Mona Lisa Overdrive (11 page)

“Africa?” Gentry looked at the bag, at Slick, the bag again. “From Africa?”

“Kid Afrika. You don’t know him. Left this for you.”

“Why?”

“Because he needs me to put up these friends of his for a little while. I owe him
a favor, Gentry. Told him how you didn’t like anybody around. How it gets in your
way. So,” Slick lied, “he said he wanted to leave you some stuff to make up for the
trouble.”

Gentry took the bag and slid his finger along the seal, opening it. He took out the
opium and handed that back to Slick. “Won’t need that.” Took out one of the blue derms,
peeled off the backing, and smoothed it carefully into place on the inside of his
right wrist. Slick stood there, absently kneading the opium between his thumb and
forefinger, making the cellophane crackle, while Gentry walked back around the long
table and opened the pannier. He pulled out a new pair of black leather gloves.

“I think I’d better … meet these guests of yours, Slick.”

“Huh?” Slick blinked, astonished. “Yeah … But you don’t really have to, I mean, wouldn’t
it be—”

“No,” Gentry said, flicking up his collar, “I
insist
.”

Going down the stairs, Slick remembered the opium and flung it over the rail, into
the dark.

He hated drugs.

“Cherry?” He felt stupid, with Gentry watching him bang his knuckles on his own door.
No answer. He opened it. Dim light. He saw how she’d made a shade for one of his bulbs,
a cone of yellow fax fastened with a twist of wire. She’d unscrewed the other two.
She wasn’t there.

The stretcher was there, its occupant bundled in the
blue nylon bag.
It’s eating him
, Slick thought, as he looked at the superstructure of support gear, the tubes, the
sacs of fluid.
No
, he told himself,
it’s keeping him alive, like in a hospital
. But the impression lingered: what if it were draining him, draining him dry? He
remembered Bird’s vampire talk.

“Well,” said Gentry, stepping past him to stand at the foot of the stretcher. “Strange
company you keep, Slick Henry …” Gentry walked around the stretcher, keeping a cautious
meter between his ankles and the still figure.

“Gentry, you sure you maybe don’t wanna go back up? I think that derm … Maybe you
did too much.”

“Really?” Gentry cocked his head, his eyes glittering in the yellow glow. He winked.
“Why do you think that?”

“Well,” Slick hesitated, “you aren’t like you usually are. I mean, like you were before.”

“You think I’m experiencing a mood swing, Slick?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m
enjoying
a mood swing.”

“I don’t see you smiling,” Cherry said from the door.

“This is Gentry, Cherry. Factory’s sort of his place. Cherry’s from Cleveland.…”

But Gentry had a thin black flashlight in his gloved hand; he was examining the trode-net
that covered the sleeper’s forehead. He straightened up, the beam finding the featureless,
unmarked unit, then darting down again to follow the black cable to the trode-net.

“Cleveland,” Gentry said at last, as though it were a name he’d heard in a dream.
“Interesting …” He raised his light again, craning forward to peer at the point where
the cable joined the unit. “And Cherry—Cherry, who is
he
?” the beam falling hard on the wasted, irritatingly ordinary face.

“Don’t know,” Cherry said. “Get that out of his eyes. Might screw up his REM or something.”

“And this?” He lit the flat gray package.

“The LF, Kid called it. Called him the Count, called
that his LF.” She thrust her hand inside her jackets and scratched herself.

“Well, then,” Gentry said, turning, click as the beam died, the light of his obsession
burning bright, bright behind his eyes, amplified so powerfully by Kid Afrika’s derm
that it seemed to Slick that the Shape must be right there, blazing through Gentry’s
forehead, for anyone at all to see except Gentry himself, “that must be just what
it is.…”

Mona woke as they were landing.

Prior was listening to Eddy and nodding and flashing his rectangular smile. It was
like the smile was always there, behind his beard. He’d changed his clothes, though,
so he must’ve had some on the plane. Now he wore a plain gray business suit and a
tie with diagonal stripes. Sort of like the tricks Eddy’d set her up with in Cleveland,
except the suit fit a different way.

