Mona Lisa Overdrive (33 page)

“Who the fuck are you?” The light in Mona’s eyes. Cleveland voice, tough little foxface
under raggy bleachblond hair.

“Mona. Who’re you?” But then she saw the hammer.

“Cherry …”

“What’s that hammer?”

This Cherry looked at the hammer. “Somebody’s after me ’n’ Slick.” She looked at Mona
again. “You them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You look like her.” The light jabbing at Angie.

“Not my hands. Anyway, I didn’t used to.”

“You both look like Angie Mitchell.”

“Yeah. She
is
.”

Cherry gave a little shiver. She was wearing three or four leather jackets she’d gotten
off different boyfriends; that was a Cleveland thing.

“Unto this high castle,” came the voice from Angie’s mouth, thick as mud, and Cherry
banged her head against the roof of the cab, dropping her hammer, “my horse is come.”
In the wavering beam of Cherry’s keyring flashlight, they saw the muscles of Angie’s
face crawling beneath the skin. “Why do you linger here, little sisters, now that
her marriage is arranged?”

Angie’s face relaxed, became her own, as a thin bright
trickle of blood descended from her left nostril. She opened her eyes, wincing in
the light. “Where is she?” she asked Mona.

“Gone,” Mona said. “Told me to stay here with you …”

“Who?” Cherry asked.

“Molly,” Mona asked. “She was driving.…”

Cherry wanted to find somebody called Slick. Mona wanted Molly to come back and tell
her what to do, but Cherry was antsy about staying down here on the ground floor,
she said, because there were these people outside with guns. Mona remembered that
sound, something hitting the hover; she got Cherry’s light and went back there. There
was a hole she could just stick her finger into, halfway up the right side, and a
bigger one—two fingers—on the left side.

Cherry said they’d better get upstairs, where Slick probably was, before those people
decided to come in here. Mona wasn’t sure.

“Come on,” Cherry said. “Slick’s probably back up there with Gentry and the Count.…”

“What did you just say?” And it was Angie Mitchell’s voice, just like in the stims.

Whatever this was, it was cold as hell when they got out of the hover—Mona’s legs
were bare—but dawn was coming, finally: she could make out faint rectangles that were
probably windows, just a gray glow. The girl called Cherry was leading them somewhere,
she said upstairs, navigating with little blinks of the keyring light, Angie close
behind her and Mona bringing up the rear.

Mona caught the toe of her shoe in something that rustled. Bending to free herself,
she found what felt like a plastic bag. Sticky. Small hard things inside. Took a deep
breath and straightened up, shoving the bag into the side pocket of Michael’s jacket.

Then they were climbing these narrow stairs, steep,
almost a ladder, Angie’s fur brushing Mona’s hand on the rough cold railings. Then
a landing, then a turn, another set of stairs, another landing. A draft blew from
somewhere.

“It’s kind of a bridge,” Cherry said. “Just walk across it quick, okay, ’cause it
kind of moves.…”

And not expecting this, any of it, not the high white room, the sagging shelves stuffed
with ragged, faded books—she thought of the old man—the clutter of console things
with cables twisting everywhere; not this skinny, burning-eyed man in black, with
his hair trained back into the crest they called a Fighting Fish in Cleveland; not
his laugh when he saw them there, or the dead guy.

Mona’d seen dead people before, enough to know it when she saw it. The color of it.
Sometimes in Florida somebody’d lie down on a cardboard pallet on the sidewalk outside
the squat. Just not get up. Clothes and skin gone the color of sidewalk anyway, but
still different when they’d kicked, another color under that. White truck came then.
Eddy said because if you didn’t, they’d swell up. Like Mona’d seen a cat once, blown
up like a basketball, turned on its back, legs and tail sticking out stiff as boards,
and that made Eddy laugh.

And this wiz artist laughing now—Mona knew those kind of eyes—and Cherry making this
kind of groaning sound, and Angie just standing there.

