Mona Lisa Overdrive

"Guess we wait for you now."

"No," she said. "You go to Cleveland. Cherry just told you."

"What about you?"

"I'm going for a walk."

"You wa

"Wa

Cherry waved, the zippers of her leather jackets jingling.

44 - Red Leather

Petal said that her bags were waiting in the Jaguar. "You won't want to be coming back to Notting Hill," he said, "so we've arranged something for you in Camden Town."

"Petal," she said, "I have to know what has happened to Sally."

He started the engine.

"Swain was blackmailing her. Forcing her to kidnap -- "

"Ah. Well then," he interrupted, "I see. Shouldn't worry, if I were you."

"I am worried."

"Sally, I would say, has managed to extricate herself from that little matter. She's also, according to certain official friends of ours, managed to cause all record of herself to evaporate, apparently, except for a controlling interest in a German casino. And if anything's happened to Angela Mitchell, Sense/Net hasn't gone public with it. All of that is done with, now."

"Will I see her again?"

"Not on my parish. Please."

They pulled away from the curb.

"Petal," she said, as they drove through London, "my father told me that Swain -- "

"Fool. Bloody fool. Rather not talk about it now."

"I'm sorry."

The heater was working. It was warm in the Jaguar, and Kumiko was very tired now. She settled back against red leather and closed her eyes. Somehow, she thought, her meeting with 3Jane had freed her of her shame, and her father's answer of her anger. 3Jane had been very cruel. Now she saw her mother's cruelty as well. But all must be forgiven, one day, she thought, and fell asleep on the way to a place called Camden Town.

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 gri

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 Fi

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 Fi

"She never guessed, huh?" the Fi

"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 Fi

"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 Fi

"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 Fi

"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 Fi

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