Synners

7

"Hallelujah," said Melody Cruz with her usual exaggerated good cheer, "it's another day! Anybody here care which one?"

"Not me," Gabe muttered groggily as he shuffled into the living room and plumped down on the mile-long couch. Twenty minutes of shower-massage had been either too little or too much; he wanted nothing more than to sink into the sofa and become one with the cushions.

"I just knew you'd see it that way. Well, here's the ugly truth of it, big guy: deadline on the Gilding BodyShields spot looms big as life and twice as graphic, you should pardon the expression."

Gabe grunted. "Tell me something I don't know."

"I'm getting to that. But first, this reminder: lunch with Manny Rivera today. Another good reason to get the Body-Shields spot wrapped."

"Okay, okay," Gabe said. "Nag." He sat up a little straighter, but his eyes still refused to open all the way.

"And we've got a mailbox close to capacity here. Three more items, and they're gonna hit you with the surcharge. I don't wanna say they're gougers or anything, but if you don't do something soon, they're gonna name the node after you. The Gabriel Ludovic Electronic Postal Node, funded entirely by you. I wouldn't want that carved on my tombstone."

"Right. What's in it?"

"Only the most comprehensive collection of junk mail in the entire Los Angeles area. Offers so refusable it's amazing they don't implode."

"Anything from Cassandra? Cross-ref Sam?"

There wasn't even a pause. "Not today."

"Delete it all, then."

"You sure about that?"

Gabe yawned. "Real sure. I'm not in the mood. Do we have any grapefruit juice?"

"We should, unless you sneaked into the kitchen in the middle of the night and drank it all without telling anyone."

Gabe grunted again and pushed himself up off the couch. Melody's voice followed him, switching to the ceiling speaker in the kitchen.

"Took another chunk out of your account for your share of the mortgage on this dump, just thought you'd like to know. Wanna know the balance, or would you rather be surprised?"

"Surprise me." Gabe held a glass under the juice tap on the side of the refrigerator and pressed for six ounces, unsweetened. The juice was bitter and icy, hitting his sinuses a moment after it hit his palate. He leaned against the refrigerator, eyes squeezed shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. His sleepiness had dropped away in a rush, leaving him wide-eyed with a lingering undertone of fatigue.

"That's about it as directly concerns your miserable life," Melody went on conversationally. "In the general news Malaysia is still trashed, your tax dollars at work. Another day of food riots throughout the British Isles, while here in town the price of the Gatsby Restaurant's Gourmet Breadloaf goes to twenty dollars per as of this morning. Kinda makes you wonder, don't it?"

"Not really," Gabe said. "I work in advertising, remember?"

"Gilding BodyShields. Deadline: jump it or lump it."

"All right, all right, you said already." He refilled his glass and went back into the living room.

"Hey, you said a trigger-word. Watch the triggers, and you won't cue the nag subroutine when you don't want to."

"Actually, I did want to," Gabe said, settling down on the couch again. "I need to be kept after until I get it done."

The four-screen dataline in the wall across from him was running highlights from General News on the two left-hand screens, while a script more formal than Melody Cruz's headline summary ran on the upper right. The lower right screen displayed an abbreviated menu. Gabe picked up the remote and thumbed for the Popular Culture format.

"Pop-Cult comin' atcha," Melody said. "Anything in peculiar or the usual mix?"

"The usual, thanks."

"Don't mention it." Pause. "To anyone. Ever. If I'd known I was going to end up like this when I agreed to license myself for dataline modules, I'd have slit my wrists."

"Me, too," Gabe murmured, watching the parade of items that the summarizer had gleaned from FolkNet, the Public Eye, and the Human Behavior nets, with tidbits from BizNet thrown in. Popular Culture was a bottomless pit of raw material for commercials, and he badly needed some raw material this morning.

A shortened version of his old pharmaceutical spot ran between a segment on new trends in breakfast habits and an item on the sudden jump in popularity of video parlors among people with implants. He'd won a minor award for the pharmaceutical spot, nothing too flashy, just a commendation from the National Pharmaceutical Board for responsible presentation two years ago. Which was as good as a lifetime in the Age of Fast Information.

You know how it is, Gabe: What have you done for us lately, and when are you going to do it again?

Shut up, Manny, he thought. "Melody!"

"You barked?"

"Run down a short list of the contents captured from Pop-Cult for me, will you?" Maybe her voice would drown out the sound of Manny's in his head.

