Mona Lisa Overdrive Read online

  “Cherry …”

  “What’s that hammer?”

  This Cherry looked at the hammer. “Somebody’s after me ’n’ Slick.” She looked at Mona again. “You them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You look like her.” The light jabbing at Angie.

  “Not my hands. Anyway, I didn’t used to.”

  “You both look like Angie Mitchell.”

  “Yeah. She is.”

  Cherry gave a little shiver. She was wearing three or four leather jackets she’d gotten off different boyfriends; that was a Cleveland thing.

  “Unto this high castle,” came the voice from Angie’s mouth, thick as mud, and Cherry banged her head against the roof of the cab, dropping her hammer, “my horse is come.” In the wavering beam of Cherry’s keyring flashlight, they saw the muscles of Angie’s face crawling beneath the skin. “Why do you linger here, little sisters, now that her marriage is arranged?”

  Angie’s face relaxed, became her own, as a thin bright trickle of blood descended from her left nostril. She opened her eyes, wincing in the light. “Where is she?” she asked Mona.

  “Gone,” Mona said. “Told me to stay here with you …”

  “Who?” Cherry asked.

  “Molly,” Mona asked. “She was driving.…”

  Cherry wanted to find somebody called Slick. Mona wanted Molly to come back and tell her what to do, but Cherry was antsy about staying down here on the ground floor, she said, because there were these people outside with guns. Mona remembered that sound, something hitting the hover; she got Cherry’s light and went back there. There was a hole she could just stick her finger into, halfway up the right side, and a bigger one—two fingers—on the left side.

  Cherry said they’d better get upstairs, where Slick probably was, before those people decided to come in here. Mona wasn’t sure.

  “Come on,” Cherry said. “Slick’s probably back up there with Gentry and the Count.…”

  “What did you just say?” And it was Angie Mitchell’s voice, just like in the stims.

  Whatever this was, it was cold as hell when they got out of the hover—Mona’s legs were bare—but dawn was coming, finally: she could make out faint rectangles that were probably windows, just a gray glow. The girl called Cherry was leading them somewhere, she said upstairs, navigating with little blinks of the keyring light, Angie close behind her and Mona bringing up the rear.

  Mona caught the toe of her shoe in something that rustled. Bending to free herself, she found what felt like a plastic bag. Sticky. Small hard things inside. Took a deep breath and straightened up, shoving the bag into the side pocket of Michael’s jacket.

  Then they were climbing these narrow stairs, steep, almost a ladder, Angie’s fur brushing Mona’s hand on the rough cold railings. Then a landing, then a turn, another set of stairs, another landing. A draft blew from somewhere.

  “It’s kind of a bridge,” Cherry said. “Just walk across it quick, okay, ’cause it kind of moves.…”

  And not expecting this, any of it, not the high white room, the sagging shelves stuffed with ragged, faded books—she thought of the old man—the clutter of console things with cables twisting everywhere; not this skinny, burning-eyed man in black, with his hair trained back into the crest they called a Fighting Fish in Cleveland; not his laugh when he saw them there, or the dead guy.

  Mona’d seen dead people before, enough to know it when she saw it. The color of it. Sometimes in Florida somebody’d lie down on a cardboard pallet on the sidewalk outside the squat. Just not get up. Clothes and skin gone the color of sidewalk anyway, but still different when they’d kicked, another color under that. White truck came then. Eddy said because if you didn’t, they’d swell up. Like Mona’d seen a cat once, blown up like a basketball, turned on its back, legs and tail sticking out stiff as boards, and that made Eddy laugh.

  And this wiz artist laughing now—Mona knew those kind of eyes—and Cherry making this kind of groaning sound, and Angie just standing there.

  “Okay, everybody,” she heard someone say—Molly—and turned to find her there, in the open door, with a little gun in her hand and this big dirty-haired guy beside her looking stupid as a box of rocks, “just stand there till I sort you out.”

  The skinny guy just laughed.

  “Shut up,” Molly said, like she was thinking about something else. She shot without even looking at the gun. Blue flash on the wall beside his head and Mona couldn’t hear anything but her ears ringing.

