Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

“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.”

She had nothing to say to that, so she hung up.

“He really hurt me when he said that,” she said to Benedetta, and began to cry.

“You should leave that old fool,” Benedetta said, munching a fresh canapé. “You should come with me to Bologna. Come tonight. We’ll catch a train. It’s the finest city in Europe. There are colonnades and communards and blimps. You should see the arcades, they’re so beautiful. And we have wonderful plans in Bologna. Come with us to the Istituto di Estetica. You can watch us as we work.”

“Can I take photos of what you’re up to?”

“Well …”

“I take such bad photos,” she mourned. “Josef Novak doesn’t take bad photographs. Sometimes they’re wonderful. Sometimes they’re just odd, but he never takes a bad one. Never, he just doesn’t make mistakes. And me, I never take good ones. It’s not that I have bad technique. I can learn the technique, but I still don’t see.”

Benedetta sipped her tincture.

“There’s no one me inside to see with, Benedetta. I can be beautiful, because there is no great beauty without some strangeness in the proportion, and I am all a strangeness. But being beautiful doesn’t make me all right. I’m not at one with myself. I am in fragments, and I’m starting to think that I’ll always be in fragments. I’m a broken mirror inside, and so my work in artifice is always a blur. Art is long and life just isn’t short anymore.” Maya hid her face in her hands.

“You’re a good friend, Maya. I don’t have many true friends, but you’re a true friend of mine. The years don’t matter like you think they matter. They matter but they matter differently. Please don’t be so sad.” Benedetta began to search in her jacket pockets. “I brought you a gift from Bologna. To celebrate. Because we truly are sisters now.”

Maya looked up. “You did?”

Benedetta searched through her pockets. She pulled out a suckered barnacle.

Maya stared. “That really looks like something I ought not to be messing with.”

“Do you know what a cerebrospinal decantation is?”

“Unfortunately, yes, I do.”

“Let me give this to you, Maya. Let me put it on your head.”

“Benedetta, I really shouldn’t. You know I’m not young. This could really hurt me.”

“Of course it hurts. It took me a year to prepare this decantation. It hurt me every time. Whenever I felt a certain way—the way that was really me … I put this thing on my head. And it sucked me out, and it stored me. I thought I would use it sometime much later, to remember myself if I ever got lost somehow. But I want you to have it now. I want you to know who I am.”

Maya sighed. “Life is risk.” She took off her wig.

The barnacle went in through the back of her skull. It hurt quite a bit, and it was good that it hurt, because otherwise it would have come too easily. Perfusions oozed and she went very calm and supernaturally lucid.

She felt the mind of another woman. Not her thoughts. Her life. The unearthly sweetness of human identity. Loneliness, and a little bitterness for strength, and a bright plateau of single-minded youthful self-possession. The ghostly glaze of another soul.

She closed her eyes. It was deep, it was deep posthuman rapture. Awareness stole across her mind like black light from another world. And then the gray meat slowly ate that other soul. Sucked it hungrily into a million little crevices.

When she came to, the barnacle was gone. She was flat on the floor, and Benedetta was gently wiping her face with a damp towel. “Can you speak?” Benedetta said.

She worked her jaws, forced her tongue to move. “Yes, I think so.”

“You know who you are?” Benedetta was anxious. “Tell me.”

“That was truly holy,” she said. “It’s sacred. You have to hide that in some sacred place. Never let anyone touch that, or defile that. It would be too awful, and too terrible, if that were ever touched.”

Benedetta embraced her. “I’m sorry, darling. I know how to do it. I know how it works. I even know how to give it to you. But I don’t know how to hide from what I am, and what I know.”

Three weeks passed. Spring had come and Praha was in bloom. She was still working with Novak, but it was not the same. He treated her like an assistant now, instead of a magical waif or a stranded elf. Milena could sense that there was trouble in the wind. Milena hated cops, but Milena was nevertheless making life hard, because Milena hated a disruption in the ancient Novak household even more than Milena hated cops.

Maya took a train to Milano and did a very boring shoot with some of Vietti’s very boring staffers. Because it was a working engagement, she saw almost nothing at all of Milano, and precious little of the Emporio Vietti. Vietti himself didn’t bother to show; the great man was off in Gstaad boiling his crabs.

The results of the shoot were perfect and glossy and awful, because it wasn’t Josef Novak. She learned quite a bit during the shoot, but mostly she hated it. Nevertheless, she thought it was a smart thing to do. People had been fussing entirely too much about the Novak photographs. They were all over the net and they were rather too beautiful and they were much, much too true. It seemed to her that people would be happier if she proved she could be boring. Just another silly model, on just another couture shoot. And besides, there was money in it.