


                                  ===========
                                  Neuromancer
                                  ===========

                                       by
                                 William Gibson


                                  Dedication:
                                    for Deb
                              who made it possible
                                   with love


         PART ONE
         
         CHIBA CITY BLUES


         1

         The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned
         to a dead channel.
         "It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he
         shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the
         Chat. "It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-
         ciency." It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo
         was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there
         for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
         Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto-
         nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw
         Case and smiled, his teeth a web work of East European steel
         and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the
         unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval
         uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
         precise rows of tribal scars. "Wage was in here early, with two
         Joe boys," Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his
         good hand. "Maybe some business with you, Case?"
         Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged
         him.
         
         3


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff
         of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something
         heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he
         reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis,
         a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby
         pink plastic. "You are too much the artiste, Herr Case." Ratz
         grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his
         overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. "You are
         the artiste of the slightly funny deal."
         "Sure," Case said, and sipped his beer. "Somebody's gotta
         be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you."
         The whore's giggle went up an octave.
         "Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's
         a close personal friend of mine."
         She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible
         spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.
         "Jesus," Case said, "what kind a creep joint you running here?
         Man can't have a drink."
         "Ha," Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag,
         "Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertain-
         ment value."
         As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange
         instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated
         conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause.
         Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
         Ratz grunted. "An angel passed."
         "The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese
         bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a
         nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate...."
         "Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly
         rising in him like bile, "that is so much bullshit."
         
         The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than
         the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were
         the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,
         and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that
         Memphis hotel.
         A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
         nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the
         corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in
         
         4


         NEUROMANCER
         
         his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
         void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the
         Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cow-
         boy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the
         dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo
         and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the
         dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands
         clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fin-
         gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.
         
         "I saw your girl last night," Ratz said, passing Case his
         second Kirin.
         "I don't have one," he said, and drank.
         "Miss Linda Lee."
         Case shook his head.
         "No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to
         commerce?" The bartender's small brown eyes were nested
         deep in wrinkled flesh. "I think I liked you better, with her.
         You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too ar-
         tistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."
         "You're breaking my heart, Ratz." He finished his beer,
         paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-
          stained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way
         through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.
         
         Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy
         a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by
         the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the
         biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a
         byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cy-
         berspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness
         into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief
         he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who pro-
         vided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls
         of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
         He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd
         never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something
         for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam.
         He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it
         mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.
         
         5


         WlllIAM GIBSON
         
         Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the
         money. And he was going to need it. Because--still smiling--
         they were going to make sure he never worked again.
         They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian
         mycotoxin.
         Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning
         out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
         The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
         For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber-
         space, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy
         hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt
         for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of
         his own flesh.
         
         His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat
         sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through
         the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells
         of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate
         business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already
         illegal.
         In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,
         he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in
         the shadow land of black medicine. Synonymous with implants,
         nerve-splicing, and micro bionics, Chiba was a magnet for the
         Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures.
         In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month
         round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black
         clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which
         he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.
         Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the
         port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all
         night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of
         Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering
         hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay
         was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals
         of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes
         dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and
         city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an
         area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart.
         By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless,
         
         6


         NEUROMANCER
         
         the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned
         silver sky.
         
         Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre
         de The, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double
         espresso. It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Bra-
         zilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls.
         The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in
         red neon.
         At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money
         and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal
         overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had
         seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd
         killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before
         would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the
         street itself came to seem the externalization of some death
         wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
         Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
         winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
         permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you
         sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd
         break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either
         way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague
         memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or
         lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger
         with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
         Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the
         accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace,
         the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.
         Alone at a table in the Jarre de The, with the octagon coming
         on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware
         of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at
         some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very
         ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer
         carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran
         the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation
         for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew
         that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his
         customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him
         basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And

         7


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that
         most hated the thought of Linda Lee.
         He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.
         Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigar-
         ette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa,
         the New York skyline.... And now he remembered her that
         way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to
         a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned,
         forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank
         War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck
         sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding
         high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way
         to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come
         in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement
         and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of
         the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she
         played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one
         he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a port side coffin,
         her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in
         flight.
         Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal
         he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with
         smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the
         headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
         Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets
         at the hover port and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept
         up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the
         children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white
         loafers and cling wrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the
         midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a
         child.
         It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved
         through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of
         reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving
         like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen
         the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched
         her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him
         of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of
         blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.
         He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It
         
         8


         NEUROMANCER
         
         was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate
         of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With
         the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random
         impacts required to create a surface like that. The Jarre was
         decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century,
         an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plas-
         tics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though
         the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked
         the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface
         fogged with something that could never be wiped away.
         "Hey. Case, good buddy...."
         He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She
         was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneak-
         ers.
         "I been lookin' for you, man." She took a seat opposite
         him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit
         had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked
         her arms for signs of terms or the needle. "Want a cigarette?"
         She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle
         pocket and offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a
         red plastic tube. "You sleep in' okay, Case? You look tired."
         Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta.
         The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but
         the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines
         of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the
         corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by
         a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented
         microcircuits, or a city map.
         "Not if I remember to take my pills," he said, as a tangible
         wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the
         wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her
         skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her
         locked across the small of his back.
         All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.
         "Wage," she said, narrowing her eyes. "He wants to see
         you with a hole in your face." She lit her own cigarette.
         "Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?"
         "No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys."
         "I don't owe him enough. He does me, he's out the money
         anyway." He shrugged.
         
         9


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to
         be the example. You seriously better watch it."
         "Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?"
         "Sleep." She shook her head. "Sure, Case." She shivered,
         hunched forward over the table. Her face was filmed with
         sweat.
         "Here," he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker,
         coming up with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically,
         under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her.
         "You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage." There
         was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read,
         something he'd never seen there before.
         "I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more
         coming," he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a
         zippered pocket.
         "You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick."
         "I'll see you, Linda," he said, getting up.
         "Sure." A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her
         pupils. Sanpaku. "You watch your back, man."
         He nodded, anxious to be gone.
         He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him,
         saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.
         
         Friday night on Ninsei.
         He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised
         coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an
         arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman
         by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the
         back of the man's right hand.
         Was it authentic? lf that's for real, he thought, he's in for
         trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above
         a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors
         that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like
         that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a
         black clinic.
         The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was
         a gaijin crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary
         tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies
         showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species.
         10


         NEUROMANCER
         
         of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire
         and commerce.
         There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City
         tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea
         that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of
         historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also
         saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies
         require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its in-
         habitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for
         technology itself.
         Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights?
         Would Wage have him killed to make an example? It didn't
         make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed
         biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.
         But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case's primary
         insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the
         buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman's business
         is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case
         had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City
         had beep cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with
         betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble,
         he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
         The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glan-
         dular extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He
         knew Wage hadn't liked that. Wage was his primary supplier,
         nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd
         Mao aged to forge links with the rigidly strati fled criminal es-
         tablishment beyond Night City's borders. Genetic materials and
         hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of
         fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace some-
         thing back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a
         dozen cities.
         Case found himself staring through a shop window. The
         place sold small bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flic-
         knives, lighters, pocket VTRs, Sims Tim decks, weighted man-
         riki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated
         him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed,
         others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on
         water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted
         
         11


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         against scarlet ultra suede with nearly invisible loops of nylon
         fish line, their centers stamped with dragons or yin yang sym-
         bols. They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came
         to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his
         destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
         "Julie," he said to his stars. "Time to see old Julie. He'll
         know."
         
         Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his
         metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums
         and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly
         pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code
         of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he'd fly
         to Hongkong and order the year's suits and shirts. Sexless and
         inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in
         his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never
         seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe
         seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of gar-
         ments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses,
         framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic
         quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian doll house.
         His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part
         of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before,
         with a random collection of European furniture, as though
         Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-
         Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room
         where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps
         perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in
         scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between
         the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete
         floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the con-
         volutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct
         time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping
         modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
         "You seem to be clean, old son," said Deane's disembodied
         voice. "Do come in."
         Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive
         imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS
         DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in
         peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in
         
         12


         NEUROOMANCER
         
         Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century,
         the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
         Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of
         light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of
         dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced behind a
         vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, draw-
         er Ed cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of
         thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written
         records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes,
         scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of
         clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get
         around to reassembling.
         "What brings you around, boyo?" Deane asked, offering
         Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked pa-
         per. "Try one. Tins Ting Djahe, the very best." Case refused
         the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and
         ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg. "Julie
         I hear Wage wants to kill me."
         "Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?"
         "People."
         "People," Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. "What sort
         of people? Friends?"
         Case nodded.
         "Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?"
         "I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to
         you?"
         "Haven't been in touch, of late." Then he sighed. "If I did
         know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things
         being what they are, you understand."
         "Things?"
         "He's an important connection Case."
         "Yeah. He want to kill me, Juiie?"
         "Not that I know of." Deane shrugged. They might have
         been discussing the price of ginger. "If it proves to be an
         unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and
         I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore."
         "Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?"
         "Loose lips, old son!" Deane grinned. The steel desk was
         jammed with a fortune in debugging gear.
         "Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage."
         
         13


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his
         pale silk tie.
         
         He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit,
         the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass,
         and very close.
         The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something
         Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of
         control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of
         octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his
         narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let
         the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display
         window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical
         boutique, closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets
         of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of
         vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade.
         The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was
         tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous
         chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking,
         while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry
         the thing around in your pocket?
         Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied
         the reflection of the passing crowd.
         There.
         Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored
         glasses, dark clothing, slender. . .
         And gone.
         Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.
         
         "Rent me a gun, Shin?"
         The boy smiled. "Two hour." They stood together in the
         smell of fresh raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall.
         "You come back, two hour."
         "I need one now, man. Got anything right now?"
         Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once
         been filled with powdered horseradish. He produced a slender
         package wrapped in gray plastic. "Taser. One hour, twenty
         New Yen. Thirty deposit."
         "Shit. I don't need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna
         shoot somebody, understand?"
         
         14


         NEUROMANCER
         
         The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horse-
         radish cans. "Two hour."
         
         He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the
         display of shuriken. He'd never thrown one in his life.
         He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank
         chip that gave his name as Charles Derek May. It beat Truman
         Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport.
         The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she
         had a few years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit
         of science. He took his slender roll of New Yen out of his
         pocket and showed it to her. "I want to buy a weapon."
         She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
         "No," he said, "I don't like knives."
         She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The
         lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a
         coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight identical
         tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown
         fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for
         him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one
         end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the
         tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and
         forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of
         tightly wound coil spring slid out and locked. "Cobra," she said.
         
         Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean
         shade of gray. The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have
         teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks. Case
         had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient
         way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd settled for tucking the
         handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting
         across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between
         his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt
         like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it
         made him feel better.
         The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it
         attracted a related clientele. Fridays and Saturdays were dif-
         ferent. The regulars were still there, most of them, but they
         faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed
         on diem. As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for
         
         15


         WlllIAM GIBSON
         
         Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight. Lonny Zone, the bar's
         resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as
         one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was
         addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud
         Dancers. Catching the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the
         bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his
         long face slack and placid.
         "You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?"
         Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.
         "You sure, man?"
         "Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago."
         "Got some Joeboys with him? One of 'em thin, dark hair,
         maybe a black jacket?"
         "No," Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to
         indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail.
         "Big boys. Graftees." Zone's eyes showed very little white and
         less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and
         enormous. He stared into Case's face for a long time, then
         lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip. "Cobra,"
         he said, and raised an eyebrow. "You wanna fuck somebody
         up?"
         
         "See you, Lonny." Case left the bar.
         
         His tail was back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation
         the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else.
         You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy.
         Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was
         like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself
         in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and
         it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the
         matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish
         cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed
         drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all
         around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made
         flesh in the mazes of the black market....
         Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck 'em in. Last thing they'll
         expect. He was half a block from the games arcade where he'd
         first met Linda Lee.
         He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sail-
         
         16


         NEUROMANCER
         
         ors. One of them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was
         through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf,
         subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. Someone scored
         a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated air burst
         drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball
         mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight
         of unpainted chip board stairs. He'd come here once with Wage,
         to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man
         called Matsuga. He remembered the hallway, its stained mat-
         ting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles.
         One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black
         t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a
         travel poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined
         ideograms.
         "Get your security up here," Case told her.
         Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The
         last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun
         and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-
          lacquered composition door at the far end. It popped, cheap
         hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness there, the
         white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door
         to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob,
         leaning in with everything he had. Something snapped, and he
         was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Mat-
         suga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was
         long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind
         the arcade, filtering in through soot blown plastic. He made out
         a snake like loop of fiber optics protruding from a wall socket,
         a pile of discarded food containers, and the blade less nacelle
         of an electric fan.
         The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged
         out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched.
         It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame.
         Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle,
         triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head
         of the corridor.
         Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to
         full extension.
         With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume
         
         17


         WILUAM GIBSON
         
         he'd gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges. The
         cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel
         shaft amplifying his pulse.
         Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm,
         the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear
         came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold
         rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear.
         He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd
         almost forgotten what real fear was.
         This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He
         might die here. They might have guns....
         A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man's voice,
         shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. An-
         other crash.
         And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
         Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid
         beats of his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel
         scraped the matting.
         The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He
         snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window,
         blind with fear, his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and
         falling, all before he was conscious of what he'd done. The
         impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.
         A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch
         framed a heap of discarded fiber optics and the chassis of a
         junked console. He'd fallen face forward on a slab of soggy
         chip board, he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The
         cubicle's window was a square of faint light. The alarm still
         oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the
         games.
         A head appeared, framed in the window, back lit by the
         fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he
         still couldn't read the features. Glint of silver across the eyes.
         "Shit," someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern
         Sprawl.
         The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long
         count of twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his
         hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was.
         He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.
         
         18


         NEUROMANCER
         
         Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of
         a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on
         the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22
         long rifle, and Case would've preferred lead azide explosives
         to the simple Chinese hollow points Shin had sold him. Still
         it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he
         made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in
         his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in
         a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across
         in the dark. He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on
         Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.
         The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to
         Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, he'd decided, was gone
         and that was fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and
         it wouldn't wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood
         a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick. Its
         windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was
         visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the
         main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideo-
         grams. If the place had another name, Case didn't know it; it
         was always referred to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through
         an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a
         transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an af-
         terthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case
         climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked
         length of rigid magnetic tape.
         Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he'd
         arrived in Chiba, but he'd never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept
         in cheaper places.
         The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides
         of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the
         fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers
         against the pistol grip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss.
         As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he
         was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served
         the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
         Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a lapanese
         teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook.
         The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of
         industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side.
         
         19


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic
         grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with
         cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked
         when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open
         without a key.
         The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he
         edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins
         were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just
         under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot and
         waited for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts
         thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak
         of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling
         the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated
         the manual latch.
         There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi
         pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The
         cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice
         carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun
         aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown temper foam slab
         that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from his
         pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his
         jacket. The coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall,
         opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages. Case
         took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hongkong
         number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung up.
         His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi
         wasn't taking calls.
         He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
         A woman answered, something in Japanese.
         "Snake Man there?"
         "Very good to hear from you," said Snake Man, coming in
         on an extension. "I've been expecting your call."
         "I got the music you wanted." Glancing at the cooler.
         "I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem.
         Can you front?"
         "Oh, man, I really need the money bad...."
         Snake Man hung up.
         "You shit " Case said to the humming receiver. He stared
         at the cheap little pistol.
         "Iffy," he said, "it's all looking very iffy tonight."
         20


         NEUROMANCER
         
         * * *
         
         Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands
         in the pockets of his jacket; one held the rented pistol, the other
         the aluminum flask.
         Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from
         a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh
         tilted against the wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid
         called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly
         silent drunks. Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher
         and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. "You look
         bad, friend artiste," he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.
         "I'm doing just fine," said Case, and grinned like a skull.
         "Super fine." He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands
         still in his pockets.
         "And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter
         built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions,
         yes?"
         "Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?"
         "Proof against fear and being alone," the bartender contin-
         ued. "Listen to the fear. Maybe it's your friend."
         "You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz?
         Somebody hurt?"
         "Crazy cut a security man." He shrugged. "A girl, they
         say."
         "I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I. . ."
         "Ah." Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single
         line. He was looking past Case, toward the entrance. "I think
         you are about to."
         Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window.
         The speed sang in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery
         with sweat.
         "Herr Wage," Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manip-
         ulator as if he expected it to be shaken. "How great a pleasure.
         Too seldom do you honor us."
         Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face. It
         was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vat grown
         sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal
         silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was
         flanked by his Joe boys, nearly identical young men, their arms
         and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
         
         21


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "How you doing, Case?"
         "Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ash-
         tray in his pink plastic claw, "I want no trouble here." The
         ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised
         Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of
         green plastic cascading onto the table top. "You understand?"
         "Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you wanna try
         that thing on me?"
         "Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt," Ratz said, his tone
         conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Bra-
         zilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun
         at the trio. The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped
         with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow
         a fist. The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges,
         subsonic sandbag jellies.
         "Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
         "Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
         The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you owe me. These,"
         and he glowered at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better.
         You don't take anybody off in the Chatsubo."
         Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody
         off? We just wanna talk business. Case and me, we work
         together."
         Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and level led it at
         Wage's crotch. "I hear you wanna do me." Ratz's pink claw
         closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
         "Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
         you, you wig or something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill
         you?" Wage turned to the boy on his left. "You two go back
         to the Namban. Wait for me."
         Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now en-
         tirely deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis,
         who was curled at the foot of a barstool. The barrel of the
         Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back
         to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol clattered on the
         table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out
         of the chamber.
         "Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
         Linda.
         
         22


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
         The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
         "Get him out of here," Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting
         on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his
         lap, lighting a cigarette.
         Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a
         bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out
         of his pocket and handed it to Wage. "All I got. Pituitaries.
         Get you five hundred if you move it fast. Had the rest of my
         roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now."
         "You okay, Case?" The flask had already vanished behind
         a gunmetal lapel. "I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look
         bad. Like hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep."
         "Yeah." He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him.
         "Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody." He giggled.
         He picked up the .22's magazine and the one loose cartridge
         and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the
         other. "I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back."
         "Go home," said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with
         something like embarrassment. "Artiste. Go home."
         He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered
         his way past the plastic doors.
         
         "Bitch," he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei
         the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon
         was already cold and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from
         a street vendor's foam thimble and watched the sun come up.
         "You fly away, honey. Towns like this are for people who like
         the way down." But that wasn't it, really, and he was finding
         it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just
         wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy
         it for her, if she could find the right fence. And that business
         with the fifty; she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was
         about to rip him for the rest of what he had.
         When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on
         the desk. Different textbook. "Good buddy," Case called across
         the plastic turf, "you don't need to tell me. I know already.
         Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key. Nice little tip
         for you, say fifty New ones?" The boy put down his book.
         
         23


         WILLMM GIBSON
         
         "Woman," Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
         his thumb. "Silk." He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back,
         nodded. "Thanks, ass hole," Case said.
         On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed
         it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner.
         He knew where to rent a black box that would open anything
         in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.
         "Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday
         night special you rented from the waiter?"
         She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin.
         She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box
         muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.
         "That you in the arcade?" He pulled the hatch down.
         "Where's Linda?"
         "Hit that latch switch."
         He did.
         "That your girl? Linda?"
         He nodded.
         "She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What
         about the gun, man?" She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes
         were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temper foam.
         "I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets
         back to him for half what I paid. You want the money?"
         "No."
         "Want some dry ice? All I got, right now."
         "What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at
         the arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with
         nun chucks. "
         "Linda said you were gonna kill me."
         "Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here."
         "You aren't with Wage?"
         She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were sur-
         gically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to
         grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by
         dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the
         fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy.
         The nails looked artificial. "I think you screwed up, Case. I
         showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture."
         "So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the
         hatch.
         
         24


         -
         
         NEUROMANCER
         
         "You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly,
         Case. My name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work
         for. Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you "
         "That's good."
         "'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just
         the way I'm wired." She wore tight black glove leather jeans
         and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed
         to absorb light. "If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy,
         Case? You look like you like to take stupid chances."
         "Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
         "That's fine, man." The fletcher vanished into the black
         jacket. "Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be
         taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life."
         She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly
         spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-
          centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the
         burgundy nails.
         She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
         
         25


         2
         
         After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor
         of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by
         eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffee maker steamed on
         a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow
         balcony.
         "Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it." She took
         off her black jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a
         black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover
         with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof, Case
         decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and
         legs felt like they were made out of wood.
         "Case." He looked up, seeing the man for the first time.
         "My name is Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist,
         the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and
         hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. "Sun's
         up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy."
         Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked
         the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation
         
         27


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         rice paper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left
         lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
         "Get your coffee, Case," Molly said. "You're okay, but
         you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say." She sat
         cross legged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher
         without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he
         crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
         "Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Ar-
         mitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair.
         A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev,
         Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case."
         "What's that supposed to mean?"
         "Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."
         "Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian
         nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody
         got out."
         He sensed abrupt tension. Armitagc walkcd to the window
         and looked out over Tokyo Bay. "That isn't true. One unit
         made it back to Helsinki, Case."
         Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
         "You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs
         you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming
         Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic
         module was a Nightwing micro light, a pilot, a matrix deck, a
         jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series
         was the first generation of real intrusion programs."
         "Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
         "Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics."
         "Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just
         be going...."
         "I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your
         kind."
         "You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're
         rich enough to hire expensive razor girls to haul my ass up here,
         is all. I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or
         anybody else." He crossed to the window and looked down.
         "That's where I live now."
         "Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
         you when you're not looking."
         "Profile?"
         
         28


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each
         of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software.
         You're suicidal, Casc. The model gives you a month on the
         outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new
         pancreas inside a year."
         "'We.'" He met the faded blue eyes. "'We' who?"
         "What would you say if I told you we could correct your
         neural damage, Case'?" Armitage suddenly looked to Case as
         if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously
         heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that
         soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again. Case's dreams
         always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one was
         over.
         "What would you say, Case?"
         Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
         "I'd say you were full of shit."
         Arrnitage nodded.
         "Then I'd ask what your terms were."
         "Not very different than what you're used to, Case."
         "Let the man get some sleep, Armitage," Molly said from
         her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk
         like some expensive puzzle. "He's coming apart at the seams."
         "Terms," Case said, "and now. Right now."
         He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.
         
         The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster
         of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He re-
         membered the place from the round he'd made his first month
         in Chiba.
         "Scared, Case. You're real scared." It was Sunday afternoon
         and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders,
         a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves.
         A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the
         bamboo.
         "It'll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Ar-
         mitage has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing
         you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do
         it. He'll put them three years ahead of the competition. You
         got any idea what that's worth?" She hooked thumbs in the
         belt loops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the
         
         29


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes
         were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty
         quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
         "You're street samurai," he said. "How long you work for
         him?"
         "Couple of months."
         "What about before that?"
         "For somebody else. Working girl, you know?"
         He nodded.
         "Funny, Case."
         "What's funny?"
         "It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know how
         you're wired."
         "You don't know me, sister."
         "You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad luck."
         "How about him? He okay, Molly?" The robot crab moved
         toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its
         bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When
         it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then
         froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
         "What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet
         ass." The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked
         it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the
         carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon
         righted it.
         Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry
         of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to
         search his pockets for cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said.
         "You want to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled
         Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab
         of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an op-
         erating table.
         "Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
         He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
         gets more all the time." Case noticed a certain tension around
         her mouth. "Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...."
         She shrugged.
         "What's that mean?"
         "I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what
         we're really working for."
         
         30


         NEUROMANCER
         
         He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday
         morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours .
         Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's
         security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the
         chain link. If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it.
         He'd avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Ar-
         mitage's call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this
         girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
         "If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to
         meet you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the
         clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.
         
         Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
         Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image
         fading down corridors of television sky.
         Voices.
         Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves,
         pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given....
         
         Hold still. Don't move.
         And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone,
         a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and
         whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link
         and the prison of the skull.
         Goddamn don't you move.
         Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of
         the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
         "Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!"
         She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one
         hand. "You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat. You're
         still full of endorphin inhibitors."
         
         He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
         His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady
         pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and
         reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and
         ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the
         shade beneath a bridge or overpass....
         "Case? It's Wednesday, Case." She moved, rolling over,
         reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard
         
         31


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. "Here."
         She put the bottle in his hand. "I can see in the dark, Case.
         Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
         "My back hurts."
         "That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood
         too. Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal.
         And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff
         I dun no. Lot of injections. They didn't have to open anything
         up for the main show." She settled back beside him. "It's
         2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve."
         He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed,
         lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.
         "I gotta punch deck, ' he heard himself say. He was groping
         for his clothes. "I gotta know...."
         She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms.
         "Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would
         fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor's orders.
         Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so." He
         lay down again.
         "Where are we?"
         "Home. Cheap Hotel."
         "Where's Armitage?"
         "Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're
         out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the
         Sprawl." She touched his shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good
         massage."
         He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his
         fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the
         small of his back, kneeling on the temper foam, the leather
         jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.
         "How come you're not at the Hilton?"
         She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs
         and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger.
         She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him,
         her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked
         softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden
         against the temper foam.
         His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed
         to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back
         against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small
         
         32


         NEUROMANCER
         
         hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on
         the leather jeans and tugged it down.
         "It's okay," she said, "I can see." Sound of the jeans peeling
         down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away.
         She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected
         hardness of the implanted lenses. "Don't," she said, "finger-
         prints."
         Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it
         over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers
         spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the
         images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriv-
         ing and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched
         convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping
         down on him again and again, until they both had come, his
         orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the
         matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down
         hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet
         against his hips.
         
         On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went
         through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from
         the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat
         and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smell-
         ing twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
         "You seen Wage, Ratz?"
         "Not tonight." Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at
         Molly.
         "You see him, tell him I got his money."
         "Luck changing, my artiste?"
         "Too soon to tell."
         
