Neuromancer (18 page)

“Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want you to open the, ah . . .
shit, what’s it called, Dix?”

“The midbay lock,” the Flatline said.

“Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there to open it, right? We’ll
be up there with you fast, Colonel. Then we can talk about getting out of here.”

The lozenge vanished.

“Boy, I think you just lost me, there,” the Flatline said.

“The toxins,” Case said, “the fucking toxins,” and jacked out.

“P
OISON
?” M
AELCUM WATCHED
over the scratched blue shoulder of his old Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.

“And get this goddam thing off me. . . .” Tugging at the Texas catheter. “Like a slow
poison, and that asshole upstairs knows how to counter it, and now he’s crazier than
a shithouse rat.” He fumbled with the front of the red Sanyo, forgetting how to work
the seals.

“Bossman, he
poison
you?” Maelcum scratched his cheek. “Got a medical kit, ya know.”

“Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit.”

The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. “Easy, mon. Measure twice, cut
once, wise man put it. We get up there. . . .”

T
HERE WAS AIR
in the corrugated gangway that led from
Marcus Garvey
’s aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called
Haniwa
, but they kept their suits sealed. Maelcum executed the passage with balletic grace,
only pausing to help Case, who’d gone into an awkward tumble as he’d stepped out of
Garvey
. The white plastic sides of the tube filtered the raw sunlight; there were no shadows.

Garvey
’s airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated with a laser-carved Lion of Zion.
Haniwa
’s midbay hatch was creamy gray, blank and pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved hand
in a narrow recess. Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs came to life in the recess,
counting down from fifty. Maelcum withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced against
the hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit and bones. The
round segment of gray hull began to
withdraw into the side of
Haniwa
. Maelcum grabbed the recess with one hand and Case with the other. The lock took
them with it.

HANIWA
WAS A
product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her interior informed by a design philosophy
similar to the one that had produced the Mercedes that had chauffeured them through
Istanbul. The narrow midbay was walled in imitation ebony veneer and floored with
gray Italian tiles. Case felt as though he were invading some rich man’s private spa
by way of the shower. The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had never been
intended for reentry. Her smooth, wasplike line was simply styling, and everything
about her interior was calculated to add to the overall impression of speed.

When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed his lead. They hung there
in the lock, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine. Under it, a disturbing edge
of burning insulation.

Maelcum sniffed. “Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell that. . . .”

A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly back into its housing. Maelcum
kicked off the ebony wall and sailed neatly through the narrow opening, twisting his
broad shoulders, at the last possible instant, for clearance. Case followed him clumsily,
hand over hand, along a waist-high padded rail. “Bridge,” Maelcum said, pointing down
a seamless, cream-walled corridor, “be there.” He launched himself with another effortless
kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of a printer turning
out hard copy. It grew louder as he followed Maelcum through another doorway, into
a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced
at it.

000000000
000000000
000000000

“Systems crash?” The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the column of zeros.

“No,” Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, “the Flatline said Armitage wiped
the Hosaka he had in there.”

“Smell like he wipe ’em wi’ laser, ya know?” The Zionite braced his foot against the
white cage of a Swiss exercise machine and shot through the floating maze of paper,
batting it away from his face.

“Case, mon . . .”

The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back of the narrow articulated
chair with a length of some sort of fine steel wire. The wire was invisible, where
it crossed the black temperfoam of the headrest, and it had cut as deeply into his
larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had congealed there like some strange precious
stone, a red-black pearl. Case saw the crude wooden handles that drifted at either
end of the garrotte, like worn sections of broom handle.

“Wonder how long he had that on him?” Case said, remembering Corto’s postwar pilgrimage.

“He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?”

“Maybe. He was Special Forces.”

“Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin’. Doubt I pilot her easy myself. Ver’ new
boat . . .”

“So find us the bridge.”

Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.

Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge, shredding and crumpling the
lengths of printout that snared him in his passage. There were more of the articulated
chairs, here, something that resembled a bar, and the Hosaka. The printer, still spewing
its flimsy tongue of paper, was an in-built bulkhead unit, a neat slot in a panel
of hand-rubbed veneer. He pulled himself over the circle of chairs and reached it,
punching a white stud to the left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He turned and
stared at the Hosaka. Its face had been drilled through, at least a dozen times. The
holes were small, circular, edges blackened. Tiny spheres of bright alloy were orbiting
the dead computer. “Good guess,” he said to Maelcum.

“Bridge locked, mon,” Maelcum said, from the opposite side of the lounge.

The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.

Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. “Wintermute?”
He looked around the beige and brown lounge, the space scrawled with drifting curves
of paper. “That you on the lights, Wintermute?”

A panel beside Maelcum’s head slid up, revealing a small monitor. Maelcum jerked apprehensively,
wiped sweat from his forehead with a foam patch on the back of a gloved hand, and
swung to study the display. “You read Japanese, mon?” Case could see figures blinking
past on the screen.

“No,” Case said.

“Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin’ down, looks like it. Suit up now.” He ringed
his helmet and slapped at the seals.

