“I’m truly sorry about your cats. Really, I’d do anything to make it up to you.”
“[All right, so get us more stones to eat.]”
“They’re oysters, Olga. They’re oysters, and sure, I’ll get us some.” The sun was shining on the Red Sea and it was hot and real. Wading on rocks would be fun. It would be bliss to swim. She began shedding her clothes.
“Oysters,” Olga said aloud. “[Words are so funny, aren’t they.]”
The scandal with Helene had locked them out of the Tête. Mere scandal couldn’t stop a man of Paul’s resourcefulness. He’d found them another meeting place in the Helleniki Dimokratia. He’d arranged a major immersion for them.
Greece in early summer was lovely. It was a country that could sprout a great civilization with the sweet ease of bread sprouting mold. The resort was outside the little city of Kórinthos, in the fragrant wooded hills of the Pelopónnisos. The resort was owned by a forty-year-old multimillionaire who had managed to make a terrific garbage strike in the poorly explored industrial wilds of eastern Deutschland. As one of the youngest truly rich people in Europe, the eccentric wildcatter delighted in doing things to annoy.
Now Paul and thirty of his vivid fellow-travelers were lounging around the resort’s glimmering pool, greased and naked and in big toga-pinned bath towels. They were in more trouble than they had ever been in their young lives, and they were in the best of spirits about it.
“Have a grape,” Benedetta said, offering a stemmed and lacquered bowl.
“Natural fruits are full of toxins,” said Maya.
“These are genetic knockouts.”
“Okay, give me a bunch.” She ate one. It was delicious. She stuffed in a handful.
“These are fabulous,” she said. “Give me more. Make me fat, ruin my stupid career.”
Benedetta laughed. Benedetta nude and laughing was a creature of intense and striking loveliness. She was 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.
“I’m trouble,” Bouboule insisted. “I am the trouble. Don’t be greedy.”
“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 Tête, 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. “Succès 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 Français,” said Bouboule.
“What’s wrong with ‘the Tête crowd’?” demanded Niko, restlessly. “We always just called ourselves ‘the Tête 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 Français.
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 Français, 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, Renée, 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.