Mona Lisa Overdrive

  It was drizzling outside, maybe dome condensation. She’d worn the white raincoat for the lobby, figuring Prior knew what he was doing after all, but now she was glad she had it. She grabbed a fold of fax out of an overflowing bin and held it over her head to keep her hair dry. It wasn’t as cold as before, which was another good thing. None of her new clothes were what you’d call warm.

  Looking up and down the avenue, deciding which way to go, she took in half-a-dozen nearly identical hotel fronts, a rank of pedicabs, the rainslick glitter of a row of small shops. And people, lots of them, like the Cleveland core but everybody dressed so sharp, and all moving like they were on top of it, everybody with someplace to go. Just go with it, she thought, the wiz giving her a sweet second boot that tripped her into the river of pretty people without even having to think about it. Clicking along in her new shoes, holding the fax over her head until she noticed — more luck — the rain had stopped.

  She wouldn’t’ve minded a chance to check out the shop windows, when the crowd swept her past, but the flow was pleasure and nobody else was pausing. She contented herself with sidelong flashes of each display. The clothes were like clothes in a stim, some of them, styles she’d never seen anywhere.

  I should‘ve been here, she thought, I should‘ve been here all along. Not on a catfish farm, not in Cleveland, not in Florida. It‘s a place, a real place, anybody can come here, you don’t have to get it through a stim. Thing was, she’d never seen this part of it in a stim, the regular people part. A star like Angie, this part wasn’t her part. Angie’d be off in high castles with the other stim stars, not down here. But God it was pretty, the night so bright, the crowd surging around her, past all the good things you could have if you just got lucky.

  Eddy, he didn’t like it. Anyway he’d always said how it was shitty here, too crowded, rent too high, too many police, too much competition. Not that he’d waited two seconds when Prior ‘d made an offer, she reminded herself. And anyway, she had her own ideas why Eddy was so down on it. He’d blown it here, she figured, pulled some kind of serious wilson. Either he didn’t want to be reminded or else there were people here who’d remind him for sure if he came back. It was there in the pissed-off way he talked about the place, same way he’d talk about anybody who told him his scams wouldn’t work. The new buddy so goddamn smart the first night was just a stone wilson the next, dead stupid, no vision.

  Past a big store with ace-looking stim gear in the window, all of it matte black and skinny, presided over by this gorgeous holo of Angie, who watched them all slide by with her half-sad smile. Queen of the night, yeah.

  The crowd-river flowed out into a kind of circle, a place where four streets met and swung around a fountain. And because Mona really wasn’t headed anywhere, she wound up there, because the people around her peeled off in their different directions without stopping. Well, there were people in the circle too, some of them sitting on the cracked concrete that edged the fountain. There was a statue in the center, marble, all worn-out and soft-edged. Kind of a baby riding a big fish, a dolphin. It looked like the dolphin’s mouth would spray water if the fountain was working, but it wasn’t. Past the heads of the seated people she could see crumpled, sodden fax and white foam cups in the water.

  Then it seemed like the crowd had melded behind her, a curved, sliding wall of bodies, and the three who faced her on the fountain rim jumped out like a picture. Fat girl with black-dyed hair, mouth half-open like it stayed that way, tits spilling out of a red rubber halter; blonde with a long face and a thin blue slash of lipstick, hand like a bird’s claw sprouting a cigarette; man with his oiled arms bare to the cold, graft-job muscle knotted like rock under synthetic tan and bad jail tattoos . . .

  "Hey, bitch," cried the fat girl, with a kind of glee, "hope y’don’t think y’gonna turn any ‘roun’ here!"

  The blonde looked at Mona with her tired eyes and gave her a wan grin, an it’s-not-my-fault grin, and then looked away.

  The pimp came up off the fountain like something driven by springs, but Mona was already moving, cued by the blonde’s expression. He had her arm, but the raincoat’s plastic seam gave way and she elbowed her way back into the crowd. The wiz took over and the next thing she knew she was at least a block away, sagging against a steel pole, coughing and hyperventilating.

