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 connector. To Mahnmut, watching on rear video, the white welding-arc looked like a star against the black sail behind the awkward mass of Orphu. Mahnmut, are you talking about Proust or his Marcel-narrator?

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 sonnets and the historical artist named Shakespeare. He suspected the Proust, however dense and impenetrable, to be just as complex when it came to identity of author and characters.

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 sonnets.

Listen, said Orphu as he scuttled back along one of the taut bucky-lines to the ship, reaction jets pulsing. Read this part of “Swann in Love” again. This is where Swann, in thrall to the faithless and fickle Odette, is using all his skill as an emotional blackmailer to keep her from going to the theater without him. Listen to the humor here, my friend. He downloaded text.

“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 annoyed, if, after all, you tell me you’re not going. But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also. A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I was about to pass judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your Nuit de Cléopâtre (what a title!) has no bearing on the point. What I must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forgoing a pleasure. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect but at least perfectible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against the glass wall, always mistaking it for water. Do you realize that your answer will have the effect—I won’t say of making me cease loving you immediately, of course, but of making you less attractive in my eyes when I realise that you are not a person, that you are beneath everything in the world and incapable of raising yourself one inch higher? Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you as a matter of little or no importance to give up your Nuit de Cléopâtre (since you compel me to sully my lips with so abject a name) in the hope that you would go to it none the less. But, having decided to make such an issue of it, to draw such drastic consequences from your reply, I confessed it more honourable to give you due warning.”

 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 unnecessary to obey them, as they would only be more in love later on. And so she would have heard Swann out with the utmost tranquility had she not noticed that it was growing late, and that if he went on talking much longer she would “never,” as she told him with a fond smile, obstinate but slightly abashed, “get there in time for the Overture.”

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 Swann character to manipulate the behavior of the woman named Odette. Now it was . . . clear.

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—manner.

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 Swann—have three chances to sniff out and put together the thick puzzle of life. Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator’s and even author’s failures!

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.”