“You expect them to find the whale? To take possession of her?”
“I expect—” he briefly studied a point just below the screen, then raised his eyes again “—that I will no longer be able to keep her where she is now.”
“I understand your protectiveness, but what would it hurt for you to provide a tissue sample? Think of the importance of—”
“Contrary to what the producers of vids believe, Maya Tatyanichna,” he interrupted, “you cannot just dump a cloned calf in the middle of the ocean and expect her to repopulate her kind. Whales in the wild had millennia of accumulated knowledge that is now irrevocably lost. Without a parent to protect and guide her, a cloned whale would starve, freeze, or drown in a matter of days.”
“Could your whale—”
“She could not,” he snapped, “and even if she could, I would not allow it. Hundreds of whales would die in this ridiculous experiment, and even if some lived, if they eventually flourished, what do you think would happen? Amusement parks would capture them, ships of tourists harass them; perfumers would discover a need for ambergris; jaded executives would pay thousands to slot up Queequeg on adventure vacations…. No, Maya Tatyanichna. There will be no whales.”
“But we need them,” I said.
“We need them? Is that the best reason you can come up with?” He laughed, a rasping, mechanical sound. “The kings of the ocean are gone, and what is our argument for their return? We need them? We? Their murderers? The ones that made the water bitter in their mouths, and killed the food they ate? The ones that made the ocean boil red with their blood for miles around? Men need them? Those vermin? Those stinging insects? Struggling pustulent humanity—needs them? Do you think a whale cares? You might as well need the sun to rise at midnight because you’re feeling a bit chilly. Yes, of course, certainly we need them. But the question is, do we deserve them?”
Silence. Then I heard the whirring as he moved his hand toward the vidphone’s control panel. He paused and said: “Be in Arkhangelsk.”
“I will.”
CONNECTION BROKEN, said the phone.
“Well,” I said. “He can be goaded.”
“I charge you to use this power only for good,” Keishi said solemnly.
“Just when I thought you were starting to understand this business. Mirabara, park your body on a train to Arkhangelsk and get your bandwidth over here. We’ve got work to do.”
Twelve
IMMEDIATE TOUCH
She materialized again. “Already bought the ticket. What do you need?”
“I won’t say I need anything. I seem to get attacked when I use that word. What I want is to know everything there is to know about whales by noon tomorrow. Biology, history, poetry, folklore, you name it.”
“Is that all?”
“No. I also want every scrap of information you can dig up on Voskresenye. Go over the interview with a fine-toothed comb and do a search on every word he used, apart from ‘and’ and ‘if.’ Anything you can dig up on Derzhavin, on the Andersons, especially on Catharine Anderson—I know most of it’s probably on the chip you gave me, but I need to be sure.”
“Sounds like a long night. Should I order in pasta or something?”
“I’m sick and tired of makarony,” I said. “What are you in the mood for—dim sum or Ethiopian?”
She shrugged. “Up to you. I’ll be eating train food, remember?”
“Oh, right,” I said sheepishly. “In that case, which of those two will make you the least envious if I eat it in front of you?”
She smiled. “I’ve never been much for African food. Ironically.”
“Ironically,” I echoed. “Ethiopian it is.” I was about to touch the videophone when she said, “Let me do it.” I shrugged assent; her eyes unfocused for a second. “Done.”
“That fast? OK, let’s start with—”
The doorbell rang. My house, unlike my car, does not have weapons hidden in its every crevice, so my first thought was of kitchen knives and cast-iron skillets; my second, of escape routes.
“Don’t panic,” Keishi said. “It’s just your food.”
I went to the door and looked through the peephole, cringing a little as I did. It was rumored that the Weavers would use infrared to watch you approach the door, and then, as you squinted to see who it was, fire a bullet through the glass into your eye. The fear was irrational, I knew; they usually gave the Postcops a chance at you first, and the Postcops would consider such a tactic impolite. But the thought made me uncomfortably aware of the shape of my eyes in my head, and their softness. Somehow you think of eyes as being as shallow as almonds, but of course they’re not; they go back deep, and press against the brain’s gray labyrinths. The feeling persisted as I opened the door on the bored and impatient delivery boy, and made me reluctant to allow his retinal scan.
“I can’t give you your food without a scan, tavarishcha. Regulations.” He balanced the stack of boxes on his shoulder, obviously prepared to wait.
I submitted my eye to be lasered, and paid all in green out of sheer irritation. “Is that all, or do you want a blood test?”
“So take it up with management.”
I slammed the door in his face. Punk. “Keishi, do I want to know how you did that?”
“I just found the nearest unit and switched addresses.”
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s wrong to steal?”
“So who stole?” she said. “You paid for it, didn’t you?”
“I guess that’s true,” I admitted. The smell of food had made my salivary glands spurt to life, with a stab of pain far more compelling than the pangs of conscience. I sat down on the couch and started opening boxes. “You’re sure you don’t mind my eating in front of you?”
“What are my chances of stopping you?” she said, smiling. “No, relax, I’m not hungry anyway.”
“Thanks,” I said, and proceeded. She watched me closely as I tore off a piece of crepe and used it to scoop up mashed chickpeas.
“You’re staring,” I said. “I thought you weren’t hungry.”
“I’m not. It’s just that you’re eating with your right hand.”
“That’s how you eat Ethiopian food,” I said, capturing a blob of umber curry.
“How come?”
I fanned my mouth instead of answering; the lentils had been too hot. When my tear ducts stopped firing, I said, “The left hand used to be considered unclean.”
“Like a taboo?”
I paused with a bite halfway to my mouth. “Um… no, just basic hygiene, actually. I think it goes back to before they had toilet paper. Could we talk about this when I’m not eating?”
“Huh? Oh, sure.”
I looked at the crepeful of vegetables suspiciously, then thrust all associations from my mind and swallowed it.
She couldn’t let the topic go. “You know,” she marveled, “I never would have thought of something like that.”
“Typical wirehead,” I said between mouthfuls. “You’ve spent so much time on the Net you’ve forgotten you have a digestive tract.”
“Yeah?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Okay, Miss Earthier-than-thou, when was the last time you cooked a meal that didn’t come in a box?”
“I’m a camera,” I said. “I’m all over the country. I don’t have time to shop.”
“All right, then, when was the last time you ate? Not since yesterday, I’ll bet.”
“I had something for breakfast.”