  Skinny guy curled in a knot on the floor, head between his knees.

  Angie walking toward the stretcher where the dead guy lay, his eyes just white. Slow, slow, like she was moving underwater, and this look on her face …

  Mona’s hand, in her jacket pocket, was sort of figuring something out, all by itself. Sort of squeezing that Ziploc she’d picked up downstairs, telling her … it had wiz in it.

  She pulled it out and it did. Sticky with drying blood. Three crystals inside and some kind of derm.

  She didn’t know why she’d pulled it out, right then, except that nobody was moving.

  The guy with the Fighting Fish had sat up, but he just stayed there. Angie was over by the stretcher, where she didn’t seem to be looking at the dead guy but at this gray box stuck up over his head on a kind of frame. Cherry from Cleveland had got her back up against the wall of books and was sort of jamming her knuckles into her mouth. The big guy just stood there beside Molly, who had her head cocked to the side like she was listening for something.

  Mona couldn’t stand it.

  Table had a steel top. Big hunk of old metal there, holding down a dusty stack of printout. Snapped the three yellow crystals down like buttons in a row, picked up that metal hunk, and—one, two, three—banged them into powder. That did it: everybody looked. Except Angie.

  “ ’Scuse me,” Mona heard herself say, as she swept the mound of rough yellow powder into the waiting palm of her left hand, “how it is …” She buried her nose in the pile and snorted. “Sometimes,” she added, and snorted the rest.

  Nobody said anything.

  And it was the still center again. Just like that time before.

  So fast it was standing still.

  Rapture. Rapture’s coming.

  So fast, so still, she could put a sequence to what happened next: This big laugh, haha, like it wasn’t really a laugh. Through a loudspeaker. Past the door. From out on the catwalk thing. And Molly just turns, smooth as silk, quick but like there’s no hurry in it, and the little gun snicks like a lighter.

  Then there’s this blue flash outside, and the big guy gets sprayed with blood from out there as old metal tears loose and Cherry’s screaming before the catwalk thing hits with this big complicated sound, dark floor down there where she found the wiz in its bloody bag.

  “Gentry,” someone says, and she sees it’s a little vid on the table, young guy’s face on it, “jack Slick’s control unit now. They’re in the building.” Guy with the Fighting Fish scrambles up and starts to do things with wires and consoles.

  And Mona could just watch, because she was so still, and it was all interesting stuff.

  How the big guy gives this bellow and rushes over, shouting how they’re his, they’re his. How the face on the screen says: “Slick, c’mon, you don’t need ’em anymore.…”

  Then this engine starts up, somewhere downstairs, and Mona hears this clanking and rattling, and then somebody yelling, down there.

  And sun’s coming in the tall, skinny window now, so she moves over there for a look. And there’s something out there, kind of a truck or hover, only it’s buried under this pile of what looks like refrigerators, brand-new refrigerators, and broken hunks of plastic crates, and there’s somebody in a camo suit, lying down with his face in the snow, and out past that there’s another hover looks like it’s all burned up.

  It’s interesting.

  40

  PINK SATIN

  Angela Mitchel
l comprehends this room and its inhabitants through shifting data planes that represent viewpoints, though of whom or what, she is in most cases in doubt. There is a considerable degree of overlap, of contradiction.

  The man with the ragged crest of hair, in black-beaded leather, is Thomas Trail Gentry (as birth data and SIN digits cascade through her) of no fixed address (as a different facet informs her that this room is his). Past a gray wash of official data traces, faintly marbled with the Fission Authority’s repeated pink suspicions of utilities fraud, she finds him in a different light: he is like one of Bobby’s cowboys; though young, he is like the old men of the Gentleman Loser; he is an autodidact, an eccentric, obsessed, by his own lights a scholar; he is mad, a nightrunner, guilty (in Mamman’s view, in Legba’s) of manifold heresies; Lady 3Jane, in her own eccentric scheme, has filed him under RIMBAUD. (Another face flares out at Angie from RIMBAUD; his name is Riviera, a minor player in the dreams.) Molly has deliberately stunned him, causing an explosive fléchette to detonate eighteen centimeters from his skull.

