Bozhena languidly reemerged, carefully tucked in her shin-length gray skirt, and sat at her magisterial plastic desk. She searched methodically through six drawers. Finally she found a lovely cast-glass paperweight. She set it on her tabletop and began toying with it.
“Excuse me,” Maya said. “Do you happen to have any material on Josef Novak?”
Bozhena’s face froze. She rose from her desk and came to the counter. “Why would you want to investigate Mr. Novak? Who told you we had Josef Novak in our archives here?”
“I’m Mr. Novak’s new pupil,” Maya lied cheerfully. “He’s teaching me photography.”
Bozhena’s face fell into deep confusion. “You? Why? Novak’s student? But you’re a foreigner. What’s he done this time, poor fellow?” Bozhena found her purse and began brushing her hair with redoubled vigor.
The door opened and two Czech cops in pink uniforms came in. They sat at a wooden table, booted up a screen, and sipped hot tinctures from cartons.
It struck Maya suddenly that the trusted Mr. Stuart had sent her directly to a Praha police bureau. These people were all cops. This was a cops’ research establishment. She was surrounded by Czech virtuality cops. This was an antiquarian netsite, all right—but only because the Czech police had some of the worst equipment in the world.
“Do you know Helene?” Maya said casually, leaning on the countertop. “Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier?”
“The Widow’s in and out,” shrugged Bozhena, examining her nails. “All the time. Why, I don’t know. She never has a good word for us.”
“I need to call her this morning and clear a few little things. Do you happen to have Helene’s net-address handy?”
“This is a netsite, not a reference service,” Bozhena said tartly. “We love to help in Access Bureau, we are so very open and friendly in Praha with nothing to hide! But the Widow’s not based in Praha so that’s not my department.”
“Look,” Maya said, “if you’re not going to help me on the Novak case, just say so straight out.”
“I never said that,” Bozhena parried.
“I’ve got other methods, and other contacts, and other ways to go about my job, you know.”
“I’m sure you do, Miss Amerika,” Bozhena said, with an acid scowl.
Maya rubbed her bloodshot eyes. “Look, let’s make this real simple and easy for both of us,” she said. “I’ll just elbow my way through your dense crowd of eager clients here, and I’ll scare up some action on that old magnetic tracker set. Don’t think you have to help me, or anything. You don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you. We’ll both just pretend this isn’t really happening. Okay?”
Bozhena said nothing. She retreated back to her desk.
Fear and adrenaline had made Maya invincible. She found goggles and gloves. It struck her that no one ever bothered or interrupted people who were busy in goggles and gloves. Goggles and gloves would make her invisible.
She bullied the ancient machine into operation and she stroked in the passtouch. She conjured up the memory palace seemingly through sheer force of will.
The familiar architect’s office appeared all around her, plating the screens a finger’s width from the damp surfaces of her eyeballs. Someone had tampered with the blackboard. Along with the curly Kilroy and the greenish scrawl MAYA WAS HERE, the blackboard now had a neatly printed MAYA PRESS HERE and a button drawn in multicolored chalk.
Maya thought it over, then pressed the colored button on the chalkboard. The gloves felt good and solid, but nothing happened.
She looked around the virtual office. The place was aswarm with geckos. There were repair geckos all over the place, some as big as bread loaves and others milling like ants. The broken table had been removed. The plants in the garden outside were much better rendered now. They closely resembled real vegetation.
One of the armchairs suffered a sudden identity crisis and morphed itself into Benedetta. The virtual Benedetta was in a black hourglass cocktail dress and a cropped pink jacket with black piping. She had the unnaturally elongated legs of a fashion sketch, with highly improbable stiletto heels. Benedetta’s face was an excellent likeness, but the virtual hair was bad. Virtual hair almost always looked phony, either like a rubber casting or some hyperactive Medusa subroutine. Benedetta had unwisely gone for an arty Medusa gambit, which rather overloaded the local data flow. When she moved too quickly, big shining wads of coiffure flickered violently in and out of existence.
