Holy Fire

3

Maya went to work for Therese in her shop in the Viktualienmarkt. The shop was glass-fronted brick, untidily crammed with clothes and shoes, with a tiny office in the back where Therese scraped out a narrow financial niche. Therese dealt mostly in cash, often in barter, sometimes in precious metals. Maya lived in the shop, wore her pick of the merchandise, and slept under Therese’s desk. Therese slept in her parents’ high-rise with a variety of scruffy, dangerous-looking, semiarticulate boyfriends.

It was a great comfort to be compelled to work and not have to spend so much time being perfectly free and happy and confident. All that freedom and happiness and confidence was terribly wearing.

One night at the shop in late February, Maya awoke to find herself sleepwalking, yet still compulsively putting the stock in order. That was Mia’s doing. Mia was all right now. Mia liked this situation. Mia felt very safe and at ease now that she had duties.

Maya worked quite hard and without complaint and without much in the way of reward, and Therese appreciated this. Like most young people who had created careers for themselves in the contemporary economy, Therese was a great connoisseur of the gratuitous gesture. Still, Maya was dissatisfied. She couldn’t read the tags in the clothing, and she couldn’t discuss things properly with the customers. This would not do.

Maya begged some cash off Therese, went to a cut-rate language school in the Schwabing section of Munchen, and bought 500 cc’s of education tinctures. These particular philters were said to convey a new plasticity for language, “giving the adult brain the eager syntactical receptiveness of a child of three.” All the smart drugs in the world couldn’t make the Deutsch language a cheap or easy accomplishment—but the “child of three” part certainly met its billing. The neural dope found her inbuilt mastery of English and put its pharmaceutical foot right through it, like a boot through a stained-glass window.

“You’d better ease off that cheap dope and try learning Deutsch the old-fashioned way,” Therese said.

“Ist mein Deutsch so schlecht, Fräulein Obermufti?”

Therese sighed. “Maya, you try too hard. People enjoy having foreign girls in a couture shop. It’s cute to be a young foreign girl. At least you can make correct change with silver money, and that’s more than Klaudia has ever managed.”

“Ich verstehe nur Wurstsalat. Am Montag muss ich wieder malochen.”

“Would you stop that? It’s eerie.”

“I really need to do this so that, uhm, können Sie mir das Dingsda da im Schaufenster zeigen?”

“Listen, darling, you can’t give anyone fashion advice. You don’t have any proper sense of chic. You dress just like a little California magpie.” Therese stood up. “I never dreamed you’d treat the shop like an adult’s job. You need to relax. You’re an illegal, remember? If you start fussing about making money, some cop is going to notice you.”

Maya frowned. “ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well.’ ”

Therese thought this over. The tone and the sentiment didn’t agree with her at all. “That’s like something my grandmother would say. I think I know some people who can help you, darling. Let’s stop this nonsense, it’s a slow day anyway.”

Therese made some net calls, and then shut up shop. They took the tube into Landsbergerstrasse and crossed the Hacker-Brucke. Maya saw the distant towers of the cathedral rising behind the train station. The ancient permanence of Munchen—combined with the seductive possibility of instant escape. The contrast gave her a deep moment of intense inexpressible pleasure.

All the young people in Munchen seemed to know Therese. Therese had a thousand vivid friends. Therese even personally knew some old people, and it was touching to see that they treated her almost as an equal. It often seemed that Therese’s little clothing store scarcely existed as a shop per se. The shop was just the physical instantiation of her vast and tenuous gray-market web of tips, barters, bribes, pawns, trade-offs, swaps, hand-me-downs, subtle obligations, and frank kickbacks.

Today’s particular friends of Therese had a production studio in the basement of a low-rise in Neuhausen. There were strict laws in central München about obscuring the skyline with high-rises, so the local real-estate entrepreneurs had tried burrowing into the earth. The faddish subterranean buildings had a big overhead from ventilation and heat pollution, and they’d gone broke so repeatedly that they were forced to rent out to kids.

Therese’s friends were sculptors. Their studio was down in the bowels of the place, oddly shaped and full of coughing lunglike racket from the ventilator next door. “Ciao Franz.”

“Ciao Therese.” Franz was a stout Deutschlander with a brown beard and a rumpled lab coat. He wore spex on a neck chain. “[So this is the new mannequin?]”

“Ja.”

Franz fiddled with his spex, scanning Maya as she strolled into the studio. He smiled. “[Interesting bone structure.]”

“[What do you think?]” Therese said. “[Can you cast her for me? Maybe a nice porous plastic?]” They started bargaining, in a vivid Deutsch so thick with argot that Maya’s translator choked.

Another guy showed up from the back of the lab. “Hey, hello, beautiful.”

“Ich heisse Maya. And yes, I speak English.” She shook the new guy’s plastic-gloved hand.

“Ciao Maya. I’m Eugene.” Eugene removed his spex, let them dangle on the neck chain, and looked her up and down bare eyed. “I like your color sense. You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

“Are you American?”

“Toronto.” Eugene looked pretty good without his spex on. A bit gawky and hawk faced, but with a lot of energy. Eugene hadn’t bathed in a long time, but he was giving off an intriguing scent, like warm bananas. “You’ve never been in our studio before, right? Let me give you the tour of the works.”

Eugene showed her a camera-crowded scanning pit and a pair of big, translucent assembler tanks. “We map out our various models here,” said Eugene, “and this is how we do physical instantiation. This old classic,” he patted the transparent wall of the tank, “is a laser-cured thermoplastic instantiator. Modern industrial standards passed her by some time ago. But we’re not industrial people here in the lab. We do artifice. Franz has worked some intriguing culturotechnical variations.”

“Really? Wunderbar.”

“You know how thermocuring works?”

“Nein.”

Eugene was very patient. He was obviously taken with her. “You fill this tank with a special liquid plastic. Then you fire lasers through the plastic, and the lasers cause the liquid plastic to cure into a durable solid object. The object’s proportions are defined by the movements of the beam—sculpted from liquid into solid, at the focus of coherent light. Naturally the beam is an output from our design virtuality—so we can design physical objects from scratch inside a computational space. Or else we can photocopy Three-D actualities. Like, for instance, your body. Which is what we’ll be doing today.”

The technical English verbiage seemed to be driving the language tincture out of her head. “I think I understand. What you do is like photography.”

“Right! Very much like photography! Solid photography. The plastic’s expensive, but we can carbonate it. We can get cheap Three-D foam objects that are mostly gas. The real fun is in whipping it all the way up to aerogel. That way, we can make a structure the size of an elephant that weighs about three kilos.”

Maya gazed respectfully at the machine. “That’s a big tank, but it’s not big enough for an elephant.”

“You make the elephant in pieces and then you laminate the sections together,” Eugene explained, rolling his eyes slightly.

She spoke carefully. “I’m sorry. I’m not normally this stupid, but I’m on drugs.”

Eugene burst into laughter. “You’re a lot of fun.”

“So you’re a sculptor? An artist?”

“Artifice isn’t art.”

“Are you an engineer, then?”

“Artifice isn’t engineering. Let me show you something else. You’re a couture model, right? You ought to find this intriguing.”

Eugene led her over to a life-sized plastic nude sprawling on the floor. The nude woman was lying on her back with her hands laced behind her head and a vague expression of animal bliss.

“Who’s your model?”

“She’s nobody. And everybody. See, Muncheners are very big on nude sunbathing. We just went down to the Flauchersteg one Sunday last summer, and we scanned a bunch of people with our spex. Then we did a physical composite of all the models, a collation in our virtuality. Then we output the collation in plastic, and we got her: The Average Nude Munchener Sunbathing Woman.” Eugene looked at the statue with pride, then jerked his thumb over his lab-coated shoulder. “We got her husband, Mr. Nude Munchener, stashed over there in the corner; he’s a little hard to see right now because his finish wore off and his substance is semi translucent.”

“Right.”

“You can see that as a model she’s not particularly compelling; I mean, entirely average people are unremarkable by definition, wouldn’t you say? But creating this image was just the first step. My next concept was to get about a hundred men to look at her—while wearing spex, of course, so we could track the movement of their attention.”

“How’d you get a hundred people to stare at a nude plastic statue?”

“Well, we just bicycled her down to the Marienplatz and made it a performance event. The tourists were real cooperative.”

“Oh.”

“Then we collated our attention statistics in an algorithm and plotted it in virtuality and fused it out. Come have a look.”

He strolled over to a corner and whipped away a thin black sheet.

“Wait a minute,” Maya said, “I … I know this thing. It’s the …”

“The Venus of Willendorf.”

“That’s it. That’s her.”

“My original conjecture was that we were going to output the most beautiful woman in the world,” Eugene said, “a feminine form that would absolutely compel male attention! But what we got here is basically a pretty good replica of something that a Paleolithic guy might have whittled out of mammoth tusk. You start messing with archetypal forms and this sort of thing turns up just like clockwork.”

“What’s the man look like?”

“The man as seen by men, or the man as seen by women?”

“The man as seen by women.”

Eugene shrugged. “Somehow I knew you’d ask that.… Well, have a look.” He crossed the floor of the studio and removed another sheet.

“What went wrong?” Maya said.

“Well, we’re not quite sure. We think maybe it was our sampling procedure. I mean, you get these two rather odd artificer guys, me and Franz, asking total female strangers in the Marienplatz to put on spex and stare at a naked plastic guy.… We got a few volunteers, but it was kind of a small self-selected crowd of women, and this is what we ended up with.”

The statue was a big angry-looking horned mask connected to a swollen bunch of bulging bubbles.

“It looks like they tried to boil him to death.”

“You see those three, um, leglike appendages here? They’re supposed to float detached in midair, but we couldn’t cast it that way. We still don’t get what happened to his nose; it looks like they just sort of stared right through him.”

Maya gazed meditatively at the statue. The initial impression of ugliness seemed to fade after a while. It was getting harder and harder to stop watching the thing. She felt a growing sense of excitement. It was as if they’d dragged the statue whole and true from some sticky crevice deep in her own brain. “Eugene, this artwork is doing something to me. This feels very … unreal.”

“Thanks a lot.” Eugene shrugged. “We lost interest in this one, we figured we had a flaw in our procedurals. I’m thinking now that maybe self-portraits are the next conceptual step. We scan you, we show you yourself, then we plot out your attention algorithm as you’re looking at your own replicated body. That way we can cast your internal self-image in permanent plastic.”

“I think this boiling-bubble guy would be a lot less scary if he were really small,” Maya offered thoughtfully. “Like something I could wear on a charm bracelet, maybe.”

“You’d have to take that up with Franz. Franz does our merchandising.

Therese came up. “Franz says he’ll cut me a discount if we do six of you,” she told Maya.

“I thought we were just going to do just one nice replica dummy of me for the store window.”

“Sure, but if we do six dummies then I can retail you. Assuming the product would move, that is.”

“Certainly this girl will sell,” said Franz with confidence.

“The problem with couture mannequins is they’re not very tactile,” Eugene opined. “We’ve been doing some great work in surfaces. We got some new finishing techniques that feel just like wet sealskin.”

Therese made a quick moue of distaste. “We don’t want people feeling up the mannequins, Eugene. It wrinkles the clothes.”

Eugene was crestfallen. He considered a further argument, then looked at his watch. “Well, I can’t stay chatting, I gotta see a dog about a man.… ” He looked at Maya. “Y’know, I enjoyed meeting you. You’re a really fascinating conversationalist. If you’re not too busy, why don’t you drop by the Tête du Noyé in Praha next Tuesday? You know where that is?”

“No.”

“It’s in the Praha Old Town, the Staromestska. The Tête is a tincture joint for the artifice crowd. We got a crowd of very vivid people from the net, they meet there in Praha once a month. Someone like you—I think maybe you’d fit right in.”

Franz and Eugene delivered six Mayas next Monday. Eugene had jointed their shoulders, knees, elbows, and hips on plastic swivels. He had trimmed their skulls inside the design virtuality, so the finished mannequins had no hair.

The shop was now in possession of six tall plastic nudes with slightly startled expressions. The mannequins weighed about five kilos each, so lightweight and breezy that it was a good idea to weight their feet lest they topple over.

Maya and Klaudia spent the day dressing the plastic mannequins, doing their wigs and makeup, and assembling them in action tableaus outside the shop.

Klaudia was surprisingly good at this. Klaudia was no genius at making change but she was great at deploying mannequins—mannequins clambering over café tables, mannequins brandishing tennis rackets, mannequins chewing enthusiastically on each other’s feet. The outdoor orgy of well-dressed plastic Mayas was a powerful crowd draw. Maya would take her own place among the plastic stiffs and then suddenly move, on Klaudia’s cue. The effect was profound.

Maya found it lovely to be publicly admired. So publicly, and with such intense repetition. The romantic ingenue Maya; the big floral pink powderpuff Maya; the Maya in gallopades with gleaming wads of costume jewelry and big kicky wings of eyeliner; the Maya in the white neon battery suit; the high-kicking hey-sailor Maya in red and white culottes; the sporty mountain-hiking Maya; the cool and classic draperied Maya with a fluted frappé glass. The Maya multiplicity was grand fun, a pocket spectacle. Still, when the day was over, Maya felt peculiarly thin and stretched. Strangely and terribly weary.

It was Therese’s biggest commercial day in months. They sold so much stock (including every last one of the Maya dolls) that Therese decided to leave town for an acquisition tour.

“You can run along and have some fun in Praha while I’m out of town,” Therese said to Maya. “You’d better take Klaudia with you. I never knew Eugene to ask any girl for a date before. Taking Klaudia will widen your options.”

“Eugene wasn’t making a date with me, and I don’t even like Eugene. Much. Besides, why should I go to Praha? There are plenty of vivid cafés here in Munchen.”

“Don’t be a mule, darling. Praha is a big fashion town. The Tête du Noyé is a scene. You’re a model in the rag trade, so it’s important for you to make scenes.”

“That kind of fun sounds like a lot of work.”

“Well, at least it’s work of a different kind. Klaudia deserves time off from the store, and so do you. Anyway, if Klaudia runs off to party without you to look after her, she’ll only get into trouble. Klaudia always does.”

“That’s all very clever and convenient, Therese. You’re always so full of wiles and angles.”

“I have to make arrangements. I can’t do business from an empty shop, you know that as well as I do. Get Klaudia off my hands for a little while—and take your camera, too. There are big armies of vivid women in Praha.” Therese narrowed her eyes. “Those Praha vivid girls … They have an iron grip on the fragile exotic look.”

There was no resisting a determined Therese. Maya and Klaudia loaded their backpacks and their hangered garment bags, and caught the Praha train late Tuesday morning. Klaudia paid. Klaudia almost always paid; she had a little salary, plus a tidy allowance from her wealthy and influential Munchener parents.

