Holy Fire (36 page)

“So?”

“The curve is not strictly linear. The rate of increase is itself increasing. Eventually the rate of increase will reach the speed of one year per year. At that point, the survivors become effectively immortal.”

“Sure they do. Maybe.”

“Well, of course it’s not true ‘immortality.’ There is still a mortality rate from accident and misadventure. At the singularity”—Benedetta drew a little black X—“the average human life span, with accident included, becomes about fourteen hundred and fifty years.”

“How lovely for that generation.”

“The first generation to reach the singularity will become the first truly genuine gerontocracy. It will be a generation which does not die out. A generation that can dominate culture indefinitely.”

“Well, I’ve heard that sort of speculation before, darling. It’s a nice line of hype and it always struck me as an interesting theory.”

“Once it was theory. For you, it’s theory. For us, it’s reality. Maya, we
are
those people. We’re the lovely generation. We are the first people who were born just in time. We are the first true immortals.”

“You’re the first
immortals
?” Maya said slowly.

“Yes, we are; and what is more, we know that we are.” Benedetta sat back and tucked her stylus in her hair.

“So why are you meeting in a sleazy art bar in some little political cabal?”

“We have to meet somewhere,” Benedetta said, and smiled.

“It had to be some generation,” said another woman peevishly. “We are the someones. We don’t impress you much. Well, no one ever said we would impress you.”

“So you really believe you’re immortals.” Maya looked at the scrawl on the furoshiki. “What if there’s a hitch in your calculations? Maybe the rate will slow.”

“That could be quite serious,” Benedetta said. She pulled her stylus and carefully redrew the slope of the curve. “See? Very bad. We get only nine hundred years.”

Maya looked at the base of the fatal little curve. For her, it climbed. For them, it rocketed. “This curve means I’ll never make it,” she realized sadly. “This curve proves that I’m doomed.”

Benedetta nodded, delighted to see her catching on. “Yes, darling, we know that. But we don’t hold that fact against you, truly.”

“We still need the palazzo,” said another woman.

“Why do you need a palazzo?”

“We plan to install some things in it,” Benedetta said.

Maya frowned. “Isn’t there trouble enough inside that place, for heaven’s sake? What kind of things?”

“Cognition things. Perception things. Software factories for the holy fire.”

Maya thought about it. The prospect sounded very farfetched. “What’s that supposed to get you?”

“It gets us a way to change ourselves. A chance to make our own mistakes, instead of repeating the mistakes of others. We hope it will make us artificers who deserve our immortality.”

“You really think you can do—what?—really radical cognitive transforms of some kind? And just with a virtuality?”

“Not with the kind of virtuality protocols they allow us nowadays. Of course you can’t do any such thing where civil support is watching, because they designed the public networks to be perfectly safe and reliable. But with the kind of protocols they don’t imagine yet—well, yes. Yes, Maya. That’s exactly what we think we can do with a virtuality.”

Maya sighed. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to
open up my palace, and install some kind of brand-new, illegal, mutant, brain-damaging virtuality system?”

“ ‘Cognitive enhancement’ is a much better term,” Benedetta said.

“That is truly crazy talk, Benedetta. I can’t believe you mean that. That sounds just like some kind of junkie drug scheme.”

“Gerontocrats are always making that category error,” Benedetta said dismissively. “Software isn’t neurochemistry! We—our generation—we
know
virtuality! We grew up with it! It’s a world that today’s old people will never truly understand.”

“You certainly are terribly serious about this,” Maya said, looking slowly around the table. “If what you tell me is true … well, you’ve got it made. Don’t you? Someday, you’ll run the whole world. More or less forever, right? So why make trouble now? Why don’t you just wait a while? Wait until you reach that little black X on the graph.”

“Because when we reach the singularity, we must be prepared for it. Worthy of it. Otherwise we will become even more stale and stupid than the ruling class is now. They’re only mortals, and they are nice enough to die eventually, but we’re not mortals and we won’t die. If we obey their rules when we take power, we’ll bore the world to death. Once we repeat their mistakes, our generation will repeat them forever. Their padded little nurse’s paradise will become our permanent tyranny.”

