Mona Lisa Overdrive

by William Gibson

  Slick watched the girl.

  “And the sum was greater than the parts?” Gentry really seemed to be enjoying this. “Cybernetic godhead? Light on the waters?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said, “that’s about it.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Gentry said, and laughed.

  And the girl was gone. No click.

  Slick shivered.

  32

  WINTER JOURNEY (2)

  Night fell during the Underground’s peak evening traffic, though even then it was nothing like Tokyo, no shiroshisan struggling to wedge a last few passengers in as the doors were closing. Kumiko watched the salmon haze of sunset from a windy platform on the Central Line, Colin lounging against a broken vending machine with a row of cracked, dusty windows. “Time now,” he said, “and keep your head demurely down through Bond Street and Oxford Circus.”

  “But I must pay, when I leave the system?”

  “Not everyone does, actually,” he said, tossing his forelock.

  She set off for the stairs, no longer requiring his directions to find her way to the opposite platform. Her feet were very cold again, and she thought of the fleece-lined German boots in the closet in her room at Swain’s. She’d decided on the combination of the rubber toe-socks and the high French heels as a ploy to lull Dick, to make him doubt she’d run, but with each bite of cold through the thin soles she regretted the idea.

  In the tunnel to the other platform, she relaxed her grip on the unit and Colin flickered out. The walls were worn white ceramic with a decorative band of green. She took her hand from her pocket and trailed her fingers along the green tiles as she went, thinking of Sally and the Finn and the different smell of a Sprawl winter, until the first Dracula stepped smartly in front of her and she was instantly and very closely surrounded by four black raincoats, four bone-thin, bone-white faces. “ ’Ere,” the first one said, “innit pretty.”

  They were eye to eye, Kumiko and the Dracula; his breath smelled of tobacco. The evening crowd continued on its way around them, bundled for the most part in dark wool.

  “Oo,” one said, beside her, “look. Wot’s this?” He held up the Maas-Neotek unit, his hand gloved in cracked black leather. “Flash lighter, innit? Let’s ’ave a snag, Jap.” Kumiko’s hand went to her pocket, shot straight through the razor slash, and closed on air. The boy giggled.

  “Snags in ’er bag,” another said. “ ’Elp ’er, Reg,” A hand darted out and the leather strap of her purse parted neatly.

  The first Dracula caught the purse, whipped the dangling strap around it with a practiced flick, and tucked it into the front of his raincoat. “Ta.”

  “ ’Ere, she’s got ’em in ’er pants!” Laughter as she fumbled beneath layered sweaters. The tape she’d used hurt her stomach as she tore the gun free with both hands and flipped it up against the cheek of the boy who held the unit.

  Nothing happened.

  Then the other three were racing frantically for the stairs at the far end of the tunnel, their high-laced black boots slipping in melted snow, their long coats flapping like wings. A woman screamed.

  And still they were frozen there, Kumiko and the Dracula, the muzzle of the pistol pressed against his left cheekbone. Kumiko’s arms began to tremble.

  She was looking into the Dracula’s eyes, brown eyes gone wide with an ancient simple terror; the Dracula was seeing her mother’s mask. Something struck the concrete at her feet: Colin’s unit.

  “Run,” she said. The Dracula convulsed, opened his mouth, made a strangled, sobbing sound, and twisted away from the gun.

  Kumiko looked down and saw the Maas-Neotek unit in a puddle of gray slush. Beside it lay the clean silver rectangle of a single-edged industrial razorblade. When she picked up the unit, she saw that its case was cracked. She shook moisture from the crack and squeezed it hard in her hand. The tunnel was deserted now. Colin wasn’t there. Swain’s Walther air pistol was huge and heavy in her other hand.

  She stepped to a rectangular receptacle fastened to the tile wall and tucked the gun down between a grease-flecked foam food container and a neatly folded sheaf of newsfax. Turned away, then turned back for the fax.

  Up the stairs.

  Someone pointed at her, on the platform, but the train roared in with its antique clatter and then the doors slid shut behind her.