"Okay. Gotta hot report on those breakfast habits, which you saw, and a nonstory about implantees flocking to video parlors, you saw that, too. Also in the queue, we've got-hey, hey!-a big scoop on pet implants, is that something? Nobody wants to paper-train Rover anymore. Now you can get an AKC-registered springer spaniel who can walk himself. Hey, get yourself a poodle named Physician and say, 'Physician, heel thyself.' Come on, don't groan-whatcha wanna bet Physician comes up top of the trend for dogs' names inside of a month?"

"A million billion dollars," Gabe said, shaking his head.

"You do and I'll own you. Won't that be embarrassing, in hock to a dataline module. I'll reset all your defaults for food porn."

Gabe slumped farther down on the couch, letting her voice wash over him as she went on listing the items in the recently saved files. He'd bought the Melody Cruz module separately and installed it himself, jamming it permanently in humor mode. At times it could be a bit macabre, and Catherine had accused him of being a throwback to the days of happy-talk news. Catherine couldn't seem to differentiate between happy uud funny.

From where he sat he couldn't see the door to Catherine's olfice, but he didn't need to. It would be sealed as always, the white-noise soundproofing engaged so there was no danger of Melody Cruz's humor offending Catherine's sensibilities or disturbing her while she punched up real-estate deals on her console. Hermetically-sealed Catherine Mirijanian. For all he knew, she ate and slept in there. He was living out of the guest room himself these days, so he couldn't prove she was making any use of their bedroom. He couldn't even prove she'd noticed he wasn't.

Maybe if they'd had more kids, even just one other-he winced at himself. Considering how things had gone with the one child they'd had, the idea was absurd. Still, Sam's babyhood had been the best time between them. If it could have lasted longer, he and Catherine might have gotten into the habit of being good to each other, good for each other.

No, still absurd. More children would have meant more people he could disappoint, while for Catherine it would have meant more people to disappoint her.

He heard a series of light rattling clicks then; Catherine's door was unsealing, and she was coming out.

"Melody!"

"What, you again? I mean, huh?"

"Email everything to my office, I'll scan it over there."

"The summary, too?"

"Yah. Go mute. Just leave the dataline on in real time." He sat up tensely. There was no time to slip back to the guest room and wait for Catherine to clear. Perhaps she would ignore the fact that the dataline was on and just go about her business. It wouldn't have been the first time.

In the next moment he regretted his thoughts, as he always did when he saw his wife, regretted everything, especially the way things had gone so awfully wrong with them. She was one of those women whose looks had improved as she'd gotten older. Her Middle Eastern ancestry had given her strong, well-formed features and a head of thick hair most people could obtain only at cosmetology clinics. Her skin was the shade of deep honey, a little darker than when he'd last seen her. She had someone who came in once a month to give her dye jobs, something he didn't think she really needed. Her own skin-tone had always looked perfect to him, like her hands; never given to long, red claws, she kept her hands very plain and neat. Whenever he looked at her hands, he remembered that there really were things about her that he loved, things that were still there, somewhere, if only he could figure out how to reach them.

"I'm showing a house," she said, standing at the far end of the sofa.

He blinked at her without comprehension and then realized she was announcing that she was going out. He turned down the volume on the dataline. "A house? You mean a condo?"

She shook her head, smoothing her long wine-colored vest. "A detached residence. Someone is selling, land and all."

Gabe put on a smile. "And not even on the San Andreas Fault? That's wonderful. Congratulations. I'm happy for you."

"That may be premature," she said, a bit primly. "The deal hasn't gone through yet, but the buyers can afford it." She smoothed her vest again, checked her platinum cuff links, brushed invisible lint from her narrow trousers.

"Well, good luck, then. I hope it comes through."

Her full lips twitched. "If it does come through, luck won't have much to do with it."

Gabe nodded contritely. "Of course. I forgot."

She stood there looking at him steadily, and he found himself suddenly wondering not how she had ever gotten so far away from him, but how he had ever been close to her.

"My commission on this one puts me in house range. I know about another coming up for sale soon." She surveyed the living room slowly before her gaze came to rest on him again.

He frowned, looking around himself. "And?"

She was silent.

"Well, what?" he said. "Are you saying you want to move to a house? Is that it?"

"Yes." She wet her lips. "I want to move to a house."

