Holy Fire (27 page)

“[It’s a species of ontological limbo, really,]” said the television. It was Aquinas, the dog with the Deutsch talk show. The dog had been dubbed into Czestina. “[What I call my intelligence has its source in three worlds. My own innate canine cognition. The artificial intelligence network outside my skull. And the internal wiring that has grown among the interstices of my canine brain, programmed with human language. Among this tripartite intelligence, where does my identity reside? Am I a computer’s peripheral, or a dog with a cybernetic unconscious? Furthermore, how much of what I call ‘thought’ is actually mere facility with language?]”

“[I suppose that’s a problem for any talk-show host,]” agreed the guest.

“[I have remarkable cognitive abilities. For instance, I can do mathematical problems of almost any level of complexity. Yet my canine brain is almost entirely innumerate. I solve these problems without understanding them.]”

“[Comprehending mathematics is one of the greatest of intellectual pleasures. I’m sorry to hear that you miss that mental experience, Aquinas.]”

The dog nodded knowingly. It was very peculiar to see a dog nod in a conversation, no matter how well he was dressed. “[That assessment means even more, coming from yourself, Professor Harald. With your many scientific honors.]”

“[We have more in common than the layman might think,]” said the professor graciously. “[After all, any mammalian brain, including the natural human brain, has multiple functional sections, each with its own cognitive agenda. I have to confess something to you, Aquinas. Modern mathematics is impossible without machine aid. I had a simulator entirely interiorized]”—the guest, tactfully, tapped his wrinkled forehead—“[and yet I’ve never
been able to fully
feel
those results, even when I can speak the results aloud and even somehow intuitively sense their rightness.]”

“[Tell me, do you ever do math in your sleep, Professor?]”

“[Constantly. I get many of my best results that way.]”

“[Myself as well. In sleep—perhaps that’s where we mammals find our primal unity.]”

Slowly Professor Harald shook the dog’s elegant prehensile paw. The audience applauded politely.

M
aya woke at five in the morning. Her fingernails itched. They no longer seemed to fit her hands. The hormones surging through her made her nails grow like tropical bamboo. The cuticles were ragged, the keratin gone strangely flimsy. They felt very much like false nails.

She left the couch of Mrs. Najadova, fetched her backpack, crept silently out the door and down the stairs, and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil slept heavily, alone. She felt a strong temptation to crawl in next to him, to try to recapture sleep, but she resisted it. She wasn’t fitting properly inside her own skin. There would hardly be comfort now in anyone else’s.

She quietly found her red jacket. She poured water, then sorted nimbly through her happy little galaxy of analgesics. She decided not to take any more of the pills. She might need them badly next time, and she might not be in a place so understanding as Stuttgart.

Emil woke, and sat up in his bed. He looked at her with polite incomprehension, then pulled the bedspread over his face and went back to sleep. Maya methodically stuffed her backpack. Then she walked out his door. She did not know if she would ever be back. There was nothing there she wasn’t willing to abandon.

She walked into the starlit street, entered a gently glowing net booth, and called for net help. The net’s guidance was, as always, excellent. She linked to the netsite in San Francisco and connected synchronously to Mr. Stuart.

“What can I do for you this fine evening?” said Stuart, with a two-hundred-fifty-millisecond lag time but total vocal clarity.

“Mr. Stuart, I’ve been a longtime customer of yours and I need access to an old virtuality with defunct protocols.”

“Well, ma’am, if they’re in stock, we got ’em. Come on down to the barn.”

“I happen to be in Praha at the moment.”

“Praha, real nice town,” remarked Stuart, deeply unsurprised. “I can link you through if the price is right, no problem on this end if you don’t mind the lag. Why don’t you hang up and virch in through our primary server?”

“No no—that’s very generous of you, but I wondered if you had a colleague here in Praha who would understand my need for discretion. Someone in Praha that you could recommend to me. I trust your judgment in these matters. Implicitly.”

