rice paper wall. He saw the
angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
"Get your coffee, Case," Molly said. "You're okay, but
you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say." She sat
cross legged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher without
bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table
and refilled his cup.
"Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Armitage ran a
large hand back through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet
flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia,
Case."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."
"Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus
with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out."
He sensed abrupt tension. Armitagc walkcd to the window and looked out
over Tokyo Bay. "That isn't true. One unit made it back to Helsinki,
Case."
Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
"You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use
to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault
on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing micro light, a
pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The
Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs."
"Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
"Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics."
"Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll
just be going. . ."
"I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind."
"You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're rich enough
to hire expensive razor girls to haul my ass up here, is all. I'm
never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else." He crossed
to the window and looked down. "That's where I live now."
"Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
you when you're not looking."
"Profile?"
"We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your
aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You're
suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical
projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year."
" 'We.&lsquo " He met the faded blue eyes. " ‘We'
who?"
"What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage,
Case?" Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of
metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream,
and that soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again.
Case's dreams always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one
was over.
"What would you say, Case?"
Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
"I'd say you were full of shit."
Armitage nodded.
"Then I'd ask what your terms were."
"Not very different than what you're used to, Case."
"Let the man get some sleep, Armitage," Molly said from her futon, the
components of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive puzzle.
"He's coming apart at the seams."
"Terms," Case said, "and now. Right now."
He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.
The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek
pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place from
the round he'd made his first month in Chiba.
"Scared, Case. You're real scared." It was Sunday afternoon and
he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green
bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a
large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.
"It'll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage
has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the
program he's giving them to tell them how to do it. He'll put
them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what
that's worth?" She hooked thumbs in the belt loops of her leather
jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots.
The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were
empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
"You're street samurai," he said. "How long you work for him?"
"Couple of months."
"What about before that?"
"For somebody else. Working girl, you know?"
He nodded.
"Funny, Case."
"What's funny?"
‘It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know
how you're wired."
"You don't know me, sister."
"You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad
luck."
"How about him? He okay, Molly?" The robot crab moved toward them,
picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have
been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired
a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
"What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass." The crab
had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision,
the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back,
but the bronze limbs soon righted it.
Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel
waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for
cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said.
"You want to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from
the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked
as though it belonged on an operating table.
"Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
gets more all the time." Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth.
"Or maybe, maybe something's on to him. . ." She shrugged.
"What's that mean?"
"I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what
we're really working for."
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning,
he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours . Then
he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security
perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chain link. If
she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it. He'd
avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Armitage's
call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a
gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
"If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet
you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting
to see if Case would follow.
Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down
corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain
beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. . .
Hold still. Don't move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces
from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is
poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don't you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix,
and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
"Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!" She was straddling his chest,
a blue plastic syrette in one hand. "You don't lie still, I'll
slit your fucking throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors."
He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain
midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of
the Sprawl's towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward
him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass. . .
"Case? It's Wednesday, Case." She moved, rolling over, reaching
across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal
from a bottle of water and drink. "Here." She put the bottle in his hand. "I
can see in the dark, Case. Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
"My back hurts."
"That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood too.
Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new
tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff I dun no. Lot of injections.
They didn't have to open anything up for the main show." She settled
back beside him. "It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my
optic nerve."
He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm
water spraying his chest and thighs.
"I gotta punch deck," he heard himself say. He was groping for his
clothes. "I gotta know. . ."
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. "Sorry,
hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if
you jacked in now. Doctor's orders. Besides, they figure it worked.
Check you in a day or so." He lay down again.
"Where are we?"
"Home. Cheap Hotel."
"Where's Armitage?"
"Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of
here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl." She touched his
shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good massage."
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers
against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back,
kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her
fingers brushed his neck.
"How come you're not at the Hilton?"
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs and gently
encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a
minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather
of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself
harden against the temperfoam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat.
He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling
her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his
cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.
"It's okay," she said, "I can see." Sound of the jeans peeling
down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a
leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted
lenses. "Don't," she said, "fingerprints."
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his
thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia.
As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces,
fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his
back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping
down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring
blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were
shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were
strong and wet against his hips.
On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the
motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko
parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in
the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
"You seen Wage, Ratz?"
"Not tonight." Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.
"You see him, tell him I got his money."
"Luck changing, my artiste?"
"Too soon to tell."
"Well, I gotta see this guy," Case said, watching his reflection in her
glasses. "I got biz to cancel out of."
"Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight." She stood
beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
"The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I
don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people
who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my
people, you know?"
Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
"I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza,
and they'll go down, understand?" he lied, his hand on the shoulder of
her black jacket. "Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?"
"Not what I'm paid for."
"What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends
die because you're too literal about your instructions is something
else."
"Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to check
us out with your smuggler." She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered
Kandinsky coffee table.
"Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is
definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head .
What is this about, exactly?" Deane's ghostly cough seemed to hang in
the air between them.
"Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone."
"You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any other
way."
"Okay," she said. "Go. But five Minutes. Any more and I'll come
in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you're at it, you
try to figure something out."
"What's that?"
"Why I'm doing you the favor." She turned and walked out, past
the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
"Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?" asked Julie.
"Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?"
The bolts worked. "Slowly, Case," said the voice.
"Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk," Case said,
taking his place in the swivel chair.
"It's on all the time," Deane said mildly, taking a gun from
behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it
carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel
sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger-guard had been cut away and the
grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked
very strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. "Just taking care, you
Understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want."
"I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody."
"What's moving, old son?" Deane's shirt was candy-striped
cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
"Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?"
"Go-to on whom, old son?"
"Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton."
Deane put the pistol down. "Sit still, Case." He tapped something out
on a lap terminal. "It seems as though you know as much as my net does,
Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza,
and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies
from the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history.
You said history." He picked up the gun again, but didn't point it
directly at Case.
"What sort of history?"
"The war. You in the war, Julie?"
"The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks."
"Screaming Fist."
"Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great bloody
postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your
brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers,
all of that. . . great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh
in order to test some new technology. They knew about the Russians'
defenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons.
Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see." Deane shrugged. "Turkey
shoot for Ivan."
"Any of those guys make it out?"
"Christ," Deane said, "it's been bloody years. . . Though I do
think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov gunship. Helicopter,
you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't have entry codes, of course,
and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. Special
Forces types." Deane sniffed. "Bloody hell."
Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.
"I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting the gun
down. "Lovely place, Lisbon."
"In the service, Julie?"
"Hardly. Though I did see action." Deane smiled his pink smile.
"Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets."
"Thanks, Julie. I owe you one."
"Hardly, Case. And goodbye."
And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had
felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly along that
corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket stubs and styrofoam
cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, waiting. . .
They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and paid
off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. Wage had liked
that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case's side
with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them
to make a move. Then he'd taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
"Wasting your time, cowboy," Molly said, when Case took an octagon from
the pocket of his jacket. "How's that? You want one?" He held the pill
out to her.
"Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had
them designed to bypass that shit." She tapped the octagon with one burgundy
nail. "You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or
cocaine."
"Shit," he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
"Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen."
He did. Nothing did.
Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
"Sammi's," Ratz said. "I'll pass," Case said, "I hear they
kill each other down there."
An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai in a white
t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a port side warehouse, taut
gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a
door at either end, was a crude airlock preserving the pressure differential
that supported the dome. Fluorescent rings were screwed to the plywood
ceiling at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and
close with the smell of sweat and concrete.
None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the
towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers to
a kind of central stage, a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of
projection gear. No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above
the ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata of
cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set
up by the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the muted purring of
the blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters.
Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men circled.
The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten, the knives they held
were just under a meter long. The knife-fighter's grip is the
fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers curled, thumb aligned with
blade. The knives seemed to move of their own accord, gliding with a ritual
lack of urgency through the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing
point, as the men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was
smooth and still, watching.
"I'll go find us some food," Case said. She nodded, lost in
contemplation of the dance.
He didn't like this place.
He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet.
The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd.
Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the
approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what
it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing,
company hymn, company funeral.
He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the
food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall waxy cartons of
beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw that blood laced one
figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers and over
his knuckles.
Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now,
he'd see the matrix.
Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of
sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn't
worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on
the circling knives, no Armitage waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a
new passport and money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy. . .
Hot tears blurred his vision.
Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the crowd
was screaming, rising, screaming – as one figure crumpled, the
hologram fading, flickering. . .
Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took a deep
breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him her gray eyes blind
with fear. She wore the same French fatigues.
And gone. Into shadow.
Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after
her. He might have called her name, but he'd never be sure.
Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete
beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now and again
the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as
he ran.
Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.
He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair
lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage,
a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and
drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam
blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat
like a dowser's wand.
The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions.
Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed
once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's legs.
He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down,
expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He
found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes
closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the
winner's name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One
white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking.
Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's image above the
ring. Once a seamed European face danced in the glare of a match, lips
pursed around the short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked
on, feeling nothing.
"Case." Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. "You okay?"
Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.
He shook his head.
"Fight's over, Case. Time to go home."
He tried to walk past her. back into the dark, where something was
dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest. "Friends of your tight
friend. Killed your girl for you. You haven't done too well for
friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard
when we did you, man. He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one
back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM.
Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money. . . I
got the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were
here, but I had to make sure." Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin
line.
Case felt as though his brain were jammed. "Who," he said, "who sent
them?"
She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her
hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds
and died.
