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.”
“
“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 glanced 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. “
“[The mademoiselle will be having a bottle of
“
“What
“That’s the steward.”