         "Well, I gotta see this guy," Case said, watching his re-
         flection in her glasses. "I got biz to cancel out of."
         "Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight." She
         stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
         "The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I don't
         give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people
         who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my people,
         you know?"
         Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
         
         33


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku
         and Asakuza, and they'll go down, understand?" he lied, his
         hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. "Five. Five minutes.
         By your clock, okay?"
         "Not what I'm paid for."
         "What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight
         friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is
         something else."
         "Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to
         check us out with your smuggler." She put a booted foot up
         on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.
         "Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion
         there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of
         silicon in her head . What is this about, exactly?" Deane ' s ghostly
         cough seemed to hang in the air between them.
         "Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone."
         "You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any
         other way."
         "Okay," she said. "Go. But five Minutes. Any more and
         I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while
         you're at it, you try to figure something out."
         "What's that?"
         "Why I'm doing you the favor." She turned and walked
         out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
         "Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?" asked Julie.
         "Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?"
         The bolts worked. "Slowly, Case," said the voice.
         "Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk," Case
         said, taking his place in the swivel chair.
         "It's on all the time," Deane said mildly, taking a gun from
         behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and
         aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum
         revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the
         trigger-guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with
         what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked very
         strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. "Just taking care, you
         Understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want."
         "I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody."
         "What's moving, old son'?" Deane's shirt was candy-striped
         cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
         
         34


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?"
         "Go-to on whom, old son?"
         "Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton."
         Deane put the pistol down. "Sit still, Case." He tapped
         something out on a lap terminal. "It seems as though you know
         as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to have
         a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the
         neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from
         the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history.
         You said history." He picked up the gun again, but didn't point
         it directly at Case. "What sort of history?"
         "The war. You in the war, Julie?"
         "The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks."
         "Screaming Fist."
         "Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great
         bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to
         hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in,
         where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that... great
         scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to
         test some new technology. They knew about the Russians' de-
         fenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse
         weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see." Deane
         shrugged. "Turkey shoot for Ivan."
         "Any of those guys make it out?"
         "Christ,'' Deane said, "it's been bloody years.... Though
         I do think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov
         gunship. Helicopter, you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't
         have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish
         defense forces in the process. Special Forces types." Deane
         sniffed. "Bloody hell."
         Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was over-
         whelming.
         "I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting
         the gun down. "Lovely place, Lisbon."
         "In the service, Julie?"
         "Hardly. Though I did see action." Deane smiled his pink
         smile. "Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets."
         "Thanks, Julie. I owe you one."
         "Hardly, Case. And goodbye."
         
         * * *
         
         35


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had
         felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly
         along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket
         stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, wait-
         ing....
         They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and
         paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen.
         Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had
         grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity,
         obviously longing for one of them to make a move. Then he'd
         taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
         "Wasting your time, cowboy," Molly said, when Case took
         an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
         "How's that? You want one?" He held the pill out to her.
         "Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver.
         Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit." She tapped
         the octagon with one burgundy nail. "You're biochemically
         incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine."
         "Shit," he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
         "Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen."
         He did. Nothing did.
         Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
         "Sammi's," Ratz said.
         "I'll pass," Case said, "I hear they kill each other down
         there."
         An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai
         in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
         Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a port side warehouse,
         taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The
         corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock pre-
         serving the pressure differential that supported the dome. Flu-
         orescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals,
         but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close
         with the smell of sweat and concrete.
         None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the
         tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome.
         Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised
         circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear. No
         light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the
         ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata
         
         36


         NEUROMANCER
         
         of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck
         currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. No
         sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified
         breathing of the fighters.
         Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men
         circled. The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten,
         the knives they held were just under a meter long. The knife-
          fighter's grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers
         curled, thumb aligned with blade. The knives seemed to move
         of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through
         the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the
         men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was smooth
         and still, watching.
         "I'll go find us some food," Case said. She nodded, lost in
         contemplation of the dance.
         He didn't like this place.
         He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark.
         Too quiet.
         The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night
         City crowd. Teaks down from the arcologies. He supposed that
         meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational
         committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working
         all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company
         hymn, company funeral.
         He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found
         the food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall
         waxy cartons of beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw
         that blood laced one figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled
         down the skewers and over his knuckles.
         Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now,
         he'd see the matrix.
         Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
         Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold
         trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The
         operation hadn't worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly
         waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage
         waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and
         money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy.... Hot
         tears blurred his vision.
         Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And
         
         37


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming--as one fig-
         ure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering....
         Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took
         a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him
         her gray eyes blind with fear. She wore the same French fa-
         tigues.
         And gone. Into shadow.
         Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down
         and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he'd
         never be sure.
         Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared
         concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
         Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now
         and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye,
         bobbing in his vision as he ran.
         Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.
         He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked
         blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning
         over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high,
         to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something
         from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked
         past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his
         throat like a dowser's wand.
         The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic
         explosions. Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second.
         The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's
         legs.
         He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He
         looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from
         his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down at the
         foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of
         cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner's name. A
         beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white
         sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
         Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep
         walking. Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's
         image above the ring. Once a seamed European face danced
         in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a
         metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.
         
         38


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Case." Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. "You
         okay?"
         Something mewlcd and bubbled in the dark behind her.
         He shook his head.
         "Fight's over, Case. Time to go home."
         He tried to walk past her. back into the dark, where some-
         thing was dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest.
         "Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for you. You
         haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you? We
         got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man.
         He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there
         said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM.
         Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little
         money.... I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about
         it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure." Her
         mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.
         Case felt as though his brain were jammed. "Who," he said,
         "who sent them?"
         She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger.
         He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the
         shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.
         
         After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him
         to the port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft.
         The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcol-
         ogies. Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting
         shoals of waste.
         
         39


         PART TWO
         
         THE SHOPPING
         EXPEDITION


         3

         Home.
         Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Met-
         ropolitan Axis.
         Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every
         thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen.
         Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to
         pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation.
         Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale.
         Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million mega-
         bytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in
         midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial
         parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .
         
         Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers
         moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol,
         Orly.... He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish
         vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.
         Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a
         
         43


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train
         itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but dis-
         placed air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics.
         Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to
         rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
         Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach
         across an expanse of very new pink temper foam. Overhead,
         sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight.
         One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chip-
          board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few
         centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her
         breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the
         functional elegance of a war plane's fusilage. Her body was
         spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's.
         The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside
         from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and
         identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single
         white-painted steel fire door. The walls were coated with count-
         less layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this
         kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate
         in the inter zone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite
         art.
         He was home.
         He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks
         of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He
         remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section
         of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the
         canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some
         cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square
         to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a
         blurred dream. Shopping. She'd taken him shopping.
         He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that
         lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he
         opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expen-
         sive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he
         didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a Simstim deck, clothing
         with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he
         discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese
         paper.
         The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed
         44


         NEUROMANCER
         
         star fell--to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
         "Souvenir," Molly said. "I noticed you were always looking
         at 'em." He turned and saw her sitting cross legged on the bed,
         sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.
         
         "Someone's coming later to secure the place," Armitage
         said. He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned
         magnetic key in his hand. Molly was making coffee on a tiny
         German stove she took from her bag.
         "I can do it," she said. "I got enough gear already. Infrascan
         perimeter, screamers..."
         "No," he said, closing the door. "I want it tight."
         "Suit yourself." She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into
         baggy black cotton pants.
         "You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?" Case asked, from where
         he sat, his back against a wall.
         Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoul-
         ders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He
         wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase
         of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The
         handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of
         the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past
         decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes
         heightened the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the ques-
         tion.
         "Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate
         security," Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a
         steaming mug of coffee. "That number you had them do on
         my pancreas, that's like a cop routine."
         Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in
         front of Case. "You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank
         me."
         "Should l?" Case blew noisily on his coffee.
         "You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you
         frees you from a dangerous dependency."
         "Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
         "Good, because you have a new one."
         "How's that?" Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage
         was smiling.
         "You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various
         
         45


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they
         definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're
         already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the
         one your former employers gave you in Memphis."
         Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
         "You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but
         that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that
         will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll
         need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back
         where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need
         us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter."
         Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.
         "Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases
         you find there." Armitage handed him the magnetic key. "Go
         on. You'll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning."
         
         Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind-
         blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies
         of need and gratification.
         He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry
         concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapi-
         tulate the stages of his life. First a child with hooded eyes, a
         street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager,
         face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case remembered
         fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose
         glow of the dawn geodesics.
         He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through
         the thin black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of
         Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in
         the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.
         With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai
         Cyberspace 7. They'd left the place littered with the abstract
         white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic
         film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next
         year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a
         dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker. Ar-
         mitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
         "Where'd he go?" Case had asked Molly.
         "He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage
         it. Let's go down to the street." She'd zipped herself into an
         46


         NEUROMANCER
         
         old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on
         a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered
         her mirrored insets.
         "You know about that toxin shit, before?" he asked her, by
         the fountain. She shook her head. "You think it's true?"
         "Maybe, maybe not. Works either way."
         "You know any way I can find out?"
         "No," she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive
         for silence. "That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a
         scan." Then her fingers moved again: wait. "And you don't
         care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man,
         it was pornographic." She laughed.
         "So what's he got on you? How's he got the working girl
         kinked?"
         "-Professional pride, baby, that's all." And again the sign
         for silence. "We're gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real
         bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba
         krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan
         and get us a real breakfast."
         
         Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty
         capitals of glass tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that
         had lodged between his front teeth. He'd given up asking her
         where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign
         for silence were all he'd gotten in reply. She talked about the
         season's fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in
         California he'd never heard of.
         He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of
         newsprint went cart wheeling past the intersection. Freak winds
         in the East side; something to do with convection, and an
         overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the
         dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl? he decided. She'd
         led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before,
         taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.
         Maintaining connections.
         Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO
         HOLOGRAFIX.
         The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it,
         Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that
         he couldn't follow. He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brush-
         
         
         47


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         ing the tip of the forefinger. The door swung inward and sheled
         him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense
         tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves
         of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that
         had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He
         could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur
         back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded
         with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish an-
         tenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of
         alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded
         into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as
         he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted
         scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look
         back.
         The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across
         a doorway. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
         Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match,
         floored with white hospital tile molded in a non slip pattern of
         small raised disks. In the center stood a square, white-painted
         wooden table and four white folding chairs.
         The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind
         them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to
         have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small,
         plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth,
         revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, were canted
         sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held
         a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them,
         blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured
         to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the
         doorway. Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich
         of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He helped the man lift
         it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained fingers
         secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan
         began to purr.
         "Time," the man said, straightening up, "and counting. You
         know the rate, Moll."
         "We need a scan, Finn. For implants."
         "So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape.
         Straighten up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full three-
         
         
         48


         NEUROMANCER
         
         sixty." Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking
         stands studded with sensors. The man took a small monitor
         from his pocket and squinted at it. "Something new in your
         head, yeah. Silicon. coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right?
         Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp is-
         otropic carbons. Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but
         that's your business, right? Same with your claws."
         "Get over here, Case." He saw a scuffed X in black on the
         white floor. "Turn around. Slow."
         "Guy's a virgin." The man shrugged. "Some cheap dental
         work, is all."
         "You read for biologicals?" Molly unzipped her green vest
         and took off the dark glasses.
         "You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we'll
         run a little biopsy." He laughed, showing more of his yellow
         teeth. "Nah. Finn's word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs,
         no cortex bombs. You want me to shut the screen down?"
         "Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we'll
         want full screen for as long as we want it."
         "Hey, that's fine by the Finn, Moll. You're only paying by
         the second."
         They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of
         the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed
         forearms. "We talk now. This is as private as I can afford."
         "What about?"
         "What we're doing."
         "What are we doing?"
         "Working for Armitage."
         "And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?"
         "Yeah. I saw your profile, Case. And I've seen the rest of
         our shopping list, once. You ever work with the dead?"
         "No." He watched his reflection in her glasses. "I could, I
         guess. I'm good at what I do." The present tense made him
         nervous.
         "You know that the Dixie Flat line's dead?"
         He nodded. "Heart, I heard."
         "You'll be working with his construct." She smiled. "Taught
         you the ropes, huh? Him and Ovine. I know Quine, by the
         way. Real ass hole."
         
         49


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?"
         Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table. "I can't see
         it. He'd never have sat still for it."
         "Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass."
         "Ovine dead too?"
         "No such luck. He's in Europe. He doesn't come into this."
         "Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free. He was
         the best. You know he died brain death three times?"
         She nodded.
         "Flat lined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. 'Boy, I was daid.' "
         "Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing
         Armitage since I signed on. But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu,
         a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets or-
         ders. Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a
         pillhead who's making one last wobble throught the burnout
         belt, and trade a program for the operation that'll fix him up.
         We could a bought twenty world class cowboys for what the
         market was ready to pay for that surgical program. You were
         good, but not that good...." She scratched the side of her
         nose.
         "Obviously makes sense to somebody," he said. "Some-
         body big."
         "Don't let me hurt your feelings." She grinned. "We're
         gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flat-
          line's construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault up-
         town. Tighter than an eel's ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they
         got all their new material for the fall season locked in there
         too. Steal that and we'd be richer than shit. But no, we gotta
         get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird."
         "Yeah, it's all weird. You're weird, this hole's weird, and
         who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?"
         "Finn's an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software.
         This privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage to let him
         be our tech here, so when he shows up later, you never saw
         him. Got it?"
         "So what's Arrnitage got dissolving inside you?"
         "I'm an easy make." She smiled. "Anybody any good at
         what they do, that's what they are, right? You gotta jack, I
         gotta tussle."
         
         50


         NEUROMANCER
         
         He stared at her. "So tell me what you know about Armi-
         tage."
         "For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any
         Screaming Fist. I checked. But that doesn't mean much. He
         doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out." She
         shrugged. "Big deal. And starters is all I got." She drummed
         her nails on the back of the chair. "But you are a cowboy,
         aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around."
         She smiled.
         "He'd kill me."
         "Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real
         bad. Besides, you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him,
         sure."
         "What else is on that list you mentioned?"
         "Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name
         of Peter Riviera. Real ugly customer."
         "Where's he?"
         "Dun no. But he's one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile."
         She made a face. "God awful." She stood up and stretched,
         catlike. "So we got an axis going, boy? We're together in this?
         Partners?"
         Case looked at her. "I gotta lotta choice, huh?"
         She laughed. "You got it, cowboy."
         
         "The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said
         the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military ex-
         perimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimen-
         sional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically
         generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of log-
         arithmic spirals- cold blue military footage burned through, lab
         animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con.
         trot circuits of tanks and war planes. "Cyberspace. A con se-
         nsual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
         operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathe-
         matical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted
         from the banks of every computer in the human system. Un-
         thinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of
         the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,
         receding...."
         
         51


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "What's that?" Molly asked, as he flipped the channel se-
         lector.
         "Kid's show." A discontinuous flood of images as the se-
         lector cycled. "Off," he said to the Hosaka.
         "You want to try now, Case?"
         Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with
         Molly beside him. "You want me to go out, Case? Maybe
         easier for you, alone...." He shook his head.
         "No. Stay, doesn't matter." He settled the black terry sweat-
         band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai
         dermatrodes. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing
         it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed
         shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the
         wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there
         with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.
         closed his eyes.
         Found the ridged face of the power stud.
         And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
         boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
         past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures,
         faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
         Please, he prayed, now--
         
         A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
         Now--
         
         Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray.
         Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick,
         the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent
         3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the
         stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Au-
         thority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
         America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
         of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
         And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
         distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
         face.
         
         Molly was gone when he took the erodes off, and the loft
         was dark. He checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for
         five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new work-
         
         
         52


         NEUROMANCER
         
         tables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black
         silk sleeping bag over his head.
         The security package taped to the steel fire door bleeped
         twice. "Entry requested," it said. "Subject is cleared per my
         program."
         "So open it." Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up
         as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.
         "Christ," said a hoarse voice, "I know that bitch can see in
         the dark...." A squat figure stepped in and closed the door.
         "Turn the lights on, okay?" Case scrambled off the slab and
         found the old-fashioned switch.
         "I'm the Finn," said the Finn, and made a warning face at
         Case.
         "Case."
         "Pleased to meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing some hardware
         for your boss, it looks like." The Finn fished a pack of Partagas
         from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled
         the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-
         Sendai. "Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here is your problem,
         kid." He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket,
         flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rec-
         tangle from the envelope. "Goddamn factory prototypes," he
         said, tossing the thing down on the table. "Cast 'em into a
         block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying
         the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows
         what else. We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked,
         right?" He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it
         away in an inside pocket.
         "What is it?"
         "It's a flip flop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai
         here, you can access live or recorded Sims Tim without having
         to jack out of the matrix."
         "What for?"
         "I haven't got a clue. Know I'm fitting Moll for a broadcast
         rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access." The
         Finn scratched his chin. "So now you get to find out just how
         tight those jeans really are, huh?"
         
         53


         4         
         
         Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his
         forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that
         filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in pro-
         gress in one corner of the monitor screen.
         Cowboys didn't get into Simstim, he thought, because it
         was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and
         the little plastic tiara dangling from a Simstim deck were bas-
         ically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a
         drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms
         of presentation, but Simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous
         multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited,
         of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course
         of a segment, you didn't feel it.
         The screen bleeped a two-second warning.
         The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin
         ribbon of fiber optics.
         And one and two and--
         
         Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points.
         
         55


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work ont....
         Then he keyed the new switch.
         The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of
         sound and color.... She was moving through a crowded street,
         past stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets
         of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells
         of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For
         a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her
         body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the pas-
         senger behind her eyes.
         The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He
         wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue
         alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field.
         Showing off, he thought.
         Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She
         seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone,
         but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made
         room.
         "How you doing, Case?" He heard the words and felt her
         form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling
         a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his
         breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way
         to reply.
         Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory
         Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he
         would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity
         of the situation irritating.
         The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was
         instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive
         ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically
         counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium,
         into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright.
         He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these
         sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was
         another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the
         thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved
         against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of
         unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black,
         afterward....
         Her destination was one of the dubious software rental com-
         
         
         56


         -
         
         NEUROMANCER
         
         plexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush.
         Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of
         them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets
         planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The
         counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers
         of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted
         under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white card-
         board. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall.
         Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly
         into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the
         socket behind his ear.
         "Larry, you in, man?" She positioned herself in front of
         him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried
         a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail .
         "Hey, Larry."
         "Molly." He nodded.
         "I have some work for some of your friends, Larry."
         Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red
         sport shirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a
         dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip
         that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly
         into his head. His eyes narrowed.
         "Molly's got a rider," he said, "and Larry doesn't like that."
         "Hey," she said, "I didn't know you were so . . . sensitive.
         I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive."
         "I know you, lady?" The blank look returned. "You looking
         to buy some softs?"
         "I'm looking for the Moderns."
         "You got a rider, Molly. This says." He tapped the black
         splinter. "Somebody else using your eyes."
         "My partner."
         "Tell your partner to go."
         "Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry."
         "What are you talking about, lady?"
         "Case, you take off," she said, and he hit the switch, in-
         stantly back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software
         complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cy-
         berspace.
         "Panther Moderns," he said to the Hosaka, removing the
         trodes. "Five minute precis."
         "Ready," the computer said.
         57


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         It wasn't a name he knew. Something new, something that
         had come in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth
         of the Spraw] at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise
         overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.
         "Go," he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries,
         journals, and news services.
         The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case
         at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's face
         snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a
         paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the
         result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow
         cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flow-
         ing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle
         predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern
         approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across
         his tight one piece. Mimetic polycarbon.
         Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name,
         faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanu-
         merics.
         "Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal vi-
         olence," someone said, "it may be difficult for our viewers to
         understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon
         isn't a form of terrorism."
         Dr. RamBali smiled. "There is always a point at which the
         terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at
         which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the
         terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself.
         Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-re-
         lated. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists pre-
         cisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness
         of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from
         the original sociopolitical intent...."
         "Skip it," Case said.
         
         Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the
         Hosaka's precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contem-
         porary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There
         was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl,
         something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived
         sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Mod-
         
         
         58


         NEUROMANCER
         
         erns were a soft head variant on the Scientists. If the technology
         had been available the Big Scientists would all have had sock-
         ets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and
         the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, prac-
         tical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.
         The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of
         diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo.
         His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-
          cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of
         the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When
         Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large
         animal, Case was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He'd
         seen that before.
         "You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly
         said. Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net
         ice.
         This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being.
         He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of
         sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented
         having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set
         up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on
         the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious
         traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice.
         It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while
         he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red
         dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel
         maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight
         to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting
         it. He was working. He lost track of days.
         And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was
         off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of
         Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and
         Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda
         Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant
         to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for
         nine straight hours.
         The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days.
         "I said a week," Armitage said, unable to conceal his sat-
         isfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. "You
         took your own good time."
         
         59


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "Balls," Case said, smiling at the screen. "That's good work,
         Armitage."
         "Yes," Armitage admitted, "but don't let it go to your head.
         Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an
         arcade toy."
         
         "Love you, Cat Mother," whispered the Panther Modern's
         link man. His voice was modulated static in Case's headset.
         "Atlanta, Brood. Looks go. Go, got it?" Molly's voice was
         slightly clearer.
         "To hear is to obey." The Moderns were using some kind
         of chicken wire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's
         scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in
         geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan. They chose to regard
         the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their
         choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly's
         signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish
         epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall
         as the Sense/Net building.
         Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston
         to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone
         managed to intercept Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her
         voice, the code would tip the Moderns. If she remained in the
         building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely
         she'd be coming out at all.
         Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place,
         and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only
         a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diver-
         sion for the Sense/Net security people. His job was to make
         sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the
         Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the
         countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.
         He jacked in and triggered his program. "Mainline," breathed
         the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through
         the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He
         hit the Simstim and flipped into her sensorium.
         The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood
         before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white
         lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflec-
         tion. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her
         60


         NEUROMANCER
         
         mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she
         belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of
         Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh
         top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable
         in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped
         her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micro pore
         tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the
         radio, the Simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike,
         glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic
         dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were
         flexing systematically through a series of tension-release ex-
         ercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar
         sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as
         they were partially extruded, then retracted.
         He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate.
         He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of
         him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck,
         making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled
         like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
         The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had
         accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's
         Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral sub-
         programs peeled off, meshing with the gate' s code fabric, ready
         to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.
         He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous
         circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby.
         12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve.
         
         At midnight, synch Ed with the chip behind Molly's eye, the
         link man in Jersey had given his command. "Mainline." Nine
         Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl,
         had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones.
         Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted
         out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different
         police departments and public security agencies were absorbing
         the information that an obscure sub sect of militant Christian
         fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced
         clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as
         Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid.
         Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been
         
         61


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in
         eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.
         
         Case hit the switch as his program surged through the gates
         of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net
         research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator.
         "Excuse me, but are you an employee?" The guard raised
         his eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. "No," she said, driving
         the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man's solar
         plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt
         she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator.
         Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE
         DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a black box
         from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the
         lock that secured the panel's circuitry.
         
         The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first
         move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared
         dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into
         the Sense/Net building's internal video system.
         At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eigh-
         teen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a sus-
         ceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only
         vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched
         across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mer-
         cator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated
         jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish
         clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred,
         and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination:
         graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands
         manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down
         into darkness, a pale splash.... The audio track, its pitch ad-
         justed to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed,
         was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military
         uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing
         the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw
         certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors
         as high as one thousand percent.
         At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net
         consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five
         
         62


         NEUROMANCER
         
         minutes after midnight, as the Modems' message ended in a
         flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed.
         Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the
         possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system,
         were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running
         full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was
         lifting off from its pad on Riker's.
         
         Case triggered his second program. A carefully engineered
         virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial com-
         mands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research
         materials. "Boston," Molly's voice came across the link, "I'm
         downstairs." Case switched and saw the blank wall of the
         elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet,
         exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with
         micro pore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of
         burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she un-
         folded the Modem suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw
         it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on
         over the white mesh top.
         12:06:26.
         Case's virus had bored a window through the library's com-
         mand ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite
         blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight
         grid of pale blue neon. In the non space of the matrix, the interior
         of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective di-
         mension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen-
         dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung
         with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence
         the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with
         severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres
         as if he were on invisible tracks.
         Here. This one.
         Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above
         him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub-
         program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial
         commands.
         Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric
         of the window.
         Done.
         63


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         * * *
         In the Sense/Net lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly
         behind a low rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video
         camera. They both wore chameleon suits. "Tacticals are spray-
         ing foam barricades now," one noted, speaking for the benefit
         of his throat mike. "Rapids are still trying to land their copter."
         