The virtual model’s lips moved soundlessly. “Ciao Maya.”
Maya found a dangling plug on the spex and tucked it into her ear. “Ciao Benedetta.”
Benedetta made a little curtsy. “Are you surprised?”
“I’m a little disappointed,” Maya said. “Is my vocal level coming across okay?”
“Yes, I hear you fine.”
“I never dreamed you’d steal my passtouch and take advantage of my act of trust. Really, Benedetta, how childish of you.”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” Benedetta said contritely. “I wanted to admire the palazzo architecture and the period detail. And all the lovely antique coding structures.”
“Of course you did, darling. And did you find the pornography, too?”
“Yes, of course I found the pornography. But I left this call button for you”—Benedetta gestured at the chalkboard—“because we have a little problem now. A little problem in the palazzo.”
“We do, do we?”
“Something is loose in here. Something alive.”
“Something you let loose, or something you found loose?”
“I can’t tell you, because I don’t know,” Benedetta said. “I tried to find out, but I can’t. Neither can anyone else.”
“I see. How many ‘anyone elses’ have you let through here, exactly?”
“Maya, this old palazzo is very big. Wonderfully big. There’s a lot of space. No one was using it, and it’s wonderful that there are no network cops here. Please don’t be jealous. Believe me, you never would have noticed us. If not for this little trouble.”
“This isn’t good news.”
“But there is very good news. There’s money inside this place. Did you know that? Real money! Old people’s certified money!”
“How nice. Did you and the gang leave any money for me?”
“Listen, I so much want to talk to you,” said Benedetta. “About everything. But this truly is not a good time. I’m playing cards with my father right now. I don’t like to do this kind of talk from my father’s house. Can you come to Bologna and see me? I have a lot I can offer to you. I want to be your friend.”
“Maybe I can come. Exactly how much money did you find? Do I have enough to pay off these Swiss shareware pests for this diamond necklace you gave me?”
“Don’t worry about the necklace,” Benedetta said. “The Ohrschmuck company went broke. They asked too much, so no one ever paid them. Just give the necklace to some other woman. She can use it free for a month before it starts to complain in the ear.”
“You’re such a treasure, darling.”
“Let me call you later, Maya. I’ve been bad, I admit it. I will do for you so much better if you only give me a chance! Just for one thing, I can give you much better online presence—do you know that you look like a big ugly blue block to me? Where are you now?”
“I’m nowhere that you need to know about. Leave me a message with Paul.”
Benedetta’s virtual mouth stretched in surprise. “You didn’t tell Paul about your palace, I hope.”
“Why shouldn’t I tell Paul?”
“Darling, Paul is only a theorist. But I am an activist.”
“Maybe I’m a theorist, too.”
“I don’t think that you are,” Benedetta said. “I don’t think that at all. Am I wrong?”
Maya considered this. “All right, if we can’t tell Paul, then leave a message for me at the Tête. I go there almost every day. I’m on pretty good terms with Klaus.”
“A
ll right. At the Tête. That’s a good idea. Klaus is a good man, he is so discreet. Now I truly must go.” Benedetta morphed. The chair recovered and lay sideways on the floor.
Maya tried to set the toppled chair upright. Her gloved hands plunged through it repeatedly, with the deep ontological uselessness of dysfunctional software. She struggled with the chair for quite some time, her back bent, wrestling air at various experimental angles.
She then became aware of another presence in the virtual room. She gazed about herself cautiously, not moving. The virtual presence oozed through the wall, moved through her presence like a crawling wind, exited through the far wall. A fractured glaze creeping through the fabric of computation.
Maya yanked her head from the spex and earphones. She stripped the gloves away from her swollen fingertips. She shut the machine down. Then she examined the sweat-smeared gear, regretting the vilely incriminating cloud of human DNA she had just deposited on Czech police equipment. She scrubbed at the spex a bit with her sleeve, just as if that token gesture would help anything. DNA was microscopic. Evidence was everywhere. Evidence was totipresent, the truth seething below awareness, just like germs.
