At that moment gallows humor was not what I needed. Fear shifted in the coils of my intestines, like a restless snake. I would forget my lines. I would trip on a buried cobblestone and half the Russian Historical Nation would feel me break my nose. I fixed my eyes on the ground and began to hyperventilate, fighting for control.
And Keishi, knowing that anything she said would make it worse, did the only thing she could do to help. She plugged in her screening chip and patched into my mind.
There’s a sense of presence when the screener comes on line, a faint heat, a pullulation. Keishi’s feedback was clear and warm and reassuring, the strongest I’ve ever felt—as though someone had wrapped a blanket around my head. (“That’s me,” Keishi agreed. “An electric babushka.”) Maybe this would work out after all, I decided, knowing she heard the thought.
“Ten more seconds,” she warned me. “Five. Four. Three… and you’re live, girl.” I felt the “up” drug flood my visual cortex, making me strain my eyes to separate the river from the rolling hill behind it. Keishi fed the hours of interviews and research that Anton and I had done into my memory, so that the five-minute Netcast could imply a whole week’s work. And you came on line, a shadow audience that always stood behind me no matter how I turned my head.
“This is what’s left of Square-Mile-on-Chu,” I said aloud, panning slowly around from the river. You said it with me. In a single body, with the same volition, we strode forward up the hill. “Three crumbling chimneys and some scattered stones, half sunk into the ground.” I had reached the middle chimney now; I walked around it, running my hand over the cobblestones to transmit their tiled smoothnesses. “Typical Guardian construction: cobblestone instead of brick because of the thousands of hours of slave labor it took to gather the stones, carry them up here, and fit them together. The more labor-intensive, the greater the status.”
I panned around to view the river again, then carefully leaned against the chimney, feeling it cool and lumpy against my back. “It’s as idyllic a scene as you’ll find anywhere in Kazakhstan. You could spend hours in this place. Nature bounces back, you think, whatever humans do. The hills are leaved with grass, and laced with branches, growing the same as ever. The birds have long forgotten what happened here, if indeed they ever noticed, and are building their nests now. And the river flows on, just as it did when the word Guardian meant a good thing.”
I walked down the hill, slowly, letting the sun warm my back that the stones had made cold. It was an aggressively beautiful spring day, tyrannically perfect: the kind of day that spurs the suicide to action by its mocking contrast to her own despair. Lull them, Keishi, I subvocalized. Make them feel it.
“I’m lulling, I’m lulling,” was her reply, as laconic as the mood I wished to set and as the day itself.
Walking slowly in the mild breeze, I approached the lake, reached it, and did not stop. Without removing my shoes or rolling up my cuffs or bracing myself against the touch of the water, I walked off into the muck. Skirls of shock and disgust mingled with the cold—your shock. Feedback to the limbic system, say the manuals; what it means is that what you feel, I feel. And vice versa: I took the feeling and intensified it, hurling it back out at you.
“It is a beautiful day in Kazakhstan,” I said, “and you are calf-deep in the ash of human bodies.” A second long wave of mute horror as the ash and mud cemented in around my legs, entrapping them.
“The Unanimous Army came through here in the fall of 2246,” I said when the audience had quieted. Calling on my imagination chip, I drew a sound of marching out of the white noise of the river. Then I looked up at the shadowed hillside and began to sculpt its waving grasses into men. “Imagine a solid column of humanity, twenty abreast, and so long that if you wanted to cross their path you’d have to camp here until dawn tomorrow. They have no uniforms, but wear whatever they happened to have on when they were absorbed: overalls, cocktail dresses—some are naked beneath makeshift coats. But all have the same round black chip, the size of a ruble coin, in their left temples. From time to time a memory unit passes, like the nameless man we met last week—” and here Keishi lifted a curtain from the memory “—people whose minds the Army erased and filled with its data, so the memories of the others could remain inviolate. The memory units can no longer even walk, so they are carried along—but upright, to confuse snipers. At this distance they are lost in the crowd, and you will never know them.”
By now the Army was almost as clear as reality, thanks to the imagination chip in my right temporal socket. Keishi flashed the word “re-creation” at the bottom of my field of vision, so credulous channel-flippers wouldn’t call the station thinking that the Army had returned.
“The first quarter-mile of the Army consists of people who are weak or dying or otherwise of little use. Their only purpose is to walk blindly into everything and see if it will kill them. Now that they’ve marched through the Square Mile without harm, Sensors start to break away from the column: Eyes, Ears, Noses, Fingertips, each with its respective sense enhanced and all the others numbed. They swarm over the Square Mile in thousands, sniffing and prodding and tasting. They take nothing, but now and again they smear something with a fragrant paint they carry with them, or with urine or blood.
“When the Sensors return to the march, the column slows and spreads out to the width of the Square Mile. And when it has passed, hours later, everything in the camp—the barbed wire, the burnt wood, even the concrete from the foundations—is gone, digested into that great worm of meat that once was, and will soon again be, human.
“By November, every man, woman, and child over five in Kazakhstan had been taken up into the One Mind and was marching on Occupied Russia. And in 2248, when the Army software detected victory and suddenly erased itself from all its component minds, more than half the people in the world found themselves at least a thousand miles from home. It was a time of global confusion, during which millions starved or were murdered. Not many people were concerned with seeing to it that places like this were remembered.”
“But is that the whole explanation?” (Okay, let’s wind it up, I subvoked.) “Or is there a deeper reason? The Holocaust and Terror-Famine both haunted the consciences of generations, yet the Calinshchina is barely remembered—why? We’ll have some answers for you next week, in the third and last part of our series.”
And then it’s back to fads and scandals for the both of us, I subvoked to Keishi, who chuckled politely in reply. I closed my eyes, calling up my quite beautiful and utterly fictitious Net-portrait, and signed off: “Maya Tatyanichna Andreyeva. Of News One hearth, a Camera.”
No sooner had the audience fallen away than Keishi said: “I can’t believe you gave that whole speech standing in the water. I filtered out most of the cold and wetness, but even so, it wasn’t easy to keep their minds on history while water was seeping into their underwear.”
“If I’d walked out of the water and stood around dripping,” I said, sitting down on the grass to take off my shoes, “it would have been even more distracting.”
“You could have saved your swimming lesson for the very end,” she said. “You could—” but I had pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you’d find living under a rock. Vermin. I slipped it into a pocket and began to scrape the ash off of my shoes.