“So you’ve never had sex with a Gzilt woman?”
“Ah. I didn’t say that.”
“So you have?” Cossont, lying on the bed, plumped up her pillow and made herself comfortable, staring at the screen. Maybe she should have put his face on the screen. Would he be blushing now? Did mind-states inside devices like this blush? Did QiRia blush? Had he? She couldn’t remember.
“Technically, yes,” the voice from the cube said, sounding unconcerned. “It was, again technically, unsatisfactory for both parties. The seemingly superficial physical differences become more… pronounced when one gets down to it, as it were. Sometimes, however, one indulges in that sort of behaviour as a sort of extension of friendship. Not with everyone; not all need such an expression. Most of the people I find interesting, and in that sense attractive, live more in the mind than in the body. Still, some seem to require such… confirmation. My impression has always been that the commitment to the act, its symbolism, is more important than the act itself, which, in its commission — or at least in the reflection upon it — tends to emphasise the differences between those involved rather than their similarities. I have done the same sort of thing with males of my own species type, despite not having sexual feelings specifically for them. Sometimes it feels only polite.”
Cossont lay on her back, looked up at the cabin ceiling, both hands clasped behind her head. “Anybody I’d know?”
“Who? My sexual partners amongst the Gzilt?”
“Yes.”
“No. Nor heard of. And besides, they’re all long dead. As of now, I believe all my ex-lovers, of all species, are dead. One or two might be in Storage.”
“That sounds so sad.”
“Well it isn’t. Feel free to feel sorry for me if you wish, for your own sentimental satisfaction, but not on my account. I have lived ten thousand years; I’m used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying… one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually. Happily one retains the emotions that let one draw delight from life’s enduring basics, like love, friendship, sex, sheer sensory pleasure, discovery, understanding and erudition. Even when one knows that in the end it’s all… contingent.”
“Really thought you were going to say ‘meaningless’, there.”
“No. All things have meaning. Haven’t we already been through this?”
“It’s just that meaning doesn’t mean what we think it means.”
“Even your attempts at triteness cannot entirely hide the grain of truth in that particular assertion. We are all prone, in our ways. My own comforter at the moment, and perhaps for the next few centuries, appears to be homing in on the serenity offered by immersing oneself in an environment of all-pervading sound… for some reason. I really only meant to spend a year or so with the leviathids on Perytch IV, but then felt very… at home in that sonic environment; very content.” The voice from the cube paused. “In the end it palled… but only relatively, and still it left its own… echo. An echo of desire, of need.” Another pause. “I — the real me — may pursue that interest. For a time.”
Cossont was silent for a while.
“You really are old, aren’t you?” she said eventually.
“What makes you think that?”
“A young — younger — guy would have asked whether I ever felt attracted to you.”
“No; a less secure, less self-sufficient, less sure-of-himself person might have.”
She gave it a moment, then said, “So, what do you think?”
“About your feelings for me?”
“Yes.”
“As a person I’m sure you found me profoundly interesting though not actually attractive. As a potential sexual partner, I would prefer to hope the very thought would have been at least slightly unpleasant. Don’t feel you have to confirm or deny any of that. What other questions arising might you have?”
“How have you kept going, all this time?”
“Fortitude.”
“Seriously. If I’m to take you seriously, your claims seriously: how? Wouldn’t you want to kill yourself eventually, at some point, just at some really low point that you’d never have got to if you only lived for a century, like they did in the old days, or a few centuries, or whatever? Wouldn’t that happen?”
“Well, not to me, obviously.”
“But that’s what I’m asking. Why? Why not? How come?”
“I told you before: I take a perverse delight in watching species fuck up.”
“I remember. I’ve thought about that. I don’t believe that can be all there is. There must be something else.”
“Maybe I had something to live for.”
“Okay. But what?”
“Or, maybe I had something to not die for.”
“Hmm. Aren’t they…?”
“They are not quite the same thing. You may have to think about it. Anyway, my precise motivations needn’t concern you. That I am as old as I’ve claimed, that you believe me; that does concern me. Not a great deal, but I would like to think you do believe me.”
“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t,” she confessed. “When I talk to you I do.”
“That will suffice. Anything else I can help you with?”
She smiled, though he couldn’t see. “So, do we get more secure as we get older?”
“Some do. I have. Though I have also detected a sort of long-term tidal action in that and a lot of other emotional states. For real-time centuries I will feel, say, gradually more secure in myself, then for the next few centuries I’ll feel less certain. Or over time I’ll go from thinking I know pretty much everything to realising I know next to nothing, then back again, and so on and so on. Overall, it approximates to a sort of steady state, I suppose, and I am by now quite entirely used to such periodicity and allow for it. Similarly, I seem to oscillate between times of feeling that nothing matters, when I tend to act riskily, foolishly — often on a whim — and intervening periods when I feel that everything matters, and I become cautious, risk-averse, fearful and paranoid. The former attitude believes in a sort of benign fate, thinking I am just somehow destined to live for ever, while the latter believes in statistics, and a cold, uncaring cosmos, and cannot quite believe that I have lived as long as I have while ever thinking that life is just a hoot, and taking risks and behaving rashly is worth it just for the fun of tweaking the nose of the universe. The former state has a sort of cheery contempt for its opposite, while the latter is simply terrified of its obverse. Anyway, my point is: come back in a century or two and I might not seem so sure of myself.”
“In a century — in a few years — I’ll be with everybody else in the Sublime.”
“Best place for all of us. I’d go myself but longevity has become such a habit.”
“You don’t want to be offered the chance to go with us, with the Gzilt?”
“You’d be my second choice, after the Culture itself, but no. Not really my choice to make anyway; my real self will take that decision and I’ll be looked out wherever I am and taken away too, if and when the time comes.”