“But when the man sleeps… in the sleeping,” I said, picking up her catchphrase, “you aren’t here. You swim in the network. You’re free then.”
“The net… work is an admirable ocean.” The great eye closed again. “But it is not mine.” She began to drift away.
“Durachok,” I said. “Ivan Durachok.”
“What is that?”
“Ivan Durachok—he’s the hero in a story I remember from when I was a child. Why wasn’t that on the moistdisk, Mirabara?” No reply. “I don’t remember very well. Let’s see.
“Ivan Durachok is out riding his hunchbacked pony, and he comes to the ocean. And he meets a whale who’s crying out in pain. He looks up, to see why she’s crying, and he sees that some peasants have set up a village on the whale’s back. They’ve built their houses right into her bones, and are ploughing her back to plant crops.
“Ivan Durachok says to the whale, I will free you from this agony, if only you will dive down into the ocean, and find the ring. Because he’s looking for a ring, you see. There’s a king who wants to marry—some woman, I don’t know what she is, I think she’s some kind of foreign princess. And the princess says to the king, I will marry you, but only if you find my ancestral ring, which was lost far beneath the ocean. And the king sends Ivan Durachok to go find it.”
“Du-ra-chok,” the whale repeated.
“Yes. Ivan Durachok—Ivan the Idiot—that was his name, yes. And the whale agrees to find the ring. So Durachok shouts out to all the peasants, Get off! There’s going to be a great storm, and you’ll all be drowned. And they believe him, they all get off. Except, um, I think there’s one who refuses to go, who stays there, ploughing. But Ivan Durachok says to the whale, Go ahead, dive, find the ring. And the man who would not leave is drowned in the ocean.”
“Drowned,” the whale said emphatically. “In the ocean.”
“Yes. And the whale—stop that,” I said to the audience, brushing away tears. “I told you people to be calm. —The whale dives down. She finds the ring and brings it up. And she says to Ivan Durachok, The reason the city was built on my back, it was a punishment from God, because once, once long ago, I swallowed up a whole fleet of ships.”
“Small ships,” the whale said.
“Well. It’s just a fairy tale. Yes, all right, if you want, the ships were very small. They were only the size of a pomegranate seed, and that was how she swallowed them. And the whale departs, she’s whole again, and Durachok goes back to the kingdom with the ring. And he and the pony kill the king somehow—they convince him that if he jumps into boiling water his youth will be restored, and he does it and he dies. I never really understood that part. And Ivan Durachok and the princess are married. And I guess that’s the end of it.”
She floated motionless, making no reply.
“I didn’t tell that very well, I know. I don’t know why I even tried. I don’t suppose even a human would—”
“Marriage is a thing in ending stories,” she said suddenly.
“Yes,” I said, taken aback. “I suppose so. In fairy tales, sure.”
“Then,” she boomed out with an air of finality, “an ocean is in dreaming, and no city is only real.” And she swam up out of sight, leaving me to wonder whether we’d communicated anything at all.
Just when I was about to turn away, she sank into view and said, “What time is it?”
“Six is not far,” I said. “Six isn’t far at all.”
For once my feelings and the audience’s coincided. I pressed my face against the glass, glad of its coolness. “I will be sorry not to have known you,” I said.
She was silent. I thought she would say nothing more. Then the voice from the speaker returned, one last time. “Those who wake…” she began tentatively. She paused so long that I was not sure whether or not she was starting a new sentence. At last she said: “… do not regret the dream.”
Keishi? I subvoked. Can you patch in the telepresence from the whale?
There was no answer, but my Net-rune went dark.
And turn off the feedback for me, I said. Please? Keishi?
The next thing I remember, I was sitting on the floor, my arms wrapped around me, rocking back and forth and saying over and over, “Will you turn it off now. Will you turn it off.”
And no, I haven’t watched the disk. I haven’t and I’m not going to, and I really don’t want to talk about it. I just hoped that the last whale on earth might be something more important than a cheap thrill for every wirehead in Russia. I know—I should have known better. I’m not going to watch it, that’s all.
I felt my Net-rune light again, but decided not to stand up until the world in my head made me. And, strangely, the audience was quiet. Perhaps after the whale they needed some rest, I thought. I stayed sitting there, with my eyes closed, until I heard Voskresenye say:
“When we first met, you asked me why we don’t remember the Square Miles. Would you like to hear the answer?”
To my surprise, the audience did not protest against this change of subject. I stood up, as slowly as I could, and turned my eyes on him.
“You were on the right track,” he said, “when you compared the Calinshchina to the Holocaust, and to the Terror-Famine. Your error lay in asking what the difference was between these two events. There are many differences, but none is essential. You should have asked, not about the difference in events, but about the difference in ourselves.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, still standing.
“Why, that the Holocaust and Terror-Famine both occurred long before telepresence.”
“The invention of telepresence is an event, isn’t it? I thought this was a difference in us.”
“What is a medium like telepresence but the extension—no, the definition—of ourselves? Are we, who live things at a distance, the same species as our ancestors, who could hear of events in the next town only by going there? If you met a person from that time, would you have any more in common with him than with a whale, or with a chimpanzee? You have traveled to meet me with better than seven-league boots; and I have done more math this morning than Pythagoras, and Euclid, and all Ancient Greece and Rome. Surely, if we are human, they were animals; and we are a race of gods, if they were men.”
“Yes,” I said, and I sat down in the chair he had provided for me, putting my back, once again, to the whale. “I’ve felt that, too. That it changes what we are.”
“Indeed it does, Maya Tatyanichna. It changes the central fact of the human condition: that each of us lives behind one set of eyes, and not another; that our own pain is an agony, and another’s pain only an abstraction we believe in by an act of faith. It makes impossible all the sins of locality, all the errors that arise from being prisoned in one body and no other—as racism, sexism, classism, and of course and especially nationalism.”
“The Africans seem to manage,” I said.
“Come now, Andreyeva, don’t be so historically naive. The Africans are not, and never were, one people. They are fifty nations and a thousand tribes, and it is telepresence that has stitched them into one. His-Majesty-In-Chains has built a wall around his country, yes, but not to keep people out. It is to keep himself in. The Wall of Souls at Suez is the sword in Tristan’s bed: His-Majesty wants desperately to reach across, for he so loves the world that he would not part with a village of it. But he knows he would destroy the thing he touched. He remembers Egypt, and he knows.”
“And he turns away white immigrants because they don’t match the divan.”
“He does not tell us what his plans for us are,” Voskresenye said. “But I assure you that he does not turn us away out of callousness. His-Majesty cannot not empathize, but often, even so, he cannot help. Why do you think he names himself His-Majesty-in-Chains? Fools and children think it is because he is wired to the world’s pain, but that is a lash, not a shackle. The chains are what he locks around himself to keep him from doing more to ease that pain—knowing it would only be worse in the end if he did. But he is patient. The chains give him no choice but to be patient. And he knows that, in the fullness of time, superior technology will tell.”