Mona Lisa Overdrive

12 - Antarctica Starts Here

"I'm ready now," Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. "Touch the spread with your left hand." Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper's ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

Angie, wrapped in a white terry robe, faced the blond technician from the edge of the bed, the black test unit covering her forehead like a raised blindfold. She did as she was told, running the tips of her fingers lightly across the raw silk and unbleached linen of the rumpled bedspread.

"Good," Piper said, more to herself than to Angie, touching something on the board. "Again." Angie felt the weave thicken beneath her fingertips.

"Again." Another adjustment.

She could distinguish the individual fibers now, know silk from linen ...

"Again."

Her nerves screamed as her flayed fingertips grated against steel wool, ground glass ...

"Optimal," Piper said, opening blue eyes. She produced a tiny ivory vial from the sleeve of her kimono, removed its stopper, passed the vial to Angie.

Closing her eyes, Angie sniffed cautiously. Nothing.

"Again."

Something floral. Violets?

"Again."

Her head flooded with a nauseating greenhouse reek.

"Olfactory's up," Piper said, as the choking odor faded.

"Haven't noticed." She opened her eyes. Piper was offering her a tiny round of white paper. "As long as it's not fish," Angie said, licking the tip of her finger. She touched the dot of paper, raised her finger to her tongue. One of Piper's tests had once put her off seafood for a month.

"It's not fish," Piper said, smiling. She kept her hair short, a concise little helmet that played up the graphite gleam of the sockets inset behind either ear. Saint Joan in silicone, Porphyre said, and Piper's true passion seemed to be her work. She was Angie's personal technician, reputed to be the Net's best troubleshooter.

Caramel ...

"Who else is here, Piper?" Having completed the Usher, Piper was zipping her board into a fitted nylon case.

Angie had heard a helicopter arrive an hour earlier; she'd heard laughter, footsteps on the deck, as the dream receded. She'd abandoned her usual attempt to inventory sleep -- if it could be called sleep, the other's memories washing in, filling her, then draining away to levels she couldn't reach, leaving these afterimages ...

"Raebel," Piper said, "Lomas, Hickman, Ng, Porphyre, the Pope."

"Robin?"

"No."

"Continuity," she said, showering.

"Good morning, Angie."

"Freeside torus. Who owns it?"

"The torus has been renamed Mustique II by the current joint owners, the Julianna Group and Carribbana Orbital."

"Who owned it when Tally taped there?"

"Tessier-Ashpool S.A."

"I want to know more about Tessier-Ashpool."

"Antarctica starts here."

She stared up through the steam at the white circle of the speaker. "What did you just say?"

"Antarctica Starts Here is a two-hour video study of the Tessier-Ashpool family by Hans Becker, Angie."

"Do you have it?"

"Of course. David Pope accessed it recently. He was quite impressed."

"Really? How recently?"

"Last Monday."

"I'll see it tonight, then."

"Done. Is that all?"

"Yes."

"Goodbye, Angie."

David Pope. Her director. Porphyre said that Robin was telling people she heard voices. Had he told Pope? She touched a ceramic panel; the spray grew hotter. Why was Pope interested in Tessier-Ashpool? She touched the panel again and gasped under needles of suddenly frigid water.

Inside out, outside in, the figures of that other landscape arriving soon, too soon ...

Porphyre was posed by the window when she entered the living room, a Masai warrior in shoulder-padded black silk crepe and black leather sarong. The others cheered when they saw her, and Porphyre turned and grinned.

"Took us by surprise," Rick Raebel said, sprawled on the pale couch. He was effects and editing. "Hilton figured you'd want more of a break."

"They pulled us in from all over, dear," Kelly Hickman added. "I was in Bremen, and the Pope was up the well in full art mode, weren't you, David?" He looked to the director for confirmation.

Pope, who was straddling one of the Louis XVI chairs backward, his arms crossed along the top of its fragile back, smiled wearily, dark hair tangled above his thin face. When Angie's schedule allowed for it, Pope made documentaries for Net/Knowledge. Shortly after she'd signed with the Net, Angie participated anonymously in one of Pope's minimalist art pieces, an endless stroll across dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky. Three months later, the arc of her career firmly under way, an unlicensed version of the tape became an underground classic.

