Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

“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.”

“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: