Mona Lisa Overdrive

  "He’d better be," Angie said, climbing into the back of the car.

  "You too, hon," Molly said, pushing Mona toward the open door.

  "But . . . I mean . . ."

  "Move!"

  Mona climbed in, smelling Angie’s perfume, wrist brushing the supernatural softness of that big fur. "I saw you," she heard herself say. "On the vid."

  Angie didn’t say anything.

  Molly slid into the driver’s seat, yanked the door shut, and started the engine. The orange hood was snugged up tight, her face a white mask with blank silver eyes. Then they were rolling toward the sheltered ramp, swinging into the first curve. Down five levels like that, in a tight spiral, and Molly swung them off into aisles of larger vehicles under dim green diagonals of light-strip.

  "Parafoils," Molly said. "You ever see any parafoil gear, up the Envoy?"

  "No," Angie said.

  "If Net security has any, they could be upstairs already . . ." She swung the car in behind a big long boxy hover, a white one with a name painted across the rear doors in square blue letters.

  "What’s it say?" Mona asked, then felt herself blush.

  "Cathode Cathay," Angie said.

  Mona thought she’d heard that name before.

  Molly was out there opening those big doors. Pulling down these yellow plastic ramp things.

  Then she was back in the car. Reversed, put it in drive, and they rolled right up into the hover. She stripped back the orange hood and shook her head to free her hair. "Mona, you think you can get out there and shove those ramps back in? They aren’t heavy." It didn’t sound like a question.

  They weren’t heavy. She pulled herself up behind the car and helped Molly pull the doors shut.

  She could feel Angie there in the dark.

  It was really Angie.

  "Up front, strap in, hold on."

  Angie. She was sitting right beside Angie.

  There was a whoosh as Molly filled the hover’s bags; then they were skimming down the spiral ramp.

  "Your friend," Molly said, "he’s awake by now, but he can’t really move yet. Another fifteen minutes." She swung off the ramp again and this time Mona had lost track of the levels. This one was packed with fancy cars, little ones. The hover roared along a central aisle, swung left.

  "You’ll be lucky if he isn’t waiting for us outside," Angie said.

  Molly brought them to a halt ten meters from a big metal door painted with diagonal stripes, yellow and black.

  "No," Molly said, taking a little blue box from the dash compartment, "he ‘s lucky if he’s not waiting outside." The door blew out of its frame with an orange flash and a sound that slammed into Mona’s diaphragm like a solid blow. It crashed into the wet street in a cloud of smoke and then they were over it, turning, the hover accelerating.

  "This is awfully crude, isn’t it?" Angie said, and actually laughed.

  "I know," Molly said, intent on her driving. "Sometimes that’s just the way to go. Mona, tell her about Prior. Prior and your boyfriend. What you told me."

  Mona hadn’t ever felt so shy in her life.

  "Please," Angie said, "tell me. Mona."

  Just like that. Her name. Angie Mitchell had actually said her name. To her. Right there.

  It made her want to faint.

  34

  Margate Road

  "You seem lost," the noodle seller said, in Japanese. Kumiko guessed that he was Korean. Her father had associates who were Korean; they were in the construction business, her mother had said. They tended, like this one, to be large men, very nearly as large as Petal, with broad, serious faces. "You look very cold."

  "I’m looking for someone," she said. "He lives in Margate Road."

  "Where is that?"

  "I don’t know."

  "Come inside," the noodle man said, gesturing Kumiko around the end of his counter. His stall was made of pink corrugated plastic.

  She stepped between the noodle stall and another that advertised something called roti, this word worked in deliriously colored spraybomb capitals trimmed with looping, luminous blobs. That stall smelled of spices and stewing meat. Her feet were very cold.

  She ducked beneath a clouded sheet of plastic. The noodle stall was crowded: squat blue tanks of butane, the three cooking grids with their tall pots, plastic sacks of noodles, stacks of foam bowls, and the shifting bulk of the big Korean as he tended his pots. "Sit," he said; she sat on a yellow plastic canister of MSG, her head below the level of the counter. "You’re Japanese?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Tokyo?"