“Okay, everybody,” she heard someone say—Molly—and turned to find her there, in the
open door, with a little gun in her hand and this big dirty-haired guy beside her
looking stupid as a box of rocks, “just stand there till I sort you out.”

The skinny guy just laughed.

“Shut up,” Molly said, like she was thinking about something else. She shot without
even looking at the gun. Blue flash on the wall beside his head and Mona couldn’t
hear anything but her ears ringing.

Skinny guy curled in a knot on the floor, head between his knees.

Angie walking toward the stretcher where the dead guy lay, his eyes just white. Slow,
slow, like she was moving underwater, and this look on her face …

Mona’s hand, in her jacket pocket, was sort of figuring something out, all by itself.
Sort of squeezing that Ziploc she’d picked up downstairs, telling her … it had wiz
in it.

She pulled it out and it did. Sticky with drying blood. Three crystals inside and
some kind of derm.

She didn’t know why she’d pulled it out, right then, except that nobody was
moving
.

The guy with the Fighting Fish had sat up, but he just stayed there. Angie was over
by the stretcher, where she didn’t seem to be looking at the dead guy but at this
gray box stuck up over his head on a kind of frame. Cherry from Cleveland had got
her back up against the wall of books and was sort of jamming her knuckles into her
mouth. The big guy just stood there beside Molly, who had her head cocked to the side
like she was listening for something.

Mona couldn’t stand it.

Table had a steel top. Big hunk of old metal there, holding down a dusty stack of
printout. Snapped the three yellow crystals down like buttons in a row, picked up
that metal hunk, and—one, two, three—banged them into powder. That did it: everybody
looked. Except Angie.

“ ’Scuse me,” Mona heard herself say, as she swept the mound of rough yellow powder
into the waiting palm of her left hand, “how it is …” She buried her nose in the pile
and snorted. “Sometimes,” she added, and snorted the rest.

Nobody said anything.

And it was the still center again. Just like that time before.

So fast it was standing still.

Rapture. Rapture’s coming
.

So fast, so still, she could put a sequence to what happened next: This big laugh,
haha
, like it wasn’t really a laugh. Through a loudspeaker. Past the door. From out on
the catwalk thing. And Molly just turns, smooth as silk, quick but like there’s no
hurry in it, and the little gun snicks like a lighter.

Then there’s this blue flash outside, and the big guy gets sprayed with blood from
out there as old metal tears loose and Cherry’s screaming before the catwalk thing
hits with this big complicated sound, dark floor down there where she found the wiz
in its bloody bag.

“Gentry,” someone says, and she sees it’s a little vid on the table, young guy’s face
on it, “jack Slick’s control unit now. They’re in the building.” Guy with the Fighting
Fish scrambles up and starts to do things with wires and consoles.

And Mona could just watch, because she was so still, and it was all interesting stuff.

How the big guy gives this bellow and rushes over, shouting how they’re his, they’re
his. How the face on the screen says: “Slick, c’mon, you don’t
need
’em anymore.…”

Then this engine starts up, somewhere downstairs, and Mona hears this clanking and
rattling, and then somebody yelling, down there.

And sun’s coming in the tall, skinny window now, so she moves over there for a look.
And there’s something out there, kind of a truck or hover, only it’s buried under
this pile of what looks like refrigerators, brand-new refrigerators, and broken hunks
of plastic crates, and there’s somebody in a camo suit, lying down with his face in
the snow, and out past that there’s another hover looks like it’s all burned up.

It’s interesting.

Angela Mitchell comprehends this room and its inhabitants through shifting data planes
that represent viewpoints, though of whom or what, she is in most cases in doubt.
There is a considerable degree of overlap, of contradiction.

