21
The music woke him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own heart. He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket over his shoulders in the predawn chill, gray light from the doorway and the fire long dead. His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it ex— perimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages. The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his neck. He crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the music. The pulse faded, returned, faded…. «What's wrong?» She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes. «Baby . . .» «I feel … like a drug…. You get that here?» She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper arms. «Linda, who told you? Who told you I'd come? Who?» «On the beach,» she said, something forcing her to look away. «A boy. I see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He lives here.» «And what did he say?» «He said you'd come. He said you wouldn't hate me. He said we'd be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool was. He looks Mexican.» «Brazilian,» Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed down the wall. «I think he's from Rio.» He got to his feet and began to struggle into his jeans. «Case,» she said, her voice shaking, «Case, where you goin ' ?» «I think I'll find that boy,» he said, as the music came surging back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although he couldn't place it in memory. «Don't, Case.» «I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down the beach. But yesterday it wasn't there. You ever seen that?» He yanked his zipper up and tore at the impossible knot in his shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes into the corner. She nodded, eyes lowered. «Yeah. I see it sometimes.» «You ever go there, Linda?» He put his jacket on. «No,» she said, «but I tried. After I first came, an' I was bored. Anyway, I figured it's a city, maybe I could find some shit.» She grimaced. «I wasn't even sick, I just wanted it. So I took food in a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn't have another can for water. An' I walked all day, an' I could see it, sometimes, city, an' it didn't seem too far. But it never got any closer. An' then it was gettin' closer, an' I saw what it was. Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked, or maybe nobody there, an' other times I thought I'd see light flashin' off a machine, cars or somethin' ….» Her voice trailed off. «What is it?» «This thing,» she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark walls, the dawn outlining the doorway, «where we live. It gets smaller, Case, smaller, closer you get to it.» Pausing one last time, by the doorway. «You ask your boy about that?» «Yeah. He said I wouldn't understand, an' I was wastin' my time. Said it was, was like . . . an event. An' it was our horizon. Event horizon, he called it.» The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and struck out blindly, heading-he knew, somehow-away from the sea. Now the hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from his feet, drew back from him as he walked. «Hey,» he said, «it's breaking down. Bet you know, too. What is it? Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart? Maybe the Dixie Flatline's no pushover, huh?» He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was following him, not trying to catch up, the broken zip of the French fatigues flapping against the brown of her belly, pubic hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like one of the girls on the Finn's old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life, only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass. And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of them, and the boy's gums were wide and bright pink against his thin brown face. He wore ragged, colorless shorts, limbs too thin against the sliding blue-gray of the tide. «I know you,» Case said, Linda beside him. «No,» the boy said, his voice high and musical, «you do not.» «You're the other AI. You're Rio. You're the one who wants to stop Wintermute. What's your name? Your Turing code. What is it?» The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera's, but there was no malice there. «To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names. . .» «A Turing code's not your name.» «Neuromancer,» the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. «The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of he; days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Nec— romancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,» and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, «I am the dead, and their land.» He laughed. A gull cried. «Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you.» «You're cracking. The ice is breaking up.» «No,» he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed his foot against the sand. «It is more simple than that. But the choice is yours.» The gray eyes regarded Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics. «Case, honey,» Linda said, and touched his shoulder. «No,» he said. He took off his jacket and handed it to her. «I don't know,» he said, «maybe you're here. Anyway, it gets cold.» He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he'd closed his eyes, watching the music define itself at the center of things. He did look back, once, although he didn't open his eyes. He didn't need to. They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the thin child who said his name was Neuromancer. His leather jacket dangled from her hand, catching the fringe of the surf. He walked on, following the music. Maelcum's Zion dub.
There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shift— ing, moire, degrees of half tone generated by a very simple graphics program. There was a long hold on a view through chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water. There were voices. There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again….
