Mona Lisa Overdrive (23 page)

“I do hear voices, Porphyre.”

“Don’t we all, missy?”

“No,” she said, “not like mine. Do you know anything about African religions, Porphyre?”

He smirked. “I’m not African.”

“But when you were a child …”

“When I was a child,” Porphyre said, “I was white.”

“Oh …”

He laughed. “Religions, missy?”

“Before I came to the Net, I had friends. In New Jersey. They were black and … religious.”

He smirked again and rolled his eyes. “Hoodoo sign, missy? Chickenbone and pennyroyal
oil?”

“You know it isn’t like that.”

“And if I do?”

“Don’t tease me, Porphyre. I need you.”

“Missy has me. And yes, I know what you mean. And
those
are your voices?”

“They were. After I began to use the dust, they went away.…”

“And now?”

“They’re gone.” But the impulse was past now, and she cringed from trying to tell
him about Grande Brigitte and the drug in the jacket.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good, missy.”

The Lear began its descent over Ohio. Porphyre was staring at the bulkhead, still
as a statue. Angie looked out at the cloud-country below as it rose toward them, remembering
the game she’d played on airplanes as a child, sending an imaginary Angie out to romp
through cloud-canyons and over fluffy peaks grown magically solid. Those planes had
belonged to Maas-Neotek, she supposed. From the Maas corporate jets she’d gone on
to Net Lears. She knew commercial airliners only as locations for her stims: New York
to Paris on the maiden flight of JAL’s restored Concorde, with Robin and a hand-picked
party of Net people.

Descending. Were they over New Jersey yet? Did the children swarming the rooftop playgrounds
of Beauvoir’s arcology hear the Lear’s engine? Did the sound of her passage sweep
faintly over the condos of Bobby’s childhood? How unthinkably intricate the world
was, in sheer detail of mechanism, when Sense/Net’s corporate will shook tiny bones
in the ears of unknown, unknowing children.…

“Porphyre knows certain things,” he said, very softly. “But Porphyre needs time to
think, missy.…”

They were banking for the final approach.

And Sally was silent, on the street and in the cab, all the long cold way back to
their hotel.

Sally and Swain were being blackmailed by Sally’s enemy “up the well.” Sally was being
forced to kidnap Angie Mitchell. The thought of someone’s abducting the Sense/Net
star struck Kumiko as singularly unreal, as if someone were plotting to assassinate
a figure out of myth.

The Finn had implied that Angie herself was already involved, in some mysterious way,
but he had used words and idioms Kumiko hadn’t understood. Something in cyberspace;
people forming pacts with a thing or things there. The Finn had known a boy who became
Angie’s lover; but wasn’t Robin Lanier her lover? Kumiko’s mother had allowed her
to run several of the Angie and Robin stims. The boy had been a cowboy, a data thief,
like Tick in London.…

And what of the enemy, the blackmailer? She was mad, Finn said, and her madness had
brought about the decline of her family’s fortunes. She lived alone, in her ancestral
home, the house called Straylight. What had
Sally done to earn her enmity? Had she really killed this woman’s father? And who
were the others, the others who had died? Already she’d forgotten the gaijin names.…

And had Sally learned what she’d wanted to learn, in visiting the Finn? Kumiko had
waited, finally, for some pronouncement from the armored shrine, but the exchange
had wound down to nothing, to a gaijin ritual of joking goodbyes.

In the hotel lobby, Petal was waiting in a blue velour armchair. Dressed for travel,
his bulk encased in three-piece gray wool, he rose from the chair like some strange
balloon as they entered, eyes mild as ever behind steel-rimmed glasses.

“Hello,” he said, and coughed. “Swain’s sent me after you. Only to mind the girl,
you see.”

“Take her back,” Sally said. “Now. Tonight.”

“Sally! No!” But Sally’s hand was already locked firmly around Kumiko’s upper arm,
pulling her toward the entrance to the darkened lounge off the lobby.

