Holy Fire

4

Maya woke at five in the morning. Her fingernails itched. They no longer seemed to fit her hands. The hormones surging through her made her nails grow like tropical bamboo. The cuticles were ragged, the keratin gone strangely flimsy. They felt very much like false nails.

She left the couch of Mrs. Najadova, fetched her backpack, crept silently out the door and down the stairs, and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil slept heavily, alone. She felt a strong temptation to crawl in next to him, to try to recapture sleep, but she resisted it. She wasn’t fitting properly inside her own skin. There would hardly be comfort now in anyone else’s.

She quietly found her red jacket. She poured water, then sorted nimbly through her happy little galaxy of analgesics. She decided not to take any more of the pills. She might need them badly next time, and she might not be in a place so understanding as Stuttgart.

Emil woke, and sat up in his bed. He looked at her with polite incomprehension, then pulled the bedspread over his face and went back to sleep. Maya methodically stuffed her backpack. Then she walked out his door. She did not know if she would ever be back. There was nothing there she wasn’t willing to abandon.

She walked into the starlit street, entered a gently glowing net booth, and called for net help. The net’s guidance was, as always, excellent. She linked to the netsite in San Francisco and connected synchronously to Mr. Stuart.

“What can I do for you this fine evening?” said Stuart, with a two-hundred-fifty-millisecond lag time but total vocal clarity.

“Mr. Stuart, I’ve been a longtime customer of yours and I need access to an old virtuality with defunct protocols.”

“Well, ma’am, if they’re in stock, we got ’em. Come on down to the barn.”

“I happen to be in Praha at the moment.”

“Praha, real nice town,” remarked Stuart, deeply unsurprised. “I can link you through if the price is right, no problem on this end if you don’t mind the lag. Why don’t you hang up and virch in through our primary server?”

“No no—that’s very generous of you, but I wondered if you had a colleague here in Praha who would understand my need for discretion. Someone in Praha that you could recommend to me. I trust your judgment in these matters. Implicitly.”

“You trust my judgment, eh? Implicitly and everything, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That’s really nice. Personal trust is the core global infrastructure. You wouldn’t care to tell me who you are?”

“No. I’d love to tell you, of course. But, well, you understand.”

“All righty, then. Let me consult this handy trade reference. I’ll be right with you.”

Maya fidgeted with her tender fingertips.

“Try a place called the Access Bureau on Narodni Obrany in Praha Six. Ask for Bozhena.”

“Okay, I got it. Thanks a lot.” She hung up.

She found the address on a Praha civil-support map, and she began to walk. It was a very long hike in the dark and the cold. Silent cobbled streets. Closed shops. Solitude. High clouds, and moonlight on the river. The otherworldly glow of the Hradcany, the castle dominating the old town as an ancient aristocracy had once loomed over Europe. All the variant spires of sleeping Praha. Iron lanterns, statuary, tiled roofing, dark arches and secretive passageways, wandering moon-eyed cats. Such a city—even its most ancient fantasies were far more real than herself.

Her feet on the cobbles grew hot with incipient blisters. The backpack dug into her shoulders. Pain and weariness pushed her into deep lucidity. She paused periodically, framing bits of the city with her camera, but could not bring herself to take a photo. Once the machine had touched her face, the viewfinder showed her only lies. It struck her then that the problem was simple: the lens was mounted backward. All camera lenses were mounted backward. She was trying so hard to engage the world, but her subject was behind her eyelids.

Just after dawn, she found the Praha street address. It was a stone-faced official-looking building, its rotten Communist-era concrete long since gnawed out and replaced with a jolly modern greenish foam. The building was still closed and locked for the night. There were discreet blue-and-white Czesky placards on the doors, but she couldn’t read Czestina.

She found a breakfast café, warmed up, had something to eat, repaired her damaged makeup, saw life return to the city in a languid rattle of bicycles. When the building’s front door opened with a programmed click of the clock, she was the first to slip inside.

She discovered the netsite on the building’s fourth floor, at the head of the stairs. The netsite was closed and locked. She retreated, winded and footsore, to the ladies’, where she sat in a booth with her eyes closed, and dozed a bit.

On her next attempt she found the door ajar. Inside, the netsite was a fabulous mess of vaulted ceilings, brass-knobbed doors, plastic-spined reference manuals, dying wire-festooned machinery. The windows had been bricked up. There were odd stains on the plaster walls, and cobwebs in the corners.

Bozhena was brushing her hair, eating breakfast rolls, and drinking from a bottle of animal milk. Bozhena had very luxuriant hair for a woman of such advanced age. Her teeth were also impressive: big as tombstones, perfectly preserved, and with a very high albedo.

“You’re Bozhena, right? Good morning.”

“Good morning and welcome to the Coordinated Access Bureau.” Bozhena seemed proud of her brisk technician’s English. “What are your requirements?”

“I need a touchscreen to access a memory palace set up in the sixties. A contact of mine in San Francisco said you could supply the necessary discretion.”

“Oh yes, we’re very discreet here at Access Bureau,” Bozhena assured her. “Also, completely out of date! Old palaces, old castles, all manner of labyrinths and dungeons! That is our local specialty.” Without warning, Bozhena touched her earpiece and suddenly left the counter. She retired into a cloistered back room of the office.

Time passed very slowly. Dust motes floated in the glare of a few paraboloid overheads. The net machines sat there as inert as long-abandoned fireplugs.

Four elderly Czech women, bureaucratic functionaries, filtered one by one into the office. They were carrying breakfast and their knitting. One of them had brought her cat.

After some time, one of the women, yawning, arrived with a touchscreen, set it on the counter, checked it off on a notepad, and wandered off without a word. Maya picked the touchscreen from its grainy plastic box and blew dust from it. It was covered with peeling official stickers in unreadable Czestina. Ancient pre-electronic text, the old-style Czesky orthography from before the European orthographic reformations. Little circles, peculiar caret marks, a thicket of acutes and circumflexes and accent marks, so that the words looked wrapped in barbed wire.

Bozhena languidly reemerged, carefully tucked in her shin-length gray skirt, and sat at her magisterial plastic desk. She searched methodically through six drawers. Finally she found a lovely cast-glass paperweight. She set it on her tabletop and began toying with it.

“Excuse me,” Maya said. “Do you happen to have any material on Josef Novak?”

Bozhena’s face froze. She rose from her desk and came to the counter. “Why would you want to investigate Mr. Novak? Who told you we had Josef Novak in our archives here?”

“I’m Mr. Novak’s new pupil,” Maya lied cheerfully. “He’s teaching me photography.”

Bozhena’s face fell into deep confusion. “You? Why? Novak’s student? But you’re a foreigner. What’s he done this time, poor fellow?” Bozhena found her purse and began brushing her hair with redoubled vigor.

The door opened and two Czech cops in pink uniforms came in. They sat at a wooden table, booted up a screen, and sipped hot tinctures from cartons.

It struck Maya suddenly that the trusted Mr. Stuart had sent her directly to a Praha police bureau. These people were all cops. This was a cops’ research establishment. She was surrounded by Czech virtuality cops. This was an antiquarian netsite, all right—but only because the Czech police had some of the worst equipment in the world.

“Do you know Helene?” Maya said casually, leaning on the countertop. “Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier?”

“The Widow’s in and out,” shrugged Bozhena, examining her nails. “All the time. Why, I don’t know. She never has a good word for us.”

“I need to call her this morning and clear a few little things. Do you happen to have Helene’s net-address handy?”

“This is a netsite, not a reference service,” Bozhena said tartly. “We love to help in Access Bureau, we are so very open and friendly in Praha with nothing to hide! But the Widow’s not based in Praha so that’s not my department.”

“Look,” Maya said, “if you’re not going to help me on the Novak case, just say so straight out.”

“I never said that,” Bozhena parried.

“I’ve got other methods, and other contacts, and other ways to go about my job, you know.”

“I’m sure you do, Miss Amerika,” Bozhena said, with an acid scowl.

Maya rubbed her bloodshot eyes. “Look, let’s make this real simple and easy for both of us,” she said. “I’ll just elbow my way through your dense crowd of eager clients here, and I’ll scare up some action on that old magnetic tracker set. Don’t think you have to help me, or anything. You don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you. We’ll both just pretend this isn’t really happening. Okay?”

Bozhena said nothing. She retreated back to her desk.

Fear and adrenaline had made Maya invincible. She found goggles and gloves. It struck her that no one ever bothered or interrupted people who were busy in goggles and gloves. Goggles and gloves would make her invisible.

She bullied the ancient machine into operation and she stroked in the passtouch. She conjured up the memory palace seemingly through sheer force of will.

The familiar architect’s office appeared all around her, plating the screens a finger’s width from the damp surfaces of her eyeballs. Someone had tampered with the blackboard. Along with the curly Kilroy and the greenish scrawl MAYA WAS HERE, the blackboard now had a neatly printed MAYA PRESS HERE and a button drawn in multicolored chalk.

Maya thought it over, then pressed the colored button on the chalkboard. The gloves felt good and solid, but nothing happened.

She looked around the virtual office. The place was aswarm with geckos. There were repair geckos all over the place, some as big as bread loaves and others milling like ants. The broken table had been removed. The plants in the garden outside were much better rendered now. They closely resembled real vegetation.

One of the armchairs suffered a sudden identity crisis and morphed itself into Benedetta. The virtual Benedetta was in a black hourglass cocktail dress and a cropped pink jacket with black piping. She had the unnaturally elongated legs of a fashion sketch, with highly improbable stiletto heels. Benedetta’s face was an excellent likeness, but the virtual hair was bad. Virtual hair almost always looked phony, either like a rubber casting or some hyperactive Medusa subroutine. Benedetta had unwisely gone for an arty Medusa gambit, which rather overloaded the local data flow. When she moved too quickly, big shining wads of coiffure flickered violently in and out of existence.

The virtual model’s lips moved soundlessly. “Ciao Maya.”

Maya found a dangling plug on the spex and tucked it into her ear. “Ciao Benedetta.”

Benedetta made a little curtsy. “Are you surprised?”

“I’m a little disappointed,” Maya said. “Is my vocal level coming across okay?”

“Yes, I hear you fine.”

“I never dreamed you’d steal my passtouch and take advantage of my act of trust. Really, Benedetta, how childish of you.”

“I didn’t mean any harm,” Benedetta said contritely. “I wanted to admire the palazzo architecture and the period detail. And all the lovely antique coding structures.”

“Of course you did, darling. And did you find the pornography, too?”

“Yes, of course I found the pornography. But I left this call button for you”—Benedetta gestured at the chalkboard—“because we have a little problem now. A little problem in the palazzo.”

“We do, do we?”

“Something is loose in here. Something alive.”

“Something you let loose, or something you found loose?”

“I can’t tell you, because I don’t know,” Benedetta said. “I tried to find out, but I can’t. Neither can anyone else.”

“I see. How many ‘anyone elses’ have you let through here, exactly?”

“Maya, this old palazzo is very big. Wonderfully big. There’s a lot of space. No one was using it, and it’s wonderful that there are no network cops here. Please don’t be jealous. Believe me, you never would have noticed us. If not for this little trouble.”

“This isn’t good news.”

“But there is very good news. There’s money inside this place. Did you know that? Real money! Old people’s certified money!”

“How nice. Did you and the gang leave any money for me?”

“Listen, I so much want to talk to you,” said Benedetta. “About everything. But this truly is not a good time. I’m playing cards with my father right now. I don’t like to do this kind of talk from my father’s house. Can you come to Bologna and see me? I have a lot I can offer to you. I want to be your friend.”

“Maybe I can come. Exactly how much money did you find? Do I have enough to pay off these Swiss shareware pests for this diamond necklace you gave me?”

“Don’t worry about the necklace,” Benedetta said. “The Ohrschmuck company went broke. They asked too much, so no one ever paid them. Just give the necklace to some other woman. She can use it free for a month before it starts to complain in the ear.”

“You’re such a treasure, darling.”

