slows and becomes regular. I wonder if she is asleep.
“Hey,” I say.
“What?” She slurs the word sleepily.
“I’m sorry about tonight.”
“ . . . Not your fault.”
“I love you very much.”
She rolls to face me. “Huh?”
“I love you.”
“No, babe. Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” I say.
“Won’t work.”
”Doesn’t matter,” I say.
“It can’t work.”
I know I don’t have any right to feel this, but I’m pissed, and so I move away in the bed. “I don’t care.” The first time: “Such a goddamned adolescent, Rob.”
After a while, she says, “Robbie, I’m cold,” and so I move back to her and hold her and say nothing. I realize, rubbing against her hip, that I’m hard again; she doesn’t object as I pour back into her all the frustration she unloaded in me earlier.
Neither of us sleeps much the rest of the night. Sometime before dawn I doze briefly and awaken from a nightmare. I am disoriented and can’t remember the entirety of the dream, but I do remember hard wires and soft flows of electrons. My eyes suddenly focus and I see her face inches away from mine. Somehow she knows what I am thinking. “Whose turn is it?” she says. The antenna.
8
At least a thousand hired kids are there setting up chairs in the arena this morning, but it’s still hard to feel I’m not alone. The dome is that big. Voices get lost here. Even thoughts echo.
“It’s gonna be a hell of a concert tonight. I know it.” Jain had said that and smiled at me when she came through here about ten. She’d swept down the center aisle in a flurry of feathers and shimmering red strips, leaving all the civilians stunned and quivering.
God only knows why she was up this early; over the last eight months, I’ve never seen her get up before noon on a concert day. That kind of sleep-in routine would kill me. I was out of bed by eight this morning, partly because I’ve got to get this console modified by show-time, and partly because I didn’t feel like being in the star’s bed when she woke up.
“The gate’s going to be a lot bigger than last night,” Jain had said. “Can you handle it?”
“Sure. Can you?”
Jain had flashed me another brilliant smile and left. And so I sit here substituting circuit chips.
A couple kids climb on stage and pull breakfasts out of their backpacks. “You ever read this?” says one, pulling a tattered paperback from his hip pocket. His friend shakes her head. “You?” He turns the book in my direction; I recognize the cover.
It was two, maybe three months ago in Memphis, in a studio just before rehearsal. Jain had been sitting and reading. She reads quite a lot, though the promotional people downplay it—Alpertron, Ltd., likes to suck the country-girl image for all it’s worth.
“What’s that?” Stella says.
“A book.” Jain holds up the book so she can see.
“I know that.” Stella reads the title: Receptacle. “Isn’t that the—”
“Yeah,” says Jain.
Everybody knows about Receptacle—the best-seller of the year. It’s all fact, about the guy who went to Prague to have a dozen artificial vaginas implanted all over his body. Nerve grafts, neural rerouting, the works. I’d seen him interviewed on some talk show where he’d worn a jumpsuit zipped to the neck.
“It’s grotesque,” Stella says.
Jain takes back the book and shrugs.
“Would you try something like this?”
“Maybe I’m way beyond it.” A receptacle works only one way.
Stella goes white and bites off whatever it is she was about to say.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry.” Jain smiles and looks fourteen again. Then she stands and gives Stella a quick hug. She glances over at me and winks, and my face starts to flush. One-way.
Now, months later, I remember it and my skin again goes warm. “Get out of here,” I say to the kids. “I’m trying to concentrate.” They look irritated, but they leave.
I’m done with the circuit chips. Now the easy stuff. I wryly note the male and female plugs I’m connecting. Jain . . . The com circuit buzzes peremptorily and Jain’s voice says, “Robbie? Can you meet me outside?”
I hesitate, then say, “Sure, I’m almost done with the board.”
“I’ve got a car; we’re going away.”
“What?”
“Just for the afternoon.”
“Listen, Jain—”
She says, “Hurry,” and cuts off.
It’s gonna be a hell of a concert.
9
Tonight’s crowd strains even the capacity of the Rocky Mountain Central Arena. The gate people say there are more than nine hundred thousand people packed into the smoky recesses of the dome. It’s not just