“It feels just fine, Paul.”
“And how does it feel now that I’m speaking to you in English?”
Surprised, she pulled her hand away.
He laughed. “There. You see? Your reaction demonstrates the truth. It’s the same with networks. We meet physically because we have to supplement the networks. It’s not that networks lack intimacy. On the contrary, networks are too precisely intimate, in too narrow a channel. We have to meet in a way that feeds the gray meat.”
“That’s very clever. But tell me—what would have happened if I hadn’t pulled my hand away?”
“[Then,]” said Paul with great rationality and delicacy, “[you would have been a woman of blunted perceptions. Which you are not.]” And that seemed to be pretty much the end of that.
She noticed for the first time that his right hand had a ring on the third finger. It looked like a dark engraved band—but it was not a ring at all. It was a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of Paul’s flesh.
They were sliding with enormous magnetic levitational speed through the diamond-drilled depths of the European earth. She was taking enormous pleasure in his company and she felt absolutely no desire to flirt with him. It would be like trying to throw a come-hither at a limestone stalactite. Intimacy was not a prospect that appealed. It would take a woman of enormous self-abnegation and tolerance to endure the torment of that much clarity on a day-by-day basis. If he had a girlfriend she would sit across the breakfast table from him with fork in hand, and every day she would be impaled on the four steel tines of his intelligence and his perception and his ambition and his self-regard.
Paul was gazing at her silently, clearly undergoing some very similar line of assessment. She could almost hear the high-speed crackle of neurochemical cognition seething through the wettest glandular depths of his beautiful leonine head.
She was insanely close to confessing everything. It was an extremely stupid thing to do, especially twice in a row, but she was feeling incredibly reckless today and she wanted risk in the way that one might want oxygen and, most of all, she just really, really felt like it. She didn’t want to ever touch Paul, hold him or caress him, but she direly wanted to confess to him. To immolate herself, to force him to take real notice.
But it wouldn’t be like confessing to Emil. Poor Emil, in his own peculiar animal fashion, was outside time, un-woundable, indestructible. Paul was very actual. Paul talked about cosmic transgressions but Paul was not beyond the pale. Paul was young, he was just a young man. A young man who didn’t need her troubles.
Their eyes met. There was a sudden terrific tension between them. It would have felt like sexual attraction with anyone else. With Paul it felt like an attack of telepathy.
He stared at her. Surprise struck him visibly. His fine brows arched and his eyes widened.
“What are you thinking, Paul?”
“Sincerely?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’m wondering why I see this frivolous young beauty. Here, across this table from me.”
“Why shouldn’t I be here?” she said.
“Because it’s a facade. Isn’t it? You’re not frivolous. And I feel quite certain suddenly that you’re not young.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re very beautiful. But it’s not a young woman’s beauty. You’re terribly beautiful. There is an element of terror to your presence.”
“Thanks very much.”
“Now that I recognize that fact, it makes me wonder. What do you want from us? Are you a police spy? Are you civil support?”
“No. I’m not. I promise.”
“I was civil support once,” Paul said calmly. “Youth-league civil support, in Avignon. I was quite ambitious about the work, and I learned about interesting aspects of life. But I quit, I gave it up. Because they want to make the world a better place. And I knew that I didn’t want the world to be any better. I want the world to become more interesting. Do you think that’s a crime, Maya?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. It doesn’t seem very much like a crime.”
“I know a police spy rather well. She reminds me of you very much. She has your strange self-possession, your peculiarly intense presence as a woman. I was looking at you just now, and I realized that you look like the Widow. So it all became clear to me suddenly.”
“I’m not a widow.”
“She’s an astonishing woman. Enormously beautiful, sublime. She’s like a sphinx. Like some untouchable creature from myth. She takes a deep interest in artifice. You’ll likely meet the Widow someday. If you stay in our company.”
“This Widow person—she’s an artifice cop? I had no idea there was any such thing as a police force for artifice. What’s her name?”
“Her name is Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier.”
“Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier … My goodness, what a wonderful name she has!”
“If you don’t know Helene already, then you might not want to meet her.”
“I’m certain I don’t want to meet her. Because I’m not an informer. Actually, I’m a criminal fugitive.”
“Informer, criminal …” He shook his head. “There’s far less distinction there than one might think.”
“You’re very right as usual, Paul. It’s rather like that blurry distinction between terror and beauty. Or youth and age. Or artifice and crime.”
He stared at her in surprise. “Well put,” he said at last. “That’s just what Helene would say. She’s quite the devotee of blurry distinctions.”
“I promise that I’m not a police agent. I’d prove it to you, if I could.”
“Maybe you’re not. It’s not that civil-support people can’t be pretty, but they usually consider your kind of glamour to be suspect.”
“I’m not suspect. Why should I be suspect?”
“I suspect you because I have to protect my friends,” Paul said. “Our lives are our lives, they’re not a theoretical exercise. We’re a much put-upon generation. We have to treasure our vitality, because our vitality is methodically stifled. Other generations never faced that dilemma. Their parents fell into their graves and power fell into their laps. But we’ve never been a natural generation. We’re the first truly native posthumans.”
