“I’m not trying to tell you your business,” Gerald was saying, above a running tap and a rattle of metal, like he was washing pans or something, “but you’re kidding yourself if you think she’d fool anyone who didn’t want to be fooled. It’s really a very superficial job.” Prior said something she couldn’t make out. “I said superficial, not shoddy. That’s quality work, all of it. Twenty-four hours on a dermal stimulator and you won’t know she’s been here. Keep her on the antibiotics and off stimulants; her immune system isn’t all it could be.” Then Prior again, but she still couldn’t catch it.
Opened her eyes but there was only the ceiling, white squares of acoustic tile. Turned her head to the left. White plastic wall with one of those fake windows, hi-rez animation of a beach with palm trees and waves; watch the water long enough and you’d see the same waves rolling in, looped, forever. Except the thing was broken or worn out, a kind of hesitation in the waves, and the red of the sunset pulsed like a bad fluorescent tube.
Try right. Turning again, feeling the sweaty paper cover on the hard foam pillow against her neck …
And the face with bruised eyes looking at her from the other bed, nose braced with clear plastic and micropore tape, some kind of brown jelly stuff smeared back across the cheekbones …
Angie. It was Angie’s face, framed by the reflected sunset stutter of the defective window.
“There was no bonework,” Gerald said, carefully loosening the tape that held the little plastic brace in place along the bridge of her nose. “That was the beauty of it. We planed some cartilage in the nose, working in through the nostrils, then went on to the teeth. Smile. Beautiful. We did the breast augmentation, built up the nipples with vat-grown erectile tissue, then did the eye coloration.…” He removed the brace. “You mustn’t touch this for another twenty-four hours.”
“That how I got the bruises?”
“No. That’s secondary trauma from the cartilage job.” Gerald’s fingers were cool on her face, precise. “That should clear up by tomorrow.”
Gerald was okay. He’d given her three derms, two blue and a pink, smooth and comfortable. Prior definitely wasn’t okay, but he was gone or anyway out of sight. And it was just nice, listening to Gerald explain things in his calm voice. And look what he could do.
“Freckles,” she said, because they were gone.
“Abrasion and more vat tissue. They’ll come back, faster if you get too much sun.…”
“She’s so beautiful.…” She turned her head.
“You, Mona. That’s you.”
She looked at the face in the mirror and tried on that famous smile.
Maybe Gerald wasn’t okay.
Back in the narrow white bed again, where he’d put her to rest, she raised her arm and looked at the three derms. Trank. Floating.
She worked a fingernail under the pink derm and peeled it off, stuck it on the white wall, and pushed hard with her thumb. A single bead of straw-colored fluid ran down. She carefully peeled it back and replaced it on her arm. The stuff in the blue ones was milky white. She put them back on too. Maybe he’d notice, but she wanted to know what was happening.
She looked in the mirror. Gerald said he could put it back the way it was, someday, if she wanted him to, but then she wondered how he’d remember what she’d looked like. Maybe he’d taken a picture or something. Now that she thought about it, maybe there wasn’t anybody who’d remember how she’d looked before. She guessed Michael’s stim deck was probably the closest bet, but she didn’t know his address or even his last name. It gave her a funny feeling, like who she’d been had wandered away down the street for a minute and never come back. But then she closed her eyes and knew she was Mona, always had been, and that nothing much had changed, anyway not behind her eyelids.
Lanette said it didn’t matter, how you got yourself changed. Lanette told her once that she didn’t have 10 percent of her own face left, the one she’d been born with. Not that you’d guess, except for the black around her lids so she never had to mess with mascara. Mona had thought maybe Lanette hadn’t got such good work done, and it must have shown once in Mona’s eyes, because then Lanette said: You shoulda seen me before, honey.
But now here she was, Mona, stretched out straight in this skinny bed in Baltimore, and all she knew about Baltimore was the sound of a siren from down in the street and the motor running on Gerald’s air-conditioner.
