“I changed my mind. I’m not done talking to her yet. Maybe I’m just not done yelling at her yet. Either way, you’re not doing anything.”
In reply he stripped off his gloves, revealing the frame of steel that moved his hands. It was hard, with sharp edges: a nice set of built-in brass knuckles. “Do you think,” he said, “that after all that I have done, I will scruple to hurt you?”
But I had not listened to all Voskresenye’s stories without learning something about him. He could get past me by knocking me out—as he could have saved Katya from killing her uncle by taking the bar himself. But he wouldn’t. Now, as then, he would only talk. He didn’t have it in him.
Or so I hoped. I grasped his wrists—
And they had less than human strength. The carapace looked strong, but it wasn’t. I could hold him easily.
He soon quit trying to break away—he was not a man to struggle against the inevitable—and said:
“You do have a certain flair for the dramatic, Maya Tatyanichna. Very well, then. It will make a better disk this way; there’s more to see….”
I was supporting his weight; he had gone limp. I put one arm around him and guided him back to his chair, not gently.
“Thank you,” he said. “I knew there was chivalry in you yet.”
“What have you done?”
“Look!”
The whale had turned onto her back and was struggling against the airhose that anchored her. On the third try it came free, taking some of the scar tissue with it. As she swam to the other end of the tank, a brown plume of blood trailed behind her.
“I have released her,” he said, his limbs still as death. “All these years I have held her back by force of will, every waking hour, and separated her from her body at night—all to prevent the sibyl from getting what she so desired.”
“This is her?” I asked. “You’re not doing it?”
“Certainly not.”
“Is there something you can do to make it easier?”
“You should have thought of that before,” he said. “But it will be, if not painless, at least quick. When she runs out of air, she will die. And then the nanotech I have implanted in her body will take over, and tear her DNA to atoms, so that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…” He smiled and did not complete the rhyme.
“How long can she hold her breath?”
“In her current state, not long. And I imagine she will try to tire herself out, to make it even quicker. Come, put in your camera chip, Andreyeva; the world is waiting.”
I stared at the chip in my hand for a moment, then slotted it in. The whale began to swim back and forth in the tank. With her damaged fluke she could not stop her motion, so with each lap around the tank she struck the glass, harder each time.
“Oh, my God,” I said, “it’s going to break!”
Voskresenye chuckled. “You have no drowning mark upon you; your complexion is perfect gallows. It will hold.”
The whale slammed into the back of the tank. A sepia-colored cloud of blood surrounded her. The audience was back, and screaming in my head.
“I’m not going to record this,” I said suddenly. “I’m not.” Quickly, before the audience could react, I pulled the camera chip out of my head, dropped it, and crushed it underfoot.
Twenty-one
SORROW’S SPRINGS
“You will let this be forgotten?” Voskresenye shouted as I walked away.
“It’s all right,” Keishi said to him. “I’ll put you on the Net. They won’t cut this off, no matter who it comes from.”
I walked out of the room and shut the door behind me.
“Well?” she said, appearing next to me. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye?”
I looked out at the rows of books in cages and said nothing.
“In that case… take me with you.”
I leaned my head back against the door and closed my eyes.
“Maya, I know what you must be feeling. But there’s no more time. When the whale dies, I die too—unless you help me.”
She waited for me to respond. I didn’t. At last she said: “I’m still a Weaver, Maya. Only a tiny part of me is any kind of flesh. But that part, the part that matters, is in danger. I will die with the whale, unless you let me live in you.”
Again she waited. I stood motionless, feeling the mechanized breath of the ceiling vent against my face.
“I’ll keep my memories on the Net,” she said. “Everything that’s data. I’ll just offload a little of your mind into the Net, and take that space. You’ll never feel anything missing. But we’ll be together. Always.”
Still I did not move. I felt that I would stand there forever if I had to, rather than speak to her—forever, or until the whale died. Surely that would not be long.
“I’m not talking about a fusion as extreme as Voskresenye and the whale. All it means is that I become a silent partner in your body. In the day, I’ll be with you; and at night, we can be together in the Net. Wherever you go, I’ll protect you. I’ll cut you a path through the Postcops, and keep the Weavers from your door.” Her hand must have been almost touching me; I could feel its virtual warmth against my face. “And I’ll bend every delivery boy in Russia to your whim, and show uppity rental cars the error of their ways….” Her hand touched my cheek, and began to sink into it.
“And will you hold me when I’m frightened,” I said, “Keishi Mirabara?”
For a moment I hated her for tearing the words out of me, for making me open myself up enough to push her away. Then I opened my eyes, and saw her standing before me, her face turned away as though slapped; and I began to feel a certain tenderness, though of a kind I knew I must resist.
“You know my name,” she said at last. “Why won’t you use it?”
“Answer the question,” I said. But that was just my camera’s instinct, working on autopilot. I didn’t want her to answer the question at all. The question was only an omen, like a whale’s fluke briefly rising to the surface of the water. I wanted her to answer the whale, and all the drowned and dying things beneath it, and the whole salt hidden sea.
“I didn’t ask to be this way,” she said. “If I had lost a limb, if I were paralyzed, would you turn me away for that?”
“I don’t know,” I said; and it would have been a truthful answer to any question that she could have asked.
“Maya, please. It’s the only chance I have left—the only chance we have left. Go back in. The camera chip may not be ruined, and even if it is, we can set up something else.”
“If I did go back,” I said, “you’d still be there, wouldn’t you? Helping Voskresenye get out to the Net. Turning the death of the last whale in the world into something you can buy shrink-wrapped off a spinner at the grocery.”
“Yes,” she said. “And I don’t like it any more than you do. Less—you can’t know what it means to me, you haven’t lived in her for all these years. But it has to be done. Do you understand why?”
“You think he’s right,” I said.
“In many things, yes. He’s right about the Weavers and what they’re trying to do. And he’s partly right about what has to be done. If he weren’t, I wouldn’t have helped him. I certainly wouldn’t have let him send out the countervirus, if I didn’t think it had a chance of working.
“But in one thing, he is very wrong. Pavel Sergeyevich has been old a long time, and he has been bitter even longer than that. It’s quite a collection of horrors he’s sending out—it takes a lot of pain to enforce the Weavers’ vision of humanity. But you can’t just show people the evil. They’ll only turn away. You have to give them something else. Something to care about. Something to hope for.”