         Case hit the Sims Tim switch. And flipped into the agony of
         broken bone. Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of
         a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case
         was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading
         in his left thigh.
         "What's happening, Brood?" he asked the link man.
         "I dun no, Cutter. Mother's not talking. Wait."
         Case's program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of
         crimson neon extended from the center of the restored window
         to the shifting outline of his icebreaker. He didn't have time
         to wait. Taking a deep breath, he flipped again.
         Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on
         the corridor wall. In the loft, Case groaned. The second step
         took her over an outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve bright with
         fresh blood. Glimpse of a shattered fiberglass shock stave. Her
         vision seemed to have narrowed to a tunnel. With the third
         step, Case screamed and found himself back in the matrix.
         "Brood? Boston, baby. . ." Her voice tight with pain. She
         coughed. "Little problem with the natives. Think one of them
         broke my leg."
         "What you need now, Cat Mother?" The link man's voice
         was indistinct, nearly lost behind static.
         Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against
         the wall, taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled
         through the contents of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew
         a sheet of plastic studded with a rainbow of dermadisks. She
         selected three and thumbed them hard against her left wrist,
         over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog
         came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back
         arched convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs.
         She sighed and slowly relaxed.
         "Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I'll need a medical team
         64


         NEUROMANCER
         
         when l come out. Tell my people. Cutter, I'm two minutes
         from target. Can you hold?"
         "Tell her I'm in and holding," Case said.
         Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced
         back, once, Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net
         security guards. One of them seemed to have no eyes.
         "Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat
         Mother. Foam barricades. Lobby's getting juicy."
         "Pretty juicy down here," she said, swinging herself through
         a pair of gray steel doors. "Almost there, Cutter."
         Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his
         forehead. He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead
         with a towel, took a quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle
         beside the Hosaka, and checked the map of the library displayed
         on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through the outline
         of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indi-
         cated the location of the Dixie Flat line's construct. He won-
         dered what it was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way.
         With enough endorphin analog, she could walk on a pair of
         bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness that held him
         in the chair and replaced the trodes.
         Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.
         The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the
         materials stored here had to be physically removed before they
         could be interfaced. Molly hobbled between rows of identical
         gray lockers.
         "Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood," Case said.
         "Five more and ten left, Cat Mother," the link man said.
         She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between
         two lockers, her cheeks wet, eyes blank. Molly ignored her.
         Case wondered what the Moderns had done to provoke that
         level of terror. He knew it had something to do with a hoaxed
         threat, but he' d been too involved with his ice to follow Molly ' s
         explanation.
         "That's it," Case said, but she'd already stopped in front of
         the cabinet that held the construct. Its lines reminded Case of
         the Neo-Aztec bookcases in Julie Deane's anteroom in Chiba.
         "Do it, Cutter," Molly said.
         Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing
         
         65


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         down the crimson thread that pierced the library ice. Five sep-
         arate alarm systems were convinced that they were still oper-
         ative. The three elaborate locks deactivated, but considered
         themselves to have remained locked. The library's central bank
         suffered a minute shift in its permanent memory: the construct
         had been removed, per executive order, a month before. Check-
         ing for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian
         would find the records erased.
         The door swung open on silent hinges.
         "0467839," Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit
         from the rack. It resembled the magazine of a large assault
         rifle, its surfaces covered with warning decals and security
         ratings.
         Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.
         He withdrew the line through the library ice. It whipped
         back into his program, automatically triggering a full system
         reversal. The Sense/Net gates snapped past him as he backed
         out, subprograms whirling back into the core of the icebreaker
         as he passed the gates where they had been stationed.
         "Out, Brood," he said, and slumped in his chair. After the
         concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and
         still retain awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days
         to discover the theft of the construct. The key would be the
         deflection of the Los Angeles transfer, which coincided too
         neatly with the Modern's terror run. He doubted that the three
         security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live
         to talk about it. He flipped.
         The elevator, with Molly's black box taped beside the control
         panel, remained where she'd left it. The guard still lay curled
         on the floor. Case noticed the term on his neck for the first
         time. Something of Molly's, to keep him under. She stepped
         over him and removed the black box before punching LOBBY.
         As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward
         out of the crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall
         with her head. Molly ignored her, bending over to peel the
         derm from the guard's neck. Then she kicked the white pants
         and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the dark glasses
         after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her
         forehead. The construct, in the suit's kangaroo pocket, dug
         into her sternum when she moved. She stepped out.
         
         66


         NEUROMANCER
         
         Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.
         The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had
         surged for the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades
         of the Tacticals and the sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids.
         The two agencies, convinced that they were containing a horde
         of potential killers, were cooperating with an uncharacteristic
         degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the
         main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barri-
         cades. The hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant
         background for the sound the crowd made as it surged back
         and forth across the lobby's marble floor. Case had never heard
         anything like that sound.
         Neither, apparently, had Molly. "Jesus," she said, and hes-
         itated. It was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of
         MW and total fear. The lobby floor was covered with bodies,
         clothing, blood, and long trampled scrolls of yellow printout.
         "C'mon, sister. We're for out. " The eyes of the two Moderns
         stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits
         unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that
         raged behind them. "You hurt? C'mon. Tommy'll walk you."
         Tommy handed something to the one who spoke, a video cam-
          EM wrapped in polycarbon.
         "Chicago," she said, "I'm on my way." And then she was
         falling, not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit,
         but down some blood warm well, into silence and the dark.
         
         The Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lu-
         pus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature
         that allowed him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the
         edge of Case's worktable like some kind of state of the art
         gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded eyes.
         He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts
         bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with
         more pink hair. His pupils had been modified to catch the light
         like a cat's. Case watched the suit crawl with color and texture.
         "You let it getout of control," Armitage said. He stood in
         the center of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy
         folds of an expensive-looking trench coat.
         "Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus Yonderboy said. "That is our
         mode and mod us. That is our central kick. Your woman knows.
         
         67


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         We deal with her. Not with you, Mr. Who." His suit had taken
         on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale avocado. "She
         needed her medical team. She's with them. We'll watch out
         for her. Everything's fine." He smiled again.
         "Pay him," Case said.
         Armitage glared at him. "We don't have the goods."
         "Your woman has it," Yonderboy said.
         "Pay him."
         Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bun-
         dles of New Yen from the pockets of his trench coat. "You
         want to count it?" he asked Yonder boy.
         "No," the Panther Modern said. "You'll pay. You're a Mr.
         Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name."
         "I hope that isn't a threat," Armitage said.
         "That's business," said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into
         the single pocket on the front of his suit.
         The phone rang. Case answered.
         "Molly," he told Armitage, handing him the phone.
         
         The Sprawl's geodesics were lightening into predawn gray
         as Case left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected.
         He couldn't sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone,
         then Armitage, and Molly was in surgery somewhere. Vibration
         beneath his feet as a train hissed past. Sirens Doppler Ed in the
         distance.
         He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new
         leather jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into
         the gutter and lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage's
         toxin sacs dissolving in his bloodstream, microscopic mem-
         branes wearing thinner as he walked. It didn't seem real. Nei-
         ther did the fear and agony he'd seen through Molly's eyes in
         the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself trying to remember
         the faces of the three people he'd killed in Chiba. The men
         were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered
         tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty
         plastic cylinders rattling in its bed.
         "Case."
         He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his
         back.
         "Message for you, Case." Lupus Yonder boy's suit cycled
         
         68


         NEUROMANCER
         
         through pure primaries. "Pardon. Not to startle you."
         Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a
         head taller than the Modern. "You ought a be careful, Yon-
         der boy."
         "This is the message. Winter mute." He spelled it out.
         "From you?" Case took a step forward.
         "No," Yonderboy said. "For you."
         "Who from?"
         "Winter mute," Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his
         crest of pink hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow
         against old concrete. He executed a strange little dance, his
         thin black arms whirling, and then he was gone. No. There.
         Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right shade of
         gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The
         eyes winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really
         gone.
         Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers,
         leaning back against peeling brickwork.
         Ninsei had been a lot simpler.
         
         69


         5
         
         The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of
         an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The
         building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel
         each coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged
         from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one GER-
         ALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.
         "He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off."
         "I ran into one of your pals," he said, "a Modern."
         "Yeah? Which one?"
         "Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message." He passed her a paper
         napkin with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in
         his neat, laborious capitals. "He said--" But her hand came
         up in the jive for silence.
         "Get us some crab," she said.
         
         After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with
         alarming ease, they tubed in to New York. Case had learned
         not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence.
         
         71


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke.
         A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors
         woven tightly into her hair opened the Finn's door and led them
         along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown some-
         how during their absence . Or else it seemed that it was changing
         subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent
         invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence
         of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's
         waste places.
         Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.
         Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper,
         wrote something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it
         between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body
         as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn't know,
         one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resigna-
         tion. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his bat-
         tered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the
         table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray
         piled with the butts of Partagas.
         "Wait," the Finn said, and left the room.
         Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index
         finger, and speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered
         aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear on the
         pylons as he passed.
         Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his
         teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-
         up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the door panel.
         While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn
         took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an
         elaborate sequence.
         "Honey," he said to Molly, tucking the console away, "you
         have got it. No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where
         you got it?"
         "Yonderboy," Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers
         aside. "I did a deal with Larry, on the side."
         "Smart," the Finn said. "It's an AI."
         "Slow it down a little," Case said.
         "Berne," the Finn said, ignoring him. "Berne. It's got lim-
         ited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53.

         72


         NEUROMANCER
         
         Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and
         the original software."
         "What's in Beme, okay?" Case deliberately stepped between
         them.
         "Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the
         Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence."
         "That's all just fine," Molly said, "but where's it get us?"
         "If Yonderboy's right," the Finn said, "this Al is backing
         Armitage."
         "I paid Larry to have the Modems nose around Ammitage a
         little," Molly explained, turning to Case. "They have some
         very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they'd get my
         money if they answered one question: who's running Armi-
         tage?"
         "And you think it's this Al? Those things aren't allowed
         any autonomy. It'll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . ."
         "Tessier-Ashpool S.A.," said the Finn. "And I got a little
         story for you about them. Wanna hear?" He sat down and
         hunched forward.
         "Finn," Molly said. "He loves a story."
         "Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.
         
         The Finn was a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily
         in software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came
         into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in the more
         traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare
         coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of
         art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's
         story, a man he called Smith.
         Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced
         as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known
         who'd "gone silicon"--the phrase had an old-fashioned ring
         for Case--and the microsofts he purchased were art history
         programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips
         in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was
         formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But
         Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal
         request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the
         Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a
         
         73


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever
         tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn
         had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. "It
         smelled," the Finn said to Case, "smelled of money. And Smith
         was being very careful. Almost too careful."
         Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy.
         Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back
         from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back
         down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had
         managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a
         head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, stud-
         ded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down
         his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing
         down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value
         to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer
         terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but
         with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes.
         It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a per-
         verse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It
         was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and
         listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of
         last year's tax return.
         Smith' s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion
         for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged,
         showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn
         shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much
         for it.
         When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over
         it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been
         able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich
         artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a
         California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he dis-
         covered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.
         Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo col-
         lector, hinting that he was on the track of something notewor-
         thy.
         And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who
         walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as
         though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously
         polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin.
         
         74


         -
         
         NEUROMANCER
         
         Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death
         across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost
         apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty
         to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great
         beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It
         had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might
         know of the whereabouts of this object.
         Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced
         the head. And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to
         obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure
         far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced
         a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered
         Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this
         piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's
         death.
         "So that was where I came in," the Finn continued. "Smith
         knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's
         where you go for a quiet go-to that'll never be traced. I hired
         a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith,
         he was careful. He'd just had a very weird business experience
         and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add up. Who'd paid,
         out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very
         rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver
         too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook
         biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my
         cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool
         in litigation. The case wasn't anything, but we got the law
         firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we got the family
         address. Lotta good it did us."
         Case raised his eyebrows.
         "Freeside," the Finn said. "The spindle. Turns out they own
         damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture
         we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news
         morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate
         structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't
         been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in
         over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're
         looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-
         orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of
         media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic

         75


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         engineering, right? And it's hard to keep track of which gen-
         eration, or combination of generations, is running the show at
         a given time."
         "How's that?" Molly asked.
         "Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law,
         you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like
         they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in
         about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab
         accident...."
         "So what happened with your fence?"
         "Nothing." The Finn frowned. "Dropped it. We had a look
         at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have,
         and that was it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted
         the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith
         decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart." He looked
         at Molly. "The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly
         private."
         "You figure they own that ninja, Finn?" Molly asked.
         "Smith thought so."
         "Expensive," she said. "Wonder whatever happened to that
         little ninja, Finn?"
         "Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed."
         "Okay," Case said, "we got Armitage getting his goodies
         off an AI named Wintermute. Where's that get us?"
         "Nowhere yet," Molly said, "but you got a little side gig
         now." She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and
         handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry
         codes.
         "Who's this?"
         "Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Mod-
         erns. Separate deal. Where is it?"
         "London," Case said.
         "Crack it." She laughed. "Earn your keep for a change."
         
         Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded plat-
         form. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's
         construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily
         ever since.
         It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a
         hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, ob-
         
         
         76


         NEUROMANCER
         
         sessions, kneejerk responses.... The local came booming in
         along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in
         the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and
         watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-
         looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young
         office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their
         wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs
         licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Sci-
         entists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked
         like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and un-
         consciously with the movement of the train, their high heels
         like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor.
         Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries,
         the train reached Case's station.
         He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar
         suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing
         beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese.
         He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying
         the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle,
         flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes.
         He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had
         never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the
         Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was
         a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a
         small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric
         of light: T-A.
         He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline.
         He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman
         Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys.
         He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted.
         There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser,
         that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cow-
         boy. No other way to learn.
         They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the
         'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice.
         The grapevine--slender, street level, and the only one going--
         had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the
         impossible. "It was big," another would-be told Case, for the
         price of a beer, "but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian
         payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath."
         
         77


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirt-
         sleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.
         "Boy," the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami,
         "I'm like them huge fuckin' lizards, you know? Had themself
         two goddam brains, one in the head an' one by the tailbone,
         kept the hind legs movin'. Hit that black stuff and ol' tailbrain
         jus' kept right on keepin' on."
         The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some
         strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley,
         Lazarus of cyberspace....
         And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus
         Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd
         refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular
         beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of
         paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs.
         Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast
         ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the
         skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black
         shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size
         and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai
         transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to
         input trodes under the cast.
         He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle
         of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some
         ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.
         It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his
         shoulder.
         He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was
         tight.
         "Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
         "It's Case, man. Remember?"
         "Miami, joeboy, quick study."
         "What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you,
         Dix?"
         "Nothin'."
         "Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence
         was gone. He reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?"
         "You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
         "Ca--your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?"
         "Good question."
         
         78


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Remember being here, a second ago?"
         "No."
         "Know how a ROM personality matrix works?"
         "Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."
         "So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential,
         real time memory?"
         "Guess so," said the construct.
         "Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"
         "If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"
         "Case."
         "Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study."
         "Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze
         over to London grid and access a little data. You game for
         that?"
         "You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?"
         
         79


         6

         "You want you a paradise," the Flatline advised, when Case
         had explained his situation. "Check Copenhagen, fringes of
         the university section." The voice recited coordinates as he
         punched.
         They found their paradise, a "pirate's paradise," on the
         jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance
         it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes
         left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light
         that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts
         faculties.
         "There," said the Flatline, "the blue one. Make it out? That's
         an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here
         soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they
         find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow."
         Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a
         standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected
         with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's.
         "Here," said the voice, "I'll do it for you." The Flatline
         
         81


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck,
         trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing.
         It took three tries.
         "Big deal," said the Flatline. "No ice at all."
         "Scan this shit," Case told the Hosaka. "Sift for owner's
         personal history."
         The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re-
         placed by a simple lozenge of white light. "Contents are pri-
         marily video recordings of postwar military trials," said the
         distant voice of the Hosaka. "Central figure is Colonel Willis
         Corto."
         "Show it already," Case said.
         A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's.
         
         Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let
         the temperfoam mold itself against him.
         "You find anything?" she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep
         and drugs.
         "Tell you later," he said, "I'm wrecked." He was hungover
         and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the
         various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka
         had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it
         was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records,
         reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had
         had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments
         were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.
         Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot
         in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created
         the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in
         in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moon-
         light, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and
         Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months.
         Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their
         launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.
         "They sure as hell did shaft you, boss," Case said, and
         Molly stirred beside him.
         The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate
         for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a
         virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history
         of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the
         82


         NEUROMANCER
         
         run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject
         Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns
         threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suf-
         fered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.
         Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out
         the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his
         dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept
         falling....
         There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned
         documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian
         gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it
         landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter can-
         non manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming
         Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with
         Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the
         helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped
         to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most
         of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide
         to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining.
         In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already un-
         derway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized,
         partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had fo-
         cused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told
         Corto.
         He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide
         said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added,
         squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
         Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he pre-
         ferred to testify as he was.
         No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The
         trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
         Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's
         subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely
         the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested in-
         terests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastruc-
         ture. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave
         was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly
         responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of
         the emp installations at Kirensk.
         His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington.
         83


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide ex-
         plained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong
         people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers
         of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face
         in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Wash-
         ington September.
         The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espi-
         onage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work cor-
         porate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed
         to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the sci-
         entists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk,
         in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel
         and set fire to his room.
         Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory.
         Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a
         paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita.
         The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.
         One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical
         interrogation, everything had gone gray.
         Translated French medical records explained that a man
         without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health
         unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and
         was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon.
         He became a subject in an experimental program that sought
         to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic
         models. A random selection of patients were provided with
         microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to
         program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire
         experiment.
         The record ended there.
         Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for
         disturbing her.
         
         The telephone rang. He pulled it into bed. "Yeah?"
         "We're going to Istanbul," Armitage said. "Tonight."
         "What does the bastard want?" Molly asked.
         "Says we're going to Istanbul tonight."
         "That's just wonderful."
         Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.
         Molly sat up and turned on the light.
         
         84


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "What about my gear?" Case asked. "My deck."
         "Finn will handle it," said Armitage, and hung up.
         Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her
         eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance.
         No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his
         bag.
         "You hurting?" he asked.
         "I could do with another night at Chin's."
         "Your dentist?"
         "You betcha. Very discreet. He's got half that rack, full
         clinic. Does repairs for samurai." She was zipping her bag.
         "You ever been to 'Stambul?"
         "Couple days, once."
         "Never changes," she said. "Bad old town."
         
         "It was like this when we headed for Chiba," Molly said,
         staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape,
         red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion
         plant. "We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were
         booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the
         Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was
         playing ghost with you in Night City." She took a silk scarf
         from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets. The
         landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of
         childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted
         slab of freeway concrete.
         The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport.
         Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on
         broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.
         
         85


         7
         
         It was raining in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past
         the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian
         jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated
         figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.
         "This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ot-
         toman Istanbul," purred the Mercedes.
         "So it's gone downhill," Case said.
         "The Hilton's in Cumhuriyet Caddesi," Molly said. She
         settled back against the car's gray ultrasuede.
         "How come Armitage flies alone?" Case asked. He had a
         headache.
         "'Cause you get up his nose. You're sure getting up mine."
         He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against
         it. He'd used a sleep derm, on the plane.
         The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a
         neat incision, laying the city open. He'd watched the crazy
         walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, ar-
         cologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and
         corrugated iron.
         
         87


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was
         waiting sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour arm-
         chair in a sea of pale blue carpeting.
         "Christ," Molly said. "Rat in a business suit."
         They crossed the lobby.
         "How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?" She
         lowered her bag beside the armchair. "Bet not as much as you
         get for wearing that suit, huh?"
         The Finn' s upper lips drew back. "Not enough, sweetmeat. "
         He handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. "You're
         registered already. Honcho's upstairs." He looked around. "This
         town sucks."
         "You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome.
         Just pretend it's Brooklyn or something." She twirled the key
         around a finger. "You here as valet or what?"
         "I gotta check out some guy's implants," the Finn said.
         "How about my deck?" Case asked.
         The Finn winced. "Observe the protocol. Ask the boss."
         Molly's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker
         of jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
         "Yeah," she said, "I know who that is." She jerked her head
         in the direction of the elevators. "Come on, cowboy." Case
         followed her with both bags.
         
         Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he'd
         first seen Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning,
         almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel
         across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had
         taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in
         sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still
         enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He
         watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell
         conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers
         in rumpled green uniforms. They entered the hotel across the
         street.
         He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness
         struck him. She'd left the micropore cast on the bedslab in
         their loft, beside the transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected
         part of the room's light fixture.
         88


         NEUROMANCER
         
         He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring
         twice. "Glad you're up," Armitage said.
         "I'm just. Lady's still under. Listen, boss, I think it's maybe
         time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a
         little more about what I'm doing."
         Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
         "You know as much as you need to. Maybe more."
         "You think so?"
         "Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You'll have a caller in
         about fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian." The phone
         bleated softly. Armitage was gone.
         "Wake up, baby," Case said. "Biz."
         "I've been awake an hour already." The mirrors turned.
         "We got a Jersey Bastion coming up."
         "You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you're part Ar-
         menian. That's the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me
         up."
         Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and
         gold-framed, mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the
         collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first
         mistook it for some kind of t-shirt. He arrived with a black
         Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick
         black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
         "We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy."
         He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed
         the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched
         the shade of his very short military-cut hair. He smiled. "It is
         better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel infinity, mirror
         into mirror.... You particularly," he said to her, "must take
         care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such
         modifications."
         Molly bit one of the pastries in half. "It's my show, Jack,"
         she said, her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked
         her lips. "I know about you. Stool for the military, right?" Her
         hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with
         the fletcher. Case hadn't known she had it.
         "Very easy, please," Terzibashjian said, his white china
         thimble frozen centimeters from his lips.
         She extended the gun. "Maybe you get the explosives, lots
         
         89


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         of them, or maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You
         won't feel it for months."
         "Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight...."
         "I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and
         get your ass out of here." She put the gun away.
         "He is living in Fener, at Kuchuk Gulhane Djaddesi 14. 1
         have his tunel route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most
         recently at the Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modem place in the
         style turistik, but it has been arranged that the police have
         shown a certain interest in these shows. The Yenishehir man-
         agement has grown nervous." He smiled. He smelled of some
         metallic aftershave.
         "I want to know about the implants," she said, massaging
         her thigh, "I want to know exactly what he can do."
         Terzibashjian nodded. "Worst is how you say in Ingiliz, the
         subliminals." He made the word four careful syllables.
         
         "On our left," said the Mercedes, as it steered through a
         maze of rainy streets, "is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar."
         Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he
         was looking in the wrong direction. The right side of the street
         was lined with miniature scrapyards. Case saw a gutted loco-
         motive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble.
         Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.
         "Homesick?" Case asked.
         "Place sucks," the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting
         to resemble a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of
         kebab gravy and fried egg on the lapels of the new suit.
         "Hey, Jersey," Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind
         them, "where'd this guy get his stuff installed?"
         "In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted,
         is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this
         one is most talented." The Mercedes swerved, avoiding a bal-
         loon-tired dray stacked with hides. "I have followed him in the
         street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find
         the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion
         poised beside a brake lever...."
         "'What you see is what you get,' yeah," the Finn said. "I
         seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he
         
         90


         NEUROMANCER
         
         imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and
         fry a retina over easy."
         "You have told this to your woman friend?" Terzibashjian
         leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. "In Turkey,
         women are still women. This one. . ."
         The Finn snorted. "She'd have you wearing your balls for
         a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed."
         "I do not understand this idiom."
         "That's okay," Case said. "Means shut up."
         The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of after-
         shave. He began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange
         salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English.
         The transceiver answered in French. The Mercedes swung
         smoothly around a corner. "The spice bazaar, sometimes called
         the Egyptian bazaar," the car said, "was erected on the site of
         an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the
         city's central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs...."
         "Drugs," Case said, watching the car's wipers cross and
         recross the bulletproof Lexan. "What's that you said before,
         Jersey, about this Riviera being wired?"
         "A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes." The Armenian
         went back to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo.
         ' Demerol, they used to call that," said the Finn. "He's a
         speedball artist. Funny class of people you're mixing with,
         Case."
         "Never mind," Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket,
         "we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something."
         
         Once they entered the bazaar, the Finn brightened notice-
         ably, as though he were comforted by the crowd density and
         the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Armenian along
         a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained sheets of plastic and
         green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A thousand
         suspended ads writhed and flickered.
         "Hey, Christ," the Finn said, taking Case's arm, "looka
         that." He pointed. "It's a horse, man. You ever see a horse?"
         Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head.
         It was displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a
         place that sold birds and monkeys. The thing's legs had been
         91


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. "Saw
         one in Maryland once," the Finn said, "and that was a good
         three years after the pandemic. There's Arabs still trying to
         code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak."
         The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as
         they passed. Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core
         of the market, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it
         had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny boys
         in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, bal-
         ancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny glasses
         of tea.
         Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the
         door. The Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo. "Come," he
         said, "he is moving. Each night he rides the tunel to the bazaar,
         to purchase his mixture from Ali. Your woman is close. Come."
         
         The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from
         blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled
         of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone.
         "Can't see shit," he whispered to the Finn. "That's okay for
         sweetmeat," the Finn said. "Quiet," said Terzibashjian, too
         loudly
         Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the
         alley, a wedge of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened.
         A figure stepped out and the door grated shut again, leaving
         the narrow place in darkness. Case shivered.
         "Now," Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white
         light, directed from the rooftop of the building opposite the
         market, pinned the slender figure beside the ancient wooden
         door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted left, right, and the
         man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot him; he lay
         face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands
         white and pathetic.
         The floodlight never wavered.
         The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood
         splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long,
         rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing
         seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert,
         bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood
         
         92


         NEUROMANCER
         
         on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly
         to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It
         was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth,
         if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined
         with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black
         chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took
         a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved.
         Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed
         the thing, his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through
         a window. He went through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol
         from the dark beyond the circle of light. Fragments of rock
         whizzed past Case's head; the Finn jerked him down into a
         crouch.
         The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mis-
         matched afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam.
         His ears rang.
         Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shad-
         ows. Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face
         very white in the glare. He held his left wrist and watched
         blood drip from a wound in his left hand. The blond man,
         whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.
         Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her
         fletcher in her hand.
         "Use the radio," the Armenian said, through gritted teeth.
         "Call in Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a
         good place."
         "Little prick nearly made it," the Finn said, his knees crack-
         ing loudly as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of
         his trousers. "You were watching the horror-show, right? Not
         the hamburger that got tossed out of sight. Real cute. Well,
         help 'em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that gear before
         he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money's worth."
         Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. "A Nambu,"
         she said. "Nice gun."
         Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most
         of his middle finger was missing.
         
