Mona Lisa Overdrive

  Cold, it would always be cold now. The freezing damp in the city’s ancient bones, the cold waters of Sumida that had filled her mother’s lungs, the chill flight of the neon cranes.

  Her mother was fine-boned and dark, the thick spill of her hair grained with gold highlights, like some rare tropical hardwood. Her mother smelled of perfume and warm skin. Her mother told her stories, about elves and fairies and Copenhagen, which was a city far away. When Kumiko dreamed of the elves, they were like her father’s secretaries, lithe and staid, with black suits and furled umbrellas. The elves did many curious things, in her mother’s stories, and the stories were magic, because they changed with the telling, and you could never be certain how a tale might end on a given night. There were princesses in the stories as well, and ballerinas, and each of them, Kumiko had known, was in some way her mother.

  The princess-ballerinas were beautiful but poor, dancing for love in the far city’s heart, where they were courted by artists and student poets, handsome and penniless. In order to support an aged parent, or purchase an organ for an ailing brother, a princess-ballerina was sometimes obliged to voyage very far indeed, perhaps as far as Tokyo, to dance for money. Dancing for money, the tales implied, was not a happy thing.

  Sally took her to a robata bar in Earls Court and forced her to drink a glass of sake. A smoked fugu fin floated in the hot wine, turning it the color of whiskey. They ate robata from the smoky grill, and Kumiko felt the cold recede, but not the numbness. The decor of the bar induced a profound sense of cultural dislocation: it managed to simultaneously reflect traditional Japanese design and look as though it had been drawn up by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

  She was very strange, Sally Shears, stranger than all of gaijin London. Now she told Kumiko stories, stories about people who lived in a Japan Kumiko had never known, stories that defined her father’s role in the world. The oyabun, she called Kumiko’s father. The world Sally’s stories described seemed no more real than the world of her mother’s fairy tales, but Kumiko began to understand the basis and extent of her father’s power. "Kuromaku," Sally said. The word meant black curtain. "It’s from Kabuki, but it means a fixer, someone who sells favors. Means behind-the-scenes, right? That’s your father. That’s Swain, too. But Swain’s your old man’s kobun, or anyway one of them. Oyabun-kobun, parent-child. That’s partly where Roger gets his juice. That’s why you’re here now, because Roger owes it to the oyabun. Giri, understand?"

  "He is a man of rank."

  Sally shook her head. "Your old man, Kumi, he’s it. If he’s had to ship you out of town to keep you safe, means there’s some serious changes on the way."

  "Been down the drinker?" Petal asked, as they entered the room, his eyeglass edges winking Tiffany light from a bronze and stained-glass tree that grew on the sideboard. Kumiko wanted to look at the marble head that hid the Maas-Neotek unit, but forced herself to look out into the garden. The snow there had become the color of London sky.

  "Where’s Swain?" Sally asked.

  "Guvnor’s out," Petal told her.

  Sally went to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of scotch from a heavy decanter. Kumiko saw Petal wince as the decanter came down hard on the polished wood. "Any messages?"

  "No."

  "Expect him back tonight?"

  "Can’t say, really. Do you want dinner?"

  "No."

  "I’d like a sandwich," Kumiko said.

  Fifteen minutes later, with the untouched sandwich on the black marble bedside table, she sat in the middle of the huge bed, the Maas-Neotek unit between her bare feet. She’d left Sally drinking Swain’s whiskey and staring out into the gray garden.

  Now she took up the unit and Colin shuddered into focus at the foot of the bed.

  "Nobody can hear my half of this," he said quickly, putting a finger to his lips, "and a good thing, too. Room’s bugged."

  Kumiko started to reply, then nodded.

  "Good," he said. "Smart girl. Got two conversations for you. One’s your host and his minder, other’s your host and Sally. Got the former about fifteen minutes after you stashed me downstairs. Listen . . ." Kumiko closed her eyes and heard the tinkle of ice in a whiskey glass.

