Mona Lisa Overdrive (27 page)

If this was part of Bobby’s big gray house in the country, Slick decided, opening
his eyes on the cramped curve of the narrow corridor, then it was a stranger place
than it had seemed the first time. The air was thick and dead and the light from the
greenish glass-tile ceiling-strip made him feel like he was under water. The tunnel
was made of some kind of glazed concrete. It felt like jail.

“Maybe we came out in the basement or something,” he said, noticing the faint
ping
of echo off the concrete when he spoke.

“No reason we’d cut into the construct you saw before,” Gentry said.

“So what is it?” Slick touched the concrete wall; it was warm.

“Doesn’t matter,” Gentry said.

Gentry started walking in the direction they were both facing. Past the curve, the
floor became an uneven mosaic of shattered china, fragments pressed into something
like epoxy, slippery under their boots.

“Look at this stuff …” Thousands of different patterns
and colors in the broken bits, but no overall design in how it had been put down,
just random.

“Art.” Gentry shrugged. “Somebody’s hobby. You should appreciate that, Slick Henry.”

Whoever it was, they hadn’t bothered with the walls. Slick knelt to run his fingers
over it, feeling raw edges of broken ceramic, glassy hardened plastic in between.
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘hobby’?”

“It’s like those things you build, Slick. Your junk toys …” Gentry grinned his tense
crazy grin.

“You don’t know,” Slick said. “Spend your whole fucking life trying to figure what
cyberspace is shaped like, man, and it probably isn’t even shaped like anything, and
anyway who gives a shit?” There wasn’t anything random about the Judge and the others.
The process was random, but the results had to conform to something inside, something
he couldn’t touch directly.

“Come on,” Gentry said.

Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry’s pale eyes, gray in this light, his
taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway?

Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole
landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around.
Bird wasn’t any good to talk to because there wasn’t much he was interested in, and
all he talked was stringtown stupid. And even if Gentry never admitted it, Slick felt
like Gentry understood about some things.

“Yeah,” Slick said, getting up, “let’s go.”

The tunnel wound in on itself like a gut. The section with the mosaic floor was back
there now, around however many curves and up and down short, curving stairwells. Slick
kept trying to imagine a building that would have insides like this, but he couldn’t.
Gentry was walking fast, eyes narrowed, chewing on his lip. Slick thought the air
was getting worse.

Up another stairwell, they hit a straight stretch that narrowed to nothing in the
distance, either way you looked. It was broader than the curved parts and the floor
was soft and humpy with little rugs, it looked like hundreds of them, rolled out layers
deep over the concrete. Each rug had its own pattern and colors, lots of reds and
blues, but all the patterns were the same zaggy diamonds and triangles. The dusty
smell was thicker here and Slick figured it had to be the rugs, they looked so old.
The ones on top, nearest the center, were worn down to the weave, in patches. A trail,
like somebody’d been walking up and down there for years. Sections of the overhead
light-strip were dark, and others pulsed weakly.

“Which way?” he asked Gentry.

Gentry was looking down, working his thick lower lip between finger and thumb. “This
way.”

“How come?”

“Because it doesn’t matter.”

It made Slick’s legs tired, walking over those rugs. Had to watch not to snag his
toes in the ones with holes worn through. Once he stepped over a glass tile that had
fallen from the light-strip. At regular intervals now they were passing sections of
wall that looked as though portals had been sealed over with more concrete. There
wasn’t anything there, just the same arched shape in slightly paler concrete with
a slightly different texture.

“Gentry, this has gotta be underground, right? Like a basement under something …”

But Gentry just brought his arm up, so that Slick bumped into it, and they both were
standing there staring at the girl at the end of the corridor, not a dozen meters
across the waves of carpet.

She said something in a language Slick guessed was French. The voice was light and
musical, the tone matter-of-fact. She smiled. Pale under a twist of dark hair, a fine,
high-boned face, strong thin nose, and wide mouth.

Slick felt Gentry’s arm trembling against his chest. “It’s okay,” he said, taking
Gentry’s arm and lowering it. “We’re just looking for Bobby.…”

“Everyone’s looking for Bobby,” she said, English with an accent he didn’t know. “I’m
looking for him myself. For his body. Have you seen his body?” She took a step back,
away from them, like she was about to run.

