Mona Lisa Overdrive

10 - The Shape

He spent an hour checking the saw's bearings, then lubed them again. It was already too cold to work; he'd have to go ahead and heat the room where he kept the others, the Investigators and the Corpsegrinder and the Witch. That in itself would be enough to disturb the balance of his arrangement with Gentry, but it faded beside the problem of explaining his agreement with Kid Afrika and the fact of two strangers in Factory. There was no way to argue with Gentry; the juice was his, because he was the one who fiddled it out of the Fission Authority; without Gentry's monthly passes on the console, the ritual moves that kept the Authority convinced Factory was somewhere else, some place that paid its bill, there wouldn't be any electricity.

And Gentry was so strange anyway, he thought, feeling his knees creak as he stood up and took the Judge's control unit from his jacket pocket. Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form. Not that that was the weirdest idea Slick had ever run across, but Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the Shape mattered totally. The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry's grail.

Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn't there? And if that something was something, then wasn't that part of the universe too? This was exactly the kind of thing you didn't want to get into with Gentry, because Gentry could tie your head in knots. But Slick didn't think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. The Fission Authority had always looked like a big red Aztec pyramid, but it didn't have to; if the FA wanted it to, they could have it look like anything. Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?

He touched the unit's power stud; the Judge, ten meters away, hummed and trembled.

Slick Henry hated the Judge. That was what the art people never understood. That didn't mean it didn't give him pleasure to have built the thing, to have gotten the Judge out, out where he could see him and keep track of him and finally, sort of, be free of the idea of him, but that sure wasn't the same as liking him.

Nearly four meters tall, half as broad at the shoulders, headless, the Judge stood trembling in his patchwork carapace the color of rust gone a certain way, like the handles of an old wheelbarrow, polished by the friction of a thousand hands. He'd found a way to get that surface with chemicals and abrasives, and he'd used it on most of the Judge; the old parts anyway, the scavenged parts, not the cold teeth of the circular blades or the mirrored surfaces of the joints, but the rest of the Judge was that color, that finish, like a very old tool still in hard daily use.

He thumbed the joystick and the Judge took one step forward, then another. The gyros were working perfectly; even with an arm off, the thing moved with a terrible dignity, planting its huge feet just so.

Slick grinned in Factory's gloom as the Judge clomped toward him, one-two, one-two. He could remember every step of the Judge's construction, if he wanted to, and sometimes he did, just for the comfort of being able to.

He couldn't remember when he hadn't been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could.

That was why he had built the Judge, because he'd done something -- it hadn't been anything much, but he'd been caught doing it, twice -- and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn't been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people's cars. They made sure you remembered what you did.

Working the joystick, he got the Judge turned around and walked him into the next room, along an aisle between rows of damp-stained concrete pads that had once supported lathes and spot welders. High overhead, up in the gloom and dusty beams, dangled dead fluorescent fixtures where birds sometimes nested.

Korsakov's, they called that, something they did to your neurons so that short-term memories wouldn't stick. So that the time you did was time you lost, but he'd heard they didn't do it anymore, or anyway not for grand theft auto. People who hadn't been there thought it sounded easy, like jail but then it's all erased, but it wasn't like that. When he'd gotten out, when it was over -- three years strung out in a long vague flickering chain of fear and confusion measured off in five-minute intervals, and it wasn't the intervals you could remember so much as the transitions ... When it was over, he'd needed to build the Witch, the Corpsegrinder, then the Investigators, and finally, now, the Judge.

As he guided the Judge up the concrete ramp to the room where the others waited, he heard Gentry gunning his motor out on Dog Solitude.

People made Gentry uncomfortable, Slick thought as he headed for the stairs, but it worked both ways. Strangers could feel the Shape burning behind Gentry's eyes; his fixation came across in everything he did. Slick had no idea how he got along on his trips to the Sprawl; maybe he just dealt with people who were as intense as he was, loners on the jagged fringes of the drug and software markets. He didn't seem to care about sex at all, to the extent that Slick had no idea what it was he'd have wanted if he'd decided to care.

Sex was the Solitude's main drawback, as far as Slick was concerned, particularly in the winter. Summers, sometimes, he could find a girl in one of those rusty little towns; that was what had taken him to Atlantic City that time and gotten him in the Kid's debt. Lately he told himself the best solution was just to concentrate on his work, but climbing the shuddering steel stairs to the catwalk that led to Gentry's space, he found himself wondering what Cherry Chesterfield looked like under all those jackets. He thought about her hands, how they were clean and quick, but that made him see the unconscious face of the man on the stretcher, the tube feeding stuff into his left nostril, Cherry dabbing at his sunken cheeks with a tissue; made him wince.

