Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

THE

FORTUNATE

FALL

RAPHAEL CARTER

TOR

A TOMDOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEWYORK

Anextract from Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright 1957

byVladimir Nabokov, copyright 1985 by Vera Nabokovand

DmitriNabokov, is reprinted by permission of Vintage Books,

aDivision of Random House Inc. All rights reserved.

Anextract from "Cinderella," Transformations, copyright

1971by Anne Sexton, is reprinted by permission ofHoughton

MifflinCompany. All rights reserved.

Thisis a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayedin

thisnovel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THEFORTUNATE FALL

Copyright 1996 by Raphael Carter

Allrights reserved, including the right to reproduce thisbook,

orportions thereof, in any form.

Thisbook is printed on acid-free paper.

A TorBook

Publishedby Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175Fifth Avenue

NewYork, NY 10010

TorBooks on the World Wide Web:

http://www.tor.com

Toris a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates,Inc.

Libraryof Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter,Raphael.

Thefortunate fall / Raphael Carter.1st ed.

p. cm.

"A TomDoherty Associates book."

ISBN0-312-86034-X (alk. paper)

1.Women journalistsRussiaFiction. 2.GenocideRussia-

-Fiction. 3. Virtual realityFiction. I. Title.

PS3553.A78278F67 1996

813'.54 dc20 96-2656

CIP

FirstEdition: July 1996

Printedin the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

forPamela Dyer-Bennet

whoturned out to be real

THANKS

to RichVeraa, who was first to read it;

toPatrick Goodman, who delivered take-out

andhelped vet the continuity;

toGeorge Willard, who posed for a statue,

andprovided lessons in parachuting and

costumery;

to BethFriedman, who taught the nanobugs

how todrink;

toPatricia Wrede, who provided a critique so

perceptiveI suspect she may be God;

and toLarissa Printzian, who told me the

storyof Ivan Durachok, and may live to regret it.

VIRTUAL OR IMMEDIATE TOUCH

Lovenot the heavenly Spirits, and how their love

Expressthey? by looks only? or do they mix

Irradiance,virtual or immediate touch?

Milton,Paradise Lost

Thewhale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with thePost police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out tobeall this you know. I suppose I can't complain. I knewthe risks when I became a camera. If you see something importantenough, your thoughts become a coveted commodity: they steal yourmemories and sell them tied in twine. Now you may find my lifefor sale in certain stalls, on dusty street and twistingalleyway; it is available on moistdisk, opticube, and dryROM.There are places on the Net where you can make a copy free,although the colors may have faded to sepia and the passions topastel. You have taken my memories and slotted them into yourhead. And you have played them through, reclining on a futon insome neon-streaked apartment, reliving my every sensation andthought from the hour underground with the whale.

If youpaid extra for the moistdisk, you have more than just that hour.You can peer around each thought to see the memories implied init, the way you'd turn a hologram to see what lies behind therose. You can freeze-frame at the moment I first saw the whale,and follow the associations backto the argument overMoby-Dick the night before; to the first time Voskresenyesaid the word, in the cafe on Nevsky Prospect; to the dolphinsthat made me clutch my mother's hand with fear, at the amusementpark when I was six years old. You have searched me and known me:and when at last you put the disk away, you thought of my mind asa sucked orange, dry of secrets.

Butwhat you saw, heard, touched, remembered, does not quite exhaustmy meanings. With the moistdisk in your head, however bristledyou may be with sockets, what you see is only the moment ofexperience, frozen forever. It excludes any later reflectionsupon the eventas the hologram of a rose in bloom excludesthe flower's swollen ripening and black decay.

I willgive you my thoughts since that time, but not on moist-disk. Iwill not let you explore the twining pathways of my thoughts as Iexplore themnot again. I will hide instead behind thiswall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. Iwill tell you the story in order, as you'd tell a story to astranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, andwhat you know is far less than you think you know. You will readmy life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling upthe inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will liedown again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neonsplashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know alittle less about me than you did before.

One

Ashes, Ashes

"Okay,what's this scent?"

"Roses,"I said.

"Andthis one?"

"Citrus.Grapefruit."

"Allright. What about this?"

"Cowshit."

"Close."

"Okay,horse shit."

"Bull's-eye.Olfactory systems are go. Let's do hearing."

I wasstanding by the River Chu, in Kazakhstan, staring at a littlehill from which three naked chimneys rose. I stood alone; but athousand miles away, in Leningrad, a woman I had never met wastesting my senses. When she had finished, she would slide herselfinto my mind, like a rat into water. As my thoughts went out liveto the Net, she would screen them through hers, strengthening myforeground thoughts and sifting out impurities, so thatifshe was any goodthe signal that went out on News One wouldbe pure and clear. And when she drew herself out of my mindagain, five minutes later, she would know more about me than afriend of thirty years.

"Ithink it's an E flat," I said.

"Yes,but what instrument?"

"Brass."

"Bespecific."

"Do Ilook like a conductor?"

"It's atrombone. You can tell by the glissando. Now what'sthis?"

I hadnever met this Keishi Mirabara. I had no idea what she lookedlike. But Keishi was a screener, so for her, our acquaintance ofhalf an hour was already long. Hooking up mind to mind, the waythey do, they can only scorn the glacial rituals the rest of ususe to form friendships. By the end of the day, she might alreadyhate menot with some casual dislike, but with a deep,dissective hatred, such as is otherwise only attained afterdecades of marriage. It's bad stuff, their hatred. Their love isworse: a surge of emotion that comes at you flood-fast,overwhelming your own feelings before you're even certain whatthey are. And the poor camera, who can reach out to another mindonly with mute eyes and vague bludgeoning words ... well, it'slike being an amnesia victim, coming home a stranger to someonewho's loved you all your life.

"Allright, stop me when this stripe is the same color as thesky."

"Nowno,a little moreyes, there."

"You'recoming through faded, then. I'm going to split your field ofvision. What you're seeing will be on your left, and what'scoming through here will be on your right. Tell me when thecolors are the same. Ready?"

"Ready,"I said. I gave it only half attention. I had done this allbefore.

Keishihad come in to screen for me only that evening, when my lastscreener, Anton Tamarich, disappeared on the day of a broadcast.It didn't surprise mescreeners go burnout all thetimebut it left me stuck going live with a screener I'dnever worked with before. It's the beginning of any of a dozencamera nightmares. You're working with a new screener who fallsasleep at the switch just when you remember something you heardonce about how to make brain viruses, and a Weaver possesses theman you're interviewing and kills you on the spot. Or someespecially compromising sexual fantasy flits through your headand out into the Net and is the scandal of the week. The untriedscreener is the camera's equivalent of having your flyopen.