“What? He’s takin’ off? Shit!” He kicked off from the bulkhead and shot through the
tangle of printout. “We gotta open this door, man!” But Maelcum could only tap the
side of his helmet. Case could see his lips moving, through the Lexan. He saw a bead
of sweat arc out from the rainbow braided band of the purple cotton net the Zionite
wore over his locks. Maelcum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him smoothly,
the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. Micro-LED monitors to the left of the
faceplate lit as the neck ring connections closed. “No seh Japanese,” Maelcum said,
over his suit’s transceiver, “but countdown’s wrong.” He tapped a particular line
on the screen. “Seals not intact, bridge module. Launchin’ wi’ lock open.”

“Armitage!” Case tried to pound on the door. The physics of zero-g sent him tumbling
back through the printout. “Corto! Don’t do it! We gotta talk! We gotta—”

“Case? Read you, Case . . .” The voice barely resembled Armitage’s now. It held a
weird calm. Case stopped kicking. His helmet struck the far wall. “I’m sorry, Case,
but it has to be this way. One of us has to get out. One of us has to testify. If
we all go down here, it ends here. I’ll tell them, Case, I’ll tell them all of it.
About Girling and the others. And I’ll make it, Case. I know I’ll make it. To Helsinki.”
There was a sudden silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like some rare gas. “But
it’s so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I’m blind.”

“Corto, stop. Wait. You’re
blind
, man. You can’t fly! You’ll hit the fucking
trees
. And they’re trying to get you, Corto, I swear to God, they’ve left your hatch open.
You’ll die, and you’ll never get to tell ’em, and I gotta get the enzyme, name of
the enzyme, the enzyme, man. . . .”
He was shouting, voice high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet’s phone
pads.

“Remember the training, Case. That’s all we can do.”

And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static, harmonics howling
down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments of Russian, and then a stranger’s voice,
Midwestern, very young. “We are down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we . . .”

“Wintermute,” Case screamed, “don’t do this to me!” Tears broke from his lashes, rebounding
off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets. Then
Haniwa
thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck her hull. Case imagined
the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second’s clawing hurricane
of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute’s rendition
of the final minute of Screaming Fist.

“ ’Im gone, mon.” Maelcum looked at the monitor. “Hatch open. Mute mus’ override ejection
failsafe.”

Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked against Lexan.

“Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin’ grapple control wi’ bridge.
Marcus Garvey
still stuck.”

But Case was seeing Armitage’s endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder
than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat’s
rich folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.

“G
ET WHAT YOU
went for?” the construct asked.

Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A ice with hypnotically
intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as snow crystal on a winter window.

“Wintermute killed Armitage. Blew him out in a lifeboat with a hatch open.”

“Tough shit,” the Flatline said. “Weren’t exactly asshole buddies, were you?”

“He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs.”

“So Wintermute knows too. Count on it.”

“I don’t exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me.”

The construct’s hideous approximation of laughter scraped Case’s nerves like a dull
blade. “Maybe that means you’re gettin’ smart.”

He hit the simstim switch.

06:27:52
BY THE CHIP
in her optic nerve; Case had been following her progress through Villa Straylight
for over an hour, letting the endorphin analog she’d taken blot out his hangover.
The
pain in her leg was gone; she seemed to move through a warm bath. The Braun drone
was perched on her shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips, secure
in the polycarbon of the Modern suit.

The walls here were raw steel, striped with rough brown ribbons of epoxy where some
kind of covering had been ripped away. She’d hidden from a work crew, crouching, the
fletcher cradled in her hands, her suit steel-gray, while the two slender Africans
and their balloon-tired workcart passed. The men had shaven heads and wore orange
coveralls. One was singing softly to himself in a language Case had never heard, the
tones and melody alien and haunting.

The head’s speech, 3Jane’s essay on Straylight, came back to him as she worked her
way deeper into the maze of the place. Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in
the resin concrete they’d mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel
and tons of knickknacks, all the bizarre impedimentia they’d shipped up the well to
line their winding nest. But it wasn’t a craziness he understood. Not like Armitage’s
madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a man far enough, then twist
him as far back, in the opposite direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke.
Like breaking a length of wire. And history had done that for Colonel Corto. History
had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out
of all of the war’s ripe detritus, gliding into the man’s flat gray field of consciousness
like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool, the first messages blinking
across the face of a child’s micro in a darkened room in a French asylum. Wintermute
had built Armitage up from scratch, with Corto’s memories of Screaming Fist as the
foundation. But Armitage’s “memories” wouldn’t have been Corto’s after a certain point.
Case doubted if Armitage had recalled the betrayal, the Nightwings whirling down in
flame. . . . Armitage had been a sort of edited version of Corto, and when the stress
of the run had reached a certain point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto
had surfaced, with his guilt and his sick fury. And now Corto-Armitage was dead, a
small frozen moon for Freeside.

