“All of which,” I said, “is very necessary.”
“I did not say that it was not. Many things are necessary, and yet evil, or inevitably lead to evil. I understand the temptation of Weavers; it is one beside which any apple pales. Imagine that the Net, the very world-mind, is stretched out between your hands, like a cat’s cradle. You can see every twist and tangle, every unaesthetic knot that leads to suffering. Will you stand there, and watch, and do nothing? His-Majesty-in-Chains does; but then His-Majesty is not a man, though he has a man in his heart, as you might have a seed in your stomach, or as a church might have a corpse in its foundation, or a bridge be built on bones. The Weavers are human—all too human—and they will never put themselves in chains. And so they do what you would do, what any of us would do. They move their fingers—” he mimed making a cat’s cradle “—they move their fingers, and the patterns change.”
“Everyone knows that Weavers keep things off the Net that would make people go into overload,” I said.
“Oh yes, and perhaps for a brief time they did nothing more. But observe how easy a descent it is, Maya Tatyanichna. First, viruses that control minds; certainly we don’t want those. Then, feelings so intense they might cause damage to the audience. Then, things which simply disturb people. Finally, anything which might be a bad influence—for after all, if you control the world-soul, anything that you exclude does not exist. And so the sentinel of viruses comes to control the postproduction of the human heart.” He folded his hands into a spire, and slowly brought them to his chest. “And that is where we come to your case, Maya Tatyanichna: you, and the young woman with whom you compromised yourself.”
“You son of a bitch, you just killed me.” I sprang out of my chair, and for a moment I felt I might actually hit him. “My God, you told the whole Net—”
“And what was the Net’s reaction, Maya Tatyanichna?”
I stopped short, relief flooding my body. The Net had been silent. Oh, Keishi, you just made the save of the century. When we get out of this—
“You may as well turn off that damned flashcube, Maya Tatyanichna; no one is watching. When you turned over your signal to the whale, I took the liberty of not returning it. What is going out on News One comes from me.”
Sorrow seized my throat, and my tear glands fired so suddenly it made my whole face ache. The world in my head had been plunged into grief, like a hand plunged into boiling water. Then, just as quickly, they were calm again.
“What are you doing to them?”
“Oh, nothing of consequence. Only giving them their souls back.” He looked at the chair significantly, but I remained standing. “Turn the camera back on and go to disk, if you please. This needs to be told, and I don’t want to have to trust your memory.”
Warily, I sat down across from him and lit my rune. All right, Keishi, let’s give this bastard his last words. Go to disk.
Keishi did not reply.
“What have you done with my screener?” I said.
“She has not been harmed… by me. You will see her later, I expect. Now go to disk; I have a statement.”
“Why should I cooperate with you?”
He raised his eyebrows in exasperation. “For truth, justice, and the future of humanity. And because it will prove you were just an unwitting dupe, when you toss my carcass to the Weavers.”
So it would. I set the camera chip to record onto the moistdisk, overwriting the research on whales. Whoever viewed the disk might find Voskresenye’s words surrounded by a cloud of strange cetacean associations, but then, that was only appropriate. “All right. Now I’d like an explanation for what you’ve done.”
“As I said before, your own example is most illustrative—”
I switched off my Net-rune. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? One more word about me, and this disk goes in the samovar.”
He stared at me, as if gauging my resolve. “Very well,” he said at last, inclining his head.
Warily, I turned the rune back on.
“As I said before, the Weavers have progressed through all possible stages of censorship, including many which would once have been unthinkable—such as the suppressor chip, the censorer of souls.”
His eyes strayed to my forehead; I kept my mind carefully blank.
“Do you have any idea how much different things are in Africa, where the Net is free?” he continued. “They’ve changed so much, it’s like another world. But here, here in the Fusion, things are much the same as they were fifty years ago. The Net should be the most democratic form of communication that the world has ever known. It should replace the poor bumblings of human compassion with perfect electronic sympathy—instant, universal understanding, available to everyone. It might have brought about a true and lasting peace. But instead, it is being used to enforce an official vision of humanity.”
Regretfully, I passed up the aside on peace—too easy a target— and homed in on the essential. “There are a lot of different people on the Net,” I said. “Who’s missing?”
“Animals,” he said.
“What?”
“Animals. Think about it. We have the means to span the greatest gap there is, not just between one human and another, but between us and other forms of life. We could reproduce, in the human mind, the circuits that enable dolphins to use sonar, or pigeons to come home. We could know what it is like to be a bat, a whale, a sparrow—but only a few clever hackers do so, and only until they are caught by the Weavers. That alone should raise grave questions in your mind.”
“So,” I said dryly, “aside from our furred and feathered friends, who exactly is it that’s, ah, underrepresented?”
“Drunks,” he said, as if at random. “Addicts, wireheads. The desperate and the dissipate. Or for that matter, Christians, Muslims—we can’t have people going about believing in Hell; it causes ever so much anguish. And just try to find a homosexual. You’ll search in vain for years.”
Still keeping my mind blank, I let my eyes stray to the samovar.
“I must confess,” he said, ignoring me, “it is a most delicious irony. Christians and homoamorists, those age-old enemies, living in peace at last—not because they have at last resolved their ancient quarrel, but because they no longer remember the grounds of it: lost souls, united in the brotherhood of amnesia. The lion shall lie down with the lamb, because we’ve told them they’re both rabbits.”
I thought back to the last thing that did not apply to me, and answered that. “You gave me a list of people that are never seen on the Net. What if I tell you that I’ve seen all of them? News One cameras have interviewed wireheads, for example. More than once. I think you’ve been watching the wrong channels.”
“Oh yes,” he said bitterly, “the exhibition interview. Here they are, the ones you never see—talk to them, look at them, pinch them!”
“I don’t see the problem.”
He exploded: “Don’t you see, it does not matter if we look at them! We must look in them! The Fusion will never be free until the cameras become dissidents or the dissidents become cameras. It is not enough to send out cameras to see and hear them; sight and sound are dying media—dying, if not dead already. We must feel them. We must know their thoughts. Who is missing, you ask me? All of us are missing. Everyone but a few thousand cameras—”
“Tens of thousands.”
“What difference does it make? They’re all the same. It’s the same viewpoint you see, every time, whether it’s a soap-channel camera whose brain-makeup paints her as the banal parody of a ravished bride, or a News One camera interviewing a crazy old man with a whale in his basement. They are all clones of each other.”