Jain sways and the crowd sways; she thrusts and the crowd thrusts. It is one gigantic act. It is as though a temblor shakes the Front Range.
Insect chittering in my earpiece: “What the hell’s going on, Rob? I’m monitoring the stim feed. You’re oscillating from hell to fade-out.”
“I’m trying to balance.” I juggle slides. “Any better?”
“At least it’s no worse,” says the tech. He pauses. “Can you manage the payoff?”
The payoff. The precision-engineered and carefully timed upslope leading to climax. The Big Number. I’ve kept the slim tracks plateaued for the past three sets. “Coming,” I say. It’s coming. There’s time.
“You’re in bad trouble with New York if there isn’t,” says the tech. “I want to register a jag. Now.”
“Okay,” I say.
Love me
Eat me
All of me
“Better,” the tech says. “But keep it rising. I’m still only registering a sixty percent.”
Sure, bastard. It isn’t your brain burning with the output of these million strangers. My violence surprises me. But I push the slim up to seventy. Then Nagami goes into a synthesizer riff, and Jain sags back against a vertical rank of amps.
“Robbie?” It comes into my left ear, on the in-house com circuit reserved for performer and me alone.
“I’m here, Jain.”
“You’re not trying, babe.”
I stare across the stage and she’s looking back at me. Her eyes flash emerald in the wave from Hollis’s color generator. She subvocalizes so her lips don’t move.
“I mean it.”
“This is new territory,” I answer. “We never had a million before.” I know she thinks it’s an excuse.
“This is it, babe,” she says. “It’s tonight. Will you help me?”
I’ve known the question would come, though I hadn’t known who’d articulate it—her or me. My hesitation stretches much longer in my head than it does in realtime. So much passion, Rob . . . It seems to build. Would you kill for me?
“Yes,” I say.
“Then I love you,” and breaks off as the riff ends and she struts back out into the light. I reluctantly touch the console and push the stim to seventy-five. Fifty tracks are in. Jain, will you love me if I don’t?
A bitter look
Eighty. I engage five more tracks. Five to go. The crowd’s getting damn near all of her. And, of course, the opposite’s true.
A flattering word
Since I first heard her in Washington, I’ve loved this song the best. I push more keys. Eighty-two. Eighty-five. I know the tech’s happily watching the meters.
A kiss
The last tracks cut in. Okay, you’re getting everything from the decaying food in her gut to her deepest buried childhood fears of an empty echoing house.
Ninety.
A sword
And the song ends, one last diminishing chord, but her body continues to move. For her there is still music.
On the com circuit the tech yells: “Idiot! I’m already reading ninety. Ninety, damn it. There’s still one number to go.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. Just . . . trying to make up for previous lag-lime.”
He continues to shout and I don’t answer. On the stage Nagarni and Hollis look at each other and at the rest of the group, and then Moog Indigo slides into the last number with scarcely a pause. Jain turns toward my side of the stage and gives me a soft smile. And then it’s back to the audience and into the song she always tops her concerts with, the number that really made her.
Fill me like the mountains
Ninety-five. There’s only a little travel left in the console slides.
The tech’s voice is aghast. “Are you out of your mind, Rob? I’ve got a ninety-five here—damned needle’s about to peg. Back off to ninety.”
“Say again?” I say. “Interference. Repeat, please.”
“I said back off! We don’t want her higher than ninety.”
Fill me like the sea
Jain soars to the climax. I shove the slides all the way forward. The crowd is on its feet; I have never been so frightened in my life.
“Rob! I swear to God you’re canned, you—”
Somehow Stella’s on the com line too: “You son of a bitch! You hurt her—”
Jain flings her arms wide. Her back arches impossibly.
All of me
One hundred.
I cannot rationalize electronically what happens. I cannot imagine the affection and hate and lust and fear cascading into her and pouring back out. But I see the antenna mesh around her naked body glowing suddenly whiter until it flares in an actinic flash and I shut my eyes.
When I open them again, Jain is a blackened husk tottering toward the front of the stage. Her body falls over the edge into the first rows of spectators.