She didn’t try to touch me again, but she moved very close, looking up into my eyes. My back was pressed against the door, so I had nowhere to retreat to.
“Do you know the story of Pandora?” she said. “Pandora opens up a box of demons, unleashing them all on the world. But at the bottom of the box, there’s one thing that’s either the worst demon of all, or the saving grace, depending who you listen to: hope.”
I remembered that I had been filled with hope only that morning. It seemed years and oceans away.
“Maya, let’s be the hope,” she said. “The whole world will be watching what happens to us. Anything we care to toss out will be pounced on. So let’s show them that not everything the Weavers suppress is bad. Let’s show them that love can win out—that when the Weavers have done their worst, some things can still endure.
“Don’t you see, Maya? He wanted to Netcast my death, but your love got mixed in with it. He thinks of the two of us as some rare and unwholesome species of butterfly, to be etherized and pinned to a card. But we know better, and we can prove it. No one has imagined us. All telepresence ever shows people is love between men and women, and not even real love at that—some pathetic imitation done with brain-makeup. We’ll hit them like a thunderbolt. We—our love—that’s what will make the Wall of Souls come tumbling down.”
She smiled, briefly closing her eyes. “This is an easy one, Ilsa; this time, staying with Rick is helping the Resistance. So the question is—no, wait. Let me do this right.”
She sank to one knee, and touched my hand with hers. “Maya Tatyanichna, clan the whole world, hearth lesbianka: Will you take what is left of this woman, who has the mind of a Weaver, the soul of a whale, and the education of a half-crazed four-nine terrorist, and who can’t figure out whether she’s a fallen angel or a risen devil—but who loves you more than any language that she knows could ever say?”
I looked down at her in horror. “No,” I said.
“You don’t mean that,” she said imploringly.
“The hell I don’t. You’re crazier than Voskresenye. You don’t get it, do you? You’ve forgotten what human emotions are like— you either forget them completely, or you blow them up into something they can never be. Damn it, Mirabara, it’s only love. It doesn’t mean you want to fuse souls with someone. And it doesn’t save the world, or even the people in it. It’s not something you put on display for some political purpose. It’s not a statement or a demonstration; it just is.”
“You just got finished saying that love matters.”
“It does matter,” I said. “But not for the reasons you think. And the woman I loved would have understood that.”
“Maya, you underestimate—”
“Considering what you’ve done to me, after loving me for thirty years,” I said, “do you really think people will act any differently after feeling some pale ghost of that for thirty seconds?”
Now it was her turn not to answer. She rose to her feet—selfconsciously, as if she had realized the absurdity of continuing to kneel. She walked up to the cage marked POETRY and stared into its shadowed depths. “You know what this means, don’t you?” she said. “It means they won. Whatever we may have accomplished, they won in the end. They tore us apart.”
“They won a long time ago. This is between us.”
She looked at me over her shoulder. “It also means I die.”
I clenched my hands in frustration. “If you need a mind, take Voskresenye’s. He’s not using it.”
“I can’t,” she said. “His brain’s too damaged, and he’s locked me out so he can have his hell. And besides, if I can’t be with you, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I’m not trying to kill you,” I said.
“I know. But that’s what you’re doing.”
“Oh, that’s perfect,” I said in a flash of anger. “‘Give me your hypothalamus or I’ll kill myself.’ You’re lying even now, aren’t you? You never wanted a lifemate. You wanted a lifeboat. I’m your ticket out of the whale.”
She said nothing; her eyes looked into mine. Her face was shimmering, not with tears, but as if trying to break up into component polygons.
“That was a low blow,” I admitted, looking past her toward the door.
“It wasn’t a comedy after all,” she said under her breath.
“What?”
She looked up, her arms wrapped around her. “Remember what the whale said? ‘Marriage is a thing in ending stories.’ I taught her that. I fed her Aristotle, and told her to find me a plot that was a comedy, and not a tragedy: a story with a wedding at the end, and not a death. Maybe she never understood what marriage was, and was just humoring me. Or maybe the wedding in the story you told her is what she foresaw. Or—I don’t know—maybe it was me who ruined things, refusing to believe how much you’d changed. I suppose we relied on the whale too much, both of us.”
“Maybe if you had spent your time thinking of me as a person, and not a variable, things would have been different.”
“Would they?” she said, longingly.
I shook my head. “No.” Because I was thinking of how she had made her plans against the Weavers, all those years, and never told me—to protect me, she had said; protect me in ignorance, as if I were her child and not her lover. The woman who wanted to share my mind had never been willing to share my trust.
“You’ll never get to Africa alone. You go out there and you’ll be dead by sunset.” She thrust her hands into her jacket pockets; tears were in her eyes. “Just let me in for long enough to save you; when you’re safe, if you want to erase me again—”
“That’s enough.” I squeezed past her, banging my shoulder against the cage bars. “That’s enough.” I went out into the laboratory.
She was blocking the door out. “Maya, I love you. I know you think it isn’t real, but it is. It’s the only thing about me that is real. I showed you that once….”
She reached out and touched her hand to my cheekbone. I tried to push her arm away, but my hand passed through it: unreal. Holding my breath, I stepped forward and walked right through her. When my heart passed through hers it seemed to shudder, and for a moment, I thought it would never recover its own rhythms. But it was only an illusion. There was nothing there at all.
I went out into the hall, got onto the motionless slidewalk, and began to run.
She was beside me. She kept pace without needing to move her legs, but her image was starting to flicker. “Maya, tell me one thing. Say you don’t love me, and then I’ll go.”
I looked at her. And I could not deny it: there was something that responded. For twenty years, my heart had been hollow and dry, an empty seashell. Now I was surprised by warmth; as earlier, in front of the police station, I had put out my hands expecting metal and instead touched breathing flesh.
She must have seen the hesitation in my face. “Well then,” she said. “Your choice is obvious.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.” And I pushed past her toward the elevator.
Again she stood before me. Herringbones chased each other down her cheeks, and I thought surely she would disappear at last; but she regained control. “They’ll be watching for me,” she said. “But if I swarmed again, I might get out. And this time go to Africa, and try to find a place to grow my soul back. If I did that, and came back to you in, say, another twenty years, would you—” Her image flickered, and her mouth moved silently. Static invaded her eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”