Down on the Drag
Mona woke as they were landing. Prior was listening to Eddy and nodding and flashing his rectangular smile. It was like the smile was always there, behind his beard. He’d changed his clothes, though, so he must’ve had some on the plane. Now he wore a plain gray business suit and a tie with diagonal stripes. Sort of like the tricks Eddy’d set her up with in Cleveland, except the suit fit a different way. She’d seen a trick fitted for a suit once, a guy who took her to a Holiday Inn. The suit place was off the hotel lobby, and he stood in there in his underwear, crosshatched with lines of blue light, and watched himself on three big screens. On the screens, you couldn’t see the blue lines, because he was wearing a different suit in each image. And Mona had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing, because the system had a cosmetic program that made him look different on the screens, stretched his face a little and made his chin stronger, and he didn’t seem to notice. Then he picked a suit, got back into the one he’d been wearing, and that was it. Eddy was explaining something to Prior, some crucial point in the architecture of one of his scams. She knew how to tune the content out, but the tone still got to her, like he knew people wouldn’t be able to grasp the gimmick he was so proud of, so he was taking it slow and easy, like he was talking to a little kid, and he’d keep his voice low to sound patient. It didn’t seem to bother Prior, but then it seemed to Mona that Prior didn’t much give a shit what Eddy said. She yawned, stretched, and the plane bumped twice on runway concrete, roared, began to slow. Eddy hadn’t even stopped talking. »We have a car waiting,« Prior said, interrupting him. »So where’s it taking us?« Mona asked, ignoring Eddy’s frown. Prior showed her the smile. »To our hotel.« He unfastened his seatbelt. »We’ll be there for a few days. Afraid you’ll have to spend most of them in your room.« »That’s the deal,« Eddy said, like it was his idea she’d have to stay in the room. »You like stims, Mona?« Prior asked, still smiling. »Sure,« she said, »who doesn’t?« »Have a favorite, Mona, a favorite star?« »Angie,« she said, vaguely irritated. »Who else?« The smile got a little bigger. »Good. We’ll get you all of her latest tapes.« Mona’s universe consisted in large part of things and places she knew but had never physically seen or visited. The hub of the northern Sprawl didn’t smell, in stims. They edited it out, she guessed, the way Angie never had a headache or a bad period. But it did smell. Like Cleveland, but even worse. She’d thought it was just the way the airport smelled, when they left the plane, but it had been even stronger when they’d gotten out of their car to go into the hotel. And it was cold as hell in the street, too, with a wind that bit at her bare ankles. The hotel was bigger than that Holiday Inn, but older, too, she thought. The lobby was more crowded than lobbies were in stims, but there was a lot of clean blue carpet. Prior made her wait by an ad for an orbital spa while he and Eddy went over to a long black counter and he talked to a woman with a brass nametag. She felt stupid waiting there, in this white plastic raincoat Prior had made her wear, like he didn’t think her outfit was good enough. About a third of the crowd in the lobby were Japs she figured for tourists. They all seemed to have recording gear of some kind — video, holo, a few with simstim units on their belts — but otherwise they didn’t look like they had a whole lot of money. She thought they were all supposed to have a lot. Maybe they ‘re smart , don ‘t want to show it , she decided. She saw Prior slide a credit chip across the counter to the woman with the nametag, who took it and zipped it along a metal slot.