Gingerly, I touched the memories on the moistdisk. The audience let me, but I wouldn’t have wanted to try it a second time. Thinking with half the world inside my head was like crossing a frozen lake in smooth-soled shoes: the slightest misstep might send me spinning out of control. Fortunate, then, that I was in this chair, across from a man I could interview, with a moistdisk whispering in my ear. I had done this at least once a week for longer than I could remember. I could do it in my sleep—and even in this state. The castle of my mind had been usurped, but the maids could still cook just as well as before; and this was galley work.
“Pavel Voskresenye,” I began carefully, “when we last talked I was, shall we say, a little skeptical about the whale. Afterward, as I recall, I said to my screener, ‘You can’t put a whale in a tank. It’s like claiming you slipcovered Leningrad.’” I paused to wait out the giddy feeling of a million people snickering. “It looks like Derzhavin slipcovered Leningrad. But even now that I’ve seen it, it still seems impossible. Can you show me the flaw in my reasoning?”
“It seems unthinkable to you,” he said, “because you are Maya Andreyeva, a News One camera, and not Aleksandr Derzhavin, a Guardian scientist. That means, of course, that you do not have access to Calin’s treasuries or to unlimited amounts of slave labor; those are things that accustom a person to thinking big. But more important, it means that when you look at a whale, you see a living being—a creature with senses, organs, dimensions, passions. When Derzhavin looked at a whale, he saw none of that.
“All the Guardians experienced some degree of spiritual atrophy, or they could not have done what they did, but Derzhavin was an especially advanced and chronic case. He was an urbane, oftentimes a witty man; he honored the memory of his wife and he was gentle with his children. He was even, in his own way, scrupulously moral, though it was a purely arithmetical morality in which no sympathy was needed or allowed. Yet he was one of the most evil men that ever lived. It was not that he hated; he was beyond hatred, hatred is human. He seemed to have been born without the gene that enables us to see souls in the world—spirit-blind, as some are colorblind. When Derzhavin looked at a Kazakh or a whale, he saw a wetdisk, an organic computer, sheathed in a husk of irrelevant flesh. The body was an unfortunate complication, and the spirit just a dream of foolish men.”
Hypnotized by his voice, the audience had reached a state of calm attention. The clamoring to look behind me had grown weaker, and a genuine interest in his story was beginning to form. The camera in me had noticed that he’d twisted my question around so he could make the point he wanted to make anyway. No one with any sense would go into a News One interview without knowing how to do that; he’d be slaughtered. It’s something you expect your subjects to do, as you expect a chessplayer to castle. So you plan for it, and counter it. But for the time being, anything that calmed the audience was fine with me. If I needed to pin him down I could do it later, after people had started to switch back to their sitcoms. For now, keeping the conversation on anything but whales was more important. Still, I couldn’t help but worry that somewhere in our exchanges I would take a poisoned pawn.
“I’m afraid I cut you off in mid-story last time,” I said. “When we left off, you—well, you were doing what we just did: seeing the whale for the first time. How was it different for you?”
“In appearance she has not changed much. She is older, but that is not apparent to the untrained eye. I saw the same thing all of you just saw. Except that I knew, the moment I saw her, that she was a part of myself. I knew it not just because of the cable that connected us, but because as I looked into her eye, I was that eye, I was that wall of altered flesh.”
He paused, looking down at the carapace that covered his hand. The audience noticed it then for the first time, and it held their attention an instant; then they grew restless. Just when I might have lost viewers, he said:
“It is most difficult to explain, this being two selves at once, to you who are only one. You might as well try to explain your single self to a computer, who has none at all. For those of your viewers who speak Sapir—” He emitted a series of clicks and whistles, like a whale song played too fast. “Which I suppose, if pummeled into Russian, would be ‘O my amphibious—no, my hermaphrodite—soul.’ And that is hardly useful. Perhaps a metaphor will help.
“Imagine that I were to hold up a half-silvered mirror between our faces—a sheet of glass painted with clear and reflective squares alternating like a chessboard, on a scale too small to see. Then you would see my face combine with your own, not statically, but fading in and out, and sometimes merging. The left eye of your reflection might appear, then disappear, to be replaced with mine, while all the time the right eye was a fusion of the two. If you looked at the mirror long enough, you might learn to control this process, to choose whose features you would see in which place; but at first, the faces would recombine randomly. That was how it was for my mind and the whale’s. Later I would discover how to switch between visual cortices, but at the time, I could only watch my field of vision slowly crossfade back and forth.
“When I saw through her eyes, I saw myself—rather flattened, and more scarred than I had guessed, but recognizable. Standing behind me, I saw Aleksandr Derzhavin. And I remembered. He had killed my mother before my eyes, and when the nets lifted me from the water, he had sponged her blood off of my skin with his own hands. He had brought me to this place, where I could only swim a few strokes at a time before I reached a wall and had to turn. He had put things into my skin that changed my shape, so that when I moved in the water, it resisted me, as though I were a stranger to it. He had changed my mind so that my thoughts became faint furtive things among a babble of human voices I could barely understand. And he had tied me to this pale, soft creature even lumpier than myself, this ill-designed monstrosity that would struggle in the water like a wounded fish, and whose mind, too, struggled against the world, as against an enemy.
“And why not kill him? It had not occurred to me before; and now I realized for the first time that this was strange. Derzhavin had done something to me, more than the obvious. I could see it— a black spot occluding the light. He had altered me to keep me from conspiring against him. But being who he was, he had not considered what the whale might feel. I could not hate him myself, in that crippled body slumped inertly in a chair. But in the mind of the whale, I hated him so purely that my hands and flippers trembled at the sight of him. And the whale, who could hate, but who was held back from the object of her hate by a pane of glass, could plan against him by borrowing my unasked-for oracular gift.
“And so I looked down at my hands, and concentrated on them, as I had concentrated on the chessboard earlier, until I saw the shining pathways start to spiral out. And slowly, taking our time—for we had all the time in the world—my whale-self and my man-self began to choose those futures in which we would kill him.”
“What did you do?”
“At first there was nothing we could do. I needed the use of my legs, and he puttered over that for months, until my man-self was simmering with impatience. Yet we waited. We waited until I could walk, and then we waited again for him to begin to trust me. Derzhavin was a suspenders-and-belt man from way back: even though he had made me, so he thought, incapable of disobedience, he still turned on my carapace only when he needed me. Other times I sat inert in this same chair, in this very room, like a child’s toy set aside.