Neuromancer (Chapter 21)

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 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 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 managed.
`Come on, mon,' the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like a child, `I an' I mus' go.'