Mona Lisa Overdrive (31 page)

“Yes,” she said, and Tick’s room was gone, its walls a flutter of cards, tumbling
and receding, against the bright grid, the towering forms of data.

“Nice transition, that,” she heard him say. “Built into the trodes, that is. Bit of
drama …”

“Where is Colin?”

“Just a sec … Let me work this up.…”

Kumiko gasped as she shot toward a chrome-yellow plain of light.

“Vertigo can be a problem,” Tick said, and was abruptly beside her on the yellow plain.
She looked down at his suede shoes, then at her hands. “Bit of body image takes care
of that.”

“Well,” Colin said, “it’s the little man from the Rose and Crown. Been tinkering with
my package, have you?”

Kumiko turned to find him there, the soles of his brown boots ten centimeters above
chrome yellow. In cyberspace, she noted, there are no shadows.

“Wasn’t aware we’d met,” Tick said.

“Needn’t worry,” Colin said. “It wasn’t formal. But,” he said to Kumiko, “I trust
you found your way safely to colorful Brixton.”

“Christ,” Tick said, “aren’t half a snot, are you?”

“Forgive me,” Colin said, grinning, “I’m meant to mirror the visitor’s expectations.”

“What you are is some Jap designer’s idea of an Englishman!”

“There were Draculas,” she said, “in the Underground. They took my purse. They wanted
to take you.…”

“You’ve come away from your housing, mate,” Tick said. “Got you jacked through my
deck now.”

Colin grinned. “Ta.”

“Tell you something else,” Tick said, taking a step toward Colin, “you’ve got the
wrong data in you, for what you’re meant to be.” He squinted. “Mate of mine in Birmingham’s
just turned you over.” He turned to Kumiko.

“Your Mr. Chips here, he’s been tampered with. D’you know that?”

“No …”

“To be perfectly honest,” Colin said, with a toss of his forelock, “I’ve suspected
as much.”

Tick stared off into the matrix as though he were listening to something Kumiko couldn’t
hear. “Yes,” he said, finally, “though it’s almost certainly a factory job. Ten major
blocks of you.” He laughed. “Been iced over … You’re supposed to know fucking everything
about Shakespeare, aren’t you?”

“Sorry,” Colin said, “but I’m afraid that I
do
know fucking everything about Shakespeare.”

“Give us a sonnet, then,” Tick said, his face wrinkling in a slow-motion wink.

Something like dismay crossed Colin’s face. “You’re right.”

“Or bloody Dickens either!” Tick crowed.

“But I
do
know—”

“
Think
you do, till you’re asked a specific! See, they left those bits empty, the Eng. lit.
parts, then filled ’em with something else.…”

“With what, then?”

“Can’t say,” Tick said. “Boy in Birmingham can’t fiddle it. Clever, he is, but you’re
that bloody Maas biosoft.…”

“Tick,” Kumiko interrupted, “is there no way to contact Sally, through the matrix?”

“Doubt it, but we can try. You’ll get to see that macroform I was telling you about,
in any case. Want Mr. Chips along for company?”

“Yes, please …”

“Fine, then,” Tick said, then hesitated. “But we don’t know what’s stuffed into your
friend here. Something your father paid for, I’d assume.”

“He’s right,” Colin said.

“We’ll all go,” she said.

Tick executed the transit in real time, rather than employing the bodiless, instantaneous
shifts ordinarily employed in the matrix.

The yellow plain, he explained, roofed the London Stock Exchange and related City
entities. He somehow generated a sort of boat to carry them along, a blue abstraction
intended to reduce the possibility of vertigo. As the blue boat glided away from the
LSE, Kumiko looked back and watched the vast yellow cube recede. Tick was pointing
out various structures like a tour guide; Colin, seated beside her with his legs crossed,
seemed amused at the reversal of roles. “That’s White’s,” Tick was saying, directing
her attention to a modest gray pyramid, “the club in Saint James. Membership registry,
waiting list …”

Kumiko looked up at the architecture of cyberspace, hearing the voice of her bilingual
French tutor in Tokyo, explaining humanity’s need for this information-space. Icon,
waypoints, artificial realities … But it blurred together, in memory, like these towering
forms as Tick accelerated.…

The scale of the white macroform was difficult to comprehend.

