“Oh, poor Paul, poor Benedetta. Poor everybody.”
“What does this matter to me?” said Benedetta, all lighthearted bitterness. “I’ll live for a thousand years. If I had Paul even for a hundred years, it would only be an episode. If I had Paul now, what would I do with Paul later, when things become interesting? As for the Widow, he can forget all about that. Helene is a creature of habit. She’ll never love any man who will outlive her.”
“Oh. Well, that explains a lot. I guess.”
“See, Maya? You’re not human. We’re not human. But we can understand. We’re artifice people. We always know it, before we can speak it aloud. We always understand much better than we think.”
A gong rang. It was Marcel. He shouted something in Francais, and then in Deutsch, and then in English. The time had come for the immersion.
“I’m not going in,” Maya said.
“You should swim with us, Maya. It’s good for you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“This isn’t serious virtuality. It’s not holy fire. The immersion pool is only a rich man’s toy. But it’s pretty. And technically sweet.”
Shimmering liquid gushed as the others whooped and dived in. No one surfaced.
Benedetta wrapped her lustrous hair in a Psyche knot and pinned it. “I’m going in. I think I’ll have sex today.”
“Who with, for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, if I can’t find someone willing to bother, maybe I’ll try by myself.” She smiled, ran, and dived headlong. White bubbles rose, and she was gone.
Paul patrolled the edge of the pool. Gazing in. Smiling. The picture of satisfaction.
“That’s everyone but you and me,” he called out.
She waved. “Don’t mind me, you go ahead.”
He shook his head. He drew near, walking slowly, barefooted. “I can’t leave you sitting here looking so sad.”
“Paul, why don’t you go?”
“You’ve been talking politics with Benedetta,” Paul concluded analytically. “We didn’t take these risks, and make this effort, just to add to our own unhappiness. That would only represent a moral defeat for us. We must have a good time with our youth, or there’s so little point in being young. So you see, you simply must come in with us.”
“Things like this frighten me.”
“Then I’ll teach you about it,” said Paul, perching cautiously on the foot of her lounge chair. “Think of the virtuality pool as a kind of creme de menthe. All right? On the top layer is a breathable silicone fluid. We’ve put a trace of anandamine in it, just for fun. On the bottom is a malleable liquid. It’s something like the fusible liquids that our friend Eugene uses to cast sculpture. But it’s much more advanced and much more friendly, so we can swim inside it. It’s a buoyant, tactile, breathable, immersible virtuality.”
Maya said nothing. She tried to look very attentive.
“The best part is the platform. The platform is a fluidic computer. It uses liquid moving through tiny locks and channels to form its logic gates. You see? We dive into the pool and we can actually
“All right, I understand it now. It’s enormously clever, isn’t it? Now please go on in.”
He looked at her seriously, for the first time. He seemed to gaze completely through her head.
“Are you angry with me, Maya?”
“No.”
“Have I done something to hurt or offend you? Please be honest.”
“No, I’m not hurting, honestly.”
“Then please don’t refuse me when I ask you to share this experience with us. We’ll walk into the shallow end together. Very gently. I’ll stay very close. All right?”
She sighed. “All right.”
He led her by the hand like a man escorting a duchess to a quadrille. The fluid swarmed with millions of prismatic flakes. Little floating sensors, maybe. Sensors small enough to breathe. The fluid was at blood heat. They waded in. Their legs seemed to dissolve.
Inhaling it was far easier than she had ever imagined. A mouthful of it dissolved on her tongue like sorbet, and when the fluid touched her lungs they reacted with startled pleasure, like sore feet suddenly massaged. Even her eyeballs loved it. The fluid closed over her head. Visibility was very short, no farther than her fingertips. Paul held her hand. Patches of him emerged from the glittering murk: hands, elbows, a flash of naked hip.
They descended slowly, swimming. Down to the white viscous surface of the creme de menthe. It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm. Paul dug out a double handful and it boiled in his floating hands, indescribably active, like a poem becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.
Someone frog-kicked past her and burrowed headlong into the mass of it, like a skier drowning joyfully in some impossible hot snowbank. Now she was beginning to get the hang of it. It was beyond eros, beyond skin. Skinlessness. Skinless memory. Bloody nostalgia, somatic deja vu, neural
Memory came upon her like a hammer full of needles. It was nothing like pain. These were sensations far stronger than the personality. They were experiences that consciousness could not contain. Enormous powers riddling the flesh that the mind could make no sense of. A software crash for the soul.
When she came to, she was flat on her back. Paul was heaving at her ribs, hard flat-handed punches of resuscitation. Fluid gushed from her nose and mouth, and she coughed up a bucketful.
“I blew apart,” she gasped.
“Maya, don’t try to talk.”
“It blew my mind.… ”
He pressed his ear between her breasts and listened to her heartbeat.
“Where is that ambulance?” Benedetta demanded. “My God, it’s been an hour.” She was wrapped in a towel, and shivering.
Paul said, “That was so stupid of me. I’ve read about Neo-Telomeric treatment. They suspend you in a virtuality.… I should have thought that this might happen.” He kept heaving at her lungs.
Maya rolled her head on the floor and tried to look around. There was a dried and glittering snail trail where Paul had hauled her from the pool across the chilly tiles. In the distance the others clustered, talking anxiously, looking her way. Her feet were up on blocks.
She began trembling violently.
“She’ll have another convulsion if you don’t stop,” Benedetta said.
“It’s better to convulse than to stop breathing,” he said, pushing hard.
Benedetta knelt beside her, her face in anguish. “Stop it, Paul,” she said. “She’s breathing. I think she’s conscious.” She looked up. “Will she die?”
“She almost died there in my arms. When I pulled her from the pool, the pupils of her eyes were two different sizes.”
“Can’t she live ten more years? That’s hardly anything, isn’t it? Just ten years? I know she’ll die and I’ll have to mourn her, but why should she die now?”
“Life is too short,” Paul said. “Life will always be too short.”
“I like to think so,” Benedetta said. “Truly, I hope so. I believe it with all my heart.”
The medical cops took her to Praha. It had something to do with a possible network-abuse case against her. Apparently most of the evidence was in Praha.
However, no one at the Access Bureau was willing to arrest her. The Czech Access Bureau cops apparently despised and distrusted Greek medical cops; it seemed to be some kind of weird European interservice rivalry. She
