cosmetic, pleasant but essentially worthless. Some had been functional, high-tech, genuinely restorative facials that left one’s face raw and unsettled, the kind of face that wanted to be left alone in a warm dark room to collect itself. But Philippe’s work was artifice. Still a Maya face—but a composed, radiant, flawless Maya face. Curled and slightly tinted lashes. Smoky eyelids. Brows like wings. Skin to shame damask. Pellucid irises and eyewhites as glossy as china. Lips like two poppy petals. A finished face. Human perfection.
Then they put the new wig on and she left human perfection for a higher realm. It was a very smart wig. This wig could have leapt from her scalp like a supersonic octopus and flung its piercing tendrils right through a plaster wall. But it was the tool of a major couture house, so it would never do anything half so gauche. It was merely a staggeringly pretty wig, a wig in rich, solid, deeply convincing, faintly luminescent auburn, a wig as expensive, as cozy, and as well designed as a limousine.
The wig settled to her scalp with an intimate grip rather more convincing than the grip of her own hair. When it curled lustrously about her neck and shoulders it behaved the way a woman’s hair behaved in daydreams.
A gonging alarm sounded. The last men cleared out of the room. Four female models sauntered in. The women were tall and slender and fully dressed except for shoes. The shoes were being a lot of trouble, and anxious runners kept hauling new pairs in and out. The models, bored and patient, sipped tinctures and puffed at inhalants and ate little white sticks of calorie-free finger food. They nibbled and dabbed at their hors d’oeuvres, and their preternatural arms moved with perfect eerie grace, from painted plate to painted lip.
The models were old women, and they looked the way that modern old women looked when they were in truly superb condition: they looked like amenorrheic female athletes. Like pubescent female gymnasts who’d been bleached completely free of any youthful brio. They showed none of the natural signs of human aging, but they were just a little crispy, a little taut. The models were solemn and sloe-eyed and dainty and extremely strong. They looked as if they could leap headlong through plate glass without turning a hair.
Their clothes were decorative and columnar and slender hipped and without much in the way of bustline. To see these clothes was to realize just how garments could be beautiful, impressive, even feminine, while being almost entirely free of sexual allure. The clothes were splendidly cut and defined. Rather ecclesiastical, rather bankerly, rather like the court dress of high-powered palace eunuchs from the Manchu Forbidden City. Some of the clothes showed skin, but it was the kind of skin a woman might reveal as she conquered the English Channel.
The clothes were very rich in feathering. Not frail or showy feathers, but feathers in gleaming businesslike array, feathers in swathes like chain mail. Giancarlo had been very reliant on feathers this spring season. It was mostly the detail work with feathers that had sent these garments soaring into the unearthly realm of luxe.
“[It’s not just the risk reduction,]” said the nearest model, in Italiano. “[You get a six-point-five percent rate of return.]”
“[I’m not sure the time is right for medical mutual funds,]” said a second model. “[Besides, I’m Catholic.]”
“[No one says you have to take a treatment on the banned list, you just invest in them,]” said the first model patiently. She was deeply, spiritually, untouchably beautiful; she looked like a bit player in Botticelli’s
The second model looked at Maya in surprise, and then at her wristwatch. “[When do you go on?]”
Maya touched her necklace and her ear. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italiano.”
“Your diamonds are so true to the past life, I love the diamonds,” said the second model in halting but sympathetic English. “The hair, though—not so very good. That’s very smart hair, that’s not twenties hair.”
“You’re very sexy,” the first model told her politely. “
The show was warming up outside; she could hear periodic bursts of applause. They brought her Vietti’s gown, still warm from the instantiator. This gown fit at least as well as the cheaper version Novak had given her, but Vietti’s stylists did not consider this a proper fit at all. Maya found herself naked and shivering beneath the impassive eyes and knowing hands of two men and three women. They slashed quickly at the gown with razorlike ceramic scissors and painted her goose-bumped flesh with quick-setting adhesive. In a fury of efficiency they squeezed and waxed her into the gown, then jammed her feet into pumps two sizes too small. Then, out the door in a bustle of anxious minders. Philippe hurried alongside her, retouching her face as she waited to take her cue.
When her cue came she left the curtain and walked as she had been taught. The catwalk’s floods were as bright as double-ranked full moons and the audience beyond their arc was a gleaming mass of spex, nocturnal eyes in a gilded swamp. They were playing a twenties pop song, a theme she actually recognized, a song she’d once thought was slick. Now the ancient pop song sounded lost and primitive, almost feral. Theme music for the triumphal march of the living fossils.
They’d dressed her as a glamorous young woman from the 2020s. A joke, a little shattering blast at the conceptual framework. Because, in stark actuality, she’d been a young woman during the 2020s. She had never been glamorous then, not a bit like this, not even for a moment, because she had been far too busy and far too careful. And now through some astounding fluke of chic she had avenged herself. The joy of it was both nostalgic and immediate, melding in her head in a fabulous jouissance.
White laserflashes puffed from cameras in the audience, growing into a crescendo as she walked. She felt so radiant. She was stunning people. She was whirling past their machine-shrouded eyes like nostalgic vertigo. She was the cynosure, the belle, the vamp, the femme fatale. Lost love beyond mortal attainment, dressed to kill, dressed to bury, dressed to rise again and walk among mortals. She had crushed them with stolen charisma. They had dressed a risen ghost in a Milanese couture gown and let her trample time underfoot. She was making them love her.
She took the little pirouette at the end of the walkway, kicked back a bit with a crack of heels, sneered at them happily. She was so high above them and so wrapped in lunar brightness, and they were such low fetid dark creatures that not a one of them could ever touch her. The walk was taking forever. She had forgotten how to breathe. The sense of constriction made her frantic with excitement. A white crane leapt onto the catwalk, immediately recognized that it had done something rash, and hopped off into the crowd with a jostle of pipestem legs and a snowy flap of wings. She hesitated just before the curtain, then whirled and blew the crowd a kiss. They responded with a cataclysm of photographic flash shots.
Behind the curtain she found herself tingling, trembling. She found a stool in a corner and sat and fought for proper breath. The crowd was still applauding. Then the music changed and another model slid past her like an angel on casters.
Novak found her. He was laughing.
“What a brave girl. You don’t give two pins, do you?”
“Was I all right?”
“Better than that! You looked so very pleased and wicked, like a little spoilt child. It was so pretty of you, so apropos.”
“Will Giancarlo be happy with me?”
“I have no idea. He probably thinks you’re a terrible brat to ham it up that way. But don’t worry, it made the night for the rest of us.” Novak chuckled. She hadn’t seen Novak truly pleased before; he was like a man who’d just pulled off a trick billiard shot with a rubber cue. “Giancarlo will come around, once he hears them talk about you. Giancarlo’s very clever in that way. He never judges anything until he sees what it’s done to his public.”
Maya tumbled hard from her crest of elation. The real world felt so deflated suddenly. Quotidian, wearied, flat. “I did the best that I could.”
“Of course you did, of course you did,” he soothed. “You mustn’t cry, darling, it’s all right now. It was very nice for us, it was different. They hire the pros to walk properly for them, and you were very sincere, they can’t buy that.” Novak took her elbow and led her backstage to a watercooler.
He deftly filled a cup with pristine distillate and gave it to her, one-handed. “It’s so remarkable,” he mused. “You can’t show a garment to advantage, of course, because you’re only a little beginner. But you truly have that look! Seeing you there, it was like archival video. Some Yankee girl from the twenties, in her too-tight shoes, so touchingly proud of her wonderful gown. What deja vu, what
