Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [99]
Maya found herself admiring the place. It lacked the weed-eaten stony authenticity of Roma’s many actual ruins, but it seemed transcendantly functional and had all the unconscious grace of a well-designed photocopier.
They entered the building, logged in, and discovered three hundred people preparing to eat, attended by crabs.
So many old people. She was struck by their corporate air of monumental gravity, by the striking fact that this chattering tonnage of well-manicured and brilliantly dressed flesh was so much older than the building that housed it.
These were Europe’s shiny set. A people who had beaten time into submission, and with their spex-hooded, prescient eyes they looked as though they could stare through solid rock. Veterans of European couture, they had taken the essence of neophiliac evanescence and had frozen it around themselves like a shroud. They were as glamorous as pharaonic tomb paintings.
Novak slipped on his own pair of spex, then made his way deftly to his appointed place, following some social cue narrowcast to the lenses. Novak and Maya sat together at a small round table set with silver, draped in cream-colored linen, and surrounded by upholstered stools. “Good evening, Josef,” said the man across the table.
“Hello, Daizaburo, dear old colleague. It’s been a long time.”
Daizaburo examined Maya over the rim of his elaborate spex with the remote and chilly interest of a lepidopterist. “She’s lovely. Where on earth did you find that gown?”
“The first Vietti original I ever shot,” said Novak.
“I’m astonished that particular Vietti is still on file.”
“Giancarlo may have purged it from his own files. Mine are high capacity.”
“Giancarlo was so young then,” Daizaburo said. “Juvenilia suits your little friend so well. We’re taking waters. Would you like a water?”
“Why not?” said Novak.
Daizaburo signaled a crab. It began speaking Nihongo. “English, please,” said Daizaburo.
“Antarctic glacier water,” offered the crab. “A deep core from Pleistocene deposits. Entirely unpolluted, undisturbed since the dawn of humanity. Profoundly pure.”
“What a delightful conceit,” said Novak. “Very Vietti.”
“We have lunar water,” said the crab. “Very interesting isotopic properties.”
“Did you ever drink water from the moon, my dear?” Novak asked her.
Maya shook her head.
“We’ll have the lunar water,” Novak ordered.
A second crab arrived with a vacuum-sealed vial. Using shining forceps, it dropped two dainty cubes of smoking blue ice into a pair of brandy glasses.
“Water is the perfect social pleasure,” said Daizaburo as the crabs stalked off to answer fresh demands. “We can’t all share the brute act of liquid consumption, but we surely can all share the ineffable pleasure of watching ice melt.”
The other woman at their little table leaned forward. She was small and shrunken and almost hairless, a person of profoundly indefinite ethnic origin who was wearing an enormous black chapeau. “It rode a comet from the rim of universe,” she lisped alertly. “Frozen six billion year. Never know the heat of life—until we drink it.”
Novak lifted his glass one-handed and swirled it, his craggy peasant face alight with anticipation. “I’m surprised there are still enough lunarians around to mine lunar ice.”
“There are seventeen survivors up there. Such a pity they all hate each other.” Daizaburo offered a brief and steely smile.
“Cosmic rebels, cosmic visionaries,” said Novak, carefully sniffing his glass. “Poor fellows, they discovered the existential difficulties of life without tradition.”
Maya looked at the people clustered at the other little tables and knowledge clicked within her like a light switch. She began cataloging treatments in her head. All these old people and all their old techniques. Wrinkle removal, hair growth, skin transplants. Blood filtration. Synthetic lymph. Nerve and muscle growth factor. Meiotic acceleration. Intracellular Antioxidant Enzymation: rejuvenant witches’ brews of arginines, ornithines and cysteines, glutathiones and catalases.