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William Gibson. Neuromancer


     
     




     THE CRITICS RAVE ABOUT NEUROMANCER. . .
     "Neuromancer is freshly imagined, compellingly  detailed and chiling..."
     -- The New York Times
     "UNFORGETTABLE.   .   .  The  richness   of  Gibson's  world   is
incredible!"
     -- Chicago Sun-Times
     "SUPERB!  Gibson has created  a  rich, detailed, and vivid near future,
populated with uncomfortably realistic characters . . . an amazingly comples
novel . . . Some will enjoy it as  a fast-paced, exciting adventure;  others
will claim it's actually a  very subtle, clever mystery;  still others
will see it as a thought-provoking social discourse. .  .  Neuromancer IS  A
MAJOR NOVEL,  difficult  to  compare with other works  for the simple reason
that it really is new, and different . . . HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!"
     -- Fantasy Review
     "A  flashy tour  of a remarkably  well-visualized  future.  . .  Gibson
manufactures wild  details with a virtuoso's glee. .  . an  impressive
new voice!"
     -- Newsday

     "WILLIAM GIBSON IS A WELCOME NEW TALENT!"
     -- Locus
     A SIGNIFICANT ACHIEVEMENT! William Gibson's Neuromancer is one of
the finest first novels of the last few years,  and may be  the only science
fiction  novel which  has  combined  hard  science. . .and a  well-developed
sensibility to produce a kind of high-tech punk novel."
     -- Norman Spinrad
     "Science Fiction of exceptional texture and vision.  . .Gibson opens up
a new genre, with a finely crafted grittiness, with a number of literary and
computer inventions that may well stick. . .SHEER PLEASURE!"
     Stewart Brand, San Francisco Chronicle
     "A crowd-pleaser  as well as a finely  crafted piece of literature. . .
The book deserves immense popularity. . . READ IT!"
     -- Edward Bryant, Mile High Futures
     "A  MINDBINDER  OF  A READ.  .  .  fully realized in its  geopolitical,
technological and, psychosexual dimensions. . ."
     -- Village Voice
     "William Gibson is one  of the most excited new writers to  hit science
fiction in a long time. His first  novel is an event I've been eagerly
awaiting."
     -- Robert Silverberg
     "William  Gibson's  Neuromancer.  .  .  brings  an  entirely  new
electronic  punk sensibility to SF, both  in content and prose style. It has
been a  long time indeed  since  a first  novel established such  a  new and
unusual voice with this degree of strength and surety."
     -- Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
     "Say goodbye to your old stale  futures. Here is an  entirely  realized
new world, intense  as  an  electric  shock.  William  Gibson's prose,
astonishing  in it's clarity and skill, becomes high-tech electronic poetry.
. . An enthralling adventure story,  as brilliant and  coherent as  a laser.
THIS IS WHY SCIENCE FICTION WAS INVENTED!"
     -- Bruce Sterling


     Ace books by William Gibson

     BURNING CHROME COUNT ZERO MONA LISA OVERDRIVE



Neuromancer

William Gibson


     This  book  was  first published  as  an Ace Science  Fiction  original
edition. The first through third printings were as as an Ace Science Fiction
Special, edited  by Terry Carr. A limited hardcover edition was published by
Phantasia Press in the Spring of 1986.

     NEUROMANCER
     An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
     PRINTING HISTORY Ace edition / July 1984
     All rights reserved. Copyright © 1984 by  William Gibson Cover art
by  Richard  Berry This book  may not be reproduced  in whole or in part, by
mimeograph or any other  means, without permission. For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

     ISBN: 0-441-56959-5
     Ace books are  published by  The Berkley  Publishing Group, 200 Madison
Avenue,  New  York, New York  10016.  The Name "Ace"  and  the "A" logo  are
trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

     PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


                       Dedication: for Deb
                       who made it possible
                       with love


