Neuromancer (17 page)

He jacked back in.

And flipped.

M
OLLY WAS TROTTING
along a length of corridor that might have been the one she’d traveled before. The
glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case decided they were moving toward the tip
of the spindle; gravity was growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling
hillocks of carpets. Faint twinges in her leg. . . .

The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.

She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her leg beginning
to ache. Overhead, strapped and bundled cables hugged the stairwell’s ceiling like
colorcoded ganglia. The walls were splotched with damp.

She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More corridors, narrow,
their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three directions.

LEFT.

She shrugged. “Lemme look around, okay?”

LEFT.

“Relax. There’s time.” She started down the corridor that led off to her right.

STOP.

GO BACK.

DANGER.

She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the passage came a voice,
loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case thought the language might be French,
but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit
to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor’s field,
her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her Fletcher.
She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead.
She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone.

“What’s this,” said the slurred voice, “fancy dress?” A trembling hand entered the
front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. “Come visit, child. Now.”

She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man’s
hand was steady enough, now; the gun’s barrel seemed to be attached to her throat
with a taut, invisible string.

He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed
in the Vingtième Siècle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long
cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with
an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. “Slow,
darling.” The
room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to
Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped
with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used
to pave the corridors. Molly’s eyes darted from a huge Telefunken entertainment console
to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic,
to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace
deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing.

“It would be customary,” the old man said, “for me to kill you now.” Case felt her
tense, ready for a move. “But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?”

“Molly.”

“Molly. Mine is Ashpool.” He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather
armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on
a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table
was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic envelopes spilling white powders.
Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.

“How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I’m curious.” His eyes were
red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided.
Or drugs.

“I don’t cry, much.”

“But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?”

“I spit,” she said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.”

“Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young.” He rested the
hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without
bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle
of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. “That is the way to handle tears.”
He drank again. “I’m busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I’m busy. Dying.”

“I could go out the way I came,” she said.

He laughed, a harsh high sound. “You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply
walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.”

“It’s my ass, boss, and it’s all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece.”

“You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That’s
what I’m doing, you understand. But perhaps I’ll take you with me tonight, down to
hell. . . . It would be very Egyptian of me.” He drank again. “Come here then.” He
held out the bottle, his hand shaking. “Drink.”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t poisoned,” he said, but returned the brandy to the table. “Sit. Sit on the
floor. We’ll talk.”

“What about?” She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails.

“Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It’s my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago.
Something was afoot, they said, and I was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely
they didn’t need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but I’d been dreaming,
you see. For thirty years. You weren’t born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They
told us we wouldn’t dream, in that cold. They told us we’d never feel cold, either.
Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it.
The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one
grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold. . . . Others following it, filling my
head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember. The pools were terracotta,
nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went winking through the gardens at sunset. . . .
I’m old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.” The barrel
of the pistol snapped up suddenly, quivering. The tendons in her thighs were drawn
tight as wires now.

“You can get freezerburn,” she said carefully.

“Nothing burns there,” he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few movements were
increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an effort to stop it. “Nothing
burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions
we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I
told the cores I’d deal with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne
and only our sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing,
perhaps. Would you know, Molly?” The gun rose again. “There are some odd things afoot
now, in the Villa Straylight.”

“Boss,” she asked him, “you know Wintermute?”

“A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my time, dear Molly,
I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a queen of Spain, once, in that
very bed. . . . But I wander.” He coughed wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking
as he convulsed. He spat on the carpet near his one bare foot. “How I do wander. Through
the cold. But soon no more. I’d ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie
every few decades with what legally amounts to one’s own daughter.” His gaze swept
past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. “Marie-France’s eyes,”
he said, faintly, and smiled. “We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of
its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.”
His head swayed sideways, recovered. “I understand that the effect is now more easily
obtained with an embedded microchip.”

The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.

“The dreams grow like slow ice,” he said. His face was tinged with blue. His head
sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.

Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool’s automatic in her hand.

