Mona Lisa Overdrive (12 page)

Prior smiled.

“You’re short what, ten years?”

“Not quite,” Prior said. “We aren’t asking for perfection.”

Gerald looked at her. “You aren’t going to get it.” He hooked the goggles over his
ears and tapped something; a light came on below the right lens. “But there are degrees
of approximation.” The light swung toward her.

“We’re talking cosmetic, Gerald.”

“Where’s Eddy?” she asked, as Gerald came closer.

“In the bar. Shall I call him?” Prior picked up the phone, but put it back down without
using it.

“What is this?” Backing away from Gerald.

“A medical examination,” Gerald said. “Nothing painful.” He had her against the window;
above the towel, her shoulderblades pressed against cool glass. “Someone’s about to
employ you, and pay you very well; they need to be certain you’re in good health.”
The light stabbed into her left eye. “She’s on stimulants of some kind,” he said to
Prior, in a different tone of voice.

“Try not to blink, Mona.” The light swung to her right eye. “What is it, Mona? How
much did you do?”

“Wiz.” Wincing away from the light.

He caught her chin in his cool fingers and realigned her head. “How much?”

“A crystal …”

The light was gone. His smooth face was very close, the goggles studded with lenses,
slots, little dishes of black metal mesh. “No way of judging the purity,” he said.

“It’s real pure,” she said, and giggled.

He let her chin go and smiled. “It shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “Could you open
your mouth, please?”

“Mouth?”

“I want to look at your teeth.”

She looked at Prior.

“You’re in luck, here,” Gerald said to Prior, when he’d used the little light to look
in her mouth. “Fairly good condition and close to target configuration. Caps, inlays.”

“We knew we could count on you, Gerald.”

Gerald took the goggles off and looked at Prior. He returned to the black case and
put the goggles away. “Lucky with the eyes, too. Very close. A tint job.” He took
a foil envelope from the case and tore it open, rolled
the pale surgical glove down over his right hand. “Take off the towel, Mona. Make
yourself comfortable.”

She looked at Prior, at Gerald. “You want to see my papers, the bloodwork and stuff?”

“No,” Gerald said, “that’s fine.”

She looked out the window, hoping to see the bighorn, but it was gone, and the sky
seemed a lot darker.

She undid the towel, let it fall to the floor, then lay down on her back on the beige
temperfoam.

It wasn’t all that different from what she got paid for; it didn’t even take as long.

Sitting in the bathroom with the cosmetic kit open on her knees, grinding another
crystal, she decided she had a right to be pissed off.

First Eddy takes off without her, then Prior shows up with this creep medic, then
he tells her Eddy’s sleeping in a different room. Back in Florida she could’ve used
some time off from Eddy, but up here was different. She didn’t want to be in here
by herself, and she’d been scared to ask Prior for a key.
He
fucking well had one, though, so he could walk in any time with his creep-ass friends.
What kind of deal was that?

And the business with the plastic raincoat, that burned her ass too. A disposable
fucking plastic raincoat.

She fluffed the powdered wiz between the nylon screens, carefully tapped it into the
hitter, exhaled hard, put the mouthpiece to her lips, and hit. The cloud of yellow
dust coated the membranes of her throat; some of it probably even made it to her lungs.
She’d heard that was bad for you.

She hadn’t had any plan when she’d gone in the bathroom to take her hit, but as the
back of her neck started tingling, she found herself thinking about the streets around
the hotel, what she’d seen of them on their way in. There were clubs, bars, shops
with clothes in the window. Music. Music would be okay, now, and a crowd. The way
you could lose it in a crowd, forget yourself, just be there. The door wasn’t locked,
she knew that; she’d already tried it. It would lock behind her, though, and she didn’t
have a key. But she was staying here, so Prior must have registered her at the desk.
She thought about going down and asking the woman behind the counter for a key, but
the idea made her uncomfortable. She knew suits behind counters and how they looked
at you. No, she decided, the best idea was to stay in and stim those new Angie’s.

Ten minutes later she was on her way out a side entrance off the main lobby, the wiz
singing in her head.

