Gibson William. Neuromancer

   «Case, what's wrong with you?» Armitage said, as the waiter was seating them at his table in the Vingtieme Siecle. It was the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants on a small lake near the Intercontinental. Case shuddered. Bruce hadn't said anything about after ef— fects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands were shaking. «Something I ate, maybe.» «I want you checked out by a medic,» Armitage said. «Just this hystamine reaction,» Case lied. «Get it when I travel, eat different stuff, sometimes.» Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine and sipped. «I've ordered for you,» he said. Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing. «Jesus,» Molly said, her own plate empty, «gimme that. You know what this costs?» She took his plate. 'They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff.» She forked a mouthful up and chewed. «Not hungry,» Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain. «You look fucking awful,» Molly said cheerfully. Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylam— ine made it taste like iodine. The lights dimmed. «Le Restaurant Vingtieme Siecle,» said a disembodied voice with a pronounced Sprawl accent, «proudly presents the hol— ographic cabaret of Mr. Peter Riviera. « Scattered applause from the other tables. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. Soon a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and drinks were being poured. «What's happening?» Case asked Armitage, who said noth— ing. Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail. «Good evening,» Riviera said, stepping forward on a small stage at the far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort, he hadn't noticed the stage. He hadn't seen where Riviera had come from. His uneasiness increased. At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight. Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit the dark hangings behind the stage. He was projecting. Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel, blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fin— gernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting, an embrace for his audience. Case heard the shallow water lap against the side of the restaurant. «Tonight,» Riviera said, his long eyes shining, «I would like to perform an extended piece for you. A new work.» A cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand. He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up from the point of impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled. More applause. «The title of the work is 'The Doll.'» Riviera lowered his hands. «I wish to dedicate its premiere here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool.» A wave of polite ap— plause. As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table. «And to another lady.» The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds, leaving only the glow of candles. Riviera's holographic aura had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing with his head bowed. Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals, sketching an open cube around the stage. The restaurant's lights had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to quiver with concentration. Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled, had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing the audience to view its contents. Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but kept his eyes closed. «I'd always lived in the room,» he said. «I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room.» The room's walls were yellowed white plaster. It contained two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair, the other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped and flaked, revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed was bare. Stained ticking with faded brown stripes. A single bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire. Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper curve. Riviera opened his eyes. «I'd been alone in the room, always.» He sat on the chair, facing the bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower on his lapel. «I don't know when I first began to dream of her,» he said, «but I do remember that at first she was only a haze, a shadow.» There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone. «I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted to hold her, hold her and more….» His voice carried perfectly in the hush of the restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a glass. Someone giggled. Someone else asked a whispered ques— tion in Japanese. «I decided that if I could visualize some part of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in the most perfect detail….» A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers pale. Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer. A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei surgical boutique. Riviera was holding the hand to his lips, licking its palm. The fingers tentatively caressed his face. But now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera reached for it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet of flesh and bone. The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own. The arms were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful. Case's head throbbed. His throat was dry. He drank the last of the wine. Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it fade away. The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still seething with its blue inner flame. Then the torso formed, as Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect, sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat. Molly's body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn't Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands with their bright nails. The bed was thick now with folds of yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying, pinching, caressing hands. Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass, his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room. Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered. The head was there, the image complete. Molly's face, with smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Molly— image began to couple with a renewed intensity. Then the image slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades. With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was already up and stumbling for the door. He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his head like a vise had released him now. Kneeling, his cheek against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne. Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager in the Sprawl, they'd called it, ''dreaming real.» He remem— bered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet. What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head and spat into the lake. He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace. Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran his hands over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the Vingtieme Siecle. Molly's chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass between his fingers. «Where is she?» Case asked. «Gone,» Armitage said. «She go after him?» «No.» There was a soft tink. Armitage looked down at the glass. His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its measure of red wine. The broken stem protruded like a sliver of ice. Case took it from him and set it in a water glass. «Tell me where she went, Armitage.» The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing there at all. «She's gone to prepare herself. You won't see her again. You'll be together during the run.» «Why did Riviera do that to her?» Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. «Get some sleep, Case.» «We run, tomorrow?» Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away, toward the exit. Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware, muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on the ceiling. The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the bal— ustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of candles. As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young French— men and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the far shore and the nearest casino.
   Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some beach after a retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for a note. There was nothing. Several seconds passed before the scene beyond the window registered through his tension and unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata, expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty. He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he hadn't bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope. He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony. «Get me a number for the Marcus Garvey,» he told the desk. «It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster.» The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. «Sir,» it added «the registration in question is Panamanian.» Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. «Yo?» «Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?» «Yo. On th' navigation comp, ya know.» «Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka. Then turn my deck on. It's the stud with the ridges on it.» «How you doin' in there, mon?» «Well, I need some help.» «Movin', mon. I get th' modem.» Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the simple phone link. «Ice this,» he told the Hosaka, when he heard it beep. «You are speaking from a heavily monitored location,» the computer advised primly. «Fuck it,» he said. «Forget the ice. No ice. Access the construct. Dixie?» «Hey, Case.» The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely. «Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get something for me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly's in here somewhere and I wanna know where. I'm in 335W, the Intercontinental. She was registered here too, but I don't know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone and do their records for me.» «No sooner said,» the Flatline said. Case heard the white sound of the invasion. He smiled. «Done. Rose Kolodny. Checked out. Take me a few minutes to screw their security net deep enough to get a fix.» «Go.» The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts. Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up on the temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up. A Japanese pop star reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen interviewer asked a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped with jags of blue interference. «Case, baby, you lose your mind, man?» The voice was slow, familiar. The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the interior of the Jarre de The, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.
   Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray sharkskin slacks. «Really, man, you're lookin' very scattered.» The voice came from the Braun's speakers. «Wintermute,» Case said. The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled. «Where's Molly?» «Never you mind. You're screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd do that, man. It's outside the profile.» «So tell me where she is and I'll call him off.» Zone shook his head. «You can't keep too good track of your women, can you Case. Keep losin' 'em, one way or another.» «I'll bring this thing down around your ears,» Case said. «No. You aren't that kind, man. I know that. You know something, Case? I figure you've got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba.» «Don't,» Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the window. «But I didn't. What's it matter, though? How much does it really matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you'd give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn't handle it. She's dead.» Case's fist glanced off the glass. «Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck.» Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of the condos. The Braun shut off. From the bed, the phone bleated steadily. «Case?» The Flatline was waiting. «Where you been? I got it. but it isn't much.» The construct rattled off an address. «Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub. That's all I could get without leaving a calling card.» «Okay,» Case said. «Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to disconnect the modem. Thanks, Dix.» «A pleasure.» He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage.
   «Hey. Lupus. Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus.» Bruce stood naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. «But we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?» «No. Thanks. I want some help.» He pushed the boy's arm aside and stepped into the room. «Hey, really, man, we're…» «Going to help me. You're really glad to see me. Because we're friends, right? Aren't we?» Bruce blinked. «Sure.» Case recited the address the Flatline had given him. «I knew he was a gangster,» Cath called cheerfully from the shower. «I gotta Honda trike,» Bruce said, grinning vacantly. «We go now,» Case said.
   «That level's the cubicles,» Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell ex— haust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks. «You be long?» «No saying. But you'll wait.» «We'll wait, yeah.» He scratched his bare chest. «That last part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. Number forty— three.» «You expected, Lupus?» Cath craned forward over Bruce's shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair. «Not really,» Case said. «That's a problem?» «Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don't wanna see you . . .» She shrugged. Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan, looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents of the islands. «Downstairs,» he said to a passing waiter, «I want to go downstairs.» He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club. He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing frag— ments of half a dozen European languages as he passed. «I want a cubicle,» he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a terminal on her lap. «Lower level.» He handed her his chip. «Gender preference?» She passed the chip across a glass plate on the face of the terminal. «Female,» he said automatically. «Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can access our special services display beforehand, if you like.» She smiled. She returned his chip. An elevator slid open behind her. The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the el— evator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an expensive clinic. He found his cubicle. He'd been looking for Molly's; now confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath the number plate. Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel. The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut— out. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door. The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were sound— proof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb the sound. He placed his chip against the black plate. The bolts clicked. She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually got— ten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes…. «Jesus Christ,» she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. «You're an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?» She leaned over him. «Chip,» he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the cubicle. «You bribe the help, upstairs?» He shook his head and fell across the bed. «Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count.» He clutched his stomach. «You kicked me,» he managed. «Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I'm meditating, right?» She sat beside him. «And getting a briefing.» She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. «Win— termute's telling me about Straylight.» «Where's the meat puppet?» «There isn't any. That's the most expensive special service of all.» She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. «The run's tomorrow, Wintermute says.» «What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?» «'Cause, if I'd stayed, I might have killed Riviera.» «Why?» «What he did to me. The show.» «I don't get it.» «This cost a lot,» she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. «Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you'll