Mona Lisa Overdrive

  She entered the Rose and Crown by a side door, Colin at her elbow, grateful for the snug gloom and irradiating warmth that seemed central to the idea of these drinking-burrows. She was struck by the amount of padding on the walls and seats, by the muffling curtains. If the colors and fabrics had been less dingy, the effect would somehow have been less warm. Pubs, she guessed, were an extreme expression of the British attitude toward gomi.

  At Colin’s urging, she made her way through the drinkers clustered in front of the bar, hoping to find Tick.

  "What’ll it be, dear?"

  She looked up into the broad blond face behind the bar, bright lipstick and rouged cheeks. "Excuse me," Kumiko began, "I wish to speak with Mr. Bevan — "

  "Mine’s a pint, Alice," someone said, slapping down three ten-pound coins, "lager." Alice worked a tall white ceramic lever, filling a mug with pale beer. She put the mug on the scarred bar and swept the money into a rattling till behind the counter.

  "Someone wanting a word, Bevan," Alice said, as the man lifted his pint.

  Kumiko looked up at a flushed, seamed face. The man’s upper lip was short; Kumiko thought of rabbits, though Bevan was large, nearly as large as Petal. He had a rabbit’s eyes as well: round, brown, showing very little white. "With me?" His accent reminded her of Tick’s.

  "Tell him yes," Colin said. "He can’t think why a little Jap girl in rubber socks has come into the drinker looking for him."

  "I wish to find Tick."

  Bevan regarded her neutrally over the rim of his raised pint. "Sorry," he said, "can’t say I know anyone by the name." He drank.

  "Sally told me I should find you if Tick wasn’t here. Sally Shears . . ."

  Bevan choked on his lager, his eyes showing a fraction of white. Coughing, he set the mug on the bar and took a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket. He blew his nose and wiped his mouth.

  "I’m on duty in five," he said. "Best step in the back."

  Alice raised a hinged section of the bar; Bevan ushered Kumiko through with small flapping motions of his large hands, glancing quickly over his shoulder. He guided her down a narrow passage that opened off the area behind the bar. The walls were brick, old and uneven, thickly coated with dirty green paint. He stopped beside a battered steel hamper heaped with terry bar towels that reeked of beer.

  "You’ll regret it if you’re on a con, girl," he said. "Tell me why you’re looking for this Tick."

  "Sally is in danger. I must find Tick. I must tell him."

  "Fucking hell," the barman said. "Put yourself in my position . . ."

  Colin wrinkled his nose at the hamper of sodden towels.

  "Yes?" Kumiko said.

  "If you’re a nark, and I sent you to find this Tick fellow, assuming I did know him, and he’s on some sort of blag, then he’d do for me, wouldn’t he? But if you’re not, then this Sally, she’d likely do for me if I don’t, understand?"

  Kumiko nodded. " ‘Between the rock and the hard place.’ " It was an idiom Sally had used; Kumiko found it very poetic.

  "Quite," Bevan said, giving her an odd look.

  "Help me. She is in very great danger."

  He ran his palm back across thinning ginger-colored hair.

  "You will help me," she heard herself say, feeling her mother’s cold mask click into place, "Tell me where to find Tick."

  The barman seemed to shiver, though it was overly warm in the passageway, a steamy warmth, beer smell mingling with raw notes of disinfectant. "D’you know London?"

  Colin winked at her. "I can find my way," she said.

  "Bevan," Alice said, putting her head around the corner, "the filth."

  "Police," Colin translated.

  "Margate Road, SW2," Bevan said, "dunno the number, dunno his phone."

  "Let him show you out the back now," Colin said. "Those are no ordinary policemen."

  Kumiko would always remember her endless ride through the city’s Underground. How Colin led her from the Rose and Crown to Holland Park, and down, explaining that her MitsuBank chip was worse than useless now; if she used it for a cab, or any sort of purchase, he said, some Special Branch operator would see the transaction flare like magnesium on the grid of cyberspace. But she had to find Tick, she told him; she had to find Margate Road. He frowned No, he said wait till dark; Brixton wasn’t far, but the streets were too dangerous now, by daylight, with the police on Swain’s side. But where could she hide? she asked. She had very little cash; the concept of currency, of coins and paper notes, was quaint and alien.

