Peace and War - Omnibus (71 page)

That may have been the last straw. When I brought in her clothes she just shrugged off the pale blue hospital gown. She didn't have anything on underneath. There were eight or ten people in the waiting room.

I was thunderstruck. My dignified Amelia?

The receptionist was a young man with ringlets. He stood up. 'Wait! You … you can't do that!'

'Watch me.' She put on the blouse first, and took her time buttoning it. 'I was kicked out of my room. I don't have anyplace to–'

'Amelia–' She ignored me.

'Go to the ladies' room! Right now!'

'Thank you, no.' She tried to stand on one foot and put a sock on, but teetered and almost fell over. I gave her an arm. The audience was respectfully quiet.

'I'm going to call a guard.'

'No you're not.' She strode over to him, in socks but still bare from ankles to waist. She was an inch or two taller and stared down at him. He stared down, too, looking as if he'd never had a triangle of pubic hair touch his desktop before. 'I'll make a scene,' she said quietly. 'Believe me.'

He sat down, his mouth working but no words coming out. She stepped into her pants and slippers, picked up the gown and threw it into the 'cycler.

'Julian, I don't like this place.' She offered her arm. 'Let's go bother someone else.' The room was quiet until we were well out into the corridor, and then there was a sudden explosion of chatter. Amelia stared straight ahead and smiled.

'Bad day?'

'Bad place.' She frowned. 'Did I just do what I think I did?'

I looked around and whispered, 'This is Texas. Don't you know it's against the law to show your ass to a black man?'

'I'm always forgetting that.' She smiled nervously and hugged my arm. 'I'll write you every day from prison.'

There was a cab waiting. We got in fast and Amelia gave it my address. 'That's where my bag is, right?'

'Yeah … but I could bring it over.' My place was a mess. 'I'm not exactly ready for polite company.'

'I'm not exactly company.' She rubbed her eyes. 'Certainly not polite.'

In fact, the place had been a mess when I went to Portobello two weeks earlier, and I hadn't had time to do anything but add to it. We entered a one-room disaster area, ten meters by five of chaos: stacks of papers and readers on every horizontal surface, including the bed; a pile of clothes in one corner aesthetically balanced by a pile of dishes in the sink. I'd forgotten to turn off the coffeepot when I'd gone to school, so a bitter smell of burnt coffee added to the general mustiness.

She laughed. 'You know, this is even worse than I expected?' She'd only been here twice and both times I'd been forewarned.

'I know. I need a woman around the place.'

'No. You need about a gallon of gasoline and a match.' She looked around and shook her head. 'Look, we're out in the open. Let's just move in together.'

I was still trying to cope with the striptease. 'Uh … there's really not enough room…'

'Not
here
.' She laughed. 'My place. And we can file for a two-bedroom.'

I cleared off a chair and steered her to it. She sat down warily.

'Look. You know how much I'd like to move in with you. It's not as if we hadn't talked about it.'

'So? Let's do it.'

'No … let's not make
any
decisions now. Not for a couple of days.'

She looked past me, out the window over the sink. 'I, you think I'm crazy.'

'Impulsive.' I sat down on the floor and stroked her arm.

'It is strange for me, isn't it?' She closed her eyes and kneaded her forehead. 'Maybe I'm still medicated.'

I hoped that was it. 'I'm sure that's all it is. You need a couple of days' more rest.'

'What if they botched the operation?'

'They didn't. You wouldn't be walking and talking.'

She patted my hand, still looking abstracted. 'Yeah, sure. You have some juice or something?'

I found some white grape juice in the refrigerator and poured us each a small glass. I heard a zipper and turned around, but it was only her leather suitcase.

I brought her drink over. She was staring intently, slowly picking through the contents of the suitcase. 'Think something might be missing?'

She took the drink and set it down. 'Oh, no. Or maybe. Mainly I'm just checking my memory. I do remember packing. The trip down. Talking to Dr, um, Spencer.' She backed up two steps, felt behind her, and sat down slowly on the bed.

'Then the blur – you know, I was sort of awake when they operated. I could see lots of lights. My chin and face were in a padded frame.'