“Look, you’ll never manage this,” Maya said bluntly. “It’s dangerous. It’s a reckless, silly, extravagant gesture that can only get you in trouble. They’ll surely find out what you’re doing in there, and they’ll jump on you. You can’t keep any major secrets from the polity for eighty years. Come on, you’re just a bunch of kids. I’m a gerontocrat myself, and I can’t keep my precious secrets for three lousy months!”

Another woman—she hadn’t been saying much—
spoke up suddenly. Very diplomatically. “Mrs. Ziemann, we’re truly sorry that we had to discover your secrets. We never wanted to spoil your secret life.”

“You’re not half as sorry as I am, darling.”

The speaker pulled off her spex. “We’ll never tell. We have learned what you are, Mrs. Ziemann, but we were forced to do that investigation. We are not a bit shocked by our findings. Truly. Are we?”

She looked around the table. All the others gamely pretended not to be shocked.

“We are modern young people,” said the little diplomat. “We are free of old-fashioned prejudices. We admire you. We applaud you. You encourage us by your personal example. We think you are a fine posthuman being.”

“That’s so lovely,” Maya said. “I’m really moved by that sentiment. I’d be even more touched if I didn’t know you were flattering me. For your own purposes.”

“Please try to understand us. We’re not reckless. This is an act of deep foresight on our part. We do this because we believe in the cause of our generation. We are prepared to face the consequences. We are young and inexperienced, that is true. But we have to act. Even if they arrest us. Even if they punish us very severely. Even if they send us all the way to the moon.”

“Why? Why are you risking this? You never cleared this through proper channels, you never asked anyone’s permission. What gives you any right to change the way the world works?”

“Because we are scientists.”

“You never put this question to a vote, that I ever heard of. This proposal hasn’t been properly discussed. It’s not democratic. You don’t have the informed consent of the people you are going to affect. What gives you any right to change the way people think?”

“Because we are artists.”

Another woman spoke up suddenly in Italiano. “[Look, I can barely understand all this stupid English.
And politics in English are the worst. But that woman is not a hundred years old. This has got to be a scam.]”

“[She is a hundred years old,]” Benedetta insisted calmly, “[and what’s more, she has the holy fire.]”

“[I don’t believe it. I bet her photographs stink of death, just like Novak’s. She’s very pretty I suppose, but for heaven’s sake, any idiot can look pretty.]”

“Do it,” Maya said.

Benedetta brightened. “Truly? You mean it?”

“Do it. Of course I mean it. I don’t care what happens to me. If it works—if it even looks like it works—if they even
think
it looks like it works—then they’ll smother me alive. But that doesn’t matter, because they’re going to get me anyway. I’m doomed. I know that. I’m a freakish creature. If you really knew or cared about me or my precious life, you’d know all that already. You had better do whatever you have to do. Do it quick.”

She knocked the chair back and walked away.

Back to Paul’s table. She was in anguish, but sitting in the gaseous aura of Paul’s charisma was much, much better than sitting alone. Paul sipped his
limoncello
and smiled. He had a new furoshiki spread before him on the table, with a lovely tapestrylike pointillistic photo of a desert sunset. “Isn’t this sunset beautiful?”

“Sometimes,” someone offered guardedly.

“I didn’t tell you that I changed the color registers.” Paul tapped the furoshiki with his fingernail. The sunset altered drastically. “This was the actual, original sunset. Is this sunset more beautiful than my altered version?”

No one answered.

“Suppose you could manipulate a real sunset—manipulate the atmosphere at will. Suppose you could turn up the red and turn down the yellow, as you pleased. Could you make a sunset more beautiful?”

“Yes,” said a listener. “No,” insisted another.

“Let’s consider a martian sunset, from one of the martian telepresence sites. Another planet’s sunset, one we
can’t experience directly with human flesh. Are the sunsets on Mars less beautiful because of machine intermediation?”

Silent pain.

A woman appeared at the head of the stairs in a heavy lined cape and gray velvet gloves. She wore a tricorn hat, glittering spex, an open-collared white blouse, a necklace of dark carved wood. She had a profile of classical perfection: straight nose, full lips, broad brow; the haute couture sister of the Statue of Liberty. She proceeded down the stairs of the bar with the stagy precision of a prima ballerina. She walked with more than grace. She walked with martial authority. She had two small white dogs in tow.

