deeply and intimately linked. It was a truth that could not be grasped unless you were sad enough to let yourself understand.
Antonio and his two friends were busily working their tincture set. The proper use of a tincture set was something of a social art, it required composure and grace and foresight and attention to detail. The junkies had none of these qualities. They were awkward and rather clumsy and yet terribly determined. They were deeply intoxicated, so they made many small mistakes. Whenever they made a mistake they would retreat and try to think about it, and then they would mentally circle back to poke and prod and jiggle. It was like watching three little spiders gently preparing to eat a trapped and kicking insect.
She shuddered violently, and Brett gently stroked her arm. “Don’t be afraid.”
There hadn’t been any fear at all until Brett unleashed the word. Then of course there was fear. A cold gush of nasty fear from a brimming reservoir like a vast black ocean. What had she to fear? Why get panicky all of a sudden? There was nothing to fear. Nothing, of course, except that she had surrendered herself to desire. Desire had grown in her aging brain in gray wedges of new neural flesh. Her youthful joie de vivre was every bit as counterfeit as the arachnid twitchings of a junkie. They dreamed of the artificial paradise, but she had become the artificial paradise.
She was blundering through Europe as if no one would ever guess the truth, but how could they fail to guess? She’d brazened her way through three months of outlaw existence with nothing to guard her but a mad veneer of perfect happiness and confidence. The eggshell surface of a crazy confidence trick. She’d been walking a suspension bridge of other people’s disbelief. Only someone blind with manic exultation could believe that such a situation would last.
Of course they were going to catch her. Of course she would trip up eventually. Stark reality could shove its rhinoceros horn through the tissue of her fantasy at any moment. Denunciation and betrayal could come from any point of the compass. From Paul, who knew too much. From Josef, if he ever thought to bother. From Benedetta, who would turn on her in vengeful fury if she knew the ugly truth. What if Emil missed her and thought to ask a policeman for help?
The surge of terrible insight was enough to make her scramble headlong from the building, but the cruelly revelatory power of the drug froze her in place. Suppose she did run away again. Suppose she jumped a train for Vladivostok or Ulan Bator or Johannesburg—what would happen if she ever got sick? Or if the treatment began to manifest side effects? How could she, a professional medical economist, have been so stupid? Of course a treatment as radical as NTDCD would manifest side effects—that was why they’d been wise enough to want to watch her closely in the first place. So that they could trace and study unexpected reactions. Especially in fast- growing tissue, like hair and nails …
Maya looked at her ragged fingertips and a whimper of anguish escaped her. How could she have done this to herself? She was a monster. She was a monster escaped from a cage and it was in the interests of everyone she knew, and everyone she met, to lock her up. She began to shake in abject terror.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given you so much,” Brett said with concern. “But I didn’t want you to take just a little lacrimogen, and ride it out all smug, and then make me give it up.”
“I’m a monster,” Maya said. Her lips began to tremble.
Brett put her arm around Maya’s shoulders. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” she murmured. “You’re not a monster. Everyone knows that you’re very beautiful. You’d better cry some. With lacrimogen that always helps.”
“I’m a monster,” Maya insisted, and began obediently to cry.
“I never met a beautiful woman who wasn’t deeply insecure,” said Brett.
Antonio shuffled over and looked into the hammock. “Is she all right? Is she handling it?”
“She’s not too great,” Brett said. “What’s that smell?”
“We overcooked the batch,” Antonio said. “We have to flush and start over.”
“What do you mean, flush?” Brett said tensely.
Antonio gestured at the bathroom door.
Brett sat up in the hammock, sending it swaying sickeningly. “Look, you can’t flush a bad tincture down the commode! Are you crazy? You have to decompose a bad tincture inside the set. Man, they’ve got monitors in the sewer system! You can’t just spew some bad chemical process into a city sewer. It might be toxic or carcinogenic! That makes environmental monitors go crazy!”
“We flushed bad batches before,” Antonio said patiently. “We do it all the time.”
“A bad lacrimogen run?”
“No, entheogens. But no problem.”
“You are an irresponsible sociopath with no consideration for innocent people,” Brett said mordantly, bitterly, and with complete accuracy.
Antonio grinned, maybe a little angry now, but too polite to show it. “You’re always so nasty on lacrimogens, Natalie. If you want to be so nasty, get a boyfriend. You can feel just as bad from a love affair.”
One of the women shuffled up. She was not Italian. Maybe Swiss. “Natalie, this isn’t San Francisco,” she said. “These are Roman sewers, the oldest sewers in the world. All catacombs and buried villas down there, dead temples of the virgins, drowned mosaics, Christian bones …” She blinked, and swayed a little. “Bad lacrimogen can’t make old Roman ghosts any sorrier.”
Brett shook her head. “You need to clean that tincture set, run a diagnostic, and then decompose the bad production. That’s the proper method, that’s all!”
“We’re too tired,” said Antonio. “Do you want some more or don’t you?”
“I don’t want anything out of that set,” Brett said. “Do you think I’m crazy? That could poison me!” She burst into tears.
A sleeping junkie spoke up from his hammock. He was large and bulky, with heavy, threatening brows and four days of beard. “Do you mind?” he said in Irish-tinged English. “Do read aloud, my dears, converse, enjoy yourselves. But don’t squabble and fuss. And especially, don’t weep.”
“Sorry, Kurt, very sorry,” said Antonio. He carried a plastic-sealed pannikin behind the bathroom door. An ancient chain rattled, and water gurgled.
Kurt sat up. “My, our new guest is very lovely.”
“She’s on lacrimogen,” Brett said defensively.
“Women need a man when they’re on lacrimogen,” rumbled Kurt. “Come cuddle up with me, darling. Cry yourself to sleep.”
“I’d never sleep with anyone so dirty,” Maya blurted.
“Women on lacrimogen are also very tactless,” Kurt remarked. He turned away onto his side with a hammocky squeak.
There was silence for a while. Finally, Antonio picked up his book again and began to read aloud again.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Brett whispered to Maya.
“What’s that?”
“Let’s lie down.”
They lay down together in the hammock. Brett put both her arms around Maya’s neck and looked into her eyes. They were both feeling so much pain that there was nothing but deep solace in the gesture. They were like two women who had crawled together from a burning car.
“I’m never going to make it,” Brett said. A tear rolled slowly down her nose and fell onto Maya’s cheek. “I want to do clothes, that’s all I want. But I’ll never make it. I’ll never be as good as Giancarlo Vietti. He’s a hundred and twelve years old. He has every file ever posted on couture, every book ever written. He’s had his own couture house for seventy-five years. He’s a multimillionaire with an enormous staff of people. He has everything, and he’s going to keep it forever. There’s just no way to challenge him.”
“He’ll have to die someday,” Maya said.
“Sure. Maybe. But by that time I’ll be ninety. I’ll never get a chance to really live until I’m ninety. Vietti got to start young, he got to have experience, he got to be king of the world through this whole century. I’ll never have that experience. By the time I’m ninety, I’ll be turned to a stone.”
“If he won’t let you play in his world, then you’ll have to make your own world.”
“That’s what all the vivid people say, but the old people won’t let us. They won’t give us anything but a sandbox. They won’t give us real money or real power or any real chances.” She drew a ragged breath. “And this is
