Most of them were Caucasian, but all were brown as coffee beans.
"It's true," she said. "I never wore anything but a pair of track shoes."
"Even to school?"
"They didn't believe in dictating things like that to us."
He watched her develop as a woman in a sequence that lap-dissolved her from the age of ten, like those magic time-lapses of flowers blooming.
"I call this 'The Puberieties of 2073,' " she said, with a self-deprecating laugh. "I put it together years ago, for something to do."
He had already been aware of the skilled hand which had assembled these pieces into a whole which was integrated, yet not artificially slick. The arts learned during her years in the business had enabled her to produce an extended program which entranced him far longer than its component parts, seen raw, could ever have done. He remembered Anna-Louise's accusations, and wondered what she would think if she could see him now, totally involved in someone else's life.
A hand-lettered title card appeared on the screen: "The Broken Blossom: An Act of Love. By Megan Allegra Galloway and Reginald Patrick Thomas." What followed had none of the smooth flow of what had gone before. The cuts were jerky. The camera remained stationary at all times, and there were no fades. He knew this bit of tape had been left untouched from the time a young girl had spliced it together many years ago. The children ran along the beach in slow-motion, huge waves breaking silently behind them. They walked along a dirt road, holding hands, stopping to kiss. The music swelled behind them. They sat in an infinite field of yellow flowers. They laughed, tenderly fondled each other. The boy covered Megan with showers of petals.
They ran through the woods, found a waterfall and a deep pool. They embraced under the waterfall.
The kisses became passionate and they climbed out onto a flat rock where—coincidentally—there was an inflatable mattress. ("When we rehearsed it," Megan explained, "that damn rock didn't feel half as romantic as it looked.") The act was consummated. The sequence was spliced from three camera angles; in some of the shots Cooper could see the legs of one of the other tripods. The lovers lay in each other's arms, spent, and more ocean breakers were seen. Fade to black.
Galloway turned off the tape player. She sat for a time examining her folded hands.
"That was my first time," she said.
Cooper frowned. "I was sure I saw—"
"No. Not with me, you didn't. The other girls, yes. And you saw me doing a lot of other things. But I was 'saving' that." She chuckled. "I'd read too many old romances. My first time was going to be with someone I loved. I know it's silly."
"And you loved him?"
"Hopelessly." She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand, then sighed. "He wanted to pull out at the end and ejaculate on my belly, because that's the way they always do it on television. I had to argue with him for hours to talk him out of that. He was an idiot." She considered that for a moment.
"We were both idiots. He believed real life should imitate television, and I believed it wasn't real unless it was on television. So I had to record it, or it might all fade away. I guess I'm still doing that."
"But you know it's not true. You do it for a living."
She regarded him bleakly. "This makes it better?"
When he did not answer she fell silent for a long time, studying her hands again. When she spoke, she did not look up.
"There are more tapes."
He knew what she meant, knew it would no longer be fun, and knew just as certainly that he must view them. He told her to go on.
"My mother shot this."
It began with a long shot of a silver hang-glider. Cooper heard Megan's mother shout for her daughter to be careful. In response, the glider banked sharply upward, almost stalled, then came around to pass twenty meters overhead. The camera followed. Megan was waving and smiling.
There was a chaotic moment—shots of the ground, of the sky, a blurred glimpse of the glider nearing the tree—then it steadied.
"I don't know what was going through her mind," Megan said, quietly. "But she responded like an old pro. It must have been reflex."
Whatever it was, the camera was aimed unerringly as the glider turned right, grazed the tree, and flipped over. It went through the lower branches, and impaled itself. The image was jerky as Megan's mother ran. There was a momentary image of Megan dangling from her straps. Her head was at a horrifying angle. Then the sky filled one half of the screen and the ground the other as the camera continued to record after being flung aside.
Things were not nearly so comprehensive after that. The family at last had no more inclination to tape things. There were some hasty shots of a bed with a face—Megan, so wrapped and strapped and tucked that nothing else showed—pictures of doctors, of the doors of operating rooms and the bleak corridors of hospitals. And suddenly a girl with ancient eyes was sitting in a wheelchair, feeding herself laboriously with a spoon strapped to her fist.
"Things pick up a little now," Megan said. "I told them to start taping again. I was going to contrast these tapes with the ones they would make a year from now, when I was walking again."
"They told you you would walk?"
"They told me I would not. But everyone thinks they're the exception. The doctors tell you you'll regain some function, and hell, if you can regain some you can regain it all, right? You start to believe in mind over matter, and you're sure God will smile on you alone. Oh, by the way, there's trans-tape material with some of these."
The implications of the casual statement did not hit him for a moment. When he understood, he knew she would not mention it again. It was an invitation she would never make more directly than she had just done.
"I'd like to run them, if you wouldn't mind." He had hoped for a tone of voice as casual as hers had been, and was not sure he had pulled it off. When she looked at him her eyes were measuring.
"It would be bad form for me to protest," she said, at last. "Obviously, I want very much for you to try them. But I'm not sure you can handle them. I should warn you, they're—"
"—not much fun? Damn it, Megan, don't insult me."
"All right." She got up and went to a cabinet, removed a very small, very expensive Transer unit and helmet. As she helped him mount it she would not look into his eyes, but babbled nervously about how the Feelie Corporation people had showed up in the hospital one day, armed with computer printouts that had rated her a good possibility for a future contract with the company. She had turned them away the first time, but they were used to that. Transing had still been a fairly small industry at the time. They were on the verge of breakthroughs that would open the mass market, but neither Feeliecorp nor Megan knew that. When she finally agreed to make some tapes for them it was not in the belief that they would lead to stardom. It was to combat her growing fear that there was very little she could do with her life. They were offering the possibility of a job, something she had never worried about when she was rich and un-injured. Suddenly, any job looked good.
"I'll start you at low intensity," she said. "You don't have a tolerance for transing, I presume, so there's no need for power boosters. This is fragmented stuff. Some of the tapes have trans-tracks, and others don't, so you'll—"
"Will you get on with it, please?"
She turned on the machine.
On the screen, Megan was in a therapy pool. Two nurses stood beside her, supporting her, stretching her thin limbs. There were more scenes of physical therapy. He was wondering when the transing would begin. It should start with a shifting of perspectives, as though he had (The television expanded; he passed through the glass and into the world beyond.) actually entered—
"Are you all right?"