"Well, I made inquiries. Continuity had gotten me this Becker video, and of course her orbit’s in the book, but it’s no good dropping by if you haven’t been invited, is it? And then Hilton buzzed me to get back here and back to work . . . Aren’t you feeling well?"
"Yes, I . . . I think I’ll change now, put on something warmer."
After they’d eaten, when coffee was being served, she excused herself and said goodnight.
Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He’d stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was. All the things the drug had fenced away.
"Missy, take care," he said, too quietly for the others to hear.
"I’m fine," she said. "Too many people. I’m still not used to it."
He stood there looking up at her, the glow of dying coals behind his elegantly crafted, subtly inhuman skull, until she turned and climbed the stairs.
She heard the helicopter come for them an hour later.
"House," she said, "I’ll see the video from Continuity now."
As the wallscreen slid down into place, she opened the bedroom door and stood for a moment at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Surf, the hum of the dishwasher, wind buffeting the windows that faced the deck.
She turned back to the screen and shivered at the face she saw there in a grainy freeze-frame headshot, avian eyebrows arched above dark eyes, high fragile cheekbones, and a wide, determined mouth. The image expanded steadily, into the darkness of an eye, black screen, a white point, growing, lengthening, becoming the tapered spindle of Freeside. Credits began to flash in German.
"Hans Becker," the house began, reciting the Net library’s intro-critique, "is an Austrian video artist whose hallmark is an obsessive interrogation of rigidly delimited fields of visual information. His approaches range from classical montage to techniques borrowed from industrial espionage, deep-space imaging, and kino-archaeology. Antarctica Starts Here, his examination of images of the Tessier-Ashpool family, currently stands as the high point of his career. The pathologically media-shy industrial clan, operating from the total privacy of their orbital home, posed a remarkable challenge."
The white of the spindle filled the screen as the final credit vanished. An image tracked to center screen, snapshot of a young woman in loose dark clothes, background indistinct. MARIE-FRANCE TESSIER, MOROCCO.
This wasn’t the face in the opening shot, the face of invading memory, yet it seemed to promise it, as though a larval image lay beneath the surface.
The soundtrack wove atonal filaments through strata of static and indistinct voices as the image of Marie-France was replaced by a formal monochrome portrait of a young man in a starched wing collar. It was a handsome face, finely proportioned, but very hard somehow, and in the eyes a look of infinite boredom. JOHN HARNESS ASHPOOL, OXFORD.
Yes, she thought, and I‘ve met you many times. I know your story, though I‘m not allowed to touch it.
But I really don’t think I like you at all, do I, Mr. Ashpool?
13
Catwalk
The catwalk groaned and swayed. The stretcher was too wide for the walk’s handrails, so they had to keep it chest-high as they inched across, Gentry at the front with his gloved hands clamped around the rails on either side of the sleeper’s feet. Slick had the heavy end, the head, with the batteries and all that gear; he could feel Cherry creeping along behind him. He wanted to tell her to get back, that they didn’t need her weight on the walk, but somehow he couldn’t.
Giving Gentry Kid Afrika’s bag of drugs had been a mistake. He didn’t know what was in the derm Gentry’d done; he didn’t know what had been in Gentry’s bloodstream to begin with. Whatever, Gentry’d gone bare-wires crazy and now they were out here on the fucking catwalk, twenty meters over Factory’s concrete floor, and Slick was ready to weep with frustration, to scream; he wanted to smash something, anything, but he couldn’t let go of the stretcher.
And Gentry’s smile, lit up by the glow of the bio-readout taped to the foot of the stretcher, as Gentry took another step backward across the catwalk . . .
"O man," Cherry said, her voice like a little girl’s, "this is just seriously fucked . . ."
Gentry gave the stretcher a sudden impatient tug and Slick almost lost his grip.
"Gentry," Slick said, "I think you better think twice about this."
Gentry had removed his gloves. He held a pair of optic jumpers in either hand, and Slick could see the splitter fittings trembling.
