Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [104]
“You’re very sexy,” the first model told her politely. “Molte grazie” Maya said tentatively. “There should be more couture for sexy women now, such a pity sexy women don’t have proper money,” the first model said. “When I was young and sexy they paid me so much money. It’s so hard for young girls now, it’s so hard to sell sexy. Really, it’s not fair one bit, not at all.”
The show was warming up outside; she could hear periodic bursts of applause. They brought her Vietti’s gown, still warm from the instantiator. This gown fit at least as well as the cheaper version Novak had given her, but Vietti’s stylists did not consider this a proper fit at all. Maya found herself naked and shivering beneath the impassive eyes and knowing hands of two men and three women. They slashed quickly at the gown with razorlike ceramic scissors and painted her goose-bumped flesh with quick-setting adhesive. In a fury of efficiency they squeezed and waxed her into the gown, then jammed her feet into pumps two sizes too small. Then, out the door in a bustle of anxious minders. Philippe hurried alongside her, retouching her face as she waited to take her cue.
When her cue came she left the curtain and walked as she had been taught. The catwalk’s floods were as bright as double-ranked full moons and the audience beyond their arc was a gleaming mass of spex, nocturnal eyes in a gilded swamp. They were playing a twenties pop song, a theme she actually recognized, a song she’d once thought was slick. Now the ancient pop song sounded lost and primitive, almost feral. Theme music for the triumphal march of the living fossils.
They’d dressed her as a glamorous young woman from the 2020s. A joke, a little shattering blast at the conceptual framework. Because, in stark actuality, she’d been a young woman during the 2020s. She had never been glamorous then, not a bit like this, not even for a moment, because she had been far too busy and far too careful. And now through some astounding fluke of chic she had avenged herself. The joy of it was both nostalgic and immediate, melding in her head in a fabulous jouissance.
White laserflashes puffed from cameras in the audience, growing into a crescendo as she walked. She felt so radiant. She was stunning people. She was whirling past their machine-shrouded eyes like nostalgic vertigo. She was the cynosure, the belle, the vamp, the femme fatale. Lost love beyond mortal attainment, dressed to kill, dressed to bury, dressed to rise again and walk among mortals. She had crushed them with stolen charisma. They had dressed a risen ghost in a Milanese couture gown and let her trample time underfoot. She was making them love her.
She took the little pirouette at the end of the walkway, kicked back a bit with a crack of heels, sneered at them happily. She was so high above them and so wrapped in lunar brightness, and they were such low fetid dark creatures that not a one of them could ever touch her. The walk was taking forever. She had forgotten how to breathe. The sense of constriction made her frantic with excitement. A white crane leapt onto the catwalk, immediately recognized that it had done something rash, and hopped off into the crowd with a jostle of pipestem legs and a snowy flap of wings. She hesitated just before the curtain, then whirled and blew the crowd a kiss. They responded with a cataclysm of photographic flash shots.
Behind the curtain she found herself tingling, trembling. She found a stool in a corner and sat and fought for proper breath. The crowd was still applauding. Then the music changed and another model slid past her like an angel on casters.
Novak found her. He was laughing.
“What a brave girl. You don’t give two pins, do you?”
“Was I all right?”
“Better than that! You looked so very pleased and wicked, like a little spoilt child. It was so pretty of you, so apropos.”
“Will Giancarlo be happy with me?