Initially, it had seemed to Kumiko like the sky, but now, gazing at it, she felt as
though it were something she might take up in her hand, a cylinder of luminous pearl
no taller than a chess piece. But it dwarfed the polychrome forms that clustered around
it.

“Well,” Colin said, jauntily, “this really
is
very peculiar indeed, isn’t it? Complete anomaly, utter singularity …”

“But you don’t have to worry about it, do you?” Tick said.

“Only if it has no direct bearing on Kumiko’s situation,” Colin agreed, standing up
in the boat-shape, “though how can one be certain?”

“You must attempt to contact Sally,” Kumiko said impatiently. This thing—the macroform,
the anomaly—was of little interest, though Tick and Colin both regarded it as extraordinary.

“Look at it,” Tick said. “Could have a bloody world, in there …”

“And you don’t know what it is?” She was watching Tick; his eyes had the distant look
that meant his hands were moving, back in Brixton, working his deck.

“It’s a very great deal of data,” Colin said.

“I just tried to put a line through to that construct, the one she calls Finn,” Tick
said, his eyes refocusing, an edge of worry in his voice, “but I couldn’t get through.
I’d this feeling then, something was there, waiting.… Think it’s best we jack out
now …”

A black dot, on the curve of pearl, its edges perfectly defined …

“Fucking hell,” Tick said.

“Break the link,” Colin said.

“Can’t! ’S got us.…”

Kumiko watched as the blue boat-shape beneath her feet elongated, stretched into a
thread of azure, drawn across the chasm into that round blot of darkness. And then,
in an instant of utter strangeness, she too, along with Tick and Colin, was drawn
out to an exquisite thinness—

To find herself in Ueno Park, late autumn afternoon, by the unmoving waters of Shinobazu
Pond, her mother seated beside her on a sleek bench of chilly carbon laminate, more
beautiful now than in memory. Her mother’s lips were full and richly glossed, outlined,
Kumiko knew, with the finest and narrowest of brushes. She wore her black French jacket,
with the dark fur collar framing her smile of welcome.

Kumiko could only stare, huddled there around the cold bulb of fear beneath her heart.

“You’ve been a foolish girl, Kumi,” her mother said. “Did you imagine I wouldn’t remember
you, or abandon you to winter London and your father’s gangster servants?”

Kumiko watched the perfect lips, open slightly over white teeth; teeth maintained,
she knew, by the best dentist in Tokyo. “You are dead,” she heard herself say.

“No,” her mother replied, smiling, “not now. Not here, in Ueno Park.
Look at the cranes, Kumi
.”

But Kumiko would not turn her head.

“Look at the cranes.”

“Fuck right off, you,” said Tick, and Kumiko spun to find him there, his face pale
and twisted, filmed with sweat, oily curls plastered to his forehead.

“I am her mother.”

“Not your mum, understand?” Tick was shaking, his twisted frame quivering as though
he forced himself against a terrible wind. “Not … your … mum …” There were dark crescents
beneath the arms of the gray suit jacket. His small fists shook as he struggled to
take the next step.

“You’re ill,” Kumiko’s mother said, her tone solicitous. “You must lie down.”

Tick sank to his knees, forced down by an invisible weight. “Stop it!” Kumiko cried.

Something slammed Tick’s face against the pastel concrete of the path.

“Stop it!”

Tick’s left arm shot out straight from the shoulder and began to rotate slowly, the
hand still balled in a white-knuckled fist. Kumiko heard something give, bone or ligament,
and Tick screamed.

Her mother laughed.

Kumiko struck her mother in the face, and pain, sharp and real, jolted through her
arm.

Her mother’s face flickered, became another face. A gaijin face with wide lips and
a sharp thin nose.

Tick groaned.

“Well,” Kumiko heard Colin say, “isn’t this interesting?” She turned to him there,
astride one of the horses from the hunting print, a stylized representation of an
extinct animal, its neck curved gracefully as it trotted toward them. “Sorry it took
me a moment to find you. This is a wonderfully complex structure. A sort of pocket
universe. Bit of everything, actually.” The horse drew up before them.

