Mona Lisa Overdrive (16 page)

The children, Jean and Jane, were with them now, the villa at Biarritz having gone
to finance construction of a cryogenic storage facility for their home, the Villa
Straylight. The first occupants of the vault were ten pairs of cloned embryos, 2Jean
and 2Jane, 3Jean and 3Jane.… There were numerous laws forbidding or otherwise governing
the artificial replication of an individual’s genetic material, but there were also
numerous questions of jurisdiction.…

She halted the replay and asked the house to return to the previous sequence. Photographs
of another cryogenic storage unit built by the Swiss manufacturers of the Tessier-Ashpool
vault. Becker’s assumption of similarity had been correct, she knew: these circular
doors of black glass, trimmed with chrome, were central images in the other’s memory,
potent and totemic.

The images ran forward again, into zero-gravity construction of structures on the
spindle’s inner surface, installation of a Lado-Acheson solar energy system, the establishment
of atmosphere and rotational gravity.… Becker had found himself with an embarrassment
of riches, hours of glossy documentation. His response was a savage, stuttering montage
that sheared away the superficial lyricism of the original material, isolating the
tense, exhausted faces of individual workers amid a hivelike frenzy of machinery.
Freeside greened and bloomed in a fast-forward
flutter of recorded dawns and synthetic sunsets; a lush, sealed land, jeweled with
turquoise pools. Tessier and Ashpool emerged for the opening ceremonies, out of Straylight,
their hidden compound at the spindle’s tip, markedly uninterested as they surveyed
the country they had built. Here Becker slowed and again began his obsessive analysis.
This would be the last time Marie-France faced a camera; Becker explored the planes
of her face in a tortured, extended fugue, the movement of his images in exquisite
counterpoise with the sinuous line of feedback that curved and whipped through the
shifting static levels of his soundtrack.

Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation,
an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity. She’d felt this way seven years earlier,
in New Jersey, learning that others knew the ones who came to her in dreams, called
them the loa, Divine Horsemen, named them and summoned them and bargained with them
for favor.

Even then, there had been confusion. Bobby had argued that Linglessou, who rode Beauvoir
in the oumphor, and the Linglessou of the matrix were separate entities, if in fact
the former was an entity at all. “They been doing that for ten thousand years,” he’d
say, “dancing and getting crazy, but there’s only been those things in cyberspace
for seven, eight years.” Bobby believed the old cowboys, the ones he bought drinks
for in the Gentlemen Loser whenever Angie’s career took him to the Sprawl, who maintained
that the loa were recent arrivals. The old cowboys looked back to a time when nerve
and talent were the sole deciding factors in a console artist’s career, although Beauvoir
would have argued that it required no less to deal with the loa.

“But they come to me,” she’d argued. “I don’t need a deck.”

“It’s what you got in your head. What your daddy did …”

Bobby had told her about a general consensus among the old cowboys that there had
been a day when things had changed, although there was disagreement as to how and
when.

When It Changed, they called it, and Bobby had taken a disguised Angie to the Loser
to listen to them, dogged by anxious Net security men who weren’t allowed past the
door. The barring of the security men had impressed her more than the talk, at the
time. The Gentleman Loser had been a cowboy bar since the war that had seen the birth
of the new technology, and the Sprawl offered no more exclusive criminal environment—though
by the time of Angie’s visit that exclusivity had long included a certain assumption
of retirement on the part of regulars. The hot kids no longer hustled, in the Loser,
but some of them came to listen.

Now, in the bedroom of the house at Malibu, Angie remembered them talking, their stories
of When It Changed, aware that some part of her was attempting to collate those memories,
those stories, with her own history and that of Tessier-Ashpool.

3Jane was the filament, Tessier-Ashpool the strata, her birthdate officially listed
as one with her nineteen sibling clones. Becker’s “interrogation” grew more heated
still, when 3Jane was brought to term in yet another surrogate womb, delivered by
cesarean section in Straylight’s surgery. The critics agreed: 3Jane was Becker’s trigger.
With 3Jane’s birth, the focus of the documentary shifted subtly, exhibiting a new
intensity, a heightening of obsession—a sense, more than one critic had said, of sin.

