Mona Lisa Overdrive (15 page)

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.

There was a vid behind the bar, up over the bottles, and then she saw Angie there,
looking square into the camera and saying something, but they had the sound down too
low to hear over the crowd. Then there was a shot from up in the air, looking down
on a row of houses that sat right at the edge of a beach, and then Angie was back,
laughing and shaking her hair and giving the camera that half-sad grin.

“Hey,” she said to the bartender, “there’s Angie.”

“Who?”

“Angie,” Mona said, pointing up at the screen.

“Yeah,” he said, “she’s on some designer shit and decides to kick, so she goes to
South America or somewhere and pays ’em a few mil to clean her act up for her.”

“She can’t be on shit.”

The bartender looked at her. “Whatever.”

“But how come she’d even start doing anything? I mean, she’s
Angie
, right?”

“Goes with the territory.”

“But look at her,” she protested, “she looks so good.…” But Angie was gone, replaced
by a black tennis player.

“You think that’s her? That’s a talking head.”

“Head?”

“Like a puppet,” a voice behind her said, and she swung around far enough to see a
ruff of sandy hair and a loose white grin. “Puppet,” and held up his hand, wiggling
thumb and fingers, “you know?”

She felt the bartender drop the exchange, moving off down the bar. The white grin
widened. “So she doesn’t have to do all that stuff herself, right?”

She smiled back. Cute one, smart eyes and a secret halo flashing her just the signal
she wanted to read. No suit trick. Kinda skinny, she could like that tonight, and
the loose look of fun around his mouth set strange against the bright smart eyes.

“Michael.”

“Huh?”

“My name. Michael.”

“Oh. Mona. I’m Mona.”

“Where you from, Mona?”

“Florida.”

And wouldn’t Lanette just tell her go for it?

Eddy hated art-crowd people; they weren’t buying what he was selling. He’d have hated
Michael more, because Michael had a job and this loft in a co-op building. Or anyway
he said it was a loft, but when they got there it was smaller than Mona thought a
loft was supposed to be. The building was old, a factory or something; some of the
walls were sandblasted brick and the ceilings were wood and timbers. But all of it
had been chopped up into places like Michael’s, a room not much bigger than the one
back at the hotel, with a sleeping space off one side and a kitchen and bath off the
other. It was on the top floor, though, so the ceiling was mostly skylight; maybe
that made it a loft. There was a horizontal red paper shade below the skylight, hooked
up to strings and pulleys, like a big kite. The place was kind of messy but the stuff
that was scattered around was all new: some skinny white wire chairs strung with loops
of clear plastic to sit on, a stack of entertainment modules, a work station, and
a silver leather couch.

They started out on the couch but she didn’t like the way her skin stuck to it, so
they moved over to the bed, back in its alcove.

That was when she saw the recording gear, stim stuff, on white shelves on the wall.
But the wiz had kicked in again, and anyway, if you’ve decided to go for it, you might
as well. He got her into the pickup, a black rubber collar with trode-tipped fingers
pressing the base of her skull. Wireless; she knew that was expensive.

While he was getting his own set on and checking the gear on the walls, he talked
about his job, how he worked for a company in Memphis that thought up new names for
companies. Right now he was trying to think of one for a company called Cathode Cathay.
They need it bad, he said, and laughed, but then he said it wasn’t easy. Because there
were so many companies already that the good names had been used up. He had a computer
that knew all the names of all the companies, and another one that made up words you
could use for names, and another one that checked if the made-up words meant “dickhead”
or something in Chinese or Swedish. But the company he worked for didn’t just sell
names, they sold what he called image, so he had to work with a bunch of other people
to
make sure the name he came up with fit the rest of the package.

Then he got into bed with her and it wasn’t really great, like the fun was gone and
she might as well have been with a trick, how she just lay there thinking he was recording
it all so he could play it back when he wanted, and how many others did he have in
there anyway?

So she lay there beside him, afterward, listening to him breathe, until the wiz started
turning tight little circles down on the floor of her skull, flipping her the same
sequence of unconnected images over and over: the plastic bag she’d kept her things
in down in Florida, with its twist of wire to keep the bugs out—the old man sitting
at the chipboard table, peeling a potato with a butcher knife worn down to a nub about
as long as her thumb—a krill place in Cleveland that was shaped like a shrimp or something,
the plates of its arched back bent from sheet metal and clear plastic, painted pink
and orange—the preacher she’d seen when she’d gone to get her new clothes, him and
his pale, fuzzy Jesus. Each time the preacher came around, he was about to say something,
but he never did. She knew it wouldn’t stop unless she got up and got her mind onto
something else. She crawled off the bed and stood there looking at Michael in the
gray glow from the skylight.
Rapture. Rapture’s coming
.

So she went out into the room and pulled her dress on because she was cold. She sat
on the silver couch. The red shade turned the gray of the skylight pink, as it got
lighter outside. She wondered what a place like this cost.

Now that she couldn’t see him, she had trouble remembering what he looked like.
Well
, she thought,
he won’t have any trouble remembering me
, but thinking that made her feel hit or hurt or jerked around, like she wished she’d
stayed at the hotel and stimmed Angie.

The gray-pink light was filling up the room, pooling,
starting to curdle at the edges. Something about it reminded her of Lanette and the
stories that she’d OD’d. Sometimes people OD’d in other people’s places, and the easiest
thing was just to toss them out the window, so the cops couldn’t tell where they came
from.