They fell headlong into their beanbags. Maya felt cranky and exhausted. Klaudia was twenty-two; the previous day of excitement and frenzied labor had only improved her mood. Klaudia was ready for anything. “[You’d better eat something, Maya,]” she said in Deutsch. “[You never eat anything.]”

“I’m never hungry.”

Klaudia adjusted her own earpiece translator. Despite weary years of the finest state-assisted classroom training, Klaudia’s English was highly unstable. “[Well, you’ll eat something today, or I’ll sit on you. You look so pale. Look at that wig. Can’t you even try?]” Klaudia deftly adjusted Maya’s secondhand mop of blond curls. “[You have the strangest hair, girl, you know that? Your natural hair feels more like a wig than this wig does.]”

“That’s from my shampoo.”

“[What shampoo? Are you trying to kid me? You never shampoo. You should let me spritz you a nice protein strengthened I know you’re trying to grow your hair out, but you should let me trim it a little. Without that wig, you look like a big ragazzina.]”

“Ja, Klaudia, ich bin die grosse Ragazzina.”

Klaudia gave her the look that locals always gave her when she tried her broken Deutsch—a look as if her intelligence had suddenly plummeted.

The train pulled out of the station with the ease and silence of a skate skimming ice. The car was three-quarters full. Klaudia examined every one of the passengers in their car with her forthright Deutschlander stare. She elbowed Maya suddenly. “Na, Maya!”

“What?”

“[See that old lady sitting back there with the police dog and the little kid? That’s the president of the Magyar Koztarsasag.]”

“The president of what?”

“Hungary.”

“Oh.” Maya shook her head. “I know we’re all supposed to call people by their own proper names nowadays, but speaking Hungarian, that’s pushing it.”

“[She’s an important polity figure. You should go ask for the log-on address to her publicity palace.]”

“Me? I feel so sleepy,” Maya said. “[She’s a big politician. She’ll speak English to you. What a shame she’s so badly dressed. I wish I could remember her name. You could take my picture with her.]”

“If she’s really a politician, she’ll appreciate it if we respect her privacy.”

“[What?]” Klaudia demanded, skeptically. “[States-people hate privacy. Government people don’t do that privacy nonsense.]”

Maya yawned. “I don’t know what it is, but I feel so worn out today. I’m having a sinking spell. I think maybe a little nap …”

“[I’ll get you something,]” volunteered Klaudia, squirming onto her high heels, eyes gleaming. “[A tincture. How about caffeine?]”

“Caffeine? That’s addictive. And isn’t it awfully strong?”

“[It’s our day off! Let’s be daring! Let’s drink caffeine and get really sternhagelvoll! We’ll run around Praha all day! Praha, the Golden City!]”

“Okay,” Maya said, sinking into her pastel blue beanbag and fluttering one hand at the wrist. “Go, go. Bring me something.… ”

Maya slumped bonelessly into the luscious depths of her beanbag and gazed up at the roof of the train car. A blank expanse of gleaming metal. This railcar was a real antique. It had been designed for advertisements, before advertising had been outlawed worldwide. Light flashed by through the bare limbs of the trackside arbors against the gleaming expanse of the roof. Flash, flash, flash.

She emerged from her daze with a piercing ache behind both eyes. Something was really hurting her ear. She pulled it off. An earcuff. The skin of her ear was all pinched beneath it, as if she’d been wearing it for weeks. She plucked the little device off her head, held it in her hand, gazed at it blankly, then let it drop on the floor.… What was she wearing?

She was wearing a red jacket over a long-sleeved low-cut shirtdress, a slinky number that looked and clung like lace and snakeskin. The dress ended at midthigh. She wore spangled metallic hose and high-heeled ankle boots.

Mia got onto her feet, wobbling. She began walking unsteadily down the aisle of the train car, wobbling in the absurd boots. Her toes were pinched and her ankles ached. She felt very strange and weak—starved, headachy, shaky, really bad.

She was alone inside a train with twenty or thirty foreigners. An alien landscape was rushing at terrific speed by the window.

She had a very bad moment then, an all-over shudder of identity crisis and culture shock, so that she swayed where she stood and felt sweat break out all down her back. Then the nausea passed and she came out of it, and she felt extremely different.

She was Mia Ziemann. She was Mia Ziemann and she was having a very strange reaction to the treatment.

A dog was staring at her. It was the police dog belonging to the Magyar president. The dog was crouching on his beanbag at the edge of the aisle, looking very efficient in his strapped and buttoned police-dog uniform. His ears were cocked alertly and his eyes were fixed on Mia.

The president of Hungary sat next to the dog, together with a ten-year-old boy. She was showing the boy the screen of her notebook, pointing into its depths with a virtuality wand, a slim and elegant access device like an ivory chopstick. The boy was gazing into the woman’s screen in primal trust and fascination, and the president was teaching him something, speaking gently in Magyar.

The old woman had the most astonishing hands. Hands that were wrinkled and deft and strong. A face supernaturally full of character, a postmortal face. The face you had when you were a very strong-willed, very healthy, very intelligent woman a hundred and twenty years old, and you had seen many sorrows and had made many painful decisions, and you had lost all illusion, but had never lost your self-respect, or your desire to help.

Of course this lady would speak English. She was a European intellectual, she would speak English, along with her consummate mastery of five or six other languages. She had authority—no, she was authority. So Mia would totter over to this saintly woman, and beg her help, and say, I’m sick, I’m hungry, I’m weak, I’ve lost my way, I’ve run away, I’ve broken my faith and abandoned all my duties and my obligations, I’ve done something bad, and I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, please help me.

And the president would look at her and she would master the situation in an instant. She would not be embarrassed or upset, she would be very wise, and she would know just what to do. The president would say, My dear, be calm, sit down, rest a moment, of course we can help you. There would be networking, and explanations, and advice and guidance and food, and a warm safe place to sleep. And the blasted tatters of her life would be stitched back around Mia Ziemann, like a big warm quilt of official forgiveness and grace.

She stumbled forward.

The dog said something in Deutsch.

“What?” Mia said.

The dog switched to English. “Are you all right, miss? Shall I call a steward? You smell a little upset.”

The president looked up and smiled politely.

“No,” Mia said, “no. I’m feeling much better now.”

“What a lovely dress. What’s your name?” asked the president.

“Maya.”

“This fine young man is Laszlo Ferencsi,” the president said, patting the shoulder of the boy.

“I won the school essay contest!” Laszlo piped up in English. “I get to stay with the president today!”

Maya swallowed hard. “That’s great, kid. You must be really proud.”

“I am the future,” Laszlo confided shyly.

“I’m a big ragamuffin,” Maya said. She tottered to the back of the cabin, found the ladies’, knelt on the floor with a squeak of stockings, and had the dry heaves.

Klaudia found her in the ladies’, hauled her out, and bullied her into eating. Once the nutrient broth had hit her system, Maya’s morale began to soar.

Klaudia gently clipped the translator back onto Maya’s head. “[I knew you were in trouble when you left your earpiece.… It’s a good thing Therese sent me along to look after you! You don’t have any more sense than a rabbit! Even a rabbit knows enough to eat.]”

Maya dabbed cooling sweat from her forehead. “Rabbits never have my problems unless they’ve done something really postlagomorphian.”

“[No wonder Eugene likes you. You talk just as crazy as he does. You better stick close to me at this party tonight. These artifice characters are real stuck-up oddballs.]”

Maya gazed out the window and sipped pale broth from her spoon. It felt so good to be someone new. So good to be herself. So good to be alive. It was much, much more important to be alive than to be anyone in particular. Thick Bohemian forest outside the train window, the branches just beginning to leaf out for spring. Then they were silently sliding at very high velocity on skeletal arches over intensely cultivated green fields. Vast irrigated stands of tall and looming gasketfungus.

The giant fungi weren’t plants. They’d been designed to transmute air, water, and light into fats, carbohydrates, and protein, with a bioengineered efficiency previously unknown to the world of nature. A field of engineered gasketfungus could feed a small town. The fungi were two stories tall: dense, green, leafless, square edged, and as riddled as a sponge. Once you got used to the monsters, they were rather pretty. And it was nice that they were pretty, because they covered most of rural Europe.

They spent the afternoon in the center of Praha. In Mala Strana. In the Old Town, Stare Mesto. Cobbled squares. Cathedrals. Spires and ancient brick and footworn stone. Gilded steeples, railings, bridges, damply gleaming statuary. The river Vltava. Architecture centuries old.

Klaudia shopped frenetically, and methodically stuffed Maya with fast food from the street stalls. The tasty nourishing grease hit Maya like a drug, and her world grew easy and comfortable. Everything was cheerful, everything was making sense.

They took their cameras to the Karel Bridge. This was not the peak of the tourist season, but Praha was always in vogue. Praha was an artifice town, a couture town. People came here to show off.

Of course most of the tourists were old people. Most of everyone was old people. And old women had never dressed so beautifully, never carried chic so well into such advanced years. The bridge was aswarm with older women, Europe’s female gerontocrats, ladies who were poised, serene, deeply experienced, deliberate, and detached. Firm but gentle femmes du monde, who were all the more tolerant of human foibles since they were left with very few of their own. Gracious women who knew how to listen, distinguished women who could love their enemies until those enemies fell into little pieces. Beautiful, clever, accomplished women, gently quivering with the electricity of determined and long-tested ego.

Old women in winter glissade jackets, in porous-weave two-tone nattiere sweaters. Old women in smart, self-contained business suits of pinkish apricot, poilu blue, eucalyptus. Women in stylish padded winter pajamas of pale yellow and crepuscular blue. Hard sleek hairstyles without a trace of gray, bobbed and parted at the side, with cape-scarves flung over one shoulder and neatly pinned with seashell brooches. Surplice fronts and fringed lapels, mousselines, failles, polycarbon chiffons, marquisettes, matelassés, rich crepes, and restrained lamés. Sheath dresses over the sleek planar lines of unobtrusive medical cuirasses. A slender postsexual profile with a waistline that seemed to start at midthigh, breaking into smart flounces and chic little gouts of astrakhan and breitschwantz. Beautiful teeming masses of posthuman women.

The old men in the crowd dressed with columnar forbidding dignity in belted coats and dark medical vests and tailored jackets, as if they’d outgrown the prospect of intimate human contact. The old men looked suave and unearthly and critically detached, a race of scholarly ice kings who walked so slowly in their beautifully polished shoes that it seemed they were being paid by the step.

And then the vivid people. They were a minority of course, but they were less of a minority in Praha, and that made them bold and intense.

Young men. Lots of bold and intense young men, that surplus of men that every generation boasted before the male mortality rate kicked in. Swaggering young bravos with lucid unlined skin like angels, because acne was as dead as smallpox. They favored gleaming jackets and odd heavy boots and patterned neckscarves. It was a generation of young men fed from birth on biochemical ambrosia, with perfect teeth and perfect eyesight and lithe, balletic posture. The real dandies among the boys wore decorative translator earcuffs, and didn’t mind a dusting of blusher to accentuate the cheekbones.

Vivid women. Black-sleeved print dresses, garishly patterned fabric shawls, swirling postiche capes, gunmetal shoegloves with zesty little flip-up ankle collars. Patterned frocks, flirty short jackets, lots of lacquer red. Backpacks with little bells and clattering bangles, and very serious lipstick. Praha had a vogue for checkered winter gloves nicked off at the fingertips for the emergence of daggerlike lacquered nails. Big serious cinching waistline belts, belts that threw the hips out. And décolletage, whole hot hormonal acres of décolletage, even in winter. Big cushiony vivid cleavage that went beyond allure and became a political statement.

The young women were thrilled to be photographed. They laughed at her and clowned for the camera. Many people in Praha, even the kids, wore spex, but nobody wore glasses anymore. Corrective lenses were a prosthetic device as dead as the ivory pegleg.

Praha was giving her new insight.

She found herself suddenly understanding the profound alliance between old European city centers and young Europeans. All the world’s real and serious business took place in the giant, sophisticated, intelligent high-rise rings around the downtowns—buildings with advanced infrastructure, buildings with the late twenty-first century embedded in their diamond bones and fiber-optic ligaments.

Still, those in power could not bring themselves to demolish their architectural heritage. To destroy their own cultural roots was to leave themselves without even the fiction of an alternative, marooned in a terrible vacuity of postindustrial pragmatism. They prized those aging bricks and those moldering walls and, for oddly similar reasons, Europe’s young people were similarly prized, and similarly sidelined.

Young kids lurking in old cities. They formed an urban symbiosis of the profoundly noneconomic, a conjunction of the indestructible past with a future not yet allowed to be.

Maya and Klaudia dressed in a ladies’ and left their bags in a public locker. The Tête de Noyé was in Opatovicka Street, a three-story building with a steeply pitched tiled roof. You entered it by walking up a short set of worn stone steps with ornate iron railings, and then directly down a rather longer set of wooden steps into the windowless basement, where they kept the bar. All this stepping up and down made very little architectural sense, but the building was at least five hundred years old. It had been through so many historic transitions that it had a patina like metamorphic rock.

Klaudia and Maya were met at the foot of the stairs by an elderly spotted bulldog in a tattered sweater and striped shorts, possibly the ugliest intelligent animal Maya had ever seen. “Who asked ya here?” demanded the dog in English, and he growled with unfeigned menace.

Maya looked quickly around the bar. The place was lit by a few twinkly bluish overheads and the pale glow of a rectangular wallscreen. The bar smelled like seaweed, like iodine. Maybe like blood. Twenty people scattered in it, dim hunched forms slumped in couches around low tables. Many of them were wearing spex. She could see faint pools of lit virtuality squeezing out around the rims of their lenses. There was no sign of Eugene.

“That guy over there invited us,” Maya lied glibly, pointed, and waved. “Hey!” she shouted. “Na mensch! Ciao!”

Naturally some male stranger at a far table looked up and politely waved back at them. Maya breezed past the dog.

“Na Maya!” Klaudia whispered, sticking close. “[We are way overdressed for this. This place is a morgue.]”

“I love it here,” said Maya, perfectly happy and confident. She went to the bar.

Faint analog instrumental music was playing, muted and squeaky. The bartender was studying an instruction screen and repairing a minor valve on an enormously ramified tincture set. The tincture set stretched the length of the mahogany bar, weighed four or five tons, and looked as if its refinery products could demolish a city block.

The bartender wore a thin, ductile, transparent decontamination suit. This was the kind of gear that courageous civil-support people had once used when cleaning out plague sites. The bartender was naked beneath his gleaming airtight veil. His unclothed body in the plastic suit was covered head to foot in thick gray fur. From a distance, his dense body hair looked very much like a gray wool sweater-trouser set.

The bartender, to their disquiet, now took notice of them. He slapped his notebook shut with a bang, and shuffled over. He was very old—or very sick—and walked as if his feet ached.

