Holy Fire

5

Novak found her a place in Praha. She got a job cat-sitting. There wasn’t any money in it, but the cats were lonely.

The place belonged to a former actress named Olga Jeskova. Miss Jeskova had appeared in several of Novak’s early virtualities, among other thespian efforts. She had salted her money away in Czech real estate speculation, and now, seventy years later, she was quite well-to-do. Miss Jeskova usually spent Praha’s foggy winters somewhere in the chic and sunny Sinai, doing unlikely medical spa things.

Miss Jeskova’s Praha flat was on the fifteenth floor of a seventy-story high-rise in the edge-city ring. It was a twenty-minute tube ride to the Old Town, but that was a small price to pay for the space and the luxury. The actress’s cats were two white furry Persians. The cats seemed to have been integrated in some biocybernetic fashion into the texture of the flat. The predominant note in the flat was white fur: white fur bed, white fur toilet, white fur massage lounger, white fur hassock, white fur net terminal. At night two very odd devices like walking nutcrackers came out and groomed everything with their teeth.

On April 20, Maya took her equipment and went to Emil’s flat. Emil was up and working. He answered the door in his mud-smeared apron.

“Ciao Emil,” Maya said.

“Ciao,” Emil said, and smiled guardedly.

“I’m the photographer,” she told him.

“Oh. How nice.” Emil opened his door.

There was a girl in the apartment. She had waist-length hair and a black cowboy hat and a fur-trimmed coat and slacks. She was eating a goulash. She was Nipponese. She was lovely.

“I’m the photographer,” Maya said. “I’m here to document Emil’s latest work.”

The girl nodded. “I am Hitomi.”

“Ciao Hitomi, jmenuji se Maya.”

“He is forgetful,” said Hitomi, apologetically. “We weren’t expecting. You want some goulash?”

“No thank you,” Maya said. “Hitomi, do you photograph?”

“Oh no,” said Hitomi emphatically, “I do wanderjahr from Nippon, we hate cameras.”

Maya cleared the worktable, set out a rippling sheet of chameleon photoplastic, and set up her tripod. White against white would work best for the china. Diagonal lighting to reveal the hollowed shape of cups and saucers. The pots and urns were all about shape and tactility. She had been thinking about this project every day. She had mapped it all out in her head.

She was beginning to appreciate the lovely qualities of optic fibercord. You could do almost anything with optic fibercord, tune it to any color in the spectrum, bend it into any shape, and it would glow in any brightness along any section of its length. Soft, even shadows. Or strong, sculptural shadows. The deep shadows of backlighting. Or you could kick it way up and get very contrasty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It does? You do?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Opravdu?” said Maya.

“[They were Milena’s Tuesdays, to tell the truth. Our friends always pretended they were my little meetings, but of course without Milena no one would have come.]”

“This was before Klaus went to the moon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ciao Maya.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What would you do with it, Maya?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s your relationship with Martin Warshaw?”

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

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

“Who’s that?” Maya said.

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

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

“Benedetta, who are these people?”

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

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

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

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

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

“So?”

“The curve is not strictly linear. The rate of increase is itself increasing. Eventually the rate of increase will reach the speed of one year per year. At that point, the survivors become effectively immortal.”

“Sure they do. Maybe.”

“Well, of course it’s not true ‘immortality.’ There is still a mortality rate from accident and misadventure. At the singularity”—Benedetta drew a little black X—“the average human life span, with accident included, becomes about fourteen hundred and fifty years.”

“How lovely for that generation.”

“The first generation to reach the singularity will become the first truly genuine gerontocracy. It will be a generation which does not die out. A generation that can dominate culture indefinitely.”

“Well, I’ve heard that sort of speculation before, darling. It’s a nice line of hype and it always struck me as an interesting theory.”

“Once it was theory. For you, it’s theory. For us, it’s reality. Maya, we are those people. We’re the lovely generation. We are the first people who were born just in time. We are the first true immortals.”

“You’re the first immortals?” Maya said slowly.

“Yes, we are; and what is more, we know that we are.” Benedetta sat back and tucked her stylus in her hair.

“So why are you meeting in a sleazy art bar in some little political cabal?”

“We have to meet somewhere,” Benedetta said, and smiled.

“It had to be some generation,” said another woman peevishly. “We are the someones. We don’t impress you much. Well, no one ever said we would impress you.”

“So you really believe you’re immortals.” Maya looked at the scrawl on the furoshiki. “What if there’s a hitch in your calculations? Maybe the rate will slow.”

“That could be quite serious,” Benedetta said. She pulled her stylus and carefully redrew the slope of the curve. “See? Very bad. We get only nine hundred years.”

Maya looked at the base of the fatal little curve. For her, it climbed. For them, it rocketed. “This curve means I’ll never make it,” she realized sadly. “This curve proves that I’m doomed.”

Benedetta nodded, delighted to see her catching on. “Yes, darling, we know that. But we don’t hold that fact against you, truly.”

“We still need the palazzo,” said another woman.

“Why do you need a palazzo?”

“We plan to install some things in it,” Benedetta said.

Maya frowned. “Isn’t there trouble enough inside that place, for heaven’s sake? What kind of things?”

“Cognition things. Perception things. Software factories for the holy fire.”

Maya thought about it. The prospect sounded very farfetched. “What’s that supposed to get you?”

“It gets us a way to change ourselves. A chance to make our own mistakes, instead of repeating the mistakes of others. We hope it will make us artificers who deserve our immortality.”

“You really think you can do—what?—really radical cognitive transforms of some kind? And just with a virtuality?”

“Not with the kind of virtuality protocols they allow us nowadays. Of course you can’t do any such thing where civil support is watching, because they designed the public networks to be perfectly safe and reliable. But with the kind of protocols they don’t imagine yet—well, yes. Yes, Maya. That’s exactly what we think we can do with a virtuality.”

Maya sighed. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to open up my palace, and install some kind of brand-new, illegal, mutant, brain-damaging virtuality system?”

“ ‘Cognitive enhancement’ is a much better term,” Benedetta said.

“That is truly crazy talk, Benedetta. I can’t believe you mean that. That sounds just like some kind of junkie drug scheme.”

“Gerontocrats are always making that category error,” Benedetta said dismissively. “Software isn’t neurochemistry! We—our generation—we know virtuality! We grew up with it! It’s a world that today’s old people will never truly understand.”

“You certainly are terribly serious about this,” Maya said, looking slowly around the table. “If what you tell me is true … well, you’ve got it made. Don’t you? Someday, you’ll run the whole world. More or less forever, right? So why make trouble now? Why don’t you just wait a while? Wait until you reach that little black X on the graph.”

“Because when we reach the singularity, we must be prepared for it. Worthy of it. Otherwise we will become even more stale and stupid than the ruling class is now. They’re only mortals, and they are nice enough to die eventually, but we’re not mortals and we won’t die. If we obey their rules when we take power, we’ll bore the world to death. Once we repeat their mistakes, our generation will repeat them forever. Their padded little nurse’s paradise will become our permanent tyranny.”

“Look, you’ll never manage this,” Maya said bluntly. “It’s dangerous. It’s a reckless, silly, extravagant gesture that can only get you in trouble. They’ll surely find out what you’re doing in there, and they’ll jump on you. You can’t keep any major secrets from the polity for eighty years. Come on, you’re just a bunch of kids. I’m a gerontocrat myself, and I can’t keep my precious secrets for three lousy months!”

Another woman—she hadn’t been saying much— spoke up suddenly. Very diplomatically. “Mrs. Ziemann, we’re truly sorry that we had to discover your secrets. We never wanted to spoil your secret life.”

“You’re not half as sorry as I am, darling.”

The speaker pulled off her spex. “We’ll never tell. We have learned what you are, Mrs. Ziemann, but we were forced to do that investigation. We are not a bit shocked by our findings. Truly. Are we?”

She looked around the table. All the others gamely pretended not to be shocked.

“We are modern young people,” said the little diplomat. “We are free of old-fashioned prejudices. We admire you. We applaud you. You encourage us by your personal example. We think you are a fine posthuman being.”

“That’s so lovely,” Maya said. “I’m really moved by that sentiment. I’d be even more touched if I didn’t know you were flattering me. For your own purposes.”

“Please try to understand us. We’re not reckless. This is an act of deep foresight on our part. We do this because we believe in the cause of our generation. We are prepared to face the consequences. We are young and inexperienced, that is true. But we have to act. Even if they arrest us. Even if they punish us very severely. Even if they send us all the way to the moon.”

“Why? Why are you risking this? You never cleared this through proper channels, you never asked anyone’s permission. What gives you any right to change the way the world works?”

“Because we are scientists.”

“You never put this question to a vote, that I ever heard of. This proposal hasn’t been properly discussed. It’s not democratic. You don’t have the informed consent of the people you are going to affect. What gives you any right to change the way people think?”

“Because we are artists.”

Another woman spoke up suddenly in Italiano. “[Look, I can barely understand all this stupid English. And politics in English are the worst. But that woman is not a hundred years old. This has got to be a scam.]”

“[She is a hundred years old,]” Benedetta insisted calmly, “[and what’s more, she has the holy fire.]”

“[I don’t believe it. I bet her photographs stink of death, just like Novak’s. She’s very pretty I suppose, but for heaven’s sake, any idiot can look pretty.]”

“Do it,” Maya said.

Benedetta brightened. “Truly? You mean it?”

“Do it. Of course I mean it. I don’t care what happens to me. If it works—if it even looks like it works—if they even think it looks like it works—then they’ll smother me alive. But that doesn’t matter, because they’re going to get me anyway. I’m doomed. I know that. I’m a freakish creature. If you really knew or cared about me or my precious life, you’d know all that already. You had better do whatever you have to do. Do it quick.”

She knocked the chair back and walked away.

Back to Paul’s table. She was in anguish, but sitting in the gaseous aura of Paul’s charisma was much, much better than sitting alone. Paul sipped his limoncello and smiled. He had a new furoshiki spread before him on the table, with a lovely tapestrylike pointillistic photo of a desert sunset. “Isn’t this sunset beautiful?”

“Sometimes,” someone offered guardedly.

“I didn’t tell you that I changed the color registers.” Paul tapped the furoshiki with his fingernail. The sunset altered drastically. “This was the actual, original sunset. Is this sunset more beautiful than my altered version?”

No one answered.

“Suppose you could manipulate a real sunset—manipulate the atmosphere at will. Suppose you could turn up the red and turn down the yellow, as you pleased. Could you make a sunset more beautiful?”

“Yes,” said a listener. “No,” insisted another.

“Let’s consider a martian sunset, from one of the martian telepresence sites. Another planet’s sunset, one we can’t experience directly with human flesh. Are the sunsets on Mars less beautiful because of machine intermediation?”

Silent pain.

A woman appeared at the head of the stairs in a heavy lined cape and gray velvet gloves. She wore a tricorn hat, glittering spex, an open-collared white blouse, a necklace of dark carved wood. She had a profile of classical perfection: straight nose, full lips, broad brow; the haute couture sister of the Statue of Liberty. She proceeded down the stairs of the bar with the stagy precision of a prima ballerina. She walked with more than grace. She walked with martial authority. She had two small white dogs in tow.

Silence spread over the Tête du Noyé.

“Bonsoir à tout le monde,” the stranger proclaimed at the foot of the stairs, and she smiled like a sphinx.

Paul stood quickly, with something between a half bow and a reluctant beckoning. When they saw that he truly meant to speak to her, his little circle of listeners vacated his table with haste.

Paul offered his new guest a chair.

“How well you look, Helene. What are you drinking tonight?”

The policewoman sat with an elegant little whirl of her cape. “I’ll have what the gentleman in the spacesuit is having,” she said in English. She detached the dogs from their narrow gleaming leashes—just as if dogs of that sort needed leashes.

Paul hastily signaled the bar. “We were just having a small debate on aesthetics.”

Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier removed her spex, folded them, made them vanish into a slit in the cape. Maya stared in astonishment. Helene’s natural eyes, slate gray, astoundingly beautiful, tremendously remote, were far more intimidating than any computer-assisted perception set. “What charming preoccupations you have, Paul.”

“Helene, do you think a mechanically assisted sunset can be more beautiful than a natural sunset?”

“Darling, there hasn’t been a natural sunset since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.” Helene glanced briefly at Maya, then pinned her with the focused shaft of her attention like a moth in a cigar box. “Please don’t stand there, my child. Do have a seat with us. Have we met?”

“Ciao Helene. I’m Maya.”

