Johnny Mnemonic, Page 3

  And at the end, just before he made his final cast with the filament, I saw in his face, an expression that didn't seem to belong there. It wasn't fear and it wasn't anger. I think it was disbelief; stunned incomprehension mingled with pure aesthetic revulsion at what he was seeing, hearing–at what was happening to him. He retracted the whirling filament, the ghost disk shrinking to the size of a dinner plate as he whipped his arm above his head and brought it down, the thumb tip curving out for Molly like a live thing.

  The Floor carried her down, the molecule passing just above her head; the Floor whip lashed, lifting him into the path of the taut molecule. It should have passed harmlessly over his head and been withdrawn into its diamond hard socket. It took his hand off just behind the wrist. There was a gap in the Floor in frond of him, and he went through it like a diver, with a strange deliberate grace, a defeated kamikaze on his way down to Nighttown. Partly, I think, he took that dive to buy himself a few seconds of the dignity of silence. She'd killed him with culture shock.

  The Lo Teks roared, but someone shut the amplifier off, and Molly rode the Killing Floor into silence, hanging on now, her face white and blank, until the pitching slower and there was only a faint pinging of tortured metal and the grating of rust on rust.

  We searched the Floor for the severed hand, but we never found it. All we found was a graceful curve in one piece of rusted steel, where the molecule went through. Its edge was bright as new chrome.

  * * *

  We never learned whether the Yakuza had a accepted our terms, or ever whether they got our message. As far as I know, their program is still waiting for Eddie Bax on a shelf in the back room of a gift shop on the third level of Sydney Central-5. Probably they sold the original back to Ono-Sendai months ago. But maybe they did get the pirate's broadcast, because nobody's come looking for me yet, and it's been nearly a year.

  If they do come, they'll have a long climb up through the dark, past Dog's sentries, and I don't look much like Eddie Bax these days.

  I let Molly take care of that, with a local anesthetic. And my new teeth have almost grown in.

  I decided to stay up here. When I looked out across the Killing Floor, before he came, I saw how hollow I was. And I knew I was sick of being a bucket. So now I climb down and visit Jones, almost every night.

  We're partners now, Jones and I, and Molly Millions, too. Molly handles our business in the Drome. Jones is still in Funland, but he has a bigger tank, with fresh seawater trucked in once a week. And he has his junk, when he needs it. He still talks to the kids with his frame of lights, but he talks to me on a new display unit in a shed that I rent there, a better unit than the one he used in the navy.

  And we're all making good money, better money than I made before, because Jones's Squid can read the traces of anything that anyone ever stored in me, and he gives it to me on the display unit in languages I can understand. So we're learning a lot about all my formed clients. And one day I'll have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and I'll live with my own memories and nobody else's, the way other people do. But not for a while.

  In the meantime it's really okay up here, way up in the dark, smoking a Chinese filter tip and listening to the condensation that drips from the geodesics. Real quiet up here– unless a pair of Lo Teks decide to dance on the Killing Floor.

  It's educational, too. With Jones to help me figure things out, I'm getting to be the most technical boy in town.