Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,83

aspects of self-awareness . . .”

Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill—his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impressions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise. If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be?

Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock, huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.

“Where’d he go?” Molly asked. “To take his shot?”

3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. “He told me when to let you in,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?”

Case felt Molly hesitate. “I would’ve killed him. I’d’ve tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you.”

“Why?” 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the djellaba’s inner pockets. “And why? And what about?”

Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane’s eyes were dark, curiously opaque. “Because I hate him,” she said at last, “and the why of that’s just the way I’m wired, what he is and what I am.”

“And the show,” 3Jane said. “I saw the show.”

Molly nodded.

“But Hideo?”

“Because they’re the best. Because one of them killed a partner of mine, once.”

3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.

“Because I had to see,” Molly said.

“And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?” Her dark hair was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling. “Shall we talk now?”

“Take this off,” Molly said, raising her captive hands.

“You killed my father,” 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. “I was watching on the monitors. My mother’s eyes, he called them.”

“He killed the puppet. It looked like you.”

“He was fond of broad gestures,” she said, and then Riviera was beside her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he’d worn in the roof garden of their hotel.

“Getting acquainted? She’s an interesting girl, isn’t she? I thought so when I first saw her.” He stepped past 3Jane. “It isn’t going to work, you know.”

“Isn’t it, Peter?” Molly managed a grin.

“Wintermute won’t be the first to have made the same mistake. Underestimating me.” He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. “He talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case, whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can’t really understand us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature.” He drank.

“And what exactly is that, Peter?” Molly asked, her voice flat.

Riviera beamed. “Perversity.” He walked back to the two women, swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. “An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision.”

She waited, looking up at him.

“Oh, Peter,” 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation ordinarily reserved for children.

“No word for you, Molly. He told me about that, you see. 3Jane knows the code, of course, but you won’t have it. Neither will Wintermute. My Jane’s an ambitious girl, in her perverse way.” He smiled again. “She has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy’s favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match, a floor of dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool.” He drank off the last of the mineral water. “No, you wouldn’t