“Yes?”
“Neither down nor a feather!”
“To the devil!” I roared back. I’d need all the luck I could get.
The slidewalk took a left turn, then a right, and I passed several doors, all of them boarded up. Was the whole place abandoned? No, someone had kept the slidewalk in repair. Which did not, of course, mean that anyone was there at the moment. Please, God, don’t let this be a Capone’s Vault. I slotted the imagination enhancer, just in case.
“Ten,” Keishi said, with no end in sight. “Nine, eight,” and another curve came into view. “Seven, six, five”—I turned the corner. There was a door ahead: end of the line. I started a lunge—“four”—then changed my mind and stopped, letting the slidewalk carry me along. “Three, two,” and I was just stepping off, my momentum pitching me forward; I caught myself; “one—and you’re live.”
“This is Maya of hearth News One,” I said, briskly walking toward the door. “I’m in what used to be the laboratory of the Guardian collaborator, Aleksandr Derzhavin.” I paused to let the memories float up from the moistdisk: women with glass skulls revealing their brain grafts; rings of animals linked by cables; a Kazakhi infant with a second head, not human, hanging limply from his shoulder.
“I feel your horror, but it’s muted,” I said, stopping in front of the door. “After all, it was a long time ago. The Guardians are gone, and Derzhavin is dead, and it’s hard to get worked up about it. But this place is not abandoned. Someone lives here—someone for whom Derzhavin’s experiments are much more than a distant memory.” I put my hand on the doorknob. “This is Maya Andreyeva, coming to you from about a kilometer underneath—ah, underneath the ground.” No sense giving the Postcops free hints. “And I’m about to show you something amazing.”
I hope. I turned the doorknob—and had to suppress my relief when the door opened easily. I walked through into a room that, but for the lack of a sparking Jacob’s-ladder, might have been the set of some remake of Frankenstein. On my left, behind a transparent curtain, were three dissecting tables, each large enough to autopsy an elephant. One lay bare; one was piled with Petri dishes, test tubes, and retorts; the third held the earthly remains of several antique computers, lying in state among a maze of cables. On my right were larger pieces of equipment—centrifuge, terminal with headset, and a thing the size of an oven that I guessed to be an electron microscope. None looked new, or even functional.
I took all this in with a quick pan of my eyes, then focused on the chessboard in the middle of the room. The pieces were still set up, as though abandoned in mid-game. Calling on my imagination chip, I placed Voskresenye and Derzhavin at the table. In the foreground, I reenacted Voskresenye’s awakening; in the background, I let the memory of my interview filter in. When Derzhavin got up and wheeled Voskresenye through the door, I silently followed them into a hall—for them dimly lit, and for me dark. Long rows of cages were set into both walls. I made Voskresenye’s image look to both sides as they passed, and briefly showed the audience what he had seen there. Then I lit my Net-nine, to show them what was in the cells now.
All the cages had been fitted with shelves; rows of books sat behind the iron bars, huddling at the backs of their cells like frightened prisoners. There were twenty cells in all, and over each, a description of the contents was painted in neat block letters: Theology, Ethics, Poetry, Biology. On impulse I tried a door, only to find it locked—they were all locked. Nor was this a measure against theft; the keys were hanging openly on a board at the end of the hall. It was as if he wanted to prevent the books’ escape.
“What kind of a man keeps a library like this?” I asked aloud. I kept my mind blank of answers. Let the audience invent its own.
There was a door at the end of the hall. This had better be the one; I had no time to spare. I let Derzhavin push Voskresenye’s ghostly image through the door and vanish. Then I slipped the nucleus of the whale research into my memory, gently, so as not to give the game away too soon. I turned the knob with melodramatic slowness. The door obliged me with an eerie creak.
When I looked into the room, the audience inside me caught all its breaths at once. Behind a sheet of glass the size of a soccer field, the whale floated as though in sleep, barely moving her serrated fins. Long, crooked scars marked her side, and half the crescent of her fluke was torn away. A thick air-tube pierced her blowhole, surrounded by a mass of sores where it had rubbed against her skin. Her head was ringed by a crown of sockets, their little copper thorns sealed off from the water by clear plastic inserts. Fluorescent lights behind the tank surrounded her with luminous blue halos, and, filtering through the glass, tattooed my skin with moving waves.
As I approached the whale, she opened her eyes, like a man briefly roused from an opium sleep. She didn’t see me—or if she did, I was beneath her notice. Perhaps what she looked at was not in this world.
And if the whale looked through me, then, too, the audience looked through her. The chips and tubes were transparent to their eyes, and even her flesh symbolic and not real. Looking at her, they were watching that vid with the whale in the iceberg. I tried to win them over by brute force, staring at the sores around her blowhole and trying to imagine what she must feel; I tried horror, pity, melancholy; but I couldn’t even mute their giddiness. Finally I gave up, made my mind a blank, and waited for the audience to grow calm.
Calm would not come. I’d caught what cameras call an updraft: just as the viewers got over their first rush of interest, others smelled the excitement and tuned in. The surprise of the newcomers strengthened the scent, attracting still more people, in a spiral that could make the feedback escalate out of control. Wave upon wave of astonishment crashed through me. I tried to look down, but the curiosity of millions forced my head back up. I stood there staring at the whale like someone forced to look into the sun, unable to turn away, though my mind cringed from the sight and my eyes were burning. It was not just an updraft, but riptide: feedback so strong that it flooded out my own emotions and derailed my thoughts. The audience grew so large and so greedy that it wouldn’t even let me blink. I sank to one knee—it was that or fall— and silently begged Keishi to cut off the input.
“News One says wait it out,” she said apologetically. “They think they can still bring in more viewers.”
Greedy sons of bitches. What are we up to?
“Do the words forty share mean anything to you?”
I was already brimful of the audience’s amazement, so the news could not surprise me, but I reminded myself to be impressed when my reactions were my own again. Two out of every five viewers in Russia—
“No, three out of five in Russia. I’m talking global. If this doesn’t taper off soon, you’ll be reaching half the people in the world.”
Well, the eyes of half the world were worth a little riptide. I stared at the whale until my tears dissolved it into halos, until my eyes were nothing but a dull ache boring its way deeper and deeper back into my head.
Keishi? I said, weakly. Does News One have any ideas on how I might manage to stand back up?
She didn’t answer, but I heard someone come up behind me, and felt a hand cover my eyes. The metal of his carapace was cold against my cheekbone: Voskresenye. The audience, cut off from the source of its excitement, grew quiet enough that I could blink and turn away. Voskresenye took my elbow and guided me to a chair.
When my eyes cleared, I saw that I was sitting with the whale behind me. It was like having your back to a man with a gun: the urge to look around was almost irresistible. But at least I could think. As he sat down across from me, I mouthed a silent “thank you,” which he answered with a slight nod of his head.