  But now the wiz was all turned around, the way it went sometimes, and everything was ugly. The faces in the crowd were driven and hungry-looking, like they all had their own private desperate errands to run, and the light from the shop windows was cold and mean, and all the things behind the glass were just there to tell her she couldn’t have them. There was a voice somewhere, an angry child’s voice stringing obscenities together in an endless, meaningless chain; when she realized who it was, she stopped doing it.

  Her left arm was cold. She looked down and saw that the sleeve was gone, the seam down her side torn open to the waist. She took off the coat and draped it over her shoulders like a cape; maybe that made it a little harder to notice.

  She braced her back against the pole as the wiz rolled over her on a wave of delayed adrenaline; her knees started to buckle and she thought she was going to faint, but then the wiz pulled one of its tricks and she was crouching in summer sunset light in the old man’s dirt yard, the flaky gray earth scribed with the game she’d been playing, but now she was just hunched there, vacant, staring off past the bulks of the tanks to where fireflies pulsed in the blackberry tangle above a twisted old chassis. There was light behind her from the house and she could smell the cornbread baking and the coffee he boiled and reboiled there, till a spoon stood up in it, he said, and he’d be in there now reading one of his books, crumbly brown leaves, never a page with a corner on it, he got ‘em in frayed plastic baggies and sometimes they just fell to dust in his hands, but if he found something he wanted to keep he’d get a little pocket copier out of the drawer, fit the batteries in it, run it down the page. She liked to watch the copies spool out all fresh, with their special smell that faded away, but he’d never let her work it. Sometimes he’d read out loud, a kind of hesitation in his voice, like a man trying to play an instrument he hasn’t picked up in a long time. They weren’t stories he read, not like they had endings or told a joke. They were like windows into something so strange; he never tried to explain any of it, probably didn’t understand it himself, maybe nobody did . . .

  Then the street snapped back hard and bright.

  She rubbed her eyes and coughed.

  12

  Antarctica Starts Here

  "I’m ready now," Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. "Touch the spread with your left hand." Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper’s ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

  Angie, wrapped in a white terry robe, faced the blond technician from the edge of the bed, the black test unit covering her forehead like a raised blindfold. She did as she was told, running the tips of her fingers lightly across the raw silk and unbleached linen of the rumpled bedspread.

  "Good," Piper said, more to herself than to Angie, touching something on the board. "Again." Angie felt the weave thicken beneath her fingertips.

  "Again." Another adjustment.

  She could distinguish the individual fibers now, know silk from linen . . .

  "Again."

  Her nerves screamed as her flayed fingertips grated against steel wool, ground glass . . .

  "Optimal," Piper said, opening blue eyes. She produced a tiny ivory vial from the sleeve of her kimono, removed its stopper, passed the vial to Angie.

  Closing her eyes, Angie sniffed cautiously. Nothing.

  "Again."

  Something floral. Violets?

  "Again."

  Her head flooded with a nauseating greenhouse reek.

  "Olfactory’s up," Piper said, as the choking odor faded.

  "Haven’t noticed." She opened her eyes. Piper was offering he
r a tiny round of white paper. "As long as it’s not fish," Angie said, licking the tip of her finger. She touched the dot of paper, raised her finger to her tongue. One of Piper’s tests had once put her off seafood for a month.

  "It’s not fish," Piper said, smiling. She kept her hair short, a concise little helmet that played up the graphite gleam of the sockets inset behind either ear. Saint Joan in silicone, Porphyre said, and Piper’s true passion seemed to be her work. She was Angie’s personal technician, reputed to be the Net’s best troubleshooter.

  Caramel . . .

  "Who else is here, Piper?" Having completed the Usher, Piper was zipping her board into a fitted nylon case.

  Angie had heard a helicopter arrive an hour earlier; she’d heard laughter, footsteps on the deck, as the dream receded. She’d abandoned her usual attempt to inventory sleep — if it could be called sleep, the other’s memories washing in, filling her, then draining away to levels she couldn’t reach, leaving these afterimages . . .

