Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [89]
She was back in Praha by midnight, with her backpack and a shopping bag, giddy, exhausted, footsore, and in pain. But Praha looked so lovely. So solid, so inorganic, so actual, so wonderfully old. Bartolomejska Street looked lovely. The building looked lovely. She paused at Emil’s door, then went upstairs and knocked at the door of Mrs. Najadova.
“What is it?” Mrs. Najadova paused, looked Maya up and down. “What has he done to you?”
“There are certain days in a month when a woman needs time to herself. But he doesn’t understand.”
“Oh, that dirty, thoughtless brute. That’s so like him. Come in. I’m only watching television.” Mrs. Najadova put her on the couch. She found Maya a blanket and a heating pad and made her a frappé. Then she sat in a rocker fiddling contentedly with her notebook, as the television muttered aloud in Czestina.
Mrs. Najadova’s room was full of wicker baskets, jugs, bottles, driftwood, bird eggs, bric-a-brac. A blue glass vase with a bouquet of greenhouse lilies. And intensely nostalgic memorabilia of the former Mr. Najad, a great strapping fellow with a ready grin, who seemed to dote on skiing and fishing. To judge by the style of his sportswear he had been either dead or gone for at least twenty years.
Seeing the photos Maya felt a great leaping pang of pathos for all the women of the world who had married for a human lifetime, lived and loved faithfully through a human lifetime, and then outlived their humanity. All the actual widows, and the virtual widows, and those who sought widowhood, and those who had widowhood thrust upon them. You could outlive sexuality, but you never truly got over it—any more than you got over childhood.
Maya’s golden bird chimed on her breast. It had begun to chime the hours lately, with small but piercing cuckoo sounds, a tactful referral, apparently, to the time elapsing without a payoff. She tucked the bird into her ear. It began at once to translate the mutter of the television.
“[It’s a species of ontological limbo, really,]” said the television. It was Aquinas, the dog with the Deutsch talk show. The dog had been dubbed into Czestina. “[What I call my intelligence has its source in three worlds. My own innate canine cognition. The artificial intelligence network outside my skull. And the internal wiring that has grown among the interstices of my canine brain, programmed with human language. Among this tripartite intelligence, where does my identity reside? Am I a computer’s peripheral, or a dog with a cybernetic unconscious? Furthermore, how much of what I call ‘thought’ is actually mere facility with language?]”
“[I suppose that’s a problem for any talk-show host,]” agreed the guest.
“[I have remarkable cognitive abilities. For instance, I can do mathematical problems of almost any level of complexity. Yet my canine brain is almost entirely innumerate. I solve these problems without understanding them.]”
“[Comprehending mathematics is one of the greatest of intellectual pleasures. I’m sorry to hear that you miss that mental experience, Aquinas.]”
The dog nodded knowingly. It was very peculiar to see a dog nod in a conversation, no matter how well he was dressed. “[That assessment means even more, coming from yourself, Professor Harald. With your many scientific honors.]”
“[We have more in common than the layman might think,]” said the professor graciously. “[After all, any mammalian brain, including the natural human brain, has multiple functional sections, each with its own cognitive agenda. I have to confess something to you, Aquinas. Modern mathematics is impossible without machine aid. I had a simulator entirely interiorized]”—the guest, tactfully, tapped his wrinkled forehead—“[and yet I’ve never been able to fully feel those results, even when I can speak the results aloud and even somehow intuitively sense their rightness.]”
“[Tell me, do you ever do math in your sleep, Professor?]”
“[Constantly. I get many of my best results that way.]”
“[Myself as well. In sleep—perhaps that’s where we mammals find our primal unity.]”
Slowly