Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,92

length of silvered wood. “Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, ’cept she looked like more money than you had. . . .” She glanced back at him. “I’m real sorry I stole your RAM.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?”

“Tony,” she said. “I’d been seein’ him, kinda. He had a habit an’ we . . . anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin’ how you—”

“There wasn’t any graphics in there,” he interrupted.

“Sure was. I just couldn’t figure how you’d have all those pictures of when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that. . . .”

“Tony see it?”

“I don’t remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds all yellin’ so lonely. Scared ’cause I didn’t have a shot on me, nothin’, an’ I knew I’d be gettin’ sick. . . . An’ I walked an’ walked, ’til it was dark, an’ found this place, an’ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.” She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. “Never did get sick,” she said, as embers crawled. “Missed cigarettes more. How ’bout you, Case? You still wired?” Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of Wizard’s Castle and Tank War Europa.

“No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive held.

She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.

Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he remembered what she had said.

“He told you I was coming,” he said.

But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.

TWENTY-ONE

THE MUSIC WOKE him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own heart. He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket over his shoulders in the predawn chill, gray light from the doorway and the fire long dead.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.

The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his neck. He crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the music. The pulse faded, returned, faded. . . .

“What’s wrong?” She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes. “Baby . . .”

“I feel . . . like a drug. . . . You get that here?”

She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper arms.

“Linda, who told you? Who told you I’d come? Who?”

“On the beach,” she said,