"The English of which is..." he pleaded.

"...that I think of pressing the middle valve down, the music goes round and round and it comes out here." She held out her hand and depressed the middle finger. "You would weep to know how many decisions the core made to accomplish that simple movement."

"On the other hand," he said, and rushed on when he remembered what had happened to her other hand, "what goes on in my brain to do the same thing is complex, but I don't have to program it. It's done for me. Isn't it much the same with you?"

"Much. Not exactly. If they made one of these for you and plugged you in right now, you'd twitch a lot. In a few weeks you'd patty-cake pretty well. But in a year you'd not even think about it. The brain re-trains itself. Which is a simple way of saying you struggle day and night for six or seven months with something that feels totally unnatural and eventually you learn to do it. Having done it, you know that learning to tap-dance on the edge of a razor blade would be a snap."

"You say you've heard all the questions. What's your least favorite?"

"God, you're merciless, aren't you? There's no contest. 'How did you hurt yourself?' To answer the question you so cleverly didn't ask, I broke my fool neck when me and my hang-glider got into an argument with a tree. The tree won. Many years later I went back and chopped that tree down, which just may be the stupidest thing I ever did, not counting today." She looked at him and raised one eyebrow. "Aren't you going to ask me about that?"

He shrugged.

"The funny thing is, that's the question I want you to ask. Because it's tied up with what we did yesterday, and that's really what I came here to talk to you about."

"So talk," he said, wondering what she could have to say about it beyond the fact that it had been hideous, and demeaning to both of them.

"It was the worst sexual experience I ever had," she said. "And you bear zero percent responsibility for that. Please don't interrupt. There are things you don't know about.

"I know you don't think much of my profession—I really don't want you to interrupt, or I'll never get all this out; if you disagree you can tell me when I'm through.

"You'd be a pretty strange lifeguard if you were a fan of the trans-tapes, or if you didn't feel superior to the kind of people who buy them. You're young, fairly well-educated and fairly articulate, you've got a good body and an attractive face and the opposite sex neither terrifies nor intimidates you. You are out on the end of all the bell-curves, demographically. You are not my audience, and people who aren't my audience tend to look down on my audience, and usually on me and my kind, too. And I don't blame them. Me and my kind have taken what might have been a great art-form and turned it into something so exploitative that even Hollywood and Sixth Avenue gag at it.

"You know as well as I do that there are many, many people growing up now who wouldn't know an honest, genuine, self-originated emotion if it kicked them in the behind. If you take their Transers away from them they're practically zombies.

"For a long time I've flattered myself that I'm a little better than the industry in general. There are some tapes I've made that will back me up on that. Things I've taken a chance on, things that try to be more complex than the LCD would dictate. Not my bread-and-butter tapes. Those are as simpleheaded as the worst hack travelogue. But I've tried to be like the laborers in other artistic sweatshops of the past. Those few who managed to turn out something with some merit, like some directors of Hollywood westerns which were never meant to be anything but crowd pleasers and who still produced some works of art, or a handful of television producers who... none of this is familiar to you, is it? Sorry, I didn't mean to get academic. I've made a study of it, of art in the mass culture.

"All those old art-forms had undergrounds, independents who struggled along with no financing and produced things of varying quality but with some vision, no matter how weird. Trans-tapes are more expensive than films or television but there is an underground. It's just so far under it practically never comes to light. Believe it or not, it's possible to produce great art in emotional recording. I could name names, but you will not have heard of any of them. And I'm not talking about the people who make tapes about how it feels to kill somebody; that's another underground entirely.

"But things are getting tight. It used to be that we could make a good living and still stay away from the sex tapes. Let me add that I don't feel contempt for the people who make sex tapes. Given the state of our audience, it has become necessary that many of them have their well-worn jerk-off cassette, so when they get horny they know what to do with it. Most of them wouldn't have the vaguest notion otherwise. I just didn't want to make them myself. It's axiomatic in the trade that love is the one emotion that cannot be recorded, and if I can't have—"

"I'm sorry," Cooper said, "but I have to interrupt there. I've never heard that. In fact, I've heard just the opposite."

"You've been listening to our commercials," she reproved. "Get that shit out of your head, Cooper.

It's pure hype." She rubbed her forehead, and sighed. "Oh, all right. I wasn't precise enough. I can make a tape of how I love my mother or my father or anybody I'm already in love with. It's not easy to do—it's the less subtle emotions that are more readily transed. But nobody has ever recorded the process of falling in love. It's sort of a Heisenberg Principle of transing, and nobody's sure if the limitation is in the equipment or in the person being recorded, but it exists, and there are some very good reasons to think nobody will ever succeed in recording that kind of love."

"I don't see why not," Cooper confessed. "It's supposed to be very intense, isn't it? And you said the strong emotions are the easiest to tape."

"That's true. But... well, try to visualize it. I've got my job because I'm better at ignoring all the hardware involved in transing. It's because of my sidekick; I mean, if I can learn to forget I'm operating that I can ignore anything. That's why the nets scour the trauma wards of hospitals looking for potential stars. It's like... well, in the early days of sex research they had people fuck in laboratories, with wires taped to them. A lot of people just couldn't do it. They were too selfconscious.

Hook most people up to a transcorder and what you get is 'Oh, how interesting it is to be making a tape, look at all those people watching me, look at all those cameras, how interesting, now I have to forget about them, I must forget about them I just must forget—' "

Cooper held up his hand, nodding. He was recalling seeing her burst from the water that first day in the Bubble, and his feelings as he watched her.

"So the essence of making a tape," she went on, "is the ability to ignore the fact that you're making one. To react just as you would have reacted if you weren't doing it. It calls for some of the qualities of an actor, but most actors can't do it. They think too much about the process. They can't be natural about it. That's my talent: to feel natural in unnatural circumstances.

"But there are limits. You can fuck up a storm while transing, and the tape will record how good everything feels and how goddam happy you are to be fucking. But it all falls apart when the machine is confronted with that moment of first falling in love. Either that, or the person being recorded just can't get into the frame of mind to fall in love while transing. The distraction of the transer itself makes that emotional state impossible.

"But I really got off on a tangent there. I'd appreciate it if you'd just hear me out until I've said what I have to say." She rubbed her forehead again, and looked away from him.