Mona Lisa Overdrive

34 - Margate Road

"You seem lost," the noodle seller said, in Japanese. Kumiko guessed that he was Korean. Her father had associates who were Korean; they were in the construction business, her mother had said. They tended, like this one, to be large men, very nearly as large as Petal, with broad, serious faces. "You look very cold."

"I'm looking for someone," she said. "He lives in Margate Road."

"Where is that?"

"I don't know."

"Come inside," the noodle man said, gesturing Kumiko around the end of his counter. His stall was made of pink corrugated plastic.

She stepped between the noodle stall and another that advertised something called roti, this word worked in deliriously colored spraybomb capitals trimmed with looping, luminous blobs. That stall smelled of spices and stewing meat. Her feet were very cold.

She ducked beneath a clouded sheet of plastic. The noodle stall was crowded: squat blue tanks of butane, the three cooking grids with their tall pots, plastic sacks of noodles, stacks of foam bowls, and the shifting bulk of the big Korean as he tended his pots. "Sit," he said; she sat on a yellow plastic canister of MSG, her head below the level of the counter. "You're Japanese?"

"Yes," she said.

"Tokyo?"

She hesitated.

"Your clothes," he said. "Why do you wear rubber tabi-socks in winter? Is this the fashion?"

"I lost my boots."

He passed her a foam bowl and plastic chopsticks; fat twists of noodle swam in a thin yellow soup. She ate hungrily, then drank off the soup. She watched as he served a customer, an African woman who took away noodles in her own lidded pot.

"Margate," the noodle man said, when the woman was gone. He took a greasy paperbound book from beneath the counter and thumbed through it. "Here," he said, jabbing at an impossibly dense little map, "down Acre Lane." He took a blue feltpen and sketched the route on a coarse gray napkin.

"Thank you," she said. "Now I will go."

Her mother came to her as she made her way to Margate Road.

Sally was in jeopardy, somewhere in the Sprawl, and Kumiko trusted that Tick would know a way to contact her. If not by phone then through the matrix. Perhaps Tick knew Finn, the dead man in the alley ...

In Brixton, the coral-growth of the metropolis had come to harbor a different life. Faces dark and light, uncounted races, the brick facades washed with a riot of shades and symbols unimaginable to the original builders. A drumbeat pulsed from a pub's open door as she passed, heat and huge laughter. The shops sold foodstuffs Kumiko had never seen, bolts of bright cloth, Chinese handtools, Japanese cosmetics ...

Pausing by that bright window, the display of tints and blushes, her own face reflected in the silver backing, she felt her mother's death fall on her out of the night. Her mother had owned things like this.

Her mother's madness. Her father would not refer to it. Madness had no place in her father's world, though suicide did. Her mother's madness was European, an imported snare of sorrow and delusion ... Her father had killed her mother, Kumiko had told Sally, in Covent Garden. But was it true? He had brought doctors from Denmark, from Australia, and finally from Chiba. The doctors had listened to the dreams of the princess-ballerina, had mapped and timed her synapses and drawn samples of her blood. The princess-ballerina had refused their drugs, their delicate surgeries. "They want to cut my brain with lasers," she had whispered to Kumiko.

She'd whispered other things as well.

At night, she said, the evil ghosts rose like smoke from their boxes in Kumiko's father's study. "Old men," she'd said, "they suck our breath away. Your father sucks my breath away. This city sucks my breath away. Nothing here is ever still. There is no true sleep."

In the end, there had been no sleep at all. Six nights her mother sat, silent and utterly still, in her blue European room. On the seventh day, she left the apartment alone -- a remarkable feat, considering the diligence of the secretaries -- and made her way to the cold river.

But the backing of the display was like Sally's glasses. Kumiko took the Korean's map from the sleeve of her sweater.

There was a burnt car beside the curb in Margate Road. Its wheels were missing. She paused beside it, and was scanning the unrevealing faces of the houses opposite, when she heard a sound behind her. Turning to find a twisted gargoyle face, under a greasy spill of curls, in the light from the half-open door of the nearest house.

"Tick!"

"Terrence," he said, "actually," as the facial convulsion subsided.

Tick's flat was on the top floor. The lower floors were empty, unoccupied, peeling wallpaper showing ghostly traces of vanished pictures.

The man's limp was more obvious as he climbed the stairs ahead of her. He wore a gray sharkskin suit and thick-soled suede oxfords the color of tobacco.

"Been expecting you," he said, hauling himself up another step, another.

"You have?"

"Knew you'd run from Swain's. Been logging their traffic, when I've had time from the other."

"The other?"

