- Rosebuck and Pierhal, Recent American History: A Systems View.

Fast forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.

Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...

- and the smell of dust.

Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn't met you yet; you're hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, the horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle -

- and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn't there. And the tape ends.

The inducer's light is burning now.

Parker lies in darkness, recalling the tousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram that has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he'll never know - stolen credit cards - a burned out suburb - planetary conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway - a flat packet of drugs - a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.

Thinking: We're each other's fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer now, or mor real, for his having been there?

She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-induce, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.