  "Raebel," Piper said, "Lomas, Hickman, Ng, Porphyre, the Pope."

  "Robin?"

  "No."

  "Continuity," she said, showering.

  "Good morning, Angie."

  "Freeside torus. Who owns it?"

  "The torus has been renamed Mustique II by the current joint owners, the Julianna Group and Carribbana Orbital."

  "Who owned it when Tally taped there?"

  "Tessier-Ashpool S.A."

  "I want to know more about Tessier-Ashpool."

  "Antarctica starts here."

  She stared up through the steam at the white circle of the speaker. "What did you just say?"

  "Antarctica Starts Here is a two-hour video study of the Tessier-Ashpool family by Hans Becker, Angie."

  "Do you have it?"

  "Of course. David Pope accessed it recently. He was quite impressed."

  "Really? How recently?"

  "Last Monday."

  "I’ll see it tonight, then."

  "Done. Is that all?"

  "Yes."

  "Goodbye, Angie."

  David Pope. Her director. Porphyre said that Robin was telling people she heard voices. Had he told Pope? She touched a ceramic panel; the spray grew hotter. Why was Pope interested in Tessier-Ashpool? She touched the panel again and gasped under needles of suddenly frigid water.

  Inside out, outside in, the figures of that other landscape arriving soon, too soon . . .

  Porphyre was posed by the window when she entered the living room, a Masai warrior in shoulder-padded black silk crepe and black leather sarong. The others cheered when they saw her, and Porphyre turned and grinned.

  "Took us by surprise," Rick Raebel said, sprawled on the pale couch. He was effects and editing. "Hilton figured you’d want more of a break."

  "They pulled us in from all over, dear," Kelly Hickman added. "I was in Bremen, and the Pope was up the well in full art mode, weren’t you, David?" He looked to the director for confirmation.

  Pope, who was straddling one of the Louis XVI chairs backward, his arms crossed along the top of its fragile back, smiled wearily, dark hair tangled above his thin face. When Angie’s schedule allowed for it, Pope made documentaries for Net/Knowledge. Shortly after she’d signed with the Net, Angie participated anonymously in one of Pope’s minimalist art pieces, an endless stroll across dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky. Three months later, the arc of her career firmly under way, an unlicensed version of the tape became an underground classic.

  Karen Lomas, who did Angie’s in-fills, smiled from the chair left of Pope. To his right, Kelly Hickman, wardrobe, sat on the bleached floor beside Brian Ng, Piper’s gofer-cum-understudy.

  "Well," Angie said, "I’m back. I’m sorry to have hung all of you up, but it had to be done."

  There was a silence. Minute creaks from the gilt chairs. Brian Ng coughed.

  "We’re just glad you’re back," Piper said, coming in from the kitchen with a cup of coffee in either hand.

  They cheered again, somewhat self-consciously this time, then laughed.

  "Where’s Robin?" Angie asked.

  "Mistah Lanier in London," Porphyre said, hands on his leather-wrapped hips.

  "Expected hourly," Pope said dryly, getting up and accepting a coffee from Piper.

  "What were you doing in orbit, David?" Angie asked, taking the other cup.

  "Hunting solitaries."

  "Solitude?"

  "Solitaries. Hermits."

  "Angie," Hickman said, springing up, "you have to see this satin cocktail number Devicq sent last week! And I’ve got all of Nakamura’s swimwear . . ."

  "Yes, Kelly, but — "

  But Pope had already turned to say something to Raebel.

  "Hey," Hickman said, beaming with enthusiasm, "come on! Let’s try it on!"

  Pope spent most of the day with Piper, Karen Lomas, and Raebel, discussing the results of the Usher and the endless minor details of what they referred to as Angie’s reinsertion. After lunch, Brian Ng went along with her to her physical, which was conducted in a private clinic in a mirror-clad compound on Beverly Boulevard.

