Neuromancer ts-1

by William Gibson

  Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward and get his fingers around the figure's throat, just above the ragged knot in the rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn's larynx.

  `Well, good luck,' the Finn said. He turned, hands in pockets and began trudging back up the green arch.

  `Hey, asshole,' the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone a dozen paces. The figure paused, half turned. `What about me? What about my payoff?'

  `You'll get yours,' it said.

  `What's that mean?' Case asked, as he watched the narrow tweed back recede.

  `I wanna be erased,' the construct said. `I told you that, remember?'

  Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shopping centers he'd known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again.

  Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing her goal or out of concern for her leg. The pain was starting to work its jagged way back through the endorphins, and he wasn't sure what that meant. She didn't speak, kept her teeth clenched, and carefully regulated her breathing. She'd passed many things that Case hadn't understood, but his curiosity was gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly's incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled -her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically -`La marie mise nu par ses clibataires, mme.'She'd reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass. There had been what was obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool's cryogenic compound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.

  She'd seen no one since the two Africans and their cart, and for Case they'd taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured them gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth dark skulls gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired little song. And none of this was anything like the Villa Straylight he would have expected, some cross between Cath's fairy tale castle and a half-remembered childhood fantasy of the Yakuza's inner sanctum.

  07:02:18.

  One and a half hours.

  `Case,' she said, `I wanna favor.' Stiffly, she lowered herself to sit on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of each plate protected by an uneven coating of clear plastic. She picked at a rip in the plastic on the topmost plate, blades sliding from beneath thumb and forefinger. `Leg's not good, you know? Didn't figure any climb like that, and the endorphin won't cut it, much longer. So maybe -just maybe, right? -I got a problem here. What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera does' -and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through Modern polycarbon and Paris leather -`I want you to tell him. Tell him it was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly. He'll know. Okay?' She glanced around the empty hallway, the bare walls. The floor here was raw lunar concrete and the air smelled of resins. `Shit, man, I don't even know if you're listening.'

  CASE.

  She winced, got to her feet, nodded. `What's he told you, man, Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was the Tessier half, 3Jane's genetic mother. And of that dead puppet of Ashpool's, I guess. Can't figure why he'd tell me, down in that cubicle... lotta stuff... Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It's not just a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of personality.' She drew her fletcher and limped away down the corridor.

  The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced by what Case at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from solid rock. Molly examined its edge and he saw that in fact the steel was sheathed with panels of something that looked and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the dark sand spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like sand, cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed like a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters ahead, the tunnel curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shadows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb. He was thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror for cowboys.

  But she wasn't lost, he told himself.

  Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across the un-sand of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.

  The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time to realize that the thing was a recording. The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly's breasts were too large, visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist was impossibly narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty. Beside her, Armitage stood rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki uniform. His eyes, Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny monitor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a howling waste of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds.

  She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage's television eyes, then turned to the figure of Case. Here, it was as if Riviera -and Case had known instantly that Riviera was responsible -had been unable to find anything worthy of parody. The figure that slouched there was a fair approximation of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin, high-shouldered, a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a shave, but then he usually did.

  Molly stepped back. She looked from one figure to another. It was a static display, the only movement the silent gusting of the black trees in Armitage's frozen Siberian eyes.

  `Tryin'~ to tell us something, Peter?' she asked softly. Then she stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet of the holo-Molly. Metal clinked against the wall and the figures were gone. She bent and picked up a small display unit. `Guess he can jack into these and program them direct,' she said, tossing it away.

  She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandescent globe set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of expansion grating. The style of the improvised fixture suggested childhood, somehow. He remembered fortresses he'd built with other children on rooftops and in flooded sub-basements. A rich kid's hideout, he thought. This kind of roughness was expensive. What they called atmosphere.

  She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the entrance to 3Jane's apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing in the alley behind the Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of Riviera's shattered body. Several others were scenes of torture, the inquisitors always military officers and the victims invariably young women. These had the awful intensity of Riviera's show at the Vingtime Sicle, as though they had been frozen in the blue flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed them.

  The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera had had to drag across some private distance of memory and time. She had to kneel to examine it; it had been projected from the vantage point of a small child. None of the others had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments of torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.

  A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond its crest the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city
towers. The rubble wave was textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted gracefully as fine string, vast slabs of concrete still clinging there. The foreground might once have been a city square; there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a fountain. At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau was confusing at first. Molly must have read it correctly before Case had quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She spat, then stood.

  Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores on their contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and throat open to the sky. They were feeding.

  `Bonn,' she said, something like gentleness in her voice. `Quite the product, aren't you, Peter? But you had to be. Our 3Jane, she's too jaded now to open the back door for just any petty thief. So Wintermute dug you up. The ultimate taste, if your taste runs that way. Demon lover. Peter.' She shivered. `But you talked her into letting me in. Thanks. Now we're gonna party.'

  And then she was walking -strolling, really, in spite of the pain -away from Riviera's childhood. She drew the fletcher from its holster, snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed that, and replaced it with another. She hooked her thumb in the neck of the Modern suit and ripped it open to the crotch with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting the tough polycarbon like rotten silk. She freed herself from the arms and legs, the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell to the dark false sand.

  Case noticed the music then. A music he didn't know, all horns and piano.

  The entrance to 3Jane's world had no door. It was a ragged five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down in a broad shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows, music.

