"What the hell are you looking at?"
"Uh . . . your boots."
"So?"
"They don’t make it with your pants."
"Wore ‘em to kick the shit out of Prior."
Prior moaned on the floor and started trying to throw up. It made Mona feel kind of sick herself, so she said she was going to go to the bathroom.
"Don’t try to leave." The woman seemed to be watching Prior, over the rim of her white china cup, but with those glasses, it was hard to be sure.
Somehow she found herself in the bathroom with her purse on her lap. She hurried, getting the hit together; didn’t grind it fine enough, so it burned the back of her throat, but like Lanette used to say, you don’t always have time for the niceties. And anyway, wasn’t that all a lot better now? There was a little shower in Gerald’s bathroom, but it looked like it hadn’t been used for a long time. She took a closer look and saw gray mold growing around the drain, and spots that looked like dried blood.
When she came back, the woman was dragging Prior into one of the other rooms, pulling him by his feet. He had socks on, no shoes, Mona noticed now, like maybe he’d had his feet up to sleep. His blue shirt had blood on it and his face was all bruised.
What Mona felt, as the rush kicked in, was a bright and innocent curiosity. "What are you doing?"
"I think I’ll have to wake him up," the woman said, like she was on the subway, talking about another passenger who was about to miss his stop. Mona followed her into the room where Gerald did his work, everything clean and hospital white; she watched as the woman got Prior up into a sort of chair like in a salon, with levers and buttons and things. It isn’t like she’s that strong, Mona thought, it ‘s like she knows which way to throw the weight. Prior’s head fell to the side as the woman fastened a black strap across his chest. Mona was starting to feel sorry for him, but then she remembered Eddy.
"What is it?" The woman was filling a white plastic container with water from a chrome tap.
Mona just kept trying to say it, feeling her heart race out of control on the wiz. He killed Eddy, she kept trying to say, but it wouldn’t come out. But then it must have, because the woman said, "Yeah, he’ll do that sort of thing . . . if you let him." She threw the water over Prior, into his face and all down his shirt; his eyes snapped open and the white of the left one was solid red; the metal prongs of the shockrod snapped white sparks when the woman pressed it against the wet blue shirt. Prior screamed.
Gerald had to get down on his hands and knees to pull her out from under the bed. He had cool, very gentle hands. She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten under there, but now everything was quiet. Gerald had on a gray topcoat and dark glasses.
"You’re going with Molly now, Mona," he said.
She started to shake.
"I think I’d better give you something for your nerves."
She jerked back, out of his grip. "No! Don’t fucking touch me!"
"Leave it, Gerald," the woman said from the door. "It’s time you go now."
"I don’t think you know what you’re doing," he said, "but good luck."
"Thanks. Think you’ll miss the place?"
"No. I was going to retire soon anyway."
"So was I," the woman said, and then Gerald left, without even a nod for Mona.
"Got any clothes?" the woman asked Mona. "Get ‘em on. We’re leaving too."
Dressing, Mona found she couldn’t button her dress over her new breasts, so she left it open, putting Michael’s jacket on and sipping it up to her chin.
28
Company
Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues, the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience . . . So he was doing that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.
Gentry was up in the loft with the shape he’d captured, what he called a macroform node, and he’d hardly listened to what Slick had tried to tell him about the house and that whole place and Bobby the Count.
So Slick had come down here to crouch next to an Investigator in the cold and dark, retracing all the things he’d done with so many different tools, and where he’d scrounged each part, and then Cherry reached out and touched his cheek with her cold hand.
"You okay?" she asked. "I thought maybe it was happening to you again . . ."
"No. It’s just I gotta come down here, sometimes."
"He plugged you into the Count’s box, didn’t he?"
"Bobby," Slick said, "that’s his name. I saw him."
"Where?"
"In there. It’s a whole world. There’s this house, like a castle or something, and he’s there."
"By himself?"
"He said Angie Mitchell’s in there too . . ."
"Maybe he’s crazy. Is she?"
"I didn’t see her. Saw a car he said was hers."
"She’s in some celebrity detox place in Jamaica, last I heard."
He shrugged. "I dunno."
"What’s he like?"
"He looked younger. Anybody’d look bad with all those tubes ‘n’shit in ‘em. He figured Kid Afrika dumped him here because he got scared. He said if anybody comes looking for him, we jack him into the matrix."
"Why?"
"Dunno."
"You shoulda asked him."
He shrugged again. "Seen Bird anywhere?"
"No."
"Shoulda been back already . . ." He stood up.
Little Bird came back at dusk, on Gentry’s bike, the dark wings of his hair damp with snow and flapping behind him as he roared in across the Solitude. Slick winced; Little Bird was in the wrong gear. Little Bird jolted up an incline of compacted oildrums and hit the brakes when he should’ve gunned it. Cherry gasped as Bird and the bike separated in midair; the bike seemed to hang there for a second before it somersaulted into the rusted sheet-metal tangle that had been one of Factory’s outbuildings, and Little Bird was rolling over and over on the ground.
