Holy Fire (20 page)

“Pretty is just a technique of mine. You’re pretty. I could make you look really vivid if you wanted me to.”

“I hate body artifice,” Benedetta said, fingering keys with great expertise. “It’s even worse now that women’s bodies last forever. We women are so much of the female body it’s fatal to us, we even have to die beautiful. Even Paul … he talks to me about theory. Like a colleague! Like a philosopher! Then the glamour girl appears in her wig and lipstick and it’s like his little Muse just jumped off the train for him. Women never learn! Men contemplate beauty, but we have to
be
beauty. So the female is always the other, and we’re never the center.”

Maya blinked. “Men and women just think differently, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s so stupid! ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ That’s all
gone now, you understand? Anatomy is
industry
now! You want to do some terrifying male mathematics, little glamour girl? Put enough stickers on your head and I’ll teach you calculus in a week!”

“You can break a blood vessel doing that sort ofthing.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, darling. I’m sure you’ve done things to your breasts that are a thousand times more radical than calculus. Wait a moment—here it comes.”

Benedetta’s eggshell white furoshiki turned a smoky slate gray. “That’s good. Just a moment while I find a public netsite.… Here we have it.”

Bouboule arrived at their table. Bouboule had a lacquered little cupid’s-bow mouth, no chin, and large, luminescent brown eyes. She wore a narrow-brimmed domed hat, fancy spex on a neck chain, a woven sweater, a long scarf, and she carried a large yellow backpack. “Ciao Benedetta.”

“Bouboule is from Stuttgart,” Benedetta said. “What was your name again?”

“Maya.”

“Maya is going to show us a secret, Bouboule.”

“I adore secrets,” said Bouboule, settling down with a wriggle. “How charming of you, Maya, to share your secrets with little nobodies like ourselves. Do you mind if my monkey sees?”

A golden marmoset crept up Bouboule’s solid back and shoulder. The marmoset was fully clad in miniature evening dress, tie and tails. The monkey’s eyes were two gleaming metallic domes. Implanted mirrorspex.

“Does your monkey talk?” Maya asked. The monkey had no shoes. Its furry little feet, protruding from the trouser’s hems, seemed peculiarly ghastly.

“My monkey’s a virtualist,” Bouboule said airily. “Maya, where are your spex?”

“Don’t have spex. Got no gloves either.”

“
Quel dommage!
” said Bouboule, clearly very pleased. “My uncles manufacture spex in Stuttgart. I have four uncles.
All brothers! Do you know how rare that is nowadays, to have four brother men, all from one family? Five childs! With my mother, all together. That never happens now! But things always happen to me that should never happen.” Bouboule opened her pack and handed Maya a plastic-wrapped pair of wire-rimmed spex.

“Liquid film?” Maya said, examining the lenses.

“Disposables,” shrugged Bouboule. “Take these smartgloves—I don’t say these are gloves of the mode. These are gloves to wear on party nights, when you might wake up who knows where. Don’t break the fingers, stretch them out slowly … that’s the way.”

“You’re very kind to loan me these,” Maya said.

“No loan, keep them! My uncles like gifting toys to the childs, they have a very long-term view of the market.”

“I have something for you, too, Maya,” said Benedetta suddenly, apparently on impulse. Benedetta groped with two fingers beneath the high rolled collar of her blouse. She tugged out a diamond necklace, with a pendant on a thin golden chain. “Here. This is for you. Yours is the greater need.”

“A diamond necklace?”

“Don’t look so surprised, any idiot can make diamonds,” Benedetta said. She handed it over. “Look at the pendant.”

“A little nightingale in a golden nest! This is so lovely, Benedetta. I can’t possibly accept this.”

“Gold is dirt. Stop gaping, and pay attention. The bird nest goes inside your ear. It’s a translator. All the diamonds are memory beads, they contain all the European languages. See the little numbers etched on the beads? The bird, she is hatching English, Italiano, and Français now. You don’t need Italiano as your major language, so put in English, that’s egg number one … put English in the center of the nest, and put Italiano back on one side. Italiano, that’s egg number seventeen.”

“Italiano is
seventeen
?” said Bouboule.

“It’s a Swiss device. From Basel.”

“What humorless people the Swiss are,” said Bouboule. “Just because Milano bought Geneva … What a grudge.”

