“Something solid?”
“All right, Mirabara, you’ve made your point.”
“You know,” she said, pressing her advantage, “I think you’d maintain the Net against someone who preferred the body, and the body against someone who preferred the Net. You don’t seem to have much use for either one.”
“And what does that leave?”
“You tell me.”
“Look, as fascinating as this is,” I said, using a stray chopstick from the day before to mix the bland chickpeas into the overspiced lentils, “we’ve got about fourteen hours before I have to get on the train to Arkhangelsk, and in that time I have to get ready for the biggest interview of my life. This strikes me as more important than a lecture on nutrition. Can we leave it for another time?”
She sighed slightly and stood very straight, as though at attention. I wondered briefly whether she was making fun of me. “All right,” she said. “Where do we start?”
“Let’s see what we can find on Voskresenye himself.”
We spent several fruitless hours in search of data. Every time we caught hold of a thread, it would wind around and around the Net, until finally at the end we found his name, Net address, police record, dates of birth and death—and nothing more. Finally we gave up and started tracking down the people and things he’d referred to during our first interview. Catharine Anderson, we found, went missing during her senior year at MGU. A few days before that, Edward Sinclair drove his truck into the Volga River in an apparent suicide, which was later reclassified as a terrorist strike. Dr. Aleksandr Derzhavin, a Russian scientist who had collaborated with the Guardians, died of a heart attack at age forty-five; little more was known, because the Guardians had burned his laboratory, and his records with it, as the Unanimous Army approached. It was all consistent with Voskresenye’s story, but then you’d expect it to be. If he made something up, he would consult the Net first; and what he could find was about the same as what we could find. Stalemate.
“All right,” I said, rubbing fatigue from my eyes, “what about this ‘Queequeg’ reference?”
“It’s the name of a harpooner in a novel about whaling called Moby-Dick.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar.”
“You might have heard about it in school,” Keishi said. “It was widely read in Classical America. I think there’s an episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg doesn’t return it and gets a huge library fine… no, wait, that’s The Red Badge of Courage. Anyway, it was well known.”
“How long would it take you to read it for me?”
“Slot me a fresh moistdisk,” she said. “I’ll give you the novel as a memory. Have you used an English fluency chip much?”
“Sure, but not for a while.”
“A year? Two years? That’s okay, the neuromodulators should still be able to find those pathways lying around; you won’t have to burn in again. In English, then. Oh, and I can also give you the memories of a Preclassical Lit. professor from LGU who wrote his thesis on it. Ready?”
I nodded. The novel seeped into my mind, like milk into a sponge. A man tattooed with frogs and labyrinths; a leg of polished whalebone; duodecimo, octavo, folio whales; a coffin bobbing among the waves; and in the blue distance a white mass rising, unknotting its suckered limbs, and sinking: unearthly, formless, chance-like mockery of life.
“Now that’s really something,” I said when it had finished. “Why couldn’t we read that in school, instead of watching all that television?”
“You liked it?”
“It beats hell out of The Brady Bunch.”
“Well, I think it’s horrible,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “It makes whaling out to be some kind of heroic pursuit, when all it really was is genocide.”
“Sure, in hindsight,” I said. “But there were whales all over the place back then. They didn’t know they were going to run out.”
“It’s still disgusting. Look at that scene where they go all orgasmic over that spermaceti stuff. He makes it out to be a mystical experience, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world, and there they are running their hands through some gunk they dug out of an incredibly beautiful creature that they killed by ramming a harpoon into its eye and dragging it in—” She shuddered and drew her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around her knees.
“First of all,” I said, “I think you’re confusing a few different incidents. And secondly, when exactly did Pavel Voskresenye take over your mind?”
She stiffened. “If two people who hate each other as much as Voskresenye and I do can agree on something, you should consider the possibility that we might be right. Killing is killing; it’s sordid, bloody, stupid, and wasteful. There’s nothing noble about it. People will do what they’ll do, but we can at least call it what it is.”
“But to take on something a hundred times your size and bring it down by strength and cunning and sheer determination—I can’t think of anything more noble. Sure it’s brutal. Biology is always brutal. ‘Dinner’ is just a euphemism for destruction.” I waved my hand at the rubble of my meal. “You do remember eating, don’t you? That’s your problem, you know. Too much time out-of-body. You’ve forgotten the brutality of the flesh.”
“If keeping your mind in a piece of rotting meat makes you condone violence, that’s another point against it,” she said irritably. “If I could get African citizenship, I swear I’d take Translation and have done with the whole stinking mess.”
I sighed and said: “Dost thou think because thou art virtual there shall be no more flesh and blood?”
“Aha!” She put her feet back on the floor, noiselessly. “Now I have you! You can’t tell me you had Shakespeare ready to mind before you slotted up—certainly not in English. Without the moist-disk, you wouldn’t have been able to express the thought so elegantly. Without my Net link, I wouldn’t have known what you meant. The electronics improve understanding. They put us in sync. Even something as simple as a Preclassical Lit. chip.”
“Just more garbage encrusting the truth,” I said, but I didn’t take out the moistdisk.
“Words encrust,” she said earnestly, leaning forward. “Words and bodies. The truth is underneath, and cables can break through to it. Why do you deny that?”
“Because—” I said, and then stopped, feeling the futility of trying to explain.
“No answer?” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think it is. I think you’re afraid. You’re terrified of anything that might connect you to another person, and you fear cabling most of all because it’s the surest way to—”
“All right, then,” I said in exasperation. “There are so many reasons I hardly know where to start, but here’s one. You’re always talking about getting past people’s surfaces to what’s inside, and that’s what you call real. But you can’t just break through a person’s defenses like that; the defenses are part of the person, they are the person. It’s our nature to have hidden depths. It’s like—” my eyes searched the room for a metaphor “—like skinning a frog and saying, ‘Now I understand this frog, because I’ve seen what’s inside it.’ But when you skin it, it dies. You haven’t understood a frog, you’ve understood a corpse.”
“The cable doesn’t ‘skin’ anything. Besides, it doesn’t have to be one-way.”
“Oh yes, that’s even better. People swapping souls on the first date. Once you’ve done that, what the hell do you talk about for the rest of your life?” She tried to break in with an answer; I cut her off. “Nothing, that’s what. There’s nothing left to say. There’s no wonder, no unfolding, no chance to gradually grow into each other… I don’t know why I’m even trying to explain….”