Holy Fire (30 page)

A bronze gong sounded. The three hundred diners rose from their little tables in unison, walked or limped or shuffled or rolled, and engaged in a huge and extremely well-ordered session of musical chairs. There was no fuss and no confusion. When they were done, everybody found themselves in the intimate company of new friends, with every appearance of spontaneous delight. Scurrying robots brought everyone fresh utensils and the soup course.

Josef’s new tablemates—he seemed to know them well, or perhaps they were broadcasting biographies to be picked up by his spex—were speaking Deutsch. Maya had set her translator for Czestina and Italiano. She could have inserted the little diamond egg for Deutsch, but whenever
she fussed with the necklace nowadays, it infallibly stopped and scolded her about how much she owed.

She felt ashamed of her necklace. The cheap gold and diamonds sparkled like so much radioactive junk on the exposed slope of her décolletage. She remained deaf to the Deutsch and said nothing, and her lack of contribution was not noticed in the slightest. She was young. She had nothing of interest to say.

The robots took the zuppa away and everyone moved again. A visually perfect, utterly bland, and intensely digestible cannelloni was served. Some guests chose to eat it, others merely beat it into submission. Then they moved again into fresh company for the delightfully molded and quite taste-free little gnocchi. Then again for gleaming rippled yellow wedges of a scent-free cheeselike substance. Then again for the fluted conical molds of the dolce. It was an intensely elaborate repast, none of it requiring much use of teeth.

The crowd adjourned to the gloomy grandeur of the Kio’s display suite. There were booths here and there against the walls, very daring booths that almost looked as if they were engaging in advertising. This tweaking of the rules was mere bravado on Vietti’s part, for blatant commerciality was not required in haute couture. True haute couture, the pursuit of genuine excellence in dress, required mostly patience. Patience was something that society’s glitterati had a very great deal of, these days. Couture was a game of prestige, and the money that supported it came partly from the wealthy, and mostly from Vietti’s licensing: spexware, scents, bath accoutrements, private spas, medicated cosmetics. An arsenal of intellectual property for a couturier who did not so much make clothing as tailor modes of living.

Here at last the lucky attendees, bones aching from the ascetic stools, found decent chairs in which to sit. They broke up into pewlike rows of competing subclasses. Various
Indonesian, Nipponese, and American politicians and financiers who were considered peacocks of the shiny set invested the front row in determined effort to impress one another. They were backed by layers of net-editors, store buyers, photographers, actors, actresses, common or garden millionaires, and hommes and femmes du monde.

There were not quite enough chairs for everyone: a deliberate and very traditional oversight. Novak took her backstage through a milling crowd of socialites, junior designers, and minor celebrities.

The area backstage was full of European storks, African secretary birds, and American whooping cranes. These tall and solemn feathered bipeds awaited their cue with impressive single-minded dignity, deftly sidestepping the anxious humans.

The legendary couturier was the nucleus of a buzzing and highly motivated crowd of atelier subordinates. Vietti wore his version of working clothes: a seal black, vaguely furry, multipocketed getup that would have looked splendid with aqualungs. He tracked events for the show on a rainbow pair of fluttering wrist-mounted display fans.

“Josef, so good of you to come,” said Vietti in English. He was tall and broad shouldered and square chinned and one of the very few people at the event who did not deign to wear spex. It was clear that Vietti had once been very beautiful. Many years and many pains had been at him. Now he had the slightly sinister ruinous dignity of the Roman Colosseum—although in point of fact Giancarlo Vietti was not Roman but Milanese.

Vietti glanced at Maya with the same absently indulgent gaze he’d been giving his obedient storks. His faded blue eyes widened suddenly. Finally he revealed a sparkling rack of ceramic teeth. “Oh, but Josef. But she’s so cute! You rascal. Really, you shouldn’t have.”

“So you do remember.”

“You thought I’d forget my first collection? It’s like
forgetting your first time under the knife.” Vietti gazed at Maya, deeply intrigued. “Where did you find her?”

“She’s my new student.”

Vietti very gently touched Maya’s jawline with one black-gloved fingertip. He plucked once at the end of a trailing length of her wig, and gave a quick adjusting tug at her shoulder seam. He laughed delightedly.