  Here, he said, as she rode a lift down into Holland Park. "For the price of a ticket."

  The bulgy silver shapes of the trains.

  The soft old seats in gray and green.

  And warm, beautifully warm; another burrow, here in the realm of ceaseless movement . . .

  30

  The Rip

  The airport sucked a groggy Danielle Stark away down a pastel corridor lined with reporters, cameras, augmented eyes, while Porphyre and three Net security men swept Angie through the closing ring of journalists, a choreographed piece of ritual that had more to do with providing dramatic visuals than protection. Anyone present had already been cleared by security and the PR department.

  Then she was alone with Porphyre in an express elevator, on their way to the heliport the Net maintained on the terminal’s roof.

  As the doors opened, into gusts of wet wind across brilliantly lit concrete, where a new trio of security men waited in giant fluorescent-orange parkas, Angie remembered her first glimpse of the Sprawl, when she’d ridden the train up from Washington with Turner.

  One of the orange parkas ushered them across an expanse of spotless concrete to the waiting helicopter, a large twin-prop Fokker finished in black chrome. Porphyre led the way up the spidery, matte-black stairway. She followed without looking back.

  She had something now, a new determination. She’d decided to contact Hans Becker through his agent in Paris. Continuity had the number. It was time, time to make something happen. And she’d make something happen with Robin as well; he’d be waiting now, she knew, at the hotel.

  The helicopter told them to fasten their seatbelts.

  As they lifted off, there was virtual silence in the soundproofed cabin, only a throbbing in the bones, and for a strange second she seemed able to hold the whole of her life in mind and know it, see it for what it had been. And it was this, she thought, that the dust had drifted over and concealed, and that had been freedom from pain.

  And the site of the soul ‘s departure, said an iron voice, out of candleglow and the roar of the hive . . .

  "Missy?" Porphyre from the seat beside her, leaning close . . .

  "I’m dreaming . . ."

  Something had been waiting for her, years ago, in the Net. Nothing like the loa, like Legba or the others, though Legba, she knew, was Lord of the Crossroads; he was synthesis, the cardinal point of magic, communication . . .

  "Porphyre," she asked, "why did Bobby leave?" She looked out at the Sprawl’s tangled grid of light, at the domes picked out in red beacons, seeing instead the datascape that had drawn him, always, back to what he’d believed was the only game worth playing.

  "If you don’t know, missy," Porphyre said, "who does?"

  "But you hear things. Everything. All the rumors. You always have . . ."

  "Why ask me now?"

  "It’s time . . ."

  "I remember talk, understand? How people who aren’t famous talk about those who are. Maybe someone who claimed they knew Bobby talked to someone else, and it came around . . . Bobby was worth talking about because he was with you, understand? That’s a good place to start, missy, because he wouldn’t have found that so very gratifying, would he? Story was, he’d set out hustling on his own, but he’d found you instead, and you rolled higher and faster than anything he could’ve dreamed of. Took him up there, understand? Where the kind of money he’d never even dreamed of, back in Barrytown, was just change . . ."


  Angie nodded, looking out over the Sprawl.

  "Talk was he had his own ambitions, missy. Something driving him. Drove him off, finally . . ."

  "I didn’t think he’d leave me," she said. "When I first came to the Sprawl, it was like being born. A new life. And he was there, right there, the very first night. Later, when Legba — when I was with the Net . . ."

  "When you were becoming Angie."

  "Yes. And as much of me as that took, I knew he’d be there. And also that he’d never buy it, entirely, and I needed that, how it was still just a scam, to him, the whole business . . ."

  "The Net?"

  "Angie Mitchell. He knew the difference between it and me."

  "Did he?"

  "Maybe he was the difference." So high above the lines of light . . .

  The old New Suzuki Envoy had been Angie’s favorite Sprawl hotel since her earliest days with the Net.

