La Femme

by Storm Constantine

  Human beings could talk about their private experience – indirect communication. Similarly, negotiators could talk about their olfactory experiences, could glean meaning from artefacts of odour and pass that on to ordinary humans. Yet he had seen himself from somebody else’s point of view just now.

  Lucas knew that the Lebanese Bomb had led to a different humanity. He was a child of that creation, as were all who worked in London restaurants. He suspected now that the Palestinians had made a discovery. There was a meta-negotiation happening here, and he lay at its heart… and perhaps Ghinwa did too.

  He breathed out, softly, so that he could sense his own breath at the back of his nose. Her odour was there. She was inside him.

  *

  Lucas departed the Jameed and walked down the alley into Baker Street. The sparkle of hallucinations that was neon within biochemically enhanced fog, green algae light in banks of mist, fluorescence amidst dust, burst into his eyes, combining with olfactory, London-standard knowledge: map position, ambient temperature, traffic updates (solar vehicles only in London Central since peak oil). He paused at the street junction, orienting himself.

  There stood Ghinwa in a doorway!

  He ran over to her. She grabbed him and pressed her lips against his. For a few seconds he kept his mouth closed, aware of the consequences of tongues… but then the moment overpowered what little resistance he had. He felt the passion within her in many ways, through all of his senses.

  The kiss went on and on and on – they breathed through their noses. Lucas felt he was eating her, consuming her, taking all the information in her saliva, tongue-to-tongue, allowing it to register in his mouth and nose, feeling it emerge, like a dawning realisation, in his mind. An almost infinite complexity of molecules passing from her mouth to his, comprising knowledge that they both knew because he was a dog and she was a bitch. Was this then the truth of her influence at the Jameed, that she was a honey trap?

  She gasped and pulled back, her hips locked against his, pupils dilated, cheeks heightened red as blood capillaries expanded. “Do you sense me?” she asked.

  Lucas wiped saliva from his lips and chin with his jacket sleeve. “Sense you?” he asked.

  She nodded, grinning.

  “Sense you?”

  “You and me, we’re something special together.”

  “What are you doing to me?” he asked.

  She replied at once, “I do like you – you were right. And you like me. I can smell your pheromones Lucas, you want me. That’s okay, I want to be wanted. You’re a man and I’m a woman –”

  “Wait, what’s this got to do with the Palest –”

  “Shhh!” She put a finger against his lips.

  Irritated, he pulled back, let her go. Translucent mist swirled around them, so that for a moment she faded from his vision. He said, “You’re trying to trick the Greek Orth –”

  “Lucas! The bigger picture?”

  “The what?”

  “Aren’t you frustrated by the lack of heart in negotiation?” she said. “I am. My people are too. We want to use patchwork London to make something better, so there aren’t any divides any more, no splits –”

  “No schisms?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then the Palestinian Schism is all smoke and mirrors?”

  She grinned.

  Then he had a thought. “Wait. Why are you telling me all this?” He took a few steps backwards. “Why isn’t this coming to me through…”

  “Through my saliva? Because we’re not done yet. All this is incomplete. But tonight’s test worked –”

  “Test? You mean… that moment when I saw myself?”

  She nodded.

  Lucas, aware now of a conceptual grandeur behind her ordinary, ragged lust, realised that he stood at a crossroads. There was a decision to be made. Perhaps they had picked on him because they knew he was dissatisfied with the emotional sterility of negotiation. Perhaps they had targeted him because he was young. But oh, he longed for this woman. Was that maybe the point of the Schism?

  “But how could I experience your private vision?” he asked.

  “You didn’t. Human mental experience is impossible to transmit except indirectly.”

  “Then…”

  “The biochemical format isn’t neutral. It’s recorded the last thirty years of what human beings have done in this city. It’s got attitude. But people like you and me, we have access to those records – private access to what is effectively a public entity. An exceptionally selective entity, of course. You didn’t experience my private mentality, you experienced a representation of it stored in the Ocean.”

