Holy Fire (35 page)

Novak said that if you exposed for the shadows the rest would come by itself. Novak said that all mystery was in the shadows. Novak said that he had truly never mastered shadows in ninety years. Novak said a great many things and she listened as she’d never listened to anyone before. She went home at night and took notes and fed the actress’s cats and thought and dreamed photography for days and days.

“It’s good you know your job so well,” said Emil cordially. “I haven’t looked at some of these pieces in … oh, such a long time.”

“Don’t let me take you from your work, Emil.”

“Oh no my dear, it’s a pleasure.” Emil fetched equipment and moved the pots a bit and was very helpful.

She would have liked to take the raw shots back to the cats’ apartment and touch them up with her wand, but the wand was terribly addictive. Once you got down to pixel level there was no end to all that gripping and blurring and twisting and mixing.… Knowing when to stop, what to omit, was every bit as important as any postproduction craftwork. Elegance was restraint. So she printed the photos out on the spot on Novak’s borrowed scroller. Then she blew a bit of dust from the photo album and slipped the photos neatly into place.

“These are fine,” Emil said sincerely. “I’d never seen such justice done to my work. I think you should sign these.”

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary.”

“It was so good of you to come. What do I owe you?”

“No charge, Emil, it’s just apprentice work. I was glad to have the experience.”

“No one so determined should be called a mere apprentice,”
said Emil gallantly. “I hope you’ll come again. Have we worked together before? It seems to me that I know you.”

“It does? You do?”

Hitomi sidled over rhythmically and slipped her slender arm over Emil’s shoulders.

“It wasn’t you,” Emil said, leafing through his album. “Your photos are much better than these others.”

“We might have met at the Tête du Noyé,” Maya suggested, unable to resist. “I go there rather often. Are you going there later? There’s a meeting soon.”

Emil looked up at Hitomi adoringly, and caught her slender hand. “Oh, no,” he said, “we’ve given up that little place.”

“[It will be good to see my old friend Klaus,]” said Novak in Czestina as they walked together down Mikulandska Street. “[Klaus used to come to my Tuesdays.]”

“
Opravdu?
” said Maya.

“[T
hey were Milena’s Tuesdays, to tell the truth. Our friends always pretended they were my little meetings, but of course without Milena no one would have come.]”

“This was before Klaus went to the moon?”

“Oh, yes … [Good old Klaus was quite hairless in those days.… He was a microbiologist at Charles University. Klaus and I, we did a series of experimental landscapes, using photoabsorbent bacteria.… The light shone on his gel plate of inoculant. The exposure would last many days. Germs grew only where the light fed them. Those images had the quality of an organic daguerreotype. Then, over the weeks that followed, we would watch those plates slowly rot. Sometimes … quite often, really … that rot produced fantastic beauty.]”

“I’m so glad you’re coming with me to meet my friends tonight, Josef. It means so much to me, truly.”

Novak smiled briefly. “[These little émigré communities
in Praha, they may love the local architecture, but they never pay proper attention to us Czechs. Perhaps if we catch the children young enough, we can teach them better habits.]”

Novak spoke lightly, but he had combed his hair, he had dressed, he had taken the trouble to wear his artificial arm. He was coming with her because she had earned a little measure of his respect.

She had come to know her teacher a little. There were veins of deceit and venality and temper in him, like the bluish veins in an old cheese. But it was not wickedness. It was stubbornness, the measure of a crabbed, perverse integrity. Josef Novak was entirely his own man. He had lived for decades, openly and flagrantly, in a way that she had dared to live only deep inside. Though he never seemed happy, and he had probably never been a happy man, he was in some deep sense entirely imperturbable. He was utterly and entirely Josef Novak. He would be Josef Novak until the day he died.

He would be dead within five years—or so she judged. He was frail, and had been very badly injured once. There were steps he might have taken toward increased longevity, but he seemed to consider this struggle to be vulgar. Josef Novak was one hundred twenty-one years old, far older than the people of his generation had ever expected to become. He was a relic, but Maya still felt a bitter sense of injustice at the thought of Novak’s mortality. Novak often spoke of his own death, and clearly felt no fear of passing, but it seemed to her that a just universe would have let a creature like Josef Novak live, somehow, forever. He was her teacher, and she had come to love him very much.