have the reflexes to go with the gear…. You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for….» She cracked her knuckles. «Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't com— patible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could re— member it…. But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.» She smiled. «Then it started getting strange.» She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. «The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time.» She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. «So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.» «They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?» «I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain…. You can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn't tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.» She seemed to speak from a distance. «And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I'd tell myself that at least some of them were just dreams, but by then I'd started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me. Nothing's too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.» She shook her head. «That prick was charging eight times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn't know.» «So what was he charging for?» «Bad dreams. Real ones. One night . . . one night, I'd just come back from Chiba.» She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall. «Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer….» She dug her fingers deep in the foam. «Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all. ..» She tugged at the temperfoam. «Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, 'What's wrong. What's wrong?' 'Cause we weren't finished yet….» She began to shake. «So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?» The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. «The house put a con— tract out on me. I had to hide for a while.» Case stared at her. «So Riviera hit a nerve last night,» she said. «I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I'll be psyched up to go in there after him.» «After him?» «He's already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . .» Case remembered the face he'd seen. «You gonna kill him?» She smiled. Cold. «He's going to die, yeah. Soon.» «I had a visit too,» he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded. «Maybe it wants you to hate something too.» «Maybe I hate it.» «Maybe you hate yourself, Case.»
   «How was it?» Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda. «Try it sometime,» he said, rubbing his eyes. «Just can't see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,» Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist. «Can we go home, now?» Bruce asked. «Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.» Rue Jules Verne was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle's midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps. If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you'd find yourself approaching Desiderata from the left. Case watched Bruce's trike until it was out of sight, then turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the faces of the month's newest simstim stars. Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass. The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa's edge. He'd seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle's security system, controlled by some central computer. In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer, Shozoku Smith's, Emer— gency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly's rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground plans of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools? He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall. Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he'd killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda's death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind's screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn't become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone. It was a strange thing. He couldn't take its measure. «Numb,» he said. He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it. «Gangster.» He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda. «Thought you went home,» he said, and covered his con— fusion with a sip of Carlsberg. «I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this.» She ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her wrist. «Like it?» «Sure.» He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked back at her. «What do you think you're up to, honey?» «You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?» She was very close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enor— mous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz. «You get off?» «Yeah. But the comedown's a bitch.» «Then you need another one.» «And what's that supposed to lead to?» «I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the cream— iest crib. People down the well on business tonight, if you follow me….» «If I follow you.» She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. «You're Yak, aren't you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza.» «You got an eye, huh?» He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette. «How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every time you screwed up.» «I never screw up.» He lit his cigarette. «I saw that girl you're with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares me.» She smiled too widely. «I like that. She like it with girls?» «Never said. Who's Hideo?» «3Jane's, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer.» Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he spoke. «Dee-Jane?» «Lady 3Jane. She's triff. Rich. Her father owns all this.» «This bar?» «Freeside ! « «No shit. You keepin' some class company, huh?» He raised an eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. «So how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet deb? You an' Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?» He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed. «Oh, you know,» she said, lids half lowered in what must have been intended as a look of modesty, «she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the party circuit…. It gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long as she brings Hideo to take care of her.» «Where's it get boring?' «Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it's pretty, all the pools and lilies.It's a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets.» She snuggled in against him. «Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together.» She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bub— ble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane. «Hideo gave it to me,» she said. «He tried to show me how, but I can't ever get it right. The necks come out backwards.» She tucked the folded paper back into her purse. Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing, and smoothed it across his inner wrist. «3Jane, she's got a pointy face, nose like a bird?» He watched his hands fumble an outline. «Dark hair? Young?» «I guess. But she's triff, you know? Like, all that money.» The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-cir— cuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sand— storms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding…. «Come on,» she said, taking his hand. «You got it now. We got it. Up the hill, we'll have it all night.»
   The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the-something flared white behind his eyes. He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out of the way. «Fuck you!» she screamed behind him, «you ripoff shit!» He couldn't feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles. And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the loser's zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate mono— chrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee. When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with wonder. And when the lights in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete. Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe. Midnight.
