Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,93

something forcing her to look away. “A boy. I see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He lives here.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said you’d come. He said you wouldn’t hate me. He said we’d be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool was. He looks Mexican.”

“Brazilian,” Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed down the wall. “I think he’s from Rio.” He got to his feet and began to struggle into his jeans.

“Case,” she said, her voice shaking, “Case, where you goin’?”

“I think I’ll find that boy,” he said, as the music came surging back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although he couldn’t place it in memory.

“Don’t, Case.”

“I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down the beach. But yesterday it wasn’t there. You ever seen that?” He yanked his zipper up and tore at the impossible knot in his shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes into the corner.

She nodded, eyes lowered. “Yeah. I see it sometimes.”

“You ever go there, Linda?” He put his jacket on.

“No,” she said, “but I tried. After I first came, an’ I was bored. Anyway, I figured it’s a city, maybe I could find some shit.” She grimaced. “I wasn’t even sick, I just wanted it. So I took food in a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn’t have another can for water. An’ I walked all day, an’ I could see it, sometimes, city, an’ it didn’t seem too far. But it never got any closer. An’ then it was gettin’ closer, an’ I saw what it was. Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked, or maybe nobody there, an’ other times I thought I’d see light flashin’ off a machine, cars or somethin’. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What is it?”

“This thing,” she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark walls, the dawn outlining the doorway, “where we live. It gets smaller, Case, smaller, closer you get to it.”

Pausing one last time, by the doorway. “You ask your boy about that?”

“Yeah. He said I wouldn’t understand, an’ I was wastin’ my time. Said it was, was like . . . an event. An’ it was our horizon. Event horizon, he called it.”

The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and struck out blindly, heading—he knew, somehow—away from the sea. Now the hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from his feet, drew back from him as he walked. “Hey,” he said, “it’s breaking down. Bet you know, too. What is it? Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart? Maybe the Dixie Flatline’s no pushover, huh?”

He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was following him, not trying to catch up, the broken zip of the French fatigues flapping against the brown of her belly, pubic hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like one of the girls on the Finn’s old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life, only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.

And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of them, and the boy’s gums were wide and bright pink against his thin brown face. He wore ragged, colorless shorts, limbs too thin against the sliding blue-gray of the tide.

“I know you,” Case said, Linda beside him.

“No,” the boy said, his voice high and musical, “you do not.”

“You’re the other AI. You’re Rio. You’re the one who wants to stop Wintermute. What’s your name? Your Turing code. What is it?”

The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera’s, but there was no malice there. “To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .”

“A Turing code’s not your name.”

“Neuromancer,” the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. “The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,” and the boy did