 * PART ONE. CHIBA CITY BLUES


1
     The sky  above the port was the color  of television, tuned  to a  dead
channel.
     "It's  not  like I'm using,"  Case heard someone say, as he
shouldered  his  way  through  the  crowd  around  the  door  of  the  Chat.
"It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency." It
was  a  Sprawl  voice  and  a  Sprawl  joke.  The Chatsubo  was  a  bar  for
professional expatriates; you could drink  there  for a week and never  hear
two words in Japanese.
     Ratz was tending bar, his  prosthetic  arm  jerking monotonously  as he
filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth
a web work of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the
bar, between the unlikely tan  on one of Lonny  Zone's whores and  the
crisp  naval uniform  of a  tall African whose  cheekbones were ridged  with
precise rows of  tribal scars. "Wage was in here early, with two  Joe boys,"
Ratz said, shoving a draft  across the bar with his  good hand.  "Maybe some
business with you, Case?"
     Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
     The bartender's  smile  widened.  His ugliness was the  stuff  of
legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something  heraldic  about
his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was
a Russian military prosthesis, a  seven-function force-feedback manipulator,
cased in grubby pink plastic. "You are  too  much  the artiste, Herr  Case."
Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of
white-shirted belly with the pink claw. "You are the artiste of the slightly
funny deal."
     "Sure,"  Case said,  and  sipped  his  beer. "Somebody's gotta be
funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you."
     The whore's giggle went up an octave.
     "Isn't you either,  sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's
a close personal friend of mine."
     She  looked  Case  in the  eye and  made the softest  possible spitting
sound, her  lips barely moving. But she left. "Jesus," Case said, "what kind
a creep joint you running here? Man can't have a drink."
     "Ha," Ratz said, swabbing  the  scarred wood with a rag, "Zone shows  a
percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value."
     As  Case  was picking up his  beer, one  of those strange  instants  of
silence  descended,   as  though  a  hundred  unrelated   conversations  had
simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore's giggle rang
out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
     Ratz grunted. "An angel passed."
     "The Chinese," bellowed  a drunken Australian, "Chinese bloody invented
nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right,
mate. . ."
     "Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness  suddenly rising
in him like bile, "that is so much bullshit."

     The  Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than  the Chinese
had ever known.  The black  clinics  of  Chiba  were the cutting edge, whole
bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair
the damage he'd suffered in that Memphis hotel.
     A year  here and he still dreamed of  cyberspace, hope  fading nightly.
All the  speed  he  took,  all  the turns he'd taken  and  the corners
he'd  cut in Night City,  and still he'd  see the matrix  in his
sleep, bright  lattices  of logic unfolding across that colorless  void. . .
The Sprawl was a long strange way  home over the Pacific now,  and he was no
console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another  hustler,  trying to make it
through. But the dreams  came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo
and  he'd  cry for  it, cry in  his sleep, and wake alone in the dark,
curled in his  capsule  in some  coffin  hotel, his  hands  clawed  into the
bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console
that wasn't there.

     "I saw your girl last night," Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.
     "I don't have one," he said, and drank.
     "Miss Linda Lee."
     Case shook his head.
     "No girl?  Nothing? Only biz,  friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?"
The  bartender's small brown eyes were nested deep in  wrinkled flesh.
"I  think  I liked you better, with her. You laughed more.  Now, some night,
you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."
     "You're breaking my heart, Ratz." He finished  his beer, paid and
left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained  khaki nylon of
his windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell
his own stale sweat.

     Case  was  twenty-four.  At twenty-two,  he'd  been  a  cowboy  a
rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best,
by McCoy Pauley and Bobby  Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on
an  almost  permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency,
jacked  into  a  custom  cyberspace  deck  that  projected  his  disembodied
consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief
he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers  who  provided the
exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems,
opening windows into rich fields of data.
     He'd  made   the  classic  mistake,  the  one  he'd   sworn
he'd never  make. He stole  from his  employers. He kept something for
himself  and tried  to  move it  through  a  fence in  Amsterdam.  He  still
wasn't sure how he'd been discovered,  not that it mattered now.
He'd expected to die,  then,  but  they only  smiled. Of course he was
welcome,  they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to  need it.
Because – still smiling – they were going  to make sure he never
worked again.
     They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
     Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his  talent burning out micron by
micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
     The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
     For Case, who'd lived for  the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,
it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a  cowboy hotshot, the
elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was
meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

     His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of  the
old  paper currency that circulated endlessly through the  closed circuit of
the  world's  black  markets  like  the  seashells  of  the  Trobriand
islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the
Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal.
     In Japan, he'd  known  with a clenched  and  absolute  certainty,
he'd find his cure. In  Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in the
shadow land of black medicine. Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing, and
micro  bionics,  Chiba  was a  magnet for the Sprawl's techno-criminal
subcultures.
     In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month round of
examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope,
had admired the expertise with which he'd been maimed, and then slowly
shaken their heads.
     Now  he  slept in the cheapest  coffins,  the ones  nearest  the  port,
beneath  the quartz-halogen  floods that lit the docks  all night like  vast
stages;  where you couldn't  see the lights of Tokyo  for the glare of
the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric
Company, and Tokyo  Bay  was  a  black  expanse  where  gulls  wheeled above
drifting  shoals  of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay  the city, factory
domes  dominated  by the vast  cubes of corporate  arcologies. Port and city
were  divided by  a narrow borderland  of older  streets,  an  area with  no
official  name. Night  City, with  Ninsei its  heart.  By day, the bars down
Ninsei were  shuttered and featureless, the neon dead,  the holograms inert,
waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.

     Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de The, Case
washed down the night's first pill  with a  double  espresso. It was a
flat  pink octagon, a potent species  of Brazilian dex he bought from one of
Zone's girls.
     The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon.
     At  first, finding himself alone in Chiba,  with little money and  less
hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind  of  terminal overdrive,
hustling fresh capital with a cold  intensity that  had  seemed to belong to
someone else. In the first month, he'd killed two men and a woman over
sums that  a year before would  have  seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down
until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish,
some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
     Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed
by a bored  researcher  who kept one  thumb permanently on  the fast-forward
button. Stop hustling and  you  sank  without a trace, but move a little too
swiftly  and  you'd  break the fragile surface  tension  of the  black
market; either way, you were gone, with nothing  left of you  but some vague
memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart  or lungs or kidneys
might survive in  the service of  some stranger with  New Yen for the clinic
tanks.
     Biz  here was  a  constant  subliminal  hum,  and  death  the  accepted
punishment for laziness, carelessness,  lack  of grace, the  failure to heed
the demands of an intricate protocol.
     Alone  at a table  in the Jarre de  The,  with  the  octagon coming on,
pinheads of sweat starting from his palms,  suddenly aware of  each tingling
hair on his  arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he'd started
to  play a game with  himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a  final
solitaire.  He  no  longer  carried  a weapon,  no  longer  took  the  basic
precautions. He  ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and  he had a
reputation for  being able  to get  whatever you wanted.  A part of him knew
that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers,
who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked  in the  knowledge
that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its
expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee.
     He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.
     Under  bright  ghosts burning through  a blue haze  of cigarette smoke,
holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline. .
.  And now he remembered her  that  way, her  face bathed  in restless laser
light,  features  reduced to  a  code:  her  cheekbones flaring  scarlet  as
Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched  with azure when Munich fell
to the Tank  War, mouth touched  with  hot gold as a gliding  cursor  struck
sparks from  the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night,
with a brick of Wage's  ketamine on  its way to Yokohama and the money
already in his pocket. He'd come in out  of the warm rain that sizzled
across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she'd been singled out for him,
one face  out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost  in the game she
played. The expression on her face, then, had been the  one he'd seen,
hours later, on her sleeping face in  a port side coffin, her upper lip like
the line children draw to represent a bird in flight.
     Crossing the arcade to stand  beside her, high on the  deal  he'd
made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black  paintstick.
Eyes of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
     Their  night  together  stretching into a morning, into tickets  at the
hover port and  his first  trip  across the Bay.  The  rain kept up, falling
along  Harajuku,  beading  on  her  plastic  jacket, the children  of  Tokyo
trooping past the famous boutiques in white  loafers and  cling wrap  capes,
until  she'd  stood  with  him in the  midnight clatter  of a pachinko
parlor and held his hand like a child.
     It took  a month  for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through
to turn  those  perpetually startled  eyes  into  wells  of  reflexive need.
He'd  watched her  personality  fragment,  calving  like  an  iceberg,
splinters drifting away, and finally  he'd  seen  the  raw  need,  the
hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with
a concentration that  reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along
Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.
     He  stared at  the  black  ring  of  grounds in his empty  cup.  It was
vibrating  with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate  of the table
top  was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through
his spine he saw the countless random impacts required  to create  a surface
like that.  The Jarre  was decorated in  a  dated, nameless  style  from the
previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and  pale Milanese
plastics,  but everything  seemed to wear a subtle film,  as though the  bad
nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the  mirrors and the once
glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never
be wiped away.
     "Hey. Case, good buddy. . ."
     He  looked  up, met  gray eyes ringed  with paintstick. She was wearing
faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers.
     "I  been lookin' for you, man." She took a seat opposite him, her
elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit had been ripped out at
the shoulders; he automatically  checked her  arms for signs of derms or the
needle. "Want a cigarette?"
     She dug  a crumpled pack  of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle pocket  and
offered him one. He took it, let her light  it with a red plastic tube. "You
sleepin' okay, Case? You look tired." Her  accent put her south  along
the   Sprawl,  toward  Atlanta.  The  skin  below  her  eyes  was  pale  and
unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was  still smooth and firm. She was twenty.
New  lines of  pain were  starting  to  etch themselves  permanently at  the
corners  of her  mouth.  Her  dark  hair was drawn back, held  by  a band of
printed silk. The  pattern might have  represented microcircuits,  or a city
map.
     "Not if I remember to take  my pills,"  he said,  as a tangible wave of
longing  hit  him,  lust  and  loneliness  riding  in  on the  wavelength of
amphetamine. He remembered the  smell of her skin in the overheated darkness
of a coffin near the port, her locked across the small of his back.
     All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.
     "Wage," she said, narrowing her eyes.  "He wants to see you with a hole
in your face." She lit her own cigarette.
     "Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?"
     "No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys."
     "I  don't owe  him enough. He  does me, he's out  the money
anyway." He shrugged.
     "Too many people owe  him now, Case. Maybe  you get  to be the example.
You seriously better watch it."
     "Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?"
     "Sleep." She  shook  her  head.  "Sure, Case."  She  shivered,  hunched
forward over the table. Her face was filmed with sweat.
     "Here,"  he said, and dug in  the pocket of  his windbreaker, coming up
with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded
it in quarters, and passed it to her.
     "You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage." There was something
in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read, something he'd never
seen there before.
     "I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more coming," he lied,
as he watched his New Yen vanish into a zippered pocket.
     "You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick."
     "I'll see you, Linda," he said, getting up.
     "Sure." A  millimeter of  white showed  beneath  each  of  her  pupils.
Sanpaku. "You watch your back, man."
     He nodded, anxious to be gone. He looked back as the plastic door swung
shut behind him, saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.