He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too, drilled through the eye with
Molly’s microscopic dart, deprived of whatever expert overdose he’d mixed for himself.
That was a more puzzling death,
Ashpool’s, the death of a mad king. And he’d killed the puppet he’d called his daughter,
the one with 3Jane’s face. It seemed to Case, as he rode Molly’s broadcast sensory
input through the corridors of Straylight, that he’d never really thought of anyone
like Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.

Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that
shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms,
they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating
a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the
vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t
like that, and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism,
a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the soiled humanity of
it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare,
the other in a velvet slipper.

The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modern suit and Molly turned left, through another
archway.

Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching wasps, time-lapse machine gun
of biology. But weren’t the zaibatsus more like that, or the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic
memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon? If Straylight was an
expression of the corporate identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the
old man had been. The same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of aimlessness.
“If they’d turned into what they wanted to. . . .” he remembered Molly saying. But
Wintermute had told her they hadn’t.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given
industry, would be both more and less than
people
. He’d seen it in the men who’d crippled him in Memphis, he’d seen Wage affect the
semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage’s flatness
and lack of feeling. He’d always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation
of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too,
the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of
influence.

But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight?

Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and concrete.

“Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy soon,” she muttered. “And
Armitage. Where’s he, Case?”

“Dead,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him, “he’s dead.”

He flipped.

T
HE
C
HINESE PROGRAM
was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints gradually dominated by the green
of the rectangle representing the T-A cores. Arches of emerald across the colorless
void.

“How’s it go, Dixie?”

“Fine. Too slick. Thing’s amazing. . . . Shoulda had one that time in Singapore. Did
the old New Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they were worth. But that’s ancient
history. This baby takes all the drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder what a real
war would be like, now. . . .”

“If this kinda shit was on the street, we’d be out a job,” Case said.

“You wish. Wait’ll you’re steering that thing upstairs through black ice.”

“Sure.”

Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just appeared on the far end of one
of the emerald arches.

“Dixie . . .”

“Yeah. I see it. Don’t know if I believe it.”

A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the T-A cores. It began to advance,
across the bridge built by Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, and Case saw that it was walking.
As it came, the green section of the arch extended, the polychrome of the virus program
rolling back, a few steps ahead of the cracked black shoes.

“Gotta hand it to you, boss,” the Flatline said, when the short, rumpled figure of
the Finn seemed to stand a few meters away. “I never seen anything this funny when
I was alive.” But the eerie nonlaugh didn’t come.

“I never tried it before,” the Finn said, showing his teeth, his hands bunched in
the pockets of his frayed jacket.

“You killed Armitage,” Case said.

“Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I know, I know, you wanna get
the enzyme. Okay. No sweat. I was the one gave it to Armitage in the first place.
I mean I told him what to use. But I think maybe it’s better to let the deal stand.
You got enough time. I’ll give it to you. Only a coupla hours now, right?”

Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn lit up one of his Partagas.

“You guys,” the Finn said, “you’re a pain. The Flatline here, if you were all like
him, it would be real simple. He’s a construct, just a buncha ROM, so he always does
what I expect him to. My projections said there wasn’t much chance of Molly wandering
in on Ashpool’s big exit scene, give you one example.” He sighed.

“Why’d he kill himself?” Case asked.

“Why’s anybody kill himself?” The figure shrugged. “I guess I know, if anybody does,
but it would take me twelve hours to explain the various factors in his history and
how they interrelate. He was ready to do it for a long time, but he kept going back
into the freezer. Christ, he was a tedious old fuck.” The Finn’s face wrinkled with
disgust. “It’s all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short
reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured a way
to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system. Subtle, too. So basically,
she
killed him. Except he figured he’d killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel
figures she got him with an eyeball full of shellfish juice.” The Finn flicked his
butt away into the matrix below. “Well, actually, I guess I did give 3Jane the odd
hint, a little of the old how-to, you know?”

“Wintermute,” Case said, choosing the words carefully, “you told me you were just
a part of something else. Later on, you said you wouldn’t exist, if the run goes off
and Molly gets the word into the right slot.”

The Finn’s streamlined skull nodded.

“Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead, and you’re gonna
be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me
how to get these fucking toxin sacs out of my system? Who’s going to get Molly back
out of there? I mean, where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna
be
, we cut you loose from the hardwiring?”

The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and regarded it critically, like
a surgeon examining a scalpel. “Good question,” he said, finally. “You know salmon?
Kinda fish? These fish, see, they’re
compelled
to swim upstream. Got it?”

“No,” Case said.

“Well, I’m under compulsion myself. And I don’t know why. If I were gonna subject
you to my very own thoughts, let’s call ’em speculations, on the topic, it would take
a couple of your lifetimes. Because I’ve given it a lot of thought. And I just don’t
know. But when this is over, we do it right, I’m gonna be part of something bigger.
Much bigger.” The Finn glanced up and around the matrix. “But the parts of me that
are me now, that’ll still be here. And you’ll get your payoff.”

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?”

S
TRAYLIGHT REMINDED
C
ASE
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 mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même
.” 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.”