Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,69

the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor’s field, her ears rang, a tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her Fletcher. She pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone.

“What’s this,” said the slurred voice, “fancy dress?” A trembling hand entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. “Come visit, child. Now.”

She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic pistol. The man’s hand was steady enough, now; the gun’s barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.

He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had glimpsed in the Vingtième Siècle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. “Slow, darling.” The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly’s eyes darted from a huge Telefunken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing.

“It would be customary,” the old man said, “for me to kill you now.” Case felt her tense, ready for a move. “But tonight I indulge myself. What is your name?”

“Molly.”

“Molly. Mine is Ashpool.” He sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.

“How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I’m curious.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs.

“I don’t cry, much.”

“But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?”

“I spit,” she said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.”

“Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young.” He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. “That is the way to handle tears.” He drank again. “I’m busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I’m busy. Dying.”

“I could go out the way I came,” she said.

He laughed, a harsh high sound. “You intrude on my suicide and then ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.”

“It’s my ass, boss, and it’s all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in one piece.”

“You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of decorum. That’s what I’m doing, you understand. But perhaps I’ll take you with me tonight, down to hell. . . . It would be very Egyptian of me.” He drank again. “Come here then.” He held out the bottle, his hand shaking. “Drink.”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t poisoned,” he said, but returned the brandy to the table. “Sit. Sit on the floor. We’ll talk.”

“What about?” She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly, beneath her nails.

“Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It’s my party. The cores woke me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and I was needed. Were you the something, Molly? Surely they didn’t need me to handle you, no. Something else . . . but I’d been dreaming, you see. For thirty years. You weren’t born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we wouldn’t dream, in that cold. They told us we’d never