It was drizzling outside, maybe dome condensation. She’d worn the white raincoat for
the lobby, figuring Prior knew what he was doing after all, but now she was glad she
had it. She grabbed a fold of fax out of an overflowing bin and held it over her head
to keep her hair dry. It wasn’t as cold as before, which was another good thing. None
of her new clothes were what you’d call warm.

Looking up and down the avenue, deciding which way to go, she took in half-a-dozen
nearly identical hotel fronts, a rank of pedicabs, the rainslick glitter of a row
of small shops. And people, lots of them, like the Cleveland core but everybody dressed
so sharp, and all moving like they were on top of it, everybody with someplace to
go.
Just go with it
, she thought, the wiz giving her a sweet second boot that tripped her into the river
of pretty people without even having to think about it. Clicking along in her new
shoes, holding the fax over her head until she noticed—more luck—the rain had stopped.

She wouldn’t’ve minded a chance to check out the shop windows, when the crowd swept
her past, but the flow was pleasure and nobody else was pausing. She contented herself
with sidelong flashes of each display. The clothes were like clothes in a stim, some
of them, styles she’d never seen anywhere.

I should’ve been here
, she thought,
I should’ve been here all along. Not on a catfish farm, not in Cleveland
,
not in Florida. It’s a place, a real place, anybody can come here, you don’t have
to get it through a stim
. Thing was, she’d never seen this part of it in a stim, the regular people part.
A star like Angie, this part wasn’t her part. Angie’d be off in high castles with
the other stim stars, not down here. But God it was pretty, the night so bright, the
crowd surging around her, past all the good things you could have if you just got
lucky.

Eddy, he didn’t like it. Anyway he’d always said how it was shitty here, too crowded,
rent too high, too many police, too much competition. Not that he’d waited two seconds
when Prior’d made an offer, she reminded herself. And anyway, she had her own ideas
why Eddy was so down on it. He’d blown it here, she figured, pulled some kind of serious
wilson. Either he didn’t want to be reminded or else there were people here who’d
remind him for sure if he came back. It was there in the pissed-off way he talked
about the place, same way he’d talk about anybody who told him his scams wouldn’t
work. The new buddy so goddamn smart the first night was just a stone wilson the next,
dead stupid, no
vision
.

Past a big store with ace-looking stim gear in the window, all of it matte black and
skinny, presided over by this gorgeous holo of Angie, who watched them all slide by
with her half-sad smile. Queen of the night, yeah.

The crowd-river flowed out into a kind of circle, a place where four streets met and
swung around a fountain. And because Mona really wasn’t headed anywhere, she wound
up there, because the people around her peeled off in their different directions without
stopping. Well, there were people in the circle too, some of them sitting on the cracked
concrete that edged the fountain. There was a statue in the center, marble, all worn-out
and soft-edged. Kind of a baby riding a big fish, a dolphin. It looked like the dolphin’s
mouth would spray water if the fountain was working, but it wasn’t. Past the heads
of the seated people
she could see crumpled, sodden fax and white foam cups in the water.

Then it seemed like the crowd had melded behind her, a curved, sliding wall of bodies,
and the three who faced her on the fountain rim jumped out like a picture. Fat girl
with black-dyed hair, mouth half-open like it stayed that way, tits spilling out of
a red rubber halter; blonde with a long face and a thin blue slash of lipstick, hand
like a bird’s claw sprouting a cigarette; man with his oiled arms bare to the cold,
graft-job muscle knotted like rock under synthetic tan and bad jail tattoos …

“Hey, bitch,” cried the fat girl, with a kind of glee, “hope y’don’t think y’gonna
turn any ’roun’ here!”

The blonde looked at Mona with her tired eyes and gave her a wan grin, an it’s-not-my-fault
grin, and then looked away.

The pimp came up off the fountain like something driven by springs, but Mona was already
moving, cued by the blonde’s expression. He had her arm, but the raincoat’s plastic
seam gave way and she elbowed her way back into the crowd. The wiz took over and the
next thing she knew she was at least a block away, sagging against a steel pole, coughing
and hyperventilating.