«Case? Mon?» The music. «You back, mon.» The music was taken from his ears. «How long?» he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth was very dry. «Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan' pull th' jack, Mute seh no. Screen goin' funny, then Mute seh put th' phones on you.» He opened his eyes. Maelcum's features were overlayed with bands of translucent hieroglyphs. «An' you medicine,» Maelcum said. «Two derm.» He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the monitor. The Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement threw him into the savage rush of the betaphenethylamine, the blue derms burning against his left wrist. «Overdose,» he man— aged. «Come on, mon,» the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like a child, «I an' I mus' go.»
There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shift— ing, moire, degrees of half tone generated by a very simple graphics program. There was a long hold on a view through chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water. There were voices. There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again….
«Case? Mon?» The music. «You back, mon.» The music was taken from his ears. «How long?» he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth was very dry. «Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan' pull th' jack, Mute seh no. Screen goin' funny, then Mute seh put th' phones on you.» He opened his eyes. Maelcum's features were overlayed with bands of translucent hieroglyphs. «An' you medicine,» Maelcum said. «Two derm.» He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the monitor. The Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement threw him into the savage rush of the betaphenethylamine, the blue derms burning against his left wrist. «Overdose,» he man— aged. «Come on, mon,» the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like a child, «I an' I mus' go.»
22
The service cart was crying. The betaphenethylamine gave it a voice. It wouldn't stop. Not in the crowded gallery, the long corridors, not as it passed the black glass entrance to the T-A crypt, the vaults where the cold had seeped so gradually into old Ashpool's dreams. The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement of the cart indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the overdose. When the cart died, at last, something beneath the seat giving up with a shower of white sparks, the crying stopped. The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of 3Jane's pirate cave. «How far, mon?» Maelcum helped him from the sputtering cart as an integral extinguisher exploded in the thing's engine compartment, gouts of yellow powder squirting from louvers and service points. The Braun tumbled from the back of the seat and hobbled off across the imitation sand, dragging one useless limb behind it. «You mus' walk, mon.» Maelcum took the deck and construct, slinging the shock cords over his shoul— der.
The trodes rattled around Case's neck as he followed the Zionite. Riviera's holos waited for them, the torture scenes and the cannibal children. Molly had broken the triptych. Maelcum ignored them. «Easy,» Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding figure. «Gotta do this right.» Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his hands. «Right, mon? How's right?» «Got Molly in there, but she's out of it. Riviera, he can throw holos. Maybe he's got Molly's fletcher.» Maelcum nod— ded. «And there's a ninja, a family bodyguard.» Maelcum's frown deepened. «You listen, Babylon mon,» he said. «I a warrior. But this no m' fight, no Zion fight. Babylon fightin' Babylon, eatin' i'self, ya know? But Jah seh I an' I t' bring Steppin' Razor outa this.» Case blinked. «She a warrior,» Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. «Now you tell me, mon, who I not t' kill.» «3Jane,» he said, after a pause. «A girl there. Has a kinda white robe thing on, with a hood. We need her.»
When they reached the entrance, Maelcum walked straight in, and Case had no choice but to follow him. 3Jane's country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum handed him the deck and the construct and walked to the edge of the pool. Beyond the white pool furniture, there was dark— ness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high maze of partially demolished walls. The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool. «They're here,» Case said. «They gotta be.» Maelcum nodded. The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared, its meter of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending it spinning across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down hard and fumbled at the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked at it. Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a slender bamboo bow. He bowed. Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft. «The artery is intact,» the ninja said. Case remembered Molly's description of the man who-d killed her lover. Hideo was another. Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter calm. He wore clean, frayed khaki workpants and soft dark shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at the toes like tabi socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look of the best Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare and smooth. «You cut my thumb, mon, wi' secon' one,» Maelcum said. «Coriolis force,» the ninja said, bowing again. «Most dif— ficult, slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not intended.» «Where's 3Jane?» Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum. He saw that the tip of the arrow in the ninja's bow was like a double-edged razor. «Where's Molly?» «Hello, Case.» Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind Hideo, Molly's fletcher in his hand. «I would have expected Armitage, somehow. Are we hiring help out of that Rasta cluster now?» «Armitage is dead.» «Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news hardly comes as a shock.» «Wintermute killed him. He's in orbit around the spindle.» Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to Maelcum and back. «I think it ends here, for you,» he said. «Where's Molly?» The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, low— ering the bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. «This is without subtlety,» he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity. «It ends here for her, too,» Riviera said. «Maybe 3Jane won't go for that, Peter,» Case said, uncertain of the impulse. The derms still raged in his system, the old fever starting to grip him, Night City craziness. He remembered moments of grace, dealing out on the edge of things, where he'd found that he could sometimes talk faster than he could think.