     Friday night on Ninsei.
     He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop
called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade.  He  stepped out
of  the   way   to   let   a   dark-suited  sarariman   by,   spotting   the
Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back  of the man's right
hand.
     Was it authentic? lf  that's for  real, he thought, he's in
for trouble.  If  it wasn't,  served  him right. M-G employees above a
certain level  were implanted with advanced microprocessors  that  monitored
mutagen levels in the bloodstream.  Gear  like that would  get you rolled in
Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic.
     The  sarariman had  been  Japanese, but  the  Ninsei crowd was a gaijin
crowd. Groups of  sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists  hunting
pleasures  no  guidebook  listed,  Sprawl  heavies showing  off  grafts  and
implants, and a dozen distinct species  of hustler, all swarming  the street
in an intricate dance of desire and commerce.
     There were countless theories explaining why  Chiba City  tolerated the
Ninsei  enclave, but  Case  tended  toward the idea that the Yakuza might be
preserving the place  as a kind  of  historical park, a  reminder of  humble
origins.  But  he also  saw  a certain  sense  in the notion that burgeoning
technologies require outlaw zones,  that Night City  wasn't there  for
its  inhabitants,  but  as  a   deliberately   unsupervised  playground  for
technology itself.
     Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? Would Wage have
him  killed  to make an  example?  It didn't make much sense, but then
Wage dealt primarily in proscribed biologicals,  and they said you had to be
crazy to do that.
     But  Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case's primary insight into
the dynamics of  street dealing was  that  neither  the buyer nor the seller
really  needed  him.  A  middleman's business  is to  make  himself  a
necessary  evil.  The  dubious  niche Case  had  carved for  himself in  the
criminal  ecology of Night City  had beep cut out  with lies,  scooped out a
night  at a time with betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to
crumble, he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
     The week  before, he'd delayed  transfer of a synthetic glandular
extract,  retailing  it  for  a  wider  margin  than  usual.  He  knew  Wage
hadn't liked that. Wage was his primary supplier,  nine years in Chiba
and one of the  few gaijin dealers who'd  managed to  forge links with
the  rigidly  stratified criminal  establishment  beyond  Night City's
borders. Genetic materials and  hormones trickled down to  Ninsei  along  an
intricate ladder of fronts and  blinds.  Somehow Wage had  managed to  trace
something  back, once,  and  now  he enjoyed  steady connections in  a dozen
cities.
     Case found himself  staring through a shop window. The place sold small
bright objects to the  sailors.  Watches, flicknives, lighters, pocket VTRs,
Simstim  decks, weighted  manriki  chains, and  shuriken.  The shuriken  had
always  fascinated  him,  steel  stars with knife-sharp  points.  Some  were
chromed, others  black, others  treated with a rainbow  surface  like oil on
water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against scarlet
ultra suede with nearly invisible  loops  of nylon fish line, their  centers
stamped  with  dragons or yin yang symbols.  They  caught the street's
neon  and twisted it, and it came to Case  that these were  the stars  under
which  he  voyaged,  his  destiny spelled out  in  a  constellation of cheap
chrome.
     "Julie,"  he said to his  stars. "Time  to  see old Julie.  He'll
know."

