Voskresenye looked over my head at the whale. The audience had shrunk a little and was easier to resist, but not by much. I still had to fight the impulse to turn around.
“I still forget sometimes,” he said, “and call my two selves ‘she’ and ‘I,’ as though we were separate. There are some things that Russian is just not designed to express, and you, alas, do not speak Sapir. I had better say man-self and whale-self; that is cumbersome, but accurate. So: as my man-self lay trapped in the pit, my whale-self was still in the tank here, trying to break free.”
“From the tank? How?”
“It’s not closed, like a fish tank—how did you think he got her down here, on the elevator? This whole complex is built under the continental shelf. The tank goes up some hundreds of metres, and ends with an adjustable vent set just above the ocean floor. If I could just break through it, I would be free. But my air tube was connected to the side of the tank, and quite short. In order to reach the vent, I would have to pull it out, and I had no way of putting it back in. If I tried to break through and failed, I would drown. But when my man-self got pinned, I knew I had to make the attempt. No Guardian was going to take the time to feed me. It would be better to drown than starve.
“I slowly filled my lungs from the trickle of air in the tube, then turned onto my back and pulled. When the tube wrenched itself from my blowhole, I dove to the very bottom of the tank and swam straight upward. But at the last moment I flinched, and took the impact on my back instead of my head. The blow was diffused; the grate was loosened, but not broken. We dove again. My whale-self was calm, but my man-self was in terror that we would drown. Then I began to wonder if the sense of suffocation I was feeling came from my man-self. There might have been another avalanche; I might be dying. At the last instant, before we hit the grate, I switched back to my human body.
“I was not dying, or at least not any faster than I had been before, and I did not hear gunshots. Perhaps they had stopped. When I went back into the whale, we had made it through the vent and were shooting up toward the air.
“I had no idea what the surface of the water should look like from below, so I suspected nothing; but the whale knew, halfway up, what we would find. It was already autumn. The ocean around Arkhangelsk had begun to freeze. Above us, where the sky should have been, there was only an expanse of shadow, which, as we approached it, turned to white.
“Panicking, our lungs aching, we cast about for an opening in the ice. Time and again, we would see a shaft of daylight in the distance, only to find it filtering through a crevice too small to breathe through. Finally, just when I was sure that our lungs would explode, we came to a patch of thin ice and, smashing our head against it, managed to break through. We gulped air into our lungs, sank, then surfaced and breathed again. Nothing but ice was around us; the water was bitterly cold; our chance of surviving was almost nil— and none of it mattered. I wept with joy, the tears falling onto the corpse my face was pressed against. I was free.
“From Arkhangelsk by ocean, there’s nowhere to go but north,” Voskresenye continued. “It’s a good nine hundred kilometers up through the White Sea and around the tip of Norway before you can turn around south. The ice would get worse for a long time before it got better. Besides that, part of the whale’s fluke had long ago been lost to gangrene, and she was bleeding where the edges of the vent had raked against her side, and after so many years of captivity, she was not in shape for such a journey. All these things occurred to me as I dove back down into the freezing water to search for the next air hole. But what stopped me was something quite different. The radio link that connected my two selves was not strong enough to stretch beyond a few tens of kilometers. If I sent the whale past that limit, she would be separated from my man-self—and he would be reduced to idiocy, unable to rejoin her.
“For it is so hard, you see, to be two selves, for all its advantages. One can be attacked through the other, or you can be separated. It is giving up a hostage to the world. Live single: that is my advice to you. Or if you must be two selves, keep them in one body.”
“I’ll, ah, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” I said.
He nodded. “See that you do.”
He sipped his tea again before continuing his story. “For three days my mind dwelled in the whale, as my body lay among the dead. And on the third day, the Unanimous Army came to Square-Mile-at-Arkhangelsk. I could see nothing from where I lay, but I heard them coming for hours, with their ragged, shuffling march. Finally I heard them climb into the pit, by the hundreds, walking on the bodies. I was so cold and hungry that I considered calling out to them, letting them absorb me, anything, if only they would keep me warm. But I changed my mind when I began to hear jingling and ripping sounds all around me. They were stripping the dead.
“The Army worked its way across the pit to where I lay. One of the soldiers—a girl of sixteen, wearing a peacoat over a thin summer dress—lifted up the man that had been lying across my arms. As she held him upright, another soldier, elderly, clad in rags, turned out his pockets. And something hard—a coin, a pocket knife—fell from his pocket and struck my temple.
“In the movies, I’d have held stoically still, to fool the Army. Well, you try it sometime. Of course I jumped; I would have jumped more, if so much of me hadn’t been paralyzed; and I very nearly cried out, too. The Army took no notice. As you have found, Andreyeva, against an unimaginative enemy any fool can be a hero.”
I kept my mind blank, relying on Keishi to screen out any furtive thoughts of the Postcops. I should have known he’d know.
“When the man had been thoroughly searched, the girl took a soda bottle from her pocket, upended it into her palm, and daubed his face with a red, stinking mixture: the done-paint. By the time they were finished, the whole camp would be covered with this goo, whose stench would tell everyone for miles around that the Army need not come again. As the two soldiers walked away, I turned my head a little to watch them go. They climbed out of the pit on the backs of other soldiers, who had formed a human ladder up the side. Many of those leaving the pit were carrying bodies—I presumed for food.
“The next soldier that came by lifted me up from behind, just as the other man had been lifted. I went limp, hoping they wouldn’t know I was alive. The man who came to strip me was a middle-aged Japanese fellow in the remains of an expensive business suit. He turned out my pockets, which of course held nothing, then reached his hand into my shirt—and paused. He laid his hand against my forehead, then pressed his cheek to mine. The warmth of my body had given me away. He reached his hand toward my neck, and for a second I was sure he was going to strangle me; but no, he only wanted to feel my pulse. When that was done, he examined my socket, turning his head to see it from several angles, with a motion that reminded me of robot welders. He turned and made several quick hand signals, then walked away toward the back-bridge, leaving me suspended.
“The next soldier passed without looking, and the next after that, until I began to hope they had forgotten me. But then one stopped in front of me and stood there motionless, waiting. In the distance, a black ring was thrown down into the pit and passed from hand to hand. At last it came to the soldier before me. It was a coiled cable. He was going to infect me with the Army.
“As he unwound the cable, I flexed my fingers. That part of my carapace still worked, yes, but there might yet be subtle damage, and besides, the battery was almost dead. I couldn’t hope to overpower him. He inserted one end of the cable into his temporal socket, and then, as if relishing my terror, gradually extended the other end toward me. Just when he was about to slide the plug home, I blocked it with one hand, and with the other put the plug into my wrist socket. I reached my hand into his brain and tore it away from the Army mind.