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 to
ad 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 immortalit
y.”
“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!”
Holy Fire Page 28
