Holy Fire

“Let’s pop your palazzo open and look about inside.” Benedetta deftly wrapped the kerchief around her neck. The cloth twitched a bit, then flashed into a pattern of gold and paisley. Benedetta picked up her smooth and slender notebook and her metal-studded purse. “We’ll go behind the bar where it’s discreet.”

“You’ve been so patient with me already, Benedetta. I hate to impose.”

Benedetta stared at her for a long moment, then dropped her eyes. “All right. I was stupid. I’m sorry that I was stupid to you. I’ll be better now. So can we go?”

“I accept your apology.” Maya stood up. “Let’s go.”

Benedetta led her into an especially bluish and subterranean niche behind the long mahogany bar. Someone had been doing blood sampling on the table top. There was a litter of crumpled chromatographs and a diamond- beaked mosquito syringe.

Benedetta swept the litter aside, thumped her notebook down, and unreeled an antenna from its top. “So. What is required? Gloves? Spex?”

“I need a touchscreen for my password.”

“A touchscreen! It must be fate that I brought my furoshiki.” Benedetta whipped her kerchief off, set it on the table, and smoothed it flat. “This will work. It’s from Nippon. The Nipponese love the obscure functionalities.” She plugged the corner of the inert cloth into her notebook and the cloth flashed into vivid glowing eggshell white.

“I’ve never seen one of these furoshiki.” Maya leaned over the table. “I’ve certainly heard of them.… ” The intelligent cloth was woven from a dense matrix of fiber-optic threads, organic circuitry, and piezoelastic fiber. The hair-thin optical threads oozed miniscule screen-line pixels of colored light. A woven display screen. A flexible all- fabric computer.

Benedetta opened her purse, removed an exquisite pair of Italian designer spex, and slipped them on.

“Those are lovely,” Maya said.

“You need spex and gloves? Well, you’re in the right crowd. We’ll ask Bouboule. We can trust Bouboule. All right?”

“I suppose so.”

Benedetta tapped her spex and clawed at invisible midair commands. “You’ll love Bouboule,” she promised. “Everyone loves Bouboule. She’s rich and generous and funny and promiscuous, and likes to punch cops in the face. She’ll be dead at forty.”

Benedetta stroked at her notebook keys. Then she aimed her spex across the table at Maya. Maya’s face bloomed across the fabric kerchief in full color.

“The Miracle of Saint Veronica!” Benedetta said, and smirked. “Let me find the touch function.”

“This is a big secret. I’m being very rash in trusting a stranger with this. I’m sure you realize that, Benedetta.”

“You’re very pretty,” Benedetta said slowly, staring into her screen and typing. “You shouldn’t be so pretty, and also push me so hard.”

“Pretty is just a technique of mine. You’re pretty. I could make you look really vivid if you wanted me to.”

“I hate body artifice,” Benedetta said, fingering keys with great expertise. “It’s even worse now that women’s bodies last forever. We women are so much of the female body it’s fatal to us, we even have to die beautiful. Even Paul … he talks to me about theory. Like a colleague! Like a philosopher! Then the glamour girl appears in her wig and lipstick and it’s like his little Muse just jumped off the train for him. Women never learn! Men contemplate beauty, but we have to be beauty. So the female is always the other, and we’re never the center.”

Maya blinked. “Men and women just think differently, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s so stupid! ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ That’s all gone now, you understand? Anatomy is industry now! You want to do some terrifying male mathematics, little glamour girl? Put enough stickers on your head and I’ll teach you calculus in a week!”

“You can break a blood vessel doing that sort ofthing.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, darling. I’m sure you’ve done things to your breasts that are a thousand times more radical than calculus. Wait a moment—here it comes.”

Benedetta’s eggshell white furoshiki turned a smoky slate gray. “That’s good. Just a moment while I find a public netsite.… Here we have it.”

Bouboule arrived at their table. Bouboule had a lacquered little cupid’s-bow mouth, no chin, and large, luminescent brown eyes. She wore a narrow-brimmed domed hat, fancy spex on a neck chain, a woven sweater, a long scarf, and she carried a large yellow backpack. “Ciao Benedetta.”

“Bouboule is from Stuttgart,” Benedetta said. “What was your name again?”

“Maya.”

“Maya is going to show us a secret, Bouboule.”

“I adore secrets,” said Bouboule, settling down with a wriggle. “How charming of you, Maya, to share your secrets with little nobodies like ourselves. Do you mind if my monkey sees?”

A golden marmoset crept up Bouboule’s solid back and shoulder. The marmoset was fully clad in miniature evening dress, tie and tails. The monkey’s eyes were two gleaming metallic domes. Implanted mirrorspex.

“Does your monkey talk?” Maya asked. The monkey had no shoes. Its furry little feet, protruding from the trouser’s hems, seemed peculiarly ghastly.

“My monkey’s a virtualist,” Bouboule said airily. “Maya, where are your spex?”

“Don’t have spex. Got no gloves either.”

“Quel dommage!” said Bouboule, clearly very pleased. “My uncles manufacture spex in Stuttgart. I have four uncles. All brothers! Do you know how rare that is nowadays, to have four brother men, all from one family? Five childs! With my mother, all together. That never happens now! But things always happen to me that should never happen.” Bouboule opened her pack and handed Maya a plastic-wrapped pair of wire-rimmed spex.

“Liquid film?” Maya said, examining the lenses.

“Disposables,” shrugged Bouboule. “Take these smartgloves—I don’t say these are gloves of the mode. These are gloves to wear on party nights, when you might wake up who knows where. Don’t break the fingers, stretch them out slowly … that’s the way.”

“You’re very kind to loan me these,” Maya said.

“No loan, keep them! My uncles like gifting toys to the childs, they have a very long-term view of the market.”

“I have something for you, too, Maya,” said Benedetta suddenly, apparently on impulse. Benedetta groped with two fingers beneath the high rolled collar of her blouse. She tugged out a diamond necklace, with a pendant on a thin golden chain. “Here. This is for you. Yours is the greater need.”

“A diamond necklace?”

“Don’t look so surprised, any idiot can make diamonds,” Benedetta said. She handed it over. “Look at the pendant.”

“A little nightingale in a golden nest! This is so lovely, Benedetta. I can’t possibly accept this.”

“Gold is dirt. Stop gaping, and pay attention. The bird nest goes inside your ear. It’s a translator. All the diamonds are memory beads, they contain all the European languages. See the little numbers etched on the beads? The bird, she is hatching English, Italiano, and Francais now. You don’t need Italiano as your major language, so put in English, that’s egg number one … put English in the center of the nest, and put Italiano back on one side. Italiano, that’s egg number seventeen.”

“Italiano is seventeen?” said Bouboule.

“It’s a Swiss device. From Basel.”

“What humorless people the Swiss are,” said Bouboule. “Just because Milano bought Geneva … What a grudge.”

Maya took the Italiano egg from the chain. Then she pried the English egg loose from the golden nest, and carefully popped the Italiano diamond egg beneath the bird’s etched little circuitry feet. The tiny eggs snapped nicely into place with satisfying little clicks.

She gently tucked the little pendant into the hollow of her right ear. The pendant wriggled about like a metallic earwig. Something threadlike and waxy crept into her ear canal. She felt an instant violent urge to claw the