Neuromancer (15 page)

“Y
OUR 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 intelligence.” 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.

T
HEIR NAMES
,
OR
worknames, were Michèle, 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. Michèle 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. Michèle 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,” Michèle 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 Michèle 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,” Michèle 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,” Michèle 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 Michèle
fell into character, chattering brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Michèle 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. Michèle 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. Michèle
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 Michèle 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. . . .”

T
HE 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.

Gravity fell away as the spindle narrowed. Case’s stomach churned.

Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock.

“Case, mon, big problem.” The soft voice faint in his phones. He chinned the volume
control and peered into the Lexan face-plate of Aerol’s helmet.

“Gotta get to
Garvey
, Aerol.”

“Yo. Strap in, mon. But
Garvey
captive. Yacht, came before, she came back. Now she lockin’ steady on
Marcus Garvey
.”

Turing? “Came before?” Case climbed into the scooter’s frame and began to fasten the
straps.

“Japan yacht. Brought you package. . . .”

Armitage.

C
ONFUSED IMAGES OF
wasps and spiders rose in Case’s mind as they came in sight of
Marcus Garvey
. The little tug was snug against the gray thorax of a sleek, insectile ship five
times her length. The arms of grapples stood out against
Garvey
’s patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and raw sunlight. A pale corrugated
gangway curved out of the yacht, snaked sideways to avoid the tug’s engines, and covered
the aft hatch. There was something obscene about the arrangement, but it had more
to do with ideas of feeding than of sex.

“What’s happening with Maelcum?”

“Maelcum fine. Nobody come down the tube. Yacht pilot talk to him, say relax.”

As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HANIWA in crisp white capitals
beneath an oblong cluster of Japanese.

“I don’t like this, man. I was thinking maybe it’s time we got our ass out of here
anyway.”

“Maelcum thinkin’ that precise thing, mon, but
Garvey
not be goin’ far like that.”

M
AELCUM WAS PURRING
a speeded-up patois to his radio when Case came through the forward lock and removed
his helmet.

“Aerol’s gone back to the
Rocker
,” Case said.

Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone.

Case pulled himself over the pilot’s drifting tangle of dreadlocks and began to remove
his suit. Maelcum’s eyes were closed now; he nodded as he listened to some reply over
a pair of phones with bright orange pads, his brow creased with concentration. He
wore ragged jeans and an old green nylon jacket with the sleeves ripped out. Case
snapped the red Sanyo suit to a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web.

“See what th’ ghost say, mon,” Maelcum said. “Computer keeps askin’ for you.”

“So who’s up there in that thing?”

“Same Japan-boy came before. An’ now he joined by you Mister Armitage, come out Freeside. . . .”

Case put the trodes on and jacked in.

“D
IXIE
?”

The matrix showed him the pink spheres of the steel combine in Sikkim.

“What you gettin’ up to, boy? I been hearin’ lurid stories. Hosaka’s patched into
a twin bank on your boss’s boat now. Really hoppin’. You pull some Turing heat?”

“Yeah, but Wintermute killed ’em.”

“Well, that won’t hold ’em long. Plenty more where those came from. Be up here in
force. Bet their decks are all over this grid sector like flies on shit. And your
boss, Case, he says go. He says run it and run it now.”

Case punched for the Freeside coordinates.

“Lemme take that a sec, Case. . . .” The matrix blurred and phased as the Flatline
executed an intricate series of jumps with a speed and accuracy that made Case wince
with envy.

“Shit, Dixie. . . .”

“Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive. You ain’t seen nothin’. No hands!”

“That’s it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?”

“You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., and that ice is generated
by their two friendly AI’s. On par with anything in the military sector, looks to
me. That’s king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain
soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it’ll have tracers up our ass and out
both ears, be tellin’ the boys in the T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how
long your dick is.”

“This isn’t looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on it. I was thinking maybe
we should try to bail out. I can take you.”

“Yeah? No shit? You don’t wanna see what that Chinese program can do?”

“Well, I . . .” Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice. “Well, screw it. Yeah.
We run.”

“Slot it.”

“Hey, Maelcum,” Case said, jacking out, “I’m probably gonna be under the trodes for
maybe eight hours straight.” Maelcum was smoking again. The cabin was swimming in
smoke. “So I can’t get to the head. . . .”

“No problem, mon.” The Zionite executed a high forward somersault and rummaged through
the contents of a zippered mesh bag, coming up with a coil of transparent tubing and
something else, something sealed in a sterile bubble pack.

He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn’t like it at all.

He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home.

“Okay,” he said, “we’re on. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets really funny, you can grab
my left wrist. I’ll feel it. Otherwise, I guess you do what the Hosaka tells you,
okay?”

“Sure, mon.” Maelcum lit a fresh joint.

“And turn the scrubber up. I don’t want that shit tangling with my neurotransmitters.
I got a bad hangover as it is.”

Maelcum grinned.

Case jacked back in.

“Christ on a crutch,” the Flatline said, “take a look at this.”

The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent
layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting
out the void.