“Let me call you later, Maya. I’ve been bad, I admit it. I will do for you so much better if you only give me a chance! Just for one thing, I can give you much better online presence—do you know that you look like a big ugly blue block to me? Where are you now?”

“I’m nowhere that you need to know about. Leave me a message with Paul.”

Benedetta’s virtual mouth stretched in surprise. “You didn’t tell Paul about your palace, I hope.”

“Why shouldn’t I tell Paul?”

“Darling, Paul is only a theorist. But I am an activist.”

“Maybe I’m a theorist, too.”

“I don’t think that you are,” Benedetta said. “I don’t think that at all. Am I wrong?”

Maya considered this. “All right, if we can’t tell Paul, then leave a message for me at the Tête. I go there almost every day. I’m on pretty good terms with Klaus.”

“All right. At the Tête. That’s a good idea. Klaus is a good man, he is so discreet. Now I truly must go.” Benedetta morphed. The chair recovered and lay sideways on the floor.

Maya tried to set the toppled chair upright. Her gloved hands plunged through it repeatedly, with the deep ontological uselessness of dysfunctional software. She struggled with the chair for quite some time, her back bent, wrestling air at various experimental angles.

She then became aware of another presence in the virtual room. She gazed about herself cautiously, not moving. The virtual presence oozed through the wall, moved through her presence like a crawling wind, exited through the far wall. A fractured glaze creeping through the fabric of computation.

Maya yanked her head from the spex and earphones. She stripped the gloves away from her swollen fingertips. She shut the machine down. Then she examined the sweat-smeared gear, regretting the vilely incriminating cloud of human DNA she had just deposited on Czech police equipment. She scrubbed at the spex a bit with her sleeve, just as if that token gesture would help anything. DNA was microscopic. Evidence was everywhere. Evidence was totipresent, the truth seething below awareness, just like germs.

But crime could not become a crime unless somebody, somehow, cared enough to notice.

She decided not to steal the handy touchscreen.

She was tired now, so she got onto a train and slept for two hours as it ran back and forth below the city. Then she walked into a netsite at the Malostranska tubestation and asked the net to find her Josef Novak. The net offered his address in a split second. Maya took the tube back to Karlovo Namesti and walked, footsore and limping, to Josef Novak’s home. The place did not look promising. She examined her civil-support map, cross-checked it twice, and then pushed on the doorbell. No response. She pushed harder and the defunct doorbell cracked inside its plastic case.

She pounded on the iron-bound wooden door with the side of her fist. There were muffled noises from the interior, but nobody bothered to answer. She banged again, harder.

An elderly Czech woman opened the door, which was secured on a short brass chain. She wore a head-scarf and spex. “[What do you want?]”

“I want Josef Novak. I need to speak to him.”

“[I don’t speak English. Josef isn’t taking any visitors. Especially not tourists. Go away.]” The door slammed shut.

Maya went out and had some chutovky with a side of knedliky. These little setbacks were very useful. If she remembered to eat every time she was locked out, shut out, or thrown out, it would keep her fit and healthy. After a final carton of tasty government-issue blancmange she returned to Novak’s place and knocked again.

The same woman answered, this time in a thick winter night-robe. “[You again! The girl who smells like Stuttgart. Don’t bother us, it’s very rude and it’s useless!]” Slam.

Another good reminder. Maya walked down the block and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil wasn’t there. Emil’s absence might have been worrisome, but she deduced from the state of his kitchen that he’d had to leave the place to eat. She scrubbed and mopped for a long time, and inoculated the studio with certain handy packets she’d acquired in Stuttgart. The studio began to reek of fresh bananas. This solid victory over the unseen world of the microbial gave Maya a great sense of accomplishment. She walked back to Novak’s in the cold and darkness, and knocked again.

A bent white-haired man opened the door. He had a black jacket with one sleeve. The old man had only one arm. “[What do you want?]”

“Do you speak English, Mr. Novak?”

“If I must.”

“I’m your new pupil. My name is Maya.”

“I don’t take pupils,” Novak said politely, “and I’m leaving for Roma tomorrow.”

“Then I’m also leaving for Roma tomorrow.”

Novak stared at her through the wedge of light in his chained door.

“Glass Labyrinth,” Maya said. “The Sculpture Gardens. The Water Anima. Vanished Statues.”

Novak sighed. “Those titles sound so very bad in English.… Well, I suppose you had better come in.”

The walls on the ground floor of Novak’s home were a wooden honeycomb: a phantasmagoria of hexagonal storage racks. Jointed wooden puppets. Glassware. Etching tools. Feathers. Wicker. Postage stamps. Stone eggs. Children’s marbles. Fountain pens and paper clips. Eyeglasses. Relief masks. Compasses and hourglasses. Medals. Belt buckles. Pennywhistles and windup toys. Some of the cubbyholes were stuffed to bursting. Others spare, a very few entirely empty. Like a wooden hive infested by some sentient race of time-traveling bees.

There were study tables, but no place to sit. The bare floor was waxed and glossy.

A sleepy female voice called down from the stairs. “[What is it?]”

“[A guest has come,]” Novak said. He reached into his baggy trouser pocket and pulled out an enameled lighter. “[Is it that stupid American girl with short hair?]”

“[Exactly, the very same.]” Novak thumb-clicked a muddy flame and methodically lit a candelabrum. Six candle flames waxed. The overhead lights blinked out. The room was immersed in deep yellow. “[Darling, send down a beanbag, won’t you?]”

“[It’s late. Tell her to go away.]”

“[She’s very pretty,]” said Novak. “[There are sometimes uses for someone very pretty.]”

There was silence. Then a pair of black beanbags came slithering down the candlelit stairs like a pair of undulant blood puddings.

Novak sat in his bag and gestured one-armed at Maya. His right arm was gone at the shoulder. He seemed very much at ease with his loss, as if a single arm were perfectly adequate and other people were merely being excessive.

Maya heaved her backpack onto the wooden floor. She sat in her beanbag. “I want to learn photography.”

“Photography.” Novak nodded. “It’s wonderful! So very real, so much like life. If you are a Cyclops. Nailed in one spot. For one five-thousandth of a second.”

“I know you can teach me.”

“I have taught photography,” Novak admitted like a man under torture. “I have taught human beings to see like a camera. What a fine accomplishment! Look at this poor little house of mine. I’ve been a photographer for ninety years, ninety! What do we have for all that hard work, the old woman and I? Nothing. All the terrible market crashes! Devaluations! Confiscatory taxes! Abolitions and eliminations! Political troubles. Plagues! Bank crashes! Nothing solid, nothing that lasts.”

Novak glared at her with resigned suspicion, gone all peasant shrewdness suddenly, protuberant ears, bristling eyebrows, a swollen old-man’s nose like a potato. “We have no property, we have no assets. We are very old people, but we have nothing for you, girl. You should go, and save everyone trouble.”

“But you’re famous.”

“I outlived my fame, I am forgotten. I only go on because I cannot help myself.”

Maya gazed around the sitting room. A unique melange of eclectic clutter and utter cleanliness. A thousand little objects on the razor’s edge of art and junk. A library of gimmickry rocket-blasted from the grip of time. Yet there was not a speck of dust in the place. Those who worship the Muses end up running a museum.

The burning candles gnawed their white cores of string inside their waxy sheaths. The white-haired Novak seemed perfectly at ease with an extended silence.

Maya pointed to the top of the honeycomb of wooden shelving. “That crystal vase,” she said, “that decanter up there.”

“Old Bohemian glass,” said Novak.

“It’s very beautiful.”

Novak whistled softly. A trapdoor opened in the wall beside the kitchen and a human arm flopped out.

The arm landed on the wooden floor with a meaty slap of five outstretched fingers. Its naked shoulder had a feathery clump like the curled marine feet of a barnacle.

The arm flexed and leapt, flexed and leapt, pogoing deftly across the gleaming candlelit floorboards. It twisted and ducked, and then tunneled with unearthly speed into a scarcely visible slit in the empty shoulder of Novak’s jacket.

Novak squinted, winced a bit, then lifted his artificial hand and flexed it gently.

He then shifted casually onto his left elbow in the beanbag and reached far across the room. The right arm stretched out, its hairless skin gone all bubbled and granular, his forearm shrinking to the width of bird bone. His distant hand grasped the decanter. He fetched it back, his arm reassuming normal size with a quiet internal rasp, like ashes crunching underfoot.

He gave Maya the decanter. She studied it in the candlelight.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “I lived inside it for a little while. It was a universe.”

Novak shrugged. With his new arm and shoulder attached, he shrugged in remarkable fashion. “Poets have said the same for a single grain of sand.”

She looked up. “This glass is made of sand, isn’t it? A camera’s lens is made from sand. A data bit is like a single grain of sand.”

Slowly, Novak smiled. “There’s good news,” he said. “I like you.”

“It’s such a wonder to hold the glass labyrinth,” she said, turning the decanter in her hands. “It seemed so much more real when it was virtual.” She gave it back to him.

Novak examined his decanter idly, stroking it with the left hand, the right one like a glove-shaped set of rubber forceps. “Well, it’s very old. A little shape from culture’s attic. Oh attic shape!” He began to recite aloud, in Czestina. “ ‘[Designed with marble men and marble women, and forest branches, and weeds crushed by the feet. You silent formation. You twist our minds as if you were eternity. You poem of ice! When old age kills this generation, you will remain in the thick of other people’s troubles. A friend to humanity. You say to us, “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.” We know nothing else and we need to know no more.]’ ”

“Was that poetry?”

“An old English poem.”

“Why not recite the poem in English, then?”

“There is no poetry left in English. When they stretched that language to cover the whole earth, all the poetry fell out of it.”

Maya thought this over. It sounded very plausible, and seemed to explain a lot. “Does the poem still sound all right in Czestina, though?”

“Czestina is an obsolescent platform,” Novak said. He stood up, stretched his arm like plasticine, and put his decanter in place.

“When do we leave for Roma?” Maya said.

“In the morning. Early.”

“May I sit here and wait for you, then?”

“If you promise to blow out the candles,” Novak said. And he trudged upstairs. After ten minutes his arm hopped down and deftly put itself away.

They left for Roma in the morning. Mrs. Novakova had packed her husband an enormous shoulder-slung case. Novak didn’t bother to take his prosthetic arm.

Maya shouldered her backpack. Bravely she offered to carry Novak’s case. Novak handed it over at once. It weighed half a ton. Novak collected himself with a sigh of discontent, opened his front door with deep reluctance, and took three short steps across the ancient sidewalk into a very new and very polished limousine.

Maya put the case and her backpack in the trunk and climbed into the limo, which departed with silent efficiency. “Why won’t your wife come with us to Roma?”

“Oh, these business events, they are tiresomeness itself, they are completely obligatory. They bore her.”

“How long have you and Milena been married?”

“Since 1994,” Novak grunted. “A marriage in name only now. We live like brother and sister.” He stroked his chin. “No, that doesn’t put it correctly. We’re past any burden of gender. We live like commensal animals.”

“It’s very rare to be married for an entire century. You must be very proud.”

“It can be done. If you forgive one another that awesome vulgarity of intimate desire—well, Milena and I are both collectors, we hate to throw things away.” Novak reached one-handed to his collar and detached his netlink. He thumbed a net-address.

“Hello?” he barked. “Oh, voice mail, eh?” Novak slipped into angry Czestina. “[Still avoiding me? Well, listen to this, you drone! It’s unthinkable—it’s impossible!—that an aged invalid, missing his right arm, forgotten by the world, with no proper studio, and no professional help, could have a turnover of thirty thousand marks in a year! That assessment is preposterous! Especially for the year 2095, a year very poor in commissions! And what’s this needless claptrap about the ’92 extensions? Still demanding your late fees? And even penalties? After you bled us dry? An Artist of Merit of the Czech Republic! A five-time winner of the Praha Municipal Prize! Brought to his knees through your crazy persecutions! It’s an open scandal! You haven’t heard the last from me, you shiftless dodger.]” He shut the link.