A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle of congealed
blood, thick and shiny on the patterned rugs. Twitching a corner of the quilt back,
she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades slick with blood. Her throat had
been slit. The triangular blade of some sort of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside
her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl’s face to the
light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant.

There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly’s
simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl’s cheek. The freeze
held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda
Lee.

Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking down at a golden
laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a bedside table. A length of
fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the console to a socket at the base of the
slender neck.

“I got your number, fucker,” Case said, feeling his own lips moving, somewhere, far
away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast. Molly hadn’t seen the dead
girl’s face swirl like smoke, to take on the outline of Linda’s deathmask.

Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool’s chair. The man’s breathing was slow
and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and alcohol. She put his pistol down,
picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully
put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath
halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.

It was still open when she turned and left the room.

“G
OT YOUR BOSS
on hold,” the Flatline said. “He’s coming through on the twin Hosaka in that boat
upstairs, the one that’s riding us piggy-back. Called the
Haniwa
.”

“I know,” Case said, absently, “I saw it.”

A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the Tessier-Ashpool
ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his
eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.

“Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took care of mine,”
Case said.

Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his gaze. “You okay,
Armitage?”

“Case”—and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue stare—“you’ve
seen Wintermute, haven’t you? In the matrix.”

Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in
Marcus Garvey
would relay the gesture to the
Haniwa
monitor. He imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations, unable
to hear the voices of the construct or Armitage.

“Case”—and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his computer—“what is he,
when you see him?”

“A high-rez simstim construct.”

“But
who?”

“Finn, last time. . . . Before that, this pimp I . . .”

“Not General Girling?”

“General who?”

The lozenge went blank.

“Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up,” he told the construct.

He flipped.

T
HE PERSPECTIVE STARTLED
him. Molly was crouching between steel girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained
floor of polished concrete. The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three
spacecraft, none larger than
Garvey
and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A figure in an orange jumpsuit
stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous construction vehicle and stood beside
one of the thing’s piston-driven, weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something
into a portable console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight
on gray balloon tires.

CASE, flashed her chip.

“Hey,” she said. “Waiting for a guide.”

She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern suit the color
of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp steady pain now. “I shoulda
gone back to Chin,” she muttered.

Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her left shoulder.
It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on high-arched spider legs,
fired a microsecond burst of diffuse laser-light, and froze. It was a Braun microdrone,
and Case had once owned the same model, a pointless accessory he’d obtained as part
of a package deal with a Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte
black daddy longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere’s equator. Its body
was no larger than a baseball. “Okay,” she said, “I hear you.” She stood up, favoring
her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse.
It picked its methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned
and looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing the
front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet, pick up his
console, and step back through the gap in the construction boat’s hull. There was
a rising whine of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of sight on a ten-meter circle
of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently
at the edge of the hole left by the elevator panel.

Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest of welded steel
struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her on.

“How you doin’, Case? You back in
Garvey
with Maelcum? Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I’ve always talked
to myself, in my head, when I’ve been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody
I can trust, and I’ll tell ’em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I’ll
pretend they’re telling me what they think about that, and I’ll just go along that
way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . .” She gnawed at
her lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. “I was expecting
something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in
here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads
or something. I don’t like the way it looks, I don’t like the way it smells. . . .”

The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder of U-shaped steel rungs,
toward a narrow dark opening. “And while I’m feeling confessional, baby, I gotta admit
maybe I never much expected to make it out of this one anyway. Been on this bad roll
for a while, and you’re the only good change come down since I signed on with Armitage.”
She looked up at the black circle. The drone’s LED winked, climbing. “Not that you’re
all that shit hot.” She smiled, but it was gone too quickly, and she gritted her teeth
at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to climb. The ladder continued up through
a metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders.

She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis.

Her chip pulsed the time.

04:23:04.

It had been a long day. The clarity of her sensorium cut the bite of the betaphenethylamine,
but Case could still feel it. He preferred the pain in her leg.

CASE:0000
000000000
00000000.