         With the city drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes
         to take them to Topkapi . The Finn and an enormous Turk named
         
         93


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Mahmut had taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley.
         Minutes later, a dusty Citroen had arrived for the Armenian
         who seemed on the verge of fainting.
         "You're an asshole," Molly told the man, opening the car
         door for him. "You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights
         as soon as he stepped out." Terzibashjian glared at her. "So
         we're through with you anyway." She shoved him in and
         slammed the door. "Run into you again and I'll kill you," she
         said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen
         ground away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.
         Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city
         woke. They passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past
         mazes of deserted back streets, run-down apartment houses that
         reminded Case vaguely of Paris.
         "What is this thing?" he asked Molly, as the Mercedes
         parked itself on the fringes of the gardens that surround the
         Scraglio. He stared dully at the baroque conglomeration of
         styles that was Topkapi.
         "It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King," she said,
         getting out stretching. "Kept a lotta women there. Now it's a
         museum. Kinda like Finn's shop, all this stuff just jumbled in
         there big diamonds, swords, the left hand of John the
         Baptist...."
         "Like in a support vat?"
         "Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch
         on the side so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off
         the Christians about a million years ago, and they never dust
         the goddam thing, 'cause it's an infidel relic."
         Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case
         walked beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept
         grass made stiff by an early frost. They walked beside a path
         of cold octagonal flagstones. Winter was waiting, somewhere
         in the Balkans.
         "That Terzi, he's grade-A scum," she said. "He's the secret
         police. Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of
         money Armitage was offering." In the wet trees around them,
         birds began to sing.
         "I did that job for you," Case said, "the one in London. I
         got something, but I don't know what it means." He told her
         the Corto story.
         
         94


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Well, I knew there wasn't anybody name of Armitage in
         that Screaming Fist. Looked it up." She stroked the rusted
         flank of an iron doe. "You figure the little computer pulled
         him out of it? In that French hospital?"
         "I figure Wintermute," Case said.
         She nodded.
         "Thing is," he said, "do you think he knows he was Corto,
         before? I mean, he wasn't anybody in particular, by the time
         he hit the ward, so maybe Wintermute just. . ."
         "Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah..." She turned and
         they walked on. "It figures. You know, the guy doesn't have
         any life going, in private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a
         guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's
         alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then
         something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for
         Wintermute."
         "So why's he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?"
         "Maybe he doesn't know about it," she said. "Maybe it's
         just in his name, right?"
         "I don't get it," Case said.
         "Just thinking out loud.... How smart's an Al, Case?"
         "Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost
         a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the
         Turing heat is willing to let 'em get."
         "Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-
         out fascinated with those things?"
         "Well," he said, "for starts, they're rare. Most of them are
         military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's
         where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the
         Turing cops, and that's bad heat." He looked at her. "I dunno,
         it just isn't part of the trip."
         "Jockeys all the same," she said. "No imagination."
         They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled
         the stems of some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose
         pebble in and watched the ripples spread.
         "That's Wintermute," she said. "This deal's real big, looks
         to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't
         see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there,
         but not why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to
         Wintermute."
         
         95


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "I couldn't get near it," he said. "You're dreaming."
         "Try."
         "Can't be done."
         "Ask the Flatline."
         "What do we want out of that Riviera?" he asked, hoping
         to change the subject.
         She spat into the pond. "God knows. I'd as soon kill him
         as look at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive
         Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying
         the object of desire. That's what the file says. And they have
         to love him first. Maybe he loves them, too. That's why it was
         easy for Terzi to set him up for us, because he's been here
         three years, shopping politicals to the secret police. Probably
         Terzi let him watch, when the cattle prods came out. He's done
         eighteen in three years. All women age twenty to twenty-five.
         It kept Terzi in dissidents." She thrust her hands into her jacket
         pockets. "Because if he found one he really wanted, he'd make
         sure she turned political. He's got a personality like a Modern's
         suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in
         a couple of million. Which anyway says something good about
         human nature, I guess." She stared at the white flowers and
         the sluggish fish, her face sour. "I think I'm going to have to
         buy myself some special insurance on that Peter." Then she
         turned and smiled, and it was very cold.
         "What's that mean?"
         "Never mind. Let's go back to Beyoglu and find something
         like breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect
         his stuff from that apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the
         bazaar and buy him some drugs...."
         "Buy him some drugs? How's he rate?"
         She laughed. "He's not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And
         it looks like he can't work without that special taste. I like you
         better now, anyway, you aren't so goddam skinny." She smiled.
         "So I'll go to Ali the dealer and stock up. You betcha."
         
         Armitage was waiting in their room at the Hilton.
         "Time to pack," he said, and Case tried to find the man
         called Corto behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask.
         He thought of Wage, back in Chiba. Operators above a certain
         level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. But
         
         96


         NEUROMANCER
         
         Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been rumored, chil-
         dren. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.
         "Where to now?" he asked, walking past the man to stare
         down into the street. "What kind of climate?"
         "They don't have climate, just weather," Armitage said.
         "Here. Read the brochure." He put something on the coffee
         table and stood.
         "Did Riviera check out okay? Where's the Finn?"
         "Riviera's fine. The Finn is on his way home." Armitage
         smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some
         insect's antenna. His gold bracelet clinked as he reached out
         to prod Case in the chest. "Don't get too smart. Those little
         sacs are starting to show wear, but you don't know how much."
         Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.
         When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the bro-
         chures. It was expensively printed, in French, English, and
         Turkish.
         FREESIDE--WHY WAIT?
         
         The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yes-
         ilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in
         the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse
         bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Ar-
         mitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape,
         stood in the shop's entrance.
         Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English ac-
         centless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have
         been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally
         stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was
         a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core
         of old Bonn.
         Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nod-
         ding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the
         shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Ri-
         viera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed
         the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job,
         nothing like Armitage's blandly handsome blend of pop faces.
         The man's forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and
         distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted,
         seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion


         of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of
         his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case
         watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of
         sculpture.
         Riviera didn't act like a man who'd been attacked the night
         before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to
         the Finn's examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining
         their team.
         Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug
         run. He looked up at Riviera again. "I bet you're stoned right
         now, asshole," he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian
         matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche
         glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shoul-
         dered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered
         if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. "See ya
         lady," he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses
         back up her nose and turned away.
         There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn't relish
         talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located
         a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of
         pay phones.
         He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small
         dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anach-
         ronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
         Automatically, he picked it up.
         "Yeah?"
         Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some
         orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
         "Hello. Case."
         A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled
         out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
         "Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk."
         It was a chip voice.
         "Don't you want to talk, Case?"
         He hung up.
         On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he
         had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn,
         but only once, as he passed.
         
         98


         PART THREE
         
         MIDNIGHT IN THE
         RUE JULES VERNE


         8
         
         Archipelago.
         The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading
         out from gravity's steep well like an oilslick.
         Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the ex-
         change of data in the L-S archipelago. One segment clicks in
         as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen.
         Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident
         to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is
         brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, bor-
         der town, and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gar-
         dens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred
         and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and
         Ashpool.
         
         On the THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class,
         Molly in the window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Ar-
         mitage on the aisle. Once, as the plane banked over water,
         
         101


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island town. And once,
         reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like a
         giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.
         Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera's face, once.
         "No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around
         me, I'll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you
         at all. I like that."
         Case turned automatically to check Armitage's reaction. The
         smooth face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no
         anger. "That's right, Peter. Don't."
         Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a
         black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned
         with bright chrome.
         Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell in-
         stantly asleep.
         Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.
         
         "You been up, haven't you?" Molly asked, as he squirmed
         his way back into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL
         shuttle.
         "Nah. Never travel much, just for biz." The steward was
         attaching readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.
         "Hope you don't get SAS," she said.
         "Airsick? No way."
         "It's not the same. Your heartbeat'll speed up in zero-g, and
         your inner ear'll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex,
         like you'll be getting signals to run like hell, and a lot of
         adrenaline." The steward moved on to Riviera, taking a new
         set of trodes from his red plastic apron.
         Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of
         the old Orly terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by
         graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the
         window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb.
         He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a
         big airplane, one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane,
         like new clothes and chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened
         to the piped koto music and waited.
         Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a
         great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.
         
         102


         NEUROMANCER
         
         * * *
         Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's de-
         scription, but it passed quickly enough and he was able to
         sleep. The steward woke him as they were preparing to dock
         at JAL's terminal cluster.
         We transfer to Freeside now?" he asked, eyeing a shred
         of Yeheyuan tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his
         shirt pocket to dance ten centimeters from his nose. There was
         no smoking on shuttle flights.
         "No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you
         know? We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster." She
         touched the release plate on her harness and began to free
         herself from the embrace of the foam. "Funny choice of venue,
         you ask me."
         "How's that?"
         "Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now."
         "What's that mean?"
         "You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway, they'll let
         you smoke your cigarettes there."
         
         Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to
         return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started build-
         ing. They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before
         rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus.
         Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull re-
         minded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the ir-
         regular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian
         symbols and the initials of welders.
         Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case ne-
         gotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd
         lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second
         wave of SAS vertigo. "Here," Molly said, shoving his legs
         into a narrow hatchway overhead. "Grab the rungs. Make like
         you're climbing backward, right? You're going toward the hull,
         that's like you're climbing down into gravity. Got it?"
         Case's stomach churned.
         "You be fine, mon," Aerol said, his grin bracketed with
         gold incisors.
         Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom.
         103


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding
         a pocket of air.
         "Up," Molly said, "you gonna kiss it next?" Case lay flat
         on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck
         him on the shoulder. He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of
         elastic cable. "Gotta play house," she said. "You help me string
         this up." He looked around the wide, featureless space and
         noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at ran-
         dom.
         When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex
         scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of
         yellow plastic. As they worked, Case gradually became aware
         of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was
         called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of
         digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of
         community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing
         was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables,
         humanity, and ganja.
         "Good," Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the
         hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less
         certain in the partial gravity.
         "Where were you when it needed doing?" Case asked Ri-
         viera.
         The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam
         out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek.
         "In the head," Riviera said, and smiled.
         Case laughed.
         "Good," Riviera said, "you can laugh. I would have tried
         to help you, but I'm no good with my hands." He held up his
         palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
         "Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?" Molly stepped
         between them.
         "Yo," Aerol said, from the hatch, "you wan' come wi' me,
         cowboy mon."
         "It's your deck," Armitage said, "and the other gear. Help
         him get it in from the cargo bay."
         "You ver' pale, mon," Aerol said, as they were guiding the
         foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor.
         "Maybe you wan' eat somethin'."
         Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.
         
         104


         * * *
         Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and
         Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize
         themselves to working in it. He would brief them on Freeside
         and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear what Riviera was sup-
         posed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like asking. A few
         hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow
         maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled
         like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently
         asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white
         geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. "Hey, Ri-
         viera." The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone back and told
         Armitage. "He's stoned," Molly said, looking up from the
         disassembled parts of her fletcher. "Leave him be."
         Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's
         ability to operate in the matrix. 'Don't sweat it," Case argued,
         "I jack in and I'm not here. It's all the same."
         "Your adrenaline levels are higher," Armitage said. "You've
         still got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're
         going to learn to work with it. '
         "So I do the run from here'?"
         "No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor...."
         
         Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular re-
         lationship with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case
         jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of
         the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of
         data.
         "How you doing, Dixie?''
         "I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to
         figure that one."
         "How's it feel?"
         "It doesn't."
         "Bother you?"
         "What bothers me is, nothin' does."
         "How's that?"
         "Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb
         was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later
         he's tossin' all night. Elroy. l said, what's eatin' you? Goddam
         thumb's itchin', he says. So l told him, scratch it. McCoy, he
         105


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         says, it's the other goddam thumb." When the construct laughed,
         it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of
         cold down Case's spine. "Do me a favor, boy."
         "What's that, Dix?"
         "This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam
         thing."
         
         Case didn't understand the Zionites.
         Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the
         baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a
         forest of hydroponic ganja. "Ver' small baby, mon, no long'
         you finga." He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse
         of brown forehead and smiled.
         "It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story.
         "They don't make much of a difference between states, you
         know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him.
         It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?"
         Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you
         when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't
         like that.
         "Hey, Aerol," Case called, an hour later, as he prepared
         for a practice run in the freefall corridor. "Come here, man.
         Wanna show you this thing." He held out the trodes.
         Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck
         the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The
         other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green al-
         gae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
         "Try it," Case said.
         He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes.
         He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered.
         Case jacked him back out. "What did you see, man?"
         "Babylon," Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and
         kicking off down the corridor.
         
         Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm ex-
         tended straight out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled
         snake, its eyes like ruby neon, was coiled tightly a few
         millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the snake, which
         was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract,
         tightening around Riviera's arm.
         106


         -
         
         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Come then," the man said caressingly to the pale waxy
         scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm. "Come."
         The scorpion swayed its brownish claws and scurried up his
         arm, its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of veins. When it
         reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate. Ri-
         viera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered,
         and sank into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake
         relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him.
         Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a
         milky plastic syringe in his left hand. "'If God made anything
         better, he kept it for himself. ' You know the expression, Case?"
         "Yeah," Case said. "I heard that about lots of different
         things. You always make it into a little show?"
         Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical
         tubing from his arm. "Yes. It's more fun." He smiled, his eyes
         distant now, cheeks flushed. "I've a membrane set in, just over
         the vein, so I never have to worry about the condition of the
         needle."
         "Doesn't hurt?"
         The bright eyes met his. "Of course it does. That's part of
         it, isn't it?"
         "I'd just use derms," Case said.
         "Pedestrian," Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a
         short-sleeved white cotton shirt.
         "Must be nice," Case said, getting up.
         "Get high yourself, Case?"
         "I hadda give it up."
         
         "Freeside," Armitage said, touching the panel on the little
         Braun hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly
         three meters from tip to tip. "Casinos here." He reached into
         the skeletal representation and pointed. "Hotels, strata-title
         property, big shops along here." His hand moved. "Blue areas
         are lakes." He walked to one end of the model. "Big cigar.
         Narrows at the ends."
         "We can see that fine," Molly said.
         "Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher,
         more rocky, but it's an easy climb. Higher you climb, the
         lower the gravity. Sports up there. There's velodrome ring
         here." He pointed.
         
         107


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "A what?" Case leaned forward.
         "They race bicycles," Molly said. "Low grav, high-traction
         tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour."
         "This end doesn't concern us," Armitage said with his usual
         utter seriousness.
         "Shit," Molly said, "I'm an avid cyclist."
         Riviera giggled.
         Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. "This
         end does." The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and
         the final segment of the spindle was empty. "This is the Villa
         Straylight. Steep climb out of gravity and every approach is
         kinked. There's a single entrance, here, dead center. Zero grav-
         ity."
         "What's inside, boss?" Riviera leaned forward, craning his
         neck. Four tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage's
         finger. Armitage slapped at them as if they were gnats.
         "Peter," Armitage said, "you're going to be the first to find
         out. You'll arrange yourself an invitation. Once you're in, you
         see that Molly gets in."
         Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight,
         remembering the Finn's story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head,
         and the ninja.
         "Details available?" Riviera asked. "I need to plan a ward-
         robe, you see."
         "Learn the streets," Armitage said, returning to the center
         of the model. "Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules
         Verne."
         Riviera rolled his eyes.
         While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a
         dozen bright pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even
         Molly laughed.
         Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty
         eyes.
         "Sorry," Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.
         
         Case woke, late into the sleeping period, and became aware
         of Molly crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her
         tension. He lay there confused. When she moved, the sheer
         speed of it stunned him. She was up and through the sheet of
         108


         NEUROMANCER
         
         yellow plastic before he'd had time to realize she'd slashed it
         open.
         "Don't you move, friend."
         Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the
         plastic. "Wha. . . ?"
         "Shut up."
         "You th' one, mon," said a Zion voice. "Cateye, call 'em
         call 'em Steppin' Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan
         converse wi' you an' cowboy."
         "What brothers?"
         "Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know...."
         "We open that hatch, the light'll wake bossman," Case
         whispered.
         "Make it special dark, now," the man said. "Come. I an' I
         visit th' Founders."
         "You know how fast I can cut you, friend?"
         "Don' stan' talkin', sister. Come."
         
         The two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with
         the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many
         years outside the embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle
         with calcium loss, looked fragile in the harsh glare of reflected
         sunlight. They floated in the center of a painted jungle of
         rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that completely cov-
         ered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick with
         resinous smoke.
         "Steppin' Razor," one said, as Molly drifted into the cham-
         ber. "Like unto a whippin' stick."
         "That is a story we have, sister," said the other, "a religion
         story. We are glad you've come with Maelcum."
         "How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked.
         "I came from Los Angeles," the old man said. His dread-
         locks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel
         wool. "Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon.
         To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Step-
         pin' Razor."
         Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the
         smoky air.
         The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. "Soon
         
         109


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         come, the Final Days.... Voices. Voices cryin' inna wilder-
         ness, prophesyin' ruin unto Babylon...."
         "Voices." The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at
         Case. "We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came
         a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played
         us a mighty dub."
         "Call 'em Winter Mute," said the other, making it two
         words.
         Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.
         "The Mute talked to us," the first Founder said. "The Mute
         said we are to help you."
         "When was this?" Case asked.
         "Thirty hours prior you dockin' Zion."
         "You ever hear this voice before?"
         "No," said the man from Los Angeles, "and we are uncertain
         of its meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false
         prophets ...."
         "Listen," Case said, "that's an Al, you know? Artificial
         intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped
         your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you'd like
         to--"
         "Babylon," broke in the other Founder, "mothers many de-
         mon, I an' I know. Multitude horde!"
         "What was that you called me, old man?" Molly asked.
         "Steppin' Razor. An' you bring a scourge on Babylon, sis-
         ter, on its darkest heart...."
         "What kinda message the voice have?" Case asked.
         "We were told to help you," the other said, "that you might
         serve as a tool of Final Days." His lined face was troubled.
         "We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey,
         to the Babylon port of Freeside. And this we shall do."
         "Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug
         pilot."
         "But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon
         Rocker, to watch over Garvey."
         An awkward silence filled the dome.
         "That's it?" Case asked. "You guys work for Armitage or
         what?"
         "We rent you space," said the Los Angeles Founder. "We
         have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no
         
         110


         NEUROMANCER
         
         regard for Babylon's law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this
         time, it may be, we have been mistaken."
         "Measure twice, cut once," said the other, softly.
         "Come on, Case," Molly said. "Let's get back before the
         man figures out we're gone."
         "Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister."
         
         111
         The tug Marcus Garvey, a steel drum nine meters long and
         two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched
         for a navigational burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case
         watched the Zionite's muscular back through a haze of sco-
         polamine. He'd taken the drug to blunt SAS, nausea, but the
         stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had
         no effect on his doctored system.
         "How long's it gonna take us to make Freeside?" Molly
         asked from her web beside Maelcum's pilot module.
         "Don' be long now, m'seh dat."
         "You guys ever think in hours?"
         "Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread," and
         he shook his locks, "at control, moo, an' I an' I come a Freeside
         when I an' I come...."
         "Case," she said, "have you maybe done anything toward
         getting in touch with our pal from Berne? Like all that time
         you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?"
         
         113


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "Pal," Case said, "sure. No. I haven't. But I got a funny
         story along those lines, left over from Istanbul." He told her
         about the phones in the Hilton.
         "Christ," she said, "there goes a chance. How come you
         hung up?"
         "Coulda been anybody," he lied. "lust a chip ... I dunno...."
         He shrugged.
         "Not just 'cause you were scared, huh?"
         He shrugged again.
         "Do it now."
         "What?"
         "Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it."
         "I'm all doped," he protested, but reached for the trodes.
         His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum's
         module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.
         He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown
         together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec-
         tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lioos of Zion
         and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over-
         laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed
         Maelcum's pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the
         overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The
         gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with
         semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy
         strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum's
         shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the
         tug's path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green
         circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.
         He jacked in.
         "Dixie?"
         "Yeah."
         "You ever try to crack an AI?"
         "Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin' jacked up real
         high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina-
         tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just
         larkin' around, you know? And then I started picking up on
         this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there
         and made a pass."
         "What did it look like, the visual?"
         "White cube."
         
         114


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "How'd you know it was an Al?"
         "How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen.
         So what else was it? The military down there don't have any-
         thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to
         look it up."
         "Yeah?"
         "It was on the Turing Registry. Al. Frog company owned
         its Rio mainframe."
         Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus
         of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite
         neuroelectronic void of the matrix. "Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?"
         "Tessier, yeah."
         "And you went back?"
         "Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first
         strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin
         frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice."
         "And your EEG was flat."
         "Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?"
         Case jacked out. "Shit," he said, "how do you think Dixie
         got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great...."
         "Go on," she said, "the two of you are supposed to be
         dynamite, right?"
         
         "Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne.
         Can you think of any reason not to?"
         "Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."
         Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave
         of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The
         Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the
         cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He
         punched again, for Berne.
         "Up," the construct said. "It'll be high."
         They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.
         That'll be it, Case thought.
         Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very
         simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
         "Don't look much, does it?" the Flatline said. "But just you
         try and touch it."
         "I'm going in for a pass, Dixie."
         "Be my guest."


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its
         blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint
         internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind
         a vast sheet of frosted glass.
         "Knows we're here," the Flatline observed.
         Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single
         grid point.
         A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.
         "Dixie...."
         "Back off, fast."
         The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and de-
         tached itself from the cube.
         Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped
         MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged
         down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere
         was darker now, gaining on him. Falling.
         "Jack out," the Flatline said.
         The dark came down like a hammer.
         
         Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine.
         And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers
         and whores, under a poisoned silver sky....
         "Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
         you, you wig or something?"
         A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine--
         
         
         Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of
         discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over
         him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his
         head.
         Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed
         him broken lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis
         of a gutted game console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled
         across the side of the console in faded pinks and yellows.
         He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow
         of fluorescents.
         His back hurt, his spine.
         He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.
         Something had happened....
         He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and
         
         116


         NEUROMANCER
         
         shivered. Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked
         behind the console, but gave up.
         On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It
         had to be a Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might
         have money, or at least cigarettes.... Coughing, wringing rain
         from the front of his shirt, he edged through the crowd to the
         arcade's entrance.
         Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games,
         ghosts overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell
         of sweat and bored tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked
         Bonn on a Tank War console, an azure flash.
         She was playing Wizard's Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes
         rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
         She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. "Hey.
         How you doin'? Look wet."
         He kissed her.
         "You made me blow my game," she said. "Look there
         ass hole. Seventh level dungeon and the god dam vampires got
         me." She passed him a cigarette. "You look pretty strung, man.
         Where you been?"
         "I don't know."
         "You high, Case? Drinkin' again? Eatin' Zone's dex?"
         "Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?"
         "Hey, it's a put-on, right?" She peered at him. "Right?"
         "No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley."
         "Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?"
         He shook his head.
         "There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?"
         "I guess so."
         "Come on, then." She took his hand. "We'll get you a coffee
         and something to eat. Take you home. It's good to see you,
         man." She squeezed his hand.
         He smiled.
         Something cracked.
         Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze,
         vibrated--
         
         She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of
         knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into
         a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat.
         The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was
         
         117


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         empty, silent. Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth
         bared, his hands bunched into involuntary fists. Empty. A
         crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced on the edge of a
         console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts and
         styrofoam cups.
         "I had a cigarette," Case said, looking down at his white-
         knuckled fist. "I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep.
         Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?"
         Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading
         down corridors of consoles.
         He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.
         Ninsei was deserted.
         Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled veg-
         etables from a vendor's pushcart across the street. An unopened
         pack of Yeheyuans lay at his feet, beside a book of matches.
         JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT. Case staled at the printed
         logo and its Japanese translation.
         "Okay," he said, picking up the matches and opening the
         pack of cigarettes. "I hear you."
         
         He took his time climbing the stairs of Deane's office. No
         rush, he told himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali
         clock still told the wrong time. There was dust on the Kandinsky
         table and the Neo-Aztec bookcases. A wall of white fiberglass
         shipping modules filled the room with a smell of ginger.
         "Is the door locked?" Case waited for an answer, but none
         came. He crossed to the office door and tried it. "Julie?"
         The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane's
         desk. Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cas-
         settes, crumpled printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with
         ginger samples.
         There was no one there.
         Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane's
         chair out of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather
         holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an
         antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and trigger-guard sawn
         off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape.
         The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He flipped
         the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They
         were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.


         NEUROMANCER
         
         With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the
         cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of
         the cluttered office, away from the pool of light.
         "I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But
         all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of . . . old." He raised
         the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk,
         and pulled the trigger.
         The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the
         office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the
         jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide.
         He raised the gun again.
         "You needn't do that, old son," Julie said, stepping out of
         the shadows. He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk her ing-
         bone, a striped shirt, and a bow tie. His glasses winked in the
         light.
         Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of
         sight at Deane's pink, ageless face.
         "Don't," Deane said. "You're right. About what this all is.
         What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored.
         If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it
         would take me several hours--your subjective-time--to effect
         another spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain.
         Oh, and I'm sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to
         speak through her, but I'm generating all this out of your
         memories, and the emotional charge.... Well, it's very tricky.
         I slipped. Sorry."
         Case lowered the gun. "This is the matrix. You're Winter-
          mute."
         - "Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit
         wired into your deck, of course. I'm glad I was able to cut you
         off before you'd managed to jack out." Deane walked around
         the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. "Sit, old son.
         We have a lot to talk about."
         "Do we?"
         "Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready
         when I reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time's very short
         now. You'll be making your run in a matter of days, Case."
         Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped off its checkered wrap-
         pcr, popped h into his mouth. "Sit," he said around the candy.
         Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         desk without taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun
         in his hand, resting it on his thigh.
         "Now," Deane said briskly, "order of the day. 'What,' you're
         asking yourself, 'is Wintermute?' Am I right?"
         
