Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,18
bacon that had lodged between his front teeth. He’d given up asking her where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign for silence were all he’d gotten in reply. She talked about the season’s fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in California he’d never heard of.
He looked around the deserted dead-end street. A sheet of newsprint went cartwheeling past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side; something to do with convection, and an overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn’t his Sprawl, he decided. She’d led him through a dozen bars and clubs he’d never seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod. Maintaining connections.
Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO HOLOGRAFIX.
The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it, Molly’s hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that he couldn’t follow. He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brushing the tip of the forefinger. The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn’t look back.
The tunnel ended with an ancient army blanket tacked across a doorway. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match, floored with white hospital tile molded in a nonslip pattern of small raised disks. In the center stood a square, white-painted wooden table and four white folding chairs.
The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn’t quite a smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the doorway. Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He helped the man lift it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained fingers secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan began to purr.
“Time,” the man said, straightening up, “and counting. You know the rate, Moll.”
“We need a scan, Finn. For implants.”
“So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape. Straighten up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full three-sixty.” Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking stands studded with sensors. The man took a small monitor from his pocket and squinted at it. “Something new in your head, yeah. Silicon, coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic carbons. Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but that’s your business, right? Same with your claws.”
“Get over here, Case.” He saw a scuffed X in black on the white floor. “Turn around. Slow.”
“Guy’s a virgin.” The man shrugged. “Some cheap dental work, is all.”
“You read for biologicals?” Molly unzipped her green vest and took off the dark glasses.
“You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we’ll run a little biopsy.” He laughed, showing more of his yellow teeth. “Nah. Finn’s word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs, no cortex bombs. You want me to shut the screen down?”
“Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we’ll want full screen for as long as we want it.”
“Hey, that’s fine by the Finn, Moll. You’re only paying by the second.”
They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white chairs around