“Oh, yes! Vietti’s girl, on the net. I knew that I’d seen you. But you’re lovely.”

“Thank you very much.” Maya sat. Helene studied her with grave interest and deep benevolence. It felt exactly like being x-rayed.

“You’re charming, my dear. You don’t seem one bit as sinister as you do in that terrible old man’s photographs.”

“The terrible old man is standing right over there at the bar, Helene.”

“Oh dear,” said Helene, deeply unmoved. “I’ll never learn tact, will I? Really, that was so bad of me. I must go see your friend Josef and apologize from the bottom of my heart.” She rose and left for the bar.

“Good heavens, Paul,” Maya said slowly, watching Helene glide away. “I’ve never, ever seen such a—”

Paul made the slightest possible throat-cutting gesture and gazed at his feet. Maya shut up and looked down. One of Helene’s tiny white dogs looked up at her with the chilly big-science intensity of an interplanetary probe.

Bouboule appeared. Sober and anxious. “Ciao Maya.”

“Ciao Bouboule.”

“Some of the girls are going for the breath of air. Will you come with us? For a moment?”

“Certainly, darling.” Maya gave Paul a silent look full of meaning, and Paul looked back, with a gaze of such masculine trench-warfare gallantry that she wanted to tie a silken banner to him.

She followed Bouboule through an unmarked door at the back of the bar, then up four flights of steep, switchback, iron-railed stairs. Bouboule had her marmoset with her. Maya had never felt so glad to see a monkey.

Bouboule led her through the junk-cluttered attic, and then up a black iron ladder. Bouboule threw back a heavy wooden trapdoor and they emerged on the slope of the ancient tiled roof of the Tête du Noyé. Now that it was spring, Praha’s winter overcast had finally been chased away. The night was full of young stars.

Bouboule closed the trapdoor with a clunk and spoke for the first time. “Now I think it’s safe to talk.”

“Why is that cop here?”

“Sometimes she comes, sometimes she doesn’t,” Bouboule said dourly. “There’s nothing we can do.”

It was a sharp night. Cold and still. The marmoset chattered in distress. “[Be good, my Patapouff,]” Bouboule chided in Français. “[Tonight you must guard me.]” The marmoset seemed to understand this. He adjusted his tiny top hat and looked about as fierce as a yellow two-kilo primate could manage.

Maya scrambled with Bouboule to the peak of the roof, where they sat without a trace of comfort on the narrow ridgeline of arched greenish tiles.

The trapdoor opened again. Benedetta and Niko emerged.

“Is she onto us tonight?” Benedetta said anxiously.

Bouboule shrugged, and sniffed. “[I didn’t tell. You and your little politicals, you are so secret with me that I couldn’t tell if I wanted.]”

“Ciao Niko,” Maya said. She reached down and helped Niko to the peak of the roof.

“We didn’t meet in flesh before,” said Niko, “but what you say on the net, it’s very funny.”

“You’re very sweet to say that.”

“I heal from that black eye your little friend Klaudia gave me, so I decide, I like you anyway.”

“That’s very good of you, Niko, dear. Considering.”

“It’s so cold,” complained Bouboule, hugging her arms. “It’s so stupid that the Widow can drive us to this. For two marks I’d run down there and slap her face.”

“Why do they call her the Widow?” Maya said. The four of them were now squatting like four vivid magpies on the peak of the roof. The question seemed ideal for the circumstances.

“Well,” said Bouboule, “most women get over sex in later life. But not the Widow. She keeps marrying.”

“She always marries men of a certain type,” said Benedetta. “Artists. Very self-destructive artists.”

“She marries the dead-at-forty,” said Niko. “Every time.”

“She tries to save the poor gifted boys from themselves,” said Benedetta.

“Had any luck?” Maya asked.

“So far, six dead ones,” Bouboule said.

“That’s got to hurt,” Maya said.

“I grant her this much,” said Benedetta. “She never marries them until they are really far gone. And I think she does keep them alive and working a little extra while.”

“Any boy in her bed is too afraid to die,” Niko said sweetly.

Bouboule nodded. “When she sells their work later, she always holds out for top mark! She makes their reputation in the art world! Such a lovely trick! Don’t you know.”

“I see,” said Maya. “It’s a coup de grâce, then. It’s a charity.”

Benedetta sneezed, then waved her hand. “You must be wondering why I called you here tonight.”

“Do tell us,” urged Maya, cupping her chin.

“Darling, we want to make you one of us tonight.”

“Really?”

“But we have a little test for you first.”

“A little test. But of course.”

Benedetta pointed down the length of the roof. The roofline stretched for the length of the bar. At the roof’s far edge rose the broad metal post of a shallow celestial bowl. Klaus’s satellite antenna. Maybe twenty meters away.

“Yes?” Maya said.

Benedetta plucked the stylus from her hair. She adjusted a tiny knob, then bent over carefully and touched the stylus to a ceramic tile. Sparks flew. Blackness etched its way into the tile.

“Sign our membership list,” Benedetta said. She handed Maya the stylus.

“Wonderful. Good idea. Where do I sign?”

“You sign on that post.” Benedetta pointed at the satellite dish.

“You walk,” Niko said.

“You mean I walk from here to there, along the peak of this roof.”

“She’s so clever,” said Bouboule to Niko. Niko nodded smugly.

“So I just walk twenty meters in the dark along the peak of a slippery tile roof with a four-story drop on both sides,” Maya said. “That’s what you want from me. Right?”

“Do you remember,” said Benedetta, quietly, “that vivid friend of yours in Roma? Little Natalie?”

“Natalie. Sure. What about her?”

“You asked me to look after your friend Natalie a little.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I did that for you,” Benedetta said. “Now I know your Natalie. She could never pass this test. You know why? Because she’ll stop in the middle, and she’ll know that she can’t win. Then the fear will kill her. The blackness and the badness will take her by her little beating heart, and she’ll slip. Down she goes. Off the edge, darling. Bang, bang, bang, down the tiles. And then hard onto the cold old streets of Praha. If she’s lucky, she’ll land on her head.”

“But since you are one of us,” Bouboule said, “it’s not risky.”

“It only looks risky,” offered Niko brightly.

“If these tiles were on the ground in the old town square, any fool could walk them,” said Benedetta. “No one would ever slip or fall. The tiles are not dangerous. The danger is inside you. In your head, in your heart. It’s your self that is the danger. If you can possess your self, then you go sign your name on the post and you walk back to us. It is safe as a pillow, safe as a bed; no, darling, it’s safer than that, because there are men in the world. But to walk beneath the stars—well, it’s in you, or it isn’t in you.”

“Go sign your name for us, darling,” said Bouboule.

“Then come back to us and be our sister,” said Niko.

Maya looked at them. They were perfectly serious. They meant it. This was how they lived.

“Well, I’m not gonna do it in heels,” she said. She pulled off her shoes and stood up. It was good that Novak had taught her to walk a little. She fixed her eyes on the distant glow of the dish and she walked the spine of the roof. Nothing could stop her. She was perfectly happy and confident. Then she wrote:

In a blast of sparks. It looked very nice there on the post with all the other names. So she did a little drawing, too.

The way back was harder because her bare feet were so cold. The tiles hurt her, and she picked her way more slowly, and this gave her more time to think. She would not fall, but it occurred to her in a cold black flash that she might deliberately throw herself from the roof. There was bittersweet appeal in the idea. If she was Mia Ziemann, as she had just proclaimed herself to be, then there was part of Mia Ziemann she had not yet made her peace with. This was the large and deeply human part of Mia Ziemann that was truly tired of life and genuinely anxious to be dead.

But she was so much stronger than that now.

“We hoped you would blow us a kiss,” Benedetta said, scooting over to make room.

“I save that for gerontocrats,” Maya said. She gave Benedetta the stylus.

The trapdoor opened a bit. One of Helene’s dogs squirmed out. A little white dog had no business on a steep tile roof, but the dog walked like no dog had any business walking. It crept like a gecko, like a salamander. It saw them and it skidded a bit on the tile in surprise and it whimpered.

“Voici un raton!” Bouboule shouted. “Patapouff, de-fends-moi!”

A screech, a catapulting flash of golden fur. Primates were smarter than canines. Primates could climb like anything. The dog yelped in terror and tumbled from the edge of the roof with a howl of despair.

“Oh, poor baby,” said Bouboule, hugging her shivering marmoset, “you have lost your fine chapeau.”

“No, I see it,” said Niko. “It’s in the gutter.” She scrambled down and fetched the tiny hat and brought it back.

They were silent for a moment, weighing the consequences.

“We’d better not go back down. You know another way out?” Maya said to Benedetta.

“I specialize in other ways out,” said Benedetta.

The four of them caught the tube and split up. It seemed wisest. Maya took Benedetta home with her. She and Benedetta had a lot to discuss. Two in the morning found them nibbling canapés in the actress’s white furry apartment. Then Novak called her on the actress’s netlink. The screen was blank, a voice call. Novak hated synchronous video.

“You don’t meet in the Tête again,” he told her somberly.

“No?”

“She wept for her little dog. Klaus won’t have that. It was cruel and stupid.”

“I’m sorry for the accident, Josef. It was very sudden.”

“You’re a bad and destructive girl.”

“I don’t mean to be. Truly.”

“Helene understands you far, far better than you will ever understand Helene. She means so well and has no malice, but how she suffers! She won’t allow herself any luck.” Novak sighed. “Helene was rude to me tonight. Can you believe that, girl? It’s a tragedy to see a grande dame being crass. And in public! It means she is afraid, you see.”

“I’m sorry that she was rude.”

“If you could have known her, Maya, when she was young. A great patroness of the arts. A woman of taste and discernment. She asked for nothing but to help us. But the parasites crowded around her, taking advantage of her. Feeding on her, for decades. Never forgiving her anything. They have embittered her. She’s defending you, you should know that. She defends you from far worse things than Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier. She guards the young people in artifice. Helene still believes.”

“Josef,” she said, “are you calling me from your house?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think this line might be tapped?”

“Helene has that capacity,” Novak said, his voice tightening. “That doesn’t mean that she will bother to listen.”

“I’m sorry I made this night such a debacle. Do you hate me now, Josef? Please don’t hate me. Because I’m afraid that worse is coming.”

“Darling, I don’t hate you. I’m sorry that I must tell you this, but there’s nothing you can do to make me hate you. I am a very old man. There’s nothing left of me but irony and pride, and a little muddy benevolence. I’m afraid perhaps you are becoming evil. But I can’t find it in myself to hate that, or to hate you. You will always be my favorite little monster.”

She had nothing to say to that, so she hung up.

“He really hurt me when he said that,” she said to Benedetta, and began to cry.

“You should leave that old fool,” Benedetta said, munching a fresh canapé. “You should come with me to Bologna. Come tonight. We’ll catch a train. It’s the finest city in Europe. There are colonnades and communards and blimps. You should see the arcades, they’re so beautiful. And we have wonderful plans in Bologna. Come with us to the Istituto di Estetica. You can watch us as we work.”

“Can I take photos of what you’re up to?”

“Well …”

“I take such bad photos,” she mourned. “Josef Novak doesn’t take bad photographs. Sometimes they’re wonderful. Sometimes they’re just odd, but he never takes a bad one. Never, he just doesn’t make mistakes. And me, I never take good ones. It’s not that I have bad technique. I can learn the technique, but I still don’t see.”

Benedetta sipped her tincture.

“There’s no one me inside to see with, Benedetta. I can be beautiful, because there is no great beauty without some strangeness in the proportion, and I am all a strangeness. But being beautiful doesn’t make me all right. I’m not at one with myself. I am in fragments, and I’m starting to think that I’ll always be in fragments. I’m a broken mirror inside, and so my work in artifice is always a blur. Art is long and life just isn’t short anymore.” Maya hid her face in her hands.

“You’re a good friend, Maya. I don’t have many true friends, but you’re a true friend of mine. The years don’t matter like you think they matter. They matter but they matter differently. Please don’t be so sad.” Benedetta began to search in her jacket pockets. “I brought you a gift from Bologna. To celebrate. Because we truly are sisters now.”

Maya looked up. “You did?”

Benedetta searched through her pockets. She pulled out a suckered barnacle.

Maya stared. “That really looks like something I ought not to be messing with.”

“Do you know what a cerebrospinal decantation is?”

“Unfortunately, yes, I do.”

“Let me give this to you, Maya. Let me put it on your head.”

“Benedetta, I really shouldn’t. You know I’m not young. This could really hurt me.”