Somehow Slick never heard the crash. He was standing beside Cherry in the shelter of a doorless loading bay — then he was sprinting across snow-flecked rust to the fallen rider, no transition. Little Bird lay on his back with blood on his lips, his mouth partially hidden by the jumble of thongs and amulets he wore around his neck.
"Don’t touch him," Cherry said. "Ribs may be broken, or he’s mashed up inside . . ."
Little Bird’s eyes opened at the sound of her voice. He pursed his lips and spat blood and part of a tooth.
"Don’t move," Cherry said, kneeling beside him and switching to the crisp diction she’d learned in med-tech school. "You may have been injured . . ."
"F-fuck it, lady," he managed, and struggled stiffly up, with Slick’s help.
"All right, asshole," she said, "hemorrhage. See if I give a shit."
"Didn’t get it," Little Bird said, smearing blood across his face with the back of his hand, "the truck."
"I can see that," Slick said.
"Marvie ‘n’ them, they got company. Like flies on shit. Couple of hovers ‘n’ a copter ‘n’shit. All these guys."
"What kind of guys?"
"Like soldiers, but they’re not. Soldier’ll goof around, bullshit, crack jokes when nobody important’s looking. But not them."
"Cops?" Marvie and his two brothers grew mutant ruderalis in a dozen half-buried railway tankcars; sometimes they tried to cook primitive amine compounds, but their lab kept blowing up. They were the nearest thing Factory had to permanent neighbors. Six kilometers.
"Cops?" Little Bird spat another tooth chip and gingerly probed his mouth with a bloody finger. "They aren’t doin’ anything against the law. Anyway, cops can’t afford shit like that, new hovers, new Honda . . ." He grinned through a film of blood and spittle. "I hung off in the Solitude ‘n’scoped ‘em g
ood. Nobody I’d wanna talk to, or you either. Guess I really fucked Gentry’s bike, huh?"
"Don’t worry about it," Slick said. "I think his mind’s on something else."
"Tha’s good . . ." He staggered in the direction of Factory, nearly fell, caught himself, continued.
"He’s higher’n a kite," Cherry said.
"Hey, Bird," Slick called, "what happened to that bag of shit I gave you to give Marvie?"
Bird swayed, turned. "Lost it . . ." Then he was gone, around a corner of corrugated steel.
"Maybe he’s making that up," Cherry said. "About those guys. Or seeing things."
"I doubt it," Slick said, pulling her into deeper shadow as an unlit black Honda swung down toward Factory out of winter twilight.
He heard the Honda making its fifth pass over Factory as he pounded up the quaking stairs, the iron roof rattling with the copter’s passage. Well, he thought, that should anyway bring it to Gentry’s attention that they had visitors. He took the fragile catwalk in ten long, slow steps; he was beginning to wonder if they’d ever be able to get the Count and his stretcher back out without having to weld extra I-bar across the span.
He went into the bright loft without knocking. Gentry was sitting at a workbench, his head cocked to one side, staring up at the plastic skylights. The bench was littered with bits of hardware and small tools.
"Helicopter," Slick said, panting from the climb.
"Helicopter," Gentry agreed, nodding thoughtfully, his disheveled roostertail bobbing. "They seem to be looking for something."
"I think they just found it."
"Could be the Fission Authority."
"Bird saw people at Marvie’s. Saw that copter there too. You weren’t paying much attention when I tried to tell you what he said."
"Bird?" Gentry looked down at the small bright things on the workbench. Picked up two fittings and twisted them together.
"The Count! He told me — "
"Bobby Newmark," Gentry said, "yes. I know a lot more about Bobby Newmark, now."
Cherry came in behind Slick. "You gotta do something about that bridge," she said, going immediately to the stretcher, "it shakes too much." She bent to check the Count’s readouts.
"Come here, Slick," Gentry said, standing. He walked to the holo table. Slick followed, looked at the image that glowed there. It reminded him of the rugs he’d seen in the gray house, patterns like that, only these were woven of hairfine neon, and twisted into some kind of infinite knot; the knot’s core hurt his head to look at it. He looked away.
"That’s it?" he asked Gentry. "What you’ve always been looking for?"
"No. I told you. This is just a node, a macroform. A model . . ."
"He’s got this house in there, like a castle, and grass and trees and sky . . ."
"He’s got a lot more than that. He’s got a universe more than that. That was just a construct worked up from a commercial stim. What he’s got is an abstract of the sum total of data constituting cyberspace. Still, it’s closer than I’ve gotten before . . . He didn’t tell you why he was in there?"
"Didn’t ask him."
"Then you’ll have to go back."
"Hey. Gentry. Listen up. That copter, it’ll be back. It’ll be back with two hovers fulla guys Bird said looked like soldiers. They aren’t after us, man. They’re after him."
"Maybe they’re his. Maybe they are after us."
"No. He told me, man. He said, anybody comes looking for him, we’re in deep shit and we gotta jack him into the matrix."
Gentry looked down at the little coupling he still held. "We’ll talk with him, Slick. You’ll go back; this time I’ll go with you."
