Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [93]
“We do, do we?”
“Something is loose in here. Something alive.”
“Something you let loose, or something you found loose?”
“I can’t tell you, because I don’t know,” Benedetta said. “I tried to find out, but I can’t. Neither can anyone else.”
“I see. How many ‘anyone elses’ have you let through here, exactly?”
“Maya, this old palazzo is very big. Wonderfully big. There’s a lot of space. No one was using it, and it’s wonderful that there are no network cops here. Please don’t be jealous. Believe me, you never would have noticed us. If not for this little trouble.”
“This isn’t good news.”
“But there is very good news. There’s money inside this place. Did you know that? Real money! Old people’s certified money!”
“How nice. Did you and the gang leave any money for me?”
“Listen, I so much want to talk to you,” said Benedetta. “About everything. But this truly is not a good time. I’m playing cards with my father right now. I don’t like to do this kind of talk from my father’s house. Can you come to Bologna and see me? I have a lot I can offer to you. I want to be your friend.”
“Maybe I can come. Exactly how much money did you find? Do I have enough to pay off these Swiss shareware pests for this diamond necklace you gave me?”
“Don’t worry about the necklace,” Benedetta said. “The Ohrschmuck company went broke. They asked too much, so no one ever paid them. Just give the necklace to some other woman. She can use it free for a month before it starts to complain in the ear.”
“You’re such a treasure, darling.”
“Let me call you later, Maya. I’ve been bad, I admit it. I will do for you so much better if you only give me a chance! Just for one thing, I can give you much better online presence—do you know that you look like a big ugly blue block to me? Where are you now?”
“I’m nowhere that you need to know about. Leave me a message with Paul.”
Benedetta’s virtual mouth stretched in surprise. “You didn’t tell Paul about your palace, I hope.”
“Why shouldn’t I tell Paul?”
“Darling, Paul is only a theorist. But I am an activist.”
“Maybe I’m a theorist, too.”
“I don’t think that you are,” Benedetta said. “I don’t think that at all. Am I wrong?”
Maya considered this. “All right, if we can’t tell Paul, then leave a message for me at the Tête. I go there almost every day. I’m on pretty good terms with Klaus.”
“All right. At the Tête. That’s a good idea. Klaus is a good man, he is so discreet. Now I truly must go.” Benedetta morphed. The chair recovered and lay sideways on the floor.
Maya tried to set the toppled chair upright. Her gloved hands plunged through it repeatedly, with the deep ontological uselessness of dysfunctional software. She struggled with the chair for quite some time, her back bent, wrestling air at various experimental angles.
She then became aware of another presence in the virtual room. She gazed about herself cautiously, not moving. The virtual presence oozed through the wall, moved through her presence like a crawling wind, exited through the far wall. A fractured glaze creeping through the fabric of computation.
Maya yanked her head from the spex and earphones. She stripped the gloves away from her swollen fingertips. She shut the machine down. Then she examined the sweat-smeared gear, regretting the vilely incriminating cloud of human DNA she had just deposited on Czech police equipment. She scrubbed at the spex a bit with her sleeve, just as if that token gesture would help anything. DNA was microscopic. Evidence was everywhere. Evidence was totipresent, the truth seething below awareness, just like germs.
But crime could not become a crime unless somebody, somehow, cared enough to notice.
She decided not to steal the handy touchscreen.
She was tired now, so she got onto a train and slept for two hours as it ran back and forth below the city. Then she walked into a netsite at the Malostranska tubestation and asked the net to find her Josef Novak. The net offered his address in a split second. Maya took the tube back to Karlovo Namesti and walked, footsore and limping, to Josef