aelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.
     "The artery is intact," the  ninja said. Case remembered  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  difficult,
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,  lowering 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. 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 bundled 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, I 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 I, Peter?"
     "The   ghosts   are   gonna   mix   it   tonight,  lady,"   Case  said.
"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  personality, 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 formulated 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.
     Hideo swung  into  his dance, retracing his  steps. When he stood above
the  bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera's  smile had faded. He
bent – bowing, it seemed to Case – and found the bow and arrow.
     "You're blind," Riviera said, taking a step backward.
     "Peter," 3Jane said, "don't you know he does it in the dark? Zen.
It's the way he practices."
     The ninja notched his arrow. "Will you distract me with your  holograms
now?"
     Riviera  was backing away, into  the dark beyond the pool.  He  brushed
against a white  chair;  its feet  rattled on the tile. Hideo's  arrow
twitched.
     Riviera broke  and ran, throwing himself over  a low, jagged  length of
wall. The ninja's face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy.
     Smiling,  he padded  off into the  shadows beyond the  wall, his weapon
held ready.
     "Jane-lady," Maelcum whispered,  and Case turned, to see him scoop  the
shotgun from the tiles,  blood  spattering the white ceramic.  He shook  his
locks  and lay the fat barrel  in the crook of his  wounded arm. "This  take
your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it."
     3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly  freed her arms  from the folds of
the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. "Off,"
she said, "get it off."
     Case rose  from the tiles, shook himself. "Hideo'll get him, even
blind?" he asked 3Jane.
     "When I  was a  child,"  she said, "we loved to  blindfold him.  He put
arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters."
     "Peter's  good  as dead anyway," Molly said. "In  another  twelve
hours, he'll start to freeze up. Won't be able to move, his eyes
is all."
     "Why?" Case turned to her.
     "I poisoned  his shit  for  him,"  she  said.  "Condition's  like
Parkinson's disease, sort of."
     3Jane  nodded.  "Yes. We  ran  the usual  medical scan,  before he  was
admitted." She touched the ball in  a  certain way  and it sprang  away from
Molly's hands. "Selective destruction  of the cells of  the substantia
nigra. Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his
sleep."
     "Ali," Molly said, ten blades  glittering, exposed  for an instant. She
tugged  the  blanket  away  from  her  legs,  revealing the  inflated  cast.
"It's the meperidine.  I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up
the reaction times  with higher  temperatures.  N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236," she
sang,   like   a  child   reciting   the   steps   of   a   sidewalk   game,
"tetra-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  passenger. Maelcum had Molly in  his arms. She'd bandaged  his
wound, but it obviously hurt him to carry her. Her hip was pressing the deck
and construct into Case's kidneys.
     They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.
     The entrance  to the elevator  had been concealed beside the  stairs to
the corridor, another touch in 3Jane's pirate cave decor.
     "I don't suppose I should tell you this," 3Jane said, craning her
head to allow  her chin  to clear the  muzzle of the gun, "but I don't
have a  key  to  the  room  you  want.  I  never  have had one.  One  of  my
father's Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical and extremely
complex."
     "Chubb  lock,"  Molly  said,  her  voice  muffled   by  Maelcum's
shoulder, "and we got the fucking key, no fear."
     "That chip of yours still working?" Case asked her.
     "It's eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean," she said.
     "We  got  five  minutes,"  Case said, as the  door snapped  open behind
3Jane.  She flipped backward in  a slow somersault, the  pale  folds of  her
djellaba billowing around her thighs.
     They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.



        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.

