Mona Lisa Overdrive

by William Gibson

  25

  BACK EAST

  While Kelly and his assistants were assembling her wardrobe for the trip, she felt as though the house itself were stirring around her, preparing for one of its many brief periods of vacancy.

  She could hear their voices, from where she sat in the living room, their laughter. One of the assistants was a girl in a blue polycarbon exo that allowed her to carry the Hermès wardrobe cases as though they were weightless blocks of foam, the humming skeleton suit padding softly down the stairs on its blunt dinosaur feet. Blue skeleton, leather coffins.

  Now Porphyre stood in the doorway. “Missy ready?” He wore a long, loose coat cut from tissue-thin black leather; rhinestone spurs glittered above the heels of black patent boots.

  “Porphyre,” she said, “you’re in mufti. We have an entrance to make, in New York.”

  “The cameras are for you.”

  “Yes,” she said, “for my reinsertion.”

  “Porphyre will keep well in the rear.”

  “I’ve never known you to worry about upstaging anyone.”

  He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an avant-garde dentist’s fantasy of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.

  “Danielle Stark will be flying with us.” She heard the sound of the approaching helicopter. “She’s meeting us at LAX.”

  “We’ll strangle her,” he said, his tone confidential, as he helped her on with the blue fox Kelly had selected. “If we promise to hint to the fax that the motive was sexual, she might even decide to play along.…”

  “You’re horrid.”

  “Danielle is a horror, missy.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “Ah,” said the hairdresser, narrowing his eyes, “but my soul is a child’s.”

  Now the helicopter was landing.

  Danielle Stark, associated with stim versions of both Vogue-Nippon and Vogue-Europa, was widely rumored to be in her late eighties. If it were true, Angie thought, covertly inspecting the journalist’s figure as the three of them boarded the Lear, Danielle and Porphyre would be on par for overall surgical modification. Apparently in her willowy early thirties, her only obvious augments were a pair of pale blue Zeiss implants. A young French fashion reporter had once referred to these as “modishly outdated”; the reporter, Net legend said, had never worked again.

  And soon, Angie knew, Danielle would want to talk drugs, celebrity drugs, the cornflower eyes schoolgirl-wide to take it all in.

  Under Porphyre’s daunting gaze, Danielle managed to contain herself until they were in cruise mode somewhere over Utah.

  “I was hoping,” she began, “that I wouldn’t have to be the one to bring it up.”

  “Danielle,” Angie countered, “I am sorry. How thoughtless.” She touched the veneered face of the Hosaka flight kitchen, which purred softly and began to dispense tiny plates of tea-smoked duck, gulf oysters on black-pepper toast, crayfish flan, sesame pancakes.… Porphyre, taking Angie’s cue, produced a bottle of chilled Chablis—Danielle’s favorite, Angie now recalled. Someone—Swift?—had also remembered.

  “Drugs,” Danielle said, fifteen minutes later, finishing the last of the duck.

  “Don’t worry,” Porphyre assured her. “When you get to New York, they have anything you want.”

  Danielle smiled. “You’re so amusing. Do you know I’ve a copy of your birth certificate? I know your real name.” She looked at him meaningfully, still smiling.

  “ ‘Sticks and stones,’ ” he said, topping up her glass.

  “Interesting notation regarding congenital defects.” She sipped her wine.

  “Congenital, genital … We all change so much these days, don’t we? Who’s been doing your hair, dear?” He leaned forward. “Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human.”

  Danielle smiled.

  The interview itself went smoothly enough; Danielle was too skilled an interviewer to allow her feints to cross the pain threshold, where they might rally serious resistance. But when she brushed a fingertip back across her temple, depressing a subdermal switch that deactivated her recording gear, Angie tensed for the real onslaught.

  “Thank you,” Danielle said. “The rest of the flight, of course, is off the record.”

  “Why don’t you just have another bottle or two and turn in?” Porphyre asked.

  “What I don’t see, dear,” Danielle said, ignoring him, “is why you bothered.…”

  “Why I bothered, Danielle?”

