by Greg Egan
Prabir thought: I’m ruining it. He didn’t want to fill her head with sugar-coated stories that might as well be fairy tales. He could still feel his father’s hands around him, holding him up to the sky. He could still hear his mother’s voice, telling him they were heading for the island of butterflies. How could he ever make them as real again for Madhusree?
Madhusree was having second thoughts about the picture of Radha. ‘Why isn’t she crying?’
Prabir put his fingers to his cheek. ‘There’s a spot where there’s hardly any nerve endings.’ He’d checked one of the virtual bodies on the net. ‘There are lots of tiny threads in your skin for feeling pain, but if you don’t cut them it doesn’t hurt.’
Madhusree looked doubtful.
There were kebab skewers in the kitchen. He could sterilise one in a gas flame, or use disinfectant from the medicine cabinet. The thought of pushing the metal right through his own flesh made his stomach clench; he wouldn’t have minded someone else performing the trick on him – that could hardly have been worse than the injections he’d had to dissolve the scar tissue on his face – but the prospect of having to apply the force himself was daunting.
But his mother had done it; that wasn’t a fairy tale, the proof was right in front of him. It was just a matter of being confident that you understood what you were doing.
He said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He put the notepad down on the pillow and climbed off the bed. ‘Just the cheeks, though, not the tongue. And when you’re older, you have to help me pull the truck.’
Madhusree didn’t make commitments lightly; she examined the picture of her father again. Prabir leant over her. ‘Look at their faces. If it hurt, they wouldn’t be smiling, would they?’
Madhusree considered the merits of this argument, then nodded solemnly.
‘OK.’
PART THREE
6
Prabir worked late to finish a project, to keep it from nagging at his thoughts all weekend. It was nothing out of the ordinary, but there were some minor problems that demanded his concentration; he lost himself in the details and the time flew by. But when he was done, instead of dashing for the elevators with a clear conscience, gleefully consigning the bank to oblivion, he sat for fifteen minutes in a kind of stupor, staring out across the rows of deserted cubicles.
He turned back to his work station and reran the tests on the credit card plug-in, one more time. It was a standard piece of anthropomorphic software, an ‘investment adviser’ with voice and appearance tailored to the customer’s psychological and cultural profile, who appeared on the card and offered suggestions for shuffling money between various financial instruments. It was a sales gimmick, more than anything else. People who played the markets seriously had to arm themselves with far more sophisticated tools, and know how to use them; anyone who didn’t want to waste time becoming an expert was better off relying on one of the bank’s standard low-risk algorithms. And most people did just that. But the bank had identified a demographic of potential customers who’d be attracted by this kind of novelty: the illusion of technology labouring ceaselessly on their behalf, but only to put the facts at their fingertips, always leaving the final decision to them.
It was worth doing anything well. Even this. But as Prabir watched the array of sixteen sample advisers reacting flawlessly to a barrage of test data, he just felt tired and ridiculous, as if he’d stayed back to straighten all the pictures in the corridors. He wasn’t even impressing his superiors, making his position more secure; the only way to do that would be to spend his evenings studying advanced financial voodoo at quant school, a prospect he found dispiriting beyond words. But he’d probably be idle now for half the day on Monday, before the sales consultants and market researchers made up their minds on the next gimmick.
As he stepped out of his cubicle, the screen and the desk light flickered off; a sprite in the ceiling guided him through the darkness to the elevators. Wasting a few hours on a Friday night was no great tragedy, but he felt the same sense of anticlimax every time he went looking for some kind of satisfaction from the job. He had to be stupid, or morbidly compulsive, to keep on acting as if there was any to be found.
It was only half past nine, but as he walked out on to Bay Street he suddenly felt light-headed with hunger, as if he’d been fasting all day. He bought a glutinous foil-packed meal from a vending machine, and ate it waiting for the bus. It was a crisp winter night; the sky looked clear, but it was a blank starless grey behind the street lights.
