Mona Lisa Overdrive (29 page)

She stepped between the noodle stall and another that advertised something called
roti
, this word worked in deliriously colored spraybomb capitals trimmed with looping,
luminous blobs. That stall smelled of spices and stewing meat. Her feet were very
cold.

She ducked beneath a clouded sheet of plastic. The noodle stall was crowded: squat
blue tanks of butane, the
three cooking grids with their tall pots, plastic sacks of noodles, stacks of foam
bowls, and the shifting bulk of the big Korean as he tended his pots. “Sit,” he said;
she sat on a yellow plastic canister of MSG, her head below the level of the counter.
“You’re Japanese?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Tokyo?”

She hesitated.

“Your clothes,” he said. “Why do you wear rubber tabi-socks in winter? Is this the
fashion?”

“I lost my boots.”

He passed her a foam bowl and plastic chopsticks; fat twists of noodle swam in a thin
yellow soup. She ate hungrily, then drank off the soup. She watched as he served a
customer, an African woman who took away noodles in her own lidded pot.

“Margate,” the noodle man said, when the woman was gone. He took a greasy paperbound
book from beneath the counter and thumbed through it. “Here,” he said, jabbing at
an impossibly dense little map, “down Acre Lane.” He took a blue feltpen and sketched
the route on a coarse gray napkin.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now I will go.”

Her mother came to her as she made her way to Margate Road.

Sally was in jeopardy, somewhere in the Sprawl, and Kumiko trusted that Tick would
know a way to contact her. If not by phone then through the matrix. Perhaps Tick knew
Finn, the dead man in the alley.…

In Brixton, the coral-growth of the metropolis had come to harbor a different life.
Faces dark and light, uncounted races, the brick facades washed with a riot of shades
and symbols unimaginable to the original builders. A drumbeat pulsed from a pub’s
open door as she passed, heat and huge laughter. The shops sold foodstuffs Kumiko
had never seen, bolts of bright cloth, Chinese handtools, Japanese cosmetics.…

Pausing by that bright window, the display of tints and blushes, her own face reflected
in the silver backing, she felt her mother’s death fall on her out of the night. Her
mother had owned things like this.

Her mother’s madness. Her father would not refer to it. Madness had no place in her
father’s world, though suicide did. Her mother’s madness was European, an imported
snare of sorrow and delusion.… Her father had killed her mother, Kumiko had told Sally,
in Covent Garden. But was it true? He had brought doctors from Denmark, from Australia,
and finally from Chiba. The doctors had listened to the dreams of the princess-ballerina,
had mapped and timed her synapses and drawn samples of her blood. The princess-ballerina
had refused their drugs, their delicate surgeries. “They want to cut my brain with
lasers,” she had whispered to Kumiko.

She’d whispered other things as well.

At night, she said, the evil ghosts rose like smoke from their boxes in Kumiko’s father’s
study. “Old men,” she’d said, “they suck our breath away. Your father sucks my breath
away. This city sucks my breath away. Nothing here is ever still. There is no true
sleep.”

In the end, there had been no sleep at all. Six nights her mother sat, silent and
utterly still, in her blue European room. On the seventh day, she left the apartment
alone—a remarkable feat, considering the diligence of the secretaries—and made her
way to the cold river.

But the backing of the display was like Sally’s glasses. Kumiko took the Korean’s
map from the sleeve of her sweater.

There was a burnt car beside the curb in Margate Road. Its wheels were missing. She
paused beside it, and was scanning the unrevealing faces of the houses opposite, when
she heard a sound behind her. Turning to find a
twisted gargoyle face, under a greasy spill of curls, in the light from the half-open
door of the nearest house.

“Tick!”

“Terrence,” he said, “actually,” as the facial convulsion subsided.

Tick’s flat was on the top floor. The lower floors were empty, unoccupied, peeling
wallpaper showing ghostly traces of vanished pictures.

The man’s limp was more obvious as he climbed the stairs ahead of her. He wore a gray
sharkskin suit and thick-soled suede oxfords the color of tobacco.

“Been expecting you,” he said, hauling himself up another step, another.

“You have?”

“Knew you’d run from Swain’s. Been logging their traffic, when I’ve had time from
the other.”