But she wasn’t going to think about that, so she went into the kitchen and looked
through the fridge and the cabinets. There was a bag of coffee beans in the freezer,
but coffee gave you the shakes on wiz. There were a lot of little foil packets with
Japanese labels, freeze-dried stuff. She found a package of teabags and tore the seal
from one of the bottles of water in the fridge. She put some of the water in a pan
and fiddled with the cooker until she got it to heat up. The elements were white circles
printed on the black countertop; you put the pan in the center of a circle and touched
a red dot printed beside it. When the water was hot, she tossed one of the teabags
in and moved the pan off the element.

She leaned over the pan, inhaling herb-scented steam.

She never forgot how Eddy looked, when he wasn’t around. Maybe he wasn’t much, but
whatever he was, he was there. You have to have one face around that doesn’t change.
But thinking about Eddy now maybe wasn’t such a good idea either. Pretty soon the
crash would come on, and before then she’d have to figure out a way to get back to
the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things
to do, angles to figure, and that
was
the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again.

She didn’t think Prior was going to let Eddy hit her, though, because whatever he
wanted had something to do with her looks. She turned around to get a cup.

Prior was there in a black coat. She heard her throat make a weird little noise all
by itself.

She’d seen things before, crashing on wiz; if you
looked at them hard enough, they went away. She tried it on Prior but it didn’t work.

He just stood there, with a kind of plastic gun in his hand, not pointing it at her,
just holding it. He was wearing gloves like the ones Gerald had worn for the examination.
He didn’t look mad but for once he wasn’t smiling. And for a long time he didn’t say
anything at all, and Mona didn’t either.

“Who’s here?” Like you’d ask at a party.

“Michael.”

“Where?”

She pointed toward the sleeping space.

“Get your shoes.”

She walked past him, out of the kitchen, bending automatically to hook her underwear
up from the carpet. Her shoes were by the couch.

He followed and watched her put on her shoes. He still had the gun in his hand. With
his other hand, he took Michael’s leather jacket from the back of the couch and tossed
it to her. “Put it on,” he said. She did, and tucked her underwear into one of its
pockets.

He picked up the torn white raincoat, wadded it into a ball, and put it into his coat
pocket.

Michael was snoring. Maybe he’d wake up soon and play it all back. With the gear he
had, he didn’t really need anybody there.

In the corridor, she watched Prior relock the door with a gray box. The gun was gone,
but she hadn’t seen him put it away. The box had a length of red flex sticking out
of it with an ordinary-looking magnetic key on the end.

Out in the street was cold. He took her down the block and opened the door of a little
white three-wheeler. She got in. He got in the driver’s side and peeled off the gloves.
He started the car; she watched a blowing cloud reflected in the copper-mirrored side
of a business tower.

“He’ll think I stole it,” she said, looking down at the jacket.

Then the wiz flashed a final card, ragged cascade of neurons across her synapses:
Cleveland in the rain and a good feeling she had once, walking.

Silver.

I’m your ideal audience, Hans
—as the recording began for the second time.
How could you have a more attentive viewer? And you did capture her, Hans: I know,
because I dream her memories. I see how close you came
.

Yes, you captured them. The journey out, the building of walls, the long spiral in.
They were about walls, weren’t they? The labyrinth of blood, of family. The maze hung
against the void, saying,
We are that within, that without is other, here forever shall we dwell
. And the darkness was there from the beginning.… You found it repeatedly in the eyes
of Marie-France, pinned it in a slow zoom against the shadowed orbits of the skull.
Early on she ceased to allow her image to be recorded. You worked with what you had.
You justified her image, rotated her through planes of light, planes of shadow, generated
models, mapped her skull in grids of neon. You used special programs to age her images
according to statistical models, animation systems to bring your mature Marie-France
to life. You reduced her image to a vast but finite
number of points and stirred them, let new forms emerge, chose those that seemed to
speak to you.… And then you went on to the others, to Ashpool and the daughter whose
face frames your work, its first and final image.

The second viewing solidified their history for her, allowed her to slot Becker’s
shards along a time line that began with the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, a union
commented upon, in its day, primarily in the media of corporate finance. Each was
heir to a more than modest empire, Tessier to a family fortune founded on nine basic
patents in applied biochemistry and Ashpool to the great Melbourne-based engineering
firm that bore his father’s name. It was marriage as merger, to the journalists, though
the resulting corporate entity was viewed by most as ungainly, a chimera with two
wildly dissimilar heads.

But it was possible, then, in photographs of Ashpool, to see the boredom vanish, and
in its place a complete surety of purpose. The effect was unflattering—indeed, frightening:
the hard, beautiful face grew harder still, merciless in its intent.

Within a year of his marriage to Marie-France Tessier, Ashpool had divested himself
of 90 percent of his firm’s holdings, reinvesting in orbital properties and shuttle
utilities, and the fruit of the living union, two children, brother and sister, were
being brought to term by surrogates in their mother’s Biarritz villa.

Tessier-Ashpool ascended to high orbit’s archipelago to find the ecliptic sparsely
marked with military stations and the first automated factories of the cartels. And
here they began to build. Their combined wealth, initially, would barely have matched
Ono-Sendai’s outlay for a single process-module of that multinational’s orbital semiconductor
operation, but Marie-France demonstrated an unexpected entrepreneurial flare, establishing
a highly profitable data haven serving the needs of less reputable sectors of the
international banking community. This in turn
generated links with the banks themselves, and with their clients. Ashpool borrowed
heavily and the wall of lunar concrete that would be Freeside grew and curved, enclosing
its creators.

When war came, Tessier-Ashpool were behind that wall. They watched Bonn flash and
die, and Beograd. The construction of the spindle continued with only minor interruptions,
during those three weeks; later, during the stunned and chaotic decade that followed,
it would sometimes be more difficult.