like a greased naiad. They were all so effortlessly lovely, these modern young people. Immortals wrapped in togas of the finest technological rhetoric. Supernaturally healthy creatures.
“I’m hungry all the time now,” Maya said, munching her grapes. “It’s good. Now I belong to my body again. Or my body belongs to me.… ”
“It’s more fun to share the body,” said Bouboule, squeezing lotion into her palm. “I can’t reach the what- you-call, the backs of my feet. Get some boy here to rub my legs. They’re too lazy in all this sun, the boys need to work more.”
“You look better,” said Benedetta to Maya very seriously. “You mustn’t run away ever again. Take things easy now, keep control, stay close to us. We will look out for you. You know that, Maya. See?” She gestured around the pool. “Isn’t this lovely? Aren’t we looking out for you?”
“I’m too much trouble,” Maya said.
“
“Trouble has been very good for us,” said Benedetta. “Trouble has made our name.”
“You don’t know enough about trouble yet,” said Maya.
“But trouble made us famous. Trouble made us truly vivid. We define vivid now. Look at us! We lose the Tete, but now we relax by this beautiful pool while some rich idiot trash tycoon picks up all our bills. He thinks we’re cute, because the cops say we are dangerous. He’s a rich radical. Isn’t it lovely that there are rich radicals? We are young European chic. This is radical chic. It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
“Epater les bourgeois,” said Bouboule. “Succes de scandale. The old games are the good games.”
“Don’t you read the net, Maya? They are giving our group such nice names.”
“ ‘The Ghost Children,’ “ Niko spoke up sourly. “I hate that name.”
“It sounds good in Francais,” said Bouboule.
“What’s wrong with ‘the Tete crowd’?” demanded Niko, restlessly. “We always just called ourselves ‘the Tete crowd.’ ”
“It doesn’t matter what we called ourselves,” said Benedetta. “We should make up our own new name. We’re creative people. We should take control of our own publicity. I like ‘the Illuminati.’ ”
“It’s been done,” said Niko.
“The Young Immortals,” said Bouboule.
“The People Who Take Paul Seriously,” said Maya.
“The Cosmos-Shattering Anarchist Goddesses,” said Niko. “Plus their boyfriends.”
“The Subjects under Investigation,” said Maya. “The Potential Defendants.”
“Those names stink,” said Niko, hurt.
“Not like my name does,” Maya said. “I’m a crazed outlaw gerontocrat who led you all into delinquency.”
Benedetta sat up, shocked. “That was stupid to say. Who says that?”
“Everyone will. Because I’m famous now, too. Once nobody knew who I was, so nobody cared. I could do anything I wanted, as long as I never made any kind of difference. Now you’re actually making a difference, and I’m in the thick of it. I’m your collaborator, but I don’t have any of your noble excuses. You may be visionaries, but I’m an illegal alien who embezzled a very valuable medical property.” Maya tapped her sternum. “I know that I can’t get away with what I’ve done. So I’m going to make them arrest me. I’ll give myself up.”
Benedetta thought this over. “I suppose you think you’re being noble,” she said slowly. “Well, you don’t understand our strategy. They seized your network server and took your palace away from us. So what? Some pet animals died. So what? Those are only little setbacks, now that we know what is possible. We’re already into other palaces. We’re under the skin of the gerontocrats. The old people can’t claw us out or push us aside anymore. Let them try! We’ll turn them inside out.”
“No, darling, it’s you who can’t understand. You’ve never been a gerontocrat, but I have. They don’t care about your virtualities. They don’t care about your silly problem with your infinite imagination. They pretend that they care what you think, because to admit they don’t care wouldn’t be polite. But they truly don’t care much about dreams. They care about actualities. They care about responsibilities. They know they’ll die someday. They know that you’ll dance on their graves. They’ll gladly forgive you anything you do, as long as they’re nice and dead first. But darling, I’m not some futurist rebel, I’m a heretic here and now. I’m dancing on their feet.”
