Just after dawn, she found the Praha street address. It was a stone-faced official-looking building, its rotten Communist-era concrete long since gnawed out and replaced with a jolly modern greenish foam. The building was still closed and locked for the night. There were discreet blue-and-white Czesky placards on the doors, but she couldn’t read Czestina.
She found a breakfast cafe, warmed up, had something to eat, repaired her damaged makeup, saw life return to the city in a languid rattle of bicycles. When the building’s front door opened with a programmed click of the clock, she was the first to slip inside.
She discovered the netsite on the building’s fourth floor, at the head of the stairs. The netsite was closed and locked. She retreated, winded and footsore, to the ladies’, where she sat in a booth with her eyes closed, and dozed a bit.
On her next attempt she found the door ajar. Inside, the netsite was a fabulous mess of vaulted ceilings, brass-knobbed doors, plastic-spined reference manuals, dying wire-festooned machinery. The windows had been bricked up. There were odd stains on the plaster walls, and cobwebs in the corners.
Bozhena was brushing her hair, eating breakfast rolls, and drinking from a bottle of animal milk. Bozhena had very luxuriant hair for a woman of such advanced age. Her teeth were also impressive: big as tombstones, perfectly preserved, and with a very high albedo.
“You’re Bozhena, right? Good morning.”
“Good morning and welcome to the Coordinated Access Bureau.” Bozhena seemed proud of her brisk technician’s English. “What are your requirements?”
“I need a touchscreen to access a memory palace set up in the sixties. A contact of mine in San Francisco said you could supply the necessary discretion.”
“Oh yes, we’re very discreet here at Access Bureau,” Bozhena assured her. “Also, completely out of date! Old palaces, old castles, all manner of labyrinths and dungeons! That is our local specialty.” Without warning, Bozhena touched her earpiece and suddenly left the counter. She retired into a cloistered back room of the office.
Time passed very slowly. Dust motes floated in the glare of a few paraboloid overheads. The net machines sat there as inert as long-abandoned fireplugs.
Four elderly Czech women, bureaucratic functionaries, filtered one by one into the office. They were carrying breakfast and their knitting. One of them had brought her cat.
After some time, one of the women, yawning, arrived with a touchscreen, set it on the counter, checked it off on a notepad, and wandered off without a word. Maya picked the touchscreen from its grainy plastic box and blew dust from it. It was covered with peeling official stickers in unreadable Czestina. Ancient pre-electronic text, the old-style Czesky orthography from before the European orthographic reformations. Little circles, peculiar caret marks, a thicket of acutes and circumflexes and accent marks, so that the words looked wrapped in barbed wire.
Bozhena languidly reemerged, carefully tucked in her shin-length gray skirt, and sat at her magisterial plastic desk. She searched methodically through six drawers. Finally she found a lovely cast-glass paperweight. She set it on her tabletop and began toying with it.
“Excuse me,” Maya said. “Do you happen to have any material on Josef Novak?”
Bozhena’s face froze. She rose from her desk and came to the counter. “Why would you want to investigate Mr. Novak? Who told you we had Josef Novak in our archives here?”
“I’m Mr. Novak’s new pupil,” Maya lied cheerfully. “He’s teaching me photography.”
Bozhena’s face fell into deep confusion. “You? Why? Novak’s student? But you’re a foreigner. What’s he done this time, poor fellow?” Bozhena found her purse and began brushing her hair with redoubled vigor.
The door opened and two Czech cops in pink uniforms came in. They sat at a wooden table, booted up a screen, and sipped hot tinctures from cartons.
It struck Maya suddenly that the trusted Mr. Stuart had sent her directly to a Praha police bureau. These people were all cops. This was a cops’ research establishment. She was surrounded by Czech virtuality cops. This was an antiquarian netsite, all right—but only because the Czech police had some of the worst equipment in the world.
“Do you know Helene?” Maya said casually, leaning on the countertop. “Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier?”
“The Widow’s in and out,” shrugged Bozhena, examining her nails. “All the time. Why, I don’t know. She never has a good word for us.”
“I need to call her this morning and clear a few little things. Do you happen to have Helene’s net-address handy?”
“This is a netsite, not a reference service,” Bozhena said tartly. “We love to help in Access Bureau, we are so very open and friendly in Praha with nothing to hide! But the Widow’s not based in Praha so that’s not my department.”
“Look,” Maya said, “if you’re not going to help me on the Novak case, just say so straight out.”
“I never said that,” Bozhena parried.
“I’ve got other methods, and other contacts, and other ways to go about my job, you know.”
“I’m sure you do, Miss Amerika,” Bozhena said, with an acid scowl.
Maya rubbed her bloodshot eyes. “Look, let’s make this real simple and easy for both of us,” she said. “I’ll just elbow my way through your dense crowd of eager clients here, and I’ll scare up some action on that old magnetic tracker set. Don’t think you have to help me, or anything. You don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you. We’ll both just pretend this isn’t really happening. Okay?”
Bozhena said nothing. She retreated back to her desk.
Fear and adrenaline had made Maya invincible. She found goggles and gloves. It struck her that no one ever bothered or interrupted people who were busy in goggles and gloves. Goggles and gloves would make her invisible.
She bullied the ancient machine into operation and she stroked in the passtouch. She conjured up the memory palace seemingly through sheer force of will.
The familiar architect’s office appeared all around her, plating the screens a finger’s width from the damp surfaces of her eyeballs. Someone had tampered with the blackboard. Along with the curly Kilroy and the greenish scrawl MAYA WAS HERE, the blackboard now had a neatly printed MAYA PRESS HERE and a button drawn in multicolored chalk.
Maya thought it over, then pressed the colored button on the chalkboard. The gloves felt good and solid, but nothing happened.
She looked around the virtual office. The place was aswarm with geckos. There were repair geckos all over the place, some as big as bread loaves and others milling like ants. The broken table had been removed. The plants in the garden outside were much better rendered now. They closely resembled real vegetation.
One of the armchairs suffered a sudden identity crisis and morphed itself into Benedetta. The virtual Benedetta was in a black hourglass cocktail dress and a cropped pink jacket with black piping. She had the unnaturally elongated legs of a fashion sketch, with highly improbable stiletto heels. Benedetta’s face was an excellent likeness, but the virtual hair was bad. Virtual hair almost always looked phony, either like a rubber casting or some hyperactive Medusa subroutine. Benedetta had unwisely gone for an arty Medusa gambit, which rather overloaded the local data flow. When she moved too quickly, big shining wads of coiffure flickered violently in and out of existence.
The virtual model’s lips moved soundlessly. “Ciao Maya.”
Maya found a dangling plug on the spex and tucked it into her ear. “Ciao Benedetta.”
Benedetta made a little curtsy. “Are you surprised?”
“I’m a little disappointed,” Maya said. “Is my vocal level coming across okay?”
“Yes, I hear you fine.”
“I never dreamed you’d steal my passtouch and take advantage of my act of trust. Really, Benedetta, how childish of you.”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” Benedetta said contritely. “I wanted to admire the palazzo architecture and the period detail. And all the lovely antique coding structures.”
“Of course you did, darling. And did you find the pornography, too?”
“Yes, of course I found the pornography. But I left this call button for you”—Benedetta gestured at the chalkboard—“because we have a little problem now. A little problem in the palazzo.”
