Synners (31 page)

That would make his brain the headmount, he thought dreamily, and looked around. In another part of the room, on a raised platform, a woman was holding a strange piece of machinery that looked like the bastard offspring of a shovel and a keyboard and screaming something at the top of her lungs. Periodically she slammed the wide part of the machine down on the stage. After the third time he started seeing sparks flying up from the point of impact.

Yah, his body was the hotsuit, and his brain was the head-mount, but the program seemed to have gone a little crazy.

MORE DRUGS.

He understood
percussionist
right away, but it took him a while to grab the idea that her last name was
Something.
The gold tone of her skin had a stronger yellow in it than Catherine's, but on her it looked good. On her it was Something. She wasn't impressed with his Something jokes, but she didn't hit him with the sticks, either. She tortured the table with them.

Maybe he needed some sticks, he thought. He could have used them in Manny's office. Bing, bang, bap, flip-flip, tap. She wouldn't let him handle them, so he used his fingers, trying to find a way through her rhythm. A little later she told him he'd made a game try, and if he wanted to get into music, she could show him the way. But right then Gina lifted him out of the chair by the back of his neck, and he could only watch the table recede in the distance. The sticks tapped good-bye before a sudden glittering population fell into the space between him and them, blotting them out. He must be leaving.

———

He had gone away for a little while, but there was a dim recording in his mind of a blimp, a far more vivid memory of a yellow gold woman with dancing sticks, and somewhere in there a brick wall with snakes crawling on it—or was that a brick floor? A brick
ceiling?
—and now here he was in the open night air and someone was saying, "AR is a big,
big
concept. Wraps around a lotta stuff. A
whole
lotta stuff."

His vision cleared again, and he was looking at a monitor screen running in split-mode, with what might have been identical sets of figures scrolling up either side at different rates.

"On the right here," the voice went on, "are the readings for the area under normal conditions, when there'd be nobody here. On the left are the real readings that we're intercepting on the way to the security-system sensors—"

Marly's voice spoke casually in his head.
Try to say that five times real
fast.
No, not her voice, just his own, he decided. Suddenly he no longer wanted to disown his thoughts and stick false names on them. He didn't have to do that right now, he didn't have to cut pieces of himself off and dress them up in masks and costumes to keep himself company—

"—tents and purposes a facade simulation at the point of input to the security system, where we alter the readings, change the figures going in to be those you'd get if there was nobody here. See, there's air pressure, wind velocity—now the sound and vision's trickier because we have to get between what the cams see and hear and what they tell the system they see and hear. So we run a real facade simulation there in a loop. That's the fooler loop. You just have to sit on top of it and make sure nothing gets jiggled out of place—"

He drifted away again, unsure if he was moving physically. It felt as though he might be. The lights and colors were shot through with large pockets of darkness, and he couldn't seem to get oriented.

"Yah, well, we're all corks on this ocean." A kid raised up from the synthesizer he had been bending over. "I've got a real feel for the sound of guitars, myself. All kinds. I don't need
anybody
else. Hear me, and you'd swear you were hearing four-five people—"

Someone interrupted him. He shoved a hand at Gabe, and Gabe took it. "Remember me," he said, pumping Gabe's hand up and down. "My name's Dexter, and I'm a whole fucking group in one body, I swear I am. Tell her that. Please? Tell her."

Gabe nodded, dazed, and wandered off. A whole fucking group in one body. He could sympathize. That wasn't really so hard. Just pull them out and make them into individuals, the group, make good guys and bad guys and stick them in a simulation, and you'd never have to be alone—

Deadline < month.

The memory was a fist in the face. He knew just how a fist in the face felt, too; if he ever had to program a hotsuit with facial coverage for a fast shot to the head, he was ready. What he ought to do now, he thought, was take a blow to the stomach and then program
that
into one of his commercials and persuade Manny to test-drive it 'suited up. Wouldn't that give old Manny a surprise, would that just give him something to think over? It wouldn't actually hurt him, it would just be unpleasant. After all, it wasn't like the hotsuit was anything but skin-deep.

