Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [63]
Back on deck, the crew were assembling a pair of projectors. “Let’s run out those ghost nets again. Watch that—”
There was a knock on the door.
Marivaud opened it. A woman with hard, handsome features that echoed her own stood there. “Goguette! Come in, let me take your cloak. Have you eaten yet? What brings you here so early?”
“I’ll take some berry tea.” Goguette sat at the table. “I’ve come to share the jubilee with my little sister. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“No, of course not. Oh! Mousket’s on deck.”
A large, heroically breasted military type faded in, all jaw and dark purpose. “Mousket,” Goguette said. “She’s the commandant, right?”
“Yes. She’s having an affair with the pilot.” A quick glimpse of a slim, straight-built man with cynical eyes. To the bureaucrat she said, “He is an extremely private man. The public nature of their love embarrasses, humiliates, arouses him. That only makes it the sweeter for her. She savors his abasement.”
“Excuse me,” the bureaucrat said. “How do you know all this?”
“Didn’t you notice my earrings?” Marivaud brushed back a curtain of braids, exposing an ear all coral and cream. From it hung an amber leaf, silver-veined, and delicate as a dragon’s wing. The image swelled so he could see the embedded elements of a television transceiver, signal processor, and neural feed. It was an elegantly simple arrangement that would let her effortlessly employ all electronic skills: She might talk with friends, receive entertainments, preserve a particularly beautiful sunrise, copy an Old Master drawing in her own hand, do research, take and teach educational courses, or transmit her dreams for machine analysis, at her whim. It made her brain a node within an invisible empire of interactivity, the perfect focus of a circle so infinitely large its center was everywhere, its circumference nowhere.
“Even the offworlders didn’t have these,” she said. “We were the first to combine everything into one continuous medium. It was like being in two worlds at once, like having a second, unseen life. This was when you offworlders were creating that awkward mnemonic palace of yours. Our method was superior. If it hadn’t been for the Atlantis incident, you would be a part of it now.”
“By God, you’re talking about the Trauma!” the bureaucrat cried in rising horror. “There was a ship involved—that must have been the Atlantis! Everyone on it was wired for continuous broadcast.”
“Do you want to listen to this story or narrate it yourself? Yes, of course the crew were all actors, improvisors—what do you call people who lead lives of shaped intensity in order to create public dramas?”
“I don’t think we have them anymore. What are they doing to the haunts?”
“Fitting them with broadcast chips, of course. What did you think this project was all about?”
“Why would you want to do such a thing?”
“That is exactly what I ask her myself!” Goguette said. “There are so many refined, educational, and enriching experiences available on the net. Why waste your life listening in on creatures little better than animals?”
“Ah, but such splendid animals!” Marivaud giggled. “But we are getting away from our story. You”—she addressed the bureaucrat directly—“can experience only the middle range of this. You miss the little things, the burn of rope in chafed hand, Ocean’s smell, the chill of a salt breeze across your arm. And the grand emotions you can only sense from the outside. There is no way we can share more than a fraction of this with you. So I will show you two minor players, a ghostnetter and a flash-surgeon. Their true names have been lost, so I will give the ghostnetter the offworld name of Underhill. The flash-surgeon I will name—Gogo, after my sister.”
Goguette punched her shoulder, she laughed, and they were gone. On deck, the flash-surgeon holstered her gun. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, glanced up past the mast-high cranes to see Caliban high above, a disk of ice melting