Mona Lisa Overdrive

24 - In a Lonely Place

And Gentry standing there with the Shape burning behind his eyes, holding out the trode-net under the glare of bare bulbs, telling Slick why it had to be that way, why Slick had to put the trodes on and jack straight into whatever the gray slab was inputting to the still figure on the stretcher.

He shook his head, remembering how he'd come to Dog Solitude. And Gentry started talking faster, taking the gesture for refusal.

Gentry was saying Slick had to go under, he said maybe just for a few seconds, while he got a fix on the data and worked up a macroform. Slick didn't know how to do that, Gentry said, or he'd go under himself; it wasn't the data he wanted, just the overall shape, because he thought that would lead him to the Shape, the big one, the thing he'd chased for so long.

Slick remembered crossing the Solitude on foot. He'd been scared that the Korsakov's would come back, that he'd forget where he was and drink cancer-water from the slimed red puddles on the rusty plain. Red scum and dead birds floating with their wings spread. The trucker from Tennessee had told him to walk west from the highway, he'd hit two-lane blacktop inside an hour and get a ride down to Cleveland, but it felt like longer than an hour now and he wasn't so sure which way was west and this place was spooking him, this junkyard scar like a giant had stomped it flat. Once he saw somebody far away, up on a low ridge, and waved. The figure vanished, but he walked that way, no longer trying to skirt the puddles, slogging through them, until he came to the ridge and saw that it was the wingless hulk of an airliner half-buried in rusted cans. He made his way up the incline along a path where feet had flattened the cans, to a square opening that had been an emergency exit. Stuck his head inside and saw hundreds of tiny heads suspended from the concave ceiling. He froze there, blinking in the sudden shade, until what he was seeing made some kind of sense. The pink plastic heads of dolls, their nylon hair tied up into topknots and the knots stuck into thick black tar, dangling like fruit. Nothing else, only a few ragged slabs of dirty green foam, and he knew he didn't want to stick around to find out whose place it was.

He'd headed south then, without knowing it, and found Factory.

"I'll never have another chance," Gentry said. Slick stared at the taut face, the eyes wide with desperation. "I'll never see it ... "

And Slick remembered the time Gentry'd hit him, how he'd looked down at the wrench and felt ... Well, Cherry wasn't right about them, but there was something else there, he didn't know what to call it. He snatched the trode-net with his left hand and shoved Gentry hard in the chest with his right. "Shut up! Shut the fuck up!" Gentry fell back against the steel table's edge.

Slick cursed him softly as he fumbled the delicate net of contact dermatrodes across his forehead and temples.

Jacked in.

His boots crunched gravel.

Opened his eyes and looked down; the gravel drive smooth in the dawn, cleaner than anything in Dog Solitude. He looked up and saw where it curved away, and beyond green and spreading trees the pitched slate roof of a house half the size of Factory. There were statues near him in the long wet grass. A deer made of iron, and a broken figure of a man's body carved from white stone, no head or arms or legs. Birds were singing and that was the only sound.

He started walking up the drive, toward the gray house, because there didn't seem to be anything else to do. When he got to the head of the drive, he could see past the house to smaller buildings and a broad flat field of grass where gliders where staked against the wind.

Fairytale, he thought, looking up at the mansion's broad stone brow, the leaded diamond panes; like some vid he'd seen when he was little. Were there really people who lived in places like this? But it 's not a place, he reminded himself, it only feels like it is.

"Gentry," he said, "get my ass out of this, okay?"

He studied the backs of his hands. Scars, ingrained grime, black half-moons of grease under his broken nails. The grease got in and made them soft, so they broke easy.

He started to feel stupid, standing there. Maybe somebody was watching him from the house. "Fuck it," he said, and started up the broad flagstone walk, unconsciously hitching his stride into the swagger he'd learned in the Deacon Blues.

