Neuromancer by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across
     Case’s legs.
    He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down, expecting to see
     that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down
     at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The
     crowd was chantingthe winner’s name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white sneaker
     had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
    Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking. Past unseeing
     faces, every eye raised to the victor’s image above the ring. Once a seamed European
     face danced in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a metal
     pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.
    “Case.” Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. “You okay?”
    Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.
    He shook his head.
    “Fight’s over, Case. Time to go home.”
    He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where something was dying. She stopped
     him with a hand on his chest. “Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for
     you. You haven’t done too well for friends in this town, have you? We got a partial
     profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. He’d fry anybody, for a few New
     ones. The one back there said they got onto her when she was trying to fence your
     RAM. Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money. . . . I got
     the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I
     had to make sure.” Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.
    Case felt as though his brain were jammed. “Who,” he said, “who sent them?”
    She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were
     sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.
    A FTER THE POSTOPERATIVE check at the clinic, Molly took him to the port. Armitage was waiting. He’d chartered
     a hovercraft. The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then
     a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.

PART 2

THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION

THREE
    H OME .
    Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
    Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single
     pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start
     to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is
     about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At
     a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown
     Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta . . .
    C ASE WOKE FROM a dream of airports, of Molly’s dark leathers moving ahead of him through the concourses
     of Narita, Schipol, Orly. . . . He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish
     vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.
    Somewhere down in the Sprawl’s ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale
     air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent,gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing, bass down
     into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to rise from
     the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
    Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an expanse of very
     new pink temperfoam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of
     a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chipboard, a fat
     gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few centimeters of the floor. He lay
     on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with
     the functional elegance of a war plane’s fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles
     like a dancer’s.
    The room was