Mona Lisa Overdrive

45 - Smooth Stone Beyond

They have come to live in this house: walls of gray stone, roof of slate, in a season of early summer. The grounds are bright and wild, though the long grass does not grow and the wildflowers do not fade.

Behind the house are outbuildings, unopened, unexplored, and a field where tethered gliders strain against the wind.

Once, walking alone among the oaks at the edge of that field, she saw three strangers, astride something approximately resembling a horse. Horses are extinct, their line terminated years before Angie's birth. A slim, tweed-coated figure was in the saddle, a boy like a groom from some old painting. In front of him, a young girl, Japanese, straddled the horse thing, while behind him sat a pale, greasy-looking little man in a gray suit, pink socks and white ankles showing above his brown shoes. Had the girl seen her, returned her gaze?

She has forgotten to mention this to Bobby.

Their most frequent visitors arrive in dawn dreams, though once a grinning little kobold of a man announced himself by thumping repeatedly on the heavy oak door, demanding, when she ran to open it, "that little shit Newmark." Bobby introduced this creature as the Finn, and seemed delighted to see him. The Finn's decrepit jacket exuded a complex odor of stale smoke, ancient solder, and pickled herring. Bobby explained that the Finn was always welcome. "Might as well be. No way to keep him out, once he wants in."

3Jane comes as well, one of the dawn visitors, her presence sad and tentative. Bobby seems scarcely aware of her, but Angie, the repository of so many of her memories, resonates to that particular mingling of longing, jealousy, frustration, and rage. Angie has come to understand 3Jane's motives, and to forgive her -- though what, exactly, wandering amid these oaks in sunlight, is there to forgive?

But dreams of 3Jane sometimes weary Angie; she prefers other dreams, particularly those of her young protégé. These often come as the lace curtains billow, as a first bird calls. She rolls closer to Bobby, closes her eyes, forms the name Continuity in her mind, and waits for the small bright images.

She sees that they have taken the girl to a clinic in Jamaica, to treat her addiction to crude stimulants. Her metabolism fine-tuned by a patient army of Net medics, she emerges at last, radiant with health. With her sensorium expertly modulated by Piper Hill, her first stims are greeted with unprecedented enthusiasm. Her global audience is entranced by her freshness, her vigor, the delightfully ingenuous way in which she seems to discover her glamorous life as if for the first time.

A shadow sometimes crosses the distant screen, but only for an instant: Robin Lanier has been found strangled, frozen, on the mountainscaped facade of the New Suzuki Envoy; both Angie and Continuity know whose long strong hands throttled the star and threw him there.

But a certain thing eludes her, one special fragment of the puzzle that is history.

At the edge of oak shadow, beneath a steel and salmon sunset, in this France that isn't France, she asks Bobby for the answer to her final question.

They waited in the drive at midnight, because Bobby had promised her an answer.

As the clocks in the house struck twelve, she heard the hiss of tires over gravel. The car was long, low and gray.

Its driver was the Finn.

Bobby opened the door and helped her in.

In the backseat sat the young man she recalled from her glimpse of the impossible horse and its three mismatched riders. He smiled at her, but said nothing.

"This is Colin," Bobby said, climbing in beside her. "And you know the Finn."

"She never guessed, huh?" the Finn asked, putting the car in gear.

"No," Bobby said, "I don't think so."

The young man named Colin was smiling at her. "The aleph is an approximation of the matrix," he said, "a sort of model of cyberspace ... "

"Yes, I know." She turned to Bobby. "Well? You promised you'd tell me the why of When It Changed."

The Finn laughed, a very strange sound. "Ain't a why, lady. More like it's a what. Remember one time Brigitte told you there was this other? Yeah? Well, that's the what, and the what's the why."

"I do remember. She said that when the matrix finally knew itself, there was the other.' ... "

"That's where we're going tonight," Bobby began, putting his arm around her. "It isn't far, but it's -- "

"Different," the Finn said, "it's real different."

"But what is it?"

"You see," Colin said, brushing aside his brown forelock, a gesture like a schoolboy's in some antique play, "when the matrix attained sentience, it simultaneously became aware of another matrix, another sentience."

"I don't understand," she said. "If cyberspace consists of the sum total of data in the human system ... "

"Yeah," the Finn said, turning out onto the long straight empty highway, "but nobody's talkin' human, see?"

"The other one was somewhere else," Bobby said.

"Centauri," Colin said.

Can they be teasing her? Is this some joke of Bobby's?

"So it's kinda hard to explain why the matrix split up into all those hoodoos 'n'shit, when it met this other one," the Finn said, "but when we get there, you'll sorta get the idea ... "

"My own feeling," Colin said, "is that it's all so much more amusing, this way ... "

"Are you telling me the truth?"

"Be there in a New York minute," said the Finn, "no shit."