“Excuse me,” the bureaucrat said. “How do you know all this?”
“Didn’t you notice my earrings?” Marivaud brushed back a curtain of braids, exposing an ear all coral and cream. From it hung an amber leaf, silver-veined and delicate as a dragon’s wing. The image swelled so he could see the embedded elements of a television transceiver, signal processor, and neural feed. It was an elegantly simple arrangement that would let her effortlessly employ all electronic skills: She might talk with friends, receive entertainments, preserve a particularly beautiful sunrise, copy an Old Master drawing in her own hand, do research, take and teach educational courses, or transmit her dreams for machine analysis, at her whim. It made her brain a node within an invisible empire of interactivity, the perfect focus of a circle so infinitely large its center was everywhere, its circumference nowhere.
“Even the offworlders didn’t have these,” she said. “We were the first to combine everything into one continuous medium. It was like being in two worlds at once, like having a second, unseen life. This was when you offworlders were creating that awkward mnemonic palace of yours. Our method was superior. If it hadn’t been for the Atlantis incident, you would be a part of it now.”
“By God, you’re talking about the Trauma!” the bureaucrat cried in rising horror. “There was a ship involved — that must have been the Atlantisl Everyone on it was wired for continuous broadcast.”
“Do you want to listen to this story or narrate it yourself? Yes, of course the crew were all actors, improvisors — what do you call people who lead lives of shaped intensity in order to create public dramas?”
“I don’t think we have them anymore. What are they doing to the haunts?”
“Fitting them with broadcast chips, of course. What did you think this project was all about?”
“Why would you want to do such a thing?”
“That is exactly what I ask her myself!” Goguette said. “There are so many refined, educational, and enriching experiences available on the net. Why waste your life listening in on creatures little better than animals?”
“Ah, but such splendid animals!” Marivaud giggled. “But we are getting away from our story. You” — she addressed the bureaucrat directly — “can experience only the middle range of this. You miss the little things, the burn of rope in chafed hand, Ocean’s smell, the chill of a salt breeze across your arm. And the grand emotions you can only sense from the outside. There is no way we can share more than a fraction of this with you. So I will show you two minor players, a ghostnetter and a flash-surgeon. Their true names have been lost, so I will give the ghostnetter the offworld name of Underbill. The flash-surgeon I will name — Gogo, after my sister.”
Goguette punched her shoulder, she laughed, and they were gone. On deck, the flash-surgeon bolstered her gun. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, glanced up past the mast-high cranes to see Caliban high above, a disk of ice melting in blue sky. Then down again to see haunts’ heads appearing and disappearing above the water.
She strolled over to the nearest projector. “My God,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”
Underbill looked up from his screen, flashed a smile. “This is the last sounding. When they’re done, our job is over.” His hands were delicate on the controls. The projector swiveled slightly, and the ghost net swung an arc forward. “Watch that group out there.” Into a microphone he said, “Point one.”
Cut to the other projector. Its operator swiveled in the opposite direction. “Point one.”
Far away black dots appeared and disappeared in the water. The ghost net crept closer, its progress traceable by the hissing line of bubbles along its length. The sounding changed direction, angling away. “Clever little babies,” Underbill muttered. “Don’t you run away from me.”
The two lines of white bubbles were slowly converging now, like a giant pair of scissors closing. The haunts caught between the ghost nets fled toward open sea. A few broke away from the main pack and doubled back through the ghost net.
“Oh!” Gogo cried. “They’re getting away.”
That confident grin again. Underbill brushed back his hair. “No, those are ones we caught earlier, with your chips telling them they can go through.”
Gogo was bouncing up and down on her toes in excitement.
She looked very young, almost a child. “Oh! Are you sure? Yes, of course.”
“Relax. Even if we let a few get away — what would it hurt?”
“There are so few of them left,” Gogo said wistfully. “So very few. We should have chipped them while they were still ashore.”
Distractedly, staring down at his screens with perfect concentration, Underbill said, “It wasn’t possible to find them all while they were on land. They’re elusive, you know that.” Into the microphone he said, “Point three.”
“Point three.”
The lines of bubbles were closing. Gogo stared off at them. “Sometimes I wonder should we be doing this at all?”
He looked up at her with frank wonder. “Do you?”
“It hurts them!” Softly: “I hurt them.”
Underbill was perfectly intent on his screen. “It was not so long ago that the indigenes were almost extinct. It was all our own fault. Unwise policies, disease — people even hunted them in the early years. Do you know what put an end to all that?”
“What?”
“The first time an indigene was chipped into the net. The first time people could feel sensation with that purity and clean zest they feel. The first—”
“The first time people could run with them through the magical night, wind in hair, to hunt and mate,” Gogo breathed. She blushed prettily. “I know it’s kind of sick.”
“That’s what I say,” Goguette interpolated.
“Oh, poof!” Marivaud said. “If you’re not enjoying this, there are other shows for you to experience.”
“No, it’s not!” Underbill said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural, healthful thing to be interested in the physical side of love. It shows you have a lively interest in life. Point five,” he said, “and locking.”
“Point five and locking.”
A third ghostnetter snapped on his projector, and a new line of bubbles capped the other two. The pack of haunts wheeled in confusion. Slowly the last ghost net began to draw them in. The crane operator began moving her scoop into position. “Your turn soon.”
“I’ll be ready,” she said. Then, “You’re easy to talk to.”
“Thank you.” He studied her. “What’s really bothering you?”
Her fingers closed on the grip of her gun, opened again. “I’m afraid it won’t be so good. I mean, with them in winter morph.”
“You mean you haven’t tried them?”
“I was afraid.”
Underbill smiled. “Try.”
She hesitated, then nodded. The image switched to the haunts again, fleeing through bubbles, diving to catch a passing crustacean and crunch it in small sharp teeth. Even on the screen, limited to sight and sound, the joy the creatures felt simply swimming along was obvious.
“Oh,” she said. Her eyes widened. “Oh!”
Goguette was washing dishes. A door banged open, and Marivaud came in with raindrops on her cloak and an armful of fresh-cut flowers. “You have so little time,” she said to the bureaucrat as she began arranging them. “We’ll cut forward a few hours, to the jubilee.”
Ocean roared. Abandoning their posts, those of the crew who weren’t already at the rails ran to starboard and stared. It was an impossible sight: all the water in the world humping up, as if the planet had suddenly decided it needed a higher horizon. The Atlantis listed a degree in anticipation. The grandmother of all tidal waves, the polar tsunami, was passing beneath them. The ship shot upward, carried by the power of a continent of ice melting all at once.