Mona Lisa Overdrive

  “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.

  “Mistuh 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 neurotechnicians. 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 back 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?”

  “Well, I made inquiries. Continuity had gotten me this Becker video, and of course her orbit’s in the book, but it’s no good dropping by if you haven’t been invited, is it? And then Hilton buzzed me to get back here and back to work.… Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “Yes, I … I think I’ll change now, put on something warmer.”

  After they’d eaten, when coffee was being served, she excused herself and said goodnight.

  Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He’d stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was. All the things the drug had fenced away.

  “Missy, take care,” he said, too quietly for the others to hear.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Too many people. I’m still not used to it.”

  He stood there looking up at her, the glow of dying coals behind his elegantly crafted, subtly inhuman skull, until she turned and climbed the stairs.

  She heard the helicopter come for them an hour later.

  “House,” she said, “I’ll see the video from Continuity now.”

  As the wallscreen slid down into place, she opened the bedroom door and stood for a moment at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Surf, the hum of the dishwasher, wind buffeting the windows that faced the deck.

  She turned back to the screen and shivered at the face she saw there in a grainy freeze-frame headshot, avian eyebrows arched above dark eyes, high fragile bones, and a wide, determined mouth. The image expanded steadily, into the darkness of an eye, black screen, a white point, growing, lengthening, becoming the tapered spindle of Freeside. Credits began to flash in German.

  “Hans Becker,” the house began, reciting the Net library’s intro-critique, “is an Austrian video artist whose hallmark is an obsessive interrogation of rigidly delimited fields of visual information. His approaches range from classical montage to techniques borrowed from industrial espionage, deep-space imaging, and kino-archaeology. Antarctica Starts Here, his examination of images of the Tessier-Ashpool family, currently stands as the high point of his career. The pathologically media-shy industrial clan, operating from the total privacy of their orbital home, posed a remarkable challenge.”

  The white of the spindle filled the screen as the final credit vanished. An image tracked to center screen, snapshot of a young woman in loose dark clothes, background indistinct. MARIE-FRANCE TESSIER, MOROCCO.

  This wasn’t the face in the opening shot, the face of invading memory, yet it seemed to promise it, as though a larval image lay beneath the surface.

  The soundtrack wove atonal filaments through strata of static and indistinct voices as the image of Marie-France was replaced by a formal monochrome portrait of a young man in a starched wing collar. It was a handsome face, finely proportioned, but very hard somehow, and in the eyes a look of infinite boredom. JOHN HARNESS ASHPOOL, OXFORD. Yes, she thought, and I’ve met you many times. I know your story, though I’m not allowed to touch it.

  But I really don’t think I like you at all, do I, Mr. Ashpool?

  13

  CATWALK

  The catwalk groaned and swayed. The stretcher was too wide for the walk’s handrails, so they had to keep it chest-high as they inched across, Gentry at the front with his gloved hands clamped around the rails on either side of the sleeper’s feet. Slick had the heavy end, the head, with the batteries and all that gear; he could feel Cherry creeping along behind him. He wanted to tell her to get back, that they didn’t need her weight on the walk, but somehow he couldn’t.

  Giving Gentry Kid Afrika’s bag of drugs had been a mistake. He didn’t know what was in the derm Gentry’d done; he didn’t know what had been in Gentry’s bloodstream to begin with. Whatever, Gentry’d gone bare-wires crazy and now they were out here on the fucking catwalk, twenty meters over Factory’s concrete floor, and Slick was ready to weep with frustration, to scream; he wanted to smash something, anything, but he couldn’t let go of the stretcher.

  And Gentry’s smile, lit up by the glow of the bio-readout taped to the foot of the stretcher, as Gentry took another step backward across the catwalk …

  “O man,” Cherry said, her voice like a little girl’s, “this is just seriously fucked.…”

  Gentry gave the stretcher a sudden impatient tug and Slick almost lost his grip.

  “Gentry,” Slick said, “I think you better think twice about this.”

  Gentry had removed his gloves. He held a pair of optic jumpers in either hand, and Slick could see the splitter fittings trembling.