29
Winter Journey
Petal had agreed, finally, but only after she’d suggested phoning her father for permission. That had sent him shuffling unhappily off in search of Swain, and when he’d returned, looking no happier, the answer had been yes. Bundled in several layers of her warmest clothing, she stood in the white-painted foyer, studying the hunting prints while Petal lectured the red-faced man, whose name was Dick, behind closed doors. She couldn’t distinguish individual words, only a low torrent of admonition. The Maas-Neotek unit was in her pocket, but she avoided touching it. Twice already Colin had tried to dissuade her.
Now Dick emerged from Petal’s lecture with his hard little mouth set in a smile. Under his tight black suit he wore a pink cashmere turtleneck and a thin gray lambswool cardigan. His black hair was plastered tightly back against his skull; his pale cheeks were shadowed by a few hours’ growth of beard. She palmed the unit in her pocket. " ‘Lo," Dick said, looking her up and down. "Where shall we go for our walk?"
"Portobello Road," Colin said, slouched against the wall beside the crowded coatrack. Dick took a dark overcoat from the rack, reaching through Colin to do it, put it on, and buttoned it. He pulled on a bulky pair of black leather gloves.
"Portobello Road," Kumiko said, releasing the unit.
"How long have you worked for Mr. Swain?" she asked, as they made their way along the icy pavement of the crescent.
"Long enough," he replied. "Mind you don’t slip. Wicked heels on those boots . . ."
Kumiko tottered along beside him on black French patent spikes. As she’d predicted, it was virtually impossible to navigate the glass-hard rippled patches of ice in these boots. She took his hand for support; doing this, she felt solid metal across his palm. The gloves were weighted, the fingers reinforced with carbon mesh.
He was silent, as they turned the sidestreet at the end of the crescent, but when they reached Portobello Road, he paused. "Excuse me, miss," he said, a note of hesitation in his voice, "but is it true, what the boys say?"
"Boys? Excuse me?"
"Swain’s boys, his regulars. That you’re the big fellow’s daughter — the big fellow back in Tokyo?"
"I’m sorry," she said, "I don’t understand."
"Yanaka. Your name’s Yanaka?"
"Kumiko Yanaka, yes . . ."
He peered at her with intense curiosity. Then worry crossed his face and he glanced carefully around. "Lord," he said, "must be true . . ." His squat, tightly buttoned body was taut and alert. "Guvnor said you wanted to shop?"
"Yes, thank you."
"Where shall I take you?"
"Here," she said, and led him into a narrow arcade lined solidly with British gomi.
Her Shinjuku shopping expeditions served her well with Dick. The techniques she’d devised for torturing her father’s secretaries proved just as effective now, as she forced the man to participate in dozens of pointless choices between one Edwardian medallion and another, this or that fragment of stained glass, though she was careful only to choose items, finally, that were fragile or very heavy, awkward to carry, and extremely expensive. A cheerful bilingual shop assistant accessed an eighty-thousand-pound charge against Kumiko’s MitsuBank chip. Kumiko slipped her hand into the pocket that held the Mass-Neotek unit. "Exquisite," the English girl said in Japanese, as she wrapped Kumiko’s purchase, an ormolu vase encrusted with griffins.
"Hideous," Colin commented, in Japanese. "An imitation as well." He reclined on a Victorian horsehair sofa, his boots up on an art deco cocktail stand supported by airstream aluminum angels.
The shop assistant added the wrapped vase to Dick’s burden. This was Dick’s eleventh antique shop and Kumiko’s eighth purchase.
"I think you’d better make your move," Colin advised. "Any moment now, our Dick will buzz Swain’s for a car to take that lot home."
"Think this is it, then?" Dick asked hopefully, over Kumiko’s purchases.
"One more shop, please." Kumiko smiled.
"Right," he said grimly. As he was following her out the door, she drove the heel of her left boot into a gap in the pavement she’d noticed on her way in. "You all right?" he asked, seeing her stumble.
"I’ve broken the heel of my boot . . ." She hobbled back into the shop and sat down beside Colin on the horsehair sofa. The a
ssistant came fussing up to help.
"Get ‘em off quick," Colin advised, "before Dickie puts his parcels down."
She unzipped the boot with the broken heel, then the other, pulled off both. In place of the coarse Chinese silk she usually wore in winter, her feet were sheathed in thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles. She nearly ran between Dick’s legs as she cleared the door, but instead her shoulder struck his thigh as she squeezed past, toppling him into a display of faceted crystal decanters.
And then she was free, plunging through the press of tourists down Portobello Road.
Her feet were very cold, but the ridged plastic soles provided excellent traction — though not on ice, she reminded herself, picking herself up from her second spill, wet grit against her palms. Colin had directed her down this narrow passage of blackened brick . . .
She grasped the unit. "Where next?"
"This way," he said.
"I want the Rose and Crown," she reminded him.
"You want to be careful. Dickie’ll have Swain’s men here by now, not to mention the sort of hunt that friend of Swain’s from Special Branch could mount if he’s asked to. And I can’t imagine why he shouldn’t be asked to . . ."