Mona Lisa Overdrive

  Prior put her blue bag into a white cart with a striped top and she climbed in after it, hearing tiny Spanish voices from the Cuban driver’s headset. Then Eddy stowed the gator cases and he and Prior got in. Rolling out to the runway through walls of rain.

  The plane wasn’t what she knew from the stims, not like a long rich bus inside, with lots of seats. It was a little black thing with sharp, skinny wings and windows that made it look like it was squinting.

  She went up some metal stairs and there was a space with four seats and the same gray carpet all over, on the walls and ceiling too, everything clean and cool and gray. Eddy came in after her and took a seat like it was something he did every day, loosening his tie and stretching his legs. Prior was pushing buttons beside the door. It made a sighing sound when it closed.

  She looked out the narrow, streaming windows at runway lights reflected on wet concrete.

  Came down here on the train, she thought, New York to Atlanta and then you change.

  The plane shivered. She heard the airframe creak as it came to life.

  She woke briefly, two hours later, in the darkened cabin, cradled by the long hum of the jet. Eddy was asleep, his mouth half-open. Maybe Prior was sleeping too, or maybe he just had his eyes closed, she couldn’t tell.

  Halfway back into a dream she wouldn’t remember in the morning, she heard the sound of that Texas radio, fading steel chords drawn out like an ache.

  9

  UNDERGROUND

  Jubilee and Bakerloo, Circle and District. Kumiko peered at the little laminated map Petal had given her and shivered. The concrete platform seemed to radiate cold through the soles of her boots.

  “It’s so fucking old,” Sally Shears said absently, her glasses reflecting a convex wall sheathed in white ceramic tile.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The tube.” A new tartan scarf was knotted under Sally’s chin, and her breath was white when she spoke. “You know what bothers me? It’s how sometimes you’ll see ’em sticking new tile up in these stations, but they don’t take down the old tile first. Or they’ll punch a hole in the wall to get to some wiring and you can see all these different layers of tile.…”

  “Yes?”

  “Because it’s getting narrower, right? It’s like arterial plaque.…”

  “Yes,” Kumiko said dubiously, “I see.… Those boys, Sally, what is the meaning of their costume, please?”

  “Jacks. What they call Jack Draculas.”

  The four Jack Draculas huddled like ravens on the opposite platform. They wore nondescript black raincoats and polished black combat boots laced to the knee. One turned to address another and Kumiko saw that his hair was drawn back into a plaited queue and bound with a small black bow.

  “Hung him,” Sally said, “after the war.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Dracula. They had public hangings for a while, after the war. Jacks, you wanna stay away from ’em. Hate anybody foreign …”

  Kumiko would have liked to access Colin, but the Maas-Neotek unit was tucked behind a marble bust in the room where Petal served their meals, and then the train arrived, amazing her with the archaic thunder of wheels on steel rail.

  Sally Shears against the patchwork backdrop of the city’s architecture, her glasses reflecting the London jumble, each period culled by economics, by fire, by war.

  Kumiko, already confused by three rapid and apparently random train changes, let herself be hauled through a sequence of taxi rides. They’d jump out of one cab, march into the nearest large store, then take the first available exit to another street and another cab. “Harrods,” Sally said at one point, as they cut briskly through an ornate, tile-walled hall pillared in marble. Kumiko blinked at thick red roasts and shanks displayed on tiered marble counters, assuming they were made of plastic. And then out again, Sally hailing the next cab. “Covent Garden,” she said to the driver.

  “Excuse me, Sally. What are we doing?”

  “Getting lost.”

  Sally drank hot brandy in a tiny cafe beneath the snow-streaked glass roof of the piazza. Kumiko drank chocolate.

  “Are we lost, Sally?”

  “Yeah. Hope so, anyway.” She looked older today, Kumiko thought; lines of tension or fatigue around her mouth.

  “Sally, what is it that you do? Your friend asked if you were still retired.…”

  “I’m a businesswoman.”

  “And my father is a businessman?”

  “Your father is a businessman, honey. No, not like that. I’m an indie. I make investments, mostly.”

  “In what do you invest?”

  “In other indies.” She shrugged. “Feeling curious today?” She sipped her brandy.

  “You advised me to be my own spy.”

  “Good advice. Takes a light touch, though.”

  “Do you live here, Sally, in London?”

  “I travel.”

  “Is Swain another ‘indie’?”

  “He thinks so. He’s into influence, nods in the right direction; you need that here, to do business, but it gets on my nerves.” She tossed back the rest of the brandy and licked her lips.

  Kumiko shivered.

  “You don’t have to be scared of Swain. Yanaka could have him for breakfast.…”

  “No. I thought of those boys in the subway. So thin …”

  “The Draculas.”

  “A gang?”

  “Bosozoku,” Sally said, with fair pronunciation. “ ‘Running tribes’? Anyway, like a tribe.” It wasn’t the right word, but Kumiko thought she saw the distinction. “They’re thin because they’re poor.” She gestured to the waiter for a second brandy.

  “Sally,” Kumiko said, “when we came here, the route we took, the trains and cabs, that was in order to make certain we were not followed?”

  “Nothing’s ever certain.”

  “But when we went to meet Tick, you took no precautions. We could easily have been followed. You enlist Tick to spy on Swain, yet you take no precautions. You bring me here, you take many precautions. Why?”

  The waiter put a steaming glass down in front of her. “You’re a sharp little honey, aren’t you?” She leaned forward and inhaled the fumes of brandy. “It’s like this, okay? With Tick, maybe I’m just trying to shake some action.”

  “But Tick is concerned that Swain not discover him.”

  “Swain won’t touch him, not if he knows he’s working for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knows I might kill him.” She raised the glass, looking suddenly happier.

  “Kill Swain?”

  “That’s right.” She drank.

  “Then why were you so cautious today?”

  “Because sometimes it feels good to shake it all off, get out from under. Chances are, we haven’t. But maybe we have. Maybe nobody, nobody at all, knows where we are. Nice feeling, huh? You could be kinked, you ever think of that? Maybe your dad, the Yak warlord, he’s got a little bug planted in you so he can keep track of his daughter. You got those pretty little teeth, maybe Daddy’s dentist tucked a little hardware in there one time when you were into a stim. You go to the dentist?”

  “Yes.”

  “You stim while he works?”

  “Yes …”

  “There you go. Maybe he’s listening to us right now.…”

  Kumiko nearly overturned what was left of her chocolate.

  “Hey.” The polished nails tapped Kumiko’s wrist. “Don’t worry about it. He wouldn’t’ve sent you here like that, with a bug. Make you too easy for his enemies to track. But you see what I mean? It’s good to get out from under, or anyway try. On our own, right?”

  “Yes,” Kumiko said, her heart still pounding, the panic continuing to rise. “He killed my mother,” she blurted, then vomited chocolate on the café’s gray marble floor.

  Sally leading her past the columns of Saint Paul’s, walking, not talking. Kumiko, in a disjointed trance of shame, registering random information: the whit
e shearling that lined Sally’s leather coat, the oily rainbow sheen of a pigeon’s feathers as it waddled out of their way, red buses like a giant’s toys in the Transport Museum, Sally warming her hands around a foam cup of steaming tea.

  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 arid 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 Kanakas 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 and 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.