He glanced over at the phone again. It might have been imagination, but he thought he felt a little more competent. Rest a bit longer and maybe he'd be ready to try canoodling around the outcall block again.
Or maybe a miracle would happen and Visual Mark, Diversifications Guinea Pig Number One, would come back and agree to get a message out for him. He'd been too dumbed down to ask before. Not that Visual Mark had seemed a whole lot better himself, but at least he was free. For the time being, anyway. Damn but he had to admire Diversifications' strategy on this. Pushing the implants by way of the artificial reality of rock videos-the ground swell of prelegal demand alone would probably kick things over in the States. Fuck the bribes to the AMA and the FDSA and the politicians-the vidiots would kill for it.
Truth to tell, he'd have killed for it himself. He wanted it as bad as everybody else was going to when the news broke, he couldn't deny that. He just didn't like the idea that Diversifications was in the driver's seat. All he'd wanted to do was steal the wheel and toss it out for grabs.
Nice try. He would remember it for as long as he could, because he had a feeling that by the time he saw anything besides the inside of this penthouse again, he might have forgotten all about it.
He looked at the phone again. Just a few more minutes and he was sure he'd be up for another try. Another wave of fresh-air aroma from his corporate-issue shirt hit him, and he dozed.
11
She could see why they called it a pit. It was cush; even the walls were carpeted. Down at the other end was enough junk for a personal gym-treadmill, stair-climber, a rack of pulleys with assorted handles, scaffold and platform assemblies, stacks of modular units that would probably make better furniture than what she had in her apartment. Hanging from the ceiling was a flying harness complete with joystick, in case she needed to levitate. They seemed to have thought of everything here, just like the Beater had said, and if you didn't see it, all you had to do was get your ass down to Central Stores.
The system was equally elaborate. It had a flatscreen as well as a headmount for the state-of-the-art hotsuit, a full sound system, and a keyboard about as wide as the farthest reach she could make stretching out both arms without locking her elbows. Plenty of capacity-two dozen programs in volatile storage wouldn't have taxed it. The phone was built in along with the controls for the room, including the printlock on the door, which she had left open. She could close it now just by touching a small lighted panel, but she didn't. The idea of being shut in completely had zero appeal.
She looked up at the open door, as though Mark might pop his head in at any moment and say, Wanna jam? And then, like the old days, they'd play a few rounds of Dueling Videos. Run this one, lover. Can you top it?
Not today. He'd about left a hole in the air after she'd popped the corporate stud-damfool just stepped between them at the wrong moment, and she hadn't been able to pull her punch. Christ knew where that clown's mind had been. There'd been a certain small amount of sour satisfaction in knocking him down-in knocking anyone down at that point-but it had dissipated right after. Guy looked even more lost than Mark, if that was possible.
Figured, though; go to get a few hard answers out of Mark, and he slipped out from under. It was the story of their life. Not the same as the story of their lives. They had their lives, and then they had this overlapping life, two circles intersecting each other, with the eye-shaped common ground between them. Sometimes she thought she knew that territory better than her own mind; other times she was sure it was a frontier only Mark knew. And then there were times like today, when neither one of them seemed to have any idea which end was up or which way was out.
Mark had always been a flake. By the time she'd managed to crack the video business, she'd practically memorized most of his work. He'd already been Visual Mark by then; it should have been Visualizing Mark. It was as if he had a pipeline to some primal dream spot, where music and image created each other, the pictures suggesting the music, the music generating the pictures, in a synesthetic frenzy.
Synner. Yah. The Beater's cutie-pie-tech term. If a synner was someone who continually hallucinated, then Mark was the original. Sometimes it seemed that when he looked at her, just looked, he had to search her out of some kind of wilder, larger, more baroque vision his brain had laid over the world. She'd wondered how long that could go on with him, how long it would be until some kind of critical threshold was reached inside that picture-filled brain, and what would happen then.
Twenty-umpt years ago that hadn't been a big worry. It had been a vague, not terribly real future they hadn't bothered to think about. Mark hadn't been burning out then, and she hadn't had crazy debts the size of Canada from the goddamn father who'd booted her ass into the Boston streets at fucking fourteen and years later took such a long fucking expensive uninsured time dying that the hospital had hunted her down with a court order to pay it off.
The Beater's old career had started to drag, but that hadn't been so real then, either. The Beater had still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don't slow down, we're gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn't happened that way. So they'd all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old-hell, not even growing up.
She looked around the pit. Definitely a place for grown-ups. Either they'd all gotten old, or they'd died and gone to video hell. Maybe both, and not necessarily in that order.
Someone was standing in the open doorway. The Beater.
The guy in the drab suit had only a vestige of the gong-banging wild animal she'd known when she'd first gotten into video. The straight chin-length hair had been slicked back, and she could see there was more gray among the brown. For that confidence-inspiring corporate look, no doubt. Most of the people he'd be moving among now wouldn't remember him from his performance days-his real performance days, when there had still been plenty of concerts, and video had been the come-on for the studio releases and the live events, not an end in itself.
If anyone had remembered him, Gina doubted that all the corporate grey in the world would have put him over. Hey, kids, this guy used to wear more paint than the Sistine Chapel and still holds the world distance record for projectile vomiting from a tour-bus window.
Just seeing him now, you could tell the party was definitely over, had been for some time. Everything's business, let's work again like we worked last century.
Did he know about the night-court follies starring Mark? Gina doubted it. But he had to know something; he had to know why Mark would have been with Galen and his twitch and Rivera. Maybe. The way the Beater told it, his new position at Diversifications was supposed to be something roughly equal to Rivera's. Yah, I'll still be your boss, you just gotta show up washed.
Yah. Twenty-umpt years and that was the first time the word boss had come up in polite or even impolite conversation, even back when there'd been half a dozen of them cranking video, before Galen had taken over and pushed the others out. And if you couldn't tell who was the real boss, you were probably flatline.