His face was a solid mass of gray beard—no eyebrows, no visible nose, no forehead, ears, or temples. The hairless membranes of his lips and eyelids were three pale patches in a face-smothering snarl of whiskers.

“You’re new here,” the bartender announced, through an external speaker on his suit.

“That’s right. I’m Maya, and this is Klaudia. We do couture.”

The bartender looked them over in the relatively lucid lighting directly over the mahogany bar. He had a small scabby bald patch on the crown of his head. “I like young girls in fine clothes,” he said at last, blinking. “The dog gives you any trouble, you tell him to come to old Klaus.”

Maya smiled at him sunnily. “Thank you so much. It’s very good of you to have us in to your famous establishment. We won’t be any trouble, I promise. Can we take pictures?”

“No. What are you drinking?”

“Caffeine,” Klaudia said bravely.

Klaus deftly served up two demitasses. “You want animal cream?”

“Nein danke,” said Klaudia with a scarcely perceptible shudder.

“No charge, then,” said Klaus, returning to his repair work.

Maya and Klaudia took their clattering cups and saucers to a couch-and-table set, and sat down together. Klaudia threw her ribbed cloak aside and shivered inside her pink ruffled top.

“[This sure isn’t my kind of party,]” Klaudia moaned quietly. “[I was sure there would be dancing and music and public sex and maybe some anandamines. This bar is like a tomb or something. What’s that awful music they’re playing?]”

“That’s antique acoustic analog music. There wasn’t much vertical color to the sound back in those days. The instruments were made of wood and animal organs.”

Klaudia sipped nervously at her demitasse. “[You know what the problem is, Maya? This is a party for intellectuals. It’s really stupid to be an intellectual when you’re young. You should be an intellectual when you’re a hundred years old and can’t feel anything anymore. Intellectuals are so pretentious! They don’t know how to live!]”

“Klaudia, relax, okay? It’s still early.”

The wall mural was the most warm and inviting object in the Tête du Noyé. It was not glassy or screenlike at all, it was very painterly, very like a canvas. The screen had been broken up into hundreds of fragments, honeycombed cells, slowly wobbling and jostling. The moving cells swam among one another, and pulsed, and rotated, and mutated. A digital dance of the flowers.

Maya lifted her demitasse cup, formally touched it to her lower lip, and put it back on the table. She watched Klaudia fidget for a while, and then glanced at the mural again. The amber floral shapes were mostly gone, replaced by a growing majority of cool geometrical crystals.

She wasn’t quite sure how she knew it, but she realized somehow that the mural was watching her. The mural had some way to monitor people—probably cameras, hidden behind the screen. Whenever anyone looked at the mural directly, its movement slowed drastically. It only really got going when no one was looking at it.

Maya opened her backpack, and slyly watched the mural in the mirror of her makeup case. The mural knew no better, and thought it had escaped her attention. The little cells became quite lively, flinging sparks of information at one another, blossoming, conjugating, spinning, kaleidoscoping. Maya snapped her case shut, and turned to face the screen directly. The cells froze guiltily in place and crept along on their best behavior.

Eugene ambled over. “Ciao Maya!”

“Ciao Eugene.” She was glad to see him. Eugene had bathed. He’d combed his hair. He was looking very natty in a long brocade coat and stovepipe slacks.

Eugene smiled winningly. “Was ist los, Camilla?”

“Klaudia,” Klaudia said, frowning and tucking in her legs on the couch.

Eugene sat down cheerfully. “You should have logged on at the bar! That’s the custom here at the Tête. I didn’t even know you’d arrived.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Eugene.”

“Most people log on from home to say they’re coming. This scene is very netted. The Tête is our meat rendezvous. I’m pleased that you’ve come. How do you like our host?”

“I don’t much like him,” Klaudia said primly in English.

“Amazing character, isn’t he? He’s a fascinating conversationalist. Got a million stories. He was a cosmonaut.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the only Czech in the lunar colony. Stayed up on the moon all during the plague years. That’s why he wears the suit. They had those immune system problems with the long-term radiation. He tried to make it on Earth without his suit at first, but he caught the staph and it scarred him pretty bad. That’s why he went for the heavy fur.”

“I’ve never met a cosmonaut.”

“Well, you’ve met one now. Klaus owns the Tête. I gotta warn you, Klaus doesn’t much like to talk about his moon years. Most of his friends died during the blowouts and the coup and the purges. But he’s really good to the local scene. He was the only Czech lunarian, a national hero. So the Praha city council lets him do anything he wants. Klaus is no stuffy gerontocrat, he’s really been to the edge. Mit ihm konnte man Pferde stehlen.”

“You don’t have to speak Deutsch just for me,” Klaudia pouted.

“Deutsch is no problem! We got a Shqiperisan guy right over there trying to find someone here who can speak Geg. Geg, or maybe Tosk.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Tirana.”

Reluctantly, Klaudia brightened. “[I love men from Shqiperise,]” she said in Deutsch. “[They’re so industrial and romantic. What does he do?]”

“Virtualitat,” Eugene said.

“Prima.” Klaudia stood up and left.

Maya patted the couch seat next to her. “Come sit closer.”

Eugene edged over cautiously.

“Tell me something about the woman who did that wall mural.”

“How do you know a woman did it?”

“I can just tell, that’s all.”

Eugene watched the mural, which noticed his attention and slowed instantly. “It’s a cellular automata display. From the fifties, to judge by the technique. I hope she built it solid, because you’d have a pretty hard time replacing the works-and-wares from a dead platform like that.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? That gimmick almost made me angry, before I realized what she meant to say.”

Eugene scratched his head. “You got me. Not my variety of gimmick at all. Paul would know, Paul’s a scholar.”

“Who’s Paul?”

Eugene smiled guardedly. “Paul pretty much lays down the law in our little scene. Y’know, I don’t like being told what to think. Because I’m not much for ideology. But I trust Paul. And I think that Paul trusts me.”

“Is Paul here tonight? Introduce me, all right?”

“Sure.”

Eugene led her across the bar. Haifa dozen people were eagerly clustered around a muscular red-haired young man in a vivid display suit. His suit jacket showed a splendid satellite view of night-lit Praha, patterned streetlights sprawled across his black lapels and down both his glossy sleeves. He was telling some lively and elaborate anecdote in Français. His enthralled listeners laughed aloud, with the clubby sounds of friends absorbing in-jokes.

Maya waited patiently until the story was wound up in a torrent of alien wisecracks. Then she spoke quickly. “Ciao Paul! Do you mind English?”

The red-haired man scratched his beard. “I have great respect for the English language, but that’s Paul there at the end of the table, darling.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t do that, okay?” Eugene muttered. He led her past a clutter of legs and drinks.

Paul was dark and stocky and clean-shaven, wrapped in quiet conversation with a sharp-nosed woman with black bangs and no lipstick. Paul was groping with an oversized table napkin. The square decorative cloth had a life of its own. It flapped and wriggled and seemed determined to crawl up Paul’s forearms.

Eugene whispered. “Let me get you something.”

“A mineral water? Thanks.” Maya perched on the edge of the couch and watched as Paul and the dark-haired woman discussed the glimmering, flopping cloth in rapid and fluent Italiano.

Paul wore gray fabric trousers and a buttoned fabric shirt in faded khaki; he’d thrown his coat over the back of the couch. The woman wore dark tights and boots and elbow-length white smartgloves. The woman was putting a lot of effort into ignoring her.

Paul deftly pinched a corner of the kerchief. The wriggling cloth went limp. He attached the kerchief to a slender cable, pulled a notebook from beneath the couch, and, still speaking nonstop Italiano, began pounding the keys and observing a readout in some grisly technical dialect of English.

Paul touched a final key and a process began execution. Then he turned alertly to Maya. “American?”

“Yes.”

“Californian?”

“That’s right.”

“San Francisco.”

“You’re very clever.”

“I’m Paul, from Stuttgart. I program. This is Benedetta, she’s a coder from Bologna.”

“Maya. From nowhere in particular, really. Don’t do much of anything.” She offered her hand to the woman across the table.

“You’re a model,” Benedetta said wearily.

“Yes. Sometimes. Barely.”

“Ever had one real idea to trouble your pretty head?”

“Not really, but I can dust myself off if I trip over one.”

Paul laughed. “Benedetta, don’t be gauche.”

Benedetta brushed at Maya’s fingers with her smart-glove, and slumped back into the couch. “I came a long way to talk to this man tonight. I hope you can wait to flirt with him until everyone gets very tight.”

“Benedetta’s a Catholic,” Paul explained.

“I am not a Catholic! Bologna is the least Catholic city in Europe! I am an anarchist and an artificer and a programmer! I plan to hang the last gerontocrat with the guts of the last priest!”

“Benedetta is also a miracle of tact,” Paul said.

“I only wanted to ask about the mural,” Maya said.

“The Garden of Eden, Eva Maskova, 2053,” Paul said.

Eugene had returned from the bar, but he was wrapped up in another story from the raconteur. Eugene was leaning on his elbows on the back of the couch, snorting with laughter, and sipping absently from Maya’s mineral water.

“Tell me about this Eva person. Where is she now?”

“She took too many tinctures and fell off her bicycle, and she broke her neck,” Benedetta said coolly. “But the medicals patched her back together. So she married a rich banker in España, and now she works for the polity in some stupid high-rise in Madrid.”

Paul shook his head slightly. “You’re very unforgiving. In her own day, Eva had the holy fire.”

“That’s for you to say, Paul. I met her. She’s a perfect little middle-aged bourgeoise who keeps houseplants.”

“She had the holy fire, nevertheless.”

Maya spoke up. “Her mural. It’s all about people like yourselves, isn’t it? When they’re left to themselves, they do miracles. But when they’re scrutinized and analyzed from the outside, then they dry up.”

Paul and Benedetta exchanged surprised glances, then turned to look at her.

“You’re not an actress manqué, I hope,” said Benedetta.

“No, not at all.”

“You don’t dance? You don’t sing?”

Maya shook her head.

“You don’t work in artifice at all?” Paul demanded.

“No. Well—sometimes I take photographs.”

“It had to be something,” Benedetta said triumphantly. “Show me your spex.”

“Don’t have any spex.”

“Show me your camera, then.”

Maya pulled the tourist camera from her woven purse. Benedetta gave a short bark of laughter. “Oh, that’s hopeless! What a relief! For one terrible moment I thought I’d met an intelligent woman who liked to wear spangled tights.”

A tall man in a long gray coat and mud-smeared work pants stumbled down the stairs. “Emil has come,” said Paul, with pleasure. “Emil has remembered! How amazing! Just a moment.” He rose and left them.

Benedetta watched Paul go, with deep irritation. “Now you’ve done it,” she said. “Once Paul gets started with that holy fool, there’ll be no end to it.” She unplugged her writhing handkerchief and stood up.

It wouldn’t do to be abandoned. Not when she was just getting through. “Benedetta, stay with me.”

Benedetta was surprised. She looked at Maya forth-rightly. “Why should I?”

Maya lowered her voice. “Can you keep a secret?”

Benedetta frowned. “What kind of secret?”

“A programmer’s secret.”

“What on earth do you know about programming?”

Maya leaned forward. “Not much. But I need a programmer. Because I own a memory palace.”

Benedetta sat back down. “You do? A big one?”

“Yes, and yes.”

Benedetta leaned forward. “Illegal?”

“Probably.”

“How did someone like you acquire an illegal memory palace?”

“How do you think someone like me acquired an illegal memory palace?”

“I hate to speculate,” Benedetta said, pursing her lips. “May I guess? You traded sexual favors for it.”

“No, certainly not! Well … Yes, I did. Sort of. Actually.”

“Let’s pop your palazzo open and look about inside.” Benedetta deftly wrapped the kerchief around her neck. The cloth twitched a bit, then flashed into a pattern of gold and paisley. Benedetta picked up her smooth and slender notebook and her metal-studded purse. “We’ll go behind the bar where it’s discreet.”

“You’ve been so patient with me already, Benedetta. I hate to impose.”

Benedetta stared at her for a long moment, then dropped her eyes. “All right. I was stupid. I’m sorry that I was stupid to you. I’ll be better now. So can we go?”

“I accept your apology.” Maya stood up. “Let’s go.”

Benedetta led her into an especially bluish and subterranean niche behind the long mahogany bar. Someone had been doing blood sampling on the table top. There was a litter of crumpled chromatographs and a diamond-beaked mosquito syringe.

Benedetta swept the litter aside, thumped her notebook down, and unreeled an antenna from its top. “So. What is required? Gloves? Spex?”

“I need a touchscreen for my password.”

“A touchscreen! It must be fate that I brought my furoshiki.” Benedetta whipped her kerchief off, set it on the table, and smoothed it flat. “This will work. It’s from Nippon. The Nipponese love the obscure functionalities.” She plugged the corner of the inert cloth into her notebook and the cloth flashed into vivid glowing eggshell white.

“I’ve never seen one of these furoshiki.” Maya leaned over the table. “I’ve certainly heard of them.… ” The intelligent cloth was woven from a dense matrix of fiber-optic threads, organic circuitry, and piezoelastic fiber. The hair-thin optical threads oozed miniscule screen-line pixels of colored light. A woven display screen. A flexible all-fabric computer.

Benedetta opened her purse, removed an exquisite pair of Italian designer spex, and slipped them on.

“Those are lovely,” Maya said.

“You need spex and gloves? Well, you’re in the right crowd. We’ll ask Bouboule. We can trust Bouboule. All right?”

“I suppose so.”

Benedetta tapped her spex and clawed at invisible midair commands. “You’ll love Bouboule,” she promised. “Everyone loves Bouboule. She’s rich and generous and funny and promiscuous, and likes to punch cops in the face. She’ll be dead at forty.”

Benedetta stroked at her notebook keys. Then she aimed her spex across the table at Maya. Maya’s face bloomed across the fabric kerchief in full color.

“The Miracle of Saint Veronica!” Benedetta said, and smirked. “Let me find the touch function.”

“This is a big secret. I’m being very rash in trusting a stranger with this. I’m sure you realize that, Benedetta.”

“You’re very pretty,” Benedetta said slowly, staring into her screen and typing. “You shouldn’t be so pretty, and also push me so hard.”

“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.”

“Est-il Québecois?” said Bouboule, with interest.

“Toronto’s not in Quebec,” Maya said.

“C’est triste.… Oh, ciao Paul.”

“You’ve stolen the party, Benedetta,” said Paul, smiling. “This is Emil, from Praha. He’s a ceramicist. Emil, this is Maya, a model, and Benedetta, a programmer. And this is Bouboule. She’s our industry patroness.”

Emil bowed to Bouboule. “I’m told that we have met.”

“In a way,” said Bouboule, her face clouding. She rose, kissed Emil’s cheek briefly, and walked away. The marmoset ran after her and bounded onto her shoulder.

“They were lovers once,” Benedetta explained, wrinkling her nose.

