Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [80]
Paul, all patience and indifference, had been studying Emil’s more recent works. He’d found a wooden box and opened it. “Did he ever show you this?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s my favorite.” Paul reached with exaggerated care into the shredded lining of the box and retrieved a delicate white cup and saucer. He set them on Emil’s worktable. “He did this piece just after the change. He was thrashing at reality like a drowning man.”
“A cup-and-saucer set,” Maya said.
“Touch them. Pick them up.”
She reached for the cup. The cup sizzled under her fingertips, and she jerked her hand back. Paul chuckled.
She reached out again with one forefinger and gently touched the saucer. There was a faint electrical tingling, the feeling of something soft yet spiky brushing back at her skin. A crackly sandpaper creeping.
Paul laughed.
She gripped the cup with determination. Without moving, it seemed to buzz and writhe within her fingers. She set it back down. “Is there a battery inside it? Is that the trick?”
“It’s not ceramic,” Paul said.
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. It resembles ceramic, and it gleams like ceramic, but I believe it’s piezoelectric foamed glass. Once I saw him pour a tincture into that cup. The liquid slowly seeped through both the cup and the saucer. Some quality—the porosity, or the fractal dimension, or maybe a van der Waals charge—it reacts very oddly when it contacts the fingertips.”
“But why?”
“It is an objet gratuit. A work of artifice that demonstrates the bankruptcy of the quotidian.”
“Is it a joke?”
“Is Emil a joke?” Paul said somberly. “Is it a joke to be no longer human? Of course it is. What is a joke? A joke is a violation of the conceptual framework.”
“But that’s not all there is to it.”
“Of course not.”
“So tell me the rest of it.”
Paul restored the cup and saucer to its box, and put the box back on its shelf, with reverent care. “Are you ready to go? Then we should go.” He picked up his backpack, opened the door for her, ushered her through, locked it carefully behind him.
They walked loudly down the creaking stairs. Outside, the day was overcast and windy. They headed toward the Narodni tubestation. She walked at his shoulder. In her flats, she was as tall as he was. “Paul, please forgive me if I’m too direct. I come from very far away, and I’m a naif. I hope you can forgive me that. You’re a teacher, I know that you can tell me the truth.”
“I’m touched by your optimism,” Paul said.
“Please don’t be that way. What do I have to do—to convince you to tell me the truth?”
“Consider that object,” Paul told her very politely. “It destroys the quotidian swindle. It confronts us with a tactile violation of conventional cognition.”
“Yes?”
“The destruction of the human condition offers us an avalanche of novel creative approaches. Those possibilities must be assimilated and systematically deployed by the heirs of humanity. Artifice is not Art. Although it deploys the imagination of the preconscious, it recognizes that the imagination of the unconscious is impoverished. We honor the irrationality of the creative impulse, but we deny the primacy or even the relevancy of hallucination. We harness the full power of conscious rationality and the scientific method in pursuit of the voluntary destruction and supercession of human culture.”
They walked down the stairs of the tubestation. Paul discreetly produced a laminated travel pass from an inner jacket pocket. “The human condition is over. Nature is over. Art is over. Consciousness is ductile. Science is an infinite powder keg. We confront a new reality formerly obscured by the inbuilt limits of mammalian primates. We must create work which brings this new reality to the surface, a sequence of seemingly gratuitous gestures which will form in their aggregate the consciousness of posthumanity.” Paul’s limpid gaze grew more intense. “At the same time, politically,