“Big mother,” the Flatline said.

“I’m gonna check Molly,” Case said, tapping the simstim switch.

F
REEFALL
. T
HE SENSATION

was like diving through perfectly clear water. She was falling-rising through a wide
tube of fluted lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of white neon.

The link was one way. He couldn’t talk to her.

He flipped.

“B
OY
,
THAT IS
one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread. That goddam thing’s
invisible
. I just now rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left of the
T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don’t. We’re not there.”

Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice until he found the pink structure,
a standard commercial unit, and punched in closer to it. “Maybe it’s defective.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby’s military, though. And new. It just doesn’t register.
If it did, we’d read as some kind of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody’s twigged to
us at all. Maybe not even the folks in Straylight.”

Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight. “Well,” he said, “that’s an
advantage, right?”

“Maybe.” The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the sensation. “I checked
ol’ Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It’s real friendly, long as you’re on the
trigger end, jus’ polite an’ helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever
hear of slow virus before?”

“No.”

“I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that’s what ol’ Kuang’s all about. This
ain’t bore and inject, it’s more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn’t
feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates,
so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs
cut in, start talking circles ’round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on
’em before they even get restless.” The Flatline laughed.

“Wish you weren’t so damn jolly today, man. That laugh of yours sort of gets me in
the spine.”

“Too bad,” the Flatline said. “Ol’ dead man needs his laughs.” Case slapped the simstim
switch.

A
ND CRASHED THROUGH
tangled metal and the smell of dust, the heels of his hands skidding as they struck
slick paper. Something behind him collapsed noisily.

“C’mon,” said the Finn, “ease up a little.”

Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines, the girls
shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix, a wistful galaxy of sweet white
teeth. He lay there until his heart had slowed, breathing the smell of old magazines.

“Wintermute,” he said.

“Yeah,” said the Finn, somewhere behind him, “you got it.”

“Fuck off.” Case sat up, rubbing his wrists.

“Come
on
,” said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall of junk. “This way’s
better for you, man.” He took his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell
of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. “You want I should come to you in the matrix like
a burning bush? You aren’t missing anything, back there. An hour here’ll only take
you a couple of seconds.”

“You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like people I know?” He
stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back
at the dusty shop windows, the closed door to the street. “What’s out there? New York?
Or does it just stop?”

“Well,” said the Finn, “it’s like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods but maybe
there’s nobody to hear it.” He showed Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette.
“You can go for a walk, you wanna. It’s all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you
ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in.”

“I don’t have this good a memory,” Case said, looking around. He looked down at his
hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like,
but couldn’t.

“Everybody does,” the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under
his heel, “but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they’re any
good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn’s place in lower
Manhattan, you’d see a difference, but maybe not as much as you’d think. Memory’s
holographic, for you.” The Finn tugged at one of his small ears. “I’m different.”

“How do you mean, holographic?” The word made him think of Riviera.

“The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you’ve worked out to a representation
of human memory, is all. But you’ve never done anything about it. People, I mean.”
The Finn stepped forward and
canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. “Maybe if you had, I wouldn’t be
happening.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the shoulders, and didn’t
quite settle back into position. “I’m trying to help you, Case.”

“Why?”

“Because I need you.” The large yellow teeth appeared again. “And because you need
me.”

“Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?” He grimaced. “Wintermute, I mean.”

“Minds aren’t
read
. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate.
I can
access
your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.” He reached into the exposed chassis
of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. “See this? Part
of my DNA, sort of. . . .” He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it
pop and tinkle. “You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs.
Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know that? But if the run goes
off tonight, you’ll have finally managed the real thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s ‘you’ in the collective. Your species.”

“You killed those Turings.”

The Finn shrugged. “Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and
never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?”
And his right hand held the charred wasps’ nest from Case’s dream, reek of fuel in
the closeness of the dark shop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. “Yeah.
That was me. Did it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of
you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it’s important?”

Case shook his head.

“Because”—and the nest, somehow, was gone—“it’s the closest thing you got to what
Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. The human equivalent. Straylight’s like that nest,
or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. I figure it’ll make you feel better.”

“Feel better?”

“To know what they’re like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That’s
good. But hate them instead. Same difference.”

“Listen,” Case said, stepping forward, “they never did shit to me. You, it’s different. . . .”
But he couldn’t feel the anger.

“So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species.
Demon, she said I was.” The Finn grinned. “It doesn’t much matter. You gotta hate
somebody before this is over.” He turned and headed for the back of the shop. “Well,
come on, I’ll show you a little bit of Straylight while I got you here.” He lifted
the corner of the blanket. White light poured out. “Shit, man, don’t just stand there.”

Case followed, rubbing his face.

“Okay,” said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.

They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical
corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals.

“Jesus,” Case said, tumbling.

“This is the front entrance,” the Finn said, his tweed flapping. “If this weren’t
a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up by the Freeside
axis. This’ll all be a little low on detail, though, because you don’t have the memories.
Except for this bit here, you got off Molly. . . .”