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I don’t know, said Mahnmut. I just don’t see it. It all seems like the overwrought musings of an aesthete to me.
Aesthete? Orphu swiveled one of his communication stalks to lock in the tightbeam while his manipulators and flagella were busy spot-welding a cable co
Is there a difference? Even as he sent the sarcastic query, Mahnmut knew he was being unfair. He had sent Orphu hundreds—perhaps thousands—of e-mails over the last dozen e-years, explaining the difference between the Poet named “Will” in the so
Orphu of Io ignored that question and sent back—Admit that you loved Proust’s comic vision. He is, above almost all else, a comic writer.
Was there a comic vision? I saw little comedy in the work. Mahnmut was serious about this. It was not that the human sense of humor was alien to Mahnmut or moravecs; even the earliest spacefaring, self-evolving, only dimly sentient robots created and dispatched by the human race before the rubicon pandemic had been programmed to understand humor. Communication with human beings—real, two-way communication—had been impossible without humor. It was as human as anger or logic or jealousy or pride—all elements he had noticed and noted in Proust’s endless novel. But Proust and his protagonists as comic writers, comic characters? Mahnmut failed to see it, and if Orphu were right, it was a major oversight. It had been Mahnmut who spent decades on finding the word-play humor and satire in the Bard’s plays, Mahnmut who had ferreted out even the tiniest ironies in Shakespeare’s so
Listen, said Orphu as he scuttled back along one of the taut bucky-lines to the ship, reaction jets pulsing. Read this part of “Swa
“I swear to you,” he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, “that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel trapped myself, and rather a
Meanwhile, Odette had shown signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty. Although the meaning of his tirade was beyond her, she grasped that it was to be included in the category of “harangues” and scenes of reproach or supplication, which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without paying any heed to the words that were uttered, to conclude that they would not make unless they were in love, and that since they were in love, it was u
Mahnmut laughed out loud in the tight confines of The Dark Lady ’s pressurized control room. He saw it now. The humor was brilliant. He had read that passage the first time focusing on the human emotion of jealousy and the obvious effort of the Swa
Thanks, he said to Orphu as the six-meter horseshoe-crab-shaped moravec settled into his hull-crèche. I think I hear the humor coming through now. I appreciate it. Everything is different than Shakespeare’s tone and language and structure, but something is—the same.
Obsession with the puzzle of what it means to be human, suggested Orphu. Your Shakespeare looks at all the facets of humanity through reaction to events, finding the deep-internal through characters defined as actions. Proust’s characters delve deep into memory to see the same facets. Perhaps your Bard is more like Koros III, leading this outward expedition. My sweet Proust is more like you, wrapped in the cocoon of The Dark Lady and diving deep, seeking the geography of reefs and the hard bottom and other living things and the whole world through echo-location.
Mahnmut thought about this for several rich nanoseconds. I don’t see how your Proust solved this puzzle—or rather, how he tried to solve it other than through immersion in memory.
Not just in memory, Mahnmut my friend, but in time.
Tens of meters away, shielded by his near-invulnerable and impenetrable double-hull of his submersible and that of of the ship carrying it, Mahnmut felt as if the Ionian had reached out and touched him in some personal—some profound—ma
Time is separate from memory, muttered Mahnmut on their private line, speaking now mostly to himself, but is memory ever separate from time?
Precisely! boomed Orphu. Precisely. Proust’s protagonists—primarily the “I” or “Marcel” narrator, but also our poor Swa
Mahnmut thought about this for a time in silence. He switched his vision from external camera to external camera, looking away at the complexities of the ship itself and its frightening circular sail “downward” toward the rocks, toward the Belt. He willed the image to full magnification and there it was.
A solitary asteroid was tumbling against black. There was no danger of impact. Not only was their ship now 150,000,000 kilometers above the plane of the ecliptic and passing the Belt at blinding speed, but this asteroid—he queried Ri Po’s astrogation banks and identified the rock as Gaspra—was tumbling away from them. Still, it was a sizable mini-world—the overlay data said that Gaspra sized out at 20×16×11 kilometers—and the magnification, equal to a pass at about 16,000 kilometers—showed an irregular, sharpened-potato mass with a complicated pattern of cratering. More interestingly, there were obvious artificial elements in the image—straight lines gouged in the rock, gleams of light in dark craters, clear patterns of light sources on the asteroid’s flattened “nose.”