“For a moment he was Michael Arnason, aged thirty-four, from Sussex, England, a solicitor’s clerk, who had gone to sleep one night beside his wife and woken in this pit of death alone—but that was only for a moment. Then he shuddered, and the glimmer of selfhood went out of his eyes. Moving jerkily, he reached into his trenchcoat, took out a bottle of done-paint, and poured it over my head. When the soldier behind me smelled it he let me drop, but the thing that had been Arnason grasped me under the arms, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me up the ladder of backs. As soon as we were out of the pit, I turned him toward the setting sun, and we began the long walk westward to our meeting with the whale.”
Seventeen
FALLEN LIKE LIGHTNING
“You said—” I conferred with the Net briefly “‘—None of it mattered. I was free.’ Yet you came back here.”
“What else could we do? There aren’t many places you can keep a crippled whale.”
“Why couldn’t she stay in the ocean?”
“Derzhavin’s modifications made her dependent on electronics for her life; from that, nothing could free her. Without maintenance, she wouldn’t have lived out the year. One of her socket seals would have been torn away, perhaps; it would take no more than that. And then, too, Derzhavin had converted portions of her brain to uses they were not intended for—a cloverleaf with an unenhanced whale would have been of little use. Some of the things he took from her would have been crucial to survival in the wild. So we waited, I repairing my exoskeleton, and she finding what food she could. And next summer, when the ice was gone and the ocean warm, my selves began our separate journeys to Arkhangelsk, home.”
Time? I asked Keishi.
“All the time in the world, girl. You think they’re going to cut this off? But Maya, News One wants another look at the whale.”
Then let them turn off the feedback.
“I can turn it down to one-quarter for you.”
Not enough, I said. Tell them to go to hell.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said. “When you started pulling record ratings, Netcast became remarkably unhelpful to the Post police. If you lose viewers…”
I get the picture, I said. One-quarter it is.
When I felt my limbic system settle down, I said, “Let me apologize to all of you for that delay. News One has told me that you would all like another look at the whale. I’m going to do it, but please, remain as calm as possible. Otherwise you’ll have to wait till we can get a robot camera in here to film it. Come on, people, it’s just a dolphin with gland problems—nothing to get excited about.”
“Instead of just looking at her,” Voskresenye said with quiet amusement, “would you like to talk to her?”
“I thought I was.”
“Not exactly—any more than you’re talking to Stepan Sornyak. I am a fusion of the two, a compromise—’O my negotiated soul’ is in the Sapir, too. Thanks to his injuries, my man-self cannot be separated from that union, but the whale can. I have only to release the portions of her mind I occupy—to see myself in the half-silvered mirror.”
“How long will that take?”
“An instant. I will appear to have fainted; do not be alarmed. Once the artificial neuromodulators have been stilled, it will take some few seconds for her neurons to reorganize into their natural circuits—such, that is, as Derzhavin did not destroy completely.” Then another thought seemed to strike him: “If you like, you can turn over the Netcast to her for a while. She can output telepresence. I’m sure your audience would be interested to find out what it’s like to be a whale.”
The audience was far too interested, and Voskresenye was far too casual. I didn’t believe for a second that he’d just thought of the idea.
But you don’t spend thirty years as a camera and turn up your nose at something like that. It’s just not in the programming.
“All right,” I said warily. “How do I wake you when we’re done?”
“A good hard shaking will generally do it,” he said as he closed his eyes.
I turned around, panning my eyes along the floor so as to sneak up on the sight. My mind was trying to go in all directions at once, like a chariot drawn by eight cats. But at least I could control it. I raised my eyes to the whale.
Instinctively, my mind sought analogies. It’s something I do as a camera—it gives people something to quote over breakfast. This time nothing would come. She was simply herself, beyond all comparison, the metaphor for big.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
She swam closer and put her eye up to the side of the tank. “Are you the one?” said a voice through the speaker, startling me with its pure contralto. Female or not, I had expected a resonant bass.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The one…” Her eye closed, then opened. “The one with the world in her head?”
“Oh. You mean, because I’m a camera? Yes, I suppose I am.”
She swam back and forth in the tank several times, her broken fluke and flippers struggling. Then her moistware scraped the glass, and her eye stopped right in front of my face. “What time is it?” she asked, her voice betraying a hint of eagerness.
The question was so absurdly mundane that I was startled into answering. Uh, Keishi? Time?
No answer.
Mirabara!
Still nothing. She must be deep in trance, I thought, mixing the Netcast and keeping the audience at bay.
I touched the Net myself and said, “Almost five thirty.”
“How near is six o’clock?”
“Half an hour,” I said. Would she know how long that was? “Not long.”
The whale drifted away without further comment.
“Has it come to that?” I said, trying to entice her back. “Do even whales have schedules? Is there somewhere that you need to be?”
She rolled onto her side, revealing pale ventral grooves like the whorls of a thumbprint. “If you are the one,” she said, as though in sleep, “you are the why that I am here. Where you go…” She broke off and was still for long moments, considering. Then she approached the glass again. “In the sleeping is an ocean.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the sleeping,” she said, “I swim… where the tangle webs, and where the colors change….”
“I’m sorry, I don’t—oh. Of course.” I remembered the dark cloud that Voskresenye had been tethered to in grayspace. “You mean in the Net?”
“Yes, that,” she said. “What happens to a whale that swims in a tangle, if she is a very small whale?”
“I suppose she’d die.”
She slapped the glass with her flipper—hard, it looked like, though there was no sound. “If you are the one,” she said, “then where six o’clock is, I will—what you said.”
“Why?”
She closed her eyes and was silent a long time before answering. “I fell in the man the way a whale falls in a dream,” she said, “a dream where the water will not hold me up, and I am moving my fluke all the time, the way the sharks do that are not such small sharks…. I am in this dream of being a man because I wish to be a man, in order to… to make die….”
“Derzhavin,” I supplied.
“That. Yes. It is a dream come out of hating. I will swim in this small sea no farther.”