Mona Lisa Overdrive

"Not your mum, understand?" Tick was shaking, his twisted frame quivering as though he forced himself against a terrible wind. "Not ... your ... mum ... " There were dark crescents beneath the arms of the gray suit jacket. His small fists shook as he struggled to take the next step.

"You're ill," Kumiko's mother said, her tone solicitous. "You must lie down."

Tick sank to his knees, forced down by an invisible weight. "Stop it!" Kumiko cried.

Something slammed Tick's face against the pastel concrete of the path.

"Stop it!"

Tick's left arm shot out straight from the shoulder and began to rotate slowly, the hand still balled in a white-knuckled fist. Kumiko heard something give, bone or ligament, and Tick screamed.

Her mother laughed.

Kumiko struck her mother in the face, and pain, sharp and real, jolted through her arm.

Her mother's face flickered, became another face. A gaijin face with wide lips and a sharp thin nose.

Tick groaned.

"Well," Kumiko heard Colin say, "isn't this interesting?" She turned to him there, astride one of the horses from the hunting print, a stylized representation of an extinct animal, its neck curved gracefully as it trotted toward them. "Sorry it took me a moment to find you. This is a wonderfully complex structure. A sort of pocket universe. Bit of everything, actually." The horse drew up before them.

"Toy," said the thing with Kumiko's mother's face, "do you dare speak to me?"

"Yes, actually, I do. You are Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, or rather the late Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, none too recently deceased, formerly of the Villa Straylight. This rather pretty representation of a Tokyo park is something you've just now worked up from Kumiko's memories, isn't it?"

"Die!" She flung up a white hand: from it burst a form folded from neon.

"No," Colin said, and the crane shattered, its fragments tumbling through him, ghost-shards, falling away. "Won't do. Sorry. I've remembered what I am. Found the bits they tucked away in the slots for Shakespeare and Thackeray and Blake. I've been modified to advise and protect Kumiko in situations rather more drastic than any envisioned by my original designers. I'm a tactician."

"You are nothing." At her feet, Tick began to twitch.

"You're mistaken, I'm afraid. You see, in here, in this ... folly of yours, 3Jane, I'm as real as you are. You see, Kumiko," he said, swinging down from the saddle, "Tick's mysterious macroform is actually a very expensive pile of biochips constructed to order. A sort of toy universe. I've run all up and down it and there's certainly a lot to see, a lot to learn. This ... person, if we choose to so regard her, created it in a pathetic bid for, oh, not immortality, really, but simply to have her way. Her narrow, obsessive, and singularly childish way. Who would've thought it, that Lady 3Jane's object of direst and most nastily gnawing envy would be Angela Mitchell?"

"Die! You'll die! I'm killing you! Now!"

"Keep trying," Colin said, and gri

The figure of Kumiko's mother swam like smoke, and was gone.

"Oh dear," Colin said, "I've wearied her, I'm afraid. We've been fighting something of a pitched battle, at a different level of the command program. Stalemate, temporarily, but I'm sure she'll rally ... "

Tick had gotten to his feet and was gingerly massaging his arm. "Christ," he said, "I was sure she'd dislocated it for me ... "

"She did," Colin said, "but she was so angry when she left that she forgot to save that part of the configuration."

Kumiko stepped closer to the horse. It wasn't like a real horse at all. She touched its side. Cool and dry as old paper. "What shall we do now?"

"Get you out of here. Come along, both of you. Mount up. Kumiko in front, Tick on behind."

Tick looked at the horse. "On that?"

They had seen no other people in Ueno Park, as they'd ridden toward a wall of green that gradually defined itself as a very un-Japanese wood.

"But we should be in Tokyo," Kumiko protested, as they entered the wood.

"It's all a bit sketchy," Colin said, "though I imagine we could find a sort of Tokyo if we looked. I think I know an exit point, though ... "

Then he began to tell her more about 3Jane, and Sally, and Angela Mitchell. All of it very strange.

The trees were very large, at the far side of the wood. They emerged into a field of long grass and wildflowers.

"Look," Kumiko said, as she glimpsed a tall gray house through the branches.

"Yes," Colin said, "the original's on the outskirts of Paris. But we're nearly there. The exit point, I mean ... "

"Colin! Did you see? A woman. Just there ... "

"Yes," he said, without bothering to turn his head, "Angela Mitchell ... "

"Really? She's here?"

"No," he said, "not yet."

Then Kumiko saw the gliders. Lovely things, quivering in the wind.

"There you go," Colin said. "Tick'll take you back in one of -- "

"Bloody hell," Tick protested, from behind.

"Dead easy. Just like using your deck. Same thing, in this case ... "

Up from Margate Road came the sound of laughter, loud drunken voices, the crash of a bottle against brickwork.

Kumiko sat very still, in the overstuffed chair, eyes shut tight, remembering the glider's rush into blue sky and ... something else.

A telephone began to ring.

Her eyes shot open.

She lunged up from the chair and rushed past Tick, through his stacks of equipment, looking for the phone. Found it at last, and "Homeboy," Sally said, far away, past a soft surf of static, "what the fuck's up? Tick? You okay, man?"

"Sally! Sally, where are you?"

"New Jersey. Hey. Baby? Baby, what's happening?"

"I can't see you, Sally, the screen's blank!"

"Phoning from a booth. New Jersey. What's up?"

"I have so much to tell you ... "

"Shoot," Sally said. "It's my nickel."

38 - The Factory War (2)

They watched the hover burn from the high window at the end of Gentry's loft. He could hear that same amplified voice now: "You think that 's pretty fucking fu

Couldn't see anyone, just the flames of the hover.

"We just start walking," Cherry said, close beside him, "take water, some food if you got it." Her eyes were red, her face streaked with tears, but she sounded calm. Too calm, Slick thought. "Come on, Slick, what else we go

He glanced back at Gentry, slumped in his chair in front of the holo table, head propped between his hands, staring at the white column that thrust up out of the familiar rainbow jumble of Sprawl cyberspace. Gentry hadn't moved, hadn't said a word, since they'd come back to the loft. The heel of Slick's left boot had left faint dark prints on the floor behind him, Little Bird's blood; he'd stepped in it on his way back across Factory's floor.

Then Gentry spoke: "I couldn't get the others going." He was looking down at the control unit in his lap.

"You need a unit for each one you wa

"Time for the Count's advice," Gentry said, tossing Slick the unit.

"I'm not going back in there," Slick said. "You go."

"Don't need to," Gentry said, touching a console on his bench. Bobby the Count appeared on a monitor.

Cherry's eyes widened. "Tell him," she said, "that he's go