Mona Lisa Overdrive Read online

  The helicopter told them to fasten their seatbelts.

  As they lifted off, there was virtual silence in the soundproofed cabin, only a throbbing in the bones, and for a strange second she seemed able to hold the whole of her life in mind and know it, see it for what it had been. And it was this, she thought, that the dust had drifted over and concealed, and that had been freedom from pain.

  And the site of the soul’s departure, said an iron voice, out of candleglow and the roar of the hive.…

  “Missy?” Porphyre from the seat beside her, leaning close …

  “I’m dreaming.…”

  Something had been waiting for her, years ago, in the Net. Nothing like the loa, like Legba or the others, though Legba, she knew, was Lord of the Crossroads; he was synthesis, the cardinal point of magic, communication.…

  “Porphyre,” she asked, “why did Bobby leave?” She looked out at the Sprawl’s tangled grid of light, at the domes picked out in red beacons, seeing instead the datascape that had drawn him, always, back to what he’d believed was the only game worth playing.

  “If you don’t know, missy,” Porphyre said, “who does?”

  “But you hear things. Everything. All the rumors. You always have.…”

  “Why ask me now?”

  “It’s time.…”

  “I remember talk, understand? How people who aren’t famous talk about those who are. Maybe someone who claimed they knew Bobby talked to someone else, and it came around.… Bobby was worth talking about because he was with you, understand? That’s a good place to start, missy, because he wouldn’t have found that so very gratifying, would he? Story was, he’d set out hustling on his own, but he’d found you instead, and you rolled higher and faster than anything he could’ve dreamed of. Took him up there, understand? Where the kind of money he’d never even dreamed of, back in Barrytown, was just change.…”

  Angie nodded, looking out over the Sprawl.

  “Talk was he had his own ambitions, missy. Something driving him. Drove him off, finally …”

  “I didn’t think he’d leave me,” she said. “When I first came to the Sprawl, it was like being born. A new life. And he was there, right there, the very first night. Later, when Legba—when I was with the Net …”

  “When you were becoming Angie.”

  “Yes. And as much of me as that took, I knew he’d be there. And also that he’d never buy it, entirely, and I needed that, how it was still just a scam, to him, the whole business.…”

  “The Net?”

  “Angie Mitchell. He knew the difference between it and me.”

  “Did he?”

  “Maybe he was the difference.” So high above the lines of light …

  The old New Suzuki Envoy had been Angie’s favorite Sprawl hotel since her earliest days with the Net.

  It maintained its street wall for eleven stories, then narrowed jaggedly, at the first of nine setbacks, into a mountainside assembled from bedrock excavated from its Madison Square building site. Original plans had called for this steep landscape to be planted with flora native to the Hudson Valley region, and populated with suitable fauna, but subsequent construction of the first Manhattan Dome had made it necessary to hire a Paris-based eco-design team. The French ecologists, accustomed to the “pure” design problems posed by orbital systems, had despaired of the Sprawl’s particulate-laden atmosphere, opting for heavily engineered strains of vegetation and robotic fauna of the sort encountered in children’s theme parks, but Angie’s continued patronage had eventually lent the place a cachet it would otherwise have lacked. The Net leased the five topmost floors, where her permanent suite had been installed, and the Envoy had come to enjoy a certain belated reputation with artists and entertainers.

  Now she smiled as the helicopter rose past a disinterested robot bighorn pretending to munch lichen beside the illuminated waterfall. The absurdity of the place always delighted her; even Bobby had enjoyed it.

  She glanced out at the Envoy’s heliport, where the Sense/Net logo had been freshly repainted on heated, floodlit concrete. A lone figure, hooded in a bright orange parka, waited beside a sculpted outcropping of rock.

  “Robin will be here, won’t he, Porphyre?”

  “Mistah Lanier,” he said sourly.

  She sighed.

