Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [123]
“Do it,” Maya said.
Benedetta brightened. “Truly? You mean it?”
“Do it. Of course I mean it. I don’t care what happens to me. If it works—if it even looks like it works—if they even think it looks like it works—then they’ll smother me alive. But that doesn’t matter, because they’re going to get me anyway. I’m doomed. I know that. I’m a freakish creature. If you really knew or cared about me or my precious life, you’d know all that already. You had better do whatever you have to do. Do it quick.”
She knocked the chair back and walked away.
Back to Paul’s table. She was in anguish, but sitting in the gaseous aura of Paul’s charisma was much, much better than sitting alone. Paul sipped his limoncello and smiled. He had a new furoshiki spread before him on the table, with a lovely tapestrylike pointillistic photo of a desert sunset. “Isn’t this sunset beautiful?”
“Sometimes,” someone offered guardedly.
“I didn’t tell you that I changed the color registers.” Paul tapped the furoshiki with his fingernail. The sunset altered drastically. “This was the actual, original sunset. Is this sunset more beautiful than my altered version?”
No one answered.
“Suppose you could manipulate a real sunset—manipulate the atmosphere at will. Suppose you could turn up the red and turn down the yellow, as you pleased. Could you make a sunset more beautiful?”
“Yes,” said a listener. “No,” insisted another.
“Let’s consider a martian sunset, from one of the martian telepresence sites. Another planet’s sunset, one we can’t experience directly with human flesh. Are the sunsets on Mars less beautiful because of machine intermediation?”
Silent pain.
A woman appeared at the head of the stairs in a heavy lined cape and gray velvet gloves. She wore a tricorn hat, glittering spex, an open-collared white blouse, a necklace of dark carved wood. She had a profile of classical perfection: straight nose, full lips, broad brow; the haute couture sister of the Statue of Liberty. She proceeded down the stairs of the bar with the stagy precision of a prima ballerina. She walked with more than grace. She walked with martial authority. She had two small white dogs in tow.
Silence spread over the Tête du Noyé.
“Bonsoir à tout le monde,” the stranger proclaimed at the foot of the stairs, and she smiled like a sphinx.
Paul stood quickly, with something between a half bow and a reluctant beckoning. When they saw that he truly meant to speak to her, his little circle of listeners vacated his table with haste.
Paul offered his new guest a chair.
“How well you look, Helene. What are you drinking tonight?”
The policewoman sat with an elegant little whirl of her cape. “I’ll have what the gentleman in the spacesuit is having,” she said in English. She detached the dogs from their narrow gleaming leashes—just as if dogs of that sort needed leashes.
Paul hastily signaled the bar. “We were just having a small debate on aesthetics.”
Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier removed her spex, folded them, made them vanish into a slit in the cape. Maya stared in astonishment. Helene’s natural eyes, slate gray, astoundingly beautiful, tremendously remote, were far more intimidating than any computer-assisted perception set. “What charming preoccupations you have, Paul.”
“Helene, do you think a mechanically assisted sunset can be more beautiful than a natural sunset?”
“Darling, there hasn’t been a natural sunset since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.” Helene glanced briefly at Maya, then pinned her with the focused shaft of her attention like a moth in a cigar box. “Please don’t stand there, my child. Do have a seat with us. Have we met?”
“Ciao Helene. I’m Maya.”
“Oh, yes! Vietti’s girl, on the net. I knew that I’d seen you. But you’re lovely.”
“Thank you very much.” Maya sat. Helene studied her with grave interest and deep benevolence. It felt exactly like being x-rayed.
“You’re charming, my dear. You don’t seem one bit as sinister