“You tell them again and again,” he mourned. “You pile up attestations, applications, documents, years and years of legal correspondence! Oh, they’re senseless. They’re like Capek’s robots.” He shook his head, then smiled grimly. “But I don’t worry! Because I am very patient, so I will outlast them.”

A private business plane was waiting for them at the Praha tarmac, a vision of aviation elegance in white, silver, and peacock blue. “Look at this,” Novak fretted, at the foot of the hinged and perforated entry stairs. “Giancarlo should have sent a steward for me. He knows my grave state of decline.”

“I’m here, Josef, I’ll be your steward.” She opened the trunk and gathered their luggage.

“He’s such a creature di moda, Giancarlo. You should see his château in Gstaad, it’s infested with those Stuttgart lobsters. You know, if they go haywire those crazy machines can murder you. Clip your throat clean through with pincers while you sleep.” Novak stepped aside as Maya lugged the heavy baggage into the plane. Then he hopped spryly up the steps.

There were no beanbags. Maya paused, puzzled. Novak crouched where he stood, and a chair leapt into existence beneath him with silent blinding speed. The plane’s flooring resembled fine Italian marble, but when presented with a lowering human rump its tricky surface puffed up a translucent airtight chair like a supersonic blister. Maya sat at random and a new chair leapt up instantly and caught her. “What a lovely plane this is,” Maya said, patting the ductile arms of her chair.

“Thank you, madame,” said the plane. “Are we ready for departure?”

“I suppose we are,” Novak grumbled. The long slender wings underwent a silent high-speed vibration. The plane ascended vertically.

Novak gazed out the window with silent concentration until the last of his beloved Praha was out of sight. Then he turned to her.

“Do you model? Surely you must,” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“Do you have an agency?”

“No. I’ve never modeled for real money.” She paused. “I don’t want to do it for money. But I’ll model for you, if you want me to.”

“Can you show clothes? Do you know how to walk?”

“I’ve seen models walking.… But no, I don’t know how.”

“Then I’ll teach you,” Novak said. “Watch carefully, and see how I place my feet.” They stood and their chairs vanished instantly, like silent burst balloons. Without the clutter of chairs around, there was lots of room to learn.

In 2065, Innocent XIV had become the first pope to undergo life extension. The exact nature of the pope’s treatment was shrouded in mystery, a rare and very diplomatic exception to the usual political practice of full medical disclosure. The pope’s decision, with its profound violation of the natural God-given life span and its grave challenge to the normal processes of papal succession, had caused a crisis in the Church.

The College of Cardinals, meeting in council to discuss the implications of the pope’s action, had experienced an episode of divine possession. Their frenzied spiritual exaltation, ecstatic dancing, and babbling in tongues had looked to skeptics like chemically propelled hallucination. But those who had directly experienced the descent of holy fire had no doubt of its sacred origin. The Church had always survived the uncharitable speculations of skeptics.

After this divine intervention, formal Church approval of certain processes of posthumanization had swiftly followed. The Church now recommended its own designated series of life-extension techniques. These approved medical procedures, along with modern entheogenic tincture communions and various spiritual disciplines, were formally known as the “New Emulation of Christ.”

The humble and metabolically tireless Holy Father, with his long white beard now grown out black for half its length, had become a central, iconic figure of European modernity. Many had once considered Innocent a mere careerist, the genial caretaker of an ancient faith in decline. After the holy fire, it became clear to all that the reborn pope possessed genuinely superhuman qualities. The pope’s astonishing eloquence, his sincerity and his manifest goodwill, shook even the most cynical.

As his chemically amplified Church reconquered the lost ground of ancient Christendom, the vicar of Christ began to manifest miracles unknown since the days of the apostles. The pope had cured the lame and the halt with a word and a touch. He had cast out devils from the minds of the mentally ill. Furthermore, their recovery was often permanent.

He could also prophesy—in detail, and often rather accurately. Many people believed that the pope could read minds. This paranormal claim was attested not merely by credulous Catholics, but by diplomats and statespeople, scientists and lawyers. His uncanny insight into the souls of others had often been demonstrated on the world political stage. Hardened warlords and career criminals, brought into private audience with the pontiff, had emerged as shattered men, confessing their sins to the world in an agony of regret.

Pope Innocent had succored the poor, sheltered the homeless, shamed recalcitrant governments into new and more humane social policies. He had founded mighty hospitals and teaching orders, libraries, netsites, museums, and universities. He had dotted Europe with shelters and amenities for the mendicant and pilgrim. He had rebuilt the Vatican, and had turned ancient cathedrals and churches worldwide into ecstatic centers of Christian spirituality, vibrant with the awesome celestial virtualities of the modern Mass. He was certainly the greatest pope of the twenty-first century, probably the greatest pope of the last ten centuries, perhaps the greatest pope of all time. His sainthood was a certainty, if he could ever find the time and opportunity to die.

Maya found Roma a mess. There had been a miracle the day before. Miracles had become relative commonplaces since the advent of entheogens; it now took very unusual circumstances to attract public attention to sightings of supernatural entities. This latest miracle had raised the ante on the supernatural: the Virgin Mary had manifested herself to two children, a dog, and a Public Telepresence Point.

Children did not normally take entheogens. Even postcanine dogs were rarely given to spiritual revelations. And the recordings in Public Telepresence Points were supposed to be beyond alteration; they were certainly not supposed to show pillowcaselike glowing blurs levitating over the Viale Guglielmo Marconi.

The Romans were not particularly impressed by miracles. Goings-on at the Vatican rarely impressed native Romans. Nevertheless, the devout had poured into Roma from all over Europe to pray, do penance, to seek out relics, to enjoy the media coverage. The traffic—buses, bikes, trailers, sacred tourist groups in the robes of Franciscan mendicants—was dense, loud, incredible, festive, beyond sane management, primal Italian. It was also raining.

Maya gazed through the rain-streaked window of their latest limo. “Josef, are you religious?”

“There are many worlds. There is a world here which perceives in darkness,” said Novak, tapping his wrinkled forehead. “There is a material world, the world lit by the sun. There is also virtuality, our modern immateriality pretending to exist. Religion is a virtuality of sorts. A very old one.”

“But are you a believer?”

“I believe a few very modest things. I believe that if you take an object, and make it come to life through light, and carry that perception of life into a virtual representation, then you have achieved what they call ‘lyricism.’ Some people have a great irrational need for religion. I have a great irrational need for lyricism. I can’t help myself, and I’m not interested in debate about it. So I won’t trouble the faithful, if they don’t trouble me.”

“But there must be half a million people here today! All because of some dog and a computer and a couple of kids. What do you think about that?”

“I think Giancarlo will be piqued to be upstaged.”

The limo, sparring gamely with the Roman traffic, carried them to their hotel, which, of course, was badly overbooked. Novak engaged in a vicious multilingual fight with the concierge, and won them separate rooms, to the considerable discomfiture of everyone in the lobby. Maya bathed and sent her clothes out.

When her clothes returned, an evening gown came with them. Novak’s idea of feminine formal wear looked touchingly old-fashioned, but it was freshly instantiated and it seemed to fit very well, a credit to Novak’s photographic eye for proportion.

Giancarlo Vietti, the master couturier of Emporio Vietti, was presenting his seventy-fifth spring collection. An event of this magnitude required a proper setting. Vietti had hired the Kio Amphitheater, an arched colossus in exquisite pastiche, built by an eccentric Nipponese billionaire after an earthquake had devastated much of Roma’s Flaminio district.

They pulled up in front of the roseate columnar Kio and departed their taxi amid a sidewalk jostle of spex-clad Roman paparazzi. Novak did not seem particularly well known in Roma, but with his single arm he was certainly easy to spot. He ignored the clamoring paparazzi, but he ignored them very slowly.

They worked their way up the stairs. Novak examined the towering faux-marble facade with a feral eye. “Living proof that the past is a finite resource,” he muttered. “It would have been better to mimic Indianapolis than to try to out-fascist Mussolini—with cheap materials.”

Maya found herself admiring the place. It lacked the weed-eaten stony authenticity of Roma’s many actual ruins, but it seemed transcendantly functional and had all the unconscious grace of a well-designed photocopier.

They entered the building, logged in, and discovered three hundred people preparing to eat, attended by crabs.

So many old people. She was struck by their corporate air of monumental gravity, by the striking fact that this chattering tonnage of well-manicured and brilliantly dressed flesh was so much older than the building that housed it.

These were Europe’s shiny set. A people who had beaten time into submission, and with their spex-hooded, prescient eyes they looked as though they could stare through solid rock. Veterans of European couture, they had taken the essence of neophiliac evanescence and had frozen it around themselves like a shroud. They were as glamorous as pharaonic tomb paintings.

Novak slipped on his own pair of spex, then made his way deftly to his appointed place, following some social cue narrowcast to the lenses. Novak and Maya sat together at a small round table set with silver, draped in cream-colored linen, and surrounded by upholstered stools. “Good evening, Josef,” said the man across the table.

“Hello, Daizaburo, dear old colleague. It’s been a long time.”

Daizaburo examined Maya over the rim of his elaborate spex with the remote and chilly interest of a lepidopterist. “She’s lovely. Where on earth did you find that gown?”

“The first Vietti original I ever shot,” said Novak.

“I’m astonished that particular Vietti is still on file.”

“Giancarlo may have purged it from his own files. Mine are high capacity.”

“Giancarlo was so young then,” Daizaburo said. “Juvenilia suits your little friend so well. We’re taking waters. Would you like a water?”

“Why not?” said Novak.

Daizaburo signaled a crab. It began speaking Nihongo. “English, please,” said Daizaburo.

“Antarctic glacier water,” offered the crab. “A deep core from Pleistocene deposits. Entirely unpolluted, undisturbed since the dawn of humanity. Profoundly pure.”

“What a delightful conceit,” said Novak. “Very Vietti.”

“We have lunar water,” said the crab. “Very interesting isotopic properties.”

“Did you ever drink water from the moon, my dear?” Novak asked her.

Maya shook her head.

“We’ll have the lunar water,” Novak ordered.

A second crab arrived with a vacuum-sealed vial. Using shining forceps, it dropped two dainty cubes of smoking blue ice into a pair of brandy glasses.

“Water is the perfect social pleasure,” said Daizaburo as the crabs stalked off to answer fresh demands. “We can’t all share the brute act of liquid consumption, but we surely can all share the ineffable pleasure of watching ice melt.”

The other woman at their little table leaned forward. She was small and shrunken and almost hairless, a person of profoundly indefinite ethnic origin who was wearing an enormous black chapeau. “It rode a comet from the rim of universe,” she lisped alertly. “Frozen six billion year. Never know the heat of life—until we drink it.”

Novak lifted his glass one-handed and swirled it, his craggy peasant face alight with anticipation. “I’m surprised there are still enough lunarians around to mine lunar ice.”

“There are seventeen survivors up there. Such a pity they all hate each other.” Daizaburo offered a brief and steely smile.

“Cosmic rebels, cosmic visionaries,” said Novak, carefully sniffing his glass. “Poor fellows, they discovered the existential difficulties of life without tradition.”

Maya looked at the people clustered at the other little tables and knowledge clicked within her like a light switch. She began cataloging treatments in her head. All these old people and all their old techniques. Wrinkle removal, hair growth, skin transplants. Blood filtration. Synthetic lymph. Nerve and muscle growth factor. Meiotic acceleration. Intracellular Antioxidant Enzymation: rejuvenant witches’ brews of arginines, ornithines and cysteines, glutathiones and catalases. Intestinal Villi Lamination (IVL). Affective Circadian Adjustment (ACA). Bone augmentation. Ceramic joint prostheses. Targeted aminoguanidines. Targeted dehydroepiandrosterone. Autoimmune Reprogramming Systematics (ARS). Atherosclerotic Microbial Scrubbing (AMS). Glial-Neural Dissipative Defibrillation (GNDD). Broad-Spectrum Kinetic Metabolic Acceleration (BSKMA). Those were old-fashioned techniques. After that they had begun getting ambitious.

