Mona Lisa Overdrive

  He tried to get a morning’s work in on the Judge, but Little Bird had vanished again and the image of the figure on the stretcher kept getting in the way. It was too cold; he’d have to run a line down from Gentry’s territory at the top of Factory, get some space heaters. But that meant haggling with Gentry over the current. The juice was Gentry’s because Gentry knew how to fiddle it out of the Fission Authority.

  It was heading into Slick’s third winter in Factory, but Gentry had been there four years when Slick found the place. When they’d gotten Gentry’s loft together, Slick had inherited the room where he’d put Cherry and the man she said Kid Afrika called the Count. Gentry took the position that Factory was his, that he’d been there first, got the power in so the Authority didn’t know. But Slick did a lot of things around Factory that Gentry wouldn’t have wanted to do himself, like making sure there was food, and if something major broke down, if the wiring shorted or the water filter packed it in, it was Slick who had the tools and did the fixing.

  Gentry didn’t like people. He spent days on end with his decks and FX-organs and holo projectors and came out only when he got hungry. Slick didn’t understand what it was that Gentry was trying to do, but he envied Gentry the narrowness of his obsession. Nothing got to Gentry. Kid Afrika couldn’t have gotten to Gentry, because Gentry wouldn’t have gone over to Atlantic City and gotten into deep shit and Kid Afrika’s debt.

  He went into his room without knocking and Cherry was washing the guy’s chest with a sponge, wearing white throwaway gloves. She’d carried the butane stove up from the room where they did the cooking and heated water in a steel mixing bowl.

  He made himself look at the pinched face, the slack lips parted just enough to reveal yellow smoker’s teeth. It was a street face, a crowd face, face you’d see in any bar.

  She looked up at Slick.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, where she’d unzipped his sleeping bag and spread it out flat like a blanket, with the torn end tucked in under the foam.

  “We gotta talk, Cherry. Figure this, you know?”

  She squeezed the sponge out over the bowl.

  “How’d you get mixed up with Kid Afrika?”

  She put the sponge in a Ziploc and put that away in the black nylon bag from the Kid’s hover. As he watched her, he saw there was no wasted motion, and she didn’t seem to have to think about what she was doing. “You know a place called Moby Jane’s?”

  “No.”

  “Roadhouse, off the interstate. So I had this friend was manager there, doing it for about a month when I move in with him. Moby Jane, she’s just huge; she just sits out back the club in a float tank with this freebase IV drip in her arm and it’s totally disgusting. So like I said, I move in there with my friend Spencer, he’s the new manager, because I had this trouble over my ticket in Cleveland and I couldn’t work right then.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The usual kind, okay? You wanna hear this or not? So Spencer’s let me in on the owner’s horrible condition, right? So the last thing I want anybody to know is that I’m a med-tech, otherwise they’ll have me out there changing filters on her tank and pumping freebase into two hundred kilos of hallucinating psychotic. So they put me waiting tables, slinging beer. It’s okay. Get some good music in there. Kind of a rough place but it’s okay because people know I’m with Spencer. ’Cept I wake up one day and Spencer’s gone. Then it comes out he’s gone with a bunch of their money.” She was drying the sleeper’s chest as she spoke, using a thick wad of white absorbent fiber. “So they knock me around a little.” She looked up at him and shrugged. “But then they tell me what they’re gonna do. They’re gonna cuff my hands behind my back and put me in the tank with Moby Jane and turn her drip up real high and tell her my boyfriend ripped her off.…” She tossed the damp wad into the bowl. “So they locked me up in this closet to let me think about it before they did it. When the door opens, though, it’s Kid Afrika. I never saw him before. ‘Miss Chesterfield,’ he said, ‘I have reason to believe you were until recently a certified medical technician.”

  “So he made you an offer.”

  “Offer, my ass. He just checked my papers and took me straight on out of there. Not a soul around, either, and it was Saturday afternoon. Took me out in the parking lot, there’s this hover sittin’ in the lot, skulls on the front, two big black guys waiting for us, and any way away from that float tank, that’s just fine by me.”

  “Had our friend in the back?”

  “No.” Peeling off the gloves. “Had me drive him back to Cleveland, to this burb. Big old houses but the lawns all long and scraggy. Went to one with a lot of security, guess it was his. This one,” and she tucked the blue sleeping bag up around the man’s chin, “he was in a bedroom. I had to start right in. Kid told me he’d pay me good.”

  “And you knew he’d bring you out here, to the Solitude?”

  “No. Don’t think he did, either. Something happened. He came in next day and said we were leaving. I think something scared him. That’s when he called him that, the Count, ’Cause he was angry and I think maybe scared. ‘The Count and his fucking LF,’ he said.”

  “His what?”

  “ ‘LF.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think this,” she said, pointing up at the featureless gray package mounted above the man’s head.

