"Behold, my culture speaks to me," Gina said. The scan went on to Peccadillo Update. Gabe lowered the volume. "Feel like a winner yet?"
Gabe shrugged. "What's a winner?" He looked around the shabby apartment. The legendary Visual Mark did not live in even a fair approximation of a video.
"I'm not sure," Gina said suddenly, "which I'm more curious about-how you found me, or why you bothered."
"I just went to all the places I could remember that you'd taken me to," he said. "Someone said they'd seen you in that joint on the boulevard. When I got there, someone else said you'd left with, ah, Loophead. I got the address of the studio off directory assistance."
"That's one question."
He shrugged. "I'm sorry, I'm unprepared. If I'd known I was going to have to go into detail, I'd have whipped up an outline and a storyboard."
Gina pealed hearty laughter at the ceiling. He sat fingering the unopened bottle of LotusLand and feeling embarrassed. "Come on," he said after a bit. "It wasn't that funny."
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Jesus, we've all got you on the run, don't we? Rivera and Para-Versal and even me."
The dataline was showing a commercial for a new private neighborhood in Canoga Park; the voice-over seemed to jump out at him. "… tiled bathrooms, spacious living suites, kitchens where functionality wasn't left out of the design." The pov swooped along a narrow kitchenette that Gabe knew was only half as long as the cam made it seem, and cruised through another room shaped so that it was almost two separate spaces. "Canoga Park's finest new living arrangement, Park Residence. For further information, on-line tours, and in-person inspection, contact Catherine Mirijanian."
Gabe winced at the sight of the regal face on the screen. "My wife," he said. "She never did have a sense of timing."
"Her? The one that's leaving you?"
"Left. Gone already. I'm waiting for her to sell the condo out from under me."
"Where you gonna go then?"
He shrugged. "Somewhere. I guess."
Gina squinted at the screen. "She doesn't look like you."
"No, we never achieved that point in marriage where you start to look like each other."
"Not what I meant. She doesn't look like she's for you, like she was supposed to be your wife."
"I know." Catherine's picture lingered a moment longer, rippled slightly, and then vanished, to be replaced by some incomprehensible episode from a series labeled Lighthand in the lower corner. Gabe wondered idly when the divisions on the screen had disappeared. Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way. "I think I was always hoping someday she would look like my wife. Now I can't remember why."
Gina yawned. "I fucking hate this kind of discussion."
"You started it," Gabe said, his voice rising in exasperation. "You're a real comedy on wheels, you know that? As far as I can tell, all you ever do is hit people, get toxed, and chase around after a guy who doesn't know what planet he's on half the time."
She looked down at her lap. "I make videos, too."
"Is that what you were doing tonight? With those people, Loophead?"
"You see any of that?" she asked, not looking up at him.
"I saw it all. They wouldn't let me near you, but I saw it all, and I know what was going on."
She nodded. "Yah. It was all right. The synthesis was there, just came up like it was meant to be, and it was all right."
He set the bottle aside on the floor. "Are you going to do that with Mark?" he asked, without thinking.
She looked up at him, shocked, and he wanted to bite his tongue off. "Mark's not a musician, he's another synner. Why would I do that with him?"
He moved a little closer to her on the couch. "I just wondered, when I saw all of you connected at the same time. I-" Suddenly he couldn't think of what to say next, and he felt as if he had stepped off solid floor into a void. MORE DRUGS. He shook his head. "Never mind. I'm sorry, forget I asked that question."
"What are you gonna do?" she asked.
"When?"
"When you're in the wire. When you're rattling around your condo while you wait for the floor to get sold out from under you."
He shook his head again. This was the point where he could get up and leave, and he waited for his legs to push him upright and carry him out the door. He'd been running around in simulation for so long, he'd forgotten how to run a realife, real-time routine; he'd forgotten that if he made mistakes, there was no safety-net program ready to jump in and correct for him.
"Well." Gina let out a long breath. "You want the bed or the couch? I've slept on both, they're equally shitty."
"No, I can go home." He started to get up.
"Bad idea," she said, pulling him down again. "The neighborhood slash-artists'll take you out before you get back to your rental. I'll come out tomorrow morning and find your bloody hide plastered up on the front of the building."
Suddenly he was too tired to argue. Let her go to bed, and then he could sneak out and go home. "I'll take the couch."
"Turn out the lights when you're done." She got up and went into the bedroom.
He sat staring at the dataline, which had cycled back to General News. There was a new anchor now, a young Scandinavian type who looked about sixteen years old. He was rattling on in his sunny voice about something to do with sockets. Of course; if sockets were out of the news for more than half an hour, that would have been an item in itself. Surprising that Mrs. Troubles hadn't been offering advice for the socketed. Well, dears, a mixed relationship-the socketed and the un-socketed-is a peck of trouble waiting to happen, and we all know it. And so is the socketed with the socketed, and the un-socketed with the unsocketed. Better you should try to kindle something with a convicted felon behind bars, or even just forget the whole thing.
"Didn't you hear me, stupid? I said, you're not really listening, are you? But then, if you weren't listening, of course you didn't hear me. Dealing with your type is enough to make me berserk."
Gabe blinked rapidly at the screen. The sunny anchor's face was now a distorted mask of furious disgust.
"You out there, on your couches, on your beds, on your toilets, squatting in your expensive fetid hovels, you don't put this on to listen to anything. You just let it babble at you, and you let the babble bounce off, a little white noise to make you feel a little less like the stagnant, empty straw-people you really are. Get ready, all you null-and-voids, because here it comes-"
The screen went blank. Seconds crawled by, and then an easy-viewing scene of Big Sur at sunset came up. "We are experiencing some technical difficulties at this time," said a calm, refined voice. "Normal programming should be restored within a few minutes. If you have been running a download from this channel, we strongly advise immediate diagnostics and decontamination, and that you refrain from uploading or downloading any other material until such time as your own system has been certified free of infection. We remind our viewers that diagnostic and decontamination programs are free whenever the problem stems from the network. Consult your program guide for further details."
Gabe let out a short laugh of disbelief. It had been a long time since anything like this had happened on the dataline. He wondered how the abusive swashbuckler was. Maybe one of Sam's friends.
He flicked off the dataline and sat in the silence, at a loss. When the dataline insulted and abandoned you, you knew you were really alone.
A voice in his head. Somebody's, maybe his own. Hey, hotwire-you're an asshole.
"Yah," he muttered, "but I'm trying to quit." He got up and went to the bedroom.
She was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed in a T-shirt and underpants as if she had forgotten what she wanted to do next. He wanted to say her name, but his voice refused to work. She turned then and saw him standing in the doorway, holding onto the frame as if he were trying to push it out and make it wider.