"I mean Kid Afrika’s heavy, Gentry. You don’t know what you’re messing with, you mess with him." This was not, strictly speaking, true, the Kid being, as far as Slick knew, too smart to value revenge. But who the hell knew what Gentry was about to mess with anyway?
"I’m not messing with anything," Gentry said, approaching the stretcher with the jumpers.
"Listen, buddy," Cherry said, "you interrupt his input, you maybe kill ‘im; his autonomic nervous system’ll go tits-up. Why don’t you just stop him?" she asked Slick. "Why don’t you just knock him on his ass?"
Slick rubbed his eyes. "Because . . . I dunno. Because he’s . . . Look, Gentry, she’s saying it’ll maybe kill the poor bastard, you try to tap in. You hear that?"
" ‘LF,’ " Gentry said, "I heard that." He put the jumpers between his teeth and began to fiddle with one of the connections on the featureless slab above the sleeper’s head. His hands had stopped shaking.
"Shit," Cherry said, and gnawed at a knuckle. The connection came away in Gentry’s hand. He whipped a jumper into place with his other hand and began to tighten the connection. He smiled around the remaining jumper. "Fuck this," Cherry said, "I’m outa here," but she didn’t move.
The man on the stretcher grunted, once, softly. The sound made the hairs stand up on Slick’s arms.
The second connection came loose. Gentry inserted the other splitter and began to retighten the fitting.
Cherry went quickly to the foot of the stretcher, knelt to check the readout. "He felt it," she said, looking up at Gentry, "but his signs look okay . . ."
Gentry turned to his consoles. Slick watched as he jacked the jumpers into position. Maybe, he thought, it was going to work out; Gentry would crash soon, and they’d have to leave the stretcher up here until he could get Little Bird and Cherry to help him get it back across the catwalk. But Gentry was just so crazy, probably he should try to get the drugs back, or some of them anyway, get things back to normal . . .
"I can only believe," Gentry said, "that this was predetermined. Prefigured by the form of my previous work. I wouldn’t pretend to understand how that might be, but ours is not to question why, is it, Slick Henry?" He tapped out a sequence on one of his keyboards. "Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?"
"What’s he talking about?" Cherry asked.
Slick glumly shook his head. If he said anything, it would only encourage Gentry’s craziness.
Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. "There are worlds within worlds," he said. "Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below . . . It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I’d not dared to hope . . ." He glanced coyly back at them over a black-beaded shoulder. "And now," he said, "we’ll see the shape of the little universe our guest’s gone voyaging in. And in that form, Slick Henry, I’ll see . . ."
He touched the power stud at the edge of the holo table. And screamed.
14
Toys
"Here’s a lovely thing," Petal said, touching a rosewood cube the size of Kumiko’s head. "Battle of Britain." Light shimmered above it, and when Kumiko leaned forward she saw that tiny aircraft looped and dived in slow motion above a gray Petrie smear of London. "They worked it up from war films," he said, "gunsight cameras." She pe
ered in at almost microscopic flashes of antiaircraft fire from the Thames estuary. "Did it for the Centenary."
They were in Swain’s billiard room, ground-floor rear, number 16. There was a faint mustiness, an echo of pub smell. The overall tidiness of Swain’s establishment was tempered here by genteel dilapidation: there were armchairs covered in scuffed leather, pieces of heavy dark furniture, the dull green field of the billiard table . . . The black steel racks stacked with entertainment gear had caused Petal to bring her here, before tea, shuffling along in his seam-sprung moleskin slippers, to demonstrate available toys.
"Which war was this?"
"Last but one," he said, moving on to a similar but larger unit that offered holograms of two Thai boxing girls. One’s callused sole smacked against the other’s lean brown belly, tensed to take the blow. He touched a stud and the projections vanished.
Kumiko glanced back at the Battle of Britain and its burning gnats.
"All sorts of sporting fiche," Petal said, opening a fitted pig-skin case that held hundreds of the recordings.
He demonstrated half-a-dozen other pieces of equipment, then scratched his stubbled head while he searched for a Japanese video news channel. He found it, finally, but couldn’t cut out the automatic translation program. He watched with her as a cadre of Ono-Sendai executive trainees effaced themselves in a tearful graduation ceremony. "What’s all that then?" he asked.