“The other?”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s the matrix. Something’s happening. Easier to show you than try to explain it.
As though I could explain it, which I can’t. I’d say a good three-quarters of humanity
is jacked at the moment, watching the show.…”

“I don’t understand.”

“Doubt anyone does. There’s a new macroform in the sector that represents the Sprawl.”

“A macroform?”

“Very large data-construct.”

“I came here to warn Sally. Swain and Robin Lanier intend to give her to the ones
who plot to kidnap Angela Mitchell.”

“Wouldn’t worry about that,” he said, reaching the head of the stairs. “Sally’s already
scooped Mitchell and half-killed Swain’s man in the Sprawl. They’re after her in any
case, now. Bloody everybody’ll be after her,
soon. Still, we can tell her when she checks in. If she checks in …”

Tick lived in a single large room whose peculiar shape suggested the removal of walls.
Large as it was, it was also very crowded; it looked to Kumiko as though someone had
deployed the contents of an Akihabara module shop in a space already filled, gaijin-style,
with too many pieces of bulky furniture. In spite of this, it was startlingly neat
and tidy: the corners of magazines were aligned with the corners of the low glass
table they rested on, beside an unused black ceramic ashtray and a plain white vase
of cut flowers.

She tried Colin again, while Tick filled an electric kettle with water from a filter
jug.

“What’s that?” he asked, putting down the jug.

“A Maas-Neotek guide unit. It’s broken now; I can’t make Colin come.…”

“Colin? It’s a stim rig?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s have a look.…” He held out his hand.

“My father gave it to me.…”

Tick whistled. “Thing cost a fortune. One of their little AIs. How’s it work?”

“You close your hand around it and Colin’s there, but no one else can see or hear
him.”

Tick held the unit beside his ear and shook it. “It’s broken? How?”

“I dropped it.”

“It’s just the housing that’s broken, see. The biosoft’s come away from the case,
so you can’t access it manually.”

“Can you repair it?”

“No. But we can access it through a deck, if you want.…” He returned it. The kettle
was boiling.

Over tea, she told him the story of her trip to the Sprawl and Sally’s visit to the
shrine in the alley. “He called her Molly,” she said.

Tick nodded, winked several times in rapid succession. “What she went by, over there.
What did they talk about?”

“A place called Straylight. A man called Case. An enemy, a woman …”

“Tessier-Ashpool. Found that for her when I rustled Swain’s data flow for her. Swain’s
shopping Molly to this lady 3Jane, so called; she has the juiciest file of inside
dirt you could imagine—on anything and anyone at all. I’ve been bloody careful not
to look too closely at any of that. Swain’s trading it right and left, making a dozen
fortunes in the process. I’m sure she’s got enough dirt on our Mr. Swain as well.…”

“And she is here, in London?”

“In orbit somewhere, looks like, though some people say she’s dead. I was working
on that, actually, when the big fella popped into the matrix.…”

“Excuse me?”

“Here, I’ll show you.” When he returned to the white breakfast table, he carried a
shallow square black tray with a number of tiny controls arranged along one side.
He placed it on the table and touched one of the minute switches. A cubical holo display
blinked on above the projector: the neon gridlines of cyberspace, ranged with the
bright shapes, both simple and complex, that represented vast accumulations of stored
data. “That’s all your standard big shits. Corporations. Very much a fixed landscape,
you might say. Sometimes one of ’em’ll grow an annex, or you’ll see a takeover and
two of them merge. But you aren’t likely to see a
new
one, not on that scale. They start small and grow, merge with other small formations.…”
He reached out to touch another switch. “About four hours ago”—and a plain white vertical
column appeared in the exact center of the display—“this popped up. Or in.” The colored
cubes, spheres, and pyramids had rearranged themselves instantly to allow for the
round white upright; it dwarfed them entirely, its upper end cut
off smoothly by the vertical limit of the display. “Bastard’s bigger than anything,”
Tick said, with a certain satisfaction, “and nobody knows what it is or who it belongs
to.”

“But someone must know,” Kumiko said.

“Stands to reason, yes. But people in my line of work, and there’s millions of us,
haven’t been able to find out. That’s stranger, in some ways, than the fact that the
thing’s there at all. I was all up and down the grid, before you came, looking for
any jockey with a clue. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“How could this 3Jane be dead?” But then she remembered the Finn, the boxes in her
father’s study. “I must tell Sally.”

