Rock On (8 page)

It isn’t Moog Indigo; they’re laying down the sound and light patterns behind Jain as expertly as always.

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think I’m handling the stim console badly. If I were, the nameless tech would be on my ass over the com circuit.

Jain goes into her final number. It does not work. The audience is enthusiastic and they want an encore, but that’s just it: they shouldn’t want one. They shouldn’t need one.

She comes off the stage crying. I touch her arm as she walks past my console. Jain stops and rubs her eyes and asks me if I’ll go back to the hotel with her.

7

It seems like the first time I was in Jain Snow’s bed. Jain keeps the room dark and says nothing as we go through the positions. Her breathing grows a little ragged; that is all. And yet she is more demanding of me than ever before.

When it’s done, she holds me close and very tightly. Her rate of breathing 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 hard to believe; it’s scary. But computer ticket-totes don’t lie.

I look out at the crowd and it’s like staring at the Pacific after dark; the gray waves march out to the horizon until you can’t tell one from the other. Here on the stage, the crowd-mutter even sounds like the sea, exactly as though I was on the beach trying to hear in an eighteen-foot surf. It all washes around me and I’m grateful for the twin earpieces, reassured to hear the usual check-down lists on the in-house com circuit.

I notice that the blowers have cut off. It’s earlier than usual, but obviously there’s enough body heat to keep the dome buoyed aloft. I imagine the Central Arena drifting away like that floating city they want to make out of Venice, California. There is something appealing about the thought of this dome floating away like dandelion fluff. But now the massive air-conditioning units hum on and the fantasy dies.

The house lights momentarily dim and the crowd noise raises a few decibels. I realize I can’t see features or faces or even separate bodies. There are simply too many people to comprehend. The crowd has fused into one huge tectonic slab of flesh.

“Rob, are you ready?” The tech’s soft voice in my earpiece.

“Ready.”

“It’s a big gate tonight. Can you do it?”

Sixty overlay tracks and one com board between Jain and maybe a cool million horny, sweating spectators? “Sure,” I say. “Easy.” But momentarily I’m not sure and I realize how tightly I’m gripping the ends of the console. I consciously will my fingers to loosen.

“Okay,” the tech says. “But if anything goes wrong, cut it. Right? Damp it completely.”

“Got it.”

“Fine,” he says. “About a minute, stand by. Ms. Snow wants to say hello.”

“Hello, Robbie?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Good luck.”

Interference crackles and what she says is too soft to hear. I tell her, “Repeat, please.”

“Stone don’t break. At least not easy.” She cuts off the circuit.

I’ve got ten seconds to stare out at that vast crowd. Where, I wonder, did the arena logistics people scrape up almost a million in/out headbands? I know I’m hallucinating, but for just a moment I see the scarlet webwork of broadcast power reaching out from my console to those million skulls. I don’t know why; I find myself reaching for the shield that covers the emergency total cutoff. I stop my hand.

The house lights go all the way down; the only illumination comes from a thousand exit signs and the equipment lights. Then Moog Indigo troops onstage as the crowd begins to scream in anticipation. The group finds their instruments in the familiar darkness. The crowd is already going crazy.

Hollis strokes her color board and shoots concentric spheres of hard primaries expanding through the arena; red, yellow, blue. Start with the basics. Red.

Nagami’s synthesizer spews a volcanic flow of notes like burning magma.

And then Jain is there. Center stage.

“Damn it,” says the tech in my ear. “Level’s too low. Bring it up in back.” I must have been dreaming. I am performing stupidly, like an amateur. Gently I bring up two stim balance slides.

“—love you. Every single one of you.”

The crowd roars back. The filling begins. I cut in four more low-level tracks.

“—ready. How about you?”

They’re ready. I cut in another dozen tracks, then mute two. Things are building just a little too fast. The fine mesh around Jain’s body seems to glitter with more than reflected light. Her skin already gleams with moisture.

“—get started easy. And then things’ll get hard. Yeah?”

“YEAH!” from thousands of throats simultaneously.

I see her stagger slightly. I don’t think I am feeding her too much too fast, but mute another pair of tracks anyway. Moog Indigo takes their cue and begins to play. Hollis gives the dome the smoky pallor of slow-burning leaves, Then Jain Snow sings.