  She did as Colin had instructed, White City and Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park, raising the fax as the train slowed for Notting Hill—the King, who was very old, was dying—and keeping it there through Bond Street. The station at Oxford Circus was very busy and she was grateful for the sheltering crowd.

  Colin had said that it was possible to leave the station without paying. After some consideration, she decided that this was true, though it required speed and timing. Really, there was no other way; her purse, with the MitsuBank chip and her few English coins, had gone with the Jack Draculas. She spent ten minutes watching passengers surrender their yellow plastic tickets to the automated turnstyles, took a deep breath, and ran. Up, over, behind her a shout and a loud laugh, and then she was running again.

  When she reached the doors at the top of the stairs, she saw Brixton Road waiting like a tatty Shinjuku, jammed with steaming foodstalls.

  33

  STAR

  She was waiting in a car and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like waiting anyway, but the wiz she’d done made it really hard. She had to keep reminding herself not to grit her teeth, because whatever Gerald had done to them, they were still sore. She was sore all over, now that she thought about it. Probably the wiz hadn’t been such a great idea.

  The car belonged to the woman, the one Gerald called Molly. Some kind of regular gray Japanese car like a suit would have, nice enough but nothing you’d notice. It had that new smell inside and it was fast when they got out of Baltimore. It had a computer but the woman drove it herself, all the way back to the Sprawl, and now it was parked on the roof of a twenty-level lot that must be close to the hotel where Prior had taken her, because she could see that crazy building, the one with the waterfall, fixed up like a mountain.

  There weren’t many other cars up here, and the ones that were were humped over with snow, like they hadn’t moved in a long time. Except for the two guys in the booth where you drove in, there didn’t seem to be anybody around at all. Here she was, in the middle of all those people, the biggest city in the world, and she was alone in the backseat of a car. Told to wait.

  The woman hadn’t said much when they’d come from Baltimore, just asked a question now and then, but the wiz had made it hard for Mona not to talk. She’d talked about Cleveland and Florida and Eddy and Prior.

  Then they’d driven up here and parked.

  So this Molly’d been gone at least an hour now, maybe longer. She’d taken a suitcase with her. The only thing Mona’d been able to get out of her was that she’d known Gerald a long time, and Prior hadn’t known that.

  It was getting cold in the car again, so Mona climbed into the front seat and turned on the heater. She couldn’t just leave it on low, because it might run the battery down, and Molly’d said if that happened, they were really in the shit. “ ’Cause when I come back, we leave in a hurry.” Then she’d shown Mona where there was a sleeping bag under the driver’s seat.

  She set the heater on high and held her hands in front of the vent. Then she fiddled with the little vid studs beside the dash monitor and got a news show. The King of England was sick; he was really old. There was a new disease in Singapore; it hadn’t killed anybody yet, but nobody knew how you got it or how to cure it. Some people thought there was some kind of big fight going on in Japan, two different bunches of Yakuza guys trying to kill each other, but nobody really knew; Yakuza—that was something Eddy liked to bullshit about. Then these doors popped open and Angie came through on the arm of this amazing black guy, and the vid voice was saying this was live, she’d just arrived in the Sprawl after a brief vacation at her house in Malibu,
following treatment at a private drug clinic.…

  Angie looked just great in this big fur, but then the segment was over.

  Mona remembered what Gerald had done; she touched her face.

  She shut off the vid, then the heater, and got into the backseat again. Used the corner of the sleeping bag to clean her condensed breath off the window. She looked up at the mountainside-building, all lit up, past the sagging chainlink at the edge of the carlot’s roof. Like a whole country up there, maybe Colorado or something, like the stim where Angie went to Aspen and met this boy, only Robin turned up like he almost always did.

  But what she didn’t understand was this clinic stuff, how that barman had said Angie’d gone there because she was wired on something, and now she’d just heard the news guy say it too, so she guessed it had to be true. But why would anybody like Angie, with a life like that and Robin Lanier for a boyfriend, want to do drugs?