  “I mean Kid Afrika’s heavy, Gentry. You don’t know what you’re messing with, you mess with him.” This was not, strictly speaking, true, the Kid being, as far as Slick knew, too smart to value revenge. But who the hell knew what Gentry was about to mess with anyway?

  “I’m not messing with anything,” Gentry said, approaching the stretcher with the jumpers.

  “Listen, buddy,” Cherry said, “you interrupt his input, you maybe kill ’im; his autonomic nervous system’ll go tits-up. Why don’t you just stop him?” she asked Slick. “Why don’t you just knock him on his ass?”

  Slick rubbed his eyes. “Because … I dunno. Because he’s … Look, Gentry, she’s saying it’ll maybe kill the poor bastard, you try to tap in. You hear that?”

  “ ‘LF,’ ” Gentry said, “I heard that.” He put the jumpers between his teeth and began to fiddle with one of the connections on the featureless slab above the sleeper’s head. His hands had stopped shaking.

  “Shit,” Cherry said, and gnawed at a knuckle. The connection came away in Gentry’s hand. He whipped a jumper into place with his other hand and began to tighten the connection. He smiled around the remaining jumper. “Fuck this,” Cherry said, “I’m outa here,” but she didn’t move.

  The man on the stretcher grunted, once, softly. The sound made the hairs stand up on Slick’s arms.

  The second connection came loose. Gentry inserted the other splitter and began to retighten the fitting.

  Cherry went quickly to the foot of the stretcher, knelt to check the readout. “He felt it,” she said, looking up at Gentry, “but his signs look okay.…”

  Gentry turned to his consoles. Slick watched as he jacked the jumpers into position. Maybe, he thought, it was going to work out; Gentry would crash soon, and they’d have to leave the stretcher up here until he could get Little Bird and Cherry to help him get it back across the catwalk. But Gentry was just so crazy, probably he should try to get the drugs back, or some of them anyway, get things back to normal.…

  “I can only believe,” Gentry said, “that this was predetermined. Prefigured by the form of my previous work. I wouldn’t pretend to understand how that might be, but ours is not to question why, is it, Slick Henry?” He tapped out a sequence on one of his keyboards. “Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon
of religious conversion?”

  “What’s he talking about?” Cherry asked.

  Slick glumly shook his head. If he said anything, it would only encourage Gentry’s craziness.

  Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. “There are worlds within worlds,” he said. “Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below.… It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I’d not dared to hope.…” He glanced coyly back at them over a black-beaded shoulder. “And now,” he said, “we’ll see the shape of the little universe our guest’s gone voyaging in. And in that form, Slick Henry, I’ll see …”

  He touched the power stud at the edge of the holo table. And screamed.

  14

  TOYS

  “Here’s a lovely thing,” Petal said, touching a rosewood cube the size of Kumiko’s head. “Battle of Britain.” Light shimmered above it, and when Kumiko leaned forward she saw that tiny aircraft looped and dived in slow motion above a gray Petrie smear of London. “They worked it up from war films,” he said, “gunsight cameras.” She peered in at almost microscopic flashes of antiaircraft fire from the Thames estuary. “Did it for the Centenary.”

  They were in Swain’s billiard room, ground-floor rear, number 16. There was a faint mustiness, an echo of pub smell. The overall tidiness of Swain’s establishment was tempered here by genteel dilapidation: there were armchairs covered in scuffed leather, pieces of heavy dark furniture, the dull green field of the billiard table.… The black steel racks stacked with entertainment gear had caused Petal to bring her here, before tea, shuffling along in his seam-sprung moleskin slippers, to demonstrate available toys.

  “Which war was this?”

  “Last but one,” he said, moving on to a similar but larger unit that offered holograms of two Thai boxing girls. One’s callused sole smacked against the other’s lean brown belly, tensed to take the blow. He touched a stud and the projections vanished.

  Kumiko glanced back at the Battle of Britain and its burning gnats.

  “All sorts of sporting fiche,” Petal said, opening a fitted pigskin case that held hundreds of the recordings.