Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,12
Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an operating table.
“Well, I’ll tell you, the man’s definitely onto something. He’s got big money now, and he’s never had it before, and he gets more all the time.” Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth. “Or maybe, maybe something’s onto him. . . .” She shrugged.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I know I don’t know who or what we’re really working for.”
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning, he’d gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours. Then he’d taken a long and pointless walk along the port’s security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chainlink. If she’d followed him, she’d done a good job of it. He’d avoided Night City. He’d waited in the coffin for Armitage’s call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a gymnast’s body and conjurer’s hands.
“If you’ll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet you.” The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.
COLD STEEL ODOR. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. . . .
HOLD STILL. DON’T move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chainlink and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don’t you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the noncolor of the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
“Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!”
She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one hand. “You don’t lie still, I’ll slit your fucking throat. You’re still full of endorphin inhibitors.”
HE WOKE AND found her stretched beside him in the dark.
His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl’s towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass. . . .
“Case? It’s Wednesday, Case.” She moved, rolling over, reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. “Here.” She put the bottle in his hand. “I can see in the dark, Case. Microchannel image-amps in my glasses.”
“My back hurts.”
“That’s where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood, too. Blood ’cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff, I dunno. Lot of injections. They didn’t have to open anything up for the main show.” She settled back beside him. “It’s 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve.”
He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.
“I gotta punch deck,” he heard himself say. He was groping for his clothes. “I gotta know. . . .”
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. “Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor’s orders. Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so.” He lay down again.
“Where are we?”
“Home. Cheap Hotel.”
“Where’s Armitage?”
“Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We’re out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl.” She touched his shoulder. “Roll over. I give a good massage.”
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.
“How come you’re not at the Hilton?”
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs, and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temperfoam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the