  Molly, like the girl Mona, is SINless, her birth unregistered, yet around her name (names) swarm galaxies of supposition, rumor, conflicting data. Streetgirl, prostitute, bodyguard, assassin, she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have long since been woven through the global culture. (And this too belonged to 3Jane, and now belongs to Angie.)

  Molly has just killed a man, has fired one of the explosive fléchettes into his throat. His collapse against a steel railing suffering metal fatigue has caused a large section of catwalk to tumble to the floor below. This room has no other entrance, a fact of some strategic importance. It was probably not Molly’s intention to cause the collapse of the catwalk. She sought to prevent the man, a hired mercenary, from using his weapon of choice, a short alloy shotgun coated with a black, nonreflective finish. Nonetheless, Gentry’s loft is now effectively isolated.

  Angie understands Molly’s importance to 3Jane, the source of her desire for and rage at her; knowing this, she sees all the banality of human evil.

  Angie sees Molly restlessly prowling a gray winter London, a young girl at her side—and knows, without knowing how she knows, that this same girl is now at 23 Margate Road, SW2. (Continuity?) The girl’s father was previously the master of the man Swain, who had lately become 3Jane’s servant for the sake of the information she provides to those who do her bidding. As has Robin Lanier, of course, though he waits to be paid in a different coin.

  For the girl Mona, Angie feels a peculiar tenderness, a pity, a degree of envy: though Mona has been altered to resemble Angie as closely as possible, Mona’s life has left virtually no trace on the fabric of things, and represents, in Legba’s system, the nearest thing to innocence.

  Cherry-Lee Chesterfield is surrounded by a sad ragged scrawl, her information profile like a child’s drawing: citations for vagrancy, petty debts, an aborted career as a paramedical technician Grade 6, framing birth data and SIN.

  Slick, or Slick Henry, is among the SINless, but 3Jane, Continuity, Bobby, all have lavished their attention on him. For 3Jane, he serves as the focus of a minor node of association: she equates his ongoing rite of construction, his cathartic response to chemo-penal trauma, with her own failed attempts to exorcise the barren dream of Tessier-Ashpool. In the corridors of 3Jane’s memory, Angie has frequently come upon the chamber where a spider-armed manipulator stirs the refuse of Straylight’s brief, clotted history—an act of extended collage. And Bobby provides other memories, tapped from the artist as he accessed 3Jane’s library of Babel: his slow, sad, childlike labor on the plain called Dog Solitude, erecting anew the forms of pain and memory.

  Down in the chill dark of Factory’s floor, one of Slick’s kinetic sculptures, controlled by a subprogram of Bobby’s, removes the left arm of another mercenary, employing a mechanism salvaged two summers before from a harvesting machine of Chinese manufacture. The mercenary, whose name and SIN boil past Angie like hot silver bubbles, dies with his cheek against one of Little Bird’s boots.

  Only Bobby, of all the people in this room, is not here as data. And Bobby is not the wasted thing before her, strapped down in alloy and nylon, its chin filmed with dried vomit, nor the eager, familiar face gazing out at her from a monitor on Gentry’s workbench. Is Bobby the solid rectangular mass of memory bolted above the stretcher?

  Now she steps across rolling dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky, free at last of the room and its data.

  Brigitte walks beside her, and there is no pressure, no hollow of night, no hive sound. There are no candles. Continuity is there too, represented by a strolling scribble of silver tinsel that reminds her, somehow, of Hilton Swift on the beach at Malibu.

  “Feeling better?” Brigitte asks.

  “Much better, thank you.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Why is Continuity here?”

  “Because he is your cousin, built from Maas biochips. Because he is young. We walk with you to your wedding.”

  “But who are you, Brigitte? What are you really?”

  “I am the message your father was told to write. I am the vévés he drew in your head.” Brigitte leans close. “Be kind to Continuity. He fears that in his clumsiness, he has earned your displeasure.”

  The tinsel scribble scoots off before them, across the satin dunes, to announce the bride’s arrival.

