Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [98]
Maya found Roma a mess. There had been a miracle the day before. Miracles had become relative commonplaces since the advent of entheogens; it now took very unusual circumstances to attract public attention to sightings of supernatural entities. This latest miracle had raised the ante on the supernatural: the Virgin Mary had manifested herself to two children, a dog, and a Public Telepresence Point.
Children did not normally take entheogens. Even postcanine dogs were rarely given to spiritual revelations. And the recordings in Public Telepresence Points were supposed to be beyond alteration; they were certainly not supposed to show pillowcaselike glowing blurs levitating over the Viale Guglielmo Marconi.
The Romans were not particularly impressed by miracles. Goings-on at the Vatican rarely impressed native Romans. Nevertheless, the devout had poured into Roma from all over Europe to pray, do penance, to seek out relics, to enjoy the media coverage. The traffic—buses, bikes, trailers, sacred tourist groups in the robes of Franciscan mendicants—was dense, loud, incredible, festive, beyond sane management, primal Italian. It was also raining.
Maya gazed through the rain-streaked window of their latest limo. “Josef, are you religious?”
“There are many worlds. There is a world here which perceives in darkness,” said Novak, tapping his wrinkled forehead. “There is a material world, the world lit by the sun. There is also virtuality, our modern immateriality pretending to exist. Religion is a virtuality of sorts. A very old one.”
“But are you a believer?”
“I believe a few very modest things. I believe that if you take an object, and make it come to life through light, and carry that perception of life into a virtual representation, then you have achieved what they call ‘lyricism.’ Some people have a great irrational need for religion. I have a great irrational need for lyricism. I can’t help myself, and I’m not interested in debate about it. So I won’t trouble the faithful, if they don’t trouble me.”
“But there must be half a million people here today! All because of some dog and a computer and a couple of kids. What do you think about that?”
“I think Giancarlo will be piqued to be upstaged.”
The limo, sparring gamely with the Roman traffic, carried them to their hotel, which, of course, was badly overbooked. Novak engaged in a vicious multilingual fight with the concierge, and won them separate rooms, to the considerable discomfiture of everyone in the lobby. Maya bathed and sent her clothes out.
When her clothes returned, an evening gown came with them. Novak’s idea of feminine formal wear looked touchingly old-fashioned, but it was freshly instantiated and it seemed to fit very well, a credit to Novak’s photographic eye for proportion.
Giancarlo Vietti, the master couturier of Emporio Vietti, was presenting his seventy-fifth spring collection. An event of this magnitude required a proper setting. Vietti had hired the Kio Amphitheater, an arched colossus in exquisite pastiche, built by an eccentric Nipponese billionaire after an earthquake had devastated much of Roma’s Flaminio district.
They pulled up in front of the roseate columnar Kio and departed their taxi amid a sidewalk jostle of spex-clad Roman paparazzi. Novak did not seem particularly well known in Roma, but with his single arm he was certainly easy to spot. He ignored the clamoring paparazzi, but he ignored them very slowly.
They worked their way up the stairs. Novak examined the towering faux-marble facade with a feral eye. “Living proof that the past is a finite resource,” he muttered. “It would have been better to mimic Indianapolis than to try