  “Going to that tedious clinic at all. You’ve said it didn’t affect your work. You’ve also said there was no ‘high,’ not in the usual sense.” She giggled. “Though you do maintain that it was such a terribly addictive substance. Why did you decide to quit?”

  “It was terribly expensive.…”

  “In your case, surely, that’s academic.”

  True, Angie thought, though a week of it did cost something in the vicinity of your annual salary.

  “I suppose I began to resent paying to feel normal. Or a poor approximation of normal.”

  “Did you build up a tolerance?”

  “No.”

  “How odd.”

  “Not really. These designers provide substances that supposedly bypass the traditional drawbacks.”

  “Ah. But what about the new drawbacks, the now drawbacks?” Danielle poured herself more wine. “I’ve heard another version of all this, of course.”

  “You have?”

  “Of course I have. What it was, who made it, why you quit.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was an antipsychotic, produced in Sense/Net’s own labs. You quit taking it because you’d rather be crazy.”

  Porphyre gently took the glass from Danielle’s hand as her lids fluttered heavily over the brilliant blue eyes. “Nightie-night, dear,” he said. Danielle’s eyes closed and she began to snore gently.

  “Porphyre, what—?”

  “I dosed her wine,” he said. “She won’t know the difference, missy. She won’t remember anything she didn’t record.…” He grinned broadly. “You really didn’t want to have to listen to this bitch all the way back, did you?”

  “But she’ll know, Porphyre!”

  “No, she won’t. We’ll tell her she killed three bottles by herself and made a disgusting mess in the washroom. And she’ll feel like it, too.” He giggled.

  Danielle Stark was still snoring, quite loudly now, in one of the two swing-down bunks in the rear of the cabin.

  “Porphyre,” Angie said, “do you think she might’ve been right?”

  The hairdresser gazed at her with his gorgeous, inhuman eyes. “And you wouldn’t have known?”

  “I don’t know.…”

  He sighed. “Missy worries too much. You’re free now. Enjoy it.”

  “I do hear voices, Porphyre.”

  “Don’t we all, missy?”

  “No,” she said, “not like mine. Do you know anything about African religions, Porphyre?”

  He smirked. “I’m not African.”

  “But when you were a child …”

  “When I was a child,” Porphyre said, “I was white.”

  “Oh …”

  He laughed. “Religions, missy?”

  “Before I came to the Net, I had friends. In New Jersey. They were black and … religious.”

  He smirked again and rolled his eyes. “Hoodoo sign, missy? Chickenbone and pennyroyal oil?”

  “You know it isn’t like that.”

  “And if I do?”

  “Don’t tease me, Porphyre. I need you.”

  “Missy has me. And yes, I know what you mean. And those are your voices?”

  “They were. After I began to use the dust, they went away.…”

  “And now?”

  “They’re gone.” But the impulse was past now, and she cringed from trying to tell him about Grande Brigitte and the drug in the jacket.

  “Good,” he s
aid. “That’s good, missy.”

  The Lear began its descent over Ohio. Porphyre was staring at the bulkhead, still as a statue. Angie looked out at the cloud-country below as it rose toward them, remembering the game she’d played on airplanes as a child, sending an imaginary Angie out to romp through cloud-canyons and over fluffy peaks grown magically solid. Those planes had belonged to Maas-Neotek, she supposed. From the Maas corporate jets she’d gone on to Net Lears. She knew commercial airliners only as locations for her stims: New York to Paris on the maiden flight of JAL’s restored Concorde, with Robin and a hand-picked party of Net people.

  Descending. Were they over New Jersey yet? Did the children swarming the rooftop playgrounds of Beauvoir’s arcology hear the Lear’s engine? Did the sound of her passage sweep faintly over the condos of Bobby’s childhood? How unthinkably intricate the world was, in sheer detail of mechanism, when Sense/Net’s corporate will shook tiny bones in the ears of unknown, unknowing children.…

  “Porphyre knows certain things,” he said, very softly. “But Porphyre needs time to think, missy.…”

  They were banking for the final approach.

