Synners (62 page)

Then it was a pillar of fire, and he remembered how he had ducked, expecting it to become a laser beam in the next moment. He got up and went over to the wall of screens.

Instead of the tech-fantasy porn clip, he was watching Gina. She was lying on a cot with wires in her head; behind her closed lids her eyes moved back and forth.

Gina-porn?

"That's a good way to put it," said a familiar voice. "If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it,
be
it, or throw it away. Lucky her. Not only can she dance, but she can be it, too. And so can you."

Abruptly the scene switched to Mark's bedroom, and he saw himself and Gina together. He looked away quickly only to find he was turning to the wall of screens again, all of them showing the scene in Mark's bedroom now. He put his back to them and there they were in front of him, above him, below him, on all sides, at every angle.

"It's no more of a prison than you were ever in," Mark's easy voice said soothingly. "After all, that's entertainment. Isn't it? One person's pain being another's entertainment. One person's grand love affair being another person's porn. That's all it ever meant to anyone. 'Don't know what it is, but it makes me horny, and that's all that matters'—other than that, nobody cares. It doesn't make a difference to anyone. A drop in the consumer bucket, to be drunk up, digested, excreted, and fed back into the food-fuck-anddance chain. Food-fuck-dance-
and-be
chain, excuse me, whether it's you and Gina, or you and your virtual playmates, you and your wife, you and Sam, or just you and your carefully cultivated, fully formed pain."

The screens were splitting, multiplying, now displaying a myriad of pictures from both himself and Gina, each one different. His vision rebelled, unable to see them all at once, and they melted into a blur that ran and faded to a bleak grey color.

———

Ow.

She turned in a rush, looking for Markt. For all she could sense of him, or them, or whatever the fuck, Markt might have vacated as soon as she and Ludovic had gone through the window. "Enjoying the show?" she called angrily. "You get off on fucking with me like this?"

Laughter in the dark, flowing like music. Then Mark was pulling her onto the narrow bed in the room in Mexico. She hadn't been sure at first what he'd been doing, or even if he'd been sure, she remembered that, just as she remembered clutching his jumpsuit in both hands and tearing it away from him, driven by an urgency she hadn't wanted to identify at the time. Reveling in that intense familiarity and letting it cover over thought of anything and everything else, especially the feeling that this would be the last she could have from him in this way, that he was going down the rabbit hole in his brain finally and for good.

Feeling? Shit, he'd
told
her, right out. . . .
you're gonna see this funny
looking thing, a piece of flesh clutching into naked console . . .

So what was she doing here, with the feel of cloth and flesh so vivid?

"Because you can have anything you want, just by thinking of it. Make it over into what you wanted it to be, instead of the disappointment it turned out to be," Mark whispered. She felt his breath on her neck and strained toward him in reaction, pulling an arm out of her own jumpsuit. "Because the brain feels no pain."

The sensation running down her side with his hand definitely wasn't pain, she thought, letting herself open to it as it intensified; not pain, nothing like it.

"Pain is curable," Mark whispered to her. "It's the most curable thing of all, really, and it's the thing we all walk around feeling all the time when we don't have to. There doesn't have to be pain. Just us. No pain. Just us . . . us

. . ."

Is there really such a thing as a second chance?
"It's not a
second
chance, Gina. It's a
new
one. And in spite of all that's happened—maybe even because of it—you want that. Do it any way you want to. Pain, your pain, my pain, it was all noise, and I've cleared it away for us."

What's wrong with this picture?

Echoes of phantom sounds bounced oft the low clouds above the stony shore. Gabe stared up at the sky, wincing at the feel of the stones pressing into his back. In a moment the shadowed areas of the clouds would begin to shift and throb, and he didn't want to see that. Stones scraped the back of his head as he turned to look across the water.

The surface of the lake rippled as something began to fade in on the part of the shore directly in his line of sight. He could feel the pressure of its gathering, an unpleasant tightening sensation behind his eyes. With an effort he rolled over and sat up, keeping his back to the lake. The stones dug into him harder. When your whole body was a hotsuit, he thought, there were definite disadvantages. He pushed himself to his feet.