“Toy,” said the thing with Kumiko’s mother’s face, “do you dare speak to me?”

“Yes, actually, I do. You are Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, or rather the
late
Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, none too recently deceased, formerly of the Villa Straylight.
This rather pretty representation of a Tokyo park is something you’ve just now worked
up from Kumiko’s memories, isn’t it?”

“Die!” She flung up a white hand: from it burst a form folded from neon.

“No,” Colin said, and the crane shattered, its fragments tumbling through him, ghost-shards,
falling away. “Won’t do. Sorry. I’ve remembered what I am. Found the bits they tucked
away in the slots for Shakespeare and Thackeray and Blake. I’ve been modified to advise
and protect Kumiko in situations rather more drastic than any envisioned by my original
designers. I’m a tactician.”

“You are nothing.” At her feet, Tick began to twitch.

“You’re mistaken, I’m afraid. You see, in here, in this … folly of yours, 3Jane, I’m
as real as you are. You see, Kumiko,” he said, swinging down from the saddle, “Tick’s
mysterious macroform is actually a very expensive pile of biochips constructed to
order. A sort of toy universe. I’ve run all up and down it and there’s certainly a
lot to see, a lot to learn. This … person, if we choose to so regard her, created
it in a pathetic bid for, oh, not
immortality
,
really, but simply to have her way. Her narrow, obsessive, and singularly childish
way. Who would’ve thought it, that Lady 3Jane’s object of direst and most nastily
gnawing envy would be Angela Mitchell?”

“Die! You’ll die! I’m killing you! Now!”

“Keep trying,” Colin said, and grinned. “You see, Kumiko, 3Jane knew a secret about
Mitchell, about Mitchell’s relationship to the matrix; Mitchell, at one time, had
the potential to become, well, very central to things, though it’s not worth going
into. 3Jane was jealous.…”

The figure of Kumiko’s mother swam like smoke, and was gone.

“Oh dear,” Colin said, “I’ve wearied her, I’m afraid. We’ve been fighting something
of a pitched battle, at a different level of the command program. Stalemate, temporarily,
but I’m sure she’ll rally.…”

Tick had gotten to his feet and was gingerly massaging his arm. “Christ,” he said,
“I was sure she’d dislocated it for me.…”

“She did,” Colin said, “but she was so angry when she left that she forgot to save
that part of the configuration.”

Kumiko stepped closer to the horse. It wasn’t like a real horse at all. She touched
its side. Cool and dry as old paper. “What shall we do now?”

“Get you out of here. Come along, both of you. Mount up. Kumiko in front, Tick on
behind.”

Tick looked at the horse. “On that?”

They had seen no other people in Ueno Park, as they’d ridden toward a wall of green
that gradually defined itself as a very un-Japanese wood.

“But we should be in Tokyo,” Kumiko protested, as they entered the wood.

“It’s all a bit sketchy,” Colin said, “though I imagine we could find a sort of Tokyo
if we looked. I think I know an exit point, though.…”

Then he began to tell her more about 3Jane, and Sally, and Angela Mitchell. All of
it very strange.

The trees were very large, at the far side of the wood. They emerged into a field
of long grass and wildflowers.

“Look,” Kumiko said, as she glimpsed a tall gray house through the branches.

“Yes,” Colin said, “the original’s on the outskirts of Paris. But we’re nearly there.
The exit point, I mean …”

“Colin! Did you see? A woman. Just there …”

“Yes,” he said, without bothering to turn his head, “Angela Mitchell …”

“Really? She’s here?”

“No,” he said, “not yet.”

Then Kumiko saw the gliders. Lovely things, quivering in the wind.

“There you go,” Colin said. “Tick’ll take you back in one of—”

“Bloody hell,” Tick protested, from behind.

“Dead easy. Just like using your deck. Same thing, in this case …”

Up from Margate Road came the sound of laughter, loud drunken voices, the crash of
a bottle against brickwork.

Kumiko sat very still, in the overstuffed chair, eyes shut tight, remembering the
glider’s rush into blue sky and … something else.