Ben got her to Paris as quickly as he could. A mid-morning shuttle from Heathrow landed them at Charles de Gaulle before he could finish the piccolo of Heidsieck that the EuroAir cabin attendant had proffered in recognition of their premium fares. In the moulded seat beside him, Dela feigned sleep, while the headset streamed some nameless neo-classical soporific into her indifferent ears. Ben cycled through the inflight programming, resisting the urge to disturb her. When he did look over, he saw only the distorted geometry of the shuttle cabin reflected in the opaque, impenetrable surface of her faceshade.
He had booked them into a small four star hotel on the Left Bank, a safe distance from the soaring mega-boards of the Champs Arcade and the Secured Retail Zone of Faubourg-St. Honoré, where her images would be everywhere. Here, in the uncurious mélée of the Latin Quarter, they could keep a lower profile; even Dela’s extravagant beauty and extraordinary fashions would excite little comment. They checked in, and walked to a café for lunch. At his urging, they sat outdoors, where the tables clustered on the narrow sidewalk, uncomfortably close to the thronging pedestrian traffic.
Dela watched the swarming parade as it passed their tiny table, silently envying the effortless chic with which the Parisiens moved through the layered textures of their city, perfectly costumed extras against a set of crumbling, corrugated grey. Slowly, she removed her faceshade, peeled off her bellcap, and faced Paris as she was.
Released, her blended hair billowed with a life of its own, then settled to a kind of fragile repose. The tresses flexed gently in time to her pulse, as if stirred by a slight wind, creating a subtle, moving chiaroscuro of spun blonde and copper. The eyes that scanned the bustling streetscape were like diamonds, brilliant lies of colour that refracted any light, slivered any movement into a dazzling promise of mystery. Retinal faceting was still an experimental and risky procedure; Dela’s results had, fortunately, been spectacular.
Her jawlines had been shaved by laser-surgery to near perfect symmetry (to frustrate counterfeiting of her priceless image, a nanometric error had been programmed.) Her brows arched ferally with recent transplants of Alaskan lynx. The teeth were almost natural, perfectly white, and regressed just a little, to restore a fine sawtooth of mammalons to the edges. (She had resisted the canine implant fad, and wore caps when the shoot demanded a sabretooth look.)
Her body was a fitting pedestal for the sublime artwork that was Dela’s face. There had been no need for any skeletal retro-fitting; the bones were all her own, and she had built the rest herself. The muscles were authentic, produced with a minimum of steroid and amino-protoid supplements, and maintained with a strict daily regimen in the air-gym. In such effort, she took pride. It was only when she couldn’t build it herself that she looked for professional assistance. Or when she had an impossible deadline. Or was asked to go where nature could not take her. And sometimes, even then, there were limits.
“So remind me. Why are we here?” It was the first complete sentence she’d spoken since leaving London, and Ben was jarred from his brief reverie of adoration. The rare sight of her face exposed in raw daylight had awakened his basic photographer’s instincts; he revelled in her image. He wondered how anyone could ask for more.
A tongue-fork, for Christ’s sake.
He was hardly surprised when she blew up at the agency meeting.
He leaned forward over the marbelite tabletop, smirking. “Hiding out from the legals at SS-Comm?”
She looked at him, then smiled, sadly. “I’m sorry, Ben, that was a big one to throw.”
“We have lots of other big ones.” His tone was suddenly serious, but there was no regret in it.
“Why do they do that? Why hire the most expensive face on the planet, then ask for . . . ”
Ben shrugged vaguely. His fingers stacked little parcels of cubed sugar on the tabletop.
“They want that shit, let them construct.” The defiance in her voice waned. “I’m done, Ben. I’ve had enough. No more alters.”
“Dela, listen to me.” She looked up, and those eyes began to work with emotion. He looked past them, and spoke. “You did right. It wasn’t your look.” He paused, giving her time to register what he said. “Now put it away. Okay?”
She searched his eyes for a moment, then nodded. She slouched back in the chair, her haughty power returning like a transfusion. “So, what’s next?”
“Monday?”
“Today, Benjamin.” She toppled his tiny sugar castle with a flick of an onyx fingernail, grinning. “You bring me to Paris for the weekend and you’d better do more than a fucking salade campagne on Boulevard Saint Michel.”
He smiled, relieved to see her humour. “Your agenda, babe. I got nothing planned.”
“When since I’ve known you did you have nothing planned?” It was a jab, and not entirely in jest.
“Just a weekend away, Dela. Clear space. That’s all. You call it.” There was a trace of something in his voice, something she couldn’t quite fix. She pushed it away.
“I don’t care, just so long as there isn’t a call sheet or a holocam anywhere near it. And keep that bloody thing closed, too.” A perfect finger pointed emphatically at the port-pack that nestled beside him on the café chair. Ben put a protective hand over the skin-covered tablet, and smiled. After a moment, she said, “I mean it Ben. Take me right away from my life. Lose me in Paris.”
He made a deliberate show of weighing the options, considering her request. A baker’s boy went past on a rattling moped, his panniers filled with great bouquets of fresh baguettes. The delicate fragrance of his cargo reached them for a moment as the bread bounced on its way through the churning grime of the street air. He looked back to Dela, and her eyebrows arched with feline eloquence.
“How do you feel about art?” he said.
He led her through the Metro tunnels and onto a whispering, well-populated train. They disembarked at the Louvre station and he guided her up onto the streets, around the side of the vast palace to the old, exterior entrance: a cracked, fogged glass pyramid set incongruously into the stately expanse of the Cour Napoleon, framed on three sides by the sprawling wings of the palace. They entered the pyramid, and wound down the curling, floating staircase to the security gate. They cleared it with a scan of their Connext cards, and were instantly rewarded with small passcards which bore on their obverse an English language map of the museum layout, printed seconds earlier.
