dder 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  cyberspace 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 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 overlapping  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 Maelcum 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 vanished, 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
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 painfully
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. 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  family.
She commissioned the construction  of  our artificial intelligences. 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 Wintermute, which is the Turing code for our Berne
AI, 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.
     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 smiling, 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 riderless service
cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless concrete  arch marking the far
end of their corridor. It might have  been the  one his Africans had ridden,
but if it was,  they were gone now. Just behind the back  of  the low padded
seat,  its tiny manipulators  gripping the upholstery,  the little Braun was
steadily winking its red LED.
     "Bus to catch," Case said to Maelcum.



        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
pressing the shuriken in his jacket pocket into his hip.
     "You got a watch?" he asked Maelcum.
     The Zionite shook his locks. "Time be time."
     "Jesus," Case said, and closed his eyes.

     The Braun scuttled over mounded carpets  and  tapped one of  its padded
claws against an  oversized rectangular door of  dark battered wood.  Behind
them,  the  cart sizzled  and  shot blue sparks from a louvered  panel.  The
sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool.
     "This  th' way,  mon?"  Maelcum  eyed the door  and  snapped  the
shotgun's safety.
     "Hey," Case said, more to himself than  to Maelcum, "you think I know?"
The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed.
     "It wan' you open door," Maelcum said, nodding.
     Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a brass
plate mounted on the  door at  eye level, so old that the lettering that had
once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the
name of some long  dead  function or functionary, polished into oblivion. He
wondered vaguely if  Tessier-Ashpool  had selected each piece of  Straylight
individually,  or if  they'd  purchased  it  in  bulk  from  some vast
European equivalent  of  Metro Holografix.  The  door's hinges creaked
plaintively as  he  edged  it  open,  Maelcum stepping  past  him  with  the
Remington thrust forward from his hip.
     "Books," Maelcum said.
     The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.
     "I know where we are," Case said. He looked back at the service cart. A
curl of smoke was rising from  the  carpet.  "So  come on,"  he said. "Cart.
Cart?" It  remained  stationary.  The  Braun  was plucking at the leg of his
jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted a strong urge to kick it. "Yeah?"
     It ticked its way around the  door. He followed it. The monitor in  the
library was another Sony, as old  as the first one. The Braun paused beneath
it and executed a sort of Jig.
     "Wintermute?"
     The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled.
     "Time to  check in, Case," the  Finn  said, his eyes screwed up against
the smoke of a cigarette. "C'mon, jack."
     The Braun threw itself against his ankle  and  began to climb his  leg,
its manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. "Shit!" He
slapped  it aside and it struck the wall.  Two of its limbs began to  piston
repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air.  "What's wrong with the goddam
thing?"
     "Burned  out,"  the  Finn said. "Forget  it.  No problem. jack in now."
There were four sockets beneath the  screen, but  only one would  accept the
Hitachi adaptor.
     He jacked in.

     Nothing. Gray void.
     No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.
     The deck was gone. His fingers were. . .
     And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression
of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.
     He tried to scream.