“Of course it hurts. It took me a year to prepare this decantation. It hurt me every time. Whenever I felt a certain way—the way that was really me … I put this thing on my head. And it sucked me out, and it stored me. I thought I would use it sometime much later, to remember myself if I ever got lost somehow. But I want you to have it now. I want you to know who I am.”

Maya sighed. “Life is risk.” She took off her wig.

The barnacle went in through the back of her skull. It hurt quite a bit, and it was good that it hurt, because otherwise it would have come too easily. Perfusions oozed and she went very calm and supernaturally lucid.

She felt the mind of another woman. Not her thoughts. Her life. The unearthly sweetness of human identity. Loneliness, and a little bitterness for strength, and a bright plateau of single-minded youthful self-possession. The ghostly glaze of another soul.

She closed her eyes. It was deep, it was deep posthuman rapture. Awareness stole across her mind like black light from another world. And then the gray meat slowly ate that other soul. Sucked it hungrily into a million little crevices.

When she came to, the barnacle was gone. She was flat on the floor, and Benedetta was gently wiping her face with a damp towel. “Can you speak?” Benedetta said.

She worked her jaws, forced her tongue to move. “Yes, I think so.”

“You know who you are?” Benedetta was anxious. “Tell me.”

“That was truly holy,” she said. “It’s sacred. You have to hide that in some sacred place. Never let anyone touch that, or defile that. It would be too awful, and too terrible, if that were ever touched.”

Benedetta embraced her. “I’m sorry, darling. I know how to do it. I know how it works. I even know how to give it to you. But I don’t know how to hide from what I am, and what I know.”

Three weeks passed. Spring had come and Praha was in bloom. She was still working with Novak, but it was not the same. He treated her like an assistant now, instead of a magical waif or a stranded elf. Milena could sense that there was trouble in the wind. Milena hated cops, but Milena was nevertheless making life hard, because Milena hated a disruption in the ancient Novak household even more than Milena hated cops.

Maya took a train to Milano and did a very boring shoot with some of Vietti’s very boring staffers. Because it was a working engagement, she saw almost nothing at all of Milano, and precious little of the Emporio Vietti. Vietti himself didn’t bother to show; the great man was off in Gstaad boiling his crabs.

The results of the shoot were perfect and glossy and awful, because it wasn’t Josef Novak. She learned quite a bit during the shoot, but mostly she hated it. Nevertheless, she thought it was a smart thing to do. People had been fussing entirely too much about the Novak photographs. They were all over the net and they were rather too beautiful and they were much, much too true. It seemed to her that people would be happier if she proved she could be boring. Just another silly model, on just another couture shoot. And besides, there was money in it.

She persuaded Benedetta to come to Milano to handle the money for her. Benedetta didn’t handle the funds herself, but she knew people, who knew people, who knew people who could handle money. Benedetta bought her a Milanese designer furoshiki, which was beautiful and useful, and a big Indonesian network server, which was useful and beautiful. Maya returned to Praha and the actress’s apartment, wearing the furoshiki and carrying the server in its shatterproof case.

The Indonesian server came with an elaborate set of installation procedures in sadly mangled English. Maya booted the server, failed, wiped it, rebooted it, failed again. So she fed the actress’s cats. Then she wiggled all the loose connections, booted the server, failed much worse than before, and had a frappé to calm down. She booted it again, achieved partial functionality, searched the processing crystal for internal conflicts, eliminated three little nasty ones. The system crashed. She ran a diagnostic test, cleaned out a set of wonky buffers, picked the main processor up and dropped it. After that, it seemed to work. She installed a network identity. Finally she plugged into the net.

The server rang immediately. It was a voice call from Therese.

“How did you know I was on-line?” Maya said.

“I have my ways,” said Therese. “Did they really throw you out of the Tête because you killed a cop’s dog?”

“Word gets around in a hurry, and no, I didn’t do that, I swear it was somebody else.”

“If word travels any slower than the speed of light now, it only means we’re not paying attention,” Therese said. “I was paying plenty of attention. Because I need a big favor from you.”

“Is it the favor, Therese?”

“It is the favor, Maya, if you are discreet.”

“Therese, I’m in so much trouble of my own now that I don’t think yours can possibly affect me. What is it that you need?”

“I need a very private room in Praha,” Therese said somberly. “It has to be a nice room with a very nice bed. Not a hotel, because they keep records. And I need a car. It doesn’t have to be a very nice car, but it has to be very private. Not a rented car, because they keep records. I need the room for one night and I need the car for two days. After that, I don’t need any questions, from anybody, ever.”

“No questions and no records. Right. When do you need these things?”

“Tuesday.”

“Let me call you back.”

The actress’s room was out of the question. Novak? She couldn’t. Paul? Maybe, but, well, certainly not. Klaus? Since she’d become a regular at the Tête, she’d come to realize that Klaus was a very interesting man. Klaus had many resources through every level of Praha society. Klaus was a genuine doyen. Klaus was universally known and respected in Praha, and yet Klaus seemed to owe nothing to anyone; Klaus belonged to nobody at all. Klaus even liked her, but …

Emil. Perfect.

She did what she could for Therese. The arrangements required a serious investment of time, energy, and wiles, but they seemed to work well enough.

At two in the morning on Tuesday she got a priority call from Therese. “Are you awake?”

“I am now, darling.”

“Can you come and have a drink with me? I’m in the Café Chyba on the forty-seventh floor of this big rabbit nest you found for me.”

“Are you all right, Therese?”

“No, I’m not all right,” said Therese meekly, “and I need you to come and have a little drink with me.”

Maya dressed in a hurry and went to the café. It took her forty minutes. When she arrived at the Café Chyba she found it deserted. It was a perfectly clean and perfectly soulless little bar, entirely automated, just the sort of place where one would end up at three in the morning when one was having an emotional crisis in an eighty-story modern Czech high-rise. Emotional crises seemed to be pretty rare in the high-rise, to judge by the lack of customers. This high-rise was inhabited by Emil’s parents, who were, conveniently, in Finland for a month. In Suomen Tasavalta, rather.

Maya ordered a mineralka from a disgustingly cute little novelty robot. She sipped it and waited.

Therese appeared around half past three. She perched on the edge of a barstool and tried to smile. She had been weeping.

“Maya,” she said, and took her hand. “You’ve grown up so much.”

“This wig makes me look a lot more mature,” Maya lied cheerfully.

“You’re so chic! You’re so … Well, I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t, truly. Can I still trust you?”

“Why don’t you just tell me what kind of trouble you’re in, Therese. I’ll see if I can figure out the rest of that later.”

“He beat me.”

“He did? Let’s go and kill him.”

“He’s doing that already,” Therese said, and began to cry.

Therese’s boyfriend had never beaten her before, but since he was on the point of suicide, he seemed to feel a need to put a sharper point to their relationship. He’d whipped her on the back and bottom with a leather belt. Therese’s boyfriend was a Corsican gangster.

Therese’s boyfriend wasn’t a cute gangster. There was nothing cute about him. He was a career criminal, a consigliore in the Black Hand organization; protection racketeers, pimps, hardcase tincture people. Major-league money launderers. Influence peddlers. Bribers of judges, suborners of police. Murderers. Men who put people’s feet in buckets of cement. He was sixty years old and he called himself Bruno when he wasn’t calling himself something else.

“How’d you come to know this character?”

“How do you think? I run a gray-market shop in the rag trade. I got mixed up with the rackets. Mafiosi dress very flash, and sometimes they steal clothes and sell them. The rag trade is very old. You know? It’s very old and it has some strange things in its closets. I do little illegal things. Mafiosi do big illegal things. They counterfeit couture sometimes, they give people protection sometimes. It happens. It just happens.” Therese shrugged.

Maya drummed her fingers slowly on the top of the bar.

“He likes the apartment you found for us,” Therese offered. “It’s funny to steal a last night from bourgeois people.”

“I can’t believe this,” Maya said.

“Bruno’s a real man,” Therese said slowly. “I love real men. I like it when they can’t be polite about it. I like it when men really …” She thought about it. “When they really come unwound.”

“That’s not a healthy hobby, darling.”

“Life is a risk. I like it when they’re truly men. When nothing else matters to them but being a man. It’s exciting. It really feels like living. I didn’t think he’d beat me. But I was doing anything he wanted tonight. So he wanted to beat me. It’s his last night on earth. I shouldn’t have cried so much. I shouldn’t have called you. I’m being a big baby.”

“Therese, this is really sick.”

“No, it’s not,” Therese said, wounded. “It’s just old-fashioned.”

“How do you know he’s not going to murder you?”

“He’s a man of honor,” Therese said. “Anyway, I’m doing him a big favor tomorrow.”

Bruno was dying. Therese’s best guess was liver cancer. It was impossible to tell for certain, because Bruno hadn’t been near official diagnostic machinery in forty years. First his rap sheet had caught up with him, and denied him access to life-extension treatments. Then he’d begun to do a number of extremely interesting and highly illegal things to himself through the medical black market. The extra testicle, apparently, was just the least of it.

Bruno was determined to die outside the reach of the polity. Should the authorities happen to render his corpse in one of those necropolitan emulsifiers, then alarm bells would ring from Dublin to Vladivostok. The Black Hand had been founded on the ancient tradition of omertà, silence until death. Nowadays, silence after death was just as necessary.

The romance between Bruno and Therese had been very simple. He’d met her in Marseilles when she was twenty. Bruno was always beautifully dressed, reeking of mystery, and entirely menacing. For Therese this combination was catnip. Bruno liked her because she was young, and cute, and no trouble for him, and pretty much ready for anything, and grateful for favors. Sometimes he bought her nice presents: shoes, gowns, sexy underwear, little holidays on the Côte d’Azur. He gave her contact with a very, very vivid side of life.

Once she had gone into the rag trade, Bruno became even more useful. Sometimes she had trouble from buyers and suppliers. If he happened to feel like it, Bruno would show up from out of town and have a little word with the offending parties. This never failed to effect radical improvement.

Sometimes Bruno would slap her around a little. This was only to be expected from a man who was perfectly capable of putting her enemies into cement. Not that Bruno had actually murdered anyone for Therese. If he had, he wouldn’t have told her about it anyway. “It isn’t that he hits you,” Therese explained. “He hits you so you do what he wants. He’s the man, he’s the boss, he’s the top. Sometimes he makes you do what he wants. That’s what he is.”

“This is seriously bad,” Maya said.

Therese tossed her head irritably. “Did you think every criminal in Europe was like your loser boyfriend Jimmy the pickpocket? Bruno is a soldier! He’s a boss.”

“What happened to Jimmy?” Maya said. “I haven’t thought about him in such a long time.”

“Oh, they caught him,” Therese said. “Jimmy was always stupid. They arrested him. They did a laundry job on his head.”

“Oh, no,” Maya said. “Poor Ulrich. Did it change his behavior much?”

“Totally,” Therese said gloomily. “He used to steal purses from tourist women. Now he fills purses with useful goods and gives them to tourist women when they’re not looking.”

“Well, it’s a good sign that they let him keep his anarchist political convictions.”

“Oh, the polity, they fuss so much about behavior mod,” said Therese. “They catch some nasty creep like Jimmy who ought to be dropped off a bridge, and every civil libertarian in the world starts whining on the net. Really, bourgeois people have no sense at all.”

“So what’s the plan with Bruno?”

“We’re going to drive into the Black Forest tomorrow. He’s going to kill himself. I’m going to bury him in a secret place where no one will ever know. That’s our bargain. That’s our secret and private arrangement.”

“Young lady, you’re not supposed to bury any lovers until you are very, very old.”

“I’ve always been so precocious, it always gets me into trouble.” Therese sighed. “Will you come with me tomorrow? Please?”

“Look, you can’t ask that of me. If you think I can handle a sick and desperate man who’s bent on suicide, well—” She hesitated. “Well, actually, I’d probably be better at that than anyone else you know.”

“You’re so good to me, Maya. I knew you would help me. I knew somehow, the moment that I saw you, that you were someone very special.” Therese stood up. She was much happier now. “I have to go back and sleep with Bruno now. I promised I’d stay all night.”

“A promise is a promise, I guess.”

Therese looked around the deserted bar. “It’s late, it’s so strange and lonely here.… Do you want to come in and sleep with him with me?”

“I might not mind it all that much really,” Maya said, “but I hardly see how that’s going to help.”

She met Bruno for the first time at ten in the morning. She was astonished by Bruno’s uncanny resemblance to a twentieth-century matinee idol. The twentieth-century look mostly came from his bad health and the crudity of his makeup. Bruno had a broad wavy-haired rock-solid head with the greasy pores typical of heavy male steroid treatment. He wore a lacquered straw hat and a thin-lapelled dark suit and crisply creased tailored slacks and a shirt without a cellphone.