But crime could not become a crime unless somebody, somehow, cared enough to notice.
She decided not to steal the handy touchscreen.
She was tired now, so she got onto a train and slept for two hours as it ran back and forth below the city. Then she walked into a netsite at the Malostranska tubestation and asked the net to find her Josef Novak. The net offered his address in a split second. Maya took the tube back to Karlovo Namesti and walked, footsore and limping, to Josef Novak’s home. The place did not look promising. She examined her civil-support map, cross-checked it twice, and then pushed on the doorbell. No response. She pushed harder and the defunct doorbell cracked inside its plastic case.
She pounded on the iron-bound wooden door with the side of her fist. There were muffled noises from the interior, but nobody bothered to answer. She banged again, harder.
An elderly Czech woman opened the door, which was secured on a short brass chain. She wore a head-scarf and spex. “[What do you want?]”
“I want Josef Novak. I need to speak to him.”
“[I don’t speak English. Josef isn’t taking any visitors. Especially not tourists. Go away.]” The door slammed shut.
Maya went out and had some chutovky with a side of knedliky. These little setbacks were very useful. If she remembered to eat every time she was locked out, shut out, or thrown out, it would keep her fit and healthy. After a final carton of tasty government-issue blancmange she returned to Novak’s place and knocked again.
The same woman answered, this time in a thick winter night-robe. “[You again! The girl who smells like Stuttgart. Don’t bother us, it’s very rude and it’s useless!]” Slam.
Another good reminder. Maya walked down the block and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil wasn’t there. Emil’s absence might have been worrisome, but she deduced from the state of his kitchen that he’d had to leave the place to eat. She scrubbed and mopped for a long time, and inoculated the studio with certain handy packets she’d acquired in Stuttgart. The studio began to reek of fresh bananas. This solid victory over the unseen world of the microbial gave Maya a great sense of accomplishment. She walked back to Novak’s in the cold and darkness, and knocked again.
A bent white-haired man opened the door. He had a black jacket with one sleeve. The old man had only one arm. “[What do you want?]”
“Do you speak English, Mr. Novak?”
“If I must.”
“I’m your new pupil. My name is Maya.”
“I don’t take pupils,” Novak said politely, “and I’m leaving for Roma tomorrow.”
“Then I’m also leaving for Roma tomorrow.”
Novak stared at her through the wedge of light in his chained door.
“Glass Labyrinth,” Maya said. “The Sculpture Gardens. The Water Anima. Vanished Statues.”
Novak sighed. “Those titles sound so very bad in English.… Well, I suppose you had better come in.”
The walls on the ground floor of Novak’s home were a wooden honeycomb: a phantasmagoria of hexagonal storage racks. Jointed wooden puppets. Glassware. Etching tools. Feathers. Wicker. Postage stamps. Stone eggs. Children’s marbles. Fountain pens and paper clips. Eyeglasses. Relief masks. Compasses and hourglasses. Medals. Belt buckles. Pennywhistles and windup toys. Some of the cubbyholes were stuffed to bursting. Others spare, a very few entirely empty. Like a wooden hive infested by some sentient race of time-traveling bees.
There were study tables, but no place to sit. The bare floor was waxed and glossy.
A sleepy female voice called down from the stairs. “[What is it?]”
“[A guest has come,]” Novak said. He reached into his baggy trouser pocket and pulled out an enameled lighter. “[Is it that stupid American girl with short hair?]”
“[Exactly, the very same.]” Novak thumb-clicked a muddy flame and methodically lit a candelabrum. Six candle flames waxed. The overhead lights blinked out. The room was immersed in deep yellow. “[Darling, send down a beanbag, won’t you?]”
“[It’s late. Tell her to go away.]”
“[She’s very pretty,]” said Novak. “[There are sometimes uses for someone very pretty.]”
There was silence. Then a pair of black beanbags came slithering down the candlelit stairs like a pair of undulant blood puddings.