"Hey, Gentry," he bellowed out into the iron void of Factory, "comin' up ... "

Three things about Gentry weren't sharp and thin and tight: his eyes, his lips, his hair. His eyes were large and pale, gray or blue depending on the light; his lips were full and mobile; his hair was swept back into a ragged blond roostertail that quivered when he walked. His thinness wasn't Bird's emaciation, born of a stringtown diet and bad nerves; Gentry was just narrow, the muscle packed in close, no fat at all. He dressed sharp and tight, too, black leather trimmed with jet-black beads, a style Slick remembered from his days in the Deacon Blues. The beads, as much as anything, made Slick think he was about thirty; Slick was about thirty himself.

Gentry stared as Slick stepped through the door into the glare of ten 100-watt bulbs, making sure Slick knew he was another obstacle coming between Gentry and the Shape. He was putting a pair of motorcycle panniers up on his long steel table; they looked heavy.

Slick had cut roof panels away, installed struts where needed, covered the holes with sheets of rigid plastic, caulked the resulting skylights with silicone. Then Gentry came in with a mask and a sprayer and twenty gallons of white latex paint; he didn't dust or clean anything, just lay down a thick coat over all the crud and desiccated pigeonshit, sort of glued it all down and painted over it again until it was more or less white. He painted everything but the skylights, then Slick started winching gear up from Factory's floor, a small truckload of computers, cyberspace decks, a huge old holo-projection table that nearly broke the winch, effect generators, dozens of corrugated plastic cartons stuffed with the thousands of fiche Gentry had accumulated in his quest for the Shape, hundreds of meters of optics, on bright new plastic reels, that spoke to Slick of industrial theft. And books, old books with covers made of cloth glued over cardboard. Slick hadn't ever known how heavy books were. They had a sad smell, old books.

"You're pulling a few more amps, since I left," Gentry said, opening the first of the two panniers. "In your room. Get a new heater?" He began to root quickly through the contents, as though he were looking for something he needed but had misplaced. He wasn't, though, Slick knew; it was having to have someone, even someone he knew, unexpectedly in his space.

"Yeah. I gotta heat the storage area again, too. Too cold to work, otherwise."

"No," Gentry said, looking up suddenly, "that's not a heater in your room. The amperage is wrong."

"Yeah." Slick grinned, on the theory that grinning made Gentry think he was stupid and easily cowed.

" 'Yeah' what, Slick Henry?"

"It's not a heater."

Gentry closed the pannier with a snap. "You can tell me what it is or I can cut your power."

"Y'know, Gentry, I wasn't around here, you'd have a lot less time for ... things." Slick raised his eyebrows meaningfully in the direction of the big projection table. "Fact is, I got two people staying with me ... " He saw Gentry stiffen, the pale eyes widen. "But you won't see either of 'em, won't hear 'em, nothing."

"No," Gentry said, his voice tight, as he rounded the end of the table, "because you're going to get them out of here, aren't you?"

"Two weeks max, Gentry."

"Out. Now." Gentry's face was inches away and Slick smelled the sour breath of exhaustion. "Or you go with them."

Slick outweighed Gentry by ten kilos, most of it muscle, but that had never intimidated Gentry; Gentry didn't seem to know or care that he could be hurt. That was intimidating in its own way. Gentry had slapped him, once, hard, in the face, and Slick had looked down at the huge chrome-moly wrench in his own hand and had felt an obscure embarrassment.

Gentry was holding himself rigid, starting to tremble. Slick had a pretty good idea that Gentry didn't sleep when he went to Boston or New York. He didn't always sleep that much in Factory either. Came back strung and the first day was always the worst. "Look," Slick said, the way somebody might to a child on the verge of tears, and pulled the bag from his pocket, the bribe from Kid Afrika. He held up the clear plastic Ziploc for Gentry to see: blue derms, pink tablets, a nasty-looking turd of opium in a twist of red cellophane, crystals of wiz like fat yellow throat lozenges, plastic inhalers with the Japanese manufacturer's name scraped off with a knife ... "From Afrika," Slick said, dangling the Ziploc.

"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 ... "