  She hesitated.

  "Your clothes," he said. "Why do you wear rubber tabi-socks in winter? Is this the fashion?"

  "I lost my boots."

  He passed her a foam bowl and plastic chopsticks; fat twists of noodle swam in a thin yellow soup. She ate hungrily, then drank off the soup. She watched as he served a customer, an African woman who took away noodles in her own lidded pot.

  "Margate," the noodle man said, when the woman was gone. He took a greasy paperbound book from beneath the counter and thumbed through it. "Here," he said, jabbing at an impossibly dense little map, "down Acre Lane." He took a blue feltpen and sketched the route on a coarse gray napkin.

  "Thank you," she said. "Now I will go."

  Her mother came to her as she made her way to Margate Road.

  Sally was in jeopardy, somewhere in the Sprawl, and Kumiko trusted that Tick would know a way to contact her. If not by phone then through the matrix. Perhaps Tick knew Finn, the dead man in the alley . . .

  In Brixton, the coral-growth of the metropolis had come to harbor a different life. Faces dark and light, uncounted races, the brick facades washed with a riot of shades and symbols unimaginable to the original builders. A drumbeat pulsed from a pub’s open door as she passed, heat and huge laughter. The shops sold foodstuffs Kumiko had never seen, bolts of bright cloth, Chinese handtools, Japanese cosmetics . . .

  Pausing by that bright window, the display of tints and blushes, her own face reflected in the silver backing, she felt her mother’s death fall on her out of the night. Her mother had owned things like this.

  Her mother’s madness. Her father would not refer to it. Madness had no place in her father’s world, though suicide did. Her mother’s madness was European, an imported snare of sorrow and delusion . . . Her father had killed her mother, Kumiko had told Sally, in Covent Garden. But was it true? He had brought doctors from Denmark, from Australia, and finally from Chiba. The doctors had listened to the dreams of the princess-ballerina, had mapped and timed her synapses and drawn samples of her blood. The princess-ballerina had refused their drugs, their delicate surgeries. "They want to cut my brain with lasers," she had whispered to Kumiko.

  She’d whispered other things as well.

  At night, she said, the evil ghosts rose like smoke from their boxes in Kumiko’s father’s study. "Old men," she’d said, "they suck our breath away. Your father sucks my breath away. This city sucks my breath away. Nothing here is ever still. There is no true sleep."

  In the end, there had been no sleep at all. Six nights her mother sat, silent and utterly still, in her blue European room. On the seventh day, she left the apartment alone — a remarkable feat, considering the diligence of the secretaries — and made her way to the cold river.

  But the backing of the display was like Sally’s glasses. Kumiko took the Korean’s map from the sleeve of her sweater.

  There was a burnt car beside the curb in Margate Road. Its wheels were missing. She paused beside it, and was scanning the unrevealing faces of the houses opposite, when she heard a sound behind her. Turning to find a twisted gargoyle face, under a greasy spill of curls, in the light from the half-open door of the nearest house.

  "Tick!"

  "Terrence," he said, "actually," as the facial convulsion subsided.

  Tick’s flat was on the top floor. The lower floors were empty, unoccupied, peeling wallpaper showing ghostly traces
of vanished pictures.

  The man’s limp was more obvious as he climbed the stairs ahead of her. He wore a gray sharkskin suit and thick-soled suede oxfords the color of tobacco.

  "Been expecting you," he said, hauling himself up another step, another.

  "You have?"

  "Knew you’d run from Swain’s. Been logging their traffic, when I’ve had time from the other."

  "The other?"

  "You don’t know, do you?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "It’s the matrix. Something’s happening. Easier to show you than try to explain it. As though I could explain it, which I can’t. I’d say a good three-quarters of humanity is jacked at the moment, watching the show . . ."

  "I don’t understand."

  "Doubt anyone does. There’s a new macroform in the sector that represents the Sprawl."

  "A macroform?"

  "Very large data-construct."

  "I came here to warn Sally. Swain and Robin Lanier intend to give her to the ones who plot to kidnap Angela Mitchell."