     Julius Deane  was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism
assiduously warped by  a weekly fortune in serums  and hormones. His primary
hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons
re-set  the  code  of  his  DNA,  a  procedure  unavailable  in Chiba.  Then
he'd  fly to  Hongkong and  order  the year's suits  and shirts.
Sexless and inhumanly patient, his  primary gratification seemed  to lie  in
his  devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship.  Case had never  seen him
wear the same suit twice,  although his wardrobe seemed  to consist entirely
of  meticulous  reconstructions of  garments  of  the previous  century.  He
affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs
of pink synthetic  quartz and beveled  like the mirrors  in a Victorian doll
house.
     His  offices  were located in a warehouse behind  Ninsei, part of which
seemed  to  have  been  sparsely decorated,  years  before,  with  a  random
collection  of European  furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use
the place as  his home. NeoAztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of
the  room where  Case  waited. A pair of bulbous  Disney-styled  table lamps
perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee  table in scarlet-lacquered
steel.  A Dali clock hung  on  the wall between the bookcases, its distorted
face  sagging to  the  bare concrete floor.  Its hands  were holograms  that
altered to match the convolutions of the face  as they rotated, but it never
told the correct time. The room was stacked with  white fiberglass  shipping
modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
     "You seem to be clean, old son," said Deane's disembodied voice.
     "Do come in." Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive
imitation-rosewood door to  the  left of the bookcases. JULIUS  DEANE IMPORT
EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If
the furniture scattered in Deane's makeshift  foyer suggested the  end
of the past century, the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
     Deane's  seamless pink face  regarded Case from  a pool  of light
cast by an ancient brass lamp with  a rectangular shade of dark green glass.
The  importer  was  securely fenced behind  a vast  desk  of  painted steel,
flanked on either side by tall, drawered cabinets  made of some sort of pale
wood.  The sort  of thing, Case supposed,  that had once been used to  store
written  records of some  kind.  The  desktop  was littered  with cassettes,
scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of  some sort  of  clockwork
typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get around to reassembling.
     "What brings you  around, boyo?" Deane  asked,  offering Case a  narrow
bonbon  wrapped in blue-and-white checked  paper. "Try one. Ting Ting Djahe,
the very best." Case refused the ginger, took  a  seat  in  a  yawing wooden
swivel  chair,  and ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black  jeans-leg.
"Julie I hear Wage wants to kill me."
     "Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?"
     "People."
     "People,"  Deane  said,  around a ginger bonbon. "What sort  of people?
Friends?"
     Case nodded.
     "Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?"
     "I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to you?"
     "Haven't been in touch, of late." Then he sighed. "If I did know,
of course, I might not be in  a position to tell you. Things being what they
are, you understand."
     "Things?"
     "He's an important connection Case."
     "Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?"
     "Not  that I know of."  Deane shrugged. They might have been discussing
the  price  of  ginger. "If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you
come  back in a week  or so and I'll  let you in on a little something
out of Singapore."
     "Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?"
     "Loose  lips, old son!" Deane grinned. The steel desk was jammed with a
fortune in debugging gear.
     "Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage."
     Deane's fingers  came  up to brush the perfect  knot in his  pale
silk tie.

     He  was less  than  a block  from Deane's office when it hit, the
sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close.
     The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was  something Case took for
granted. The  trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could
be quite a trick, behind a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge
and composed  his narrow features in a mask  of bored vacancy, pretending to
let  the crowd carry him  along.  When he  saw a darkened display window, he
managed  to pause  by it.  The place was  a  surgical  boutique, closed  for
renovations. With his  hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through
the glass at a flat lozenge of vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal
of  imitation  jade. The  color of  its  skin  reminded him of  Zone's
whores;  it  was  tattooed  with  a  luminous  digital  display  wired  to a
subcutaneous chip.  Why bother with the surgery, he  found himself thinking,
while sweat  coursed down  his  ribs,  when you  could just  carry the thing
around in your pocket?
     Without moving his head, he raised his  eyes and studied the reflection
of the passing crowd.
     There.
     Behind  sailors in short-sleeved  khaki.  Dark  hair, mirrored glasses,
dark clothing, slender. . .
     And gone.
     Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.

     "Rent me a gun, Shin?"
     The  boy smiled. "Two hour."  They stood together in the smell of fresh
raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall. "You come back, two hour."
     "I need one now, man. Got anything right now?"
     Shin rummaged  behind empty  two-liter  cans  that had once been filled
with powdered  horseradish. He produced  a slender package  wrapped in  gray
plastic. "Taser. One hour, twenty New Yen. Thirty deposit."
     "Shit. I don't need that. I need a gun. Like I  maybe wanna shoot
somebody, understand?"
     The waiter shrugged,  replacing the taser  behind the horseradish cans.
"Two hour."

