Mona Lisa Overdrive

28 - Company

Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues, the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience ... So he was doing that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.

Gentry was up in the loft with the shape he'd captured, what he called a macroform node, and he'd hardly listened to what Slick had tried to tell him about the house and that whole place and Bobby the Count.

So Slick had come down here to crouch next to an Investigator in the cold and dark, retracing all the things he'd done with so many different tools, and where he'd scrounged each part, and then Cherry reached out and touched his cheek with her cold hand.

"You okay?" she asked. "I thought maybe it was happening to you again ... "

"No. It's just I gotta come down here, sometimes."

"He plugged you into the Count's box, didn't he?"

"Bobby," Slick said, "that's his name. I saw him."

"Where?"

"In there. It's a whole world. There's this house, like a castle or something, and he's there."

"By himself?"

"He said Angie Mitchell's in there too ... "

"Maybe he's crazy. Is she?"

"I didn't see her. Saw a car he said was hers."

"She's in some celebrity detox place in Jamaica, last I heard."

He shrugged. "I dunno."

"What's he like?"

"He looked younger. Anybody'd look bad with all those tubes 'n'shit in 'em. He figured Kid Afrika dumped him here because he got scared. He said if anybody comes looking for him, we jack him into the matrix."

"Why?"

"Dunno."

"You shoulda asked him."

He shrugged again. "Seen Bird anywhere?"

"No."

"Shoulda been back already ... " He stood up.

Little Bird came back at dusk, on Gentry's bike, the dark wings of his hair damp with snow and flapping behind him as he roared in across the Solitude. Slick winced; Little Bird was in the wrong gear. Little Bird jolted up an incline of compacted oildrums and hit the brakes when he should've gunned it. Cherry gasped as Bird and the bike separated in midair; the bike seemed to hang there for a second before it somersaulted into the rusted sheet-metal tangle that had been one of Factory's outbuildings, and Little Bird was rolling over and over on the ground.

Somehow Slick never heard the crash. He was standing beside Cherry in the shelter of a doorless loading bay -- then he was sprinting across snow-flecked rust to the fallen rider, no transition. Little Bird lay on his back with blood on his lips, his mouth partially hidden by the jumble of thongs and amulets he wore around his neck.

"Don't touch him," Cherry said. "Ribs may be broken, or he's mashed up inside ... "

Little Bird's eyes opened at the sound of her voice. He pursed his lips and spat blood and part of a tooth.

"Don't move," Cherry said, kneeling beside him and switching to the crisp diction she'd learned in med-tech school. "You may have been injured ... "

"F-fuck it, lady," he managed, and struggled stiffly up, with Slick's help.

"All right, asshole," she said, "hemorrhage. See if I give a shit."

"Didn't get it," Little Bird said, smearing blood across his face with the back of his hand, "the truck."

"I can see that," Slick said.

"Marvie 'n' them, they got company. Like flies on shit. Couple of hovers 'n' a copter 'n'shit. All these guys."

"What kind of guys?"

"Like soldiers, but they're not. Soldier'll goof around, bullshit, crack jokes when nobody important's looking. But not them."

"Cops?" Marvie and his two brothers grew mutant ruderalis in a dozen half-buried railway tankcars; sometimes they tried to cook primitive amine compounds, but their lab kept blowing up. They were the nearest thing Factory had to permanent neighbors. Six kilometers.

"Cops?" Little Bird spat another tooth chip and gingerly probed his mouth with a bloody finger. "They aren't doin' anything against the law. Anyway, cops can't afford shit like that, new hovers, new Honda ... " He grinned through a film of blood and spittle. "I hung off in the Solitude 'n'scoped 'em good. Nobody I'd wanna talk to, or you either. Guess I really fucked Gentry's bike, huh?"

"Don't worry about it," Slick said. "I think his mind's on something else."

"Tha's good ... " He staggered in the direction of Factory, nearly fell, caught himself, continued.

"He's higher'n a kite," Cherry said.

"Hey, Bird," Slick called, "what happened to that bag of shit I gave you to give Marvie?"

Bird swayed, turned. "Lost it ... " Then he was gone, around a corner of corrugated steel.

"Maybe he's making that up," Cherry said. "About those guys. Or seeing things."

"I doubt it," Slick said, pulling her into deeper shadow as an unlit black Honda swung down toward Factory out of winter twilight.

He heard the Honda making its fifth pass over Factory as he pounded up the quaking stairs, the iron roof rattling with the copter's passage. Well, he thought, that should anyway bring it to Gentry's attention that they had visitors. He took the fragile catwalk in ten long, slow steps; he was beginning to wonder if they'd ever be able to get the Count and his stretcher back out without having to weld extra I-bar across the span.

He went into the bright loft without knocking. Gentry was sitting at a workbench, his head cocked to one side, staring up at the plastic skylights. The bench was littered with bits of hardware and small tools.

"Helicopter," Slick said, panting from the climb.

"Helicopter," Gentry agreed, nodding thoughtfully, his disheveled roostertail bobbing. "They seem to be looking for something."

"I think they just found it."

"Could be the Fission Authority."

"Bird saw people at Marvie's. Saw that copter there too. You weren't paying much attention when I tried to tell you what he said."

"Bird?" Gentry looked down at the small bright things on the workbench. Picked up two fittings and twisted them together.

"The Count! He told me -- "

"Bobby Newmark," Gentry said, "yes. I know a lot more about Bobby Newmark, now."

Cherry came in behind Slick. "You gotta do something about that bridge," she said, going immediately to the stretcher, "it shakes too much." She bent to check the Count's readouts.

"Come here, Slick," Gentry said, standing. He walked to the holo table. Slick followed, looked at the image that glowed there. It reminded him of the rugs he'd seen in the gray house, patterns like that, only these were woven of hairfine neon, and twisted into some kind of infinite knot; the knot's core hurt his head to look at it. He looked away.

"That's it?" he asked Gentry. "What you've always been looking for?"

"No. I told you. This is just a node, a macroform. A model ... "

"He's got this house in there, like a castle, and grass and trees and sky ... "

"He's got a lot more than that. He's got a universe more than that. That was just a construct worked up from a commercial stim. What he's got is an abstract of the sum total of data constituting cyberspace. Still, it's closer than I've gotten before ... He didn't tell you why he was in there?"

"Didn't ask him."

"Then you'll have to go back."

"Hey. Gentry. Listen up. That copter, it'll be back. It'll be back with two hovers fulla guys Bird said looked like soldiers. They aren't after us, man. They're after him."

"Maybe they're his. Maybe they are after us."

"No. He told me, man. He said, anybody comes looking for him, we're in deep shit and we gotta jack him into the matrix."

Gentry looked down at the little coupling he still held. "We'll talk with him, Slick. You'll go back; this time I'll go with you."