The Text

NEUROMANCER

PART ONE
CHIBA CITY BLUES

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned
to a dead channel.
`It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he
shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the
Chat. `It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-
ciency.' It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo
was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there
for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto-
nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw
Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel
and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the
unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval
uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
precise rows of tribal scars. `Wage was in here early, with two
joeboys,' Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his
good hand. `Maybe some business with you, Case?'
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged
him.
The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff
of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something
heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he
reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis,
a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby
pink plastic. `You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.' Ratz
grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his
overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. `You are
the artiste of the slightly funny deal.'
`Sure,' Case said, and sipped his beer. `Somebody's gotta
be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you.'
The whore's giggle went up an octave.
`Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's
a close personal friend of mine.'
She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible
spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.
`Jesus,' Case said, `what kinda creepjoint you running here?
Man can't have a drink.'
`Ha,' Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag,
`Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertain-
ment value.'
As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange
instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated
conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause.
Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
Ratz grunted. `An angel passed.'
`The Chinese,' bellowed a drunken Australian, `Chinese
bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a
nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate...'
`Now that,' Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly
rising in him like bile, `that is _so_ much bullshit.'