Emil sat down mournfully. “Was I really that woman’s lover?”

“Don’t talk scandal, Benedetta,” Paul chided. “Let me see the furoshiki.” He set his notebook down. “Emil, this device is fascinating, you should watch this closely” He rolled up his sleeves.

Emil glanced at Maya. He had lovely dark eyes. “Were we once lovers?”

“Why do you ask?” Maya said.

Emil sighed bitterly. “Paul is so persuasive,” he muttered. “He always convinces me to attend these parties of his, and then I commit some terrible faux pas.”

Paul glanced up from his screen. “Stop whining, Emil. You’re doing fine tonight. Come look at this device, this will cheer you up. It’s marvelous.”

“I’m not a digital person, Paul. I like clay. Clay! The least digital substance on earth.”

“You have really good English,” Maya said, moving closer.

“Thank you, my dear. You’re certain we’ve never met?”

“Never. I’ve never been to Praha.”

“Then you should let me show you the city.”

Maya glanced at Paul and Benedetta. They had launched into furious Italiano, enraptured by the fabric machine. “That might be very nice,” she said slowly. “What are you doing after this party?”

“What am I doing at this moment?” countered Emil. “Embarrassing myself and everyone, that is what. Let’s go for a walk. I need fresh air.”

Maya gazed slowly around the subterranean bar. No one was watching them. No one cared what she did. She was perfectly free. She could do whatever she pleased. “All right,” she said. “If you like.”

She found her red jacket. Emil found a long dirty coat and a slouch hat. There was no sign of Klaudia. “I have a friend here at the Tête,” she told Emil. “We’ll have to come back for her. Just a little walk around the block, all right?”

Emil nodded absently. They left the Tête. Emil stuffed his large bony hands in his coat pockets. The night was clear and still, and growing colder steadily. He began walking up Opatovicka Street.

“Are you hungry?” Emil asked.

“No.”

Emil walked on silently, staring at the pavement. They passed streets with utterly impossible names: Kremencova, Vjircharich, Ostrovni.

“Shouldn’t we be going back?” Maya said.

“I’m having a crisis,” Emil confessed wearily.

“What kind of crisis?”

“I shouldn’t tell you. It’s a complicated story.”

Emil had a Czech British accent. She could scarcely believe she was walking through such a lovely city, on a cold clear night, hearing such a touchingly exotic version of her own language. “I don’t mind. Everyone has troubles.”

“I’m forty-five years old.”

“Why is that a crisis?”

“It’s not my age,” said Emil, “it’s the steps I took to evade my other difficulties. You see, I was a potter. I was a potter for twenty-five years.”

“Yes?”

“I was a bad potter. A wheel kicker, a mud dauber. Technically adept, but lacking the holy fire. I couldn’t commit myself wholly to the craft, and the better I became at technique, the less inspiration I felt. I was sickened by my own inadequacies.”

“That sounds very serious.”

“It’s all right to be a happy amateur. And it’s all right to be truly gifted. But to be competent and middling bad at an artifice that you care about—that’s a nightmare.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Maya said.

This remark seemed to crush Emil completely. He pulled the slouch hat down over his eyes and trudged.

“Emil,” she said at last, “would it help you to talk in Czestina? I happen to have a Czech translation unit with me.”

“Maybe you can’t understand, but my life was untenable,” Emil said. “I decided I had gone too far. I had to erase my mistakes, and try to start again. So, I talked to some friends. Tincture people. Very hard-case tincture people. I got them to give me a very strong broad-spectrum amnesiac.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I injected it. When I woke up next morning, I couldn’t even talk. I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, or even what I was. I didn’t know what a potter’s wheel was. All I saw was that I was in a studio and there was a wheel and a lump of damp mud in a bag. And broken pots. Of course I’d broken all my worthless ugly pots the night before, before,” he smacked his skull with the flat of his hand, “before I broke my own head.”

“Then what?”

“I put the mud on the wheel, I spun it, and I could work clay. It was a miracle. I could do clay without any thought, without any doubt. I knew nothing about clay and yet the skill came out of my hands. Clay was all I had—all that I was. Clay was all that was left of me. I was an animal that made pots.”

Emil laughed. “I made pots for a year. They were very good pots. Everyone said so. I sold all of them. To big collectors. For big money. I had the gift now, you see. At last I was good.”

“That’s quite a story. What did you do then?”

“Oh, I took my money and learned again how to read and write. Also, I took English lessons. I never could learn English properly before, but, in the state I was in, English was easy. Bit by bit, some of my old memories came back. Most of my personality is gone forever. No great loss. I was never happy.”

She thought this over. She felt glad she had come to Praha. Here of all places she’d somehow found someone who was truly her kind of guy.

“Let’s go back to the party now.”

“No, I can’t bear to go back. My studio is just up this street.” Emil shrugged. “He’s a nice man, Paul, he means well. Some of his friends are all right. But they shouldn’t admire people like me. I made a few good pots, but I’m not Paul’s case study in the liberation of the holy fire. I’m a desperate man who destroyed himself for the sake of mud. Paul’s people should admit this to themselves. I’m a monstrous fool. They should stop romanticizing posthuman extremities.”

“You can’t go home and brood, Emil. You said you’d show me the city.”

“Did I tell you that?” said Emil politely. “I’m very sorry, my dear. You see, if I promise something early in the morning, then I can almost always fulfill it. But if it’s late at night … well, it’s something to do with my biorhythms. I grow forgetful.”

“Well, then, at least show me your studio. Since we’re so near.”

Emil locked eyes with her. A very knowing look. “You’re welcome to see where I live,” he said, meaning nothing of the kind. “If you feel you must.”

The building was dark and impossibly old. Emil’s studio was on the second floor, up a creaking set of stairs. He unlocked the door with a metal pocket key. The floors were uneven wooden boards and the walls were lined in ancient flowered paper.

Most of the floor space was taken up with tall wooden racks of earthenware. There were two big mud-stained sinks, one of them dripping steadily. A white kiln, and stained pegboards hung with tools of wire and wood. A potter’s wheel, a crowded worktable. Dusty sacks of glazing compound. A primitive kitchen full of handmade crockery in finger-grimed white cupboards. Old windows warped with damp, with lovely flowerpots sprouting the skeletal remains of houseplants. Crumpled sheets of canvas and paper everywhere. Sponges. Gloves. The sharp smell of clay. No shower, no toilet; the bath was down the hall. A sagging wooden bed with grime-smeared sheets.

“At least you have electricity. But no computer of any kind? No netlink? No screens?”

“I once had a notebook here,” Emil said. “A very clever machine. My notebook had my schedules written in it, addresses, numbers, appointments. Many helpful hints for living from my former self. One morning I woke up with a bad headache. The notebook began to tell me what to do that day. So, I opened that window there”—he pointed—“and I dropped that machine onto the street. Now my life is simpler.”

“Emil, why are you so sad? These pots are beautiful. You took a medically irrevocable step. So what? A lot of people have bad luck with their upgrades. There’s nothing to be gained by fussing about that, once it happens. You just have to find a way to live on the far side of that event.”

“If you must know,” Emil grumbled. “Look at this.” He put an urn into her hands. It was squat and round with a glaze in ocher, cream white, and jet black. The pattern was crazily energetic, like a chessboard struck by lightning, and yet there was enormous clarity and stillness to the piece. It was dense and heavy and sleek, like a fossil egg for some timeless state of mind.

“My latest work,” he said bitterly.

“But Emil, this thing is wonderful. It’s so beautiful I wish I could be buried in it.”

He took the urn off her hands and shelved it. “Now look at this. A catalog of all my works since the change.” He sighed. “How I wish I’d had the good sense to burn this stupid catalog.… ”

Maya sat on Emil’s workstool and leafed through the album. Print after print of Emil’s ceramics, lit and recorded with loving care. “Who took these photographs?”

“Some woman. Two or three different women, I think … I’ve forgotten their names. Look at page seventy-four.”

“Oh, I see. This one is very like your latest work. It’s part of a series?”

“It’s not very like, it’s identical. But that piece was spontaneous. It came to me in a moment’s inspiration. You see what that means? I’ve begun to repeat myself. I’ve run dry. I have hit my creative limits. My so-called creative freedom is only a cheap fraud.”

“You’ve created the same pot twice?”

“Exactly! Exactly! Can you imagine the horror? When I saw that photograph—it was a knife in my heart.” He collapsed on the bed and put his head in his hands.

“I can see that you regard this as something very dreadful.”

Emil flinched and said nothing.

“You know, a lot of ceramics people create work with molds. They make hundreds of identical copies of a work. Why is this so much worse than that?”

Emil opened his eyes, hurt and bitter. “You’ve been discussing my case with Paul!”

“No, no, I haven’t! But … You know, I take photographs. There’s no such thing as an original digital photograph. Digital photography has always been an art without originals.”

“I’m not a camera. I’m a human being.”

“Well, then that must be the flaw in your thinking, Emil. Instead of torturing yourself about originality, maybe you’d be happier if you just accepted the fact that you’re posthuman. I mean, people don’t remain human nowadays, do they? Everyone has to come to terms with that sooner or later.”

“Don’t do this to me,” Emil moaned. “Don’t talk that way. If you want to talk that way, go back to the party. You’re wasting your time with me. Talk to Paul, he’ll talk like that for as long as you like.”

Emil kicked a wadded bathrobe from the edge of the bed. “I’m not posthuman. I’m just a foolish, very damaged man who had no real talent and made a very bad mistake. I can no longer remember things very well, but I know very well who I am. All the clever theories in the world make no difference to me.”

“So? It seems like your mind’s already made up. What’s your solution for this so-called crisis?”

“What else?” said Emil. “What else is there to do? I can’t spend my existence going round and round in circles. I’m going to throw myself out the window.”

“Oh dear.”

“Taking the amnesiac was only a cowardly compromise. A half measure. I’m not what I wanted to become. I never will be that person. I can’t live being anything less.”

“Well,” Maya said, “of course I’m not one to talk against suicide. Suicide is very proper, it’s always a perfectly honorable option. But …”

Emil put his hands over his ears.

Maya sat next to him on the bed, and sighed. “Emil, it’s silly to die. You have such beautiful hands.”

He said nothing.

“What a shame that such beautiful strong hands should be turning into clay. Deep under the cold, hard earth. When you could be slipping those hands under my shirt.”

Emil sat up. His eyes gleamed. “Why do women do this to me?” he demanded at last. “Can’t you see that I’m a shattered emotional wreck? I have nothing to give to you. In the morning, I won’t even remember your name!”

“I know that you won’t,” Maya said. “Of course I realize that about you. I never met anyone quite like you before. It’s a very attractive quality. I don’t know quite why, but truly, it’s very tempting, it’s terribly hard to resist.” She kissed him. “I know that’s an awful thing to say to you. So let’s stop talking now.”

She woke in the middle of the night, in a strange bed in a strange city, to the soft rise and fall of another human breath. The structure of the universe had shifted again. She felt soft and sweetly wearied, deeply warmed by his sleeping presence. Having a lover was like having a second soul. She had enough spare souls for every man in the world.

In the morning she made them breakfast. Emil, just as he had promised, did not remember her name. He was cheerfully embarrassed about this fact. A quick bed-wrestling match knocked their affair into order. Emil ate his breakfast, grinned triumphantly, and started working. Maya, unable to bear the disorder, started cleaning the studio.

To judge by the state of his catalog, Emil had been living alone for two, maybe three months. The documentation of his work was out of order and out of date. She would have to see to putting the record straight. This was clearly the open-ended legacy of being with Emil. To judge from the varying competence of the photographs, she was the fourth in a series.

Giving the place a good cleaning job was even more revelatory. Women had blown through Emil’s studio like a series of storm fronts. Hairpins here. A single crumpled stocking there. Shoe liners. An empty lipstick. Pink feathers off some long-lost costume. Cheap sunglasses. Mismatched cooking utensils. Lubricants. Blood testers. And, of course, the photographs. The women doing the photographs had been the ones investing real effort.

“I feel good today,” Emil declared, as well he should. “I’m going to create a new piece just for you, Maya. A piece to capture your unique qualities. Your generosity. Your goodness.”

“I’m not your clay vessel, you know.”

“Of course you are, my dear! We are all clay vessels. Why contradict Scripture?” Emil chuckled merrily and started pounding clay.

Maya found her way downtown and rescued her luggage from the storage locker. Klaudia’s backpack and garment bag were gone. Klaudia had left her a note. In Deutsch. Maya couldn’t read Deutsch, of course, but to judge by the angular scrawl and the forest of exclamation points, Klaudia had been furious.

Maya found a public netsite. She plugged in her camera and wired her photos to Therese at the shop. Then she had lunch.

When she had finished dutifully nourishing herself, she called the shop in Munchen.

“Where are you?” said Therese.

“I’m still in Praha. How is Klaudia?”

“She’s back. Mad. Worried. Hung over. Humiliated. You’re not being helpful, Maya.”

“I picked up a guy.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.… When will you be back?”

Maya shook her head. “Therese, if I don’t look after this one, he’s going to throw himself out the window.”

Therese laughed. “Have you lost your mind? That’s the oldest art-boy scam in the book. Show some sense and get back right away. I’ve brought in a lot of new stock.”

“Therese …” She sighed. “You were right. The Tête is a scene. I’m very taken with these artifice people. They’re going to teach me to be vivid. I’m not coming back to Munchen.”

Therese was silent.

“Therese, did you see my photos?”

“The photos are not bad,” Therese said. “I think maybe I can use the photos.”

“They’re awful. But I’m going to take lessons. In photography, in spex work. I’m going to get better. I’m going to get better equipment and I’m going to really work in artifice. I’m going to make myself into one of these people.”

“You’re not happy here at the shop, darling?”

“I don’t want to be happy, Therese. There’s not enough of me to be happy. I’m not my own woman yet, I have to learn to be more like myself. These artifice people, I think they can help me. They have my kind of hunger.”

“You sound very certain very suddenly. What changed your mind for you? One night in bed with some man? Why don’t you get on the train and come back here? Trains are very easy.”

“I can send you lots of photos, if you want them. But I can’t go back to the shop.”

“If you don’t come back to Munchen, I’ll have to get someone else. There won’t be a welcome for you anymore.”

“Get someone else, Therese.”

“My poor little Maya! Always so ambitious. And artifice people are so chic.” Therese sighed. “Cleverness doesn’t make them nice people, you know. You’re very innocent, and they could hurt you.”

“If I wanted safe and nice, I’d have stayed in California. My life is risk. I’m an illegal. I’m on the drift, the wanderjahr. You were very good to me, but Munchen’s not my home. I had to leave sometime. You knew that.”

“I knew that,” Therese acknowledged. She lowered her voice. “But still: you owe me. Don’t you owe me?”

“That’s true. I owe you.”

“I fed you, and I clothed you, and I sheltered you, and I never turned you in. That was a lot, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. It was a lot.”