The gray eyes narrowed. «Why, Case? Why do you think that?» Case smiled. Riviera didn't know about the simstim rig. He'd missed it in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for him. But how could Hideo have missed it? And Case was certain the ninja would never have let 3Jane treat Molly without first checking her for kinks and concealed weapons. No, he decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would know as well. «Tell me, Case,» Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle of the fletcher. Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed Molly out of the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its tall, spidery wheels squeaking as they turned. Molly was bun— dled deep in a red and black striped blanket, the narrow, caned back of the antique chair towering above her. She looked very small. Broken. A patch of brilliantly white micropore covered her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed with the motion of the chair. «A familiar face,» 3Jane said, «I saw you the night of Peter's show. And who is this?» «Maelcum,» Case said. «Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr. Malcolm's wound.» Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face. The ninja walked to where Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his bow and the shotgun well out of reach, and took something from his pocket. A pair of bolt cutters. «I must cut the shaft,» he said. «It is too near the artery.» Maelcum nodded. His face was grayish and sheened with sweat. Case looked at 3Jane. «There isn't much time,» he said. «For whom, exactly?» «For any of us.» There was a snap as Hideo cut through the metal shaft of the arrow. Maelcum groaned. «Really,» Riviera said, «it won't amuse you to hear this failed con artist make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful, 1 can assure you. He'll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you his mother, perform the most boring sexual favors….» 3Jane threw back her head and laughed. «Wouldn't 1, Pe— ter?» «The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,» Case said. «Wintermute's going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps. You know that?» 3Jane raised her eyebrows. «Peter's suggested something like that, but tell me more.» «I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he's something like a giant ROM construct, for recording per— sonality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like it's real, but it just goes on forever.» 3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. «Where? Describe the place, this construct.» «A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete thing, kinda bunker….» He hesitated. «It's nothing fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come back to where you started.» «Yes,» she said. «Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse. She for— mulated the basis of her philosophy there.» Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants. He held a section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had his eyes closed, his hand clapped tight around his bicep. «I will bandage it,» Hideo said. Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear shot. The darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He flicked it underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera's hand. The fletcher struck the tiles a meter away. Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity. Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of Riviera's sternum. The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found his balance. «Peter,» 3Jane said, «Peter, what have you done?» «He's blinded your clone boy,» Molly said flatly. Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile Case saw whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes. Riviera smiled.
Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera's smile had faded. He bent-bowing, it seemed to Case-and found the bow and arrow. «You're blind,» Riviera said, taking a step backward. «Peter,» 3Jane said, «don't you know he does it in the dark? Zen. It's the way he practices.» The ninja notched his arrow. «Will you distract me with your holograms now?» Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo's arrow twitched. Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of wall. The ninja's face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy. Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon held ready. «Jane-lady,» Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop the shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. «This take your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it.» 3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. «Off,» she said, «get it off.» Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. «Hideo'll get him, even blind?» he asked 3Jane. «When I was a child,» she said, «we loved to blindfold him. He put arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.» «Peter's good as dead anyway,» Molly said. «In another twelve hours, he'll start to freeze up. Won't be able to move, his eyes is all.» «Why?» Case turned to her. «I poisoned his shit for him,» she said. «Condition's like Parkinson's disease, sort of.» 3Jane nodded. «Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was admitted.» She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from Molly's hands. «Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia nigra. Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his sleep.»
