Neuromancer (Chapter 11)

11

`Case, what's wrong with you?' Armitage said, as the waiter was seating them at his table in the Vingtime Sicle. It was the smallest and most expensive of several floating restaurants on a small lake near the Intercontinental.
Case shuddered. Bruce hadn't said anything about after ef fects. He tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands were shaking. `Something I ate, maybe.'
`I want you checked out by a medic,' Armitage said.
`Just this hystamine reaction,' Case lied. `Get it when I travel, eat different stuff, sometimes.'
Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a white silk shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine and sipped. `I've ordered for you,' he said.
Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.
`Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, `gimme that. You know what this costs?' She took his plate. `They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff.' She forked a mouthful up and chewed.
`Not hungry,' Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain.
`You look fucking awful,' Molly said cheerfully.
Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylam ine made it taste like iodine.
The lights dimmed.
`Le Restaurant Vingtime Sicle,' said a disembodied voice with a pronounced Sprawl accent, `proudly presents the hol ographic cabaret of Mr. Peter Riviera.' Scattered applause from the other tables. A waiter lit a single candle and placed it in the center of their table, then began to remove the dishes. Soon a candle flickered at each of the restaurant's dozen tables, and drinks were being poured.
`What's happening?' Case asked Armitage, who said noth ing.
Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail.
`Good evening,' Riviera said, stepping forward on a small stage at the far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort, he hadn't noticed the stage. He hadn't seen where Riviera had come from. His uneasiness increased.
At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight.
Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit the dark hangings behind the stage. He was projecting.
Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel, blue coals burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fin gernails flashed as he raised his hands in a gesture of greeting, an embrace for his audience. Case heard the shallow water lap against the side of the restaurant.
`Tonight,' Riviera said, his long eyes shining, `I would like to perform an extended piece for you. A new work.' A cool ruby of light formed in the palm of his upraised right hand. He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up from the point of impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled. More applause.
`The title of the work is `The Doll.'' Riviera lowered his hands. `I wish to dedicate its premiere here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool.' A wave of polite ap plause. As it died, Riviera's eyes seemed to find their table. `And to another lady.'
The restaurant's lights died entirely, for a few seconds, leaving only the glow of candles. Riviera's holographic aura had faded with the lights, but Case could still see him, standing with his head bowed.
Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals, sketching an open cube around the stage. The restaurant's lights had come back up slightly, but the framework surrounding the stage might have been constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at his sides, Riviera seemed to quiver with concentration. Suddenly the ghostly cube was filled, had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall, allowing the audience to view its contents.
Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but kept his eyes closed. `I'd always lived in the room,' he said. `I couldn't remember ever having lived in any other room.' The room's walls were yellowed white plaster. It contained two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair, the other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped and flaked, revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed was bare. Stained ticking with faded brown stripes. A single bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted length of black wire. Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb's upper curve. Riviera opened his eyes.
`I'd been alone in the room, always.' He sat on the chair, facing the bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower on his lapel. `I don't know when I first began to dream of her,' he said, `but I do remember that at first she was only a haze, a shadow.'
There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone.
`I couldn't quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted to hold her, hold her and more...' His voice carried perfectly in the hush of the restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a glass. Someone giggled. Someone else asked a whispered ques tion in Japanese. `I decided that if I could visualize some part of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in the most perfect detail...'
A woman's hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers pale.
Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer.
A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei surgical boutique. Riviera was holding the hand to his lips, licking its palm. The fingers tentatively caressed his face. But now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera reached for it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a bracelet of flesh and bone.
The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own. The arms were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful. Case's head throbbed. His throat was dry. He drank the last of the wine.
Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been a part of the projection, but Case couldn't remember seeing it fade away. The black flower lay at the foot of the bed, still seething with its blue inner flame. Then the torso formed, as Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless, and perfect, sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat.
Molly's body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn't Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands with their bright nails. The bed was thick now with folds of yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying, pinching, caressing hands.
Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of Riviera's projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage was leaning forward, his hands round the stem of a wineglass, his pale eyes fixed on the stage, the glowing room.
Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered. The head was there, the image complete. Molly's face, with smooth quicksilver drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Molly- image began to couple with a renewed intensity. Then the image slowly extended a clawed hand and extruded its five blades. With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked Riviera's bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was already up and stumbling for the door.
He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters of the lake. Something that had seemed to close around his head like a vise had released him now. Kneeling, his cheek against the cool wood, he stared across the shallow lake at the bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne.
Case had seen the medium before; when he'd been a teenager in the Sprawl, they'd called it, `dreaming real.' He remem bered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.
What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head and spat into the lake.
He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace.
Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran his hands over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the Vingtime Sicle.
Molly's chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage sat alone, still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass between his fingers.
`Where is she?' Case asked.
`Gone,' Armitage said.
`She go after him?'
`No.' There was a soft _tink._ Armitage looked down at the glass. His left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its measure of red wine. The broken stem protruded like a sliver of ice. Case took it from him and set it in a water glass.
`Tell me where she went, Armitage.'
The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing there at all. `She's gone to prepare herself. You won't see her again. You'll be together during the run.'
`Why did Riviera do that to her?'
Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. `Get some sleep, Case.'
`We run, tomorrow?'
Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away, toward the exit.
Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware, muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on the ceiling.
The girl's face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera's projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the bal ustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of candles.
As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young French men and their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the far shore and the nearest casino.