  It maintained its street wall for eleven stories, then narrowed jaggedly, at the first of nine setbacks, into a mountainside assembled from bedrock excavated from its Madison Square building site. Original plans had called for this steep landscape to be planted with flora native to the Hudson Valley region, and populated with suitable fauna, but subsequent construction of the first Manhattan Dome had made it necessary to hire a Paris-based eco-design team. The French ecologists, accustomed to the "pure" design problems posed by orbital systems, had despaired of the Sprawl’s particulate-laden atmosphere, opting for heavily engineered strains of vegetation and robotic fauna of the sort encountered in children’s theme parks, but Angie’s continued patronage had eventually lent the place a cachet it would otherwise have lacked. The Net leased the five topmost floors, where her permanent suite had been installed, and the Envoy had come to enjoy a certain belated reputation with artists and entertainers.

  Now she smiled as the helicopter rose past a disinterested robot bighorn pretending to munch lichen beside the illuminated waterfall. The absurdity of the place always delighted her; even Bobby had enjoyed it.

  She glanced out at the Envoy’s heliport, where the Sense/Net logo had been freshly repainted on heated, floodlit concrete. A lone figure, hooded in a bright orange parka, waited beside a sculpted outcropping of rock.

  "Robin will be here, won’t he, Porphyre?"

  "Mistah Lanier," he said sourly.

  She sighed.

  The black chrome Fokker brought them smoothly down, glasses tinkling gently in the drinks’ cabinet as the landing gear met the roof of the Envoy. The muted throb of the engines died.

  "Where Robin is concerned, Porphyre, I’ll have to make the first move. I’m going to speak with him tonight. Alone. In the meantime, I want you to stay out of his way."

  "Porphyre’s pleasure, missy," the hairdresser said, as the cabin door opened behind them. And then he was twisting, clawing at the buckle of his seatbelt, and Angie turned in time to see the bright orange parka in the hatchway, the upraised arm, the mirrored glasses. The gun made no more sound than a cigarette lighter, but Porphyre convulsed, one long black hand slapping at his throat as the security man swung the hatch shut behind him and sprang at Angie.

  Something was clapped hard against her stomach as Porphyre lolled back bonelessly in his seat, the sharp pink tip of his tongue protruding. She looked down, in pure reflex, and saw the black chrome buckle of her seatbelt through a sticky-looking lozenge of greenish plastic.

  She looked up into a white oval face framed by a tightly drawn orange nylon hood. Saw her own face blank with shock, doubled in the silver lenses. "He drink, tonight?"

  "What?"

  "Him." A thumb jerked in Porphyre’s direction. "He drink any alcohol?"

  "Yes . . . Earlier."

  "Shit." A woman’s voice, as she turned to the unconscious hairdresser. "Now I’ve sedated him. Don’t wanna suppress his breathing reflex, y’know?" Angie watched as the woman checked Porphyre’s pulse. "Guess he’s okay . . ." Did she shrug, inside the orange parka?

  "Security?"

  "What?" The glasses flashed.

  "Are you Net security?"

  "Fuck no, I’m abducting you."

  "You are?"

  "You bet."

  "Why?"

  "Not for any of the usual reasons. Somebody’s got it in for you. Got it in for me too. I was supposed to set it up to grab you next week. Fuck ‘em. Had to talk to you, anyway." "You did? Talk to me?"

  "Know anybody name of 3Jane?"

  "No. I mean, yes, but — "

  "Save it. Our asses outa here, fast."

  "Porphyre — "

  "He’s gonna wake up soon. Look of him, I don’t wanna be around when he does . . ."

  31

  3Jane

  If this was part of Bobby’s big gray house in the country, Slick decided, opening his eyes on the cramped curve of the narrow corridor, then it was a stranger place than it had seemed the first time. The air was thick and dead and the light from the greenish glass-tile ceiling-strip made him feel like he was under water. The tunnel was made of some kind of glazed concrete. It felt like jail.

  "Maybe we came out in the basement or something," he said, noticing the faint ping of echo off the concrete when he spoke.

  "No reason we’d cut into the construct you saw before," Gentry said.