"Okay. All you had to do was say so-" He broke off, the realization creeping up on him like a hotsuit sensation of rising water. "You want to move to a house. Not me and you, but you. Alone."

Her dignified features took on an expression that might have been regret. "I guess that's what I want to say."

"You guess? That's not like you. You don't trust to luck, and you don't guess."

She lifted her chin defensively. "It's not easy to say."

He blew out a breath and sat back against the couch cushions. "Yah. I know."

"Once it would have been for both of us," she said, sounding suddenly urgent as she leaned forward on the arm of the couch. "I used to picture it that way. If you think it doesn't hurt even now to let go of that, then it's just as well things have turned out the way they have."

The grapefruit juice seemed to be eating a hole in his stomach. "Really, Catherine? Tell me-does it hurt because it's us, or because it spoils your one hundred percent success rating in the Valley?"

Now she glowered at him. "My success rate with this residence is zero."

"And you'll never forgive us for that, will you?" He shook his head. "Me and Sam, we really put the screws to you."

"Cassandra's a child. What's your excuse?" She came around the front of the couch and sat down on the cushion next to him, well within the borders of her own cushion. Real estate had given her a well-honed sense of territory, he thought, feeling a bit dazed. "We could have had a house together seven years ago, if you'd had any"-she struggled for a moment- " any anything. You could have gotten ahead instead of treading water, you could be in a position of power right now. I kept hoping you'd wake up and realize you were wasting yourself. If you had, we'd have that house, and maybe we'd even still have a daughter to live in it with us."

"I still have a daughter, even if she's emancipated," Gabe said sharply. "She's not like a goddamn house, you know, there's no title, no deed."

"If you'd had the wits to use your job to your own advantage, maybe Cassandra would have wanted to be more than a bum, living in holes with a lot of vermin and outlaws-"

"I think all she ever wanted was to be accepted as she was. And I never wanted the goddamn job to begin with. You wanted me to take it, and then because of all the things you insisted we had to have, I had to stay with it, and I got trapped there."

"And what were you going to be instead?" Catherine gave an amazed laugh. "An artist. What the world needs is another artist, especially if his name is Gabriel Ludovic. Was I supposed to support all of us while you answered the call of the muse? You even wasted that. You were going to pursue it part-time nights and weekends, remember? I had no problem with that; hobbies are good."

"It wasn't a hobby!" he said.

She laughed again, waving his words away with one hand. "Fool yourself all you want now, but that's all it would have been. One in two million make it as artists. The rest end up in little dumps that pretend to be galleries, or doing porn for next to nothing. That's a real prestige career, isn't it. As a hobby it would have probably done you some good. But-" She spread her hands and looked around. "I don't see any holo loops, I don't see any environmental designs, I don't see anything that qualifies as even an attempt at fine art, because you didn't go through with it. You just sat around bitching about the job until I couldn't stand the sound of your voice. That's why I was always against your quitting your job for art's sake. Even if you'd been that one in two million, I knew you just wouldn't produce."

"It was the job," Gabe said, suddenly wanting to make her understand once and for all, if she was going to leave him. "The job took too much out out of me, I didn't have enough energy left over for my own work."

"No," she said firmly. "You just didn't want it badly enough. Otherwise you would have pulled yourself together and just done it. You'd have done it under any circumstances, in any condition-Christ, quadriplegics used to paint pictures holding brushes in their teeth, because they wanted to paint more than anything in the world-"

"Look, I didn't have to live like this, I could have lived with less-"

"But I wouldn't." Her dark hair fell forward over her left shoulder, and she slapped it back. "And we had a daughter to think about. It wasn't her art, it wasn't my art, it was yours. It was up to you, not us, to find a way. It was up to you to work around our needs. If you'd wanted to starve under a pier, you shouldn't have had a family."

"But we didn't have to have my income-"

She sat up straight, looking at him as if from a great height. "I don't carry anybody. And nobody carries me. You knew that when we got married."

"Poor Sam," he said suddenly.

She looked as if he'd slapped her. "What about Cassandra?"

He tried to put it into words, but it wouldn't come. "Never mind. That slipped out. You're leaving. Case closed. To tell you the truth, I don't know why you didn't leave me a long time ago. What's the matter, couldn't you afford a house till now?"

She didn't answer, but her gaze slid away from him. He burst out laughing.

"My God, I hit it! You've been marking time to put together a down payment on a house!"

"Not a down payment," she said in a low voice. "The whole thing, outright."