Their room was silent, the temperfoam smooth as some beach after a retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for a note. There was nothing. Several seconds passed before the scene beyond the window registered through his tension and unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of Desiderata, expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty.
He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he hadn't bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope.
He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.
`Get me a number for the _Marcus Garvey,'_ he told the desk. `It's a tug, registered out of Zion cluster.'
The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. `Sir,' it added, `the registration in question is Panamanian.'
Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. `Yo?'
`Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?'
`Yo. On th' navigation comp, ya know.'
`Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka. Then turn my deck on. It's the stud with the ridges on it.'
`How you doin' in there, mon?'
`Well, I need some help.'
`Movin', mon. I get th' modem.'
Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the simple phone link. `Ice this,' he told the Hosaka, when he heard it beep.
`You are speaking from a heavily monitored location,' the computer advised primly.
`Fuck it,' he said. `Forget the ice. No ice. Access the construct. Dixie?'
`Hey, Case.' The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka's voice chip, the carefully engineered accent lost entirely.
`Dix, you're about to punch your way in here and get something for me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly's in here somewhere and I wanna know where. I'm in 335W, the Intercontinental. She was registered here too, but I don't know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone and do their records for me.'
`No sooner said,' the Flatline said. Case heard the white sound of the invasion. He smiled. `Done. Rose Kolodny. Checked out. Take me a few minutes to screw their security net deep enough to get a fix.'
`Go.'
The phone whined and clicked with the construct's efforts. Case carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up on the temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. As he was stepping back out, the monitor on the room's Braun audiovisual complex lit up. A Japanese pop star reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen interviewer asked a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped with jags of blue interference. `Case, baby, you lose your mind, man?' The voice was slow, familiar.
The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of Desiderata, but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the interior of the Jarre de Th, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls.
Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone among the square tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray sharkskin slacks. `Really, man, you're lookin' very scattered.'
The voice came from the Braun's speakers.
`Wintermute,' Case said.
The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.
`Where's Molly?'
`Never you mind. You're screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline's ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd do that, man. It's outside the profile.'
`So tell me where she is and I'll call him off.'
Zone shook his head.
`You can't keep too good track of your women, can you, Case. Keep losin' 'em, one way or another.'
`I'll bring this thing down around your ears,' Case said.
`No. You aren't that kind, man. I know that. You know something, Case? I figure you've got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that little cunt of yours in Chiba.'
`Don't,' Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the window.
`But I didn't. What's it matter, though? How much does it really matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you'd give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn't handle it. She's dead.'
Case's fist glanced off the glass.
`Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck.'
Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of the condos. The Braun shut off.
From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.
`Case?' The Flatline was waiting. `Where you been? I got it, but it isn't much.' The construct rattled off an address. `Place had some weird ice around it for a nightclub. That's all I could get without leaving a calling card.'
`Okay,' Case said. `Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to disconnect the modem. Thanks, Dix.'
`A pleasure.'
He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure.
Rage.