  "Wouldn’t worry about that," he said, reaching the head of the stairs. "Sally’s already scooped Mitchell and half-killed Swain’s man in the Sprawl. They’re after her in any case, now. Bloody everybody’ll be after her, soon. Still, we can tell her when she checks in. If she checks in . . ."

  Tick lived in a single large room whose peculiar shape suggested the removal of walls. Large as it was, it was also very crowded; it looked to Kumiko as though someone had deployed the contents of an Akihabara module shop in a space already filled, gaijin-style, with too many pieces of bulky furniture. In spite of this, it was startlingly neat and tidy: the corners of magazines were aligned with the corners of the low glass table they rested on, beside an unused black ceramic ashtray and a plain white vase of cut flowers.

  She tried Colin again, while Tick filled an electric kettle with water from a filter jug.

  "What’s that?" he asked, putting down the jug.

  "A Maas-Neotek guide unit. It’s broken now; I can’t make Colin come . . ."

  "Colin? It’s a stim rig?"

  "Yes."

  "Let’s have a look . . ." He held out his hand.

  "My father gave it to me . . ."

  Tick whistled. "Thing cost a fortune. One of their little AIs. How’s it work?"

  "You close your hand around it and Colin’s there, but no one else can see or hear him."

  Tick held the unit beside his ear and shook it. "It’s broken? How?"

  "I dropped it."

  "It’s just the housing that’s broken, see. The biosoft’s come away from the case, so you can’t access it manually."

  "Can you repair it?"

  "No. But we can access it through a deck, if you want . . ." He returned it. The kettle was boiling.

  Over tea, she told him the story of her trip to the Sprawl and Sally’s visit to the shrine in the alley. "He called her Molly," she said.

  Tick nodded, winked several times in rapid succession. "What she went by, over there. What did they talk about?"

  "A place called Straylight. A man called Case. An enemy, a woman . . ."

  "Tessier-Ashpool. Found that for her when I rustled Swain’s data flow for her. Swain’s shopping Molly to this lady 3Jane, so called; she has the juiciest file of inside dirt you could imagine — on anything and anyone at all. I’ve been bloody careful not to look too closely at any of that. Swain’s trading it right and left, making a dozen fortunes in the process. I’m sure she’s got enough dirt on our Mr. Swain as well . . ."

  "And she is here, in London?"

  "In orbit somewhere, looks like, though some people say she’s dead. I was working on that, actually, when the big fella popped into the matrix . . ."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Here, I’ll show you." When he returned to the white breakfast table, he carried a shallow square black tray with a number of tiny controls arranged along one side. He placed it on the table and touched one of the minute switches. A cubical holo display blinked on above the projector: the neon gridlines of cyberspace, ranged with the bright shapes, both simple and complex, that represented vast accumulations of stored data. "That’s all your standard big shits. Corporations. Very much a fixed landscape, you might say. Sometimes one of ‘em’ll grow an annex, or you’ll see a takeover and two of them merge. But you aren’t likely to see a new one, not on that scale. They start small and grow, merge with other small formations . . ." He reached out to touch another switch. "About four hours ago" — and a plain white vertical column appeared in the exact center of the display — "this popped up. Or in." The colored cubes, spheres, and pyramids had rearranged themselves instantly to allow for the round white upright; it dwarfed them entirely, its upper end cut off smoothly by the vertical limit of the display. "Bastard’s bigger than anything," Tick said, with a certain satisfaction, "and nobody knows what it is or who it belongs to."

  "But someone must know," Kumiko said.

  "Stands to reason, yes. But people in my line of work, and there’s millions of us, haven’t been able to find out. That’s stranger, in some ways, than the fact that the thing’s there at all. I was all up and down the grid, before you came, looking for any jockey with a clue. Nothing. Nothing at all."

  "How could this 3Jane be dead?" But then she remembered the Finn, the boxes in her father’s study. "I must tell Sally."

  "Nothing for that but waiting," he said. "She’ll probably phone in. In the meantime, we could have a go accessing that pricey little AI of yours, if you like."

  "Yes," she said, "thank you."