  During the very brief wait in the white, plant-filled reception area — surely a matter of ritual, as though a medical appointment that involved no wait might seem incomplete, inauthentic — Angie found herself wondering, as she’d wondered many times before, why her father’s mysterious legacy, the vévés he’d drawn in her head, had never been detected by this or any other clinic.

  Her father, Christopher Mitchell, had headed the hybridoma project that had allowed Maas Biolabs a virtual monopoly in the early manufacture of biochips. Turner, the man who had taken her to New York, had given her a kind of dossier on her father, a biosoft compiled by a Maas security AI. She’d accessed the dossier four times in as many years; finally, one very drunken night in Greece, she’d flung the thing from the deck of an Irish industrialist’s yacht after a shouting match with Bobby. She no longer recalled the cause of the fight, but she did remember the mingled sense of loss and relief as the squat little nub of memory struck the water.

  Perhaps her father had designed his handiwork so that it was somehow invisible to the scans of the neuro-technicians. Bobby had his own theory, one she had suspected was closer to the truth. Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vévés transparent . . . Legba, after all, had orchestrated her debut in the industry and the subsequent rise that had seen her eclipse Tally Isham’s fifteen-year career as Net megastar.

  But it had been so long since the loa had ridden her, and now, Brigitte had said, the vévés had been redrawn . . .

  "Hilton had Continuity front a head for you today," Ng told her, as she waited.

  "Oh?"

  "Public statement on your decision to go to Jamaica, praise for the methods of the clinic, the dangers of drugs, renewed enthusiasm for your work, gratitude to your audience, stock footage of the Malibu place . . ."

  Continuity could generate video images of Angie, animate them with templates compiled from her stims. Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.

  A chime sounded, beyond the greenery.

  Returning from the city, she found caterers preparing for a barbecue on the deck.

  She lay on the couch beneath the Valmier and listened to the surf. From the kitchen, she could hear Piper explaining the results of the physical to Pope. There was no need, really — she’d been given the cleanest possible bill of health — but both Pope and Piper were fond of detail.

  When Piper and Raebel put on sweaters and went out onto the deck, where they stood warming their hands above the coals, Angie found herself alone in the living room with the director.

  "You were about to tell me, David, what you were doing up the well . . ."

  "Looking for serious loners." He ran a hand bac
k across his tangled hair. "It grows out of something I wanted to do last year, with intentional communities in Africa. Trouble was, when I got up there, I learned that anyone who goes that far, who’ll actually live alone in orbit, is generally determined to stay that way."

  "You were taping, yourself? Interviews?"

  "No. I wanted to find people like that and talk them into recording segments themselves."

  "Did you?"

  "No. I heard stories, though. Some great stories. A tug pilot claimed there were feral children living in a mothballed Japanese drug factory. There’s a whole new apocrypha out there, really — ghost ships, lost cities . . . There’s a pathos to it, when you think about it. I mean, every bit of it’s locked into orbit. All of it manmade, known, owned, mapped. Like watching myths take root in a parking lot. But I suppose people need that, don’t they?"

  "Yes," she said, thinking of Legba, of Mamman Brigitte, the thousand candles . . .

  "I wish, though," he said, "that I could’ve gotten through to Lady Jane. Such an amazing story. Pure gothic."

  "Lady Jane?"

  "Tessier-Ashpool. Her family built Freeside torus. High-orbit pioneers. Continuity has a marvelous video . . . They say she killed her father. She’s the last of the line. Money ran out years ago. She sold everything, had her place sawn off the tip of the spindle and towed out to a new orbit . . ."

  She sat up on the couch, her knees together, fingers locked across them. Sweat trickled down across her ribs.

  "You don’t know the story?"

  "No," she said.

  "That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news. The mother was Tessier, the father Ashpool. They built Freeside when there was nothing else like it. Got fantastically rich in the process. Probably running a very close second to Josef Virek when Ashpool died. And of course they’d gotten wonderfully weird in the meantime, had taken to cloning their children wholesale . . ."

  "It sounds . . . terrible. And you tried, you did try to find her?"