I sat down with her. 'I remember that from my own installation. And the drill sound.'

'And the smell. You know you're smelling your own skull being sawed open. But you don't care.'

'Drugs,' I said.

'That's part of it. Also looking forward to it.' Well, not in my case. 'I could hear them talking, the doctor and some woman.'

'What about?'

'It was Spanish. They were talking about her boyfriend and … shoes or something. Then everything went black. I guess it went white, then black.'

'I wonder if that was before or after they put the jack in.'

'It was after, definitely after. They call it a bridge, right?'

'From French, yeah:
pont mental
.'

'I heard him say that –
ahora, el puente –
and then they pressed really hard. I could feel it on my chin, on the cushion.'

'You remember a lot more than I did.'

'That was about it, though. The boyfriend and the shoes and then
click
. The next thing I knew, I was lying in bed, unable to move or speak.'

'That must have been terrifying.'

She frowned, remembering. Not really. It was like an enormous … lassitude, numbness. As if I could move my arms and legs, or speak, if I really had to. But the effort would have been tremendous. That was probably mood drugs, too, to keep me from panicking.

'They kept moving my arms and legs around and shouting nonsense at me. It was probably English, and I just couldn't decipher their accents, in my condition.'

She gestured and I handed her the grape juice. She sipped. 'If I remember this right … I was really, really annoyed that they wouldn't just go away and let me lie in peace. But I didn't say anything, because I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of hearing me complain. It's an odd thing to remember. I was really being infantile.'

'They didn't try the jack?'

She got a faraway look. 'No … Dr Spencer told me about that later. In my condition it was better to wait and have the first time be with someone I knew. Seconds count, he explained that to you?'

I nodded. 'Exponential increase in the number of neural connections.'

'So I lay in a darkened room then, for a long time; lost track of time, I suppose. Then all the things that happened before we … we jacked, I thought it was a dream. Everything was suddenly flooded with light and a couple of people lifted me and bit me on the wrists – the IVs – and then we were floating from room to room.'

'Riding a gurney.'

She nodded. 'It really felt like levitation, though – I remember thinking,
"I'm dreaming,"
and resolving to enjoy it. An image of Marty floated by, asleep in a chair, and I accepted that as part of the dream. Then you and Dr Spencer appeared – okay, you were in the dream, too.

'Then it was all suddenly real.' She rocked back and forth, remembering the instant we jacked. 'No, not
real
. Intense. Confusing.'

'I remember,' I said. 'The double vision, seeing yourself. You didn't recognize yourself at first.'

'And you told me most people don't. I mean you told me in one word, somehow, or no words. Then it all snapped into focus, and we were…' She nodded rhythmically, biting her lower lip. 'We were all the same. We were one … thing.'

She took my right hand in both of hers. 'And then we had to talk to the doctor. And he said we couldn't, he wouldn't let us…' She lifted my hand to her breast, the way it had been that last moment, and leaned forward. But she didn't kiss me. She put her chin on my shoulder and whispered, voice cracking: 'We'll never have that again?'

I automatically tried to feed her a gestalt, the way you do jacked, about how she might be able to try again in a few years, about Marty having her data, about the partial re-establishment of neuron connection so we might try, we might try; and a fraction of a second later I realized
no, we weren't connected; she can only hear something if I say it
.

'Most people never even have it once.'

'Maybe they're better off,' she said, muffled, and sobbed quietly. Her hand moved up to squeeze my neck and caress the jack.

I had to say something. 'Look … it's possible you haven't lost it all. There might be a small fraction of the ability still there.'

'What do you mean?' I explained about some of the neurons homing back into the jack's receptor areas. 'How much might be there?'

'I don't have the faintest idea. I'd never even heard of it until a couple of days ago.' Though I knew with sudden certainty that some of the jills must be that way, unable to make a really deep connection. Ralph had brought back memories of some who had hardly seemed jacked at all.

'We have to try. Where could we … could you bring the equipment back from Portobello?'

'No, I'd never get it off the base.' And be court-martialed, if I tried.

