She closes the gap and cozies up against him, knowing how much this contact will deplete whatever stockpile of touch he might have left for her. But she needs the thing so much that she will take even sex again in its stead, since he can give nothing else. Friction — attenuating, static, distracting, ridding the minute of old injuries. It is the lesser of two requests. A way to avoid wondering when the private batterings— the cloaked secrecies, violations, and covert hurt-mes — will start again this time.
More wrongs to redress than there are hours in the day. The only answer, of course, is unflagging industry, the same ceaseless dedication and energy that enabled him, from essentially zero capitalization, to assemble the complete Riders at the End of Time, volume 3, numbers 1 through 161. Not that he makes the mistake of trying to pull off this whole scam single-handedly. He allows himself the luxury of delegating authority on labor-intensive matters. He's assigned his corps of engineers the task of building a little lookout nest on the roof next to the chopper pad, from which they hope soon to be launching bottle rockets, currently under development by Chuckie and the brain trust according to proprietary specs of his own design: various supply-closet combustibles set alight in one-liter IV bags.
Okay, everything they've mounted so far is just piddling stuff compared to the major campaign. But he refuses, on grounds of project security, to discuss future operations. Also, he's kind of winging it. Not really sure what he's after himself. The girl Joy seems somehow instrumental to the master plan. He doubles back to her on repeated, suck-up visits, cementing their wary truce with miscalculated small gifts: dried dough he swears will come back to life if soaked, half of a sundered walkie-talkie set, worthless books washed up in the tidal pools of trade, tides only she would read. Decisive Sieges of the Sixteenth Century, or Our Friends on the Pacific Rim.
"So are you getting any better?"
"I don't know," she answers gravely, unwilling to lie. He kicks at her crutches, toppling her in treachery. She emits a bleat, a "Hai!" of surprised pain.
"Sorry. Just conducting a little experiment." She stares at him in incomprehension, a retriever whose hindquarters are crushed under its careless owner's recliner. "Look, I said I'm sorry. Here." He doffs the cap. "Go ahead. Pull my hair. What's left of it, anyway."
She covers her smirk with the back of an autumn-leaf hand. She forgets the pointless cruelty faster than anything can explain. Pain passes from her face without residuals, replaced by another, iodine hurt each time she steals a look at him. Something inside her cells would match his instant age, decade for decade. Something in her is crying, "Little girl, little girl, let go of me."
Sorties with the Stepaneevong female leave Nico's senior lieutenants more than a little nervous. What's the point? How's she gonna help us any? Come on; let's go steal some tubing and make a Comm Device. Or or or: let's say that the third floor is M-31 and the fifth floor is Heliotria. The Cyclogeneron's about 90 percent finished, but we need just one more trigawatt-hour of juice…
But the guy they vie for is worlds away. Sometimes he's morose with preoccupation, and will snap, "Grow up, will you? The hell is this, Peeweeland?"
His crushing rebukes demoralize the upper echelons of Command and Control. The only encouraging spin to Nico's enigmatic insistence on parlay with this foreign element is that the more the two of them talk, the less they seem to need to.
He brings her a plastic soccer ball, half of a cruel carrot-and-stick cure. Astonishingly, she can keep it in the air with just her knees, elbows, head, and shoulders, even while propped up over her leg struts.
"Jeez. Where'd you learn how to do that?" But she cannot talk while the ball is aloft.
And he cannot wait for her to miss, which could be never. "Look," he blusters. "Joyless. They're probably not telling you everything, right?" She executes an especially skillful lob with the inside arch of her good foot. "I mean, you could be Xed off the charts as dead meat already, without even knowing it." If she gives a reply, he's the only one who hears it.
"Okay. So suppose you gotta go down," he postulates, watching her, wagging his head in admiration. She counts softly, out loud, her successive aerial taps, somewhere in the high eighties. "With all due respect, Joyless, I'd like to suggest to you that the only thing worth doing, if that's the case, is to try going down in the record books."
She giggles, and it breaks her concentration. The ball rolls down the hall, and she limps along after it. "I'm not that good," she says, the giggles still softly issuing from her like shy, unsigned, dime preemie valentines. A twinge of conscience nags at her. The books are waiting; she's been remiss. She shouldn't stand here playing all day. "I'm only so-so. Where I come from, they can keep a ball in the air all.. "
"Not that record. I'm talking something truly grabbing. Totally new project. Wait a minute. Got it. This is a great one. Classic! What we got to do is write TV-25 Action Corps and tell them there's this little Asian girl lavishing in the charity hospital and she probably's not going to make it, and the only thing that keeps her holding on fighting for sweet life is her driving dream to go down in Guinness as the recipient of the most get-well cards of all time. What do you say?"
"Languishing."
"Whatever. Come on. They love this kind of pathetic kiddie crap. Capture the regional imagination. Feel-gooder campaign. Courage in the face of keeling over. Vote with your stamps. The whole bullshit waterworks. What d'ya think?"
She smiles like she hasn't yet smiled in this lifetime, and starts the ball up in the air again. Eight, nine, ten, eleven. "Clap your hands," she says suddenly.
"Say what?"
"Clap your hands. Don't let Tink die."
He plays dumb until she explains. That book I lent you? He makes out that he hasn't read it yet. Not enough time. Hospital's been going to serious hell in a handbag, and has been for years before his arrival. Consequently, it takes every hour in his agenda just to stabilize the situation. Reading's a luxury, strictly for those with time to burn.
"Know what's wrong with this place?" Nicolino declares to a rumpled Linda. The lady is losing it; she looks like she's slept in that cute little physio getup of hers. "I said, 'Know what's wrong…?' You're supposed to say, 'No, Nico. What?' "
"Do I have to? Okay, okay. Tell me what's wrong with this place."
"Everybody's so twigging sick. We gotta git outta here before we all go rabid. I've seen it happen. Trailblazer, number twenty-three. Whole pioneer colony just ups and goes completely stir crazy with cabin fever. Hey. A ball game. There's yer ticket. How 'bout it, Doll-face? You can swing a Dodger home bill for us?"
" 'Doll-face'? Let me see those comics of yours."
"Ha! You and the Navy SEALs, maybe. Come on. Get that so-called surgeon guy of yours to take us. You two are doing it, aren't you?"
"Doing what?"
"Oh, excuse me. I thought you were old enough to know about these things."
"You little braguillas!"
To which, he replies in a language she doesn't even want to identify.
"Not that getting you long-termers out of here is such a bad idea. But baseball? Kind of sedate, isn't it? No Amorphicoms? No Grid? No Galactic Heat Death?"
"You only need that shit when nothing's breaking."
"Nico. I'm not going to tell you again."
"Promise? Sor-ry. I meant to say 'that shirt.' "
"How are you going to keep a whole patrol of your contemporaries in one place in the bleachers for nine complete innings?"
"We'll only take the crips. You know; the ones who can't move."
"What a little fiend we are. All right, let's call the so-called surgeon. But I can't believe I'm doing this for you."