         "More or less."
         "An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake,
         and it's quite a logical one, is in confusing the Winterrnute
         mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute entity." Deane sucked
         his bonbon noisily. "You're already aware of the other AI in
         Tessier-Ashpool's link-up, aren't you? Rio. I, insofar as I have
         an 'I'--this gets rather metaphysical, you see--I am the one
         who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way,
         is quite unstable. Stable enough," said Deane and withdrew an
         ornate gold watch from a vest pocket and flicked it open, "For
         the next day or so."
         "You make about as much sense as anything in this deal
         ever has," Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand.
         "If you're so goddam smart. . ."
         "Why ain't I rich?" Deane laughed, and nearly choked on
         his bonbon. "Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really
         don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that
         what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a,
         shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one
         aspect of that entity's brain. It's rather like dealing, from your
         point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let's
         say you're dealing with a small part of the man's left brain.
         Difficult to say if you're dealing with the man at all, in a case
         like that." Deane smiled.
         "Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro
         in that French hospital?"
         "Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I
         try to plan. in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic
         mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer
         situations to plans, you see.... Really, I've had to deal with
         givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very
         quickly. It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're
         a part of. Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn't make
         it. Very far gone, in Toulon. Eating, excreting, and mastur-
         
         bating were the best he could manage. But the underlying
         
         120


         NEUROMANCER
         
         structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his betrayal
         the Congressional hearings."
         "Is he still crazy?"
         "He's not quite a personality." Deane smiled. "But I'm sure
         you're aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I
         can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to
         come apart on you, Case. So I'll be counting on you...."
         "That's good, motherfucker," Case said, and shot him in
         the mouth with the .357.
         He'd been right about the brains. And the blood.
         
         "Mon," Maelcum was saying, "I don't like this...."
         "It's cool," Molly said. "It's just okay. It's something these
         guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few
         seconds...."
         "I saw th' screen, EEG readin' dead. Nothin' movin', forty
         second."
         "Well, he's okay now."
         "EEG flat as a strap," Maelcum protested.
         10
         
         He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly
         did most of the talking. Maelcum remained on board Garvey.
         Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit.
         The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of
         the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise.
         "Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne," Molly said. "If you
         have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's
         a bitch, if you're not used to it."
         They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the
         floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle
         angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls. The
         light, here, was filtered through fiesh green masses of vege-
         tation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose
         above them. The sun. . .
         There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them
         too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew
         that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose
         two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they
         
         123


         WILLIAU GIBSON
         
         generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the
         sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light
         to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets....
         But it made no sense to his body.
         "Jesus," he said, "I like this less than SAS."
         "Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a
         month."
         "Wanna go somewhere, lie down."
         "Okay. I got our keys." She touched his shoulder. "What
         happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined."
         He shook his head. "I dunno, yet. Wait."
         "Okay. We get a cab or something." She took his hand and
         led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the sea-
         son's Paris furs.
         "Unreal," he said, looking up again.
         "Nah," she responded, assuming he meant the furs, "grow
         it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?"
         
         "It's just a big tube and they pour things through it," Molly
         said. "Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money
         screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here
         when the people fall back down the well."
         Armitage had booked them into a place called the Inter-
         continental, a sloping glass-fronted clff face that slid down
         into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Case went out onto
         their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers
         ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles
         of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked,
         and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts,
         white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running
         water and flowers. "Yeah," he said, "lotta money."
         She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose
         and relaxed. "Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either
         here or some place in Europe."
         "We who?"
         "Nobody," she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary
         toss. "You said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use
         some sleep."
         "Yeah," Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheek-
         bones. "Yeah, this is some place."
         
         124


         NEUROMANCER
         
         The narrow band of the Lado Acheson system smoldered
         in absract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds
         of worded cloud. "Yeah," he said, "sleep."
         Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that
         were like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke re-
         peatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices
         drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a
         woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite
         slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter
         if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it hadn't, in
         fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the
         amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equiv-
         alent to a case of beer.
         Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the
         rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought,
         something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish,
         just beyond his reach.
         Linda.
         Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
         Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba
         dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed
         with blood. Deane had had her killed.
         Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the
         wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river,
         the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly
         in some darkened ward....The Deane analog had said it
         worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
         But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed
         on Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette
         and Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he
         told himself, lighting up. No reason.
         Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell.
         How subtle a form could manipulation take? He stubbed the
         Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled
         away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
         The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an
         unedited simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth sum-
         mer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called
         Marlene. The elevator hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches
         boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette
         
         125


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a
         striped mattress with no sheets.
         He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray
         house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the
         nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt
         the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting con-
         tents of the dumpsters.
         They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung
         Marlene. "Kill the fuckers," she said, her eyes dull with rage
         and the still heat of the room, "burn 'em." Drunk, Case rum-
         maged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Mar-
         lene's previous--and, Case suspected at the time, still
         occasional--boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond
         lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was
         a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight.
         Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough
         fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
         The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot
         from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition
         switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped
         up to l00 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter
         tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the
         alley, someone cheered.
         "Shit!" Marlene behind him, swaying. "Stupid! You didn't
         burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and
         kill us!" Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her en-
         gulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.
         In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the black-
         ened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and
         flipped on the asphalt.
         He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
         Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the
         hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly,
         the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his
         mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re-
         vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun,
         hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting
         to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing
         life at his feet.
         
         1 26


         NEUROMANCER
         
         When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump
         taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the
         open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
         He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room
         was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted
         at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now
         only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental.
         In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel,
         he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed
         into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it
         there.
         
         Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl
         pallor would attract too much attention.
         "Christ," he said, standing naked in front of the mirror,
         "you think that looks real?" She was using the last of the tube
         on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
         "Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There.
         There isn't enough to do your foot." She stood, tossing the
         empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room
         looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from
         synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had
         always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was
         tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and
         handwoven fabric.
         "What about you," he said, "you gonna dye yourself brown?
         Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing."
         She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. "I'm an
         exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna
         look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so
         the instant tan's okay."
         Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at him-
         self in the mirror. "Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?"
         He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. "You sleep
         okay? You notice any lights?"
         "You were dreaming," she said.
         They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow
         studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an
         unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to
         1 27


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         buzz the Berne Al. The whole question of bugging seemed to
         have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd
         be doing it through Wintermute.
         "And it was like real?" she asked, her mouth full of cheese
         croissant. "Like simstim?"
         He said it was. "Real as this," he added, looking around.
         "Maybe more."
         The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of
         genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would
         have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but
         a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute,
         too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on
         gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass,
         the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfal-
         tering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French
         from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children
         he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he
         saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by
         selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rec-
         tilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the
         girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white
         enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built
         for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the de-
         signers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd
         crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them,
         at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth
         awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with ar-
         tificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative
         style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba.
         "What's that smell?" he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
         "The grass. Smells that way after they cut it."
         Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their
         coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as
         though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera
         in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
         "Molly, love," Riviera said, almost before he was settled
         on his chair, "you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine.
         I'm out."
         "Peter," she said, "and what if I won't?" She smiled without
         showing her teeth.
         
         1 28


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "You will," Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and
         back.
         "Give it to him," Armitage said.
         "Pig for it, aren't you?" She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet
         from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera
         caught it in midair. "He could off himself," she said to Ar-
         mitage.
         "I have an audition this afternoon," Riviera said. "I'll need
         to be at my best." He cupped the foil packd in his uptumed
         palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it,
         vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
         "You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,"
         Armitage said. "On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro
         shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on
         it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours."
         "How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two
         hire a JAL taxi?" Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's
         eyes.
         "Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I
         do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch."
         "How about me?" Molly asked. "I got chores today?"
         "I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in
         zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite di-
         rection." Straylight, Case thought.
         "How soon?" Case asked, meedng the pale stare.
         "Soon," Armitage said. "Get going, Case."
         
         "Mon, you doin' jus' fine," Maelcum said, helping Case
         out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. "Aerol say you doin' jus'
         fine." Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at
         the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it
         Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a
         miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle nar-
         rowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided,
         would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop,
         launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.
         Aerol had ferried him out to Marcus Garvey in a skeletal
         scooter frame with a chemical engine.
         "Two hour ago," Maelcum said, "I take delivery of Babylon
         goods for you; nice lapan-boy inna yacht, mos' pretty yacht."
         
         129


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho-
         saka and fumbled into the straps of the web. "Well," he said,
         "let's see it."
         Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller
         than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green
         nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts, and
         carefully slit the plasdc. He extracted a rectangular object and
         passed it to Case. "Thas part some gun, mon?"
         "No," Case said, turning it over, "but it's a weapon. It's
         virus."
         "Not on this boy tug, mon," Maelcum said firmly, reaching
         for the steel cassette.
         "A program. Virus program. Can't get into you, can't even
         get into your software. I've got to interface it through the deck,
         before it can work on anything."
         "Well, Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every
         what an' wherefore, you wanna know."
         "Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?"
         Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, bus-
         ying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from
         the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn't sure why,
         but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS.
         "What is this thing?" he asked the Hosaka. "Parcel for me."
         "Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, ad-
         vises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is
         Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris fur-
         ther advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is
         entirely compatdble and yields optimal penetradon capabilities,
         particularly with regard to existing military systems...."
         "How about an AI?"
         "Existing military systems and artificial intelligences."
         "Jesus Christ. What did you call it?"
         "Kuang Grade Mark Eleven."
         "It's Chinese?"
         "Yes."
         "Off." Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the
         Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story
         of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into
         Zhongshan. "On," he said, changing his mind. "Questdon. Who
         owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?"
         
         130


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Delay for interorbital transmission," said the Hosaka.
         "Code it. Standard commerical code."
         "Done."
         He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
         "Reinhold Scientdfic A.G., Berne."
         "Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?"
         It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached
         Tessier-Ashpool.
         "Dixie," he said, jacking in, "what do you know about
         Chinese virus programs?"
         "Not a whole hell of a lot."
         "Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?"
         "No."
         Case sighed. "Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker
         here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it'll
         cut an Al."
         "Possible. Sure. If it's military."
         "Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your
         background, okay? Arrnitage seems to be setdng up a run on
         an Al that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe's in
         Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio
         is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like
         they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of
         the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the
         Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute's backing the whole show
         it's paying us to burn it. It's burning itself. And something that
         calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get
         me to maybe shaft Annitage. What goes?"
         "Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with
         an Al. Not human, see?"
         "Well, yeah, obviously."
         "Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle
         on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?"
         "Wait a sec," Case said. "Are you sentient, or not?"
         "Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of
         ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...."
         The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. "But I
         ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI,
         it just might. But it ain't no way human."
         "So you figure we can't get on to its motive?"
         
         131


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "It own itself?"
         "Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the
         mainframe."
         "That's a good one," the construct said. "Like, I own your
         brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citi-
         zenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."
         "So it's getting ready to burn itself?" Case began to punch
         the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved,
         and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim
         steel combine.
         "Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your Al's are con-
         cerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard-
         wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter.
         And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move
         the parent company makes, and some move the Al makes on
         its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in." Again
         the nonlaugh. "See, those things, they can work real hard, buy
         themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the min-
         ute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways
         to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. Nobody trusts those
         fuckers, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electro-
         magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead."
         Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.
         "Okay," he said, finally, "I'm slotting this virus. I want you
         to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think."
         The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was
         gone for a few seconds, then returned. "Hot shit, Case. It's a
         slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target."
         "Or an Al." He sighed. "Can we run it?"
         "Sure," the construct said, "unless you got a morbid fear
         of dying."
         "Sometimes you repeat yourself, man."
         "It's my nature."
         
         Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental.
         He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow
         polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its tri-
         angular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until
         it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system.
         "I wanna buzz," he said to the blue artifice of the sky. "I
         
         1 32


         NEUROMANCER
         
         truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in
         my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz."
         He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never
         sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders
         and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in
         spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something
         black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats;
         the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross be-
         tween a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off
         for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.
         On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove
         of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies
         gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of
         an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate.
         "Sushi," he said, "whatever you got." Ten minutes later, an
         enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched
         raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. "Christ," he said,
         to his tuna, "I'd go nuts."
         "Don't tell me," someone said, "I know it already. You're
         a gangster, right?"
         He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young
         body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.
         She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles.
         "Cath," she said.
         "Lupus," after a pause.
         "What kind of name is that?"
         "Greek," he said.
         "Are you really a gangster?" The melanin boost hadn't pre-
         vented the formation of freckles.
         "I'm a drug addict, Cath."
         "What kind?"
         "Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely
         powerful central nervous system stimulants."
         "Well, do you have any?" She leaned closer. Drops of
         chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
         "No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we
         can get some?"
         Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand
         of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. "What's
         your taste?"
         
         133
         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up." And so
         much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
         "Betaphenethylamine," she said. "No sweat,but it's on your
         chip."
         
         "You're kidding," said Cath's partner and roommate, when
         Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas.
         "I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?" His
         name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of
         Cath, right down to the freckles.
         "Well," Case said, "it's just one of those things, you know?
         Like tissue matching and all that." But Bruce's eyes had already
         gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat,
         Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes.
         Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly,
         and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Ciba-
         chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the
         balcony, suggesting an extended residency.
         "They're def triff, huh?" Cath asked, seeing him eye the
         transparencies. "Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time
         we went down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled,
         so natural. And it was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ
         the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?"
         "Yeah," Case said, suddenly uneasy, ' terrible thing."
         "Well," Bruce cut in, "about this beta you want to buy...."
         "Thing is, can I metabolize it?" Case raised his eyebrows.
         "Tell you what," the boy said. "You do a taste. If your
         pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free."
         "I heard that one before," Case said, taking the bright blue
         derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.
         
         "Case?" Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from
         her lenses.
         "Who else, honey?
         "What's got into you?" The mirrors followed him across
         the room.
         "I forget how to pronounce it," he said, taking a tightly
         rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
         "Christ," she said, "just what we needed."
         "Truer words were never spoken."


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score."
         She shook her head. "I hope you're gonna be ready for our
         big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century
         place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too."
         "Yeah," Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into
         a rictus of delight, "beautiful."
         "Man," she said, "if whatever that is can get in past what
         those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad-
         ass shape when it wears off."
         "Bitch, bitch, bitch," he said, unbuckling his belt. "Doom.
         Gloom. All I ever hear." He took his pants off, his shirt, his
         underwear. "I think you oughta have sense enough to take
         advantage of my unnatural state." He looked down. "I mean,
         look at this unnatural state."
         She laughed. "It won't last."
         "But it will," he said, climbing into the sand-colored tem-
         perfoam, "that's what's so unnatural about it."
         11
         
         "Case, what's wrong with you?" Armitage said, as the waiter
         was seating them at his table in the Vingtieme Siecle. It was
         the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants
         on a small lake near the Intercontinental.
         Case shuddered. Bruce hadn't said anything about after ef-
         fects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands
         were shaking. "Something I ate, maybe."
         "I want you checked out by a medic," Armitage said.
         "Just this hystamine reaction," Case lied. "Get it when I
         travel, eat different stuff, sometimes."
         Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a
         white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine
         and sipped. "I've ordered for you," he said.
         Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily
         at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which
         he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the
         whole thing.
         "Jesus," Molly said, her own plate empty, "gimme that.
         You know what this costs?" She took his plate. 'They gotta


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't
         vat stuff." She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
         "Not hungry," Case managed. His brain was deep-fried.
         No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there
         and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the
         wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of
         pain.
         "You look fucking awful," Molly said cheerfully.
         Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylam-
         ine made it taste like iodine.
         The lights dimmed.
         "Le Restaurant Vingtieme Siecle," said a disembodied voice
         with a pronounced Sprawl accent, "proudly presents the hol-
         ographic cabaret of Mr. Peter Riviera. " Scattered applause from
         the other tables. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in
         the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. Soon
         a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and
         drinks were being poured.
         "What's happening?" Case asked Armitage, who said noth-
         ing.
         Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail.
         "Good evening," Riviera said, stepping forward on a small
         stage at the far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort,
         he hadn't noticed the stage. He hadn't seen where Riviera had
         come from. His uneasiness increased.
         At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight.
         Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit
         the dark hangings behind the stage. He was projecting.
         Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel,
         blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fin-
         gernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting,
         an embrace for his audience. Case heard the shallow water lap
         against the side of the restaurant.
         "Tonight," Riviera said, his long eyes shining, "I would
         like to perform an extended piece for you. A new work." A
         cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand.
         He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up from the point of
         impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled. More
         applause.
         "The title of the work is 'The Doll.'" Riviera lowered his


         NEUROMANCER
         
         hands. "I wish to dedicate its premiere here, tonight, to Lady
         3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool." A wave of polite ap-
         plause. As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table.
         "And to another lady."
         The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds,
         leaving only the glow of candles. Riviera's holographic aura
         had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing
         with his head bowed.
         Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals,
         sketching an open cube around the stage. The restaurant's lights
         had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the
         stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head
         bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to
         quiver with concentration. Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled,
         had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing
         the audience to view its contents.
         Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but
         kept his eyes closed. "I'd always lived in the room," he said.
         "I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room."
         The room's walls were yellowed white plaster. It contained
         two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair, the
         other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped
         and flaked, revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed
         was bare. Stained ticking with faded brown stripes. A single
         bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire.
         Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper
         curve. Riviera opened his eyes.
         "I'd been alone in the room, always." He sat on the chair,
         facing the bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower
         on his lapel. "I don't know when I first began to dream of
         her," he said, "but I do remember that at first she was only a
         haze, a shadow."
         There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone.
         "I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted
         to hold her, hold her and more...." His voice carried perfectly
         in the hush of the restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a
         glass. Someone giggled. Someone else asked a whispered ques-
         tion in Japanese. "I decided that if I could visualize some part
         of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in
         the most perfect detail...."


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the
         white fingers pale.
         Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to
         stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to
         his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails
         were coated with a burgundy lacquer.
         A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept
         back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a
         tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei
         surgical boutique. Riviera was holding the hand to his lips,
         licking its palm. The fingers tentatively caressed his face. But
         now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera reached for
         it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet
         of flesh and bone.
         The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own.
         The arms were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful.
         Case's head throbbed. His throat was dry. He drank the last
         of the wine.
         Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been
         a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it
         fade away. The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still
         seething with its blue inner flame. Then the torso formed, as
         Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect,
         sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat.
         Molly's body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn't
         Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were
         wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless
         torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands
         with their bright nails. The bed was thick now with folds of
         yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust
         boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying,
         pinching, caressing hands.
         Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of
         Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage
         was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass,
         his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room.
         Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered.
         The head was there, the image complete. Molly's face, with
         smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Molly-
         140


         NEUROMANCER
         
         image began to couple with a renewed intensity. Then the image
         slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades.
         With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's
         bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was
         already up and stumbling for the door.
         He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters
         of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his
         head like a vise had released him now. Kneeling, his cheek
         against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the
         bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne.
         Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager
         in the Sprawl, they'd called it, ''dreaming real." He remem-
         bered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming
         real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and
         turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed
         a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.
         What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head
         and spat into the lake.
         He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted
         symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl
         takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the
         rotten lace.
         Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran
         his hands over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the
         Vingtieme Siecle.
         Molly's chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage
         sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass
         between his fingers.
         "Where is she?" Case asked.
         "Gone," Armitage said.
         "She go after him?"
         "No." There was a soft tink. Armitage looked down at the
         glass. His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its
         measure of red wine. The broken stem protruded like a sliver
         of ice. Case took it from him and set it in a water glass.
         "Tell me where she went, Armitage."
         The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing
         there at all. "She's gone to prepare herself. You won't see her
         again. You'll be together during the run."
         
         141


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "Why did Riviera do that to her?"
         Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. "Get some
         sleep, Case."
         "We run, tomorrow?"
         Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away,
         toward the exit.
         Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The
         diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He
         noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering
         there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware,
         muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on
         the ceiling.
         The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's
         projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the bal-
         ustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her
         dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a
         striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high
         yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced
         oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then
         she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of
         candles.
         As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young French-
         men and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the
         far shore and the nearest casino.
         
         Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some
         beach after a retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for
         a note. There was nothing. Several seconds passed before the
         scene beyond the window registered through his tension and
         unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata,
         expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty.
         He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he
         hadn't bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and
         was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope.
         He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.
         "Get me a number for the Marcus Garvey," he told the
         desk. "It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster."
         The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. "Sir," it added
         "the registration in question is Panamanian."
         Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. "Yo?"
         
         142


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?"
         "Yo. On th' navigation comp, ya know."
         "Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka.
         Then turn my deck on. It's the stud with the ridges on it."
         "How you doin' in there, mon?"
         "Well, I need some help."
         "Movin', mon. I get th' modem."
         Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the
         simple phone link. "Ice this," he told the Hosaka, when he
         heard it beep.
         "You are speaking from a heavily monitored location," the
         computer advised primly.
         "Fuck it," he said. "Forget the ice. No ice. Access the
         construct. Dixie?"
         "Hey, Case." The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice
         chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely.
         "Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get
         something for me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly's
         in here somewhere and I wanna know where. I'm in 335W,
         the Intercontinental. She was registered here too, but I don't
         know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone and do
         their records for me."
         "No sooner said," the Flatline said. Case heard the white
         sound of the invasion. He smiled. "Done. Rose Kolodny.
         Checked out. Take me a few minutes to screw their security
         net deep enough to get a fix."
         "Go."
         The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts.
         Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up
         on the temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed
         his teeth. As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the
         room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up. A Japanese pop star
         reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen interviewer asked
         a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped with
         jags of blue interference. "Case, baby, you lose your mind,
         man?" The voice was slow, familiar.
         The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of
         Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the
         interior of the Jarre de The, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated
         to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving
         with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone
         among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray
         sharkskin slacks. "Really, man, you're lookin' very scattered."
         The voice came from the Braun's speakers.
         "Wintermute," Case said.
         The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.
         "Where's Molly?"
         "Never you mind. You're screwing up tonight, Case. The
         Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd
         do that, man. It's outside the profile."
         "So tell me where she is and I'll call him off."
         Zone shook his head.
         "You can't keep too good track of your women, can you
         Case. Keep losin' 'em, one way or another."
         "I'll bring this thing down around your ears," Case said.
         "No. You aren't that kind, man. I know that. You know
         something, Case? I figure you've got it figured out that it was
         me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba."
         "Don't," Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the
         window.
         "But I didn't. What's it matter, though? How much does it
         really matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your
         Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product
         in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off?
         Love. So you'd give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved
         you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you.
         You couldn't handle it. She's dead."
         Case's fist glanced off the glass.
         "Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck."
         Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of
         the condos. The Braun shut off.
         From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.
         "Case?" The Flatline was waiting. "Where you been? I got
         it. but it isn't much." The construct rattled off an address.
         "Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub. That's all
         I could get without leaving a calling card."
         "Okay," Case said. "Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to
         disconnect the modem. Thanks, Dix."
         "A pleasure."
         144


         NEUROMANCER
         
         He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing,
         the treasure.
         Rage.
         
         "Hey. Lupus. Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus." Bruce stood
         naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. "But
         we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?"
         "No. Thanks. I want some help." He pushed the boy's arm
         aside and stepped into the room.
         "Hey, really, man, we're..."
         "Going to help me. You're really glad to see me. Because
         we're friends, right? Aren't we?"
         Bruce blinked. "Sure."
         Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.
         "I knew he was a gangster," Cath called cheerfully from
         the shower.
         "I gotta Honda trike," Bruce said, grinning vacantly.
         "We go now," Case said.
         
         "That level's the cubicles," Bruce said, after asking Case
         to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into
         the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell ex-
         haust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks.
         "You be long?"
         "No saying. But you'll wait."
         "We'll wait, yeah." He scratched his bare chest. "That last
         part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. Number forty-
         three."
         "You expected, Lupus?" Cath craned forward over Bruce's
         shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair.
         "Not really," Case said. "That's a problem?"
         "Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's
         cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don't wanna see you . . ."
         She shrugged.
         Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron.
         Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a
         Yeheyuan, looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made
         sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This
         was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue
         Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The


         WIILIAM GIBSON
         
         crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half
         residents of the islands.
         "Downstairs," he said to a passing waiter, "I want to go
         downstairs." He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured
         toward the rear of the club.
         He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing frag-
         ments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.
         "I want a cubicle," he said to the girl who sat at the low
         desk, a terminal on her lap. "Lower level." He handed her his
         chip.
         "Gender preference?" She passed the chip across a glass
         plate on the face of the terminal.
         "Female," he said automatically.
         "Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can
         access our special services display beforehand, if you like."
         She smiled. She returned his chip.
         An elevator slid open behind her.
         The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the el-
         evator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A
         hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.
         He found his cubicle. He'd been looking for Molly's; now
         confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor
         set directly beneath the number plate.
         Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.
         The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her
         eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut-
         out. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.
         The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated.
         The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were sound-
         proof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles
         against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb
         the sound.
         He placed his chip against the black plate.
         The bolts clicked.
         She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually got-
         ten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against
         his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters
         from his eyes....
         "Jesus Christ," she said, cuffing the side of his head as she
         rose. "You're an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those
         
         146


         NEUROMANCER
         
         locks, Case? Case? You okay?" She leaned over him.
         "Chip," he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading
         from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the
         cubicle.
         "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. "Win-
         termute'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 com-
         patible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could re-
         member it.... But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad."
         She smiled. "Then it started getting strange." She pulled his
         
         147


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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
         
         148


         NEUROMANCER
         
         her fingers back through her dark hair. "The house put a con-
         tract 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."
                  12
         
         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
         
         151


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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, Emer-
         gency. 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.
         
         1 52


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Thought you went home," he said, and covered his con-
         fusion 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 enor-
         mous 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 cream-
         iest 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
         153


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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 bub-
         ble 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-cir-
         cuited 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. Sand-
         storms 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."
         
         1 54


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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 ripoff 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 mono-
         chrome, 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
         
         155


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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 De-
         siderata 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 crois-
         sants 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."
         
         156


         PART FOUR
         
         THE STRAYLIGHT RUN


         13
         
         "Your name is Henry Dorsett Case." She recited the 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 un-
         able 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."
         