Maya took the Italiano egg from the chain. Then she pried the English egg loose from the golden nest, and carefully popped the Italiano diamond egg beneath the bird’s etched little circuitry feet. The tiny eggs snapped nicely into place with satisfying little clicks.

She gently tucked the little pendant into the hollow of her right ear. The pendant wriggled about like a metallic earwig. Something threadlike and waxy crept into her ear canal. She felt an instant violent urge to claw the device out of her head, but she accepted the tickling penetration, shivering on the spot.

“[It has no battery,]” Benedetta told her in Italiano. “[You have to keep the bird warmed by your skin at all times. If she ever gets cold, the bird will die.]”

The new translator had a wonderful flutelike resonance, a tiny piping right next to the surface of her right eardrum. “But it’s so lovely! So clear!”

“Remember—no battery.”

“No battery. Okay. But that seems like an odd oversight.”

“That’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” Benedetta said glumly. “That bird is a shareware device. The Swiss weren’t missing any tricks when they built it.”

Maya clipped the diamond chain around her neck, and tucked it beneath her blouse. She couldn’t help but feel pleased. “You’re very generous. Would you like my Deutsch translator?”

Benedetta looked it over. “Deutsch-to-English. I can’t use this. It’s tourist kitsch.” She tossed it back. “[Now we can talk like civilized people. Show us your palazzo.]”

“I certainly hope this works.” Maya traced her passtouch into the glossy surface of the woven computer. “Are my gloves turned on?”

“[Something is processing,]” Benedetta diagnosed skeptically.

Bouboule pulled on a pair of exquisitely tailored lemon yellow smartgloves and carefully adjusted her spex. “This is so exciting. Patapouff and I love memory palaces. Don’t we, Pouff-pouff?”

Maya tensed in expectation that the monkey would speak aloud. The monkey said nothing. Maya forced herself to relax. Talking dogs were okay. There was definitely something awful about monkeys.

A blurry test pattern appeared on Maya’s spex. She ran her finger along the stem of the right eyepiece until the pattern focused and clarified. She pressed the nosebridge to bring the depth in. These were habitual gestures, little technical actions she’d been doing for decades, but she felt a sudden thrill. Her astigmatism was all gone. Her astigmatism was entirely cured, and until this instant she had never managed to miss it.

“[It’s an office!]” Benedetta said triumphantly. “[Such a strange old office! I’ll navigate, okay?]”

“A man’s office,” Bouboule said, bored.

“[Where does this man keep his pornography?]” Benedetta asked.

“What?” Maya said.

“[You never found his pornography? There’s not a man alive who doesn’t hide pornography in his memory palazzo.]”

“He’s not alive,” Maya said.

Bouboule said something wicked, and laughed. “A pun in Français,” the bird translator fluted, in its sweet but peculiarly characterless English. “The context is not understood.”

“[I see here the big blueprint,]” said Benedetta, examining one wall. “[The sixties, eh? They built like maniacs then. Library. Gallery. Artificial Life Zoo—that sounds good! Business records. Health records. CAD-CAM pattern storage.] ‘Movies.’ Are there movies in this place?”

“What is that word, ‘movies’?” Bouboule said.

“
Cinématographique.
”

“
Prima!
”

“[Tailor’s measurements … tincture recipes. House plans. Oh, that’s very nice! To keep your physical house plans inside your palazzo. Three or four different houses! This man must have been quite rich.]”

“He was rich several different times,” Maya said.

“[Oh, look at this thing! He had a ptydepe tracker.]”

“What’s a ptydepe?” Maya said.

Benedetta, forced into technical definitions, switched to English again. “A Public Telepresence Point, a PTP. He has—he had—a scanner-collator that could sample public telepresence records. Good for tracking friends. Or enemies. The program will sample millions of public telepresence records for years, cataloging appearances of the target person. It’s a dataminer. Industrial Spyware.”

“Illegal?” Bouboule asked with interest.

“Probably. Maybe not, when he had it built.”

“Why do you call it a ‘ptydepe’?” Maya said.

“Ptydepe, that’s what they always call the PTPs here in Praha.… It’s such a strange language, Czesky.”

“Czesky is not the noun,” said Bouboule helpfully. “Czesky is only the, what-you-call, adverb. The proper name of the language is Czestina.”

“Czestina is egg number twelve, Maya.”

“Thank you,” Maya said.

She felt tiny paws stealthily creeping into her sleeve. Maya shrieked and yanked her spex off.

