Elanore sought him out that day. Gustav heard her footsteps on the stairs, and knew that she’d pretend to be puzzled as to why he wasn’t working in his studio.
“There you are,” she said, appearing a little breathless after her climb up the stairs. “I was thinking—”
Finally scratching the itch that he realized had been tickling him for some time, Gustav clicked his fingers. Elanore—and the whole room, the table, the flowers, the tapestries—flickered off.
He waited—several beats, he really didn’t know how long. The wind still blew in through the window. The powerfield hummed faintly, waiting for its next command. He clicked his fingers. Elanore and the room took shape again.
“I thought you’d probably override that,” he said. “I imagined you’d given yourself a higher priority than the furniture.”
“I could if I wished,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d need to do such a thing.”
“No. I mean, you can just go somewhere else, can’t you? Some other room in this house. Some other place. Some other continent…”
“I keep telling you. It isn’t like that.”
“I know. Consciousness is fragile.”
“And we’re really not that different, Gus. I’m made of random droplets held in a force field—but what are you? Think about it. You’re made of atoms, which are just quantum flickers in the foam of space, particles that aren’t even particles at all…”
Gustav stared at her. He was remembering—he couldn’t help it—that they’d made love the previous night. Just two different kinds of ghost; entwined, joining—he supposed that that was what she was saying. And what about my cock, Elanore, and all the stuff that gets emptied into you when we’re fucking? What the hell do you do with that?
“Look, Gus, this isn’t—”
“—And what do you dream at night, Elanore? What is it that you do when you pretend you’re sleeping?”
She waved her arms in a furious gesture that Gustav almost recognized from the Elanore of old. “What the hell do you think I do, Gus? I try to be human. You think it’s easy, do you, hanging on like this? You think I enjoy watching you flicker in and out?—which is basically what it’s like for me every time you step outside these fields? Sometimes I just wish I…”
Elanore trailed off there, glaring at him with emerald eyes. Go on, Gustav felt himself urging her. Say it, you phantom, shade, wraith, ghost. Say you wish you’d simply died. But instead, she made some internal command of her own, and blanked the room—and vanished.
It was the start of the end of their relationship.
Many guests came to visit their house in the weeks after that, and Elanore and Gustav kept themselves busy in the company of the dead and the living. All the old crowd, all the old jokes. Gustav generally drank too much, and made his presence unwelcome with the female ghosts as he decided that once he’d fucked the nano-droplets in one configuration, he might as well try fucking them in another. What the hell was it, Gus wondered, that made the living so reluctant to give up the dead, and the dead to give up the living?
In the few hours that they did spend together and alone at that time, Elanore and Gustav made detailed plans to travel. The idea was that they (meaning Elanore, with all the credit she was accumulating) would commission a ship, a sailing ship, traditional in every respect apart from the fact that the sails would be huge power receptors driven directly by the moon, and the spars would be the frame of a reality engine. Together, they would get away from all of this, and sail across the foreal oceans, perhaps even as far as Tahiti. Admittedly, Gustav was intrigued by the idea of returning to the painter who by now seemed to be the initial wellspring of his creativity. He was certainly in a suitably grumpy and isolationist mood to head off, as the poverty-stricken and desperate Gauguin had once done, in search of inspiration in the South Seas; and ultimately to his death from the prolonged effects of syphilis. But they never actually discussed what Tahiti would be like. Of course, there would be no tourists there now—only eccentrics bothered to travel foreal these days. Gustav liked to think, in fact, that there would be none of the tall ugly buildings and the huge Coca-Cola signs that he’d once seen in an old photograph of Tahiti’s main town of Papeete. There might—who knows?—not be any reality engines, even, squatting like spiders across the beaches and jungle. With the understandable way that the birthrate was now declining, there would be just a few natives left, living as they had once lived before Cook and Bligh and all the rest—even Gauguin with his art and his myths and his syphilis—had ruined it for them. That was how Gustav wanted to leave Tahiti.
Winter came to their clifftop house. The guests departed. The wind raised white crests across the ocean. Gustav developed a habit, which Elanore pretended not to notice, of turning the heating down; as if he needed chill and discomfort to make the place seem real. Tahiti, that ship of theirs, remained an impossibly long way off. There were no final showdowns—just this gradual drifting apart. Gustav gave up trying to make love to Elanore, just as he had given up trying to paint her. But they were friendly and cordial with each other. It seemed that neither of them wished to pollute the memory of something that had once been wonderful. Elanore was, Gustav knew, starting to become concerned about his failure to have his increasing signs of age treated, and his refusal to have a librarian; even his insistence on pursuing a career that seemed only to leave him depleted and damaged. But she never said anything.
They agreed to separate for a while. Elanore would head off to explore pure virtuality. Gustav would go back to foreal Paris and try to rediscover his art. And so, making promises they both knew they would never keep, Gustav and Elanore finally parted.
Gustav slid his unfinished Olympia back down amid the other canvases. He looked out of the window, and saw from the glow coming up through the gaps in the houses that the big reality engines were humming. The evening, or whatever other time and era it was, was in full swing.
A vague idea forming in his head, Gustav pulled on his coat and headed out from his tenement. As he walked down through the misty, smoggy streets, it almost began to feel like inspiration. Such was his absorption that he didn’t even bother to avoid the shining bubbles of the reality engines. Paris, at the end of the day, still being Paris, the realities he passed through mostly consisted of one or another sort of cafe, but they were set amid dazzling souks, dank medieval alleys, yellow and seemingly watery places where swam strange creatures that he couldn’t think to name. But his attention wasn’t on it anyway.
The Musee D’Orsay was still kept in reasonably immaculate condition beside the faintly luminous and milky Seine. Outside and in, it was well-lit, and a trembling barrier kept in the air that was necessary to preserve its contents until the time came when they were fashionable again. Inside, it even smelled like an art gallery, and Gustav’s footsteps echoed on the polished floors, and the robot janitors greeted him; in every way, and despite all the years since he’d last visited, the place was the same.
Gustav walked briskly past the statues and the bronze casts, past Ingres’ big, dead canvases of supposedly voluptuous nudes. Then Moreau, early Degas, Corot, Millet… Gustav did his best to ignore them all. For the fact was that Gustav hated art galleries—he was still, at least, a painter in that respect. Even in the years when he’d gone deliberately to such places, because he knew that they were good for his own development, he still liked to think of himself as a kind of burglar—get in, grab your ideas, get out again. Everything else, all the ahhs and the oohs, was for mere spectators.…