Bruno didn’t bluster or threaten. He swaggered a bit, but he lacked the smooth enormous muscle of people truly devoted to muscle. Bruno was terrifying because he truly looked willing and able to kill people, without hesitation and without regret afterward. Bruno looked truly feral. He looked old and beaten, too, like a very sick wolf. He looked as if he had chewed off his own leg and eaten it and enjoyed the flavor.

For a man driving to his own execution, Bruno was remarkably cheerful and philosophical. She’d never met anyone bent on death who seemed so truly pleased about the prospect. He kept making little wisecracks to Therese, in some criminal south-of-France argot that baffled Maya’s wig translator. Quite often he used obscenities. This was the sort of language no one used nowadays. Obscenity had simply gone out of use, vanished from human intercourse, gone like the common cold. But Bruno spoke obscenely and with relish. This verbal transgression would always upset Therese no end. She never failed to scold Bruno while showing unmistakable signs of arousal. It was like a table-tennis game between the two of them, and appeared to be their version of courting behavior.

The three of them ate in the car. The condemned man ate a hearty lunch. They finally drove up into some dense patch of forest north of the Czech border. This didn’t seem to be the actual Black Forest, but this seemed to matter not at all. The trees were leafing out and there was a warm spring breeze. The car—it belonged to Emil’s ex-wife—protested bitterly at being ordered into the shrubbery at the side of the road. But there they left it.

Bruno retrieved a folding shovel and a heavy valise from the boot of the car. Then they set out on foot. Bruno knew very well where he was going.

They emerged in a small hillside meadow. Bruno opened the sharp ceramic shovel, hung his hat and jacket neatly from a branch, and began digging. He removed a wide circle of sod and carefully set it aside. As he dug, he began reminiscing.

“He says this is an old secret resting place,” Therese translated. “Romany people used it a long time ago. Later, some other people put some troublemakers here.”

Bruno wiped sweat from his brow. Suddenly he spoke up in English. “A man,” he pronounced, “does his own work in this life.” He looked at Maya and smiled winningly.

Bruno dug until he hurt too much to dig anymore. He sat down ashen faced and puffed at a gunmetal inhaler. Therese dug for him. When she got too tired, Maya had a turn. She’d dressed in flats and pants and a light sweater, not too bad for gravedigging. The only fashion touch was the furoshiki. She’d set it for olive and khaki. Something not too alluring.

They followed Bruno’s direction. The result was not a normal grave. It was a conical pit with a round rim the size of a manhole cover. Bruno tossed out a few final wedges of dirt, and then explained to them the theory and craft of concealed burials.

The crux of the matter was rapid and complete decomposition. Truly high-speed decomposition caused the corpse to bloat rapidly. This side effect would disturb the surface of the grave. Therefore it was necessary to saw through the ribs up both sides, and to ventilate the intestines.

Bruno opened his valise. He had thoughtfully brought all the proper equipment. It had seen plenty of use. He had an old-fashioned ceramic bone saw, battery driven. He also had some kind of horse-doctoring veterinary hypodermic, with a great spike of a steel needle that could have stitched sheet aluminum.

Bruno now disrobed. He was covered from neck to groin in tattoos. Snakes. Roses. Handguns. Mottos in gutter Français. At least Therese had never lacked for things to read.

Bruno heartily pinched his own goosefleshed hide to show where the needle should go in. Into the thighbones. Into the meat of the calves. Into the biceps. Into the buttocks. Into the skull. He had a little canister of some highly carnivorous rot bacterium. Eating its way out from the injection sites, the decomposer would cook him down like tallow.

After he was settled nicely into the pit, they would have to shovel the dirt around him and carefully replace the lid of sod. It was best to leave a dome of extra dirt below the lid. This looked suspicious at first, but it would look much better in the long run because of the settling. The leftover dirt had to be scattered in the forest. And of course they must remove his clothes and the tools. Nothing metal to be left around the site. Nothing to attract attention.

“Ask him if he has any metal inside of him,” Maya said. “Dental work, anything like that?”

“He says he’s not old enough to have dental work made of metal,” Therese translated. “He says the only thing on him made of solid iron is his manhood.” She began to cry.

Bruno took two canisters the size of his thumbs from the pockets of his discarded pants. He then climbed, naked and peaceable, into his grave.

He stood there, leaned back casually, and shook the first of the thumb-sized objects in his fist. He sprayed a fine layer of black paint over his right hand. He beckoned to Therese, calling out something in the argot. She came over, trudging, reluctant, afraid. He gripped her hand gently with the black-painted hand, shook her hand firmly, pulled her close, whispered, kissed her.

Then he called Maya over. He kissed her as well. A long and deep and contemplative and very bitter kiss. He trapped the nape of her neck with his left hand. He didn’t touch her with the painted black hand.

At last he released her. Maya gasped for breath, stumbled back, and almost slid into the pit with him. Bruno watched Therese for a moment. He seemed to be fighting tears. Therese was sprawled on the ground, watching him, sobbing bitterly.

He then picked up the second object, an inhaler. He stuck the muzzle into his mouth, squeezed the trigger, and sucked in a breath. He tossed the thing aside like a dead cigar, and went into instant convulsions. He was dead in five seconds.

“Get it off!” Therese screamed. “Get it off me, get it off!” She was waving her black-stained hand, clamping her wrist left-handed.

Maya began scrubbing the painted hand with Bruno’s discarded jacket. “What is it?”

“Lacrimogen!”

“Oh my goodness.” She scrubbed harder, but rather more carefully.

“Oh, I loved him so much,” Therese howled, rocketing into hysterical grief. “Oh, I thought he’d beat me again and have sex with me in the grave. I never thought he’d give me the black hand. I wish I was dead.” She broke into frantic Deutsch. “[Where is the poison? Spray it in my mouth. No, let me kiss him, there must be poison on his tongue to kill a hundred women.]”

She began crawling toward the lip of the grave, exploding with drug-propelled grief. Maya caught her by the ankle, and hauled her back. “Stay away from him, I mean it. Get away from him, and keep away. I’m going to cut him up now.”

“[Maya, how can you! How can you saw him up and make him rot? It’s not some piece of meat, it’s Bruno!]”

“I’m sorry, darling, but once you’ve lived through the great plagues like I have, you really do learn that when people are dead, they’re just plain dead.” She could have bitten her tongue for that confession, but it didn’t matter; Therese was too far gone, beyond listening. Therese began to howl till the woods rang, great horrid wails of primal bereavement and anguish.

Maya found a sheet of alcionage in Therese’s backpack. It was pretty mild stuff, alcionage, so she reeled off six of them. Therese made no resistance when Maya stickered her neck. The impetus of her grief kept her rocking and moaning in a fetal position, clutching her tainted hand. Then the tranquilizer sandbagged her.

Maya fetched out the last of a mineralka and gave Therese’s hand a thorough wet scrubbing. It was nasty stuff, that spray-on lacrimogen. You could murder somebody with it easily. She could hardly imagine a defter way to kill.

She walked over to the lip of the grave. Bruno was still dead. A little more dead, if anything. She closed his eyes for him. Then she filled the hypodermic.

“Well, big guy,” she told him, “rest easy. You’ve found yourself a little girl who is truly happy to do this.”

It was dark by the time she was done. It had been a very nasty job. It was like some macabre parody of medical practice. But it was enough like medical practice that it felt like honest work.

Therese had recovered. Therese was young and strong. Young people could whip their way through more moods in a day than old people managed in a month. Therese tottered back with Maya to the car.

“Where’s his suitcase?” Therese said, red-eyed and trembling.

“I put it in the boot with all the clothes and tools.”

“Get it out for me.”

Therese searched through Bruno’s case with frantic eagerness. She came up with a long rectangular tray of gray metalglass alloy. She opened it.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, looking into it with awestruck joy. “I was sure he was going to cheat me.”

“I think he meant to kill you.”

“No, he didn’t. That was only a little bit of spray. He just wanted a woman to cry for him. I feel better now that I cried so much. I feel all right. I’ll never cry for him anymore ever again. Look, Maya, look what he gave me. Look at my wonderful heirloom from my dead old man.” She showed her the little hinged tray.

It was lined in black velvet and held two dozen little spotted seashells.

“Seashells?” Maya said.

“Cowries,” Therese said. “I’m rich!” She carefully shut the tray, then slammed the suitcase shut and kicked it into the boot. “Let’s go now,” she said, clutching the tray with both hands. “Let’s go get a drink. I cried so much, and I’m so thirsty. Oh, I can’t believe I’ve really done this.” She opened the door and climbed inside.

They drove away with a rattle and crunch of brush. Suddenly Therese gazed over her shoulder, and laughed. “I can’t believe it, but I won. I’m getting away with it. Now life will be so different for me.”

“A box of little seashells,” Maya mused. The car threaded its way through the darkened woodlands, heading for an autobahn.

“It’s something that’s not trash. The world is full of trash now,” Therese said, settling back into her seat. “Virtualities and fakes. We’ve turned everything into trash. Diamonds and jewels are cheap. Coins, anyone can forge coins now. Stamps, they’re so easy to forge, it’s a laugh. Money is nothing but ones and zeroes. But Maya—seashells! Nobody can forge seashells.”

“Maybe those are just cheap fake trashy seashells.”

Therese opened the tray again, stabbed with anxiety. Then she smiled. “No, no. Look at these growth marks, look at this mottling. Only years and years of organic process can create a real seashell. Cowries are much too complex to be faked. These are real. Extinct species! So very rare! There will never be any more, ever. They’re worth a fortune! So much—so much that I can do everything now.”

“So what are you going to do with them, exactly?”

“I’m going to grow up, of course! I can leave that little dump in the Viktualienmarkt. I can start a real store. In a real building, a high-rise! For real customers who will pay me real money. I’m very young to be a store owner, but with this in my hands, I can do it. I can get old people to work for me. I’ll hire my own accountant, and my own business lawyer. I’ll start over legally. Everything above-board. Real business books, and I’ll pay taxes!”

“Gosh, that sounds lovely.”

“It’s my dream come true. Real couture people will pay attention to me now. I’ll carry real lines of clothing from professional designers. No more of this kid stuff. Kid stuff, kid stuff, kid stuff, oh, truly I’m so, so sick of the vivid life.”

“I hope you’ll stay out of trouble with Bruno’s friends from now on.”

“Of course I will,” Therese said. “No matter what you think about the polity, well … they are making the world better. They really are! Bruno’s gangsters—well, the police have got them. It’s the medical thing, and the money, and the surveillance.… It’s working. The bad boys are dying from it. Every year, less and less of them. The criminal classes are dying. They’re very old and they were very strong for a long time but they are going away now, like a disease. There is something tragic there, but … but it’s a great political accomplishment.”

Maya sighed wearily. “Maybe I shouldn’t have stickered you with quite so many tranquilizers.”

“Don’t say that. It’s not true. Can’t you see how happy I am? You should be happy with me.” She looked into Maya’s face. “What changed you so much, Maya? Why aren’t you cheerful like you were in Munchen?”

“You’re having mood swings, darling. Try not to talk so much. Let’s get some rest. I’m very tired.”

Therese shrank back in her seat. “Of course you’re very tired. You were so brave. I’m sorry, Maya.… Thank you so much.”

They were silent a long time. Therese wept a little more. Finally she fell asleep.

In the passing lights of rural Europe, Therese’s face was a picture of peace. “You’re on the other side now,” Maya told her gently. “Now you’re a perfect little bourgeoise. I can’t believe it really works like this. I can’t believe it works so well. I let a world like this happen. I did it, it was my fault, this was just the kind of world I wanted. I can’t believe you’re so anxious to live in a world that I couldn’t stand to live in for one moment longer. I have to be an outlaw just to live and breathe, and now there’s no way back for me. And the Widow is onto me now. She knows. I just know that she knows. She’d arrest me right now, except that she’s patient and gentle. You know who the Widow is?”

The sleeping Therese hugged her tray a little closer.

“Don’t ever find out,” Maya said.

Reworking the palace presented considerable difficulties. Foremost among them was the difficult fact that something was alive inside it. It had taken Benedetta and her friends quite a while to track down this troubling presence. It was Martin’s dog. Plato was loose in the memory palace.

