Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [88]
“And?”
“And yes, I was strong enough.” Paul’s eyes grew distant. “Ah, there’s a packet tube. I have a class to teach soon. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you now.”
“You do? Oh dear.”
Paul walked to the front of the packet tube and entered an address on a keypad. A vault door shunted open. He tossed his backpack into the padded capsule. “I’m leaving you because I must,” he said patiently, “but I’m leaving you in lovely Stuttgart. I hope you’ll put your time here to good use.” The capsule vanished. Another capsule instantly took its place. Paul hit a repeat key, crawled deftly into the padded interior, and doubled his arms around his knees. “Until we meet in Praha, Maya.”
“Au revoir, Paul.” She waved at him, and the door shunted with a brisk pneumatic pop.
She spent three strange aching days in Stuttgart, ghosting the honeycombed plazas and haunting the city’s peculiarly liberal apothecary malls. On the evening train back to Praha she collapsed into her beanbag and was left in silence and solitude. It felt so lovely to be within the familiar confines of a moving train again. She was vibrating with hormones and culture shock, and she hadn’t been eating properly. Every passing hour carried her further into new realms of experience, strange deep somatic spaces that words such as “hunger” and “weariness” scarcely seemed to describe.
Sleep beckoned. But then the translator, which was still tucked into her ear, began to sing inside her ear. Very gently at first, a distant musical warbling. The music grew louder. She’d never known the device to malfunction, so she was ready when it made a kind of musical throat-clearing tone, and addressed her directly. “[Hello, user Maya.]”
“Hello?” she said.
“[This is an interactive message for you from Ohrschmuck Enterprises of Basel. We are the inventors and manufacturers of this translation necklace. Do you understand us? Please signify by orally responding ‘Yes, I understand’ in your favorite language, English.]”
“ ‘Yes, I understand.’ ”
She looked around the train car. She was speaking aloud to thin air, but no one considered this unusual behavior. They naturally assumed she was using a netlink.
“[User Maya, you’ve been in possession of the necklace for two weeks. You have already used its functionalities in English, Italiano, Czestina, Deutsch, and Français. We hope you’ll agree that the translation service has been prompt and accurate.]”
“Yes, it certainly has.”
“[Did you notice the fine physical workmanship of our necklace? It would have been simple to do a cheap knockoff in copper and silicon, but we prefer the classic chic of real jewels. We at Ohrschmuck take pride in our traditional European craftsmanship, and your use of our shareware proves that you’re a discerning woman of taste. Any fly-by-night company can supply a working tourist translator nowadays. We at Ohrschmuck supply an entire library of modern European languages, including proprietary vocabulary segments featuring modern slang and argot. It’s no simple matter to provide our level of linguistic service.]”
“I suppose not.”
“[If you agree that our shareware necklace meets your exacting personal standards, then we think our efforts to please you should be rewarded. Doesn’t that seem just and fair, user Maya?]”
“What is it that you want from me, exactly?”
“[If you’ll simply wire us seven hundred marks, we can see to it that your translator is supplied with the very latest vocabulary updates. We also register you with our company, supply service referrals, and answer user questions.]”
“I’ll certainly send you that money if I ever come across that large a sum.”
“[We feel that we’re worth our price, user Maya. We’ll trust you to pay us. Our business is based on mutual trust. We know that you trust us. After all, you’ve been trusting our machine with the tympanum of your own right ear, a very tender and personal membrane. We feel sure that mutual respect will lead us to a long relationship. Our net-address will work from any net location in the world, and it takes cash. We look forward to hearing from