“You could have just told me.”
“I had no choice,” she said. “The locks were there, and Voskresenye was whispering in my ear in Sapir the whole time. I had to fight for every hint I gave you. Sometimes there were whole arguments in the space of a single word.”
“And the fake mindlink?”
“I didn’t hide a single thing from you. The locks were in the way, but I opened up. And the love you felt was real.”
“My God,” I said, “you even proposed to me, in the car on the way here, and you were lying all the time. Did you really think the Africans would take in a white girl who wanted to marry a ghost?”
She looked intently at the whale, as though afraid to meet my eyes. “Maya, it’s been twenty years,” she said. “You’re not the same person you were, and God knows I’m not. I don’t even know what I am anymore. I wanted to see if we could fall in love with each other again, without a lot of old memories telling you that you had to.”
“You knew full well I wasn’t capable of loving anything.”
“But you were. You did.” She reached out to take my hand, but her fingers passed through it. “Maya, they can only take away so much. They can’t change who you are, not completely. You did feel something. The suppressor muffled it, but it was there. This morning, over the vidphone—it was written all over your face.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose it must have been. And you looked into my face and saw it, and you told me to come to Arkhangelsk, so Voskresenye could rape my memories.”
“Maya, believe me,” she said fiercely, “that was never supposed to happen. I agreed to let him Netcast my memories, not yours. If I’d known he was going to do that to you, you’d still be in Leningrad.”
“Oh, but Mirabara, I had the deaths of hundreds,” Voskresenye said. “Seeing a woman killed for dissidence, from the viewpoint of one who loved her—I could not pass it by. Besides, the memories at the moment of desuppression are so much stronger—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said to her. “They’re not my memories or yours—if you are who you say you are. They’re ours. If he’d taken them from you, it would still have been my life.”
“I know,” she said. “I know. But what else could I do? It was the only way I could ever talk to you again. He still held the locks in his hands. Besides—Maya, his Netcast could change the lives of everyone in the Fusion. Compared to that…” She smiled uneasily and said in a flawless Bogart: “It doesn’t matter a hill of beans in this crazy world whether two people find love—”
“It does matter,” I said. “It matters a lot more than the ethical loop-the-loops you two have spent all this time figuring out.”
“Yes,” she said. “It matters, yes. But not more than anything. You and I are important, but some things are more important.”
I turned to the whale, who was drifting as if in sleep, and put my hand against the glass.” ‘Marriage is a thing in ending stories,’” I said. “You knew it all along.”
“Maya, there had to be a world for us to live in. You know what happened last time—how it wore us down, how we could only live by hiding. Well, we’re not going to be able to hide this time. Everyone knows us. If we’re going to live, they have to understand us, too.”
“And what happened to Africa, Keishi?” I said, my voice colder than the glass I touched. “What happened to climbing the Wall of Souls and marrying the foreign princess? Was that just your happily ever after, in the lie you used to get me here?”
“It was what I hoped for. What I still hope for. I want us to be together, because I love you.”
“Oh, sure, in a fairy tale.”
I tried to make my voice hard, to control my gestures—but I wavered. My hand, which had been pressed against the glass, came down in a loose shake of weary relinquishment. “No, that’s not fair,” I admitted. “You do love me. You just don’t mean by love what I mean by it.”
“What does it mean, then?” She stepped toward me, closing in. “I thought it meant caring for you. Staying with you—I’ve stood by you for thirty years. What else? Protecting you? I’ve done that, too. I’ve done it today. Remember?”
“Sure, I remember everything. The Postcops wore black; you wore blue.” The words were harsh, but I could hardly keep my voice from trembling. I remembered the joy I had felt when I first heard her voice on the radio, and let myself begin to hope that I might live. That hope was still in me—a black ember with a point of red-gold at its heart. She could fan it back to life, I knew. She could wear me down until I forgave her out of sheer fatigue. She had all the time there was, time ticked in silicon; and I was only flesh, and flesh was weak.
Then I flared up—not in joy, but in anger. “Wait,” I said. “The videophone—this morning—you only told me to come to Arkhangelsk early after you saw I wasn’t wearing the new chips. So I went, and the Postcops were waiting, and they took my old moist-ware away. After you’d spent the whole week trying to get me to replace it. You did it, didn’t you? You had to get the new chips in my head, so you could run the Netcast through me, and put in the countervirus. And when you couldn’t do it any other way, you had me arrested. That’s why you got so upset when you saw I wasn’t wearing the 6000s. And I thought it was because they were a gift, and you were in love.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “Yes, I tried every way I could think of to get you to put the 6000s in—”
“Including pretending to modify them. When they were already modified.”
“He’d modified them, yes. But I still had to fix them so you could take out your suppressor chip.”
“Which let Voskresenye steal my memories.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know that. And then this morning, when I’d tried everything I could think of, Voskresenye wanted me to reach into your mind and make you put the new chips in. But I wouldn’t—even though I knew it meant he’d have you captured. I knew I could rescue you. It was terrible, but I thought it would be better than changing your mind.”
“Besides,” I said, “you couldn’t pass up the chance to make a hero’s entrance.”
She stepped back, stung. “Maya, whatever I am, I’m not Edward Sinclair. If you think I am, you’re not getting good color fidelity on your morality chip.”
“Oh, what does it matter?” I said wearily. The ember was dead now; there was no reason to keep smothering it. There was no need to continue this, to tear open her wounds or mine. I didn’t want to hurt her. I just wanted this all to be over. I wanted to be alone, to be out of this place, and to rest.
“Well,” Voskresenye said with a sigh of amusement, “if you can grow another soul in twenty more years, Miss Mirabara, try again. She may have mellowed by that time.”
“Old man,” Keishi said with fervor, “if I could think of anything to do to you worse than what you’re doing to yourself—”
“Oh, Mirabara, enough blustering; you’ll miss all the fun.” He turned his wrist as if consulting an imaginary watch. “It’s six o’clock. Time for the show.”
“Keishi,” I said in sudden fear, “what happens to you when the whale dies?”
“What do you think? You know everything else.” Her swollen eyes looked up at me; relented. “I die, too.”
“Come, Andreyeva,” Voskresenye said, rising. “Put your moist-ware back in. You are too much of a camera, even now, to miss the death of the world’s last whale.”
He was walking toward the tank. I moved to block his path.
“Well, well. Riding to your lover’s rescue, despite it all?”