Karen Lomas, who did Angie's in-fills, smiled from the chair left of Pope. To his right, Kelly Hickman, wardrobe, sat on the bleached floor beside Brian Ng, Piper's gofer-cum-understudy.

"Well," Angie said, "I'm back. I'm sorry to have hung all of you up, but it had to be done."

There was a silence. Minute creaks from the gilt chairs. Brian Ng coughed.

"We're just glad you're back," Piper said, coming in from the kitchen with a cup of coffee in either hand.

They cheered again, somewhat self-consciously this time, then laughed.

"Where's Robin?" Angie asked.

"Mistah Lanier in London," Porphyre said, hands on his leather-wrapped hips.

"Expected hourly," Pope said dryly, getting up and accepting a coffee from Piper.

"What were you doing in orbit, David?" Angie asked, taking the other cup.

"Hunting solitaries."

"Solitude?"

"Solitaries. Hermits."

"Angie," Hickman said, springing up, "you have to see this satin cocktail number Devicq sent last week! And I've got all of Nakamura's swimwear ... "

"Yes, Kelly, but -- "

But Pope had already turned to say something to Raebel.

"Hey," Hickman said, beaming with enthusiasm, "come on! Let's try it on!"

Pope spent most of the day with Piper, Karen Lomas, and Raebel, discussing the results of the Usher and the endless minor details of what they referred to as Angie's reinsertion. After lunch, Brian Ng went along with her to her physical, which was conducted in a private clinic in a mirror-clad compound on Beverly Boulevard.

During the very brief wait in the white, plant-filled reception area -- surely a matter of ritual, as though a medical appointment that involved no wait might seem incomplete, inauthentic -- Angie found herself wondering, as she'd wondered many times before, why her father's mysterious legacy, the vévés he'd drawn in her head, had never been detected by this or any other clinic.

Her father, Christopher Mitchell, had headed the hybridoma project that had allowed Maas Biolabs a virtual monopoly in the early manufacture of biochips. Turner, the man who had taken her to New York, had given her a kind of dossier on her father, a biosoft compiled by a Maas security AI. She'd accessed the dossier four times in as many years; finally, one very drunken night in Greece, she'd flung the thing from the deck of an Irish industrialist's yacht after a shouting match with Bobby. She no longer recalled the cause of the fight, but she did remember the mingled sense of loss and relief as the squat little nub of memory struck the water.

Perhaps her father had designed his handiwork so that it was somehow invisible to the scans of the neuro-technicians. Bobby had his own theory, one she had suspected was closer to the truth. Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vévés transparent ... Legba, after all, had orchestrated her debut in the industry and the subsequent rise that had seen her eclipse Tally Isham's fifteen-year career as Net megastar.

But it had been so long since the loa had ridden her, and now, Brigitte had said, the vévés had been redrawn ...

"Hilton had Continuity front a head for you today," Ng told her, as she waited.

"Oh?"

"Public statement on your decision to go to Jamaica, praise for the methods of the clinic, the dangers of drugs, renewed enthusiasm for your work, gratitude to your audience, stock footage of the Malibu place ... "

Continuity could generate video images of Angie, animate them with templates compiled from her stims. Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.

A chime sounded, beyond the greenery.

Returning from the city, she found caterers preparing for a barbecue on the deck.

She lay on the couch beneath the Valmier and listened to the surf. From the kitchen, she could hear Piper explaining the results of the physical to Pope. There was no need, really -- she'd been given the cleanest possible bill of health -- but both Pope and Piper were fond of detail.

When Piper and Raebel put on sweaters and went out onto the deck, where they stood warming their hands above the coals, Angie found herself alone in the living room with the director.

"You were about to tell me, David, what you were doing up the well ... "

"Looking for serious loners." He ran a hand back across his tangled hair. "It grows out of something I wanted to do last year, with intentional communities in Africa. Trouble was, when I got up there, I learned that anyone who goes that far, who'll actually live alone in orbit, is generally determined to stay that way."

