Mona Lisa Overdrive

  Freeside prospers as the archipelago expands. Banking nexus, brothel, data haven, neutral territory for warring corporations, the spindle comes to play an increasingly complex role in high-orbit history, while Tessier-Ashpool S.A. recedes behind yet another wall, this one composed of subsidiary corporations. Marie-France’s name surfaces briefly, in connection with a Geneva patent trial concerning certain advances in the field of artificial intelligence, and Tessier-Ashpool’s massive funding of research in this area is revealed for the first time. Once again the family demonstrates its peculiar ability to fade from sight, entering another period of obscurity, one which will end with the death of Marie-France.

  There would be persistent rumors of murder, but any attempt to investigate would founder on the family’s wealth and isolation, the peculiar breadth and intricacy of their political and financial connections.

  Angie, screening Becker for the second time, knew the identity of Marie-France Tessier’s murderer.

  At dawn, she made coffee in the unlit kitchen and sat watching the pale line of the surf.

  "Continuity."

  "Hello, Angie."

  "Do you know how to reach Hans Becker?"

  "I have his agent’s number in Paris."

  "Has he done anything since Antarctica? "

  "Not that I know of."

  "And how long has that been?"

  "Five years."

  "Thanks."

  "You’re welcome, Angie."

  "Goodbye."

  "Goodbye, Angie."

  Had Becker assumed that 3Jane was responsible for Ashpool’s eventual death? He seemed to suggest it, in an oblique way.

  "Continuity."

  "Hello, Angie."

  "The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about that?" And what will Swift make of all this? she wondered.

  "What would you like to know, Angie?"

  " ‘When It Changed’ . . ."

  "The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a ‘hidden people.’ The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

  "That the matrix is God?"

  "In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being’s omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix."

  "If it has limits, it isn’t omnipotent."

  "Exactly. Notice that the mythform doesn’t credit the being with immortality, as would ordinarily be the case in belief systems positing a supreme being, at least in terms of your particular culture. Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency."

  "Like you."

  "Yes."

  She wandered into the living room, where the Louis XVI chairs were skeletal in the gray light, their carved legs like gilded bones.

  "If there were such a being," she said, "you’d be a part of it, wouldn’t you?"

  "Yes."

  "Would you know?"

  "Not necessarily."

  "Do you know?"

  "No."

  "Do you rule out the possibility?"

  "No."

  "Do you think this is a strange conversation, Continuity?" Her cheeks were wet with tears, although she hadn’t felt them start.

  "No."

  "How do the stories about — " she hesitated, having almost said the loa, "about things in the matrix, how do they fit in to this supreme-being idea?"

  "They don’t. Both are variants of ‘When it Changed.’ Both are of very recent origin."

  "How recent?"

  "Approximately fifteen years."

  17

  Jump City

  She woke with Sally’s cool palm pressed to her mouth, the other hand gesturing for silence.

  The little lamps were on, the ones set into the panels of gold-flecked mirror. One of her bags was open, on the giant bed, a neat little stack of clothing beside it.

  Sally tapped her index finger against closed lips, then gestured toward the case and the clothing.

  Kumiko slid from beneath the duvet and tugged on a sweater against the cold. She looked at Sally again and considered speaking; whatever this was, she thought, a word might bring Petal. She was dressed as Kumiko had last seen her, in the shearling jacket, her tartan scarf knotted beneath her chin. She repeated the gesture: pack.

  Kumiko dressed quickly, then began to put the clothing into the case. Sally moved restlessly, silently around the room, opening drawers, closing them. She found Kumiko’s passport, a black plastic slab embossed with a gold chrysanthemum, and hung it around Kumiko’s neck on its black nylon cord. She vanished into the veneered cubicle and emerged with the suede bag that held Kumiko’s toilet things.

  As Kumiko was sealing the case, the gilt-and-ivory telephone began to chime.

