Mona Lisa Overdrive (19 page)

“I gotta feeling off Kid Afrika,” Cherry said, “that this guy was paying to stay this
way. Kinda wirehead action but different. And anyway, wireheads don’t REM like that.…”

“But when you tried to put it out through your stuff,” Slick ventured, “you got that … thing.”
He saw Gentry’s shoulders tense beneath black-beaded leather.

“Yes,” Gentry said, “and now I have to reconstruct our account with the Fission Authority.”
He pointed at the permanent storage batteries stacked beneath the steel table. “Get
those out for me.”

“Yeah,” Cherry said, “it’s about time. I’m freezing my ass.”

They left Gentry bent over a cyberspace deck and went back to Slick’s room. Cherry
had insisted they rig Gentry’s electric blanket to one of the batteries so she could
drape it over the stretcher. There was cold coffee left on the butane stove; Slick
drank it without bothering to reheat it, while Cherry stared out the window at the
snow-streaked plain of the Solitude.

“How’d it get like this?” she asked.

“Gentry says it was a landfill operation a hundred years ago. Then they laid down
a lot of topsoil, but stuff wouldn’t grow. A lot of the fill was toxic. Rain washed
the cover off. Guess they just gave up and started dumping more shit on it. Can’t
drink the water out there; fulla PCBs and everything else.”

“What about those rabbits Bird-boy goes hunting for?”

“They’re west of here. You don’t see ’em on the Solitude. Not even rats. Anyway, you
gotta test any meat you take around here.”

“There’s birds, though.”

“Just roost here, go somewhere else to feed.”

“What is it with you ’n’ Gentry?” She was still looking out the window.

“How do you mean?”

“My first idea was maybe you were gay. Together, I mean.”

“No.”

“But it’s kind of like you need each other some way.…”

“It’s his place, Factory. Lets me live here. I … need to live here. To do my work.”

“To build those things downstairs?”

The bulb in the yellow cone of fax came on; the fan in the heater kicked in.

“Well,” Cherry said, squatting in front of the heater and unzipping one jacket after
another, “he may be crazy but he just did something right.”

Gentry was slouched in the old office chair when Slick entered the loft, staring at
the little flip-up monitor on his deck.

“Robert Newmark,” Gentry said.

“Huh?”

“Retinal identification. Either this is Robert Newmark or someone who bought his eyes.”

“How’d you get that?” Slick bent to peer at the screen of basic birth stats.

Gentry ignored the question. “This is it. Push it and you run into something else
entirely.”

“How’s that?”

“Someone wants to know if anyone asks any questions about Mr. Newmark.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” Gentry drummed his fingers on his black leather thighs. “Look at this:
nothing. Born in Barrytown. Mother: Marsha Newmark. We’ve got his SIN, but it’s definitely
been tagged.” He shoved the chair back on its casters and swung around so that he
could see the Count’s still face. “How about it, Newmark? Is that your name?” He stood
up and went to the holo table.

“Don’t,” Slick said.

Gentry touched the power stud on the holo table.

And the gray thing was there again, for an instant, but this time it dived toward
the core of the hemispherical display, dwindled, and was gone. No. It was there, a
minute gray sphere at the very center of the glowing projection field.

Gentry’s crazy smile had returned. “Good,” he said.

“What’s good?”

“I see what it is. A kind of ice. A security program.”

“That monkey?”

“Someone has a sense of humor. If the monkey doesn’t scare you off, it turns into
a pea.…” He crossed to the table and began to root through one of the panniers. “I
doubt if they’ll be able to do that with a direct sensory link.” He held something
in his hand now. A trode-net.

“Gentry, don’t
do
it! Look at him!”

“I’m not going to do it,” Gentry said. “You are.”

Staring through the cab’s smudged windows, she found herself wishing for Colin and
his wry commentary, then remembered that this was entirely beyond his sphere of expertise.
Did Maas-Neotek manufacture a similar unit for the Sprawl, she wondered, and if so,
what form would its ghost take?

“Sally,” she said, perhaps half an hour into the drive to New York, “why did Petal
let me go with you?”

“Because he was smart.”

“And my father?”

“Your father’ll shit.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Will be angry. If he finds out. And he may not. We aren’t here for long.”

“Why are we here?”