A bronze gong sounded. The three hundred diners rose from their little tables in unison, walked or limped or shuffled or rolled, and engaged in a huge and extremely well-ordered session of musical chairs. There was no fuss and no confusion. When they were done, everybody found themselves in the intimate company of new friends, with every appearance of spontaneous delight. Scurrying robots brought everyone fresh utensils and the soup course.

Josef’s new tablemates—he seemed to know them well, or perhaps they were broadcasting biographies to be picked up by his spex—were speaking Deutsch. Maya had set her translator for Czestina and Italiano. She could have inserted the little diamond egg for Deutsch, but whenever she fussed with the necklace nowadays, it infallibly stopped and scolded her about how much she owed.

She felt ashamed of her necklace. The cheap gold and diamonds sparkled like so much radioactive junk on the exposed slope of her décolletage. She remained deaf to the Deutsch and said nothing, and her lack of contribution was not noticed in the slightest. She was young. She had nothing of interest to say.

The robots took the zuppa away and everyone moved again. A visually perfect, utterly bland, and intensely digestible cannelloni was served. Some guests chose to eat it, others merely beat it into submission. Then they moved again into fresh company for the delightfully molded and quite taste-free little gnocchi. Then again for gleaming rippled yellow wedges of a scent-free cheeselike substance. Then again for the fluted conical molds of the dolce. It was an intensely elaborate repast, none of it requiring much use of teeth.

The crowd adjourned to the gloomy grandeur of the Kio’s display suite. There were booths here and there against the walls, very daring booths that almost looked as if they were engaging in advertising. This tweaking of the rules was mere bravado on Vietti’s part, for blatant commerciality was not required in haute couture. True haute couture, the pursuit of genuine excellence in dress, required mostly patience. Patience was something that society’s glitterati had a very great deal of, these days. Couture was a game of prestige, and the money that supported it came partly from the wealthy, and mostly from Vietti’s licensing: spexware, scents, bath accoutrements, private spas, medicated cosmetics. An arsenal of intellectual property for a couturier who did not so much make clothing as tailor modes of living.

Here at last the lucky attendees, bones aching from the ascetic stools, found decent chairs in which to sit. They broke up into pewlike rows of competing subclasses. Various Indonesian, Nipponese, and American politicians and financiers who were considered peacocks of the shiny set invested the front row in determined effort to impress one another. They were backed by layers of net-editors, store buyers, photographers, actors, actresses, common or garden millionaires, and hommes and femmes du monde.

There were not quite enough chairs for everyone: a deliberate and very traditional oversight. Novak took her backstage through a milling crowd of socialites, junior designers, and minor celebrities.

The area backstage was full of European storks, African secretary birds, and American whooping cranes. These tall and solemn feathered bipeds awaited their cue with impressive single-minded dignity, deftly sidestepping the anxious humans.

The legendary couturier was the nucleus of a buzzing and highly motivated crowd of atelier subordinates. Vietti wore his version of working clothes: a seal black, vaguely furry, multipocketed getup that would have looked splendid with aqualungs. He tracked events for the show on a rainbow pair of fluttering wrist-mounted display fans.

“Josef, so good of you to come,” said Vietti in English. He was tall and broad shouldered and square chinned and one of the very few people at the event who did not deign to wear spex. It was clear that Vietti had once been very beautiful. Many years and many pains had been at him. Now he had the slightly sinister ruinous dignity of the Roman Colosseum—although in point of fact Giancarlo Vietti was not Roman but Milanese.

Vietti glanced at Maya with the same absently indulgent gaze he’d been giving his obedient storks. His faded blue eyes widened suddenly. Finally he revealed a sparkling rack of ceramic teeth. “Oh, but Josef. But she’s so cute! You rascal. Really, you shouldn’t have.”

“So you do remember.”

“You thought I’d forget my first collection? It’s like forgetting your first time under the knife.” Vietti gazed at Maya, deeply intrigued. “Where did you find her?”

“She’s my new student.”

Vietti very gently touched Maya’s jawline with one black-gloved fingertip. He plucked once at the end of a trailing length of her wig, and gave a quick adjusting tug at her shoulder seam. He laughed delightedly.

After ten seconds or so of hearty laughter, Vietti’s cheeks flushed patchily and there were odd aquatic gurglings beneath the suit. Vietti put his left hand to his midriff, winced, wriggled a bit on the deep internal hooks of his life support. Then he examined a wrist-fan and sketched at the membrane with his forefinger.

“Let’s put her on the catwalk tonight,” he said. “A show in Roma is always such chaos anyway. And really, this is too cute.”

“You mustn’t, Giancarlo. That’s costume plastic, it’s a knockoff.”

“I know this garment is your little joke on me, but we can get that fixed. Can she walk?”

“She can walk a little.”

“She’s very young, they’ll forgive her if she can’t walk.” Vietti looked at her, expectantly. “The name?”

“Maya.”

“Little Maya, I have a very good crew here. Let me put you in their hands. Can you walk in front of all these shiny people? They are terribly old, and they all have silly spex and too much money.” Vietti winked at her, a leaden pretense of camaraderie across the awful gulf of a century.

“Sure I can.” Perfectly happy and confident.

Vietti gazed at Novak limpidly. “And Josef—a few little pictures for me. For my little corner of the net.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Novak. “I haven’t brought the proper gear.”

“Josef, for old times’ sake. You can use Madracki’s gear, Madracki’s a poseur, he’s an idiot, he owes me the favor anyway.”

“I’m all out of practice with couture. Really, it takes everything I have these days just to photograph an eggshell, a spiderweb.… ”

“Josef, after you took the trouble to dress her! Don’t be coy. The face is awful, it’s true, that’s little-girl makeup, vivid kitsch for kids, but we can see to the face. And the wig’s a disaster.… But she’s so sexy, Josef! Everyone was so very sexy in the twenties. Even I was sexy then.” Vietti sighed nostalgically. “You remember how sexy I was?”

“When you’re young, even the moon and stars are sexy.”

“Ah, but people died so young in the twenties, so everyone was sexy then, everything was always so sexy. Even AIDS was sexy in the twenties. I don’t have a single sexy thing in this collection, your little girl can be my sexy thing tonight, it’ll be fun. Barbara will see to it.” Vietti flapped his wrist-fans shut and clapped his hands. “Barbara!”

“You’re very lucky,” Novak told Maya, very quietly. “He wants to like you. Don’t disappoint us.”

She whispered back. “He’s not going to pay me, is he? I can do this as long as I don’t get paid.”

“I’ll look after that,” Novak assured her. “Be brave.”

Barbara was a senior Vietti assistant. Barbara had the accent of West End London, and the broad features and kinked black hair of a West Indian, combined with the painterly peaches-and-cream complexion of a Pre-Raphaelite lass on a canvas. Barbara was sober and efficient and dressed as beautifully as a ranking diplomat. Barbara was eighty years old.

Barbara took Maya into the cosmetic studio, which was crowded with male models. Ten or so stunningly beautiful men, in various states of partial dress, sat before brilliantly lit videomirrors, chattering, flexing biceps and quadriceps, methodically primping.

“This is Philippe, he’ll look after you now,” said Barbara, and she put Maya into a red support chair at the elbow of the cosmetician. Philippe was a small man with a tiny pinched mouth and brilliantined blond hair and enormous spex. Philippe took one look at her, blurted a horrified, “Oh dear no,” and sent off for spatulas and cleansing cream and adhesive towels and powerbrushes and a red alert for the hairdresser.

The two nearest models were having a chat. “Have you seen Tomi tonight? He’s bulked. He’s really bulked.”

“It’s the grandkid thing,” said a second model. “I mean, you get over having the kid, but when the kid has a kid, I dunno.”

“How’s your new house, Brandon?”

“So far so good, but we shouldn’t have drilled that deep in a seismic area. It’s got me all worried.”

“No, you got it made now, you and Bobby can seal it off, set up some hermetic germware, some very sweet discretion way down deep there, really, I’m green with envy.” The model examined his videomirror. The screen showed him an image without reversal. “Do my eyelids look okay?”

“You had them tucked again?”

“No, something new this time.”

“Adrian, the eyelids never looked better. Seriously.”

“Thanks. Did I tell you I enlisted in the army?”

“You’re kidding.” Effortlessly Brandon bent double and placed his palms flat on the floor. He went into a handstand, then flexed his elbows methodically. His muscular legs, toes pointed at the ceiling like a high-diver’s, looked as solid as cast bronze.

“Well,” said Adrian, “my medical’s running pretty high, and civil support, well, they’re a bunch of dirty finks. Aren’t they? But the armed forces! I mean, modern society—seriously—there has to be real authority! Somewhere on the far side of all these civilian broads, there have to be some serious guys willing to kick butts and take names. Capisci?”

Brandon curled into an effortless backflip. He examined his washboard abdomen in the mirror, frowned, and found a reactive girdle. “How long are you in for?”

“Five years.”

“No problem, you could do a five-year enlistment on your head.” Brandon adjusted the girdle, which sealed tight with a violent sucking sound. “You got through the army physical and everything?”

“Sure, they love me. They put me in the officer corps.”

“They didn’t mind the prostate thing?”

“The prostate thing is history, the prostate’s very fresh and crunchy now. I’m doing weekends at a guard base in Cairo.” Adrian stopped suddenly. “Philippe, what are you doing to that poor kid’s eyebrows?”

“I’m in a hurry,” Philippe complained.

“That’s a period dress. You gotta do period eyebrows for this little girl, twenties eyebrows. You can’t just pluck her out like she was Veruzhina on the rampage or something, this is an ingenue look.” Adrian patted Maya’s forearm with fatherly aplomb. “Haven’t seen you around, kid. First time with Giancarlo?”

“Yes, it is. First time ever with anybody.”

“Oh Brandon, listen to that, she’s American.”

“Are you guys American, too?” she said.

“Sure,” smiled Adrian, “Europeans love the primal American male, big shoulders, upholstered, dumb as rocks, can’t hardly talk, what’s not to like?”

“They like us virile,” said Brandon. “They pay real well for virile. You gotta pay for virile, because the upkeep on virile is murder.” He laughed.

“You have very acid pores, sweetie,” Philippe told her with deep concern. “Have you been bathing in mold?”

“Just once.”

“You should. You really should! I’ve got a strain of cultured aspergillus that would do wonders for you. I need to move your hairline and depilate your upper lip. This may hurt a little.”

Tweezers plucked, brushes whirred, greases soaked, powders reacted and settled. In thirty minutes all the men were meticulously dressed. Some of them were taking their turns outside.

Philippe showed her the new face.

She had been through many facials before, all kinds of facials, decades of facials. Most had been entirely cosmetic, pleasant but essentially worthless. Some had been functional, high-tech, genuinely restorative facials that left one’s face raw and unsettled, the kind of face that wanted to be left alone in a warm dark room to collect itself. But Philippe’s work was artifice. Still a Maya face—but a composed, radiant, flawless Maya face. Curled and slightly tinted lashes. Smoky eyelids. Brows like wings. Skin to shame damask. Pellucid irises and eyewhites as glossy as china. Lips like two poppy petals. A finished face. Human perfection.

Then they put the new wig on and she left human perfection for a higher realm. It was a very smart wig. This wig could have leapt from her scalp like a supersonic octopus and flung its piercing tendrils right through a plaster wall. But it was the tool of a major couture house, so it would never do anything half so gauche. It was merely a staggeringly pretty wig, a wig in rich, solid, deeply convincing, faintly luminescent auburn, a wig as expensive, as cozy, and as well designed as a limousine.

The wig settled to her scalp with an intimate grip rather more convincing than the grip of her own hair. When it curled lustrously about her neck and shoulders it behaved the way a woman’s hair behaved in daydreams.

A gonging alarm sounded. The last men cleared out of the room. Four female models sauntered in. The women were tall and slender and fully dressed except for shoes. The shoes were being a lot of trouble, and anxious runners kept hauling new pairs in and out. The models, bored and patient, sipped tinctures and puffed at inhalants and ate little white sticks of calorie-free finger food. They nibbled and dabbed at their hors d’oeuvres, and their preternatural arms moved with perfect eerie grace, from painted plate to painted lip.

