Sorcerer: A Loveswept Contemporary Classic Romance (21 page)

She watched his eyes. Even in his virtual representation she could see his internal battle, the logical scientist struggling with the compassionate man. He pushed his hand through his hair, the static electricity
in the simulated environment making his fingers spark with living fire. “Jillie, I—”

He paused, his attention suddenly captured by something to Jill’s left. She turned to follow the direction of his gaze, and saw that PINK had left her position of safety several yards off and was hovering close to Einstein’s head. “PINK, get back! The creatures are still …”

Her words of warning died on her tongue. PINK’s fireball flared like a supernova, becoming so bright Jill had to hold up her hand to shield her eyes. “What the—?”

“She’s morphing,” Ian said, his voice hushed with awe. “She’s reconfiguring her simulated pattern within the locked topology. Theoretically I knew it could happen, but—it requires so much directed energy, so much willpower.”

Miracle or not, Jill was stunned by PINK’s transformation. As she watched, the fireball stretched and expanded, swirling like a miniature whirlwind. Gradually the whirlwind solidified into a humanlike body, a slight, elfin woman with close-cropped black hair and skin cut with pink and silver stripes. Formed a few inches above the ground, she drifted down and knelt beside E’s lifeless torso. She placed her hands on his shoulders, just as Jill had done. But, instead of shaking him, she began to pulse with power.

“PINK,” Jill whispered, unsure of how to speak to the mythical being in front of her.

PINK raised her head and met Jill’s gaze. Her eyes radiated pure light, like the heart of a nuclear
reactor, or a star. She said nothing aloud, yet Jill felt PINK’s message burn in her mind.
My world. My task
. And, after the echo of those words had died,
my love
.

Ian must have heard PINK too, because he and Jill rose to their feet as one. They backed away, watching as PINK poured her own power into Einstein, bringing him back to life. It was a testament to a love that defied boundaries, that was strong enough to overcome the cessation of electronic impulses, that meant death in any reality. “She shouldn’t be able to do that,” Ian muttered, his gaze riveted on the pair. “It’s not possible.”

Anything’s possible with love
, Jill thought. She tried to say the words to Ian, but she couldn’t get her mouth to move properly. She was beginning to lose touch with this reality, even though their “time limit” in the simulator was not yet up. Apparently either her intense “physical” exertion, or her prolonged contact with the ray creatures, had speeded up her degradation process. She focused what was left of her concentration and painstakingly raised her hand to tug on the doctor’s sleeve. “Ian—”

She froze. Past his shoulder she saw one of the largest of the nightmare creatures gliding steadily toward his unprotected head. Even in her befuddled state she couldn’t miss its deadly intent.
At any moment one might morph into something that prefers human energy to electronic
.…

She couldn’t warn him, so she did the next best thing. She screamed at the top of her lungs and gave
him a mighty shove, toppling herself backward in the process. Her scream alerted Felix and Sadie to the danger. They immediately started the exiting procedures. Smiling with relief, she saw the evil creature glide through Ian’s fading body.

A sharp crackle and the smell of sulphur alerted her to a new danger. She looked to the side, seeing too late that she’d fallen into the path of the cobalt-blue grid lines, which was already beginning to power up for their exit.

“Jill!” She turned at the faint cry, and saw Ian’s ghostly form trying to reach her. Halfway between the two realities he saw her danger, but was powerless to save her. She saw the terror in his expression, but felt none for herself.
He’s safe
, she thought, knowing that was all that mattered to her—all that would ever matter.
Looks like I saved you after all, Doctor
.

And then the full power of the simulator blasted through her, and she remembered nothing more.

“… done everything we could to revive her,” Dr. Hassam, head of the coma unit, said as he scanned the wide bank of monitors packed into the intensive care unit. “We’ve exhausted the possibilities.”

Ian barely heard him. He stared at the slim, unmoving form in the bed, the physical shell that housed the spirit of the woman he loved. A dozen tubes and wires connected her slight body to the life-sustaining
machines. She’d been this way for almost twenty-four hours, and every minute of those hours felt like a stake driven through his heart. “There must be something more you can do,” he said hoarsely. “Some drug. Some medical procedure.”

