Mona Lisa Overdrive Read online

  “You called it Smoke,” she said, as he reached for the brass knob, “the city.…”

  He paused. “The Smoke,” he said, “yes,” and opened the door into warmth and light, “that’s an old expression, sort of nickname.” He picked up her bags and padded into a blue-carpeted foyer paneled in white-painted wood. She followed him, the door closing itself behind her, its bolts thumping back into place. A mahogony-framed print hung above the white wainscoting, horses in a field, crisp little figures in red coats. Colin the chip-ghost should live there, she thought. Petal had put her bags down again. Flakes of compacted snow lay on the blue carpet. Now he opened another door, exposing a gilt steel cage. He drew the bars aside with a clank. She stared into the cage, baffled. “The lift,” he said. “No space for your things. I’ll make a second trip.”

  For all its apparent age, it rose smoothly enough when Petal touched a white porcelain button with a blunt forefinger. Kumiko was forced to stand very close to him then; he smelled of damp wool and some floral shaving preparation.

  “We’ve put you up top,” he said, leading her along a narrow corridor, “because we thought you might appreciate the quiet.” He opened a door and gestured her in. “Hope it’ll do.…” He removed his glasses and polished them energetically with a crumpled tissue. “I’ll get your bags.”

  When he had gone, Kumiko walked slowly around the massive black marble tub that dominated the center of the low, crowded room. The walls, angled sharply toward the ceiling, were faced with mottled gold mirror. A pair of small dormer windows flanked the largest bed she’d ever seen. Above the bed, the mirror was inset with small adjustable lights, like the reading lamps in an airliner. She stood beside the tub to touch the arched neck of a gold-plated swan that served as a spout. Its spread wings were tap handles. The air in the room was warm and still, and for an instant the presence of her mother seemed to fill it, an aching fog.

  Petal cleared his throat in the doorway. “Well then,” he said, bustling in with her luggage, “everything in order? Feeling hungry yet? No? Leave you to settle in …” He arranged her bags beside the bed. “If you should feel like eating, just ring.” He indicated an ornate antique telephone with scrolled brass mouth- and earpieces and a turned ivory handle. “Just pick it up, you needn’t dial. Breakfast’s when you want it. Ask someone, they’ll show you where. You can meet Swain then.…”

  The sense of her mother had vanished with his return. She tried to feel it again, when he said goodnight and closed the door, but it was gone.

  She remained a long time beside the tub, stroking the smooth metal of the swan’s cool neck.

  2

  KID AFRIKA

  Kid Afrika came cruising into Dog Solitude on the last day in November, his vintage Dodge chauffeured by a white girl named Cherry Chesterfield.

  Slick Henry and Little Bird were breaking down the buzzsaw that formed the Judge’s left hand when Kid’s Dodge came into view, its patched apron bag throwing up brown fantails of the rusty water that pooled on the Solitude’s uneven plain of compacted steel.

  Little Bird saw it first. He had sharp eyes, Little Bird, and a 10X monocular that dangled on his chest amid the bones of assorted animals and antique bottleneck cartridge brass. Slick looked up from the hydraulic wrist to see Little Bird straighten up to his full two meters and aim the monocular out through the grid of unglazed steel that formed most of Factory’s south wall. Little Bird was very thin, almost skeletal, and the lacquered wings of brown hair that had earned him the name stood out sharp against the pale sky. He kept the back and sides shaved high, well above his ears; with the wings and the aerodynamic ducktail, he looked as though he were wearing a headless brown gull.

  “Whoa,” said Little Bird, “motherfuck.”

  “What?” It was hard to get Little Bird to concentrate, and the job needed a second set of hands.

  “It’s that nigger.”

  Slick stood up and wiped his hands down the thighs of his jeans while Little Bird fumbled the green Mech-5 microsoft from the socket behind his ear—instantly forgetting the eight-point servo-calibration procedure needed to unfuck the Judge’s buzzsaw. “Who’s driving?” Afrika never drove himself if he could help it.