Martin had linked the dog’s organic brain directly to his virtuality. This was not a medical process approved for human beings, for many good reasons. Neural activity was an emergent and highly nonlinear phenomenon. Brains grew, they metabolized from a physical organic substrate. When software tried to grow in tandem with a brain, the result was never a smooth symbiosis of thought and computation. It was usually a buzzing, blooming mess. Left alone it became artificial insanity.

Benedetta showed her the hidden wing of the palace where the dog’s brain had been at work. The cyborganic mélange had grown for years in knobs and layers, immense frottages and glittering precipitates, a maze like coral and oatmeal. The neural augmentation wasn’t dead yet, but they had found the links to the dog’s wetware, and blocked them off. There were monster pearls in it here and there, massive spinning nodules like bad dreams that would never melt.

Since Warshaw’s death, the dog’s mental processes had broken through the floors in five places. The abandoned mentality jetted through the broken floors like sea urchins.

“What does this look like in code?” Maya said.

“Oh, it’s such wonderful code. You couldn’t parse this code in a million years.”

“Do you really think it was helping him think?”

“I don’t think dogs think the way we think, but this is definitely mammalian cognitive processing. Warshaw had his palace netlinked into the dog’s head. Very sophisticated for the time. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the stunts they work on lab animals nowadays. But for the 2060s, this was broad bandwidth and very rapid baud rate. There must be antennas woven all through the dog’s spine.”

“Why?”

“We speculate that he meant to hide some data inside the dog. Possibly move the whole palace into the dog’s nervous system. That sort of visionary nonsense was very big in the 2060s. People believed anything in those days. They romanticized computers and mysticized virtualities. There was a lot of weird experimentation. They thought anything was possible, and they didn’t have much sense. But Warshaw was no programmer. He was just old and rich. And reckless.”

“Is the dog still on-line in here?”

“That’s not the way to phrase it, Maya. The dog never had little doggy gloves or little doggy goggles. He never experienced the palace as a palace at all, he just infested it. Or it infested him.… Maybe Warshaw thought he could live in here as well, someday. Pull up all his physical traces and vanish into textures of pure media. People thought that was possible, until they tried it a bit, and learned how hard it was. Warshaw did a silly movie about that once.”

“You’ve seen Martin Warshaw’s movies? Really?”

“We have made it our business to dig them up.”

“Do you like Warshaw’s movies?”

“He was a primitive.”

“This doesn’t look primitive to me.”

“But this isn’t cinema at all. This is artificial life. Billions of cycles every day for thirty years.”

Down in the palace basement, they had the holy-fire machineries partly stoked and lit. The dream machines. They were supposed to do certain highly arcane things to the vision sites in the brain and the auditory processing centers. You would sort of look at them and sort of hear them, and yet it never felt much like anything. Human consciousness couldn’t perceive the deeply preconscious activities of the auditory and visual systems, any more than you consciously felt photons striking your retina, or felt the little bones knocking the cochlear hairs in your ears. The installations weren’t blurry exactly; they simply weren’t exactly there. The experience was soothing, like being underwater. Like twilight sleep in the color factory. To a semi-inaudible theme of music-not-music.

It wasn’t spectacular or thrilling. It didn’t burn or blast or coruscate. But it did not weary. It was the polar opposite of weariness. They were inventing very, very slow refreshments for the posthuman souls of a new world. They didn’t know how to do it very well yet. They were trying different things, and testing approaches and keeping records.

Maya was not one of the test subjects, but they let her see everything, because they liked her. There were the boxes in the boxes in the boxes, the ones that bled their own geometries, the spatial kaleidoscope. Then there were the ear-flower pinwheels. You could hear the flowers moving but they never really touched the backs of your eyes. And the giant burrowing things that endlessly burrowed into the burrowing things. These were very visceral and subtle, like mental vitamins.

She could not tire of the holy fire. There was no possible way to tire of it. It did not require attention; it worked without attention. It was something that happened to one, instead of something one did. But eventually the gloves and the earphones would pinch her, or her back would start to ache. Then she would log off and look at the wall.

After the holy fire, a blank wall was intensely revelatory. She could sit and meditate on a blank wall and the sheer richness of its physicality, the utter and total thereness of its sublime and awesome thereness was sweetly overwhelming. It wasn’t the inside that did things anymore, it was the outside when you came out and looked. …

Sometimes she would lie flat on the floor and watch the ceiling. The actress’s white cats would come and sit on her chest and knead their paws and look into her face. Animal eyes from a world that knew no words and no symbols.

They were busy outside the palace, too. They had launched strikes at some of the apparently abandoned palaces, and had managed to break into three of them. They had found the physical source of Warshaw’s palace; it was datastriped through a series of servers in the Pacific island of Nauru. They were collating the palace line by line out of the Nauru networks, through Morocco, through Bologna, and eventually bit by bit into the crystalline server in the actress’s room in Praha. Once the altered palace was all in one machine, it would run a lot faster and more efficiently, they believed. Eventually she would be able to walk around with Warshaw’s palace under her own arm. Frozen into a fist-sized chunk of optically etched computational diamond.

One day in June she spent too much time next to the vapor blizzard snowflake calliope, and when she pulled the goggles off she knew she had hurt herself a little. When she closed her eyes, the world had changed on the insides of her eyelids. They had touched the utterly intimate place where she hid when she closed her eyes. There was never true blackness when you closed your eyes while waking. Activity of a sort took place behind closed eyelids. Deprived of light, the visual cortex still worked, and tried in its gray-meat not-blind way to grip at reality. And it made a little world. The intimate world behind human eyelids was gentle formless blues and dim swimming flashbulb purples and optic flecks of dun and brown. But now they had touched it somehow. They had made it a different place. They had made it something new and not Maya.

She called Benedetta. It was trouble to call her, because Benedetta was always tight and guarded now. But she had to talk.

“Benedetta, I made a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

“This isn’t going to work for me.”

“You have to be very patient,” Benedetta said very patiently. “This is a very long-term project.”

“It’s not going to work for me, because I’m not young. I’ve already been young. I was young in a different world. That world in there is your world. You’re building something I can’t even imagine. I can sympathize, and I can even help you build it, but I can’t live there, because I’m not one of you.”

“Of course you’re one of us. Don’t worry if it isn’t having much effect. This is nothing compared to what we’ll do in a hundred years.”

“I won’t live a hundred more years. I’ll never live to see the world beyond the singularity. It’s not that I don’t want to. But I just wasn’t born in time.”

“Maya, don’t give up. Don’t talk like a defeatist. You’re important to our morale.”

“I love you, and I’ll do anything to help you, but you’ll have to manage your own morale. I’m never going back in there again. I’m starting to feel and understand what it really means now. I’ll never be able to stretch that far. I don’t want that, and in my condition I don’t even need that. It might help you with your problems, but it can’t help me with mine. It will only make me worse than dead.”

“Are there things worse than dead, Maya?”

“Oh, my heavens, yes.” She hung up. Then she lay on her back on the bed to examine the featureless ceiling.

Some endless time later, the doorbell rang and roused her.

Maya rose like a sleepwalker, crossed the white fluffy carpet, opened the door.

A large brown dog released the bell. He dropped to all fours.

Then he lunged through the open door. She backed away, stumbling backward, and he stalked into the room.

“You hurt me,” he said.

“Come in, Plato. Where are your nice clothes?”

“You hurt me.”

“You don’t look well. Haven’t you been eating right? You should always watch what you eat. It’s so important to eat properly.”

“You hurt me a lot.”

Maya backed away toward the kitchen. “Would you like a treat? I have so many treats now.”

“I hurt a lot. I hurt inside my head.” The dog stalked into the room, his matted head hung low. He sniffed at the floor and shook his filthy head. “You did it,” he said.

One of the white cats woke up, stared in amazement, and went into bottle-brush feline terror.

“Kitty, be good!” Maya shouted quickly. “Plato, I’m going to feed you now! Everything will be fine! I’ll make some calls! I’ll take care of you now! We’ll have a nice bath! We’ll get dressed, we’ll go out—”

“There are cats!” the dog howled. He attacked.

Maya screamed. White fur flew. The room exploded with animal hate. He smashed the first cat between his white-fanged jaws and it fell to the floor in convulsions. An alarm began to shriek as the cat began to die.

Maya leapt at the dog as he attacked the second cat. She tried to grab at the matted fur of his neck. He turned with enormous feral speed and ease, and bit her on the shin. It was as if she’d slammed her leg in a fanged iron door. She screamed and fell.

The cat tried hard to climb the wallpaper. The dog seized the cat’s tail with his dreadful grasping paw and threw the cat down and killed him with his teeth.

Maya yanked at the door and ran away.

She had nothing. She had no shoes. She knew the dog would come for her now. Her leg was bleeding and she stank of fear, enough fear to crush the world. She ran. She ran down the hall and into an elevator. She stood there and shook and moaned until the doors closed.

There was nothing else to do now. So she caught a train.

On the first day she stole clothes. This was very difficult now because she was so afraid. It was easy to steal things when you were perfectly happy and confident, because everyone loved pretty girls who were perfectly happy and confident. But nobody loved crazy girls who had funny stiff hair and who limped and who winced and who looked like a junkie and who carried no luggage.

The dog was inside the net. She couldn’t imagine why she’d ever thought a net was a nice thing. A net was a thing to kill fish with. Big pieces of the dog’s gray meat had grown inside the net. He had been haunting the palace, and he had used it to track her down. He was smelling after her, and he was all over the world like a kind of vapor.

The police would find her the moment she stopped running. She was very tired and very guilty and she hurt. Whenever she sat still, blind panic gripped her, and she had to go throw up.

But in the Sinai, it was summer. This wasn’t Europe. She found no release in the sensation of travel now; it felt bad and strange to be traveling. The actress was in a Red Sea resort. It was a place to go when you were very tired. The actress had naturally left strict orders not to be disturbed.

Maya convinced the staff of the spa that she had news of a death in the family. They saw that she was shattered, haunted and struck with grief, so they believed her little story and they pitied her. They were kindly people, in their little Edenic niche of desalination and pampered jungle. Their business was to care for others. They gave her a notebook and told her how to hunt for the actress’s spoor.

The actress was a furry hominid with thick black nails and hairy calloused feet. She was naked and covered in wiry black fur. People could do this sort of thing conveniently if they were willing to activate some of the human junk DNA. It wasn’t a medical activity that lengthened the life span, so it was the sort of thing that one did in a spa.

In certain modern circles it was considered very relaxing to retreat to a prehominid form. A few soothing months of very dim consciousness, with the hunt for food to keep one toned. The prehominid guests at the spa ate fruit and chased and killed small animals with sticks. They wore tracking devices and were feted once a week on carrion.

Maya followed the hints from the notebook. Eventually, she found Miss Jeskova. Miss Jeskova was staring out to sea and cracking raw oysters with a fist ax.

“Are you Olga Jeskova?”

Miss Jeskova loudly slurped an oyster. The notebook said something in Czestina. Maya manipulated some menus. “[Not right now,]” the machine said ambiguously.

“My name is Mia Ziemann, Miss Jeskova,” she said, speaking into the notebook’s inset microphone. “I’m sorry that we have to meet this way. I’ve come from Praha and I have some bad news for you.”

“[Bad news can wait,]” said the notebook in English, crankily. “[Bad news can always wait. I’m hungry.]”

“I was living in your apartment. I was taking care of your cats. I was your cat-sitter in Praha. Do you understand me?”

Miss Jeskova chewed another oyster. Her hide twitched and she scratched herself vigorously. “[My nice little cats,]” the notebook said at last.

The staff had warned her that communication would take patience. People at the spa didn’t go there to chat, but they left certain mental conduits in case there was an emergency.

“[What about my little darlings?]” said the notebook at last.

“They’re dead. I’m very sorry. I was a guest in your home and your cats were killed. I feel truly terrible about it. It was all my fault. I came here as soon as I could, because I had to tell you myself.”

“[My cats are dead?]” Miss Jeskova said. “[When I go home, this will make me very sad.]”

“A dog got in and killed them. It was awful, and it was all because of me. I had to come and tell you myself. I just had to.” She was trembling violently.

Miss Jeskova looked at her with timeless brown eyes. “[Stop crying. You look bad. You must be hungry.]”

“I guess I am.”

“[Eat these stone sweeties. So juicy and good.]” She deftly whacked another oyster with her hand ax.

Maya fished the raw oyster from its broken shell. It took a lot of courage to swallow the thing. The tactility was gruesome but it was a deeply sensual experience.

Maya studied the Red Sea. It was hard to understand why they called it Red when it was so intensely blue.