After ten seconds or so of hearty laughter, Vietti’s cheeks flushed patchily and there were odd aquatic gurglings beneath the suit. Vietti put his left hand to his midriff, winced, wriggled a bit on the deep internal hooks of his life support. Then he examined a wrist-fan and sketched at the membrane with his forefinger.

“Let’s put her on the catwalk tonight,” he said. “A show in Roma is always such chaos anyway. And really, this is too cute.”

“You mustn’t, Giancarlo. That’s costume plastic, it’s a knockoff.”

“I know this garment is your little joke on me, but we can get that fixed. Can she walk?”

“She can walk a little.”

“She’s very young, they’ll forgive her if she can’t walk.” Vietti looked at her, expectantly. “The name?”

“Maya.”

“Little Maya, I have a very good crew here. Let me put you in their hands. Can you walk in front of all these shiny people? They are terribly old, and they all have silly spex and too much money.” Vietti winked at her, a leaden pretense of camaraderie across the awful gulf of a century.

“Sure I can.” Perfectly happy and confident.

Vietti gazed at Novak limpidly. “And Josef—a few little pictures for me. For my little corner of the net.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Novak. “I haven’t brought the proper gear.”

“Josef, for old times’ sake. You can use Madracki’s gear, Madracki’s a poseur, he’s an idiot, he owes me the favor anyway.”

“I’m all out of practice with couture. Really, it takes everything I have these days just to photograph an eggshell, a spiderweb.… ”

“Josef, after you took the trouble to dress her! Don’t be coy. The face is awful, it’s true, that’s little-girl makeup, vivid kitsch for kids, but we can see to the face. And the wig’s a disaster.… But she’s so sexy, Josef! Everyone was so very sexy in the twenties. Even I was sexy then.” Vietti sighed nostalgically. “You remember how sexy I was?”

“When you’re young, even the moon and stars are sexy.”

“Ah, but people died so young in the twenties, so everyone was sexy then, everything was always so sexy. Even AIDS was sexy in the twenties. I don’t have a single sexy thing in this collection, your little girl can be my sexy thing tonight, it’ll be fun. Barbara will see to it.” Vietti flapped his wrist-fans shut and clapped his hands. “Barbara!”

“You’re very lucky,” Novak told Maya, very quietly. “He wants to like you. Don’t disappoint us.”

She whispered back. “He’s not going to pay me, is he? I can do this as long as I don’t get paid.”

“I’ll look after that,” Novak assured her. “Be brave.”

Barbara was a senior Vietti assistant. Barbara had the accent of West End London, and the broad features and kinked black hair of a West Indian, combined with the painterly peaches-and-cream complexion of a Pre-Raphaelite lass on a canvas. Barbara was sober and efficient and dressed as beautifully as a ranking diplomat. Barbara was eighty years old.

Barbara took Maya into the cosmetic studio, which was crowded with male models. Ten or so stunningly beautiful men, in various states of partial dress, sat before brilliantly lit videomirrors, chattering, flexing biceps and quadriceps, methodically primping.

“This is Philippe, he’ll look after you now,” said Barbara, and she put Maya into a red support chair at the
elbow of the cosmetician. Philippe was a small man with a tiny pinched mouth and brilliantined blond hair and enormous spex. Philippe took one look at her, blurted a horrified, “Oh dear no,” and sent off for spatulas and cleansing cream and adhesive towels and powerbrushes and a red alert for the hairdresser.

The two nearest models were having a chat. “Have you seen Tomi tonight? He’s bulked. He’s really bulked.”

“It’s the grandkid thing,” said a second model. “I mean, you get over having the kid, but when the kid has a kid, I dunno.”

“How’s your new house, Brandon?”

“So far so good, but we shouldn’t have drilled that deep in a seismic area. It’s got me all worried.”

“No, you got it made now, you and Bobby can seal it off, set up some hermetic germware, some very sweet discretion way down deep there, really, I’m green with envy.” The model examined his videomirror. The screen showed him an image without reversal. “Do my eyelids look okay?”

“You had them tucked again?”

“No, something new this time.”

“Adrian, the eyelids never looked better. Seriously.”

“Thanks. Did I tell you I enlisted in the army?”

“You’re kidding.” Effortlessly Brandon bent double and placed his palms flat on the floor. He went into a handstand, then flexed his elbows methodically. His muscular legs, toes pointed at the ceiling like a high-diver’s, looked as solid as cast bronze.