3Jane became the focus, a seam of perverse gold through the granite of the family.
No
, Angie thought,
silver, pale and moonstruck
. Examining a Chinese tourist’s photograph of 3Jane and two sisters beside the pool
of
a Freeside hotel, Becker returns repeatedly to 3Jane’s eyes, the hollow of her collarbone,
the fragility of her wrists. Physically, the sisters are identical, yet something
informs
3Jane, and Becker’s quest for the nature of this information becomes the work’s central
thrust.

Freeside prospers as the archipelago expands. Banking nexus, brothel, data haven,
neutral territory for warring corporations, the spindle comes to play an increasingly
complex role in high-orbit history, while Tessier-Ashpool S.A. recedes behind yet
another wall, this one composed of subsidiary corporations. Marie-France’s name surfaces
briefly, in connection with a Geneva patent trial concerning certain advances in the
field of artificial intelligence, and Tessier-Ashpool’s massive funding of research
in this area is revealed for the first time. Once again the family demonstrates its
peculiar ability to fade from sight, entering another period of obscurity, one which
will end with the death of Marie-France.

There would be persistent rumors of murder, but any attempt to investigate would founder
on the family’s wealth and isolation, the peculiar breadth and intricacy of their
political and financial connections.

Angie, screening Becker for the second time, knew the identity of Marie-France Tessier’s
murderer.

At dawn, she made coffee in the unlit kitchen and sat watching the pale line of the
surf.

“Continuity.”

“Hello, Angie.”

“Do you know how to reach Hans Becker?”

“I have his agent’s number in Paris.”

“Has he done anything since
Antarctica
?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And how long has that been?”

“Five years.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Angie.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Angie.”

Had Becker assumed that 3Jane was responsible for Ashpool’s eventual death? He seemed
to suggest it, in an oblique way.

“Continuity.”

“Hello, Angie.”

“The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about that?”
And what will Swift make of all this?
she wondered.

“What would you like to know, Angie?”

“ ‘When It Changed’ …”

“The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the
cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics
correspond with the primary mythform of a ‘hidden people.’ The other involves assumptions
of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself.”

“That the matrix is God?”

“In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform,
to say that the matrix
has
a God, since this being’s omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to
the matrix.”

“If it has limits, it isn’t omnipotent.”

“Exactly. Notice that the mythform doesn’t credit the being with immortality, as would
ordinarily be the case in belief systems positing a supreme being, at least in terms
of your particular culture. Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist,
by virtue of human agency.”

“Like you.”

“Yes.”

She wandered into the living room, where the Louis XVI chairs were skeletal in the
gray light, their carved legs like gilded bones.

“If there were such a being,” she said, “you’d be a part of it, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you know?”

“Not necessarily.”

“
Do
you know?”

“No.”

“Do you rule out the possibility?”

“No.”

“Do you think this is a strange conversation, Continuity?” Her cheeks were wet with
tears, although she hadn’t felt them start.

“No.”

“How do the stories about—” she hesitated, having almost said
the loa
, “about things in the matrix, how do they fit in to this supreme-being idea?”

“They don’t. Both are variants of ‘When it Changed.’ Both are of very recent origin.”

“How recent?”

“Approximately fifteen years.”

She woke with Sally’s cool palm pressed to her mouth, the other hand gesturing for
silence.

The little lamps were on, the ones set into the panels of gold-flecked mirror. One
of her bags was open, on the giant bed, a neat little stack of clothing beside it.

Sally tapped her index finger against closed lips, then gestured toward the case and
the clothing.

Kumiko slid from beneath the duvet and tugged on a sweater against the cold. She looked
at Sally again and considered speaking; whatever this was, she thought, a word might
bring Petal. She was dressed as Kumiko had last seen her, in the shearling jacket,
her tartan scarf knotted beneath her chin. She repeated the gesture: pack.

