“And you have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”
“Mais oui.”
“Well, so do I. I have a whole lot of them.”
“No one asked you to become one of us.”
It was a terribly wounding thing to say. She felt as if she’d been stabbed. He stared at her in direct challenge and she was suddenly too tired to go on fencing with him. He was too young and strong and quick, and she was too upset and broken up to push him into a corner. She began to cry. “What happens now?” she asked. “Should I beg for your permission to live? I’ll beg if you want me to. Just tell me that’s what you want.”
Paul glanced anxiously around the train car. “Please don’t make a scene.”
“I have to cry! I want to cry, I deserve it! I’m not all right. I don’t have any pride, I don’t have any dignity—I don’t have anything. I’m hurt in ways you can’t even imagine. What else should I do but cry? You’ve caught me out. I’m at your mercy. You can destroy me now.”
“You could destroy us. Maybe that’s what you want.”
“I won’t do that. Give me a chance! I can be vivid. I can even be beautiful. You should let me try. Let me try, Paul—I can be an interesting case study for you.”
“I’d love to let you try,” he said. “I like to feast with panthers. But why play games with my friends’ safety? I know nothing about you, except that you seem very pretty and very posthuman. Why should I trust you? Why don’t you simply go home?”
“Because I can’t go home. They’ll make me be old again.”
Paul’s eyes widened. She’d struck through to him, she’d touched him. Finally he handed her a kerchief. She glanced at the kerchief, felt it carefully to make sure it wasn’t computational, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
Paul pressed a button on the rim of the table.
“You let Emil stay with your group,” she offered at last, “and Emil’s worse than I am.”
“I’m responsible for Emil,” he said gloomily.
“What do you mean?”
“I let him take the amnesiac. I made arrangements.”
“You did? Do the others know?”
“It was a good idea. You didn’t know Emil earlier.”
A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace.
It picked its way through barely perceptible niches in the ceiling, stopped, and dropped beside their beanbags. It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam’s. “Oui monsieur?”
“[The mademoiselle will be having a bottle of eau minerale and two hundred micrograms of alcionage,]” said Paul. “[I’ll have a limoncello and … oh, bring us half a dozen croissants.]”
“Très bien.” It stalked away.
“What was that thing?” Maya said.
“That’s the steward.”
“I can guess that much, but what is it? Is it alive? Is it a robot? Is it some kind of lobster? It sounded like it was talking with real lips and a tongue!”
Paul looked exasperated. “Do you mind? This is the Stuttgart express, you know.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”
Paul gazed at her silently, meditatively. “Poor Emil,” he said at last.
“Don’t tell me that! You have no right to tell me that! I’m good for him. I know I’m good for him. You don’t know anything about it.”
“Are you good for Emil?”
“Look, what can I do to make you trust me? You can’t just write me off, you can’t just push me out. You say you want something really strange to happen in the world. Well, I’m really strange, all right? And I’m happening.”
Paul thought this over, tapping the edge of the table with his fingertips. “Let me test your blood,” he said.
“All right. Sure.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweater.
He stood up, retrieved his backpack from the overhead compartment, opened it, rummaged about methodically and removed a blood-test mosquito. He placed the little device on the center of her forearm. It sniffed about, squatted, inserted its hair-thin beak. There was no pain at all. Maybe a tiny itch.
Paul retrieved the blood-glutted device. It bent down and unfolded its wings, which formed a display screen the width of a pair of thumbnails. Paul bent down close and stared.
“So,” he said at last. “If you want to keep your secret, you’d better not let anyone else try a blood test.”
“Okay.”
“You’re very anemic. In fact, there’s a lot of fluid inside you that isn’t even blood.”
“Yeah, those would be cellular detox detergents and some catalyzed oxygen transports.”
“I see. But there’s more than enough DNA in here for me to establish your identity. And to turn you in to civil support. If that ever should prove necessary.”
“Look, Paul, you don’t have to take the trouble to trace my medical records. We’ve come this far—I’ll just tell you who I am.”
Paul forced the mosquito to disgorge on a slip of Chromatograph and folded the stained paper neatly. “No,” he said, “that’s not necessary. In fact, I don’t even think it’s wise. I don’t want to know who you are. That’s not my responsibility. And that’s certainly not what I want from you.”
“What do you want from me?”
He looked her in the eye. “I want you to prove to me that you’re not human yet still an artist.”
Stuttgart was a big loud town. Big, loud, sticky, and green. A city of gasps, grunts, wheezes, complex organic gurglings. People liked to shout at each other in Stuttgart. People emerged in sudden pedestrian torrents from sphinctering holes in the walls.
The famous towers were frankly cyclopean but their rhythmic billowing made them seem soothingly oceanic, rather than mountainous. She could hear the monster towers breathing with a viscous, tubercular rasping. Their breath galed above the furry streets and smelled of steam and lemons.
“My family helped to build this city,” Paul volunteered, neatly skirting around a large splattered puddle of a substance much like muesli. “My parents were garbage miners.”
“ ‘Were?’ ”
“They gave it up. Garbage was like any other extractive industry. The best and richest landfills played out early. Nowadays garbage mining is mostly left to wildcatters, methane drillers, small-timers. The great garbage fortunes are gone.”
“I see.”
“No need to fret, my mother did very well by her career. I’m a child of privilege.” Paul smiled cheerfully. He was relaxed, he was glad to be home.
“Your parents are Français?”
“Yes. We’re from Avignon originally. Half the population of Stuttgart are Français.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Paris has become a museum.” The lighting changed over the street. An enormous ribbed membrane peeled from the side of a tower and deployed itself over the neighborhood. A flock of white cranes wheeled in beneath it, landed in the streets like so many white-feathered commuters. The birds began to peck at the sidewalk, hard enough to break it into chunks.
“The finest extracts from the dumps,” Paul said, “iron, aluminum, copper, and such—their market value crashed once modern materials came into production. Cheap diamond of course, cheap diamond beats anything. But sugarglass, optical plastics, fullerenes, and aerogels”—he gestured at the cityscape around them. A small deft man with a proprietarial interest in structures four hundred stories tall. “The carbon-based products drove construction metals off the market. People in Stuttgart are progressives, they despise the shibboleths.”