Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [67]
A blurry test pattern appeared on Maya’s spex. She ran her finger along the stem of the right eyepiece until the pattern focused and clarified. She pressed the nosebridge to bring the depth in. These were habitual gestures, little technical actions she’d been doing for decades, but she felt a sudden thrill. Her astigmatism was all gone. Her astigmatism was entirely cured, and until this instant she had never managed to miss it.
“[It’s an office!]” Benedetta said triumphantly. “[Such a strange old office! I’ll navigate, okay?]”
“A man’s office,” Bouboule said, bored.
“[Where does this man keep his pornography?]” Benedetta asked.
“What?” Maya said.
“[You never found his pornography? There’s not a man alive who doesn’t hide pornography in his memory palazzo.]”
“He’s not alive,” Maya said.
Bouboule said something wicked, and laughed. “A pun in Français,” the bird translator fluted, in its sweet but peculiarly characterless English. “The context is not understood.”
“[I see here the big blueprint,]” said Benedetta, examining one wall. “[The sixties, eh? They built like maniacs then. Library. Gallery. Artificial Life Zoo—that sounds good! Business records. Health records. CAD-CAM pattern storage.] ‘Movies.’ Are there movies in this place?”
“What is that word, ‘movies’?” Bouboule said.
“Cinématographique. ”
“Prima!”
“[Tailor’s measurements … tincture recipes. House plans. Oh, that’s very nice! To keep your physical house plans inside your palazzo. Three or four different houses! This man must have been quite rich.]”
“He was rich several different times,” Maya said.
“[Oh, look at this thing! He had a ptydepe tracker.]”
“What’s a ptydepe?” Maya said.
Benedetta, forced into technical definitions, switched to English again. “A Public Telepresence Point, a PTP. He has—he had—a scanner-collator that could sample public telepresence records. Good for tracking friends. Or enemies. The program will sample millions of public telepresence records for years, cataloging appearances of the target person. It’s a dataminer. Industrial Spyware.”
“Illegal?” Bouboule asked with interest.
“Probably. Maybe not, when he had it built.”
“Why do you call it a ‘ptydepe’?” Maya said.
“Ptydepe, that’s what they always call the PTPs here in Praha.… It’s such a strange language, Czesky.”
“Czesky is not the noun,” said Bouboule helpfully. “Czesky is only the, what-you-call, adverb. The proper name of the language is Czestina.”
“Czestina is egg number twelve, Maya.”
“Thank you,” Maya said.
She felt tiny paws stealthily creeping into her sleeve. Maya shrieked and yanked her spex off.
The monkey, alarmed, leapt back to the safety of Bouboule’s shoulder, where it revealed a rack of needlelike teeth.
Bouboule, blinded to reality by her spex, groped gently in midair. “Bad tactility?”
“Bad old protocols,” Benedetta said, similarly blinded.
Maya glared silently at the monkey’s silver-capped eyeballs. “Touch me again and I’ll whack you,” she mouthed silently. The monkey adjusted its tuxedo lapels, flicked its prehensile tail, and jumped off the back of the couch.
“I found an access!” Benedetta said. “Let’s go up to the roof!”
Maya put on her spex again. Doors shunted aside in the wall. They entered a virtual darkness. White rings ran past them downward, like galloping zebra stripes.
They emerged on a crenellated rooftop. Fake gravel underfoot.
And there were other memory palaces. Warshaw’s partners in crime perhaps? She could not understand why people running memory palaces would want to make their premises visible to one another. Was it somehow reassuring to see that other people were hiding here as well? Rising in the horizon-warped virtual distance was a mist-shrouded Chinese crag, a towering digital stalagmite with the subtle monochromatics of sumi-e ink painting. Some spaceless and frankly noneuclidian distance from it, an enormous bubbled structure like a thunderhead, gleaming like veined black marble but conveying a weird impression of glassy gassiness, or maybe