Silence spread over the Tête du Noyé.

“
Bonsoir à tout le monde,
” the stranger proclaimed at the foot of the stairs, and she smiled like a sphinx.

Paul stood quickly, with something between a half bow and a reluctant beckoning. When they saw that he truly meant to speak to her, his little circle of listeners vacated his table with haste.

Paul offered his new guest a chair.

“How well you look, Helene. What are you drinking tonight?”

The policewoman sat with an elegant little whirl of her cape. “I’ll have what the gentleman in the spacesuit is having,” she said in English. She detached the dogs from their narrow gleaming leashes—just as if dogs of that sort needed leashes.

Paul hastily signaled the bar. “We were just having a small debate on aesthetics.”

Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier removed her spex, folded them, made them vanish into a slit in the cape. Maya stared in astonishment. Helene’s natural eyes, slate gray, astoundingly beautiful, tremendously remote, were far more intimidating than any computer-assisted perception set. “What charming preoccupations you have, Paul.”

“Helene, do you think a mechanically assisted sunset can be more beautiful than a natural sunset?”

“Darling, there hasn’t been a natural sunset since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.” Helene glanced briefly at Maya, then pinned her with the focused shaft of her attention like a moth in a cigar box. “Please don’t stand there, my child. Do have a seat with us. Have we met?”

“Ciao Helene. I’m Maya.”

“Oh, yes! Vietti’s girl, on the net. I knew that I’d seen you. But you’re lovely.”

“Thank you very much.” Maya sat. Helene studied her with grave interest and deep benevolence. It felt exactly like being x-rayed.

“You’re charming, my dear. You don’t seem one bit as sinister as you do in that terrible old man’s photographs.”

“The terrible old man is standing right over there at the bar, Helene.”

“Oh dear,” said Helene, deeply unmoved. “I’ll never learn tact, will I? Really, that was so bad of me. I must go see your friend Josef and apologize from the bottom of my heart.” She rose and left for the bar.

“Good heavens, Paul,” Maya said slowly, watching Helene glide away. “I’ve never, ever seen such a—”

Paul made the slightest possible throat-cutting gesture and gazed at his feet. Maya shut up and looked down. One of Helene’s tiny white dogs looked up at her with the chilly big-science intensity of an interplanetary probe.

Bouboule appeared. Sober and anxious. “Ciao Maya.”

“Ciao Bouboule.”

“Some of the girls are going for the breath of air. Will you come with us? For a moment?”

“Certainly, darling.” Maya gave Paul a silent look full of meaning, and Paul looked back, with a gaze of such masculine trench-warfare gallantry that she wanted to tie a silken banner to him.

She followed Bouboule through an unmarked door at the back of the bar, then up four flights of steep, switchback, iron-railed stairs. Bouboule had her marmoset with her. Maya had never felt so glad to see a monkey.

Bouboule led her through the junk-cluttered attic, and then up a black iron ladder. Bouboule threw back a heavy wooden trapdoor and they emerged on the slope of the ancient tiled roof of the Tête du Noyé. Now that it was spring, Praha’s winter overcast had finally been chased away. The night was full of young stars.

Bouboule closed the trapdoor with a clunk and spoke for the first time. “Now I think it’s safe to talk.”

“Why is that cop here?”

“Sometimes she comes, sometimes she doesn’t,” Bouboule said dourly. “There’s nothing we can do.”

It was a sharp night. Cold and still. The marmoset chattered in distress. “[Be good, my Patapouff,]” Bouboule chided in Français. “[Tonight you must guard me.]” The marmoset seemed to understand this. He adjusted his tiny top hat and looked about as fierce as a yellow two-kilo primate could manage.

Maya scrambled with Bouboule to the peak of the roof, where they sat without a trace of comfort on the narrow ridgeline of arched greenish tiles.

The trapdoor opened again. Benedetta and Niko emerged.

“Is she onto us tonight?” Benedetta said anxiously.

Bouboule shrugged, and sniffed. “[I didn’t tell. You and your little politicals, you are so secret with me that I couldn’t tell if I wanted.]”

“Ciao Niko,” Maya said. She reached down and helped Niko to the peak of the roof.

“We didn’t meet in flesh before,” said Niko, “but what you say on the net, it’s very funny.”