Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

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.