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:
MIA ZIEMANN WAS HERE
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.”
Holy Fire Page 29
