“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.
We had the cab let us off on the near end of the block, so we could walk the length of it and check the menus in each joint. The price was important; payday was two days away for both of us. I made three times as much as she did, but the Mexican excursion had brought me down to less than a hundred bucks. And Amelia was flat.
There were more jills than pedestrians. Some of them offered to join us in a three-way. I hadn’t known that was possible. It sounded more confusing than alluring, even under good conditions. And being more intimately linked to the jill than to Amelia would be a disaster.
The place with the best double uni deal was also one of the nicest, or the least sleazy. It was called Your World, and instead of car crashes and executions, it offered a menu of explorations—like the French tour I’d taken in Mexico, but more exotic.
I suggested the underwater tour of the