   He walked till morning. The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn't think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow. A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a De— siderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and crois— sants beneath the striped umbrellas. He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object. He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again. They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion. «Turing,» she said. «You are under arrest.»

PART FOUR. THE STRAYLIGHT RUN

   «Your name is Henry Dorsett Case.» She recited the year and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number, and a string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from his past. «You been here awhile?» He saw the contents of his bag spread out across the bed, unwashed clothing sorted by type. The shuriken lay by itself, between jeans and underwear, on the sand-tinted temperfoam. «Where is Kolodny?» The two men sat side by side on the couch, their arms crossed over tanned chests, identical gold chains slung around their necks. Case peered at them and saw that their youth was counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were un— able to erase. «Who's Kolodny?» «That was the name in the register. Where is she?» «I dunno,» he said, crossing to the bar and pouring himself a glass of mineral water. «She took off.» «Where did you go tonight, Case?» The girl picked up the pistol and rested it on her thigh, without actually pointing it at him. «Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high. How about you?» His knees felt brittle. The mineral water was warm and flat. «I don't think you grasp your situation,» said the man on the left, taking a pack of Gitanes from the breast pocket of his white mesh blouse. «You are busted, Mr. Case. The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelli— gence.» He took a gold Dunhill from the same pocket and cradled it in his palm. «The man you call Armitage is already in custody.» «Corto?» The man's eyes widened. «Yes. How do you know that that is his name?» A millimeter of flame clicked from the lighter. «I forget,» Case said. «You'll remember,» the girl said.
   Their names, or worknames, were Michele, Roland, and Pierre. Pierre, Case decided, would play the Bad Cop; Roland would take Case's side, provide small kindnesses-he found an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when Case refused a Gitane— and generally play counterpoint to Pierre's cold hostility. Michele would be the Recording Angel, making occasional adjustments in the direction of the interrogation. One or all of them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible evidence. Evidence, he asked himself, through the grinding come-down, of what? Knowing that he couldn't follow their French, they spoke freely among themselves. Or seemed to. He caught enough as it was: names like Pauley, Armitage, Sense/Net. Panther Mod— erns protruding like icebergs from an animated sea of Parisian French. But it was entirely possible that the names were there for his benefit. They always referred to Molly as Kolodny. «You say you were hired to make a run, Case,» Roland said, his slow speech intended to convey reasonableness, «and that you are unaware of the nature of the target. Is this not unusual in your trade? Having penetrated the defenses, would you not be unable then to perform the required operation? And surely an operation of some kind is required, yes?» He leaned forward, elbows on his stenciled brown knees, palms out to receive Case's explanation. Pierre paced the room; now he was by the window, now by the door. Michele was the kink, Case decided. Her eyes never left him. «Can I put some clothes on?» he asked. Pierre had insisted on stripping him, searching the seams of his jeans. Now he sat naked on a wicker footstool, with one foot obscenely white. Roland asked Pierre something in French. Pierre, at the window again, was peering through a flat little pair of binoc— ulars. «Non,» he said absently, and Roland shrugged, raising his eyebrows at Case. Case decided it was a good time to smile. Roland returned the smile. Oldest cop bullshit in the book, Case thought. «Look,» he said, «I'm sick. Had this godawful drug in a bar, you know? I wanna lie down. You got me already. You say you got Armitage. You got him, go ask him. I'm just hired help.» Roland nodded. «And Kolodny?» «She was with Armitage when he hired me. Just muscle, a razorgirl. Far as I know. Which isn't too far.» «You know that Armitage's real name is Corto,» Pierre said, his eyes still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars. «How do you know that, my friend?» «I guess he mentioned it sometime,» Case said, regretting the slip. «Everybody's got a couple names. Your name Pierre?» «We know how you were repaired in Chiba,» Michele said, «and that may have been Wintermute's first mistake.» Case stared at her as blankly as he could. The name hadn't been mentioned before. «The process employed on you resulted in the clinic's owner applying for seven basic patents. Do you know what that means?» «No.» «It means that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums. This reverses the usual order of things, you see. It attracted attention.» She crossed her brown arms across her small high breasts and settled back against the print cushion. Case wondered how old she might be. People said that age always showed in the eyes, but he'd never been able to see it. Julie Deane had had the eyes of a disinterested ten-year-old behind the rose quartz of his glasses. Nothing old about