"You don't know, do you?"

"Excuse me?"

"It's the matrix. Something's happening. Easier to show you than try to explain it. As though I could explain it, which I can't. I'd say a good three-quarters of humanity is jacked at the moment, watching the show ... "

"I don't understand."

"Doubt anyone does. There's a new macroform in the sector that represents the Sprawl."

"A macroform?"

"Very large data-construct."

"I came here to warn Sally. Swain and Robin Lanier intend to give her to the ones who plot to kidnap Angela Mitchell."

"Wouldn't worry about that," he said, reaching the head of the stairs. "Sally's already scooped Mitchell and half-killed Swain's man in the Sprawl. They're after her in any case, now. Bloody everybody'll be after her, soon. Still, we can tell her when she checks in. If she checks in ... "

Tick lived in a single large room whose peculiar shape suggested the removal of walls. Large as it was, it was also very crowded; it looked to Kumiko as though someone had deployed the contents of an Akihabara module shop in a space already filled, gaijin-style, with too many pieces of bulky furniture. In spite of this, it was startlingly neat and tidy: the corners of magazines were aligned with the corners of the low glass table they rested on, beside an unused black ceramic ashtray and a plain white vase of cut flowers.

She tried Colin again, while Tick filled an electric kettle with water from a filter jug.

"What's that?" he asked, putting down the jug.

"A Maas-Neotek guide unit. It's broken now; I can't make Colin come ... "

"Colin? It's a stim rig?"

"Yes."

"Let's have a look ... " He held out his hand.

"My father gave it to me ... "

Tick whistled. "Thing cost a fortune. One of their little AIs. How's it work?"

"You close your hand around it and Colin's there, but no one else can see or hear him."

Tick held the unit beside his ear and shook it. "It's broken? How?"

"I dropped it."

"It's just the housing that's broken, see. The biosoft's come away from the case, so you can't access it manually."

"Can you repair it?"

"No. But we can access it through a deck, if you want ... " He returned it. The kettle was boiling.

Over tea, she told him the story of her trip to the Sprawl and Sally's visit to the shrine in the alley. "He called her Molly," she said.

Tick nodded, winked several times in rapid succession. "What she went by, over there. What did they talk about?"

"A place called Straylight. A man called Case. An enemy, a woman ... "

"Tessier-Ashpool. Found that for her when I rustled Swain's data flow for her. Swain's shopping Molly to this lady 3Jane, so called; she has the juiciest file of inside dirt you could imagine -- on anything and anyone at all. I've been bloody careful not to look too closely at any of that. Swain's trading it right and left, making a dozen fortunes in the process. I'm sure she's got enough dirt on our Mr. Swain as well ... "

"And she is here, in London?"

"In orbit somewhere, looks like, though some people say she's dead. I was working on that, actually, when the big fella popped into the matrix ... "

"Excuse me?"

"Here, I'll show you." When he returned to the white breakfast table, he carried a shallow square black tray with a number of tiny controls arranged along one side. He placed it on the table and touched one of the minute switches. A cubical holo display blinked on above the projector: the neon gridlines of cyberspace, ranged with the bright shapes, both simple and complex, that represented vast accumulations of stored data. "That's all your standard big shits. Corporations. Very much a fixed landscape, you might say. Sometimes one of 'em'll grow an annex, or you'll see a takeover and two of them merge. But you aren't likely to see a new one, not on that scale. They start small and grow, merge with other small formations ... " He reached out to touch another switch. "About four hours ago" -- and a plain white vertical column appeared in the exact center of the display -- "this popped up. Or in." The colored cubes, spheres, and pyramids had rearranged themselves instantly to allow for the round white upright; it dwarfed them entirely, its upper end cut off smoothly by the vertical limit of the display. "Bastard's bigger than anything," Tick said, with a certain satisfaction, "and nobody knows what it is or who it belongs to."

"But someone must know," Kumiko said.

"Stands to reason, yes. But people in my line of work, and there's millions of us, haven't been able to find out. That's stranger, in some ways, than the fact that the thing's there at all. I was all up and down the grid, before you came, looking for any jockey with a clue. Nothing. Nothing at all."

"How could this 3Jane be dead?" But then she remembered the Finn, the boxes in her father's study. "I must tell Sally."

"Nothing for that but waiting," he said. "She'll probably phone in. In the meantime, we could have a go accessing that pricey little AI of yours, if you like."

"Yes," she said, "thank you."

"Only hope those Special Branch types in Swain's pay don't track you here. Still, we can only wait ... "

"Yes," Kumiko said, not at all pleased with the idea of waiting.