Novak sat in his bag and gestured one-armed at Maya. His right arm was gone at the shoulder. He seemed very much at ease with his loss, as if a single arm were perfectly adequate and other people were merely being excessive.
Maya heaved her backpack onto the wooden floor. She sat in her beanbag. “I want to learn photography.”
“Photography.” Novak nodded. “It’s wonderful! So very real, so much like life. If you are a Cyclops. Nailed in one spot. For one five-thousandth of a second.”
“I know you can teach me.”
“I have taught photography,” Novak admitted like a man under torture. “I have taught human beings to see like a camera. What a fine accomplishment! Look at this poor little house of mine. I’ve been a photographer for ninety years, ninety! What do we have for all that hard work, the old woman and I? Nothing. All the terrible market crashes! Devaluations! Confiscatory taxes! Abolitions and eliminations! Political troubles. Plagues! Bank crashes! Nothing solid, nothing that lasts.”
Novak glared at her with resigned suspicion, gone all peasant shrewdness suddenly, protuberant ears, bristling eyebrows, a swollen old-man’s nose like a potato. “We have no property, we have no assets. We are very old people, but we have nothing for you, girl. You should go, and save everyone trouble.”
“But you’re famous.”
“I outlived my fame, I am forgotten. I only go on because I cannot help myself.”
Maya gazed around the sitting room. A unique melange of eclectic clutter and utter cleanliness. A thousand little objects on the razor’s edge of art and junk. A library of gimmickry rocket-blasted from the grip of time. Yet there was not a speck of dust in the place. Those who worship the Muses end up running a museum.
The burning candles gnawed their white cores of string inside their waxy sheaths. The white-haired Novak seemed perfectly at ease with an extended silence.
Maya pointed to the top of the honeycomb of wooden shelving. “That crystal vase,” she said, “that decanter up there.”
“Old Bohemian glass,” said Novak.
“It’s very beautiful.”
Novak whistled softly. A trapdoor opened in the wall beside the kitchen and a human arm flopped out.
The arm landed on the wooden floor with a meaty slap of five outstretched fingers. Its naked shoulder had a feathery clump like the curled marine feet of a barnacle.
The arm flexed and leapt, flexed and leapt, pogoing deftly across the gleaming candlelit floorboards. It twisted and ducked, and then tunneled with unearthly spee
d into a scarcely visible slit in the empty shoulder of Novak’s jacket.
Novak squinted, winced a bit, then lifted his artificial hand and flexed it gently.
He then shifted casually onto his left elbow in the beanbag and reached far across the room. The right arm stretched out, its hairless skin gone all bubbled and granular, his forearm shrinking to the width of bird bone. His distant hand grasped the decanter. He fetched it back, his arm reassuming normal size with a quiet internal rasp, like ashes crunching underfoot.
He gave Maya the decanter. She studied it in the candlelight.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “I lived inside it for a little while. It was a universe.”
Novak shrugged. With his new arm and shoulder attached, he shrugged in remarkable fashion. “Poets have said the same for a single grain of sand.”
She looked up. “This glass is made of sand, isn’t it? A camera’s lens is made from sand. A data bit is like a single grain of sand.”
Slowly, Novak smiled. “There’s good news,” he said. “I like you.”
“It’s such a wonder to hold the glass labyrinth,” she said, turning the decanter in her hands. “It seemed so much more real when it was virtual.” She gave it back to him.
Novak examined his decanter idly, stroking it with the left hand, the right one like a glove-shaped set of rubber forceps. “Well, it’s very old. A little shape from culture’s attic. Oh attic shape!” He began to recite aloud, in Czestina. “ ‘[Designed with marble men and marble women, and forest branches, and weeds crushed by the feet. You silent formation. You twist our minds as if you were eternity. You poem of ice! When old age kills this generation, you will remain in the thick of other people’s troubles. A friend to humanity. You say to us, “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.” We know nothing else and we need to know no more.]’ ”
“Was that poetry?”
“An old English poem.”
Holy Fire Page 22
