Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,79

code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly’s incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled—her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically—“La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.” She’d reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass. There had been what was obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool’s cryogenic compound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.

She’d seen no one since the two Africans and their cart, and for Case they’d taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured them gliding gently through the halls of Straylight, their smooth dark skulls gleaming, nodding, while the one still sang his tired little song. And none of this was anything like the Villa Straylight he would have expected, some cross between Cath’s fairy tale castle and a half-remembered childhood fantasy of the Yakuza’s inner sanctum.

07:02:18.

One and a half hours.

“Case,” she said, “I wanna favor.” Stiffly, she lowered herself to sit on a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of each plate protected by an uneven coating of clear plastic. She picked at a rip in the plastic on the topmost plate, blades sliding from beneath thumb and forefinger. “Leg’s not good, you know? Didn’t figure any climb like that, and the endorphin won’t cut it, much longer. So maybe—just maybe, right?—I got a problem here. What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera does”—and she stretched her leg, kneaded the flesh of her thigh through Modern polycarbon and Paris leather—“I want you to tell him. Tell him it was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly. He’ll know. Okay?” She glanced around the empty hallway, the bare walls. The floor here was raw lunar concrete and the air smelled of resins. “Shit, man, I don’t even know if you’re listening.”

CASE.

She winced, got to her feet, nodded. “What’s he told you, man, Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was the Tessier half, 3Jane’s genetic mother. And of that dead puppet of Ashpool’s, I guess. Can’t figure why he’d tell me, down in that cubicle . . . lotta stuff. . . . Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It’s not just a mask, it’s like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of personality.” She drew her fletcher and limped away down the corridor.

The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced by what Case at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from solid rock. Molly examined its edge and he saw that in fact the steel was sheathed with panels of something that looked and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the dark sand spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like sand, cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed like a fluid, leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters ahead, the tunnel curved. Harsh yellow light threw hard shadows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth normal, which meant that she’d had to descend again, after the climb. He was thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror for cowboys.

But she wasn’t lost, he told himself.

Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across the un-sand of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.

The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time to realize that the thing was a recording. The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly’s breasts were too large, visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist was impossibly narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty. Beside her, Armitage stood rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki uniform. His eyes, Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny monitor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a howling waste of snow, the stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds.

She passed the tips of her fingers through