“Wait there,” Sally snapped at Petal. “Listen to me,” she said, tugging Kumiko around
a corner, into shadow. “You’re going back. I can’t keep you here now.”

“But I don’t like it there. I don’t like Swain, or his house.… I …”

“Petal’s okay,” Sally said, leaning close and speaking quickly. “In a pinch, I’d say
trust him. Swain, well, you know what Swain is, but he’s your father’s. Whatever comes
down, I think they’ll keep you out of the way. But if it gets bad, really bad, go
to the pub where we met Tick. The Rose and Crown. Remember?”

Kumiko nodded, her eyes filling with tears.

“If Tick’s not there, find a barman named Bevan and mention my name.”

“Sally, I …”

“You’re okay,” Sally said, and kissed her abruptly, one of her lenses brushing for
an instant against Kumiko’s
cheekbone, startlingly cold and unyielding. “Me, baby, I’m gone.”

And she was, into the muted tinkle of the lounge, and Petal cleared his throat in
the entranceway.

The flight back to London was like a very long subway ride. Petal passed the time
inscribing words, a letter at a time, in some idiotic puzzle in an English fax, grunting
softly to himself. Eventually she slept, and dreamed of her mother.…

“Heater’s working,” Petal said, driving back to Swain’s from Heathrow. It was uncomfortably
warm in the Jaguar, a dry heat that smelled of leather and made her sinuses ache.
She ignored him, staring out at the wan morning light, at roofs shining black through
melting snow, rows of chimneypots.…

“He’s not angry with you, you know,” Petal said. “He feels a special responsibility.…”

“Giri.”

“Er … yes. Responsible, you see. Sally’s never been what you’d call predictable, really,
but we didn’t expect—”

“I don’t wish to talk, thank you.”

His small worried eyes in the mirror.

The crescent was lined with parked cars, long silver-gray cars with tinted windows.

“Seeing a lot of visitors this week,” Petal said, parking opposite number 17. He got
out, opened the door for her. She followed him numbly across the street and up the
gray steps, where the black door was opened by a squat, red-faced man in a tight dark
suit, Petal brushing past him as though he weren’t there.

“Hold on,” red-face said. “Swain’ll see her now.…”

The man’s words brought Petal up short; with a grunt, he spun around with disconcerting
speed and caught the man by his lapel.

“In future show some fucking respect,” Petal said, and though he hadn’t raised his
voice, somehow all of its weary gentleness was gone. Kumiko heard stitches pop.

“Sorry, guv.” The red face was carefully blank. “He told me to tell you.”

“Come along then,” Petal said to her, releasing his grip on the dark worsted lapel.
“He’ll just want to say hello.”

They found Swain seated at a three-meter oak refectory table in the room where she’d
first seen him, the dragons of rank buttoned away behind white broadcloth and a striped
silk tie. His eyes met hers as she entered, his long-boned face shadowed by a green-shaded
brass reading lamp that stood beside a small console and a thick sheaf of fax on the
table. “Good,” he said, “and how was the Sprawl?”

“I’m very tired, Mr. Swain. I wish to go to my room.”

“We’re glad to have you back, Kumiko. The Sprawl’s a dangerous place. Sally’s friends
there probably aren’t the sort of people your father would want you to associate with.”

“May I go to my room now?”

“Did you meet any of Sally’s friends, Kumiko?”

“No.”

“Really? What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“You mustn’t be angry with us, Kumiko. We’re protecting you.”

“Thank you. May I go to my room now?”

“Of course. You must be very tired.”

Petal followed her from the room, carrying her bag, his gray suit creased and wrinkled
from the flight. She was careful not to glance up as they passed beneath the blank
gaze of the marble bust where the Maas-Neotek unit might still be hidden, though with
Swain and Petal in the room she could think of no way to retrieve it.

There was a new sense of movement in the house, brisk and muted: voices, footsteps,
the rattle of the lift, the chattering of pipes as someone drew a bath.

