Mona Lisa Overdrive

22 - Ghosts and Empties

Staring through the cab's smudged windows, she found herself wishing for Colin and his wry commentary, then remembered that this was entirely beyond his sphere of expertise. Did Maas-Neotek manufacture a similar unit for the Sprawl, she wondered, and if so, what form would its ghost take?

"Sally," she said, perhaps half an hour into the drive to New York, "why did Petal let me go with you?"

"Because he was smart."

"And my father?"

"Your father'll shit."

"I'm sorry?"

"Will be angry. If he finds out. And he may not. We aren't here for long."

"Why are we here?"

"I gotta talk to somebody."

"But why am I here?"

"You don't like it here?"

Kumiko hesitated. "Yes, I do."

"Good." Sally shifted on the broken-down seat. "Petal had to let us go. Because he couldn't have stopped us without hurting one of us. Well, maybe not hurting. More like insulting. Swain could cool you, then tell you he was sorry later, tell your father it was for your own good, if it came to that, but if he cools me, it's like face, right? When I saw Petal down there with the gun, I knew he was going to let us go. Your room's kinked. The whole place is. I set the motion sensors off when I was getting your gear together. Figured I would. Petal knew it was me. That's why he rang the phone, to let me know he knew."

"I don't understand."

"Kind of a courtesy, so I'd know he was waiting. Gimme a chance to think. But he didn't have a choice and he knew it. Swain, see, he's being forced to do something, and Petal knows it. Or anyway Swain says he is, being forced. Me, I'm definitely being forced. So I start wondering how bad Swain needs me. Real bad. Because they let me walk off with the oyabun's daughter, shipped all the way to Notting Hill for the safekeeping. Something there scares him worse than your daddy. 'Less it's something that'll make him richer than your daddy already has. Anyway, taking you kind of evens things up. Kind of like pushing back. You mind?"

"But you are being threatened?"

"Somebody knows a lot of things I did."

"And Tick has discovered the identity of this person?"

"Yeah. Guess I knew anyway. Wish to fuck I'd been wrong."

The hotel Sally chose was faced with rust-stained steel panels, each panel secured with gleaming chrome bolts, a style Kumiko knew from Tokyo and thought of as somewhat old-fashioned.

Their room was large and gray, a dozen shades of gray, and Sally walked straight to the bed, after she'd locked the door, took off her jacket, and lay down.

"You don't have a bag," Kumiko said.

Sally sat up and began to remove her boots. "I can buy what I need. You tired?"

"No."

"I am." She pulled her black sweater over her head. Her breasts were small, with brownish pink nipples; a scar, ru

"You were hurt," Kumiko said, looking at the scar.

Sally looked down. "Yeah."

"Why didn't you have it removed?"

"Sometimes it's good to remember."

"Being hurt?"

"Being stupid."

Gray on gray. Unable to sleep, Kumiko paced the gray carpet. There was something vampiric about the room, she decided, something it would have in common with millions of similar rooms, as though its bewilderingly seamless anonymity were sucking away her personality, fragments of which emerged as her parents' voices, raised in argument, as the faces of her father's black-suited secretaries ...

Sally slept, her face a smooth mask. The view from the window told Kumiko nothing at all: only that she looked out on a city that was neither Tokyo nor London, a vast generic tumble that was her century's paradigm of urban reality.

Perhaps she slept too, Kumiko, though later she wasn't certain. She watched Sally order toiletries and underwear, tapping her requirements into the bedside video. Her purchases were delivered while Kumiko was in the shower.

"Okay," Sally said, from beyond the door, "towel off, get dressed, we're going to see the man."

"What man?" Kumiko asked, but Sally hadn't heard her.

Gomi.

Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century's systematic dumping. Gomi, there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, sorted, carefully plowed under.

London's relationship to gomi was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it.

Gomi in the Sprawl was something else: a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer. The apparent lack of pla

Their taxi ride from the airport had already shown her decay, whole blocks in ruin, unglazed windows gaping above sidewalks heaped with trash. And faces staring as the armored hover made its way through the streets.

Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.

Two cab rides away from their hotel, they took to the street itself, into early-evening crowds and a slant of shadow. The air was cold, but not the cold of London, and Kumiko thought of the blossoms in Ueno Park.

Their first stop was a large, somewhat faded bar called the Gentleman Loser, where Sally conducted a quiet, very rapid exchange with a bartender.

They left without buying a drink.

"Ghosts," Sally said, rounding a corner, Kumiko close at her side. The streets had grown progressively more empty, these past several blocks, the buildings darker and more decrepit.

"Pardon me?"

"Lotta ghosts here for me, or anyway there should be."

"You know this place?"

"Sure. Looks all the same, but different, you know?"

"No ... "

"Someday you will. We find who I'm looking for, you just do your good-girl routine. Speak if you're spoken to, otherwise don't."

"Who are we looking for?"

"The man. What's left of him, anyway ... "

Half a block on, the grim street empty -- Kumiko had never seen an empty street before, aside from Swain's crescent shrouded in midnight snow -- Sally came to a halt beside an ancient and utterly unpromising storefront, its twin display windows silvered with a rich i

Now Sally faced that door, squared her shoulders, and executed a fluid series of small, quick gestures.

Kumiko stared as the sequence was repeated. "Sally -- "

"Jive," Sally cut her off. "I told you to shut up, okay?"

"Yeah?" The voice, barely more than a whisper, seemed to come from nowhere in particular.

"I told you already," Sally said.

"I don't jive."

"I wa

"He's dead."

"I know that."

A silence followed, and Kumiko heard a sound that might have been the wind, a cold, grit-laden wind scouring the curve of the geodesics far above them.