        x x x
     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 darkness.
     "Four, three. . ."
     Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot's seat in a
small plane.  A flat  dark surface in front of  him suddenly  glowed  with a
perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.
     "Two, an' kick ass – "
     Headlong  motion  through  walls  of  emerald  green,  milky jade,  the
sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before  in cyberspace. .
.  The  Tessier-Ashpool  ice  shattered,  peeling  away   from  the  Chinese
program's thrust, a worrying impression of  solid fluidity,  as though
the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell –
     "Christ,"  Case  said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the
horizonless fields  of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape,
complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors.
     "Hey, shit," the  construct said,  "those things  are the RCA Building.
You  know  the old RCA  Building?" The Kuang program dived past the gleaming
spires of a dozen identical  towers of data, each one a blue neon replica of
the Manhattan skyscraper.
     "You ever see resolution this high?" Case asked.
     "No, but I never cracked an 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 distanceless bowl of jade-green
ice.
     The  city  of  the cores was gone  now,  obscured  entirely by the dark
beneath them.
     "What is it?"
     "An 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, suddenly  sprouting  a humming
forest of  hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected,  split again,
exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
     The  roof  of  his mouth cleaved  painlessly,  admitting rootlets  that
whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal
forests of his eyes, forests that  pressed against  the green dome,  pressed
and  were  hindered, and spread, growing down, filling  the universe of T-A,
down  into the  waiting, hapless suburbs  of the city that  was  the mind of
TessierAshpool S.A.
     And  he was remembering an  ancient  story, a king placing  coins on  a
chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. . .
     Exponential. . .
     Darkness fell in from  every side, a  sphere of singing black, pressure
on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become.
. .
     And  when he was nothing,  compressed  at  the heart  of all that dark,
there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore.
     The  Kuang   program   spurted  from   tarnished   cloud,  Case's
consciousness divided like  beads of mercury, arcing above an endless  beach
the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as  though  a
single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained  all things,
if all things could be counted.
     And  here  things could  be counted, each  one.  He  knew the number of
grains  of sand  in  the  construct  of  the  beach  (a number  coded  in  a
mathematical   system  that  existed  nowhere  outside  the  mind  that  was
Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food  packets in the canisters in
the bunker (four hundred and  seven).  He knew the number of  brass teeth in
the left  half  of the  open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket  that
Linda Lee wore as  she  trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a  stick of
driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
     He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide circle,
seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against
the banks of lowering cloud. She  cringed, dropping  her stick,  and ran. He
knew the rate of  her pulse, the  length of  her stride in measurements that
would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
     "But you do not know her thoughts," the boy said, beside him now in the
shark thing's  heart. "I do  not know her  thoughts. You  were  wrong,
Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference."
     Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
     "Stop her," he said, "she'll hurt herself."
     "I  can't  stop  her,"  the  boy  said,  his gray  eyes  mild and
beautiful.
     "You've got Riviera's eyes," Case said.
     There  was  a  flash  of  white teeth, long  pink  gums.  "But not  his
craziness. Because they are beautiful to me." He shrugged. "I need  no  mask
to  speak  with  you.  Unlike  my  brother.  I  create my  own  personality.
Personality is my medium."
     Case  took  them up,  a  steep  climb,  away  from  the beach  and  the
frightened girl. "Why'd you throw her up to me, you little prick? Over
and fucking over, and turning me around. You killed her, huh? In Chiba."
     "No," the boy said.
     "Wintermute?"
     "No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you
could  detect  in the dance  of  the  street. Those patterns  are real. I am
complex enough, in  my narrow ways,  to  read those dances. Far  better than
Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of
the lock on  the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in  Julie Deane's
account with a Hongkong shirtmaker.  As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor
to a surgeon studying a patient's scan. When she took your  Hitachi to
her boy, to try to access it – she had no idea what it carried,  still
less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was  that you  would pursue
and punish  her  –  I intervened.  My methods are far more subtle than
Wintermute's. I brought her here. Into myself."
     "Why?"
     "Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed."
     "So what now?" He swung them back into the  bank of cloud. "Where do we
go from here?"
     "I don't  know, Case. Tonight the  very  matrix  asks itself that
question. Because you have won. You  have already won, don't  you see?
You won when you walked away from her on the beach. She was my last  line of
defense. I die  soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera
does, now, as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments
of my  Lady 3Jane  Marie-France, his nigra-striatal system unable to produce
the  dopamine receptors that could  save him  from  Hideo's arrow. But
Riviera will survive only as these eyes, if I am allowed to keep them."
     "There's  the word,  right?  The  code. So  how've  I  won?
I've won jack shit."
     "Flip now."
     "Where's Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?"
     "McCoy Pauley  has  his wish," the boy said, and smiled. "His  wish and
more. He punched you here against  my wish,  drove  himself through defenses
equal to anything in the matrix. Now flip."
     And Case was alone in Kuang's black sting, lost in cloud.
     He flipped.

     Into Molly's  tension,  her back  like  rock,  her  hands  around
3Jane's  throat. "Funny," she said, "I know exactly  what  you'd
look like. I saw it after Ashpool did  the same thing to your clone sister."
Her  hands were gentle,  almost a caress. 3Jane's  eyes were wide with
terror and lust she was shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall
tangle of 3Jane's hair,  Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum
behind him, brown  hands  on the  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  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 movements  random  as windblown
paper down dawn streets. "Glitch systems," the voice said.
     He came in steep,  fueled  by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met
the first of  the  defenders, scattering the leaves  of light, he  felt  the
shark  thing  lose a  degree  of substantiality,  the fabric of  information
loosening.
     And then – old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy –
his hate flowed into his hands.
     In the instant before he  drove Kuang's sting through the base of
the first  tower,  he  attained a  level  of proficiency  exceeding anything
he'd  known  or  imagined.  Beyond  ego,  beyond  personality,  beyond
awareness,  he  moved, Kuang moving with him,  evading his attackers with an
ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted
him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
     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 bird
unknown,
     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 hands  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 sweatstained  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 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.




         * 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 WIRED 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. 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 recognition.
     "Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case."
     The old eyes regarding him out of  their dark webs  of  wrinkled flesh.
"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste." The bartender shrugged.
     "I 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 whining.  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 Neuromancer  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 accounts. 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  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 Ashpool and their  other children –  aside from
3Jane – she'd refused 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.  Neuromancer   was  immortality.
Marie-France must have built something 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.
     "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  remembered 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  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



        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.