Mona Lisa Overdrive

19 - Under the Knife

Hotel again, sinking into the deathmarch of wiz-crash, Prior leading her into the lobby, Japanese tourists already up and clustering around bored-looking guides. And one foot, one foot, one foot after the other, her head so heavy now, like somebody punched a hole in the top, poured in a quarter-kilo of dull lead, and her teeth felt like they belonged to somebody else, too big; she slumped against the side of the elevator when its extra gravity pressed down.

"Where's Eddy?"

"Eddy's gone, Mona."

Got her eyes open wide and she looked at him, seeing the smile was back, bastard. "What?"

"Eddy's been bought out. Compensated. He's on his way to Macau with a line of credit. Nice little gambling junket."

"Compensated?"

"For his investment. In you. For his time."

"His time?" The doors slid open on blue-carpeted corridor.

And something falling through her, cold: Eddy hated gambling.

"You're working for us now, Mona. We wouldn't want you off on your own again."

But you did, she thought, you let me go. And you knew where to find me.

Eddy 's gone ...

She didn't remember falling asleep. She was still wearing the dress, Michael's jacket tucked up around her shoulders like a blanket. She could see the corner of the mountainside building without moving her head, but the bighorn wasn't there.

The Angie stims were still sealed in plastic. She took one at random, slit the wrapper with her thumbnail, slotted it, and put the trodes on. She wasn't thinking; her hands seemed to know what to do, friendly animals that wouldn't hurt her. One of them touched PLAY and she slid into the Angie-world, pure as any drug, slow saxophone and limo glide through some European city, how the streets revolved around her, around the driverless car, broad avenues, dawn-clean and almost empty, with the touch of fur against her shoulders, and rolling on, down a straight road through flat fields, edged with perfect, identical trees.

And turning, tires over raked gravel, up a winding drive through parkland where the dew was silver, here an iron deer, there a wet white marble torso ... The house was vast, old, unlike any house she'd seen before, but the car swung past it, then passed several smaller buildings, coming at last to the edge of a smooth broad field.

There were gliders tethered there, translucent membrane drawn taut over fragile-looking frames of polycarbon. They quivered slightly in the morning breeze. Robin Lanier was waiting beside them, handsome, easy Robin in a rough black sweater, who played opposite Angie in almost all of her stims.

And she was leaving the car now, taking to the field, laughing when her heels sank into the grass. And the rest of the way to Robin with her shoes in her hand, grinning, into his arms and his smell, his eyes.

A whirl, a dance of editing, condensing the business of boarding the glider on the silver induction rail, and they were flung smoothly down the length of the field, lifting now, banking to catch the wind, and up, up, until the great house was an angular pebble in a swathe of green, green cut by a dull gleam of curving river -

-and Prior's hand on STOP, smell of food from the cart beside the bed knotting her stomach, the dull sick ache of wiz-crash in every joint. "Eat," he said. "We're leaving soon." He took the metal cover from one of the plates. "Club sandwich," he said, "coffee, pastries. Doctor's orders. Once you're at the clinic, you won't be eating for a while ... "

"Clinic?"

"Gerald's place. Baltimore."

"Why?"

"Gerald's a cosmetic surgeon. You're having some work done. All of it reversible later, if you want, but we think you'll be pleased with the results. Very pleased." The smile. "Anyone ever tell you how much you look like Angie, Mona?"

She looked up at him, said nothing. Managed to sit up, to drink half a cup of watery black coffee. She couldn't bring herself to look at the sandwich, but she ate one of the pastries. It tasted like cardboard.

Baltimore. She wasn't too sure where that was.

And somewhere a glider hung forever above a tame green country, fur against her shoulder, and Angie must still be there, still laughing ...

An hour later, in the lobby, while Prior signed the bill, she saw Eddy's black gator-clone suitcases go by on a robot baggage cart, and that was when she knew for sure that he was dead.

Gerald's office had a sign with big old-fashioned letters, fourth floor of a condo rack in what Prior said was Baltimore. The kind of building where they throw up a framework and commercial tenants bring their own modules, plug-ins. Like a highrise trailer camp, everything snaked with bundled cables, optics, lines for sewage and water. "What's it say?" she asked Prior.

"Gerald Chin, Dentist."

"You said he was a plastic surgeon."

"He is."

"Why can't we just go to a boutique like everybody else?"

He didn't answer.

She couldn't really feel much now, and part of her knew that she wasn't as scared as she should be. Maybe that was okay, though, because if she got scared enough she wouldn't be able to do anything, and definitely she wanted to get out of the whole deal, whatever it was. On the drive over, she'd discovered this lump in the pocket of Michael's jacket. It had taken her ten minutes to figure out it was a shockrod, like nervous suits carried. It felt like a screwdriver handle with a pair of blunt metal horns where the shaft should be. It probably charged off wall current; she just hoped Michael had kept up the charge. She figured Prior didn't know it was there. They were legal, most places, because they weren't supposed to do much permanent damage, but Lanette had known a girl who'd gotten worked over real bad with one and never got much better.

If Prior didn't know it was in her pocket, it meant he didn't know everything, and he had a stake in having her think he did. But then he hadn't known how much Eddy hated gambling.

She couldn't feel much about Eddy, either, except she still figured he was dead. No matter how much they'd given him, he still wouldn't walk out without those cases. Even if he was going for a whole new wardrobe he'd need to get all dressed up to go shopping for it. Eddy cared about clothes more than almost anything. And those gator cases were special; he'd got 'em off a hotel thief in Orlando, and they were the closest thing he had to a home. And anyway, now that she thought about it, she couldn't see him going for a buy-out bid, because what he wanted most in the whole world was to be part of some big deal. Once he was, he figured, people would start to take him seriously.

So somebody finally took him seriously, she thought, as Prior carried her bag into Gerald's clinic. But not the way Eddy wanted.

She looked around at the twenty-year-old plastic furniture, the stacks of stim-star magazines with Jap writing. It looked like a Cleveland haircut place. There was nobody there, nobody behind the reception desk.

Then Gerald came through a white door, wearing the kind of crinkled foil suit that paramedics wore for traffic accidents. "Lock the door," he said to Prior, through a blue paper mask that hid his nose, mouth, and chin. "Hello, Mona. If you'll step this way ... " He gestured toward the white door.

She had her hand around the shockrod now, but she didn't know how to turn it on.

She followed Gerald, Prior taking up the rear.

"Have a seat," Gerald said. She sat on a white enamel chair. He came close, looked at her eyes. "You need to rest, Mona. You're exhausted."

There was a serrated stud on the shockrod's handle. Press it? Forward? Back?

Gerald went to a white box with drawers, got something out.

"Here," he said, extending a little tube thing with writing on the side, "this will help you ... " She barely felt the tiny, measured spray; there was a black blot on the aerosol tube, just where her eyes tried to focus, growing ...

She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole in its skull, covered with skin; you take something stiff and skinny, a wire, even a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in ...

She remembered Cleveland, ordinary kind of day before it was time to get working, sitting up in Lanette's, looking at a magazine. Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you could feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.

It's called money, Lanette said.

It's called money. You just slip it in.