Neuromancer (4 page)

“Get him out of here,” Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge of the bar
now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette.

Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet sand settling
behind his eyes. He took the flask out of his pocket and handed it to Wage. “All I
got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move it fast. Had the rest of my roll
in some RAM, but that’s gone by now.”

“You okay, Case?” The flask had already vanished behind a gunmetal lapel. “I mean,
fine, this’ll square us, but you look bad. Like hammered shit. You better go somewhere
and sleep.”

“Yeah.” He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. “Well, I had this fifty, but
I gave it to somebody.” He giggled. He picked up the .22’s magazine and the one loose
cartridge and dropped them into
one pocket, then put the pistol in the other. “I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back.”

“Go home,” said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with something like embarrassment.
“Artiste. Go home.”

He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered his way past the plastic
doors.

“B
ITCH
,”
HE SAID
to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei the holograms were vanishing like ghosts,
and most of the neon was already cold and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from
a street vendor’s foam thimble and watched the sun come up. “You fly away, honey.
Towns like this are for people who like the way down.” But that wasn’t it, really,
and he was finding it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just
wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy it for her, if she could
find the right fence. And that business with the fifty; she’d almost turned it down,
knowing she was about to rip him for the rest of what he had.

When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on the desk. Different textbook.
“Good buddy,” Case called across the plastic turf, “you don’t need to tell me. I know
already. Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key. Nice little tip for you,
say fifty New ones?” The boy put down his book. “Woman,” Case said, and drew a line
across his forehead with his thumb. “Silk.” He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back,
nodded. “Thanks, asshole,” Case said.

On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She’d messed it up somehow when she’d
fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to rent a blackbox that would open
anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.

“Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday night special you
rented from the waiter?”

She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She had her knees
up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged
from her hands.

“That you in the arcade?” He pulled the hatch down. “Where’s Linda?”

“Hit that latch switch.”

He did.

“That your girl? Linda?”

He nodded.

“She’s gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the gun, man?” She wore
mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temperfoam.

“I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him for half what
I paid. You want the money?”

“No.”

“Want some dry ice? All I got, right now.”

“What got into you tonight? Why’d you pull that scene at the arcade? I had to mess
up this rentacop came after me with nunchucks.”

“Linda said you were gonna kill me.”

“Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here.”

“You aren’t with Wage?”

She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her
sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones,
framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were
slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial. “I think
you screwed up, Case. I showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.”

“So what do you want, lady?” He sagged back against the hatch.

“You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My name’s Molly. I’m
collecting you for the man I work for. Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to
hurt you.”

“That’s good.”

“ ’Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it’s just the way I’m wired.” She
wore tight black gloveleather jeans and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric
that seemed to absorb light. “If I put this dartgun away, will you be easy, Case?
You look like you like to take stupid chances.”

“Hey, I’m very easy. I’m a pushover, no problem.”

“That’s fine, man.” The fletcher vanished into the black jacket.
“Because you try to fuck around with me, you’ll be taking one of the stupidest chances
of your whole life.”

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely
audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings
beneath the burgundy nails.

She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

A
FTER A YEAR
of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous.
It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffeemaker steamed on
a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow balcony.

“Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it.” She took off her black jacket; the
fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless
gray pullover with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof, Case decided,
slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and legs felt like they were made
out of wood.

“Case.” He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. “My name is Armitage.” The
dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach
flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. “Sun’s up, Case.
This is your lucky day, boy.”

Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding coffee. Brown
stain running down the imitation ricepaper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through
the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.

“Get your coffee, Case,” Molly said. “You’re okay, but you’re not
going anywhere ’til Armitage has his say.” She sat crosslegged on a silk futon and
began to fieldstrip the fletcher without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking
as he crossed to the table and refilled his cup.

“Too young to remember the war, aren’t you, Case?” Armitage ran a large hand back
through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. “Leningrad,
Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Screaming Fist, Case. You’ve heard the name.”

“Some kind of run, wasn’t it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs.
Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out.”

He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window and looked out over Tokyo
Bay. “That isn’t true. One unit made it back to Helsinki, Case.”

Case shrugged, sipped coffee.

“You’re a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial
banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus.
Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were
running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion
programs.”

“Icebreakers,” Case said, over the rim of the red mug.

“Ice from
ICE
, intrusion countermeasures electronics.”

“Problem is, mister, I’m no jockey now, so I think I’ll just be going. . . .”

“I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind.”

“You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You’re rich enough to hire expensive
razorgirls to haul my ass up here, is all. I’m never gonna punch any deck again, not
for you or anybody else.” He crossed to the window and looked down. “That’s where
I live now.”

“Our profile says you’re trying to con the street into killing you when you’re not
looking.”

“Profile?”

“We’ve built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your aliases and ran
the skim through some military software. You’re
suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical projection
says you’ll need a new pancreas inside a year.”

“ ‘We.’ ” He met the faded blue eyes. “ ‘We’ who?”

“What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case?” Armitage
suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously
heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he’d wake. Armitage
wouldn’t speak again. Case’s dreams always ended in these freezeframes, and now this
one was over.

“What would you say, Case?”

Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.

“I’d say you were full of shit.”

Armitage nodded.

“Then I’d ask what your terms were.”

“Not very different than what you’re used to, Case.”

“Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,” Molly said from her futon, the components
of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive puzzle. “He’s coming apart
at the seams.”

“Terms,” Case said, “and now. Right now.”

He was still shivering. He couldn’t stop shivering.

T
HE CLINIC WAS
nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek pavilions separated by small
formal gardens. He remembered the place from the round he’d made his first month in
Chiba.

“Scared, Case. You’re real scared.” It was Sunday afternoon and he stood with Molly
in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked
into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.

“It’ll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage has. Like he’s gonna
pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he’s giving them to tell them
how to do it. He’ll put them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea
what that’s worth?” She hooked thumbs in the beltloops of her leather jeans and rocked
backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow
toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding
him with an insect calm.

“You’re street samurai,” he said. “How long you work for him?”

“Couple of months.”

“What about before that?”

“For somebody else. Working girl, you know?”

He nodded.

“Funny, Case.”

“What’s funny?”

“It’s like I know you. That profile he’s got. I know how you’re wired.”

“You don’t know me, sister.”

“You’re okay, Case. What got you, it’s just called bad luck.”

“How about him? He okay, Molly?” The robot crab moved toward them, picking its way
over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old.
When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then froze for
an instant, analyzing data obtained.

“What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass.” The crab had altered
course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip
clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon righted
it.

Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel waves with
the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for cigarettes. “In your shirt,”
she said.

“You want to answer my question?” He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from the pack and
she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked as though it belonged
on an operating table.

“Well, I’ll tell you, the man’s definitely onto something. He’s got big money now,
and he’s never had it before, and he gets more all the time.” Case noticed a certain
tension around her mouth. “Or maybe, maybe something’s onto him. . . .” She shrugged.

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I know I don’t know who or what we’re really working for.”

He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday
morning, he’d gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours. Then he’d taken a
long and pointless walk along the port’s security perimeter, watching the gulls turn
circles beyond the chainlink. If she’d followed him, she’d done a good job of it.
He’d avoided Night City. He’d waited in the coffin for Armitage’s call. Now this quiet
courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a gymnast’s body and conjurer’s hands.

“If you’ll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet you.” The technician
bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.

C
OLD STEEL ODOR
. Ice caressed his spine.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors
of television sky.

Voices.

Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything
to which the name of pain is given. . . .

H
OLD STILL
. D
ON
’
T
move.

And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon
forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond
chainlink and the prison of the skull.

Goddamn don’t you move.

Where the sky faded from hissing static to the noncolor of the matrix, and he glimpsed
the shuriken, his stars.

“Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!”

She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one hand. “You don’t lie still,
I’ll slit your fucking throat. You’re still full of endorphin inhibitors.”

H
E WOKE AND
found her stretched beside him in the dark.

His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain midway down
his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering
montage of the Sprawl’s towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward
him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass. . . .

“Case? It’s Wednesday, Case.” She moved, rolling over, reaching across him. A breast
brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and
drink. “Here.” She put the bottle in his hand. “I can see in the dark, Case. Microchannel
image-amps in my glasses.”

“My back hurts.”

“That’s where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood, too. Blood ’cause you
got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new tissue patched into your liver.
The nerve stuff, I dunno. Lot of injections. They didn’t have to open anything up
for the main show.” She settled back beside him. “It’s 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout
chipped into my optic nerve.”

He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm water spraying
his chest and thighs.

“I gotta punch deck,” he heard himself say. He was groping for his clothes. “I gotta
know. . . .”

She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. “Sorry, hotshot. Eight day
wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor’s
orders. Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so.” He lay down again.

“Where are we?”

“Home. Cheap Hotel.”

“Where’s Armitage?”

“Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We’re out of here soon, man. Amsterdam,
Paris, then back to the Sprawl.” She touched his shoulder. “Roll over. I give a good
massage.”

He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers against the walls
of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam,
the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.

“How come you’re not at the Hilton?”

She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs, and gently encircling his scrotum
with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above
him, her other hand on his neck. The
leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself
harden against the temperfoam.

His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself
on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts,
small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans
and tugged it down.

“It’s okay,” she said, “I can see.” Sound of the jeans peeling down. She struggled
beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched
her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. “Don’t,” she said, “fingerprints.”

Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along
the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower
herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding.
She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way,
impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come,
his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the
faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs
were strong and wet against his hips.

O
N
N
INSEI
,
A
thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the motions of the dance. Waves
of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat
and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was
tending bar.

“You seen Wage, Ratz?”

“Not tonight.” Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.

“You see him, tell him I got his money.”

“Luck changing, my artiste?”

“Too soon to tell.”

“W
ELL
, I
GOTTA SEE
this guy,” Case said, watching his reflection in her glasses. “I got biz to cancel
out of.”

“Armitage won’t like it, I let you out of my sight.” She stood beneath Deane’s melting
clock, hands on her hips.

“The guy won’t talk to me if you’re there. Deane I don’t give two shits about. He
takes care of himself. But I got people who’ll just go under if I walk out of Chiba
cold. It’s my people, you know?”

Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.

“I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza, and they’ll
go
down
, understand?” he lied, his hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. “Five. Five
minutes. By your clock, okay?”

“Not what I’m paid for.”

“What you’re paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends die because you’re
too literal about your instructions is something else.”

“Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You’re going in there to check us out with your smuggler.”
She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.