  26

  KUROMAKU

  And Sally was silent, on the street and in the cab, all the long cold way back to their hotel.

  Sally and Swain were being blackmailed by Sally’s enemy “up the well.” Sally was being forced to kidnap Angie Mitchell. The thought of someone’s abducting the Sense/Net star struck Kumiko as singularly unreal, as if someone were plotting to assassinate a figure out of myth.

  The Finn had implied that Angie herself was already involved, in some mysterious way, but he had used words and idioms Kumiko hadn’t understood. Something in cyberspace; people forming pacts with a thing or things there. The Finn had known a boy who became Angie’s lover; but wasn’t Robin Lanier her lover? Kumiko’s mother had allowed her to run several of the Angie and Robin stims. The boy had been a cowboy, a data thief, like Tick in London.…

  And what of the enemy, the blackmailer? She was mad, Finn said, and her madness had brought about the decline of her family’s fortunes. She lived alone, in her ancestral home, the house called Straylight. What had Sally done to earn her enmity? Had she really killed this woman’s father? And who were the others, the others who had died? Already she’d forgotten the gaijin names.…

  And had Sally learned what she’d wanted to learn, in visiting the Finn? Kumiko had waited, finally, for some pronouncement from the armored shrine, but the exchange had wound down to nothing, to a gaijin ritual of joking goodbyes.

  In the hotel lobby, Petal was waiting in a blue velour armchair. Dressed for travel, his bulk encased in three-piece gray wool, he rose from the chair like some strange balloon as they entered, eyes mild as ever behind steel-rimmed glasses.

  “Hello,” he said, and coughed. “Swain’s sent me after you. Only to mind the girl, you see.”

  “Take her back,” Sally said. “Now. Tonight.”

  “Sally! No!” But Sally’s hand was already locked firmly around Kumiko’s upper arm, pulling her toward the entrance to the darkened lounge off the lobby.

  “Wait there,” Sally snapped at Petal. “Listen to me,” she said, tugging Kumiko around a corner, into shadow. “You’re going back. I can’t keep you here now.”

  “But I don’t like it there. I don’t like Swain, or his house.… I …”

  “Petal’s okay,” Sally said, leaning close and speaking quickly. “In a pinch, I’d say trust him. Swain, well, you know what Swain is, but he’s your father’s. Whatever comes down, I think they’ll keep you out of the way. But if it gets bad, really bad, go to the pub where we met Tick. The Rose and Crown. Remember?”

  Kumiko nodded, her eyes filling with tears.

  “If Tick’s not there, find a barman named Bevan and mention my name.”

  “Sally, I …”

  “You’re okay,” Sally said, and kissed her abruptly, one of her lenses brushing for an instant against Kumiko’s cheekbone, startlingly cold and unyielding. “Me, baby, I’m gone.”

  And she was, into the muted tinkle of the lounge, and Petal cleared his throat in the entranceway.

  The flight back to London was like a very long subway ride. Petal passed the time inscribing words, a letter at a time, in some idiotic puzzle in an English fax, grunting softly to himself. Eventually she slept, and dreamed of her mother.…

  “Heater’s working,” Petal said, driving back to Swain’s from Heathrow. It was uncomfortably warm in the Jaguar, a dry heat that smelled of leather and made her sinuses ache. She ignored him, staring out at the wan morning light, at roofs shining black through melting snow, rows of chimneypots.…

  “He’s not angry with you, you know,” Petal said. “He feels a special responsibility.…”

  “Giri.”

  “Er … yes. Responsible, you see. Sally’s never been what you’d call predictable, really, but we didn’t expect—”

  “I don’t wish to talk, thank you.”

  His small worried eyes in the mirror.

  The crescent was lined with parked cars, long silver-gray cars with tinted windows.

  “Seeing a lot of visitors this week,” Petal said, parking opposite number 17. He got out, opened the door for her. She followed him numbly across the street and up the gray steps, where the black door was opened by a squat, red-faced man in a tight dark suit, Petal brushing past him as though he weren’t there.