“I gotta talk to somebody.”

“But why am I here?”

“You don’t like it here?”

Kumiko hesitated. “Yes, I do.”

“Good.” Sally shifted on the broken-down seat. “Petal
had to let us go. Because he couldn’t have stopped us without hurting one of us. Well,
maybe not hurting. More like insulting. Swain could cool you, then tell you he was
sorry later, tell your father it was for your own good, if it came to that, but if
he cools me, it’s like
face
, right? When I saw Petal down there with the gun, I knew he was going to let us go.
Your room’s kinked. The whole place is. I set the motion sensors off when I was getting
your gear together. Figured I would. Petal knew it was me. That’s why he rang the
phone, to let me know he knew.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Kind of a courtesy, so I’d know he was waiting. Gimme a chance to think. But he didn’t
have a choice and he knew it. Swain, see, he’s being forced to do something, and Petal
knows it. Or anyway Swain says he is, being forced. Me, I’m definitely being forced.
So I start wondering how bad Swain needs me.
Real
bad. Because they let me walk off with the
oyabun’
s daughter, shipped all the way to Notting Hill for the safekeeping. Something there
scares him worse than your daddy. ’Less it’s something that’ll make him richer than
your daddy already has. Anyway, taking you kind of evens things up. Kind of like pushing
back. You mind?”

“But you are being threatened?”

“Somebody knows a lot of things I did.”

“And Tick has discovered the identity of this person?”

“Yeah. Guess I knew anyway. Wish to fuck I’d been wrong.”

The hotel Sally chose was faced with rust-stained steel panels, each panel secured
with gleaming chrome bolts, a style Kumiko knew from Tokyo and thought of as somewhat
old-fashioned.

Their room was large and gray, a dozen shades of gray, and Sally walked straight to
the bed, after she’d locked the door, took off her jacket, and lay down.

“You don’t have a bag,” Kumiko said.

Sally sat up and began to remove her boots. “I can buy what I need. You tired?”

“No.”

“I am.” She pulled her black sweater over her head. Her breasts were small, with brownish
pink nipples; a scar, running from just below the left nipple, vanished into the waistband
of her jeans.

“You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.

Sally looked down. “Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you have it removed?”

“Sometimes it’s good to remember.”

“Being hurt?”

“Being stupid.”

Gray on gray. Unable to sleep, Kumiko paced the gray carpet. There was something vampiric
about the room, she decided, something it would have in common with millions of similar
rooms, as though its bewilderingly seamless anonymity were sucking away her personality,
fragments of which emerged as her parents’ voices, raised in argument, as the faces
of her father’s black-suited secretaries.…

Sally slept, her face a smooth mask. The view from the window told Kumiko nothing
at all: only that she looked out on a city that was neither Tokyo nor London, a vast
generic tumble that was her century’s paradigm of urban reality.

Perhaps she slept too, Kumiko, though later she wasn’t certain. She watched Sally
order toiletries and underwear, tapping her requirements into the bedside video. Her
purchases were delivered while Kumiko was in the shower.

“Okay,” Sally said, from beyond the door, “towel off, get dressed, we’re going to
see the man.”

“What man?” Kumiko asked, but Sally hadn’t heard her.

Gomi
.

Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on
gomi
, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century’s systematic dumping.
Gomi
, there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, sorted, carefully plowed under.

London’s relationship to
gomi
was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko’s eyes, the bulk of the city
consisted
of
gomi
, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless
hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko,
the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of
restoration. The English valued their
gomi
in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it.

Gomi
in the Sprawl was something else: a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in
steel and polymer. The apparent lack of planning alone was enough to dizzy her, running
so entirely opposite the value her own culture placed on efficient land use.

Their taxi ride from the airport had already shown her decay, whole blocks in ruin,
unglazed windows gaping above sidewalks heaped with trash. And faces staring as the
armored hover made its way through the streets.

Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot
and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced
the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.

Two cab rides away from their hotel, they took to the street itself, into early-evening
crowds and a slant of shadow. The air was cold, but not the cold of London, and Kumiko
thought of the blossoms in Ueno Park.

Their first stop was a large, somewhat faded bar called the Gentleman Loser, where
Sally conducted a quiet, very rapid exchange with a bartender.

They left without buying a drink.