“You read my face when I’m asleep?”
<I read always. This is essential to understand humans. I digitize your image, then compare with previous measurements.>
“Measurements of what?”
<Of angles and amplitudes of skin folds, color, eyebrow thickness, curvatures of mouth and eyes.>
“My God! You work pretty hard.”
<But that is merely what you do.>
“Naysay, I just give people a squint and figure out—hey, you mean that’s how I know how people feel?”
<Of course. You are designed so that none of this work is conscious.>
“But for you it is?”
<If I wish it to be.>
“And if you don’t?”
<Normally I delegate the task.>
Toby knew that thought was a net of racing electrical impulses, the dance of atoms speaking through their fleet messengers. But was that all his thoughts meant? He looked at Quath without knowing what to say.
<I have been reading for a long while now the signals which move across your face. Especially at times like now.>
“It’s Shibo. Something about her.”
<She rides upon you uneasily.>
“Yeah . . .”
<Maleness for you must always carry some anger, a ruthless density. You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated. Your moral errors are most often a quick brutishness.>
“Hey, I’m better than that.”
<Femaleness—a convention which applies to me only vaguely—carries in your primate varieties an acute sensitivity of response. This is embedded within a composed stability, self-contained. Your females are expectant, impelled to waiting, estrogen-slow. Their errors tend to the static, the enduring face.>
“Hey, come on. That’s so simplified. Hell, I feel steady and composed plenty of times—just not lately, is all. And Besen, lookit her. She’s as kick-ass as they come, when she gets riled.”
<Your genus drifts between these polar extremes—a mode with great survival value, and so seen again and again throughout higher life. But frequent gray does not disprove that black and white exist.>
“You got sex on the brain, big-bug,” Toby said uneasily.
<Your sexual geometries shape your perception of the world—a collaboration between male and female, a painting etched by tensions. Man is pointed toward invasion. Woman exploits the advantages of the hidden, the never-fully-knowable, the grotto of welling darkness. This is the strategy of your species. Merging them in a mind so young as yours is inherently destabilizing.>
“That’s what’s going on in me?”
<I believe so.>
“What’ll I do?”
<I do not know. We are without the required technology for the two principal remedies. As I understand your primate minds, the optimum cure would be to reinforce your own subcharacters.>
“Which?”
<Perhaps your self-sense. That is an idiosyncratic agent present in all human minds. It supports an obliging illusion—that a single self rules your intellect and senses.>
“So if I built up this ‘self-sense’ . . . ?”
<It would counter the areas which the Shibo Personality is invading.>
“Ummm.” He was having trouble keeping his attention on the discussion. He felt a foreboding when he paid exact attention to Quath’s words. But then an itch in his servo-couplers would make him scratch, or a yawn, or some small piping of his sensorium. He would lose the thread of Quath’s argument.
It seemed as if all kinds of little things were poking at him, making his attention veer away from this problem. “The other way—”
<We do not have the equipment to adequately carry out—>
“Yeasay.” A deep breath. “Look, I’ll handle this on my own.”
<I believe the problem can only worsen.>
“We got plenty more to worry about.”
<I fear that—>
“Leave me—and her!—alone.”
