Mona Lisa Overdrive

  "He’s really a very clever man. Extraordinarily clever. Although I don’t think I fancy him, really." She wore something loose and black that hung to her knees. Her feet were bare. "Nonetheless, I want . . . his body." She laughed.

  Everything

  changed.

  "Juice?" Bobby the Count asked, holding out a tall glass of something yellow. The water in the turquoise pool reflected shifting blobs of sunlight on the palm fronds above his head. He was naked, aside from a pair of very dark glasses. "What’s the matter with your friend?"

  "Nothing," Slick heard Gentry say. "He did time on induced Korsakov’s. Transition like that scares the shit out of him."

  Slick lay very still on the white iron lounge chair with the blue cushions, feeling the sun bake through his greasy jeans.

  "You’re the one he mentioned, right?" Bobby asked. "Name’s Gentle? Own a factory?"

  "Gentry."

  "You’re a cowboy." Bobby smiled. "Console jockey. Cyberspace man."

  "No."

  Bobby rubbed his chin. "You know I have to shave in here? Cut myself, there’s a scar . . ." He drank half the glass of juice and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You’re not a jockey? How else you get in here?"

  Gentry unzipped his beaded jacket, exposing his bone-white, hairless chest. "Do something about the sun," he said.

  Twilight. Like that. Not even a click. Slick heard himself groan. Insects began to creak in the palms beyond the whitewashed wall. Sweat cooled on his ribs.

  "Sorry, man," Bobby said to Slick. "That Korsakov’s, that must be some sad shit. But this place is beautiful. Vallarta. Belonged to Tally Isham." He turned his attention to Gentry again. "If you’re not a cowboy, fella, what are you?"

  "I’m like you," Gentry said.

  "I’m a cowboy." A lizard scooted diagonally up the wall behind Bobby’s head.

  "No. You aren’t here to steal anything, Newmark."

  "How do you know?"

  "You’re here to learn something."

  "Same thing."

  "No. You were a cowboy once, but now you’re something else. You’re looking for something, but there’s nobody to steal it from. I’m looking for it too."

  And Gentry began to explain about the Shape, as the palm shadows gathered and thickened into Mexican night, and Bobby the Count sat and listened.

  When Gentry was done, Bobby sat there for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, "Yeah. You’re right. How I think of it, I’m trying to find out what brought the Change."

  "Before that," Gentry said, "it didn’t have a Shape."

  "Hey," Slick said, "before we were here, we were somewhere else. Where was that?"

  "Straylight," Bobby said. "Up the well. In orbit."

  "Who’s that girl?"

  "Girl?"

  "Dark hair. Skinny."

  "Oh," Bobby said, in the dark, "that was 3Jane. You saw her?"

  "Weird girl," Slick said.

  "Dead girl," Bobby said. "You saw her construct. Blew her family fortune to build this thing."

  "You, uh, hang out with her? In here?"

  "She hates my guts. See, I stole it, stole her soul-catcher. She had her construct in place in here when I took off for Mexico, so she’s always been around. Thing was, she died. Outside, I mean. Meantime, all her shit outside, all her scams and schemes, that’s being run by lawyers, programs, more flunkies . . ." He grinned. "It really pisses her off. The people who’re trying to get into your place to get the aleph back, they work for somebody else who works for some people she hired out on the Coast. But, yeah, I’ve done the odd deal with her, traded things. She’s crazy, but she plays a tight game . . ."

  Not even a click.

  At first he thought he was back in the gray house, where he’d seen Bobby the first time, but this room was smaller and the carpets and furniture were different, he couldn’t say how. Rich but not as glittery. Quiet. A lamp with a green glass shade glowed on a long wooden table.

  Tall windows with frames painted white, dividing the white beyond that into rectangles, each pane, and that must be snow . . . He stood with his cheek touching soft drapes, looking out into a walled space of snow.

  "London," Bobby said. "She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They’ve been fading, sort of blurring. You can still raise ‘em, sometimes, but their personalities run together . . ."

  "That fits," Gentry said. "They came out of the first cause, When It Changed. You already figured that. But you don’t know what happened yet, do you?"