The Tête was lively tonight. The crowd was much larger than she had expected and there was a tension and a vibrancy she hadn’t sensed before. She and Novak logged in at the bar. Novak reached out about four meters and gently finger-tapped Klaus’s helmet. Klaus turned,
startled, then grinned bearishly. The two old men began to chat in Czestina.

“Ciao Maya.”

“Ciao Marcel.” She had come to know Marcel on the net—to the extent that anybody knew Marcel. The red-haired and loquacious Marcel never stopped talking, but he was not a revelatory or confiding man. He was twenty-seven years old and had already circled the world, by his own estimation, some three hundred and fourteen times. Marcel had no fixed address. He had not had a fixed address since the age of two. Marcel basically lived in trains.

Benedetta, who loved to talk scandal, claimed that Marcel had Williams syndrome. In his case, it was a deliberate derangement, an abnormal enlargement of Heschl’s gyrus in the primary auditory cortex. Marcel had hyperacusis and absolute pitch; he was a musician, and a sonic artificer for virtualities. The syndrome had also drastically boosted Marcel’s verbal skills, which made him an endless source of anecdotes, speculation, brilliant chatter, unlikely linkages, and endless magnetic trains of thought that would hit a mental switch somewhere and simply …

Benedetta claimed that the pope also had Williams syndrome. Supposedly this was the secret of the pope’s brilliant sermonizing. Benedetta believed that she had the dirt on everybody.

“How chic you look, Maya. How lovely to physically witness you.” Marcel’s coat was a patchwork of urban mapping. Marcel lived in that coat, and slept in it, and used it as a navigation aid. Now that she knew that Marcel’s jacket was so plonkingly useful, it somehow seemed rather less vivid. Paul would have described that perception as a category error.

She kissed Marcel’s bearded cheek. “You, too.”

“Congratulations on your Italian venture. They say Vietti’s dying for another session.”

“Giancarlo’s not dying, darling, you mustn’t get your hopes up.”

“I see you brought your sponsor. Your photographer. He must be your man of the hour.”

“He’s my teacher, Marcel. Don’t be gauche.”

“I have my net set to read your posts in Français,” said Marcel. “I wish you would post more often. In Français, your commentary is remarkable. Aspects of wit emerge that one simply can’t find in English anymore.”

“Well, there’s a quality in a good translation that you can never capture with the original.”

“There’s another one, that’s it exactly. How is it that you do that? Is it deliberate?”

“You’re very perceptive, darling. If you don’t get me a frappé I’m afraid I’ll kiss you.”

Marcel weighed these possibilities and got her the frappé. She sipped it and gazed about the bar, leaning on one elbow. “Why do things seem so
très
vivid tonight?”

“Do they? Paul has plans for a spring outing. A major immersion. I hope you’ll come.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss a major immersion for anything.” She had no idea what Marcel was talking about. “Where is Paul?”

Paul was sitting among a group of perhaps a dozen people. He had them spellbound.

Paul opened a small metal shipping canister and removed a life-size carving of a garden toad. The squat and polished toad appeared to be chiseled from a solid ruby.

“Is this one beautiful?” Paul said. “You tell me, Sergei.”

“Well,” said Sergei, “if it’s a product of the Fabergé workshop as you tell us it is, then of course it’s beautiful. Look at that exquisite workmanship.”

“It’s a toad, Sergei. Are toads beautiful?”

“Of course toads can be beautiful. Here is your proof.”

“If someone said you were as beautiful as a toad, would you be pleased?”

“You are changing the context,” Sergei said sulkily.

“But isn’t that what the piece itself is doing? The shock
of disbelief is the core of its aesthetic. Imagine people in the year 1912, taking a rare jewel and spending months of dedicated hand labor turning it into a toad. Isn’t that perverse? It’s that very perversity which gives the piece its trophy meaning. This is a Fabergé original, designed for a Czarist aristocrat. Czarist society was a culture generating jeweled toads.”

Paul’s little crowd exchanged uneasy glances. They scarcely dared to interrupt him.

“Still—are we to imagine that Czarist aristocrats believed that toads are beautiful? Does anyone here imagine that some Czarist aristocrat
asked
the Fabergé atelier to make her a beautiful toad?” Paul gazed about the circle. “But don’t you imagine she was pleased with the result? Once she possessed it, she surely found it beautiful.”

“I love the toad,” Maya volunteered. “I wouldn’t mind owning that toad myself.”