The door had this thing fastened to a central panel: a hand, small and graceful, holding a sphere the size of a poolball, all cast in iron. Hinged at the wrist so you could raise it and bring it down. He did. Hard. Twice, then twice again. Nothing happened. The doorknob was brass, floral detail worn almost invisible by years of use. It turned easily. He opened the door.

He blinked at a wealth of color and texture; surfaces of dark polished wood, black and white marble, rugs with a thousand soft colors that glowed like church windows, polished silver, mirrors ... He grinned at the soft shock of it, his eyes pulled from one new sight to another, so many things, objects he had no name for ...

"You looking for anyone in particular, Jack?"

The man stood in front of a vast fireplace, wearing tight black jeans and a white T-shirt. His feet were bare and he held a fat glass bulb of liquor in his right hand. Slick blinked at him.

"Shit," Slick said, "you're him ... "

The man swirled the brown stuff up around the edges of the glass and took a swallow. "I expected Afrika to pull something like this eventually," he said, "but somehow, buddy, you don't look like his style of help."

"You're the Count."

"Yeah," he said, "I'm the Count. Who the fuck are you?"

"Slick. Slick Henry."

He laughed. "Want some cognac, Slick Henry?" He gestured with the glass toward a piece of polished wooden furniture where ornate bottles stood in a row, each one with a little silver tag hung around it on a chain.

Slick shook his head.

The man shrugged. "Can't get drunk on it anyway ... Pardon my saying so, Slick, but you look like shit. Am I correct in guessing that you are not a part of Kid Afrika's operation? And if not, just what exactly are you doing here?"

"Gentry sent me."

"Gentry who?"

"You're the guy on the stretcher, right?"

"The guy on the stretcher is me. Where, exactly, right this minute, is that stretcher, Slick?"

"Gentry's."

"Where's that?"

"Factory."

"And where is that? "

"Dog Solitude."

"And how did I happen to get there, wherever that is?"

"Kid Afrika, he brought you. Brought you with this girl name of Cherry, right? See, I owed him a favor, so he wanted me to put you up awhile, you an' Cherry, and she's taking care of you."

"You called me Count, Slick ... "

"Cherry said Kid called you that once."

"Tell me, Slick, did the Kid seem worried when he brought me?"

"Cherry thought he got scared, back in Cleveland."

"I'm sure he did. Who's this Gentry? A friend of yours?"

"Factory's his place. I live there too ... "

"This Gentry, is he a cowboy, Slick? A console jockey? I mean, if you're here, he must be technical, right?"

Now it was Slick's turn to shrug. "Gentry's, like, he's an artist, kind of. Has these theories. Hard to explain. He rigged a set of splitters to that thing on the stretcher, what you're jacked into. First he tried to get an image on a holo rig, but there was just this monkey thing, sort of shadow, so he talked me into ... "

"Jesus ... Well, never mind. This factory you're talking about, it's out in the sticks somewhere? It's relatively isolated?"

Slick nodded.

"And this Cherry, she's some kind of hired nurse?"

"Yeah. Had a med-tech's ticket, she said."

"And nobody's come looking for me yet?"

"No."

"That's good, Slick. Because if anyone does, other than my lying rat-bastard friend Kid Afrika, you folks could find yourselves in serious trouble."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Listen to me, okay? I want you to remember this. If any company shows up at this factory of yours, your only hope in hell is to get me jacked into the matrix. You got that?"

"How come you're the Count? I mean, what's it mean?"

"Bobby. My name's Bobby. Count was my handle once, that's all. You think you'll remember what I told you?"

Slick nodded again.

"Good." He put his glass down on the thing with all the fancy bottles. "Listen," he said. From the open door came the sound of tires over gravel. "Know who that is, Slick? That's Angela Mitchell."

Slick turned. Bobby the Count was looking out at the drive.

"Angie Mitchell? The stim star? She's in this thing too?"

"In a manner of speaking, Slick, in a manner of speaking ... "

Slick saw the long black car slide by. "Hey," he began, "Count, I mean Bobby, what d -- "

"Easy," Gentry was saying, "just sit back. Easy. Easy ... "