The stormcloud that hung above our heads shifted uneasily. “That is a question that wants answering in a dark place where no one can listen, with all the chips out of our heads. Will you meet with me?”
“I was going to ask the same thing,” I said, and added to Keishi: but not for the same reasons. “Where do you live?”
“Meet me at noon tomorrow on Nevsky Prospect, in front of the Bronze Horseman.”
I frowned. “I’d rather record you on your own turf. In your home, if possible.” I hate doing interviews in public places; it’s not fair to the screener to make her edit out gawkers. Then, too, a house is an extension of the self—a shell the soul secretes; like faces, they leak information.
“Perhaps later,” he said. “For now, the Horseman. I must ask that you come alone, and isolated from the Net. You may have an encrypted channel to your screener—I have just given her the specifications—but no more. Bring a vehicle; I will direct you to the site of the interview from there.”
“You’re maybe taking her to the Batcave?” Keishi said. “You want I should blindfold her?”
Keishi, behave!
“It is a most ill-mannered elephant.”
“She’s a loaner. My real screener’s in the shop.” I had been about to ask him for a different meeting place, but after Keishi’s outburst, it seemed petty to press the issue. “How will I recognize you?” I asked.
“I assure you I am unmistakable. I look forward to our conversation, Maya Tatyanichna. Now if you will excuse me.”
“Until tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow.” He looked up, toward where the rest of Keishi’s body towered over me. “Good-bye, elephant. Such an oddity—an elephant raised by wolves.”
“Yeah, same to you, buddy.”
“Keishi!”
But perhaps he did not even hear her; he had already moved away, the blimp swiftly reeling in the dwarf as he receded. A single grouper, streaming toward us from the dwarf’s direction, was about to overtake us—
Then I was back sitting in my living room. Rather than swim back to where we’d started, Keishi had simply pulled the plug.
It always takes me a long time to recover from going into gray-space. The parts of your brain that get copied into grayspace aren’t silenced, they’re just cut off from the rest of the brain. Isolated, they dream; and though the myrmichor overwrites the dream, there’s always something that remains, just out of reach. I can’t help trying to grasp it, though it always slips through my fingers.
Keishi, however, was awake at once. “What an asshole!” she said.
“I think he’ll be all right,” I said when I felt whole again. “He’s got presence—it’s a strange kind, but he’s got it. If I could feel it even in grayspace, it should come through beautifully in the Net-cast. This could work out.”
“Well, if he screens well, he screens well. There’s no arguing with that,” she said grudgingly. “He’s still an asshole,” she confided to the vidphone. Then she inclined her head and said slyly, “Have you thought any more about—”
“You know,” I interrupted, “you can’t keep doing this forever.”
“What?”
“I know you think now that you’ve got something on me, you can do anything you want. And you’re right, there’s nothing I can do. But sooner or later, News One’s going to catch on.”
She rested her elbow on nothing and leaned her head against her hand. “Haven’t we had this conversation already? At least once? It’s like a bad video game: if you leave the castle and go back in, the Guardians are resurrected and you have to fight your way through all over again. I thought we established that I’m not a cop, or a spy, or a blackmailer. I thought we’d finally reached some understanding—”
“Of what? Of what you showed me yesterday? What does that have to do with disrupting my interviews?”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s what you mean.” Her image shrugged; the Word scrolled down from treachery to flame. “It’s a whole different etiquette in grayspace, Maya. People always insult each other—it’s practically impolite not to. I mean, it worked, didn’t it? You got your interview. I can’t always explain everything. Sometimes I have to just follow my instincts—”
“You don’t have instincts yet,” I said. “You haven’t earned them.”
“Oh, God, not this again. I thought I took care of this before—”
“You took care of it by lying to me, yes. You can’t expect me to stick to that now that the lie’s been uncovered.”
“Scratch ‘video game,’” she said. “Insert ‘soap opera.’” She turned aside, and I thought she would leave. Then she wheeled back around and said in a burst of energy: “Why do you have to make this so complicated? Why won’t you understand—”
“Because I can’t,” I said.
She made a vague searching gesture, as though about to argue the point, then hesitated. She fixed her eyes on my encyclopedia. Doubt crossed her face like a shadow. “No,” she said bleakly, “you can’t. Of course you can’t. I don’t know why I ever expected anything else.”
I took out my Net chip, and she vanished. For a while I sat with my hand on the moistdisk, lest she should, by some miracle, find a way in through that. She didn’t. I moved my hand around to the front of my head, and rested it against the familiar warmth of my suppressor chip.
I want to say that it’s horrible. I want to tell you that being suppressed makes every moment of existence a torment, because maybe that would help—but it would be a lie. In fact, the most horrible thing is how easy it is to slide into contentment, how hard it is to nourish anger or regret. If you lost the sense of smell, say, or taste, you’d grieve for it; but if you were born without that sense, you’d never miss it. You’d almost forget there was such a thing as smell, until someone reminded you, and even then you’d only half believe it. That’s how it was for me—the sense was gone, as though it had never been. For the first few years after suppression, I kept myself in misery by sheer effort of will, trying to imagine, every day, what it was that I had lost. But in the end, it became too much trouble. I gave in to the inevitable. I forgot.
It must, I supposed, have been terribly strong, for me to risk so much. Did it come over me by surprise, like a storm uprooting everything? Or was it always there, enriching my perceptions—as when Keishi covered my eyes, making the dark world bright with salts and textures? I didn’t know. In those early years, when I imagined desire, I used to think of it as an energy that clings to objects— an electricity, that sparks and dies in every rustling of a dress, and that lives deep among the wires beneath the skin.
But those were only words. I could no more bring back the feeling with them than a man desouled in grayspace could remember the smell of a rose. I had forgotten. I had grown complacent.
And now she came into my life, and offered me all of it back— and I must refuse it. Because it would mean being dependent on her forever. Because I could never ask her to leave. Because when it was over between us, or when her enhancements aged into obsolescence, some automatic spy would sniff me out and we’d both disappear. It was impossible. I liked her—it was not that; might have liked her a lot under other circumstances; but it was impossible. The false intimacy of the screening chip had ruined any chance of friendship, much less love.
If only, I thought, I could meet her in some other place, where the Net did not reach, and where the only cables were the roots by which the grasses passed along their ancient thoughts. If only we could meet there as if for the first time, and talk together as two strangers talk: locked into our separate skulls, as though nothing had been said between us.