  `Case,' she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand. Then she raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with a wet tongue tip, kissing him through the simstim link. `Gotta go.'

  Then there was something small and heavy in her left hand, her thumb against a tiny stud, and she was descending.

  18

  She missed it by a fraction. She nearly cut it, but not quite. She went in just right, Case thought. The right attitude; it was something he could sense, something he could have seen in the posture of another cowboy leaning into a deck, fingers flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the moves. And she'd pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it together around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist.

  It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it.

  Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool had carved herself a low country flush with the inner surface of Straylight's hull, chopping away the maze of walls that was her legacy. She lived in a single room so broad and deep that its far reaches were lost to an inverse horizon, the floor hidden by the curvature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and irregular, done in the same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here and there across the floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high reminders of the labyrinth. There was a rectangular turquoise pool centered ten meters from the foot of the stairway, its underwater floods the apartment's only source of light -or it seemed that way, to Case, as Molly took her final step. The pool threw shifting blobs of light across the ceiling above it.

  They were waiting by the pool.

  He'd known that her reflexes were souped up, jazzed by the neurosurgeons for combat, but he hadn't experienced them on the simstim link. The effect was like tape run at half speed, a slow, deliberate dance choreographed to the killer instinct and years of training. She seemed to take the three of them in at a glance: the boy poised on the pool's high board, the girl grinning over her wineglass, and the corpse of Ashpool, his left socket gaping black and corrupt above his welcoming smile. He wore his maroon robe. His teeth were very white.

  The boy dove. Slender, brown, his form perfect. The grenade left her hand before his hands could cut the water. Case knew the thing for what it was as it broke the surface: a core of high explosive wrapped with ten meters of fine, brittle steel wire.

  Her fletcher whined as she sent a storm of explosive darts into Ashpool's face and chest, and he was gone, smoke curling from the pocked back of the empty, white-enameled pool chair.

  The muzzle swung for 3Jane as the grenade detonated, a symmetrical wedding cake of water rising, breaking, falling back, but the mistake had been made.

  Hideo didn't even touch her, then. Her leg collapsed.

  In Garvey,Case screamed.

  `It took you long enough,' Riviera said, as he searched her pockets. Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black sphere the size of a bowling ball. `I saw a multiple assassination in Ankara,' he said, his fingers plucking things from her jacket, `a grenade job. In a pool. It seemed a very weak explosion, but they all died instantly of hydrostatic shock.' Case felt her move her fingers experimentally. The material of the ball seemed to offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her leg was excruciating, impossible. A red moire shifted in her vision. `I wouldn't move them, if I were you.' The interior of the ball seemed to tighten slightly. `It's a sex toy Jane bought in Berlin. Wiggle them long enough and it crushes them to a pulp. Variant of the material they make this flooring from. Something to do with the molecules, I suppose. Are you in pain?'

  She groaned.

  `You seem to have injured your leg.' His fingers found the flat packet of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans. `Well. My last taste from Ali, and just in time.'

  The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.

  `Hideo,' said another voice, a woman's, `she's losing consciousness. Give her something. For that and for the pain. She's very striking, don't you think, Peter? These glasses, are they a fashion where she comes from?'

  Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon's certainty. The sting of a needle.

  `I wouldn't know,' Riviera was saying. `I've never seen her native habitat. They came and took me from Turkey.'

  `The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we sent Hideo. My fault, really. I'd let someone in, a burglar. He took the family terminal.' She laughed. `I made it easy for him. To annoy the others. He was a pretty boy, my burglar. Is she waking, Hideo? Shouldn't she have more?'

  `More and she would die,' said a third voice.

  The blood mesh slid into black.

  The music returned, horns and piano. Dance music.

  C A S E : : : : :

  : : : : : J A C K

  O U T : : : : : :

  Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's eyes and creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.

  `You scream, mon, while ago.'

  `Molly,' he said, his throat dry. `Got hurt.' He took a white plastic squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat water. `I don't like how any of this shit is going.'

  The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted, impacted junk. `Neither do I. We gotta problem.'

  Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted and peered over his shoulder. `Now who is that mon, Case?'

  `That's just a picture, Maelcum,' Case said wearily. `Guy I know in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's supposed to make us feel at home.'

  `Bullshit,' the Finn said. `Like I told Molly, these aren't masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just pissing in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta problem.'

  `So express thyself, Mute,' Maelcum said.

  `Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk. How it was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the way, talk the magic word outa 3J
ane, get up to the head, and say it. Now she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after her.'

  Case stared at the face on the screen. `Us?'

  `So who else?'

  `Aerol,' Case said, `the guy on Babylon Rocker,Maelcum's pal.'

  `No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle.'

  `You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run, here. Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for...'

  `Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's navigation system. You'll take Garveyinto a very private dock I'll show you. The Chinese virus has completely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum. You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera, get the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons.'

  `Kill Riviera?'

  `Kill him.'

  Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Maelcum put his hand on his shoulder. `Hey. You forget something.' He felt the rage rising, and a kind of glee. `You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?'

  The Finn nodded.

  `So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked, man.' He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.

  `Case, mon,' Maelcum said softly, `Garveya tug.'

  `That's right,' said the Finn, and smiled.

  `You havin'~ fun in the big world outside?' the construct asked, when Case jacked back in. `Figured that was Wintermute requestin'~ the pleasure...'