“I’m going to ask you for a big favor in return, darling. Someday.”

“Anything.”

“You’ll have to be very discreet for me.”

“I can be discreet,” she promised. “I can specialize in discreet.”

“When the time comes, you’ll know. Just remember that you owe me. And try to be careful. Wiedersehen, darling.” Therese hung up.

Though he couldn’t be bothered to feed himself properly, Emil very much liked to eat. With a woman in reach, he complained bitterly if not methodically fed, as if this were some fracture in the bedrock of the universe.

Emil had a little money. He was too confused to properly manage the funds he had acquired; there were half-drained little cashcards stuffed in nooks and crannies all over his studio. So Maya went shopping for them, and began eating with more regularity and determination than she ever had before. Czech medical chow, such as noki. Chutovky. Knedliky. Kasha, and goulash. It was solid and enticing food and it made her cheerful and energetic.

Once Emil was properly fed, he generally became lively. It was sweet to be Emil’s lover, because he was never blasé. Whenever he ran his agile and dexterous hands across her flesh, there was always an element of shocked discovery to his caress. Sex made him all surprised and pleased and reverent and grateful.

Emil became very productive under this hearty regimen. He kept firing up his kiln. The kiln wasn’t a microwave exactly, it was a specialized potter’s resonator. Like most modern gadgetry, Emil’s kiln was foolproof, very clean, extremely quick, and altogether eerie. He’d pull out a freshly zapped pot with a monster pair of padded tongs. The irradiated clay would give a ghastly crystalline shriek as it hit the air and began to cool. The pot would gush heat like a fireplace brick. The whole studio would steam up and get very cozy. Maya would saunter around in slippers and an untied bathrobe, naked under her diamond necklace. Hair almost long enough to fuss with now. It was rather stiff and scruffy hair, but the speed of its growth was impressive.

If he liked the way the work had turned out, he would throw her on the bed to celebrate. If he didn’t like it, she would throw him on the bed to console him. Then they would tiptoe down the hall and wedge into a hot bath together. When they were clean they would eat something. They spoke English together, and a little guttural Czestina in Emil’s more intimate moments. Life was very simple and direct.

Emil hated time stolen from his work. From Emil’s subjective point of view, any day spent in keeping up life’s little infrastructures was a small eternity lost forever. With a permanent magic supply of groceries and electric power, Emil would have slumped into solipsism.

It was impossible to manage Emil in the morning, because he was always so startled and intrigued by her unexpected presence in his household. However, after a week, a certain visceral familiarity with her seemed to be seeping into Emil below the level of his conscious awareness. He seemed less surprised by her intimate knowledge of his desires and routines, and he became more trusting, more amenable to suggestion.

One evening she sent him out to buy new underwear and get himself a proper haircut, carefully noting the shops to be visited and the exact items and services to be purchased. She wrote them down on a cashcard and strung the card on a little chain around his neck.

“Why not tattoo it on my arm?”

“That’s very funny, Emil. Get going.”

She felt much better without him underfoot. Maybe it was that steady and nourishing diet, maybe it was the unceasing intensity of their relationship, but she was very restless today. Irritable, almost ready to come out of her skin. She felt as if she needed to be contained somehow, and dressed in tights and a sweater.

There was a knock at the door. She assumed it was Emil’s dealer, an obscure gallery owner named Schwartz who dropped by every couple of days looking for product, but it wasn’t. It was a portly Czech woman in a powder blue civil-support uniform. She carried a valise.

“Dobry vecer.”

Maya quickly tucked the bird-nest translator into her ear, a reflexive habit by now. “How do you do. Do you speak English?”

“Yes, a little English. I am the landwoman here. This is my building.”

“I see. I’m pleased to meet you. May I help you with something?”

“Yes, please. Open the door.”

Maya stepped aside. The landlady bustled in and looked the studio over sharply. Slowly, a pair of the lighter stress marks disappeared from between her much-furrowed brows. Maya took her for seventy-five, maybe eighty. Very sturdy. Very well preserved.

“You go in and out for days now,” the landlady said briskly. “You’re the new girlfriend.”

“I guess so. Uhm … jmenuji se Maya.” She smiled.

“My name is Mrs. Najadova. You are much cleaner than his last girl. You are Deutschlander?”

“Well, I came here from Munchen. But really, I’m just passing through.”

“Welcome to Praha.” Mrs. Najadova opened her valise and thumbed through a series of accordion folders. She produced a fat sheaf of laminated papers in English. “This are your support documents. All for you. Read them. Safe places to eat. Safe places to sleep. This is important medical service. Maps of Praha. Cultural events. Here is coupons for shops. Schedule of train and bus. Here is police advice.” Mrs. Najadova shuffled the documents and a little stack of cheap smartcards into Maya’s hands. Then she looked her in the eye. “Many young people come to Praha. Young people are reckless. Some people are bad. The wanderjahr girl must be careful. Read all of the official counsel. Read everything.”

“You’re very kind. Really, this is enormously helpful. Dekuji.”

Mrs. Najadova removed a gilt-embossed gilt smartcard from her jacket pocket. “These are church services. You’re a religious girl?”

“Well, no, not actually. I’m always pretty careful about drugs.”

“Poor girl, you are missing the true fine part of life.” Mrs. Najadova shook her head mournfully. She set her valise down, and deftly removed a telescoping dust-mop handle and a sterile packet of adhesive sponges. “I must sample the room now. You understand?”

Maya put the documents on the new bedspread. “You mean for contagion sampling. Yes, I’ve been wondering about that. Do you have some tailored subtilis or maybe some coli? Something I can spread around to knock back any pathogens. That corner under the sink smells kind of yeasty.”

“From the medical support,” said Mrs. Najadova, visibly pleased. “You report for official checkup. They will give you what you need to keep good house.”

“Isn’t there another way to get those microbe cultures? I’m not really due for a checkup just yet.”

“But it’s free checkup! Gift by the city! It’s all written on the documents. Where to go. How to report.”

“I see. Okay. Thanks a lot.”

Mrs. Najadova assembled her mop and began methodically creeping about the studio, scraping and dabbing. “The potter has wild mouses.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“He has bad hygiene. He leaves food and insects come.”

“I’ll watch for that.”

Mrs. Najadova, having reached a decision, looked up. “Girl, you must know this. The girlfriends of this crazy man, they are not happy. Maybe at first a few days. In the end they always cry.”

“It’s very sweet of you to be so considerate. Please don’t worry, I promise you I’m not going to marry him.”

The door opened. A neatly hair-cut Emil came in with a shopping bag. A violent argument erupted at once, in blistering Czestina. There was shouting and stomping and vile condemnation, charge and countercharge. It seemed to last forever. At last Mrs. Najadova retreated from the studio, with a shake of her mop and a final volley of vitriolic threats. Emil slammed the door.

“Emil, really. Was all that necessary?”

“That woman is a cow!”

“I’m surprised you could even remember her name.”

Emil glowered. “To forget a lover is very sad. A tragedy. But to forget an enemy is fatal stupidity! She is a cop! And a spy! And a health inspector! And a gerontocrat! She is a bourgeoise, a philistine! A fat rich rentier! And on top of all that she is my landlord! How could she be worse?”

“It’s true that combining landlady with all those other social functions does seem excessive.”

“She spies on me! She reports me to hygiene authorities. She poisons the minds of my friends against me.” His brows knotted. “Did she talk to you? What did she say?”

“We didn’t really talk. She just gave me all these free coupons. Look, I can rent a bicycle with this one. And this chipcard here has a Praha net directory in English. I wonder what it says about photography studios.”

“It’s all rubbish. Worthless! A commercial snare!”

“When was the last time you actually paid the rent here? I mean, how do you remember to pay the rent?”

“Oh, I pay. Of course I pay! You think Najadova runs a charity? I’m sure she reminds me.”

She cooked. They ate. Emil was upset. The loss of his morning and the quarrel with the landlady had put him off his feed. His hair looked much nicer now, but Emil was a congenital challenge to grooming. He spent the evening paging through his catalog of works. This was not a good sign.

She seemed unable to shrug off the argument—the fight had shredded her nerves. As the night advanced she grew ever more irritable. She was jumpy, short-tempered. She felt bad—a strange internal tightness.

Her breasts grew swollen and achy. Then she realized the truth. It had been such a long time that it almost felt like an illness. But it was womanhood. She was about to have her first period in forty years.

They went to bed. Sex chased his bad mood away, but left her feeling as if she’d been sandpapered. The night wore on. She began to realize that she was in for a very hard time. No mere lighthearted hiatus in the month’s erotic festivities. The event stealing over her body was something vengeful and postwomanly and medical. Her eyelids were swollen, her face felt waxed and puffy, and an ominous intimate ache was building deep within the pelvic girdle. Her mood was profoundly unstable. It seemed to rocket up and crash down with every other breath.

Emil tumbled into sleep. After an hour she began to quietly weep with bewilderment and pain. Crying usually helped her a lot nowadays, it came easily and would wash any sadness away like clear water over clean sand. But weeping wasn’t working that way tonight. When the tears gave out, she felt very sane, and very lucid, and very, very low.

She shook Emil awake as he lay peacefully slumbering.

“Darling, wake up, I have to tell you something.”

Emil woke up, coughed, sat up in bed, and visibly reassembled his command of English. “What is it? It’s late.”

“You remember who I am, don’t you?”

“You’re Maya, but if you tell me anything this late at night, I won’t remember tomorrow.”

“I don’t want you to remember it, Emil. I just want to tell it to you. I have to tell it to you. Now.”

Emil grew alert. He tucked the heavy curtain behind the headboard of the bed and a turbid mix of moonlight and streetlight entered the studio. He looked into her eyes. “You’ve been crying.”

“Yes …”

“And you have to confess something? Yes, I can see.… I already know it. I can see the truth there in your eyes.… You’ve been unfaithful to me!”

Amazed, she shook her head.

“No, no,” he insisted, raising one hand. “You don’t have to tell me a word! It’s all too obvious! A beautiful young girl, with a poor shattered crackpot—no man in the world could be easier to deceive! I know—I offer nothing to command a woman’s loyalty. My arms, my lips—what do those matter? When Emil himself is a ghost! A man who scarcely exists!”

“Emil, listen to me now.”

“Did I ever ask you to be faithful to me? I never asked for that! All I asked was that you not humiliate me. I gave you freedom to do as you please—take a dozen lovers, take a hundred! Just don’t let me know. And yet you have to let me know, don’t you? You have to shatter my illusions with this … this last vile confidence.”

“Emil, stop it! You’re acting like a child.”

“Don’t call me your child, you tramp! I’m twice your age!”

“No, you’re not, Emil. Be quiet now. I am much, much older than you. I’m not a young girl named Maya. I’m old, I’m an old woman. My name is Mia Ziemann and I’m almost a hundred years old.” She began to weep.

Emil was stunned. A ghastly silence passed. Slowly, Emil withdrew by inches to his edge of the bed.

“You’re not joking?”

“No, I’m not joking. I’m ninety-four—ninety-five, something like that—and in my own way, I’m a lot like you. I underwent a very powerful upgrade. Just a few months ago. It made me this way, and it broke me into pieces, it put me on the far side of everything. ”

“You weren’t unfaithful to me?”

“No! Emil, no, that has nothing to do with reality! I’m telling you the truth here. Get it through your head.”

“You’re telling me you’re a hundred years old. Even though you’re very obviously about twenty.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re not an old woman. I know old women. I’ve even had old women. You may be a lot of things, my dear, but you’re not an old woman.” He sighed. “You’ve taken something. You’re tight.”

“The only thing I’m tight on is Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification, and believe me, compared to the harmless tincture dope you little kids like to mess with, this stuff is voodoo.”

“You’re telling me you’re a female gerontocrat? Why aren’t you snug in your penthouse with a hundred monitors on you?”

“Because I tore them all off and I skipped town, that’s why. I signed all their papers for very advanced treatment and then I broke every law in the book. I hitched a plane to Europe. I’m on the lam. I’m an illegal alien and a fugitive from a research program. And Emil, someday they’re going to catch me. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” She began sobbing bitterly.

He waited a while, and when he spoke again his voice had changed. Bewildered, quizzical. “Why are you telling me this?”

She choked on her tears, too wracked with anguish to go on.

He waited another while, and then spoke in yet another tone. Speculative, stunned. “What am I supposed to do with you now?”

She wailed aloud.

“I think I understand now,” Emil concluded at last, loudly and finally. “You’re something truly freakish, aren’t you? You’re like a little vampire! Feeding on me! Feeding on my life and my youth! You’re like a little lamia from the storybooks. A little … bloodsucking … posthuman … demon-lover … incubus!”

“Stop! Stop it! Don’t go on, I’m going to kill myself!”

“Something like this could only happen in Praha,” Emil declared slowly, and with increasingly obvious satisfaction. “Only here in the Golden City. The City of Alchemists. That’s a very, very odd story that you just told me. It’s almost too odd to think about! To have heard such a story! In a very strange way, it makes me feel very proud to be Czech.”

She wiped her streaming eyes with the edge of the sheet. “What’s all that?”

“I’m the victim in this tale, aren’t I? I’m the sacrificial victim. I’m the toy for a sexual golem. Why, it’s the most amazing thing … the most amazing, mystical … It’s so dark and strange and erotic.” He looked at her. “Why did you ever choose me?”

“I just … I just really liked your hands.”

“It’s too astonishing.” Emil adjusted his pillow. “You can stop crying now. Go ahead, stop it.” He leaned back and interlaced his fingers on his hairy chest. “I won’t tell a soul. Your terrible secrets are completely safe with me. No one would believe me anyway.”

The extent of his egotism stunned her so much that she almost forgot her despair. “You don’t think I should … kill myself?” she said in a small voice.

“My goodness, woman, what’s the point? There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re no criminal, you just defrauded the gerontocrats of a few of their lab-rat studies. What are they supposed to do to you—make you old again? Shrivel you up in daylight like an apple in a cellar? They can’t do that. They think they rule the world, but they’re all doomed, a gang of sick centenarians with their ridiculous technologies.… Trifling and tinkering with human flesh, when they have no concept of the power of imagination … And all to send me you! You! Like a little pink beach crab just pulled out of her shell!”

“I’m not a little beach crab. And I’m not an incubus.” She drew a harsh breath. “I’m an outlaw.”

He laughed.

“I am! I used to pretend that I was someone else, really someone else, so that I didn’t have to face up to what I really wanted. But I was lying, because I was Mia all along, I’ve always been Mia, and I’m Mia right now, and I hate them! They don’t want me to live! They only want me to exist and wear out the days and the years, just like they do! I could walk into the street right now—well, if I put on some clothes—and I could call the lab in the Bay, and I could say, ‘Hello everybody in California, it’s me, it’s Mia Ziemann, I just had a bad reaction to the treatment, I’m sorry, I’m in Europe, I lost my head for a while, please take me back, put all your things inside me and up me and on me, I’m all right now, I’ll be really good.’ And they would! They’d send a plane and probably a reporter, and they’d give me my job back and put a cold towel on my forehead. They’re so stupid, they should all die! I’ll never go back to that life, I’d rather be killed, I’d rather jump out the window.” She was trembling.