  7

  NO THERE, THERE

  She imagined Swift waiting for her on the deck, wearing the tweeds he favored in an L.A. winter, the vest and jacket mismatched, herringbone and houndstooth, but everything woven from the same wool, and that, probably, from the same sheep on the same hillside, the whole look orchestrated in London, by committee, in a room above a Floral Street shop he’d never seen. They did striped shirts for him, brought the cotton from Charvet in Paris; they made his ties, had the silk woven in Osaka, the Sense/Net logo embroidered tight and small. And still, somehow, he looked as though his mother had dressed him.

  The deck was empty. The Dornier hovered, then darted away to its nest. Mamman Brigitte’s presence still clung to her.

  She went into the white kitchen and scrubbed drying blood from her face and hands. When she stepped into the living room, she felt as though she were seeing it for the first time. The bleached floor, the gilt frames and cut-velvet upholstery of the Louis XVI chairs, the Cubist backdrop of a Valmier. Like Hilton’s wardrobe, she thought, contrived by talented strangers. Her boots tracked damp sand across the pale floor as she went to the stairwell.

  Kelly Hickman, her wardrobe man, had been to the house while she’d been in the clinic; he’d arranged her working luggage in the master bedroom. Nine Hermès rifle cases, plain and rectangular, like coffins of burnished saddle hide. Her clothes were never folded; they lay each garment flat, between sheets of silk tissue.

  She stood in the doorway, staring at the empty bed, the nine leather coffins.

  She went into the bathroom, glass block and white mosaic tile, locking the door behind her. She opened one cabinet, then another, ignoring neat rows of unopened toiletries, patent medicines, cosmetics. She found the charger in the third cabinet, beside a bubble card of derms. She bent close, peering at the gray plastic, the Japanese logo, afraid to touch it. The charger looked new, unused. She was almost certain that she hadn’t bought it, hadn’t left it here. She took the drug from her jacket pocket and examined it, turning it over and over, watching the measured doses of violet dust tumble in their sealed compartments.

  She saw herself place the packet on the white marble ledge, position the charger above it, remove a derm from its bubble and insert it. She saw the red flash of a diode when the charger had drawn off a dose; she saw herself remove the derm, balancing it like a white plastic leech on the tip of her index finger, its moist inner surface glittering with minute beads of DMSO—

  She turned, took three steps to the toilet, and dropped the unopened packet into the bowl. It floated there like a toy raft, the drug still perfectly
dry. Perfectly. Her hand shaking, she found a stainless nailfile and knelt on the white tile. She had to close her eyes when she held the packet and drove the tip of the file against the seam, twisting. The file clattered on tile as she touched the flush button and the two halves of the empty packet vanished. She rested her forehead against cool enamel, then forced herself to get up, go to the sink, and carefully wash her hands.

  Because she wanted, now she really knew she wanted, to lick her fingers.

  Later that day, in a gray afternoon, she found a corrugated plastic shipping cannister in the garage, carried it up to the bedroom, and began to pack Bobby’s remaining things. There wasn’t much: a pair of leather jeans he hadn’t liked, some shirts he’d either discarded or forgotten, and, in the teak bureau’s bottom drawer, a cyberspace deck. It was an Ono-Sendai, hardly more than a toy. It lay amid a tangle of black leads, a cheap set of stim-trodes, a greasy-looking plastic tube of saline paste.

  She remembered the deck he’d used, the one he’d taken with him, a gray factory-custom Hosaka with unmarked keys. It was a cowboy’s deck; he’d insisted on traveling with it, even though it caused problems during customs checks. Why, she wondered, had he bought the Ono-Sendai? And why had he abandoned it? She was seated on the edge of the bed; she lifted the deck from the drawer and put it on her lap.

  Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don’t need it, he’d said. And she hadn’t, because she’d dreamed cyberspace, as though the neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.

  There’s no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor’s lecture in the arcology’s executive crèche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive “virtual world” technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers.… As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied.…

  She leaned forward and picked up the trode-set, shook it to free its leads from the tangle.

  No there, there.

  She spread the elastic headband and settled the trodes across her temples—one of the world’s characteristic human gestures, but one she seldom performed. She tapped the Ono-Sendai’s battery-test stud. Green for go. She touched the power stud and the bedroom vanished behind a colorless wall of sensory static. Her head filled with a torrent of white sound.

  Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

  “Angela,” the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, “I have a call from Hilton Swift.…”

  “Executive override?” She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen counter.

  “No,” it said, confidingly.

  “Change your tone,” she said, around a mouthful of beans. “Something with an edge of anxiety.”

  “Mr. Swift is waiting,” the house said nervously.

  “Better,” she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, “but I want something closer to genuine hysteria.…”

  “Will you take the call?” The voice was choked with tension.

  “No,” she said, “but keep your voice that way, I like it.”

  She walked into the living room, counting under her breath. Twelve, thirteen …

  “Angela,” the house said gently, “I have a call from Hilton Swift—”

  “On executive override,” Swift said.

  She made a farting sound with her lips.

  “You know I respect your need to be alone, but I worry about you.”

