Mona Lisa Overdrive (25 page)

“Leave it, Gerald,” the woman said from the door. “It’s time you go now.”

“I don’t think you know what you’re doing,” he said, “but good luck.”

“Thanks. Think you’ll miss the place?”

“No. I was going to retire soon anyway.”

“So was I,” the woman said, and then Gerald left, without even a nod for Mona.

“Got any clothes?” the woman asked Mona. “Get ’em on. We’re leaving too.”

Dressing, Mona found she couldn’t button her dress over her new breasts, so she left
it open, putting Michael’s jacket on and zipping it up to her chin.

Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the
concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues,
the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape
kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience … So he was doing
that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.

Gentry was up in the loft with the shape he’d captured, what he called a macroform
node, and he’d hardly listened to what Slick had tried to tell him about the house
and that whole place and Bobby the Count.

So Slick had come down here to crouch next to an Investigator in the cold and dark,
retracing all the things he’d done with so many different tools, and where he’d scrounged
each part, and then Cherry reached out and touched his cheek with her cold hand.

“You okay?” she asked. “I thought maybe it was happening to you again.…”

“No. It’s just I gotta come down here, sometimes.”

“He plugged you into the Count’s box, didn’t he?”

“Bobby,” Slick said, “that’s his name. I saw him.”

“Where?”

“In there. It’s a whole world. There’s this house, like a castle or something, and
he’s there.”

“By himself?”

“He said Angie Mitchell’s in there too.…”

“Maybe he’s crazy. Is she?”

“I didn’t see her. Saw a car he said was hers.”

“She’s in some celebrity detox place in Jamaica, last I heard.”

He shrugged. “I dunno.”

“What’s he like?”

“He looked younger. Anybody’d look bad with all those tubes ’n’ shit in ’em. He figured
Kid Afrika dumped him here because he got scared. He said if anybody comes looking
for him, we jack him into the matrix.”

“Why?”

“Dunno.”

“You shoulda asked him.”

He shrugged again. “Seen Bird anywhere?”

“No.”

“Shoulda been back already …” He stood up.

Little Bird came back at dusk, on Gentry’s bike, the dark wings of his hair damp with
snow and flapping behind him as he roared in across the Solitude. Slick winced; Little
Bird was in the wrong gear. Little Bird jolted up an incline of compacted oildrums
and hit the brakes when he should’ve gunned it. Cherry gasped as Bird and the bike
separated in midair; the bike seemed to hang there for a second before it somersaulted
into the rusted sheet-metal tangle that had been one of Factory’s outbuildings, and
Little Bird was rolling over and over on the ground.

Somehow Slick never heard the crash. He was standing beside Cherry in the shelter
of a doorless loading
bay—then he was sprinting across snow-flecked rust to the fallen rider, no transition.
Little Bird lay on his back with blood on his lips, his mouth partially hidden by
the jumble of thongs and amulets he wore around his neck.

“Don’t touch him,” Cherry said. “Ribs may be broken, or he’s mashed up inside.…”

Little Bird’s eyes opened at the sound of her voice. He pursed his lips and spat blood
and part of a tooth.

“Don’t move,” Cherry said, kneeling beside him and switching to the crisp diction
she’d learned in med-tech school. “You may have been injured.…”

“F-fuck it, lady,” he managed, and struggled stiffly up, with Slick’s help.

“All right, asshole,” she said, “hemorrhage. See if I give a shit.”

“Didn’t get it,” Little Bird said, smearing blood across his face with the back of
his hand, “the truck.”

“I can see that,” Slick said.

“Marvie ’n’ them, they got company. Like flies on shit. Couple of hovers ’n’ a copter
’n’ shit. All these guys.”

“What kind of guys?”

“Like soldiers, but they’re not. Soldier’ll goof around, bullshit, crack jokes when
nobody important’s looking. But not them.”

“Cops?” Marvie and his two brothers grew mutant ruderalis in a dozen half-buried railway
tankcars; sometimes they tried to cook primitive amine compounds, but their lab kept
blowing up. They were the nearest thing Factory had to permanent neighbors. Six kilometers.

