Mona Lisa Overdrive (22 page)

Slick cursed him softly as he fumbled the delicate net of contact dermatrodes across
his forehead and temples.

Jacked in.

His boots crunched gravel.

Opened his eyes and looked down; the gravel drive smooth in the dawn, cleaner than
anything in Dog Solitude. He looked up and saw where it curved away, and beyond green
and spreading trees the pitched slate roof of a house half the size of Factory. There
were statues near him in the long wet grass. A deer made of iron, and a broken figure
of a man’s body carved from white stone, no head or arms or legs. Birds were singing
and that was the only sound.

He started walking up the drive, toward the gray house, because there didn’t seem
to be anything else to do. When he got to the head of the drive, he could see past
the house to smaller buildings and a broad flat field of grass where gliders were
staked against the wind.

Fairytale
, he thought, looking up at the mansion’s broad stone brow, the leaded diamond panes;
like some vid he’d seen when he was little. Were there really people who lived in
places like this?
But it’s not a place
, he reminded himself,
it only feels like it is
.

“Gentry,” he said, “get my ass out of this, okay?”

He studied the backs of his hands. Scars, ingrained grime, black half-moons of grease
under his broken nails. The grease got in and made them soft, so they broke easy.

He started to feel stupid, standing there. Maybe somebody was watching him from the
house. “Fuck it,” he said, and started up the broad flagstone walk, unconsciously
hitching his stride into the swagger he’d learned in the Deacon Blues.

The door had this thing fastened to a central panel: a hand, small and graceful, holding
a sphere the size of a poolball, all cast in iron. Hinged at the wrist so you could
raise it and bring it down. He did. Hard. Twice, then twice again. Nothing happened.
The doorknob was brass,
floral detail worn almost invisible by years of use. It turned easily. He opened the
door.

He blinked at a wealth of color and texture; surfaces of dark polished wood, black
and white marble, rugs with a thousand soft colors that glowed like church windows,
polished silver, mirrors.… He grinned at the soft shock of it, his eyes pulled from
one new sight to another, so many things, objects he had no name for.…

“You looking for anyone in particular, Jack?”

The man stood in front of a vast fireplace, wearing tight black jeans and a white
T-shirt. His feet were bare and he held a fat glass bulb of liquor in his right hand.
Slick blinked at him.

“Shit,” Slick said, “you’re him.…”

The man swirled the brown stuff up around the edges of the glass and took a swallow.
“I expected Afrika to pull something like this eventually,” he said, “but somehow,
buddy, you don’t look like his style of help.”

“You’re the Count.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m the Count. Who the fuck are you?”

“Slick. Slick Henry.”

He laughed. “Want some cognac, Slick Henry?” He gestured with the glass toward a piece
of polished wooden furniture where ornate bottles stood in a row, each one with a
little silver tag hung around it on a chain.

Slick shook his head.

The man shrugged. “Can’t get drunk on it anyway … Pardon my saying so, Slick, but
you look like shit. Am I correct in guessing that you are not a part of Kid Afrika’s
operation? And if not, just what exactly are you doing here?”

“Gentry sent me.”

“Gentry who?”

“You’re the guy on the stretcher, right?”

“The guy on the stretcher is me. Where, exactly, right this minute, is that stretcher,
Slick?”

“Gentry’s.”

“Where’s that?”

“Factory.”

“And where is
that
?”

“Dog Solitude.”

“And how did I happen to get there, wherever that is?”

“Kid Afrika, he brought you. Brought you with this girl name of Cherry, right? See,
I owed him a favor, so he wanted me to put you up awhile, you an’ Cherry, and she’s
taking care of you.”

“You called me Count, Slick.…”

“Cherry said Kid called you that once.”

“Tell me, Slick, did the Kid seem worried when he brought me?”

“Cherry thought he got scared, back in Cleveland.”

“I’m sure he did. Who’s this Gentry? A friend of yours?”