`Hey. Lupus. Hey, Cath, it's friend Lupus.' Bruce stood naked in his doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. `But we're just having a shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?'
`No. Thanks. I want some help.' He pushed the boy's arm aside and stepped into the room.
`Hey, really, man, we're...'
`Going to help me. You're really glad to see me. Because we're friends, right? Aren't we?'
Bruce blinked. `Sure.'
Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.
`I knew he was a gangster,' Cath called cheerfully from the shower.
`I gotta Honda trike,' Bruce said, grinning vacantly.
`We go now,' Case said.

`That level's the cubicles,' Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the address for the eighth time. He climbed back into the Honda. Condensation dribbled from the hydrogen-cell ex haust as the red fiberglass chassis swayed on chromed shocks. `You be long?'
`No saying. But you'll wait.'
`We'll wait, yeah.' He scratched his bare chest. `That last part of the address, I think that's a cubicle. Number forty- three.'
`You expected, Lupus?' Cath craned forward over Bruce's shoulder and peered up. The drive had dried her hair.
`Not really,' Case said. `That's a problem?'
`Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend's cubicle. If they let you in, fine. If they don't wanna see you...' She shrugged.
Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns and he'd reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan looking over the tables. Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents of the islands.
`Downstairs,' he said to a passing waiter, `I want to go downstairs.' He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club.
He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing frag ments of half a dozen European languages as he passed.
`I want a cubicle,' he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a terminal on her lap. `Lower level.' He handed her his chip.
`Gender preference?' She passed the chip across a glass plate on the face of the terminal.
`Female,' he said automatically.
`Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can access our special services display beforehand, if you like.' She smiled. She returned his chip.
An elevator slid open behind her.
The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the el evator and chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an expensive clinic.
He found his cubicle. He'd been looking for Molly's, now, confused, he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath the number plate.
Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.
The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut- out. He backed out of the cubicle and closed the door.
The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were sound proof. It was pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal. Nothing. The door seemed to absorb the sound.
He placed his chip against the black plate.
The bolts clicked.
She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he'd actually got ten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes...
`Jesus Christ,' she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. `You're an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?' She leaned over him.
`Chip,' he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the cubicle.
`You bribe the help, upstairs?'
He shook his head and fell across the bed.
`Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count.'
He clutched his stomach.
`You kicked me,' he managed.
`Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I'm meditating, right?' She sat beside him. `And getting a briefing.' She pointed at a small monitor set into the wall opposite the bed. `Win termute's telling me about Straylight.'
`Where's the meat puppet?'
`There isn't any. That's the most expensive special service of all.' She stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. `The run's tomorrow, Wintermute says.'
`What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?'
`'Cause, if I'd stayed, I might have killed Riviera.'
`Why?'
`What he did to me. The show.'
`I don't get it.'
`This cost a lot,' she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. `Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you'll have the reflexes to go with the gear... You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for...' She cracked her knuckles. `Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't com patible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could re member it... But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.' She smiled. `Then it started getting strange.' She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. `The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time.' She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. `So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.'
`They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?'
`I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain... You can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to _remember._ Like dreams, you know. And they didn't tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.'
She seemed to speak from a distance. `And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I'd tell myself that at least some of them _were_ just dreams, but by then I'd started to figure that the boss had a whole little _clientele_ going for me. Nothing's too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.' She shook her head. `That prick was charging _eight_ times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn't know.'
`So what was he charging for?'
`Bad dreams. Real ones. One night... one night, I'd just come back from Chiba.' She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat down, leaning against the wall. `Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer...' She dug her fingers deep in the foam. `Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all...' She tugged at the temperfoam. `Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, `What's wrong. What's wrong?' 'Cause we weren't _finished_ yet...'
She began to shake.
`So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?' The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. `The house put a con tract out on me. I had to hide for a while.'
Case stared at her.
`So Riviera hit a nerve last night,' she said. `I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I'll be psyched up to go in there after him.'
`After him?'
`He's already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda...'
Case remembered the face he'd seen. `You gonna kill him?'
She smiled. Cold. `He's going to die, yeah. Soon.'
`I had a visit too,' he said, and told her about the window, stumbling over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded.
`Maybe it wants you to hate something too.'
`Maybe I hate it.'
`Maybe you hate yourself, Case.'

`How was it?' Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.
`Try it sometime,' he said, rubbing his eyes.
`Just can't see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,' Cath said unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist.
`Can we go home, now?' Bruce asked.
`Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.'