Neuromancer - Gibson William - Страница 23
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Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. `Here,' Molly said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. `Grab the rungs. Make like you're climbing backward, right? You're going toward the hull, that's like you're climbing down into gravity. Got it?'
Case's stomach churned.
`You be fine, mon,' Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.
Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.
`Up,' Molly said, `you gonna kiss it next?' Case lay flat on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. `Gotta play house,' she said. `You help me string this up.' He looked around the wide, featureless space and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at random.
When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
`Good,' Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial gravity.
`Where were you when it needed doing?' Case asked Riviera.
The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek. `In the head,' Riviera said, and smiled.
Case laughed.
`Good,' Riviera said, `you can laugh. I would have tried to help you, but I'm no good with my hands.' He held up his palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
`Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?' Molly stepped between them.
`Yo,' Aerol said, from the hatch, `you wan'~ come wi'~ me, cowboy mon.'
`It's your deck,' Armitage said, `and the other gear. Help him get it in from the cargo bay.'
`You ver'~ pale, mon,' Aerol said, as they were guiding the foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. `Maybe you wan'~ eat somethin'~.'
Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.
Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear what Riviera was supposed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like asking. A few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. `Hey, Riviera.' The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone back and told Armitage. `He's stoned,' Molly said, looking up from the disassembled parts of her fletcher. `Leave him be.'
Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's ability to operate in the matrix. `Don't sweat it,' Case argued, `I jack in and I'm not here. It's all the same.'
`Your adrenaline levels are higher,' Armitage said. `You've still got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're going to learn to work with it.'
`So I do the run from here?'
`No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor...'
Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of data.
`How you doing, Dixie?'
`I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.'
`How's it feel?'
`It doesn't.'
`Bother you?'
`What bothers me is, nothin'~ does.'
`How's that?'
`Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's tossin'~ all night. Elroy, I said, what's eatin'~ you? Goddam thumb's itchin'~, he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the othergoddam thumb.' When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. `Do me a favor, boy.'
`What's that, Dix?'
`This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing.'
Case didn't understand the Zionites.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. `Ver'~ small baby, mon, no long'~ you finga.' He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
`It's the ganja,' Molly said, when Case told her the story. `They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him.It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?'
Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that.
`Hey, Aerol,' Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice run in the freefall corridor. `Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing.' He held out the trodes.
Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
`Try it,' Case said.
He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out. `What did you see, man?'
`Babylon,' Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the corridor.
Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm extended straight out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon, was coiled tightly a few millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract, tightening around Riviera's arm.
`Come then,' the man said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm. `Come.' The scorpion swayed its brownish claws and scurried up his arm its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of veins. When it reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate. Riviera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered, and sank into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him.
Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic syringe in his left hand. ``If God made anything better, he kept it for himself.' You know the expression, Case?'
`Yeah,' Case said. `I heard that about lots of different things. You always make it into a little show?'
Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical tubing from his arm. `Yes. It's more fun.' He smiled, his eyes distant now, cheeks flushed. `I've a membrane set in, just over the vein, so I never have to worry about the condition of the needle.'
`Doesn't hurt?'
The bright eyes met his. `Of course it does. That's part of it, isn't it?'
`I'd just use derms,' Case said.
`Pedestrian,' Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a short-sleeved white cotton shirt.
`Must be nice,' Case said, getting up.
`Get high yourself, Case?'
`I hadda give it up.'
`Freeside,' Armitage said, touching the panel on the little Braun hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly three meters from tip to tip. `Casinos here.' He reached into the skeletal representation and pointed. `Hotels, strata-title property, big shops along here.' His hand moved. `Blue areas are lakes.' He walked to one end of the model. `Big cigar. Narrows at the ends.'
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