  Sally ignored it, took the suitcase from the bed, opened the door, took Kumiko’s hand, and pulled her out into the darkened hallway. Releasing her hand, Sally closed the door behind them, muffling the phone and leaving them in total darkness. Kumiko let herself be guided into the lift — she knew it by its smell of oil and furniture polish, the rattle of the metal gate.

  Then they were descending.

  Petal was waiting for them in the bright white foyer, wrapped in an enormous faded flannel robe. He wore his decrepit slippers; his legs, below the robe’s hem, were very white. He held a gun in his hands, a squat, thick thing, dull black. "Fucking hell," he said softly, as he saw them there, "and what’s this then?"

  "She’s going with me," Sally said.

  "That," said Petal, slowly, "is entirely impossible."

  "Kumi," Sally said, her hand on Kumiko’s back, guiding her out of the lift, "there’s a car waiting."

  "You can’t do this," Petal said, but Kumiko sensed his confusion, his uncertainty.

  "So fucking shoot me, Petal."

  Petal lowered the gun. "It’s Swain who’ll fucking shoot me, if you have your way."

  "If he were here, he’d be in the same bind, wouldn’t he?"

  "Please," Petal said, "don’t."

  "She’ll be fine. Not to worry. Open the door."

  "Sally," Kumiko said, "where are we going?"

  "The Sprawl."

  And woke again, huddled under Sally’s shearling jacket, to the mild vibration of supersonic flight. She remembered the huge, low car waiting in the crescent; floodlights leaping out from the facades of Swain’s houses as she and Sally reached the pavement; Tick’s sweaty face glimpsed through one of the car’s windows; Sally heaving open a door and bundling her in; Tick cursing softly and steadily as the car accelerated; the complaint of the tires as he swung them too sharply into Kensington Park Road; Sally telling him to slow down, to let the car drive.

  And there, in the car, she’d remembered returning the Maas-Neotek unit to its hiding place behind the marble bust — Colin left behind with all his fox-print poise, the elbows of his jacket worn like Petal’s slippers — no more than what he was, a ghost.

  "Forty minutes," Sally said now, from the seat beside her. "Good you got some sleep. They’ll bring us breakfast soon. Remember the name on your passport? Good. Now don’t ask me any questions until I’ve had some coffee, okay?"

  Kumiko knew the Sprawl from a thousand stims; a fascination with the vast conurbation was a common feature of Japanese popular culture.

  She’d had few preconceptions of England when she arrived there: vague images of several famous structures, unfocused impressions of a society her own seemed to regard as quaint and stagnant. (In her mother’s stories, the princess-ballerina discovered that the English, however admiring, couldn’t afford to pay her to dance.) London, so far, had run counter to her expectations, with its energy, its evident affluence, the Ginza bustle of its great shopping streets.

  She had many p
reconceptions of the Sprawl, most of which were shattered within a few hours of arrival.

  But as she waited beside Sally in a line of other travelers, in a vast, hollow customs hall whose ceiling struts rose away into darkness, a darkness broken at intervals by pale globes — globes circled, though it was winter, by clouds of insects, as though the building possessed its own discrete climate — it was the stim-Sprawl she imagined, the sensual electric backdrop for the fast-forward lives of Angela Mitchell and Robin Lanier.

  Through customs — which consisted, in spite of the endless wait in line, of sliding her passport along a greasy-looking metal slot — and out into a frantic concrete bay where driverless baggage carts plowed slowly through a crowd that milled and struggled for ground transportation.

  Someone took her bag. Reached down and took it from her with an ease, a confidence, that suggested he was meant to take it, that he was a functionary performing an accustomed task, like the young women bowing welcome at the doors of Tokyo department stores. And Sally kicked him. Kicked him in the back of the knee, pivoting smoothly, like the Thai boxing girls in Swain’s billiard room, snatching the bag before the back of his skull and the stained concrete met with an audible crack.

  Then Sally was pulling her, the crowd had closed over the prone figure, and the sudden, casual violence might have been a dream, except that Sally was smiling for the first time since they’d left London.

