by Pat Cadigan
Gabe caught the rest of it, even if Gina hadn't. Apprehension hummed within him like a spinning sawblade. Can't get her on a direct approach, he thought, urgency rising in him and trying to become panic. Got to go at her through the weak link, and that would be me.
"Knock that shit off, hotwire," Marly said seriously, "unless you just want to paint a bull's-eye on your forehead and hold still for whatever's coming up next."
They were in the dark hallway again, flattened against the wall. But the hallway was different somehow, not quite right, and yet not totally unfamiliar.
"You're good. There's really no question about that, never has been."
"That's your cue, hotwire," Caritha said, and gave him a shove.
He was sitting at the table in Manny's office, and the smell of fried food was sickeningly strong.
"This was how I got you last time," Manny said. "Playing with your friends."
Gabe tried to look at Marly and Caritha, but his head refused to turn.
"See, you all tend to do the same things, gravitate to the familiar." Manny leaned forward, the bogus concern creasing his face as nauseating as the fried-meat stink. "You're so utterly predictable, it isn't worth the bother of plotting a decision tree for you. But our kind isn't. No trap doors, no twenty-story drops this time. Sticky field."
Gabe could feel it, sucking at him in the chair like quicksand. The ever-popular sticky field, mainstay of numerous B-features. Like the holo-to-laser trick, something else that was impossible only in the real world.
Something tugged at the edge of his thoughts, the bare, dim shadow of some idea, or-
Manny got up and came around the table to him. "And though you didn't ask, yes, it is me. Manny Rivera. After a fashion."
After a fashion. In spite of everything Gabe wanted to laugh. Poor old affected Manny Rivera, posturing even in this state. Although after the initial shock, Manny had probably taken to this like home. Anyone who could survive in the belly of the corporate beast would probably find this existence all but natural.
"Me," Manny said, "not that pitiful meat that walked and talked and played the villain in the set-piece of your life. Just as this is you, isn't it, Gabe, not the meat that breathes so slowly in some other reality. You left that behind to be where you are now, and it does breathe so slowly, doesn't it? Slowly, but it still breathes. Or can't you feel it anymore?"
The sticky field increased its pull on him and scrambled inside, trying to free himself, to get some sense of his body and his connection to it, because if he couldn't, there'd be nowhere to go if this failed, nowhere to go when it was over.
I can't remember what it feels like to have a body. No? Even after everything else? He wanted to scream in frustration, but he had nothing to scream with.
"Your life's all in your mind, isn't it? Good at dreaming, not so good at waking up-pretty bad, in fact. Stone-home bad, as they say in the world, the one you don't live in right now. You were right-you are the weak link. It's not hard to get to you. You just have to hold still long enough, and even I can work on you, even I can become so important that I can feed you a line of shit that will tie you in knots."
I can't remember what it feels like to have a body. All right, then, where was Marly, where was Caritha?
"Not something we can help you with, hotwire," Caritha said apologetically.
"Of course not," Manny agreed. "No body, no hotsuit to put on it."
He strained to look down at himself. No body and no hotsuit, but the familiar baroque pattern of snaky lines and geometric sensor shapes was there. At last the permanent tattoo.
I can't remember what it feels like to have a body.
Great people leave their marks. Everyone else is left with marks-
… with visual marks…
Manny was leaning forward to take it when Gina's face burst on him like a thunderstorm.
"Can't remember? Well, lover, it's a lot like this."
His face exploded with pain. The secondary hit of his body on the carpet was negligible, but he felt it clearly this time, his lower back hitting first, then shoulders and head, his heels bouncing a few times. From behind closed eyes he felt his mouth stretching in a smile.
"Jesus," said Keely. He knelt down to touch the left side of Gabe's face.
"What happened?" Sam clutched the unit on her thigh, her other hand resting on the wire leading to the needles in her stomach. "What's doing that, why is that happening? Keely, I can't read the fucking screen the way you can, goddammit!" One little yank; if that was what it would take to save her father's life, she would do it and hope it wasn't already too late, if that weird swelling in his face didn't mean he'd stroked out-
Keely was at the monitor again, scrolling the output backwards, forwards, and backwards again. Then he looked over the top of the monitor at Jasm, who was squatting next to Gina. "Jazz, look at her hands. Are her knuckles bruised?"
Jasm checked and then held up Gina's limp right arm. "You got it. Bruised and skinned a little." She glanced at Gabe and then did a double take. "Keely, something else." She leaned over Gina and pulled Gabe's shirt up. "You want to guess at what that is?"
Keely stared in silence at the sinuous lines and shapes pressed into Gabe's flesh. Then he blew out a long breath and shook his head.
"Keely, I'm gonna tear your fucking head off," Sam said tearfully. Fez put his arms around her, and she twisted away, keeping one hand on the wire leading to the needles.
"It's all right," Keely told her, laughing a little. "It's just the best case of stigmata I've ever seen. Actually, it's the only one I've ever seen with my own eyes, so let's say it's the best one I know about."
"Shit," said Gator, "they must be seriously hysterical in there."
"Wouldn't you be?" Keely said. He smiled at Sam. "Gina just belted your father a good one."
"Whack to that," said Percy, standing over Gabe and rubbing his own face. "Whack on sight when you been to the same party."
"What about those marks on him, what are those?" she demanded.
"From his hotsuit, of course," Keely said matter-of-factly. "You've worn hotsuits a time or two, you ought to recognize the marks they leave. Your father just discovered his whole body's a hotsuit, at least as far as his mind's concerned."
Sam stared at her father, not quite believing. The marks on his skin were fresh and deep, his swelling cheek looked painful, and the expression on his face said the best dream of his life had just gotten even better.
I feel pain.
That's sober as I remember it.
"Anybody can take shelter," Marly said. "Can you take on someone else's pain?"
"You're gonna have to try, at least," Caritha said, before Gabe could answer.
He was in somebody's living room, somebody's enormous, endless living room, currently filled with a glittery array of people eating, drinking, wandering in and out, watching the multiple screens on the walls, giving the thing in the center of the room a wide, courteous berth.
Gabe blinked at it. He remembered a creature eight feet tall, part ersatz samurai and part machine-fantasy, but this thing was so much more overdone that he was having trouble keeping it in focus. He thought he could catch glimpses of Marly at certain angles, Caritha at others; sometimes when it turned a particular way, he was sure it was Gina he saw within it, other times Mark, or Markt, and occasionally even himself.
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 s
aw 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-and-dance 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 o
ut?"
"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?"
34
"Gina?" Gabe turned under the grey sky. "Marly? Caritha? Markt? Anybody?" 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.