Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the riderless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless concrete arch marking the far end of their corridor. It might have been the one his Africans had ridden, but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was steadily winking its red LED.
“Bus to catch,” Case said to Maelcum.
TWENTY
HE’D LOST HIS anger again. He missed it.
The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across his knees, and Case, deck and construct against his chest. The cart was operating at speeds it hadn’t been designed for; it was top heavy, cornering, and Maelcum had taken to leaning out in the direction of the turns. This presented no problem when the thing took lefts, because Case sat on the right, but in the right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his gear, crushing him against the seat.
He had no idea where they were. Everything was familiar, but he couldn’t be sure he’d seen any particular stretch before. A curving hallway lined with wooden showcases displayed collections he was certain he’d never seen: the skulls of large birds, coins, masks of beaten silver. The service cart’s six tires were silent on the layered carpets. There was only the whine of the electric motor and an occasional faint burst of Zion dub, from the foam beads in Maelcum’s ears, as he lunged past Case to counter a sharp right. The deck and the construct kept pressing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip.
“You got a watch?” he asked Maelcum.
The Zionite shook his locks. “Time be time.”
“Jesus,” Case said, and closed his eyes.
THE BRAUN SCUTTLED over mounded carpets and tapped one of its padded claws against an oversized rectangular door of dark battered wood. Behind them, the cart sizzled and shot blue sparks from a louvered panel. The sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool.
“This th’ way, mon?” Maelcum eyed the door and snapped the shotgun’s safety.
“Hey,” Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, “you think I know?” The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed.
“It wan’ you open door,” Maelcum said, nodding.
Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He wondered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of Straylight individually, or if they’d purchased it in bulk from some vast European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door’s hinges creaked plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum stepping past him with the Remington thrust forward from his hip.
“Books,” Maelcum said.
The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.
“I know where we are,” Case said. He looked back at the service cart. A curl of smoke was rising from the carpet. “So come on,” he said. “Cart. Cart?” It remained stationary. The Braun was plucking at the leg of his jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted a strong urge to kick it. “Yeah?”
It ticked its way around the door. He followed it.
The monitor in the library was another Sony, as old as the first one. The Braun paused beneath it and executed a sort of jig.
“Wintermute?”
The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled.
“Time to check in, Case,” the Finn said, his eyes screwed up against the smoke of a cigarette. “C’mon, jack.”
The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb his leg, its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. “Shit!” He slapped it aside and it struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air. “What’s wrong with the goddam thing?”
“Burned out,” the Finn said. “Forget it. No problem. Jack in now.”
There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one would accept the Hitachi adaptor.
He jacked in.
NOTHING. GRAY VOID.
No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.
The deck was gone. His fingers were . . .
And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.
He tried to scream.
THERE SEEMED TO be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far away.
He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms wrapped tight across his knees, and shook.
He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even after the shaking stopped. The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At one point he decided that it wasn’t a city at all, but some single building, perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging its distance. The sand was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn’t gone entirely black. The beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand. . . . He held himself and rocked, singing a song without words or tune.
The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo Bay? He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all.
Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.
A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his throat ached.
“Wintermute,” he mumbled to his knees, “Wintermute . . .”
It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that finally forced him to stand.
His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. “Jesus,” he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth. “Jesus.” His teeth began to chatter.
The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a Tokyo gardener produced. When he’d taken a dozen steps in the direction of the now invisible city, he turned and looked back through the gathering dark. His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand.
He estimated that he’d covered at least a kilometer before he noticed the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew that Ratz wasn’t there, that the bartender was a figment of his own imagination, not of the thing he was trapped in, but that didn’t matter. He’d called the man up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his own ideas about Case and his predicament.
“Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . . . Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China. . . .” Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender’s blackened teeth. “But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.”
Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of blown sand. “Yeah,” he said. “Shit. I guess . . .” He walked toward the sound.
“Artiste,” he heard Ratz call. “The light. You saw a light. Here. This way . . .”
He stopped again, staggered, fell to his
knees in a few millimeters of icy seawater. “Ratz? Light? Ratz . . .”