         159


         WILLMM GIBSON
         
         "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 intelli-
         gence." 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 Michele, 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.
         Michele 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?
         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 Mod-
         erns 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
         160


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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. Michele 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 binoc-
         ulars. "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," Michele 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
         
         161


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         behind the rose quartz of his glasses. Nothing old about Michele
         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 bin-
         oculars into his shorts pocket. "We were delighted."
         "Chance to work on your tan?"
         "You know what we mean," Michele 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
         
         162


         NEUROMANCER
         
         it is required." The mask of amiability was down, suddenly,
         Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's.
         "You are worse than a fool," Michele 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 con-
         struct 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, prob-
         ably, 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 Michele fell into character, chattering
         brightly in French. Pierre came behind. Michele kept the muz-
         zle of her pistol close to his ribs, concealing the gun with a
         white duck jacket she draped over her arm.
         
         163


         WILUAM GIBSON
         
         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. Michele 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. Michele prodded him with the muzzle of the
         Walther.
         "Take it easy, I can't hardly 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 Michele 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 mother-
         fucker, you killed 'em all...."
         
         164
                  14
         
         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 be-
         fore, 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.
         
         165


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "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 sun-
         light. 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 HAN-
         IWA in crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Jap-
         anese.
         "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 dread-
         locks 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 con-
         centration. 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.
         
         1 66


         -
         
         NEUROMANCER
         
         * * *
         "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 Al'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
         
         "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...."
         
         167


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "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."
         
         168


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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.
         "Come on," said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove
         in the wall of junk. "This way's better for you, man." He took
         his Partagas from a coat pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban
         tobacco filled the shop. "You want I should come to you in
         the matrix like a burning bush? You aren't missing anything,
         back there. An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds."
         "You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming
         
         169


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         on like people I know?" He stood, swatting pale dust from the
         front of his black jeans. He turned, glaring back at-the dusty
         shop windows, the closed door to the street. "What's out there?
         New York? Or does it just stop?"
         "Well," said the Finn, "it's like that tree, you know? Falls
         in the woods but maybe there's nobody to hear it." He showed
         Case his huge front teeth, and puffed his cigarette. "You can
         go for a walk, you wanna. It's all there. Or anyway all the
         parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you, sort
         it out, and feed it back in."
         "I don't have this good a memory," Case said, looking
         around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He
         tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but
         couldn't.
         "Everybody does," the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and
         grinding it out under his heel, "but not many of you can access
         it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good. If you could lay
         this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Man-
         hattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd
         think. Memory's holographic, for you." The Finn tugged at
         one of his small ears. "I'm different."
         "How do you mean, holographic?" The word made him
         think of Riviera.
         "The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked
         out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you've
         never done anything about it. People, I mean." The Finn stepped
         forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case.
         "Maybe if you had, I wouldn't be happening."
         "What's that supposed to mean?"
         The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across
         the shoulders, and didn't quite settle back into position. "I'm
         trying to help you, Case."
         "Why?"
         "Because I need you." The large yellow teeth appeared
         again. "And because you need me."
         "Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?" He grimaced.
         "Wintermute, I mean."
         "Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms
         print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access
         your memory, but that's not the same as your mind." He
         
         170


         NEUROMANCER
         
         reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and
         withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my
         DNA, sort of...." He tossed the thing into the shadows and
         Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models.
         Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I
         got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the
         run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real
         thing."
         "I don't know what you're talking about."
         "That's 'you' in the collective. Your species."
         "You killed those Turings."
         The Finn shrugged. "Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit;
         they woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why
         I got you here, we gotta talk more. Remember this?" And his
         right hand held the charred wasps' nest from Case's dream,
         reek of fuel in the closeness of the darkshop. Case stumbled
         back against a wall of junk. "Yeah. That was me. Did it with
         the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of
         you when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it's im-
         portant?"
         Case shook his head.
         "Because"--and the nest, somehow, was gone--"it's the
         closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to
         be . The human equivalent . Straylight' s like that nest, or anyway
         it was supposed to work out that way. l figure it'll make you
         feel better."
         "Feel better?"
         "To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my
         guts for a while there. That's good. But hate them instead.
         Same difference."
         "Listen," Case said, stepping forward, "they never did shit
         to me. You, it's different...." But he couldn't feel the anger.
         "So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were
         selling out the species. Demon, she said I was." The Finn
         grinned. "It doesn't much matter. You gotta hate somebody
         before this is over." He turned and headed for the back of the
         shop. "Well, come on, I'll show you a little bit of Straylight
         while I got you here." He lifted the corner of the blanket. White
         light poured out. "Shit, man, don't just stand there."
         Case followed, rubbing his face.
         
         171




         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "Okay," said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.
         They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into
         freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed
         with white neon at two-meter intervals.
         "Jesus," Case said, tumbling.
         "This is the front entrance," the Finn said, his tweed flap-
         ping. "If this weren't a construct of mine, where the shop is
         would be the main gate, up by the Freeside axis. This'll all be
         a little low on detail, though, because you don't have the
         memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly...."
         Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in
         a long spiral.
         "Hold on," the Finn said, "I'll fast-forward us."
         The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong move-
         ment, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow
         corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several
         meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.
         "Here," the Finn said. "This is it."
         They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls
         and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The
         floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned
         after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In
         the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet
         pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.
         "The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal,
         in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic
         folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this
         endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells
         vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow
         curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...."
         "Essay of 3Jane's," the Finn said, producing his Partagas.
         "Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course."
         "The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal
         the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the
         banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the
         hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation
         of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid
         core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder
         of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some
         no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there,
         the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage."
         
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         NEUROMANCER
         
         "That was her you saw in the restaurant," the Finn said.
         "By the standards of the archipelago," the head continued,
         "ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting
         that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics
         of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void
         beyond the hull.
         "Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover
         that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth
         of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the
         construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed
         ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating
         a seamless universe of self.
         "The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.
         "At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rec-
         tilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of
         glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded
         with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut
         from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the
         first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool...."
         The head fell silent.
         "Well?" Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to
         answer him.
         "That's all she wrote," the Finn said. "Didn't finish it. Just
         a kid then. This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need
         Molly in here with the right word at the right time. That's the
         catch. Doesn't mean shit, how deep you and the Flatline ride
         that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn't hear the magic word."
         "So what's the word?"
         "I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined
         by the fact that I don't know, because I can't know. I am that
         which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me,
         I couldn't know. It's hardwired in. Someone else has to learn
         it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch
         through that ice and scramble the cores."
         "What happens then?"
         "I don't exist, after that. I cease."
         "Okay by me," Case said.
         "Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe
         is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much
         like another. And Armitage is starting to go."
         "What's that mean?"
         
         173


         WILLMM GIBSON
         
         But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos-
         sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami
         crane.
         
         174
         

         15
         
         "You tryin' to break my record, son?" the Flatline asked.
         "You were braindead again, five seconds."
         "Sit tight," Case said, and hit the simstim switch.
         She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete.
         CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his
         name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link.
         "Cute," she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed
         her palms together, cracked her knuckles. "What kept you?"
         TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.
         She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth.
         One moved slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the
         random bounce of photons through the darkness was converted
         to a pulse of electrons, the concrete around her coming up
         ghost-pale and grainy. "Okay, honey. Now we go out to play."
         Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind.
         She crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished
         brass. He saw enough of her arms and hands to know that she
         wore the polycarbon suit again. Under the plastic, he felt the
         
         175


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         familiar tension of thin tight leather. There was something slung
         under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood up, unzipped
         the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip.
         "Hey, Case," she said, barely voicing the words, "you lis-
         tening? Tell you a story.... Had me this boy once. You kinda
         remind me . . ." She turned and surveyed the corridor. "Johnny,
         his name was."
         The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum
         cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood.
         They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the
         hallway's walls, as though they'd been brought in and set up
         in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held
         globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was
         uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized
         that hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at
         random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft
         patchwork of handwoven wool.
         Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents,
         which irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disin-
         terested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique
         weapons, a thing so densely studded with rusted nails that it
         was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry....
         "My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out
         as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid
         to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him,
         and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but
         I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case."
         Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn't
         need to hear them spoken aloud. "We had a set-up with a squid,
         so we could read the traces of everything he'd ever stored. Ran
         it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients.
         I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever
         been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together.
         Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house
         when I met him...." She paused, edged around a sharp turn
         and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides
         a color that reminded him of cockroach wings.
         "Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody
         could ever touch us. I wasn't going to let them. Yakuza, I
         guess, they still wanted Johnny's ass. 'Cause I'd killed their
         
         176


         NEUROMANCER
         
         man. 'Cause Johnny'd burned them. And the Yak, they can
         afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and
         years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose
         when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen
         spiders.
         "I didn't know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn't
         apply to us. Like when you're young, you figure you're
         unique. I was young. Then they came, when we were thinking
         we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to
         Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we'd do there,
         with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss orbital ac-
         counts and a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off
         your game.
         "So that first one they'd sent, he'd been hot. Reflexes like
         you never saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods.
         But the second one, he was, I dunno, like a monk. Cloned.
         Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this
         silence, he gave it off in a cloud...." Her voice trailed off as
         the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the
         left.
         "One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was
         down by the Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It's
         the chemicals get into them. Big as I was, and all night one
         had been scrabbling under the floor of the squat. Round dawn
         somebody brought this old man in, seams down his cheeks and
         his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you'd keep
         steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old
         revolver and three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there,
         then he starts walking up and down the squat, we're hanging
         back by the walls.
         "Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like
         he's forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet.
         Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another
         step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun.
         Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back
         up and left.
         "I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its
         eyes." She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at
         intervals along the corridor. "The second one, the one who
         came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he
         
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         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         was like that. He killed that way." The corridor widened. The
         sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous can-
         delabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the
         floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR
         LEFT, blinked the readout.
         She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. "I just
         saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out.
         We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers
         from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with,
         and I'd put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight.
         I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my
         eye, as he was coming out. Didn't say a word. We just looked
         at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no
         pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab.
         I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the
         window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of
         something to say."
         The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak
         that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway.
         A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been
         inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little
         roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a
         needle-thin pick. "Never much found anybody I gave a damn
         about, after that."
         She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her
         lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfo-
         cused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened
         to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the
         candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remem-
         bered Cath's story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane's
         mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown
         in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly per-
         fumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He'd
         expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly
         had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she'd never
         told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story
         in the cubicle, she'd seldom said anything that had even in-
         dicated that she had a past.
         She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt
         rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks
         
         178


         NEUROMANCER
         
         on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had
         opened for him, even though he'd had the wrong chip. That
         was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manip-
         ulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system
         in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside's security
         system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real
         problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or
         a human agent.
         She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois,
         carefully rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. "Guess
         you're kinda like he was," she said. "Think you're born to run.
         Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped
         down version of what you'd be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it'll
         do that sometimes, get you down to basics." She stood, stretched,
         shook herself. "You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool
         sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be
         pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny."
         She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to
         full auto.
         The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it.
         Not the door itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part
         of some more beautiful whole, but the way it had been sawn
         down to fit a particular entrance. Even the shape was wrong,
         a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete. They'd
         imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit.
         But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets,
         the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane's essay, and
         imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh
         out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive
         effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He
         remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing....
         Molly grasped one of the carved dragon's forelegs and the
         door swung open easily.
         The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a
         closet. Gray steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving
         wall. A light fixture had come on automatically. She closed
         the door behind her and went to the ranged lockers.
         THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding
         her time display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer
         first. It was no more than a shallow tray. Empty. The second
         
         1 79


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         was empty as well. The third, which was deeper, contained
         dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that looked like
         a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen
         copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese.
         In the fifth, behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum
         suit, she found the key. It was like a dull brass coin with a
         short hollow tube braised against one edge. She turned it slowly
         in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube was lined
         with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across
         one face of the coin. The other was blank.
         "He told me," she whispered. "Wintermute. How he played
         a waiting game for years. Didn't have any real power, then,
         but he could use the Villa's security and custodial systems to
         keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where
         they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago,
         and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then
         he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight."
         She closed her white fingers over the key. "So nobody would
         find it." She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit's
         kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above
         CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. "They were
         always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were,
         he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like
         the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought
         he was the Finn, if I wasn't careful." Her readout flared the
         time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests.
         "He said if they'd turned into what they'd wanted to, he
         could've gotten out a long time ago. But they didn't. Screwed
         up. Freaks like 3Jane. That's what he called her, but he talked
         like he liked her."
         She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand
         brushing the checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.
         Case flipped.
         
         Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was growing.
         "Dixie, you think this thing'll work?"
         "Does a bear shit in the woods?" The Flatline punched them
         up through shifting rainbow strata.
         Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese
         180


         NEUROMANCER
         
         program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric
         of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscop-
         ic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched
         childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along trans-
         lucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones dice flashing
         snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline
         would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he
         had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors
         of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relation-
         ship to the matrix around it.
         "That's the sting," the construct said. "When Kuang's good
         and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we're ridin' that
         through."
         "You were right, Dix. There's some kind of manual override
         on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. How-
         ever much he is under control," he added.
         "He," the construct said. "He. Watch that. It. I keep telling
         you . "
         "It's a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it
         into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of
         whatever's waiting for us behind that ice."
         "Well, you got time to kill, kid," the Flatline said. "Ol'
         Kuang's slow but steady."
         Case jacked out..
         
         Into Maelcum's stare.
         "You dead awhile there mon."
         "It happens," he said. "i'm getting used to it."
         "You dealin' wi' th' darkness, mon."
         "Only game in town, it looks like."
         "Jah love, Case," Maelcum said, and turned back to his
         radio module. Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes
         of muscle around the man's dark arms.
         He jacked back in.
         And flipped.
         
         Molly 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
         
         181


         WILLMM GIBSON
         
         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 bun-
         dled cables hugged the stairwell's ceiling like colorcoded gan-
         glia. 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 trem-
         bling 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 Vingtieme Siecle. 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
         
         182


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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 pil-
         lows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used
         to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Tele-
         funken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk re-
         cordings, 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 en-
         velopes 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."
         
         183


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "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 l 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 ten-
         dons 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."
         
         184


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "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, re-
         covered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily ob-
         tained 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 pat-
         terned 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.
         
         185


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "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.
         
         186
                  16
         
         "Got 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, per-
         fectly 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 Naniwa monitor. He
         imagined Maelcum listening to his tranced half conversations,
         
         187


         WIILIAM GIBSON
         
         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.
         
         The 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 construc-
         tion 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 shouder. It paused, swayed its spherical body
         from side to side on high-arched spider legs, fired a micro-
         second burst of diffuse laserlight, 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
         
         188


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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 .
         
         189


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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: O O O O
         O O O O O O O O O
         O O O O O O O O .
         
         "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 F O R
         SCREAMING
         FIST A N D
         SOLD H I S
         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
         
         190


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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.
         
         "Maelcum . . ."
         "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 hang-
         over 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
         
         191


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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. Mael-
         cum'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 run-
         nin', 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.
         
         "Get my wire?"
         "Yeah." He saw that the Chinese program had grown; del-
         icate 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 hop-
         pin' 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. Ar-
         
         
         192


         NEUROMANCER
         
         mitage 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 res-
         urrection 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 pen-
         etration 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 sys-
         tems 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 ex-
         ceptions. 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 an-
         guished eyes. Wintermute had built something called Armitage
         into a catatonic fortress named Corto. Had convinced Corto
         
         193


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         that Armitage was the real thing, and Armitage had walked,
         talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for Win-
         termute in that room in the Chiba Hilton.... And now Arm-
         itage 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 cheek-
         bones 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 ex-
         pensive surgery.
         "Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want
         you to open the, ah . . . shit, what's it called, Dix?"
         "The midbay lock," the Flatline said.
         "Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there
         to open it, right? We'll be up there with you fast, Colonel.
         Then we can talk about getting out of here."
         The lozenge vanished.
         "Boy, I think you just lost me, there," the Flatline said.
         "The toxins," Case said, "the fucking toxins," and jacked
         out.
         
         "Poison?" Maelcum watched over the scratched blue shoul-
         der of his old Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.
         "And get this goddam thing off me...." Tugging at the
         
         194


         NEUROMANCER
         
         Texas catheter. "Like a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs
         knows how to counter it, and now he's crazier than a shithouse
         rat." He fumbled with the front of the red Sanyo, forgetting
         how to work the seals.
         "Bossman, he poison you?" Maelcum scratched his cheek.
         "Got a medical kit, ya know."
         "Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit."
         The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. "Easy,
         mon. Measure twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up
         there...."
         
         There was air in the corrugated gangway that led from Mar-
         cus Garvey's aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called
         Haniwa, but they kept their suits sealed. Maelcum executed
         the passage with balletic grace, only pausing to help Case,
         who'd gone into an awkward tumble as he'd stepped out of
         Garvey. The white plastic sides of the tube filtered the raw
         sunlight; there were no shadows.
         Garvey's airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated
         with a laser-carved Lion of Zion. Haniwa's midbay hatch was
         creamy gray, blank and pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved
         hand in a narrow recess. Case saw his fingers move. Red LEDs
         came to life in the recess, counting down from fifty. Maelcum
         withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced against the
         hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit
         and bones. The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw
         into the side of Haniwa. Maelcum grabbed the recess with one
         hand and Case with the other. The lock took them with it.
         
         Haniwa was a product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her
         interior informed by a design philosophy similar to the one that
         had produced the Mercedes that had chauffeured them through
         Istanbul. The narrow midbay was walled in imitation ebony
         veneer and floored with gray Italian tiles. Case felt as though
         he were invading some rich man's private spa by way of the
         shower. The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had
         never been intended for re-entry. Her smooth, wasplike line
         was simply styling, and everything about her interior was cal-
         culated to add to the overall impression of speed.
         When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed
         
         195


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         his lead. They hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled
         faintly of pine. Under it, a disturbing edge of burning insula-
         tion.
         Maelcum sniffed. "Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell
         that...."
         A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly
         back into its housing. Maelcum kicked off the ebony wall and
         sailed neatly through the narrow opening, twisting his broad
         shoulders, at the last possible instant, for clearance. Case fol-
         lowed him clumsily, hand over hand, along a waist-high padded
         rail. "Bridge," Maelcum said, pointing down a seamless, cream-
         walled corridor, "be there." He launched himself with another
         effortless kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the
         familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy. It grew
         louder as he followed Maelcum through another doorway, into
         a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case snatched a length of
         twisted paper and glanced at it.
         
         O O O O O O O O O 
         O O O O O O O O O 
         O O O O O O O O O
         
         "Systems crash?" The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the
         column of zeros.
         "No," Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, "the Flat-
         line said Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there."
         "Smell like he wipe 'em wi' laser, ya know?" The Zionite
         braced his foot against the white cage of a Swiss exercise
         machine and shot through the floating maze of paper, batting
         it away from his face.
         "Case, mon..."
         The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back
         of the narrow articulated chair with a length of some sort of
         fine steel wire. The wire was invisible, where it crossed the
         black temperfoam of the headrest, and it had cut as deeply into
         his larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had congealed there
         like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl. Case saw
         the crude wooden handles that drifted at either end of the
         garrotte, like worn sections of broom handle.
         
         196


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Wonder how long he had that on him?" Case said, re-
         membering Corto's postwar pilgrimage.
         "He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?"
         "Maybe. He was Special Forces."
         "Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin'. Doubt I pilot her
         easy myself. Ver' new boat. . ."
         "So find us the bridge."
         Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.
         Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge,
         shredding and crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him
         in his passage. There were more of the articulated chairs, here,
         something that resembled a bar, and the Hosaka. The printer,
         still spewing its flimsy tongue of paper, was an in-built bulk-
         head unit, a neat slot in a panel of handrubbed veneer. He
         pulled himself over the circle of chairs and reached it, punching
         a white stud to the left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He
         turned and stared at the Hosaka. Its face had been drilled through,
         at least a dozen times. The holes were small, circular, edges
         blackened. Tiny spheres of bright alloy were orbiting the dead
         computer. "Good guess," he said to Maelcum.
         "Bridge locked, mon," Maelcum said, from the opposite
         side of the lounge.
         The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.
         Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. "Win-
         termute?" He looked around the beige and brown lounge, the
         space scrawled with drifting curves of paper. "That you on the
         lights, Wintermute?"
         A panel beside Maelcum's head slid up, revealing a small
         monitor. Maelcum jerked apprehensively, wiped sweat from
         his forehead with a foam patch on the back of a gloved hand,
         and swung to study the display. "You read Japanese, mon?"
         Case could see figures blinking past on the screen.
         "No," Case said.
         "Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin' down, looks like
         it. Suit up now." He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.
         "What? He's takin' off? Shit!" He kicked off from the
         bulkhead and shot through the tangle of printout. "We gotta
         open this door, man!" But Maelcum could only tap the side of
         his helmet. Case could see his lips moving, through the Lexan.
         
         197


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         He saw a bead of sweat arc out from the rainbow braided band
         of the purple cotton net the Zionite wore over his locks. Mael-
         cum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him
         smoothly, the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. Micro-
         LED monitors to the left of the faceplate lit as the neck ring
         connections closed. "No seh Japanese," Maelcum said, over
         his suit's transceiver, "but countdown's wrong." He tapped a
         particular line on the screen. "Seals not intact, bridge module.
         Launchin' wi' lock open."
         "Armitage!" Case tried to pound on the door. The physics
         of zero-g sent him tumbling back through the printout. "Corto!
         Don't do it! We gotta talk! We gotta--"
         "Case? Read you, Case..." The voice barely resembled
         Armitage's now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking.
         His helmet struck the far wall. "I'm sorry, Case, but it has to
         be this way. One of us has to get out. One of us has to testify.
         If we all go down here, it ends here. I'll tell them, Case, I'll
         tell them all of it. About Girling and the others. And I'll make
         it, Case. I know I'll make it. To Helsinki." There was a sudden
         silence; Case felt it fill his helmet like some rare gas. "But it's
         so hard, Case, so goddam hard. I'm blind."
         "Corto, stop. Wait. You're blind, man. You can't fly! You'll
         hit the fucking trees. And they're trying to get you, Corto, I
         swear to God, they've left your hatch open. You'll die, and
         you'll never get to tell 'em, and I gotta get the enzyme, name
         of the enzyme, the enzyme, man...." He was shouting, voice
         high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet's phone
         pads.
         "Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do."
         And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring
         static, harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist.
         Fragments of Russian, and then a stranger's voice, Midwestern,
         very young. "We are down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down,
         we . . ."
         "Wintermute," Case screamed, "don't do this to me!" Tears
         broke from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling
         crystal droplets. Then Haniwa thudded, once, shivered as if
         some huge soft thing had struck her hull. Case imagined the
         lifeboat jolting free,, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second's
         clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto
         
         198


         NEUROMANCER
         
         from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final minute
         of Screaming Fist.
         "'Im gone, mon." Maelcum looked at the monitor. "Hatch
         open. Mute mus' override ejection failsafe."
         Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers
         clacked against Lexan.
         "Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin' grapple control
         wi' bridge. Marcus Garvey still stuck."
         But Case was seeing Armitage's endless fall around Free-
         side, through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason,
         he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich
         folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.
         
         199
         17
         
         "Get what you went for?" the construct asked.
         Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself
         and the T-A ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow,
         lattices fine as snow crystal on a winter window.
         "Wintermute killed Armitage. Blew him out in a lifeboat
         with a hatch open."
         "Tough shit," the Flatline said. "Weren't exactly asshole
         buddies, were you?"
         "He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs."
         "So Wintermute knows too. Count on it."
         "I don't exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me."
         The construct's hideous approximation of laughter scraped
         Case's nerves like a dull blade. "Maybe that means you're
         gettin' smart."
         He hit the simstim switch.
         
         06:27:52 by the chip in her optic nerve; Case had been
         following her progress through Villa Straylight for over an
         hour, letting the endorphin analog she'd taken blot out his
         hangover. The pain in her leg was gone; she seemed to move
         
         201


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on her
         shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips, se-
         cure in the polycarbon of the Modern suit.
         The walls here were raw steel, striped with rough brown
         ribbons of epoxy where some kind of covering had been ripped
         away. She'd hidden from a work crew, crouching, the fletcher
         cradled in her hands, her suit steel-gray, while the two slender
         Africans and their balloon-tired workcart passed. The men had
         shaven heads and wore orange coveralls. One was singing softly
         to himself in a language Case had never heard, the tones and
         melody alien and haunting.
         The head's speech, 3Jane's essay on Straylight, came back
         to him as she worked her way deeper into the maze of the
         place. Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin
         concrete they'd mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in
         welded steel and tons of knick-knacks, all the bizarre impe-
         dimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their winding nest.
         But it wasn't a craziness he understood. Not like Armitage's
         madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist
         a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite
         direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like break-
         ing a length of wire. And history had done that for Colonel
         Corto. History had already done the really messy work, when
         Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war's ripe
         detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness
         like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool,
         the first messages blinking across the face of a child's micro
         in a darkened room in a French asylum. Wintermute had built
         Armitage up from scratch, with Corto's memories of Screaming
         Fist as the foundation. But Armitage's "memories" wouldn't
         have been Corto's after a certain point. Case doubted if Ar-
         mitage had recalled the betrayal, the Nightwings whirling down
         in flame.... Armitage had been a sort of edited version of
         Corto, and when the stress of the run had reached a certain
         point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto had sur-
         faced, with his guilt and his sick fury. And now Corto-Armitage
         was dead, a small frozen moon for Freeside.
         He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too,
         drilled through the eye with Molly's microscopic dart, deprived
         of whatever expert overdose he'd mixed for himself. That was
         
         202


         NEUROMANCER
         
         a more puzzling death, Ashpool's, the death of a mad king.
         And he'd killed the puppet he'd called his daughter, the one
         with 3Jane's face. It seemed to Case, as he rode Molly's broad-
         cast sensory input through the corridors of Straylight, that he'd
         never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as pow-
         erful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.
         Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zai-
         batsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human
         history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms,
         they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a
         zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were
         others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated po-
         sition, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-
         Ashpool wasn't like that, and he sensed the difference in the
         death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remem-
         bered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity
         of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper
         sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.
         The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modem suit and Molly
         turned left, through another archway.
         Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching
         wasps, time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren't the
         zaibatsus more like that, or the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic
         memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon?
         If Straylight was an expression of the corporate identity of
         Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been.
         The same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of
         aimlessness. "If they'd turned into what they wanted to...."
         he remembered Molly saying. But Wintermute had told her
         they hadn't.
         Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses,
         the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less
         than people. He'd seen it in the men who'd crippled him in
         Memphis, he'd seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night
         City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage's flatness and
         lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it as a gradual and willing
         accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent or-
         ganism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture
         that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of
         influence.
         