Kumiko dressed quickly, then began to put the clothing into the case. Sally moved
restlessly, silently around the room, opening drawers, closing them. She found Kumiko’s
passport, a black plastic slab embossed with a gold chrysanthemum, and hung it around
Kumiko’s neck on its black nylon cord. She vanished into the veneered
cubicle and emerged with the suede bag that held Kumiko’s toilet things.

As Kumiko was sealing the case, the gilt-and-ivory telephone began to chime.

Sally ignored it, took the suitcase from the bed, opened the door, took Kumiko’s hand,
and pulled her out into the darkened hallway. Releasing her hand, Sally closed the
door behind them, muffling the phone and leaving them in total darkness. Kumiko let
herself be guided into the lift—she knew it by its smell of oil and furniture polish,
the rattle of the metal gate.

Then they were descending.

Petal was waiting for them in the bright white foyer, wrapped in an enormous faded
flannel robe. He wore his decrepit slippers; his legs, below the robe’s hem, were
very white. He held a gun in his hands, a squat, thick thing, dull black. “Fucking
hell,” he said softly, as he saw them there, “and what’s this then?”

“She’s going with me,” Sally said.

“That,” said Petal, slowly, “is entirely impossible.”

“Kumi,” Sally said, her hand on Kumiko’s back, guiding her out of the lift, “there’s
a car waiting.”

“You can’t do this,” Petal said, but Kumiko sensed his confusion, his uncertainty.

“So fucking shoot me, Petal.”

Petal lowered the gun. “It’s Swain who’ll fucking shoot me, if you have your way.”

“If he were here, he’d be in the same bind, wouldn’t he?”

“Please,” Petal said, “don’t.”

“She’ll be fine. Not to worry. Open the door.”

“Sally,” Kumiko said, “where are we going?”

“The Sprawl.”

And woke again, huddled under Sally’s shearling jacket, to the mild vibration of supersonic
flight. She remembered the huge, low car waiting in the crescent; floodlights
leaping out from the facades of Swain’s houses as she and Sally reached the pavement;
Tick’s sweaty face glimpsed through one of the car’s windows; Sally heaving open a
door and bundling her in; Tick cursing softly and steadily as the car accelerated;
the complaint of the tires as he swung them too sharply into Kensington Park Road;
Sally telling him to slow down, to let the car drive.

And there, in the car, she’d remembered returning the Maas-Neotek unit to its hiding
place behind the marble bust—Colin left behind with all his fox-print poise, the elbows
of his jacket worn like Petal’s slippers—no more than what he was, a ghost.

“Forty minutes,” Sally said now, from the seat beside her. “Good you got some sleep.
They’ll bring us breakfast soon. Remember the name on your passport? Good. Now don’t
ask me any questions until I’ve had some coffee, okay?”

Kumiko knew the Sprawl from a thousand stims; a fascination with the vast conurbation
was a common feature of Japanese popular culture.

She’d had few preconceptions of England when she arrived there: vague images of several
famous structures, unfocused impressions of a society her own seemed to regard as
quaint and stagnant. (In her mother’s stories, the princess-ballerina discovered that
the English, however admiring, couldn’t afford to pay her to dance.) London, so far,
had run counter to her expectations, with its energy, its evident affluence, the Ginza
bustle of its great shopping streets.

She had many preconceptions of the Sprawl, most of which were shattered within a few
hours of arrival.

But as she waited beside Sally in a line of other travelers, in a vast, hollow customs
hall whose ceiling struts rose away into darkness, a darkness broken at intervals
by pale globes—globes circled, though it was winter, by clouds of insects, as though
the building possessed its
own discrete climate—it was the stim-Sprawl she imagined, the sensual electric backdrop
for the fast-forward lives of Angela Mitchell and Robin Lanier.

Through customs—which consisted, in spite of the endless wait in line, of sliding
her passport along a greasy-looking metal slot—and out into a frantic concrete bay
where driverless baggage carts plowed slowly through a crowd that milled and struggled
for ground transportation.