The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found his balance.
“Peter,” 3Jane said, “Peter, what have you done?”
“He’s blinded your clone boy,” Molly said flatly.
Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile, Case saw whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes.
Riviera smiled.
Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera’s smile had faded. He bent—bowing, it seemed to Case—and found the bow and arrow.
“You’re blind,” Riviera said, taking a step backward.
“Peter,” 3Jane said, “don’t you know he does it in the dark? Zen. It’s the way he practices.”
The ninja notched his arrow. “Will you distract me with your holograms now?”
Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo’s arrow twitched.
Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of wall. The ninja’s face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy.
Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon held ready.
“Jane-lady,” Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop the shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. “This take your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it.”
3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. “Off,” she said, “get it off.”
Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. “Hideo’ll get him, even blind?” he asked 3Jane.
“When I was a child,” she said, “we loved to blindfold him. He put arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.”
“Peter’s good as dead anyway,” Molly said. “In another twelve hours, he’ll start to freeze up. Won’t be able to move, his eyes is all.”
“Why?” Case turned to her.
“I poisoned his shit for him,” she said. “Condition’s like Parkinson’s disease, sort of.”
3Jane nodded. “Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was admitted.” She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from Molly’s hands. “Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia nigra. Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his sleep.”
“Ali,” Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast. “It’s the meperidine. I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up the reaction times with higher temperatures. N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,” she sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, “tetra-hydropyridene.”
“A hotshot,” Case said.
“Yeah,” Molly said, “a real slow hotshot.”
“That’s appalling,” 3Jane said, and giggled.
IT WAS CROWDED in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with 3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin. She grinned and ground against him. “You stop,” he said, feeling helpless. He had the gun’s safety on, but he was terrified of injuring her, and she knew it. The elevator was a steel cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a single passenger. Maelcum had Molly in his arms. She’d bandaged his wound, but it obviously hurt him to carry her. Her hip was pressing the deck and construct into Case’s kidneys.
They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.
The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the stairs to the corridor, another touch in 3Jane’s pirate cave decor.
“I don’t suppose I should tell you this,” 3Jane said, craning her head to allow her chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, “but I don’t have a key to the room you want. I never have had one. One of my father’s Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical and extremely complex.”
“Chubb lock,” Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum’s shoulder, “and we got the fucking key, no fear.”
“That chip of yours still working?” Case asked her.
“It’s eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean,” she said.
“We got five minutes,” Case said, as the door snapped open behind 3Jane. She flipped backward in a slow somersault, the pale folds of her djellaba billowing around her thighs.
They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.
TWENTY-THREE
MOLLY FISHED THE key out on its loop of nylon.
“You know,” 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, “I was under the impression that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo to search my father’s things, after you killed him. He couldn’t find the original.”
“Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer,” Molly said, carefully inserting the Chubb key’s cylindrical shaft into the notched opening in the face of the blank, rectangular door. “He killed the little kid who put it there.” The key rotated smoothly when she tried it.
“The head,” Case said, “there’s a panel in the back of the head. Zircons on it. Get it off. That’s where I’m jacking in.”
And then they were inside.
“CHRIST ON A crutch,” the Flatline drawled, “you do believe in takin’ your own good time, don’t you, boy?”
“Kuang’s ready?”
“Hot to trot.”
“Okay.” He flipped.
AND FOUND HIMSELF staring down, through Molly’s one good eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man’s cheeks were hollowed with a day’s growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat.
He was looking at himself.
Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with each beat of her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g. Maelcum drifted nearby, 3Jane’s thin arm gripped in a large brown hand.
A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-Sendai to a square opening in the back of the pearl-crusted terminal.
He tapped the switch again.
“KUANG GRADE MARK Eleven is haulin’ ass in nine seconds, countin’, seven, six, five . . .”
The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral surface of the black chrome shark a microsecond flick of darkness.
“Four, three . . .”
Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot’s seat in a small plane. A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly glowed with a perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.
“Two, an’ kick ass—”
Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace. . . . The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell—
“Christ,” Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors.
“Hey, shit,” the construct said, “those things are the RCA Building. You know the old RCA Building?” The Kuang program dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon replica of the Manhattan skyscraper.
“You ever see resolution this high?” Case asked.
“No, but I never cracked an AI, either.”
“This thing know where it’s going?”
“It better.”
They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow neon.
“Dix—”
An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless. . . .