The man with the ragged crest of hair, in black-beaded leather, is Thomas Trail Gentry
(as birth data and SIN digits cascade through her) of no fixed address (as a different
facet informs her that this room is his). Past a gray wash of official data traces,
faintly marbled with the Fission Authority’s repeated pink suspicions of utilities
fraud, she finds him in a different light: he is like one of Bobby’s cowboys; though
young, he is like the old men of the Gentleman Loser; he is an autodidact, an eccentric,
obsessed, by his own lights a scholar; he is mad, a nightrunner, guilty (in Mamman’s
view, in Legba’s) of manifold heresies; Lady 3Jane, in her own eccentric scheme, has
filed him under RIMBAUD. (Another face flares out at Angie from RIMBAUD; his name
is Riviera, a minor player in the dreams.) Molly has deliberately stunned him, causing
an explosive fléchette to detonate eighteen centimeters from his skull.

Molly, like the girl Mona, is SINless, her birth unregistered, yet around her name
(names) swarm galaxies of supposition, rumor, conflicting data. Streetgirl, prostitute,
bodyguard, assassin, she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes
and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have
long since been woven through the global culture. (And this too belonged to 3Jane,
and now belongs to Angie.)

Molly has just killed a man, has fired one of the explosive fléchettes into his throat.
His collapse against a steel railing suffering metal fatigue has caused a large section
of catwalk to tumble to the floor below. This room has no other entrance, a fact of
some strategic importance. It was probably not Molly’s intention to cause the collapse
of the catwalk. She sought to prevent the man, a hired mercenary, from using his weapon
of choice, a short alloy shotgun coated with a black, nonreflective finish. Nonetheless,
Gentry’s loft is now effectively isolated.

Angie understands Molly’s importance to 3Jane, the source of her desire for and rage
at her; knowing this, she sees all the banality of human evil.

Angie sees Molly restlessly prowling a gray winter London, a young girl at her side—and
knows, without knowing how she knows, that this same girl is now at 23 Margate Road,
SW2.
(Continuity?)
The girl’s father was previously the master of the man Swain, who had lately become
3Jane’s servant for the sake of the information she provides to those who do her bidding.
As has Robin Lanier, of course, though he waits to be paid in a different coin.

For the girl Mona, Angie feels a peculiar tenderness, a pity, a degree of envy: though
Mona has been altered to resemble Angie as closely as possible, Mona’s life has left
virtually no trace on the fabric of things, and represents, in Legba’s system, the
nearest thing to innocence.

Cherry-Lee Chesterfield is surrounded by a sad ragged scrawl, her information profile
like a child’s drawing: citations for vagrancy, petty debts, an aborted career as
a paramedical technician Grade 6, framing birth data and SIN.

Slick, or Slick Henry, is among the SINless, but 3Jane, Continuity, Bobby, all have
lavished their attention on him. For 3Jane, he serves as the focus of a minor node
of association: she equates his ongoing rite of construction, his cathartic response
to chemo-penal trauma, with her own failed attempts to exorcise the barren dream of
Tessier-Ashpool. In the corridors of 3Jane’s memory, Angie has frequently come upon
the chamber where a spider-armed manipulator stirs the refuse of Straylight’s brief,
clotted history—an act of extended collage. And Bobby provides other memories, tapped
from the artist as he accessed 3Jane’s library of Babel: his slow, sad, childlike
labor on the plain called Dog Solitude, erecting anew the forms of pain and memory.

Down in the chill dark of Factory’s floor, one of Slick’s kinetic sculptures, controlled
by a subprogram of Bobby’s, removes the left arm of another mercenary, employing a
mechanism salvaged two summers before from a harvesting machine of Chinese manufacture.
The mercenary, whose name and SIN boil past Angie like hot silver bubbles, dies with
his cheek against one of Little Bird’s boots.

Only Bobby, of all the people in this room, is not here as data. And Bobby is not
the wasted thing before her, strapped down in alloy and nylon, its chin filmed with
dried vomit, nor the eager, familiar face gazing out at her from a monitor on Gentry’s
workbench. Is Bobby the solid rectangular mass of memory bolted above the stretcher?

Now she steps across rolling dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky,
free at last of the room and its data.