Neuromancer - William Gibson Page 0,96

with sweat.

Case looked at 3Jane. “There isn’t much time,” he said.

“For whom, exactly?”

“For any of us.” There was a snap as Hideo cut through the metal shaft of the arrow. Maelcum groaned.

“Really,” Riviera said, “it won’t amuse you to hear this failed con artist make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful, I can assure you. He’ll wind up on his knees, offer to sell you his mother, perform the most boring sexual favors. . . .”

3Jane threw back her head and laughed. “Wouldn’t I, Peter?”

“The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,” Case said. “Wintermute’s going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps. You know that?”

3Jane raised her eyebrows. “Peter’s suggested something like that, but tell me more.”

“I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he’s something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only it’s full RAM. The constructs think they’re there, like it’s real, but it just goes on forever.”

3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. “Where? Describe the place, this construct.”

“A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete thing, kinda bunker. . . .” He hesitated. “It’s nothing fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come back to where you started.”

“Yes,” she said. “Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse. She formulated the basis of her philosophy there.”

Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants. He held a section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had his eyes closed, his hand clapped tight around his bicep. “I will bandage it,” Hideo said.

Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear shot. The darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He flicked it underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera’s hand. The fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.

Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity.

Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of Riviera’s sternum.

The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found his balance.

“Peter,” 3Jane said, “Peter, what have you done?”

“He’s blinded your clone boy,” Molly said flatly.

Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile, Case saw whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes.

Riviera smiled.

Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera’s smile had faded. He bent—bowing, it seemed to Case—and found the bow and arrow.

“You’re blind,” Riviera said, taking a step backward.

“Peter,” 3Jane said, “don’t you know he does it in the dark? Zen. It’s the way he practices.”

The ninja notched his arrow. “Will you distract me with your holograms now?”

Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo’s arrow twitched.

Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of wall. The ninja’s face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy.

Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon held ready.

“Jane-lady,” Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop the shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. “This take your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it.”

3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. “Off,” she said, “get it off.”

Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. “Hideo’ll get him, even blind?” he asked 3Jane.

“When I was a child,” she said, “we loved to blindfold him. He put arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.”

“Peter’s good as dead anyway,” Molly said. “In another twelve hours, he’ll start to freeze up. Won’t be able to move, his eyes is all.”

“Why?” Case turned to her.

“I poisoned his shit for him,” she said. “Condition’s like Parkinson’s disease, sort of.”

3Jane nodded. “Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was admitted.” She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from Molly’s hands. “Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia nigra. Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He