Mona Lisa Overdrive

"I'm fine," she said. "Too many people. I'm still not used to it."

He stood there looking up at her, the glow of dying coals behind his elegantly crafted, subtly inhuman skull, until she turned and climbed the stairs.

She heard the helicopter come for them an hour later.

"House," she said, "I'll see the video from Continuity now."

As the wallscreen slid down into place, she opened the bedroom door and stood for a moment at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Surf, the hum of the dishwasher, wind buffeting the windows that faced the deck.

She turned back to the screen and shivered at the face she saw there in a grainy freeze-frame headshot, avian eyebrows arched above dark eyes, high fragile cheekbones, and a wide, determined mouth. The image expanded steadily, into the darkness of an eye, black screen, a white point, growing, lengthening, becoming the tapered spindle of Freeside. Credits began to flash in German.

"Hans Becker," the house began, reciting the Net library's intro-critique, "is an Austrian video artist whose hallmark is an obsessive interrogation of rigidly delimited fields of visual information. His approaches range from classical montage to techniques borrowed from industrial espionage, deep-space imaging, and kino-archaeology. Antarctica Starts Here, his examination of images of the Tessier-Ashpool family, currently stands as the high point of his career. The pathologically media-shy industrial clan, operating from the total privacy of their orbital home, posed a remarkable challenge."

The white of the spindle filled the screen as the final credit vanished. An image tracked to center screen, snapshot of a young woman in loose dark clothes, background indistinct. MARIE-FRANCE TESSIER, MOROCCO.

This wasn't the face in the opening shot, the face of invading memory, yet it seemed to promise it, as though a larval image lay beneath the surface.

The soundtrack wove atonal filaments through strata of static and indistinct voices as the image of Marie-France was replaced by a formal monochrome portrait of a young man in a starched wing collar. It was a handsome face, finely proportioned, but very hard somehow, and in the eyes a look of infinite boredom. JOHN HARNESS ASHPOOL, OXFORD.

Yes, she thought, and I've met you many times. I know your story, though I'm not allowed to touch it.

But I really don't think I like you at all, do I, Mr. Ashpool?

13 - Catwalk

The catwalk groaned and swayed. The stretcher was too wide for the walk's handrails, so they had to keep it chest-high as they inched across, Gentry at the front with his gloved hands clamped around the rails on either side of the sleeper's feet. Slick had the heavy end, the head, with the batteries and all that gear; he could feel Cherry creeping along behind him. He wanted to tell her to get back, that they didn't need her weight on the walk, but somehow he couldn't.

Giving Gentry Kid Afrika's bag of drugs had been a mistake. He didn't know what was in the derm Gentry'd done; he didn't know what had been in Gentry's bloodstream to begin with. Whatever, Gentry'd gone bare-wires crazy and now they were out here on the fucking catwalk, twenty meters over Factory's concrete floor, and Slick was ready to weep with frustration, to scream; he wanted to smash something, anything, but he couldn't let go of the stretcher.

And Gentry's smile, lit up by the glow of the bio-readout taped to the foot of the stretcher, as Gentry took another step backward across the catwalk ...

"O man," Cherry said, her voice like a little girl's, "this is just seriously fucked ... "

Gentry gave the stretcher a sudden impatient tug and Slick almost lost his grip.

"Gentry," Slick said, "I think you better think twice about this."

Gentry had removed his gloves. He held a pair of optic jumpers in either hand, and Slick could see the splitter fittings trembling.

"I mean Kid Afrika's heavy, Gentry. You don't know what you're messing with, you mess with him." This was not, strictly speaking, true, the Kid being, as far as Slick knew, too smart to value revenge. But who the hell knew what Gentry was about to mess with anyway?

"I'm not messing with anything," Gentry said, approaching the stretcher with the jumpers.

"Listen, buddy," Cherry said, "you interrupt his input, you maybe kill 'im; his autonomic nervous system'll go tits-up. Why don't you just stop him?" she asked Slick. "Why don't you just knock him on his ass?"

Slick rubbed his eyes. "Because ... I du

" 'LF,' " Gentry said, "I heard that." He put the jumpers between his teeth and began to fiddle with one of the co

"Shit," Cherry said, and gnawed at a knuckle. The co

The man on the stretcher grunted, once, softly. The sound made the hairs stand up on Slick's arms.

The second co

Cherry went quickly to the foot of the stretcher, knelt to check the readout. "He felt it," she said, looking up at Gentry, "but his signs look okay ... "

Gentry turned to his consoles. Slick watched as he jacked the jumpers into position. Maybe, he thought, it was going to work out; Gentry would crash soon, and they'd have to leave the stretcher up here until he could get Little Bird and Cherry to help him get it back across the catwalk. But Gentry was just so crazy, probably he should try to get the drugs back, or some of them anyway, get things back to normal ...

"I can only believe," Gentry said, "that this was predetermined. Prefigured by the form of my previous work. I wouldn't pretend to understand how that might be, but ours is not to question why, is it, Slick Henry?" He tapped out a sequence on one of his keyboards. "Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?"

"What's he talking about?" Cherry asked.

Slick glumly shook his head. If he said anything, it would only encourage Gentry's craziness.

Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. "There are worlds within worlds," he said. "Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below ... It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I'd not dared to hope ... " He glanced coyly back at them over a black-beaded shoulder. "And now," he said, "we'll see the shape of the little universe our guest's gone voyaging in. And in that form, Slick Henry, I'll see ... "

He touched the power stud at the edge of the holo table. And screamed.