Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [127]
“You’re a good friend, Maya. I don’t have many true friends, but you’re a true friend of mine. The years don’t matter like you think they matter. They matter but they matter differently. Please don’t be so sad.” Benedetta began to search in her jacket pockets. “I brought you a gift from Bologna. To celebrate. Because we truly are sisters now.”
Maya looked up. “You did?”
Benedetta searched through her pockets. She pulled out a suckered barnacle.
Maya stared. “That really looks like something I ought not to be messing with.”
“Do you know what a cerebrospinal decantation is?”
“Unfortunately, yes, I do.”
“Let me give this to you, Maya. Let me put it on your head.”
“Benedetta, I really shouldn’t. You know I’m not young. This could really hurt me.”
“Of course it hurts. It took me a year to prepare this decantation. It hurt me every time. Whenever I felt a certain way—the way that was really me … I put this thing on my head. And it sucked me out, and it stored me. I thought I would use it sometime much later, to remember myself if I ever got lost somehow. But I want you to have it now. I want you to know who I am.”
Maya sighed. “Life is risk.” She took off her wig.
The barnacle went in through the back of her skull. It hurt quite a bit, and it was good that it hurt, because otherwise it would have come too easily. Perfusions oozed and she went very calm and supernaturally lucid.
She felt the mind of another woman. Not her thoughts. Her life. The unearthly sweetness of human identity. Loneliness, and a little bitterness for strength, and a bright plateau of single-minded youthful self-possession. The ghostly glaze of another soul.
She closed her eyes. It was deep, it was deep posthuman rapture. Awareness stole across her mind like black light from another world. And then the gray meat slowly ate that other soul. Sucked it hungrily into a million little crevices.
When she came to, the barnacle was gone. She was flat on the floor, and Benedetta was gently wiping her face with a damp towel. “Can you speak?” Benedetta said.
She worked her jaws, forced her tongue to move. “Yes, I think so.”
“You know who you are?” Benedetta was anxious. “Tell me.”
“That was truly holy,” she said. “It’s sacred. You have to hide that in some sacred place. Never let anyone touch that, or defile that. It would be too awful, and too terrible, if that were ever touched.”
Benedetta embraced her. “I’m sorry, darling. I know how to do it. I know how it works. I even know how to give it to you. But I don’t know how to hide from what I am, and what I know.”
Three weeks passed. Spring had come and Praha was in bloom. She was still working with Novak, but it was not the same. He treated her like an assistant now, instead of a magical waif or a stranded elf. Milena could sense that there was trouble in the wind. Milena hated cops, but Milena was nevertheless making life hard, because Milena hated a disruption in the ancient Novak household even more than Milena hated cops.
Maya took a train to Milano and did a very boring shoot with some of Vietti’s very boring staffers. Because it was a working engagement, she saw almost nothing at all of Milano, and precious little of the Emporio Vietti. Vietti himself didn’t bother to show; the great man was off in Gstaad boiling his crabs.
The results of the shoot were perfect and glossy and awful, because it wasn’t Josef Novak. She learned quite a bit during the shoot, but mostly she hated it. Nevertheless, she thought it was a smart thing to do. People had been fussing entirely too much about the Novak photographs. They were all over the net and they were rather too beautiful and they were much, much too true. It seemed to her that