Neuromancer Read Free Page A

seen him wear the same suit twice,
     although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of
     garments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses, framed in spidery
     gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors
     in a Victorian dollhouse.
    His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which seemed to have
     been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random collection of European furniture,
     as though Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-Aztec bookcases
     gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled
     table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered
     steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging
     to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions
     of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time. The room wasstacked with white fiberglass shipping modules that gave off the tang of preserved
     ginger.
    “You seem to be clean, old son,” said Deane’s disembodied voice. “Do come in.”
    Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive imitation-rosewood door
     to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic
     in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in Deane’s makeshift
     foyer suggested the end of the past century, the office itself seemed to belong to
     its start.
    Deane’s seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of light cast by an ancient brass
     lamp with a rectangular shade of dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced
     behind a vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, drawered cabinets
     made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of thing, Case supposed, that had once been
     used to store written records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes,
     scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork typewriter,
     a machine Deane never seemed to get around to reassembling.
    “What brings you around, boyo?” Deane asked, offering Case a narrow bonbon wrapped
     in blue-and-white checked paper. “Try one. Ting Ting Djahe, the very best.” Case refused
     the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and ran a thumb down the
     faded seam of one black jeans-leg. “Julie, I hear Wage wants to kill me.”
    “Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?”
    “People.”
    “People,” Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. “What sort of people? Friends?”
    Case nodded.
    “Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?”
    “I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to you?”
    “Haven’t been in touch, of late.” Then he sighed. “If I did know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they
     are, you understand.”
    “Things?”
    “He’s an important connection, Case.”
    “Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?”
    “Not that I know of.” Deane shrugged. They might have been discussing the price of
     ginger. “If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or
     so and I’ll let you in on a little something out of Singapore.”
    “Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?”
    “Loose lips, old son!” Deane grinned. The steel desk was jammed with a fortune in
     debugging gear.
    “Be seeing you, Julie. I’ll say hello to Wage.”
    Deane’s fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his pale silk tie.
    H E WAS LESS than a block from Deane’s office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that
     someone was on his ass, and very close.
    The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. The
     trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could be quite a trick, behind
     a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and