“You trust my judgment, eh? Implicitly and everything, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That’s really nice. Personal trust is the core global infrastructure. You wouldn’t care to tell me who you are?”

“No. I’d love to tell you, of course. But, well, you understand.”

“All righty, then. Let me consult this handy trade reference. I’ll be right with you.”

Maya fidgeted with her tender fingertips.

“Try a place called the Access Bureau on Narodni Obrany in Praha Six. Ask for Bozhena.”

“Okay, I got it. Thanks a lot.” She hung up.

She found the address on a Praha civil-support map, and she began to walk. It was a very long hike in the dark and the cold. Silent cobbled streets. Closed shops. Solitude. High clouds, and moonlight on the river. The otherworldly glow of the Hradcany, the castle dominating the old town as an ancient aristocracy had once loomed over Europe. All the variant spires of sleeping Praha. Iron lanterns, statuary, tiled roofing, dark arches and secretive passageways, wandering moon-eyed cats. Such a city—even its most ancient fantasies were far more real than herself.

Her feet on the cobbles grew hot with incipient blisters. The backpack dug into her shoulders. Pain and weariness pushed her into deep lucidity. She paused periodically, framing bits of the city with her camera, but could not bring herself to take a photo. Once the machine had touched her face, the viewfinder showed her only lies. It struck her then that the problem was simple: the lens was mounted backward. All camera lenses were mounted backward. She was trying so hard to engage the world, but her subject was behind her eyelids.

Just after dawn, she found the Praha street address. It was a stone-faced official-looking building, its rotten Communist-era concrete long since gnawed out and replaced with a jolly modern greenish foam. The building was still closed and locked for the night. There were discreet blue-and-white Czesky placards on the doors, but she couldn’t read Czestina.

She found a breakfast café, warmed up, had something to eat, repaired her damaged makeup, saw life return to the city in a languid rattle of bicycles. When the building’s front door opened with a programmed click of the clock, she was the first to slip inside.

She discovered the netsite on the building’s fourth floor, at the head of the stairs. The netsite was closed and locked. She retreated, winded and footsore, to the ladies’, where she sat in a booth with her eyes closed, and dozed a bit.

On her next attempt she found the door ajar. Inside, the netsite was a fabulous mess of vaulted ceilings, brass-knobbed doors, plastic-spined reference manuals, dying wire-festooned machinery. The windows had been bricked up. There were odd stains on the plaster walls, and cobwebs in the corners.

Bozhena was brushing her hair, eating breakfast rolls, and drinking from a bottle of animal milk. Bozhena had very luxuriant hair for a woman of such advanced age. Her teeth were also impressive: big as tombstones, perfectly preserved, and with a very high albedo.

“You’re Bozhena, right? Good morning.”

“Good morning and welcome to the Coordinated Access Bureau.” Bozhena seemed proud of her brisk technician’s English. “What are your requirements?”

“I need a touchscreen to access a memory palace set up in the sixties. A contact of mine in San Francisco said you could supply the necessary discretion.”

“Oh yes, we’re very discreet here at Access Bureau,” Bozhena assured her. “Also, completely out of date! Old palaces, old castles, all manner of labyrinths and dungeons! That is our local specialty.” Without warning, Bozhena touched her earpiece and suddenly left the counter. She retired into a cloistered back room of the office.

Time passed very slowly. Dust motes floated in the glare of a few paraboloid overheads. The net machines sat there as inert as long-abandoned fireplugs.

Four elderly Czech women, bureaucratic functionaries, filtered one by one into the office. They were carrying breakfast and their knitting. One of them had brought her cat.

After some time, one of the women, yawning, arrived
with a touchscreen, set it on the counter, checked it off on a notepad, and wandered off without a word. Maya picked the touchscreen from its grainy plastic box and blew dust from it. It was covered with peeling official stickers in unreadable Czestina. Ancient pre-electronic text, the old-style Czesky orthography from before the European orthographic reformations. Little circles, peculiar caret marks, a thicket of acutes and circumflexes and accent marks, so that the words looked wrapped in barbed wire.

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?”