The models were old women, and they looked the way that modern old women looked when they were in truly superb condition: they looked like amenorrheic female athletes. Like pubescent female gymnasts who’d been bleached completely free of any youthful brio. They showed none of the natural signs of human aging, but they were just a little crispy, a little taut. The models were solemn and sloe-eyed and dainty and extremely strong. They looked as if they could leap headlong through plate glass without turning a hair.

Their clothes were decorative and columnar and slender hipped and without much in the way of bustline. To see these clothes was to realize just how garments could be beautiful, impressive, even feminine, while being almost entirely free of sexual allure. The clothes were splendidly cut and defined. Rather ecclesiastical, rather bankerly, rather like the court dress of high-powered palace eunuchs from the Manchu Forbidden City. Some of the clothes showed skin, but it was the kind of skin a woman might reveal as she conquered the English Channel.

The clothes were very rich in feathering. Not frail or showy feathers, but feathers in gleaming businesslike array, feathers in swathes like chain mail. Giancarlo had been very reliant on feathers this spring season. It was mostly the detail work with feathers that had sent these garments soaring into the unearthly realm of luxe.

“[It’s not just the risk reduction,]” said the nearest model, in Italiano. “[You get a six-point-five percent rate of return.]”

“[I’m not sure the time is right for medical mutual funds,]” said a second model. “[Besides, I’m Catholic.]”

“[No one says you have to take a treatment on the banned list, you just invest in them,]” said the first model patiently. She was deeply, spiritually, untouchably beautiful; she looked like a bit player in Botticelli’s Primavera. “[Talk to any Vatican banker sometime, darling. They’re very simpatico and very up to speed about this.]”

The second model looked at Maya in surprise, and then at her wristwatch. “[When do you go on?]”

Maya touched her necklace and her ear. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italiano.”

“Your diamonds are so true to the past life, I love the diamonds,” said the second model in halting but sympathetic English. “The hair, though—not so very good. That’s very smart hair, that’s not twenties hair.”

“You’re very sexy,” the first model told her politely. “Molte grazie” Maya said tentatively. “There should be more couture for sexy women now, such a pity sexy women don’t have proper money,” the first model said. “When I was young and sexy they paid me so much money. It’s so hard for young girls now, it’s so hard to sell sexy. Really, it’s not fair one bit, not at all.”

The show was warming up outside; she could hear periodic bursts of applause. They brought her Vietti’s gown, still warm from the instantiator. This gown fit at least as well as the cheaper version Novak had given her, but Vietti’s stylists did not consider this a proper fit at all. Maya found herself naked and shivering beneath the impassive eyes and knowing hands of two men and three women. They slashed quickly at the gown with razorlike ceramic scissors and painted her goose-bumped flesh with quick-setting adhesive. In a fury of efficiency they squeezed and waxed her into the gown, then jammed her feet into pumps two sizes too small. Then, out the door in a bustle of anxious minders. Philippe hurried alongside her, retouching her face as she waited to take her cue.

When her cue came she left the curtain and walked as she had been taught. The catwalk’s floods were as bright as double-ranked full moons and the audience beyond their arc was a gleaming mass of spex, nocturnal eyes in a gilded swamp. They were playing a twenties pop song, a theme she actually recognized, a song she’d once thought was slick. Now the ancient pop song sounded lost and primitive, almost feral. Theme music for the triumphal march of the living fossils.

They’d dressed her as a glamorous young woman from the 2020s. A joke, a little shattering blast at the conceptual framework. Because, in stark actuality, she’d been a young woman during the 2020s. She had never been glamorous then, not a bit like this, not even for a moment, because she had been far too busy and far too careful. And now through some astounding fluke of chic she had avenged herself. The joy of it was both nostalgic and immediate, melding in her head in a fabulous jouissance.

White laserflashes puffed from cameras in the audience, growing into a crescendo as she walked. She felt so radiant. She was stunning people. She was whirling past their machine-shrouded eyes like nostalgic vertigo. She was the cynosure, the belle, the vamp, the femme fatale. Lost love beyond mortal attainment, dressed to kill, dressed to bury, dressed to rise again and walk among mortals. She had crushed them with stolen charisma. They had dressed a risen ghost in a Milanese couture gown and let her trample time underfoot. She was making them love her.

She took the little pirouette at the end of the walkway, kicked back a bit with a crack of heels, sneered at them happily. She was so high above them and so wrapped in lunar brightness, and they were such low fetid dark creatures that not a one of them could ever touch her. The walk was taking forever. She had forgotten how to breathe. The sense of constriction made her frantic with excitement. A white crane leapt onto the catwalk, immediately recognized that it had done something rash, and hopped off into the crowd with a jostle of pipestem legs and a snowy flap of wings. She hesitated just before the curtain, then whirled and blew the crowd a kiss. They responded with a cataclysm of photographic flash shots.

Behind the curtain she found herself tingling, trembling. She found a stool in a corner and sat and fought for proper breath. The crowd was still applauding. Then the music changed and another model slid past her like an angel on casters.

Novak found her. He was laughing.

“What a brave girl. You don’t give two pins, do you?”

“Was I all right?”

“Better than that! You looked so very pleased and wicked, like a little spoilt child. It was so pretty of you, so apropos.”

“Will Giancarlo be happy with me?”

“I have no idea. He probably thinks you’re a terrible brat to ham it up that way. But don’t worry, it made the night for the rest of us.” Novak chuckled. She hadn’t seen Novak truly pleased before; he was like a man who’d just pulled off a trick billiard shot with a rubber cue. “Giancarlo will come around, once he hears them talk about you. Giancarlo’s very clever in that way. He never judges anything until he sees what it’s done to his public.”

Maya tumbled hard from her crest of elation. The real world felt so deflated suddenly. Quotidian, wearied, flat. “I did the best that I could.”

“Of course you did, of course you did,” he soothed. “You mustn’t cry, darling, it’s all right now. It was very nice for us, it was different. They hire the pros to walk properly for them, and you were very sincere, they can’t buy that.” Novak took her elbow and led her backstage to a watercooler.

He deftly filled a cup with pristine distillate and gave it to her, one-handed. “It’s so remarkable,” he mused. “You can’t show a garment to advantage, of course, because you’re only a little beginner. But you truly have that look! Seeing you there, it was like archival video. Some Yankee girl from the twenties, in her too-tight shoes, so touchingly proud of her wonderful gown. What déjà vu, what mono no aw arel. It was uncanny.”

Maya wiped at her tears, and tried to smile. “Oh, I’m so bad, I’ve ruined that wonderful job Philippe did on my eyes.”

“No, no, don’t fret now.” Novak stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Maya, we’re going to do a proper photo shoot. You and I. We can bring your Philippe in on the job, we can bill for him. When you are working on assignment for Giancarlo, it’s very nice to have some good expensive people you can bill for.… ”

“I should go thank Giancarlo. Shouldn’t I? He really did me a huge favor, letting me go on. I mean, compared to all these professionals … And they were so kind to me, they weren’t jealous at all.”

“They are veterans. You’re far too young to make them jealous. You can thank your friend Giancarlo on the net. It’s better for us to leave now.” Novak smiled. “You’ve beaten them, darling, you beat them like sick old dogs. We’ll go now. It’s always best to leave them wanting more.”

“Well, I’ll get dressed, then.”

“Wear that gown. You can keep it. They had to hurry, so they had to ruin it.”

“Well, I’d better return this incredible wig at least.”

“Take the wig with us, we’ll hold the wig. Just to make sure they call.”

She managed to get rid of the pinching shoes. When she emerged from the dressing room she found Novak clawing one-handed at the air in the corridor, as if fighting off a phantom horde of gnats. He hadn’t gone mad, he was only using the menus on his spex. He was calling them a taxi.

Novak led her deftly past half a dozen random well-wishers backstage. The professionals all seemed quite pleased and amused with her, in their rigid and terrifying fashion. They escaped the amphitheater by a stage exit. It was cold outside, cold enough to frost the breath. The sweat leapt off her bare neck and shoulders into the Roman night. She shivered violently.

When they rounded the corner of the Kio, the paparazzi spotted them. A dozen of them dashed up, yelling at her in Italiano. They were the youngest of the paparazzi, which accounted for the fact that they were willing to dash. Some of them held up ragged halos of fiber-optic flash wire, drowning the damp pavement in sudden gouts of light. Maya smiled at them, flattered. When they saw this response they yelled more loudly and with greater enthusiasm.

“Does anyone here speak English?” Maya said.

The paparazzi, circling them and staring through their gleaming lenses, held a quick shouted consultation. A young woman hurriedly shoved her way through from the back. “I do, I speak English! Will you really talk to us?”

“Sure.”

“Great! We all want to know how you pulled that off.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, how did you get your big break?” said the girl, hastily plucking the translation cuff from her ear. She was American. “Did you do it yourself?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh, so you owe it to your escort here? Does he sponsor you? What’s your relationship with this guy exactly? And what’s your name, and who is he, anyway?”

“I’m Maya and this is Mr. Josef Novak. There’s certainly nothing illicit about our relationship.”

Novak laughed. “Don’t tell them that! I’m deeply touched to be a source of scandal.”

“How do you know Giancarlo Vietti? How old are you? Where are you from?”

“Don’t tell them anything,” Novak advised, “let the poor creatures feed on mystery.”

“Don’t be that way,” begged the young paparazza. She forced a business card on Maya. The flimsy card showed nothing but a name and a net-address. “Can I interview you later, Signorina Maya? Where are you from?”

“Where are you from?” Maya said.

“California.”

“What city?”

“The Bay.”

Maya stared at her. “Wait a minute! I can’t believe this! I know you! You’re Brett!”

Brett laughed. “Sorry, that’s not my name.”

“But it is! Your name is Brett and you had a boyfriend named Griff and I bought one of your jackets once.”

“Well, my name’s not Brett, and if anybody had one of my jackets it sure wouldn’t be a runway model for Giancarlo Vietti.”

“You are Brett, you had a rattlesnake! What on earth are you doing here in Roma, Brett? And what have you done to your hair?”

“Look, my name’s Natalie, okay? And what does it look like I’m doing here? I’m hanging around on a cold pavement outside a couture show trying to pick up scraps, that’s what.” Brett pulled off her spex and stared at Maya in pained surprise. “How come you know so much about me? Do I really know you? How? Why?”

“But it’s me, Brett! It’s me, Maya,” Maya said, and she shuddered from head to foot. A finger’s width of glue popped loose on her back. She was freezing. And she suddenly felt very bad. Nauseated, dizzy.

“You don’t know me,” Brett insisted. “I never saw you before in my life! What’s going on in there? Why are you trying to fool me?”

“The cab’s here,” Novak said.

“Don’t go now!” Brett grabbed her arm. “D’you know there’s a million girls who’d kill to do what you just did? How’d you do that? What do I have to do, to get that lucky? Tell me!”

“Don’t touch her!” Novak barked. Brett jumped back as if shot.

“If you knew what it was like in there,” Novak told her, “you’d go home tomorrow! Go lie on the beach, be a young woman, live, breathe! There’s nothing for you there. They made sure of that long before you were born.”

“I feel so bad, Josef,” Maya wailed.

“Get in the taxi.” Novak shoveled her inside. The doors shut. Brett stood stunned on the pavement, then jumped out and hammered at the window, shouting silently. The taxi pulled away.

Next morning she found she’d gotten write-ups on the net. There were white tuberoses from Vietti and eight calls from industry journalists. One of the journalists had called from the hotel lobby. He was camping out there.

They had breakfast smuggled into Novak’s room. “You’re not at the point where you can talk to real journalists,” Novak told her. “Journalists are the class enemies of celebrity models. They become hormonally excited when they discover any fact that will cause you deep personal pain.”

“I’m not a celebrity model.” She certainly didn’t feel the part. She’d had to shred the couture gown. It had required cleansing cream, a long-handled loofah, and half an hour to scrub the glue from her skin. She hadn’t dared to sleep in the intelligent wig, and in the morning she discovered it limp and dead. She couldn’t even manage to boot its software.