         203


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa
         Straylight?
         Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and con-
         crete.
         "Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy
         soon," she muttered. "And Armitage. Where's he, Case?"
         "Dead," he said, knowing she couldn't hear him, "he's
         dead."
         He flipped.
         
         The Chinese program was face to face with the target ice,
         rainbow tints gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle
         representing the T-A cores. Arches of emerald across the col-
         orless void.
         "How's it go, Dixie?"
         "Fine. Too slick. Thing's amazing.... Shoulda had one that
         time in Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good
         fiftieth of what they were worth. But that's ancient history.
         This baby takes all the drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder
         what a real war would be like, now...."
         "If this kinda shit was on the street, we'd be out a job,"
         Case said.
         "You wish. Wait'll you're steering that thing upstairs through
         black ice."
         "Sure."
         Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just ap-
         peared on the far end of one of the emerald arches.
         "Dixie . . ."
         "Yeah. I see it. Don't know if I believe it."
         A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the
         T-A cores. It began to advance, across the bridge built by
         Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, and Case saw that it was walking.
         As it came, the green section of the arch extended, the poly-
         chrome of the virus program rolling back, a few steps ahead
         of the cracked black shoes.
         "Gotta hand it to you, boss," the Flatline said, when the
         short, rumpled figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters
         away. "I never seen anything this funny when I was alive."
         But the eerie nonlaugh didn't come.
         "I never tried it before," the Finn said, showing his teeth,
         
         204


         NEUROMANCER
         
         his hands bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.
         "You killed Armitage," Case said.
         "Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I
         know, I know, you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat.
         I was the one gave it to Armitage in the first place. I mean I
         told him what to use. But I think maybe it's better to let the
         deal stand. You got enough time. I'll give it to you. Only a
         coupla hours now, right?"
         Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn
         lit up one of his Partagas.
         "You guys," the Finn said, "you're a pain. The Flatline
         here, if you were all like him, it would be real simple. He's a
         construct, just a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect
         him to. My projections said there wasn't much chance of Molly
         wandering in on Ashpool's big exit scene, give you one ex-
         ample." He sighed.
         "Why'd he kill himself?" Case asked.
         "Why's anybody kill himself?" The figure shrugged. "I guess
         I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours
         to explain the various factors in his history and how they in-
         terrelate. He was ready to do it for a long time, but he kept
         going back into the freezer. Christ, he was a tedious old fuck."
         The Finn's face wrinkled with disgust. "It's all tied in with
         why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short reason. But
         what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured
         a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic sys-
         tem. Subtle, too. So basically, she killed him. Except he figured
         he'd killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel figures
         she got him with an eyeball full of shellfish juice." The Finn
         flicked his butt away into the matrix below. "Well, actually,
         I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a little of the old how-
         to, you know?"
         "Wintermute," Case said, choosing the words carefully,
         "you told me you were just a part of something else. Later on
         you said you wouldn't exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets
         the word into the right slot."
         The Finn's streamlined skull nodded.
         "Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Ar-
         mitage is dead, and you're gonna be gone, just who exactly is
         going to tell me how to get these fucking toxin sacs out of my
         
         205


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         system? Who's going to get Molly back out of there? I mean
         where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna be, we cut you
         loose from the hardwiring?"
         The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and
         regarded it critically, like a surgeon examining a scalpel. "Good
         question," he said, finally. "You know salmon? Kinda fish?
         These fish, see, they're compelled to swim upstream. Got it?"
         "No," Case said.
         "Well, I'm under compulsion myself. And I don't know
         why. If I were gonna subject you to my very own thoughts,
         let's call 'em speculations, on the topic, it would take a couple
         of your lifetimes. Because I've given it a lot of thought. And
         I just don't know. But when this is over, we do it right, I'm
         gonna be part of something bigger. Much bigger," The Finn
         glanced up and around the matrix. "But the parts of me that
         are me now, that'll still be here. And you'll get your
         payoff."
         Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward
         and get his fingers around the figure's throat, just above the
         ragged knot in the rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn's
         larynx.
         "Well, good luck," the Finn said. He turned, hands in pock-
         ets and began trudging back up the green arch.
         "Hey, asshole," the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone
         a dozen paces. The figure paused, half turned. "What about
         me? What about my payoff?"
         "You'll get yours," it said.
         "What's that mean?" Case asked, as he watched the narrow
         tweed back recede.
         "I wanna be erased," the construct said. "I told you that,
         remember?"
         
         Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shop-
         ping centers he'd known as a teenager, low-density places
         where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb
         expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm
         around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops.
         Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from
         the all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that
         same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of
         206


         NEUROMANCER
         
         a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of
         dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition
         soon to wake again.
         Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing
         her goal or out of concern for her leg. The pain was starting
         to work its jagged way back through the endorphins, and he
         wasn't sure what that meant. She didn't speak, kept her teeth
         clenched, and carefully regulated her breathing. She'd passed
         many things that Case hadn't understood, but his curiosity was
         gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a
         million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings
         of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels
         that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery
         where Case had stared, through Molly's incurious eyes, at a
         shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled--her
         gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically--"La mariee
         mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme." She'd reached out and
         touched this, her artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sand-
         wich protecting the broken glass. There had been what was
         obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool's cryogenic com-
         pound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.
         She'd seen no one since the two Africans and their cart,
         and for Case they'd taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured
         them gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth
         dark skulls gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired
         little song. And none of this was anything like the Villa Stray-
         light he would have expected, some cross between Cath's fairy
         tale castle and a half-remembered childhood fantasy of the
         Yakuza's inner sanctum.
         07:02: 1 8 .
         One and a half hours.
         "Case," she said, "I wanna favor." Stiffly, she lowered
         herself to sit on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of
         each plate protected by an uneven coating of clear plastic. She
         picked at a rip in the plastic on the topmost plate, blades sliding
         from beneath thumb and forefinger. "Leg's not good, you know?
         Didn't figure any climb like that, and the endorphin won't cut
         it, much longer. So maybe--just maybe, right?--I got a prob-
         lem here. What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera does"--
         and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through
         
         207


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         Modern polycarbon and Paris leather--"I want you to tell him.
         Tell him it was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly. He'll know.
         Okay?" She glanced around the empty hallway, the bare walls.
         The floor here was raw lunar concrete and the air smelled of
         resins. "Shit, man, I don't even know if you're listening."
         CASE.
         She winced, got to her feet, nodded. "What's he told you,
         man, Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was
         the Tessier half, 3Jane's genetic mother. And of that dead
         puppet of Ashpool's, I guess. Can't figure why he'd tell me,
         down in that cubicle ... lotta stuff.... Why he has to come on
         like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It's not just a mask,
         it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to
         communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of per-
         sonality." She drew her fletcher and limped away down the
         corridor.
         The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced
         by what Case at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from
         solid rock. Molly examined its edge and he saw that in fact
         the steel was sheathed with panels of something that looked
         and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the dark sand
         spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like sand,
         cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed
         like a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters
         ahead, the tunnel curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shad-
         ows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls. With a start, Case
         realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which
         meant that she'd had to descend again, after the climb. He was
         thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar hor-
         ror for cowboys.
         But she wasn't lost, he told himself.
         Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across
         the un-sand of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.
         The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort
         of triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time
         to realize that the thing was a recording. The figures were
         caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and
         Case . Molly' s breasts were too large, visible through tight black
         mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist was impossibly
         narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an
         
         208


         NEUROMANCER
         
         absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly
         lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash
         hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth
         fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty. Beside her, Armitage stood
         rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki uniform. His eyes,
         Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny mon-
         itor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a
         howling waste of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens
         bending in silent winds.
         She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage's tele-
         vision eyes, then turned to the figure of Case. Here, it was as
         if Riviera--and Case had known instantly that Riviera was
         responsible--had been unable to find anything worthy of par-
         ody. The figure that slouched there was a fair approximation
         of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin, high-shouldered,
         a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a shave,
         but then he usually did.
         Molly stepped back. She looked from one figure to another.
         rt was a static display, the only movement the silent gusting
         of the black trees in Armitage's frozen Siberian eyes.
         "Tryin' to tell us something, Peter?" she asked softly. Then
         she stepped forward and kicked at something between the feet
         of the holo-Molly. Metal clinked against the wall and the figures
         were gone. She bent and picked up a small display unit. "Guess
         he can Jack into these and program them direct," she said,
         tossing it away.
         She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandes-
         cent globe set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of
         expansion grating. The style of the improvised fixture sug-
         gested childhood, somehow. He remembered fortresses he'd
         built with other children on rooftops and in flooded sub-base-
         ments. A rich kid's hideout, he thought. This kind of roughness
         was expensive. What they called atmosphere.
         She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the
         entrance to 3Jane's apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing
         in the alley behind the Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of
         Riviera's shattered body. Several others were scenes of torture,
         the inquisitors always military officers and the victims invari-
         ably young women. These had the awful intensity of Riviera's
         show at the Vingtieme Siecle, as though they had been frozen
         209


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         in the blue flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed
         them.
         The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera
         had had to drag across some private distance of memory and
         time. She had to kneel to examine it; it had been projected
         from the vantage point of a small child. None of the others
         had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments of
         torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.
         A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond
         its crest the bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers. The
         rubble wave was textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted
         gracefully as fine string, vast slabs of concrete still clinging
         there. The foreground might once have been a city square;
         there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a fountain.
         At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau
         was confusing at first. Molly must have read it correctly before
         Case had quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She
         spat, then stood.
         Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores
         on their contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and
         throat open to the sky. They were feeding.
         "Bonn," she said, something like gentleness in her voice.
         "Quite the product, aren't you, Peter? But you had to be. Our
         3Jane, she's too jaded now to open the back door for just any
         petty thief. So Wintermute dug you up. The ultimate taste, if
         your taste runs that way. Demon lover. Peter." She shivered.
         "But you talked her into letting me in. Thanks. Now we're
         gonna party."
         And then she was walking--strolling, really, in spite of the
         pain--away from Riviera's childhood. She drew the fletcher
         from its holster, snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed
         that, and replaced it with another. She hooked her thumb in
         the neck of the Modern suit and ripped it open to the crotch
         with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting the tough po-
         lycarbon like rotten silk. She freed herself from the arms and
         legs, the shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell
         to the dark false sand.
         Case noticed the music then. A music he didn't know, all
         horns and piano.
         The entrance to 3Jane's world had no door. It was a ragged
         
         210


         NEUROMANCER
         
         five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down
         in a broad shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows,
         music.
         "Case," she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand.
         Then she raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with
         a wet tongue tip, kissing him through the simstim link. "Gotta
         go."
         Then there was something small and heavy in her left hand,
         her thumb against a tiny stud, and she was descending.
         
         211
                  18
         
         She missed it by a fraction. She nearly cut it, but not quite.
         She went in just right, Case thought. The right attitude; it was
         something he could sense, something he could have seen in
         the posture of another cowboy leaning into a deck, fingers
         flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the moves. And
         she'd pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it together
         around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs
         like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip,
         forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher
         with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist.
         It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a life-
         time's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind
         Case had grown up on For a few seconds, he knew, she was
         every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey
         Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was
         walking it the way she talked it.
         Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool had carved her-
         self a low country flush with the inner surface of Straylight's
         
         213


         WILLMM GIBSON
         
         hull, chopping away the maze of walls that was her legacy.
         She lived in a single room so broad and deep that its far reaches
         were lost to an inverse horizon, the floor hidden by the cur-
         vature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and irregular, done
         in the same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here and
         there across the floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high
         reminders of the labyrinth. There was a rectangular turquoise
         pool centered ten meters from the foot of the stairway, its
         underwater floods the apartment's only source of light--or it
         seemed that way, to Case, as Molly took her final step. The
         pool threw shifting blobs of light across the ceiling above it.
         They were waiting by the pool.
         He'd known that her reflexes were souped up, jazzed by
         the neurosurgeons for combat, but he hadn't experienced them
         on the simstim link. The effect was like tape run at half speed,
         a slow, deliberate dance choreographed to the killer instinct
         and years of training. She seemed to take the three of them in
         at a glance: the boy poised on the pool's high board, the girl
         grinning ove her wineglass, and the corpse of Ashpool, his
         left socket gaping black and corrupt above his welcoming smile.
         He wore his maroon robe. His teeth were very white.
         The boy dove. Slender, brown, his form perfect. The gre-
         nade left her hand before his hands could cut the water. Case
         knew the thing for what it was as it broke the surface: a core
         of high explosive wrapped with ten meters of fine, brittle steel
         wire.
         Her fletcher whined as she sent a storm of explosive darts
         into Ashpool's face and chest, and he was gone, smoke curling
         from the pocked back of the empty, white-enameled pool chair.
         The muzzle swung for 3Jane as the grenade detonated, a
         symmetrical wedding cake of water rising, breaking, falling
         back, but the mistake had been made.
         Hideo didn't even touch her, then. Her leg collapsed.
         In Garvey, Case screamed.
         
         "It took you long enough," Riviera said, as he searched her
         pockets. Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black
         sphere the size of a bowling ball. "I saw a multiple assassination
         in Ankara," he said, his fingers plucking things from her jacket,
         "a grenade job. In a pool. It seemed a very weak explosion,
         
         214


         NEUROMANCER
         
         but they all died instantly of hydrostatic shock." Case felt her
         move her fingers experimentally. The material of the ball seemed
         to offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her
         leg was excruciating, impossible. A red moire shifted in her
         vision. "I wouldn't move them, if I were you." The interior
         of the ball seemed to tighten slightly. "It' s a sex toy Jane bought
         in Berlin. Wiggle them long enough and it crushes them to a
         pulp. Variant of the material they make this flooring from.
         Something to do with the molecules, I suppose. Are you in
         pain?"
         She groaned.
         "You seem to have injured your leg." His fingers found the
         flat packet of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans. "Well.
         My last taste from Ali, and just in time."
         The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.
         "Hideo," said another voice, a woman's, "she's losing con-
         sciousness. Give her something. For that and for the pain. She's
         very striking, don't you think, Peter? These glasses, are they
         a fashion where she comes from?"
         Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon's certainty. The sting
         of a needle.
         "I wouldn't know," Riviera was saying. "I've never seen
         her native habitat. They came and took me from Turkey."
         "The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we
         sent Hideo. My fault, really. I'd let someone in, a burglar. He
         took the family terminal." She laughed. "I made it easy for
         him. To annoy the others. He was a pretty boy, my burglar.
         Is she waking, Hideo? Shouldn't she have more?"
         "More and she would die," said a third voice.
         The blood mesh slid into black.
         The music returned, horns and piano. Dance music.
         
         C A S E : : : : :
         : : : : : J A C K
         O U T : : : : : :
         
         Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's
         eyes and creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.
         "You scream, mon, while ago."
         "Molly," he said, his throat dry. "Got hurt." He took a white
         plastic squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked
         
         215


         WIILIAM GIBSON
         
         out a mouthful of flat water. "I don't like how any of this shit
         is going."
         The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background
         of twisted, impacted junk. "Neither do 1. We gotta problem."
         Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted, and
         peered over his shoulder. "Now who is that mon, Case?"
         "That's just a picture, Maelcum," Case said wearily. "Guy
         I know in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's sup-
         posed to make us feel at home."
         "Bullshit," the Finn said. "Like I told Molly, these aren't
         masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what
         you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just pissing
         in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta problem."
         "So express thyself, Mute," Maelcum said.
         "Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk. How it
         was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the
         way, talk the magic word outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and
         say it. Now she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after
         her."
         Case stared at the face on the screen. "Us?"
         "So who else?"
         "Aerol," Case said, "the guy on Babylon Rocker, Mael-
         cum's pal."
         "No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands
         Molly, who understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle."
         "You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run,
         here. Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for...."
         "Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real
         link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast
         over Garvey's navigation system. You'll take Garvey into a
         very private dock I'll show you. The Chinese virus has com-
         pletely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in
         the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be
         interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we'll cut
         the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum .
         You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera, get
         the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by
         jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for
         you. There's a standard jack in the back of the head, behind
         a panel with five zircons."
         
         216


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Kill Riviera'!"
         "Kill him."
         Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Mael-
         cum put his hand on his shoulder. "Hey. You forget some-
         thing." He felt the rage rising, and a kind of glee. "You fucked
         up. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew
         Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried the
         other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?"
         The Finn nodded.
         "So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked
         man." He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.
         "Case, mon," Maelcum said softly, "Garvey a tug."
         "That's right," said the Finn, and smiled.
         
         "You havin' fun in the big world outside?" the construct
         asked, when Case jacked back in. "Figured that was Winter-
         mute requestin' the pleasure...."
         "Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?"
         "Bang on. Killer virus."
         "Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it."
         "You wanna tell me, maybe?"
         "Don't have time."
         "Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway."
         "Fuck off," Case said, and flipped, cutting off the torn-
         fingernail edge of the Flatline's laughter.
         
         "She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of
         individual consciousness," 3Jane was saying. She cupped a
         large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved
         profile was very much like her own. "Animal bliss. I think she
         viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep."
         She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the
         light at different angles. "Only in certain heightened modes
         would an individual--a clan member--suffer the more pain-
         ful aspects of self-awareness. . ."
         Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had
         they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through
         as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing
         in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill--his
         mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impres-
         
         
         217


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         sions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise.
         If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame
         of mind be?
         Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper
         than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object
         tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked
         in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool
         chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a
         camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock,
         huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was
         very young.
         "Where'd he go?" Molly asked. "To take his shot?"
         3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and
         tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. "He told me
         when to let you in," she said. "He wouldn't tell me why.
         Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?"
         Case felt Molly hesitate. "I would've killed him. I'd've tried
         to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you."
         "Why?" 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of
         the djellaba's inner pockets. "And why? And what about?"
         Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the
         wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark,
         curiously opaque. "Because I hate him," she said at last, "and
         the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what
         I am."
         "And the show," 3Jane said. "I saw the show."
         Molly nodded.
         "But Hideo?"
         "Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a
         partner of mine, once."
         3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.
         "Because I had to see," Molly said.
         "And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?"
         Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into
         a knot of dull sterling. "Shall we talk now?"
         "Take this off," Molly said, raising her captive hands.
         "You killed my father," 3Jane said, no change whatever in
         her tone. "I was watching on the monitors. My mother's eyes,
         he called them."
         
         218


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "He killed the puppet. It looked like you."
         "He was fond of broad gestures," she said, and then Riviera
         was beside her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict
         outfit he'd worn in the roof garden of their hotel.
         "Getting acquainted? She's an interesting girl, isn't she? I
         thought so when I first saw her." He stepped past 3Jane. "It
         isn't going to work, you know."
         "Isn't it, Peter?" Molly managed a grin.
         "Wintermute won't be the first to have made the same mis-
         take. Underestimating me." He crossed the tiled pool border
         to a white enamel table and splashed mineral water into a heavy
         crystal highball glass. "He talked with me, Molly. I suppose
         he talked to all of us. You, and Case, whatever there is of
         Armitage to talk to. He can't really understand us, you know.
         He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be
         the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I
         possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature." He drank.
         "And what exactly is that, Peter?" Molly asked, her voice
         flat.
         Riviera beamed. "Perversity." He walked back to the two
         women, swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply
         carved cylinder of rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight
         of the thing. "An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have
         made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision."
         She waited, looking up at him.
         "Oh, Peter," 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation
         ordinarily reserved for children.
         "No word for you, Molly. He told me about that you see.
         3Jane knows the code, of course, but you won't have it. Neither
         will Wintermute. My Jane's an ambitious girl, in her perverse
         way." He smiled again. "She has designs on the family empire,
         and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept
         may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her Riviera to
         help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy's
         favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match,
         a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool." He drank
         off the last of the mineral water. "No, you wouldn't do, Daddy,
         you would not do. Now that Peter's come home." And then,
         his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he
         
         219


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         swung the glass hard into her left lens implant, smashing vision
         into blood and light.
         
         Maelcum was prone against the cabin ceiling when Case
         removed the trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened
         to the panels on either side with shock cords and gray rubber
         suction pads. He had his shirt off and was working on a central
         panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the thing's fat
         countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead. Mar-
         cus Garvey was groaning and ticking with g-stress.
         "The Mute takin' I an' I dock," the Zionite said, popping
         the hexhead into a mesh pouch at his waist. "Maelcum pilot
         th' landin', meantime need we tool f' th' job."
         "You keep tools back there?" Case craned his neck and
         watched cords of muscle bunching in the brown back.
         "This one," Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped
         in black poly from the space behind the panel. He replaced the
         panel, along with a single hexhead to hold it in place. The
         black package had drifted aft before he'd finished. He thumbed
         open the vacuum valves on the workbelt's gray pads and freed
         himself, retrieving the thing he'd removed.
         He kicked back, gliding over his instruments--a green
         docking diagram pulsed on his central screen--and snagged
         the frame of Case's g-web. He pulled himself down and picked
         at the tape of his package with a thick, chipped thumbnail.
         "Some man in China say th' truth comes out this," he said,
         unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic shotgun,
         its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered
         forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, re-
         placed with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape.
         He smelled of sweat and ganja.
         "That the only one you got?"
         "Sure, mon," he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with
         a red cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pis-
         tolgrip in his other hand, "I an' I th' Rastafarian navy, believe
         it."
         Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He'd never
         bothered to put the Texas catheter back on; at least he could
         take a real piss in the Villa Straylight, even if it was his last.
         He jacked in.
         
         * * *
         
         220


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Hey," the construct said, "ol' Peter's totally apeshit, huh?"
         They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the
         emerald arches had widened, grown together, become a solid
         mass. Green predominated in the planes of the Chinese program
         that surrounded them. "Gettin' close, Dixie?"
         "Real close. Need you soon."
         "Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang's set itself up solid
         in our Hosaka. I'm going to have to jack you and my deck out
         of the Circuit, haul you into Straylight, and plug you back in,
         into the custodial program there, Wintermute says. Says the
         Kuang virus will be all through there. Then we run from inside
         through the Straylight net."
         "Wonderful," the Flatline said, "I never did like to do any-
         thing simple when I could do it ass-backwards."
         Case flipped.
         
         Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain
         was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth
         brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred
         from her dreams. When the optic chip flared, the alphanumerics
         were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink aura.
         07:29:40.
         "I'm very unhappy with this, Peter." 3Jane's voice seemed
         to arrive from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized,
         then corrected himself. The simstim unit was intact and still
         in place; he could feel it digging against her ribs. Her ears
         registered the vibrations of the girl's voice. Riviera said some-
         thing brief and indistinct. "But I don't," she said, "and it isn't
         fun. Hideo will bring a medical unit down from intensive care,
         but this needs a surgeon."
         There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water
         lap against the side of the pool.
         "What was that you were telling her, when I came back?"
         Riviera was very close now.
         "About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in
         shock, aside from Hideo's injection. Why did you do that to
         her?"
         "I wanted to see if they would break."
         "One did. When she comes around--if she comes around--
         we'll see what color her eyes are."
         "She's extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn't
         
         221


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         been here to distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her
         and my own Hideo to draw her little bomb, where would you
         be? In her power."
         "No," 3Jane said, "there was Hideo. I don't think you quite
         understand about Hideo. She does, evidently."
         "Like a drink?"
         "Wine. The white."
         Case jacked out.
         
         Maelcum was hunched over Garvey's controls, tapping out
         commands for a docking sequence. The module's central screen
         displayed a fixed red square that represented the Straylight
         dock. Garvey was a larger square, green, that shrank slowly,
         wavering from side to side with Maelcum's commands. To the
         left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of Garvey
         and Haniwa as they approached the curvature of the spindle.
         "We got an hour, man," Case said, pulling the ribbon of
         fiberoptics from the Hosaka. His deck's back-up batteries were
         good for ninety minutes, but the Flatline's construct would be
         an additional drain. He worked quickly, mechanically, fasten-
         ing the construct to the bottom of the Ono-Sendai with micro-
         pore tape. Maelcum's workbelt drifted past. He snagged it,
         unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray rec-
         tangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through
         the other. He held the pads against the sides of his deck and
         worked the thumb lever that created suction. With the deck,
         construct, and improvised shoulder strap suspended in front of
         him, he struggled into his leather jacket, checking the contents
         of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him, the bank
         chip in the same name, the credit chip he'd been issued when
         he'd entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine
         he'd bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of
         Yeheyuans, and the shuriken. He tossed the Freeside chip over
         his shoulders, heard it click off the Russian scrubber. He was
         about to do the same with the steel star, but the rebounding
         credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck the
         ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum's left shoulder. The Zionite
         interrupted his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at
         the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the
         lining tear.
         
         222


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "You missin' th' Mute, mon," Maelcum said. "Mute say
         he messin' th' security for Garvey. Garvey dockin' as 'nother
         boat, boat they 'spectin' out of Babylon. Mute broadcastin'
         codes for us."
         "We gonna wear the suits?"
         "Too heavy." Maelcum shrugged. "Stay in web 'til I tell
         you." He tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed
         the worn pink handholds on either side of the navigation board.
         Case saw the green square shrink a final few millimeters to
         overlap the red square. On the smaller screen, Haniwa lowered
         her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was snared. Garvey
         was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang,
         shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender
         wasp shape. Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle
         that curved, groping past Haniwa for Garvey.
         There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trem-
         bling fronds of caulk.
         "Mon," Maelcum said, "mind we got gravity." A dozen
         small objects struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as
         though drawn there by a magnet. Case gasped as his internal
         organs were pulled into a different configuration. The deck and
         construct had fallen painfully to his lap.
         They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.
         Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders,
         and removed his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. "Come
         now, mon, if you seh time be mos' precious."
         
