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. Intestinal Villi Lamination (IVL). Affective Circadian Adjustment (ACA). Bone augmentation. Ceramic joint prostheses. Targeted aminoguanidines. Targeted dehydroepiandrosterone. Autoimmune Reprogramming Systematics (ARS). Atherosclerotic Microbial Scrubbing (AMS). Glial-Neural Dissipative Defibrillation (GNDD). Broad-Spectrum Kinetic Metabolic Acceleration (BSKMA). Those were old- fashioned techniques. After that they had begun getting ambitious.
A bronze gong sounded. The three hundred diners rose from their little tables in unison, walked or limped or shuffled or rolled, and engaged in a huge and extremely well-ordered session of musical chairs. There was no fuss and no confusion. When they were done, everybody found themselves in the intimate company of new friends, with every appearance of spontaneous delight. Scurrying robots brought everyone fresh utensils and the soup course.
Josef’s new tablemates—he seemed to know them well, or perhaps they were broadcasting biographies to be picked up by his spex—were speaking Deutsch. Maya had set her translator for Czestina and Italiano. She could have inserted the little diamond egg for Deutsch, but whenever she fussed with the necklace nowadays, it infallibly stopped and scolded her about how much she owed.
She felt ashamed of her necklace. The cheap gold and diamonds sparkled like so much radioactive junk on the exposed slope of her decolletage. She remained deaf to the Deutsch and said nothing, and her lack of contribution was not noticed in the slightest. She was young. She had nothing of interest to say.
The robots took the zuppa away and everyone moved again. A visually perfect, utterly bland, and intensely digestible cannelloni was served. Some guests chose to eat it, others merely beat it into submission. Then they moved again into fresh company for the delightfully molded and quite taste-free little gnocchi. Then again for gleaming rippled yellow wedges of a scent-free cheeselike substance. Then again for the fluted conical molds of the dolce. It was an intensely elaborate repast, none of it requiring much use of teeth.
The crowd adjourned to the gloomy grandeur of the Kio’s display suite. There were booths here and there against the walls, very daring booths that almost looked as if they were engaging in advertising. This tweaking of the rules was mere bravado on Vietti’s part, for blatant commerciality was not required in haute couture. True haute couture, the pursuit of genuine excellence in dress, required mostly patience. Patience was something that society’s glitterati had a very great deal of, these days. Couture was a game of prestige, and the money that supported it came partly from the wealthy, and mostly from Vietti’s licensing: spexware, scents, bath accoutrements, private spas, medicated cosmetics. An arsenal of intellectual property for a couturier who did not so much make clothing as tailor modes of living.
Here at last the lucky attendees, bones aching from the ascetic stools, found decent chairs in which to sit. They broke up into pewlike rows of competing subclasses. Various Indonesian, Nipponese, and American politicians and financiers who were considered peacocks of the shiny set invested the front row in determined effort to impress one another. They were backed by layers of net-editors, store buyers, photographers, actors, actresses, common or garden millionaires, and hommes and femmes du monde.
There were not quite enough chairs for everyone: a deliberate and very traditional oversight. Novak took her backstage through a milling crowd of socialites, junior designers, and minor celebrities.
The area backstage was full of European storks, African secretary birds, and American whooping cranes. These tall and solemn feathered bipeds awaited their cue with impressive single-minded dignity, deftly sidestepping the anxious humans.
The legendary couturier was the nucleus of a buzzing and highly motivated crowd of atelier subordinates. Vietti wore his version of working clothes: a seal black, vaguely furry, multipocketed getup that would have looked splendid with aqualungs. He tracked events for the show on a rainbow pair of fluttering wrist-mounted display fans.
“Josef, so good of you to come,” said Vietti in English. He was tall and broad shouldered and square chinned and one of the very few people at the event who did not deign to wear spex. It was clear that Vietti had once been very beautiful. Many years and many pains had been at him. Now he had the slightly sinister ruinous dignity of the Roman Colosseum—although in point of fact Giancarlo Vietti was not Roman but Milanese.
Vietti glanced at Maya with the same absently indulgent gaze he’d been giving his obedient storks. His faded blue eyes widened suddenly. Finally he revealed a sparkling rack of ceramic teeth. “Oh, but Josef. But she’s so cute!