He could feel all expression leaving his face. "Damn. You've got millions."

"Because I wanted it badly enough!" She had a startlingly desperate look now, as if she were also trying one last time to be understood. "I worked around the clock, no matter how tired I was, no matter how bored, no matter how dead the market seemed. When there were no leads, I made them out of nothing. Instead of sitting around bitching, I kept watch so that when something showed even the slightest hint of promise, I was the first to see it and the first one on it. I kept track of the buyers and the sellers, I charted their spending patterns and their activities so that I knew when they wanted to buy or sell even before they did, and I was right there to make it happen for them."

She rose smoothly, brushing at her trousers and her vest. "I didn't worry about making friends. I didn't waste my energy or my work time letting some clown cry on my shoulder and get my expensive clothes all wet. I didn't let myself get marked as a troublemaker, a screwup, or a loser."

"Like me," he said simply.

She glanced upward. "God, you had a very clear grasp of all the politics at Diversifications. You could have played them like a Stradivarius, but instead you chose to bitch about them, show opposition, huddle with the other moaners and whiners. It kept you back. That's the pity of it, that's the uselessness, that's why I'm so mad at you. It wasn't that you couldn't. You just said no." She folded her arms and gave a small shudder. "I'd be embarrassed if I were you."

The faint voice-over from the dataline jumped out at him. "… don't know how to relax, we have the solution. If you're driven too hard, we have the brakes. The Coves Clinic. We don't do anything to you that you wouldn't do yourself, if you knew how. The only implant clinic with its own on-site spa. Triple-A rating by the Neurological Council, on file with the Food, Drug, and Software Administration."

The beachscape on the screen had been enhanced a little, Gabe knew. LeBlanc had done that spot; she'd thought she was going to get a couple of days on location, but instead Diversifications had jobbed the taping out to some students and called it "intern-work," beating the union fees and LeBlanc's hopes for an incidental vacation.

"You won't be able to keep this place by yourself," Catherine said. "When the time comes, I'll handle the sale for you. You'll do well, even after I take my share and my commission."

He kept staring hard at the dataline as her quiet footsteps went toward the front door. "You gonna find me something else more in my range?" he called suddenly as he heard the lock disengage.

"I don't work in your range."

At least she wasn't a door-slammer. He continued to stare at the dataline, which was babbling a report on consumer spending habits from BizNet, watered down for civilians. Obviously this was supposed to mean something to him, but he couldn't bring himself to care. It was going into the capture buffer anyway, and if he ever did find a reason to care, he could look at it later.

Sam would be happy, he thought after a bit, when his mind began to work again. Well, perhaps not happy. Relieved would be more like it. Or maybe it wouldn't matter to her one way or the other-her emancipation had put her beyond having to care about the state of her parents' marriage. If it had come to this three or four years ago, it might have made a difference to her. Even two years ago. She'd only been emancipated for a year then-he might have been able to persuade her to move in with him, go to college, get some legitimate work in programming, or simulations. She had a lot of talent-

Oh, yah. Legitimate work with some corporation, perhaps, some company like Diversifications, turn her into another corporate employee. If she'd wanted to have the spirit ground out of her, she could have stayed home and let Catherine do it.

Sure, I'll come back, Dad. As soon as you can give me one goddamn good reason why you didn't leave a long time ago yourself.

What could he have said to that-Well, Sam, you had to be there? It would have been just one more way to tell her she didn't understand, and she already knew that. He wouldn't have understood himself, back in the beginning. He hadn't been a whole lot older than Sam was now when he and Catherine had married. There had been no room in him then for the idea of a Plan B, what to do if things didn't turn out the way he wanted. There had been no room for looking ahead to a time when the dreams hadn't come true and there was no love anymore, and instead of the art he had some bootleg simulations he played with on the company clock, the way he passed the days until such time as he dropped dead. Of disinterest, most likely.

"First warning," Melody said suddenly, and he jumped at the sound of her voice.

"What?"

"You can still get to work on time if you leave now. Commuter units are still available at the nearest rental lot. Call ahead and reserve?"

"Yah, sure," he said. Yah, sure. Go to work, why not? He had that lunch with Manny, but what the hell-when your wife left you first thing in the morning, how much worse could the day get?

He'd have to remember to feed that line to the Melody Cruz module. Or maybe Marly. Yes, Marly; it was a good line, and it sounded far more like her than it did him.