But he needed the experience, so he'd know he'd gotten the hotsuit settings right. Faking it was out of the question.

Manny hated faked material; he could tell immediately when the sensation wasn't authentic.

He put his arms over his stomach. The feel of Gina's arms was long gone, and he wanted them back. Absurdly tall pink feathers growing up from what seemed to be a flamingo face sailed through his field of vision, leaving a hot pink trail behind. He became aware of the music, then, lots of guitar sounds, sounds like lots of guitars.

He felt himself walking, but it was distant, as if he were wearing a good hotsuit with the tactile damped down. The colors parted around him, and he found himself looking at hundreds of strange humps. They grew up out of the ground (or whatever this surface was—he smelled grass and dirt, so he was calling it ground) in sharply regular rows.
Information,
he thought.
Regimentation.
On the whole he preferred the idea of the Byzantine orchard. That was long gone, too, but if he could have Gina put her arms around him again, who knew but that it would come back? And if he had to get her to punch him in the stomach to do that, then he would do that.

"Gina?" he asked timidly.

Scattered voices came through the darkness over the humps.

". . . fucking furious with you, asshole."

"Fury is what made rock'n'roll great."

"When was I ever not there for you?"

"Well," Gabe murmured, maneuvering between two of the humps, "where was 'there,' and what was I doing at the time?"

". . . twenty
years
on your case, what does it fucking
take?"
That was Gina's voice, he'd know it forever. The first time he'd ever heard it, he'd known he would remember it forever, and not just because she'd punched his lights out. It was a voice with texture, a voice that you could touch as much as hear. It had been in his ears all night, and he hadn't realized how much he wanted to keep it there until it had gone away and come back just now.

"Gina," he said, moving forward. Something banged into his hip. He reached out to touch it and was startled by the feel of cold stone. One of those humps.

"It's complicated," said the other voice. Not as textured, a voice from someone who seemed to be receding in the distance, not faint but fading out all the same. "I wanted to tell you. It's a rope out of a hole."

Gabe stumbled into another hump and worked his way around it.

"Picturesque, but not accurate.
Now
you work in a rucking hole."

"I'm fading fucking
out, I'm
going so fast sometimes you can see right through me."

"I can see right through you, all right."

The darkness was no longer as deep as it had been. Gabe could make out trees now, plain old trees, and somewhere far off, light flung over the grass in great white circles. He moved sideways now, using the cold stone humps as a guide, stepping from one to another in a straight line. If he could put the voices between himself and the distant white light, he would see where Gina was and who she was talking to.

". . . guess we should have taken better care of each other."

"I took
great
care of
you,
fucker."

"But when it came down to some things, we did something else. Usually video."

"Twenty years I've heard you bullshit and shoot shit, this is the first time
this
shit has ever come up. I don't
want
a postmortem of the last twenty years trying to decide if we did right by each other. What we got right now is what we got. Maybe it's damned fucking little, but it made a difference to me. I didn't keep
my
life from you."

Now Gabe could see people moving around in the distant pools of light, and something in their motions made him think they were hunting each other. Hunting to music.

"Look,
you
got a video head,
I
got a video head, what the fuck were we gonna do, keep the day-care in business? I'll be there tomorrow, for chrissakes,
I'll be there.
When was I ever not there for you?"

Two dark shapes blocked his view of the people in the light. He recognized Gina's silhouette immediately. There was something familiar about the other one, but he couldn't place it.

"Gina," he said, just as she moved toward the other person.
"What?"
she snapped.

"Gina," he said again happily, going forward. "Punch me in the—" Something caught him right at his belt line, hard enough to flip his feet up as his head went down. Cold stone bashed into the right side of his face, and there was a technicolor explosion in his head. He was barely aware of his own flailing before something slammed against his back, knocking the wind out of him. Colors poured down in an avalanche.