     There  seemed  to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it  was far
away.
     He crouched on his haunches  on the damp sand,  his arms wrapped  tight
across his knees, and shook.
     He stayed that way  for what seemed  a very long time,  even after  the
shaking stopped. The city, if it  was a city, was low and gray.  At times it
was obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At
one point he decided  that  it wasn't  a  city at all, but some single
building, perhaps  a ruin; he had  no way of judging its distance. The  sand
was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black. The
beach was made of sand,  the beach  was very  long,  the sand was  damp, the
bottoms of his jeans were wet from the sand. . . He held himself and rocked,
singing a song without words or tune.
     The sky was a different  silver. Chiba.  Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo Bay?
He turned his head and  stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo  of
Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all.
     Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.
     A wind was rising. Sand  stung his cheek. He  put his  face against his
knees and wept, the sound  of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of
the searching gull. Hot urine soaked  his jeans,  dribbled on the  sand, and
quickly  cooled in  the wind  off the  water. When his tears were gone,  his
throat ached.
     "Wintermute," he mumbled to his knees, "Wintermute. . ."
     It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold that
finally forced him to stand.
     His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running;  he wiped  it  on the
cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty  pocket  after another. "Jesus,"
he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth.
"Jesus." His teeth began to chatter.
     The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a
Tokyo  gardener produced.  When  he'd  taken  a  dozen  steps  in  the
direction  of the now invisible city, he turned and looked  back through the
gathering dark.  His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There
were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand.
     He estimated  that he'd  covered  at least a kilometer  before he
noticed  the light. He  was talking with  Ratz,  and it was  Ratz  who first
pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew
that  Ratz wasn't there, that the  bartender was a  figment of his own
imagination, not  of  the thing  he  was trapped in,  but  that didn't
matter. He'd called the man up for  comfort of some kind, but Ratz had
had his own ideas about Case and his predicament.
     "Really, my artiste, you  amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order
to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you
had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to
keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the
axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what  grotesque props. . .
Playgrounds  hung in space, castles hermetically sealed,  the rarest rots of
old  Europa,  dead men sealed in little  boxes magic out of China. . ." Ratz
laughed, trudging  along beside him, his  pink manipulator swinging jauntily
at his side. In spite of the dark,  Case could  see  the baroque steel  that
laced the bartender's blackened teeth. "But I suppose that  is the way
of an  artiste, no? You needed this world built for  you, this  beach,  this
place. To die."
     Case  halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf  and the sting of
blown sand.  "Yeah,"  he  said. "Shit.  I guess. . ." He walked  toward  the
sound.
     "Artiste," he heard  Ratz call. "The light. You saw a light. Here. This
way. . ."
     He stopped again,  staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of
icy seawater. "Ratz? Light? Ratz. . ."
     But the dark was total, now, and there was only  the sound of the surf.
He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.
     Time passed. He walked on.
     And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with  his  every step. A
rectangle. A door.
     "Fire in there," he said, his words torn away by the wind.
     It was a bunker, stone or concrete,  buried in drifts of the dark sand.
The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and  deep, set into a wall at least a
meter thick. "Hey,"  Case said, softly,  "hey. . ." His fingers  brushed the
cold  wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the
entrance.
     He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
     A  girl  was crouched beside rusted steel,  a  sort of fireplace, where
driftwood  burned, the wind sucking smoke up  a dented chimney. The fire was
the only  light, and as his gaze  met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized
her  headband,  a  rolled  scarf,  printed  with  a  pattern like  magnified
circuitry.

     He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered him,  the
place  beside  her in the nest of blankets and  shredded  foam.  He crouched
beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour
the structure's  walls.  Every hour or so, he rose and  crossed to the
makeshift stove,  adding  fresh driftwood from the  pile beside it. None  of
this was real, but cold was cold.
     She  wasn't real, curled there  on her side  in the firelight. He
watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl  he remembered
from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
     "Mean, motherfucker,"  he  whispered to the  wind. "Don't take  a
chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is.
. ."  He tried to keep the desperation from  his voice. "I know, see? I know
who you are.  You're the  other  one. 3Jane told  Molly. Burning bush.
That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn  me  off with the
Braun.  Now  you  got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With  a ghost.
Like I remember her before. . ."
     She stirred  in  her  sleep, called something out, drawing a  scrap  of
blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
     "You   aren't  anything,"   he  said  to   the   sleeping   girl.
"You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear  that, buddy? I
know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken  about
twenty  seconds,  right?  I'm out on  my  ass in that  library and  my
brain's dead. And pretty  soon  it'll be  dead,  if  you got any
sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all,  so you
can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang,  but his ass is dead and
you  can  second guess his moves,  sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's
all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me
into the Chiba construct,  but  he  couldn't. Said it  was too tricky.
That  was  you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was
you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw
that.  You  just  edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think  you can
hurt  me. 'Cause you think  I gave a  shit.  Well,  fuck you, whatever
you're called. You won. You win. But none  of it  means anything to me
now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this  way?"  He was
shaking again, his voice shrill.
     "Honey,"  she said, twisting  up from the  rags  of blankets, "you come
here and sleep.  I'll  sit up, you want. You gotta  sleep, okay?"  Her
soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. "You just sleep, okay?"