“Nothing for that but waiting,” he said. “She’ll probably phone in. In the meantime,
we could have a go accessing that pricey little AI of yours, if you like.”

“Yes,” she said, “thank you.”

“Only hope those Special Branch types in Swain’s pay don’t track you here. Still,
we can only wait.…”

“Yes,” Kumiko said, not at all pleased with the idea of waiting.

Cherry found him with the Judge again, down there in the dark. He was sitting on one
of the Investigators with a flashlight in his hand, shining it up the Judge’s carapace
of polished rust. He didn’t remember coming here, but he couldn’t feel the jerky edge
of Korsakov’s. He remembered the girl’s eyes, in that room Bobby said was London.

“Gentry’s got the Count and his box jacked into a cyberspace deck,” Cherry said. “You
know that?”

Slick nodded, still looking up at the Judge. “Bobby said we better.”

“So what’s going on? What happened when you both jacked?”

“Gentry and Bobby, they kind of hit it off. Both crazy the same way. When we jacked,
we came out somewhere in orbit, but Bobby wasn’t there.… Then Mexico, I think. Who’s
Tally Isham?”

“Stim queen when I was little. Like Angie Mitchell is now.”

“Mitchell, she was his squeeze.…”

“Who?”

“Bobby. He was telling Gentry about it, in London.”

“London?”

“Yeah. We went there, after Mexico.”

“And he said he was Angie Mitchell’s old man? Sounds crazy.”

“Yeah, but he said that’s how he got on to it, that aleph thing.” He swung the light
down and directed it into the skeletal steel maw of the Corpsegrinder. “He was hanging
out with rich people and heard about it. Called it a soul-catcher. The people who
had it would rent time on it to these rich people. Bobby tried it once, then he went
back and stole it. Took it down to Mexico City and started spending all his time in
there. But they came after him.…”

“Sounds like you’re remembering things, anyway.”

“So he got out of there. Went up to Cleveland and made a deal with Afrika, gave Afrika
money to hide him, take care of him while he was under the wire, because he was getting
real close.…”

“Close to what?”

“Don’t know. Something weird. Like when Gentry talks about the Shape.”

“Well,” she said, “I think it might kill him, being jacked that way. His signs are
starting to screw up. He’s been on those drips too long. Why I came to find you.”

The Corpsegrinder’s steel-fanged guts glinted in the flashlight’s beam. “It’s what
he wants. Anyway, if he paid the Kid, it’s like you’re working for him. But those
guys Bird saw today, they’re working for the people from L.A., the ones Bobby stole
the thing from.…”

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

“What are these things you build? Afrika said you were this crazy white guy built
robots out of junk. Said in the summer you take ’em out there on the rust and stage
big fights—”

“They aren’t robots,” he interrupted, swinging the
flash to the low, scythe-tipped arms of the spider-legged Witch. “They’re mainly radio-controlled.”

“You just build ’em to wreck ’em?”

“No. But I have to test them. See if I got them right …” He clicked off the light.

“Crazy white guy,” she said. “You gotta girl out here?”

“No.”

“Get a shower. Maybe shave …” Suddenly she was very close to him, her breath on his
face.

“Okay people listen up—”

“What the fuck—”

“ ’Cause I’m not gonna say this twice.”

Slick had his hand over Cherry’s mouth now.

“We want your guest and all his gear. That’s all, repeat, all the gear.”
The amplified voice clanged through Factory’s iron hollow.
“Now you can give him to us, that’s easy, or we can just kill all your asses. And
we’re real easy with that too. Five minutes to think about it.”

Cherry bit his hand. “Shit, I gotta
breathe
, okay?”

Then he was running through Factory’s dark, and he heard her call his name.

A single 100-watt bulb burned above Factory’s south gate, a pair of twisted steel
doors frozen open with rust. Bird must’ve left it on. From where he crouched by an
empty window, Slick could just make out the hover, out beyond the weak fringe of light.
The man with the bullhorn came strolling out of the dark with a calculated looseness
meant to indicate that he was on top of things. He wore insulated camo overalls with
a thin nylon hood drawn up tight around his head, goggles. He raised the bullhorn.
“Three minutes.”
He reminded Slick of the guards at the holding pen, the second time he’d been done
for stealing cars.