Emil touched her hand, and said nothing for a long time. Finally he got up and fetched her a glass of water. She drank it thirstily, and wiped at her eyes.

“That’s what you had to tell me, is it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all of it?”

“Well, yes.”

“Did you ever tell it to me before?”

“No, Emil, never. I’ve never told it to you or to anyone else. You’re the first one, truly.”

“Do you think you’ll have to tell it to me again?” She paused, considering. “Do you think that you’ll remember it?”

“I don’t know. I might remember it. I don’t often remember things that I’m told this late at night. I might not remember it with some other woman, either, but there’s something very deep about the two of us. You and me. I think … I think we were fated to meet.”

“Well … Maybe we … No. No, I can’t believe that, Emil. I’m not religious, I’m not superstitious, I’m not even mystical, I’m just posthuman. I’m posthuman, I made a moral choice to go beyond the limits. I made that choice with my eyes open, and now I have to learn how to survive in my own private nightmare.”

“I know a way out for you.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have to be brave. But I can mold you all into one piece. No doubts, no secrets, no pains, just one whole new woman. If you wanted me to.”

“Oh, Emil …” She stared at him. “Not the amnesiac.”

“Of course the amnesiac. You wouldn’t think I could misplace a valuable thing like that, I hope. This Ziemann person you talk about, this old woman, this incubus that you have … We could brush her away from you. Clean away, just like a witch’s broom.”

“How would that help us? I’d still be an illegal alien.”

“No you wouldn’t. We’d brush that away too. You’d be my wife. You’d be young. And new. And fresh. And you’d love me. And I’d love you.” He sat up in bed, waving his hands. “We’d write it all down tonight. We’d explain to ourselves just how to go about it, so we could see it together in the morning. We’d get Paul to help us. Paul is good, he’s clever, he has friends and influence, he likes me. We’ll marry, we’ll leave the city, we’ll go into Bohemia. We’ll plant a garden and work clay. We’ll be two new creatures together in the countryside, and we’ll live outside bourgeois reality, forever!”

He was full of passionate excited inspiration and conviction, and she was trying to respond to him, when the black lightning of suspicion hit her and she knew, with a deep uneasy lurch, that he had made this offer to other women before.

When she woke in the morning there was no sign of Emil. The room reeked of blood. She’d bled all over the sheets. She crawled out of bed, stuffed a makeshift pad into her underwear, put on a robe, and made herself a pain tincture. She drank it, she stripped the sheets, she turned over the stained mattress, and then collapsed into bed exhausted.

Around noon there was a knock on the door. “Go away,” she moaned.

A key rattled in the lock and the door opened. It was Paul.

“Oh it’s you,” she blurted. “Ciao Paul.”

“Good afternoon. May I come in?” Paul stepped into the studio. “I see that you’re alive. That’s excellent news. Are you ill?”

“No. Yes. No. How can I put this delicately? I’m not at my feminine best.”

“And that’s all? That’s it? Well.” Paul smiled briefly. “I understand.”

“Where is Emil?”

“Yes,” Paul hedged. “Let’s discuss that, shall we? Your name is Maya, am I right? We met very briefly at last month’s session at the Tête. Your friend was the couturiere who got very tight and had the shoving match with Niko.”

“I’m sorry to hear about that.”

“Have you eaten?” said Paul, slinging his backpack onto the floor beside the kiln. He smoothed his dark hair back with both hands. “I haven’t eaten today. Let me make us something. This kitchen seems nicely stocked. How about a goulash?”

“Oh goodness no.”

“A little kasha. Something very light and restorative.” Paul began running water. “How long have you known our good friend Emil?”

“I’ve been living with him ever since that night at the Tête.”

“Three weeks with Emil! You’re a brave woman.”

“I’m not the first.”

“You’ve made changes here,” Paul said, gazing alertly about the studio. “I admire your sense of devotion. Emil requires a lot of looking after. He called me this morning. Very agitated. I took the express from Stuttgart.”

“I see.” She found the bedspread and pulled it up over her knees. “He said you were close friends. He always speaks very highly of you.”

“Does he? That’s touching. Of course, it was natural of Emil to call me. I have my net-address tattooed onto his forearm.”

She blinked. “I never noticed any such tattoo.”

“It’s rather subtle. The tattoo only becomes visible on his skin when he is very upset.”

“Was Emil very upset this morning?”

Paul sifted yellow powder into a saucepan. “He woke me this morning and told me that a strange woman was dying in his bed. Dying, or possibly dead. An incubus. A golem. He was very confused.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s relaxing, he’s having a sauna. Schwartz is looking after him. I’ll have to call them now. Just a moment.” Paul undipped the netlink from his collar and began speaking in Deutsch as he delicately stirred the pan. Paul was soothing, then funny, then authoritative, then lightly satirical. When Paul had restored sense and order to the universe, he clipped the phone back to his shirt collar.

“You should keep your fluids up,” he said. “How about a nice mineralka? With maybe two hundred micrograms targeted enkephalin and a bit of diuretic and relaxant. That should put you to rights.” He fetched his backpack, opened it, and pulled out a clear zippered bag. It held an arsenal of stickered foils and airtight capsules.

“Did you think I’d be dead when you walked in here, Paul?”

“The world is full of possibilities.” Paul opened a cabinet, retrieving spoons and bowls. “I thought it best to be here first, that’s all.”

“To put the proper cast on the situation before the authorities showed up?”

“If you like.” He brought her a fine ceramic bowl of steaming mush and a tapered china vase of mineral water. “You’ll feel less distraught if you eat this.” He went back and fetched his own bowl.

She sipped at her fizzing mineralka. “Merci beaucoup. ”

“English is fine, Maya. I’m a programmer, I’m a conquered subject of the global argot of technique. We might as well collaborate with English. It’s silly to fight it now.”

They sliced a yellow stick of lipid and stirred white cubes of sucrose into their kasha, and they ate together on the bed. The cozy little ritual made her feel five years old. She was very weak and had a viperish temper. It was not a good idea to fight with Paul.

“I’m not easy to get along with when I’m this way,” she said. “We had an argument last night and I upset him. It’s not good to tell him things late at night, it affects his sleep.” She sighed. “Besides, this morning I do look half-dead.”

“Not at all,” said Paul. “In your own hair and without cosmetics your face has great character. Less conventionally pretty perhaps, but far more compelling. There’s an element of melancholy remoteness, a Weltschmerz. It’s a face that is almost iconic.”

“You’re very tactful and galante.”

“No, I’m speaking as an aesthetician.”

“What do you do in Stuttgart, Paul? I’m very sorry that I took you from that work today, whatever it was.”

“I program. And I teach at the university.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.

“They let you teach at that age?”

“The European university system is very ancient, and convoluted, and bureaucratic, but yes, if you have publications, and sponsors, and a concerted demand from the students, yes, you can teach. Even at twenty-eight.” He smiled. “C’est possible.”

“What do you teach?”

“I teach artifice.”

“Oh. Of course.” She nodded repeatedly. “You know, I need to find someone who can teach me photography.”

“Josef Novak.”

“What?”

“Josef Novak, he lives here in Praha. I don’t suppose you know his work. But he was a great master. A pioneer of early virtuality. I’m not sure that Novak still takes students, but of course his name leapt to mind.”

“He’s a gerontocrat?”

“ ‘Gerontocrat’? A good teacher should never be scorned. Of course, Novak is not an easy man to know. The very old are rarely easy people to know.”

“Josef Novak … wait, did he do a desktop environment called Glass Labyrinth back in the teens?”

“That’s far before my time.” Paul smiled. “Novak was very prolific in his youth. All lost works now, of course. The tragic loss of all those early digital standards and platforms … it was a great cultural disaster.”

“Sure, Glass Labyrinth, The Sculpture Gardens, Vanished Statues, Josef Novak did all of those. Those were big hits then! They were wonderful! I had no idea he was still alive.”

“He lives about a block from here.”

She sat up. “He does? Then let’s go see him! Introduce me, all right?”

Paul glanced at his wrist. “I have a class in Stuttgart this afternoon … I’m a bit pressed for time today, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, of course. I’m sorry.”

“But I’m glad to see that you’re feeling so much better.”

“Those painkillers kicked in. Thanks a lot. Anyway, I’m always much better after I eat.”

“So you’re familiar with Josef Novak’s early work. You’re an antiquarian, Maya. That’s very interesting. It’s remarkable. How old are you?”

“Paul, maybe it would be a good idea if I didn’t see Emil for a few days. It might be better for Emil if I just cleared out of his life for a little while. I mean, considering. What do you advise?”

“I’m sure Emil will recover by tomorrow morning. Emil almost always does. But I can imagine that course of action might be wise. Considering.”

“Maybe I’ll just wanderjahr for a few days. Do you mind if I take the train back with you to Stuttgart? Just to talk along the way. If that’s not an imposition.”

“No, not at all, I’d be delighted with your company.”

“I’ll dress. All right?”

There was no place in the studio to dress in privacy. The young were not much concerned with privacy. Maya tunneled awkwardly into tights and a sweater. Paul, with perfect indifference, did the washing up.

She glanced into her pocket mirror and was horrified. The truth could not have been more obvious if it were flashing on her brow in neon. This face was not the face of a young woman. It was a posthuman face, pale and pinched and brimful of exotic forms of anguish it was not fully allowed to experience. The sculptured, waxy face of some outmoded plastic mannequin.

She rushed to the kitchen sink and set to work with cleansing gel. Toning lotion. Pore reliner. Epidermal matrix. Foundation. Blusher brushes. Mascara. Eyeliner. Gloss. Eyelash curler. Scleral brightener. Brow pencil. She’d forgotten to brush her teeth. The teeth would have to do.

The mirror showed her that she’d beaten the truth into submission. Smothered it in cosmetics. The hair was still awful but the natural hair was always pretty bad.

She found a bright Czech shawl, her kick-on shoes, her big warm gray beret. She slipped a couple of semidepleted cashcards into her backpack. Somehow she’d be all right now. Wrapped up, warm, contained. Perfectly happy and confident.

Paul, all patience and indifference, had been studying Emil’s more recent works. He’d found a wooden box and opened it. “Did he ever show you this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s my favorite.” Paul reached with exaggerated care into the shredded lining of the box and retrieved a delicate white cup and saucer. He set them on Emil’s worktable. “He did this piece just after the change. He was thrashing at reality like a drowning man.”

“A cup-and-saucer set,” Maya said.

“Touch them. Pick them up.”

She reached for the cup. The cup sizzled under her fingertips, and she jerked her hand back. Paul chuckled.

She reached out again with one forefinger and gently touched the saucer. There was a faint electrical tingling, the feeling of something soft yet spiky brushing back at her skin. A crackly sandpaper creeping.

Paul laughed.

She gripped the cup with determination. Without moving, it seemed to buzz and writhe within her fingers. She set it back down. “Is there a battery inside it? Is that the trick?”

“It’s not ceramic,” Paul said.

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It resembles ceramic, and it gleams like ceramic, but I believe it’s piezoelectric foamed glass. Once I saw him pour a tincture into that cup. The liquid slowly seeped through both the cup and the saucer. Some quality—the porosity, or the fractal dimension, or maybe a van der Waals charge—it reacts very oddly when it contacts the fingertips.”

“But why?”

“It is an objet gratuit. A work of artifice that demonstrates the bankruptcy of the quotidian.”

“Is it a joke?”

“Is Emil a joke?” Paul said somberly. “Is it a joke to be no longer human? Of course it is. What is a joke? A joke is a violation of the conceptual framework.”

“But that’s not all there is to it.”

“Of course not.”

“So tell me the rest of it.”

Paul restored the cup and saucer to its box, and put the box back on its shelf, with reverent care. “Are you ready to go? Then we should go.” He picked up his backpack, opened the door for her, ushered her through, locked it carefully behind him.

They walked loudly down the creaking stairs. Outside, the day was overcast and windy. They headed toward the Narodni tubestation. She walked at his shoulder. In her flats, she was as tall as he was. “Paul, please forgive me if I’m too direct. I come from very far away, and I’m a naif. I hope you can forgive me that. You’re a teacher, I know that you can tell me the truth.”

“I’m touched by your optimism,” Paul said.

“Please don’t be that way. What do I have to do—to convince you to tell me the truth?”

“Consider that object,” Paul told her very politely. “It destroys the quotidian swindle. It confronts us with a tactile violation of conventional cognition.”

“Yes?”

“The destruction of the human condition offers us an avalanche of novel creative approaches. Those possibilities must be assimilated and systematically deployed by the heirs of humanity. Artifice is not Art. Although it deploys the imagination of the preconscious, it recognizes that the imagination of the unconscious is impoverished. We honor the irrationality of the creative impulse, but we deny the primacy or even the relevancy of hallucination. We harness the full power of conscious rationality and the scientific method in pursuit of the voluntary destruction and supercession of human culture.”

They walked down the stairs of the tubestation. Paul discreetly produced a laminated travel pass from an inner jacket pocket. “The human condition is over. Nature is over. Art is over. Consciousness is ductile. Science is an infinite powder keg. We confront a new reality formerly obscured by the inbuilt limits of mammalian primates. We must create work which brings this new reality to the surface, a sequence of seemingly gratuitous gestures which will form in their aggregate the consciousness of posthumanity.” Paul’s limpid gaze grew more intense. “At the same time, politically, we must not shatter the fragile surface tension of an aging human civilization which pretends to Utopian tranquillity but is secretly traumatized beyond all possibility of healing. Beneath the repellent husk of the dying humanist agenda, we must systematically alter the physiological basis of cognition and the state of culture, and bear an honest, objective, and unpretentious witness to the results. That is the basic nature of our program as artificers.”

“I see. Can you buy me a ticket?”

“A ticket to the train station, or a ticket all the way to Stuttgart?”

“Actually, could you buy me both of those tickets? Including a round-trip ticket.”

“Why don’t you just take my Europass? It lasts till May.”

“Could I do that, Paul? That’s too generous.”

He handed her the laminated pass. “No no, I can get another smartcard from the university. Europe is full of situational perquisites.” He approached a machine and did business with it.

They boarded the Praha tube and clung to the hand straps. She looked at him. She loved the way he swept his hair back behind his ears. She admired the fine sweep of his dark mobile eyebrows, the line of his hooded eyelids. It was a comfort to be in his physical presence. He was so young.

“Tell me something else, Paul. Go on.”