And I fill her with them. And give her back to them.

space and time

measured in my heart

10

In the afternoon:

Jain gestures in an expansive circle. “This is where I grew up.”

The mountains awe me. “Right here?”

She shakes her head. “It was a lot like this. My pa ran sheep. Maybe a hundred miles north.”

“But in the mountains?”

“Yeah. Really isolated. My pa convinced himself he was one of the original settlers. He was actually a laid-off aerospace engineer out of Seattle.”

The wind flays us for a moment; Jain’s hair whips and she shakes it back from her eyes. I pull her into the shelter of my arms, wrapping my coat around us both. “Do you want to go back down to the car?”

“Hell, no,” she says. “A mountain zephyr can’t scare me off.”

I’m not used to this much open space; it scares me a little, though I’m not going to admit that to Jain. We’re above timberline, and the mountainside is too stark for my taste. I suddenly miss the rounded, wooded hills of Pennsylvania. Jain surveys the rocky fields rubbed raw by wind and snow, and I have a quick feeling she’s scared too. “Something wrong?”

“Nope. Just remembering.”

“What’s it like on a ranch?”

“Okay, if you don’t like people,” she says slowly, obviously recalling details. “My pa didn’t.”

“No neighbors?”

“Not a one in twenty miles.”

“Brothers?” I say. “Sisters?”

She shakes her head. “Just my pa.” I guess I look curious because she looks away and adds, “My mother died of tetanus right after I was born. It was a freak thing.”

I try to change the subject. “Your father didn’t come down to the first concert, did he? Is he coming tonight?”

“No way,” she says. “He didn’t and he won’t. He doesn’t like what I do.” I can’t think of anything to say now. After a while Jain rescues me. “It isn’t your hassle, and it isn’t mine anymore.”

Something perverse doesn’t let me drop it now. “So you grew up alone.”

“You noticed,” she says softly. “You’ve got a hell of a way with understatement.”

I persist. “Then I don’t understand why you still come up here. You must hate this.”

“Ever see a claustrophobe deliberately walk into a closet and shut the door? If I don’t fight it this way—” Her fingers dig into my arms. Her face is fierce. “This has got to be better than what I do on stage.” She swings away from me. “Shit!” she says. “Damn it all to hell.” She stands immovable, staring down the mountain for several minutes. When she turns back toward me, her eyes are softer and there’s a fey tone in her voice. “If I die—” She laughs. “When I die. I want my ashes here.”

“Ashes?” I say, unsure how to respond.
Humor her.
“Sure.”

“You.” She points at me. “Here.” She indicates the rock face. The words are simple commands given to a child.

“Me.” I manage a weak smile.

Her laugh is easy and unstrained now. “Kid games. Did you do the usual things when you were a kid, babe?”

“Most of them.”
I hardly ever won, but then I liked to play games with outrageous risks.

“Hammer, rock, and scissors?”

“Sure, when I was really young.” I repeat by long-remembered rote: “Rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.”

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s play.” I must look doubtful. “Rob,” she says warningly.

“Okay.” I hold out my right hand.

Jain says, “One, two, three.” On “three,” we each bring up our right hand. Hers is a clenched fist: stone. My first two fingers form the snipping blades of a pair of scissors. “I win!” she crows, delighted.

“What do you win?”

“You. Just for a little while.” She pulls my hands close and lays them on her body.

“Right here on the mountain?” I say.

“I’m from pioneer stock. But you—” She shrugs. “Too delicate?”

I laugh and pull her close.

“Just—” She hesitates. “Not like the other times? Don’t take this seriously, okay?”

In my want I forget the other occasions. “Okay.”

Each of us adds to the other’s pleasure, and it’s better than the other times. But even when she comes, she stares through me, and I wonder whose face she’s seeing—no, not even that: how many faces she’s seeing.
Babe, no man can fill me like they do.

And then I come also and—briefly—it doesn’t matter.

My long coat is wrapped around the two of us, and we watch each other inches apart. “So much passion, Rob . . . It seems to build.”

I remember the stricture and say, “You know why.”

“You really like me so much?”
The little-girl persona.