Mona Lisa Overdrive

25 - Back East

While Kelly and his assistants were assembling her wardrobe for the trip, she felt as though the house itself were stirring around her, preparing for one of its many brief periods of vacancy.

She could hear their voices, from where she sat in the living room, their laughter. One of the assistants was a girl in a blue polycarbon exo that allowed her to carry the Hermés wardrobe cases as though they were weightless blocks of foam, the humming skeleton suit padding softly down the stairs on its blunt dinosaur feet. Blue skeleton, leather coffins.

Now Porphyre stood in the doorway. "Missy ready?" He wore a long, loose coat cut from tissue-thin black leather; rhinestone spurs glittered above the heels of black patent boots.

"Porphyre," she said, "you're in mufti. We have an entrance to make, in New York."

"The cameras are for you."

"Yes," she said, "for my reinsertion."

"Porphyre will keep well in the rear."

"I've never known you to worry about upstaging anyone."

He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an avant-garde dentist's fantasy of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.

"Danielle Stark will be flying with us." She heard the sound of the approaching helicopter. "She's meeting us at LAX."

"We'll strangle her," he said, his tone confidential, as he helped her on with the blue fox Kelly had selected. "If we promise to hint to the fax that the motive was sexual, she might even decide to play along ... "

"You're horrid."

"Danielle is a horror, missy."

"Look who's talking."

"Ah," said the hairdresser, narrowing his eyes, "but my soul is a child's."

Now the helicopter was landing.

Danielle Stark, associated with stim versions of both Vogue-Nippon and Vogue-Europa, was widely rumored to be in her late eighties. If it were true, Angie thought, covertly inspecting the journalist's figure as the three of them boarded the Lear, Danielle and Porphyre would be on par for overall surgical modification. Apparently in her willowy early thirties, her only obvious augments were a pair of pale blue Zeiss implants. A young French fashion reporter had once referred to these as "modishly outdated"; the reporter, Net legend said, had never worked again.

And soon, Angie knew, Danielle would want to talk drugs, celebrity drugs, the cornflower eyes schoolgirl-wide to take it all in.

Under Porphyre's daunting gaze, Danielle managed to contain herself until they were in cruise mode somewhere over Utah.

"I was hoping," she began, "that I wouldn't have to be the one to bring it up."

"Danielle," Angie countered, "I am sorry. How thoughtless." She touched the veneered face of the Hosaka flight kitchen, which purred softly and began to dispense tiny plates of tea-smoked duck, gulf oysters on black-pepper toast, crayfish flan, sesame pancakes ... Porphyre, taking Angie's cue, produced a bottle of chilled Chablis -- Danielle's favorite, Angie now recalled. Someone -- Swift? -- had also remembered.

"Drugs," Danielle said, fifteen minutes later, finishing the last of the duck.

"Don't worry," Porphyre assured her. "When you get to New York, they have anything you want."

Danielle smiled. "You're so amusing. Do you know I've a copy of your birth certificate? I know your real name." She looked at him meaningfully, still smiling.

"'sticks and stones,' " he said, topping up her glass.

"Interesting notation regarding congenital defects." She sipped her wine.

"Congenital, genital ... We all change so much these days, don't we? Who's been doing your hair, dear?" He leaned forward. "Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human."

Danielle smiled.

The interview itself went smoothly enough; Danielle was too skilled an interviewer to allow her feints to cross the pain threshold, where they might rally serious resistance. But when she brushed a fingertip back across her temple, depressing a subdermal switch that deactivated her recording gear, Angie tensed for the real onslaught.

"Thank you," Danielle said. "The rest of the flight, of course, is off the record."

"Why don't you just have another bottle or two and turn in?" Porphyre asked.

"What I don't see, dear," Danielle said, ignoring him, "is why you bothered ... "

"Why I bothered, Danielle?"

"Going to that tedious clinic at all. You've said it didn't affect your work. You've also said there was no 'high,' not in the usual sense." She giggled. "Though you do maintain that it was such a terribly addictive substance. Why did you decide to quit?"

"It was terribly expensive ... "

"In your case, surely, that's academic."

True, Angie thought, though a week of it did cost something in the vicinity of your annual salary.

"I suppose I began to resent paying to feel normal. Or a poor approximation of normal."

"Did you build up a tolerance?"

"No."

"How odd."

"Not really. These designers provide substances that supposedly bypass the traditional drawbacks."

"Ah. But what about the new drawbacks, the now drawbacks?" Danielle poured herself more wine. "I've heard another version of all this, of course."

"You have?"

"Of course I have. What it was, who made it, why you quit."

"Yes?"

"It was an antipsychotic, produced in Sense/Net's own labs. You quit taking it because you'd rather be crazy."

Porphyre gently took the glass from Danielle's hand as her lids fluttered heavily over the brilliant blue eyes. "Nightie-night, dear," he said. Danielle's eyes closed and she began to snore gently.

"Porphyre, what -?"

"I dosed her wine," he said. "She won't know the difference, missy. She won't remember anything she didn't record ... " He grinned broadly. "You really didn't want to have to listen to this bitch all the way back, did you?"

"But she'll know, Porphyre!"

"No, she won't. We'll tell her she killed three bottles by herself and made a disgusting mess in the washroom. And she'll feel like it, too." He giggled.

Danielle Stark was still snoring, quite loudly now, in one of the two swing-down bunks in the rear of the cabin.

"Porphyre," Angie said, "do you think she might've been right?"

The hairdresser gazed at her with his gorgeous, inhuman eyes. "And you wouldn't have known?"

"I don't know ... "

He sighed. "Missy worries too much. You're free now. Enjoy it."

"I do hear voices, Porphyre."

"Don't we all, missy?"

"No," she said, "not like mine. Do you know anything about African religions, Porphyre?"

He smirked. "I'm not African."

"But when you were a child ... "

"When I was a child," Porphyre said, "I was white."

"Oh ... "

He laughed. "Religions, missy?"

"Before I came to the Net, I had friends. In New Jersey. They were black and ... religious."

He smirked again and rolled his eyes. "Hoodoo sign, missy? Chickenbone and pennyroyal oil?"

"You know it isn't like that."

"And if I do?"

"Don't tease me, Porphyre. I need you."

"Missy has me. And yes, I know what you mean. And those are your voices?"

"They were. After I began to use the dust, they went away ... "

"And now?"

"They're gone." But the impulse was past now, and she cringed from trying to tell him about Grande Brigitte and the drug in the jacket.

"Good," he said. "That's good, missy."

The Lear began its descent over Ohio. Porphyre was staring at the bulkhead, still as a statue. Angie looked out at the cloud-country below as it rose toward them, remembering the game she'd played on airplanes as a child, sending an imaginary Angie out to romp through cloud-canyons and over fluffy peaks grown magically solid. Those planes had belonged to Maas-Neotek, she supposed. From the Maas corporate jets she'd gone on to Net Lears. She knew commercial airliners only as locations for her stims: New York to Paris on the maiden flight of JAL's restored Concorde, with Robin and a hand-picked party of Net people.

Descending. Were they over New Jersey yet? Did the children swarming the rooftop playgrounds of Beauvoir's arcology hear the Lear's engine? Did the sound of her passage sweep faintly over the condos of Bobby's childhood? How unthinkably intricate the world was, in sheer detail of mechanism, when Sense/Net's corporate will shook tiny bones in the ears of unknown, unknowing children ...

"Porphyre knows certain things," he said, very softly. "But Porphyre needs time to think, missy ... "

They were banking for the final approach.