After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him to the
port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft. The last Case
saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over
the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.
Home.
Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand
megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn
solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to
overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up
your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes
per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan,
outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of
Atlanta. . .
Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers
moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly. . . He
watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an
hour before dawn.
Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a train
drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent,
gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing,
bass down into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused
dust to rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an
expanse of very new pink temperfoam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the
soot-stained grid of a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been
replaced with chip-board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a
few centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her breathe,
her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a
war plane's fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a
dancer's.
The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the wide
pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it.
Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel fire door. The walls
were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He
knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in
the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.
He was home.
He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood,
some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another
room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly
back from the canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on
some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square to a bar
she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred dream. Shopping.
She'd taken him shopping.
He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his
feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly's:
neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was
stuffed with things he didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a Simstim
deck, clothing with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he
discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper.
The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell
– to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
"Souvenir," Molly said. "I noticed you were always looking at
'em." He turned and saw her sitting cross legged on the bed, sleepily
scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.
"Someone's coming later to secure the place," Armitage said. He
stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned magnetic key in his hand.
Molly was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took from her bag.
"I can do it," she said. "I got enough gear already. Infrascan
perimeter, screamers. . ."
"No," he said, closing the door. "I want it tight."
"Suit yourself." She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black
cotton pants.
"You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?" Case asked, from where he sat, his
back against a wall.
Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and
military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian
suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special
Forces earring was gone. The handsome, inexpressive features offered the
routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past
decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened
the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.
"Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate security,"
Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a steaming mug of coffee. "That
number you had them do on my pancreas, that's like a cop routine."
Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of
Case. "You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me."
"Should I?" Case blew noisily on his coffee.
"You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a
dangerous dependency."
"Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
"Good, because you have a new one."
"How's that?" Case looked up from his coffee.
Armitage was smiling. "You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining
of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but
they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're
already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your
former employers gave you in Memphis."
Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
"You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but
that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will
dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood
change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So
you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped
you up from the gutter."
Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.
"Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases you find
there." Armitage handed him the magnetic key. "Go on. You'll enjoy
this, Case. Like Christmas morning."
Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a
field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.
He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete
fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his
life. First a child with hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready
at his sides; then a teenager, face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses.
Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the
rose glow of the dawn geodesics.
He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin
black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was
different commerce, a different rhythm, in the smell of fast food and
perfume and fresh summer sweat.
With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7.
They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the
foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam
beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a
Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker.
Armitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
"Where'd he go?" Case had asked Molly.
"He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage it.
Let's go down to the street." She'd zipped herself into an old
surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on a huge pair of
black plastic sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored insets.
"You know about that toxin shit, before?" he asked her, by the
fountain. She shook her head. "You think it's true?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Works either way."
"You know any way I can find out?"
"No," she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence.
"That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a scan." Then her
fingers moved again: wait. "And you don't care that much anyway. I saw
you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic." She laughed.
"So what's he got on you? How's he got the working girl
kinked?"
"Professional pride, baby, that's all." And again the sign for
silence. "We're gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon.
Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba krill for so long.
Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan and get us a real
breakfast."
Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of glass
tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that had lodged between his front
teeth. He'd given up asking her where they were going and why; jabs in
the ribs and the sign for silence were all he'd gotten in reply. She
talked about the season's fashions, about sports, about a political
scandal in California he'd never heard of.
He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of newsprint
went cart wheeling past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side;
something to do with convection, and an overlap in the domes. Case peered
through the window at the dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl, he
decided. She'd led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never
seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.
Maintaining connections.
Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO HOLOGRAFIX.
The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it,
Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that he
couldn't follow. He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brushing the tip
of the forefinger. The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of
dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side
to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like
something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He
could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into
the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass
stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister
stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old
magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring
blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted
scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look back.
The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across a doorway.
White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match, floored
with white hospital tile molded in a non slip pattern of small raised disks.
In the center stood a square, white-painted wooden table and four white
folding chairs.
The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket
draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind
tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull,
and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn't quite a
smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and
held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked,
and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to Case, pointed at a
slab of white plastic that leaned near the doorway. Case crossed to it and
saw that it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He
helped the man lift it and position it in the doorway. Quick,
nicotine-stained fingers secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden
exhaust fan began to purr.
"Time," the man said, straightening up, "and counting. You know the
rate, Moll."
"We need a scan, Finn. For implants."
"So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape. Straighten
up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full threesixty." Case watched her rotate
between two fragile-looking stands studded with sensors. The man took a
small monitor from his pocket and squinted at it. "Something new in your
head, yeah. Silicon. coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your glasses
gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic carbons. Better
biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but that's your business, right?
Same with your claws."
"Get over here, Case." He saw a scuffed X in black on the white floor.