“Guess it’s for you,” she said, climbing mechanically. The zeros strobed again and
a message stuttered there, in the corner of her vision, chopped up by the display
circuit.

GENERAL G
IRLING:::
TRAINED
CORTO FOR
SCREAMING
FIST AND
SOLD HIS
ASS TO
THE PENT
AGON::::
W/MUTE’S
PRIMARY
GRIP ON
ARMITAG
E IS A
CONSTRU
CT OF G
IRLING:
W/MUTE
SEZ A’ S
MENTION
OF G
MEANS
HE’S
CRACK
ING::::
WATCH
YOUR
ASS::::
::DIXIE

“Well,” she said, pausing, taking all of her weight on her right leg, “guess you got
problems too.” She looked down. There was a faint circle of light, no larger than
the brass round of the Chubb key that dangled between her breasts. She looked up.
Nothing at all. She tongued her amps and the tube rose into vanishing perspective,
the Braun picking its way up the rungs. “Nobody told me about this part,” she said.

Case jacked out.

“M
AELCUM
 . . .”

“Mon, you bossman gone ver’ strange.” The Zionite was wearing a blue Sanyo vacuum
suit twenty years older than the one Case had rented in Freeside, its helmet under
his arm and his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap crocheted from purple cotton yarn.
His eyes were slitted with ganja and tension. “Keep callin’ down here wi’
orders
, mon, but be some Babylon war. . . .” Maelcum shook his head. “Aerol an’ I talkin’,
an’ Aerol talkin’ wi’ Zion. Founders seh cut an’ run.” He ran the back of a large
brown hand across his mouth.

“Armitage?” Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hangover hit him with its full intensity,
unscreened by the matrix or simstim. Brain’s got no nerves in it, he told himself,
it can’t really feel this bad. “What do you mean, man? He’s giving you orders? What?”

“Mon, Armitage, he tellin’ me set course for Finland, ya know? He tellin’ me there
be hope, ya know? Come on my screen wi’ his shirt all blood, mon, an’ be crazy as
some dog, talkin’ screamin’ fists an’ Russian an’ th’ blood of th’ betrayers shall
be on our hands.” He shook his head again, the dreadcap swaying and bobbing in zero-g,
his lips narrowed. “Founders seh the Mute voice be false prophet surely, an’ Aerol
an’ I mus’ ’bandon
Marcus Garvey
and return.”

“Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?”

“Can’t seh, ya know? But blood, an’ stone crazy, Case.”

“Okay,” Case said. “So what about me? You’re going home. What about me, Maelcum?”

“Mon,” Maelcum said, “you comin’ wi’ me. I an’ I come Zion wi’ Aerol,
Babylon Rocker
. Leave Mr. Armitage t’ talk wi’ ghost cassette, one ghost t’ ’nother. . . .”

Case glanced over his shoulder: his rented suit swung against the hammock where he’d
snapped it, swaying in the air current from the old Russian scrubber. He closed his
eyes. He saw the sacs of toxin dissolving in his arteries. He saw Molly hauling herself
up the endless steel rungs. He opened his eyes.

“I dunno, man,” he said, a strange taste in his mouth. He looked down at his desk,
at his hands. “I don’t know.” He looked back up. The brown face was calm now, intent.
Maelcum’s chin was hidden by the high helmet ring of his old blue suit. “She’s inside,”
he said. “Molly’s inside. In Straylight, it’s called. If there’s any Babylon, man,
that’s it. We leave on her, she ain’t comin’ out, Steppin’ Razor or not.”

Maelcum nodded, the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a captive balloon of crocheted
cotton. “She you woman, Case?”

“I dunno. Nobody’s woman, maybe.” He shrugged. And found his anger again, real as
a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. “Fuck this,” he said. “Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute,
and fuck you. I’m stayin’ right here.”

Maelcum’s smile spread across his face like light breaking. “Maelcum a rude boy, Case.
Garvey
Maelcum boat.” His gloved hand slapped a panel and the bass-heavy rocksteady of Zion
dub came pulsing from the tug’s speakers. “Maelcum not runnin’, no. I talk wi’ Aerol,
he certain t’ see it in similar light.”