"They are demonstrating loyalty to their zaibatsu. "
"Right," he said. He gave the video unit a swipe with his feather duster. "Tea time soon." He left the room. Kumiko shut off the audio. Sally Shears had been absent at breakfast, as had Swain.
Moss-green curtains concealed another set of tall windows opening onto the same garden. She looked out at a sundial sheathed in snow, then let the curtain fall back. (The silent wallscreen flashed Tokyo accident images, foil-clad medics sawing limp victims from a tangle of impacted steel.) A top-heavy Victorian cabinet stood against the far wall on carved feet resembling pineapples. The keyhole, trimmed with an inlaid diamond of yellowed ivory, was empty, and when she tried the doors, they opened, exhaling a chemical odor of ancient polish. She stared at the black and white mandala at the rear of the cabinet until it became what it was, a dartboard. The glossy wood behind it was pocked and pricked; some players had missed the board entirely, she decided. The lower half of the cabinet offered a number of drawers, each with a small brass pull and miniature, ivory-trimmed keyhole. She knelt in front of these, glanced back toward the doorway (wallscreen showing the lips of a Shinjuku cabaret singer) and drew the upper right drawer out as quietly as possible. It was filled with darts, loose and in leather wallets. She closed the drawer and opened the one to its left. A dead moth and a rusted screw. There was a single wide drawer below the first two; it stuck as she opened it, and made a sound. She looked back again (stock footage of Fuji Electric’s logo illuminating Tokyo Bay) but there was no sign of Petal.
She spent several minutes leafing through a pornographic magazine, with Japanese text, which seemed to have mainly to do with the art of knots. Under this was a dusty-looking jacket made of black waxed cotton, and a gray plastic case with WALTHER molded across its lid in raised letters. The pistol itself was cold and heavy; she could see her face in the blue metal when she lifted it from its fitted bed of foam. She’d never handled a gun before. The gray plastic grips seemed enormous. She put it back into the case and scanned the Japanese section in a folder of multilingual instructions. It was an air gun; you pumped the lever below the barrel. It fired very small pellets of lead. Another toy. She replaced the contents of the drawer and closed it.
The remaining drawers were empty. She closed the cabinet door and returned to the Battle of Britain.
"No," Petal said, "sorry, but it won’t do."
He was spreading Devon cream on a crumpet, the heavy Victorian butterknife like a child’s toy in his thick fingers. "Try the cream," he said, lowering his massive head and regarding her blandly over the tops of his glasses.
Kumiko wiped a shred of marmalade from her upper lip with a linen napkin. "Do you imagine I’ll try to run away?"
"Run away? Are you considering that, running away?" He ate his crumpet, chewing stolidly, and glanced out into the garden, where fresh snow was falling.
"No," she said. "I have no intention of running away."
"Good," he said, and took another bite.
"Am I in danger, in the street?"
"Lord no," he said, with a sort of determined cheeriness, "you’re safe as houses."
"I want to go out."
"No."
"But I go out with Sally."
"Yes," he said, "and she’s a nasty piece of work, your Sally."
"I don’t know this idiom."
"No going out alone. That’s in our brief with your father, understand? You’re fine out with Sally, but she isn’t here. Nobody’s liable to give you bother in any case, but why take chances? Now I’d be happy, you see, delighted to take you out, only I’m on duty here in case Swain has callers. So I can’t. It’s a shame, really it is." He looked so genuinely unhappy that she considered relenting. "Toast you another?" he asked, gesturing toward her plate.
"No, thank you." She put down her napkin. "It was very good," she added.
"Next time you should try the cream," he said. "Couldn’t get it after the war. Rain blew in from Germany and the cows weren’t right."
"Is Swain here now, Petal?"
"No."
"I never see him."
"Out and about. Business. There’s cycles to it. Soon enough they’ll all be calling here, and he’ll be holding court again."
"Who, Petal?"