Something pulled at him from behind, trying to make him turn around. Caught off balance, he did a little staggering dance on the stones and managed to stay upright and still keep his back to the lake. "Gina?" he asked.

Her absence was a hole in the air.

———

The patterns on the cape weren't just unusual, Sam thought, watching them. There was something different about them. Sometimes she thought she could almost see pictures in them, not just shadowy shapes but real pictures, as if her mind were being teased into projecting images, or filling in color and detail. The longer she watched, the more tangible the pull on her mind felt, as if the patterns were somehow touching her in a very personal way. She wasn't sure that she liked it, but she wasn't prepared to say that she didn't like it, either. She wasn't prepared to say anything at all or, for that matter, listen to anyone else say anything, either. Good thing it had grown so quiet in the big room; no distractions. She could continue to meditate on the patterns shifting and reforming on the material.

But, God, she had to concentrate so
hard.
It was worse than when she'd been doping out the sympathetic vibration technique. Her thoughts kept nipping away, slipping out from under her almost before she could even make sense of them. It was like trying to catch sight of a number of very quick and elusive creatures that would dive into hiding places the moment she turned to them, so that all she ever saw was the very tail-end bits of them as they vanished. And that was the part she wasn't sure she liked at all, because it was like her mind was being emptied out, cleaned, sterilized in preparation for something else to come fill it up.

Something stirred on the fringes of her outer vision, disturbing her meditative state. She felt a surge of wordless, reflexive irritation that quickened to a flash/roar of blind rage.

Then she was blinking her watering eyes at the sight of Adrian standing in front of the cape, hands on his hips, looking bewildered.

"Are you all completely fucked?" he said.

"Not anymore," Keely said wearily. Wiping her eyes, Sam turned to look at him. He was rubbing his face with both hands as if he'd just woken up from a long, deep sleep. Which wasn't too far from the way she felt at the moment. "Thanks, Adrian. How'd you do it?"

"How'd I do what?" Adrian took a step forward.

"No,
don't!"
Keely said. "First, find some way to cover that goddamn thing up, or turn it inside out, or something."

Obediently Adrian turned the cape so that the plain, unpatterning side faced out and then rejoined the group. "That's the weirdest thing I ever saw," he said conversationally. "I kept trying to talk to you all, and you all just kept staring at those patterns—" He shrugged.

"I know," Keely said, watching the screen again. "Something similar happened to me the first time I saw it, but I pulled out of it on my own. It must be a lot stronger now. What makes you immune, I wonder?"

"He can't read," Sam said slowly. "Brain lesion in the visual center." Amazed, she looked at Adrian, who shrugged again.

"Then maybe he ought to be in there instead of Gabe and Gina," Keely said grimly. "A whole lot's happened since we all went under for a while, and none of it's good."

"What is it?" Sam said, craning to look at the screen. The figures on it still told her little.

Keely shook his head. "We're gonna lose them."

"All of them?" Fez said. He sounded as dazed as he looked.

"Oh, no. Just Gabe and Gina," Keely told him sourly. "Markt's just fine. At worst he'll stand the thing off, but it looks like he'll end up neutralizing the thing. But not before he sacrifices Gabe and Gina to it. Shit."

"I should have known," Fez said bleakly. "Art's always been viral at heart. Make that core. He's never had a heart."

"But Mark's part of him now," Sam said. "He wouldn't do that. Would he?" Her gaze fell on the Beater, standing silently on Keely's other side.

The Beater's face was expressionless. "I don't know anymore. 'Talent drives out sense.' Gina always said that about him. He's pure information, now. What does that drive out?"

"We've got to help them," Sam said, grabbing Keely's arm. "We've got to reach them."

"Sure," Keely said. "We might even be able to do it, we've got another person here with sockets. But we're fresh out of connections, and if we try to pull any from either Gina or Gabe, we'll finish them off. Sending in another fooler loop isn't going to do it, we need something conscious. A human. Any ideas?"

