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"You say that to all the guys?" She smiled weakly. "Look, you get some sleep.
I'll be outside."
"I'll be all right. You go on back to Houston."
"No."
"One day, then. What is it, Tuesday?"
"Wednesday."
"You have to be back tomorrow night to cover the seminar for me. Senior
seminar."
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"We'll talk in the morning." There were plenty of people better qualified.
"Promise me?"
"I promise I'll take care of it." At least with a phone call "You get some
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sleep now."
Marty and I went down to the machine cantina in the basement. He had a cup of
strong Bustelo stay awake for the 1:30 train and I had a beer. It turned out
to be nonalcoholic, specially brewed for hospitals and schools. I told him
about "Armadillo's Number" and all.
"She seems to be all there." He tasted his coffee and put another double sugar
in it. "Sometimes people lose bits of memory, that they don't miss for awhile.
Of course it's not all loss."
"No." One kiss, one touch. "She has the memory of being jacked for what, three
minutes?"
"And there might be something more," he said cautiously. He took two data
strings out of his shirt pocket and set them on the table. "These are complete
copies of her records here. I'm not supposed to have them; they cost more than
the operation itself."
"I could help pay "
"No, it's grant money. The point is, her operation failed for a reason. Not a
lack of skill or care on
Spencer's part, necessarily, but a reason."
"Something that could be reversed?"
He shook his head and then shrugged. "It's happened."
"You mean it could be reinstalled? I've never heard of that."
"Because it's so rarely done. Usually not worth the risk. They'll try it if,
after the extraction, the patient is still in a vegetative state. It's a
chance to re-establish contact with the world.
"In Blaze's case it would be too dangerous, at the present state of the art.
And it is as much art as science. But it keeps evolving, and maybe someday, if
we find out what went wrong..." He sipped at his coffee. "Probably won't
happen, not in the next twenty years. Almost all of the research funding is
military, and it's not an area they're deeply interested in. If a mechanic's
installation fails, they just draft somebody else."
I tasted the beer again and decided it wasn't going to improve. "She's totally
disconnected now? If we jacked, she wouldn't feel anything?"
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"You could try it. There's still a connection with a few minor ganglia. A few
neurons here and there
when we replace the metal core of the jack, some of them re-establish
contact."
"Be worth a try."
"Don't expect anything. People in her condition can go to a jack shop and rent
a really extreme one, like a deathtrip, but all they get is a mild
hallucinating buzz; nothing concrete. If they just jack with a person, no
go-between, there's no real effect. Maybe a placebo effect, if they expect
something to happen."
"Do us a favor," I said. "Don't tell her that."
COMPROMISING, JULIAN TOOK the train up to Houston, staying just long enough to
cover Amelia's particle seminar the students weren't wild about having a young
postdoc unexpectedly substitute for
Dr. Blaze and then caught a midnight train back to Guadalajara.
As it turned out, Amelia was released the next day, traveling by ambulance to
a care facility on campus.
The clinic didn't want a patient who was just resting under observation to
take up a valuable bed on
Friday; most of their high-ticket customers checked in that day.
Julian was allowed to ride with her, which was mostly a matter of watching her
sleep. When the sedative wore off, about an hour from Houston, they talked
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primarily about work; Julian managed to avoid lying to her about what might
happen if they jacked in her almost-connected state. He knew she would read
all about it soon enough and then they'd have to deal with their hopes and
disappointments. He didn't want her to build up some transcendental scenario
based on that one beautiful instant. The best that could happen would be a lot
less than that, and there would probably be no effect at all.
The care center was shiny on the outside and shabby on the inside. Amelia got
the only bed left in a four-
bed "suite," inhabited by women twice her age, long-term or permanent
residents. Julian helped her settle in, and when it became obvious that he
wasn't just working for her, two of the old ladies were ostentatiously
horrified at the difference in color and age. The third was blind.
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