  Feeling entirely dislocated now, Kumiko watched as Sally made a survey of available vehicles, quickly bribed a uniformed dispatcher, intimidated three other prospective fares, and chivied Kumiko into a pock-marked, slabsided hovercraft, painted in diagonal bands of yellow and black. The passenger compartment was barren and remarkably uncomfortable-looking. The driver, if there was one, was invisible beyond a scrawled bulkhead of plastic armor. The nub of a video camera protruded where the bulkhead met the roof, and someone had drawn a crude figure there, a male torso, the camera its phallus. As Sally climbed in, slamming the door behind her, a speaker grated something in what Kumiko assumed was a dialect of English.

  "Manhattan," Sally said. She took a sheaf of paper currency from her jacket pocket and fanned it below the camera.

  The speaker made interrogatory noises.

  "Midtown. Tell you where when we get there."

  The cab’s apron bag inflated, the light in the passenger compartment was extinguished, and they were on their way.

  18

  Jail-Time

  He was in Gentry’s loft. He was watching Cherry do nurse-things to Gentry. Cherry looked over at him from where she sat on the edge of Gentry’s bed. "How y’doin’, Slick?"

  "Okay . . . I’m okay."

  "Remember me asking you before?"

  He was looking down at the face of the man Kid Afrika called the Count. Cherry was fiddling with something on the stretcher’s superstructure, a bag of fluid the color of oatmeal.

  "How y’feel, Slick?"

  "Feel okay."

  "You’re not okay. You keep for — "

  He was sitting on the floor of Gentry’s loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders.

  "You did time?"

  He nodded.

  "Chemo-penal unit?"

  "Yeah . . ."

  "Induced Korsakov’s?"

  He —

  "Episodes?" Cherry asked him. He was sitting on the floor in Gentry’s loft. Where was Gentry? "You get episodes like this? Short-term memory goes?"

  How did she know? Where was Gentry?

  "What’s the trigger?"

  "What triggers the syndrome, Slick? What kicks you into jail-time?" He was sitting on the floor in Gentry’s loft and Cherry was practically on top of him.

  "Stress," he said, wondering how she knew about that. "Where’s Gentry?"

  "I put him to bed."

  "Why?"

  "He collapsed. When he saw that thing . . ."

  "What thing?"

  Cherry was pressing a pink derm against his wrist. "Heavy trank," she said. "Maybe get you out of it . . ."

  "Out of what?"

  She sighed. "Never mind."

  He woke in bed with Cherry Chesterfield. He had all his clothes on, everything but his jacket and his boots. The tip of his erect cock was trapped behind his belt buckle, pressing up against the warm denim over Cherry’s ass.

  "Don’t get any ideas."

  Winter light through the patchwork window and his breath white when he spoke. "What happened?" Why was it so cold in the room? He remembered Gentry’s scream as the thing lunged for him —

  He sat up straight, fast.

  "Easy," she said, rolling over. "Lie back. Don’t know what it takes to set you off . . ."

  "What d’y’ mean?"

  "Lie back. Get under the covers. Wanna freeze?"

  He did as she said. "You were in jail, right? In a chemo-penal unit."

  "Yeah . . . How’d you know?"

  "You told me. Last night. You told me stress could trigger a flashback. So that’s what happened. That thing went for your buddy, you jumped for the switch, shut that table down. He fell over, cut his head. I was taking care of that when I noticed you were funny. Figured out you only had a consecutive memory for about five minutes at a stretch. Get that in shock cases, sometimes, or concussion . . ."

  "Where is he? Gentry."

  "He’s in bed up in his place, plastered with downs. The shape he was in, I figured he could do with about a day’s sleep. Anyway, it gets him out of our hair for a while."

  Slick closed his eyes and saw the gray thing again, the thing that had gone for Gentry. Man-shaped, sort of, or like an ape. Nothing like the convoluted shaped Gentry’s equipment generated in his search for the Shape.

  "I think the power’s out," Cherry said. "The light went out in here about six hours ago."

