Mona Lisa Overdrive (10 page)

“Where’s our little Jap, then?” Swain asked.

“Tucked up for the night,” Petal said. “Talks to herself, that one. One-sided conversation.
Queer.”

“What about?”

“Bloody little, actually. Some people do, y’know.…”

“What?”

“Talk to themselves. Like to hear her?”

“Christ, no. Where’s the delightful Miss Shears?”

“Out for her constitutional.”

“Call Bernie ’round, next time, see what she’s about on these little walks …”

“Bernie,” and Petal laughed, “he’d come back in a fucking box!”

Now Swain laughed. “Mightn’t be a bad thing either way, Bernard off our hands and
the famous razorgirl’s thirst slaked … Here, pour us another.”

“None for me. Off to bed, unless you need me …”

“No,” Swain said.

“So,” said Colin, as Kumiko opened her eyes to find him still seated on the bed, “there’s
a voice-activated bug here in your room; the minder reviewed the recording and heard
you address me. Our second segment, now, is more interesting. Your host sits there
with his second whiskey, in comes our Sally.…”

“Hullo,” she heard Swain say, “been out taking the air?”

“Fuck off.”

“You know,” Swain said, “none of this was my idea. You might try keeping that in mind.
You know they’ve got me by the balls as well.”

“You know, Roger, sometimes I’m tempted to believe you.”

“Try it. It would make things easier.”

“Other times, I’m tempted to slit your fucking throat.”

“Your problem, dear, is that you never learned to delegate; you still want to do everything
personally.”

“Listen, asshole, I know where you’re from, and I know how you got here, and I don’t
care how far you’ve got your tongue up Kanakas crack or anybody else’s.
Sarakin!
” Kumiko had never heard the word before.

“I heard from them again,” Swain said, his tone even, conversational. “She’s still
on the coast, but it looks as though she’ll make a move soon. East, most likely. Back
on your old manor. I think that’s our best bet, really. The
house is impossible. Enough private security along that stretch to stop a fair-sized
army …”

“You still trying to tell me this is just a snatch, Roger? Trying to tell me they’re
gonna hold her for ransom?”

“No. Nothing’s been said about selling her back.”

“So why don’t they just hire that army? No reason they’d have to stop at fair-sized,
is there? Get the mercs, right? The corporate-extraction boys. She’s not that hard
a target, no more than some hotshit research man. Get the fucking
pros
in …”

“For perhaps the hundredth time, that isn’t what they want. They want you.”

“Roger, what
do
they have on you, huh? I mean, do you
really
not know what it is they got on me?”

“No, I don’t. But based on what they’ve got on me, I’ll hazard a guess.”

“Yeah?”

“Everything.”

No reply.

“There’s another angle,” he said, “that came up today. They want it to look as though
she’s been taken out.”

“What?”

“They want it to look as though we’ve killed her.”

“And how are we supposed to manage that?”

“They’ll provide a body.”

“I assume,” Colin said, “that she left the room without comment. It ends there.”

He spent an hour checking the saw’s bearings, then lubed them again. It was already
too cold to work; he’d have to go ahead and heat the room where he kept the others,
the Investigators and the Corpsegrinder and the Witch. That in itself would be enough
to disturb the balance of his arrangement with Gentry, but it faded beside the problem
of explaining his agreement with Kid Afrika and the fact of two strangers in Factory.
There was no way to argue with Gentry; the juice was his, because he was the one who
fiddled it out of the Fission Authority; without Gentry’s monthly passes on the console,
the ritual moves that kept the Authority convinced Factory was somewhere else, some
place that paid its bill, there wouldn’t be any electricity.

And Gentry was so strange anyway, he thought, feeling his knees creak as he stood
up and took the Judge’s control unit from his jacket pocket. Gentry was convinced
that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form. Not that that was the weirdest
idea Slick had ever run across, but Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the
Shape
mattered
totally
. The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry’s grail.

Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was;
Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape?
If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape
in
, wasn’t there? And if that something was something, then wasn’t
that
part of the universe too? This was exactly the kind of thing you didn’t want to get
into with Gentry, because Gentry could tie your head in knots. But Slick didn’t think
cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing
data. The Fission Authority had always looked like a big red Aztec pyramid, but it
didn’t
have
to; if the FA wanted it to, they could have it look like anything. Big companies
had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix
had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?

He touched the unit’s power stud; the Judge, ten meters away, hummed and trembled.

Slick Henry hated the Judge. That was what the art people never understood. That didn’t
mean it didn’t give him pleasure to have built the thing, to have gotten the Judge
out
, out where he could see him and keep track of him and finally, sort of, be free of
the idea of him, but that sure wasn’t the same as
liking
him.

Nearly four meters tall, half as broad at the shoulders, headless, the Judge stood
trembling in his patchwork carapace the color of rust gone a certain way, like the
handles of an old wheelbarrow, polished by the friction of a thousand hands. He’d
found a way to get that surface with chemicals and abrasives, and he’d used it on
most of the Judge; the old parts anyway, the scavenged parts, not the cold teeth of
the circular blades or the mirrored surfaces of the joints, but the rest of the Judge
was that color, that finish, like a very old tool still in hard daily use.

He thumbed the joystick and the Judge took one step
forward, then another. The gyros were working perfectly; even with an arm off, the
thing moved with a terrible dignity, planting its huge feet just so.

Slick grinned in Factory’s gloom as the Judge clomped toward him, one-two, one-two.
He could remember every step of the Judge’s construction, if he wanted to, and sometimes
he did, just for the comfort of being able to.

He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost
could.

That was why he had built the Judge, because he’d done something—it hadn’t been anything
much, but he’d been caught doing it, twice—and been judged for it, and sentenced,
and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn’t been able to remember, not anything,
not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people’s
cars. They made sure you remembered what you did.

Working the joystick, he got the Judge turned around and walked him into the next
room, along an aisle between rows of damp-stained concrete pads that had once supported
lathes and spot welders. High overhead, up in the gloom and dusty beams, dangled dead
fluorescent fixtures where birds sometimes nested.

Korsakov’s, they called that, something they did to your neurons so that short-term
memories wouldn’t stick. So that the time you did was time you lost, but he’d heard
they didn’t do it anymore, or anyway not for grand theft auto. People who hadn’t been
there thought it sounded easy, like jail but then it’s all erased, but it wasn’t like
that. When he’d gotten out, when it was over—three years strung out in a long vague
flickering chain of fear and confusion measured off in five-minute intervals, and
it wasn’t the intervals you could remember so much as the transitions … When it was
over, he’d needed to build the Witch, the Corpsegrinder, then the Investigators, and
finally, now, the Judge.

As he guided the Judge up the concrete ramp to the
room where the others waited, he heard Gentry gunning his motor out on Dog Solitude.

People made Gentry uncomfortable, Slick thought as he headed for the stairs, but it
worked both ways. Strangers could feel the Shape burning behind Gentry’s eyes; his
fixation came across in everything he did. Slick had no idea how he got along on his
trips to the Sprawl; maybe he just dealt with people who were as intense as he was,
loners on the jagged fringes of the drug and software markets. He didn’t seem to care
about sex at all, to the extent that Slick had no idea what it was he’d have wanted
if he’d decided to care.

Sex was the Solitude’s main drawback, as far as Slick was concerned, particularly
in the winter. Summers, sometimes, he could find a girl in one of those rusty little
towns; that was what had taken him to Atlantic City that time and gotten him in the
Kid’s debt. Lately he told himself the best solution was just to concentrate on his
work, but climbing the shuddering steel stairs to the catwalk that led to Gentry’s
space, he found himself wondering what Cherry Chesterfield looked like under all those
jackets. He thought about her hands, how they were clean and quick, but that made
him see the unconscious face of the man on the stretcher, the tube feeding stuff into
his left nostril, Cherry dabbing at his sunken cheeks with a tissue; made him wince.