Maybe they’d done something strange to it, primally changed the whole character of the ocean somehow. But there were waves rolling in, crashing against black rocks with an absolute and unhurried rhythm, under a million blue miles of hot and easy sky. “They say that drowning is really quick. It’s a good death.”

“[Don’t be stupid. Eat.]”

Maya had another oyster. Her stomach slowly eased from an anguished knot and rumbled in ecstasy.

“I’m hungry,” she said suddenly. “I can’t believe how hungry I feel. Good heavens, I think I haven’t eaten anything in days.”

“[Eat. Dead girls are worse than dead cats.]”

Maya ate another oyster, and stared out to sea. The waves glittered rhythmically. A strange intensity began to grip her. A waking up all over, as if her skin had become one giant eyelid.

The light of the world flooded within her.

She was broken inside. She knew then and there that she would always be broken inside. She would never become a single whole woman, there were scars far past healing at the very core of her being. She was a creature of pieces and seams, and she would always be pieces and seams.

But now, for the first time, all those pieces were gazing at the same thing. All of her, gripped by the same hot light, perceiving the world outside.

Then suddenly there was no window anymore. She was standing inside the world. Inhabiting the world. Not dodging through the fractured alterity within her own skull, but living and breathing in the world that the sun shone upon. It wasn’t happiness, not much like pleasure; but it was radiant experience that touched every shred inside her.

The world beneath the sun astounded her. It was a world vastly huger, and far more interesting, than any little world inside herself could ever be. That world touched her everywhere. She had only needed to really look. She was engaged within that world. Alive and aware and awake, in the clear light of day. The world was entirely, heavily, inescapably and liberatingly real.

“I feel the wind blowing through me,” she murmured.

Olga only grunted.

She turned and looked at her hairy companion. “Olga, do you understand anything I’m telling you? I hardly understand it myself. I’ve been having such a very hard time lately. I think that—I think I’ve been having some kind of fit.”

“[You don’t understand anything,]” Olga said. “[Life is patience. You are careless, you talk too much, you hurry too much. I know how to be patient. Grief is bad, but you get over it. Guilt is bad, but you get over it. You don’t know that yet. That’s why I’m wiser than you even when I’m a monkey.]”

“I’m truly sorry about your cats. Really, I’d do anything to make it up to you.”

“[All right, so get us more stones to eat.]”

“They’re oysters, Olga. They’re oysters, and sure, I’ll get us some.” The sun was shining on the Red Sea and it was hot and real. Wading on rocks would be fun. It would be bliss to swim. She began shedding her clothes.

“Oysters,” Olga said aloud. “[Words are so funny, aren’t they.]”

The scandal with Helene had locked them out of the Tête. Mere scandal couldn’t stop a man of Paul’s resourcefulness. He’d found them another meeting place in the Helleniki Dimokratia. He’d arranged a major immersion for them.

Greece in early summer was lovely. It was a country that could sprout a great civilization with the sweet ease of bread sprouting mold. The resort was outside the little city of Kórinthos, in the fragrant wooded hills of the Pelopónnisos. The resort was owned by a forty-year-old multimillionaire who had managed to make a terrific garbage strike in the poorly explored industrial wilds of eastern Deutschland. As one of the youngest truly rich people in Europe, the eccentric wildcatter delighted in doing things to annoy.

Now Paul and thirty of his vivid fellow-travelers were lounging around the resort’s glimmering pool, greased and naked and in big toga-pinned bath towels. They were in more trouble than they had ever been in their young lives, and they were in the best of spirits about it.

“Have a grape,” Benedetta said, offering a stemmed and lacquered bowl.

“Natural fruits are full of toxins,” said Maya.

“These are genetic knockouts.”

“Okay, give me a bunch.” She ate one. It was delicious. She stuffed in a handful.

“These are fabulous,” she said. “Give me more. Make me fat, ruin my stupid career.”

Benedetta laughed. Benedetta nude and laughing was a creature of intense and striking loveliness. She was like a greased naiad. They were all so effortlessly lovely, these modern young people. Immortals wrapped in togas of the finest technological rhetoric. Supernaturally healthy creatures.

“I’m hungry all the time now,” Maya said, munching her grapes. “It’s good. Now I belong to my body again. Or my body belongs to me.… ”

“It’s more fun to share the body,” said Bouboule, squeezing lotion into her palm. “I can’t reach the what-you-call, the backs of my feet. Get some boy here to rub my legs. They’re too lazy in all this sun, the boys need to work more.”

“You look better,” said Benedetta to Maya very seriously. “You mustn’t run away ever again. Take things easy now, keep control, stay close to us. We will look out for you. You know that, Maya. See?” She gestured around the pool. “Isn’t this lovely? Aren’t we looking out for you?”

“I’m too much trouble,” Maya said.

“I’m trouble,” Bouboule insisted. “I am the trouble. Don’t be greedy.”

“Trouble has been very good for us,” said Benedetta. “Trouble has made our name.”

“You don’t know enough about trouble yet,” said Maya.

“But trouble made us famous. Trouble made us truly vivid. We define vivid now. Look at us! We lose the Tête, but now we relax by this beautiful pool while some rich idiot trash tycoon picks up all our bills. He thinks we’re cute, because the cops say we are dangerous. He’s a rich radical. Isn’t it lovely that there are rich radicals? We are young European chic. This is radical chic. It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“Epater les bourgeois,” said Bouboule. “Succès de scandale. The old games are the good games.”

“Don’t you read the net, Maya? They are giving our group such nice names.”

“ ‘The Ghost Children,’ “ Niko spoke up sourly. “I hate that name.”

“It sounds good in Français,” said Bouboule.

“What’s wrong with ‘the Tête crowd’?” demanded Niko, restlessly. “We always just called ourselves ‘the Tête crowd.’ ”

“It doesn’t matter what we called ourselves,” said Benedetta. “We should make up our own new name. We’re creative people. We should take control of our own publicity. I like ‘the Illuminati.’ ”

“It’s been done,” said Niko.

“The Young Immortals,” said Bouboule.

“The People Who Take Paul Seriously,” said Maya.

“The Cosmos-Shattering Anarchist Goddesses,” said Niko. “Plus their boyfriends.”

“The Subjects under Investigation,” said Maya. “The Potential Defendants.”

“Those names stink,” said Niko, hurt.

“Not like my name does,” Maya said. “I’m a crazed outlaw gerontocrat who led you all into delinquency.”

Benedetta sat up, shocked. “That was stupid to say. Who says that?”

“Everyone will. Because I’m famous now, too. Once nobody knew who I was, so nobody cared. I could do anything I wanted, as long as I never made any kind of difference. Now you’re actually making a difference, and I’m in the thick of it. I’m your collaborator, but I don’t have any of your noble excuses. You may be visionaries, but I’m an illegal alien who embezzled a very valuable medical property.” Maya tapped her sternum. “I know that I can’t get away with what I’ve done. So I’m going to make them arrest me. I’ll give myself up.”

Benedetta thought this over. “I suppose you think you’re being noble,” she said slowly. “Well, you don’t understand our strategy. They seized your network server and took your palace away from us. So what? Some pet animals died. So what? Those are only little setbacks, now that we know what is possible. We’re already into other palaces. We’re under the skin of the gerontocrats. The old people can’t claw us out or push us aside anymore. Let them try! We’ll turn them inside out.”

“No, darling, it’s you who can’t understand. You’ve never been a gerontocrat, but I have. They don’t care about your virtualities. They don’t care about your silly problem with your infinite imagination. They pretend that they care what you think, because to admit they don’t care wouldn’t be polite. But they truly don’t care much about dreams. They care about actualities. They care about responsibilities. They know they’ll die someday. They know that you’ll dance on their graves. They’ll gladly forgive you anything you do, as long as they’re nice and dead first. But darling, I’m not some futurist rebel, I’m a heretic here and now. I’m dancing on their feet.”

“Maya, stop talking bad politics in English and do what Benedetta says,” said Bouboule. “Benedetta is very smart. Oh, look! Lodewijk is kissing her!” She broke into excited Français.

Maya missed her translation wig very much. She had lost it when she fled the actress’s apartment in Praha. She had lost everything she owned through running, not that she had all that much to lose. Mostly it hurt to lose her photographs. They were rather bad photographs, but they were the best she had ever made. She had carefully stored them inside the palace. Now the palace belonged to the Widow.

Niko and Bouboule were furiously excited to see Lodewijk in a sudden clinch with Yvonne. They were chattering and giggling. Even Benedetta took intense scholastic interest. If Maya paid complete attention to the gush of Français, she could decipher maybe a word in ten. Without a film of computation at her ear, these young people were impossibly distant, a generation from another culture and another continent. A generation eighty years away from her own.

She knew them, in her way: Paul, Benedetta, Marcel, Niko, Bouboule, Eugene, Lars, Julie, Eva, Max, Renée, Fernande, Pablo, Lunia, Jeanne, Victor, Berthe, Enhedu-anna-generally-known-as-Hedda, Berthe’s weird boyfriend what’s-his-face, Lodewijk, the new guy from Copenhagen, Yvonne, who’d been more or less officially Max’s girl until about ten seconds ago, that intense young Russian sculptor with twelve fingers, the cute Indonesian teenager who’d been hanging out a lot lately and was supposedly having the affair with Bouboule’s brother.… Her friends were wonderful. She had been very lucky to catch them during the brief larval phase in which they were more or less human. They loved her, and they loved one another, but they loved one another like friends and lovers should and did, and they loved her in the way that one might love a very rare and compelling set of antique portrait photographs. Bouboule rose with oily grace from her recliner and went to tease Yvonne and Lodewijk. Niko went along to make sure that Bouboule didn’t tease them too much, and also to enjoy the spectacle. Body language told her that much. Body language was a breeze without clothes.

Benedetta kicked out her slender legs on the woven lounger and turned to Maya. “He sent Yvonne so many poems, you see,” she said helpfully. “I just had to cry when I read them. I can’t believe that Danish poetry can make me cry.”

“Really, Benedetta, you don’t have to explain it to me. It’s my own fault for losing my nice shiny back-combed translator.”

“I like to explain things to you, Maya. I want you to understand.”

“I understand too much too well already.” She thought about it. “Benedetta, there is one thing I truly don’t understand. Why doesn’t Paul have a lover? I never see Paul with anyone.”

“Maybe he’s too considerate,” Benedetta said.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Are you telling me you don’t already know all about it?” She smiled. “Is this Benedetta I’m talking to?”

“It’s not that we didn’t try,” Benedetta said. “Of course we all tried to make time with Paul. Who wouldn’t want to be Mrs. Ideologue? Who wouldn’t want to be the genius’s favorite girl? Right? Completely lost in his heroic shadow. I want to pick up Paul’s dirty socks. I want to sew on his little buttons. That’s the life for me. Isn’t it? I want to gaze in silent adoration at darling Paul while he talks theory to my colleagues for fourteen hours straight. I want them to look at me and see that I have his heart in my little clutch bag. So that they can all die inside.”

“Are you serious, Benedetta? Oh, you are. You’re serious. Oh, darling, that’s too bad.”

“Did you ever have a really good talk with Paul? I have. Despite everything.”

“Yes, I have,” Maya said. “He once patted me on the hand.”

“I think it’s the cop. That’s my working hypothesis. The Widow’s our real rival. It’s his crush. A terrible crush. Isn’t that the proper word in English, ‘crush’? Anyway, it’s Helene. He wants Helene. He loves to feast with panthers.”

“Oh, no. That can’t be true.”

“He respects Helene. He takes her very seriously. He talks to her, even when he doesn’t have to talk to her. He wants something from Helene. He wants her validation, isn’t that the word? He wants to conquer the Widow, like climbing the Matterhorn. He needs to make her believe in him.”

“Oh, poor Paul, poor Benedetta. Poor everybody.”

“What does this matter to me?” said Benedetta, all lighthearted bitterness. “I’ll live for a thousand years. If I had Paul even for a hundred years, it would only be an episode. If I had Paul now, what would I do with Paul later, when things become interesting? As for the Widow, he can forget all about that. Helene is a creature of habit. She’ll never love any man who will outlive her.”

“Oh. Well, that explains a lot. I guess.”

“See, Maya? You’re not human. We’re not human. But we can understand. We’re artifice people. We always know it, before we can speak it aloud. We always understand much better than we think.”

A gong rang. It was Marcel. He shouted something in Français, and then in Deutsch, and then in English. The time had come for the immersion.

“I’m not going in,” Maya said.

“You should swim with us, Maya. It’s good for you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“This isn’t serious virtuality. It’s not holy fire. The immersion pool is only a rich man’s toy. But it’s pretty. And technically sweet.”

