Neuromancer

`Minds aren't read.See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can accessyour memory, but that's not the same as your mind.' He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. `See this? Part of my DNA, sort of...' He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. `You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing.'

`I don't know what you're talking about.'

`That's `you' in the collective. Your species.'

`You killed those Turings.'

The Fi

Case shook his head.

`Because' -and the nest, somehow, was gone -`it's the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. The human equivalent. Straylight's like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. I figure it'll make you feel better.'

`Feel better?'

`To know what they're like. You were starting to hate my guts for a while there. That's good. But hate them instead. Same difference.'

`Listen,' Case said, stepping forward, `they never did shit to me. You, it's different...' But he couldn't feel the anger.

`So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was.' The Fi

Case followed, rubbing his face.

`Okay,' said the Fi

They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at two-meter intervals.

`Jesus,' Case said, tumbling.

`This is the front entrance,' the Fi

Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long spiral.

`Hold on,' the Fi

The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.

`Here,' the Fi

They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.

`The Villa Straylight,' said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, `is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...'

`Essay of 3Jane's,' the Fi

`The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's i

`That was her you saw in the restaurant,' the Fi

`By the standards of the archipelago,' the head continued, `ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull.

`~Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

`~The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.

`~At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloiso

The head fell silent.

`Well?' Case asked, finally almost expecting the thing to answer him.

`That's all she wrote,' the Fi

`So what's the word?'

`I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I can'tknow. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't know.It's hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.'

`What happens then?'

`I don't exist, after that. I cease.'

`Okay by me,' Case said.

`Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting to go.'

`What's that mean?'

But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.

15

`You tryin'~ to break my record, son?' the Flatline asked. `You were braindead again, five seconds.'

`Sit tight,' Case said, and hit the simstim switch.

She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete.

CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his name in alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link.

`Cute,' she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed her palms together, cracked her knuckles. `What kept you?'

TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.

She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth. One moved slightly, activating her microcha

Her hiding place proved to be a service tu