Neuromancer Read online

  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 h
ardly 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. . . .”

  FOURTEEN

  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.

  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.

  CONFUSED 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.”

  MAELCUM 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.

  “DIXIE?”

  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.

  FREEFALL. THE 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.

  “BOY, 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.

  AND 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.