“You bribe the help, upstairs?”
He shook his head and fell across the bed.
“Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count.”
He clutched his stomach.
“You kicked me,” he managed.
“Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I’m meditating, right?” She sat beside him. “And getting a briefing.” She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. “Wintermute’s telling me about Straylight.”
“Where’s the meat puppet?”
“There isn’t any. That’s the most expensive special service of all.” She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. “The run’s tomorrow, Wintermute says.”
“What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?”
“ ’Cause, if I’d stayed, I might have killed Riviera.”
“Why?”
“What he did to me. The show.”
“I don’t get it.”
“This cost a lot,” she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. “Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you’ll have the reflexes to go with the gear. . . . You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ’cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . . .” She cracked her knuckles. “Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren’t compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it. . . . But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.” She smiled. “Then it started getting strange.” She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. “The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time.” She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. “So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that’s the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.”
“They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?”
“I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain. . . . You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn’t tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.”
She seemed to speak from a distance. “And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I’d tell myself that at least some of them were just dreams, but by then I’d started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me. Nothing’s too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.” She shook her head. “That prick was charging eight times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn’t know.”
“So what was he charging for?”
“Bad dreams. Real ones. One night . . . one night, I’d just come back from Chiba.” She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall. “Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. . . .” She dug her fingers deep in the foam. “Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren’t alone. She was all . . .” She tugged at the temperfoam. “Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ ’Cause we weren’t finished yet. . . .”
She began to shake.
“So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. “The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while.”
Case stared at her.
“So Riviera hit a nerve last night,” she said. “I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I’ll be psyched up to go in there after him.”
“After him?”
“He’s already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . .”
Case remembered the face he’d seen. “You gonna kill him?”
She smiled. Cold. “He’s going to die, yeah. Soon.”
“I had a visit too,” he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded.
“Maybe it wants you to hate something too.”
“Maybe I hate it.”
“Maybe you hate yourself, Case.”
“HOW WAS IT?” Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.
“Try it sometime,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“Just can’t see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,” Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist.
“Can we go home, now?” Bruce asked.
“Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.”
TWELVE
RUE JULES VERNE was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle’s midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps. If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you’d find yourself approaching Desiderata from the left.
Case watched Bruce’s trike until it was out of sight, then turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the faces of the month’s newest simstim stars.
Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass. The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa’s edge. He’d seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle’s security system, controlled by some central computer.
In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer, Shozoku Smith’s, Emergency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly’s rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground plans of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools?
He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall. Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he’d killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda’s death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind’s screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn’t become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.
It was a strange thing. He couldn’t take its measure.
“Numb,” he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he’d found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It’s the meat talking, ignore it.
“Gangster.”
He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda.
“Thought you went home,” he said, and covered his confusion with a sip of Carlsberg.
“I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this.” She ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her wrist. “Like it?”
“Sure.” He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked back at her. “What do you think you’re up to, honey?”
“You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?” She was very close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enormous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz. “You get off?”
“Yeah. But the comedown’s a bitch.”
“Then you need another one.”
“And what’s that supposed to lead to?”
“I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the creamiest crib. People down the well on business tonight, if you follow me. . . .”
“If I follow you.”
She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. “You’re Yak, aren’t you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza.”
“You got an eye, huh?” He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette.
“How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every time you screwed up.”
“I never screw up.” He lit his cigarette.
“I saw that girl you’re with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares me.” She smiled too widely. “I like that. She like it with girls?”
“Never said. Who’s Hideo?”
“3Jane’s, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer.”
Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he spoke. “Dee-Jane?”
“Lady 3Jane. She’s triff. Rich. Her father owns all this.”
“This bar?”
“Freeside!”
“No shit. You keepin’ some class company, huh?” He raised an eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. “So how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet deb? You an’ Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?” He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed.
“Oh, you know,” she said, lids half lowered in what must have been intended as a look of modesty, “she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the party circuit. . . . It gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long as she brings Hideo to take care of her.”
“Where’s it get boring?”
“Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it’s pretty, all the pools and lilies. It’s a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets.” She snuggled in against him. “Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together.”
She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bubble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane.
“Hideo gave it to me,” she said. “He tried to show me how, but I can’t ever get it right. The necks come out backwards.” She tucked the folded paper back into her purse. Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing, and smoothed it across his inner wrist.
“3Jane, she’s got a pointy face, nose like a bird?” He watched his hands fumble an outline. “Dark hair? Young?”
“I guess. But she’s triff, you know? Like, all that money.”
The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . .
“Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “You got it now. We got it. Up the hill, we’ll have it all night.”
The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the—something flared white behind his eyes.
He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out of the way.
“Fuck you!” she screamed behind him, “you rip-off shit!”
He couldn’t feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.
And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the loser’s zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate monochrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee.
When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with wonder. And when the lights in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete.
Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe.
Midnight.
HE WALKED TILL morning.
The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow.
A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a Desiderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and croissants beneath the striped umbrellas.
He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object.
He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again.
They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion.
“Turing,” she said. “You are under arrest.”
PART 4
THE STRAYLIGHT RUN
THIRTEEN
“YOUR NAME IS Henry Dorsett Case.” She recited th
e 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.
THEIR 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?