Benedetta kicked out her slender legs on the woven lounger and turned to Maya. “He sent Yvonne so many poems, you see,” she said helpfully. “I just had to cry when I read them. I can’t believe that Danish poetry can make me cry.”
“Really, Benedetta, you don’t have to explain it to me. It’s my own fault for losing my nice shiny back-combed translator.”
“I like to explain things to you, Maya. I want you to understand.”
“I understand too much too well already.” She thought about it. “Benedetta, there is one thing I truly don’t understand. Why doesn’t Paul have a lover? I never see Paul with anyone.”
“Maybe he’s too considerate,” Benedetta said.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Are you telling me you don’t already know all about it?” She smiled. “Is this Benedetta I’m talking to?”
“It’s not that we didn’t try,” Benedetta said. “Of course we all tried to make time with Paul. Who wouldn’t want to be Mrs. Ideologue? Who wouldn’t want to be the genius’s favorite girl? Right? Completely lost in his heroic shadow. I want to pick up Paul’s dirty socks. I want to sew on his little buttons. That’s the life for me. Isn’t it? I want to gaze in silent adoration at darling Paul while he talks theory to my colleagues for fourteen hours straight. I want them to look at me and see that I have his heart in my little clutch bag. So that they can all die inside.”
“Are you serious, Benedetta? Oh, you are. You’re serious. Oh, darling, that’s too bad.”
“Did you ever have a really good talk with Paul? I have. Despite everything.”
“Yes, I have,” Maya said. “He once patted me on the hand.”
“I think it’s the cop. That’s my working hypothesis. The Widow’s our real rival. It’s his crush. A terrible crush. Isn’t that the proper word in English, ‘crush’? Anyway, it’s Helene. He wants Helene. He loves to feast with panthers.”
“Oh, no. That can’t be true.”
“He respects Helene. He takes her very seriously. He talks to her, even when he doesn’t have to talk to her. He wants something from Helene. He wants her validation, isn’t that the word? He wants to conquer the Widow, like climbing the Matterhorn. He needs to make her believe in him.”
“Oh, poor Paul, poor Benedetta. Poor everybody.”
“What does this matter to me?” said Benedetta, all lighthearted bitterness. “I’ll live for a thousand years. If I had Paul even for a hundred years, it would only be an episode. If I had Paul now, what would I do with Paul later, when things become interesting? As for the Widow, he can forget all about that. Helene is a creature of habit. She’ll never love any man who will outlive her.”
“Oh. Well, that explains a lot. I guess.”
“See, Maya? You’re not human. We’re not human. But we can understand. We’re artifice people. We always know it, before we can speak it aloud. We always understand much better than we think.”
A gong rang. It was Marcel. He shouted something in Français, and then in Deutsch, and then in English. The time had come for the immersion.
“I’m not going in,” Maya said.
“You should swim with us, Maya. It’s good for you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“This isn’t serious virtuality. It’s not holy fire. The immersion pool is only a rich man’s toy. But it’s pretty. And technically sweet.”
Shimmering liquid gushed as the others whooped and dived in. No one surfaced.
Benedetta wrapped her lustrous hair in a Psyche knot and pinned it. “I’m going in. I think I’ll have sex today.”
“Who with, for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, if I can’t find someone willing to bother, maybe I’ll try by myself.” She smiled, ran, and dived headlong. White bubbles rose, and she was gone.
Paul patrolled the edge of the pool. Gazing in. Smiling. The picture of satisfaction.
“That’s everyone but you and me,” he called out.
She waved. “Don’t mind me, you go ahead.”
He shook his head. He drew near, walking slowly, barefooted. “I can’t leave you sitting here looking so sad.”
“Paul, why don’t you go?”
“You’ve been talking politics with Benedetta,” Paul concluded analytically. “We didn’t take these risks, and make this effort, just to add to our own unhappiness. That would only represent a moral defeat for us. We must have a good time with our youth, or there’s so little point in being young. So you see, you simply must come in with us.”
“Things like this frighten me.”
“Then I’ll teach you about it,” said Paul, perching cautiously on the foot of her lounge chair. “Think of the virtuality pool as a kind of crème de menthe. All right? On the top layer is a breathable silicone fluid. We’ve put a trace of anandamine in it, just for fun. On the bottom is a malleable liquid. It’s something like the fusible liquids that our friend Eugene uses to cast sculpture. But it’s much more advanced and much more friendly, so we can swim inside it. It’s a buoyant, tactile, breathable, immersible virtuality.”
Maya said nothing. She tried to look very attentive.
“The best part is the platform. The platform is a fluidic computer. It uses liquid moving through tiny locks and channels to form its logic gates. You see? We dive into the pool and we can actually breathe the very stuff of computation! And the computer instantiates itself as it runs. Soft liquid for software, hardened liquid for hardware. It abolishes certain crucial category distinctions. It’s a deeply poetic scheme. Also, it’s the sort of thing that makes gerontocrats have fits.” Paul laughed cheerfully.
“All right, I understand it now. It’s enormously clever, isn’t it? Now please go on in.”
He looked at her seriously, for the first time. He seemed to gaze completely through her head.
“Are you angry with me, Maya?”
“No.”
“Have I done something to hurt or offend you? Please be honest.”
“No, I’m not hurting, honestly.”
“Then please don’t refuse me when I ask you to share this experience with us. We’ll walk into the shallow end together. Very gently. I’ll stay very close. All right?”
She sighed. “All right.”
He led her by the hand like a man escorting a duchess to a quadrille. The fluid swarmed with millions of prismatic flakes. Little floating sensors, maybe. Sensors small enough to breathe. The fluid was at blood heat. They waded in. Their legs seemed to dissolve.
Inhaling it was far easier than she had ever imagined. A mouthful of it dissolved on her tongue like sorbet, and when the fluid touched her lungs they reacted with startled pleasure, like sore feet suddenly massaged. Even her eyeballs loved it. The fluid closed over her head. Visibility was very short, no farther than her fingertips. Paul held her hand. Patches of him emerged from the glittering murk: hands, elbows, a flash of naked hip.