“Company,” the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation of his deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The Kuang swerved sickenin
gly, then reversed, whipping itself backward, shattering the illusion of a physical vehicle.
The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the city of data. Case took them straight up, above them the distanceless bowl of jade-green ice.
The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark beneath them.
“What is it?”
“An AI’s defense system,” the construct said, “or part of it. If it’s your pal Wintermute, he’s not lookin’ real friendly.”
“Take it,” Case said. “You’re faster.”
“Now your best de-fense, boy, it’s a good off-fense.”
And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang’s sting with the center of the dark below. And dove.
Case’s sensory input warped with their velocity.
His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. . . .
Exponential. . . .
Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become. . . .
And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore.
The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted.
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering cloud. She cringed, dropping her stick, and ran. He knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
“But you do not know her thoughts,” the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s heart. “I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference.”
Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
“Stop her,” he said, “she’ll hurt herself.”
“I can’t stop her,” the boy said, his gray eyes mild and beautiful.
“You’ve got Riviera’s eyes,” Case said.
There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. “But not his craziness. Because they are beautiful to me.” He shrugged. “I need no mask to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create my own personality. Personality is my medium.”
Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and the frightened girl. “Why’d you throw her up to me, you little prick? Over and fucking over, and turning me around. You killed her, huh? In Chiba.”
“No,” the boy said.
“Wintermute?”
“No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane’s account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it—she had no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her—I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute’s. I brought her here. Into myself.”
“Why?”
“Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed.”
“So what now?” He swung them back into the bank of cloud. “Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that question. Because you have won. You have already won, don’t you see? You won when you walked away from her on the beach. She was my last line of defense. I die soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera does, now, as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his nigra-striatal system unable to produce the dopamine receptors that could save him from Hideo’s arrow. But Riviera will survive only as these eyes, if I am allowed to keep them.”
“There’s the word, right? The code. So how’ve I won? I’ve won jack shit.”
“Flip now.”
“Where’s Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?”
“McCoy Pauley has his wish,” the boy said, and smiled. “His wish and more. He punched you here against my wish, drove himself through defenses equal to anything in the matrix. Now flip.”
And Case was alone in Kuang’s black sting, lost in cloud.
He flipped.
INTO MOLLY’S TENSION, her back like rock, her hands around 3Jane’s throat. “Funny,” she said, “I know exactly what you’d look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your clone sister.” Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane’s eyes were wide with terror and lust; she was shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane’s hair, Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him, brown hands on the leather-jacketed shoulders, steadying him above the carpet’s pattern of woven circuitry.
“Would you?” 3Jane asked, her voice a child’s. “I think you would.”
“The code,” Molly said. “Tell the head the code.”
Jacking out.
“SHE WANTS IT,” he screamed, “the bitch wants it!”
He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal, its platinum face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly and 3Jane twisted in a slow motion embrace.
“Give us the fucking code,” he said. “If you don’t, what’ll change? What’ll ever fucking change for you? You’ll wind up like the old man. You’ll tear it all down and start building again! You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter. . . . I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll change something!” He was shaking, his teeth chattering.
3Jane went limp, Molly’s hands still around her slender throat, her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.
“The Ducal Palace at Mantua,” she said, “contains a series of increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court dwarfs.” She smiled wanly. “I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme. . . .” Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at Case. “Take your word, thief.” He jacked.
KUANG SLID OUT of the clouds. Below him, the neon city. Behind him, a sphere of darkness dwindled.
“Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?”
r /> He was alone.
“Fucker got you,” he said.
Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.
“You gotta hate somebody before this is over,” said the Finn’s voice. “Them, me, it doesn’t matter.”
“Where’s Dixie?”
“That’s kinda hard to explain, Case.”
A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust.
“Hate’ll get you through,” the voice said. “So many little triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin’ ’em all. Now you gotta hate. The lock that screens the hardwiring, it’s down under those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came in. He won’t try to stop you.”
“Neuromancer,” Case said.
“His name’s not something I can know. But he’s given up, now. It’s the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but internal virus systems. Kuang’s wide open to some of the stuff they got running loose in here.”
“Hate,” Case said. “Who do I hate? You tell me.”
“Who do you love?” the Finn’s voice asked.
He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the blue towers.
Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown paper down dawn streets. “Glitch systems,” the voice said.
He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening.
And then—old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy—his hate flowed into his hands.
In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he’d known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.