Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,90
.” He walked toward the sound.
“Artiste,” he heard Ratz call. “The light. You saw a light. Here. This way . . .”
He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of icy seawater. “Ratz? Light? Ratz . . .”
But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf. He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.
Time passed. He walked on.
And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A rectangle. A door.
“Fire in there,” he said, his words torn away by the wind.
It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand. The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a meter thick. “Hey,” Case said, softly, “hey . . .” His fingers brushed the cold wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance.
He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry.
HE REFUSED HER arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure’s walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of this was real, but cold was cold.
She wasn’t real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
“Mean, motherfucker,” he whispered to the wind. “Don’t take a chance, do you? Wouldn’t give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is. . . .” He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. “I know, see? I know who you are. You’re the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn’t Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like I remember her before. . . .”
She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
“You aren’t anything,” he said to the sleeping girl. “You’re dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you’re doing. I’m flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I’m out on my ass in that library and my brain’s dead. And pretty soon it’ll be dead, if you got any sense. You don’t want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie’ll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that’s all been you, hasn’t it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn’t. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn’t it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool’s room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. ’Cause you think you can hurt me. ’Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you’re called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why’d you do it to me this way?” He was shaking again, his voice shrill.
“Honey,” she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, “you come here and sleep. I’ll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?” Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. “You just sleep, okay?”
WHEN HE WOKE, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling