“Of course I’m not shocked by nudity, but it’s mold!”
“Such provincialism,” Paul said, half smiling. He was clearly piqued. “This was designed to be the friendliest city in Europe. Not that the citizens are particularly friendly—they’re like people in big cities anywhere. Rather, the city’s structure is uniquely friendly to its users.”
Paul pointed across the street, where a swarm of gnats was congregating in midair with a collective basso hum. “If you were lucky enough to acquire a room in that exclusive hostel over there—why, it’s all lattice. You can eat the walls. You can carry out any human excretory function wherever you please. Wherever you sleep, a bed of moss grows beneath you to cushion you. It’s always warm and damp. Very tactile, very epidermal, very sensual, extremely civilized. Here, the microbes are all domesticated. Life is recycled, but morbid decay has been beaten. Decay is gone like a bad dream.”
“Hmmm.” She studied the side of the hostel, a shaggy damp cascade of multicolored mosses. “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound half bad.”
They ducked together into a doorway as a truck passed, soaking the environment with a dense yellow fog.
“It was a visionary scheme. A city to free its users of material bioconstraint. A source of shelter, nourishment, inspiration, and, of course, permanent safety from the terrors of plague. Perhaps this final result wasn’t intended, but the city itself is so generous that it annihilates economics. It requires a peculiarly nonpossessive nature to live here in the long term. Rebels, dreamers, philosophers … The mentally retarded also find this quarter very convenient and popular.… Over the years, the quarter has become infested with mystics.”
“Penitentes?”
“Yes, Catholic extremists of all sorts, but also many Submissionaries. Ecstatic Submissionaries, and Charismatic Submissionaries. Mohammed’s disciples. Unfortunately the Ecstatics and Charismatics are intense rivals and bitterly hate one another.”
“Isn’t that always the way.” They stepped aside as three nude women shot by on bicycles, their swollen, bricklike calves pumping furiously.
“Fanatics always hate and fear their own dissidents far more than they loathe the bourgeoisie. By that symptom shall you know them.… That failing is what cripples the fanatics. There has been violence here in Stuttgart, street brawls, even a few killings.… Did you ever take an entheogen, Maya?”
“Never, no.”
“I did. I took it here.”
She looked around. Shaggy walls, greenness, hot misty light, an urban universe of little crawling things. “What happened?”
“I saw God. God was very warm and caring and wise. I felt enormous gratitude and love for Him. It was clear strong Platonic reality, totally authentic, the light of the cosmos. It was reality as God sees it, not the fragmentary halting rationality of a human mind. It was raw mystical insight, beyond all argument. I was in the living presence of my Maker.”
“Why did you do that? Were your parents religious?”
“No, not at all. I did it because I had seen religion consume other people. I wanted to see if I would be strong enough to come out of the far side of it.”
“And?”
“And yes, I was strong enough.” Paul’s eyes grew distant. “Ah, there’s a packet tube. I have a class to teach soon. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you now.”
“You do? Oh dear.”
Paul walked to the front of the packet tube and entered an address on a keypad. A vault door shunted open. He tossed his backpack into the padded capsule. “I’m leaving you because I must,” he said patiently, “but I’m leaving you in lovely Stuttgart. I hope you’ll put your time here to good use.” The capsule vanished. Another capsule instantly took its place. Paul hit a repeat key, crawled deftly into the padded interior, and doubled his arms around his knees. “Until we meet in Praha, Maya.”
“Au revoir, Paul.” She waved at him, and the door shunted with a brisk pneumatic pop.
She spent three strange aching days in Stuttgart, ghosting the honeycombed plazas and haunting the city’s peculiarly liberal apothecary malls. On the evening train back to Praha she collapsed into her beanbag and was left in silence and solitude. It felt so lovely to be within the familiar confines of a moving train again. She was vibrating with hormones and culture shock, and she hadn’t been eating properly. Every passing hour carried her further into new realms of experience, strange deep somatic spaces that words such as “hunger” and “weariness” scarcely seemed to describe.
Sleep beckoned. But then the translator, which was still tucked into her ear, began to sing inside her ear. Very gently at first, a distant musical warbling. The music grew louder. She’d never known the device to malfunction, so she was ready when it made a kind of musical throat-clearing tone, and addressed her directly. “[Hello, user Maya.]”
“Hello?” she said.
“[This is an interactive message for you from Ohrschmuck Enterprises of Basel. We are the inventors and manufacturers of this translation necklace. Do you understand us? Please signify by orally responding ‘Yes, I understand’ in your favorite language, English.]”
“ ‘Yes, I understand.’ ”
She looked around the train car. She was speaking aloud to thin air, but no one considered this unusual behavior. They naturally assumed she was using a netlink.
“[User Maya, you’ve been in possession of the necklace for two weeks. You have already used its functionalities in English, Italiano, Czestina, Deutsch, and Français. We hope you’ll agree that the translation service has been prompt and accurate.]”
“Yes, it certainly has.”
“[Did you notice the fine physical workmanship of our necklace? It would have been simple to do a cheap knockoff in copper and silicon, but we prefer the classic chic of real jewels. We at Ohrschmuck take pride in our traditional European craftsmanship, and your use of our shareware proves that you’re a discerning woman of taste. Any fly-by-night company can supply a working tourist translator nowadays. We at Ohrschmuck supply an entire library of modern European languages, including proprietary vocabulary segments featuring modern slang and argot. It’s no simple matter to provide our level of linguistic service.]”
“I suppose not.”
“[If you agree that our shareware necklace meets your exacting personal standards, then we think our efforts to please you should be rewarded. Doesn’t that seem just and fair, user Maya?]”
“What is it that you want from me, exactly?”
“[If you’ll simply wire us seven hundred marks, we can see to it that your translator is supplied with the very latest vocabulary updates. We also register you with our company, supply service referrals, and answer user questions.]”
“I’ll certainly send you that money if I ever come across that large a sum.”
“[We feel that we’re worth our price, user Maya. We’ll trust you to pay us. Our business is based on mutual trust. We know that you trust us. After all, you’ve been trusting our machine with the tympanum of your own right ear, a very tender and personal membrane. We feel sure that mutual respect will lead us to a long relationship. Our net-address will work from any net location in the world, and it takes cash. We look forward to hearing from you soon.]”
She was back in Praha by midnight, with her backpack and a shopping bag, giddy, exhausted, footsore, and in pain. But Praha looked so lovely. So solid, so inorganic, so actual, so wonderfully old. Bartolomejska Street looked lovely. The building looked lovely. She paused at Emil’s door, then went upstairs and knocked at the door of Mrs. Najadova.
“What is it?” Mrs. Najadova paused, looked Maya up and down. “What has he done to you?”
“There are certain days in a month when a woman needs time to herself. But he doesn’t understand.”
“Oh, that dirty, thoughtless brute. That’s so like him. Come in. I’m only watching television.” Mrs. Najadova put her on the couch. She found Maya a blanket and a heating pad and made her a frappé. Then she sa
t in a rocker fiddling contentedly with her notebook, as the television muttered aloud in Czestina.
Mrs. Najadova’s room was full of wicker baskets, jugs, bottles, driftwood, bird eggs, bric-a-brac. A blue glass vase with a bouquet of greenhouse lilies. And intensely nostalgic memorabilia of the former Mr. Najad, a great strapping fellow with a ready grin, who seemed to dote on skiing and fishing. To judge by the style of his sportswear he had been either dead or gone for at least twenty years.
Seeing the photos Maya felt a great leaping pang of pathos for all the women of the world who had married for a human lifetime, lived and loved faithfully through a human lifetime, and then outlived their humanity. All the actual widows, and the virtual widows, and those who sought widowhood, and those who had widowhood thrust upon them. You could outlive sexuality, but you never truly got over it—any more than you got over childhood.
Maya’s golden bird chimed on her breast. It had begun to chime the hours lately, with small but piercing cuckoo sounds, a tactful referral, apparently, to the time elapsing without a payoff. She tucked the bird into her ear. It began at once to translate the mutter of the television.
