Neuromancer ts-1

by William Gibson

  `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 creamiest 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 bubble 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-circuited 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. Sandstorms 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 monochrome, 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 Desiderata 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 croissants 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

  13

  `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 unable 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 int
elligence.' 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 Michle, 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. Michle 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 Moderns 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. Michle 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 binoculars. `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,' Michle 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 Michle 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 binoculars into his shorts pocket. `We were delighted.'

  `Chance to work on your tan?'

  `You know what we mean,' Michle 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 createflexibility, 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,' Michle 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 construct 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, probably, 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 Michle fell into character, chattering brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Michle kept the muzzle 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. Michle 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. Michle 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 Michle 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 motherfucker, you killed 'em all...'

  14

  The little train shot through its tunnel at eighty kilometers per hour. Case kept his eyes closed. The shower had helped, but he'd lost his breakfast when he'd looked down and seen Pierre's blood washing pink across the white tiles.