“We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming epoch. An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared to bathe in cataclysm will transcend the singularity. Someday, we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous. The admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates the quotidian. It is only a matter of time, and time is our one inexhaustible resource. There is no more strength left in normality; there are only routines.”

“What you just said. It’s so beautiful.”

He smiled. “I like to think so, too.”

“I wish I were that beautiful.”

“I think you’re making a category error, my dear.”

“All right—then I wish I could do something that beautiful.”

“Perhaps you already have.” He paused. “It’s a truly interesting concept, ‘beauty.’ An intersection of three worlds …”

The tubetrain pulled into a stop in the Muzeum station and an absolute horde of tourists piled in, a jostling mess of backpacks and bags and alien chatter. They stood amid the crowd, swaying on their hand straps. He’d tried to convince her that he could disturb the universe and the two of them were standing packed amid a horde of indifferent strangers like animals in a cattle car.

It began to get very hot within the train. A muted series of cramps gnawed away deep inside her and when she had come sweating out of the far side of the pain she realized that this was a day when she could do something truly crazy. Something mad and spontaneous and psychically automatic. Levitate. Leap off a building. Throw herself on her aching belly and kiss the feet of a policeman. Fly to the moon and dig into its white chalky soil and absolutely grope for Luna … Paul looked at her with undisguised concern. She gave him her brightest smile.

At the central train station she limped off to the ladies’. She did business with hygienic machines, drank two cups of water, and departed in better order. The pretty face in the mirror, with its dilated eyes and a little dotting of sweat beneath its layered treatments, seemed to blaze with the holy fire.

Paul was being very considerate. He got them beanbags in first class with a nice fold-down table. The Stuttgart express was a very rapid train.

“I love European trains,” she babbled, her scalp glowing beneath her beret. “Even the really fast ones that spend most of their time underground.”

“Maybe you should wanderjahr to Vladivostok,” Paul said.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“It’s a tradition in our group. Vladivostok, the far edge of the Eurasian continent. You have a Eurocard now, and you said that you wanted to drift. Why not drift to Vladivostok? You’ll be alone quite a while. You can relax and marshal your thoughts. You can reach the far rim of Asia and return in about four days.”

“What do you do once you reach the Pacific Rim?”

“Well, if you’re one of us, then you go to a certain obscure Vladivostok ptydepe—sorry, I mean Public Telepresence Point—and you perform a gratuitous act. Our group maintains a constant scan on this particular Vladivostok PTP through a conceptual sieve. Any gesture sufficiently remarkable to attract the attention of the scanner will be automatically mailed to everyone in our netlist.”

“How will I know if my gesture is sufficiently gratuitous?”

“By intuition, Maya. It helps if you’ve seen other performances. It’s not a matter of merely human judgment—our sieve program has its own evolving standards. That’s the beauty of the beauty in it.” Paul smiled. “How does anyone truly know how anything is out of the ordinary? What is ordinariness? What makes the quotidian so seemingly frail and yet so totipresent? The membrane between the bizarre and the tedious is inherently ductile.”

“I guess I’m missing a lot, not being in your network.”

“Without a doubt.”

“Why does your group even meet physically at that bar in Praha, if you’re so thoroughly netted?”

Paul considered this. “Do you have your translator? Is it working?”

“Yes. Benedetta gave me a translator at the Tête.” She showed Paul her diamond necklace.

“How very good of my valued colleague Benedetta. Any machine of Benedetta’s would translate Français, I imagine. Put it on.” Paul clipped a sleek little pad to his own ear.

Maya worked her diamond beads and tucked the golden bird’s nest in her ear. Paul began speaking Français. “[You can still understand me, I presume.]”

“Yes, my machine is working fine.”

“[There are millions of earpiece translators in circulation. They’re a modern commonplace. You speak English, I speak Français as I am doing now, and the machines interpret for us. And if the background noise is low … and our speech is not too infested with jargon or argot … and if not too many people are speaking all at once … and if we are not referring to some context beyond the comprehension of small-scale machine processing … and if we don’t complicate our exchange with too many nonverbal interactions such as human gestures and expressions—well then, we understand one another.]” He gestured broadly. “[That is to say, despite all the odds, we force some modicum of human meaning through this terribly intimate ear-mounted membrane of computation.] ”

“Yes, that’s it exactly! That’s just exactly how it works.”

“[Look at my face at this very moment, as I speak. A certain set of musculatures being put into play, a certain state of tensility that holds the face in readiness for a characteristic physical sequence of verbal movements—Français. Consciously, I’m not aware of shaping my face. Consciously, you’re not aware of noticing it. Nevertheless big wedges of our human brains are dedicated to the study of faces—and to the perception of language as well. Studies prove that we can recognize one another as aliens, not because of posture, genetics, or dress, but because our languages have physically shaped our faces. That’s a preconscious human perception. A translator doesn’t do that. A network doesn’t convey that. Networks and translators don’t have thought. They have only processing.]”

“Yes?”

“[So now you see me through your eyes, and hear Français through one ear, and receive machine-enunciated data through your machine-assisted ear. Something is missing. Something is also superfluous. Parts of you that you don’t comprehend can sense that it’s all a muddle.]”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “[Now I’m holding your hand while speaking to you in Francçis. Look, I’ll hold your hand in both of mine. I’ll gently stroke your hand. How does that feel?]”

“It feels just fine, Paul.”

“And how does it feel now that I’m speaking to you in English?”

Surprised, she pulled her hand away.

He laughed. “There. You see? Your reaction demonstrates the truth. It’s the same with networks. We meet physically because we have to supplement the networks. It’s not that networks lack intimacy. On the contrary, networks are too precisely intimate, in too narrow a channel. We have to meet in a way that feeds the gray meat.”

“That’s very clever. But tell me—what would have happened if I hadn’t pulled my hand away?”

“[Then,]” said Paul with great rationality and delicacy, “[you would have been a woman of blunted perceptions. Which you are not.]” And that seemed to be pretty much the end of that.

She noticed for the first time that his right hand had a ring on the third finger. It looked like a dark engraved band—but it was not a ring at all. It was a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of Paul’s flesh.

They were sliding with enormous magnetic levitational speed through the diamond-drilled depths of the European earth. She was taking enormous pleasure in his company and she felt absolutely no desire to flirt with him. It would be like trying to throw a come-hither at a limestone stalactite. Intimacy was not a prospect that appealed. It would take a woman of enormous self-abnegation and tolerance to endure the torment of that much clarity on a day-by-day basis. If he had a girlfriend she would sit across the breakfast table from him with fork in hand, and every day she would be impaled on the four steel tines of his intelligence and his perception and his ambition and his self-regard.

Paul was gazing at her silently, clearly undergoing some very similar line of assessment. She could almost hear the high-speed crackle of neurochemical cognition seething through the wettest glandular depths of his beautiful leonine head.

She was insanely close to confessing everything. It was an extremely stupid thing to do, especially twice in a row, but she was feeling incredibly reckless today and she wanted risk in the way that one might want oxygen and, most of all, she just really, really felt like it. She didn’t want to ever touch Paul, hold him or caress him, but she direly wanted to confess to him. To immolate herself, to force him to take real notice.

But it wouldn’t be like confessing to Emil. Poor Emil, in his own peculiar animal fashion, was outside time, un-woundable, indestructible. Paul was very actual. Paul talked about cosmic transgressions but Paul was not beyond the pale. Paul was young, he was just a young man. A young man who didn’t need her troubles.

Their eyes met. There was a sudden terrific tension between them. It would have felt like sexual attraction with anyone else. With Paul it felt like an attack of telepathy.

He stared at her. Surprise struck him visibly. His fine brows arched and his eyes widened.

“What are you thinking, Paul?”

“Sincerely?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’m wondering why I see this frivolous young beauty. Here, across this table from me.”

“Why shouldn’t I be here?” she said.

“Because it’s a facade. Isn’t it? You’re not frivolous. And I feel quite certain suddenly that you’re not young.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re very beautiful. But it’s not a young woman’s beauty. You’re terribly beautiful. There is an element of terror to your presence.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Now that I recognize that fact, it makes me wonder. What do you want from us? Are you a police spy? Are you civil support?”

“No. I’m not. I promise.”

“I was civil support once,” Paul said calmly. “Youth-league civil support, in Avignon. I was quite ambitious about the work, and I learned about interesting aspects of life. But I quit, I gave it up. Because they want to make the world a better place. And I knew that I didn’t want the world to be any better. I want the world to become more interesting. Do you think that’s a crime, Maya?”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. It doesn’t seem very much like a crime.”

“I know a police spy rather well. She reminds me of you very much. She has your strange self-possession, your peculiarly intense presence as a woman. I was looking at you just now, and I realized that you look like the Widow. So it all became clear to me suddenly.”

“I’m not a widow.”

“She’s an astonishing woman. Enormously beautiful, sublime. She’s like a sphinx. Like some untouchable creature from myth. She takes a deep interest in artifice. You’ll likely meet the Widow someday. If you stay in our company.”

“This Widow person—she’s an artifice cop? I had no idea there was any such thing as a police force for artifice. What’s her name?”

“Her name is Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier.”

“Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier … My goodness, what a wonderful name she has!”

“If you don’t know Helene already, then you might not want to meet her.”

“I’m certain I don’t want to meet her. Because I’m not an informer. Actually, I’m a criminal fugitive.”

“Informer, criminal …” He shook his head. “There’s far less distinction there than one might think.”

“You’re very right as usual, Paul. It’s rather like that blurry distinction between terror and beauty. Or youth and age. Or artifice and crime.”

He stared at her in surprise. “Well put,” he said at last. “That’s just what Helene would say. She’s quite the devotee of blurry distinctions.”

“I promise that I’m not a police agent. I’d prove it to you, if I could.”

“Maybe you’re not. It’s not that civil-support people can’t be pretty, but they usually consider your kind of glamour to be suspect.”

“I’m not suspect. Why should I be suspect?”

“I suspect you because I have to protect my friends,” Paul said. “Our lives are our lives, they’re not a theoretical exercise. We’re a much put-upon generation. We have to treasure our vitality, because our vitality is methodically stifled. Other generations never faced that dilemma. Their parents fell into their graves and power fell into their laps. But we’ve never been a natural generation. We’re the first truly native posthumans.”

“And you have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”

“Mais oui.”

“Well, so do I. I have a whole lot of them.”

“No one asked you to become one of us.”

It was a terribly wounding thing to say. She felt as if she’d been stabbed. He stared at her in direct challenge and she was suddenly too tired to go on fencing with him. He was too young and strong and quick, and she was too upset and broken up to push him into a corner. She began to cry. “What happens now?” she asked. “Should I beg for your permission to live? I’ll beg if you want me to. Just tell me that’s what you want.”

Paul glanced anxiously around the train car. “Please don’t make a scene.”

“I have to cry! I want to cry, I deserve it! I’m not all right. I don’t have any pride, I don’t have any dignity—I don’t have anything. I’m hurt in ways you can’t even imagine. What else should I do but cry? You’ve caught me out. I’m at your mercy. You can destroy me now.”

“You could destroy us. Maybe that’s what you want.”

“I won’t do that. Give me a chance! I can be vivid. I can even be beautiful. You should let me try. Let me try, Paul—I can be an interesting case study for you.”

“I’d love to let you try,” he said. “I like to feast with panthers. But why play games with my friends’ safety? I know nothing about you, except that you seem very pretty and very posthuman. Why should I trust you? Why don’t you simply go home?”

“Because I can’t go home. They’ll make me be old again.”

Paul’s eyes widened. She’d struck through to him, she’d touched him. Finally he handed her a kerchief. She glanced at the kerchief, felt it carefully to make sure it wasn’t computational, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

Paul pressed a button on the rim of the table.

“You let Emil stay with your group,” she offered at last, “and Emil’s worse than I am.”

“I’m responsible for Emil,” he said gloomily.

“What do you mean?”

“I let him take the amnesiac. I made arrangements.”

“You did? Do the others know?”

“It was a good idea. You didn’t know Emil earlier.”

A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace.

It picked its way through barely perceptible niches in the ceiling, stopped, and dropped beside their beanbags. It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam’s. “Oui monsieur?”

“[The mademoiselle will be having a bottle of eau minerale and two hundred micrograms of alcionage,]” said Paul. “[I’ll have a limoncello and … oh, bring us half a dozen croissants.]”

“Très bien.” It stalked away.

“What was that thing?” Maya said.

“That’s the steward.”

“I can guess that much, but what is it? Is it alive? Is it a robot? Is it some kind of lobster? It sounded like it was talking with real lips and a tongue!”

Paul looked exasperated. “Do you mind? This is the Stuttgart express, you know.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”

Paul gazed at her silently, meditatively. “Poor Emil,” he said at last.

“Don’t tell me that! You have no right to tell me that! I’m good for him. I know I’m good for him. You don’t know anything about it.”

“Are you good for Emil?”

“Look, what can I do to make you trust me? You can’t just write me off, you can’t just push me out. You say you want something really strange to happen in the world. Well, I’m really strange, all right? And I’m happening.”

Paul thought this over, tapping the edge of the table with his fingertips. “Let me test your blood,” he said.

“All right. Sure.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweater.

He stood up, retrieved his backpack from the overhead compartment, opened it, rummaged about methodically and removed a blood-test mosquito. He placed the little device on the center of her forearm. It sniffed about, squatted, inserted its hair-thin beak. There was no pain at all. Maybe a tiny itch.

Paul retrieved the blood-glutted device. It bent down and unfolded its wings, which formed a display screen the width of a pair of thumbnails. Paul bent down close and stared.

“So,” he said at last. “If you want to keep your secret, you’d better not let anyone else try a blood test.”

“Okay.”

“You’re very anemic. In fact, there’s a lot of fluid inside you that isn’t even blood.”

“Yeah, those would be cellular detox detergents and some catalyzed oxygen transports.”

“I see. But there’s more than enough DNA in here for me to establish your identity. And to turn you in to civil support. If that ever should prove necessary.”

“Look, Paul, you don’t have to take the trouble to trace my medical records. We’ve come this far—I’ll just tell you who I am.”

Paul forced the mosquito to disgorge on a slip of Chromatograph and folded the stained paper neatly. “No,” he said, “that’s not necessary. In fact, I don’t even think it’s wise. I don’t want to know who you are. That’s not my responsibility. And that’s certainly not what I want from you.”

“What do you want from me?”

He looked her in the eye. “I want you to prove to me that you’re not human yet still an artist.”

Stuttgart was a big loud town. Big, loud, sticky, and green. A city of gasps, grunts, wheezes, complex organic gurglings. People liked to shout at each other in Stuttgart. People emerged in sudden pedestrian torrents from sphinctering holes in the walls.

The famous towers were frankly cyclopean but their rhythmic billowing made them seem soothingly oceanic, rather than mountainous. She could hear the monster towers breathing with a viscous, tubercular rasping. Their breath galed above the furry streets and smelled of steam and lemons.