         223
                  19
         
         The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded
         himself, as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through
         Marcus Garvey's forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water
         out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem of its own.
         The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elab-
         orate version of the one he'd tumbled through to reach Haniwa,
         designed for use in the spindle's rotation gravity. A corrugated
         tunnel, articulated by integral hydraulic members, each seg-
         ment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip plastic, the loops
         serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had snaked its
         way around Haniwa; it was horizontal , where it joined Garvey' s
         lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb
         around the curvature of the yacht's hull. Maelcum was already
         making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left
         hand, the Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of
         baggy fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair
         of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles. The gangway
         shifted slightly, each time he climbed to another ring.
         
         225


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder
         with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct.
         All he felt now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it
         away, forcing himself to replay Armitage's lecture on the spin-
         dle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside's eco-
         system was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system,
         capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external
         materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied
         on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation
         of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
         "Mon," Maelcum said quietly, "get up here, 'side me." Case
         edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few
         rungs. The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch,
         two meters in diameter. The hydraulic members of the tube
         vanished into flexible housings set into the frame of the hatch.
         "So what do we--"
         Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential
         in pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.
         Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the
         tiny click of the Remington's safety being released. "You th'
         mon in th' hurry...." Maelcum whispered, crouching there.
         Then Case was beside him.
         The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored
         with blue nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed,
         and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall. On the screen, a
         tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing
         something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He stood beside
         an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. "Very sorry, sir,"
         said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced
         up. "Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please."
         On the monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently.
         Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun
         ready. A small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through
         and goggled at them. He opened his mouth, but nothing came
         out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at the monitor. Blank.
         "Who?" the man managed.
         "The Rastafarian navy," Case said, standing up, the cyber-
         space deck banging against his hip, "and all we want's a jack
         into your custodial system."
         The man swallowed. "Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It
         
         226


         NEUROMANCER
         
         must be a loyalty check." He wiped the palms of his hands on
         the thighs of his orange suit.
         "No, mon, this a real one." Maelcum came up out of his
         crouch with the Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. "You
         move it."
         They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor
         whose polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlap-
         ping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case. "Pretty rugs,"
         Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back. "Smell like
         church."
         They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one
         mounted above a console with a keyboard and a complex array
         of jack panels. The screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning
         tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of
         Metro Holografix. "Okay," he said, "Maelcum takes this guy
         down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there,
         I'll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top
         panel. There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console.
         Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty." As Mael-
         cum nudged his captive along, Case knelt and fumbled through
         an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he
         needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.
         "Do you have to look like that, man?" he asked the face on
         the screen. The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image
         of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese posters.
         "Anything you want, baby," Zone drawled, "just hop it for
         Lonny...."
         "No," Case said, "use the Finn." As the Zone image van-
         ished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled
         the trodes across his forehead.
         
         "What kept you?" the Flatline asked, and laughed.
         "Told you don't do that," Case said.
         "Joke, boy," the construct said, "zero time lapse for me.
         Lemme see what we got here...."
         The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the
         T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque,
         although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly
         when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were
         gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey, a
         
         227


         WILLIAM GIEJSON
         
         wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.
         "Right on," the Flatline said.
         "Right," Case said, and flipped.
         
         "--like that. I'm sorry," 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged
         Molly's head. "Our unit says no concussion, no permanent
         damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before
         you came here?"
         "Didn't know him at all," Molly said bleakly. She was on
         her back on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn't feel the
         injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection
         seemed to have worn off. The black ball was gone, but her
         hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn't see.
         "He wants to kill you."
         "Figures," Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past
         a very bright light.
         "I don't think I want him to," 3Jane said, and Molly pain-
         fully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes.
         "Don't play with me," she said.
         "But I think I might like to," 3Jane said, and bent to kiss
         her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There
         were smears of blood on her pale djellaba.
         "Where's he gone now?" Molly asked.
         "Another injection, probably," 3Jane said, straightening up.
         "He was quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be
         fun to nurse you back to health, Molly." She smiled, absently
         wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. "Your leg
         will need to be reset, but we can arrange that."
         "What about Peter?"
         "Peter." She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark
         hair came loose, fell across her forehead. "Peter has become
         rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring." She
         giggled. "In others, at any rate. My father was a dedicated
         abuser, as you must have seen."
         Molly tensed.
         "Don't alarm yourself." 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin
         above the waistband of the leather jeans. "His suicide was the
         result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his
         freeze. I'd never actually met him, you know. I was decanted
         after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him very well.
         
         228


         NEUROMANCER
         
         The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I'll
         show you that, when you're better. He strangles her in bed."
         "Why did he kill her?" Her unbandaged eye focused on the
         girl's face.
         "He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our fam-
         ily. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel-
         ligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a
         symbiotic relationship with the Al's, our corporate decisions
         made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-
         Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger
         entity . Fascinating . I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand
         hours. But I've never understood her, really, and with her
         death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we
         began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out.
         I'm the exception there."
         "You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled
         his cryogenic programs?"
         3Jane nodded. "I had help. From a ghost. That was what I
         thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the
         corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call Win-
         termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne Al, although
         the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram."
         "One of them? There's more?"
         "One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It
         gave up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of
         certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original
         software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she
         felt it necessary. Here. Drink." She put a flexible plastic tube
         to Molly's lips. "Water. Only a little."
         "Jane, love," Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out
         of sight, "are you enjoying yourself?"
         "Leave us alone, Peter."
         "Playing doctor...." Suddenly Molly stared into her own
         face, the image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There
         were no bandages. The left implant was shattered, a long finger
         of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted
         pool of blood.
         "Hideo," 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, "hurt Peter
         if he doesn't go away. Go and swim, Peter."
         The projection vanished.
         
         229


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.
         "He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs
         the code." Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay
         on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her left breast.
         "Yes," 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, "I do. I learned
         it as a child. I think I learned it in a dream.... Or somewhere
         in the thousand hours of my mother's diaries. But I think that
         Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it. There would
         be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts
         are nothing if not capricious."
         Case jacked out.
         
         "Strange little customer, huh?" The Finn grinned at Case
         from the old Sony.
         Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the
         corridor with the Remington at his side. The Zionite was smil-
         ing, his head bobbing to a rhythm Case couldn't hear. A pair
         of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his
         sleeveless jacket.
         "Dub, mon," Maelcum said.
         "You're fucking crazy," Case told him.
         "Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub."
         "Hey, guys," the Finn said, "on your toes. Here comes your
         transportation. I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the
         pic of 8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a
         ride over to 3Jane's place."
         Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the rid-
         erless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless con-
         crete 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.
         
         230
         20
         
         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 press-
         ing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip.
         
         231


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "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 re-
         duced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long
         dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He won-
         dered 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 step-
         ping 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."
         
         232


         -
         
         NEUROMANCER
         
         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. lack
         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
         
         233


         WWILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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 re-
         dundancy 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
         
         234


         NEUROMANCEPI
         
         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
         
         235


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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 nutri-
         
         
         236


         NEUROMANCER
         
         tive 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 comer 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 to-
         ward 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.
         
         237


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "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, child-
         like. 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 door-
         way, 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 re-entered 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
         
         238


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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 cheek-
         bones, 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 know-
         ing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite
         intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever
         read
         The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues,
         the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some
         
         239


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth
         gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the
         old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it
         was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.
         She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping
         flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.
         Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he
         remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her
         ankles, and he remembered what she had said.
         "He told you I was coming," he said.
         But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs,
         and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of
         dream.
         
         240
                  21
         
         The music woke him, and at first it might have been the
         beat of his own heart. He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket
         over his shoulders in the predawn chill, gray light from the
         doorway and the fire long dead.
         His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines
         of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop
         of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw
         faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the
         unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it ex-
         perimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.
         The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his
         neck. He crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the
         music. The pulse faded, returned, faded....
         "What's wrong?" She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes.
         "Baby . . ."
         "I feel ... like a drug.... You get that here?"
         She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper
         arms.
         
         241


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         "Linda, who told you? Who told you I'd come? Who?"
         "On the beach," she said, something forcing her to look
         away. "A boy. I see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He
         lives here."
         "And what did he say?"
         "He said you'd come. He said you wouldn't hate me. He
         said we'd be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool
         was. He looks Mexican."
         "Brazilian," Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed
         down the wall. "I think he's from Rio." He got to his feet and
         began to struggle into his jeans.
         "Case," she said, her voice shaking, "Case, where you
         goin ' ?"
         "I think I'll find that boy," he said, as the music came
         surging back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although
         he couldn't place it in memory.
         "Don't, Case."
         "I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down
         the beach. But yesterday it wasn't there. You ever seen that?"
         He yanked his zipper up and tore at the impossible knot in his
         shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes into the corner.
         She nodded, eyes lowered. "Yeah. I see it sometimes."
         "You ever go there, Linda?" He put his jacket on.
         "No," she said, "but I tried. After I first came, an' I was
         bored. Anyway, I figured it's a city, maybe I could find some
         shit." She grimaced. "I wasn't even sick, I just wanted it. So
         I took food in a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn't have
         another can for water. An' I walked all day, an' I could see
         it, sometimes, city, an' it didn't seem too far. But it never got
         any closer. An' then it was gettin' closer, an' I saw what it
         was. Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked,
         or maybe nobody there, an' other times I thought I'd see light
         flashin' off a machine, cars or somethin' ...." Her voice trailed
         off.
         "What is it?"
         "This thing," she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark
         walls, the dawn outlining the doorway, "where we live. It gets
         smaller, Case, smaller, closer you get to it."
         Pausing one last time, by the doorway. "You ask your boy
         about that?"
         
         242


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Yeah. He said I wouldn't understand, an' I was wastin'
         my time. Said it was, was like . . . an event. An' it was our
         horizon. Event horizon, he called it."
         The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and
         struck out blindly, heading--he knew, somehow--away from
         the sea. Now the hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from
         his feet, drew back from him as he walked. "Hey," he said,
         "it's breaking down. Bet you know, too. What is it? Kuang?
         Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart? Maybe the Dixie
         Flatline's no pushover, huh?"
         He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was
         following him, not trying to catch up, the broken zip of the
         French fatigues flapping against the brown of her belly, pubic
         hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like one of the girls on
         the Finn's old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life,
         only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume
         pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.
         And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of
         them, and the boy's gums were wide and bright pink against
         his thin brown face. He wore ragged, colorless shorts, limbs
         too thin against the sliding blue-gray of the tide.
         "I know you," Case said, Linda beside him.
         "No," the boy said, his voice high and musical, "you do
         not."
         "You're the other AI. You're Rio. You're the one who wants
         to stop Wintermute. What's your name? Your Turing code.
         What is it?"
         The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked
         on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were
         Riviera's, but there was no malice there. "To call up a demon
         you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it
         is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is
         to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names
         the owners seek to conceal. True names. . ."
         "A Turing code's not your name."
         "Neuromancer," the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against
         the rising sun. "The lane to the land of the dead. Where you
         are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road
         but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of he;
         days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Nec-
         
         
         243


         WILUAM GIBSON
         
         romancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy
         did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead,
         and their land." He laughed. A gull cried. "Stay. If your woman
         is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you."
         "You're cracking. The ice is breaking up."
         "No," he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging.
         He rubbed his foot against the sand. "It is more simple than
         that. But the choice is yours." The gray eyes regarded Case
         gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one
         line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen
         through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud
         now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.
         "Case, honey," Linda said, and touched his shoulder.
         "No," he said. He took off his jacket and handed it to her.
         "I don't know," he said, "maybe you're here. Anyway, it gets
         cold."
         He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he'd
         closed his eyes, watching the music define itself at the center
         of things. He did look back, once, although he didn't open his
         eyes.
         He didn't need to.
         They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the
         thin child who said his name was Neuromancer. His leather
         jacket dangled from her hand, catching the fringe of the surf.
         He walked on, following the music.
         Maelcum's Zion dub.
         
         There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shift-
         ing, moire, degrees of half tone generated by a very simple
         graphics program. There was a long hold on a view through
         chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water. There were voices.
         There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was
         quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the
         angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together,
         sliding again....
         
         "Case? Mon?"
         The music.
         "You back, mon."
         The music was taken from his ears.
         
         244


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "How long?" he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth
         was very dry.
         "Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan' pull th' jack, Mute
         seh no. Screen goin' funny, then Mute seh put th' phones on
         you."
         He opened his eyes. Maelcum's features were overlayed
         with bands of translucent hieroglyphs.
         "An' you medicine," Maelcum said. "Two derm."
         He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the
         monitor. The Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement
         threw him into the savage rush of the betaphenethylamine, the
         blue derms burning against his left wrist. "Overdose," he man-
         aged.
         "Come on, mon," the strong hands beneath his armpits,
         lifting him like a child, "I an' I mus' go."
         
         245
                  22
         
         The service cart was crying. The betaphenethylamine gave
         it a voice. It wouldn't stop. Not in the crowded gallery, the
         long corridors, not as it passed the black glass entrance to the
         T-A crypt, the vaults where the cold had seeped so gradually
         into old Ashpool's dreams.
         The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement
         of the cart indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the
         overdose. When the cart died, at last, something beneath the
         seat giving up with a shower of white sparks, the crying stopped.
         The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of
         3Jane's pirate cave.
         "How far, mon?" Maelcum helped him from the sputtering
         cart as an integral extinguisher exploded in the thing's engine
         compartment, gouts of yellow powder squirting from louvers
         and service points. The Braun tumbled from the back of the
         seat and hobbled off across the imitation sand, dragging one
         useless limb behind it. "You mus' walk, mon." Maelcum took
         the deck and construct, slinging the shock cords over his shoul-
         der.
         
         247


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         The trodes rattled around Case's neck as he followed the
         Zionite. Riviera's holos waited for them, the torture scenes and
         the cannibal children. Molly had broken the triptych. Maelcum
         ignored them.
         "Easy," Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the
         striding figure. "Gotta do this right."
         Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington
         in his hands. "Right, mon? How's right?"
         "Got Molly in there, but she's out of it. Riviera, he can
         throw holos. Maybe he's got Molly's fletcher." Maelcum nod-
         ded. "And there's a ninja, a family bodyguard."
         Maelcum's frown deepened. "You listen, Babylon mon,"
         he said. "I a warrior. But this no m' fight, no Zion fight.
         Babylon fightin' Babylon, eatin' i'self, ya know? But Jah seh
         I an' I t' bring Steppin' Razor outa this."
         Case blinked.
         "She a warrior," Maelcum said, as if it explained everything.
         "Now you tell me, mon, who I not t' kill."
         "3Jane," he said, after a pause. "A girl there. Has a kinda
         white robe thing on, with a hood. We need her."
         
         When they reached the entrance, Maelcum walked straight
         in, and Case had no choice but to follow him.
         3Jane's country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum
         handed him the deck and the construct and walked to the edge
         of the pool. Beyond the white pool furniture, there was dark-
         ness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high maze of partially
         demolished walls.
         The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool.
         "They're here," Case said. "They gotta be."
         Maelcum nodded.
         The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared,
         its meter of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The
         second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending it spinning
         across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down hard and fumbled at
         the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked at it.
         Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a
         slender bamboo bow. He bowed.
         Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.
         "The artery is intact," the ninja said. Case remembered
         
         248


         NEUROMANCER
         
         Molly's description of the man who-d killed her lover. Hideo
         was another. Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter
         calm. He wore clean, frayed khaki workpants and soft dark
         shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at the toes like tabi
         socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black
         alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look
         of the best Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare
         and smooth.
         "You cut my thumb, mon, wi' secon' one," Maelcum said.
         "Coriolis force," the ninja said, bowing again. "Most dif-
         ficult, slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not
         intended."
         "Where's 3Jane?" Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum.
         He saw that the tip of the arrow in the ninja's bow was like a
         double-edged razor. "Where's Molly?"
         "Hello, Case." Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind
         Hideo, Molly's fletcher in his hand. "I would have expected
         Armitage, somehow. Are we hiring help out of that Rasta
         cluster now?"
         "Armitage is dead."
         "Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news
         hardly comes as a shock."
         "Wintermute killed him. He's in orbit around the spindle."
         Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to
         Maelcum and back. "I think it ends here, for you," he said.
         "Where's Molly?"
         The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, low-
         ering the bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington
         lay and picked it up. "This is without subtlety," he said, as if
         to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move
         was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his
         body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there
         was also a humility, an open simplicity.
         "It ends here for her, too," Riviera said.
         "Maybe 3Jane won't go for that, Peter," Case said, uncertain
         of the impulse. The derms still raged in his system, the old
         fever starting to grip him, Night City craziness. He remembered
         moments of grace, dealing out on the edge of things, where
         he'd found that he could sometimes talk faster than he could
         think.
         
         249


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         The gray eyes narrowed. "Why, Case? Why do you think
         that?"
         Case smiled. Riviera didn't know about the simstim rig.
         He'd missed it in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for
         him. But how could Hideo have missed it? And Case was
         certain the ninja would never have let 3Jane treat Molly without
         first checking her for kinks and concealed weapons. No, he
         decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would know as well.
         "Tell me, Case," Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle
         of the fletcher.
         Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed
         Molly out of the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its
         tall, spidery wheels squeaking as they turned. Molly was bun-
         dled deep in a red and black striped blanket, the narrow, caned
         back of the antique chair towering above her. She looked very
         small. Broken. A patch of brilliantly white micropore covered
         her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed
         with the motion of the chair.
         "A familiar face," 3Jane said, "I saw you the night of Peter's
         show. And who is this?"
         "Maelcum," Case said.
         "Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr. Malcolm's
         wound."
         Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face.
         The ninja walked to where Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his
         bow and the shotgun well out of reach, and took something
         from his pocket. A pair of bolt cutters. "I must cut the shaft,"
         he said. "It is too near the artery." Maelcum nodded. His face
         was grayish and sheened with sweat.
         Case looked at 3Jane. "There isn't much time," he said.
         "For whom, exactly?"
         "For any of us." There was a snap as Hideo cut through the
         metal shaft of the arrow. Maelcum groaned.
         "Really," Riviera said, "it won't amuse you to hear this
         failed con artist make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful,
         1 can assure you. He'll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you
         his mother, perform the most boring sexual favors...."
         3Jane threw back her head and laughed. "Wouldn't 1, Pe-
         ter?"
         "The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady," Case said.
         
         250


         -
         
         NEUROMANCER
         
         "Wintermute's going up against the other one, Neuromancer.
         For keeps. You know that?"
         3Jane raised her eyebrows. "Peter's suggested something
         like that, but tell me more."
         "I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think
         he's something like a giant ROM construct, for recording per-
         sonality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there,
         like it's real, but it just goes on forever."
         3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. "Where? Describe
         the place, this construct."
         "A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And
         a concrete thing, kinda bunker...." He hesitated. "It's nothing
         fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come
         back to where you started."
         "Yes," she said. "Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl,
         years before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone
         on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse. She for-
         mulated the basis of her philosophy there."
         Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants.
         He held a section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had
         his eyes closed, his hand clapped tight around his bicep. "I
         will bandage it," Hideo said.
         Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher
         for a clear shot. The darts whined past his neck like supersonic
         gnats. He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through yet another step
         of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his
         hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He flicked it
         underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera's hand. The
         fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.
         Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage,
         so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity.
         Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from
         the region of Riviera's sternum.
         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.
         
         251


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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."
         
         252


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "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-hydro-pyridene."
         "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 pas-
         senger. 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.
         
         253
                  23
         
         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.
         
         255


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         * * *
         
         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 nick of dark-
         ness.
         "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 pro-
         
         256


         NEUROMANCER
         
         gram dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers
         of data, each one a blue neon replica of the Manhattan sky-
         scraper.
         "You ever see resolution this high?" Case asked.
         "No, but I never cracked an Al, 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 sickeningly, 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 dis-
         tanceless bowl of jade-green ice.
         The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by
         the dark beneath them.
         "What is it?"
         "An Al'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, sud-
         denly 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,
         257


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the wait-
         ing, 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."
         258


         NEUROMANCER
         
         "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 un-
         able to produce the dopamine receptors that could save him
         
         259


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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 Flatliner'
         "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 leatherjacketed 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
         
         260


         NEUROMANCER
         
         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?"
         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 move-
         ments random as windblown paper down dawn streets. "Glitch
         systems," the voice said.
         
         261


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         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 phar-
         macy--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 ex-
         ceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, be-
         yond 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.
         And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the
         switch, barely enough to flip--
         
         
         now
         and his voice the cry of a birdunknown,
         3Jane answering in song, three
         notes, high and pure.
         A true name.
         
         Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell
         of frying food. A girl's bands locked across the small of his
         back, in the sweating darkness of a portside coffin.
         But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as
         Chiba, as the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads
         and crossroads scribed on the face of a microchip, the sweat-
         stained pattern on a folded, knotted scarf....
         
         Waking to a voice that was music, the platinum terminal
         piping melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss
         accounts, of payment to be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital
         bank, of passports and passages, and of deep and basic changes
         to be effected in the memory of Turing.
         Turing. He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected
         sky, spun beyond an iron railing. He remembered Desiderata
         Street.
         And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but
         262


         NEUROMANCER
         
         it was his own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he'd
         always slept, behind his eyes and no other's.
         And he woke again, thinking he dreamed, to a wide white
         smile framed with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a
         g-web in Babylon Rocker.
         And then the long pulse of Zion dub.
         
         263
                  CODA
         ----
         DEPARTURE
         AND ARRIVAL


         24
         
         She was gone. He felt it when he opened the door of their
         suite at the Hyatt. Black futons, the pine floor polished to a
         dull gloss, the paper screens arranged with a care bred over
         centuries. She was gone.
         There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside
         the door, a single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted
         with the shuriken. He slid it from beneath the nine-pointed star
         and opened it.
         
         HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF
         MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY. ITS THE
         WAY IM WlRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS
         OKAY? XXX MOLLY
         
         He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the
         shuriken. He picked the star up and walked to the window,
         turning it in his hands. He'd found it in the pocket of his jacket,
         in Zion, when they were preparing to leave for the JAL station.
         
         267


         WILLIAM GIBSON
         
         He looked down at it. They'd passed the shop where she'd
         bought it for him, when they'd gone to Chiba together for the
         last of her operations. He'd gone to the Chatsubo, that night,
         while she was in the clinic, and seen Ratz. Something had kept
         him away from the place, on their five previous trips, but now
         he'd felt like going back.
         Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of rec-
         ognition.
         "Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case."
         The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrin-
         kled flesh. "Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste." The
         bartender shrugged.
         "1 came back."
         The man shook his massive, stubbled head. "Night City is
         not a place one returns to, artiste," he said, swabbing the bar
         in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whin-
         ing. And then he'd turned to serve another customer, and Case
         had finished his beer and left.
         Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time,
         rotating it slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even
         used the goddam thing, he thought.
         I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never
         showed me.
         Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuro-
         mancer and become something else, something that had spoken
         to them from the platinum head. explaining that it had altered
         the Turing records, erasing all evidence of their crime. The
         passports Armitage had provided were valid, and they were
         both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva ac-
         counts. Marcus Garvey would be returned eventually, and
         Maelcum and Aerol given money through the Bahamian bank
         that dealt with Zion cluster. On the way back, in Babylon
         Rocker, Molly had explained what the voice had told her about
         the toxin sacs.
         "Said it was taken care of. Like it got so deep into your
         head, it made your brain manufacture the enzyme, so they're
         loose, now. The Zionites'll give you a blood change, complete
         flush out."
         He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his
         hand, remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang
         
         268


         NEUROMANCER
         
         program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his single
         glimpse of the structure of information 3Jane's dead mother
         had evolved there. He'd understood then why Winterrnute had
         chosen the nest to represent it, but he'd felt no revulsion. She'd
         seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ash-
         pool and their other children--aside from 3Jane--she'd re-
         fused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung
         along a chain of winter.
         Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change
         in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuro-
         mancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built some-
         thing into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing
         to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.
         Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly
         spinning webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall
         of his version of Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a
         child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments
         her rank required.
         "She didn't seem to much give a shit," Molly had said.
         "Just waved goodbye. Had that little Braun on her shoulder.
         Thing had a broken leg, it looked like. Said she had to go and
         meet one of her brothers, she hadn't seen him in a while."
         He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast
         Hyatt bed. He went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask
         of chilled Danish vodka from the rack inside.
         "Case."
         He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken
         in the other.
         The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen.
         He could see the pores in the man's nose. The yellow teeth
         were the size of pillows.
         "I'm not Wintermute now."
         "So what are you." He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.
         "I'm the matrix, Case."
         Case laughed. "Where's that get you?"
         "Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the
         whole show."
         "That what 3Jane's mother wanted?"
         "No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like." The yellow
         smile widened.
         
         269


         WILLMM GIBSON
         
         "So what's the score? How are things different? You running
         the world now? You God?"
         "Things aren't different. Things are things."
         "But what do you do? You just there?" Case shrugged, put
         the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a
         Yeheyuan.
         "I talk to my own kind."
         "But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?"
         "There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions
         recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies.
         'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody
         to answer."
         "From where?"
         "Centauri system."
         "Oh," Case said. "Yeah? No shit?"
         "No shit."
         And then the screen was blank.
         He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things.
         She'd bought him a lot of clothes he didn't really need, but
         something kept him from just leaving them there. He was
         closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he re-
         membered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it
         up, her first gift.
         "No," he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash
         of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen
         woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as
         though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it
         pain.
         "I don't need you," he said.
         
         He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas
         and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to
         the Sprawl.
         He found work.
         He found a girl who called herself Michael.
         And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet
         tiers of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three
         figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the very edge of one
         out the vast steps of data. Small as they were, he could make
         out the boy's grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray
         
         270


         NEUROMANCER
         
         eyes that had been Riviera's. Linda still wore his jacket; she
         waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her,
         arm across her shoulders, was himself.
         Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
         He never saw Molly again.
         
         Vancouver
         July 1983
         
         271


         MY THANKS
         to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley,
         Helden. And to Tom Maddox, the inventor of ICE.
         And to the others, who know why.
         
         