“Not in this case,” Hassam admitted sadly. “It’s as if her mind has lost all connection with her body. Frankly, it’s a miracle she’s alive at all.”

A miracle
, Ian thought darkly. What kind of bloody miracle left an innocent woman lying in bed like a discarded corn husk? He twisted his fingers around the metal bed rail, wishing like hell he had the strength to rip it apart. She was there because of him, because she’d sacrificed her own safety to push him out of the way of the creature. And, according to Dr. Hassam’s expert opinion, there wasn’t a thing he could do to help her.

He tightened his grip on the railing. She’d done it to save him. And though she didn’t know it, she’d also saved every future cybernaut. Because of what had happened to her, Felix was able to pinpoint the problem with the grid lines, and was reconfiguring them to make them harmless. Jillie’s sacrifice had made Ian’s simulator safe for everyone, and would bring him international fame.

Fame he would have gladly consigned to the devil if it could have brought her back to him.

All too clearly he remembered their argument in the simulator, when she’d told him she couldn’t take being with him anymore. He’d been confident that he could persuade her to stay in one way or another.
But now, as he looked at her silent form, he wondered if she hadn’t found a way to leave him after all.

“Dr. Sinclair?”

Ian turned toward the speaker, a young nurse who’d just stuck his head around the hospital room door. “Yes?” Ian sighed, asking out of instinct rather than interest. Partridge’s lessons on manners died hard.

“I just got a call from your lab. They asked me to tell you that the prototype was back on-line, and that the bad data had been purged from the system.” He paused, giving an apologetic smile. “I’m not sure what that means, but they said you’d find it important.”

They were wrong. I don’t give a damn about the system.
He gave a curt nod of thanks, then turned back to the one thing he did give a damn about.
I can’t let you go, Jillie. Not like this.
“Maybe we could stimulate her body somehow. Help her mind to relearn the forgotten connections.”

“It’s worked in other patients,” Hassam agreed, “but in my opinion a program like that wouldn’t work for her. She’s lost too much. It’s just not possible.”

It’s not possible.
Ian remembered saying much the same words to Jillian in the simulator as he watched PINK transmit her energy to Einstein’s lifeless body. In many ways, a human being’s electronic physiology was very similar to a computer’s. The senses were the input-output ports. The nerve paths were the data-chip circuitry.

His mind fastened on the similarities with his legendary ruthless tenacity. If PINK could revitalize E, there was a chance he could use the same method to revitalize Jillie.

“Does this hospital have a library?” he asked suddenly.

“Well, yes,” the startled Dr. Hassam answered. “But I don’t see—”

“You will,” Ian interrupted brusquely, and he pivoted and headed for the door. “I’m going to read her every bloody book in that library. And when I’m finished, I’ll start on the paper, and the
National Enquirer
if that’s all that’s available. I’m going to stuff her so full of data that she’ll wake up out of sheer overload.”

“If she can hear you,” Dr. Hassam cautioned.

“She’ll hear me,” Ian stated confidently as he marched out the door. He didn’t voice the rest of his thought.

She’ll hear me because she has to.

He read her magazine articles. He read her newspapers. He read her science journals, paperback romances, and even the racing form. When his eyes stung and his vision blurred, he told her stories of his early years growing up in the castle, of the fabulous wealth and the impoverishing loneliness he’d experienced as a child. When his voice gave out, he called on his friends and his coworkers to take turns at Jill’s bedside. Partridge read her extremely bad poetry from the last century. Marsha religiously told her all the latest gossip in the department. Felix gave a lecture on Dungeons and Dragons. Sadie, whose hobby was cooking, brought in all sorts of savory dishes to wave under Jill’s nose, trying to stimulate her olfactory sense. Even Einstein and PINK got involved, barraging her with the most comprehensive collection of useless gambling and shopping-channel facts ever compiled.

Ian’s bombardment of Jill’s senses was constant and unrelenting. It was also apparently ineffective. During the first two weeks, not one flicker of consciousness was recorded by the ever-vigilant monitors. After three weeks, it appeared Jill was actually beginning to lose ground.