“Hey, Gentry,” he bellowed out into the iron void of Factory, “comin’ up …”

Three things about Gentry weren’t sharp and thin and tight: his eyes, his lips, his
hair. His eyes were large and pale, gray or blue depending on the light; his lips
were full and mobile; his hair was swept back into a ragged blond roostertail that
quivered when he walked. His thinness wasn’t Bird’s emaciation, born of a stringtown
diet and bad nerves; Gentry was just narrow, the muscle packed in close, no fat at
all. He dressed sharp and tight,
too, black leather trimmed with jet-black beads, a style Slick remembered from his
days in the Deacon Blues. The beads, as much as anything, made Slick think he was
about thirty; Slick was about thirty himself.

Gentry stared as Slick stepped through the door into the glare of ten 100-watt bulbs,
making sure Slick knew he was another obstacle coming between Gentry and the Shape.
He was putting a pair of motorcycle panniers up on his long steel table; they looked
heavy.

Slick had cut roof panels away, installed struts where needed, covered the holes with
sheets of rigid plastic, caulked the resulting skylights with silicone. Then Gentry
came in with a mask and a sprayer and twenty gallons of white latex paint; he didn’t
dust or clean anything, just lay down a thick coat over all the crud and dessicated
pigeonshit, sort of glued it all down and painted over it again until it was more
or less white. He painted everything but the skylights, then Slick started winching
gear up from Factory’s floor, a small truckload of computers, cyberspace decks, a
huge old holo-projection table that nearly broke the winch, effect generators, dozens
of corrugated plastic cartons stuffed with the thousands of fiche Gentry had accumulated
in his quest for the Shape, hundreds of meters of optics, on bright new plastic reels,
that spoke to Slick of industrial theft. And books, old books with covers made of
cloth glued over cardboard. Slick hadn’t ever known how heavy books were. They had
a sad smell, old books.

“You’re pulling a few more amps, since I left,” Gentry said, opening the first of
the two panniers. “In your room. Get a new heater?” He began to root quickly through
the contents, as though he were looking for something he needed but had misplaced.
He wasn’t, though, Slick knew; it was having to have someone, even someone he knew,
unexpectedly in his space.

“Yeah. I gotta heat the storage area again, too. Too cold to work, otherwise.”

“No,” Gentry said, looking up suddenly, “that’s not a heater in your room. The amperage
is wrong.”

“Yeah.” Slick grinned, on the theory that grinning made Gentry think he was stupid
and easily cowed.

“ ‘Yeah’ what, Slick Henry?”

“It’s not a heater.”

Gentry closed the pannier with a snap. “You can tell me what it is or I can cut your
power.”

“Y’know, Gentry, I wasn’t around here, you’d have a lot less time for … things.” Slick
raised his eyebrows meaningfully in the direction of the big projection table. “Fact
is, I got two people staying with me.…” He saw Gentry stiffen, the pale eyes widen.
“But you won’t
see
either of ’em, won’t hear ’em, nothing.”

“No,” Gentry said, his voice tight, as he rounded the end of the table, “because you’re
going to
get them out of here
, aren’t you?”

“Two weeks max, Gentry.”

“Out.
Now
.” Gentry’s face was inches away and Slick smelled the sour breath of exhaustion.
“Or you go with them.”

Slick outweighed Gentry by ten kilos, most of it muscle, but that had never intimidated
Gentry; Gentry didn’t seem to know or care that he could be hurt. That was intimidating
in its own way. Gentry had slapped him, once, hard, in the face, and Slick had looked
down at the huge chrome-moly wrench in his own hand and had felt an obscure embarrassment.

Gentry was holding himself rigid, starting to tremble. Slick had a pretty good idea
that Gentry didn’t sleep when he went to Boston or New York. He didn’t always sleep
that much in Factory either. Came back strung and the first day was always the worst.
“Look,” Slick said, the way somebody might to a child on the verge of tears, and pulled
the bag from his pocket, the bribe from Kid Afrika. He held up the clear plastic Ziploc
for Gentry to see: blue derms, pink tablets, a nasty-looking turd of opium in a
twist of red cellophane, crystals of wiz like fat yellow throat lozenges, plastic
inhalers with the Japanese manufacturer’s name scraped off with a knife.… “From Afrika,”
Slick said, dangling the Ziploc.