as 1 live.'
'All right. That's more or less how 1 feel.'
'I was going to leave you,' she said. 'As soon as 1 could get away. I've never felt so trapped in all my life. You and Jase, the hotel, all that. But this ... everything's changed. It's not the money. It's what the money will let us do. No pressure, no worries about how to make a living. I know money isn't the answer to everything, but it does give us a way out of this.
Couldn't you come with me? If you don't want to make any promises now, that's OK, but let's do whatever we have to do with those people, then get out of town.'
'Did you say you want me with you?' Nick said, amazed. 'Did I hear right?'
'Yes.'
He laughed. 'Say 'please'.'
'Yes please, Nick. But what about you? Don't you want to go off on your own?'
'Oh no,' he said, meaning it as never before. 'Not now.'
In the morning, after a sleepless night of plans, decisions, fantasies expressed aloud, they went downstairs to prepare the breakfasts for their guests.
Nick said, 'I never want to do hotel work ever again. Of all the underpaid, unappreciated, unsocial, unrewarding jobs . . .'
'Do you realize,' Amy said, as she cleaned out the coffee percolator, and took from the fridge the lowcaffeine, lowsodium, highzinc, economically sustainable non~ exploitative coffee grounds they had expensively obtained from an independent shipper in West London, 'do you realize that this might be the last time in your life you will have to do this?'
'Nothing ever changes that quickly,' he said.
Remind me you said that in three hours' time,' she said. 'At nine o'clock.'
'What's going to happen at nine o'clock?'
'Something 1 spent all day yesterday setting up for you.'
:What is it?'
Wait.'
Half an hour later, with the guests' breakfast preparations complete, they sat together in the kitchen and drank some of their own instant coffee from the jar: high in caffeine, high, probably, in sodium, and zinc contents unknown.
Amy said, 'We shouldn't trust these people an inch. You should get yourself a lawyer.'
'I already have,' said Nick. 'So should you.'
'That's something else 1 did yesterday.'
CHAPTER 27
Teresa was starting to feel selfconscious whenever she went to the ExEx building; she had become a familiar figure to the staff. She was not used to that. She had been trained to be unobtrusive, to function but to stay low. The knowledge that she lay unconscious in the tiny cubicle, while she roamed the inner worlds of ExEx, made her feel more vulnerable than anything else in her adult life. Perhaps it was this, by reversal, that made her feel so at home exploring the actual scenarios. She was the secret intrusive presence in these fragments of drama, the undetected mind, the will that could be exerted to override the programming and yet remain undetected.
She was learning how to push at the limits of the scenarios. There was a freedom involved. At first it had seemed to be one of landscape: distant mountains, roads leading away, endless vistas and promises of an everunfolding terrain. She had tested the limits of landscape, though, with results that were usually disappointing, and at best only ambiguous.
At last she was realizing there were other landscapes, other highways, the inner world of the consciousness, the one she touched directly the moment she entered a scenario.
This was a terrain that could be explored, this was a landscape that had only tenuous limits.
She remembered the way she had felt herself become Elsa Durdle, and liked doing so; how even without speaking his language she had managed to influence Gendarme Montaigne's movements;
even further back, the old FBI training scenarios, when she briefly influenced events, or failed in trying.
Two days after her first visit to the cowgirl skinflick scenario Teresa again exercised the privacy option, and returned to the makeshift film set.
Luke, the actor in the false whiskers, was waiting on the set beside her, reading the sports page of the tabloid newspaper. In Shandy's guileless persona Teresa tried starting a conversation with him, hoping to move the scenario in a different direction, but nothing she could do or say would divert him from his newspaper until they began filming.
When Willem, the magnificently endowed young Dutchman who played the cowboy, came leaping in on cue to throw a false blow at Luke's jaw, Shandy ducked away from him and deliberately went after Luke. But Luke had become inert again, simply lying in the wreckage of the prop furniture he had fallen against.
While the director yelled at her in fury to get back to the action, Teresa withdrew from Shandy, and, with a quick incantation of the LIVER mnemonic, she aborted the scenario.
You have been flying SENSH Y'ALL
Fantasys from the Old West
Copyroody everywhere doan even THINK about it!!
