Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

She sat down on the sofa beside me, and looked down at my hand. Her fingers brushed my palm, then stroked the socket at the throat of my wrist. “The mind has doors,” she whispered, “even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.”

“What would you know about hunger, you ghost?” I said. “You’ve forgotten you have a body—you just said you wish you didn’t have. Is there hunger on the Net now? No, don’t you dare call that hunger. Hunger is something that can be sated. But you can touch a hundred minds a night and never be filled—or fulfilled. That’s not a desire, that’s an algorithm.”

She slowly leaned over me, as though to rest her head against my shoulder. “I’ve been in thousands of minds, yes, Maya,” she whispered. “I fell in love with one. ”

I kept perfectly still and said flatly: “What else is there on whales?”

She got up, bent over the videophone, and stood there staring at the blank screen. I could not bring myself to look at the reflection of her face. When she had been silent so long that I was sure she wouldn’t answer me, she said, “… There are songs.”

“Right,” I said briskly. “Traditional songs about whales—”

“No,” she said, “I mean the whales, they sing.”

“That’s not in Moby-Dick. ”

“Well, they weren’t listening, were they?” she snapped. “If you up and chucked a spear at every human you saw, you wouldn’t know we could talk, either.”

“You mean their songs were a language?” I said, amazed.

She thought for a moment and then said, with more composure, “They’re a little repetitive for a language. More like a bird’s song, except they go on for hours. People used to listen to them for relaxation.”

“Play me one.”

“All right,” she said at length. She went back to the armchair, sat, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “This might not be such a good—”

“Play it,” I said.

She nodded, slowly. Squeaks and echoes filled the air.

I winced. “A bird’s song played off-key by fingernails on a blackboard in a swimming pool! People listened to this? Voluntarily?”

Instead of answering she turned away, pressing her face into the back of the chair. I could see by the spasms in her shoulders that she was crying, though her hands concealed the tears. I felt shamed by the unfeignedness of her grief, where I myself could muster little feeling for a race of creatures that had died out before I was born.

“Keishi, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s not the song,” she sobbed.

“Oh. No. No, of course it’s not.”

I tried to touch her hair to comfort her, but my hand passed through the strands without disturbing them. I thought of embracing her, but that too was impossible. I settled for sitting on the floor next to her chair, leaning my head against the armrest. Her face was turned away; all I could see was a crescent of cheek and temple, notched by the eye-socket, trembling and bright with tears.

“Keishi, I owe you an apology. Several, in fact. I know I’m not an easy person to work with—” she sobbed aloud “—all right, I’m a pain in the ass. I know that. What I’m trying to say is that this is the story of a lifetime, and I would have thrown it away if it weren’t for you. And I’ve treated you like dirt for your trouble. I don’t know why you’ve put up with me this long. But I hope you’ll give me another chance…. Keishi, I don’t care whether Anton comes back or not. I want you to be my screener for as long as we can trick News One into keeping us together. And for as long as you’ll have me.”

She wiped away tears with her hand, still averting her eyes. “That’s not the kind of partnership I want with you.”

“Oh, Keishi, please, any time but now—”

“I have to. Maya, I love you. And if we can’t come to terms with that, then I’d better just go, because it’s only going to get more painful. Maya, I know you don’t love me now. I know it’s hard for you to even think about it. All I can ask is that you try to remember… if the encyclopedia were out, do you think you could love me?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That part of my life is over.”

She looked up at me as I stood. “You don’t know, do you?”

“No,” I said, starting to clear away the take-out boxes in order to hide the shame in my eyes. “I don’t know.”

I carried the boxes into the kitchen and threw away the empty ones. As I was making room in the refrigerator for the leftovers, she came in behind me, so quietly I didn’t know she was there until she spoke.

“I want to give you something,” she said, “but I’m afraid to. The last time I gave you a gift, it didn’t turn out very well.”

I smiled down at the sink as I rinsed my hands. “I promise not to throw this one at you. But you don’t need to give me anything. I owe you enough already.” I turned to her, drying my hands on a dish towel. “What is it?”

“Freedom.” She leaned against the doorframe, as if to block my exit from the room. “When you were interviewing Voskresenye, and I touched your mind, I found out why you didn’t want me to help you with your encyclopedia before. I didn’t mean to peek, but it was right there. You’re afraid that if I did, and then something happened to me, or I fell in love with someone else, or we just wound up hating each other, you’d be out in the cold. There’d be no one to protect you, and the first Weaver to happen by…”

“Oh, Keishi, I didn’t mean it that way.”

“No, please don’t apologize, it’s all right. I understand. I wouldn’t want you to stay with me out of fear. What I want to do is modify your camera software to screen out… well, everything your encyclopedia suppresses. The thoughts will come back, but they won’t ever escape to the Net, or even to your screener, if that’s anyone but me. The Weavers will never know about them. You can leave the suppressor chip in, so the Postcops won’t suspect; even if they examine it, it won’t have been altered. But when you say so, it will stop working.”

“Wouldn’t the Weavers be able to see the modification?”

“Why? Anything that doesn’t make it to the Net won’t set off their detectors. Other than that… in ten years the Postcops might have come far enough to figure it out, if they knew what to look for, and if you never got an upgrade. But ten years is a long time.” She brushed the salty deposit of tears from her cheekbone. “You could say no, and live to be a hundred. Or you could die tomorrow, for all you know.”

“Especially if the Postcops figure out the man with the whale is Voskresenye.”

“He and I fooled them once; we can do it again,” she said reassuringly. “But Maya, you could be run over by a bus next Thursday and never know what they took from you. If you take it back, you’ll have at least ten years. Probably more. They may never find out. I don’t want to tell you what to do; it has to be your choice. But if it were me, well…” She smiled and lapsed into KRIOL, her tongue clicking softly in the hidden spaces of her mouth: “!Gather(rosebuds) while.do(may)….”

My spine burst into shivers. I could not explain why a few words of KRIOL should have such an effect on me. Nevertheless they did. I had to turn away, pretending sudden interest in the moonlit trees outside the window, in order to hide the feelings that I knew my face betrayed.

She went on, half-heard: “I want you to know that if you say yes and you find out you don’t love me, that’s all right. That’s not why I’m doing it… well, not the only reason. You deserve to be free whether you love me or not.”

“Do it.” The words seemed to come directly from the tingling of my spine, bypassing my better judgment. Yet once they were said, I did not want to take them back.