“Maya, stop talking bad politics in English and do what Benedetta says,” said Bouboule. “Benedetta is very smart. Oh, look! Lodewijk is kissing her!” She broke into excited Francais.
Maya missed her translation wig very much. She had lost it when she fled the actress’s apartment in Praha. She had lost everything she owned through running, not that she had all that much to lose. Mostly it hurt to lose her photographs. They were rather bad photographs, but they were the best she had ever made. She had carefully stored them inside the palace. Now the palace belonged to the Widow.
Niko and Bouboule were furiously excited to see Lodewijk in a sudden clinch with Yvonne. They were chattering and giggling. Even Benedetta took intense scholastic interest. If Maya paid complete attention to the gush of Francais, she could decipher maybe a word in ten. Without a film of computation at her ear, these young people were impossibly distant, a generation from another culture and another continent. A generation eighty years away from her own.
She knew them, in her way: Paul, Benedetta, Marcel, Niko, Bouboule, Eugene, Lars, Julie, Eva, Max, Renee, Fernande, Pablo, Lunia, Jeanne, Victor, Berthe, Enhedu-anna-generally-known-as-Hedda, Berthe’s weird boyfriend what’s-his-face, Lodewijk, the new guy from Copenhagen, Yvonne, who’d been more or less officially Max’s girl until about ten seconds ago, that intense young Russian sculptor with twelve fingers, the cute Indonesian teenager who’d been hanging out a lot lately and was supposedly having the affair with Bouboule’s brother.… Her friends were wonderful. She had been very lucky to catch them during the brief larval phase in which they were more or less human. They loved her, and they loved one another, but they loved one another like friends and lovers should and did, and they loved her in the way that one might love a very rare and compelling set of antique portrait photographs. Bouboule rose with oily grace from her recliner and went to tease Yvonne and Lodewijk. Niko went along to make sure that Bouboule didn’t tease them too much, and also to enjoy the spectacle. Body language told her that much. Body language was a breeze without clothes.
Benedetta kicked out her slender legs on the woven lounger and turned to Maya. “He sent Yvonne so many poems, you see,” she said helpfully. “I just had to cry when I read them. I can’t believe that Danish poetry can make me cry.”
“Really, Benedetta, you don’t have to explain it to me. It’s my own fault for losing my nice shiny back-combed translator.”
“I like to explain things to you, Maya. I want you to understand.”
“I understand too much too well already.” She thought about it. “Benedetta, there is one thing I truly don’t understand. Why doesn’t Paul have a lover? I never see Paul with anyone.”
“Maybe he’s too considerate,” Benedetta said.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Are you telling me you don’t already know all about it?” She smiled. “Is this Benedetta I’m talking to?”
“It’s not that we didn’t try,” Benedetta said. “Of course we all tried to make time with Paul. Who wouldn’t want to be Mrs. Ideologue? Who wouldn’t want to be the genius’s favorite girl? Right? Completely lost in his heroic shadow. I want to pick up Paul’s dirty socks. I want to sew on his little buttons. That’s the life for me. Isn’t it? I want to gaze in silent adoration at darling Paul while he talks theory to my colleagues for fourteen hours straight. I want them to look at me and see that I have his heart in my little clutch bag. So that they can all die inside.”
“Are you serious, Benedetta? Oh, you are. You’re serious. Oh, darling, that’s too bad.”
“Did you ever have a really good talk with Paul? I have. Despite everything.”
“Yes, I have,” Maya said. “He once patted me on the hand.”
“I think it’s the cop. That’s my working hypothesis. The Widow’s our real rival. It’s his crush. A terrible crush. Isn’t that the proper word in English, ‘crush’? Anyway, it’s Helene. He wants Helene. He loves to feast with panthers.”
“Oh, no. That can’t be true.”
“He respects Helene. He takes her very seriously. He talks to her, even when he doesn’t have to talk to her. He wants something from Helene. He wants her validation, isn’t that the word? He wants to conquer the Widow, like climbing the Matterhorn. He needs to make her believe in him.”