  "Where’s our little Jap, then?" Swain asked.

  "Tucked up for the night," Petal said. "Talks to herself, that one. One-sided conversation. Queer."

  "What about?"

  "Bloody little, actually. Some people do, y ‘know . . ."

  "What?"

  "Talk to themselves. Like to hear her?"

  "Christ, no. Where’s the delightful Miss Shears?"

  "Out for her constitutional."

  "Call Bernie ‘round, next time, see what she’s about on these little walks . . ."

  "Bernie," and Petal laughed, "he’d come back in a fucking box!"

  Now Swain laughed. "Mightn’t be a bad thing either way, Bernard off our hands and the famous razorgirl’s thirst slaked . . . Here, pour us another."

  "None for me. Off to bed, unless you need me . . ."

  "No," Swain said.

  "So," said Colin, as Kumiko opened her eyes to find him still seated on the bed, "there’s a voice-activated bug here in your room; the minder reviewed the recording and heard you address me. Our second segment, now, is more interesting. Your host sits there with his second whiskey, in comes our Sally . . ."

  "Hullo," she heard Swain say, "been out taking the air?"

  "Fuck off."

  "You know," Swain said, "none of this was my idea. You might try keeping that in mind. You know they’ve got me by the balls as well."

  "You know, Roger, sometimes I’m tempted to believe you."

  "Try it. It would make things easier."

  "Other times, I’m tempted to slit your fucking throat."

  "Your problem, dear, is that you never learned to delegate; you still want to do everything personally."

  "Listen, asshole, I know where you’re from, and I know how you got here, and I don’t care how far you’ve got your tongue up Kanaka’s crack or anybody else’s. Sarakin! " Kumiko had never heard the word before.

  "I heard from them again," Swain said, his tone even, conversational. "She’s still on the coast, but it looks as though she’ll make a move soon. East, most likely. Back on your old manor. I think that’s our best bet, really. The house is impossible. Enough private security along that stretch to stop a fair-sized army . . ."

  "You still trying to tell me this is just a snatch, Roger? Trying to tell me they’re gonna hold her for ransom?"

  "No. Nothing’s been said about selling her back."

  "So why don’t they just hire that army? No reason they’d have to stop at fair-sized, is there? Get the mercs, right? The corporate-extraction boys. She’s not that hard a target, no more than some hotshit research man. Get the fucking pros in . . ."

  "For perhaps the hundredth time, that isn’t what they want. They want you."

  "Roger, what do they have on you, huh? I mean, do you really not know what it is they got on me?"

  "No, I don’t. But based on what they’ve got on me, I’ll hazard a guess."

  "Yeah?"

  "Everything."

  No reply.

  "There’s another angle," he said, "that came up today. They want it to look as though she’s been taken out."

  "What?"

  "They want it to look as though we’ve killed her."

  "And how are we supposed to manage that?"

  "They’ll provide a body."

  "I assume," Colin said, "that she left the room without comment. It ends there."

  10

  The Shape

  He spent an hour checking the saw’s bearings, then lubed them again. It was already too cold to work; he’d have to go ahead and heat the room where he kept the others, the Investigators and the Corpsegrinder and the Witch. That in itself would be enough to disturb the balance of his arrangement with Gentry, but it faded beside the problem of explaining his agreement with Kid Afrika a
nd the fact of two strangers in Factory. There was no way to argue with Gentry; the juice was his, because he was the one who fiddled it out of the Fission Authority; without Gentry’s monthly passes on the console, the ritual moves that kept the Authority convinced Factory was somewhere else, some place that paid its bill, there wouldn’t be any electricity.

  And Gentry was so strange anyway, he thought, feeling his knees creak as he stood up and took the Judge’s control unit from his jacket pocket. Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form. Not that that was the weirdest idea Slick had ever run across, but Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the Shape mattered totally. The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry’s grail.

  Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn’t there? And if that something was something, then wasn’t that part of the universe too? This was exactly the kind of thing you didn’t want to get into with Gentry, because Gentry could tie your head in knots. But Slick didn’t think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. The Fission Authority had always looked like a big red Aztec pyramid, but it didn’t have to; if the FA wanted it to, they could have it look like anything. Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?

  He touched the unit’s power stud; the Judge, ten meters away, hummed and trembled.

  Slick Henry hated the Judge. That was what the art people never understood. That didn’t mean it didn’t give him pleasure to have built the thing, to have gotten the Judge out, out where he could see him and keep track of him and finally, sort of, be free of the idea of him, but that sure wasn’t the same as liking him.

  Nearly four meters tall, half as broad at the shoulders, headless, the Judge stood trembling in his patchwork carapace the color of rust gone a certain way, like the handles of an old wheelbarrow, polished by the friction of a thousand hands. He’d found a way to get that surface with chemicals and abrasives, and he’d used it on most of the Judge; the old parts anyway, the scavenged parts, not the cold teeth of the circular blades or the mirrored surfaces of the joints, but the rest of the Judge was that color, that finish, like a very old tool still in hard daily use.

  He thumbed the joystick and the Judge took one step forward, then another. The gyros were working perfectly; even with an arm off, the thing moved with a terrible dignity, planting its huge feet just so.

  Slick grinned in Factory’s gloom as the Judge clomped toward him, one-two, one-two. He could remember every step of the Judge’s construction, if he wanted to, and sometimes he did, just for the comfort of being able to.

  He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could.

  That was why he had built the Judge, because he’d done something — it hadn’t been anything much, but he’d been caught doing it, twice — and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn’t been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people’s cars. They made sure you remembered what you did.

  Working the joystick, he got the Judge turned around and walked him into the next room, along an aisle between rows of damp-stained concrete pads that had once supported lathes and spot welders. High overhead, up in the gloom and dusty beams, dangled dead fluorescent fixtures where birds sometimes nested.

  Korsakov’s, they called that, something they did to your neurons so that short-term memories wouldn’t stick. So that the time you did was time you lost, but he’d heard they didn’t do it anymore, or anyway not for grand theft auto. People who hadn’t been there thought it sounded easy, like jail but then it’s all erased, but it wasn’t like that. When he’d gotten out, when it was over — three years strung out in a long vague flickering chain of fear and confusion measured off in five-minute intervals, and it wasn’t the intervals you could remember so much as the transitions . . . When it was over, he’d needed to build the Witch, the Corpsegrinder, then the Investigators, and finally, now, the Judge.

  As he guided the Judge up the concrete ramp to the room where the others waited, he heard Gentry gunning his motor out on Dog Solitude.

  People made Gentry uncomfortable, Slick thought as he headed for the stairs, but it worked both ways. Strangers could feel the Shape burning behind Gentry’s eyes; his fixation came across in everything he did. Slick had no idea how he got along on his trips to the Sprawl; maybe he just dealt with people who were as intense as he was, loners on the jagged fringes of the drug and software markets. He didn’t seem to care about sex at all, to the extent that Slick had no idea what it was he’d have wanted if he’d decided to care.

  Sex was the Solitude’s main drawback, as far as Slick was concerned, particularly in the winter. Summers, sometimes, he could find a girl in one of those rusty little towns; that was what had taken him to Atlantic City that time and gotten him in the Kid’s debt. Lately he told himself the best solution was just to concentrate on his work, but climbing the shuddering steel stairs to the catwalk that led to Gentry’s space, he found himself wondering what Cherry Chesterfield looked like under all those jackets. He thought about her hands, how they were clean and quick, but that made him see the unconscious face of the man on the stretcher, the tube feeding stuff into his left nostril, Cherry dabbing at his sunken cheeks with a tissue; made him wince.

  "Hey, Gentry," he bellowed out into the iron void of Factory, "comin’ up . . ."

