Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

I nodded. The novel seeped into my mind, like milk into a sponge. A man tattooed with frogs and labyrinths; a leg of polished whalebone; duodecimo, octavo, folio whales; a coffin bobbing among the waves; and in the blue distance a white mass rising, unknotting its suckered limbs, and sinking: unearthly, formless, chance-like mockery of life.

“Now that’s really something,” I said when it had finished. “Why couldn’t we read that in school, instead of watching all that television?”

“You liked it?”

“It beats hell out of The Brady Bunch. ”

“Well, I think it’s horrible,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “It makes whaling out to be some kind of heroic pursuit, when all it really was is genocide.”

“Sure, in hindsight,” I said. “But there were whales all over the place back then. They didn’t know they were going to run out.”

“It’s still disgusting. Look at that scene where they go all orgasmic over that spermaceti stuff. He makes it out to be a mystical experience, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world, and there they are running their hands through some gunk they dug out of an incredibly beautiful creature that they killed by ramming a harpoon into its eye and dragging it in—” She shuddered and drew her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around her knees.

“First of all,” I said, “I think you’re confusing a few different incidents. And secondly, when exactly did Pavel Voskresenye take over your mind?”

She stiffened. “If two people who hate each other as much as Voskresenye and I do can agree on something, you should consider the possibility that we might be right. Killing is killing; it’s sordid, bloody, stupid, and wasteful. There’s nothing noble about it. People will do what they’ll do, but we can at least call it what it is.”

“But to take on something a hundred times your size and bring it down by strength and cunning and sheer determination—I can’t think of anything more noble. Sure it’s brutal. Biology is always brutal. ‘Dinner’ is just a euphemism for destruction.” I waved my hand at the rubble of my meal. “You do remember eating, don’t you? That’s your problem, you know. Too much time out-of-body. You’ve forgotten the brutality of the flesh.”

“If keeping your mind in a piece of rotting meat makes you condone violence, that’s another point against it,” she said irritably. “If I could get African citizenship, I swear I’d take Translation and have done with the whole stinking mess.”

I sighed and said: “Dost thou think because thou art virtual there shall be no more flesh and blood?”

“Aha!” She put her feet back on the floor, noiselessly. “Now I have you! You can’t tell me you had Shakespeare ready to mind before you slotted up—certainly not in English. Without the moist-disk, you wouldn’t have been able to express the thought so elegantly. Without my Net link, I wouldn’t have known what you meant. The electronics improve understanding. They put us in sync. Even something as simple as a Preclassical Lit. chip.”

“Just more garbage encrusting the truth,” I said, but I didn’t take out the moistdisk.

“Words encrust,” she said earnestly, leaning forward. “Words and bodies. The truth is underneath, and cables can break through to it. Why do you deny that?”

“Because—” I said, and then stopped, feeling the futility of trying to explain.

“No answer?” she said. “I’ll tell you what I think it is. I think you’re afraid. You’re terrified of anything that might connect you to another person, and you fear cabling most of all because it’s the surest way to—”

“All right, then,” I said in exasperation. “There are so many reasons I hardly know where to start, but here’s one. You’re always talking about getting past people’s surfaces to what’s inside, and that’s what you call real. But you can’t just break through a person’s defenses like that; the defenses are part of the person, they are the person. It’s our nature to have hidden depths. It’s like—” my eyes searched the room for a metaphor “—like skinning a frog and saying, ‘Now I understand this frog, because I’ve seen what’s inside it.’ But when you skin it, it dies. You haven’t understood a frog, you’ve understood a corpse.”

“The cable doesn’t ‘skin’ anything. Besides, it doesn’t have to be one-way.”

“Oh yes, that’s even better. People swapping souls on the first date. Once you’ve done that, what the hell do you talk about for the rest of your life?” She tried to break in with an answer; I cut her off. “Nothing, that’s what. There’s nothing left to say. There’s no wonder, no unfolding, no chance to gradually grow into each other… I don’t know why I’m even trying to explain….”

“But, Maya,” she said, “you sound like a person who knows what she’s talking about. When, apart from the other day with me, have you cabled before?”

I looked down at the table. “I’ve been working with screeners a long time. You get a feel for what it’s like.”

“All the same—”

“And even if it were real,” I interrupted, “if you can achieve total intimacy with a piece of cable that costs fifty-nine kopeks, what good is it? How can you say that you have something special with a person, when you can get the same thing with anyone in Russia in fifteen minutes?”

“You can not. ” She had risen and was pacing around the room. “You can’t just cable with anyone. You can put in the plug, sure. But not everyone fits. Most of the time you can’t get in deep enough. And if you do, if you go ahead and force it, you just find out that on the inside, most people are stupid, mean, selfish, and boring. When you find someone that you can keep coming back to again and again, it does mean something. It is love—how can you say it’s not?”

“Oh, it’s love, I suppose. It’s love the way sugar is food: it’s got lots of calories, but no nutrition. You can’t live on it for long.”

She stopped pacing, but did not sit down. When she spoke again it was more slowly and more softly. “If you take flesh as your starting point,” she said, “you’re always going to find some way that silicon falls short. But there’s nothing special about flesh. Look, sex wasn’t invented by some loving God who wants us all to understand each other and be happy. It was made by nature, and nature doesn’t give a damn whether our hearts hook up or not, just as long as our gametes do. Why should evolution get to make all the decisions? Why can’t we use something that is designed to bring people together? If you turn the comparison around, and start with cabling, then love in the meat starts to look pretty shabby. Love happens in the mind, in the soul—what does the union of two sweating bodies have to do with that?”

“Love without touching—”

“I would touch your mind more gently than any hand,” she said, looking down at me. “More softly than—”

“That’s not what I mean by touch, and you know it,” I said. “You keep trying to change around the meanings of words. You’re using some new definition of love, too. I don’t think it’s in my dictionary.”

“No, nor in your encyclopedia, either,” she said, so gently that I couldn’t take offense. “It’s real, though. And it isn’t new. That’s one thing Derzhavin was right about, as twisted as he was. You think cabling is unnatural—that’s what your arguments all come down to. But it’s not. Not between people that really fit. Maya, do you have any idea how unlikely it is that two structures as complex as minds could be joined like that? It’s like picking up two stones at random and discovering that they fit together perfectly. It isn’t a coincidence. It can’t be. They fit together so easily—like reuniting something that should never have been broken, filling in some ancient wound….”