  "No. I just know where. Straylight. She’s told me all that part, I think all she knows. Doesn’t really care about it. Her mother put together a couple of AIs, very early on, real heavy stuff. Then her mother died and the AIs sort of stewed in the corporate cores, up there. One of them started doing deals on its own. It wanted to get together with the other one . . ."

  "It did. There’s your first cause. Everything changed."

  "Simple as that? How do you know?"

  "Because," Gentry said, "I’ve been at it from another angle. You’ve been playing cause and effect, but I’ve been looking for outlines, shapes in time. You’ve been looking all over the matrix, but I’ve been looking at the matrix, the whole thing. I know things you don’t."

  Bobby didn’t answer. Slick turned from the window and saw the girl, the same one, standing across the room. Just standing there.

  "It wasn’t just the Tessier-Ashpool AIs," Gentry said. "People came up the well to crack the T-A cores. They brought a Chinese military icebreaker."

  "Case," Bobby said, "Guy named Case. I know that part. Some kind of synergistic effect . . ."

  Slick watched the girl.

  "And the sum was greater than the parts?" Gentry really seemed to be enjoying this. "Cybernetic godhead? Light on the waters?"

  "Yeah," Bobby said, "that’s about it."

  "It’s a little more complicated than that," Gentry said, and laughed.

  And the girl was gone. No click.

  Slick shivered.

  32

  Winter Journey [2]

  Night fell during the Underground’s peak evening traffic, though even then it was nothing like Tokyo, no shiroshi-san struggling to wedge a last few passengers in as the doors were closing. Kumiko watched the salmon haze of sunset from a windy platform on the Central Line, Colin lounging against a broken vending machine with a row of cracked, dusty windows. "Time now," he said, "and keep your head demurely down through Bond Street and Oxford Circus."

  "But I must pay, when I leave the system?"

  "Not everyone does, actually," he said, tossing his forelock.

  She set off for the stairs, no longer requiring his directions to find her way to the opposite platform. Her feet were very cold again, and she thought of the fleece-lined German boots in the closet in her room at Swain’s. She’d decided on the combination of the rubber toe-socks and the high French heels as a ploy to lull Dick, to make him doubt she’d run, but with each bite of cold through the thin soles she regretted the idea.

  In the tunnel to the other platform, she relaxed her grip on the unit and Colin flickered out. The walls were worn white ceramic with a decorative band of green. She took her hand from her pocket and trailed her fingers along the green tiles as she went, thinking of Sally and the Finn and the different smell of a Sprawl winter, until the first Dracula stepped smartly in front of her and she was instantly and very closely surrounded by four black raincoats, four bone-thin, bone-white faces. " ‘Ere," the first one said, "innit pretty."

  They were eye to eye, Kumiko and the Dracula; his breath smelled of tobacco. The evening crowd continued on its way around them, bundled for the most part in dark wool.

  "Oo," one said, beside her, "look. Wot’s this?" He held up the Maas-Neotek unit, his hand gloved in cracked black leather. "Flash lighter, innit? Let’s ‘ave a snag, Jap." Kumiko’s hand went to her pocket, sho
t straight through the razor slash, and closed on air. The boy giggled.

  "Snags in ‘er bag," another said. " ‘Elp ‘er, Reg." A hand darted out and the leather strap of her purse parted neatly.

  The first Dracula caught the purse, whipped the dangling strap around it with a practiced flick, and tucked it into the front of his raincoat. "Ta."

  " ‘Ere, she’s got ‘em in ‘er pants!" Laughter as she fumbled beneath layered sweaters. The tape she’d used hurt her stomach as she tore the gun free with both hands and flipped it up against the cheek of the boy who held the unit.

  Nothing happened.

  Then the other three were racing frantically for the stairs at the far end of the tunnel, their high-laced black boots slipping in melted snow, their long coats flapping like wings. A woman screamed.

  And still they were frozen there, Kumiko and the Dracula, the muzzle of the pistol pressed against his left cheekbone. Kumiko’s arms began to tremble.

  She was looking into the Dracula’s eyes, brown eyes gone wide with an ancient simple terror; the Dracula was seeing her mother’s mask. Something struck the concrete at her feet: Colin’s unit.