'Hmm … Maybe we could find a way to sneak into the hospital–'

I laughed. 'You don't have to sneak anywhere. Just buy time at one of the jack joints.'

'But I don't want that. I want to do it with you.'

'That's what I mean! They have double unis – two-person universes. Two people jack in and go someplace together.' That's where the jills took their customers. You can screw on the streets of Paris, floating in outer space, riding a canoe down rapids. Ralph had brought us back the weirdest memories.

'Let's go do it.'

'Look, you're still beat from the hospital. Why not get a day or two rest and then–'

'No!' She stood up. 'For all we know, the connections might be fading while we sit here and talk about it.' She picked up the phone off the table and punched two numbers; she knew my cab code. 'Outside?'

I got up and followed her to the door, afraid I'd made a big mistake. 'Look, don't expect the world.'

'Oh, I don't expect anything. Just have to try it, find out.' For someone who didn't expect anything, she was awfully eager.

It was infectious. While we waited for the cab, I went from thinking
Well, at least we'll find out one way or the other
to being sure that there would be at least something there. Marty had said there would be a placebo effect, if nothing more.

I couldn't give the cab a specific address, since I'd only been there once. But I asked whether it knew where the block of jack joints was, just outside the university, and it said yes.

We could have biked there, but it was the neighborhood where that guy had pulled a knife on me – it had started pretty low and gone downhill – and I figured it might be dark by the time we finished our experiment.

It was a good thing the cab turned off the meter while we went through security. The shoe in charge saw our destination and jerked us around for ten minutes, I supposed to watch Amelia's discomfort.

Or try to get some sort of rise out of me. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

We had the cab let us off on the near end of the block, so we could walk the length of it and check the menus in each joint. The price was important; payday was two days away for both of us. I made three times as much as she did, but the Mexican excursion had brought me down to less than a hundred bucks. And Amelia was flat.

There were more jills than pedestrians. Some of them offered to join us in a three-way. I hadn't known that was possible. It sounded more confusing than alluring, even under good conditions. And being more intimately linked to the jill than to Amelia would be a disaster.

The place with the best double uni deal was also one of the nicest, or the least sleazy. It was called Your World, and instead of car crashes and executions, it offered a menu of explorations – like the French tour I'd taken in Mexico, but more exotic.

I suggested the underwater tour of the Great Barrier Reef.

'I'm not a good swimmer,' Amelia said. 'Would that make a difference?'

'Me neither; don't worry. It's like being a fish.' I'd done this one. 'You don't even think about swimming.'

It was a dollar a minute, cash, or two minutes for three dollars, plastic. Ten minutes up front … I paid cash; keep the plastic for emergencies.

A stern-looking fat lady, black with a springy forest of white hair, led us to the booth. It was a small cubicle just over a meter high, with a padded blue mat on the floor, two jack cables hanging from the low ceiling.

'Time start' when the first one plug in. You-all want to take your clothes off first, I s'pose. Place been sterilized. You-all have a good time, now.'

She turned abruptly and bustled away. 'She thinks you're a jill,' I said.

'I could use a second income.' We entered the place on our hands and knees and when I shut the door the air conditioner started to whir. Then a white-noise generator added a steady hiss.

'Does the light make a difference?'

'It goes off automatically.' We helped each other undress and she lay down the right way, on her stomach facing the door.

She was rigid and trembling slightly. 'Relax,' I said, kneading her shoulders.

'I'm afraid nothing will happen.'

'If nothing happens, we'll try it again.' I remembered what Marty had said – she really should start off with something like jumping off a cliff. Well, I could tell her that later.

'Here.' I slid over a diamond-shaped pillow that supports your face on the chin, cheekbones, and forehead. 'This'll help your neck relax.' I stroked her back for a minute, and when she seemed looser, I moved the jack interface into place over the metal socket in her head. There was a faint click and the light went out.

Of course after thousands of hours, I didn't need the pillow; I could jack standing up or hanging upside down. I groped for the cable and stretched out so we were touching, arm and hip. Then I jacked in.