And somehow that turned into sleep, she didn’t know for how long, and then Prior was there with his hand on her arm, asking her if she was hungry.
She watched Prior shave his beard. He did it at the stainless surgical sink, trimming it back with a pair of chrome scissors. Then he switched to a white plastic throwaway razor from a box of them that Gerald had. It was strange watching his face come out. It wasn’t a face she’d have expected: it was younger. But the mouth was the same.
“We gonna be here much longer, Prior?”
He had his shirt off for the shave; he had tattoos across his shoulders and down his upper arms, dragons with lion-heads. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“It’s boring.”
“We’ll get you some stims.” He was shaving under his chin.
“What’s Baltimore like?”
“Bloody awful. Like the rest of it.”
“So what’s England like?”
“Bloody awful.” He wiped his face with a thick wad of blue absorbent paper.
“Maybe we could go out, get some of those crabs. Gerald says they got crabs.”
“They do,” he said. “I’ll get some in.”
“How about you take me out?”
He tossed the blue wad into a steel waste canister. “No, you might try to run away.”
She slid her hand between the bed and the wall and found the torn foam air cell where she’d hidden the shockrod. She’d found her clothes in a white plastic bag. Gerald came in every couple of hours with fresh derms; she’d wring them out as soon as he’d gone. She’d figured if she could get Prior to take her out to eat, she could make a move in the restaurant. But he wasn’t having any.
In a restaurant she might even be able to get a cop, because now she figured she knew what the deal was.
Snuff. Lanette had told her about that. How there were men who’d pay to have girls fixed up to look like other people, then kill them. Had to be rich, really rich. Not Prior, but somebody he worked for. Lanette said these guys had girls fixed to look like their wives sometimes. Mona hadn’t really believed it, back then; sometimes Lanette told her scary stuff because it was fun to be scared when you knew you were pretty safe, and anyway Lanette had a lot of stories about weird kinks. She said suits were the weirdest of all, the big suits way up in big companies, because they couldn’t afford to lose control when they were working. But when they weren’t working, Lanette said, they could afford to lose it any way they wanted. So why not a big suit somewhere who wanted Angie that way? Well, there were lots of girls got themselves worked over to look like her, but they were mostly pathetic. Wannabes—and she hadn’t ever seen one who really looked much like Angie, anyway not enough to fool anybody who cared. But maybe there was somebody who’d pay for all this just to get a girl who did look like Angie. Anyway, if it wasn’t snuff, what was it?
Now Prior was buttoning his blue shirt. He came over to the bed and pulled the sheet down to look at her breasts. Like he was looking at a car or something.
She yanked the sheet back up.
“I’ll get some crabs.” He put his jacket on and went out. She could hear him saying something to Gerald.
Gerald stuck his head in. “How are you, Mona?”
“Hungry.”
“Feeling relaxed?”
“Yeah …”
When she was alone again, she rolled over and studied her face, Angie’s face, in the mirrored wall. The bruising was almost gone. Gerald taped things like miniature trodes to her face and hooked them to a machine. Said they made it heal real fast.
It didn’t make her
jump, now, Angie’s face in the mirror. The teeth were nice; the teeth you’d wanna keep anyway. She wasn’t sure about the rest, not yet.
Maybe she should just get up now, get her clothes on, head for the door. If Gerald tried to stop her, she could use the rod. Then she remembered how Prior had turned up at Michael’s, like he’d had somebody watching her, all night, following her. Maybe somebody watching now, outside. Gerald’s place didn’t seem to have any windows, not real ones, so she’d have to go out the door.
And she was starting to want her wiz bad, too, but if she did even a little, Gerald would notice. She knew her kit was there, in her bag under the bed. Maybe if she did some, she thought, she’d just do something. But maybe it wouldn’t be the right thing; she had to admit that what she did on wiz didn’t always work out, even though it made you feel like you couldn’t make a mistake if you tried.