  "Only hope those Special Branch types in Swain’s pay don’t track you here. Still, we can only wait . . ."

  "Yes," Kumiko said, not at all pleased with the idea of waiting.

  35

  The Factory War

  Cherry found him with the Judge again, down there in the dark. He was sitting on one of the Investigators with a flashlight in his hand, shining it up the Judge’s carapace of polished rust. He didn’t remember coming here, but he couldn’t feel the jerky edge of Korsakov’s. He remembered the girl’s eyes, in that room Bobby said was London.

  "Gentry’s got the Count and his box jacked into a cyberspace deck," Cherry said. "You know that?"

  Slick nodded, still looking up at the Judge. "Bobby said we better."

  "So what’s going on? What happened when you both jacked?"

  "Gentry and Bobby, they kind of hit it off. Both crazy the same way. When we jacked, we came out somewhere in orbit, but Bobby wasn’t there . . . Then Mexico, I think. Who’s Tally Isham?"

  "Stim queen when I was little. Like Angie Mitchell is now."

  "Mitchell, she was his squeeze . . ."

  "Who?"

  "Bobby. He was telling Gentry about it, in London."

  "London?"

  "Yeah. We went there, after Mexico."

  "And he said he was Angie Mitchell’s old man? Sounds crazy."

  "Yeah, but he said that’s how he got on to it, that aleph thing." He swung the light down and directed it into the skeletal steel maw of the Corpsegrinder. "He was hanging out with rich people and heard about it. Called it a soul-catcher. The people who had it would rent time on it to these rich people. Bobby tried it once, then he went back and stole it. Took it down to Mexico City and started spending all his time in there. But they came after him . . ."

  "Sounds like you’re remembering things, anyway."

  "So he got out of there. Went up to Cleveland and made a deal with Afrika, gave Afrika money to hide him, take care of him while he was under the wire, because he was getting real close . . ."

  "Close to what?"

  "Don’t know. Something weird. Like when Gentry talks about the Shape."

  "Well," she said, "I think it might kill him, being jacked that way. His signs are starting to screw up. He’s been on those drips too long. Why I came to find you."

  The Corpsegrinder’s steel-fanged guts glinted in the flashlight’s beam. "It’s what he want
s. Anyway, if he paid the Kid, it’s like you’re working for him. But those guys Bird saw today, they’re working for the people from L.A., the ones Bobby stole the thing from . . ."

  "Tell me something."

  "What?"

  "What are these things you build? Afrika said you were this crazy white guy built robots out of junk. Said in the summer you take ‘em out there on the rust and stage big fights — "

  "They aren’t robots," he interrupted, swinging the flash to the low, scythe-tipped arms of the spider-legged Witch. "They’re mainly radio-controlled."

  "You just build ‘em to wreck ‘em?"

  "No. But I have to test them. See if I got them right . . ." He clicked off the light.

  "Crazy white guy," she said. "You gotta girl out here?"

  "No."

  "Get a shower. Maybe shave . . ." Suddenly she was very close to him, her breath on his face.

  "Okay people listen up —"

  "What the fuck — "

  " ‘Cause I ‘m not gonna say this twice. "

  Slick had his hand over Cherry’s mouth now.

  "We want your guest and all his gear. That ‘s all, repeat, all the gear." The amplified voice clanged through Factory’s iron hollow. "Now you can give him to us, that ‘s easy, or we can just kill all your asses. And we ‘re real easy with that too. Five minutes to think about it."

  Cherry bit his hand. "Shit, I gotta breathe, okay?"

  Then he was running through Factory’s dark, and he heard her call his name.

  A single 100-watt bulb burned above Factory’s south gate, a pair of twisted steel doors frozen open with rust. Bird must’ve left it on. From where he crouched by an empty window, Slick could just make out the hover, out beyond the weak fringe of light. The man with the bullhorn came strolling out of the dark with a calculated looseness meant to indicate that he was on top of things. He wore insulated camo overalls with a thin nylon hood drawn up tight around his head, goggles. He raised the bullhorn. "Three minutes." He reminded Slick of the guards at the holding pen, the second time he’d been done for stealing cars.