  Mona shook her head, looking out at that building, glad she wasn’t hooked on anything.

  She must’ve drifted off for a minute, thinking about Lanette, because when she looked again, there was a copter, a big one, glittery black, poised above the mountain-building. It looked good, real big-town.

  She’d known some rough women in Cleveland, girls nobody messed with, but this Molly was something else—remembering Prior coming through that door, remembering him screaming.… She wondered what it was he’d finally admitted, because she’d heard him talking, and Molly hadn’t hurt him anymore. They’d left him strapped in that chair and Mona had asked Molly if she thought he’d get loose. Either that, Molly had said, or somebody finds him, or he dehydrates.

  The copter settled, vanished. Big one, the kind with the whirly thing at both ends.

  So here she was, waiting, no fucking idea what else to do.

  Something Lanette had taught her, sometimes you had to list your assets—assets were what you had going for you—and just forget the other stuff. Okay. She was out of Florida. She was in Manhattan. She looked like Angie.… That one stopped her. Was that an asset? Okay—putting it another way—she’d just had a fortune in free cosmetic surgery and she had totally perfect teeth. Anyway, look at it that way and it wasn’t so bad. Think about the flies in the squat. Yeah. If she spent the money she had left on a haircut and some makeup, she could come up with something that didn’t look all that much like Angie, which was probably a good idea, because what if somebody was looking for her?

  There went the copter again, lifting off.

  Hey.

  Maybe two blocks away and fifty stories higher, the thing’s nose swung toward her, dipped.… It’s the wiz. Sort of wobbled there, then it was coming down.… Wiz; it’s not real. Straight down toward her. It just got bigger. Toward her. But it’s the wiz, right? Then it was gone, behind another building, and it was just the wiz.…

  It swung around a corner, still five stories above the roof of the carlot, and it was still coming down and it wasn’t the wiz, it was on her, a tight white beam stabbing out to find the gray car, and Mona popped the door lock and rolled out into the snow, still in the car’s shadow, all around her the thunder of the thing’s blades, its engines; Prior or whoever he worked for and they were after her. Then the spotlight went out, blades changed pitch, and it came down fast, too fast. Bounced on its landing gear. Slammed down again, engines dying, coughing blue flame.

  Mona was on her hands and knees by the car’s rear bumper. Slipped when she tried to get to her feet.

  There was a sound like a gunshot; a square section of the copter’s skin blew out and skidded across the lot’s salt-stained concrete; a bright orange five-meter emergency exit slide popped out, inflating like a kid’s beachtoy. Mona got up more carefully, holding on to the gray car’s fender. A dark, bundled figure swung its legs out over the slide and went down, sitting up, just like a kid at a playground. Another figure followed, this one padded in a huge hooded jacket the same color as the slide.

  Mona shivered as the one in orange led the other toward her across the roof, away from the black copter. It was … But it was!

  “Want you both in back,” Molly said, opening the door on the driver’s side.

  “It’s you,” Mona managed, to the most famous face in the world.

  “Yes,” Angie said, her eyes on Mona’s face, “it … seems to be.…”

  “Come on,” Molly said, her hand on the star’s shoulder. “Get in. Your Martian spade’ll be waking up already.” She glanced back at the helicopter. It looked like a big toy sitting there, no lights, like a giant kid had put it down and forgotten it.

  “He’d better be,” Angie said, climbing into the back of the car.

  “You too, hon,” Molly said, pushing Mona toward the open door.

  “But … I mean …”

  “Move!”

  Mona climbed in, smelling Angie’s perfume, wrist brushing the supernatural softness of that big fur. “I saw you,” she heard herself say. “On the vid.”

  Angie didn’t say anything.

  Molly slid into the driver’s seat, yanked the door shut, and started the engine. The orange hood was snugged up tight, her face a white mask with blank silver eyes. Then they were rolling toward the sheltered ramp, swinging into the first curve. Down five levels like that, in a tight spiral, and Molly swung them off into aisles of larger vehicles under dim green diagonals of light-strip.

