"So? Let's do it."
"No ... let's not make any decisions now. Not for a couple of days."
She looked past me, out the window over the sink. "I, you think I'm crazy."
"Impulsive." I sat down on the floor and stroked her arm.
"It is strange for me, isn't it?" She closed her eyes and kneaded her forehead. "Maybe I'm still medicated."
I hoped that was it. "I'm sure that's all it is. You need a couple of days' more rest."
"What if they botched the operation?"
"They didn't. You wouldn't be walking and talking."
She patted my hand, still looking abstracted. "Yeah, sure. You have some juice or something?"
I found some white grape juice in the refrigerator and poured us each a small glass. I heard a zipper and turned around, but it was only her leather suitcase.
I brought her drink over. She was staring intently, slowly picking through the contents of the suitcase. "Think something might be missing?"
She took the drink and set it down. "Oh, no. Or maybe. Mainly I'm just checking my memory. I do remember packing. The trip down. Talking to Dr., um, Spencer." She backed up two steps, felt behind her, and sat down slowly on the bed.
"Then the blur-you know, I was sort of awake when they operated. I could see lots of lights. My chin and face were in a padded frame."
I sat down with her. "I remember that from my own installation. And the drill sound."
"And the smell. You know you're smelling your own skull being sawed open. But you don't care."
"Drugs," I said.
"That's part of it. Also looking forward to it." Well, not in my case. "I could hear them talking, the doctor and some woman."
"What about?"
"It was Spanish. They were talking about her boyfriend and ... shoes or something. Then everything went black. I guess it went white, then black."
"I wonder if that was before or after they put the jack in."
"It was after, definitely after. They call it a bridge, right?"
"From French, yeah: pont mental."
"I heard him say that – ahora, el puente – and then they pressed really hard. I could feel it on my chin, on the cushion."
"You remember a lot more than I did."
"That was about it, though. The boyfriend and the shoes and then click. The next thing I knew, I was lying in bed, unable to move or speak."
"That must have been terrifying."
She frowned, remembering. "Not really. It was like an enormous ... lassitude, numbness. As if I could move my arms and legs, or speak, if I really had to. But the effort would have been tremendous. That was probably mood drugs, too, to keep me from panicking.
"They kept moving my arms and legs around and shouting nonsense at me. It was probably English, and I just couldn't decipher their accents, in my condition."
She gestured and I handed her the grape juice. She sipped. "If I remember this right... I was really, really annoyed that they wouldn't just go away and let me lie in peace. But I didn't say anything, because I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of hearing me complain. It's an odd thing to remember. I was really being infantile."
"They didn't try the jack?"
She got a faraway look. "No ... Dr. Spencer told me about that later. In my condition it was better to wait and have the first time be with someone I knew. Seconds count, he explained that to you?"
I nodded. "Exponential increase in the number of neural connections."
"So I lay in a darkened room then, for a long time; lost track of time, I suppose. Then all the things that happened before we... we jacked, I thought it was a dream. Everything was suddenly flooded with light and a couple of people lifted me and bit me on the wrists – the IVs-and then we were floating from room to room."
"Riding a gurney."
She nodded. "It really felt like levitation, though-I remember thinking, 'I'm dreaming,' and resolving to enjoy it. An image of Marty floated by, asleep in a chair, and I accepted that as part of the dream. Then you and Dr. Spencer appeared-okay, you were in the dream, too.
"Then it was all suddenly real." She rocked back and forth, remembering the instant we jacked. "No, not real. Intense. Confusing."
"I remember," I said. "The double vision, seeing yourself. You didn't recognize yourself at first."
"And you told me most people don't. I mean you told me in one word, somehow, or no words. Then it all snapped into focus, and we were ..." She nodded rhythmically, biting her lower lip. "We were all the same. We were one ... thing."
She took my right hand in both of hers. "And then we had to talk to the doctor. And he said we couldn't, he wouldn't let us ..." She lifted my hand to her breast, the way it had been that last moment, and leaned forward. But she didn't kiss me. She put her chin on my shoulder and whispered, voice cracking: "We'll never have that again?"
I automatically tried to feed her a gestalt, the way you do jacked, about how she might be able to try again in a few years, about Marty having her data, about the partial re-establishment of neuron connection so we might try, we might try; and a fraction of a second later I realized no, we weren't connected; she can only hear something if I say it.
"Most people never even have it once."
"Maybe they're better off," she said, muffled, and sobbed quietly. Her hand moved up to squeeze my neck and caress the jack.
I had to say something. "Look... it's possible you haven't lost it all. There might be a small fraction of the ability still there."
"What do you mean?" I explained about some of the neurons homing back into the jack's receptor areas. "How much might be there?"
"I don't have the faintest idea. I'd never even heard of it until a couple of days ago." Though I knew with sudden certainty that some of the jills must be that way, unable to make a really deep connection. Ralph had brought back memories of some who had hardly seemed jacked at all.
"We have to try. Where could we ... could you bring the equipment back from Portobello?"
"No, I'd never get it off the base." And be court-martialed, if I tried.
"Hmm ... Maybe we could find a way to sneak into the hospital – "
I laughed. "You don't have to sneak anywhere. Just buy time at one of the jack joints."
"But I don't want that. I want to do it with you."
"That's what I mean! They have double unis-two-person universes. Two people jack in and go someplace together." That's where the jills took their customers. You can screw on the streets of Paris, floating in outer space, riding a canoe down rapids. Ralph had brought us back the weirdest memories.
"Let's go do it."
"Look, you're still beat from the hospital. Why not get a day or two rest and then – "
"No!" She stood up. "For all we know, the connections might be fading while we sit here and talk about it." She picked up the phone off the table and punched two numbers; she knew my cab code. "Outside?"
I got up and followed her to the door, afraid I'd made a big mistake. "Look, don't expect the world."
"Oh, I don't expect anything. Just have to try it, find out." For someone who didn't expect anything, she was awfully eager.
It was infectious. While we waited for the cab, I went from thinking Well, at least we'll find out one way or the other to being sure that there would be at least something there. Marty had said there would be a placebo effect, if nothing more.
I couldn't give the cab a specific address, since I'd only been there once. But I asked whether it knew where the block of jack joints was, just outside the university, and it said yes.
We could have biked there, but it was the neighborhood where that guy had pulled a knife on me – it had started pretty low and gone downhill-and I figured it might be dark by the time we finished our experiment.
It was a good thing the cab turned off the meter while we went through security. The shoe in charge saw our destination and jerked us around for ten minutes, I supposed to watch Amelia's discomfort. Or try to get some sort of rise out of me. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.