«Ali,» Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast. «It's the meperidine. I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up the reaction times with higher temperatures. N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,» she sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, «tetra-hydro-pyridene.» «A hotshot,» Case said. «Yeah,» Molly said, «a real slow hotshot.» «That's appalling,» 3Jane said, and giggled.
It was crowded in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with 3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin. She grinned and ground 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 pas— senger. 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 AI, 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 dis— tanceless 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, sud— denly 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 Tessier-Ashpool 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 Flatliner' «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 move— ments 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 phar— macy-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 ex— ceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, be— yond 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 birdunknown, 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 bands 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 sweat— stained 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.
The trodes rattled around Case's neck as he followed the Zionite. Riviera's holos waited for them, the torture scenes and the cannibal children. Molly had broken the triptych. Maelcum ignored them. «Easy,» Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding figure. «Gotta do this right.» Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his hands. «Right, mon? How's right?» «Got Molly in there, but she's out of it. Riviera, he can throw holos. Maybe he's got Molly's fletcher.» Maelcum nod— ded. «And there's a ninja, a family bodyguard.» Maelcum's frown deepened. «You listen, Babylon mon,» he said. «I a warrior. But this no m' fight, no Zion fight. Babylon fightin' Babylon, eatin' i'self, ya know? But Jah seh I an' I t' bring Steppin' Razor outa this.» Case blinked. «She a warrior,» Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. «Now you tell me, mon, who I not t' kill.» «3Jane,» he said, after a pause. «A girl there. Has a kinda white robe thing on, with a hood. We need her.»
When they reached the entrance, Maelcum walked straight in, and Case had no choice but to follow him. 3Jane's country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum handed him the deck and the construct and walked to the edge of the pool. Beyond the white pool furniture, there was dark— ness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high maze of partially demolished walls. The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool. «They're here,» Case said. «They gotta be.» Maelcum nodded. The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared, its meter of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending it spinning across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down hard and fumbled at the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked at it. Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a slender bamboo bow. He bowed. Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft. «The artery is intact,» the ninja said. Case remembered Molly's description of the man who-d killed her lover. Hideo was another. Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter calm. He wore clean, frayed khaki workpants and soft dark shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at the toes like tabi socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look of the best Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare and smooth. «You cut my thumb, mon, wi' secon' one,» Maelcum said. «Coriolis force,» the ninja said, bowing again. «Most dif— ficult, slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not intended.» «Where's 3Jane?» Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum. He saw that the tip of the arrow in the ninja's bow was like a double-edged razor. «Where's Molly?» «Hello, Case.» Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind Hideo, Molly's fletcher in his hand. «I would have expected Armitage, somehow. Are we hiring help out of that Rasta cluster now?» «Armitage is dead.» «Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news hardly comes as a shock.» «Wintermute killed him. He's in orbit around the spindle.» Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to Maelcum and back. «I think it ends here, for you,» he said. «Where's Molly?» The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, low— ering the bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. «This is without subtlety,» he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity. «It ends here for her, too,» Riviera said. «Maybe 3Jane won't go for that, Peter,» Case said, uncertain of the impulse. The derms still raged in his system, the old fever starting to grip him, Night City craziness. He remembered moments of grace, dealing out on the edge of things, where he'd found that he could sometimes talk faster than he could think.