White light seared his eyes and drilled into his brain. He squeezed his eyes shut again quickly. The buzzing roar now waxing and waning in his ears resolved itself into voices over music. Something was pressing firmly against the side of his face. The patches, he thought; if he could move his arm, he would reach into his pocket and stick on two, or three, or four—

Someone was holding his arm. Laboriously he made his head turn, feeling the pressure against his face yield slightly, and opened his eyes again.

Sam's face swam into focus, started to melt away, and came back again. The hollows below her cheekbones had deepened a bit, and her wide, serious eyes made her look both frighteningly old and frightened and young. The unruly black hair was a little longer, a little softer. She was hanging onto his arm as if she meant to pull him up out of deep water.
We're all
corks on this ocean.

"So," he said, taking a cautious breath. Pain flared in his back, then receded to a constant dull ache. "And when did you get back into town?"

Sam glanced away for a moment. "I guess you'll be all right if you recognize me."

A young woman appeared behind Sam and put her hand on Sam's shoulder. "Ain't sure we can say the same, doll."

"I know, Rosa. Another minute and we'll go. Where's Jones? Don't lose him again." She looked up, and Gabe followed her gaze to a young guy with nervous-breakdown hair framing a bony, sullen face. "Just make sure you stay there, you," Sam said to the guy, and turned back to him. "Gabe, I can't stick around, and I don't know what you're doing here or what you did to yourself—"

"Told you, he tripped over a fucking
tombstone,"
came Gina's voice from nearby. She was pressing something to the side of his face, he realized, and his head was pillowed on her knees. He reached up, found her hand and the wad of cloth in it. She wiggled out of his grasp and closed his hand around the wad. He had a glimpse of something red.

". . . going away," Sam was saying. "For a real long time. Please, don't try to find me."

"You're always going away," he said resignedly. "It would be news if you were staying."

Sam shrugged. "I was going to try to get a message to you later, when things calmed down—" The woman behind Sam gave her a poke, and Sam glanced back at her. "Christ, Rosa, he works there. I gotta tell you, Gabe, I never expected to see you at a hit-and-run in Forest Lawn." She reached over and tucked something into his pants pocket. "If something—oh, I don't know, if something comes up, and you want to tell me something, if there's some kind of trouble, you can try getting a message to me through the name on the paper."

He gave a weak, disbelieving laugh. "Aren't we doing this backwards?"

"I know where
you
are." She let go of his arm and stood up, her gaze going briefly to Gina. "Some life, Dad." She moved off with the other woman and the guy. He tried to sit up, thinking to call after her, but the pain in his face and the pain in his back blossomed anew, pinning him where he was.

Gina slipped his head onto the uneven pillow of her jacket and then knelt beside him, crossing her arms expectantly.

"That was my daughter," he said, still marveling. Sam had called him Dad.

"That's what she told me."

"But I didn't get a chance to let her know," he added sadly.

"Let her know what? That you've been 'found out'?"

"Her mother's leaving me. She'd have wanted to know that." He took the wad of cloth from his face and looked at it, not understanding right away that the red was his own blood. Gina pushed it back against his cheek.

"You never mentioned that to me, either," she said quietly. "Talked about plenty else. That why you wanted a punch in the stomach, because her mother's leaving you?"

His free hand found hers. "No. When your wife leaves you first thing in the morning, how much worse can the day get? I wanted it because—" Because he thought he was about to lose his job, and he wanted to leave Manny something to remember him by? Oh, that sounded real fierce. Leaving Manny a simulated punch in the stomach for the loss of his simulated girlfriends and his simulated secret life, for the loss of his simulated job. If he was losing it all, he might as well leave Manny with a
real
punch in the stomach.

The idea gave him a rush of pleasure that temporarily overrode the pain. Take it out of porn, make it something real. Do one real thing. Hell, he might never do another.

Gina's gaze turned to her right. The crazy guy, Visual Mark, was bending over him with the same space-case expression he'd been wearing the day Gabe had first met him.