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," said Nick in measured tones, "would be to visit him, to talk to him from a
holostage. Perhaps to meet him in some virtual space, as we are meeting now."
"To meet him in some imaginary world, like this? Or to gaze at him from a
holostage? What good is that to anyone?" The lady was starting to grow frantic
once again. "What good is it to Dirac, especially? To a man who married me to
start a dynasty? In his world of politics, being married to an
electronic phantom will mean nothing, nothing at all. No, my husband must
never know what has happened to me, at least not until you have brought me
back to real life. He must never see me this way! He might-" She let the
sentence die there, as if she were afraid to complete it.
"There are alternatives, of course," said Nick after a short
interval. His own desperation was growing. "I think they are
excellent alternatives. The fact is that you and I-that there are ways
in which we might have a life together. Eventually, with others like
ourselves-"
"Like ourselves? You mean unreal? Only programs, images?"
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"It is a different form of life, I admit. But we-"
"Life? Is this a life? I tell you, I must have a body." The lady,
interrupting, almost screaming, waved her imaged arms. "Skin and blood
and bones and sex and muscles-can you give me those?"
Hawksmoor exerted his best efforts to explain. But she wasn't particularly
interested in the technical details. She wanted him to cease his protests that
getting her a body was impossible, and to get on with the task of doing it,
somehow, at any cost.
But at the same time-this was a new development, and it certainly
gave Nick new hope-she didn't want him to leave her alone. It was
painfully lonely in the Abbey, Genevieve complained, when he was absent.
Hawksmoor experienced great joy at the discovery that the
lady missed him. Still, he was going to have to leave her sometime.
"I could provide people," he suggested.
"Real people?"
"Well, at the moment, no. Currently your companionship would be
limited to somewhat distant figures, like the verger.
Maybe a small crowd having a party in the next room or around the pool, the
sounds, the distant images of people singing, dancing?"
"And I could never join them. No thanks, Nick. Just come and see me when you
have the time. And you must, you really must, try to bring me some good news."
"I'll do that." And he went away, projected his awareness elsewhere,
fled down the pathway of an exit circuit, returning to duty fired with a new
resolve, because she hadn't wanted him to leave.
Before he left, a small thing but about all that he could do, Nick
had shown her how to put herself to sleep.
He was bitterly disappointed, though he told himself he had no right to be, at
the savage reaction, absolutely unjustified as far as he could see, of the
woman he loved. He had meant to offer her a joyous future.
Also, he was really sure, down at the most fundamental level of his
programming, that her demand to be restored to flesh was going to
prove impossible to meet. Nowhere in his flawless, extensive memory was
there any indication that the mass of data comprising an optelectroperson
(authorities differed on the proper term to cover both kinds of programmed
people), either organic or artificial in origin, had ever been
successfully downloaded to an organic brain.
At the pair's next meeting, which came only minutes later in
what fleshly folk would have counted as real time, Jenny, as she continued
trying to come to terms with the harsh facts of her new existence, showed that
she felt some repentance for her stridency and seeming lack of gratitude.
She was, she now insisted repeatedly, really grateful to Nick for saving
her in the only way he could. She agreed that surely, surely this shadowy
existence among shadowy images was better than being dead.
From the way she repeated this over and over, Nick got the impression
that she might be endeavoring to convince herself.
Hawksmoor was happy to be thanked, but he still felt deeply wounded that the
woman he loved could so reject his world, his whole existence. He still
worshiped this woman-more than ever, now that she was of his kind. If woman
was still the right word for what she had become-yes, it was, he would insist
on that-and if worship had ever been the right word for what he felt.
Love? The data banks to which he had access and the troubled presence, the
enigmatic position, of that word in them assured him that it would
admit of no easy definition.
What he felt, he knew, some people would insist upon defining as one mass of
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programming hankering for another.
In his timidity he had found the matter difficult to explain to the Lady
Genevieve, but he had begun to have such feelings for her well before he
had ever managed to get close enough for them to interact. It had
all started when he had first seen her image, many months before her
unlucky journey to Imatra.
She had now been long enough in his world that it had become necessary for
him to explain the degrees of difference, in his world, between
perception and interaction. All that anyone, fleshly or optelectronic,
ever saw of any other person was an image, was it not?
On a succeeding visit to the Abbey he tried again. The lady did seem to be
touched eventually by his pleas and arguments; she
admitted that she liked Nick too, she really did. But she would not admit any
lessening of her need to regain a body somehow, anyhow. On that point, she
warned him, there was going to be no compromise. And she needed the cure, the
restoration, as soon as possible: why wasn't he working on the problem now?
And when Hawksmoor made yet another effort, very tentative, to persuade her
out of that demand, she quickly gave evidence of falling again into a fit of
screaming panic.
Under the circumstances Nick would have promised anything.
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