“Cops?” Little Bird spat another tooth chip and gingerly probed his mouth with a bloody
finger. “They aren’t doin’ anything against the law. Anyway, cops can’t afford shit
like that, new hovers, new Honda.…” He grinned through a film of blood and spittle.
“I hung off in the Solitude ’n’ scoped ’em good. Nobody I’d wanna talk to, or you
either. Guess I really fucked Gentry’s bike, huh?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Slick said. “I think his mind’s on something else.”

“Tha’s good.…” He staggered in the direction of Factory, nearly fell, caught himself,
continued.

“He’s higher’n a kite,” Cherry said.

“Hey, Bird,” Slick called, “what happened to that bag of shit I gave you to give Marvie?”

Bird swayed, turned. “Lost it …” Then he was gone, around a corner of corrugated steel.

“Maybe he’s making that up,” Cherry said. “About those guys. Or seeing things.”

“I doubt it,” Slick said, pulling her into deeper shadow as an unlit black Honda swung
down toward Factory out of winter twilight.

He heard the Honda making its fifth pass over Factory as he pounded up the quaking
stairs, the iron roof rattling with the copter’s passage. Well, he thought, that should
anyway bring it to Gentry’s attention that they had visitors. He took the fragile
catwalk in ten long, slow steps; he was beginning to wonder if they’d ever be able
to get the Count and his stretcher back out without having to weld an extra I-bar
across the span.

He went into the bright loft without knocking. Gentry was sitting at a workbench,
his head cocked to one side, staring up at the plastic skylights. The bench was littered
with bits of hardware and small tools.

“Helicopter,” Slick said, panting from the climb.

“Helicopter,” Gentry agreed, nodding thoughtfully, his disheveled roostertail bobbing.
“They seem to be looking for something.”

“I think they just found it.”

“Could be the Fission Authority.”

“Bird saw people at Marvie’s. Saw that copter there too. You weren’t paying much attention
when I tried to tell you what he said.”

“Bird?” Gentry looked down at the small bright things on the workbench. Picked up
two fittings and twisted them together.

“The Count! He told me—”

“Bobby Newmark,” Gentry said, “yes. I know a lot more about Bobby Newmark, now.”

Cherry came in behind Slick. “You gotta do something about that bridge,” she said,
going immediately to the stretcher, “it shakes too much.” She bent to check the Count’s
readouts.

“Come here, Slick,” Gentry said, standing. He walked to the holo table. Slick followed,
looked at the image that glowed there. It reminded him of the rugs he’d seen in the
gray house, patterns like that, only these were woven of hairfine neon, and twisted
into some kind of infinite knot; the knot’s core hurt his head to look at it. He looked
away.

“That’s it?” he asked Gentry. “What you’ve always been looking for?”

“No. I told you. This is just a node, a macroform. A model …”

“He’s got this house in there, like a castle, and grass and trees and sky.…”

“He’s got a lot more than that. He’s got a universe more than that. That was just
a construct worked up from a commercial stim. What he’s got is an
abstract
of the sum total of data constituting cyberspace. Still, it’s closer than I’ve gotten
before.… He didn’t tell you why he was in there?”

“Didn’t ask him.”

“Then you’ll have to go back.”

“Hey. Gentry. Listen up. That copter, it’ll be back. It’ll be back with two hovers
fulla guys Bird said looked like soldiers. They aren’t after us, man. They’re after
him
.”

“Maybe they’re his. Maybe they are after us.”

“No. He
told
me, man. He said, anybody comes looking for him, we’re in deep shit and we gotta
jack him into the matrix.”

Gentry looked down at the little coupling he still held. “We’ll talk with him, Slick.
You’ll go back; this time I’ll go with you.”