     He went  into  the shop  without  bothering to glance at the display of
shuriken. He'd never thrown one in his life.
     He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with  a Mitsubishi Bank chip that gave
his name as Charles Derek May. It beat  Truman Starr,  the  best  he'd
been able to do for a passport.
     The Japanese woman behind  the terminal looked like she had a few years
on old Deane, none of them with the  benefit of science. He took his slender
roll of New Yen out  of  his pocket and showed it to  her. "I want  to buy a
weapon."
     She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
     "No," he said, "I don't like knives."
     She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter.  The lid was yellow
cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a coiled cobra with a swollen hood.
Inside  were  eight  identical  tissue-wrapped cylinders.  He  watched while
mottled brown fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for
him to examine,  a dull steel tube with  a  leather  thong  at one end and a
small bronze  pyramid at the other. She gripped the  tube with one hand, the
pyramid  between her other thumb  and  forefinger,  and pulled. Three oiled,
telescoping segments  of  tightly  wound  coil spring  slid  out and locked.
"Cobra," she said.

     Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray.
The air  had  gotten  worse; it seemed  to have teeth  tonight, and half the
crowd wore filtration masks. Case had spent ten minutes  in a urinal, trying
to  discover  a  convenient way to conceal  his  cobra;  finally  he'd
settled  for tucking the  handle into the waistband  of his jeans, with  the
tube slanting  across his stomach. The  pyramidal striking tip rode  between
his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt like it  might
clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it made him feel better.
     The  Chat  wasn't  really  a dealing  bar,  but  on weeknights it
attracted a related  clientele. Fridays and Saturdays  were  different.  The
regulars were still there,  most of them, but they faded behind an influx of
sailors and the specialists  who preyed on diem.  As Case pushed through the
doors, he looked for Ratz,  but  the  bartender wasn't in sight. Lonny
Zone, the bar's  resident  pimp,  was  observing with glazed  fatherly
interest as  one of his girls  went to work  on  a young  sailor.  Zone  was
addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud Dancers.  Catching
the  pimp's eye, Case  beckoned him  to  the  bar. Zone  came drifting
through the crowd in slow motion, his long face slack and placid.
     "You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?"
     Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.
     "You sure, man?"
     "Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago."
     "Got some Joeboys with him?  One of 'em  thin, dark hair, maybe a
black jacket?"
     "No," Zone said at  last, his  smooth  forehead creased to indicate the
effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail. "Big boys. Graftees."
Zone's eyes showed very little white and less iris; under the drooping
lids, his pupils were dilated and enormous. He stared into Case's face
for a long time, then  lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip.
"Cobra," he said, and raised an eyebrow. "You wanna fuck somebody up?"
     "See you, Lonny." Case left the bar.