  Three things about Gentry weren’t sharp and thin and tight: his eyes, his lips, his hair. His eyes were large and pale, gray or blue depending on the light; his lips were full and mobile; his hair was swept back into a ragged blond roostertail that quivered when he walked. His thinness wasn’t Bird’s emaciation, born of a stringtown diet and bad nerves; Gentry was just narrow, the muscle packed in close, no fat at all. He dressed sharp and tight, too, black leather trimmed with jet-black beads, a style Slick remembered from his days in the Deacon Blues. The beads, as much as anything, made Slick think he was about thirty; Slick was about thirty himself.

  Gentry stared as Slick stepped through the door into the glare of ten 100-watt bulbs, making sure Slick knew he was another obstacle coming between Gentry and the Shape. He was putting a pair of motorcycle panniers up on his long steel table; they looked heavy.

  Slick had cut roof panels away, installed struts where needed, covered the holes with sheets of rigid plastic, caulked the resulting skylights with silicone. Then Gentry came in with a mask and a sprayer and twenty gallons of white latex paint; he didn’t dust or clean anything, just lay down a thick coat over all the crud and desiccated pigeonshit, sort of glued it all down and painted over it again until it was more or less white. He painted everything but the skylights, then Slick started winching gear up from Factory’s floor, a small truckload of computers, cyberspace decks, a huge old holo-projection table that nearly broke the winch, effect generators, dozens of corrugated plastic cartons stuffed with the thousands of fiche Gentry had accumulated in his quest for the Shape, hundreds of meters of optics, on bright new plastic reels, that spoke to Slick of industrial theft. And books, old books with covers made of cloth glued over cardboard. Slick hadn’t ever known how heavy books were. They had a sad smell, old books.

  "You’re pulling a few more amps, since I left," Gentry said, opening the first of the two panniers. "In your room. Get a new heater?" He began to root quickly through the contents, as though he were looking for something he needed but had misplaced. He wasn’t, though, Slick knew; it was having to have someone, even someone he knew, unexpectedly in his space.

  "Yeah. I gotta heat the storage area again, too. Too cold to work, otherwise."

  "No," Gentry said, looking up
suddenly, "that’s not a heater in your room. The amperage is wrong."

  "Yeah." Slick grinned, on the theory that grinning made Gentry think he was stupid and easily cowed.

  " ‘Yeah’ what, Slick Henry?"

  "It’s not a heater."

  Gentry closed the pannier with a snap. "You can tell me what it is or I can cut your power."

  "Y’know, Gentry, I wasn’t around here, you’d have a lot less time for . . . things." Slick raised his eyebrows meaningfully in the direction of the big projection table. "Fact is, I got two people staying with me . . ." He saw Gentry stiffen, the pale eyes widen. "But you won’t see either of ‘em, won’t hear ‘em, nothing."

  "No," Gentry said, his voice tight, as he rounded the end of the table, "because you’re going to get them out of here, aren’t you?"

  "Two weeks max, Gentry."

  "Out. Now." Gentry’s face was inches away and Slick smelled the sour breath of exhaustion. "Or you go with them."

  Slick outweighed Gentry by ten kilos, most of it muscle, but that had never intimidated Gentry; Gentry didn’t seem to know or care that he could be hurt. That was intimidating in its own way. Gentry had slapped him, once, hard, in the face, and Slick had looked down at the huge chrome-moly wrench in his own hand and had felt an obscure embarrassment.

  Gentry was holding himself rigid, starting to tremble. Slick had a pretty good idea that Gentry didn’t sleep when he went to Boston or New York. He didn’t always sleep that much in Factory either. Came back strung and the first day was always the worst. "Look," Slick said, the way somebody might to a child on the verge of tears, and pulled the bag from his pocket, the bribe from Kid Afrika. He held up the clear plastic Ziploc for Gentry to see: blue derms, pink tablets, a nasty-looking turd of opium in a twist of red cellophane, crystals of wiz like fat yellow throat lozenges, plastic inhalers with the Japanese manufacturer’s name scraped off with a knife . . . "From Afrika," Slick said, dangling the Ziploc.