But now the wiz was all turned around, the way it went sometimes, and everything was
ugly. The faces in the crowd were driven and hungry-looking, like they all had their
own private desperate errands to run, and the light from the shop windows was cold
and mean, and all the things behind the glass were just there to tell her she couldn’t
have them. There was a voice somewhere, an angry child’s voice stringing obscenities
together in an endless, meaningless chain; when she realized who it was, she stopped
doing it.

Her left arm was cold. She looked down and saw that the sleeve was gone, the seam
down her side torn open to the waist. She took off the coat and draped it over her
shoulders like a cape; maybe that made it a little harder to notice.

She braced her back against the pole as the wiz rolled over her on a wave of delayed
adrenaline; her knees started to buckle and she thought she was going to faint, but
then the wiz pulled one of its tricks and she was crouching in summer sunset light
in the old man’s dirt yard, the flaky gray earth scribed with the game she’d been
playing, but now she was just hunched there, vacant, staring off past the bulks of
the tanks to where fireflies pulsed in the blackberry tangle above a twisted old chassis.
There was light behind her from the house and she could smell the cornbread baking
and the coffee he boiled and reboiled there, till a spoon stood up in it, he said,
and he’d be in there now reading one of his books, crumbly brown leaves, never a page
with a corner on it, he got ’em in frayed plastic baggies and sometimes they just
fell to dust in his hands, but if he found something he wanted to keep he’d get a
little pocket copier out of the drawer, fit the batteries in it, run it down the page.
She liked to watch the copies spool out all fresh, with their special smell that faded
away, but he’d never let her work it. Sometimes he’d read out loud, a kind of hesitation
in his voice, like a man trying to play an instrument he hasn’t picked up in a long
time. They weren’t stories he read, not like they had endings or told a joke. They
were like windows into something so strange; he never tried to explain any of it,
probably didn’t understand it himself, maybe nobody did.…

Then the street snapped back hard and bright.

She rubbed her eyes and coughed.

“I’m ready now,” Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation
of the lotus position. “Touch the spread with your left hand.” Eight slender leads
trailed from the sockets behind Piper’s ears to the instrument that lay across her
tanned thighs.

Angie, wrapped in a white terry robe, faced the blond technician from the edge of
the bed, the black test unit covering her forehead like a raised blindfold. She did
as she was told, running the tips of her fingers lightly across the raw silk and unbleached
linen of the rumpled bedspread.

“Good,” Piper said, more to herself than to Angie, touching something on the board.
“Again.” Angie felt the weave thicken beneath her fingertips.

“Again.” Another adjustment.

She could distinguish the individual fibers now, know silk from linen.…

“Again.”

Her nerves screamed as her flayed fingertips grated against steel wool, ground glass.…

“Optimal,” Piper said, opening blue eyes. She produced
a tiny ivory vial from the sleeve of her kimono, removed its stopper, passed the vial
to Angie.

Closing her eyes, Angie sniffed cautiously. Nothing.

“Again.”

Something floral. Violets?

“Again.”

Her head flooded with a nauseating greenhouse reek.

“Olfactory’s up,” Piper said, as the choking odor faded.

“Haven’t noticed.” She opened her eyes. Piper was offering her a tiny round of white
paper. “As long as it’s not fish,” Angie said, licking the tip of her finger. She
touched the dot of paper, raised her finger to her tongue. One of Piper’s tests had
once put her off seafood for a month.

“It’s not fish,” Piper said, smiling. She kept her hair short, a concise little helmet
that played up the graphite gleam of the sockets inset behind either ear. Saint Joan
in silicone, Porphyre said, and Piper’s true passion seemed to be her work. She was
Angie’s personal technician, reputed to be the Net’s best troubleshooter.

Caramel …

“Who else is here, Piper?” Having completed the Usher, Piper was zipping her board
into a fitted nylon case.

Angie had heard a helicopter arrive an hour earlier; she’d heard laughter, footsteps
on the deck, as the dream receded. She’d abandoned her usual attempt to inventory
sleep—if it could be called sleep, the other’s memories washing in, filling her, then
draining away to levels she couldn’t reach, leaving these afterimages.…