“We won’t hurt you,” Slick said, suddenly aware of his own smell, of the grease worked
into his jeans and brown jacket, and Gentry didn’t really look all that much more
reassuring.

“I shouldn’t think so,” she said, and her white teeth flashed again in the stale undersea
light. “But then I don’t think I fancy either of you.”

Slick wanted Gentry to say something, but Gentry didn’t. “You know him—Bobby?” Slick
ventured.

“He’s really a very clever man. Extraordinarily clever. Although I don’t think I fancy
him, really.” She wore something loose and black that hung to her knees. Her feet
were bare. “Nonetheless, I want … his body.” She laughed.

Everything

changed.

“Juice?” Bobby the Count asked, holding out a tall glass of something yellow. The
water in the turquoise pool reflected shifting blobs of sunlight on the palm fronds
above his head. He was naked, aside from a pair of very dark glasses. “What’s the
matter with your friend?”

“Nothing,” Slick heard Gentry say. “He did time on induced Korsakov’s. Transition
like that scares the shit out of him.”

Slick lay very still on the white iron lounge chair with the blue cushions, feeling
the sun bake through his greasy jeans.

“You’re the one he mentioned, right?” Bobby asked. “Name’s Gentle? Own a factory?”

“Gentry.”

“You’re a cowboy.” Bobby smiled. “Console jockey. Cyberspace man.”

“No.”

Bobby rubbed his chin. “You know I have to shave in here? Cut myself, there’s a scar.…”
He drank half the glass of juice and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re
not a jockey? How else you get in here?”

Gentry unzipped his beaded jacket, exposing his bone-white, hairless chest. “Do something
about the sun,” he said.

Twilight. Like that. Not even a click. Slick heard himself groan. Insects began to
creak in the palms beyond the whitewashed wall. Sweat cooled on his ribs.

“Sorry, man,” Bobby said to Slick. “That Korsakov’s, that must be some sad shit. But
this place is beautiful. Vallarta. Belonged to Tally Isham.” He turned his attention
to Gentry again. “If you’re not a cowboy, fella, what are you?”

“I’m like you,” Gentry said.

“I’m a cowboy.” A lizard scooted diagonally up the wall behind Bobby’s head.

“No. You aren’t here to steal anything, Newmark.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re here to learn something.”

“Same thing.”

“No. You were a cowboy once, but now you’re something else. You’re looking for something,
but there’s nobody to steal it from. I’m looking for it too.”

And Gentry began to explain about the Shape, as the palm shadows gathered and thickened
into Mexican night, and Bobby the Count sat and listened.

When Gentry was done, Bobby sat there for a long time without saying anything. Then
he said, “Yeah. You’re right. How I think of it, I’m trying to find out what brought
the Change.”

“Before that,” Gentry said, “it didn’t have a Shape.”

“Hey,” Slick said, “before we were here, we were somewhere else. Where was that?”

“Straylight,” Bobby said. “Up the well. In orbit.”

“Who’s that girl?”

“Girl?”

“Dark hair. Skinny.”

“Oh,” Bobby said, in the dark, “that was 3Jane. You saw her?”

“Weird girl,” Slick said.

“Dead girl,” Bobby said. “You saw her construct. Blew her family fortune to build
this thing.”

“You, uh, hang out with her? In here?”

“She hates my guts. See, I stole it, stole her soul-catcher. She had her construct
in place in here when I took off for Mexico, so she’s always been around. Thing was,
she died. Outside, I mean. Meantime, all her shit outside, all her scams and schemes,
that’s being run by lawyers, programs, more flunkies.…” He grinned. “It really pisses
her off. The people who’re trying to get into your place to get the aleph back, they
work for somebody else who works for some people she hired out on the Coast. But,
yeah, I’ve done the odd deal with her, traded things. She’s crazy, but she plays a
tight game.…”

Not even a click.

At first he thought he was back in the gray house, where he’d seen Bobby the first
time, but this room was smaller and the carpets and furniture were different, he couldn’t
say how. Rich but not as glittery. Quiet. A lamp with a green glass shade glowed on
a long wooden table.