When he arrived home, Madhusree’s door was closed, so he didn’t disturb her. As he sank into the couch the TV came on, with no sound and the picture half-size. Watching an image three metres wide was fine if you wanted to get drawn in, but all that activity in your peripheral vision was counter-productive if you were really just hoping to doze off as soon as possible. Prabir kept thinking about work – even with the adviser finished, there were half a dozen things he could be tinkering with – but the bank had a strict policy of no remote access for software development.
Someone rang the doorbell down on the street; a window appeared in the corner of the screen, showing Felix shuffling his feet against the cold. Prabir felt a rush of guilt; he’d been meaning to call him all week. Felix spread his arms and looked straight into the camera, comically imploring. Prabir said, ‘Come on up.’
Felix entered the apartment smiling, looking around. ‘So what are you up to?’
Prabir indicated the TV. ‘Stupefaction therapy.’
‘Do you want to go somewhere?’
‘I don’t know. I just got home; I’m pretty tired.’
Felix nodded sympathetically. ‘Me too.’ He didn’t look tired. ‘I came straight here; I had a batch of coins in a reducing bath I couldn’t leave.’
‘Have you eaten?’ Prabir took a few steps towards the kitchen. ‘We’ve got plenty of food, if you don’t mind something reheated.’
‘No, it’s OK. I grabbed something at work.’ Felix took off his jacket and they sat on the couch.
Prabir said, ‘What kind of coins?’
‘English. Eighteenth century. Nothing very interesting.’ Felix was a preservationist at the Royal Ontario Museum; his job was a mixture of everything from art history to zoology. He often complained that most of what he did was mundane lab work, but he seemed to have a very different notion of ‘mundane’ than anyone who’d worked in retail banking.
He leant forward and kissed Prabir, then moved closer and put an arm around him. Prabir did his best to respond enthusiastically, kissing back, trying to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. He wanted nothing more than to be at ease, to be as unselfconscious as Felix was, but his heart still skipped a beat out of sheer panic at the first touch.
Even when Madhusree had first moved in with him, nine years before, Amita hadn’t fought him for custody; she’d resigned herself to Madhusree’s decision. But Prabir had never felt confident that there wouldn’t be a legal challenge from somewhere, and an eighteen-year-old guardian who slept with men under the same roof as his ten-year-old sister would hardly have been placing himself in the most secure position imaginable. He’d heard of established, respectable gay couples winning custody battles, but his own situation could not have been more different, and the prospect of his first clumsy attempts to find a partner not only costing him Madhusree but ending up as evidence in court was all the discouragement he needed.
The risk had begun to seem far less dramatic when Madhusree was a few years older, but Prabir still hadn’t been willing to gamble. By the time she’d turned eighteen and the danger of losing her had evaporated, Prabir had grown so accustomed to celibacy that he’d had no real idea how to end it. He’d had no social life for eight years; aside from not wanting to leave Madhusree with sitters in the early days, everything his old schoolfriends or colleagues had been into had seemed to demand either that he faked being straight, or that he tempted fate. But once there was nothing holding him back, he felt like a stranger
in the country all over again. He knew he could have found Toronto’s gay bars and nightclubs listed in any tourist guide, but he had no reason to believe that he’d belong in that world, any more than anywhere else.
Felix began unbuttoning Prabir’s shirt. Prabir came to his senses and pulled away. He whispered, ‘What are you doing? She’s just in the next room.’
‘Yes?’ Felix laughed. ‘Somehow I don’t think your sister has a problem with us.’ It was Madhusree who’d introduced them. ‘And I wasn’t planning to tear all your clothes off until we were in your bedroom.’
‘I’m serious. She’s trying to study.’
‘I can be as quiet as you like.’
‘Quiet just makes it obvious.’
Felix shook his head, more amused than annoyed.
Prabir protested, ‘Don’t try telling me it’s not distracting, knowing that someone’s having sex ten metres away. She has a cladistics test on Monday.’
‘That’s why Darwin invented Sunday afternoons. Listen, I did my entire degree sharing a house with six other students. It was quadraphonic fucking twenty-four hours a day. Madhusree has it easy.’ Felix stretched his legs and sat back on the couch.
