（外文电子版资料）William Gibson - Mona Lisa Overdrive.pdfVIP

file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Mona%20Lisa%20Overdrive.txt Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson VERSION 1.1 (Feb 23 00). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute. The Smoke The ghost was her fathers parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita. For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her purse, a smooth dark oblong, one side impressed with the ubiquitous Maas-Neotek logo, the other gently curved to fit the users palm. She sat up very straight in her seat in the first-class cabin, her features composed in a small cold mask modeled after her dead mothers most characteristic expression. The surrounding seats were empty; her father had purchased the space. She refused the meal the nervous steward offered. The vacant seats frightened him, evidence of her fathers wealth and power. The man hesitated, then bowed and withdrew. Very briefly, she allowed the mask her mothers smile. Ghosts, she thought later, somewhere over Germany, staring at the upholstery of the seat beside her. How well her father treated his ghosts. There were ghosts beyond the window, too, ghosts in the stratosphere of Europes winter, partial images that began to form if she let her eyes drift out of focus. Her mother in Ueno Park, face fragile in September sunlight. 禄The cranes, Kumi! Look at the cranes!芦 And Kumiko looked across Shinobazu Pond and saw nothing, no cranes at all, only a few hopping black dots that surely were crows. The water was smooth as silk, the color of lead, and pale holograms flickered indistinctly above a distant line of archery stalls. But Kumiko would see the cranes later, many times, in dreams; they were origami, angular things folded from sheets of neon, bright stiff birds sailing the moonscape of her mothers madness. . . . Remembering her father, the black robe open across a t