     His  tail was back. He was sure of  it.  He felt a stab of  elation the
octagons and adrenaline mingling with  something else. You're enjoying
this, he thought; you're crazy.
     Because, in some weird  and very approximate way, it  was like a run in
the  matrix. Get  just  wasted enough, find  yourself in some desperate  but
strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as  a
field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of  proteins linking
to  distinguish  cell  specialties.  Then you  could  throw  yourself into a
highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all
around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the
mazes of the black market. . .
     Go  it,  Case,  he  told   himself.  Suck   'em  in.  Last  thing
they'll  expect.  He  was  half a  block  from the games  arcade where
he'd first met Linda Lee.
     He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sailors. One of
them  screamed after him in Spanish.  Then he was through the entrance,  the
sound crashing over  him like surf, subsonics  throbbing in the  pit of  his
stomach.  Someone scored a  ten-megaton hit on  Tank War Europa, a simulated
air  burst drowning the arcade  in white sound as a  lurid hologram fireball
mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right  and loped up a flight of unpainted
chip board stairs. He'd come here once with Wage, to discuss a deal in
proscribed hormonal triggers with a  man called  Matsuga. He  remembered the
hallway, its  stained matting, the  row of identical doors  leading to  tiny
office cubicles. One door  was open  now. A  Japanese girl  in a  sleeveless
black  t-shirt glanced  up from a white  terminal, behind her head  a travel
poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined ideograms.
     "Get your security up here," Case told her.
     Then  he sprinted  down  the  corridor, out of her  sight. The last two
doors were  closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun and slammed the sole  of
his nylon running shoe  into the blue-lacquered composition door  at the far
end.  It popped, cheap  hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness
there, the white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door to its
right, both hands  around  the transparent  plastic knob,  leaning  in  with
everything he had. Something  snapped, and he was inside. This was  where he
and Wage  had  met  with  Matsuga,  but whatever front company  Matsuga  had
operated was long  gone.  No terminal, nothing.  Light from the alley behind
the  arcade, filtering in through  soot  blown plastic. He  made out a snake
like loop of fiber optics protruding from a wall socket, a pile of discarded
food containers, and the bladeless nacelle of an electric fan.
     The window was a  single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged out of  his
jacket, bundled it around his  right  hand, and punched. It split, requiring
two more blows to free it from the frame. Over the muted chaos of the games,
an alarm  began to cycle,  triggered either by  the broken window or  by the
girl at the head of the corridor.
     Case  turned,  pulled  his  jacket on,  and flicked  the cobra to  full
extension.
     With  the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume he'd
gone  through   the   one   he'd  kicked  half  off  its  hinges.  The
cobra's  bronze pyramid began  to bob gently,  the  spring-steel shaft
amplifying his pulse.
     Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm, the crashing
of  the games,  his heart  hammering. When the  fear  came, it was like some
half-forgotten friend. Not the cold rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but
simple  animal  fear.  He'd  lived for so long  on a constant edge  of
anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was.
     This  cubicle  was the  sort of place  where people  died. He might die
here. They might have guns. . .
     A  crash,  from  the far end  of  the corridor.  A  man's  voice,
shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. Another crash.
     And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
     Passing  his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid beats of
his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel scraped the matting.
     The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the cobra
into its  handle and scrambled for  the window, blind with fear,  his nerves
screaming. He was up, out, and falling, all before he was  conscious of what
he'd  done. The impact  with pavement drove dull rods of  pain through
his shins.
     A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch framed a heap of
discarded  fiber optics and  the  chassis of  a junked  console.  He'd
fallen face forward on a  slab of soggy chip board, he rolled over, into the
shadow  of the  console. The cubicle's  window was a  square of  faint
light.  The  alarm still oscillated, louder here,  the rear wall dulling the
roar of the games.
     A head appeared, framed in the window,  back lit by the fluorescents in
the  corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he still  couldn't read
the features. Glint  of silver  across the  eyes.  "Shit,"  someone said,  a
woman, in the accent of the northern Sprawl.
     The head  was gone. Case lay under the  console  for  a long  count  of
twenty,  then stood up. The steel  cobra was still in his hand, and it  took
him a few seconds  to remember what  it was. He  limped away down the alley,
nursing his left ankle.

x x x
     Shin's  pistol  was  a  fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation  of a
South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on the  first shot, with
a  very  rough  pull.  It  was  chambered  for  .22  long  rifle,  and  Case
would've preferred lead  azide explosives to the simple Chinese hollow
points  Shin had  sold him.  Still  it was  a  handgun  and nine  rounds  of
ammunition,  and as he  made his  way down Shiga from  the  sushi  stall  he
cradled it in his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in
a raised dragon motif,  something  to run  your  thumb  across in the  dark.
He'd  consigned  the   cobra  to  a  dump  canister   on   Ninsei  and
dry-swallowed another octagon.
     The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush  down  Shiga to  Ninsei,
then over  to Baiitsu. His tail, he'd  decided,  was gone and that was
fine.  He had calls to make, biz  to transact, and it wouldn't wait. A
block down Baiitsu, toward the  port, stood  a  featureless ten-story office
building  in ugly yellow brick. Its windows were dark now, but a  faint glow
from the roof was visible if you craned your  neck. An unlit neon sign  near
the main entrance offered CHEAP  HOTEL under a cluster of ideograms. If  the
place had another name, Case didn't know it; it was always referred to
as  Cheap  Hotel.  You  reached  it through  an alley off Baiitsu,  where an
elevator waited at the foot of a transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap
Hotel, was  an  afterthought, lashed to  the building with bamboo and epoxy.
Case climbed into the  plastic cage and used  his key, an unmarked length of
rigid magnetic tape.
     Case  had rented  a coffin here, on a weekly  basis,  since  he'd
arrived in  Chiba, but  he'd never slept  in Cheap Hotel.  He slept in
cheaper places.
     The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the  sides of the  cage
was  scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed  the fifth  floor, he saw the
lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistol grip as the cage
slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent
jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served
the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
     Centered in  the  square  carpet  of green  plastic  turf,  a  Japanese
teenager  sat  behind  a  C-shaped console, reading  a textbook.  The  white
fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six
tiers  of coffins, ten coffins  on  a  side. Case nodded in the  boy's
direction and limped  across the  plastic  grass  to the nearest ladder. The
compound was roofed  with cheap laminated matting  that rattled in a  strong
wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to
open without a key.
     The expansion-grate  catwalk vibrated with his weight as  he edged  his
way along the  third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters  long,
the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed
his key into  the slot and waited  for verification from the house computer.
Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly  and the hatch  rose vertically  with  a
creak  of springs. Fluorescents flickered on  as he crawled in,  pulling the
hatch shut  behind him and  slapping the  panel  that  activated the  manual
latch.
     There  was nothing in Number 92 but a  standard Hitachi pocket computer
and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The  cooler contained the  remains
of  three  ten-kilo slabs of dry ice carefully  wrapped  in  paper to  delay
evaporation,  and  a  spun  aluminum  lab  flask.  Crouching  on  the  brown
temperfoam slab that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from
his pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his jacket. The
coffin's terminal was molded  into one  concave wall, opposite a panel
listing house rules in seven languages.  Case took the pink handset from its
cradle and punched a Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times,
then hung up.  His  buyer for the three megabytes of hot  RAM in the Hitachi
wasn't taking calls.
     He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
     A woman answered, something in Japanese.
     "Snake Man there?"
     "Very  good to  hear  from  you,"  said  Snake  Man, coming  in  on  an
extension. "I've been expecting your call."
     "I got the music you wanted." Glancing at the cooler.
     "I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you
front?"
     "Oh, man, I really need the money bad. . ."
     Snake Man hung up.
     "You shit" Case  said to the humming  receiver. He stared  at the cheap
little pistol.
     "Iffy," he said, "it's all looking very iffy tonight."