She’d seen a trick fitted for a suit once, a guy who took her to a Holiday Inn. The
suit place was off the hotel lobby, and he stood in there in his underwear, crosshatched
with lines of blue light, and watched himself on three big screens. On the screens,
you couldn’t see the blue lines, because he was wearing a different suit in each image.
And Mona had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing, because the system had a cosmetic
program that made him look different on the screens, stretched his face a little and
made his chin stronger, and he didn’t seem to notice. Then he picked a suit, got back
into the one he’d been wearing, and that was it.

Eddy was explaining something to Prior, some crucial point in the architecture of
one of his scams. She knew how to tune the content out, but the tone still got to
her, like he knew people wouldn’t be able to grasp the gimmick he was so proud of,
so he was taking it slow and easy, like he was talking to a little kid, and he’d keep
his voice low to sound patient. It didn’t seem to bother Prior, but then it seemed
to Mona that Prior didn’t much give a shit what Eddy said.

She yawned, stretched, and the plane bumped twice on runway concrete, roared, began
to slow. Eddy hadn’t even stopped talking.

“We have a car waiting,” Prior said, interrupting him.

“So where’s it taking us?” Mona asked, ignoring Eddy’s frown.

Prior showed her the smile. “To our hotel.” He unfastened his seatbelt. “We’ll be
there for a few days. Afraid you’ll have to spend most of them in your room.”

“That’s the deal,” Eddy said, like it was his idea she’d have to stay in the room.

“You like stims, Mona?” Prior asked, still smiling.

“Sure,” she said, “who doesn’t?”

“Have a favorite, Mona, a favorite star?”

“Angie,” she said, vaguely irritated. “Who else?”

The smile got a little bigger. “Good. We’ll get you all of her latest tapes.”

Mona’s universe consisted in large part of things and places she knew but had never
physically seen or visited. The hub of the northern Sprawl didn’t smell, in stims.
They edited it out, she guessed, the way Angie never had a headache or a bad period.
But it did smell. Like Cleveland, but even worse. She’d thought it was just the way
the airport smelled, when they left the plane, but it had been even stronger when
they’d gotten out of their car to go into the hotel. And it was cold as hell in the
street, too, with a wind that bit at her bare ankles.

The hotel was bigger than that Holiday Inn, but older, too, she thought. The lobby
was more crowded than lobbies were in stims, but there was a lot of clean blue carpet.
Prior made her wait by an ad for an orbital spa while he and Eddy went over to a long
black counter and he talked to a woman with a brass nametag. She felt stupid waiting
there, in this white plastic raincoat Prior had made her wear, like he didn’t think
her outfit was good enough. About a third of the crowd in the lobby were Japs she
figured for tourists. They all seemed to have recording gear of some kind—video, holo,
a few with simstim units on their belts—but otherwise they didn’t look like they had
a whole lot of money. She thought they were all supposed to have a lot.
Maybe they’re smart, don’t want to show it
, she decided.

She saw Prior slide a credit chip across the counter to the woman with the nametag,
who took it and zipped it along a metal slot.

Prior put her bag down on the bed, a wide slab of beige temperfoam, and touched a
panel that caused a wall of drapes to open. “It’s not the Ritz,” he said, “but we’ll
try to make you comfortable.”

Mona made a noncommittal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland and she couldn’t
see what that had to do with anything.

“Look,” he said, “your favorite.” He was standing beside the bed’s upholstered headboard.
There was a stim unit there, built in, and a little shelf with a set of trodes in
a plastic wrapper and about five cassettes. “All of Angie’s new stims.”

She wondered who’d put those cassettes there, and if they’d done it after Prior had
asked her what stims she liked. She showed him a smile of her own and went to the
window. The Sprawl looked like it did in stims; the window was like a hologram postcard,
famous buildings she didn’t know the names of but she knew they were famous.

Gray of the domes, geodesics picked out white with snow, behind that the gray of the
sky.

“Happy, baby?” Eddy asked, coming up behind her and putting his hands on her shoulders.

“They got showers here?”

Prior laughed. She shrugged out of Eddy’s loose grip and took her bag into the bathroom.
Closed and locked the door. She heard Prior’s laugh again, and Eddy starting up with
his scam talk. She sat on the toilet, opened her bag, and dug out the cosmetic kit
where she kept her wiz. She had four crystals left. That seemed like enough; three
was enough, but when she got down to two she usually started looking to score. She
didn’t do jumpers much, not every day anyway, except recently she had, but that was
because Florida had started to drive her crazy.