“And you have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”
“Mais oui.”
“Well, so do I. I have a whole lot of them.”
“No one asked you to become one of us.”
It was a terribly wounding thing to say. She felt as if she’d been stabbed. He stared at her in direct challenge and she was suddenly too tired to go on fencing with him. He was too young and strong and quick, and she was too upset and broken up to push him into a corner. She began to cry. “What happens now?” she asked. “Should I beg for your permission to live? I’ll beg if you want me to. Just tell me that’s what you want.”
Paul glanced anxiously around the train car. “Please don’t make a scene.”
“I have to cry! I want to cry, I deserve it! I’m not all right. I don’t have any pride, I don’t have any dignity—I don’t have anything. I’m hurt in ways you can’t even imagine. What else should I do but cry? You’ve caught me out. I’m at your mercy. You can destroy me now.”
“You could destroy us. Maybe that’s what you want.”
“I won’t do that. Give me a chance! I can be vivid. I can even be beautiful. You should let me try. Let me try, Paul—I can be an interesting case study for you.”
“I’d love to let you try,” he said. “I like to feast with panthers. But why play games with my friends’ safety? I know nothing about you, except that you seem very pretty and very posthuman. Why should I trust you? Why don’t you simply go home?”
“Because I can’t go home. They’ll make me be old again.”
Paul’s eyes widened. She’d struck through to him, she’d touched him. Finally he handed her a kerchief. She gl
anced at the kerchief, felt it carefully to make sure it wasn’t computational, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
Paul pressed a button on the rim of the table.
“You let Emil stay with your group,” she offered at last, “and Emil’s worse than I am.”
“I’m responsible for Emil,” he said gloomily.
“What do you mean?”
“I let him take the amnesiac. I made arrangements.”
“You did? Do the others know?”
“It was a good idea. You didn’t know Emil earlier.”
A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace.
It picked its way through barely perceptible niches in the ceiling, stopped, and dropped beside their beanbags. It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam’s. “Oui monsieur?”
“[The mademoiselle will be having a bottle of eau minerale and two hundred micrograms of alcionage,]” said Paul. “[I’ll have a limoncello and … oh, bring us half a dozen croissants.]”
“Très bien.” It stalked away.
“What was that thing?” Maya said.
“That’s the steward.”
“I can guess that much, but what is it? Is it alive? Is it a robot? Is it some kind of lobster? It sounded like it was talking with real lips and a tongue!”
Paul looked exasperated. “Do you mind? This is the Stuttgart express, you know.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”
Paul gazed at her silently, meditatively. “Poor Emil,” he said at last.
“Don’t tell me that! You have no right to tell me that! I’m good for him. I know I’m good for him. You don’t know anything about it.”
“Are you good for Emil?”
“Look, what can I do to make you trust me? You can’t just write me off, you can’t just push me out. You say you want something really strange to happen in the world. Well, I’m really strange, all right? And I’m happening.”
Paul thought this over, tapping the edge of the table with his fingertips. “Let me test your blood,” he said.
“All right. Sure.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweater.
He stood up, retrieved his backpack from the overhead compartment, opened it, rummaged about methodically and removed a blood-test mosquito. He placed the little device on the center of her forearm. It sniffed about, squatted, inserted its hair-thin beak. There was no pain at all. Maybe a tiny itch.
Paul retrieved the blood-glutted device. It bent down and unfolded its wings, which formed a display screen the width of a pair of thumbnails. Paul bent down close and stared.
“So,” he said at last. “If you want to keep your secret, you’d better not let anyone else try a blood test.”
“Okay.”
“You’re very anemic. In fact, there’s a lot of fluid inside you that isn’t even blood.”
“Yeah, those would be cellular detox detergents and some catalyzed oxygen transports.”
“I see. But there’s more than enough DNA in here for me to establish your identity. And to turn you in to civil support. If that ever should prove necessary.”
“Look, Paul, you don’t have to take the trouble to trace my medical records. We’ve come this far—I’ll just tell you who I am.”
Paul forced the mosquito to disgorge on a slip of Chromatograph and folded the stained paper neatly. “No,” he said, “that’s not necessary. In fact, I don’t even think it’s wise. I don’t want to know who you are. That’s not my responsibility. And that’s certainly not what I want from you.”
“What do you want from me?”
He looked her in the eye. “I want you to prove to me that you’re not human yet still an artist.”
Stuttgart was a big loud town. Big, loud, sticky, and green. A city of gasps, grunts, wheezes, complex organic gurglings. People liked to shout at each other in Stuttgart. People emerged in sudden pedestrian torrents from sphinctering holes in the walls.
The famous towers were frankly cyclopean but their rhythmic billowing made them seem soothingly oceanic, rather than mountainous. She could hear the monster towers breathing with a viscous, tubercular rasping. Their breath galed above the furry streets and smelled of steam and lemons.
“My family helped to build this city,” Paul volunteered, neatly skirting around a large splattered puddle of a substance much like muesli. “My parents were garbage miners.”
