Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [90]
4
Maya woke at five in the morning. Her fingernails itched. They no longer seemed to fit her hands. The hormones surging through her made her nails grow like tropical bamboo. The cuticles were ragged, the keratin gone strangely flimsy. They felt very much like false nails.
She left the couch of Mrs. Najadova, fetched her backpack, crept silently out the door and down the stairs, and let herself into Emil’s studio. Emil slept heavily, alone. She felt a strong temptation to crawl in next to him, to try to recapture sleep, but she resisted it. She wasn’t fitting properly inside her own skin. There would hardly be comfort now in anyone else’s.
She quietly found her red jacket. She poured water, then sorted nimbly through her happy little galaxy of analgesics. She decided not to take any more of the pills. She might need them badly next time, and she might not be in a place so understanding as Stuttgart.
Emil woke, and sat up in his bed. He looked at her with polite incomprehension, then pulled the bedspread over his face and went back to sleep. Maya methodically stuffed her backpack. Then she walked out his door. She did not know if she would ever be back. There was nothing there she wasn’t willing to abandon.
She walked into the starlit street, entered a gently glowing net booth, and called for net help. The net’s guidance was, as always, excellent. She linked to the netsite in San Francisco and connected synchronously to Mr. Stuart.
“What can I do for you this fine evening?” said Stuart, with a two-hundred-fifty-millisecond lag time but total vocal clarity.
“Mr. Stuart, I’ve been a longtime customer of yours and I need access to an old virtuality with defunct protocols.”
“Well, ma’am, if they’re in stock, we got ’em. Come on down to the barn.”
“I happen to be in Praha at the moment.”
“Praha, real nice town,” remarked Stuart, deeply unsurprised. “I can link you through if the price is right, no problem on this end if you don’t mind the lag. Why don’t you hang up and virch in through our primary server?”
“No no—that’s very generous of you, but I wondered if you had a colleague here in Praha who would understand my need for discretion. Someone in Praha that you could recommend to me. I trust your judgment in these matters. Implicitly.”
“You trust my judgment, eh? Implicitly and everything, huh?”
“Yes.”
“That’s really nice. Personal trust is the core global infrastructure. You wouldn’t care to tell me who you are?”
“No. I’d love to tell you, of course. But, well, you understand.”
“All righty, then. Let me consult this handy trade reference. I’ll be right with you.”
Maya fidgeted with her tender fingertips.
“Try a place called the Access Bureau on Narodni Obrany in Praha Six. Ask for Bozhena.”
“Okay, I got it. Thanks a lot.” She hung up.
She found the address on a Praha civil-support map, and she began to walk. It was a very long hike in the dark and the cold. Silent cobbled streets. Closed shops. Solitude. High clouds, and moonlight on the river. The otherworldly glow of the Hradcany, the castle dominating the old town as an ancient aristocracy had once loomed over Europe. All the variant spires of sleeping Praha. Iron lanterns, statuary, tiled roofing, dark arches and secretive passageways, wandering moon-eyed cats. Such a city—even its most ancient fantasies were far more real than herself.
Her feet on the cobbles grew hot with incipient blisters. The backpack dug into her shoulders. Pain and weariness pushed her into deep lucidity. She paused periodically, framing bits of the city with her camera, but could not bring herself to take a photo. Once the machine had touched her face, the viewfinder showed her only lies. It struck her then that the problem was simple: the lens was mounted backward. All camera lenses were mounted backward. She was trying so hard to engage the world, but her subject was behind her eyelids.
Just after dawn, she found the Praha street address. It was a stone-faced official-looking building,