“Well,” said Adrian, “my medical’s running pretty high, and civil support, well, they’re a bunch of dirty finks. Aren’t they? But the armed forces! I mean, modern society—seriously—there has to be real authority! Somewhere on the far side of all these civilian broads, there have to be some serious guys willing to kick butts and take names. Capisci?”

Brandon curled into an effortless backflip. He examined
his washboard abdomen in the mirror, frowned, and found a reactive girdle. “How long are you in for?”

“Five years.”

“No problem, you could do a five-year enlistment on your head.” Brandon adjusted the girdle, which sealed tight with a violent sucking sound. “You got through the army physical and everything?”

“Sure, they love me. They put me in the officer corps.”

“They didn’t mind the prostate thing?”

“The prostate thing is history, the prostate’s very fresh and crunchy now. I’m doing weekends at a guard base in Cairo.” Adrian stopped suddenly. “Philippe, what are you doing to that poor kid’s eyebrows?”

“I’m in a hurry,” Philippe complained.

“That’s a period dress. You gotta do period eyebrows for this little girl, twenties eyebrows. You can’t just pluck her out like she was Veruzhina on the rampage or something, this is an ingenue look.” Adrian patted Maya’s forearm with fatherly aplomb. “Haven’t seen you around, kid. First time with Giancarlo?”

“Yes, it is. First time ever with anybody.”

“Oh Brandon, listen to that, she’s American.”

“Are you guys American, too?” she said.

“Sure,” smiled Adrian, “Europeans love the primal American male, big shoulders, upholstered, dumb as rocks, can’t hardly talk, what’s not to like?”

“They like us virile,” said Brandon. “They pay real well for virile. You gotta pay for virile, because the upkeep on virile is murder.” He laughed.

“You have very acid pores, sweetie,” Philippe told her with deep concern. “Have you been bathing in mold?”

“Just once.”

“You should. You really should! I’ve got a strain of cultured aspergillus that would do wonders for you. I need to move your hairline and depilate your upper lip. This may hurt a little.”

Tweezers plucked, brushes whirred, greases soaked, powders reacted and settled. In thirty minutes all the men were meticulously dressed. Some of them were taking their turns outside.

Philippe showed her the new face.

She had been through many facials before, all kinds of facials, decades of facials. Most had been entirely cosmetic, pleasant but essentially worthless. Some had been functional, high-tech, genuinely restorative facials that left one’s face raw and unsettled, the kind of face that wanted to be left alone in a warm dark room to collect itself. But Philippe’s work was artifice. Still a Maya face—but a composed, radiant, flawless Maya face. Curled and slightly tinted lashes. Smoky eyelids. Brows like wings. Skin to shame damask. Pellucid irises and eyewhites as glossy as china. Lips like two poppy petals. A finished face. Human perfection.

Then they put the new wig on and she left human perfection for a higher realm. It was a very smart wig. This wig could have leapt from her scalp like a supersonic octopus and flung its piercing tendrils right through a plaster wall. But it was the tool of a major couture house, so it would never do anything half so gauche. It was merely a staggeringly pretty wig, a wig in rich, solid, deeply convincing, faintly luminescent auburn, a wig as expensive, as cozy, and as well designed as a limousine.

The wig settled to her scalp with an intimate grip rather more convincing than the grip of her own hair. When it curled lustrously about her neck and shoulders it behaved the way a woman’s hair behaved in daydreams.

A gonging alarm sounded. The last men cleared out of the room. Four female models sauntered in. The women were tall and slender and fully dressed except for shoes. The shoes were being a lot of trouble, and anxious runners kept hauling new pairs in and out. The models, bored and patient, sipped tinctures and puffed at inhalants and ate little white sticks of calorie-free finger food. They nibbled
and dabbed at their hors d’oeuvres, and their preternatural arms moved with perfect eerie grace, from painted plate to painted lip.

The models were old women, and they looked the way that modern old women looked when they were in truly superb condition: they looked like amenorrheic female athletes. Like pubescent female gymnasts who’d been bleached completely free of any youthful brio. They showed none of the natural signs of human aging, but they were just a little crispy, a little taut. The models were solemn and sloe-eyed and dainty and extremely strong. They looked as if they could leap headlong through plate glass without turning a hair.