On the twenty-second night of her coma, Ian sat alone by her bedside, reading her Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol.
The story had always been one of his favorites, but this time he found the imagery of the ghosts and death disturbing. He looked at Jillie’s quiet figure, with its tubes and wires and click-clacking breathing device.
Is that what you are, my darling? A ghost?

Other disturbing images filled his mind. Several days ago Jill’s grandparents had arrived from Nebraska. Good, decent folk, they’d been appalled at the thought of their granddaughter’s body being kept alive when there was no hope of recovery. Ian had explained his theory and gotten them to agree to let Jill remain on life support. But as the days passed by with no encouraging results, they began to re-think their decision. Today they’d talked to Dr. Hassam about the procedures for medically “pulling the plug.” Ian knew that his time was running out.

He sat in the night-quiet hospital, listening to the breathing device separate the silence into discrete, quantifiable sections. All his professional life he’d put his trust in machines, in the measurable and rational laws of reality. Even his simulator, which created alternate realities, was based on those irrefutable
laws. But the love he felt for Jill had blasted a heart-shaped hole in those irrefutable laws. Through it he’d caught a glimpse of another reality—a bright world that cast his own safe, careful existence into dull gray shadow. “I can’t go back to the way I was,” he confessed to her seemingly unhearing form. “And I can’t go on without you. Dammit, Jillie, I
need
you.”

His throat was raw from talking, yet he continued, speaking words dredged straight from his heart. “I’ve lived a lie all my life. When I was a boy I was cast in the role of the heir to the Sinclair title. But I wasn’t that heir. When I married, I became the sophisticated husband of an international socialite. That wasn’t me either. Even my role as scientist is only a part of who I am. I’ve lived behind masks for so long, I don’t know who I am anymore. But when I look into your eyes, I see the man I want to be—the man I could be. With your help.”

He bent closer to her immobile features, willing a response. But, as usual, he saw nothing.
What did you expect?
the rational demons of his mind chided him.
By every verifiable measure she’s been dead for weeks. Stop making a bloody fool of yourself. Let her go.

“No,” he promised with all the strength left in him. “Never. I’ll never let her go.” Ignoring every accepted medical procedure, he grasped her shoulders and gave her a firm shake. “You said you felt that Einstein was still alive. Well, I feel that you are. You’re in there somewhere, Jillie, and I want you back. I’ll storm the pearly gate of heaven itself if
that’s what it takes. I’m not giving you up, do you here?” He shook her so roughly, he dislodged her wires. “Wake up, dammit. Come back to me!”

What happened during the next seconds happened so fast he could barely make sense of it. Suddenly the room was full of medical personnel swarming over Jillie’s form like a hive of angry bees. A brawny orderly pulled Ian off her, but not before he saw one of the nurses begin to extract her breathing tube. “No,” he yelled, fighting the orderly with all the strength left in him. “You can’t take her off life support. She’ll die!”

“She’ll die if we don’t,” the orderly explained as he bodily dragged Ian from the room. “She’ll choke if the tube’s left in. Her throat’s rejecting it.”

“Her throat?” Ian muttered, stunned at what the simple words implied. “You mean she’s breathing on her own?”

“Looks like it, man,” the orderly replied, grinning. Everyone on the hospital staff knew of Ian’s crusade to bring Jill back. “She’s one in a million. A miracle.”

Ian slumped against the wall, exhausted beyond measure. She was going to live. She’d come back to him after all. “You’re right,” he said, giving the orderly an exhausted smile. “She’s a bloody miracle.”

There was a knock on Jill’s door.

Okay, don’t panic
, she told herself as she glanced in the pocket mirror she’d borrowed from one of the
nurses.
So what if you look like you’ve just been run over by a semi? He loves you. It won’t matter to him.

But it matters to me.

The knock sounded again. She sighed, finally acknowledging that thirty minutes’ worth of preening wasn’t going to make up for three weeks of near-death coma.
Rats
, she thought as she lifted her eyes to face the door. “Come in.”

When he first entered the room, she wondered if someone hadn’t played a trick on her. Her elegant doctor was gone, switched for a man in a rumpled suit with several days’ growth of beard on his chin. Shocked, she said the first thing that came to mind. “You look terrible.”