“Tell me something else, Paul. Go on.”
“We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming epoch. An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared to bathe in cataclysm will transcend the singularity. Someday, we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous. The admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates the quotidian. It is only a matter of time, and time is our one inexhaustible resource. There is no more strength left in normality; there are only routines.”
“What you just said. It’s so beautiful.”
He smiled. “I like to think so, too.”
“I wish I were that beautiful.”
“I think you’re making a category error, my dear.”
“All right—then I wish I could
“Perhaps you already have.” He paused. “It’s a truly interesting concept, ‘beauty.’ An intersection of three worlds …”
The tubetrain pulled into a stop in the Muzeum station and an absolute horde of tourists piled in, a jostling mess of backpacks and bags and alien chatter. They stood amid the crowd, swaying on their hand straps. He’d tried to convince her that he could disturb the universe and the two of them were standing packed amid a horde of indifferent strangers like animals in a cattle car.
It began to get very hot within the train. A muted series of cramps gnawed away deep inside her and when she had come sweating out of the far side of the pain she realized that this was a day when she could do something truly crazy. Something mad and spontaneous and psychically automatic. Levitate. Leap off a building. Throw herself on her aching belly and kiss the feet of a policeman. Fly to the moon and dig into its white chalky soil and absolutely
At the central train station she limped off to the ladies’. She did business with hygienic machines, drank two cups of water, and departed in better order. The pretty face in the mirror, with its dilated eyes and a little dotting of sweat beneath its layered treatments, seemed to blaze with the holy fire.
Paul was being very considerate. He got them beanbags in first class with a nice fold-down table. The Stuttgart express was a very rapid train.
“I love European trains,” she babbled, her scalp glowing beneath her beret. “Even the really fast ones that spend most of their time underground.”
“Maybe you should wanderjahr to Vladivostok,” Paul said.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“It’s a tradition in our group. Vladivostok, the far edge of the Eurasian continent. You have a Eurocard now, and you said that you wanted to drift. Why not drift to Vladivostok? You’ll be alone quite a while. You can relax and marshal your thoughts. You can reach the far rim of Asia and return in about four days.”
“What do you do once you reach the Pacific Rim?”
“Well, if you’re one of us, then you go to a certain obscure Vladivostok ptydepe—sorry, I mean Public Telepresence Point—and you perform a gratuitous act. Our group maintains a constant scan on this particular Vladivostok PTP through a conceptual sieve. Any gesture sufficiently remarkable to attract the attention of the scanner will be automatically mailed to everyone in our netlist.”
“How will I know if my gesture is sufficiently gratuitous?”
“By intuition, Maya. It helps if you’ve seen other performances. It’s not a matter of merely human judgment —our sieve program has its own evolving standards. That’s the beauty of the beauty in it.” Paul smiled. “How does anyone truly know how anything is out of the ordinary? What is ordinariness? What makes the quotidian so seemingly frail and yet so totipresent? The membrane between the bizarre and the tedious is inherently ductile.”
“I guess I’m missing a lot, not being in your network.”
“Without a doubt.”
“Why does your group even meet physically at that bar in Praha, if you’re so thoroughly netted?”
Paul considered this. “Do you have your translator? Is it working?”
“Yes. Benedetta gave me a translator at the Tete.” She showed Paul her diamond necklace.
“How very good of my valued colleague Benedetta. Any machine of Benedetta’s would translate Francais, I imagine. Put it on.” Paul clipped a sleek little pad to his own ear.
Maya worked her diamond beads and tucked the golden bird’s nest in her ear. Paul began speaking Francais. “[You can still understand me, I presume.]”
“Yes, my machine is working fine.”
“[There are millions of earpiece translators in circulation. They’re a modern commonplace. You speak English, I speak Francais as I am doing now, and the machines interpret for us. And if the background noise is low … and our speech is not too infested with jargon or argot … and if not too many people are speaking all at once … and if we are not referring to some context beyond the comprehension of small-scale machine processing … and if we don’t complicate our exchange with too many nonverbal interactions such as human gestures and expressions—well then, we understand one another.]” He gestured broadly. “[That is to say, despite all the odds, we force some modicum of human meaning through this terribly intimate ear-mounted membrane of computation.] ”
“Yes, that’s it exactly! That’s just exactly how it works.”
“[Look at my face at this very moment, as I speak. A certain set of musculatures being put into play, a certain state of tensility that holds the face in readiness for a characteristic physical sequence of verbal movements—Francais. Consciously, I’m not aware of shaping my face. Consciously, you’re not aware of noticing it. Nevertheless big wedges of our human brains are dedicated to the study of faces—and to the perception of language as well. Studies prove that we can recognize one another as aliens, not because of posture, genetics, or dress, but because our languages have physically shaped our faces. That’s a preconscious human perception. A translator doesn’t do that. A network doesn’t convey that. Networks and translators don’t have thought. They have only processing.]”
“Yes?”
“[So now you see me through your eyes, and hear Francais through one ear, and receive machine-enunciated data through your machine-assisted ear. Something is missing. Something is also superfluous. Parts of you that you don’t comprehend can sense that it’s all a muddle.]”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “[Now I’m holding your hand while speaking to you in Franccis. Look, I’ll hold your hand in both of mine. I’ll gently stroke your hand. How does that feel?]”
“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.
