Neuromancer (№1) - Neuromancer

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 nutri-

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. «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 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 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 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. «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 he; days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Nec— 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. «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.»

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.

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 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.

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. «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.

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.»