  "So what is it?" Slick touched the concrete wall; it was warm.

  "Doesn’t matter," Gentry said.

  Gentry started walking in the direction they were both facing. Past the curve, the floor became an uneven mosaic of shattered china, fragments pressed into something like epoxy, slippery under their boots.

  "Look at this stuff . . ." Thousands of different patterns and colors in the broken bits, but no overall design in how it had been put down, just random.

  "Art." Gentry shrugged. "Somebody’s hobby. You should appreciate that, Slick Henry."

  Whoever it was, they hadn’t bothered with the walls. Slick knelt to run his fingers over it, feeling raw edges of broken ceramic, glassy hardened plastic in between. "What’s that supposed to mean, ‘hobby’?"

  "It’s like those things you build, Slick. Your junk toys . . ." Gentry grinned his tense crazy grin.

  "You don’t know," Slick said. "Spend your whole fucking life trying to figure what cyberspace is shaped like, man, and it probably isn’t even shaped like anything, and anyway who gives a shit?" There wasn’t anything random about the Judge and the others. The process was random, but the results had to conform to something inside, something he couldn’t touch directly.

  "Come on," Gentry said.

  Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry’s pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway?

  Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around. Bird wasn’t any good to talk to because there wasn’t much he was interested in, and all he talked was stringtown stupid. And even if Gentry never admitted it, Slick felt like Gentry understood about some things.

  "Yeah," Slick said, getting up, "let’s go."

  The tunnel wound in on itself like a gut. The section with the mosaic floor was back there now, around however many curves and up and down short, curving stairwells. Slick kept trying to imagine a building that would have insides like this, but he couldn’t. Gentry was walking fast, eyes narrowed, chewing on his lip. Slick thought the air was getting worse.

  Up another stairwell, they hit a straight stretch that narrowed to nothing in the distance, either way you looked. It was broader than the curved parts and the floor was soft and humpy with little rugs, it looked like hundreds of them, rolled out layers deep over the concrete. Each rug had its own pattern and colors, lots of reds and blues, but all the patterns were the same zaggy diamonds and triangles. The dusty smell was thicker here and Slick figured it had to be the rugs, they looked so old. The ones on top, nearest the center, were worn down to the weave, in patches. A trail, lik
e somebody’d been walking up and down there for years. Sections of the overhead light-strip were dark, and others pulsed weakly.

  "Which way?" he asked Gentry.

  Gentry was looking down, working his thick lower lip between finger and thumb. "This way."

  "How come?"

  "Because it doesn’t matter."

  It made Slick’s legs tired, walking over those rugs. Had to watch not to snag his toes in the ones with holes worn through. Once he stepped over a glass tile that had fallen from the light-strip. At regular intervals now they were passing sections of wall that looked as though portals had been sealed over with more concrete. There wasn’t anything there, just the same arched shape in slightly paler concrete with a slightly different texture.

  "Gentry, this has gotta be underground, right? Like a basement under something . . ."

  But Gentry just brought his arm up, so that Slick bumped into it, and they both were standing there staring at the girl at the end of the corridor, not a dozen meters across the waves of carpet.

  She said something in a language Slick guessed was French. The voice was light and musical, the tone matter-of-fact. She smiled. Pale under a twist of dark hair, a fine, high-boned face, strong thin nose, and wide mouth.

  Slick felt Gentry’s arm trembling against his chest. "It’s okay," he said, taking Gentry’s arm and lowering it. "We’re just looking for Bobby . . ."

  "Everyone’s looking for Bobby," she said, English with an accent he didn’t know. "I’m looking for him myself. For his body. Have you seen his body?" She took a step back, away from them, like she was about to run.

  "We won’t hurt you," Slick said, suddenly aware of his own smell, of the grease worked into his jeans and brown jacket, and Gentry didn’t really look all that much more reassuring.

  "I shouldn’t think so," she said, and her white teeth flashed again in the stale undersea light. "But then I don’t think I fancy either of you."

  Slick wanted Gentry to say something, but Gentry didn’t. "You know him — Bobby?" Slick ventured.