Anyway, she was hungry, and too bad Gerald didn’t have some kind of music or something, so maybe she’d just wait for that crab.…
24
IN A LONELY PLACE
And Gentry standing there with the Shape burning behind his eyes, holding out the trode-net under the glare of bare bulbs, telling Slick why it had to be that way, why Slick had to put the trodes on and jack straight into whatever the gray slab was inputting to the still figure on the stretcher.
He shook his head, remembering how he’d come to Dog Solitude. And Gentry started talking faster, taking the gesture for refusal.
Gentry was saying Slick had to go under, he said maybe just for a few seconds, while he got a fix on the data and worked up a macroform. Slick didn’t know how to do that, Gentry said, or he’d go under himself; it wasn’t the data he wanted, just the overall shape, because he thought that would lead him to the Shape, the big one, the thing he’d chased for so long.
Slick remembered crossing the Solitude on foot. He’d been scared that the Korsakov’s would come back, that he’d forget where he was and drink cancer-water from the slimed red puddles on the rusty plain. Red scum and dead birds floating with their wings spread. The trucker from Tennessee had told him to walk west from the highway, he’d hit two-lane blacktop inside an hour and get a ride down to Cleveland, but it felt like longer than an hour now and he wasn’t so sure which way was west and this place was spooking him, this junkyard scar like a giant had stomped it flat. Once he saw somebody far away, up on a low ridge, and waved. The figure vanished, but he walked that way, no longer trying to skirt the puddles, slogging through them, until he came to the ridge and saw that it was the wingless hulk of an airliner half-buried in rusted cans. He made his way up the incline along a path where feet had flattened the cans, to a square opening that had been an emergency exit. Stuck his head inside and saw hundreds of tiny heads suspended from the concave ceiling. He froze there, blinking in the sudden shade, until what he was seeing made some kind of sense. The pink plastic heads of dolls, their nylon hair tied up into topknots and the knots stuck into thick black tar, dangling like fruit. Nothing else, only a few ragged slabs of dirty green foam, and he knew he didn’t want to stick around to find out whose place it was.
He’d headed south then, without knowing it, and found Factory.
“I’ll never have another chance,” Gentry said. Slick stared at the taut face, the eyes wide with desperation. “I’ll never see it.…”
And Slick remembered the time Gentry’d hit him, how he’d looked down at the wrench and felt … Well, Cherry wasn’t right about them, but there was something else there, he didn’t know what to call it. He snatched the trode-net with his left hand and shoved Gentry hard in the chest with his right. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” Gentry fell back against the steel table’s edge.
Slick cursed him softly as he fumbled the delicate net of contact dermatrodes across his forehead and temples.
Jacked in.
His boots crunched gravel.
Opened his eyes and looked down; the gravel drive smooth in the dawn, cleaner than anything in Dog Solitude. He looked up and saw where it curved away, and beyond green and spreading trees the pitched slate roof of a house half the size of Factory. There were statues near him in the long wet grass. A deer made of iron, and a broken figure of a man’s body carved from white stone, no head or arms or legs. Birds were singing and that was the only sound.
He started walking up the drive, toward the gray house, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. When he got to the head of the drive, he could see past the house to smaller buildings and a broad flat field of grass where gliders were staked against the wind.
Fairytale, he thought, looking up at the mansion’s broad stone brow, the leaded diamond panes; like some vid he’d seen when he was little. Were there really people who lived in places like this? But it’s not a place, he reminded himself, it only feels like it is.
“Gentry,” he said, “get my ass out of this, okay?”
He studied the backs of his hands. Scars, ingrained grime, black half-moons of grease under his broken nails. The grease got in and made them soft, so they broke easy.
He started to feel stupid, standing there. Maybe somebody was watching him from the house. “Fuck it,” he said, and started up the broad flagstone walk, unconsciously hitching his stride into the swagger he’d learned in the Deacon Blues.
The door had this thing fastened to a central panel: a hand, small and graceful, holding a sphere the size of a poolball, all cast in iron. Hinged at the wrist so you could raise it and bring it down. He did. Hard. Twice, then twice again. Nothing happened. The doorknob was brass, floral detail worn almost invisible by years of use. It turned easily. He opened the door.