“That’s true enough, but a pile of sand is not yet Bohemian crystal, my dear.”

“I want to be a photographer, not a model.”

“Don’t be hasty. You should learn how to work to the camera before you torment other people with a lens. A few location shots will teach you proper sympathy for all your future victims.” Novak patted his grizzled lips with a napkin, stood, and began emptying his travel case on the bed.

The false bottom of his case held two deep layers of gray equipment foam. Four sets of highly specialized spex. Lenses in 35 mm, 105, 200, 250. Two ductile fisheyes and a photogrammeter. A tripod. Filters. Two camera bodies. Sync cording. Ten meters of tunable laser fiber-optic lighting cord. Gaffer tape. A fat graphics notebook with a high-powered touch-up wand and backup storage. Multi-head photofloods, roll-up reflector cards, filter frames, adapter rings, matte foil, a pocket superconductor.

Maya blinked. “I thought you said you hadn’t brought proper equipment.”

“I said I hadn’t brought equipment to the show,” Novak said. “Anyway, this gear is nothing much. Since I was forced to come here, I thought I might shoot—I don’t know—a few of those lovely Roman manhole covers.… But a couture shoot! Oh, what a challenge.”

“Won’t Vietti help us? He’s got a million flunkies on staff, he ought to give us anything we want.”

“Darling, Giancarlo and I are professionals. The game between the two of us has rules. When I win, I give Giancarlo exactly what I want to give Giancarlo. He shuts up and pays me. When I lose, Giancarlo offers me the full and terrible burden of his tactful advice and help.”

“Oh.”

Novak examined his bedspread arsenal of digital photon-benders and tugged thoughtfully at the bulbous end of his large, aged, cartilaginous male nose. “A couture session is no mere still life, it truly needs a team. You don’t take couture shots, you make them. The stylist for the clothing, the set dresser … a decent studio service is invaluable for props. A location scout … Hair designer, cosmetician very certainly …”

“How do we get all these people?”

“We hire them. After that, we bill Giancarlo for their services. That’s the good part. The bad part is I have no decent contacts in Roma. And, of course, since I am devastated by business failure, I have no capital.”

She gazed at him thoughtfully. She knew with deep cellular certainty that Novak had plenty of money, but extracting it from him would be like drawing ten liters of blood. “I think I have a little money,” she said tentatively.

“You do? That’s exciting news, my dear.”

“I have a contact in Bologna who might help us. She has a lot of friends in virtuality and artifice.”

“Young people? Amateurs.”

“Yes, Josef, young people. You know what that means, don’t you? It means they’ll work for us for nothing, and then we can bill for whatever we like.”

“Well,” Novak allowed thoughtfully, “they’re still amateurs, but it never hurts to ask.”

“I can ask. I’m pretty sure I can ask. Before I can ask, though, I’m going to need some equipment for asking. Do you happen to know a nice discreet netsite in Roma that runs defunct protocols?”

That question was no challenge for Josef Novak. “The Villa Curonia,” Novak said at once. “Of course, the old and wicked Villa Curonia. What a lovely atmosphere for a location shoot.”

The Villa Curonia was a former private residence in Roma’s Monteverde Nuovo. The shaggy green heads of indiscreet palm trees loomed behind its glass-topped brick walls. A certain eccentricity in the facade suggested that its builder had been some opium-smoking D’Annunzio aesthete with aristo relations in the highest and creepiest circles of the early twentieth-century Curia.

Inside, the villa had an arch-heavy interior courtyard with a dry fountain and pedestaled statue of Hermes, perfect for the midnight meetings of bagmen. The three-story east wing was riddled like cheesecloth with power leads and fiber optics, all scuffed parquet flooring and silent ivory corridors and monster antique virch-sets squatting like toads behind the locked doors of servants’ cubbyholes. Two comically sinister brothers named Khornak were running the place, for heaven only knew what sub-rosa cabal of backers, and under their aegis the ancient building had achieved the silk-padded atmosphere of a digital bordello. A Roman house of assignation for man-machine liaisons.

Novak was busy and methodical, Maya busy and nearly manic. Benedetta proved very helpful. Benedetta was tireless once she perceived a link to her own ambitions.

Brett arrived on a rented bicycle around three in the afternoon. Maya ushered her past the sidewalk guard post and the glowering Khornak brothers.

“This place is so amazing, it’s so refined,” Brett marveled. “It was so nice of you to ask me here.”

“You can stop gushing at me just any time now, Brett. Tell me something—tell me how you got to Roma.”

“You really want to know? Well, my first stop in Europe was Stuttgart, but the rents are so high there and the people are so snobby and full of themselves, so I just started doing a kind of wanderjahr, and, well, all roads lead to Roma, don’t they? And nobody was interested in what I could do with clothes, so I kept asking around and I got this kind of piecework spex job with this tabloid net, and I hang around on the shows and cafés and sometimes I get lucky and spot somebody who ranks.”

“That’s about what I imagined. You must know a lot of secondhand shops around here, right?”

“You mean clothing stores? Sure. This is Roma, there’s zillions. The Via del Corso, the Via Condotti, you can get all kinds of stuff for cash in Trastevere.… ”

“Josef is upstairs, running through his files in Praha. He’s going to instantiate me some clothes from his files, some clothes from the twenties. That’s the theme of the shoot. You know the style of that period?”

“Well, sure I do, sort of. In the twenties they were real big on, like, camisades and aubades with lastex and tulle and lots of optical fringe ribbon.”

Maya paused. The camisades sounded plausible, but she couldn’t recall having ever worn so much as a centimeter of optical fringe ribbon. “Brett, we’re going to need some props for the session. Something to inspire Josef. He hasn’t worked this way in a long time, so we need something very atmospheric, something very … well, very Glass Labyrinth, very early-Novak. Josef Novak was always very big on the inherent poetry in things … on that very strange intense poetic thingness that certain, uhm, things possess.… You have any real idea what I’m talking about here?”

“I guess so.”

Maya handed her a fat cashcard. Brett checked the register band and her eyes widened.

“Old playing cards,” Maya told her. “Crescent moons. Ladies’ gloves. Colored yarn. Netting. Weird twentieth-century scientific instruments. Obsolete prosthetics. Driftwood. Prisms. Compasses. Brass-tipped walking sticks. Some ratty stuffed animals with scary glass eyes, like minks or weasels or, you know, ermines. Broken windup toys. Do you know what a phonograph was? Well, never mind the phonographs, then. Do you get my general Novak-ish drift here?”

Brett nodded uncertainly.

“Okay, then take that money I just gave you, scout out some junk shops, tell them you’re my stylist. You’re working on my photo shoot for Giancarlo Vietti. Try to borrow whatever you can, rent what you can’t borrow, and don’t buy anything unless you’re willing to keep it yourself. We’re in a big hurry here, so round up any vivid friends that can help you. Bring it all back here to the villa. Travel quick. Forget the bike, use taxis. If you get in trouble, call me. Time is of the essence, and money is basically no object. Understand all that? Okay, get going.”

Brett stood blinking.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that it’s so exciting. I’m just so glad to be really doing this.”

“Well, do it quick.”

Brett scampered off. Josef’s first instantiations arrived by courier. They were costumery. They weren’t about comfort or wearability. They were camera props, they were about photons.

Back in the twenties, they had still been very big on natural fibers, but there was no fabric in these costumes. They were all microscopic shirrings and shrinkings and tiny little squirms of extruded plastic. The costumes didn’t breathe well and they rustled loudly when they moved, but they looked angelic. When you pinched or tucked them into place they stayed that way and laughed mockingly at gravity.

“Looks like you got us our money’s worth.”

“The Khornak brothers are robbing us,” groaned Novak. “Sixteen percent transaction fees! Can you believe that?”

Maya peeled a tangerine cape-dress from the top of the heap and held it to herself. “That won’t be a problem as long as they’re discreet.”

“Maya, before we begin this, give me an answer. Why is this being financed through the defunct production company of a dead Hollywood film director?”

“Is it?” Maya said, examining the printed sleeves. “It was supposed to be financed through the student activities budget of a Bolognese technical college.”

“That childish dodge might fool a very impatient tax accountant. It won’t fool me, or these miserable little fences either.”

Maya sighed. “Josef, I happen to have a little grown-up money. A certain grown-up gave it to me, and he really shouldn’t have done that. That money is no good for me, and I have to get rid of it. This villa is a very good place to do that. Isn’t it? This is a black-market underwire netsite. This is Roma, a very old and very wicked town. And this is the fashion industry, where people always spend absurd amounts of money for really silly reasons. If I can’t launder hot money under these circumstances, I’ll never be able to do it.”

“It’s risky.”

“My life is risk. Never mind the stupid money. Show me what beauty is.”

Novak sighed. “This isn’t going to be beauty, darling. I’m very sorry, but it will only be chic.”

“All right, then maybe I’ll settle for glamour. I’m a woman in a hurry. I want it so much, Josef. I just have to have it now.”

Slowly Novak nodded. “Yes. I can see that quality about you. That’s just where your allure lies, darling … that’s it, that’s you, and that is this moment, exactly.”

Philippe arrived at half past three to do her face. Philippe brought along a gift: a couture wig from the Emporio Vietti. This new wig boasted a built-in translation unit doing forty-seven major global languages through a translucent cord that snaked to the wearer’s right ear. It was, said Novak, “very Vietti” to pointedly ignore their purloining of the other wig and then double the ante by sending along a much nicer one.

The wig came preprogrammed with a set of three twenties hairstyles, Vietti’s tactful method of elbowing his way into the shot. It would have been crass to turn down such a handsome gift, and one that she needed so much. But Novak was angered by this little jab from his old patron. The irritation sent Novak into a frenzy of spontaneous invention.

“This I want from you, darling,” Novak muttered. “Let me tell you what is happening tonight. The thrill of the uncanny lies in the piquancy of oxymoron. You remember what life was like in the twenties? Well, of course you don’t. You can’t, but you must pretend that you do, just for me.… When Giancarlo and I were young in the twenties, anything seemed possible. Now it’s the nineties, and anything truly is possible—but if you’re young, you’re not allowed to do anything about those possibilities. You understand me?”

She nodded, stone-faced, careful not to damage her cosmetics. “Yes, Josef, I do understand. I understand perfectly.”

“The uncanny is beauty macchiato, darling, beauty just a little spotted—with the guilty, with the monstrous. That’s what Vietti really saw in you, when he said that he saw something cute. You see, my darling, in order to make this world very safe for the very old, we have changed life for the young in ways that are truly evil.”

“Is that really fair, Josef? You’re being very harsh.”

“Don’t interrupt me. Vietti cannot recognize that truth without recognizing his own complicity. That was why he was intrigued.” Novak waved his single arm. “Tonight, you become the long-dead youth of the gerontocracy, in a dangerous liaison with the crushed youth of modernity. An impossible conspiracy, a dreamlike violation. Something that plays at sentiment and nostalgia, but conceals a core that is a little dangerous, a little perverse. I’m going to push that old man’s face into it. He won’t see all of it, because he can’t allow himself to see the full truth; but what he can see of it, he will be forced to love.”

They set to work. Maya lurking in svelte black by a half-dead antique virtuality engine. Maya passing a stuffed weasel and a stuffed envelope to a sullen half-naked errand boy (played by one of Brett’s Roman acquaintances). Maya in a set of virching goggles like a domino mask, letting her signet ring be kissed by the Khornaks’ burly security guard. (The glamour-struck guard was especially good in his role.) Maya spurning a packet of dope stickers and pretending to smoke a cigarette. A pensive Maya in candlelight, crouching in her high heels over a little playing-card castle of Roman bus tickets.

Ten, then a dozen, then a score of kids showed up at the villa netsite, in their street couture. Novak fed them into the shot. Faceless and crawling at her feet, their cheap and vivid gear gone half-grotesque in shadows.

