Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Author:William Gibson [Gibson, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: _Read, General Interest
Published: 2011-05-04T23:00:00+00:00

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 thoseare 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.

Kuromaku

And Sally was silent, on the street and in the cab, all the long cold way back to their hotel.

Sally and Swain were being blackmailed by Sally's enemy»up the well.«Sally was being forced to kidnap Angie Mitchell. The thought of someone's abducting the Sense/Net star struck Kumiko as singularly unreal, as if someone were plotting to assassinate a figure out of myth.

The Finn had implied that Angie herself was already involved, in some mysterious way, but he had used words and idioms Kumiko hadn't understood. Something in cyberspace; people forming pacts with a thing or things there. The Finn had known a boy who became Angie's lover; but wasn't Robin Lanier her lover? Kumiko's mother had allowed her to run several of the Angie and Robin stims. The boy had been a cowboy, a data thief, like Tick in London…

And

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