Mona Lisa Overdrive (14 page)

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.

“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 peered
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 pigskin 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.

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 beer 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 eth 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.