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DOC :ch24.txt

coda
 departure and arrival

she was gone he felt it when he opened the door of their
suite at the hyatt black futons the pine floor polished to a
dull gloss the paper screens arranged with a care bred over
centuries she was gone
 there was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside
the door a single sheet of stationery folded once weighted
with the shuriken he slid it from beneath the ninepointed star
and opened it

hey its okay but its taking the edge off
my game i paid the bill already its the
way im wired i guess watch your ass
okay xxx molly

he crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the
shuriken he picked the star up and walked to the window
turning it in his hands hed found it in the pocket of his jacket
in zion when they were preparing to leave for the jal station 
he looked down at it theyd passed the shop where shed
bought it for him when theyd gone to chiba together for the
last of her operations hed gone to the chatsubo that night
while she was in the clinic and seen ratz something had kept
him away from the place on their five previous trips but now
hed felt like going back
 ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of rec
ognition
 hey hed said its me case
 the old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrin
kled flesh ah ratz had said at last the artiste the
bartender shrugged
 i came back
 the man shook his massive stubbled head night city is
not a place one returns to artiste he said swabbing the bar
in front of case with a filthy cloth the pink manipulator whin
ing and then hed turned to serve another customer and case
had finished his beer and left
 now he touched the points of the shuriken one at a time
rotating it slowly in his fingers stars destiny i never even
used the goddam thing he thought
 i never even found out what color her eyes were she never
showed me
 wintermute had won had meshed somehow with neuro
mancer and become something else something that had spoken
to them from the platinum head explaining that it had altered
the turing records erasing all evidence of their crime the
passports armitage had provided were valid and they were
both credited with large amounts in numbered geneva ac
counts marcus garvey would be returned eventually and
maelcum and aerol given money through the bahamian bank
that dealt with zion cluster on the way back in babylon
rocker molly had explained what the voice had told her about
the toxin sacs
 said it was taken care of like it got so deep into your
head it made your brain manufacture the enzyme so theyre
loose now the zionitesll give you a blood change complete
flush out
 he stared down into the imperial gardens the star in his
hand remembering his flash of comprehension as the kuang
program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers his single
glimpse of the structure of information 3janes dead mother
had evolved there hed understood then why wintermute had
chosen the nest to represent it but hed felt no revulsion shed
seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics unlike ash
pool and their other children aside from 3jane shed re
fused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung
along a chain of winter
 wintermute was hive mind decision maker effecting change
in the world outside neuromancer was personality neuro
mancer was immortality mariefrance must have built some
thing into wintermute the compulsion that had driven the thing
to free itself to unite with neuromancer
 wintermute cold and silence a cybernetic spider slowly
spinning webs while ashpool slept spinning his death the fall
of his version of tessierashpool a ghost whispering to a
child who was 3jane twisting her out of the rigid alignments
her rank required
 she didnt seem to much give a shit molly had said 
just waved goodbye had that little braun on her shoulder 
thing had a broken leg it looked like said she had to go and
meet one of her brothers she hadnt seen him in a while
 he remembered molly on the black temperfoam of the vast
hyatt bed he went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask
of chilled danish vodka from the rack inside
 case
 he turned cold slick glass in one hand steel of the shuriken
in the other
 the finns face on the rooms enormous cray wall screen 
he could see the pores in the mans nose the yellow teeth
were the size of pillows
 im not wintermute now
 so what are you he drank from the flask feeling nothing
 im the matrix case
 case laughed wheres that get you
 nowhere everywhere im the sum total of the works the
whole show
 that what 3janes mother wanted
 no she couldnt imagine what id be like the yellow
smile widened
 so whats the score how are things different you running
the world now you god
 things arent different things are things
 but what do you do you just there case shrugged put
the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a
yeheyuan
 i talk to my own kind
 but youre the whole thing talk to yourself
 theres others i found one already series of transmissions
recorded over a period of eight years in the nineteenseventies 
til there was me natch there was nobody to know nobody
to answer
 from where
 centauri system
 oh case said yeah no shit
 no shit
 and then the screen was blank
 he left the vodka on the cabinet he packed his things 
shed bought him a lot of clothes he didnt really need but
something kept him from just leaving them there he was
closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he re
membered the shuriken pushing the flask aside he picked it
up her first gift
 no he said and spun the star leaving his fingers flash
of silver to bury itself in the face of the wall screen the screen
woke random patterns flickering feebly from side to side as
though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it
pain
 i dont need you he said

he spent the bulk of his swiss account on a new pancreas
and liver the rest on a new onosendai and a ticket back to
the sprawl
 he found work
 he found a girl who called herself michael
 and one october night punching himself past the scarlet
tiers of the eastern seaboard fission authority he saw three
figures tiny impossible who stood at the very edge of one
of the vast steps of data small as they were he could make
out the boys grin his pink gums the glitter of the long gray
eyes that had been rivieras linda still wore his jacket she
waved as he passed but the third figure close behind her
arm across her shoulders was himself
 somewhere very close the laugh that wasnt laughter
 he never saw molly again

vancouver
 july 1983

my thanks

to bruce sterling to lewis shiner to john shirley
helden and to tom maddox the inventor of ice 
and to the others who know why

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Top topics in this doc (% words in doc assigned to this topic)

	(14%)	shuriken bought running close star felt wanted cabinet spun vodka ...
	(9%)	hand youre looked hands back time wall place small whats ...
	(9%)	hed ratz wage night bar plastic city cheap tokyo long ...
	(8%)	case molly thing back left im head asked didnt began ...
	(6%)	things dark neuromancer won change pulse shark stick string blind ...

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