“Factory’s his place. I live there too.…”

“This Gentry, is he a cowboy, Slick? A console jockey? I mean, if you’re here, he
must be technical, right?”

Now it was Slick’s turn to shrug. “Gentry’s, like, he’s an artist, kind of. Has these
theories. Hard to explain. He rigged a set of splitters to that thing on the stretcher,
what you’re jacked into. First he tried to get an image on a holo rig, but there was
just this monkey thing, sort of shadow, so he talked me into …”

“Jesus … Well, never mind. This factory you’re talking about, it’s out in the sticks
somewhere? It’s relatively isolated?”

Slick nodded.

“And this Cherry, she’s some kind of hired nurse?”

“Yeah. Had a med-tech’s ticket, she said.”

“And nobody’s come looking for me yet?”

“No.”

“That’s good, Slick. Because if anyone does, other
than my lying rat-bastard friend Kid Afrika, you folks could find yourselves in serious
trouble.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Listen to me, okay? I want you to remember this. If any company shows up at
this factory of yours, your only hope in hell is to get me jacked into the matrix.
You got that?”

“How come you’re the Count? I mean, what’s it mean?”

“Bobby. My name’s Bobby. Count was my handle once, that’s all. You think you’ll remember
what I told you?”

Slick nodded again.

“Good.” He put his glass down on the thing with all the fancy bottles. “Listen,” he
said. From the open door came the sound of tires over gravel. “Know who that is, Slick?
That’s Angela Mitchell.”

Slick turned. Bobby the Count was looking out at the drive.

“Angie Mitchell? The stim star? She’s in this thing too?”

“In a manner of speaking, Slick, in a manner of speaking …”

Slick saw the long black car slide by. “Hey,” he began, “Count, I mean Bobby, what
d—”

“Easy,” Gentry was saying, “just sit back. Easy. Easy …”

While Kelly and his assistants were assembling her wardrobe for the trip, she felt
as though the house itself were stirring around her, preparing for one of its many
brief periods of vacancy.

She could hear their voices, from where she sat in the living room, their laughter.
One of the assistants was a girl in a blue polycarbon exo that allowed her to carry
the Hermès wardrobe cases as though they were weightless blocks of foam, the humming
skeleton suit padding softly down the stairs on its blunt dinosaur feet. Blue skeleton,
leather coffins.

Now Porphyre stood in the doorway. “Missy ready?” He wore a long, loose coat cut from
tissue-thin black leather; rhinestone spurs glittered above the heels of black patent
boots.

“Porphyre,” she said, “you’re in mufti. We have an entrance to make, in New York.”

“The cameras are for you.”

“Yes,” she said, “for my reinsertion.”

“Porphyre will keep well in the rear.”

“I’ve never known you to worry about upstaging anyone.”

He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an avant-garde dentist’s fantasy
of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.

“Danielle Stark will be flying with us.” She heard the sound of the approaching helicopter.
“She’s meeting us at LAX.”

“We’ll strangle her,” he said, his tone confidential, as he helped her on with the
blue fox Kelly had selected. “If we promise to hint to the fax that the motive was
sexual, she might even decide to play along.…”

“You’re horrid.”

“Danielle is a horror, missy.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Ah,” said the hairdresser, narrowing his eyes, “but my soul is a child’s.”

Now the helicopter was landing.

Danielle Stark, associated with stim versions of both
Vogue-Nippon
and
Vogue-Europa
, was widely rumored to be in her late eighties. If it were true, Angie thought, covertly
inspecting the journalist’s figure as the three of them boarded the Lear, Danielle
and Porphyre would be on par for overall surgical modification. Apparently in her
willowy early thirties, her only obvious augments were a pair of pale blue Zeiss implants.
A young French fashion reporter had once referred to these as “modishly outdated”;
the reporter, Net legend said, had never worked again.

And soon, Angie knew, Danielle would want to talk drugs, celebrity drugs, the cornflower
eyes schoolgirl-wide to take it all in.