“ ‘Were?’ ”
“They gave it up. Garbage was like any other extractive industry. The best and richest landfills played out early. Nowadays garbage mining is mostly left to wildcatters, methane drillers, small-timers. The great garbage fortunes are gone.”
“I see.”
“No need to fret, my mother did very well by her career. I’m a child of privilege.” Paul smiled cheerfully. He was relaxed, he was glad to be home.
“Your parents are Français?”
“Yes. We’re from Avignon originally. Half the population of Stuttgart are Français.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Paris has become a museum.” The lighting changed over the street. An enormous ribbed membrane peeled from the side of a tower and deployed itself over the neighborhood. A flock of white cranes wheeled in beneath it, landed in the streets like so many white-feathered commuters. The birds began to peck at the sidewalk, hard enough to break it into chunks.
“The finest extracts from the dumps,” Paul said, “iron, aluminum, copper, and such—their market value crashed once modern materials came into production. Cheap diamond of course, cheap diamond beats anything. But sugarglass, optical plastics, fullerenes, and aerogels”—he gestured at the cityscape around them. A small deft man with a proprietarial interest in structures four hundred stories tall. “The carbon-based products drove construction metals off the market. People in Stuttgart are progressives, they despise the shibboleths.”
“This place is a lot like Indianapolis.”
“Not at all! Nothing like it!” Paul protested. “Indianapolis was a political act, a freak by revanchist Asians. Stuttgart is serious! Stuttgart is meaningful! It is the only truly modern city in Europe! The only city whose builders truly believed in a future—rather than some endless recycling of the past.”
“I’m not sure I’d be real happy if the future looked like this.”
“It won’t. Any more than the world came to look like New York City a century ago. It was enough that for a certain period of time the world wanted to look like New York City. Stuttgart is that kind of urban cynosure. It’s the only city in the world where modern society was allowed to speak with an authentic architectural voice.”
“You use the past tense, I see.”
“There won’t be many other Stuttgarts. Gerontocratic society lacks the will and energy to innovate on the grand scale. Unless, as with Stuttgart, some large city is leveled by a cataclysm and the survivors have no choice.” Paul shrugged. “Not a pleasant prospect! There may be some fanatics who consider holocaust an acceptable price for change, but I’ve studied holocaust, and holocaust is vile. The change we face has its own inexorability. There’s much to be said for survival. Live long enough, and reality will melt beneath your feet.” He paused, considering. “I’m very fond of Praha. That city surely has lessons for the world as profound as Stuttgart’s. Praha outlasted its own epoch and became a beautiful freak, a charming atavism. Praha found a second chance. Now Praha is the chrysalis for a larval form of posthumanity.”
They walked on. The skies of Stuttgart were full of aerial transports that uncoiled like butterfly tongues, adhered to a distant tower, and then rolled up neatly to the other side. These reeling walkways carried sliding capsules within their flaccid bulk. They were grotesquely efficient, like ductile pedestrian boas.
Paul led her down a long flight of stairs and beneath a solemn stone arch with a series of thick beaded curtains. The sky vanished. The air warmed. They emerged under a coarse mossy roof with humps like fabric but the apparent rigidity of concrete. The walls grew spongy and disturbed, under long brilliantly glowing strands of sun-bright optical fiber. It was hot and damp, a stony greenhouse. The air reeked of vanilla and bananas. “This is my favorite quarter of town,” said Paul. “I lived here for years before I took my teaching post. This quarter was planned and built by theorists of the edible cityscape.”
“Theorists of the what?”
“The walls here are gasketfungus. You can eat the city raw. The walls are quite nutritious.” It didn’t seem a particularly good idea to eat the fungal walls. The locals had been carving graffiti into them with some kind of herbicide. Patchy letters of wilted yellow. BENEATH THE BEACH—THE PAVEMENT. Curls of Arabic. A Kilroy face with a mess of loopy curls.
They walked beside a brilliantly lit multistory building. The open floors were marked in numbered slots. People were lying in cavities in these numbered areas, under searing artificial sunlight. The people wore spex and were covered from head to foot in big gray-green wads of dense organic fiber.
“What’s this place? A morgue?”
“It’s a public bathhouse.”
“Where’s the water?”
“It’s not water bathing, it’s exfoliation. You’re dipped in jelly and you lie under the lights. They dust you in spores and those filaments of mold take root in your skin. When the mold stops growing the machines scrape you clean with strigils. The mold peels off in sheets. All the body dirt and skin flora come away with the web. It’s very exhilarating.”
“It’s a bath in living mold?”
“Yes, an exacting process. They offer a little virtuality to pass the time in the tank, as you see. It’s an amenity, especially for those who live rough in the edible quarter. It’s a public service. When you’re done they paint you with the local blend of human microbes.”
“Yes, but it’s mold.”
“A very tame and pleasant mold. There’s no harm in it.” He paused. “I hope you’re not shocked by something as harmless as public nudity. That’s very common in Stuttgart.”
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