Free Rock On by Bruce Sterling, Poppy Z. Brite, Norman Spinrad, Elizabeth Hand, Lucius Shepard, Graham Joyce, Michael Swanwick, Charles De Lint, John Shirley, F. Paul Wilson, Howard Waldrop, Alastair Reynolds, Graham Masterton, Caitlin R. Kiernan, David J. Schow, Elizabeth Bear, Edward Bryan, Lawrence C. Connolly, Bradley Denton, Greg Kihn, Pat Cadigan, Marc Laidlaw, Del James, Lewis Shiner Page B

“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.
    “I really do.”
    “What would you do for me, if I asked you?”
    “Anything.”
    “Would you kill for me?”
    I say, “Sure.”
    “Really?”
    “Of course.” I smile. I know how to play.
    “This is no game.”
    My face must betray my confusion. I don’t know how I should react.
    Her expression mercurially alters to sadness. “You’re scissors, Robbie. All shiny cold metal. How can you ever hope to cut stone?”
    Would I want to?
    11
    Things get worse.
    Is it simply that I’m screwing up on my own hook, or is it because we’re exploring a place no performance has ever been? I don’t have time to worry about it; I play the console like it was the keyboard on Nagami’s synthesizer.
Take it
When you can get it
Where you can get it
    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