‘Yeah, well I’m sorry you were stranded in a bohemian nightmare, but it’s not my role to put character-building hurdles in front of her. She’s entitled to some peace in her own apartment when she needs it.’
Felix said nothing. He glanced at the TV.
Prabir said, ‘If you’d called me at work we could have met at your place.’
Felix kept his mouth shut, refusing to prolong the argument. He reached over and ran the back of his hand along Prabir’s forearm, a gesture that seemed both conciliatory and erotic, but Prabir wasn’t willing to let the matter drop. He said, ‘Just admit that I’m not being unreasonable.’
Madhusree emerged from her room. ‘Hi Felix.’ She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then addressed Prabir. ‘I’m going out. Don’t wait up.’
‘Where are you headed?’
‘Nowhere special. I’m just meeting some friends.’
‘That sounds good.’ Prabir tried to read her clothes, but he didn’t know the codes any more. She could have been on her way to a diplomatic reception in a five-star hotel, or a demolition party, for all he could tell.
He said, ‘Have fun.’
She smiled at him, you too, then raised a hand goodbye to Felix.
When she was gone, Felix feigned interest in the TV. The Zeitgeist Channel – a redirection filter that automatically displayed whatever the greatest number of people in the same town or city were watching – was showing a bland office comedy. Prabir said, ‘Did I ever tell you that one of my foster-parents wrote a ten-thousand-word academic paper called “Second-Level Mutual Inter-Sitcom Self-Reference as a Signifier for the Sacred”?’
Felix cracked up. ‘Who published it? Social Text?’
‘How did you know that?’
In the bedroom, Felix said, ‘Any chance of a visual cortex massage?’ Prabir knelt over him and gently peeled the electrode sheet from his back. The skin beneath was slightly pale, but it wasn’t waxen like the skin beneath a cast or a bandage; the polymer let through plenty of oxygen. Felix claimed to wash the twenty-thousand-dollar device in the laundromat along with his shirts, but Prabir had never actually witnessed this.
When Felix had been born with malformed retinas, in 2006, artificial replacements were just coming into use. But there’d been no prospect then of wiring the photosensor arrays directly to his brain. Instead, circuitry in the sheet received the signals from his eyes, and the electrodes stimulated nerves in his back. From infancy, he’d learnt to interpret the sensations as images.
Prabir started kneading, cautiously. Felix said, ‘You can be a lot rougher. It’s not hypersensitive. It’s just skin.’
‘But … do you feel my hands, or do you see something?’
‘Both.’
‘Yeah? What do you see?’
‘Abstract patterns. Rows of dots, starbursts. But it’s all pretty faint and unconvincing. The whole point is to get a strong sensation that’s more compelling as touch than as imagery, so I don’t lose the original function of the nerves.’
Prabir had found software on the net that let him transform a camera’s image into something comparable to the information flowing through the sheet. The impressionistic, monochrome version of his own face that it had shown him had barely been recognisable as a face at all, but Felix could spot people from fifty metres. Experience made all the difference. An operation to connect the artificial retinas directly to his brain had been available for about five years, but he would have found it as hard to adjust to the new way of seeing as Prabir would have found adjusting to the sheet.
Prabir’s hands began to stray. After a while, Felix rolled on to his back and pulled Prabir down on top of him. As they kissed, Prabir felt a warmth like liquid fire spreading through his veins, and a growing tightness in his chest, as if he’d been robbed of his breath by the sight of something astonishing. This was what he wanted, more than sex itself. He had no word for it: it was far too physical to be mere tenderness, far too tender to be mere desire.
He said, ‘You know what I like most about being with you?’
‘No.’