“[It’s a species of ontological limbo, really,]” said the television. It was Aquinas, the dog with the Deutsch talk show. The dog had been dubbed into Czestina. “[What I call my intelligence has its source in three worlds. My own innate canine cognition. The artificial intelligence network outside my skull. And the internal wiring that has grown among the interstices of my canine brain, programmed with human language. Among this tripartite intelligence, where does my identity reside? Am I a computer’s peripheral, or a dog with a cybernetic unconscious? Furthermore, how much of what I call ‘thought’ is actually mere facility with language?]”
“[I suppose that’s a problem for any talk-show host,]” agreed the guest.
“[I have remarkable cognitive abilities. For instance, I can do mathematical problems of almost any level of complexity. Yet my canine brain is almost entirely innumerate. I solve these problems without understanding them.]”
“[Comprehending mathematics is one of the greatest of intellectual pleasures. I’m sorry to hear that you miss that mental experience, Aquinas.]”
The dog nodded knowingly. It was very peculiar to see a dog nod in a conversation, no matter how well he was dressed. “[That assessment means even more, coming from yourself, Professor Harald. With your many scientific honors.]”
“[We have more in common than the layman might think,]” said the professor graciously. “[After all, any mammalian brain, including the natural human brain, has multiple functional sections, each with its own cognitive agenda. I have to confess something to you, Aquinas. Modern mathematics is impossible without machine aid. I had a simulator entirely interiorized]”—the guest, tactfully, tapped his wrinkled forehead—“[and yet I’ve never been able to fully feel those results, even when I can speak the results aloud and even somehow intuitively sense their rightness.]”
“[Tell me, do you ever do math in your sleep, Professor?]”
“[Constantly. I get many of my best results that way.]”
“[Myself as well. In sleep—perhaps that’s where we mammals find our primal unity.]”
Slowly Professor Harald shook the dog’s elegant prehensile paw. The audience applauded politely.
4
Maya woke at five in the morning. Her fingernails itched. They no longer seemed to fit her hands. The hormones surging through her made her nails grow like tropical bamboo. The cuticles were ragged, the keratin gone strangely flimsy. They felt very much like false nails.
She left the couch of Mrs. Najadova, fetched her backpack, crept silently out the door and down the stairs, and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil slept heavily, alone. She felt a strong temptation to crawl in next to him, to try to recapture sleep, but she resisted it. She wasn’t fitting properly inside her own skin. There would hardly be comfort now in anyone else’s.
She quietly found her red jacket. She poured water, then sorted nimbly through her happy little galaxy of analgesics. She decided not to take any more of the pills. She might need them badly next time, and she might not be in a place so understanding as Stuttgart.
Emil woke, and sat up in his bed. He looked at her with polite incomprehension, then pulled the bedspread over his face and went back to sleep. Maya methodically stuffed her backpack. Then she walked out his door. She did not know if she would ever be back. There was nothing there she wasn’t willing to abandon.
She walked into the starlit street, entered a gently glowing net booth, and called for net help. The net’s guidance was, as always, excellent. She linked to the netsite in San Francisco and connected synchronously to Mr. Stuart.
“What can I do for you this fine evening?” said Stuart, with a two-hundred-fifty-millisecond lag time but total vocal clarity.
“Mr. Stuart, I’ve been a longtime customer of yours and I need access to an old virtuality with defunct protocols.”
“Well, ma’am, if they’re in stock, we got ’em. Come on down to the barn.”
“I happen to be in Praha at the moment.”
“Praha, real nice town,” remarked Stuart, deeply unsurprised. “I can link you through if the price is right, no problem on this end if you don’t mind the lag. Why don’t you hang up and virch in through our primary server?”
“No no—that’s very generous of you, but I wondered if you had a colleague here in Praha who would understand my need for discretion. Someone in Praha that you could recommend to me. I trust your judgment in these matters. Implicitly.”
“You trust my judgment, eh? Implicitly and everything, huh?”