When Maya saw the raw shots on Novak’s notebook screen, she was elated and appalled. Elated because he had made her so lovely. Appalled because Novak’s fantasy was so revelatory. He’d made her a bewitching atavism, a subterranean queen of illicit chic for a mob of half-monstrous children. Novak’s glamour was a lie that told the truth.

Novak took a cab back to the hotel at half past one in the morning. The old man had not given so much of himself in a long time. He was palsied with an exhaustion that only a man in his one hundred twenties could manifest.

With Novak’s departure, the Khornak brothers, who had been growing very nervous about the vivid kids, threw everyone out in a scattered welter of props and equipment.

The kids drifted off with cheery good-byes, rattling off on bicycles, or cramming half a dozen into a cab. When Brett and Maya inventoried the borrowed props they discovered that the extras had magpied off with a dozen or so small but valuable articles. Brett was reduced to tears by this discovery. “That’s so typical,” she said. “Really, you give people a chance, a real chance for once, and what do they do with it. They just slap you in the face.”

“They wanted souvenirs, Brett. They gave us their time and we didn’t pay them a thing, so I don’t mind. Really, a stuffed weasel can’t be worth all that much.”

“But I promised the store people I’d take good care of everything. And I let the kids in on something really special, and they robbed me.” Brett shook her head and sniffled. “They just don’t get it here, Maya. These Roman kids, they’re not like us. It’s like all the life has been squeezed out of them. They don’t do anything, they don’t even try, they just hang out on the Spanish Steps and drink frappés and read. Good heavens, these Roman kids read. You just give them some fat paper book and they’ll sit there and nod out for hours and hours.”

“Roman kids read?” Maya encouraged, sorting shoes. “Gosh, how classical of them.”

“It’s awful, a terrible habit! In virtuality at least you get to interact! Even with television you at least have to use visual processing centers and parse real dialogue with your ears! Really, reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat.”

“Don’t you think reading can be useful sometimes?”

“Sure, that’s what they all say. You get some of these guys and they take lexic tinctures and they can read like a thousand words a minute! But still, they don’t ever do anything! They just read about doing things. It’s a disease.”

Maya stood up reluctantly. All the standing and all the fittings had made her legs ache and her feet swell. Striking and holding poses was more physically grueling than she had ever imagined. “Well, it’s too late to return any of this stuff tonight. You know any safe place we can store this junk overnight? Where do you live?”

“I don’t think my place will do.”

“You living up a tree again or something?”

Brett frowned, wounded. “No! I just don’t think my place will do, that’s all.”

“Well, I can’t carry all this weird stuff into that pricey hotel that I’m in, I’ll never even get it past the doordog.” Maya tossed her ringlets. She loved the new dark wig. It was infinitely better than hair. “Where can we squat with a closetful of prop junk at two in the morning?”

“Well, I know a really perfect place,” said Brett, “but I probably shouldn’t take you there.”

Brett’s friends were up at three in the morning, because they were hard and heavy tincture people. There were six of them and they lived in a damp cellar in the Trastevere that looked as if it had harbored thirty consecutive generations of drug addicts.

Drug addicts in the 2090s had entire new labyrinths of gleaming pathways to the artificial paradise. The polity would not allow any conventional marketing of illicit drugs, but with a properly kitted-out tincture set, and the right series of biochemical recipes, you could make almost any drug you pleased, in quantity sufficient to kill you and a whole tea party full of friends. The polity recognized that drug manufacture and possession were unpoliceable. So they contented themselves with denying medical services to people who were wrecking their health.

The situation, like all dodgy situations in the polity, had been worked out in enormous detail. Crude compounds that could stop your heart or scar your liver clearly damaged life expectancy, so their use drew stiff medical penalties. Drugs that warped cognitive processes in tiny microgram quantities did very little metabolic damage, so they were mostly tolerated. The polity was a medical-industrial complex, a drug-soaked society. The polity saw no appeal whatever in any primitive mythos of a natural drug-free existence. The neurochemical battle with senility had placed large and powerful segments of the voting populace into permanently altered states.

Maya—or rather Mia—had met junkies before. She was always impressed by how polite junkies were. Junkies had the innate unworldly gentility that came with total indifference to conventional needs and ambitions. She’d never met a junkie who wasn’t politely eager to introduce others to the plangent transcendalities of the junkie lifestyle. Junkies would share anything: mosquitos, pills, beds, forks, combs, toothbrushes, food, and of course their drugs. Junkies were all knitted into a loose global macrame, the intercontinental freemasonry of narcotics.

Since they were allowed hearty supplies of any drug they could cook up, modern junkies were rarely violent. They rarely allowed themselves to be truly miserable. Still, they were all more or less suicidal.

Many junkies could talk with surprising poetic eloquence about the joys of internal chemistry. The most fluent and intellectualized junkies were generally the people who were most visibly falling apart. Junkies were just about the only people in the modern world who looked really sick. Junkies had boils and caries and stiff lifeless hair; junky squats had fleas and lice and sometimes that endangered species, the human pubic louse. Junkies had feet that peeled with hot itchy fungus, and noses that ran. Junkies coughed and scratched and had gummy bloodshot eyes. There were millions of people in the world who were elderly and in advanced decline, but only junkies had backslid to a twentieth-century standard of personal hygiene.

The junkies—a man and two women—made them welcome. There were two other men in the cellar as well, but they were peacefully unconscious in hammocks. The junkies were very tolerant of Brett’s heap of stuff and, with a touching investment of effort, they somehow found a threadbare blanket to cover the goods. Then the male junkie went back to his disturbed routine. He was reading aloud from an Italiano translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and had reached page 212. The two women, who were higher than kites, gave occasional bursts of rich, appreciative laughter and meditatively picked at their toenails.

Maya and Brett hoisted themselves into a double hammock. There were bloodstains in it here and there, and it smelled bad, but it had been a nicely woven hammock once and it was a lot cleaner than the floor. “Brett, how did you come to know these people?”

“Maya, can I ask you something? Just as a personal favor? My name’s really not Brett. My name’s Natalie.”

“Sorry.”

“There are two kinds of life, you know,” said Natalie, spreading herself in the swaying hammock with great expertise. “There’s the kind where you just grind on being very bourgeois. And there’s the kind of life where you really try to become aware.”

“That isn’t news to me, I’m from San Francisco. So, what kind of crowbar are you using on the doors of perception, exactly?”

“Well, I’m kind of fond of lacrimogen.”

“Oh, no. Couldn’t you stick with something harmless like heroin?”

“Heroin shows up in your blood and your hair and they mark it down against you. But hey, everybody’s brain has some lacrimogen. Lacrimogen’s a natural neurochemical. It’s a very vivid drug because it’s surveillance-proof. Sure, if you use too much lacrimogen, it’s a big problem, you get clinically depressed. But if you use just the right amount, lacrimogen really makes you a lot more aware.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Look, I’m a kid, all right?” Brett announced. “I mean, we both are, but I can admit that to myself, I really know just how bad that really is. You know why young people have it so hard today? It’s not just that we’re a tiny minority. Our real problem is that kids are so stoked on hormones that we live in a fantasy world. But that’s not good enough for me; I can’t live on empty hopes. I need a clear assessment of my situation.”

“Brett, I mean Natalie, it takes a lot of maturity to live with genuine disillusionment.”

“Well, I’ll settle for artificial disillusionment. I know it’s doing me a lot of good.”

“I hardly see how that can be true.”

“Then I’ll show you why it’s true. I’ll make you a bet,” Natalie declared. “We’ll both do one hundred mikes of lacrimogen, okay? If that doesn’t make you recognize at least one terrible lie about your life, I promise I’ll give up lacrimogen forever.”

“Really? I can hardly believe you’d keep that promise.”

“Lacrimogen’s not addictive, you know. You don’t get the sweats or withdrawals or any of that nonsense. So of course I’d give it up, if I didn’t know it was helping me.”

“Listen, there’s a monster suicide rate with lacrimogen. Old people take lacrimogen to work up the nerve to kill themselves.”

“No, they don’t, they take it so that they can put their lives into retrospective order. You can’t blame the drug for that. If you need to work up the nerve to kill yourself, then it’s pretty likely that you ought to go ahead and do it. People need to kill themselves nowadays, it’s a social necessity. If lacrimogen lets you see that truth, and gets you past the scared feeling and the confusion, then more power to lacrimogen.”

“Lacrimogen is dangerous.”

“I hate safety. I hate everything about safety. They kill the spirit with safety. I’d rather be dead than safe.”

“But you’d really give it up? If I took it with you, and then I told you to give it up?”

Natalie nodded confidently. “That’s what I said. If you’re too scared to do it with me, that’s fine, I can understand that. But you’ve got no right to lecture me about it. Because you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Maya looked around the cellar. She knew she was in genuine danger now, and the threat had made the room become intensely real. The peeling walls, the cracked ceilings, and the huge and antiquated tincture set. The scattered books, the tincture bottles, the damp pillows, the broken bicycle, the underwear, the dripping tap, the rich, fruity, occluded tracheal snore from one of the unconscious junkies. Hairnets and locked shutters and the hissing rumble of a passing Roman trolley. A Brett place. She had followed Brett to this place, to this situation. She had followed Brett all the way.

“All right, I’ll do it.”

“Hey,” Brett called out. “Antonio.”

Antonio stopped his measured recitation and looked up politely.

“I’m running out of lacrimogen. I got only two doses left. Do you know where I can get some more?”

“Sure,” Antonio said. “I can make lacrimogen. You want me to make it? For your beautiful friend? I can do it.” He put his book aside and spoke to the women in rapid Italiano. The prospect of work seemed to please them all. Naturally, the first course of action was to do some stimulants.

“Please don’t cry too loud,” one of the women urged, rolling up her sleeves. She was very thin. “Kurt will wake up. Kurt hates it when people cry.”

Brett produced the tag end of a roll of stickers from a glassine bag. She peeled off four ludicrously tiny adhesive dots. She attached two dots to the pulse point at her wrist, and another pair of dots to Maya’s.

Nothing happened.

“Don’t expect any rush of sensation,” Brett said. “This isn’t a mood-altering substance. This is a mood.”

“Well, it’s sure not doing much for me,” Maya said with relief. “All I feel is tired and sleepy. I could use a bath.”

“No bath here. They got a toilet. Behind that door. You don’t mind paying for this, do you, Maya? Five marks? Just to keep them in feedstocks?”

It was technically illegal to sell drugs. You could barter them, you could give them away, you could make them yourself. Selling them was an offense. “If it will help.”

Brett smiled, relieved. “I don’t know why Novak wanted to make you look so weird and sinister. You’re very sweet, you’re really nice.”

“Well, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.” She’d said that many times, and now, for the first time, she began to sense what the slogan really meant. Why vivid people had made those words their slogan, why they would say such an apparently silly thing and say it without a smile. The status quo was the sine qua non of denied desire. Desire was irrational and juicy and trasgressive. To accept desire, to surrender yourself to desire … to explore desire, to seek out gratification. It was the polar opposite of wisdom and discretion.

And it was the core of junkie romance. Gratification as naked as geometry—the euclidean pleasures of the central nervous system, a pure form of carnality for the gray meat of the brain. An ultimate form of desire—not love, not greed, not hunger for power, just purified little molecular venoms that did marvelous intimate cellular things to gray meat. Insight swept over her in a wave. She hadn’t seen the truth of the junkie life before because she’d been so busy despising them. Now she understood them better and she pitied them. The truth and the sadness were deeply and intimately linked. It was a truth that could not be grasped unless you were sad enough to let yourself understand.

Antonio and his two friends were busily working their tincture set. The proper use of a tincture set was something of a social art, it required composure and grace and foresight and attention to detail. The junkies had none of these qualities. They were awkward and rather clumsy and yet terribly determined. They were deeply intoxicated, so they made many small mistakes. Whenever they made a mistake they would retreat and try to think about it, and then they would mentally circle back to poke and prod and jiggle. It was like watching three little spiders gently preparing to eat a trapped and kicking insect.

She shuddered violently, and Brett gently stroked her arm. “Don’t be afraid.”

