gray metalglass alloy. She opened it.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, looking into it with awestruck joy. “I was sure he was going to cheat me.”
“I think he meant to kill you.”
“No, he didn’t. That was only a little bit of spray. He just wanted a woman to cry for him. I feel better now that I cried so much. I feel all right. I’ll never cry for him anymore ever again. Look, Maya, look what he gave me. Look at my wonderful heirloom from my dead old man.” She showed her the little hinged tray.
It was lined in black velvet and held two dozen little spotted seashells.
“Seashells?” Maya said.
“Cowries,” Therese said. “I’m rich!” She carefully shut the tray, then slammed the suitcase shut and kicked it into the boot. “Let’s go now,” she said, clutching the tray with both hands. “Let’s go get a drink. I cried so much, and I’m so thirsty. Oh, I can’t believe I’ve really done this.” She opened the door and climbed inside.
They drove away with a rattle and crunch of brush. Suddenly Therese gazed over her shoulder, and laughed. “I can’t believe it, but I won. I’m getting away with it. Now life will be so different for me.”
“A box of little seashells,” Maya mused. The car threaded its way through the darkened woodlands, heading for an autobahn.
“It’s something that’s not trash. The world is full of trash now,” Therese said, settling back into her seat. “Virtualities and fakes. We’ve turned everything into trash. Diamonds and jewels are cheap. Coins, anyone can forge coins now. Stamps, they’re so easy to forge, it’s a laugh. Money is nothing but ones and zeroes. But Maya—
“Maybe those are just cheap fake trashy seashells.”
Therese opened the tray again, stabbed with anxiety. Then she smiled. “No, no. Look at these growth marks, look at this mottling. Only years and years of organic process can create a real seashell. Cowries are much too complex to be faked. These are
“So what are you going to do with them, exactly?”
“I’m going to grow up, of course! I can leave that little dump in the Viktualienmarkt. I can start a real store. In a real building, a high-rise! For real customers who will pay me real money. I’m very young to be a store owner, but with this in my hands, I can do it. I can get old people to work for me. I’ll hire my own accountant, and my own business lawyer. I’ll start over legally. Everything above-board. Real business books, and I’ll pay taxes!”
“Gosh, that sounds lovely.”
“It’s my dream come true. Real couture people will pay attention to me now. I’ll carry real lines of clothing from professional designers. No more of this kid stuff. Kid stuff, kid stuff, kid stuff, oh, truly I’m so, so sick of the vivid life.”
“I hope you’ll stay out of trouble with Bruno’s friends from now on.”
“Of course I will,” Therese said. “No matter what you think about the polity, well … they are making the world
Maya sighed wearily. “Maybe I shouldn’t have stickered you with quite so many tranquilizers.”
“Don’t say that. It’s not true. Can’t you see how happy I am? You should be happy with me.” She looked into Maya’s face. “What changed you so much, Maya? Why aren’t you cheerful like you were in Munchen?”
“You’re having mood swings, darling. Try not to talk so much. Let’s get some rest. I’m very tired.”
Therese shrank back in her seat. “Of course you’re very tired. You were so brave. I’m sorry, Maya.… Thank you so much.”
They were silent a long time. Therese wept a little more. Finally she fell asleep.
In the passing lights of rural Europe, Therese’s face was a picture of peace. “You’re on the other side now,” Maya told her gently. “Now you’re a perfect little bourgeoise. I can’t believe it really works like this. I can’t believe it works so well. I let a world like this happen. I did it, it was my fault, this was just the kind of world I wanted. I can’t believe you’re so anxious to live in a world that I couldn’t stand to live in for one moment longer. I have to be an outlaw just to live and breathe, and now there’s no way back for me. And the Widow is onto me now. She knows. I just know that she knows. She’d arrest me right now, except that she’s patient and gentle. You know who the Widow is?”
The sleeping Therese hugged her tray a little closer.
“Don’t ever find out,” Maya said.
Reworking the palace presented considerable difficulties. Foremost among them was the difficult fact that something was alive inside it. It had taken Benedetta and her friends quite a while to track down this troubling presence. It was Martin’s dog. Plato was loose in the memory palace.
Martin had linked the dog’s organic brain directly to his virtuality. This was not a medical process approved for human beings, for many good reasons. Neural activity was an emergent and highly nonlinear phenomenon. Brains grew, they metabolized from a physical organic substrate. When software tried to grow in tandem with a brain, the result was never a smooth symbiosis of thought and computation. It was usually a buzzing, blooming mess. Left alone it became artificial insanity.
Benedetta showed her the hidden wing of the palace where the dog’s brain had been at work. The cyborganic melange had grown for years in knobs and layers, immense frottages and glittering precipitates, a maze like coral and oatmeal. The neural augmentation wasn’t dead yet, but they had found the links to the dog’s wetware, and blocked them off. There were monster pearls in it here and there, massive spinning nodules like bad dreams that would never melt.
Since Warshaw’s death, the dog’s mental processes had broken through the floors in five places. The abandoned mentality jetted through the broken floors like sea urchins.
“What does this look like in code?” Maya said.
“Oh, it’s such wonderful code. You couldn’t parse this code in a million years.”
“Do you really think it was helping him think?”
“I don’t think dogs think the way we think, but this is definitely mammalian cognitive processing. Warshaw had his palace netlinked into the dog’s head. Very sophisticated for the time. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the stunts they work on lab animals nowadays. But for the 2060s, this was broad bandwidth and very rapid baud rate. There must be antennas woven all through the dog’s spine.”
“Why?”
“We speculate that he meant to hide some data inside the dog. Possibly move the whole palace into the dog’s nervous system. That sort of visionary nonsense was very big in the 2060s. People believed anything in those days. They romanticized computers and mysticized virtualities. There was a lot of weird experimentation. They thought anything was possible, and they didn’t have much sense. But Warshaw was no programmer. He was just old and rich. And reckless.”
“Is the dog still on-line in here?”
“That’s not the way to phrase it, Maya. The dog never had little doggy gloves or little doggy goggles. He never experienced the palace as a palace at all, he just infested it. Or it infested him.… Maybe Warshaw thought he could live in here as well, someday. Pull up all his physical traces and vanish into textures of pure media. People thought that was possible, until they tried it a bit, and learned how hard it was. Warshaw did a silly movie about that once.”
“You’ve seen Martin Warshaw’s movies? Really?”
“We have made it our business to dig them up.”
“Do you like Warshaw’s movies?”
“He was a primitive.”
“This doesn’t look primitive to me.”
“But this isn’t cinema at all. This is artificial life. Billions of cycles every day for thirty years.”
Down in the palace basement, they had the holy-fire machineries partly stoked and lit. The dream machines. They were supposed to do certain highly arcane things to the vision sites in the brain and the auditory processing centers. You would sort of look at them and sort of hear them, and yet it never felt much like anything. Human