  41

  MR. YANAKA

  The Maas-Neotek unit was still warm to the touch; the white plastic pad beneath it was discolored, as if by heat. A smell like burning hair …

  She watched the bruises on Tick’s face darken. He’d sent her to a bedside cabinet for a worn tin cigarette box filled with pills and dermadisks—had torn his collar open and pressed three of the adhesive disks against skin white as porcelain.

  She helped him fashion a sling from a length of optic cable.

  “But Colin said she had forgotten.…”

  “I haven’t,” he said, and sucked air between his teeth, working the sling beneath his arm. “Seemed to happen, at the time. Lingers a bit …” He winced.

  “I’m sorry.…”

  “ ’Sokay. Sally told me. About your mother, I mean.”

  “Yes …” She didn’t look away. “She killed herself. In Tokyo …”

  “Whoever she was, that wasn’t her.”

  “The unit …” She glanced toward the breakfast table.

  “She burnt it. Won’t matter to him, though. He’s still there. Has the run of it. What’s our Sally up to, then?”

  “She has Angela Mitchell with her. She’s gone to find the thing that all that comes from. Where we were. A place called New Jersey.”

  The telephone rang.

  Kumiko’s father, head and shoulders, on the broad screen behind Tick’s telephone: he wore his dark suit, his Rolex watch, a galaxy of small fraternal devices in his lapel. Kumiko thought he looked very tired, tired and very serious, a serious man behind the smooth dark expanse of desk in his study. Seeing him there, she regretted that Sally hadn’t phoned from a booth with a camera. She would very much have liked to see Sally again; now, perhaps, it would be impossible.

  “You look well, Kumiko,” her father said.

  Kumiko sat up very straight, facing the small camera mounted just below the wallscreen. In reflex, she summoned her mother’s mask of disdain, but it would not come. Confused, she dropped her gaze to where her hands lay folded in her lap. She was abruptly aware of Tick, of his embarrassment, his fear, trapped in the chair beside her, in full view of the camera.

  “You were correct to flee Swain’s house,” her father said.

  She met his eyes again. “He is your kobun.”

  “No longer. While we were distracted, here, with our own difficulties, he formed new and dubious alliances, pursuing courses of which we could not approve.”

  “And your difficulties, Father?”

 
Was there the flicker of a smile? “All that is ended. Order and accord are again established.”

  “Er, excuse me, sir, Mr. Yanaka,” Tick began, then seemed to lose his voice altogether.

  “Yes. And you are—?”

  Tick’s bruised face contorted in a huge and particularly lugubrious wink.

  “His name is Tick, Father. He has sheltered and protected me. Along with Col … with the Maas-Neotek unit, he saved my life tonight.”

  “Really? I had not been informed of this. I was under the impression that you had not left his apartment.”

  Something cold— “How?” she asked, sitting forward. “How could you know?”

  “The Maas-Neotek unit broadcast your destination, once it was known—once the unit was clear of Swain’s systems. We dispatched watchers to the area.” She remembered the noodle seller.… “Without, of course, informing Swain. But the unit never broadcast a second message.”

  “It was broken. An accident.”

  “Yet you say it saved your life?”

  “Sir,” Tick said, “you’ll pardon me, what I mean is, am I covered?”

  “Covered?”

  “Protected. From Swain, I mean, and his bent SB friends and the rest …”

  “Swain is dead.”

  There was a silence. “But somebody will be running it, surely. The fancy, I mean. Your business.”

  Mr. Yanaka regarded Tick with frank curiosity. “Of course. How else might order and accord be expected to continue?”

  “Give him your word, Father,” Kumiko said, “that he will come to no harm.”

  Yanaka looked from Kumiko to the grimacing Tick. “I extend profound gratitude to you, sir, for having protected my daughter. I am in your debt.”

  “Girt,” Kumiko said.

  “Christ,” Tick said, overcome with awe, “fucking fancy that.”

  “Father,” Kumiko said, “on the night of my mother’s death, did you order the secretaries to allow her to leave alone?”

  Her father’s face was very still. She watched it fill with a sorrow she had never before seen. “No,” he said at last, “I did not.”