The gray eyes narrowed. «Why, Case? Why do you think that?» Case smiled. Riviera didn't know about the simstim rig. He'd missed it in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for him. But how could Hideo have missed it? And Case was certain the ninja would never have let 3Jane treat Molly without first checking her for kinks and concealed weapons. No, he decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would know as well. «Tell me, Case,» Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle of the fletcher. Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed Molly out of the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its tall, spidery wheels squeaking as they turned. Molly was bun— dled deep in a red and black striped blanket, the narrow, caned back of the antique chair towering above her. She looked very small. Broken. A patch of brilliantly white micropore covered her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed with the motion of the chair. «A familiar face,» 3Jane said, «I saw you the night of Peter's show. And who is this?» «Maelcum,» Case said. «Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr. Malcolm's wound.» Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face. The ninja walked to where Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his bow and the shotgun well out of reach, and took something from his pocket. A pair of bolt cutters. «I must cut the shaft,» he said. «It is too near the artery.» Maelcum nodded. His face was grayish and sheened with sweat. Case looked at 3Jane. «There isn't much time,» he said. «For whom, exactly?» «For any of us.» There was a snap as Hideo cut through the metal shaft of the arrow. Maelcum groaned. «Really,» Riviera said, «it won't amuse you to hear this failed con artist make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful, 1 can assure you. He'll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you his mother, perform the most boring sexual favors….» 3Jane threw back her head and laughed. «Wouldn't 1, Pe— ter?» «The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,» Case said. «Wintermute's going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps. You know that?» 3Jane raised her eyebrows. «Peter's suggested something like that, but tell me more.» «I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he's something like a giant ROM construct, for recording per— sonality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like it's real, but it just goes on forever.» 3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. «Where? Describe the place, this construct.» «A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete thing, kinda bunker….» He hesitated. «It's nothing fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come back to where you started.» «Yes,» she said. «Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse. She for— mulated the basis of her philosophy there.» Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants. He held a section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had his eyes closed, his hand clapped tight around his bicep. «I will bandage it,» Hideo said. Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear shot. The darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He flicked it underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera's hand. The fletcher struck the tiles a meter away. Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity. Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of Riviera's sternum. The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found his balance. «Peter,» 3Jane said, «Peter, what have you done?» «He's blinded your clone boy,» Molly said flatly. Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile Case saw whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes. Riviera smiled.
Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera's smile had faded. He bent-bowing, it seemed to Case-and found the bow and arrow. «You're blind,» Riviera said, taking a step backward. «Peter,» 3Jane said, «don't you know he does it in the dark? Zen. It's the way he practices.» The ninja notched his arrow. «Will you distract me with your holograms now?» Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo's arrow twitched. Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of wall. The ninja's face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy. Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon held ready. «Jane-lady,» Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop the shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. «This take your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it.» 3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. «Off,» she said, «get it off.» Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. «Hideo'll get him, even blind?» he asked 3Jane. «When I was a child,» she said, «we loved to blindfold him. He put arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.» «Peter's good as dead anyway,» Molly said. «In another twelve hours, he'll start to freeze up. Won't be able to move, his eyes is all.» «Why?» Case turned to her. «I poisoned his shit for him,» she said. «Condition's like Parkinson's disease, sort of.» 3Jane nodded. «Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was admitted.» She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from Molly's hands. «Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia nigra. Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his sleep.»
«Ali,» Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast. «It's the meperidine. I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up the reaction times with higher temperatures. N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,» she sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, «tetra-hydro-pyridene.» «A hotshot,» Case said. «Yeah,» Molly said, «a real slow hotshot.» «That's appalling,» 3Jane said, and giggled.
It was crowded in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with 3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin. She grinned and ground 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 pas— senger. 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 AI, 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 dis— tanceless 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, sud— denly 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 Tessier-Ashpool 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 Flatliner' «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 move— ments 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 phar— macy-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 ex— ceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, be— yond 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 birdunknown, 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 bands 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 sweat— stained 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.
CODA. DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL
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 rec— ognition. «Hey,» he'd said, «it's me. Case.» The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrin— kled flesh. «Ah,» Ratz had said, at last, «the artiste.» The bartender shrugged. «1 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 whin— ing. 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 Neuro— mancer 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 ac— counts. 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 Ash— pool and their other children-aside from 3Jane-she'd re— fused 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. Neuro— mancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built some— thing 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 re— membered 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
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 rec— ognition. «Hey,» he'd said, «it's me. Case.» The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrin— kled flesh. «Ah,» Ratz had said, at last, «the artiste.» The bartender shrugged. «1 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 whin— ing. 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 Neuro— mancer 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 ac— counts. 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 Ash— pool and their other children-aside from 3Jane-she'd re— fused 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. Neuro— mancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built some— thing 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 re— membered 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