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 sweats a great deal, in his sleep.'
`Ali,' Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast. `It's the meperidine. I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up the reaction times with higher temperatures. Nmethyl-4-phenyl-1236,' she sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, `tetra-hydro-pyridene.'
`A hotshot,' Case said.
`Yeah,' Molly said, `a real slow hotshot.'
`That's appalling,' 3Jane said, and giggled.
It was crowded in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with 3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin. She grinned and ground against him. `You stop,' he said, feeling helpless. He had the gun's safety on, but he was terrified of injuring her, and she knew it. The elevator was a steel cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a single passenger. Maelcum had Molly in his arms. She'd bandaged his wound, but it obviously hurt him to carry her. Her hip was pressing the deck and construct into Case's kidneys.
They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.
The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the stairs to the corridor, another touch in 3Jane's pirate cave decor.
`I don't suppose I should tell you this,' 3Jane said, craning her head to allow her chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, `but I don't have a key to the room you want. I never have had one. One of my father's Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical and extremely complex.'
`Chubb lock,' Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum's shoulder, `and we got the fucking key, no fear.'
`That chip of yours still working?' Case asked her.
`It's eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean,' she said.
`We got five minutes,' Case said, as the door snapped open behind 3Jane. She flipped backward in a slow somersault, the pale folds of her djellaba billowing around her thighs.
They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.
23
Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon.
`You know,' 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, `I was under the impression that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo to search my father's things, after you killed him. He couldn't find the original.'
`Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer,' Molly said, carefully inserting the Chubb key's cylindrical shaft into the notched opening in the face of the blank, rectangular door. `He killed the little kid who put it there.' The key rotated smoothly when she tried it.
`The head,' Case said, `there's a panel in the back of the head. Zircons on it. Get it off. That's where I'm jacking in.'
And then they were inside.
`Christ on a crutch,' the Flatline drawled, `you do believe in takin'~ your own good time, don't you, boy?'
`Kuang's ready?'
`Hot to trot.'
`Okay.' He flipped.
And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat.
He was looking at himself.
Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with each beat of her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g. Maelcum drifted nearby, 3Jane's thin arm gripped in a large brown hand.