Michele but her knuckles. «Traced you to the Sprawl, lost you again, then caught up with you as you were leaving for Istanbul. We backtracked, traced you through the grid, determined that you'd instigated a riot at Sense/Net. Sense/Net was eager to cooperate. They ran an inventory for us. They discovered that McCoy Pauley's ROM personality construct was missing.» «In Istanbul,» Roland said, almost apologetically, «it was very easy. The woman had alienated Armitage's contact with the secret police.» «And then you came here,» Pierre said, slipping the bin— oculars into his shorts pocket. «We were delighted.» «Chance to work on your tan?» «You know what we mean,» Michele said. «If you wish to pretend that you do not, you only make things more difficult for yourself. There is still the matter of extradition. You will return with us, Case, as will Armitage. But where, exactly, will we all be going? To Switzerland, where you will be merely a pawn in the trial of an artificial intelligence? Or to le BAMA, where you can be proven to have participated not only in data invasion and larceny, but in an act of public mischief which cost fourteen innocent lives? The choice is yours.» Case took a Yeheyuan from his pack; Pierre lit it for him with the gold Dunhill. «Would Armitage protect you?» The question was punctuated by the lighter's bright jaws snapping shut. Case looked up at him through the ache and bitterness of betaphenethylamine. «How old are you, boss?» «Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and you are in the way.» «One thing,» Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. «Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?» He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged. «It doesn't matter,» Roland said. «You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required.» The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's. «You are worse than a fool,» Michele said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. «You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?» There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. «You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now.» She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer. «I'm dressing already,» he said, stumbling toward the bed. His legs were still numb, clumsy. He fumbled with a clean t-shirt. «We have a ship standing by. We will erase Pauley's con— struct with a pulse weapon.» «Sense/Net'll be pissed,» Case said, thinking: and all the evidence in the Hosaka. «They are in some difficulty already, for having owned such a thing.» Case pulled the shirt over his head. He saw the shuriken on the bed, lifeless metal, his star. He felt for the anger. It was gone. Time to give in, to roll with it…. He thought of the toxin sacs. «Here comes the meat,» he muttered. In the elevator to the meadow, he thought of Molly. She might already be in Straylight. Hunting Riviera. Hunted, prob— ably, by Hideo, who was almost certainly the ninja clone of the Finn's story, the one who'd come to retrieve the talking head. He rested his forehead against the matte black plastic of a wall panel and closed his eyes. His limbs were wood, old, warped and heavy with rain. Lunch was being served beneath the trees, under the bright umbrellas. Roland and Michele fell into character, chattering brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Michele kept the muz— zle of her pistol close to his ribs, concealing the gun with a white duck jacket she draped over her arm.
   Crossing the meadow, weaving between the tables and the trees, he wondered if she would shoot him if he collapsed now. Black fur boiled at the borders of his vision. He glanced up at the hot white band of the Lado-Acheson armature and saw a giant butterfly banking gracefully against recorded sky. At the edge of the meadow they came to railinged cliffside, wild flowers dancing in the updraft from the canyon that was Desiderata. Michele tossed her short dark hair and pointed, saying something in French to Roland. She sounded genuinely happy. Case followed the direction of her gesture and saw the curve of planing lakes, the white glint of casinos, turquoise rectangles of a thousand pools, the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze hieroglyphs, all held in serene approximation of gravity against the endless curve of Freeside's hull. They followed the railing to an ornate iron bridge that arched over Desiderata. Michele prodded him with the muzzle of the Walther. «Take it easy, I can't hardly walk today.» They were a little over a quarter of the way across when the microlight struck, its electric engine silent until the carbon fiber prop chopped away the top of Pierre's skull. They were in the thing's shadow for an instant; Case felt the hot blood spray across the back of his neck, and then someone tripped him. He rolled, seeing Michele on her back, knees up, aiming the Walther with both hands. That's a waste of effort, he thought, with the strange lucidity of shock. She was trying to shoot down the microlight. And then he was running. He looked back as he passed the first of the trees. Roland was running after him. He saw the fragile biplane strike the iron railing of the bridge, crumple, cartwheel, sweeping the girl with it down into Desiderata. Roland hadn't looked back. His face was fixed, white, his teeth bared. He had something in his hand. The gardening robot took Roland as he passed that same tree. It fell straight out of the groomed branches, a thing like a crab, diagonally striped with black and yellow. «You killed 'em,» Case panted, running. «Crazy mother— fucker, you killed 'em all….»