Under Porphyre’s daunting gaze, Danielle managed to contain herself until they were
in cruise mode somewhere over Utah.

“I was hoping,” she began, “that I wouldn’t have to be the one to bring it up.”

“Danielle,” Angie countered, “I
am
sorry. How thoughtless.” She touched the veneered face of the Hosaka flight kitchen,
which purred softly and began to dispense tiny plates of tea-smoked duck, gulf oysters
on black-pepper toast, crayfish flan, sesame pancakes.… Porphyre, taking Angie’s cue,
produced a bottle of chilled Chablis—Danielle’s favorite, Angie now recalled. Someone—Swift?—had
also remembered.

“Drugs,” Danielle said, fifteen minutes later, finishing the last of the duck.

“Don’t worry,” Porphyre assured her. “When you get to New York, they have anything
you want.”

Danielle smiled. “You’re so amusing. Do you know I’ve a copy of your birth certificate?
I know your real name.” She looked at him meaningfully, still smiling.

“ ‘Sticks and stones,’ ” he said, topping up her glass.

“Interesting notation regarding congenital defects.” She sipped her wine.

“Congenital, genital … We all change so
much
these days, don’t we? Who’s been doing your hair, dear?” He leaned forward. “Your
saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human.”

Danielle smiled.

The interview itself went smoothly enough; Danielle was too skilled an interviewer
to allow her feints to cross the pain threshold, where they might rally serious resistance.
But when she brushed a fingertip back across her temple, depressing a subdermal switch
that deactivated her recording gear, Angie tensed for the real onslaught.

“Thank you,” Danielle said. “The rest of the flight, of course, is off the record.”

“Why don’t you just have another bottle or two and turn in?” Porphyre asked.

“What I don’t see, dear,” Danielle said, ignoring him, “is why you
bothered.…
”

“Why I bothered, Danielle?”

“Going to that tedious clinic at all. You’ve said it didn’t affect your work. You’ve
also said there was no ‘high,’ not in the usual sense.” She giggled. “Though you do
maintain that it was such a terribly addictive substance. Why
did
you decide to quit?”

“It was terribly expensive.…”

“In your case, surely, that’s academic.”

True
, Angie thought,
though a week of it did cost something in the vicinity of your annual salary
.

“I suppose I began to resent paying to feel normal. Or a poor approximation of normal.”

“Did you build up a tolerance?”

“No.”

“How odd.”

“Not really. These designers provide substances that supposedly bypass the traditional
drawbacks.”

“Ah. But what about the new drawbacks, the
now
drawbacks?” Danielle poured herself more wine. “I’ve heard another version of all
this, of course.”

“You have?”

“Of course I have. What it was, who made it, why you quit.”

“Yes?”

“It was an antipsychotic, produced in Sense/Net’s own labs. You quit taking it because
you’d rather be crazy.”

Porphyre gently took the glass from Danielle’s hand as her lids fluttered heavily
over the brilliant blue eyes. “Nightie-night, dear,” he said. Danielle’s eyes closed
and she began to snore gently.

“Porphyre, what—?”

“I dosed her wine,” he said. “She won’t know the difference, missy. She won’t remember
anything she didn’t
record.…” He grinned broadly. “You really didn’t want to have to listen to this bitch
all the way back, did you?”

“But she’ll know, Porphyre!”

“No, she won’t. We’ll tell her she killed three bottles by herself and made a disgusting
mess in the washroom. And she’ll
feel
like it, too.” He giggled.

Danielle Stark was still snoring, quite loudly now, in one of the two swing-down bunks
in the rear of the cabin.

“Porphyre,” Angie said, “do you think she might’ve been right?”

The hairdresser gazed at her with his gorgeous, inhuman eyes. “And you wouldn’t have
known?”

“I don’t know.…”

He sighed. “Missy worries too much. You’re free now. Enjoy it.”