Petal had agreed, finally, but only after she’d suggested phoning her father for permission.
That had sent him shuffling unhappily off in search of Swain, and when he’d returned,
looking no happier, the answer had been yes. Bundled in several layers of her warmest
clothing, she stood in the white-painted foyer, studying the hunting prints while
Petal lectured the red-faced man, whose name was Dick, behind closed doors. She couldn’t
distinguish individual words, only a low torrent of admonition. The Maas-Neotek unit
was in her pocket, but she avoided touching it. Twice already Colin had tried to dissuade
her.

Now Dick emerged from Petal’s lecture with his hard little mouth set in a smile. Under
his tight black suit he wore a pink cashmere turtleneck and a thin gray lambswool
cardigan. His black hair was plastered tightly back against his skull; his pale cheeks
were shadowed by a few hours’ growth of beard. She palmed the unit in her pocket.
“ ’Lo,” Dick said, looking her up and down. “Where shall we go for our walk?”

“Portobello Road,” Colin said, slouched against the
wall beside the crowded coatrack. Dick took a dark overcoat from the rack, reaching
through Colin to do it, put it on, and buttoned it. He pulled on a bulky pair of black
leather gloves.

“Portobello Road,” Kumiko said, releasing the unit.

“How long have you worked for Mr. Swain?” she asked, as they made their way along
the icy pavement of the crescent.

“Long enough,” he replied. “Mind you don’t slip. Wicked heels on those boots …”

Kumiko tottered along beside him on black French patent spikes. As she’d predicted,
it was virtually impossible to navigate the glass-hard rippled patches of ice in these
boots. She took his hand for support; doing this, she felt solid metal across his
palm. The gloves were weighted, the fingers reinforced with carbon mesh.

He was silent, as they turned the sidestreet at the end of the crescent, but when
they reached Portobello Road, he paused. “Excuse me, miss,” he said, a note of hesitation
in his voice, “but is it true, what the boys say?”

“Boys? Excuse me?”

“Swain’s boys, his regulars. That you’re the big fellow’s daughter—the big fellow
back in Tokyo?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t understand.”

“Yanaka. Your name’s Yanaka?”

“Kumiko Yanaka, yes …”

He peered at her with intense curiosity. Then worry crossed his face and he glanced
carefully around. “Lord,” he said, “must be true …” His squat, tightly buttoned body
was taut and alert. “Guvnor said you wanted to shop?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Where shall I take you?”

“Here,” she said, and led him into a narrow arcade lined solidly with British
gomi
.

Her Shinjuku shopping expeditions served her well with Dick. The techniques she’d
devised for torturing her father’s secretaries proved just as effective now, as she
forced the man to participate in dozens of pointless choices between one Edwardian
medallion and another, this or that fragment of stained glass, though she was careful
only to choose items, finally, that were fragile or very heavy, awkward to carry,
and extremely expensive. A cheerful bilingual shop assistant accessed an eighty-thousand-pound
charge against Kumiko’s MitsuBank chip. Kumiko slipped her hand into the pocket that
held the Mass-Neotek unit. “Exquisite,” the English girl said in Japanese, as she
wrapped Kumiko’s purchase, an ormolu vase encrusted with griffins.

“Hideous,” Colin commented, in Japanese. “An imitation as well.” He reclined on a
Victorian horsehair sofa, his boots up on an art deco cocktail stand supported by
airstream aluminum angels.

The shop assistant added the wrapped vase to Dick’s burden. This was Dick’s eleventh
antique shop and Kumiko’s eighth purchase.

“I think you’d better make your move,” Colin advised. “Any moment now, our Dick will
buzz Swain’s for a car to take that lot home.”

“Think this is it, then?” Dick asked hopefully, over Kumiko’s purchases.

“One more shop, please.” Kumiko smiled.

“Right,” he said grimly. As he was following her out the door, she drove the heel
of her left boot into a gap in the pavement she’d noticed on her way in. “You all
right?” he asked, seeing her stumble.

“I’ve broken the heel of my boot.…” She hobbled back into the shop and sat down beside
Colin on the horsehair sofa. The assistant came fussing up to help.