  The black chrome Fokker brought them smoothly down, glasses tinkling gently in the drinks’ cabinet as the landing gear met the roof of the Envoy. The muted throb of the engines died.

  “Where Robin is concerned, Porphyre, I’ll have to make the first move. I’m going to speak with him tonight. Alone. In the meantime, I want you to stay out of his way.”

  “Porphyre’s pleasure, missy,” the hairdresser said, as the cabin door opened behind them. And then he was twisting, clawing at the buckle of his seatbelt, and Angie turned in time to see the bright orange parka in the hatchway, the upraised arm, the mirrored glasses. The gun made no more sound than a cigarette lighter, but Porphyre convulsed, one long black hand slapping at his throat as the security man swung the hatch shut behind him and sprang at Angie.

  Something was clapped hard against her stomach as Porphyre lolled back bonelessly in his seat, the sharp pink tip of his tongue protruding. She looked down, in pure reflex, and saw the black chrome buckle of her seatbelt through a sticky-looking lozenge of greenish plastic.

  She looked up into a white oval face framed by a tightly drawn orange nylon hood. Saw her own face blank with shock, doubled in the silver lenses. “He drink, tonight?”

  “What?”

  “Him.” A thumb jerked in Porphyre’s direction. “He drink any alcohol?”

  “Yes … Earlier.”

  “Shit.” A woman’s voice, as she turned to the unconscious hairdresser. “Now I’ve sedated him. Don’t wanna suppress his breathing reflex, y’know?” Angie watched as the woman checked Porphyre’s pulse. “Guess he’s okay …” Did she shrug, inside the orange parka?

  “Security?”

  “What?” The glasses flashed.

  “Are you Net security?”

  “Fuck no, I’m abducting you.”

  “You are?”

  “You bet.”

  “Why?”

  “Not for any of the usual reasons. Somebody’s got it in for you. Got it in for me too. I was supposed to set it up to grab you next week. Fuck ’em. Had to talk to you, anyway.”

  “You did? Talk to me?”

  “Know anybody name of 3Jane?”

  “No. I mean, yes, but—”

  “Save it. Our asses outa here, fast.”

  “Porphyre—”

  “He’s gonna wake up soon. Look of him, I don’t wanna be around when he does.…”

  31

  3JANE

  If this was part of Bobby’s big gray house in the country, Slick decided, opening his eyes on the cramped curve of the narrow corridor, then it was a stranger place than it had seemed the first time. The air was thick and dead and the light from the greenish glass-tile ceiling-strip made him feel like he was under water. The tunnel was made of some kind of glazed concrete. It felt like jail.

  “Maybe we came out in the basement or something,” he said, noticing the faint ping of echo off the concrete when he spoke.

  “No reason we’d cut into the construct you saw before,” Gentry said.

  “So what is it?” Slick touched the concrete wall; it was warm.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Gentry said.

  Gentry started walking in the direction they were both facing. Past the curve, the floor became an uneven mosaic of shattered china, fragments pressed into something like epoxy, slippery under their boots.

  “Look at this stuff …” Thousands of different patterns and colors in the broken bits, but no overall design in how it had been put down, just random.

  “Art.” Gentry shrugged. “Somebody’s hobby. You should appreciate that, Slick Henry.”

  Whoever it was, they hadn’t bothered with the walls. Slick knelt to run his fingers over
it, feeling raw edges of broken ceramic, glassy hardened plastic in between. “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘hobby’?”

  “It’s like those things you build, Slick. Your junk toys …” Gentry grinned his tense crazy grin.

  “You don’t know,” Slick said. “Spend your whole fucking life trying to figure what cyberspace is shaped like, man, and it probably isn’t even shaped like anything, and anyway who gives a shit?” There wasn’t anything random about the Judge and the others. The process was random, but the results had to conform to something inside, something he couldn’t touch directly.

  “Come on,” Gentry said.

  Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry’s pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway?

  Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around. Bird wasn’t any good to talk to because there wasn’t much he was interested in, and all he talked was stringtown stupid. And even if Gentry never admitted it, Slick felt like Gentry understood about some things.

  “Yeah,” Slick said, getting up, “let’s go.”

  The tunnel wound in on itself like a gut. The section with the mosaic floor was back there now, around however many curves and up and down short, curving stairwells. Slick kept trying to imagine a building that would have insides like this, but he couldn’t. Gentry was walking fast, eyes narrowed, chewing on his lip. Slick thought the air was getting worse.

  Up another stairwell, they hit a straight stretch that narrowed to nothing in the distance, either way you looked. It was broader than the curved parts and the floor was soft and humpy with little rugs, it looked like hundreds of them, rolled out layers deep over the concrete. Each rug had its own pattern and colors, lots of reds and blues, but all the patterns were the same zaggy diamonds and triangles. The dusty smell was thicker here and Slick figured it had to be the rugs, they looked so old. The ones on top, nearest the center, were worn down to the weave, in patches. A trail, like somebody’d been walking up and down there for years. Sections of the overhead light-strip were dark, and others pulsed weakly.

  “Which way?” he asked Gentry.

  Gentry was looking down, working his thick lower lip between finger and thumb. “This way.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter.”

  It made Slick’s legs tired, walking over those rugs. Had to watch not to snag his toes in the ones with holes worn through. Once he stepped over a glass tile that had fallen from the light-strip. At regular intervals now they were passing sections of wall that looked as though portals had been sealed over with more concrete. There wasn’t anything there, just the same arched shape in slightly paler concrete with a slightly different texture.

  “Gentry, this has gotta be underground, right? Like a basement under something …”

  But Gentry just brought his arm up, so that Slick bumped into it, and they both were standing there staring at the girl at the end of the corridor, not a dozen meters across the waves of carpet.

  She said something in a language Slick guessed was French. The voice was light and musical, the tone matter-of-fact. She smiled. Pale under a twist of dark hair, a fine, high-boned face, strong thin nose, and wide mouth.

  Slick felt Gentry’s arm trembling against his chest. “It’s okay,” he said, taking Gentry’s arm and lowering it. “We’re just looking for Bobby.…”

  “Everyone’s looking for Bobby,” she said, English with an accent he didn’t know. “I’m looking for him myself. For his body. Have you seen his body?” She took a step back, away from them, like she was about to run.

  “We won’t hurt you,” Slick said, suddenly aware of his own smell, of the grease worked into his jeans and brown jacket, and Gentry didn’t really look all that much more reassuring.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” she said, and her white teeth flashed again in the stale undersea light. “But then I don’t think I fancy either of you.”

  Slick wanted Gentry to say something, but Gentry didn’t. “You know him—Bobby?” Slick ventured.

  “He’s really a very clever man. Extraordinarily clever. Although I don’t think I fancy him, really.” She wore something loose and black that hung to her knees. Her feet were bare. “Nonetheless, I want … his body.” She laughed.

  Everything

  changed.

  “Juice?” Bobby the Count asked, holding out a tall glass of something yellow. The water in the turquoise pool reflected shifting blobs of sunlight on the palm fronds above his head. He was naked, aside from a pair of very dark glasses. “What’s the matter with your friend?”

  “Nothing,” Slick heard Gentry say. “He did time on induced Korsakov’s. Transition like that scares the shit out of him.”

  Slick lay very still on the white iron lounge chair with the blue cushions, feeling the sun bake through his greasy jeans.

  “You’re the one he mentioned, right?” Bobby asked. “Name’s Gentle? Own a factory?”

  “Gentry.”

  “You’re a cowboy.” Bobby smiled. “Console jockey. Cyberspace man.”

  “No.”

  Bobby rubbed his chin. “You know I have to shave in here? Cut myself, there’s a scar.…” He drank half the glass of juice and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re not a jockey? How else you get in here?”