“My family helped to build this city,” Paul volunteered, neatly skirting around a large splattered puddle of a substance much like muesli. “My parents were garbage miners.”

“ ‘Were?’ ”

“They gave it up. Garbage was like any other extractive industry. The best and richest landfills played out early. Nowadays garbage mining is mostly left to wildcatters, methane drillers, small-timers. The great garbage fortunes are gone.”

“I see.”

“No need to fret, my mother did very well by her career. I’m a child of privilege.” Paul smiled cheerfully. He was relaxed, he was glad to be home.

“Your parents are Français?”

“Yes. We’re from Avignon originally. Half the population of Stuttgart are Français.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Paris has become a museum.” The lighting changed over the street. An enormous ribbed membrane peeled from the side of a tower and deployed itself over the neighborhood. A flock of white cranes wheeled in beneath it, landed in the streets like so many white-feathered commuters. The birds began to peck at the sidewalk, hard enough to break it into chunks.

“The finest extracts from the dumps,” Paul said, “iron, aluminum, copper, and such—their market value crashed once modern materials came into production. Cheap diamond of course, cheap diamond beats anything. But sugarglass, optical plastics, fullerenes, and aerogels”—he gestured at the cityscape around them. A small deft man with a proprietarial interest in structures four hundred stories tall. “The carbon-based products drove construction metals off the market. People in Stuttgart are progressives, they despise the shibboleths.”

“This place is a lot like Indianapolis.”

“Not at all! Nothing like it!” Paul protested. “Indianapolis was a political act, a freak by revanchist Asians. Stuttgart is serious! Stuttgart is meaningful! It is the only truly modern city in Europe! The only city whose builders truly believed in a future—rather than some endless recycling of the past.”

“I’m not sure I’d be real happy if the future looked like this.”

“It won’t. Any more than the world came to look like New York City a century ago. It was enough that for a certain period of time the world wanted to look like New York City. Stuttgart is that kind of urban cynosure. It’s the only city in the world where modern society was allowed to speak with an authentic architectural voice.”

“You use the past tense, I see.”

“There won’t be many other Stuttgarts. Gerontocratic society lacks the will and energy to innovate on the grand scale. Unless, as with Stuttgart, some large city is leveled by a cataclysm and the survivors have no choice.” Paul shrugged. “Not a pleasant prospect! There may be some fanatics who consider holocaust an acceptable price for change, but I’ve studied holocaust, and holocaust is vile. The change we face has its own inexorability. There’s much to be said for survival. Live long enough, and reality will melt beneath your feet.” He paused, considering. “I’m very fond of Praha. That city surely has lessons for the world as profound as Stuttgart’s. Praha outlasted its own epoch and became a beautiful freak, a charming atavism. Praha found a second chance. Now Praha is the chrysalis for a larval form of posthumanity.”

They walked on. The skies of Stuttgart were full of aerial transports that uncoiled like butterfly tongues, adhered to a distant tower, and then rolled up neatly to the other side. These reeling walkways carried sliding capsules within their flaccid bulk. They were grotesquely efficient, like ductile pedestrian boas.

Paul led her down a long flight of stairs and beneath a solemn stone arch with a series of thick beaded curtains. The sky vanished. The air warmed. They emerged under a coarse mossy roof with humps like fabric but the apparent rigidity of concrete. The walls grew spongy and disturbed, under long brilliantly glowing strands of sun-bright optical fiber. It was hot and damp, a stony greenhouse. The air reeked of vanilla and bananas. “This is my favorite quarter of town,” said Paul. “I lived here for years before I took my teaching post. This quarter was planned and built by theorists of the edible cityscape.”

“Theorists of the what?”

“The walls here are gasketfungus. You can eat the city raw. The walls are quite nutritious.” It didn’t seem a particularly good idea to eat the fungal walls. The locals had been carving graffiti into them with some kind of herbicide. Patchy letters of wilted yellow. BENEATH THE BEACH—THE PAVEMENT. Curls of Arabic. A Kilroy face with a mess of loopy curls.

They walked beside a brilliantly lit multistory building. The open floors were marked in numbered slots. People were lying in cavities in these numbered areas, under searing artificial sunlight. The people wore spex and were covered from head to foot in big gray-green wads of dense organic fiber.

“What’s this place? A morgue?”

“It’s a public bathhouse.”

“Where’s the water?”

“It’s not water bathing, it’s exfoliation. You’re dipped in jelly and you lie under the lights. They dust you in spores and those filaments of mold take root in your skin. When the mold stops growing the machines scrape you clean with strigils. The mold peels off in sheets. All the body dirt and skin flora come away with the web. It’s very exhilarating.”

“It’s a bath in living mold?”

“Yes, an exacting process. They offer a little virtuality to pass the time in the tank, as you see. It’s an amenity, especially for those who live rough in the edible quarter. It’s a public service. When you’re done they paint you with the local blend of human microbes.”

“Yes, but it’s mold.”

“A very tame and pleasant mold. There’s no harm in it.” He paused. “I hope you’re not shocked by something as harmless as public nudity. That’s very common in Stuttgart.”

“Of course I’m not shocked by nudity, but it’s mold!”

“Such provincialism,” Paul said, half smiling. He was clearly piqued. “This was designed to be the friendliest city in Europe. Not that the citizens are particularly friendly—they’re like people in big cities anywhere. Rather, the city’s structure is uniquely friendly to its users.”

Paul pointed across the street, where a swarm of gnats was congregating in midair with a collective basso hum. “If you were lucky enough to acquire a room in that exclusive hostel over there—why, it’s all lattice. You can eat the walls. You can carry out any human excretory function wherever you please. Wherever you sleep, a bed of moss grows beneath you to cushion you. It’s always warm and damp. Very tactile, very epidermal, very sensual, extremely civilized. Here, the microbes are all domesticated. Life is recycled, but morbid decay has been beaten. Decay is gone like a bad dream.”

“Hmmm.” She studied the side of the hostel, a shaggy damp cascade of multicolored mosses. “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound half bad.”

They ducked together into a doorway as a truck passed, soaking the environment with a dense yellow fog.

“It was a visionary scheme. A city to free its users of material bioconstraint. A source of shelter, nourishment, inspiration, and, of course, permanent safety from the terrors of plague. Perhaps this final result wasn’t intended, but the city itself is so generous that it annihilates economics. It requires a peculiarly nonpossessive nature to live here in the long term. Rebels, dreamers, philosophers … The mentally retarded also find this quarter very convenient and popular.… Over the years, the quarter has become infested with mystics.”

“Penitentes?”

“Yes, Catholic extremists of all sorts, but also many Submissionaries. Ecstatic Submissionaries, and Charismatic Submissionaries. Mohammed’s disciples. Unfortunately the Ecstatics and Charismatics are intense rivals and bitterly hate one another.”

“Isn’t that always the way.” They stepped aside as three nude women shot by on bicycles, their swollen, bricklike calves pumping furiously.

“Fanatics always hate and fear their own dissidents far more than they loathe the bourgeoisie. By that symptom shall you know them.… That failing is what cripples the fanatics. There has been violence here in Stuttgart, street brawls, even a few killings.… Did you ever take an entheogen, Maya?”

“Never, no.”

“I did. I took it here.”

She looked around. Shaggy walls, greenness, hot misty light, an urban universe of little crawling things. “What happened?”

“I saw God. God was very warm and caring and wise. I felt enormous gratitude and love for Him. It was clear strong Platonic reality, totally authentic, the light of the cosmos. It was reality as God sees it, not the fragmentary halting rationality of a human mind. It was raw mystical insight, beyond all argument. I was in the living presence of my Maker.”

“Why did you do that? Were your parents religious?”

“No, not at all. I did it because I had seen religion consume other people. I wanted to see if I would be strong enough to come out of the far side of it.”

“And?”

“And yes, I was strong enough.” Paul’s eyes grew distant. “Ah, there’s a packet tube. I have a class to teach soon. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you now.”

“You do? Oh dear.”

Paul walked to the front of the packet tube and entered an address on a keypad. A vault door shunted open. He tossed his backpack into the padded capsule. “I’m leaving you because I must,” he said patiently, “but I’m leaving you in lovely Stuttgart. I hope you’ll put your time here to good use.” The capsule vanished. Another capsule instantly took its place. Paul hit a repeat key, crawled deftly into the padded interior, and doubled his arms around his knees. “Until we meet in Praha, Maya.”

“Au revoir, Paul.” She waved at him, and the door shunted with a brisk pneumatic pop.

She spent three strange aching days in Stuttgart, ghosting the honeycombed plazas and haunting the city’s peculiarly liberal apothecary malls. On the evening train back to Praha she collapsed into her beanbag and was left in silence and solitude. It felt so lovely to be within the familiar confines of a moving train again. She was vibrating with hormones and culture shock, and she hadn’t been eating properly. Every passing hour carried her further into new realms of experience, strange deep somatic spaces that words such as “hunger” and “weariness” scarcely seemed to describe.

Sleep beckoned. But then the translator, which was still tucked into her ear, began to sing inside her ear. Very gently at first, a distant musical warbling. The music grew louder. She’d never known the device to malfunction, so she was ready when it made a kind of musical throat-clearing tone, and addressed her directly. “[Hello, user Maya.]”

“Hello?” she said.

“[This is an interactive message for you from Ohrschmuck Enterprises of Basel. We are the inventors and manufacturers of this translation necklace. Do you understand us? Please signify by orally responding ‘Yes, I understand’ in your favorite language, English.]”

“ ‘Yes, I understand.’ ”

She looked around the train car. She was speaking aloud to thin air, but no one considered this unusual behavior. They naturally assumed she was using a netlink.

“[User Maya, you’ve been in possession of the necklace for two weeks. You have already used its functionalities in English, Italiano, Czestina, Deutsch, and Français. We hope you’ll agree that the translation service has been prompt and accurate.]”

“Yes, it certainly has.”

“[Did you notice the fine physical workmanship of our necklace? It would have been simple to do a cheap knockoff in copper and silicon, but we prefer the classic chic of real jewels. We at Ohrschmuck take pride in our traditional European craftsmanship, and your use of our shareware proves that you’re a discerning woman of taste. Any fly-by-night company can supply a working tourist translator nowadays. We at Ohrschmuck supply an entire library of modern European languages, including proprietary vocabulary segments featuring modern slang and argot. It’s no simple matter to provide our level of linguistic service.]”

“I suppose not.”

“[If you agree that our shareware necklace meets your exacting personal standards, then we think our efforts to please you should be rewarded. Doesn’t that seem just and fair, user Maya?]”

“What is it that you want from me, exactly?”

“[If you’ll simply wire us seven hundred marks, we can see to it that your translator is supplied with the very latest vocabulary updates. We also register you with our company, supply service referrals, and answer user questions.]”

“I’ll certainly send you that money if I ever come across that large a sum.”

“[We feel that we’re worth our price, user Maya. We’ll trust you to pay us. Our business is based on mutual trust. We know that you trust us. After all, you’ve been trusting our machine with the tympanum of your own right ear, a very tender and personal membrane. We feel sure that mutual respect will lead us to a long relationship. Our net-address will work from any net location in the world, and it takes cash. We look forward to hearing from you soon.]”

She was back in Praha by midnight, with her backpack and a shopping bag, giddy, exhausted, footsore, and in pain. But Praha looked so lovely. So solid, so inorganic, so actual, so wonderfully old. Bartolomejska Street looked lovely. The building looked lovely. She paused at Emil’s door, then went upstairs and knocked at the door of Mrs. Najadova.

“What is it?” Mrs. Najadova paused, looked Maya up and down. “What has he done to you?”

“There are certain days in a month when a woman needs time to herself. But he doesn’t understand.”

“Oh, that dirty, thoughtless brute. That’s so like him. Come in. I’m only watching television.” Mrs. Najadova put her on the couch. She found Maya a blanket and a heating pad and made her a frappé. Then she sat in a rocker fiddling contentedly with her notebook, as the television muttered aloud in Czestina.

Mrs. Najadova’s room was full of wicker baskets, jugs, bottles, driftwood, bird eggs, bric-a-brac. A blue glass vase with a bouquet of greenhouse lilies. And intensely nostalgic memorabilia of the former Mr. Najad, a great strapping fellow with a ready grin, who seemed to dote on skiing and fishing. To judge by the style of his sportswear he had been either dead or gone for at least twenty years.

Seeing the photos Maya felt a great leaping pang of pathos for all the women of the world who had married for a human lifetime, lived and loved faithfully through a human lifetime, and then outlived their humanity. All the actual widows, and the virtual widows, and those who sought widowhood, and those who had widowhood thrust upon them. You could outlive sexuality, but you never truly got over it—any more than you got over childhood.

Maya’s golden bird chimed on her breast. It had begun to chime the hours lately, with small but piercing cuckoo sounds, a tactful referral, apparently, to the time elapsing without a payoff. She tucked the bird into her ear. It began at once to translate the mutter of the television.

“[It’s a species of ontological limbo, really,]” said the television. It was Aquinas, the dog with the Deutsch talk show. The dog had been dubbed into Czestina. “[What I call my intelligence has its source in three worlds. My own innate canine cognition. The artificial intelligence network outside my skull. And the internal wiring that has grown among the interstices of my canine brain, programmed with human language. Among this tripartite intelligence, where does my identity reside? Am I a computer’s peripheral, or a dog with a cybernetic unconscious? Furthermore, how much of what I call ‘thought’ is actually mere facility with language?]”

“[I suppose that’s a problem for any talk-show host,]” agreed the guest.

“[I have remarkable cognitive abilities. For instance, I can do mathematical problems of almost any level of complexity. Yet my canine brain is almost entirely innumerate. I solve these problems without understanding them.]”

“[Comprehending mathematics is one of the greatest of intellectual pleasures. I’m sorry to hear that you miss that mental experience, Aquinas.]”

The dog nodded knowingly. It was very peculiar to see a dog nod in a conversation, no matter how well he was dressed. “[That assessment means even more, coming from yourself, Professor Harald. With your many scientific honors.]”

“[We have more in common than the layman might think,]” said the professor graciously. “[After all, any mammalian brain, including the natural human brain, has multiple functional sections, each with its own cognitive agenda. I have to confess something to you, Aquinas. Modern mathematics is impossible without machine aid. I had a simulator entirely interiorized]”—the guest, tactfully, tapped his wrinkled forehead—“[and yet I’ve never been able to fully feel those results, even when I can speak the results aloud and even somehow intuitively sense their rightness.]”

“[Tell me, do you ever do math in your sleep, Professor?]”

“[Constantly. I get many of my best results that way.]”

“[Myself as well. In sleep—perhaps that’s where we mammals find our primal unity.]”

Slowly Professor Harald shook the dog’s elegant prehensile paw. The audience applauded politely.