The first voice had come when they’d been driving south, after Molly’d brought Angie in the copter. That one had just hissed and croaked and said something over and over, about New Jersey and numbers on a map. About two hours after that, Molly’d slid the hover across a rest area and said they were in New Jersey. Then she’d gotten out and made a call from a frosty paybooth, a long one; when she’d climbed back in, Mona’d seen her skim a phone card out across the frozen slush, just throwing it away. And Mona’d asked her who she’d called and she’d said England.
Mona’d seen Molly’s hand, then, on the wheel, how the dark nails had little yellowish flecks, like you got when you snapped off a set of artificials. She oughta get some solvent for that, Mona thought.
Somewhere over a river they’d left the highway. Trees and fields and two-lane blacktop, sometimes a lonely red light high up on some kind of tower. And that was when the other voices had come. And then it was back and forth, back and forth, the voices and then Molly and then the voices, and what it reminded her of was Eddy trying to do a deal, except Molly was a lot better at it than Eddy; even if she couldn’t understand it, she could tell Molly was getting close to what she wanted. But she couldn’t stand it when the voices came; it made her want to press herself back as far from Angie as she could get. The worst one was called Sam-Eddy, something like that. What they all wanted was for Molly to take Angie somewhere for what they called a marriage, and Mona wondered if maybe Robin Lanier was in it somewhere, like what if Angie and Robin were gonna get married, and this was all just some kind of wild thing stars did to get married. But she couldn’t get that one to work, and every time this Sam-Eddy voice came back, Mona’s scalp would crawl. She could tell what Molly was bargaining for, though: she wanted her record cleaned up, wiped. She’d watched this vid once with Lanette, about this girl had ten, twelve personalities that would come out, like one was this shy little kid and another’d just be this total bone-addict slut, but it hadn’t ever said anything about how any of those personalities could wipe your slate with the police.
Then this flatland in their headlights, blown with snow, low ridges the color of rust, where the wind had torn away the white.
The hover had one of those map screens you saw in cabs, or if a truck driver picked you up, but Molly never turned it on except that first time, to look for the numbers the voice had given her. After a while, Mona understood that Angie was telling her which way to go, or anyway those voices were telling her. Mona’d been wishing for morning for a long time, but it was still night when Molly killed the lights and sped on through the dark . . .
"Lights!" Angie cried.
"Relax," Molly said, and Mona remembered how she’d moved in the dark in Gerald’s. But the hover slowed slightly, swung into a long curve, shuddering over the rough ground. The dash lights blinked off, all the instrumentation. "Not a sound now, okay?"
The hover accelerated through the dark.
Shifting white glare, high up. Through the window, Mona glimpsed a drifting, twirling point; above it, something else, bulbous and gray —
"Down! Get her down!"
Mona yanked at the catch on Angie’s seatbelt as something whanged against the side of the hover. Got her down on the floor and hugged her furs around her as Molly slewed left, sideswiping something Mona never saw. Mona looked up: split-second flash of a big raggedy black building, a single white bulb lit above open warehouse doors, and then they were through, the turbine screaming full reverse.
Crash.
I just don’t know, the voice said, and Mona thought: Well, I know how that is.
Then the voice started to laugh, and didn’t stop, and the laugh became an on-off, on-off sound that wasn’t laughter anymore, and Mona opened her eyes.
Girl there with a little tiny flashlight, the kind Lanette kept on her big bunch of keys; Mona saw her in the weak back-glare, the cone of light on Angie’s slack face. Then she saw Mona looking and the sound stopped.
"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 wi
z 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.
40
Pink Satin
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 night-runner, 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 flechette 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 fletchettes 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 s
alvaged 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.
Brigitte walks beside her, and there is no pressure, no hollow of night, no hive sound. There are no candles. Continuity is there too, represented by a strolling scribble of silver tinsel that reminds her, somehow, of Hilton Swift on the beach at Malibu.
"Feeling better?" Brigitte asks.
"Much better, thank you."
"I thought so."
"Why is Continuity here?"
"Because he is your cousin, built from Maas biochips. Because he is young. We walk with you to your wedding."
"But who are you, Brigitte? What are you really?"
"I am the message your father was told to write. I am the vévés he drew in your head." Brigitte leans close. "Be kind to Continuity. He fears that in his clumsiness, he has earned your displeasure."
The tinsel scribble scoots off before them, across the satin dunes, to announce the bride’s arrival.
41
Mr. Yanaka
The Maas-Neotek unit was still warm to the touch; the white plastic pad beneath it was discolored, as if by heat. A smell like burning hair . . .
She watched the bruises on Tick’s face darken. He’d sent her to a bedside cabinet for a worn tin cigarette box filled with pills and dermadisks — had torn his collar open and pressed three of the adhesive disks against skin white as porcelain.
Mona Lisa Overdrive Page 24
