“I want to give you something,” she said, “but I’m afraid to. The last time I gave you a gift, it didn’t turn out very well.”
I smiled down at the sink as I rinsed my hands. “I promise not to throw this one at you. But you don’t need to give me anything. I owe you enough already.” I turned to her, drying my hands on a dish towel. “What is it?”
“Freedom.” She leaned against the doorframe, as if to block my exit from the room. “When you were interviewing Voskresenye, and I touched your mind, I found out why you didn’t want me to help you with your encyclopedia before. I didn’t mean to peek, but it was right there. You’re afraid that if I did, and then something happened to me, or I fell in love with someone else, or we just wound up hating each other, you’d be out in the cold. There’d be no one to protect you, and the first Weaver to happen by…”
“Oh, Keishi, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“No, please don’t apologize, it’s all right. I understand. I wouldn’t want you to stay with me out of fear. What I want to do is modify your camera software to screen out… well, everything your encyclopedia suppresses. The thoughts will come back, but they won’t ever escape to the Net, or even to your screener, if that’s anyone but me. The Weavers will never know about them. You can leave the suppressor chip in, so the Postcops won’t suspect; even if they examine it, it won’t have been altered. But when you say so, it will stop working.”
“Wouldn’t the Weavers be able to see the modification?”
“Why? Anything that doesn’t make it to the Net won’t set off their detectors. Other than that… in ten years the Postcops might have come far enough to figure it out, if they knew what to look for, and if you never got an upgrade. But ten years is a long time.” She brushed the salty deposit of tears from her cheekbone. “You could say no, and live to be a hundred. Or you could die tomorrow, for all you know.”
“Especially if the Postcops figure out the man with the whale is Voskresenye.”
“He and I fooled them once; we can do it again,” she said reassuringly. “But Maya, you could be run over by a bus next Thursday and never know what they took from you. If you take it back, you’ll have at least ten years. Probably more. They may never find out. I don’t want to tell you what to do; it has to be your choice. But if it were me, well…” She smiled and lapsed into KRIOL, her tongue clicking softly in the hidden spaces of her mouth: “!Gather(rosebuds) while.do(may)….”
My spine burst into shivers. I could not explain why a few words of KRIOL should have such an effect on me. Nevertheless they did. I had to turn away, pretending sudden interest in the moonlit trees outside the window, in order to hide the feelings that I knew my face betrayed.
She went on, half-heard: “I want you to know that if you say yes and you find out you don’t love me, that’s all right. That’s not why I’m doing it… well, not the only reason. You deserve to be free whether you love me or not.”
“Do it.” The words seemed to come directly from the tingling of my spine, bypassing my better judgment. Yet once they were said, I did not want to take them back.
“Are you sure?” she asked, solicitously. “Do you need some time to think it over?”
“The last thing I want to do is think it over. Just do it.”
She looked at me with concern, but relented. “All right, then. You’ll need an adapter.”
“Why?”
“You’ll have to put it in your wrist. You can’t alter a chip in a skull socket; the hardware won’t do it. Security thing. Is your adapter still in your duffel?”
“No. I, um, I put it away…. Hang on.” I opened my junk drawer to look. When I didn’t see it, I started furiously rummaging through the drawer; I had to fight back the urge to dump its contents on the floor. Then Keishi came, stood behind me, and put her hand on my shoulder—the faintest of pressures, an insect alighting. I forced myself to calm down. She glanced at the drawer and reached through my shoulder to point out where the adapter lay.
I picked it up. “Which wrist?”
“Left, since you’re left-handed.”
I slid the plug into its socket, wrapped the Velcro cuff around my wrist, and started to put in my camera chip.
“Not that one, the 6000,” she said.
“What difference does it make?”
“Well, there’s—” she began, then broke off and smiled. “This probably isn’t the time for a technical lecture. Let’s just say the old chip isn’t up to it.”
I went into the bedroom to collect the rosebox from my closet. At first I hesitated over the choice of chipsets, but she said, “It doesn’t matter. Once I’ve done one, it’ll be easy to copy the changes to the other two.” I plugged the chameleon chip into the adapter, where it promptly sprouted trompe l’oeil black Velcro fur.
“Find a comfortable place to sit,” she said. “The first one may take a while.”
I sat on the armchair that Keishi had vacated—briefly surprised to find the cushion cold. I slipped off my shoes and leaned back.
“Just try to relax,” she said.
“I am relaxed.”
“The hell you are. If your heart were going any faster it’d break the sound barrier. Breathe slowly, and count your breaths—just up to four, then repeat it. Try to clear your mind of everything else.”
As I struggled for calm, she made the motions of taking something out of a bag, though there was no bag to be seen. Then she crawled up onto an invisible ledge five feet above the floor—a levitating mime—and reclined there, in a slightly cramped position. Her real body must have been getting into the sleeping compartment on the train. She unbound her hair, which suddenly became longer. That must be what she really looked like, I thought with half-suppressed excitement. Her hair was lifted back into the thing she had set up—a myrmichor; it must be. That was how the African engineers had solved the problem of getting data into a head without using sockets: they’d replaced her hair with some sort of conductive fiber. If I ran my fingers through it, would it be soft, or stiff, I wondered? I longed to try—a small, quiet longing; but I had not felt one as strong in twenty years.
Then I remembered how, when I had first realized she knew about my suppressor chip, I had pictured her configuring it with a waldo at a table, not with her hair in a myrmichor. That image had been so vivid—where had it come from? Who had sat at a table for hours that way, with cables trailing from her head and arms?
But there was no time to think of that. I could already feel my hand beginning to stir, to touch wires and move among patterns, though physically, of course, it hadn’t moved at all. If the image with the waldo was a memory, I would know in the morning. The dream coprocessor would bring it up.
“Do you want me to take your hand offline?” she asked, in a strangely blurred voice.
“No,” I said. “No, leave it on. I want to feel it.”
“I always knew you were the Lamaze type.” She chuckled distractedly. “I’m going to give you a phrase to say when you want the desuppression to begin. It’s not in Russian, so you won’t say it by accident. Listen closely: O vos omnes, qui transitis per viam. Say that back to me.”
I repeated the phrase.
“Good. Now don’t say it again, unless you mean it.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“If you feel like sleeping, do.”
“I’m not tired,” I said. “I’m not tired at all.” But hours later, when she wanted me to switch chips, she had to rouse me first; and by the time she had finished all three, I was sound asleep.
She touched my cheek to wake me. “Go to bed. I’m going to stay with you tonight.”