“Yes.”
“That’s really nice. Personal trust is the core global infrastructure. You wouldn’t care to tell me who you are?”
“No. I’d love to tell you, of course. But, well, you understand.”
“All righty, then. Let me consult this handy trade reference. I’ll be right with you.”
Maya fidgeted with her tender fingertips.
“Try a place called the Access Bureau on Narodni Obrany in Praha Six. Ask for Bozhena.”
“Okay, I got it. Thanks a lot.” She hung up.
She found the address on a Praha civil-support map, and she began to walk. It was a very long hike in the dark and the cold. Silent cobbled streets. Closed shops. Solitude. High clouds, and moonlight on the river. The otherworldly glow of the Hradcany, the castle dominating the old town as an ancient aristocracy had once loomed over Europe. All the variant spires of sleeping Praha. Iron lanterns, statuary, tiled roofing, dark arches and secretive passageways, wandering moon-eyed cats. Such a city—even its most ancient fantasies were far more real than herself.
Her feet on the cobbles grew hot with incipient blisters. The backpack dug into her shoulders. Pain and weariness pushed her into deep lucidity. She paused periodically, framing bits of the city with her camera, but could not bring herself to take a photo. Once the machine had touched her face, the viewfinder showed her only lies. It struck her then that the problem was simple: the lens was mounted backward. All camera lenses were mounted backward. She was trying so hard to engage the world, but her subject was behind her eyelids.
Just after dawn, she found the Praha street address. It was a stone-faced official-looking building, its rotten Communist-era concrete long since gnawed out and replaced with a jolly modern greenish foam. The building was still closed and locked for the night. There were discreet blue-and-white Czesky placards on the doors, but she couldn’t read Czestina.
She found a breakfast café, warmed up, had something to eat, repaired her damaged makeup, saw life return to the city in a languid rattle of bicycles. When the building’s front door opened with a programmed click of the clock, she was the first to slip inside.
She discovered the netsite on the building’s fourth floor, at the head of the stairs. The netsite was closed and locked. She retreated, winded and footsore, to the ladies’, where she
sat in a booth with her eyes closed, and dozed a bit.
On her next attempt she found the door ajar. Inside, the netsite was a fabulous mess of vaulted ceilings, brass-knobbed doors, plastic-spined reference manuals, dying wire-festooned machinery. The windows had been bricked up. There were odd stains on the plaster walls, and cobwebs in the corners.
Bozhena was brushing her hair, eating breakfast rolls, and drinking from a bottle of animal milk. Bozhena had very luxuriant hair for a woman of such advanced age. Her teeth were also impressive: big as tombstones, perfectly preserved, and with a very high albedo.
“You’re Bozhena, right? Good morning.”
“Good morning and welcome to the Coordinated Access Bureau.” Bozhena seemed proud of her brisk technician’s English. “What are your requirements?”
“I need a touchscreen to access a memory palace set up in the sixties. A contact of mine in San Francisco said you could supply the necessary discretion.”
“Oh yes, we’re very discreet here at Access Bureau,” Bozhena assured her. “Also, completely out of date! Old palaces, old castles, all manner of labyrinths and dungeons! That is our local specialty.” Without warning, Bozhena touched her earpiece and suddenly left the counter. She retired into a cloistered back room of the office.
Time passed very slowly. Dust motes floated in the glare of a few paraboloid overheads. The net machines sat there as inert as long-abandoned fireplugs.
Four elderly Czech women, bureaucratic functionaries, filtered one by one into the office. They were carrying breakfast and their knitting. One of them had brought her cat.
After some time, one of the women, yawning, arrived with a touchscreen, set it on the counter, checked it off on a notepad, and wandered off without a word. Maya picked the touchscreen from its grainy plastic box and blew dust from it. It was covered with peeling official stickers in unreadable Czestina. Ancient pre-electronic text, the old-style Czesky orthography from before the European orthographic reformations. Little circles, peculiar caret marks, a thicket of acutes and circumflexes and accent marks, so that the words looked wrapped in barbed wire.
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