"Business types, you’d say."
"Kuromaku," she said.
"Sorry?"
"Nothing," she said.
She spent the afternoon alone in the billiard room, curled in a leather armchair, watching snow fall in the garden and the sundial become a featureless white upright. She pictured her mother there, wrapped in dark furs, alone in the garden as the snow fell, a princess-ballerina who drowned herself in the night waters of Sumida.
She stood up, chilled, and went around the billiard table to the marble hearth, where gasflame hissed softly beneath coals that could never be consumed.
15
The Silver Walks
She’d had this friend in Cleveland, Lanette, who’d taught her lots of things. How to get out of a car fast if a trick tried to lock the doors on you, how to act when you went to make a buy. Lanette was a little older and mainly used wiz, she said, "to move the down around," being frequently downed out on anything from endorphin analogs to plain old Tennessee opium. Otherwise, she said, she’d just sit there twelve hours in front of the vid watching any kind of shit at all. When the wiz added mobility to the warm invulnerability of a good down, she said, you really had something. But Mona had noticed that people who were seriously into downs spent a lot of time throwing up, and she couldn’t see why anybody would watch a vid when they could stim just as easy. (Lanette said simstim was just more of what she wanted out of.)
She had Lanette on her mind because Lanette used to give her advice sometimes, like how to turn a bad night around. Tonight, she thought, Lanette would tell her to look for a bar and some company. She still had some money left from her last night’s work in Florida, so it was a matter of finding a place that took cash.
She hit it right, first try. A good sign. Down a narrow flight of concrete stairs and into a smoky buzz of conversation and the familiar, muted thump of Shabu’s "White Diamonds." No place for suits, but it wasn’t what the pimps in Cleveland called a spot, either. She was no way interested in drinking in any spot, not tonight.
Somebody got up from the bar to leave just as she came in, so she nipped over quick and got his stool with the plastic still warm, her second sign.
The bartender pursed his lips and nodded when she showed him one of her bills, so she told him to get her a shot of bourbon and a bee
r on the side, which was what Eddy always got if he was paying for it himself. If somebody else was paying, he’d order mixed drinks the bartender didn’t know how to make, then spend a long time explaining exactly how you made the thing. Then he’d drink it and bitch about how it wasn’t as good as the ones they made in L.A. or Singapore or some other place she knew he’d never been.
The bourbon here was weird, sort of sour but real good once you got it down. She said that to the bartender, who asked her where she usually drank bourbon. She told him Cleveland and he nodded. That was ethanol and some shit supposed to remind you of bourbon, he said. When he told her how much of her money was left, she figured out this Sprawl bourbon was expensive stuff. It was doing its job, though, taking the bad edge off, so she drank the rest and started in on her beer.
Lanette liked bars but she never drank, just Coke or something. Mona always remembered one day she’d done two crystals at the same time, what Lanette called a two-rock hit, and she’d heard this voice in her skull say, just as clear as that, like it was somebody right in the room: It ‘s moving so fast, it‘s standing still. And Lanette, who’d dissolved a matchhead of Memphis black in a cup of Chinese tea about an hour before, did half a crystal herself and then they’d gone out walking, just ghosting the rainy streets together in what felt to Mona like some perfect harmony where you didn’t need to talk. And that voice had been right, there was no jangle to the rush, no tight-jawed jitter, just this sense of something, maybe Mona herself, expanding out from a still center. And they’d found a park, flat lawns flooded with silver puddles, and gone all around the paths, and Mona had a name for that memory: the Silver Walks.
And sometime after that Lanette was just gone, nobody saw her anymore, and some people said she’d gone to California, some people said Japan, and some people said she’d OD’d and gotten tossed out a window, what Eddy called a dry dive, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Mona wanted to think about, so she sat up straight and looked around, and, yeah, this was a good place, small enough that people were kind of crowded in but sometimes that was okay. It was what Eddy called an art crowd, people who had some money and dressed sort of like they didn’t, except their clothes fit right and you knew they’d bought them new.
Mona Lisa Overdrive Page 10