  "Run," she said. The Dracula convulsed, opened his mouth, made a strangled, sobbing sound, and twisted away from the gun.

  Kumiko looked down and saw the Maas-Neotek unit in a puddle of gray slush. Beside it lay the clean silver rectangle of a single-edged industrial razorblade. When she picked up the unit, she saw that its case was cracked. She shook moisture from the crack and squeezed it hard in her hand. The tunnel was deserted now. Colin wasn’t there. Swain’s Walther air pistol was huge and heavy in her other hand.

  She stepped to a rectangular receptacle fastened to the tile wall and tucked the gun down between a grease-flecked foam food container and a neatly folded sheaf of newsfax. Turned away, then turned back for the fax.

  Up the stairs.

  Someone pointed at her, on the platform, but the train roared in with its antique clatter and then the doors slid shut behind her.

  She did as Colin had instructed, White City and Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park, raising the fax as the train slowed for Notting Hill — the King, who was very old, was dying — and keeping it there through Bond Street. The station at Oxford Circus was very busy and she was grateful for the sheltering crowd.

  Colin had said that it was possible to leave the station without paying. After some consideration, she decided that this was true, though it required speed and timing. Really, there was no other way; her purse, with the MitsuBank chip and her few English coins, had gone with the Jack Draculas. She spent ten minutes watching passengers surrender their yellow plastic tickets to the automated turnstiles, took a deep breath, and ran. Up, over, behind her a shout and a loud laugh, and then she was running again.

  When she reached the doors at the top of the stairs, she saw Brixton Road waiting like a tatty Shinjuku, jammed with steaming foodstalls.

  33

  Star

  She was waiting in a car and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like waiting anyway, but the wiz she’d done made it really hard. She had to keep reminding herself not to grit her teeth, because whatever Gerald had done to them, they were still sore. She was sore all over, now that she thought about it. Probably the wiz hadn’t been such a great idea.

  The car belonged to the woman, the one Gerald called Molly. Some kind of regular gray Japanese car like a suit would have, nice enough but nothing you’d notice. It had that new smell inside and it was fast when they got out of Baltimore. It had a computer but the woman drove it herself, all the way back to the Sprawl, and now it was parked on the roof of a twenty-level lot that must be close to the hotel where Prior had taken her, because she could see that crazy building, the one with the waterfall, fixed up like a mountain.

  There weren’t many other cars up here, and the ones that were were humped over with snow, like they hadn’t moved in a long time. Except for the two guys in the booth where you drove in, there didn’t seem to be anybody around at all. Here she was, in the middle of all those people, the biggest city in the world, and she was alone in the backseat of a car. Told to wait.

  The woman hadn’t said much when they’d come from Baltimore, just asked a question now and then, but the wiz had made it hard for Mona not to talk. She’d talked about Cleveland and Florida and Eddy and Prior.

  Then they’d driven up here and parked.

  So this Molly’d been gone at least an hour now, maybe longer. She’d taken a suitcase with her. The only thing Mona’d been able to get out of her was that she’d known Gerald a long time, and Prior hadn’t known that.

  It was getting cold in the car again, so Mona climbed into the front seat and turned on the heater. She couldn’t just leave it on low, because it might run the battery down, and Molly’d said if that happened, they were really in the shit. " ‘Cause when I come back, we leave in a hurry." Then she’d shown Mona where there was a sleeping bag under the driver’s seat.

  She set the heater on high and held her hands in front of the vent. Then she fiddled with the little vid studs beside the dash monitor and got a news show. The King of England was sick; he was really old. There was a new disease in Singapore; it hadn’t killed anybody yet, but nobody knew how you got it or how to cure it. Some people thought there was some kind of big fight going on in Japan, two different bunches of Yakuza guys trying to kill each other, but nobody really knew; Yakuza — that was something Eddy liked to bullshit about. Then these doors popped open and Angie came through on the arm of this amazing black guy, and the vid voice was saying this was live, she’d just arrived in the Sprawl after a brief vacation at her house in Malibu, following treatment at a private drug clinic . . .

