Mona Lisa Overdrive

20 - Hilton Swift

He arrived unannounced, as he always did, and alone, the Net helicopter settling like a solitary wasp, stirring strands of seaweed across the damp sand.

She watched from the rust-eaten railing as he jumped down, something boyish, almost bumbling, in his apparent eagerness. He wore a long topcoat of brown tweed; unbuttoned, it showed the immaculate front of one of his candystriped shirts, the propwash stirring his brown-blond hair and fluttering his Sense/Net tie. Robin was right, she decided: he did look as though his mother dressed him.

Perhaps it was deliberate, she thought, as he came striding up the beach, a feigned na•vetŽ. She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she'd failed to grasp his basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net's most important human decision-maker.

The thought of Porphyre made her smile; Swift, taking it as a greeting, beamed back at her.

He offered her lunch in San Francisco; the helicopter was extremely fast. She countered by insisting on preparing him a bowl of dehydrated Swiss soup and microwaving a frozen brick of sourdough rye.

She wondered, watching him eat, about his sexuality. In his late thirties, he somehow conveyed the sense of an extraordinarily bright teenager in whom the onset of puberty had been subtly delayed. Rumor, at one time or another, had supplied him with every known sexual preference, and with several that she assumed were entirely imaginary. None of them seemed at all likely to Angie. She'd known him since she'd come to Sense/Net; he'd been well established in the upper echelons of production when she'd arrived, one of the top people in Tally Isham's team, and he'd taken an immediate professional interest in her. Looking back, she assumed that Legba had steered her into his path: he'd been so obviously on his way up, though she might not have seen it herself, then, dazzled by the glitter and constant movement of the scene.

Bobby had taken an instant dislike to him, bristling with a Barrytowner's inbred hostility to authority, but had generally managed to conceal it for the sake of her career. The dislike had been mutual, Swift greeting their split and Bobby's departure with obvious relief.

"Hilton," she said, as she poured him a cup of the herbal tea he preferred to coffee, "what is it that's keeping Robin in London?"

He looked up from the steaming cup. "Something personal, I think. Perhaps he's found a new friend." Bobby had always been Angie's friend, to Hilton. Robin's friends tended to be young, male, and athletic; the muted erotic sequences in her stims with Robin were assembled from stock footage provided by Continuity and heavily treated by Raebel and his effects team. She remembered the one night they'd spent together, in a windblown house in southern Madagascar, his passivity and his patience. They'd never tried again, and she'd suspected that he feared that intimacy would undermine the illusion their stims projected so perfectly.

"What did he think of me going into the clinic, Hilton? Did he tell you?"

"I think he admired you for it."

"Someone told me recently that he's been telling people I'm crazy."

He'd rolled up his striped shirtsleeves and loosened his tie. "I can't imagine Robin thinking that, let alone saying it. I know what he thinks of you. You know what gossip is, in the Net ... "

"Hilton, where's Bobby?"

His brown eyes, very still. "Isn't that over, Angie?"

"Hilton, you know. You must know. You know where he is. Tell me."

"We lost him."

"Lost him?"

"Security lost him. You're right, of course; we kept the closest possible track of him after he left you. He reverted to type." There was an edge of satisfaction in his voice.

"And what type was that?"

"I've never asked what brought you together," he said. "Security investigated both of you, of course. He was a petty criminal."

She laughed. "He wasn't even that ... "

"You were unusually well represented, Angie, for an unknown. You know that your agents made it a key condition of your contract that we take Bobby Newmark on as well."

"Contracts have had stranger conditions, Hilton."

"And he went on salary as your ... companion."

"My 'friend.' "

Was Swift actually blushing? He broke eye contact, looked down at his hands. "When he left you, he went to Mexico, Mexico City. Security was tracing him, of course; we don't like to lose track of anyone who knows that much about the personal life of one of our stars. Mexico City is a very ... complicated place ... We do know that he seemed to be trying to continue his previous ... career."

"He was hustling cyberspace?"

He met her eyes again. "He was seeing people in the business, known criminals."

"And? Go on."

"He ... faded out. Vanished. Do you have any idea what Mexico City is like, if you slip below the poverty line?"

"And he was poor?"

"He'd become an addict. According to our best sources."

"An addict? Addicted to what?"

"I don't know."

"Continuity!"

He almost spilled his tea.

"Hello, Angie."

"Bobby, Continuity. Bobby Newmark, my friend," glaring at Swift. "He went to Mexico City. Hilton says he became addicted to something. A drug, Continuity?"

"I'm sorry, Angie. That's classified data."

"Hilton ... "

"Continuity," he began, and coughed.

"Hello, Hilton."

"Executive override, Continuity. Do we have that information?"

"Security's sources described Newmark's addiction as neuro-electronic."

"I don't understand."

"Some sort of, um, 'wirehead' business," Swift offered.

She felt an impulse to tell him how she'd found the drug, the charger.

Hush, child. Her head was full of the sound of bees, a building pressure.

"Angie? What is it?" He was half up from his chair, reaching for her.

"Nothing. I'm ... upset. I'm sorry. Nerves. It isn't your fault. I was going to tell you about finding Bobby's cyberspace deck. But you already know about that, don't you?"

"Can I get you anything? Water?"

"No, thanks, but I'll lie down for a while, if you don't mind. But stay, please. I have some ideas for orbital sequences that I'd like your advice on ... "

"Of course. Have a nap, I'll have a walk on the beach, and then we'll talk."

She watched him from the bedroom window, watched his brown figure recede in the direction of the Colony, followed by the patient little Dornier.

He looked like a child on the empty beach; he looked as lost as she felt.