Lore is almost thirteen. She has mulled over Tok’s advice for several months. For her thirteenth birthday she asks for, and gets, a camera and edit board. It is not hard to use: point the camera and record; slide the disk into the edit board, chop out sequences, and paste it back together to make whatever you wish. Despite herself, she becomes interested, soon exhausting the possibilities of one camera and one board and largely unaware subjects. She adds a storyboarder with basic library. Now she has thousands of faces and voices that she can dub in over those of her family.
Oster and Katerine think of her films as a diverting hobby, and after Lore has shown them deliberately inane clips, they do not ask her what she is up to. So when she asks for new library cards for her storyboarder, they smile indulgently and buy them, not asking what she is playing with. In this way, she obtains several adult libraries.
She starts with Tok’s subscriptions to art zines and parlays them into membership in all the on-line camera zines she can find, hanging silently in the net, soaking up all the tricks with camera, edit board, and storyboarder that professionals, enthusiastic amateurs, and self-labeled underground anarchists boast of to each other. She never leaves messages, never lets anyone know she has been there. She trades in one camera after another until she has a Hammex 20, with which she can make films as crisp and sophisticated as any net entertainment. She keeps learning and begins to enjoy her secret life.
She discovers that if she wanders the house and gardens with her camera, Katerine does not start conversations about bioremediation in Bangui or Luanda. If Oster starts talking about getting up before dawn to go game fishing, Lore casually mentions that she will be up most of the night, filming moonlight on water for her latest art documentary. Soon she carries the Hammex with her wherever she goes, but the films she makes are secret.
Her films are wish-fulfillment, for a while: Oster and Katerine eat romantic dinners together, kiss, hold hands, disappear smiling into the bedroom. Lore, whose body is beginning to wake, wonders how her parents look when they are in bed. She watches some of the standard pornography scenes from her library, then learns how to morph the faces of her parents onto the bodies of the library actors. Before she goes back to school, she films the pond and the quay, every room of Ratnapida. When she goes back to her dorm room, she learns how to splice setting and character, and her films fill with porn actors wearing her parents’ faces, fucking doggy-style on the copter pad, hanging upside down from the stone quay, thrashing in the carp pond. They cry out with her parents’ voices, get dressed using the same habitual mannerisms. They are her parents. As her parents become more distant toward one another, Lore brings them flesh to flesh, sometimes inserting dialogue. It does not matter to her whether their words to each other are cruel or kind; they communicate. Her dreams become confusing.
Once she almost calls Tok, but then she gets scared. He will not understand. She watches her films, over and over, and wonders what sex is really like. She lies awake at night and listens to her school friends, wondering what they know, and what they do.
ELEVEN
The next day I plugged in my film library for the first time in months. I had to believe Spanner about the hole in the pattern; that was her job. My job was to create a short commercial that would be indistinguishable from the real thing; one that would persuade the rich to part with their money—and do it fast enough for us to get off the air, get the money out of the account, and disappear before net security could work out that their signal had even been piggybacked.
What would work best, I had decided, was an appeal based on charity to older people, those Tom’s age or thereabouts.
Those born before 1960 had the hardest time adjusting to change. They were the ones who would suddenly stop in the middle of the street as if they had vertigo when some shopwindow flared and called out, or get that haunted, bewildered look when the PIDA readers changed again, or the newstanks swapped to a different format.
It was a very specific expression: hollow-cheeked, eyes darting, looking for somewhere to hide. I had seen