Shimmering liquid gushed as the others whooped and dived in. No one surfaced.

Benedetta wrapped her lustrous hair in a Psyche knot and pinned it. “I’m going in. I think I’ll have sex today.”

“Who with, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, if I can’t find someone willing to bother, maybe I’ll try by myself.” She smiled, ran, and dived headlong. White bubbles rose, and she was gone.

Paul patrolled the edge of the pool. Gazing in. Smiling. The picture of satisfaction.

“That’s everyone but you and me,” he called out.

She waved. “Don’t mind me, you go ahead.”

He shook his head. He drew near, walking slowly, barefooted. “I can’t leave you sitting here looking so sad.”

“Paul, why don’t you go?”

“You’ve been talking politics with Benedetta,” Paul concluded analytically. “We didn’t take these risks, and make this effort, just to add to our own unhappiness. That would only represent a moral defeat for us. We must have a good time with our youth, or there’s so little point in being young. So you see, you simply must come in with us.”

“Things like this frighten me.”

“Then I’ll teach you about it,” said Paul, perching cautiously on the foot of her lounge chair. “Think of the virtuality pool as a kind of crème de menthe. All right? On the top layer is a breathable silicone fluid. We’ve put a trace of anandamine in it, just for fun. On the bottom is a malleable liquid. It’s something like the fusible liquids that our friend Eugene uses to cast sculpture. But it’s much more advanced and much more friendly, so we can swim inside it. It’s a buoyant, tactile, breathable, immersible virtuality.”

Maya said nothing. She tried to look very attentive.

“The best part is the platform. The platform is a fluidic computer. It uses liquid moving through tiny locks and channels to form its logic gates. You see? We dive into the pool and we can actually breathe the very stuff of computation! And the computer instantiates itself as it runs. Soft liquid for software, hardened liquid for hardware. It abolishes certain crucial category distinctions. It’s a deeply poetic scheme. Also, it’s the sort of thing that makes gerontocrats have fits.” Paul laughed cheerfully.

“All right, I understand it now. It’s enormously clever, isn’t it? Now please go on in.”

He looked at her seriously, for the first time. He seemed to gaze completely through her head.

“Are you angry with me, Maya?”

“No.”

“Have I done something to hurt or offend you? Please be honest.”

“No, I’m not hurting, honestly.”

“Then please don’t refuse me when I ask you to share this experience with us. We’ll walk into the shallow end together. Very gently. I’ll stay very close. All right?”

She sighed. “All right.”

He led her by the hand like a man escorting a duchess to a quadrille. The fluid swarmed with millions of prismatic flakes. Little floating sensors, maybe. Sensors small enough to breathe. The fluid was at blood heat. They waded in. Their legs seemed to dissolve.

Inhaling it was far easier than she had ever imagined. A mouthful of it dissolved on her tongue like sorbet, and when the fluid touched her lungs they reacted with startled pleasure, like sore feet suddenly massaged. Even her eyeballs loved it. The fluid closed over her head. Visibility was very short, no farther than her fingertips. Paul held her hand. Patches of him emerged from the glittering murk: hands, elbows, a flash of naked hip.

They descended slowly, swimming. Down to the white viscous surface of the crème de menthe. It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm. Paul dug out a double handful and it boiled in his floating hands, indescribably active, like a poem becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.

Someone frog-kicked past her and burrowed headlong into the mass of it, like a skier drowning joyfully in some impossible hot snowbank. Now she was beginning to get the hang of it. It was beyond eros, beyond skin. Skinlessness. Skinless memory. Bloody nostalgia, somatic déjà vu, neural mono no aware. Memories she was not allowed to have. From sensations she was not allowed to feel.

Memory came upon her like a hammer full of needles. It was nothing like pain. These were sensations far stronger than the personality. They were experiences that consciousness could not contain. Enormous powers riddling the flesh that the mind could make no sense of. A software crash for the soul.

When she came to, she was flat on her back. Paul was heaving at her ribs, hard flat-handed punches of resuscitation. Fluid gushed from her nose and mouth, and she coughed up a bucketful.

“I blew apart,” she gasped.

“Maya, don’t try to talk.”

“It blew my mind.… ”

He pressed his ear between her breasts and listened to her heartbeat.

“Where is that ambulance?” Benedetta demanded. “My God, it’s been an hour.” She was wrapped in a towel, and shivering.

Paul said, “That was so stupid of me. I’ve read about Neo-Telomeric treatment. They suspend you in a virtuality.… I should have thought that this might happen.” He kept heaving at her lungs.

Maya rolled her head on the floor and tried to look around. There was a dried and glittering snail trail where Paul had hauled her from the pool across the chilly tiles. In the distance the others clustered, talking anxiously, looking her way. Her feet were up on blocks.

She began trembling violently.

“She’ll have another convulsion if you don’t stop,” Benedetta said.

“It’s better to convulse than to stop breathing,” he said, pushing hard.

Benedetta knelt beside her, her face in anguish. “Stop it, Paul,” she said. “She’s breathing. I think she’s conscious.” She looked up. “Will she die?”

“She almost died there in my arms. When I pulled her from the pool, the pupils of her eyes were two different sizes.”

“Can’t she live ten more years? That’s hardly anything, isn’t it? Just ten years? I know she’ll die and I’ll have to mourn her, but why should she die now?”

“Life is too short,” Paul said. “Life will always be too short.”

“I like to think so,” Benedetta said. “Truly, I hope so. I believe it with all my heart.”

The medical cops took her to Praha. It had something to do with a possible network-abuse case against her. Apparently most of the evidence was in Praha.

However, no one at the Access Bureau was willing to arrest her. The Czech Access Bureau cops apparently despised and distrusted Greek medical cops; it seemed to be some kind of weird European interservice rivalry. She did what she could to explain her circumstances. Once the Access Bureau cops down on the first floor began to fully grasp the situation, they became quite annoyed with her. They told her they would get in touch with her, and tried to convince her to leave the premises and go back with her escorts to some other country.

Maya was disgusted by the prospect of yet more time in a hospital, and refused to go. She asked them to find Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier. With profound reluctance, they said they would do this for her, and they assigned her a number.

She and Brett sat down in an elbow-shaped waiting room on a pair of nasty pink plastic chairs. After an hour, the Helleniki medical escorts carefully checked Maya’s tracking handcuffs and her tiara monitor. They were satisfied by this inspection, so they left. After this, pretty much nothing happened.

“Boy, this is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” said Brett.

“It’s good of you to stick with me through this, Brett. I know it’s boring.”

“No, no,” said Brett, adjusting her spex, “it’s a real privilege to be your personal media coverage. I’m so touched that you had your friends call me, and give me this great opportunity. It’s a fascinating experience. I’ve always been so terrified of the authorities. I had no idea their indifference to us was so complete and so total. They really hold young people in complete contempt.”

“That’s not it. Everyone has explained to them that I’m not a young person. It’s probably because I’m American. I mean, even nowadays, it’s always extra trouble to deal with people from outside the jurisdiction.”

Brett took off her spex and gazed at the floor’s worn and ancient tiling. “I wish I hated you, Mia.”

“Why?” she said.

“Because you’re everything I always wanted to be. It should have been me involved with exciting European artifice people. It should have been me up on the catwalk. You stole my life. And now you’ve even made a difference. You’ve even hurt them. I never even dreamed that I could hurt them.”

“I’m sorry,” Maya said.

“I dreamed about doing so much. I never had the nerve to really do much of anything. I could have done something. Maybe. Don’t you think? You’re pretty, but I’m as pretty as you. You sleep with anybody, well, I’ll sleep with anybody, too. I’m from the same town as you. I’m twenty, but I’m just as smart as you were when you were twenty. Aren’t I?”

“Of course you are.”

“I have some talent. I can make clothes. You can’t make clothes. What is it you have that I don’t have?”

Maya sighed. “Well, here I am sitting in a police station. Maybe you should tell me all about it.”

“You’re not young. That’s it, isn’t it? You stole my life because you’re older than me, and stronger than me. So for you, it was always easy. I mean, maybe you can panic, maybe you can be wracked with guilt, maybe you can even be terrified out of your skin by some stupid wired-up dog. But even when you don’t know who you are, you still know who you are. You’re five times older than me, and five times stronger than me. And you just won’t get out of the way.”

“The Tête people are young. They’re young like you.”

“Yeah, and they love you, don’t they? When you were my age, they’d have thought you were a hick and an idiot. Just like they think I’m a hick and an idiot. Because that’s what I am. They’re smart and gifted and really sophisticated, and the very best I can do is lurk outside their gates and watch them and envy them terribly. At my age, you wouldn’t have done any better than me. You would have done a lot worse. You wouldn’t even let your boyfriend take you to Europe. You dumped him and married some biotechnician. You turned into a bureaucrat, Mia.”

Maya closed her eyes and leaned back in the comfortless chair. It was all so true, and all so beside the point. “I wish you wouldn’t call me Mia.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t call me Brett.”

“Well, okay … call me Mia if you have to.”

“I hate it that you don’t even hate me back. You’re just bringing me along because I’m like a little good-luck charm to you. I’m like your hamster. And you couldn’t even keep your hamster.”

“That hamster creeped me out big-time. And you’re starting to seriously bug me, too.”

“You even talk just like some woman from a hundred years ago. Everybody in the whole world must be a complete idiot! I mean, once we really look at you, it’s so obvious! Your hair is terrible. Do you know you have big lines in your neck? I mean, they’re not wrinkles, they’re not allowed to be wrinkles—but boy, they sure aren’t natural.”

“Brett, stop it. You’re not talking any sense. First you say that I’m stealing your life, and then you say you couldn’t do anything with it anyway. So what’s your big problem exactly? Sure, maybe you’d have done a lot better than me, eighty years ago. But hey, you weren’t around then. You can’t romanticize the past to somebody like me. I was there in the past, all right? Eighty years ago, we basically lived like savages. We had plagues and revolutions and mass die-off and big financial crashes. People shot each other with guns when I was young. Compared to eighty years ago, this is heaven! And now you’re just abusing me, and not making one bit of sense.”

“But Mia, I can’t make perfect sense like you can. I’m only twenty years old.”

“Oh, don’t cry, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’m twenty years old and I’m an adult. But nothing I do is important. I can’t even get a chance to prove that I’m stupid. I suspect that I probably am, and I could live with that, I swear I could. I’d do something else, I wouldn’t work in artifice, I’d just live like a little animal. I’d make babies and maybe I’d potter around in a garden or something. But I can’t even manage that much, in this big safe lovely world you’ve built for me. I can’t get anywhere at all.”

Two Czech policemen arrived. They weren’t network cops, medical cops, or artifice cops. Apparently they were just common or garden cops from Praha. They produced phonetic cards from their pink uniforms and read her an extensive list of civil rights in heavily accented English. They then placed her under arrest and booked her into the local legal system. She was charged with immigration violations and working without a permit.

They threw Brett out of the building. Brett yelled and fussed vigorously in English, but the Czech cops were patient and they put up with it and they threw her out and dusted their hands. Maya was stripped, and then dressed in dun prison coveralls. They left the monitors on her wrists and the tiara on her head.

The Praha cops took her a few blocks away to a high-rise, and installed her in a very clean holding tank. There she was able to reflect with relief that she had not yet been charged with: (a) network abuse, (b) medical fraud, (c) complicity in illegal discharge into an urban sewer system, (d) abetting the posthumous escape of an organized criminal, or (e) any number of episodes of transportation toll fraud.

Nobody bothered with her for a couple of days. She was fed on a standard and extremely healthy medical diet. She was allowed to watch television and was given a deck of cards. Robots wheeled by every hour or so and engaged her in a very limited English conversation. The jail was almost entirely deserted, very little used, and therefore extremely quiet. There were a few gypsies somewhere in a decontamination wing; at night she could hear them singing.

On the third day she threw away the tiara. She couldn’t get the bracelets loose, however.

On the fourth day Helene had her brought out for interrogation. Helene had a tiny office on the top floor of the Access Bureau. Maya was astonished at how old and small and shabby Helene’s office was. It was definitely Helene’s own office, because there were neatly framed little hand-drawn originals on the walls that probably were worth more than the entire building. But Maya herself had worked for decades in offices far better equipped.

Helene was out of mufti and in a very dashing belted pink uniform. Other than that, there was a window and a chair and a desk. And a little white dog. From behind the desk rose a very big brown dog.

Maya stared. “Hello, Plato.”

The dog cocked his ears and said nothing.