Case stared. “I don’t understand you guys at all,” he said.

“Don’ ’stan’ you, mon,” the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, “but we mus’ move by
Jah love, each one.”

Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.

“G
ET MY WIRE
?”

“Yeah.” He saw that the Chinese program had grown; delicate arches of shifting polychrome
were nearing the T-A ice.

“Well, it’s gettin’ stickier,” the Flatline said. “Your boss wiped the bank on that
other Hosaka, and damn near took ours with it. But your pal Wintermute put me on to
somethin’ there before it went black. The reason Straylight’s not exactly hoppin’
with Tessier-Ashpools is that they’re mostly in cold sleep. There’s a law firm in
London keeps track of their powers of attorney. Has to know who’s awake and exactly
when. Armitage was routing the transmissions from London to Straylight through the
Hosaka on the yacht. Incidently, they know the old man’s dead.”

“Who knows?”

“The law firm and T-A. He had a medical remote planted in his sternum. Not that your
girl’s dart would’ve left a resurrection crew with much to work with. Shellfish toxin.
But the only T-A awake in Straylight right now is Lady 3Jane Marie-France. There’s
a male, couple years older, in Australia on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute
found a way to cause that business to need this 8Jean’s personal attention. But he’s
on his way home, or near as matters. The London lawyers give his Straylight ETA as
09:00:00, tonight. We slotted Kuang virus at 02:32:03. It’s 04:45:20. Best estimate
for Kuang penetration of the T-A core is 08:30:00. Or a hair on either side. I figure
Wintermute’s got somethin’ goin’ with this 3Jane, or else she’s just as crazy as her
old man was. But the boy up from Melbourne’ll know the score. The Straylight security
systems keep trying to go full alert, but Wintermute blocks ’em, don’t ask me how.
Couldn’t override the basic gate program to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a record
of all that on his Hosaka; Riviera must’ve talked 3Jane into doing it. She’s been
able to fiddle entrances and exits for years. Looks to me like one of T-A’s main problems
is that every family bigwig has riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams
and exceptions. Kinda like your immune system falling apart on you. Ripe for virus.
Looks good for us, once we’re past that ice.”

“Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm—”

A white lozenge snapped into position, filled with a close-up of
mad blue eyes. Case could only stare. Colonel Willie Corto, Special Forces, Strikeforce
Screaming Fist, had found his way back. The image was dim, jerky, badly focused. Corto
was using the
Haniwa
’s navigation deck to link with the Hosaka in
Marcus Garvey
.

“Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder.”

“Say, I . . . Colonel?”

“Hang in there, boy. Remember your training.”

But where have you been, man?
he silently asked the anguished eyes. Wintermute had built something called Armitage
into a catatonic fortress named Corto. Had convinced Corto that Armitage was the real
thing, and Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted
for Wintermute in that room in the Chiba Hilton. . . . And now Armitage was gone,
blown away by the winds of Corto’s madness. But where had Corto
been
, those years?

Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.

“Case, this will be difficult for you to accept, I know that. You’re an officer. The
training. I understand. But, Case, as God is my witness, we have been betrayed.”

Tears started from the blue eyes.

“Colonel, ah, who? Who’s betrayed us?”

“General Girling, Case. You may know him by a code name. You do know the man of whom
I speak.”

“Yeah,” Case said, as the tears continued to flow, “I guess I do. Sir,” he added,
on impulse. “But, sir, Colonel, what exactly should we do? Now, I mean.”

“Our duty at this point, Case, lies in flight. Escape. Evasion. We can make the Finnish
border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop flying on manual. Seat of the pants, boy. But
that will only be the beginning.” The blue eyes slitted above tanned cheekbones slick
with tears. “Only the beginning. Betrayal from above. From
above
 . . .” He stepped back from the camera, dark stains on his torn twill shirt. Armitage’s
face had been masklike, impassive, but Corto’s was the true schizoid mask, illness
etched deep in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.