  Gentry unzipped his beaded jacket, exposing his bone-white, hairless chest. “Do something about the sun,” he said.

  Twilight. Like that. Not even a click. Slick heard himself groan. Insects began to creak in the palms beyond the whitewashed wall. Sweat cooled on his ribs.

  “Sorry, man,” Bobby said to Slick. “That Korsakov’s, that must be some sad shit. But this place is beautiful. Vallarta. Belonged to Tally Isham.” He turned his attention to Gentry again. “If you’re not a cowboy, fella, what are you?”

  “I’m like you,” Gentry said.

  “I’m a cowboy.” A lizard scooted diagonally up the wall behind Bobby’s head.

  “No. You aren’t here to steal anything, Newmark.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re here to learn something.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No. You were a cowboy once, but now you’re something else. You’re looking for something, but there’s nobody to steal it from. I’m looking for it too.”

  And Gentry began to explain about the Shape, as the palm shadows gathered and thickened into Mexican night, and Bobby the Count sat and listened.

  When Gentry was done, Bobby sat there for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, “Yeah. You’re right. How I think of it, I’m trying to find out what brought the Change.”

  “Before that,” Gentry said, “it didn’t have a Shape.”

  “Hey,” Slick said, “before we were here, we were somewhere else. Where was that?”

  “Straylight,” Bobby said. “Up the well. In orbit.”

  “Who’s that girl?”

  “Girl?”

  “Dark hair. Skinny.”

  “Oh,” Bobby said, in the dark, “that was 3Jane. You saw her?”

  “Weird girl,” Slick said.

  “Dead girl,” Bobby said. “You saw her construct. Blew her family fortune to build this thing.”

  “You, uh, hang out with her? In here?”

  “She hates my guts. See, I stole it, stole her soul-catcher. She had her construct in place in here when I took off for Mexico, so she’s always been around. Thing was, she died. Outside, I mean. Meantime, all her shit outside, all her scams and schemes, that’s being run by lawyers, programs, more flunkies.…” He grinned. “It really pisses her off. The people who’re trying to get into your place to get the aleph back, they work for somebody else who works for some people she hired out on the Coast. But, yeah, I’ve done the odd deal with her, traded things. She’s crazy, but she plays a tight game.…”

 
; Not even a click.

  At first he thought he was back in the gray house, where he’d seen Bobby the first time, but this room was smaller and the carpets and furniture were different, he couldn’t say how. Rich but not as glittery. Quiet. A lamp with a green glass shade glowed on a long wooden table.

  Tall windows with frames painted white, dividing the white beyond that into rectangles, each pane, and that must be snow.… He stood with his cheek touching soft drapes, looking out into a walled space of snow.

  “London,” Bobby said. “She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They’ve been fading, sort of blurring. You can still raise em, sometimes, but their personalities run together.…”

  “That fits,” Gentry said. “They came out of the first cause, When It Changed. You already figured that. But you don’t know what happened yet, do you?”

  “No. I just know where. Straylight. She’s told me all that part, I think all she knows. Doesn’t really care about it. Her mother put together a couple of AIs, very early on, real heavy stuff. Then her mother died and the AIs sort of stewed in the corporate cores, up there. One of them started doing deals on its own. It wanted to get together with the other one.…”

  “It did. There’s your first cause. Everything changed.”

  “Simple as that? How do you know?”

  “Because,” Gentry said, “I’ve been at it from another angle. You’ve been playing cause and effect, but I’ve been looking for outlines, shapes in time. You’ve been looking all over the matrix, but I’ve been looking at the matrix, the whole thing. I know things you don’t.”

  Bobby didn’t answer. Slick turned from the window and saw the girl, the same one, standing across the room. Just standing there.

  “It wasn’t just the Tessier-Ashpool AIs,” Gentry said. “People came up the well to crack the T-A cores. They brought a Chinese military icebreaker.”

  “Case,” Bobby said, “Guy named Case. I know that part. Some kind of synergistic effect …”