  Angie looked just great in this big fur, but then the segment was over.

  Mona remembered what Gerald had done; she touched her face.

  She shut off the vid, then the heater, and got into the backseat again. Used the corner of the sleeping bag to clean her condensed breath off the window. She looked up at the mountainside-building, all lit up, past the sagging chainlink at the edge of the carlot’s roof. Like a whole country up there, maybe Colorado or something, like the stim where Angie went to Aspen and met this boy, only Robin turned up like he almost always did.

  But what she didn’t understand was this clinic stuff, how that barman had said Angie’d gone there because she was wired on something, and now she’d just heard the news guy say it too, so she guessed it had to be true. But why would anybody like Angie, with a life like that and Robin Lanier for a boyfriend, want to do drugs?

  Mona shook her head, looking out at that building, glad she wasn’t hooked on anything.

  She must’ve drifted off for a minute, thinking about Lanette, because when she looked again, there was a copter, a big one, glittery black, poised above the mountain-building. It looked good, real big-town.

  She’d known some rough women in Cleveland, girls nobody messed with, but this Molly was something else — remembering Prior coming through that door, remembering him screaming . . . She wondered what it was he’d finally admitted, because she’d heard him talking, and Molly hadn’t hurt him anymore. They’d left him strapped in that chair and Mona had asked Molly if she thought he’d get loose. Either that, Molly had said, or somebody finds him, or he dehydrates.

  The copter settled, vanished. Big one, the kind with the whirly thing at both ends.

  So here she was, waiting, no fucking idea what else to do.

  Something Lanette had taught her, sometimes you had to list your assets — assets were what you had going for you — and just forget the other stuff. Okay. She was out of Florida. She was in Manhattan. She looked like Angie . . . That one stopped her. Was that an asset? Okay — putting it another way — she’d just had a fortune in free cosmetic surgery and she had totally perfect teeth. Anyway, look at it that way and it wasn’t so bad. Think about the flies in the squat. Yeah. If she spent the money she had left on a haircut and some makeup, she c
ould come up with something that didn’t look all that much like Angie, which was probably a good idea, because what if somebody was looking for her?

  There went the copter again, lifting off.

  Hey.

  Maybe two blocks away and fifty stories higher, the thing’s nose swung toward her, dipped . . . It‘s the wiz. Sort of wobbled there, then it was coming down . . . Wiz; it ‘s not real. Straight down toward her. It just got bigger. Toward her. But it ‘s the wiz, right? Then it was gone, behind another building, and it was just the wiz . . .

  It swung around a corner, still five stories above the roof of the carlot, and it was still coming down and it wasn’t the wiz, it was on her, a tight white beam stabbing out to find the gray car, and Mona popped the door lock and rolled out into the snow, still in the car’s shadow, all around her the thunder of the thing’s blades, its engines; Prior or whoever he worked for and they were after her. Then the spotlight went out, blades changed pitch, and it came down fast, too fast. Bounced on its landing gear. Slammed down again, engines dying, coughing blue flame.

  Mona was on her hands and knees by the car’s rear bumper. Slipped when she tried to get to her feet.

  There was a sound like a gunshot; a square section of the copter’s skin blew out and skidded across the lot’s salt-stained concrete; a bright orange five-meter emergency exit slide popped out, inflating like a kid’s beachtoy. Mona got up more carefully, holding on to the gray car’s fender. A dark, bundled figure swung its legs out over the slide and went down, sitting up, just like a kid at a playground. Another figure followed, this one padded in a huge hooded jacket the same color as the slide.

  Mona shivered as the one in orange led the other toward her across the roof, away from the black copter. It was . . . But it was!

  "Want you both in back," Molly said, opening the door on the driver’s side.

  "It’s you," Mona managed, to the most famous face in the world.

  "Yes," Angie said, her eyes on Mona’s face, "it . . . seems to be . . ."

  "Come on," Molly said, her hand on the star’s shoulder. "Get in. Your Martian spade’ll be waking up already." She glanced back at the helicopter. It looked like a big toy sitting there, no lights, like a giant kid had put it down and forgotten it.