  “Can’t make out.” Little Bird let the monocular clatter back into the curtain of bones and brass.

  Slick joined him at the window to watch the Dodge’s progress. Kid Afrika periodically touched up the hover’s matte-black paint-job with judicious applications from an aerosol can, the somber effect offset by the row of chrome-plated skulls welded to the massive front bumper. At one time the hollow steel skulls had boasted red Christmas bulbs for eyes; maybe the Kid was losing his concern with image.

  As the hover slewed up to Factory, Slick heard Little Bird shuffle back into the shadows, his heavy boots scraping through dust and fine bright spirals of metal shavings.

  Slick watched past a last dusty dagger of window glass as the hover settled into its apron bags in front of Factory, groaning and venting steam.

  Something rattled in the dark behind him and he knew that Little Bird was behind the old parts rack, fiddling the homemade silencer onto the Chinese rimfire they used for rabbits.

  “Bird,” Slick said, tossing his wrench down on the tarp, “I know you’re an ignorant little redneck Jersey asshole, but do you have to keep goddamn reminding me of it?”

  “Don’t like that nigger,” Little Bird said, from behind the rack.

  “Yeah, and if that nigger’d bother noticing, he wouldn’t like you either. Knew you were back here with that gun, he’d shove it down your throat sideways.”

  No response from Little Bird. He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.

  “And I’d help him, too.” Slick yanked up the zip on his old brown jacket and went out to Kid Afrika’s hover.

  The dusty window on the driver’s side hissed down, revealing a pale face dominated by an enormous pair of amber-tinted goggles. Slick’s boots crunched on ancient cans rusted thin as old leaves. The driver tugged the goggles down and squinted at him; female, but now the amber goggles hung around her neck, concealing her mouth and chin. The Kid would be on the far side, a good thing in the unlikely event Little Bird started shooting.

  “Go on around,” the girl said.

  Slick walked around the hover, past the chrome skulls, hearing Kid Afrika’s window come down with that same demonstrative little sound.

  “Slick Henry,” the Kid said, his breath puffing white as it hit the air of the Solitude, “hello.”

  Slick looked down at the long brown face. Kid Afrika had big hazel eyes, slitted like a cat’s, a pencil-thin mustache, and skin with the sheen of buffed leather.

  “Hey, Kid.” Slick smelled some kind of incense from inside the hover. “How y’ doin’?”

  “Well,” the Kid said, narrowing his eyes, “recall you sayin’ once, if I ever needed a favor …”

  “Right,” Slick said, feeling a first twinge of apprehension. Kid Afrika had saved his ass once, in Atlantic City; talked some irate brothers out of dropping him off this balcony on the forty-third floor of a burned-out highstack. “Somebody wanna throw you off a tall building?”

  “Slick,” the Kid said, “I wanna introduce you to somebody.”

  “Then we’ll be even?”

  “Slick Henry, this fine-looking girl here, this is Miss Cherry Chesterfield of Cleveland, Ohio.” Slick bent down and looked at the driver. Blond shockhead, paintstick around her eyes. “Cherry, this is my close personal friend Mr. Slick Henry. When he was young and bad he rode with the Deacon Blues. Now he’s old and bad, he holes up out here and pursues his art, understand. A talented man, understand.”

  “He’s the one builds the robots,” the girl said, around a wad of gum, “you said.”

  “The very one,” the Kid said, opening his door. “You wait for us here, Cherry honey.” The Kid, draped in a mink coat that brushed the immaculate tips of his yel
low ostrich boots, stepped out onto the Solitude, and Slick caught a glimpse of something in the back of the hover, eye-blink ambulance flash of bandages and surgical tubing.…

  “Hey, Kid,” he said, “what you got back there?” The Kid’s jeweled hand came up, gesturing Slick back as the hover’s door clanked shut and Cherry Chesterfield hit the window buttons.

