“You do? Oh dear.”
Paul walked to the front of the packet tube and entered an address on a keypad. A vault door shunted open. He tossed his backpack into the padded capsule. “I’m leaving you because I must,” he said patiently, “but I’m leaving you in lovely Stuttgart. I hope you’ll put your time here to good use.” The capsule vanished. Another capsule instantly took its place. Paul hit a repeat key, crawled deftly into the padded interior, and doubled his arms around his knees. “Until we meet in Praha, Maya.”
“Au revoir, Paul.” She waved at him, and the door shunted with a brisk pneumatic pop.
She spent three strange aching days in Stuttgart, ghosting the honeycombed plazas and haunting the city’s peculiarly liberal apothecary malls. On the evening train back to Praha she collapsed into her beanbag and was left in silence and solitude. It felt so lovely to be within the familiar confines of a moving train again. She was vibrating with hormones and culture shock, and she hadn’t been eating properly. Every passing hour carried her further into new realms of experience, strange deep somatic spaces that words such as “hunger” and “weariness” scarcely seemed to describe.
Sleep beckoned. But then the translator, which was still tucked into her ear, began to sing inside her ear. Very gently at first, a distant musical warbling. The music grew louder. She’d never known the device to malfunction, so she was ready when it made a kind of musical throat-clearing tone, and addressed her directly. “[Hello, user Maya.]”
“Hello?” she said.
“[This is an interactive message for you from Ohrschmuck Enterprises of Basel. We are the inventors and manufacturers of this translation necklace. Do you understand us? Please signify by orally responding ‘Yes, I understand’ in your favorite language, English.]”
“ ‘Yes, I understand.’ ”
She looked around the train car. She was speaking aloud to thin air, but no one considered this unusual behavior. They naturally assumed she was using a netlink.
“[User Maya, you’ve been in possession of the necklace for two weeks. You have already used its functionalities in English, Italiano, Czestina, Deutsch, and Français. We hope you’ll agree that the translation service has been prompt and accurate.]”
“Yes, it certainly has.”
“[Did you notice the fine physical workmanship of our necklace? It would have been simple to do a cheap knockoff in copper and silicon, but we prefer the classic chic of real jewels. We at Ohrschmuck take pride in our traditional European craftsmanship, and your use of our shareware proves that you’re a discerning woman of taste. Any fly-by-night company can supply a working tourist translator nowadays. We at Ohrschmuck supply an entire library of modern European languages, including proprietary vocabulary segments featuring modern slang and argot. It’s no simple matter to provide our level of linguistic service.]”
“I suppose not.”
“[If you agree that our shareware necklace meets your exacting personal standards, then we think our efforts to please you should be rewarded. Doesn’t that seem just and fair, user Maya?]”
“What is it that you want from me, exactly?”
“[If you’ll simply wire us seven hundred marks, we can see to it that your translator is supplied with the very latest vocabulary updates. We also register you with our company, supply service referrals, and answer user questions.]”
“I’ll certainly send you that money if I ever come across that large a sum.”
“[We feel that we’re worth our price, user Maya. We’ll trust you to pay us. Our business is based on mutual trust. We know that you trust us. After all, you’ve been trusting our machine with the tympanum of your own right ear, a very tender and personal membrane. We feel sure that mutual respect will lead us to a long relationship. Our net-address will work from any net location in the world, and it takes cash. We look forward to hearing from you soon.]”
She was back in Praha by midnight, with her backpack and a shopping bag, giddy, exhausted, footsore, and in pain. But Praha looked so lovely. So solid, so inorganic, so actual, so wonderfully old. Bartolomejska Street looked lovely. The building looked lovely. She paused at Emil’s door, then went upstairs and knocked at the door of Mrs. Najadova.
“What is it?” Mrs. Najadova paused, looked Maya up and down. “What has he done to you?”
“There are certain days in a month when a woman needs time to herself. But he doesn’t understand.”
“Oh, that dirty, thoughtless brute. That’s so like him. Come in. I’m only watching television.” Mrs. Najadova put her on the couch. She found Maya a blanket and a heating pad and made her a frappé. Then she sat in a rocker fiddling contentedly with her notebook, as the television muttered aloud in Czestina.
Mrs. Najadova’s room was full of wicker baskets, jugs, bottles, driftwood, bird eggs, bric-a-brac. A blue glass vase with a bouquet of greenhouse lilies. And intensely nostalgic memorabilia of the former Mr. Najad, a great strapping fellow with a ready grin, who seemed to dote on skiing and fishing. To judge by the style of his sportswear he had been either dead or gone for at least twenty years.
Seeing the photos Maya felt a great leaping pang of pathos for all the women of the world who had married for a human lifetime, lived and loved faithfully through a human lifetime, and then outlived their humanity. All the actual widows, and the virtual widows, and those who sought widowhood, and those who had widowhood thrust upon them. You could outlive sexuality, but you never truly got over it—any more than you got over childhood.
Maya’s golden bird chimed on her breast. It had begun to chime the hours lately, with small but piercing cuckoo sounds, a tactful referral, apparently, to the time elapsing without a payoff. She tucked the bird into her ear. It began at once to translate the mutter of the television.
“[It’s a species of ontological limbo, really,]” said the television. It was Aquinas, the dog with the Deutsch talk show. The dog had been dubbed into Czestina. “[What I call my intelligence has its source in three worlds. My own innate canine cognition. The artificial intelligence network outside my skull. And the internal wiring that has grown among the interstices of my canine brain, programmed with human language. Among this tripartite intelligence, where does my identity reside? Am I a computer’s peripheral, or a dog with a cybernetic unconscious? Furthermore, how much of what I call ‘thought’ is actually mere facility with language?]”
“[I suppose that’s a problem for any talk-show host,]” agreed the guest.
“[I have remarkable cognitive abilities. For instance, I can do mathematical problems of almost any level of complexity. Yet my canine brain is almost entirely innumerate. I solve these problems without understanding them.]”
“[Comprehending mathematics is one of the greatest of intellectual pleasures. I’m sorry to hear that you miss that mental experience, Aquinas.]”
The dog nodded knowingly. It was very peculiar to see a dog nod in a conversation, no matter how well he was dressed. “[That assessment means even more, coming from yourself, Professor Harald. With your many scientific honors.]”
“[We have more in common than the layman might think,]” said the professor graciously. “[After all, any mammalian brain, including the natural human brain, has multiple functional sections, each with its own cognitive agenda. I have to confess something to you, Aquinas. Modern mathematics is impossible without machine aid. I had a simulator entirely interiorized]”—the guest, tactfully, tapped his wrinkled forehead—“[and yet I’ve never been able to fully feel those results, even when I can speak the results aloud and even somehow intuitively sense their rightness.]”