"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.
Can you top it, lover?
– -
"Can you, Dad?" Sam asked.
I don't know," he said, holding the stone she'd found for him. Sympathetic vibrations, she called it. He was getting a sense of the program without really understanding it, but the way things were for him, he didn't really have to understand it. Which was a good thing; he couldn't fragment his attention to that extent.
"Then maybe that's the wrong context," Sam said. Her image rippled with noise again. "Is there something you know for sure?"
He groaned. "God, Sam, how does anyone know anything for sure?"
She looked at another stone and then smiled at him a little sheepishly. "Well, what've you got?"
Back to that again, he thought. He'd been through this, he thought, picking his way farther along the shore, using Sam's sympathetic vibrations on the stones.
"No, Dad," she said urgently, "what've you got?"
"It wasn't really that I didn't want your pain," Mark said. "It was that I could never take it away. And now I can. The brain feels no pain."
Maybe it was because she had never known what that would be like, maybe because she had missed the only other chance to find out all those years ago when Dylan had spoken the truth for both of them that night. Maybe that was why she was slipping now even though he hadn't even bothered to try to trick her. Take a little walk with me, yah, right into the jaws of the beast, with both eyes wide open and clear as rainwater, but God, to undo the years of getting toxed and renting furnished rooms with everything she needed and none of it hers and was that what it had all been about all along, was that really what it had all been for, all along?
"The brain feels no pain," he whispered.
"I feel pain," said Ludovic in a cool, clear voice. She looked up and saw him lying on his back in the graveyard. There was blood on his face. "Pain the day I met you, and it hasn't quit yet."
"So curable," Mark whispered to her. "There doesn't have to be pain. Just us…"
"Oh, come on, Gina." Ludovic sat up. The blood ran down his face in streams. "What would become of you if you couldn't cause someone some pain, raise a few welts now and then, draw a little blood, bring up the swelling?"
"That's not all there is to me," she said, feeling Mark try to tighten his hold on her (warm and so familiar, as if they had never led separate lives at all).
"I know that," Ludovic said. "The difference is, I'll take it. I have taken it. He never did." He leaned forward, stretching his hand out to her.
An open window or an open wound, whatever it comes up, Gina, I'll take it. The big bad c-word. Sure is big and bad. Never knew anything of value that wasn't.
His fingers brushed her face, and there was a roar like a hurricane wind that drowned out everything.
Had she gone to him this time, or had he come to her? And did it even matter?
"It's good," said Ludovic. He sounded a little surprised. She remembered that she had thought of him down in Mexico, and it was something he needed to know.
They didn't have to bother going down the hall to the room this time, they were just there, and he let her pull him down onto the bed.
"I know," he said, "this was never the easy part. You weren't smooch-faces." He laughed. "God, I love that. It's perfect."
She didn't understand how he could be there and also be on the stony shore at the same moment. But then, you could stand in the center of the burning flame untouched, too; the only problem was getting to the center without getting singed on the way in. And that was only impossible in the real world.
"I'm proud of you, Dad," she said impulsively.
He was still glowing, and yet he averted his gaze as if he were some lovestruck innocent.
"There's nothing to be embarrassed about," she added. "I know a little about this stuff. Maybe more than a little."
"Yah, but you're not supposed to see your father naked. Or your father's mind, anyway."
She started to say something, and suddenly Beauregard as she had last seen him popped into her mind, wearing a holo crown and hustling free preview tickets. "God, maybe it really is only impossible in the real world," she said.
"What is?"
She thought of Fez and laughed, feeling both hopeless and hopeful all at once. "Everything, Dad. Everything that matters. I hope not, I wish it weren't, but-"
The screen flickered several times; down in the lower right corner, the small icon warning of imminent power interruption appeared, blinking on and off.
"Oh, shit!"
"What is it, Sam?" He came closer, looking alarmed. "You are starting to break up-"
She threw her arms around him in a quick hug before something tore her away.
The Arabian-Nights-type tent was still ornate but it also looked disheveled now, messy, things out of place.
"This is certainly an unexpected and historic pleasure," Markt said too casually. "If the media is ever restored, we can state positively that interaction between the old and the new technology is indeed feasible."
"Where the fuck were you?" Sam shouted. "What are you doing? They're all alone-my father's all alone on those rocks and Gina's out somewhere all by herself, and what the fuck is that? You said you wanted their help neutralizing that thing, you never said you were going to make them do it all by themselves!"