Sam was staring past him, at the pile of hardware he'd brought from Diversifications. "Yah," she said. "What kind of power do we have left, and how long will it last?"

Keely followed her gaze and then looked back at her with astonishment. "Sam, you am a genius."

"Yah, but will it work?" she said.

" 'Will it work,' the genius wants to know." He beckoned to Adrian. "C'mere, kid—"

"No." Sam stood up, holding the pump unit.

"But he's the only one who's immune—"

"They don't know him." She looked around. "Could someone else be a potato for a while?"

"Gina?" Gabe turned under the grey sky. "Marly? Caritha? Markt?
Any
body?"
Echoes of his voice danced all over, counterpointing each other. He took a few stumbling steps, fighting to keep his footing.

Why don't you look over here.

It was less a voice than a strong articulated urge. He refused to give in to it. "Somebody
answer!"

Over
here.
Look over
here.

At his feet the stones stretched away in a long, wide curve of shore, millions, billions, an infinity of stones, too many, and they were in there somewhere, he just had to find the right one. Except he wasn't going to live long enough to search them all, not even a fraction of them.

. . . died not of starvation but of old age looking for a way out
... So
why
don't you just just look over
here?

His pov began to move toward the source of the compulsion. He could feel it quite clearly, pulling at him. Not Gina's pull. With an effort he jerked his pov back to the stones as he stumbled along, but it slid away again, down to the water line, to the lake and the dark trees on the other side, past the trees to the stranger waiting on the other part of the stony shore.

"Gina?" he said without much hope as he turned all the way around.

There was a sudden bright light, and he was suddenly facing in a different direction entirely. "Guess again, Dad."

He could have believed it was another of Mark's apparitions (another of those visual marks, his mind whispered) except she was so obviously patched in, like a rough cut from the old days of hotsuits and headmounted monitors. Old days ... as if it had really been so very long ago.

"Yah, it's me," she said, walking smoothly over the stones as if they were an even surface like a floor. "It's Sam. I'm wearing your hotsuit."

He looked down at the permanent tattoo that was his virtual body. "What are you doing here?"

"Jamming." Her face rippled and flickered with mild line-noise. "Trying to give you a breather. It's been all over you and Gina. Where
is
Gina?" She reached out, and he took her hands. As patched in as she looked, the feel of her was startlingly realistic, and he could tell by the look on her face that she found the sensation equally real.

"It's not what you're used to," he said. "Things can change awfully quickly now. Maybe too quickly for you to keep up in that thing."

"Appropriate technology, Dad. Appropriate for me, anyway, since I don't have sockets." Her eyes shut tightly for a moment. "What is it?" he asked.

"Keely's got a program disrupting the frequency so I don't trance out," she said. "Sometimes it makes my eyes feel funny. Like they're bouncing. I don't have long. Where's Gina?"

" 'Where' is not exactly the word. She's here, I just"—he looked around at the stones—"I just can't find the right context." He felt the pull at his vision reassert itself, and he started to turn toward the stranger without wanting to.

Abruptly Sam was in front of him again. "Jamming," she said. "Buying you some time. What's this about a context?"

What does this look like to you, an open window or an open wound?

. . . the Beater? Jim Morrison, or Visual Mark? Mozart or Canadaytime? The Living Sickle Orchestra... or that strange red-headed doctor. Her mind turned fitfully like a sleeping creature in the grip of a dream about to become real. Real dreams.

Come along with me.

When was I ever not therefor you?

Come along with me now.

"It wasn't really that I didn't want your pain, Gina, it was that I could never take it away. Now I can."

What's your weak spot, Gina? Better get to it before he does.

Oh, you son of a bitch, you stupid fuck-up, my weak spot has always
been you, and you know that, you've always known it. You do what you
do, you do it because you can, and if that meant using my weakness
against me, I just had to live with it.

She stood in the shadows on the courthouse steps, watching him pinned under Joslin's dead-white hand, she stood over him on the Mimosa, she knelt beside him in a thousand different places, waiting to see if he was going to turn blue or worse.