“Plato doesn’t talk now,” Helene said. “He’s resting.”

The dog was still rather gaunt, but his coat was glossy and his nose was wet. He wore no clothing, but Helene had given him a lovely new collar. “Plato looks a lot better. I’m glad.”

“Please sit down, Mrs. Ziemann.”

“Why don’t we get on a first-name basis so I won’t have to mangle your beautiful last name with my terrible Français.”

Helene considered this. “Ciao Maya.”

“Ciao Helene.” She sat.

“I’m sorry, but business kept me out of the city a few days.”

“That’s all right. What’s a few days to the likes of us?”

“How good of you to be so public-spirited. I wish you’d shown that much patience under medical surveillance.”

“Touché,” Maya murmured.

Helene said nothing. She gazed dreamily out the office window.

Maya said nothing in return. She examined the peeling lacquer on her fingernails.

Maya was the first to break. “I can wait as long as you can,” Maya blurted, boasting, and lying. “I love your decor.”

“Do you know they spent a hundred thousand marks on your treatment?”

“A hundred thousand, three hundred and twelve.”

“And you took it in your head to dash off for a little European vacation.”

“Would it help if I said I was sorry? Of course I’m not a bit sorry, but if it would help anybody, then I’d act real polite.”

“What does make you sorry, Maya?”

“Nothing much. Well, I’m very sorry that I lost my photographs.”

“Is that all?” Helene rummaged deftly in her desk. She produced a disk. “Here.”

“Oh!” Maya clutched the disk eagerly. “You copied them! Oh, I can’t believe I have them back.” She kissed the disk. “Thank you so much!”

“You know they’re bad photographs, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know that, but I’m getting better.”

“Well, you could hardly help that. You’ve managed some Novak pastiches. But you have no talent.”

Maya stared. “I don’t think that’s up to you to judge.”

“Of course it’s up to me to judge,” Helene said patiently. “Who better? I knew Patzelt and Pauli and Becker. I married Capasso. I knew Ingrid Harmon when no one else thought she could paint. You’re not an artist, Mrs. Ziemann.”

“I don’t think I’m doing so badly for a student only four months old.”

“Art doesn’t come out of a metabolic support tank. If art came out of support tanks, it would make a complete mockery of genuine talent and inspiration. Those photographs are banal.”

“Paul doesn’t think so.”

“Paul …” She sighed. “Paul is not an artist. He’s a theoretician, a very young and very self-involved and very bad theoretician. When they thought they could mix art and science like whiskey and soda, they made an elementary blunder. It is crass and it’s a solecism. Science is not art. Science is a set of objective techniques to reveal reproducible results. Machines could do science. Art is not a reproducible result. Creativity is a profoundly subjective act. You’re a woman of damaged and fragmented subjectivity.”

“I’m a woman of a different subjectivity. And I’d sure rather mix art and science than mix art critique and police authority.”

“I’m not an artist. I only care for them.”

“If you despise science so much, why aren’t you dead?”

Helene said nothing.

“What are you so afraid of?” Maya said. “I hate to shatter your lovely mythos there, but if art can come out of a camera, it’s got no problem crawling out of a support tank. You haven’t been in the right support tanks. I have the holy fire now. That’s a silly name for it, I guess, but it’s as real as dirt, so why should I care what you call it?”

“Show me, then,” said Helene, folding her arms. “Show me one thing truly fine. Show me something truly impressive, that you or your little friends have done. I don’t count computer hacking, any idiot can break forty-year-old security systems. I don’t count new forms of media, any fool gets cheap novelty from a new medium. They’re clever, but they have no profundity! The Tête crowd loves to whine and complain, but artists today have every advantage. Education. Leisure. Excellent health. Free food, free shelter. Unlimited travel. All the time in the world to perfect their craft. All the information that the net can feed them, the world’s whole heritage of art. And what have they given us? Profoundly bad taste.”

“What do you want from them? Your world made them. Your world made me. What do you want from me?”

Helene shrugged. “What can I do with you?”

“Come on, Helene. Don’t tell me you haven’t already made up your mind about that.”

Helene spread her hands. “The children don’t understand. They truly think the world is fossilizing. They have no idea how close we are to chaos. The children want power. Power without responsibility, discretion, or maturity. They want to alter their brains! And you helped them to try it! Aren’t your brains altered enough?”

“Maybe. I know they’re pretty altered. Believe me, I can feel it. But really, I couldn’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me. How very reassuring that is. Imagine if there were genuine rebels in the modern world. Crazy rebels, true old-fashioned fanatics, but crawling out of brand-new support tanks. Did you know you can take any common tincture set and make enough nerve gas to poison a city? Here you are, darling, wrapping up in your sweet little furoshiki scarf and breaking the laws of nature with uninhibited force.… They think that you are cute. You think that you are cute. They think everything is under stifling control. Nothing is under control. Half the modern population has given up on objective reality. They are out of their minds on entheogens. They all think they see God, and if it weren’t for the fact that they love and trust their government, they’d butcher each other.”

“It’s sure a good thing you government types are so lovable, then.”

“You were government. You’re a medical economist. Aren’t you? You know very well how much trouble we’ve taken. How much labor that great effort has been. You are robbing poor, honest people so that you can have fun running off with the public’s investment in your body. Is that fair? It’s a miracle that we’ve built a just society where the rich and powerful don’t trample and steal the very lives of other people.”

“Yeah, I voted for all that,” Maya said.

“These children take the world we built for granted. They think they’re immortals. They might even be right, but they think they deserve immortality. They think that the increase in human life span is some mystical technological impulse. It’s not mystical. There’s nothing mystical about it. Real people are working very hard to achieve that progress. People are breaking their hearts, and giving everything they have, to invent new ways to postpone death. You’re not an artist, but at least once you were helping society. Now you’re actively doing harm.”

“They’ve really hurt you, haven’t they?”

“Yes, they have done real harm.”

“I’m glad they hurt you.”

“I’m glad that you said that,” Helene said serenely. “I thought you were crazy, a woman of diminished moral capacity. Now I can see that you’re actively malicious.”

“What are you going to do to me? You can’t make me be Mia.”

“Of course I can’t do that. I wish I could, but it’s too late for that. We can’t do anything about a failed experiment. Experiments fail, it happens, that’s why they are experiments. But we can stop the failures; and we can try something more productive.”

“Aha.”

“You’re a medical economist. You used to judge these processes yourself. Didn’t you? How would you judge a treatment that produces cheats and mad people?”

“Helene, are you really telling me that the other NTDCD patients are behaving as oddly as I am?”

“No, I certainly am not. More than half of them have been model patients. Those are the people I truly pity. They took those treatments in good faith and fulfilled their duty to society, and now they will be stranded. Marooned in a dead extension. Because of reckless malcontents like you.”

“That’s wonderful news.” Maya laughed. “That makes me feel so happy! It’s so lovely to know I have brothers and sisters.… And you’ve even given me my pictures back! They’re bad pictures, but at least they’re real proof I’m not Mia.”

“They’re not proof of anything.”

“They are. Well, they will be. I’ll prove that I’m better now. I’ll prove that I’m better than Mia. Go ahead, cut me off of treatments. I’ll prove I’m valuable, I’ll make everybody admit it. I’m worth much more to this world than a hundred thousand lousy marks.”

“You won’t prove it to me.”

“We’ll see about that. What do you know, anyway? You’re rich and famous, and a lot of men adored you, and you’re one of the major art collectors of the twenty-first century. Big deal, what does all that prove? Tell me who’s your favorite photographer.”

“I’d have to think.” Helene thought about it. “Helmut Weisgerber.”

“What, the guy who did that Arctic landscape stuff? The mountain climber? You really like Weisgerber?”

“I liked him well enough to marry him.”

“You really think Weisgerber was better than Capasso? But Eric Capasso was so sensual and lively. Capasso must have been a lot of fun.”

“Capasso had a great gift, but he was melodramatic. At heart he was a stage designer. But Weisgerber—nothing can touch a classic Weisgerber.”

“I have to admit I really love Weisgerber’s Dead Leaf series.”

“I commissioned those.”

“Really, Helene? That must have been fantastic.… ”

There was a timid knock at the door.

“I ordered us a mineralka,” Helene explained. “They’re very slow here.” She raised her voice. “Entrez. ”

The door opened. It was Brett.

“Come in, Brett. We were just having a little discussion on aesthetics.”

Brett put her backpack on the floor.

“Brett, this is Helene. Helene, Brett. I mean Natalie. Sorry.”

“This is a restricted area,” Helene said, rising from her chair. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“So I broke in,” Brett said, adjusting her spex. “I thought you might be beating her with a rubber hose or something, so I came in to document it.”

“We were talking about photography,” Maya said.

“She gonna give you behavior mod?”

“No, I think the plan is to shut down my extension treatment. Apparently it’s been causing a lot of civil trouble.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s real important. A bunch of rich gerontocrats and some twisted extension treatment. That must be really fascinating.” Brett wandered to the window and looked out. “Nice view. If you like power plants.”

Helene stared at her in astonishment. “Miss, this is a police interrogation. It’s confidential. You have no business here.”

“What are you going to do to those artifice kids?”

“That subject hasn’t come up yet,” Maya said.

“You mean, they’re disturbing the universe, and you two old cows are sitting here talking about photography.” Brett flipped the window latch with her thumb. “Typical.”

“I really must ask you to leave,” said Helene. “You’re not merely being rude, you are breaking the law.”

“If I only had a gun,” Brett said, “I’d kill both of you.” She opened the window.

“Brett, what are you doing?”

Brett ducked under the window frame and stepped out onto the ledge.

“Stop her,” Maya said quickly. “Arrest her!”

“Stop her how? I don’t have a weapon.”

“Why don’t you have a weapon, for heaven’s sake?”

“Do I look like I carry a weapon?” Helene walked to the window. “Young woman, please come in at once.”

“I’m going to jump,” Brett said indistinctly.

Maya rushed to the window. Brett sidled away rapidly out of their reach.

“Brett, this is stupid. Please don’t do this. You don’t have to do this. You can talk to us, Brett. Come back inside now.”

“You don’t want to talk to me. I can’t say anything that matters to you. You just don’t want to be embarrassed, that’s all.”

“Please come in,” Maya begged. “I know you’re brave. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

Brett raised her cupped hands to her face. There was a stiff breeze outside and her hair was flying. “Hey, everybody!” she shouted down into the street. “I’m gonna jump!”

Maya and Helene jostled for space inside the window frame. “I’m going out after her,” Maya announced, putting her knee on the sill.

“No, you’re not. You’re in police custody. Sit down.”

“I won’t!”

Helene turned and said something in Français to the dogs. The white dog left at a brisk little run, slipping through the open door. Plato stood up, fixed his silent eyes on Maya, and growled deep in his throat. Maya sat down.

Helene leaned out the window.

“Get out of my sight, cop,” shouted Brett. “I have a perfect right to kill myself. You can’t take that away from me.”

“I agree that is your civil right,” Helene said. “No one is trying to deprive you of your rights. But you’re not thinking clearly. You’re very distraught, and it’s clear you have been taking drugs. Killing yourself will not change anything.”

“Of course it will,” said Brett. “It will change everything, for me.”

“This is very wrong,” said Helene intensely. She was doing her best to be soothing. “It will hurt everyone who loves you. If you’re doing this for a cause, it will only discredit you in the eyes of all sensible people.” Helene glanced back hastily into the room. “Is she one of Paul’s people?” she hissed. “I’ve never seen her.”

“She’s just some kid,” Maya said.

“What was her name again?”

“Natalie.”

Helene stuck her head out again. “Natalie, look here! Natalie, stop it! Natalie, talk to me.”

“You think I want to live forever,” Natalie said. And she jumped.

Maya rushed to the window. Natalie was lying crushed in the midst of a distant little crowd. People were talking into netlinks, calling for help and advice.

“I can’t bear to look,” Helene said, and shuddered. She pulled back into the room, and took Maya by the arm.

Maya wrenched free.

“I’ve seen this so many times,” Helene said wearily. “They just do it. They just take possession of themselves and end their lives. It’s an act of enormous will.”

“You should have let me go out there after her.”

Helene shut the window with a bang. “You are in my charge, you are under arrest. You are not going anywhere, and you are not killing yourself. Sit down.”

Plato rose and began to bark. Helene caught at his collar. “Poor things,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “We have to let them go. There is no choice.… Poor things, they are only human beings.”

Maya slapped her face.

Helene looked at her in shocked surprise, then, slowly, turned her other cheek. “Do you feel better now, darling? Try the other one.”