“But, Maya,” she said, “you sound like a person who knows what she’s talking about. When, apart from the other day with me, have you cabled before?”
I looked down at the table. “I’ve been working with screeners a long time. You get a feel for what it’s like.”
“All the same—”
“And even if it were real,” I interrupted, “if you can achieve total intimacy with a piece of cable that costs fifty-nine kopeks, what good is it? How can you say that you have something special with a person, when you can get the same thing with anyone in Russia in fifteen minutes?”
“You can not.” She had risen and was pacing around the room. “You can’t just cable with anyone. You can put in the plug, sure. But not everyone fits. Most of the time you can’t get in deep enough. And if you do, if you go ahead and force it, you just find out that on the inside, most people are stupid, mean, selfish, and boring. When you find someone that you can keep coming back to again and again, it does mean something. It is love—how can you say it’s not?”
“Oh, it’s love, I suppose. It’s love the way sugar is food: it’s got lots of calories, but no nutrition. You can’t live on it for long.”
She stopped pacing, but did not sit down. When she spoke again it was more slowly and more softly. “If you take flesh as your starting point,” she said, “you’re always going to find some way that silicon falls short. But there’s nothing special about flesh. Look, sex wasn’t invented by some loving God who wants us all to understand each other and be happy. It was made by nature, and nature doesn’t give a damn whether our hearts hook up or not, just as long as our gametes do. Why should evolution get to make all the decisions? Why can’t we use something that is designed to bring people together? If you turn the comparison around, and start with cabling, then love in the meat starts to look pretty shabby. Love happens in the mind, in the soul—what does the union of two sweating bodies have to do with that?”
“Love without touching—”
“I would touch your mind more gently than any hand,” she said, looking down at me. “More softly than—”
“That’s not what I mean by touch, and you know it,” I said. “You keep trying to change around the meanings of words. You’re using some new definition of love, too. I don’t think it’s in my dictionary.”
“No, nor in your encyclopedia, either,” she said, so gently that I couldn’t take offense. “It’s real, though. And it isn’t new. That’s one thing Derzhavin was right about, as twisted as he was. You think cabling is unnatural—that’s what your arguments all come down to. But it’s not. Not between people that really fit. Maya, do you have any idea how unlikely it is that two structures as complex as minds could be joined like that? It’s like picking up two stones at random and discovering that they fit together perfectly. It isn’t a coincidence. It can’t be. They fit together so easily—like reuniting something that should never have been broken, filling in some ancient wound….”
She sat down on the sofa beside me, and looked down at my hand. Her fingers brushed my palm, then stroked the socket at the throat of my wrist. “The mind has doors,” she whispered, “even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.”
“What would you know about hunger, you ghost?” I said. “You’ve forgotten you have a body—you just said you wish you didn’t have. Is there hunger on the Net now? No, don’t you dare call that hunger. Hunger is something that can be sated. But you can touch a hundred minds a night and never be filled—or fulfilled. That’s not a desire, that’s an algorithm.”
She slowly leaned over me, as though to rest her head against my shoulder. “I’ve been in thousands of minds, yes, Maya,” she whispered. “I fell in love with one.”
I kept perfectly still and said flatly: “What else is there on whales?”
She got up, bent over the videophone, and stood there staring at the blank screen. I could not bring myself to look at the reflection of her face. When she had been silent so long that I was sure she wouldn’t answer me, she said, “… There are songs.”
“Right,” I said briskly. “Traditional songs about whales—”
“No,” she said, “I mean the whales, they sing.”
“That’s not in Moby-Dick.”
“Well, they weren’t listening, were they?” she snapped. “If you up and chucked a spear at every human you saw, you wouldn’t know we could talk, either.”
“You mean their songs were a language?” I said, amazed.
She thought for a moment and then said, with more composure, “They’re a little repetitive for a language. More like a bird’s song, except they go on for hours. People used to listen to them for relaxation.”
“Play me one.”
“All right,” she said at length. She went back to the armchair, sat, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “This might not be such a good—”
“Play it,” I said.
She nodded, slowly. Squeaks and echoes filled the air.
I winced. “A bird’s song played off-key by fingernails on a blackboard in a swimming pool! People listened to this? Voluntarily?”
Instead of answering she turned away, pressing her face into the back of the chair. I could see by the spasms in her shoulders that she was crying, though her hands concealed the tears. I felt shamed by the unfeignedness of her grief, where I myself could muster little feeling for a race of creatures that had died out before I was born.
“Keishi, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s not the song,” she sobbed.
“Oh. No. No, of course it’s not.”
I tried to touch her hair to comfort her, but my hand passed through the strands without disturbing them. I thought of embracing her, but that too was impossible. I settled for sitting on the floor next to her chair, leaning my head against the armrest. Her face was turned away; all I could see was a crescent of cheek and temple, notched by the eye-socket, trembling and bright with tears.
“Keishi, I owe you an apology. Several, in fact. I know I’m not an easy person to work with—” she sobbed aloud “—all right, I’m a pain in the ass. I know that. What I’m trying to say is that this is the story of a lifetime, and I would have thrown it away if it weren’t for you. And I’ve treated you like dirt for your trouble. I don’t know why you’ve put up with me this long. But I hope you’ll give me another chance…. Keishi, I don’t care whether Anton comes back or not. I want you to be my screener for as long as we can trick News One into keeping us together. And for as long as you’ll have me.”
She wiped away tears with her hand, still averting her eyes. “That’s not the kind of partnership I want with you.”
“Oh, Keishi, please, any time but now—”
“I have to. Maya, I love you. And if we can’t come to terms with that, then I’d better just go, because it’s only going to get more painful. Maya, I know you don’t love me now. I know it’s hard for you to even think about it. All I can ask is that you try to remember… if the encyclopedia were out, do you think you could love me?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That part of my life is over.”
She looked up at me as I stood. “You don’t know, do you?”
“No,” I said, starting to clear away the take-out boxes in order to hide the shame in my eyes. “I don’t know.”
I carried the boxes into the kitchen and threw away the empty ones. As I was making room in the refrigerator for the leftovers, she came in behind me, so quietly I didn’t know she was there until she spoke.