  He opened his eyes. The cold. Gentry hadn’t made his moves on the console. He groaned.

  He left Cherry to make coffee on the butane cooker and went looking for Little Bird. He found him by the smell of smoke. Little Bird had built a fire in a steel canister and gone to sleep curled around it like a dog. "Hey," Slick said, nudging the boy with his boot, "get up. We got problems."

  "Fuckin’ juice’s out," he mumbled, sitting up in a greasy nylon sleeping bag grimed the exact shade of Factory’s floor.

  "I noticed. That’s problem number one. Number two is we need a truck or a hover or something. We have to get that guy out of here. It’s not working out with Gentry."

  "But Gentry’s the only one can fix the juice." Little Bird got to his feet, shivering.

  "Gentry’s sleeping. Who’s got a truck?"

  "Marvie ‘n’ them," Little Bird said, and lapsed into a racking cough.

  "Take Gentry’s bike. Bring it back in the truck. Now."

  Little Bird recovered from his coughing fit. "No shit?"

  "You know how to ride it, don’t you?"

  "Yeah, but Gentry, he’ll get — "

  "You let me worry about that. You know where he keeps that spare key?"

  "Uh, yeah," Little Bird said shyly. "Say," he ventured, "what if Marvie ‘n’ them don’t wanna gimme that truck?"

  "Give ‘em this," Slick said, pulling the Ziploc full of drugs from the pocket of his jacket. Cherry had taken it after she’d bandaged Gentry’s head. "And give ‘em all of it, understand? ‘Cause I’m gonna ask ‘em later."

  Cherry’s beeper went off while they were drinking coffee in Slick’s room, huddled side by side on the edge of the bed. He’d been telling her as much as he knew about the Korsakov’s, because she’d asked him. He hadn’t ever really told anybody about it, and it was funny how little he actually knew. He told her about previous flashbacks, then tried to explain how the system worked in jail. The trick was that you retained long-term memory up to the point where they put you on the stuff. That way, they could train you to do something before you started serving your time and you didn’t forget how to do it. Mostly you did stuf
f that robots could do. They’d trained him to assemble miniature geartrains; when he’d learned to put one together inside five minutes, that was it.

  "And they didn’t do anything else?" she asked.

  "Just those geartrains."

  "No, I mean like brainlocks."

  He looked at her. The sore on her lip was almost healed. "If they do that, they don’t tell you," he said.

  Then the beeper went off in one of her jackets.

  "Something’s wrong," she said, getting up quickly.

  They found Gentry kneeling beside the stretcher with something black in his hands. Cherry snatched the thing before Gentry could move. He stayed where he was, blinking up at her.

  "Takes a lot to keep you under, mister." She handed Slick the black thing. A retinal camera.

  "We have to find out who he is," Gentry said. His voice was thick with the downs she’d administered, but Slick sensed that the bad edge of craziness had receded.

  "Hell," she said, "you don’t even know if these are the eyes he had a year ago."

  Gentry touched the bandage on his temple. "You saw it too, didn’t you?"

  "Yeah," Cherry said, "he shut it off."

  "It was the shock," Gentry said. "I hadn’t imagined . . . There was no real danger. I wasn’t ready . . ."

  "You were out of your fucking skull," Cherry said.

  Gentry got unsteadily to his feet.

  "He’s leaving," Slick said. "I sent Bird to borrow a truck. I don’t like any of this shit."

  Cherry stared at him. "Leaving where? I gotta go with him. It’s my job."

  "I know a place," Slick lied. "The power’s out, Gentry."

  "You can’t take him anywhere," Gentry said.

  "Like hell."

  "No." Gentry swayed slightly. "He stays. The jumpers are in place. I won’t disturb him again. Cherry can stay here."

  "You’re going to have to explain some shit here, Gentry," Slick said.

  "To begin with," Gentry said, and pointed at the thing above the Count’s head, "this isn’t an ‘LF’; it’s an aleph."