x x x
     Case walked into  the  Chat an hour  before  dawn, both  hands  in  the
pockets  of his jacket; one held  the  rented pistol, the other the aluminum
flask.
     Ratz  was  at  a  rear table,  drinking Apollonaris water  from  a beer
pitcher,  his  hundred  and twenty kilos of  doughy flesh tilted against the
wall  on  a  creaking chair. A Brazilian  kid called  Kurt was  on  the bar,
tending  a  thin crowd of  mostly  silent drunks.  Ratz's  plastic arm
buzzed as he  raised the pitcher  and drank. His shaven head was filmed with
sweat. "You look bad, friend artiste," he said, flashing the wet ruin of his
teeth.
     "I'm  doing just  fine," said  Case,  and  grinned like  a skull.
"Super fine."  He  sagged into the chair opposite Ratz,  hands still  in his
pockets.
     "And you wander back and forth in this  portable bombshelter  built  of
booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?"
     "Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?"
     "Proof against fear  and being alone," the bartender continued. "Listen
to the fear. Maybe it's your friend."
     "You hear anything about a fight in the  arcade tonight, Ratz? Somebody
hurt?"
     "Crazy cut a security man." He shrugged. "A girl, they say."
     "I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I. . ."
     "Ah." Ratz's  mouth  narrowed, compressed  into a single line. He
was looking past Case, toward the entrance. "I think you are about to."
     Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. The speed sang
in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery with sweat.
     "Herr Wage," Ratz said, slowly extending  his pink manipulator as if he
expected it  to be shaken. "How great a pleasure.  Too seldom  do  you honor
us."
     Case turned his head  and looked up  into Wage's  face. It was  a
tanned  and  forgettable  mask.  The  eyes  were vat grown  sea-green  Nikon
transplants. Wage  wore  a suit of gunmetal silk  and a  simple bracelet  of
platinum on either wrist. He was flanked  by his Joe boys, nearly  identical
young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
     "How you doing, Case?"
     "Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the  table's heaped ashtray in
his pink  plastic claw,  "I want  no  trouble here." The ashtray was made of
thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised  Tsingtao  beer. Ratz crushed it
smoothly, butts and shards  of green plastic cascading onto  the  table top.
"You understand?"
     "Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you  wanna try that thing
on me?"
     "Don't  bother  aiming for the  legs, Kurt,"  Ratz said, his tone
conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian  standing
on  the  bar,  aiming  a  Smith &  Wesson  riot  gun  at  the trio.  The
thing's  barrel, made of paper-thin  alloy wrapped with a kilometer of
glass filament,  was  wide enough  to  swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine
revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.
     "Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
     "Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
     The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you  owe me. These," and  he glowered
at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better. You don't  take anybody
off in the Chatsubo."
     Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody off? We just
wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together."
     Case pulled the .22 out of his  pocket and  levelled it at Wage's
crotch. "I hear you wanna do  me."  Ratz's pink claw closed around the
pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
     "Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig or
something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill you?" Wage turned
to the boy on his left. "You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me."
     Case watched  as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely  deserted
except for Kurt and a  drunken  sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot
of a barstool.  The barrel of  the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the
door,  then swung back  to cover Wage.  The magazine  of Case's pistol
clattered on the table.  Ratz held the  gun in his claw and pumped the round
out of the chamber.
     "Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
     Linda.
     "Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
     The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.