“Brett, stop it. You’re not talking any sense. First you say that I’m stealing your life, and then you say you couldn’t do anything with it anyway. So what’s your big problem exactly? Sure, maybe you’d have done a lot better than me, eighty years ago. But hey, you weren’t around then. You can’t romanticize the past to somebody like me. I was there in the past, all right? Eighty years ago, we basically lived like savages. We had plagues and revolutions and mass die-off and big financial crashes. People shot each other with guns when I was young. Compared to eighty years ago, this is heaven! And now you’re just abusing me, and not making one bit of sense.”
“But Mia, I can’t make perfect sense like you can. I’m only twenty years old.”
“Oh, don’t cry, for heaven’s sake.”
“I’m twenty years old and I’m an adult. But nothing I do is important. I can’t even get a chance to prove that I’m stupid. I suspect that I probably am, and I could live with that, I swear I could. I’d do something else, I wouldn’t work in artifice, I’d just live like a little animal. I’d make babies and maybe I’d potter around in a garden or something. But I can’t even manage that much, in this big safe lovely world you’ve built for me. I can’t get anywhere at all.”
Two Czech policemen arrived. They weren’t network cops, medical cops, or artifice cops. Apparently they were just common or garden cops from Praha. They produced phonetic cards from their pink uniforms and read her an extensive list of civil rights in heavily accented English. They then placed her under arrest and booked her into the local legal system. She was charged with immigration violations and working without a permit.
They threw Brett out of the building. Brett yelled and fussed vigorously in English, but the Czech cops were patient and they put up with it and they threw her out and dusted their hands. Maya was stripped, and then dressed in dun prison coveralls. They left the monitors on her wrists and the tiara on her head.
The Praha cops took her a few blocks away to a high-rise, and installed her in a very clean holding tank. There she was able to reflect with relief that she had not yet been charged with: (a) network abuse, (b) medical fraud, (c) complicity in illegal discharge into an urban sewer system, (d) abetting the posthumous escape of an organized criminal, or (e) any number of episodes of transportation toll fraud.
Nobody bothered with her for a couple of days. She was fed on a standard and extremely healthy medical diet. She was allowed to watch television and was given a deck of cards. Robots wheeled by every hour or so and engaged her in a very limited English conversation. The jail was almost entirely deserted, very little used, and therefore extremely quiet. There were a few gypsies somewhere in a decontamination wing; at night she could hear them singing.
On the third day she threw away the tiara. She couldn’t get the bracelets loose, however.
On the fourth day Helene had her brought out for interrogation. Helene had a tiny office on the top floor of the Access Bureau. Maya was astonished at how old and small and shabby Helene’s office was. It was definitely Helene’s own office, because there were neatly framed little hand-drawn originals on the walls that probably were worth more than the entire building. But Maya herself had worked for decades in offices far better equipped.
Helene was out of mufti and in a very dashing belted pink uniform. Other than that, there was a window and a chair and a desk. And a little white dog. From behind the desk rose a very big brown dog.
Maya stared. “Hello, Plato.”
The dog cocked his ears and said nothing.
“Plato doesn’t talk now,” Helene said. “He’s resting.”
The dog was still rather gaunt, but his coat was glossy and his nose was wet. He wore no clothing, but Helene had given him a lovely new collar. “Plato looks a lot better. I’m glad.”
“Please sit down, Mrs. Ziemann.”
“Why don’t we get on a first-name basis so I won’t have to mangle your beautiful last name with my terrible Français.”
Helene considered this. “Ciao Maya.”
“Ciao Helene.” She sat.
“I’m sorry, but business kept me out of the city a few days.”
“That’s all right. What’s a few days to the likes of us?”
“How good of you to be so public-spirited. I wish you’d shown that much patience under medical surveillance.”
“Touché,” Maya murmured.
Helene said nothing. She gazed dreamily out the office window.
Maya said nothing in return. She examined the peeling lacquer on her fingernails.
Maya was the first to break. “I can wait as long as you can,” Maya blurted, boasting, and lying. “I love your decor.”
“Do you know they spent a hundred thousand marks on your treatment?”
“A hundred thousand, three hundred and twelve.”
“And you took it in your head to dash off for a little European vacation.”
“Would it help if I said I was sorry? Of course I’m not a bit sorry, but if it would help anybody, then I’d act real polite.”
“What does make you sorry, Maya?”
“Nothing much. Well, I’m very sorry that I lost my photographs.”
“Is that all?” Helene rummaged deftly in her desk. She produced a disk. “Here.”
“Oh!” Maya clutched the disk eagerly. “You copied them! Oh, I can’t believe I have them back.” She kissed the disk. “Thank you so much!”
“You know they’re bad photographs, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know that, but I’m getting better.”
“Well, you could hardly help that. You’ve managed some Novak pastiches. But you have no talent.”
Maya stared. “I don’t think that’s up to you to judge.”
“Of course it’s up to me to judge,” Helene said patiently. “Who better? I knew Patzelt and Pauli and Becker. I married Capasso. I knew Ingrid Harmon when no one else thought she could paint. You’re not an artist, Mrs. Ziemann.”
“I don’t think I’m doing so badly for a student only four months old.”
“Art doesn’t come out of a metabolic support tank. If art came out of support tanks, it would make a complete mockery of genuine talent and inspiration. Those photographs are banal.”
“Paul doesn’t think so.”
“Paul …” She sighed. “Paul is not an artist. He’s a theoretician, a very young and very self-involved and very bad theoretician. When they thought they could mix art and science like whiskey and soda, they made an elementary blunder. It is crass and it’s a solecism. Science is not art. Science is a set of objective techniques to reveal reproducible results. Machines could do science. Art is not a reproducible result. Creativity is a profoundly subjective act. You’re a woman of damaged and fragmented subjectivity.”
“I’m a woman of a different subjectivity. And I’d sure rather mix art and science than mix art critique and police authority.”
“I’m not an artist. I only care for them.”
“If you despise science so much, why aren’t you dead?”
Helene said nothing.
“What are you so afraid of?” Maya said. “I hate to shatter your lovely mythos there, but if art can come out of a camera, it’s got no problem crawling out of a support tank. You haven’t been in the right support tanks. I have the holy fire now. That’s a silly name for it, I guess, but it’s as real as dirt, so why should I care what you call it?”
“Show me, then,” said Helene, folding her arms. “Show me one thing truly fine. Show me something truly impressive, that you or your little friends have done. I don’t count computer hacking, any idiot can break forty-year-old security systems. I don’t count new forms of media, any fool gets cheap novelty from a new medium. They’re clever, but they have no profundity! The Tête crowd loves to whine and complain, but artists today have every advantage. Education. Leisure. Excellent health. Free food, free shelter. Unlimited travel. All the time in the world to perfect their craft. All the information that the net can feed them, the world’s whole heritage of art. And what have they given us? Profoundly bad taste.”