  “Parafoils,” Molly said. “You ever see any parafoil gear, up the Envoy?”

  “No,” Angie said.

  “If Net security has any, they could be upstairs already.…” She swung the car in behind a big long boxy hover, a white one with a name painted across the rear doors in square blue letters.

  “What’s it say?” Mona asked, then felt herself blush.

  “Cathode Cathay,” Angie said.

  Mona thought she’d heard that name before.

  Molly was out there opening those big doors. Pulling down these yellow plastic ramp things.

  Then she was back in the car. Reversed, put it in drive, and they rolled right up into the hover. She stripped back the orange hood and shook her head to free her hair. “Mona, you think you can get out there and shove those ramps back in? They aren’t heavy.” It didn’t sound like a question.

  They weren’t heavy. She pulled herself up behind the car and helped Molly pull the doors shut.

  She could feel Angie there in the dark.

  It was really Angie.

  “Up front, strap in, hold on.”

  Angie. She was sitting right beside Angie.

  There was a whoosh as Molly filled the hover’s bags; then they were skimming down the spiral ramp.

  “Your friend,” Molly said, “he’s awake by now, but he can’t really move yet. Another fifteen minutes.” She swung off the ramp again and this time Mona had lost track of the levels. This one was packed with fancy cars, little ones. The hover roared along a central aisle, swung left.

  “You’ll be lucky if he isn’t waiting for us outside,” Angie said.

  Molly brought them to a halt ten meters from a big metal door painted with diagonal stripes, yellow and black.

  “No,” Molly said, taking a little blue box from the dash compartment, “he’s lucky if he’s not waiting outside.” The door blew out of its frame with an orange flash and a sound that slammed into Mona’s diaphragm like a solid blow. It crashed into the wet street in a cloud of smoke and then they were over it, turning, the hover accelerating.

  “This is awfully crude, isn’t it?” Angie said, and actually laughed.

  “I know,” Molly said, intent on her driving. “Sometimes that’s just the way to go. Mona, tell her about Prior. Prior and your boyfriend. What you told me.”

  Mona hadn’t ever felt so shy in her life.

  “Please,” Angie said, “tell me. Mona.”

  Just like that. Her name. Angie Mitchell had actually said her name. To her. Right there.

  It made her want to faint.

  34

 
; MARGATE ROAD

  “You seem lost,” the noodle seller said, in Japanese. Kumiko guessed that he was Korean. Her father had associates who were Korean; they were in the construction business, her mother had said. They tended, like this one, to be large men, very nearly as large as Petal, with broad, serious faces. “You look very cold.”

  “I’m looking for someone,” she said. “He lives in Margate Road.”

  “Where is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come inside,” the noodle man said, gesturing Kumiko around the end of his counter. His stall was made of pink corrugated plastic.

  She stepped between the noodle stall and another that advertised something called roti, this word worked in deliriously colored spraybomb capitals trimmed with looping, luminous blobs. That stall smelled of spices and stewing meat. Her feet were very cold.

  She ducked beneath a clouded sheet of plastic. The noodle stall was crowded: squat blue tanks of butane, the three cooking grids with their tall pots, plastic sacks of noodles, stacks of foam bowls, and the shifting bulk of the big Korean as he tended his pots. “Sit,” he said; she sat on a yellow plastic canister of MSG, her head below the level of the counter. “You’re Japanese?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Tokyo?”

  She hesitated.

  “Your clothes,” he said. “Why do you wear rubber tabi-socks in winter? Is this the fashion?”

  “I lost my boots.”

  He passed her a foam bowl and plastic chopsticks; fat twists of noodle swam in a thin yellow soup. She ate hungrily, then drank off the soup. She watched as he served a customer, an African woman who took away noodles in her own lidded pot.

  “Margate,” the noodle man said, when the woman was gone. He took a greasy paperbound book from beneath the counter and thumbed through it. “Here,” he said, jabbing at an impossibly dense little map, “down Acre Lane.” He took a blue feltpen and sketched the route on a coarse gray napkin.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now I will go.”