     When he  woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in  the
bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway  to throw  a crooked rectangle
of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping
container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in  its
side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they
looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling
out of  the nest, he went to the  canister and fished one of the things out,
blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom.
EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, "BEEF", TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutritive content. He
fumbled a second one out. "EGGS". "If  you're making this shit up," he
said, "you could lay on some real food, okay?" With a packet in either hand,
he made his way  through the  structure's four rooms.  Two were empty,
aside from drifts of  sand, and  the fourth held three  more of  the  ration
canisters. "Sure," he said touching the seals. "Stay here a long time. I get
the idea. Sure. . ."
     He searched the  room with the  fireplace,  finding a  plastic canister
filled with what  he assumed was rainwater.  Beside the  nest  of  blankets,
against  the wall,  lay  a cheap  red lighter, a seaman's knife with a
cracked  green handle, and  her scarf. It was still knotted, and  stiff with
sweat and dirt. He used the  knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their
contents  into a rusted can that he found beside the stove.  He dipped water
from  the canister, mixed the resulting  mush with his fingers, and  ate. It
tasted  vaguely  like  beef. When  it  was gone, he tossed the  can into the
fireplace and went out.
     Late  afternoon, by the feel  of the sun, its angle. He kicked off  his
damp  nylon shoes  and was startled by the warmth of  the sand. In daylight,
the beach was silver-gray.  The  sky  was  cloudless, blue.  He rounded  the
corner of the bunker and  walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the
sand. "Dunno whose memories you're  using for this  one," he said when
he  reached the water.  He peeled off  his jeans and  kicked  them into  the
shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
     "What you doin', Case?"
     He turned  and  found her  ten meters down the  beach, the  white  foam
sliding past her ankles.
     "I pissed  myself  last night," he said.  "Well, you  don't wanna
wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I'll show you this pool back in
the rocks." She  gestured vaguely  behind her. "It's fresh." The faded
French fatigues had  been hacked  away  above the  knee; the  skin below was
smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.
     "Listen," he said,  scooping his clothes  up and walking toward her, "I
got a  question for you. I won't ask you what you're doing here.
But what exactly do you think I'm doing here?" He stopped, a wet black
jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh.
     "You came last night," she said. She smiled at him.
     "And that's enough for you? I just came?"
     "He  said you would,"  she said, wrinkling her nose.  She shrugged. "He
knows stuff like that, I  guess." She lifted  her left foot and rubbed  salt
from the other ankle,  awkward, childlike.  She smiled at  him  again,  more
tentatively. "Now you answer me one, okay?"
     He nodded.
     "How come you're painted brown like that, all except your foot?"

     "And  that's the last  thing you remember?" He watched her scrape
the last of the freeze-dried hash  from the rectangular steel box cover that
was their only plate.
     She  nodded, her eyes  huge  in the firelight. "I'm sorry,  Case,
honest to God. It  was just  the shit, I guess, an' it was .  . ." She
hunched  forward,  forearms  across  her  knees, her face  twisted for a few
seconds with  pain or its  memory. "I just needed  the money. To get home, I
guess, or. . . hell," she said, "you wouldn't hardly talk to me."
     "There's no cigarettes?"
     "Goddam,  Case,  you asked me  that ten times today! What's wrong
with you?" She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.
     "But the food was here? It was already here?"
     "I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach."
     "Okay. Sure. It's seamless."
     She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. "Well, damn you anyway, Case,"
she managed, finally, "I was doin' just fine here by myself."
     He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway,  scraping
his  wrist  on rough concrete.  There was no  moon,  no  wind, sea sound all
around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. "Okay," he said
to  the  night,  "I  buy it. I guess I  buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes
better   wash  up."   His  own  laughter  startled  him.  "A  case  of  beer
wouldn't hurt, while you're at it." He turned and 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 looked like more money than you had. . ." She
glanced back at him. "I'm real sorry I stole your RAM."
     "Never mind," he said. "Doesn't mean  anything.  So you just took
it over to this guy and had him access it for you?"
     "Tony," she said.  "I'd  been  seein' him, kinda.  He had a
habit an' we . . . anyway, yeah,  I remember him running it by on this
monitor,  and  it  was  this real amazing  graphics  stuff,  and I  remember
wonderin' how you – "
     "There wasn't any graphics  in there," he interrupted. "Sure was.
I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those pictures of when
I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one
time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that. . ."
     "Tony see it?"
     "I don't  remember. Next thing, I was  on  the beach, real early,
sunrise,  those  birds  all  yellin' so lonely.  Scared 'cause I
didn't have a shot on me, nothin', an' I knew I'd be
gettin' sick.  . . An' I walked an' walked, 'til  it
was dark, an' found this place, an' next day the food washed in,
all tangled  in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly." She slid her
stick into the embers and left it there. "Never did get sick," she  said, as
embers  crawled.  "Missed cigarettes more. How 'bout  you,  Case?  You
still wired?"  Firelight dancing  under  her cheekbones, remembered flash of
Wizard's Castle and Tank War Europa.
     "No,"  he said, and then it no longer  mattered, what he knew,  tasting
the salt of her  mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that  ran
in her, something he'd  known in  Night City and held there, been held
by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street
that hunted them all.  It was a place he'd known  before; not everyone
could take him there, and  somehow he always managed to forget it. Something
he'd found  and lost so many times.  It  belonged, he knew  – he
remembered –  as she pulled  him  down, to the  meat,  the  flesh  the
cowboys  mocked. It  was  a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information
coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its
strong blind way, could ever read.
     The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of
toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it,  some 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.



        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 experimentally. 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.
     "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?"
     "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 her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver
paths. Romancer. Necromancer. 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 shifting, 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.
     "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 managed.
     "Come on, mon," the  strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like
a child, "I an' I mus' go."

        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 shoulder.  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 nodded. "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 darkness, 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.
     M