She sat at the foot of the huge bed, staring at the black marble tub. Residual images
of New York seemed to hover at the borders of her vision; if she closed her eyes,
she found herself back in the alley, squatting beside Sally. Sally, who’d sent her
away. Who hadn’t looked back. Sally, whose name had once been Molly, or Misty, or
both. Again, her unworthiness. Sumida, her mother adrift in black water. Her father.
Sally.

Moments later, driven by a curiosity that pushed aside her shame, she rose from where
she lay, brushed her hair, zipped her feet into thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged
plastic soles, and went very quietly out into the corridor. When the lift arrived,
it stank of cigarette smoke.

Red-face was pacing the blue-carpeted foyer when she emerged from the lift, his hands
in the pockets of his tight black jacket. “ ’Ere,” he said, raising his eyebrows,
“you need something?”

“I’m hungry,” she said, in Japanese. “I’m going to the kitchen.”

“ ’Ere,” he said, removing his hands from his pockets and straightening the front
of his jacket, “you speak English?”

“No,” she said, and walked straight past him down the corridor and around the corner.
“ ’Ere,” she heard him say, rather more urgently, but she was already groping behind
the white bust.

She managed to slip the unit into her pocket as he rounded the corner. He surveyed
the room automatically, hands held loosely at his sides, in a way that suddenly reminded
her of her father’s secretaries.

“I’m hungry,” she said, in English.

Five minutes later, she’d returned to her room with a large and very British-looking
orange; the English seemed
to place no special value on the symmetry of fruit. Closing the door behind her, she
put the orange on the wide flat rim of the black tub and took the Maas-Neotek unit
from her pocket.

“Quickly now,” Colin said, tossing his forelock as he came into focus, “open it and
reset the A/B throw to A. The new regime has a technician making the rounds, scanning
for bugs. Once you’ve changed that setting, it shouldn’t read as a listening device.”
She did as he said, using a hairpin.

“What do you mean,” she asked, mouthing the words without voicing them, “ ‘the new
regime’?”

“Haven’t you noticed? There are at least a dozen staff now, not to mention numerous
visitors. Well, I suppose it’s less a new regime than an upgrading of procedure. Your
Mr. Swain is quite a social man, in his covert way. You’ve one conversation there,
Swain and the deputy head of Special Branch, that I imagine numerous people would
kill for, not least of them the aforementioned official.”

“Special Branch?”

“The secret police. Bloody odd company he keeps, Swain: Buck House types, czars from
the East End rookeries, senior police officers …”

“Buck House?”

“The Palace. Not to mention merchant bankers from the City, a simstim star, a drove
or two of expensive panders and drug merchants …”

“A simstim star?”

“Lanier, Robin Lanier.”

“Robin Lanier? He was here?”

“Morning after your precipitous departure.”

She looked into Colin’s transparent green eyes. “Are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Do you always?”

“To the extent that I know it, yes.”

“What are you?”

“A Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base programmed to aid and advise the Japanese
visitor in the United Kingdom.” He winked at her.

“Why did you wink?”

“Why d’you think?”

“Answer the question!” Her voice loud in the mirrored room.

The ghost touched his lips with a slim forefinger. “I’m something else as well, yes.
I do display a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program. Though the model
I’m based on is top of the line, extremely sophisticated. I can’t tell you exactly
what I am, though, because I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Again subvocally, carefully.

“I know all sorts of things,” he said, and went to one of the dormer windows. “I know
that a serving table in Middle Temple Hall is said to be made from the timbers of
the
Golden Hind;
that you climb one hundred and twenty-eight steps to the walkways of Tower Bridge;
that in Wood Street, right of Cheapside, is a plane tree thought to have been the
one in which Wordsworth’s thrush sang loud.…” He spun suddenly to face her. “It
isn’t
, though, because the current tree was cloned from the original in 1998. I know all
that, you see, and more, a very great deal more. I could, for instance, teach you
the rudiments of snooker. That
is
what I am, or rather what I was intended to be, originally. But I’m something else
as well, and very likely something to do with you. I don’t know what. I really don’t.”