  “The Ocean?”

  “It’s what we call London’s accumulated, self-organising biochemical database – supported by fifty million computers all in love with organic chemistry. We’re members of an exclusive club, aren’t we?”

  “Is it like a brain?” Lucas asked, dreading the answer.

  “It’s like the brain of a bloodhound. It can’t ever do the consciousness thing because there’s only one of it. But, like a hound, it can sense, think, remember, and grow. It’s got character now. It knows us all, like a hound knows its master.”

  Lucas took more steps backward. “You’re reeling me in… you’re trying to trick me!”

  “No, Lucas! You must eat one of those sweets for this to work.”

  He stared at her. “But you tried to stop Amin giving them to me –”

  “No! I just didn’t want you to know I wanted you to have them. You’d have been too suspicious. Lucas, don’t leave me, please!”

  He ran away, stumbling down Baker Street. He knew too much; and she was inside him, like a parasitic molecule whose barbs he dare not pull out for fear of destroying himself. Like all good negotiators he never forgot a smell, a taste, he just couldn’t. Neither his nose nor his brain would allow it.

  *

  He told his father nothing. He told his mother nothing. He saw in his family a mirror of fragmentary London Central, that place of attempted diplomacy, that hopeless, amateurish association of too-male, too-intellectual, too juvenile people. His mother – too damaged to care about her marriage, too indifferent to her husband’s feelings to conceal her boyfriend. His father – of Palestinian origin, though welded to the Greek Orthodox Church by oath unbreakable – too obsessed with the nuances of thrust and counter thrust to care about the emotional life of his son. He sobbed. His father had pushed him into the field of negotiation. No, his father didn’t care about Lucas, his father only cared about the quality of Lucas’ intellect.

  Damn this family!

  And damn this church. Was there a god? He didn’t know. But, more importantly, he didn’t care.

  There came a knock on his door. He said, “Yes?”

  His father entered carrying a glass of orange juice. “Hello. You look like you could do with a pick-me-up.”

  Lucas took the glass and downed the drink. “Thanks.”

  “You haven’t told us how it went at the Jameed.”

  “Pretty well. I’ll tell you all later tonight. For now, I’m tired.”

  “Going to sleep?”

  Lucas nodded. “For a while.”

  Zeid turned away.

  “Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “How come a Palestinian is here, in this restaurant?”

  He smiled. “I’m only a Palestinian genetically. Don’t get hung up on my race.”

  “Do you think you might be the cause of this Schism?”

  “It was the first thing I thought of. But no. Patchwork London is dispensing with race, with genetics. It’s all about culture now. That’s why I have hope for humanity, despite what we’ve done to the planet.”

  “The planet?”

  “The ecosystem.”

  Lucas nodded. “Thank you, Father. You’ve really helped me, saying that.”

  “Saying… what?”

  “Oh, about culture. I agree. Culture is everything. Attitude. Gene
s are redundant, except, I suppose, as a way of maintaining variety.”

  “Variety?”

  “In the human gene pool.”

  Zeid smiled. “You’re a clever lad. Well done. Have a nap now, and we’ll see you later tonight.”

  But when Zeid was gone Lucas whispered, “No you won’t.”

  *

  Eight in the morning of the following day: Lucas at the remains of Marble Arch beneath the line of the faux-Himalayas. A beautiful location – he’d been here all night.

  He asked Ghinwa, “What’s this newborn baby?”

  In reply she asked him, “What do you think an emotion is?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You mean, psychologically? Ask a psychologist.”

  “You are a psychologist, we all are if we’re human. But I want to know what you think.”

  “I suppose,” he murmured, “when you’re upset, you cry. When you’ve lost somebody.”

  “That’s one emotion. But what is it?”

  “Surely somebody more clever than me must have come up with the answer.”

  “You’d be amazed how few people have bothered to consider it.”