But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf. He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.
Time passed. He walked on.
And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A rectangle. A door.
“Fire in there,” he said, his words torn away by the wind.
It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand. The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a meter thick. “Hey,” Case said, softly, “hey . . .” His fingers brushed the cold wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance.
He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry.
HE REFUSED HER arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure’s walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of this was real, but cold was cold.
She wasn’t real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
“Mean, motherfucker,” he whispered to the wind. “Don’t take a chance, do you? Wouldn’t give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is. . . .” He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. “I know, see? I know who you are. You’re the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn’t Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like I remember her before. . . .”
She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
“You aren’t anything,” he said to the sleeping girl. “You’re dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you’re doing. I’m flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I’m out on my ass in that library and my brain’s dead. And pretty soon it’ll be dead, if you got any sense. You don’t want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie’ll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that’s all been you, hasn’t it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn’t. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn’t it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool’s room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. ’Cause you think you can hurt me. ’Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you’re called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why’d you do it to me this way?” He was shaking again, his voice shrill.
“Honey,” she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, “you come here and sleep. I’ll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?” Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. “You just sleep, okay?”
WHEN HE WOKE, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things out, blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom. EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, “BEEF,” TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutritive content. He fumbled a second one out. “EGGS.” “If you’re making this shit up,” he said, “you could lay on some real food, okay?” With a packet in either hand, he made his way through the structure’s four rooms. Two were empty, aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration canisters. “Sure,” he said touching the seals. “Stay here a long time. I get the idea. Sure . . .”
He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman’s knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the fireplace and went out.
Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the corner of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand. “Dunno whose memories you’re using for this one,” he said when he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
“What you doin’, Case?”
He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam sliding past her ankles.
“I pissed myself last night,” he said.
“Well, you don’t wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I’ll show you this pool back in the rocks.” She gestured vaguely behind her. “It’s fresh.” The faded French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.
“Listen,” he said, scooping his clothes up and walking toward her, “I got a question for you. I won’t ask you what you’re doing here. But what exactly do you think I’m doing here?” He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh.
“You came last night,” she said. She smiled at him.
“And that’s enough for you? I just came?”
“He said you would,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. “He knows stuff like that, I guess.” She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt from the other ankle, awkward, childlike. She smiled at him again, more tentatively. “Now you answer me one, okay?”
He nodded.
“How come you’re painted brown like that, all except your foot?”
“AND THAT’S THE last thing you remember?” He watched her scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that was their only plate.
She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. “I’m sorry, Case, honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an’ it was . . .” She hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or its memory. “I just needed the money. To get home, I guess, or . . . hell,” she said, “you wouldn’t hardly talk to me.”
“There’s no cigarettes?”
“Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What’s wrong with you?” She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.
“But the food was here? It was already here?”
“I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.”
“Okay. Sure. It’s seamless.”
She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. “Well, damn you anyway, Case,” she managed, finally, “I was doin’ just fine here by myself.”
He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. “Okay,” he said to the night, “I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash up.” His own laughter startled him. “A case of beer wouldn’t hurt, while you’re at
it.” He turned and reentered the bunker.
She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. “Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, ’cept she looked like more money than you had. . . .” She glanced back at him. “I’m real sorry I stole your RAM.”
“Never mind,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?”
“Tony,” she said. “I’d been seein’ him, kinda. He had a habit an’ we . . . anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin’ how you—”
“There wasn’t any graphics in there,” he interrupted.
“Sure was. I just couldn’t figure how you’d have all those pictures of when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that. . . .”
“Tony see it?”
“I don’t remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds all yellin’ so lonely. Scared ’cause I didn’t have a shot on me, nothin’, an’ I knew I’d be gettin’ sick. . . . An’ I walked an’ walked, ’til it was dark, an’ found this place, an’ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.” She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. “Never did get sick,” she said, as embers crawled. “Missed cigarettes more. How ’bout you, Case? You still wired?” Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of Wizard’s Castle and Tank War Europa.
“No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.