His eyes lit up. "You wanna hear some music? Program director's got 'em cued up to the end of the night. There's some stuff in my room. Connection things, a monitor. We got the rest of the equipment."
They walked back to his room with their arms around each other and studied the rig together while she waited, with one part of her mind, to hear someone come down the hall and barge in and explain that they couldn't be doing that now.
But no one came, and eventually Mark was lying down on the narrow bed while she examined the slender wires to be put up against each target area, all of the latter still standing out as shaved areas on his scalp. Just like her own.
The first connection she made threw a green 3-D sketch of Mark's head up on the monitor, with the connection point highlighted amber. More amber points lit up in response to each connection she made, stars winking into existence in a new man-made constellation. You're hot with the poetry tonight, kid, she thought, looking from the monitor to Mark lying on the bed with his eyes closed and a shade of a smile on his lips and the wires flowing from his head in graceful lines. She had a sudden impulse to bend over and kiss him. It would be the first time in she didn't know how long. And maybe the last.
She considered this, looking at the simulation of Mark's brain on the monitor. Her hands were moving idly, palms sliding against each other. Got you a twenty-first-century human person here; maybe twenty-first-century human doesn't kiss. Like, doesn't have to. An image of the lake flashed in the mind and faded. Yah, we got something here a little more lasting than a kiss.
But he's hooked up to the machine, isn't he.
She rubbed a hand over her mouth as if trying to wipe away something; wasn't necessary. The impulse had passed without her doing anything about it. Just as well. It wasn't too cool to kiss someone while he was making love with someone else.
Abruptly he was groping with one hand in the semidark; wanting to hold hers. She reached over and touched his fingers. He grabbed and held on, but she worked her hand out of his grasp.
"I think I need two hands for this," she said, unsure of whether he would actually hear her or not. "You know where I am, though." His hand went back to rest on his stomach; he hadn't opened his eyes.
The image on the monitor gave a jump and disappeared; in its place came a muddy, out-of-focus scene that might have been the lake in an overcast twilight. Two figures moved in the scene, never coming clear before it whited out.
Music came up-she gave a surprised laugh. Very old piece, Lou for-chrissakes-Reed, "Coney Island Baby"; only the two of them would have placed it. The program director was on another nostalgia kick.
What faded back in wasn't Coney Island, a freaky spot that she had been to but the program director had not. Instead, the point of view was traveling low and slow over a terrain she recognized as hypermagnified carpet, pausing occasionally at odd cast-aside items: a shoe, a shirt, some loose change. It reached the side of a rumpled, unmade bed and rose, still moving as slowly as the music, to a shape under the sheets.
Gina made herself keep watching as the pov tracked along the shape, seeming to study the twists and dips in the bedclothes that concealed it. Abruptly the scene cut to an aerial view of a ragged gathering of people in a parking lot at night, and then the pov was tracking the folds in the covers again, winding along.
She swallowed, rubbing her hands together, as the pov moved sideways, showing there was more than one shape under the covers. It began to track along that one, inserting another brief view of the nighttime parking lot, closer this time so that the faces of the people, the crazy, thrown-together clothes, the wild, dancing movements, were clearly visible before the scene cut back to the bed and Mark's sleeping face. It wasn't a peaceful face; drained, if anything, worn out, a preview of a more final sort of rest.
The pov was excruciatingly slow as it moved across Mark's face to her own, lingering on the texture of her dreadlocks next to his pale, drawn flesh, finally moving on to the contrast of her deep brown skin, taking a lot of time to show that both her eyes were closed, but beneath the lids the eyes were moving back and forth restlessly.
Cut back to the hit-and-run in the parking lot, at ground level now: a frantic blond woman with multicolored feathers fighting the storm of her hair pulled the pov along, beckoning with one hand as she backed farther into the party. A young guy with waist-length dreadlocks and flip-aside lenses on his sunglasses joined the woman, grinning widely.
Cut back to the bed: the pov studied how their heads were leaning one on another, just where they touched, going slowly back up along his own face to show that his closed eyes were also in motion. Sliding over to her face again.
Cut: the pov was in the center of an enormous group of people now, trying to pull it every which way under the hard white lights swaying a little on their framework. Looking up at the lights now, the pov began to turn around and around, occasionally glimpsing some of the people around it, spinning faster and faster until the focus blurred and snapped back to the bed.
The pov cruised along her shoulder and down her arm hidden under the covers; then it was suddenly moving along a sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard under glaring sunlight, taking a good look at the signs on the wannabee parlors and the video joints, pausing to look back at the Chinese Theatre, where the tourists were trying on the footprints in the pavement and posing for pictures. A kid dressed in a red garbage bag with HAZARDOUS WASTE stenciled all over it flew into the frame and started batting her hands frantically at the pov, her mouth working angrily. The pov turned aside in imitation of a human ducking the blows, took in a few more of the street regulars coming to see what was going on, more and more faces, all crowded together, becoming smaller and smaller as the pov receded steadily, until the faces were all stones. The pov traveled upward to the grey-white sky, where the faint shadows of the clouds hinted at the twists and folds and dips of sheets before whiting out completely as the music faded.
The schematic of Mark's head, the amber points glowing, reappeared on the screen.
"I'm done," Mark's voice said clearly, coming through the speaker. "Pull 'em out for me, will you?"
He'd already given the command for disconnect. She leaned over and removed the wires from his head. For a moment she thought he wasn't going to move. Then he took a deep breath and sat up, grinning at her. "Pretty coherent, huh?"
"Great," she said. "If anyone wanted a video of some old music with some old people in it."
"The way we're actually gonna do it, the Beater says, is we're gonna take stuff provided by the bands-images, pictures, shit like that-and work it around into some form." He wiggled his eyebrows. "We're real synthesizers now. Real synners."
She looked at him. The question You wanna talk it over? was right behind her lips, just waiting for her voice, but her voice wouldn't come.
"You wanna try it" he asked.
"There's only one rig."
"We'll get yours. There's one in your room."
"There wasn't when I woke up."
"I bet there is now." He looked at her steadily.
"Yah? I bet we could figure out how to hook them together."
"Yah?" His eyes glittered. "Do you want that?"
"No." She bit the inside of her cheek, wondering if he knew she was lying.
He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. "Why do you think they let us get away with this?"
She laughed suddenly. "What makes you think we got away with anything?" She looked at the now-dark monitor. "I think they watched the whole thing." It hit her just as she said it that she believed that; they would be watching, listening, just as they would after any other kind of surgery. They just weren't being obvious about it. She leaned forward, putting her face close to his. "You wanna do any kind of funny experiments, maybe you oughta wait."