Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [95]
“I know you can teach me.”
“I have taught photography,” Novak admitted like a man under torture. “I have taught human beings to see like a camera. What a fine accomplishment! Look at this poor little house of mine. I’ve been a photographer for ninety years, ninety! What do we have for all that hard work, the old woman and I? Nothing. All the terrible market crashes! Devaluations! Confiscatory taxes! Abolitions and eliminations! Political troubles. Plagues! Bank crashes! Nothing solid, nothing that lasts.”
Novak glared at her with resigned suspicion, gone all peasant shrewdness suddenly, protuberant ears, bristling eyebrows, a swollen old-man’s nose like a potato. “We have no property, we have no assets. We are very old people, but we have nothing for you, girl. You should go, and save everyone trouble.”
“But you’re famous.”
“I outlived my fame, I am forgotten. I only go on because I cannot help myself.”
Maya gazed around the sitting room. A unique melange of eclectic clutter and utter cleanliness. A thousand little objects on the razor’s edge of art and junk. A library of gimmickry rocket-blasted from the grip of time. Yet there was not a speck of dust in the place. Those who worship the Muses end up running a museum.
The burning candles gnawed their white cores of string inside their waxy sheaths. The white-haired Novak seemed perfectly at ease with an extended silence.
Maya pointed to the top of the honeycomb of wooden shelving. “That crystal vase,” she said, “that decanter up there.”
“Old Bohemian glass,” said Novak.
“It’s very beautiful.”
Novak whistled softly. A trapdoor opened in the wall beside the kitchen and a human arm flopped out.
The arm landed on the wooden floor with a meaty slap of five outstretched fingers. Its naked shoulder had a feathery clump like the curled marine feet of a barnacle.
The arm flexed and leapt, flexed and leapt, pogoing deftly across the gleaming candlelit floorboards. It twisted and ducked, and then tunneled with unearthly speed into a scarcely visible slit in the empty shoulder of Novak’s jacket.
Novak squinted, winced a bit, then lifted his artificial hand and flexed it gently.
He then shifted casually onto his left elbow in the beanbag and reached far across the room. The right arm stretched out, its hairless skin gone all bubbled and granular, his forearm shrinking to the width of bird bone. His distant hand grasped the decanter. He fetched it back, his arm reassuming normal size with a quiet internal rasp, like ashes crunching underfoot.
He gave Maya the decanter. She studied it in the candlelight.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “I lived inside it for a little while. It was a universe.”
Novak shrugged. With his new arm and shoulder attached, he shrugged in remarkable fashion. “Poets have said the same for a single grain of sand.”
She looked up. “This glass is made of sand, isn’t it? A camera’s lens is made from sand. A data bit is like a single grain of sand.”
Slowly, Novak smiled. “There’s good news,” he said. “I like you.”
“It’s such a wonder to hold the glass labyrinth,” she said, turning the decanter in her hands. “It seemed so much more real when it was virtual.” She gave it back to him.
Novak examined his decanter idly, stroking it with the left hand, the right one like a glove-shaped set of rubber forceps. “Well, it’s very old. A little shape from culture’s attic. Oh attic shape!” He began to recite aloud, in Czestina. “ ‘[Designed with marble men and marble women, and forest branches, and weeds crushed by the feet. You silent formation. You twist our minds as if you were eternity. You poem of ice! When old age kills this generation, you will remain in the thick of other people’s troubles. A friend to humanity. You say to us, “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.” We know nothing else and we need to know no more.]’ ”
“Was that poetry?”
“An old English poem.”
“Why not recite the poem in English, then?”
“There is no poetry