Now she could start tapering off, she decided, as she tapped a crystal out of the
vial. It looked like hard yellow candy; you had to crush it, then grind it up between
a pair of nylon screens. When you did that, it gave off a kind of hospital smell.

They were both gone, by the time she finished her shower. She’d stayed in until she
got bored with it, which took a long time. In Florida she’d mostly used showers at
public pools or bus stations, the kind you worked with tokens. She guessed there was
something hooked up to this one that measured the liters and put it on your bill;
that was how it worked at the Holiday Inn. There was a big white filter above the
plastic showerhead, and a sticker on the tile wall with an eye and a tear meant it
was okay to shower but don’t get it in your eyes, like swimming pool water. There
was a row of chrome spouts set into the tile, and when you punched a button under
each one you got shampoo, shower gel, liquid soap, bath oil. When you did that, a
little red dot lit up beside the button, because it went on your bill. On Prior’s
bill. She was glad they were gone, because she liked being alone and high and clean.
She didn’t get to be alone much, except on the street, and that wasn’t the same. She
left damp footprints on the beige carpet when she walked to the window. She was wrapped
in a big towel that matched the bed and the carpet and had a word shaved into the
fuzzy part, probably the name of the hotel.

There was an old-fashioned building a block away, and the corners of its stepped peak
had been carved down to make a kind of mountain, with rocks and grass, and a waterfall
that fell and hit rocks and then fell again. It made her smile, why anybody had gone
to that trouble. Drifts of steam came off the water, where it hit. It couldn’t just
fall down into the street, though, she thought, because it would cost too much. She
guessed they pumped it back up and used it over, around in a circle.

Something gray moved its head there, swung its big curly horns up like it was looking
at her. She took a step back on the carpet and blinked. Kind of a sheep, but it had
to be a remote, a hologram or something. It tossed its head and started eating grass.
Mona laughed.

She could feel the wiz down the backs of her ankles and across her shoulderblades,
a cold tight tingle, and the hospital smell at the back of her throat.

She’d been scared before but she wasn’t scared now.

Prior had a bad smile, but he was just a player, just a bent suit. If he had money,
it was somebody else’s. And she wasn’t scared of Eddy anymore; it was almost like
she was scared for him, because she could see what other people took him for.

Well, she thought, it didn’t matter; she wasn’t growing catfish in Cleveland anymore,
and no way anybody’d get her back to Florida again.

She remembered the alcohol stove, cold winter mornings, the old man hunched in his
big gray coat. Winters he’d put a second layer of plastic over the windows. The stove
was enough to heat the place, then, because the walls were covered with sheets of
hard foam, and chipboard
over that. Places where the foam showed, you could pick at it with your finger, make
holes; if he caught you doing it, he’d yell. Keeping the fish warm in cold weather
was more work; you had to pump water up to the roof, where the sun mirrors were, into
these clear plastic tubes. But the vegetable stuff rotting on the tank ledges helped,
too; steam rose off when you went to net a fish. He traded the fish for other kinds
of food, for things people grew, stove alcohol and the drinking kind, coffee beans,
garbage the fish ate.

He wasn’t her father and he’d said it often enough, when he’d talked at all. Sometimes
she still wondered if maybe he had been. When she’d first asked him how old she was,
he’d said six, so she counted from that.

She heard the door open behind her and turned; Prior was there, the gold plastic key
tab in his hand, beard open to show the smile. “Mona,” he said, stepping in, “this
is Gerald.” Tall, Chinese, gray suit, graying hair. Gerald smiled gently, edged in
past Prior, and went straight for the drawer thing opposite the foot of the bed. Put
a black case down and clicked it open. “Gerald’s a friend. He’s medical, Gerald. Needs
to have a look at you.”

“Mona,” Gerald said, removing something from the case, “how old are you?”

“She’s sixteen,” Prior said. “Right, Mona?”

“Sixteen,” Gerald said. The thing in his hands was like a pair of black goggles, sunglasses
with bumps and wires. “That’s stretching it a little, isn’t it?” He looked at Prior.