  “Hold on,” red-face said. “Swain’ll see her now.…”

  The man’s words brought Petal up short; with a grunt, he spun around with disconcerting speed and caught the man by his lapel.

  “In future show some fucking respect,” Petal said, and though he hadn’t raised his voice, somehow all of its weary gentleness was gone. Kumiko heard stitches pop.

  “Sorry, guv.” The red face was carefully blank. “He told me to tell you.”

  “Come along then,” Petal said to her, releasing his grip on the dark worsted lapel. “He’ll just want to say hello.”

  They found Swain seated at a three-meter oak refectory table in the room where she’d first seen him, the dragons of rank buttoned away behind white broadcloth and a striped silk tie. His eyes met hers as she entered, his long-boned face shadowed by a green-shaded brass reading lamp that stood beside a small console and a thick sheaf of fax on the table. “Good,” he said, “and how was the Sprawl?”

  “I’m very tired, Mr. Swain. I wish to go to my room.”

  “We’re glad to have you back, Kumiko. The Sprawl’s a dangerous place. Sally’s friends there probably aren’t the sort of people your father would want you to associate with.”

  “May I go to my room now?”

  “Did you meet any of Sally’s friends, Kumiko?”

  “No.”

  “Really? What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You mustn’t be angry with us, Kumiko. We’re protecting you.”

  “Thank you. May I go to my room now?”

  “Of course. You must be very tired.”

  Petal followed her from the room, carrying her bag, his gray suit creased and wrinkled from the flight. She was careful not to glance up as they passed beneath the blank gaze of the marble bust where the Maas-Neotek unit might still be hidden, though with Swain and Petal in the room she could think of no way to retrieve it.

  There was a new sense of movement in the house, brisk and muted: voices, footsteps, the rattle of the lift, the chattering of pipes as someone drew a bath.

  She sat at the foot of the huge bed, staring at the black marble tub. Residual images of New York seemed to hover at the borders of her vision; if she closed her eyes, she found herself back in the alley, squatting beside Sally. Sally, who’d sent her away. Who hadn’t looked back. Sally, whose name had once been Molly, or Misty, or both. Again, her unworthiness. Sumida, her mother adrift in black water. Her father. Sally.

  Moments later, driven by a curiosity that pushed aside her shame, she
rose from where she lay, brushed her hair, zipped her feet into thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles, and went very quietly out into the corridor. When the lift arrived, it stank of cigarette smoke.

  Red-face was pacing the blue-carpeted foyer when she emerged from the lift, his hands in the pockets of his tight black jacket. “ ’Ere,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “you need something?”

  “I’m hungry,” she said, in Japanese. “I’m going to the kitchen.”

  “ ’Ere,” he said, removing his hands from his pockets and straightening the front of his jacket, “you speak English?”

  “No,” she said, and walked straight past him down the corridor and around the corner. “ ’Ere,” she heard him say, rather more urgently, but she was already groping behind the white bust.

  She managed to slip the unit into her pocket as he rounded the corner. He surveyed the room automatically, hands held loosely at his sides, in a way that suddenly reminded her of her father’s secretaries.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, in English.

  Five minutes later, she’d returned to her room with a large and very British-looking orange; the English seemed to place no special value on the symmetry of fruit. Closing the door behind her, she put the orange on the wide flat rim of the black tub and took the Maas-Neotek unit from her pocket.

  “Quickly now,” Colin said, tossing his forelock as he came into focus, “open it and reset the A/B throw to A. The new regime has a technician making the rounds, scanning for bugs. Once you’ve changed that setting, it shouldn’t read as a listening device.” She did as he said, using a hairpin.

  “What do you mean,” she asked, mouthing the words without voicing them, “ ‘the new regime’?”

  “Haven’t you noticed? There are at least a dozen staff now, not to mention numerous visitors. Well, I suppose it’s less a new regime than an upgrading of procedure. Your Mr. Swain is quite a social man, in his covert way. You’ve one conversation there, Swain and the deputy head of Special Branch, that I imagine numerous people would kill for, not least of them the aforementioned official.”

  “Special Branch?”