"I don't know what I'm talking about," he said honestly.
"Good, just as long as we're high enough up in the stupid-sphere for you." A cam poked into the room, took a careful look around, and backed out again. "There now," Gina said. "Valjean's got this running deal-not with me-that he releases all his parties as videos. You can't come here and take a fucking shit but for a fucking audience. He's on the rich-and-famous chips. The folks in Kansas buy them, pop them in their flatscreen consoles or their headmounts, if they even have that shit in Kansas, and go to parties they don't have a chance in hell of ever really going to. And you know what that's from? You know where the fuck they got that idea?"
Gabe shook his head. Whatever was in his system was fading down, a trough between one high and the next. There was a small burning point in the pit of his stomach.
"They used to have these TV shows of kids dancing to music, these flatscreen things in the pre-Jurassic when it was all in black-and-white, and there were maybe two-three networks and two-three channels you could get them on in any city. Kids dancing, just kids dancing to music, and maybe a solo or a group'd come on and lip-synch a hot release. Something like a hundred kids dancing around, and out there in TV land, there'd be maybe a million kids dancing along, pretending they were there."
"Uh-huh," Gabe said politely. He was trying to picture it without really having much idea of what she was talking about.
"It was later that music started to stand for something," she went on suddenly, in a quieter voice. "There were all these ideas, the ideas were in the music, the music was in the ideas. These performers would cut these releases, and they'd say shit like, 'Well, my album's fighting against this' and 'My album's fighting against that.' This was before anyone got the bright idea to do the monster benefits to feed the hungry. You probably don't know what those are. Nobody does that anymore. Now they go get the hungry with cams and they call it, I don't know, 'poverty porn' or 'slum porn,' or I don't know what they call it.
"So they had these albums that were fighting this and fighting that and fighting for some other thing, but what they all really fought in the end was each other, for a place on the old hit parade. Number ten with a bullet, number four with a bullet. They were all so far away from it, see, they were all so fucking far away. They'd say something like 'world peace' and they didn't have the first fucking idea of what the world was like. They saved the goddamn whales, and they didn't even fucking live in the fucking world."
She wiped the dreadlocks back from her smooth forehead, digging her fingers into them so hard, Gabe was afraid she was going to tear them away. "Some of that wasn't their fault. There was lots of crazy shit, even before the arena massacre at the Behemoth concert. You old enough to remember that one?"
Gabe tried to think. She waved a hand at him.
"Never mind, they got such killer video on it, you don't have to be old enough, just tune in disaster porn. Watch the Jesus-boy in the army fatigues take out a thousand kids in one sweep, you are there. But there was crazy shit before that, nutsoids with knives, nutsoids with guns, nutsoids with crazy fucking shit for brains, like the guy that took out Lennon."
"Lenin?" he said, puzzled.
"For all it really meant to him, he coulda shot his fucking TV set. And you know, everyone was sorry. I remember my grandmother telling me that, how really fucking awful it was, and fifteen years later they were still squeezing videos out of the guy, like they forgot somebody wiped him out, and it had gone from, like, because they loved him to it not mattering what had happened because they could still get the fucking videos. They cooked up a simulation, a fucking simulation of the man and got it to do interviews and give simulated answers to simulated questions before the estate pulled the plug on that." She focused on him suddenly with a searching expression. "Do you understand a fucking word I'm saying?"
He thought hard. "Well, I know they have to be dead for a hundred and fifty years without a conservatorship before they're in the public domain. But with a conservatorship the time limit's different, and you have to license-"
"I want it to matter," she said. "I want the fucking music and the people to matter. I don't want fucking rock'n'roll porn to go with the med porn and the war porn and the weapons porn and the food porn-shit, it's all porn, goddamn fucking video porn." She gestured at the holo; the guitar was burning again. "They fixed it so he'd live forever. They don't know he woulda lived forever anyway, because when it came outa him, it came outa something real, so it was real. I want it to come out of something real, not some fucking box, I want it to come out of human-fucking-beings, I want it to be something that makes you know you're alive, and not another part of a bunch of fucking pels in a high-res video!"
She rested her forearms on her knees. Gabe touched her shoulder, wanting to offer her something and not having the slightest idea what that could possibly be.
"That's why I'm gonna do it," she said after a moment.
"Do what?" he asked.
"Change for the machines."
He rubbed the side of his face where she had hit him about a hundred years before.
She slapped his leg suddenly, startling him. "And that's where you came in, isn't it." She got up and offered him a hand. "Come on. Take a little walk with me."
He looked at her hand suspiciously.
"I ain't gonna hit you again. That was a fucking accident, I don't know how many more times I have to tell you that."
"It isn't that," he said slowly, gazing at her hand. "It's- well-is it a long walk?"
"Longest walk you ever took." She grabbed him and hauled him up.
The sign came swimming out of the colorful darkness, plain white board with red glow-print, no holos or other tricks: Kutt-Upps (2 Drink Minim.). Gabe stopped where he was and stared up at it. It didn't mean anything to him, and he couldn't figure out why it would pop out of the roiling confusion of his vision.
Gina took hold of his arm. "Don't tell me you got a secret life with med porn, too."
"Oh, if you've seen one tracheotomy, you've seen them all," he said in a blase tone as she urged him forward. The stuff in his system had reasserted itself-either that, or he'd had some more, he didn't really know-and he seemed to be walking through an orchard of stylized, possibly artificial trees with branches like lattices and lightning bolts. Except wasn't there some place down south that did something funny with trees, got them to bear leaves that looked like lace or something? Big tourist attraction.
At the same time the street looked like a long, dark tunnel, and he couldn't really see the ground, so for all he knew, the next step could be right into some yawning pit, or the step after that, or the step after that. Gina seemed pretty confident that it was solid ground all the way.
Then he realized he was in a long, dark tunnel sloping upward, and he kept ducking his head, thinking the ceiling was very low. But Gina kept pulling him along, and he was thinking that she had been right, it was the longest walk he'd ever taken, when he stepped into an explosion of light and sound.