stitched back around Mia Ziemann, like a big warm quilt of official forgiveness and grace.
She stumbled forward.
The dog said something in Deutsch.
“What?” Mia said.
The dog switched to English. “Are you all right, miss? Shall I call a steward? You smell a little upset.”
The president looked up and smiled politely.
“No,” Mia said, “no. I’m feeling much better now.”
“What a lovely dress. What’s your name?” asked the president.
“Maya.”
“This fine young man is Laszlo Ferencsi,” the president said, patting the shoulder of the boy.
“I won the school essay contest!” Laszlo piped up in English. “I get to stay with the president today!”
Maya swallowed hard. “That’s great, kid. You must be really proud.”
“I am the future,” Laszlo confided shyly.
“I’m a big ragamuffin,” Maya said. She tottered to the back of the cabin, found the ladies’, knelt on the floor with a squeak of stockings, and had the dry heaves.
Klaudia found her in the ladies’, hauled her out, and bullied her into eating. Once the nutrient broth had hit her system, Maya’s morale began to soar.
Klaudia gently clipped the translator back onto Maya’s head. “[I knew you were in trouble when you left your earpiece.… It’s a good thing Therese sent me along to look after you! You don’t have any more sense than a rabbit! Even a rabbit knows enough to eat.]”
Maya dabbed cooling sweat from her forehead. “Rabbits never have my problems unless they’ve done something really postlagomorphian.”
“[No wonder Eugene likes you. You talk just as crazy as he does. You better stick close to me at this party tonight. These artifice characters are real stuck-up oddballs.]”
Maya gazed out the window and sipped pale broth from her spoon. It felt so good to be someone new. So good to be herself. So good to be alive. It was much, much more important to be alive than to be anyone in particular. Thick Bohemian forest outside the train window, the branches just beginning to leaf out for spring. Then they were silently sliding at very high velocity on skeletal arches over intensely cultivated green fields. Vast irrigated stands of tall and looming gasketfungus.
The giant fungi weren’t plants. They’d been designed to transmute air, water, and light into fats, carbohydrates, and protein, with a bioengineered efficiency previously unknown to the world of nature. A field of engineered gasketfungus could feed a small town. The fungi were two stories tall: dense, green, leafless, square edged, and as riddled as a sponge. Once you got used to the monsters, they were rather pretty. And it was nice that they were pretty, because they covered most of rural Europe.
They spent the afternoon in the center of Praha. In Mala Strana. In the Old Town, Stare Mesto. Cobbled squares. Cathedrals. Spires and ancient brick and footworn stone. Gilded steeples, railings, bridges, damply gleaming statuary. The river Vltava. Architecture centuries old.
Klaudia shopped frenetically, and methodically stuffed Maya with fast food from the street stalls. The tasty nourishing grease hit Maya like a drug, and her world grew easy and comfortable. Everything was cheerful, everything was making sense.
They took their cameras to the Karel Bridge. This was not the peak of the tourist season, but Praha was always in vogue. Praha was an artifice town, a couture town. People came here to show off.
Of course most of the tourists were old people. Most of everyone was old people. And old women had never dressed so beautifully, never carried chic so well into such advanced years. The bridge was aswarm with older women, Europe’s female gerontocrats, ladies who were poised, serene, deeply experienced, deliberate, and detached. Firm but gentl
Old women in winter glissade jackets, in porous-weave two-tone nattiere sweaters. Old women in smart, self-contained business suits of pinkish apricot, poilu blue, eucalyptus. Women in stylish padded winter pajamas of pale yellow and crepuscular blue. Hard sleek hairstyles without a trace of gray, bobbed and parted at the side, with cape-scarves flung over one shoulder and neatly pinned with seashell brooches. Surplice fronts and fringed lapels, mousselines, failles, polycarbon chiffons, marquisettes, matelasses, rich crepes, and restrained lames. Sheath dresses over the sleek planar lines of unobtrusive medical cuirasses. A slender postsexual profile with a waistline that seemed to start at midthigh, breaking into smart flounces and chic little gouts of astrakhan and breitschwantz. Beautiful teeming masses of posthuman women.
The old men in the crowd dressed with columnar forbidding dignity in belted coats and dark medical vests and tailored jackets, as if they’d outgrown the prospect of intimate human contact. The old men looked suave and unearthly and critically detached, a race of scholarly ice kings who walked so slowly in their beautifully polished shoes that it seemed they were being paid by the step.
And then the vivid people. They were a minority of course, but they were less of a minority in Praha, and that made them bold and intense.
Young men. Lots of bold and intense young men, that surplus of men that every generation boasted before the male mortality rate kicked in. Swaggering young bravos with lucid unlined skin like angels, because acne was as dead as smallpox. They favored gleaming jackets and odd heavy boots and patterned neckscarves. It was a generation of young men fed from birth on biochemical ambrosia, with perfect teeth and perfect eyesight and lithe, balletic posture. The real dandies among the boys wore decorative translator earcuffs, and didn’t mind a dusting of blusher to accentuate the cheekbones.
Vivid women. Black-sleeved print dresses, garishly patterned fabric shawls, swirling postiche capes, gunmetal shoegloves with zesty little flip-up ankle collars. Patterned frocks, flirty short jackets, lots of lacquer red. Backpacks with little bells and clattering bangles, and very serious lipstick. Praha had a vogue for checkered winter gloves nicked off at the fingertips for the emergence of daggerlike lacquered nails. Big serious cinching waistline belts, belts that threw the hips out. And decolletage, whole hot hormonal acres of decolletage, even in winter. Big cushiony vivid cleavage that went beyond allure and became a political statement.
The young women were thrilled to be photographed. They laughed at her and clowned for the camera. Many people in Praha, even the kids, wore spex, but nobody wore glasses anymore. Corrective lenses were a prosthetic device as dead as the ivory pegleg.
Praha was giving her new insight.
She found herself suddenly understanding the profound alliance between old European city centers and young Europeans. All the world’s real and serious business took place in the giant, sophisticated, intelligent high-rise rings around the downtowns—buildings with advanced infrastructure, buildings with the late twenty-first century embedded in their diamond bones and fiber-optic ligaments.
Still, those in power could not bring themselves to demolish their architectural heritage. To destroy their own cultural roots was to leave themselves without even the fiction of an alternative, marooned in a terrible vacuity of postindustrial pragmatism. They prized those aging bricks and those moldering walls and, for oddly similar reasons, Europe’s young people were similarly prized, and similarly sidelined.
Young kids lurking in old cities. They formed an urban symbiosis of the profoundly noneconomic, a conjunction of the indestructible past with a future not yet allowed to be.
Maya and Klaudia dressed in a ladies’ and left their bags in a public locker. The Tete de Noye was in Opatovicka Street, a three-story building with a steeply pitched tiled roof. You entered it by walking up a short set of worn stone steps with ornate iron railings, and then directly down a rather longer set of wooden steps into the windowless basement, where they kept the bar. All this stepping up and down made very little architectural sense, but the building was at least five hundred years old. It had been through so many historic transitions that it had a patina like metamorphic rock.
Klaudia and Maya were met at the foot of the stairs by an elderly spotted bulldog in a tattered sweater and striped shorts, possibly the ugliest intelligent animal Maya had ever seen. “Who asked ya here?” demanded the dog in English, and he growled with unfeigned menace.
Maya looked quickly around the bar. The place was lit by a few twinkly bluish overheads and the pale glow of
