He saw her trace the lines from the headmount back into the system, then follow the trail of wires leading from the system to his head.
"Think this up yourself?" she asked, putting down the head-mount.
"Easy to do from the inside. Whole console fits in here with room to spare. Lots of things are easy. Check the flatscreen."
He showed her the image of herself stalking across the pit toward him with the ax.
"Pretty clean," she said casually. "No extraneous elements, no static, good res. Get your ass up, I got something to say to you."
"Why don't you come on in here with me, then?"
She looked from the headmount to the meat on the floor and back, glaring. "I want to know how you pulled that shit on me."
"If it's on-line, I can get to it." How I did it, Gina? More like, how couldn't I? It's what I was made to do. I told you that ages ago, when I was far more meat than what I am now.
She stood over him, looking at the wires trailing out of his head. "Don't do it again," she said quietly. "Don't you break in on me again."
He let the words pour into him and run along his enhanced awareness, preserving the exact pitch of her voice, her pronunciation, the way her mouth had moved, and sent it all to the Gina file.
"I scared you," he said. "But really, it was just like this, like you coming here to see me. I just didn't disconnect." She glanced at the speaker.
"Yes, I do sound different," he said, and her attention snapped back to the meat on the floor. She was going to continue to address that poor meat, despite the fact that she should have looked directly into the headmount cam. "I'm better. I'm getting better all the time. That body was dragging me down."
"I wouldn't talk about it in the past tense. How the fuck you think you can last like this?"
He popped his vitals on the flatscreen for her. "Every time I took the wire, I learned to slow the metabolism a little more. I made adjustments, just like any other mechanism. Change for the machines."
She knelt next to the body, and he panned the headmount lens down, tracking her. Tentatively she took hold of the body's arm and squeezed it. Then she looked up at the console again.
"You can feel the difference, can't you, Gina? I'm not really in there, now. I'm maintaining it, but there's nobody home. I know it doesn't happen that way for you, but that's how it is for me."
She let go of him and stood up, stubbornly shaking her head. "You been in worse shape than this after a tough night. You think it's some kinda fucking novelty for me to see you passed out on the floor?" Abruptly she turned and headed back to the lift.
He swiveled the lens after her. "Gina."
She stopped and turned her head just a little. "What."
"I said this would be me. Didn't I?"
Her head dipped slightly in what might have been a nod. Then she moved off, fast.
He turned off the lens and gave himself over fully to what was within.
He was running across the airfield toward the zeppelin, following Caritha. The distance was deceptive-either that, or his pov was out of sync again. He couldn't seem to get coordinated, and he wondered how Gina handled that. He would have asked her, except there hadn't been any time the night before to bring the subject up gracefully. If he had even thought of it, which he hadn't. He was sharply aware of the way his heart was pounding, as if it were trying to beat itself to death in his chest, and not just from the illusion of running, though he was also conscious of the sensations of his feet pounding the ground and his arms pumping.
Abruptly the side of the zeppelin lit up, flashing marquee-style. MORE DRUGS. He thumped to a stop and stared up at it, more amused than dismayed. Marly paused on the stairway up to the gondola; Caritha poked her head out the doorway to see what the holdup was.
"Excuse me. What are you doing?"
He turned. Rana Copperthwait was striding across the airfield, looking both severe and concerned. Christ, his mind was wandering again.
"This is love," Copperthwait said. A breeze lifted her heavy curls slightly, brushing one ringlet across her mouth. She pushed it away irritably. "This is love and sex, no ambiguity here, no coyness. You're living everyone's fantasy, to be desirable to two people and them being willing to share. That's pretty great. It would be even better if you could throw in a few more women. Now don't you think you'd better get up in that zeppelin and get busy?"
Gabe looked over his shoulder at Marly and Caritha. They shrugged. "Come on, hotwire," Marly said, and trotted up the steps to the gondola. He followed, pausing just outside the doorway. Caritha poked her head out again.
"What's the matter now?"
"I'm blank on what the inside of a zeppelin gondola looks like."
"So call a database." She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and yanked him inside.
He was standing in Mark's bedroom, looking down at Gina asleep in the rumpled sheets. Startled, he looked at Marly, who put up her hands and backed away. "I'm not touching this one. You made it, you deal with it."
"Likewise," Caritha said, moving closer to Marly. A doorway appeared behind them, and they slipped through it. He had a glimpse of something that looked like a pilot's cockpit before they shut the door on him.
In the bed Gina remained asleep. Cautiously he moved around it and sat down on the edge of the mattress. She stirred slightly.
At first you think things are going to get better. You keep believing, and you honor the commitment-
C-word, she'd said abruptly.
Pardon?
C-word. The big bad c-word. Commitment. You got them Bad Old Cozmic C-Word Blues.
It wasn't a word to me. It was something real, not an incredible simulation. You can run on that… oh, years and years. Even after it doesn't seem worth it anymore, you can still run on it, and then one day… all gone. All used up.
Yah? Try it Cheshire-cat style. One day it's all that's left, and everything else is gone. Either way it's a stone-home bitch. I got a c-word and nothing to use it on. What've you got?
The Last Zeppelin. Coming soon to a brain near you.
Gina stirred again. There was the hint of a smile on her mouth. Had anyone ever smiled in sleep because of him? He didn't know. Still didn't but then, it had been dark.
He hadn't started to worry until the room showed signs of getting lighter. Suddenly he'd had the wild idea that the darkness had been a safe zone or a fooler loop, and the daylight would screw it all up. He'd turned to her a little desperately then, and maybe she'd been feeling the same thing, or something like it. They'd gone at each other in frenzy, and Jesus but he'd thought that would have kept the day away if anything could have.
Maybe it had. The room was completely light when they'd quieted, but the spell had not been broken. Out of bed they'd continued to move around each other easily, not falling all over each other like a couple of schoolkids, just… easily. A little sex magic could go a long way, even in the only port in a storm.
Fast train.
Pardon?
Fast train. It's usually the night-train. Never mind, Ludovic. Now you know what it's like.
The room swayed slightly as the zeppelin lifted off, and he suddenly had the certain feeling that something/someone was approaching; a new presence, as full and individual as he was. He twisted around to see who it was.
He was looking at himself in the mirror in Medical's bathroom, turning his head from side to side. Just as they'd said, he didn't look any different. Same old head, only now it had eight holes in it, eight holes to be filled with eight plugs and a small menu of commands he could use to manipulate the images in his head. Top. Forward. Reverse. Freeze. Resume. End. Save. Quit.
There was a fast montage of images as each command was executed-Caritha, MORE DRUGS, Rana Copperthwait speaking to him forward and backward, freezing briefly and then gesturing at the zeppelin, Mark's bedroom, Gina, Marly and Caritha shutting the door on him, Gina stirring and the sense of another presence even more strongly this time, his face in the bathroom mirror, the awareness of the whole mess being saved to chip, and then he was blinking at the ceiling of the pit high above him, wondering if he'd ever get this right.