Tall windows with frames painted white, dividing the white beyond that into rectangles,
each pane, and that must be snow.… He stood with his cheek touching soft drapes, looking
out into a walled space of snow.

“London,” Bobby said. “She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought
they wouldn’t have
anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They’ve been fading, sort
of blurring. You can still raise em, sometimes, but their personalities run together.…”

“That fits,” Gentry said. “They came out of the first cause, When It Changed. You
already figured that. But you don’t know what happened yet, do you?”

“No. I just know where. Straylight. She’s told me all that part, I think all she knows.
Doesn’t really care about it. Her mother put together a couple of AIs, very early
on, real heavy stuff. Then her mother died and the AIs sort of stewed in the corporate
cores, up there. One of them started doing deals on its own. It wanted to get together
with the other one.…”

“It did. There’s your first cause. Everything changed.”

“Simple as that? How do you know?”

“Because,” Gentry said, “I’ve been at it from another angle. You’ve been playing cause
and effect, but I’ve been looking for outlines, shapes in time. You’ve been looking
all over the matrix, but I’ve been looking
at
the matrix, the whole thing. I know things you don’t.”

Bobby didn’t answer. Slick turned from the window and saw the girl, the same one,
standing across the room. Just standing there.

“It wasn’t just the Tessier-Ashpool AIs,” Gentry said. “People came up the well to
crack the T-A cores. They brought a Chinese military icebreaker.”

“Case,” Bobby said, “Guy named Case. I know that part. Some kind of synergistic effect …”

Slick watched the girl.

“And the sum was greater than the parts?” Gentry really seemed to be enjoying this.
“Cybernetic godhead? Light on the waters?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, “that’s about it.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Gentry said, and laughed.

And the girl was gone. No click.

Slick shivered.

Night fell during the Underground’s peak evening traffic, though even then it was
nothing like Tokyo, no
shiroshisan
struggling to wedge a last few passengers in as the doors were closing. Kumiko watched
the salmon haze of sunset from a windy platform on the Central Line, Colin lounging
against a broken vending machine with a row of cracked, dusty windows. “Time now,”
he said, “and keep your head demurely down through Bond Street and Oxford Circus.”

“But I must pay, when I leave the system?”

“Not
everyone
does, actually,” he said, tossing his forelock.

She set off for the stairs, no longer requiring his directions to find her way to
the opposite platform. Her feet were very cold again, and she thought of the fleece-lined
German boots in the closet in her room at Swain’s. She’d decided on the combination
of the rubber toe-socks and the high French heels as a ploy to lull Dick, to make
him doubt she’d run, but with each bite of cold through the thin soles she regretted
the idea.

In the tunnel to the other platform, she relaxed her grip on the unit and Colin flickered
out. The walls were worn white ceramic with a decorative band of green. She took her
hand from her pocket and trailed her fingers along the green tiles as she went, thinking
of Sally and the Finn and the different smell of a Sprawl winter, until the first
Dracula stepped smartly in front of her and she was instantly and very closely surrounded
by four black raincoats, four bone-thin, bone-white faces. “ ’Ere,” the first one
said, “innit pretty.”

They were eye to eye, Kumiko and the Dracula; his breath smelled of tobacco. The evening
crowd continued on its way around them, bundled for the most part in dark wool.

“Oo,” one said, beside her, “look. Wot’s this?” He held up the Maas-Neotek unit, his
hand gloved in cracked black leather. “Flash lighter, innit? Let’s ’ave a snag, Jap.”
Kumiko’s hand went to her pocket, shot straight through the razor slash, and closed
on air. The boy giggled.

“Snags in ’er bag,” another said. “ ’Elp ’er, Reg,” A hand darted out and the leather
strap of her purse parted neatly.

The first Dracula caught the purse, whipped the dangling strap around it with a practiced
flick, and tucked it into the front of his raincoat. “Ta.”

“ ’Ere, she’s got ’em in ’er pants!” Laughter as she fumbled beneath layered sweaters.
The tape she’d used hurt her stomach as she tore the gun free with both hands and
flipped it up against the cheek of the boy who held the unit.