Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [118]
“These are fine,” Emil said sincerely. “I’d never seen such justice done to my work. I think you should sign these.”
“No, I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“It was so good of you to come. What do I owe you?”
“No charge, Emil, it’s just apprentice work. I was glad to have the experience.”
“No one so determined should be called a mere apprentice,” said Emil gallantly. “I hope you’ll come again. Have we worked together before? It seems to me that I know you.”
“It does? You do?”
Hitomi sidled over rhythmically and slipped her slender arm over Emil’s shoulders.
“It wasn’t you,” Emil said, leafing through his album. “Your photos are much better than these others.”
“We might have met at the Tête du Noyé,” Maya suggested, unable to resist. “I go there rather often. Are you going there later? There’s a meeting soon.”
Emil looked up at Hitomi adoringly, and caught her slender hand. “Oh, no,” he said, “we’ve given up that little place.”
“[It will be good to see my old friend Klaus,]” said Novak in Czestina as they walked together down Mikulandska Street. “[Klaus used to come to my Tuesdays.]”
“Opravdu?” said Maya.
“[They were Milena’s Tuesdays, to tell the truth. Our friends always pretended they were my little meetings, but of course without Milena no one would have come.]”
“This was before Klaus went to the moon?”
“Oh, yes … [Good old Klaus was quite hairless in those days.… He was a microbiologist at Charles University. Klaus and I, we did a series of experimental landscapes, using photoabsorbent bacteria.… The light shone on his gel plate of inoculant. The exposure would last many days. Germs grew only where the light fed them. Those images had the quality of an organic daguerreotype. Then, over the weeks that followed, we would watch those plates slowly rot. Sometimes … quite often, really … that rot produced fantastic beauty.]”
“I’m so glad you’re coming with me to meet my friends tonight, Josef. It means so much to me, truly.”
Novak smiled briefly. “[These little émigré communities in Praha, they may love the local architecture, but they never pay proper attention to us Czechs. Perhaps if we catch the children young enough, we can teach them better habits.]”
Novak spoke lightly, but he had combed his hair, he had dressed, he had taken the trouble to wear his artificial arm. He was coming with her because she had earned a little measure of his respect.
She had come to know her teacher a little. There were veins of deceit and venality and temper in him, like the bluish veins in an old cheese. But it was not wickedness. It was stubbornness, the measure of a crabbed, perverse integrity. Josef Novak was entirely his own man. He had lived for decades, openly and flagrantly, in a way that she had dared to live only deep inside. Though he never seemed happy, and he had probably never been a happy man, he was in some deep sense entirely imperturbable. He was utterly and entirely Josef Novak. He would be Josef Novak until the day he died.
He would be dead within five years—or so she judged. He was frail, and had been very badly injured once. There were steps he might have taken toward increased longevity, but he seemed to consider this struggle to be vulgar. Josef Novak was one hundred twenty-one years old, far older than the people of his generation had ever expected to become. He was a relic, but Maya still felt a bitter sense of injustice at the thought of Novak’s mortality. Novak often spoke of his own death, and clearly felt no fear of passing, but it seemed to her that a just universe would have let a creature like Josef Novak live, somehow, forever. He was her teacher, and she had come to love him very much.
The Tête was lively tonight. The crowd was much larger than she had expected and there was a tension and a vibrancy she hadn’t sensed before. She and Novak logged in at the bar. Novak reached out about four meters and gently finger-tapped Klaus’s helmet. Klaus turned, startled,