He blinked at a wealth of color and texture; surfaces of dark polished wood, black and white marble, rugs with a thousand soft colors that glowed like church windows, polished silver, mirrors.… He grinned at the soft shock of it, his eyes pulled from one new sight to another, so many things, objects he had no name for.…
“You looking for anyone in particular, Jack?”
The man stood in front of a vast fireplace, wearing tight black jeans and a white T-shirt. His feet were bare and he held a fat glass bulb of liquor in his right hand. Slick blinked at him.
“Shit,” Slick said, “you’re him.…”
The man swirled the brown stuff up around the edges of the glass and took a swallow. “I expected Afrika to pull something like this eventually,” he said, “but somehow, buddy, you don’t look like his style of help.”
“You’re the Count.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m the Count. Who the fuck are you?”
“Slick. Slick Henry.”
He laughed. “Want some cognac, Slick Henry?” He gestured with the glass toward a piece of polished wooden furniture where ornate bottles stood in a row, each one with a little silver tag hung around it on a chain.
Slick shook his head.
The man shrugged. “Can’t get drunk on it anyway … Pardon my saying so, Slick, but you look like shit. Am I correct in guessing that you are not a part of Kid Afrika’s operation? And if not, just what exactly are you doing here?”
“Gentry sent me.”
“Gentry who?”
“You’re the guy on the stretcher, right?”
“The guy on the stretcher is me. Where, exactly, right this minute, is that stretcher, Slick?”
“Gentry’s.”
“Where’s that?”
“Factory.”
“And where is that?”
“Dog Solitude.”
“And how did I happen to get there, wherever that is?”
“Kid Afrika, he brought you. Brought you with this girl name of Cherry, right? See, I owed him a favor, so he wanted me to put you up awhile, you an’ Cherry, and she’s taking care of you.”
“You called me Count, Slick.…”
“Cherry said Kid called you that once.”
“Tell me, Slick, did the Kid seem worried when he brought me?”
“Cherry thought he
got scared, back in Cleveland.”
“I’m sure he did. Who’s this Gentry? A friend of yours?”
“Factory’s his place. I live there too.…”
“This Gentry, is he a cowboy, Slick? A console jockey? I mean, if you’re here, he must be technical, right?”
Now it was Slick’s turn to shrug. “Gentry’s, like, he’s an artist, kind of. Has these theories. Hard to explain. He rigged a set of splitters to that thing on the stretcher, what you’re jacked into. First he tried to get an image on a holo rig, but there was just this monkey thing, sort of shadow, so he talked me into …”
“Jesus … Well, never mind. This factory you’re talking about, it’s out in the sticks somewhere? It’s relatively isolated?”
Slick nodded.
“And this Cherry, she’s some kind of hired nurse?”
“Yeah. Had a med-tech’s ticket, she said.”
“And nobody’s come looking for me yet?”
“No.”
“That’s good, Slick. Because if anyone does, other than my lying rat-bastard friend Kid Afrika, you folks could find yourselves in serious trouble.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Listen to me, okay? I want you to remember this. If any company shows up at this factory of yours, your only hope in hell is to get me jacked into the matrix. You got that?”
“How come you’re the Count? I mean, what’s it mean?”
“Bobby. My name’s Bobby. Count was my handle once, that’s all. You think you’ll remember what I told you?”
Slick nodded again.
“Good.” He put his glass down on the thing with all the fancy bottles. “Listen,” he said. From the open door came the sound of tires over gravel. “Know who that is, Slick? That’s Angela Mitchell.”
Slick turned. Bobby the Count was looking out at the drive.
“Angie Mitchell? The stim star? She’s in this thing too?”
“In a manner of speaking, Slick, in a manner of speaking …”
Slick saw the long black car slide by. “Hey,” he began, “Count, I mean Bobby, what d—”
“Easy,” Gentry was saying, “just sit back. Easy. Easy …”