Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [44]
The thought of being locked within the criminal den did not disturb her in the least. She got up immediately and began compulsively to clean the room. The state of disorder had been driving her crazy.
She stopped her cleaning frenzy when she discovered a little stolen laptop television. Genuine televisions, with their broadcast datastream, lack of keyboards, and miserably unilateral interface, were real oddities. She’d spent years collecting kitschy oddities from the enormous freakish garbage heaps of twentieth-century television culture, before she’d discovered the even odder CD-ROM and software media niches.
She tried turning the television on. There was no battery inside it. She began searching, and quickly discovered that all the electronic devices in the room had been deprived of their batteries. Except, of course, for the newly stolen devices that were still in her bag. She eviscerated the netlink and transplanted its battery into the laptop television. She turned the television on.
A Deutschlander talk show appeared onscreen. The host was a St. Bernard dog. He had an actress with him. Maya methodically cleaned the room as she watched the show and listened through one ear.
“[My problem is with reading,]” the dog confessed in fluent Deutsch. The dog had shaggy St. Bernard genetics, but he was very well dressed. “[Mastering speech is one matter. Any dog can do that, with the proper wiring. But reading is an entirely different level of semantic cognition. The sponsors have done their best for me—you know that as well as I do, Nadja. But I have to admit it, right here, publicly—reading is a very serious challenge for any postcanine].”
“[Poor baby,]” the actress said with genuine sympathy. “[Why fight it? They say it’s a postliterate epoch anyway.]”
“[Anyone who could say that is deeply out of touch,]” the dog said gravely and with dignity. “[Goethe. Rilke. Günter Grass. Heinrich Böll. That says it all.]”
Maya was fascinated by the actress’s clothing. The actress was wearing diaphanous military gear, greenish see-through combat pajamas, and a paratrooper’s sweater in satin. Her face was like something chiseled in cameo, and her hair was truly awe-inspiring. Her hair deserved a doctorate in fiber engineering.
“[We’re all on our own in this epoch,]” the actress mourned. “[When you think what they can do to us on set nowadays—the weird mental spaces they’re willing to put people into, in pursuit of a decent performance … And then there are the gutter net-freaks, those stinking paparazzi … But you know, Aquinas, and I mean this: You’re a dog. I know you’re a dog. It’s not any secret. But truly—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—I feel happier on your show than I would on anyone else’s.]”
The audience applauded politely.
“[That’s very sweet of you,]” the dog said, wagging his tail. “[I appreciate that more than I can say. Nadja, tell us a little about this business on-set with Christian Mancuso. What was that all about?]”
“[Well, Aquinas, just for you,]” the actress said. “[It’s certainly not something I would tell to just anyone.… But it happened like this. Christian and I are both in our sixties, we’re not young people. Of course. We’d been working together on this project for the company, Hermes Kino. We’d been within the set together for six weeks. We got along wonderfully—I was used to his company, you know, we’d emerge from the set, decompress, have dinner together, talk about the script.… Then one night, Christian took me in his arms and kissed me! I suppose we were both rather surprised by that. It seemed very sweet, though.]”
“Natürlich,” the dog agreed.
“[So we both agreed to go on the hormone course, I suppose it was his idea really.]”
The audience applauded politely.
“[So that was what we did. We took a thorough hormone course together. Sex made a lot of difference. Really, it was quite astonishing how intense