  “I’m fine, Hilton. You needn’t worry. Bye-bye.”

  “You stumbled this morning, on the beach. You seemed disoriented. Your nose began to bleed.”

  “I had a nosebleed.”

  “We want you to have another physical.…”

  “Great.”

  “You accessed the matrix today, Angie. We logged you in the BAMA industrial sector.”

  “Is that what it was?”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “There isn’t anything to talk about. I was just screwing around. You want to know, though? I was packing some crap Bobby left here. You’d have approved, Hilton! I found a deck of his and I tried it. I punched a key, sat there looking around, jacked out.”

  “I’m sorry, Angie.”

  “For what?”

  “For disturbing you. I’ll go now.”

  “Hilton, do you know where Bobby is?”

  “No.”

  “You telling me Net security hasn’t kept tabs on him?”

  “I’m telling you I don’t know, Angie. That’s the truth.”

  “Could you find out, if you wanted to?”

  Another pause. “I don’t know. If I could, I’m not sure that I would.”

  “Thanks. Goodbye, Hilton.”

  “Goodbye, Angie.”

  She sat on the deck that night, in the dark, watching the fleas dance against floodlit sand. Thinking of Brigitte and her warning, of the drug in the jacket and the derm charger in the medicine cabinet. Thinking of cyberspace and the sad confinement she’d felt with the Ono-Sendai, so far from the freedom of the loa.

  Thinking of the other’s dreams, of corridors winding in upon themselves, muted tints of ancient carpet … An old man, a head made of jewels, a taut pale face with eyes that were mirrors … And a beach in the wind and dark.

  Not this beach, not Malibu.

  And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep.

  Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine:

  T-A

  “Call Continuity,” she told the house, over a third cup of coffee.

  “Hello, Angie,” said Continuity.

  “That orbital sequence we did, two years ago. The Belgian’s yacht …” She sipped her cooling coffee. “What was the name of the place he wanted to take me? The one Robin decided was too tacky.”

  “Freeside,” the expert system said.

  “Who’s taped there?”

  “Tally Isham recorded nine sequences in Freeside.”

  “It wasn’t too tacky for her?”

  “That was fifteen years ago. It was fashionable.”

  “Get me those sequences.”

  “Done.”

  “Bye.”

  “Goodbye, Angie.”

  Continuity was writing a book. Robin Lanier had told her about it. She’d asked what it was about. It wasn’t like that, he’d said. It looped back into itself and constantly mutated; Continuity was always writing it. She asked why. But Robin had already lost interest: because Continuity was an AI, and AIs did things like that.

  Her call to Continuity cost her a call from Swift.

  “Angie, about that physical …”

  “Haven’t you scheduled it yet? I want to get back to work. I called Continuity this morning. I’m thinking about an orbital sequence. I’m going over some things Tally did; I may get some ideas.”

  There was a silence. She wanted to laugh. It was difficult to get a silence out of Swift. “You’re sure, Angie? That’s wonderful, but is it really what you want to do?”

  “I’m all better, Hilton. I’m just fine. I want to work. Vacation’s over. Have Porphyre come out here and do my hair before I have to see anyone.”

  “You know, Angie,” he said, “this makes all of us very happy.”

  “Call P
orphyre. Set up the physical.” Coup-poudre. Who, Hilton? Maybe you?

  He had the resources, she thought, half an hour later, as she paced the fogbound deck. Her addiction hadn’t threatened the Net, hadn’t affected her output. There were no physical side effects. If there had been, Sense/Net would never have allowed her to begin. The drug’s designer, she thought. The designer would know. And never tell her, even if she could reach him, which she doubted she could. Suppose, she thought, her hands on the rust of the railing, that he hadn’t been the designer? That the molecule had been designed by someone else, to his own ends?

  “Your hairdresser,” the house said.

  She went inside.

  Porphyre was waiting, swathed in muted jersey, something from the Paris season. His face, as smooth in repose as polished ebony, split into a delighted smirk when he saw her. “Missy,” he scolded, “you look like homemade shit.”

  She laughed. Porphyre clucked and tutted, came forward to flick his long fingers at Angie’s bangs with mock revulsion. “Missy was a bad girl. Porphyre told you those drugs were nasty!”

  She looked up at him. He was very tall, and, she knew, enormously strong. Like a greyhound on steroids, someone had once said. His depilated skull displayed a symmetry unknown to nature.

  “You okay?” he asked, in his other voice, the manic brio shut off as if someone had thrown a switch.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yeah. It hurt.”

  “You know,” he said, touching her chin lightly with a fingertip, “nobody could ever see what you got out of that shit. It didn’t seem to get you high.…”

  “It wasn’t supposed to. It was just like being here, being there, only you didn’t have to—”

  “Feel it as much?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, slowly. “Then that was some bad shit.”

  “Fuck it,” she said. “I’m back.”

  His smirk returned. “Let’s wash your hair.”

  “I washed it yesterday!”

  “What in? No! Don’t tell me!” He shooed her toward the stairwell.