"You were taping, yourself? Interviews?"

"No. I wanted to find people like that and talk them into recording segments themselves."

"Did you?"

"No. I heard stories, though. Some great stories. A tug pilot claimed there were feral children living in a mothballed Japanese drug factory. There's a whole new apocrypha out there, really -- ghost ships, lost cities ... There's a pathos to it, when you think about it. I mean, every bit of it's locked into orbit. All of it manmade, known, owned, mapped. Like watching myths take root in a parking lot. But I suppose people need that, don't they?"

"Yes," she said, thinking of Legba, of Mamman Brigitte, the thousand candles ...

"I wish, though," he said, "that I could've gotten through to Lady Jane. Such an amazing story. Pure gothic."

"Lady Jane?"

"Tessier-Ashpool. Her family built Freeside torus. High-orbit pioneers. Continuity has a marvelous video ... They say she killed her father. She's the last of the line. Money ran out years ago. She sold everything, had her place sawn off the tip of the spindle and towed out to a new orbit ... "

She sat up on the couch, her knees together, fingers locked across them. Sweat trickled down across her ribs.

"You don't know the story?"

"No," she said.

"That's interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news. The mother was Tessier, the father Ashpool. They built Freeside when there was nothing else like it. Got fantastically rich in the process. Probably running a very close second to Josef Virek when Ashpool died. And of course they'd gotten wonderfully weird in the meantime, had taken to cloning their children wholesale ... "

"It sounds ... terrible. And you tried, you did try to find her?"

"Well, I made inquiries. Continuity had gotten me this Becker video, and of course her orbit's in the book, but it's no good dropping by if you haven't been invited, is it? And then Hilton buzzed me to get back here and back to work ... Aren't you feeling well?"

"Yes, I ... I think I'll change now, put on something warmer."

After they'd eaten, when coffee was being served, she excused herself and said goodnight.

Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He'd stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was. All the things the drug had fenced away.

"Missy, take care," he said, too quietly for the others to hear.

"I'm fine," she said. "Too many people. I'm still not used to it."

He stood there looking up at her, the glow of dying coals behind his elegantly crafted, subtly inhuman skull, until she turned and climbed the stairs.

She heard the helicopter come for them an hour later.

"House," she said, "I'll see the video from Continuity now."

As the wallscreen slid down into place, she opened the bedroom door and stood for a moment at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Surf, the hum of the dishwasher, wind buffeting the windows that faced the deck.

She turned back to the screen and shivered at the face she saw there in a grainy freeze-frame headshot, avian eyebrows arched above dark eyes, high fragile cheekbones, and a wide, determined mouth. The image expanded steadily, into the darkness of an eye, black screen, a white point, growing, lengthening, becoming the tapered spindle of Freeside. Credits began to flash in German.

"Hans Becker," the house began, reciting the Net library's intro-critique, "is an Austrian video artist whose hallmark is an obsessive interrogation of rigidly delimited fields of visual information. His approaches range from classical montage to techniques borrowed from industrial espionage, deep-space imaging, and kino-archaeology. Antarctica Starts Here, his examination of images of the Tessier-Ashpool family, currently stands as the high point of his career. The pathologically media-shy industrial clan, operating from the total privacy of their orbital home, posed a remarkable challenge."

The white of the spindle filled the screen as the final credit vanished. An image tracked to center screen, snapshot of a young woman in loose dark clothes, background indistinct. MARIE-FRANCE TESSIER, MOROCCO.

This wasn't the face in the opening shot, the face of invading memory, yet it seemed to promise it, as though a larval image lay beneath the surface.

The soundtrack wove atonal filaments through strata of static and indistinct voices as the image of Marie-France was replaced by a formal monochrome portrait of a young man in a starched wing collar. It was a handsome face, finely proportioned, but very hard somehow, and in the eyes a look of infinite boredom. JOHN HARNESS ASHPOOL, OXFORD.

Yes, she thought, and I've met you many times. I know your story, though I'm not allowed to touch it.

But I really don't think I like you at all, do I, Mr. Ashpool?