Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

“His-Majesty-in-Chains knows what he’s doing,” I said. “Why would he send you to fight the Weavers if they were going to beat you that easily?”

“Oh, Andreyeva,” Voskresenye said, “you do not understand His Majesty at all. He does a thousand things that do no good. His-Majesty does not care what is effective, only what is right.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe he saw all the way forward to this moment. Maybe all this was His-Majesty’s way of getting the job done despite the chains. Like some complicated bank shot, where the billiard balls fly far apart across the table and then meet again….”

“But with a different English,” I said.

Her face clouded; she seemed not to have heard me. “They did it on purpose,” she said. “I’m sure they did. They took me right in the street, in front of the apartment where we lived, so you would be there, and you’d see.”

“I did see,” I said. “I saw her die. How can you claim she didn’t?”

“Why are you doing this, Maya?” she asked softly. “Do you really think I’m lying? Or do you think you can make it all unreal, if you just ask the right question? Not even a camera can do that.”

But her pleading only hardened my resolve. Yes, I thought; I am a camera, and this is no different from grilling some corrupt political that the Weavers have thrown to the wolves.

“I assume,” I said, “that your changing the subject means you haven’t got an answer?”

“Oh, nice, nice. You’re right, I am beginning to understand this business.”

“If you can’t—”

“All right, all right.” She took a cleansing breath, pushed back her inorganic hair, and said: “The place I had carved in the whale’s mind was waiting. All I had to do was get there. That’s why I put the Net chip in my head when I did. You remember? I wasn’t trying to escape, just to delay them long enough that I could slip out. And I couldn’t leave all in one piece, because they’d be expecting that. My mind wasn’t the size of a whale yet, but it was the size of a house, anyway. You can’t hide something like that. It’s like trying to mislay Leningrad.”

Her eyes sought—what? An answering jest, a hint of recognition. I kept my face blank, and my mind too. After all, that was my job. Though of course, to do it right, I’d need my screener—

I turned away, my deadpan cracking. Her hand, I saw, had sunk into the samovar; if she’d been real, she would have broken it and been burned. I walked around to her side, and, regarding her profile, said:

“How do you claim you survived?”

“I did the unexpected,” she said, turning to face me. “I tore my mind into a thousand pieces, and scattered it to the winds.”

“And lived?” I said, circling around behind her.

“Yes. I’d been planning it a long time, preparing. I had set up a swarm of programs that would descend upon my mind, divide it, and carry it away in bits, each one too small to look like anything human. Each one would hide itself, and then, at an appointed time, they would converge upon the whale.”

“The soul can’t survive that kind of dissection,” I said. “You’d be desouled. You’d be an automaton.”

“For a little while, yes,” she said. “But once I got into the whale, the soul grew back. The soul will do that, once it’s sewn together— as long as it’s in the African Net, or in flesh.”

“And did all the birds come home to roost? Or are you missing parts? The part of you that loved me?”

“No, ” she said. “I made sure of that. I knew I might lose myself. So I built a puzzle-lock around my hiding place—something I’d need my whole self to solve. Before I got through that, I’d be able to protect you, but not speak to you. That way I could be sure that if I did come back, it would really be me. I didn’t want to be some soulless monster battering at your door.”

“And you think it’s better this way? You come to me now, when for twenty years I was there every day, on the streets, looking for you, not even knowing who it was I looked for—and even when I accuse you of being a Postcop, you won’t tell me who you are? And then you think, because you come to me in Weaver white, that after all this time we can pick up where we left off?”

I had stopped in front of her. She raised her hand, as if she wanted to touch my face, but my expression warned her away. “Maya, believe me,” she said, “I never wanted it this way. Do you think it was easy for me, all those years, knowing you were there, not being able to touch you? But understand this: I was with you all along. I couldn’t speak to you, but I was there, protecting you. That’s how you managed to stay on News One, when you were a felon with bad ratings. That’s why you only have a suppressor chip, and nothing worse—nothing irreversible. If it hadn’t been for me, they would have burned the memories from your mind forever, if not killed you. I was woven into your mind so deeply that in order to appear to you, I had to pull back, so that there was something to show you that wasn’t a part of yourself. I was most with you when you thought that you were most alone.”

“Is that what it comes down to?” I said, looking away from her. “All your speeches about cabling? ‘I’ll touch you so gently that you’ll never know I’m there?’”

“I couldn’t speak to you,” she said. “I’d made a mistake.”

“What?”

She lowered her voice and said, begrudging every syllable: “I underestimated Voskresenye.”

“Miss Mirabara, my blushes!”

“One more word—”

“Will one of you just tell me what the hell happened?”

“While the Weaver was being torn apart by Bacchae,” Voskresenye said, “I had a look at her puzzle-lock, and though I had no time to open it, I surrounded it with more locks of my own. Thereafter, what she wanted the most—to reach you, Maya Tatyanichna—could only happen at my sufferance. And the price I asked was modest; it was, in fact, something she’d wanted to do all along. To defeat the Weavers.”

“For three years we fought in the mind of the whale,” she said. “And in the end, we reached a stalemate. I had gained some power over him, yes. But in the end, his locks held. And we both realized that we had to find some compromise.”

“Which took seventeen years?”

“Time was important to me, ” she said. “To him it wasn’t—he was only too willing to wait. We had to lay the groundwork, build the back doors, put together the Netcast, design the viruses. But I could have done it in a third the time, if he hadn’t stalled me.”

“I knew,” he said, “that when I allowed her to make contact with you, my power over her would be at an end. I would then have no further chance to influence the series of events that we touched off. I would have been a fool not to take my time in making preparations.”

“It was you that finally made it happen, Maya,” she said. “When you got your series on the Calinshchina. He saw it as the perfect opportunity to get time on News One. And I… when you turned over that table, and said the word that would have called me when I was a Weaver, I knew you were crying out to me, whether you knew it or not. Deep inside, you still remembered, and you were saying, ‘Come to me—I’ve been alone too long, and I can’t do this anymore.’”

But looking back on what I’d done, I could find no trace of such a sentiment.

“So I went to News One,” she said, “and told them that I was a Weaver, and that I’d seen what you’d done. I told them you were suspected of dissidence, and they should give you the story, to help flush out your accomplices. And then two weeks later, when Voskresenye’s preparations had been made, I told them I wanted to replace your screener, and that once I’d found out what I needed to know, in all probability you would be executed. They were only too glad to oblige.