  “We have to talk about that, Slick.”

  “I don’t think it’s much to ask,” Kid Afrika said, leaning back against a bare metal workbench, wrapped in his mink. “Cherry has a med-tech’s ticket and she knows she’ll get paid. Nice girl, Slick.” He winked.

  “Kid …”

  Kid Afrika had this guy in the back of the hover who was like dead, coma or something, had him hooked up to pumps and bags and tubes and some kind of simstim rig, all of it bolted to an old alloy ambulance stretcher, batteries and everything.

  “What’s this?” Cherry, who’d followed them in after the Kid had taken Slick back out to show him the guy in the back of the hover, was peering dubiously up at the towering Judge, most of him anyway; the arm with the buzzsaw was where they’d left it, on the floor on the greasy tarp. If she has a med-tech’s ticket, Slick thought, the med-tech probably hasn’t noticed it’s missing yet. She was wearing at least four leather jackets, all of them several sizes too big.

  “Slick’s art, like I told you.”

  “That guy’s dying. He smells like piss.”

  “Catheter came loose,” Cherry said. “What’s this thing supposed to do, anyway?”

  “We can’t keep him here, Kid, he’ll stiff. You wanna kill him, go stuff him down a hole on the Solitude.”

  “The man’s not dying,” Kid Afrika said. “He’s not hurt, he’s not sick.…”

  “Then what the fuck’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s under, baby. He’s on a long trip. He needs peace and quiet.”

  Slick looked from the Kid to the Judge, then back to the Kid. He wanted to be working on that arm. Kid said he wanted Slick to keep the guy for two weeks, maybe three; he’d leave Cherry there to take care of him.

  “I can’t figure it. This guy, he’s a friend of yours?”

  Kid Afrika shrugged inside his mink.

  “So why don’t you keep him at your place?”

  “Not so quiet. Not peaceful enough.”

  “Kid,” Slick said, “I owe you one, but nothing this weird. Anyway, I gotta work, and anyway, it’s too weird. And there’s Gentry, too. He’s gone to Boston now; be back tomorrow night and he wouldn’t like it. You know how he’s funny about people.… It’s mostly his place, too, how it is.…”

  “They had you over the railing, man,” Kid Afrika said sadly. “You remember?”

  “Hey, I remember, I …”

  “You don’t remember too good,” the Kid said. “Okay, Cherry. Let’s go. Don’t wanna cross Dog Solitude at night.” He pushed off from the steel bench.

  “Kid, look …”

  “Forget it. I didn’t know your fucking name, that time in Atlantic City, just figured I didn’t wanna see the white boy all over the street, y’know? So I didn’t know your name then, I guess I don’t know it now.”

  “Kid …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Okay. He stays. Two weeks max. You gimme your word, you’ll come back and get him? And you gotta help me square it with Gentry.”

  “What’s he need?”

  “Drugs.”

  Little Bird reappeared as the Kid’s Dodge wallowed away across the Solitude. He came edging out from behind an outcropping of compacted cars, rusty pallets of crumpled steel that still showed patches of bright enamel.

  Slick watched him from a window high up in Factory. The squares of the steel frame had been fitted with sections of scavenged plastic, each one a different shade and thickness, so that when Slick tilted his head to one side, he saw Little Bird through a pane of hot-pink Lucite.

  “Who lives here?” Cherry asked, from the room behind him.

  “Me,” Slick said, “Little Bird, Gentry …”

  “In this room, I mean.”

  He turned and saw her there beside the stretcher and its attendant machines. “You do,” he said.

  “It’s your place?” She was staring at the drawings taped to the walls, his original conceptions of the Judge and his Investigators, the Corpsegrinder and the Witch.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Better you don’t get any ideas,” she said.

  He looked at her. She had a large red sore at the corner of her mouth. Her bleached hair stood out like a static display. “Like I said, don’t worry about it.”

  “Kid said you got electricity.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Better get him hooked up,” she said, turning to the stretcher. “He doesn’t draw much, but the batteries’ll be getting low.”

  He crossed the room to look down at the wasted face. “You better tell me something,” he said. He didn’t like the tubes. One of them went into a nostril and the idea made him want to gag. “Who is this guy and what exactly the fuck is Kid Afrika doing to him?”

  “He’s not,” she said, tapping a readout into view on a biomonitor panel lashed to the foot of the stretcher with silver tape. “REM’s still up, like he dreams all the time …” The man on the stretcher was strapped down in a brand-new blue sleeping bag. “What it is, he—whoever—he’s paying Kid for this.”

  There was a trode-net plastered across the guy’s forehead; a single black cable was lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the fat gray package that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure. Simstim? Didn’t look like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot about cyberspace, or anyway he talked about it, but Slick couldn’t remember anything about getting unconscious and just staying jacked in.… People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.

  “He paying the Kid?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “Keep him that way. Hide him out, too.”

  “Who from?”

  “Don’t know. Didn’t say.”

  In the silence that followed, he could hear the steady rasp of the man’s breath.

  3

  MALIBU

  There was a smell in the house; it had always been there.

  It belonged to time and the salt air and the entropic nature of expensive houses built too close to the sea. Perhaps it was also peculiar to places briefly but frequently uninhabited, houses opened and closed as their restless residents arrived and departed. She imagined the rooms empty, flecks of corrosion blossoming silently on chrome, pale molds taking hold in obscure corners. The architects, as if in recognition of eternal processes, had encouraged a degree of rust; massive steel railings along the deck had been eaten wrist-thin by years of spray.

  The house crouched, like its neighbors, on fragments of ruined foundations, and her walks along the beach sometimes involved attempts at archaeological fantasy. She tried to imagine a past for the place, other houses, other voices. She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop nest when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about the way it followed her, as though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.

  She knew that Hilton Swift was watching through the Dornier’s cameras. Little that occurred in the beach house escaped Sense/Net; her solitude, the week alone she’d demanded, was under constant surveillance.

  Her years in the profession had conveyed a singular immunity to observation.

  At night she sometimes lit the floods mount
ed beneath the deck, illuminating the hieroglyphic antics of huge gray sandfleas. The deck itself she left in darkness, and the sunken living room behind her. She sat on a chair of plain white plastic, watching the Brownian dance of the fleas. In the glare of the floods, they cast minute, barely visible shadows, fleeting cusps against the sand.

  The sound of the sea wrapped her in its movement. Late at night, as she slept in the smaller of the two guest bedrooms, it worked its way into her dreams. But never into the stranger’s invading memories.

  The choice of bedrooms was instinctive. The master bedroom was mined with the triggers of old pain.

  The doctors at the clinic had used chemical pliers to pry the addiction away from receptor sites in her brain.

  She cooked for herself in the white kitchen, thawing bread in the microwave, dumping packets of dehydrated Swiss soup into spotless steel pans, edging dully into the nameless but increasingly familiar space from which she’d been so subtly insulated by the designer’s dust.

  “It’s called life,” she said to the white counter. And what would Sense/Net’s in-house psychs make of that, she wondered, if some hidden microphone caught it and carried it to them? She stirred the soup with a slender stainless whisk, watching steam rise. It helped to do things, she thought, just to do things yourself; at the clinic, they’d insisted she make her own bed. Now she spooned out her own bowl of soup, frowning, remembering the clinic.

  She’d checked herself out a week into the treatment. The medics protested. The detoxification had gone beautifully, they said, but the therapy hadn’t begun. They pointed out the rate of relapse among clients who failed to complete the program. They explained that her insurance was invalid if she terminated her treatment. Sense/Net would pay, she told them, unless they preferred she pay them herself. She produced her platinum MitsuBank chip.