“Yes, that’s it exactly! That’s just exactly how it works.”
“[Look at my face at this very moment, as I speak. A certain set of musculatures being put into play, a certain state of tensility that holds the face in readiness for a characteristic physical sequence of verbal movements—Français. Consciously, I’m not aware of shaping my face. Consciously, you’re not aware of noticing it. Nevertheless big wedges of our human brains are dedicated to the study of faces—and to the perception of language as well. Studies prove that we can recognize one another as aliens, not because of posture, genetics, or dress, but because our languages have physically shaped our faces. That’s a preconscious human perception. A translator doesn’t do that. A network doesn’t convey that. Networks and translators don’t have thought. They have only processing.]”
“Yes?”
“[So now you see me through your eyes, and hear Français through one ear, and receive machine-enunciated data through your machine-assisted ear. Something is missing. Something is also superfluous. Parts of you that you don’t comprehend can sense that it’s all a muddle.]”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “[Now I’m holding your hand while speaking to you in Francçis. Look, I’ll hold your hand in both of mine. I’ll gently stroke your hand. How does that feel?]”
“It feels just fine, Paul.”
“And how does it feel now that I’m speaking to you in English?”
Surprised, she pulled her hand away.
He laughed. “There. You see? Your reaction demonstrates the truth. It’s the same with networks. We meet physically because we have to supplement the networks. It’s not that networks lack intimacy. On the contrary, networks are too precisely intimate, in too narrow a channel. We have to meet in a way that feeds the gray meat.”
“That’s very clever. But tell me—what would have happened if I hadn’t pulled my hand away?”
“[Then,]” said Paul with great rationality and delicacy, “[you would have been a woman of blunted perceptions. Which you are not.]” And that seemed to be pretty much the end of that.
She noticed for the first time that his right hand had a ring on the third finger. It looked like a dark engraved band—but it was not a ring at all. It was a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of Paul’s flesh.
They were sliding with enormous magnetic levitational speed through the diamond-drilled depths of the European earth. She was taking enormous pleasure in his company and she felt absolutely no desire to flirt with him. It would be like trying to throw a come-hither at a limestone stalactite. Intimacy was not a prospect that appealed. It would take a woman of enormous self-abnegation and tolerance to endure the torment of that much clarity on a day-by-day basis. If he had a girlfriend she would sit across the breakfast table from him with fork in hand, and every day she would be impaled on the four steel tines of his intelligence and his perception and his ambition and his self-regard.
Paul was gazing at her silently, clearly undergoing some very similar line of assessment. She could almost hear the high-speed crackle of neurochemical cognition seething through the wettest glandular depths of his beautiful leonine head.
She was insanely close to confessing everything. It was an extremely stupid thing to do, especially twice in a row, but she was feeling incredibly reckless today and she wanted risk in the way that one might want oxygen and, most of all, she just really, really felt like it. She didn’t want to ever touch Paul, hold him or caress him, but she direly wanted to confess to him. To immolate herself, to force him to take real notice.
But it wouldn’t be like confessing to Emil. Poor Emil, in his own peculiar animal fashion, was outside time, un-woundable, indestructible. Paul was very actual. Paul talked about cosmic transgressions but Paul was not beyond the pale. Paul was young, he was just a young man. A young man who didn’t need her troubles.
Their eyes met. There was a sudden terrific tension between them. It would have felt like sexual attraction with anyone else. With Paul it felt like an attack of telepathy.
He stared at her. Surprise struck him visibly. His fine brows arched and his eyes widened.
“What are you thinking, Paul?”
“Sincerely?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’m wondering why I see this frivolous young beauty. Here, across this table from me.”
“Why shouldn’t I be here?” she said.
“Because it’s a facade. Isn’t it? You’re not frivolous. And I feel quite certain suddenly that you’re not young.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re very beautiful. But it’s not a young woman’s beauty. You’re terribly beautiful. There is an element of terror to your presence.”
“Thanks very much.”
“Now that I recognize that fact, it makes me wonder. What do you want from us? Are you a police spy? Are you civil support?”
“No. I’m not. I promise.”
“I was civil support once,” Paul said calmly. “Youth-league civil support, in Avignon. I was quite ambitious about the work, and I learned about interesting aspects of life. But I quit, I gave it up. Because they want to make the world a better place. And I knew that I didn’t want the world to be any better. I want the world to become more interesting. Do you think that’s a crime, Maya?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. It doesn’t seem very much like a crime.”
“I know a police spy rather well. She reminds me of you very much. She has your strange self-possession, your peculiarly intense presence as a woman. I was looking at you just now, and I realized that you look like the Widow. So it all became clear to me suddenly.”
“I’m not a widow.”
“She’s an astonishing woman. Enormously beautiful, sublime. She’s like a sphinx. Like some untouchable creature from myth. She takes a deep interest in artifice. You’ll likely meet the Widow someday. If you stay in our company.”
“This Widow person—she’s an artifice cop? I had no idea there was any such thing as a police force for artifice. What’s her name?”
“Her name is Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier.”
“Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier … My goodness, what a wonderful name she has!”
“If you don’t know Helene already, then you might not want to meet her.”
“I’m certain I don’t want to meet her. Because I’m not an informer. Actually, I’m a criminal fugitive.”
“Informer, criminal …” He shook his head. “There’s far less distinction there than one might think.”
“You’re very right as usual, Paul. It’s rather like that blurry distinction between terror and beauty. Or youth and age. Or artifice and crime.”
He stared at her in surprise. “Well put,” he said at last. “That’s just what Helene would say. She’s quite the devotee of blurry distinctions.”
“I promise that I’m not a police agent. I’d prove it to you, if I could.”
“Maybe you’re not. It’s not that civil-support people can’t be pretty, but they usually consider your kind of glamour to be suspect.”
“I’m not suspect. Why should I be suspect?”
“I suspect you because I have to protect my friends,” Paul said. “Our lives are our lives, they’re not a theoretical exercise. We’re a much put-upon generation. We have to treasure our vitality, because our vitality is methodically stifled. Other generations never faced that dilemma. Their parents fell into their graves and power fell into their laps. But we’ve never been a natural generation. We’re the first truly native posthumans.”