  Lucas shrugged. He was not unsettled by the question, more intrigued; but it was a difficult one. After a pause for thought he said, “I’m not sure I could know. Imagine me on the edge of a waterfall cliff. If I was a brave man, I’d be excited, but if I was a coward I’d be afraid. They’re both emotions.”

  Ghinwa nodded. “Both of those are emotions that can happen in the same circumstance.”

  “Yeah… So they depend on the experiencer, you’re saying?”

  “They’re cognitive.”

  Now Lucas nodded. He felt a stirring of excitement inside his body. “Then emotions must have actual meaning.”

  Ghinwa said nothing.

  “I never thought about them that way,” he continued. “If they have meaning – and, of course, they appeared during the evolution of human beings, didn’t they? – then there must be a very good reason for them. A survival reason.”

  Ghinwa nodded, then smiled and said, “Such as?”

  “Well, I don’t know… maybe they help us make judgements. If you meet a sabre toothed tiger, you get afraid, and you run away.”

  “They’re value judgements,” Ghinwa said. “And that’s what I think. Certain experiences are basic to conscious human beings – the danger of death, the loss of people or things- ”

  “During our evolution we would have encountered those experiences often.”

  “Yes, we would. And the experiences began to engender various states of mind, which became universal states fundamental to the human condition. I think an emotion is the symbol of a state of mind, Lucas. Our minds have to have some method of communicating significant knowledge to ourselves, and to others. Without emotion, the mind would have no method of informing itself and others of the relative values of certain experiences. It’s a strengthening and a validation of the mental model we all carry about in our heads. Do you see? By informing ourselves in this dynamic way, our mental model authenticates itself and allows other human beings to become aware of its state.”

  Lucas felt himself expanding, like an evanescent bubble, as if under the conceptual pressure of Ghinwa’s idea. He said, “Do you think that’s why emotions take over, why they always have a physical component?”

  “Like tears? Yes, I do think that. It’s because of the importance of the knowledge communicated. Lucas, I’m breathing fast out of the sheer excitement of telling you all this.”

  Lucas nodded, a grin on his face that mirrored her grin. “So some mechanism had to appear during our evolution that couldn’t be missed, like a thought or a concept could be missed… a way of forcing the mind to become aware of such knowledge –”

  “That mechanism had to appear, Lucas. It’s why all emotions have an unmissable physical consequence. In its intensity and in its physical effects, emotion is impossible to ignore. I think emotion is a communicative reaction more profound than usual, not less. It’s a channel of true connection between people and between people and the real world.”

  “A web of empirical knowledge flowing in all directions… An ocean.”

  “Ah,” Ghinwa said. “An ocean.”

  He stared deep into her eyes. “Then… your Ocean?”

  “It’s not mine, nor even the Palestinians’. It belongs to humanity.”

  “Only dogs and bitches so far.”

  “Yes. But suppose, Lucas, suppose that now the Ocean exists we could make a brand new emotion never before seen in human beings. Do you think that might be possible?”

  Lucas shook his head. “How would you genetically engineer its existence?”

  “I don’t think we’d need to. Objective observation isn’t enough to bring understanding between different cultures during negotiation, since only surface features can be noticed. Emotion, with the involvement it entails, can bring knowledge more profound-”

  “So that’s why you chose me! You know I hate the sterility of negotiation.”

  “You’re an emotional man.” Ghinwa nodded. “Your father hasn’t beaten all the feelings out of you yet. Do you have the sweets with you?”

  Lucas took out the packet from his shirt pocket. “I’ve always disliked these religious arguments, that have to be negotiated away,” he said. “That ladder in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, unmoved for generations because men couldn’t agree on a mutually beneficial plan.”

  “Emotion is the key to the new negotiation,” Ghinwa told him. “But be warned. If you eat one of those sweets, you become like me. You won’t be able to take sides any more. You’ll be for everyone.”

  “How many others are there like you?”

  “So far only my family. Randa is our neutral. We have other Lucases in other cultures, in other churches, but you were always my favourite. Honestly Lucas, I really do like you. I just didn’t know about your feelings until that moment in the Jameed when you said you were lonely.”

  Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Because it was the truth. I picked up on that. I’m a bitch.”

  “And the newborn…?”

  “The newborn emotion will be one of compromise, of the perception of compromise in individuals. It will have a physical component that can’t be avoided, so that the people experiencing the value and the importance of compromise don’t miss it. Eat a sweet. Become like me.”

  Lucas looked into her eyes. “Ghinwa, are you entirely Palestinian?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I’m Greek Orthodox. In theory… in practice, we shouldn’t be able to compromise, no religion can admit that any other is correct –”

  “Eat a sweet.”

  “What did you make them with?” he asked.

  “Artificial spices regulating the experience of the new emotion in your mind. The Ocean will feel that emotion too, and then all the dogs and bitches in London. Isn’t that amazing? So eat. Begin the transformation.”

  Still Lucas stalled. “Is Ghinwa your real name?”

  “No, of course not! I chose song for a reason.”

  Lucas nodded. “You’ll tell me your real name after –”

  “After you eat the new idea.”

  And Lucas did eat. And as he looked again at Ghinwa – beautiful, happy, radiant Ghinwa – he felt a new sensation within his body, a kind of warmth in his chest that rose like soft magma into his throat, then made him breathe fast and deep… And as he breathed, as he felt that warmth, and as he pondered the importance of compromise, his mind turned on a previously invisible axis, to take a new position.

  “I feel… amenable,” he said.

  Slink-Thinking

  Frances Hardinge

  And there it was, that familiar perfume. A little like fresh plums and custard, with a touch of clean, green, cut-grass outdoorsiness. The scent stopped me dead in my tracks on the front porch.

  I could see nothing of her at first. My morning walk with
Matt had taken me through a light shower, and sunstruck droplets still clustered on the stiff hair around my eyes, filling my vision with stars. Then the sun went in, and the dark question mark on top of the ceramic urn resolved itself into a familiar shape.

  “Hello, stranger,” said Lu Lin.

  She was sitting on the urn, hunched forwards in her old fashion, feet drawn up neatly beneath her. While I was staring at her, Matt walked into the house and closed the door behind him.

  Lu Lin was smaller than I remembered, and I was suddenly aware that her head would comfortably fit inside my mouth. And yet, standing in that unwearied gaze, I became a shambling youngster in an instant. Her great, blue eyes were luminous and bottomless as ever, and now they had a mesmeric expectancy.

  I shook the rain out of my eyes, and with it the blithe, unthinking contentment that I had been enjoying for the last year. Lu Lin was back. If I wanted to talk to her, I needed to remember how to think in that dark, twisting fashion that came so naturally to her. And as soon as I started to think, of course, something occurred to me.

  “You’re dead,” I said.

  “Do you know your tongue was hanging out?” she retorted. “Disgusting.” She stared intensely into my eyes without betraying the slightest expression, then leaned forwards precariously, laying her cheek against mine for a moment. “I really have missed you, Benjamin.” I could feel her shaking a little. Perhaps her legs were trembling with the strain of balancing. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.” She straightened again, and her tail returned to its question mark.

  “I’ve only been for a walk,” Something was wrong. “Matt – he’s shut me out, and he hasn’t tied me up…”

  “You know the really depressing thing? You’re probably the most intelligent friend available.” Lu Lin’s contralto was as smooth and toneless as cream, but I sensed that this was not intended as a compliment. She dropped softly from her seat on the urn, paws thudding softly on the turf like raindrops. “You’re not wearing a leash. What does that tell you?”

  “It… fell off?”

  “So you think Matt put it on when you went for a walk with him. Oh, Benjamin, think. I taught you to think, my sweet, didn’t I?”

  So she had. I believe at first I had thought she was my mother. I know I once tried to follow her onto the sofa back and balance along its length. I remember my fear of her strange moods and incomprehensible expectations, my desperate desire to win her approval, the torture of trying to follow the nocturnal swirls of her mind.