“Right. Okay. So His-Majesty is just, and people around the world are united by telepresence. So—”
“Ah, but not all people. Some are united, and some separated. We are pulled toward cameras, but away from people that we know in our own lives. Can you watch telepresence with your friend, your wife, your child? Not truly—you may be in the same room, but you are not together. Each is locked in his own dream, even if all are tuned to the same channel. Like movies during the binaural fad: a theater full of people wearing headphones, all hearing the same thing, but separately. And so telepresence causes the triumph of the distant over the near.”
“I seem to recall another medium that two people couldn’t use together. You could look over someone’s shoulder if you wanted, but no two people used it at the same rate or called up the same images. If I remember right, they were called newspapers.”
“Not the same thing at all, Maya Tatyanichna. Reading is a restricted and an artificial activity. It does not compete with reality because it is nothing like reality. No one could be tempted to think that what happens on the page is more real than daily life.”
I thought of the books in cages, and silently disagreed.
“But telepresence,” he continued, “is life, except in one respect: it adds a sixth sense, the telepathic, which exists nowhere else. When the telepresence is switched off, you are imprisoned again in your eyes and your ears; the intimacy of mind touching mind is gone.
“We are like men forced to walk about in darkness,” he continued, “except in one chamber where our eyes are uncovered. If the color blue were not found in that chamber, we would never know that it existed; and if in the chamber all men were well-fed, we might forget that there is hunger in the world. The chamber would impress itself upon us so forcefully that nothing else seemed real. And so it is. Telepresence is a chamber in which a new sense, more important than sight, is uncovered. What happens outside that chamber barely exists. And so you see, if what we call reality is to persist, everything must be brought into that chamber.”
“That’s what you’re leading up to? A praise of cabling?” I subvoked to Keishi: I went through all this shit for a cabling commercial I could have downloaded in Leningrad?
“Cabling is, and will always be, a marginal solution,” he said. “The common man will not expose himself that way, nor will he bother with amateur emotions, when he has six thousand channels of slickly post-produced ones at his beck and call. You know as well as I do that the cable results in hate more often than not.”
“And that’s not a sin of locality?”
“It is a sin of nonlocality; it is the agony of solitary animals at being caged together.”
“What?”
“The mind, Andreyeva. It pulls away from other minds that are too near. This is not the same as acting blindly because it knows no other creature than itself; it is the opposite.”
“Look, I don’t think the audience is quite getting this,” I said— and hoped Keishi would screen out the lie; I had not felt incomprehension, or anything else, from the audience in some time. “Give us an example. Let’s go back to where we started: the Calinshchina. Isn’t that distant enough to seem real? It’s in the chamber—it comes in through a socket.”
“But there is no telepresence of it. Telepresence of people talking about it, to be sure, but that is not the same. After all, watching a camera interview someone is no better than talking to her yourself; talk is talk, whatever door it comes in. Bringing a radio into the chamber does not help you see what is outside.”
“You were in a Square Mile,” I said. “If you think telepresence from survivors is so important, why haven’t you volunteered yourself?”
“If it were only a question of volunteering, there would be thousands of hours of disk; there were enough survivors to produce it. Instead there are no disks at all. Is that not suggestive?”
“Suggestive of what?”
“That the Weavers will not permit it to be transmitted.”
My spine stiffened. Oh God, Keishi, tell me you screened that out, I subvoked. She didn’t answer. I prayed it was only because she needed her full concentration to edit the Netcast.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said to Voskresenye, my voice betraying the fear I felt. “The Weavers wouldn’t do something like that, even if they wanted to. And they wouldn’t want to. They hate Guardians and Guardianism—everybody knows that.”
“They allow people to hate the Guardians a judicious amount. Just enough that no one will try to emulate them. Not enough that someone might begin to think the Army was justified.”
“We’re here to talk about the Guardians, not the Weavers. What you’re saying is completely off the subject.”
“But they are all one subject,” Voskresenye said. “I warned you what would happen if you persisted in pulling up tangler webs, Maya Tatyanichna. The Guardians brought about the Army, and the Army caused the Weavers; you will never understand them until you consider them together.”
“The Weavers,” I said desperately, “protect us from something like the Army happening again. Do you want a Net full of mind control viruses?”
“Assuredly not,” he said. “But that is exactly what the Weavers have given us.”
Mirabara, cut this off, now! I subvoked.
No answer. But there was a quick pulse of fear from the audience—not in response to what he’d said; the timing wasn’t right. It happens sometimes with large audiences: random fluctuations in the viewers’ emotional states happen to coincide, are amplified, flow back and forth from camera to audience in waves. If the screener can’t take care of it, you’re supposed to take your camera chip out before someone gets hurt. I lifted my hand to my head.
But being on the Net was my lifeline. Keishi had said as much. And it had only been one pulse, not the harmonic oscillations that could rend a camera’s mind. It might still be all right. My hand wavered in the air, then fell.
“Oh yes,” Voskresenye continued, oblivious, “it is very easy to understand Weavers. What would you do, if you had just lived through the Army? Wouldn’t you tremble in fear that it might return—it, or something far worse than it? For be assured, Maya Tatyanichna, nothing so innocuous as the Army could prevail today. The Army’s use of human minds was about as efficient as using a Dahlak to crack walnuts; with a billion neurons at its disposal, it carved out as many as are in the brain of a rather bright ant. A modern virus, better written and more catholic in its tastes, might subvert the entire soul—and from such a state, there can be no salvation.
“Thinking such thoughts, would you not do anything it took to prevent the spread of viruses? And how can you protect the Net, without monitoring everything that goes on in it? So you create screeners to monitor cameras. And filters to monitor screeners. And Weavers to monitor filters. And locks and signatures and needle-eyes and firewalls, to keep the whole system in place. Soon you have built a celestial bureaucracy of humans and machines and cyborgs, like orders of angels.”