There hadn’t been any fear at all until Brett unleashed the word. Then of course there was fear. A cold gush of nasty fear from a brimming reservoir like a vast black ocean. What had she to fear? Why get panicky all of a sudden? There was nothing to fear. Nothing, of course, except that she had surrendered herself to desire. Desire had grown in her aging brain in gray wedges of new neural flesh. Her youthful joie de vivre was every bit as counterfeit as the arachnid twitchings of a junkie. They dreamed of the artificial paradise, but she had become the artificial paradise.

She was blundering through Europe as if no one would ever guess the truth, but how could they fail to guess? She’d brazened her way through three months of outlaw existence with nothing to guard her but a mad veneer of perfect happiness and confidence. The eggshell surface of a crazy confidence trick. She’d been walking a suspension bridge of other people’s disbelief. Only someone blind with manic exultation could believe that such a situation would last.

Of course they were going to catch her. Of course she would trip up eventually. Stark reality could shove its rhinoceros horn through the tissue of her fantasy at any moment. Denunciation and betrayal could come from any point of the compass. From Paul, who knew too much. From Josef, if he ever thought to bother. From Benedetta, who would turn on her in vengeful fury if she knew the ugly truth. What if Emil missed her and thought to ask a policeman for help?

The surge of terrible insight was enough to make her scramble headlong from the building, but the cruelly revelatory power of the drug froze her in place. Suppose she did run away again. Suppose she jumped a train for Vladivostok or Ulan Bator or Johannesburg—what would happen if she ever got sick? Or if the treatment began to manifest side effects? How could she, a professional medical economist, have been so stupid? Of course a treatment as radical as NTDCD would manifest side effects—that was why they’d been wise enough to want to watch her closely in the first place. So that they could trace and study unexpected reactions. Especially in fast-growing tissue, like hair and nails …

Maya looked at her ragged fingertips and a whimper of anguish escaped her. How could she have done this to herself? She was a monster. She was a monster escaped from a cage and it was in the interests of everyone she knew, and everyone she met, to lock her up. She began to shake in abject terror.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have given you so much,” Brett said with concern. “But I didn’t want you to take just a little lacrimogen, and ride it out all smug, and then make me give it up.”

“I’m a monster,” Maya said. Her lips began to tremble.

Brett put her arm around Maya’s shoulders. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” she murmured. “You’re not a monster. Everyone knows that you’re very beautiful. You’d better cry some. With lacrimogen that always helps.”

“I’m a monster,” Maya insisted, and began obediently to cry.

“I never met a beautiful woman who wasn’t deeply insecure,” said Brett.

Antonio shuffled over and looked into the hammock. “Is she all right? Is she handling it?”

“She’s not too great,” Brett said. “What’s that smell?”

“We overcooked the batch,” Antonio said. “We have to flush and start over.”

“What do you mean, flush?” Brett said tensely.

Antonio gestured at the bathroom door.

Brett sat up in the hammock, sending it swaying sickeningly. “Look, you can’t flush a bad tincture down the commode! Are you crazy? You have to decompose a bad tincture inside the set. Man, they’ve got monitors in the sewer system! You can’t just spew some bad chemical process into a city sewer. It might be toxic or carcinogenic! That makes environmental monitors go crazy!”

“We flushed bad batches before,” Antonio said patiently. “We do it all the time.”

“A bad lacrimogen run?”

“No, entheogens. But no problem.”

“You are an irresponsible sociopath with no consideration for innocent people,” Brett said mordantly, bitterly, and with complete accuracy.

Antonio grinned, maybe a little angry now, but too polite to show it. “You’re always so nasty on lacrimogens, Natalie. If you want to be so nasty, get a boyfriend. You can feel just as bad from a love affair.”

One of the women shuffled up. She was not Italian. Maybe Swiss. “Natalie, this isn’t San Francisco,” she said. “These are Roman sewers, the oldest sewers in the world. All catacombs and buried villas down there, dead temples of the virgins, drowned mosaics, Christian bones …” She blinked, and swayed a little. “Bad lacrimogen can’t make old Roman ghosts any sorrier.”

Brett shook her head. “You need to clean that tincture set, run a diagnostic, and then decompose the bad production. That’s the proper method, that’s all!”

“We’re too tired,” said Antonio. “Do you want some more or don’t you?”

“I don’t want anything out of that set,” Brett said. “Do you think I’m crazy? That could poison me!” She burst into tears.

A sleeping junkie spoke up from his hammock. He was large and bulky, with heavy, threatening brows and four days of beard. “Do you mind?” he said in Irish-tinged English. “Do read aloud, my dears, converse, enjoy yourselves. But don’t squabble and fuss. And especially, don’t weep.”

“Sorry, Kurt, very sorry,” said Antonio. He carried a plastic-sealed pannikin behind the bathroom door. An ancient chain rattled, and water gurgled.

Kurt sat up. “My, our new guest is very lovely.”

“She’s on lacrimogen,” Brett said defensively.

“Women need a man when they’re on lacrimogen,” rumbled Kurt. “Come cuddle up with me, darling. Cry yourself to sleep.”

“I’d never sleep with anyone so dirty,” Maya blurted.

“Women on lacrimogen are also very tactless,” Kurt remarked. He turned away onto his side with a hammocky squeak.

There was silence for a while. Finally, Antonio picked up his book again and began to read aloud again.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Brett whispered to Maya.

“What’s that?”

“Let’s lie down.”

They lay down together in the hammock. Brett put both her arms around Maya’s neck and looked into her eyes. They were both feeling so much pain that there was nothing but deep solace in the gesture. They were like two women who had crawled together from a burning car.

“I’m never going to make it,” Brett said. A tear rolled slowly down her nose and fell onto Maya’s cheek. “I want to do clothes, that’s all I want. But I’ll never make it. I’ll never be as good as Giancarlo Vietti. He’s a hundred and twelve years old. He has every file ever posted on couture, every book ever written. He’s had his own couture house for seventy-five years. He’s a multimillionaire with an enormous staff of people. He has everything, and he’s going to keep it forever. There’s just no way to challenge him.”

“He’ll have to die someday,” Maya said.

“Sure. Maybe. But by that time I’ll be ninety. I’ll never get a chance to really live until I’m ninety. Vietti got to start young, he got to have experience, he got to be king of the world through this whole century. I’ll never have that experience. By the time I’m ninety, I’ll be turned to a stone.”

“If he won’t let you play in his world, then you’ll have to make your own world.”

“That’s what all the vivid people say, but the old people won’t let us. They won’t give us anything but a sandbox. They won’t give us real money or real power or any real chances.” She drew a ragged breath. “And this is the very worst. Even if we had those things, we’d never be as good as they are. Compared to the gerontocrats, we’re trash, we’re kitsch, we’re stupid little amateurs. I could be the most vivid girl in the world and I’d still be just a little girl. The gerontocrats, they’re like ice on a pond. We’re so deep down we’ll never see the honest light of day. By the time our turn comes around, we’ll be so old that we’ll be cold blind fish, worse than Vietti is, a hundred times worse. And then the whole world will turn to ice.”

She burst into wracking sobs.

Kurt sat up again. He was angry this time. “Do you mind? Who asked you here? If you can’t get a grip, get out!”

“That’s why I love junkies!” Brett shouted shrilly, sitting up red-faced and weeping. “Because they go where gerontocrats never go. To wrap up in a fantasy and die. Look at this place! This is what the whole world looks like when you’re not allowed to live!”

“Yeah, okay, that’s enough,” agreed Antonio, carefully putting down his book. “Kurt, throw the little idiot out. Kick her hard into the street, Kurt.”

“You kick her out,” Kurt said, “you let her in.”

There was a sudden violent burst from the bathroom. A blast of explosive compression. The door flew open and banged the wall hard enough to break a hinge.

Everyone stared in amazement. There were gurglings, then a sudden violent burst. Sewage jetted obliquely from the toilet and splattered the ceiling. Then rusty bolts snapped and the commode itself jumped from its concrete moorings and tumbled into the cellar.

A gleaming machine with a hundred thrashing legs came convulsing from the sewer. It was as narrow as a drainpipe and its thick metal head was a sewage-stained mass of bristles and chemical sensors. It grabbed at the doorframe with thick bristle-footed feet, and its hindquarters gouted spastic jets of white chemical foam.

It arched its plated sinuous back and howled like a banshee.

“Don’t run, don’t run,” Kurt shouted, “they punish you more if you run,” but of course everyone ran. They all leapt to their feet and scrambled up the stairs and out the door like a pack of panicked baboons.

Maya ran as well, dashing out into the damp and chilly Roman street. Then she turned and ran back into the squat.

She snatched up her backpack. The sewer guardian was sitting half-buried in an enormous wad of foaming sealant. It turned at her, aimed camera eyes at her, lifted two flanges on its neck, and began flashing red alarm lights. It then said something very ominous in Italiano. Maya turned and fled.

She reached the hotel at five in the morning. It had begun to rain a little, misting and damp.

She tottered into the hotel bar, knees buckling. It would have been lovely to go anywhere else, but she was tired of having no place to go. At least the walk and the lonely ride on an empty Roman trolley had given her something like a plan.

She would wait until Novak woke up, and then she would confess everything to him. Maybe, somehow, he would conquer his disgust and anger and take pity on her. Maybe he would even intercede somehow. And if he didn’t, well, he deserved the chance to turn her in. The chance to avenge himself properly.

The cops in Praha seemed a little odd, so maybe they would be gentler about it than cops in Roma, or cops in Munchen, or cops in San Francisco. And she owed Novak that much; she owed him the truth. She owed the old man the truth after throwing her worthless self into his life.

She sat at a barstool, which whirled beneath her. The world went black for a moment and spun like a carousel. The dull realization struck her that she hadn’t eaten all day. It had never once occurred to her to eat.

The bar was deserted. A bartender emerged from a staff door behind the bar. It was five in the morning, but maybe the doordog had tipped him off. The bartender strode over, a picture of solicitous concern. He was handsome and dapper and an infinitely better human being than she was. The hotel had very nice staffers, Roman people in their forties, kids who made it their business to serve the rich. “Signorina?”

“I need a drink,” Maya groaned.

The bartender smiled gallantly. “A long night, signorina? An unlucky night? May I suggest a triacylglycerol frappé?”

“Great. Make that a double. And don’t spare the saturated fats.”

He brought her a tall frappé and a squat little clear protein chaser and a fluted bowl of Roman finger snacks. The first cold mouthful hit her such a metabolic shock that she almost passed out. But then it warmed inside her and began to seep into her famished bloodstream.

By the time the frappé was half gone, the panic had left her. She was able to sit up straight on the barstool. She stopped trembling, and kicked off her shoes. The bartender wandered tactfully to the end of the bar and engaged in some menu-pecking ritual with a partially disassembled house robot.

She opened her backpack and fetched out her compact and looked at her face and shuddered. She scraped the worst of the damage off with a cream-wipe and touched fresh lipstick on.

A Roman in elegant evening dress wandered into the bar from the direction of the house casino. He tapped on the bar with the edge of a poker chip and ordered caffeine macchiato. She could tell from the brittle look on his powdered and aquiline face that the tables had been cruel to him tonight.

The Roman took his demitasse, sat on a barstool two seats away, and glanced at her in the mirror behind the bar. Then he turned and looked at her directly. He looked at her legs, her bare arms, her bare feet. He judged her bustline and approved wholeheartedly. He deeply and sincerely admired the intimate contact of her hips with the barstool. It was a gaze of direct and total male sexual interest. A look that could not have cared less that her mind was a shredded mess of anguish. A warm and scratchy look that wrapped around her flesh like a Mediterranean sun.

He shot two inches of cream-colored tailored cuff and put his elbow on the bar and propped his sleek dark head on his hand. Then he smiled.

“Ciao,” she said.

“Ciao bella.”

“You speak English?”

He shook his head mournfully and made a little moue of disappointment.

“Never mind then,” she said, and beckoned with one finger. “This is your lucky night, handsome.”