第 18 页

“Can we go home, now?” Bruce asked.

“Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.”

TWELVE

RUE JULES VERNE was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle’s midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating at either end in the supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps. If you turned right, off Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you’d find yourself approaching Desiderata from the left.

Case watched Bruce’s trike until it was out of sight, then turned and walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy Japanese magazines presenting the faces of the month’s newest simstim stars.

Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass. The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a kind of gulch, the balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising gradually to the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green verge of an artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible casino. The thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings silkscreened to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the mesa’s edge. He’d seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle’s security system, controlled by some central computer.

In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise, le Monde, Cricketeer, Shozoku Smith’s, Emergency. He chose Emergency because it was the smallest and most crowded, but it took only seconds for him to realize that it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly’s rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the little screen dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground plans of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools?

He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall. Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he’d killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda’s death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind’s screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn’t become aware of it until his exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.

It was a strange thing. He couldn’t take its measure.

“Numb,” he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he’d found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It’s the meat talking, ignore it.

“Gangster.”

He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair still wild from the ride in the Honda.

“Thought you went home,” he said, and covered his confusion with a sip of Carlsberg.

“I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this.” She ran her palm across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her wrist. “Like it?”

“Sure.” He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked back at her. “What do you think you’re up to, honey?”

“You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?” She was very close now, radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enormous pupils and a tendon in her neck tense as a bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly with the fresh buzz. “You get off?”

“Yeah. But the comedown’s a bitch.”

“Then you need another one.”

“And what’s that supposed to lead to?”

“I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the creamiest crib. People down the well on business tonight, if you follow me. . . .”

“If I follow you.”

She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. “You’re Yak, aren’t you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza.”

“You got an eye, huh?” He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette.

“How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every time you screwed up.”

“I never screw up.” He lit his cigarette.

“I saw that girl you’re with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares me.” She smiled too widely. “I like that. She like it with girls?”

“Never said. Who’s Hideo?”

“3Jane’s, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer.”

Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he spoke. “Dee-Jane?”

“Lady 3Jane. She’s triff. Rich. Her father owns all this.”

“This bar?”

“Freeside!”

“No shit. You keepin’ some class company, huh?” He raised an eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. “So how you meet these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet deb? You an’ Bruce secret heirs to some ripe old credit? Huh?” He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed.

“Oh, you know,” she said, lids half lowered in what must have been intended as a look of modesty, “she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the party circuit. . . . It gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her out sometimes, as long as she brings Hideo to take care of her.”

“Where’s it get boring?”

“Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it’s pretty, all the pools and lilies. It’s a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets.” She snuggled in against him. “Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together.”

She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bubble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane.

“Hideo gave it to me,” she said. “He tried to show me how, but I can’t ever get it right. The necks come out backwards.” She tucked the folded paper back into her purse. Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled the derm from its backing, and smoothed it across his inner wrist.

“3Jane, she’s got a pointy face, nose like a bird?” He watched his hands fumble an outline. “Dark hair? Young?”

“I guess. But she’s triff, you know? Like, all that money.”

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . .

“Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “You got it now. We got it. Up the hill, we’ll have it all night.”

The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the—something flared white behind his eyes.

He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out of the way.

“Fuck you!” she screamed behind him, “you rip-off shit!”

He couldn’t feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.

And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back, his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the loser’s zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate monochrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee.

When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with wonder. And when the lights in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces and ranked balconies of lunar concrete.

Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe.

Midnight.

HE WALKED TILL morning.

The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow.

A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a Desiderata cafe, to drink water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent on coffee and croissants beneath the striped umbrellas.

He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object.

He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and find the blankness again.

They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion.

“Turing,” she said. “You are under arrest.”

PART 4

THE STRAYLIGHT RUN

THIRTEEN

“YOUR NAME IS Henry Dorsett Case.” She recited the year and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number, and a string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from his past.

“You been here awhile?” He saw the contents of his bag spread out across the bed, unwashed clothing sorted by type. The shuriken lay by itself, between jeans and underwear, on the sand-tinted temperfoam.

“Where is Kolodny?” The two men sat side by side on the couch, their arms crossed over tanned chests, identical gold chains slung around their necks. Case peered at them and saw that their youth was counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were unable to erase.

“Who’s Kolodny?”

“That was the name in the register. Where is she?”

“I dunno,” he said, crossing to the bar and pouring himself a glass of mineral water. “She took off.”

“Where did you go tonight, Case?” The girl picked up the pistol and rested it on her thigh, without actually pointing it at him.

“Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high. How about you?” His knees felt brittle. The mineral water was warm and flat.

“I don’t think you grasp your situation,” said the man on the left, taking a pack of Gitanes from the breast pocket of his white mesh blouse. “You are busted, Mr. Case. The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence.” He took a gold Dunhill from the same pocket and cradled it in his palm. “The man you call Armitage is already in custody.”

“Corto?”

The man’s eyes widened. “Yes. How do you know that that is his name?” A millimeter of flame clicked from the lighter.

“I forget,” Case said.

“You’ll remember,” the girl said.

THEIR NAMES, OR worknames, were Michèle, Roland, and Pierre. Pierre, Case decided, would play the Bad Cop; Roland would take Case’s side, provide small kindnesses—he found an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when Case refused a Gitane—and generally play counterpoint to Pierre’s cold hostility. Michèle would be the Recording Angel, making occasional adjustments in the direction of the interrogation. One or all of them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible evidence. Evidence, he asked himself, through the grinding come-down, of what?

Knowing that he couldn’t follow their French, they spoke freely among themselves. Or seemed to. He caught enough as it was: names like Pauley, Armitage, Sense/Net, Panther Moderns protruding like icebergs from an animated sea of Parisian French. But it was entirely possible that the names were there for his benefit. They always referred to Molly as Kolodny.

“You say you were hired to make a run, Case,” Roland said, his slow speech intended to convey reasonableness, “and that you are unaware of the nature of the target. Is this not unusual in your trade? Having penetrated the defenses, would you not be unable then to perform the required operation? And surely an operation of some kind is required, yes?” He leaned forward, elbows on his stenciled brown knees, palms out to receive Case’s explanation. Pierre paced the room; now he was by the window, now by the door. Michèle was the kink, Case decided. Her eyes never left him.

“Can I put some clothes on?” he asked. Pierre had insisted on stripping him, searching the seams of his jeans. Now he sat naked on a wicker footstool, with one foot obscenely white.

Roland asked Pierre something in French. Pierre, at the window again, was peering through a flat little pair of binoculars. “Non,” he said absently, and Roland shrugged, raising his eyebrows at Case. Case decided it was a good time to smile. Roland returned the smile.

Oldest cop bullshit in the book, Case thought. “Look,” he said, “I’m sick. Had this godawful drug in a bar, you know? I wanna lie down. You got me already. You say you got Armitage. You got him, go ask him. I’m just hired help.”

Roland nodded. “And Kolodny?”

“She was with Armitage when he hired me. Just muscle, a razorgirl. Far as I know. Which isn’t too far.”

“You know that Armitage’s real name is Corto,” Pierre said, his eyes still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars. “How do you know that, my friend?”

“I guess he mentioned it sometime,” Case said, regretting the slip. “Everybody’s got a couple names. Your name Pierre?”