told him about 'Armadillo's Number' and all.
'She seems to be all there.' He tasted his coffee and put another double sugar in it. 'Sometimes people lose bits of memory, that they don't miss for awhile. Of course it's not all loss.'
'No.' One kiss, one touch. 'She has the memory of being jacked for what, three minutes?'
'And there might be something more,' he said cautiously. He took two data strings out of his shirt pocket and set them on the table. 'These are complete copies of her records here. I'm not supposed to have them; they cost more than the operation itself.'
'I could help pay – '
'No, it's grant money. The point is, her operation failed for a reason. Not a lack of skill or care on Spencer's part, necessarily, but a reason.'
'Something that could be reversed?'
He shook his head and then shrugged. 'It's happened.'
'You mean it could be reinstalled? I've never heard of that.'
'Because it's so rarely done. Usually not worth the risk. They'll try it if, after the extraction, the patient is still in a vegetative state. It's a chance to re-establish contact with the world.
'In Blaze's case it would be too dangerous, at the present state of the art. And it is as much art as science. But it keeps evolving, and maybe someday, if we find out what went wrong...' He sipped at his coffee. 'Probably won't happen, not in the next twenty years. Almost all of the research funding is military, and it's not an area they're deeply interested in. If a mechanic's installation fails, they just draft somebody else.'
I tasted the beer again and decided it wasn't going to improve. 'She's totally disconnected now? If we jacked, she wouldn't feel anything?'
'You could try it. There's still a connection with a few minor ganglia. A few neurons here and there-when we replace the metal core of the jack, some of them re-establish contact.'
'Be worth a try.'
'Don't expect anything. People in her condition can go to a jack shop and rent a really extreme one, like a deathtrip, but all they get is a mild hallucinating buzz; nothing concrete. If they just jack with a person, no go- between, there's no real effect. Maybe a placebo effect, if they expect something to happen.'
'Do us a favor,' I said. 'Don't tell her that.'
COMPROMISING, JULIAN TOOK the train up to Houston, staying just long enough to cover Amelia's particle seminar-the students weren't wild about having a young postdoc unexpectedly substitute for Dr. Blaze – and then caught a midnight train back to Guadalajara.
As it turned out, Amelia was released the next day, traveling by ambulance to a care facility on campus. The clinic didn't want a patient who was just resting under observation to take up a valuable bed on Friday; most of their high-ticket customers checked in that day.
Julian was allowed to ride with her, which was mostly a matter of watching her sleep. When the sedative wore off, about an hour from Houston, they talked primarily about work; Julian managed to avoid lying to her about what might happen if they jacked in her almost-connected state. He knew she would read all about it soon enough and then they'd have to deal with their hopes and disappointments. He didn't want her to build up some transcendental scenario based on that one beautiful instant. The best that could happen would be a lot less than that, and there would probably be no effect at all.
The care center was shiny on the outside and shabby on the inside. Amelia got the only bed left in a four-bed 'suite,' inhabited by women twice her age, long-term or permanent residents. Julian helped her settle in, and when it became obvious that he wasn't just working for her, two of the old ladies were ostentatiously horrified at the difference in color and age. The third was blind.
Well, they were out in the open now. That was one good thing that had come from the mess, for their personal lives if not their professional ones.
Amelia hadn't read the Chandler book, and was delighted. It seemed unlikely that she would spend much time in conversation.
Julian was headed for conversation that night, of course, Friday. He decided to show up at the club at least an hour late, so Marty could tell the others about the operations and reveal the sordid truth about him and Amelia. If indeed it was actually secret to anybody there. Straitlaced Hayes knew and had never given a hint.
There was plenty to occupy him before the Saturday Night Special, since he hadn't even checked his mail after reading the note under his door, when he returned from Portobello. An assistant to Hayes had written up a summary of the runs he and Amelia had missed; that would take a few hours' study. Then there were notes of concern, mostly from people he would see that night. It was the sort of news that traveled fast.
Just to make life interesting, there was a note from his father saying he'd like to drop by on his way home from Hawaii, so Julian could get to know 'Suze,' his new wife, better. Unsurprisingly, there was also a phone message from Julian's mother, wondering where he was, and would he mind if she came down to escape the last of the bad weather? Sure, Mom, you and Suze will get along just fine; think of how much you have in common.
In this case, the easiest course was the truth. He punched up his mother and said she could come down if she wanted, but that his father and Suze were going to be here at the same time. After she calmed down from that, he gave her a quick summary of the past four days' excitement.
Her image on the phone took on an odd appearance as he talked. She'd grown up with sound-only, and had never mastered the neutral expression that most people automatically assumed.
'So you're pretty serious about this old woman.'
'Old white woman, Momma.' Julian laughed at her indignation. 'And I've been telling you for a year and a half how serious we were.'
'White, purple, green; doesn't make any difference to me. Son, she's only ten years younger than I am.'
'Twelve.'
'Oh, thank God, twelve! Don't you see how foolish you look now to the people around you?'
'I'm just glad it's not a secret anymore. And if we look foolish to some people, well, that's their problem, not ours.'
She looked away from the screen. 'It's me that's the fool, and a hypocrite, too. Mother's got to worry.'
'If you'd come down once and meet her, you'd stop worrying.'
'I should. Okay. You call me when your father and his playmate have gone on up to Akron – '
'Columbus, Mom.'
'Wherever. You call me and we'll work out a time.'
He watched her image fade and shook his head. She'd been saying that for more than a year; something always came up. She had a busy life, admittedly, still teaching full-time at a junior college in Pittsburgh. But that obviously wasn't it. She really didn't want to lose her little boy at all, and to lose him to a woman old enough to be her sister was grotesque.
He'd talked to Amelia about their going up to Pittsburgh, but she said she didn't want to force the issue. There was something less simple at work with her, as well.
The two women had opposite attitudes toward his being a mechanic, too. Amelia was plainly worried sick all the time he was in Portobello-much worse now, since the massacre-but his mother treated it as a kind of brainless second job that he had to do, even though it got in the way of his actual work. She never seemed to have any curiosity about what went on down there. Amelia followed his unit's actions with the single-minded intensity of a warboy. (She'd never admitted this, which Julian supposed was to spare him anxiety, but she often slipped and asked questions about things that nobody could have found out if they simply followed the news.)
It suddenly, belatedly, occurred to Julian that Hayes, and probably everybody else in the department, knew or suspected there was something going on because of the way Amelia acted when he was away. They worked hard at (but also had fun) playing the role of 'just friends' when they came together at work. Maybe their audience knew the script.
All part of the past now. He was impatient to get to the club and see how people had reacted to the news. But he still had a couple of hours if he was going to give Marty ample time to set them up. He didn't really feel like working, even answering mail, so he flopped down on the couch and asked the cube to search.
The cube had a built-in learning routine that analyzed every selection he made, and from the content of what he liked, constructed a preference profile that it used to search through the eighteen hundred available channels.
