第 29 页

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.

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 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-hydropyridene.”

“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.

TWENTY-THREE

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.

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 flick 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 AI, 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.