“What would you do with it, Maya?”

“I’d keep it on my bureau and admire it every day.”

“Then take it,” Paul said. He handed it to her. It was surprisingly heavy; it felt just like a red stone toad.

“Of course that’s not really a valuable Fabergé heirloom,” Paul told them all, casually. “It’s an identical museum replica. The Fabergé original was laser scanned to an accuracy of a few microns, and then instantiated in modern vapor deposition. Oddly, there were even a few flaws introduced, so that the artificial ruby is indistinguishable from the genuine corundum that forms a natural ruby. About a hundred toads were made in all.”

“Oh, well, of course,” said Maya. She looked at the little red toad. It was somewhat less beautiful now, but it was still a remarkable likeness of a toad.

“Actually, there were over ten thousand made. It’s not artificial ruby, either. I lied about that. It’s only plastic.”

“Oh.”

“It wasn’t even fresh plastic,” Paul said relentlessly. “It was recycled garbage plastic, mined from a twentieth-century
dump. I just pretended it was the Fabergé original, in order to make my point.”

“Oh, no,” Maya mourned. People began laughing.

“I’m joking, of course,” Paul said cheerily. “In point of fact, that truly is a Fabergé original. It was made in Moskva in 1912. The labor took fourteen skilled artisans a full five months to complete. It’s one of a kind, completely irreplaceable. I’ve borrowed it from the Antikensammlungen in Munchen. For heaven’s sake, don’t drop it.”

“You’d better have it back, then,” Maya said.

“No, you hold it for a while, my dear.”

“I don’t think so. It wears me out when it keeps mutating like this.”

“What if I told you that it wasn’t even made by Fabergé? That in fact, it was an actual toad? Not human workmanship mimicking a toad, but an actual scanned garden toad. Cast in—well, you can choose the material.”

Maya looked at the sculpture. It was a sweet thing to hold, and there was something about it that she truly did like, but it was making her brain hurt. “You’re really asking me if a photograph of a toad can have the same beauty as a painting of a toad.”

“Can it?”

“Maybe they’re beautiful in different categories.” She looked around. “Would someone else hold this, please?”

Sergei took it off her hands with a show of bravado and pretended to smack the toad against the table. “Don’t,” Paul said patiently. “Just a moment ago you admired it. What changed your mind?”

Maya left to look for Benedetta. She found her in a little crowd behind the bar. “Ciao Benedetta.”

Benedetta rose and embraced her. “[This is Maya, everyone.]”

Benedetta had brought four of her Italian friends. They were polite and sober and steady eyed and in ominous control of themselves. They looked very intelligent. They looked very self-possessed and rather well dressed. They
looked about as dangerous as any kids she had seen in a long time. Of course they were all women.

Benedetta wedged her into a place at the table. “I’m sorry that I have no Italiano,” Maya said, sitting. “I have a translator, but I have to speak in English.”

“We want to know, what is your relationship with Vietti?” said one of the young women quietly.

Maya shrugged. “He thinks I’m cute. That’s all.”

“What’s your relationship with Martin Warshaw?”

Maya glanced at Benedetta, startled and hurt. “Well, if you have to know, it was his palazzo. You know about the palazzo?”

“We know all about the palazzo. What is your relationship with Mia Ziemann?”

“Who’s that?” Maya said.

The interrogator shrugged and sat back with a dismissive flutter of her hand. “Well, we’re fools to trust this person.”

“[Of course we’re fools,]” said Benedetta heatedly. “[We’re fools to trust one another. We’re fools to trust anyone. So now tell me of a better place where we can install those machineries.]”

“Benedetta, who are these people?”

“They are mathematicians,” Benedetta said. “Programmers. Rebels. And visionaries. And they are very good friends of mine.”

Radical students, Maya thought. Aflame with imagination because they were so wonderfully free of actual knowledge. “Who’s the oldest person here?” she asked guardedly.

“You are, of course,” said Benedetta, blinking.

“Well, never mind that question then. What’s all this have to do with me anyway?”

“I’ll draw you a little picture,” Benedetta said. She spread out her furoshiki and pulled a stylus from behind her ear. “Let me tell you an interesting fact of life. About the medical-industrial complex.” She drew an x-y graph
with two swift strokes. “This bottom axis is the passage of time. And this is the increase in life expectancy. For every year that passes, posthuman life expectancy increases by about a month.”