‘Stealing this together.’ Prabir hesitated, afraid of sounding foolish. But if he couldn’t speak now, when could he? ‘Sex is like a diamond forged in a slaughterhouse. Three billion years of unconscious reproduction. Half a billion more stumbling towards animals that weren’t just compelled to mate, but were happy to do it – and finally knew that they were happy. Millions of years spent honing that feeling, making it the most perfect thing in the world. And all just because it worked. All just because it churned out more of the same.’ He reached down and slid his palm over Felix’s penis. ‘Anyone can take the diamond; it’s there for the asking. But it’s not a lure for us. It’s not a bribe. We’ve stolen the prize, we’ve torn it free. It’s ours to do what we like with.’
Felix was silent for a while, just smiling up at him. Then he said, ‘Do you know what an oxbow lake is?’
‘No.’
‘When a river meanders sharply, sometimes the water in the bend ends up cut off from the flow. The river throws off an oxbow lake. That’s how I’ve always thought of it: we’re in an oxbow lake, we’re not part of the flow. But the river keeps making those lakes. There’s something still in it, generation after generation, that makes it happen.’
Prabir conceded, ‘Maybe that’s a more honest way of putting it. We had no choice; we’re just stranded here by chance.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’m glad I’m cut off, I’m glad I’m stranded.’
Felix reflected on this, then suggested cryptically, ‘Maybe you’re not, though. Maybe it just looks that way.’
Prabir laughed. ‘You think I’m moonlighting as a sperm donor?’
‘No. But you have to ask yourself: why are there genes in the river that keep making the lakes? What does any lineage have to gain by retaining that trait, in the long run? Swapping the sex of the object of attraction might be the least risky way to make someone infertile; it’s less dangerous than messing with anatomy or endocrine function – and a hundred thousand years ago it might not even have entailed getting the crap beaten out of you.’
Prabir had his doubts, but he was willing to accept the premise for the sake of the argument. ‘What’s the advantage of being infertile, though?’
Felix said, ‘Under the right conditions, infertile adults might be able to contribute more to the survival of the lineage by devoting their resources to close relatives, rather than children of their own. It takes so long to raise a human child that it might be worth having the occasional infertile offspring as a kind of insurance policy – to look after the others if something happens to the parents.’
Prabir disentangled himself and sat on the side of the bed. His heart was pounding, and there was a red streak across his vision, but he’d pulled away without even th
inking. He still lost his temper too easily, but through eight long years with Keith and Amita he’d trained himself to withdraw, not lash out.
‘Prabir? Shit. I didn’t mean—’ Felix swung his legs around and sat beside him.
Prabir waited until he could speak calmly. ‘I really set myself up for that one.’
‘Come on, you know I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No!’ Felix managed to sound both contrite and indignant. ‘Even if the theory’s true … all it’s describing is the survival of the trait through a statistical advantage. It says nothing about the actions of individuals.’ There was an awkward silence, then he conceded, ‘But it was pretty crass of me to bring it up like that. I’m sorry.’
‘Forget it.’ Prabir stared down at the worn linoleum at his feet, his anger draining away. ‘You know, in high school I used to try to start relationships with girls I thought Madhusree would look up to?’ He laughed, though the memory of it still made him cringe. ‘Which probably would have been enough to doom the entire endeavour, even if I’d been straight. And when I finally stopped kidding myself that there was any chance of that … I just felt like I’d fucked up again. I couldn’t even give her a sister-in-law with attitude, to make up for my stupidity in bringing her to Amita.’
Felix said, ‘You should have trusted her more. You should have known she didn’t need it.’
Prabir snorted derisively. ‘That’s easy to say now! But why should you trust a child to overcome being brought up by fools? Was I supposed to assume that she was genetically endowed with so much innate good sense that nothing anyone could do would harm her?’
‘Hmm.’ Felix seemed genuinely lost for a reply, though maybe he was just being diplomatic.
‘But you’re right,’ Prabir admitted. ‘Madhusree didn’t need role models. By the time we left Amita, I understood that. And I finally stopped worrying about all the ideology Amita would have tried to foist on me if she’d ever found out that I was gay. I started thinking about what it meant for me, instead of what it meant for everyone else.’ He stopped abruptly, his courage waning; he’d already made enough of a fool of himself.