The monkey, alarmed, leapt back to the safety of Bouboule’s shoulder, where it revealed a rack of needlelike teeth.

Bouboule, blinded to reality by her spex, groped gently in midair. “Bad tactility?”

“Bad old protocols,” Benedetta said, similarly blinded.

Maya glared silently at the monkey’s silver-capped eyeballs. “Touch me again and I’ll whack you,” she mouthed
silently. The monkey adjusted its tuxedo lapels, flicked its prehensile tail, and jumped off the back of the couch.

“I found an access!” Benedetta said. “Let’s go up to the roof!”

Maya put on her spex again. Doors shunted aside in the wall. They entered a virtual darkness. White rings ran past them downward, like galloping zebra stripes.

They emerged on a crenellated rooftop. Fake gravel underfoot.

And there were
other
memory palaces. Warshaw’s partners in crime perhaps? She could not understand why people running memory palaces would want to make their premises visible to one another. Was it somehow reassuring to see that other people were hiding here as well? Rising in the horizon-warped virtual distance was a mist-shrouded Chinese crag, a towering digital stalagmite with the subtle monochromatics of sumi-e ink painting. Some spaceless and frankly noneuclidian distance from it, an enormous bubbled structure like a thunderhead, gleaming like veined black marble but conveying a weird impression of glassy gassiness, or maybe it was gassy glassiness … A smooth and elegantly gilled construction with a mushroom’s sloping tip, fibrous at the bottom, columnar and veiny up the sides. Another palace like a honeycomb set on end, surrounded by hundreds of motes all slowly flying and detaching and absorbing, like a dovecote for virtual pterodactyls.

“What a strange metaphor,” said Bouboule, thrilled. “I’ve never seen a virtuality this old that is still functional.”

“I wonder where we are,” Maya said. “I mean, I wonder where on earth all this is running.”

“This might not represent real processing,” Benedetta said. “This looks fantastic, but it could be the tripes of one little machine in a closet somewhere in Macau. You must never trust the presentation. Through another interface, this might look very quotidian and bourgeois.”

“Don’t be such a mule, Benedetta,” said Bouboule, excited.
“Gerontocrats don’t live that way! No man who owned a place like this would come here just to fool his own eyes. This is an old man’s soulscape. An exclusive resort! A criminal enclave.”

“I wonder if any of these strange places are still inhabited. Maybe they are all dead, and still running on automatic. They are haunted castles in virtual sand.”

“Don’t talk that way,” Maya said tightly.

“Let’s fly!” Benedetta leapt gracefully from the edge of the parapet.

The spex went dark.

Benedetta gasped. “Oh! Pity! That broke the contact.”

They took their spex off, and gazed at one another silently.

“How did you come to own this palace?” Bouboule said at last.

“Don’t ask,” said Benedetta.

“Oh.” Bouboule smiled. “Did the old man leave you money, I hope?”

“If he did, I never found the treasure,” Maya said, folding her spex. “Not yet, anyway.” She tried to give the spex back.

“No, no,” Bouboule insisted, “you keep them. I’ll find you nicer ones. What’s your address?”

“No fixed address. No net address. Really, I’m just passing through.”

“Come and stay with me, if the wanderjahr takes you to Stuttgart. There’s plenty of room at my uncles’.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” said Maya. “You’re both so kind and generous to me—I scarcely know what to say.”

Benedetta and Bouboule exchanged the oddly guileless glances of young sophisticates. “Not at all,” said Benedetta. “We have our own little ways. We can always tell when we discover a sister spirit.”

“In the scene we are modern women,” declared Bouboule somberly, “who have made the decision to live free!
We all have desires that don’t accord with the status quo. We are contemporary women! We gaze at the stars all together, or we die one by one in the gutter.”

Bouboule bent over suddenly. “What’s that? Oh, look, Patapouff found a nice mosquito! It’s a lucky sign. Let’s test our blood and do some stickers to celebrate. Something very warm and cozy.”

“I don’t know,” Benedetta demurred, “my lipid levels are so low lately.… Maybe a mineral water.”

“Me, too,” Maya said.

“Let’s get some nice boy to fetch us a drink,” said Bouboule. She plucked up the inert fabric computer and flapped it over her head.

“Who’s that guy that brought you?” Benedetta said to Maya. “Eugene?”

“I didn’t come here with Eugene.”

“Eugene is an idiot, isn’t he? I hate people who confuse algorithms and archetypes. Besides, he’s from Toronto.”