The Louvre offered every kind of tour and information service imaginable, from polylingual human guides for the very rich, to socket rods for the very modern, and everything in between. Ben guided Dela past the booths, and up to the Greek and Roman exhibits in the Sully Wing. There, they walked in patient, unhurried silence through room after room of statuary, passing silent gauntlets of proud perfect forms. There were athletes and animals, gods and goddesses, beasts and demons, the meanest life size, the largest gigantic, an entire populace of silent, stained marble.
Dela’s eyes devoured the luxuriant abundance of stone flesh. They had a substance, a solidity that no hologram could reproduce. As she ambled amongst them, she was barely conscious of the twitch of her hands, of the urge to touch, as if her caress could awaken the dead stone, suffuse the frozen muscles with vitality, bring alive the sensual promise that rippled through the silent, stone skins, bring light to the empty marble orbs that were their eyes. Ben followed her slowly, watching her eyes, watching her.
Suddenly she stopped, halting him. She spoke distractedly into the air. “I know her. I know this one.”
“You ought to,” he said. She stopped at a small rope enclosure, and gazed up at the statue which stood atop a marble pedestal, elevated higher than other nearby exhibits, and separated by a generous space. A woman, captured in marble, caged in a web of invisible photosensitive beams, lit with soft autumn daylight from generous windows on both sides. Her marble figure glowed in the natural light, the stone flesh soft against the austere dark grey walls that surrounded her. “That,” said Ben, “Is the Venus de Milo. She’s very famous.”
Dela circled the stone woman slowly, her eye following the exquisite curves of the ancient flesh, the soft waves of her drapery, the perfect grace of her pose. “She’s divine,” she pronounced, at last. Ben stood, his hands in his pockets.
“Of course she is. She’s a goddess.”
“She doesn’t have much to work with, but what she does with it…” She stopped, and gazed into statue’s empty eyes. There was, in the frozen face, a palpable sense of peace, a cool, ageless serenity. “Know what I’d like?” Dela’s words came from deep inside her, far away, measured out phrase by phrase. “I’d like you to do me like that. Stripped down to nothing. No props. No ‘tronics. Just me. Bit of drape. Decent light. But just me. Can we do that, Ben?”
He looked at her, but she was fixated by the statue. The light frosted her profile, and shivered in her eyes. His heart beat was suddenly erratic, and his mouth dry. “We could try. Who’d buy it, I have no idea. Revlon? Eterna? It’s a bit dated, even for Plus Moda. But we could try.”
She moved suddenly close to him, as if needing to share a secret. She squeezed his arm, with some urgency. “Not for them, not for a client. Just for me. For myself. For us.” Her voice was drifting further away with every word. “Get us back to something simple, Ben.” Her head settled against his shoulder, and skeins of her hair snaked around the back of his neck. “Let’s do that, Ben. When we get home. I’ll get a drape and you can dust off the Arriflex and you and me can get back to some basics. A shitty studio with bad London light and my gorgeous body. Maybe, yeah?” Her voice was distant, and full of echoed sadness. Her retooled eyes had no capacity for tears, and so none came. Instead, they dulled like gemstones dipped in wax.
“We’ll do that, Dela. Maybe we’ll do just that.” He looked at the statue. “I’ve got a book somewhere with a picture. We’ll do it just right.” He got a hold of her elbow, and began to walk her away from the exhibit, but she pulled away.
“I want to stay for awhile, okay? Look around some more.”
“Sure, I’ll wait.”
“No, you go. I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”
“You’re okay?”
“Absolutely. I’ll be back for dinner.”
He paused, considered, then nodded. “Alright. Got your hotel card?”
She slapped the pouch under her jacket. The strength in her voice was returning; her smile was easy and full. “Right next to my Connext.”
“Remember the Metro?”
“Maubert-Mutualité,” she pronounced, with elaborate care. “Relax. Just go. See you in a couple of hours.” She kissed his cheek, flared her hair affectionately, and gave him a gentle push. He smiled, over his shoulder, before turning and walking away. She watched him go, his retreating form mingling with the shifting tableau of the bustling tourists and the pale, silent presences of the statues. She turned back, and faced the Venus, her diamond eyes probing the goddess’ marble face, searching for their secret. She did not see Ben stop at the distant door, and turn to look at her.
Ben slid the lens from his port-pack and slipped it over his right eye. In ten seconds he had notched a dozen stills. Enough. With a practised wink, he popped the lens from his face into his waiting hand. The cable recoiled into its socket and the lens disappeared into the pack. Ben stepped back, still watching. Dela had not noticed him. If she had, she would have been disturbed by the hungriness in his eyes. He blended away into the depths of the Sully Wing, his right hand punching commands into the pack’s board.
Ben made his way quickly out of the museum, and up to a quiet café off Rue de Rivoli. He ordered a vodka with pernod ice, sipped at it, then set his port-pack onto the table. He called up the prints and studied them carefully on the monitor. They were low-res, poorly composed, but adequate. There were some full figure two shots, torsos, heads, singles. A couple of infrareds of Dela’s body print. A drapery sample from the statue. A choker close-up of Dela, in that light. He lingered over this image longer than he had to. It was habit, and pleasurable. She still astonished him.
A small wave of traffic noise broke through the narrow street, jarring him back to the café, the time. He filed the images with a stroke, and secured the file with a print scan. He pulled a headset from the pack, plugged in, and dialled London. The call routed to the seaside resort of Bognor Regis, to a residence listed as The Cottage. A domestic of some kind answered the phone manually – Ben was impressed but not surprised – and advised him that Kyle was unavailable. “Is there a message?”
“No. Just, have him call. I am out of town, but he has the routing codes.” He disengaged, then retrieved the files, and flipped through the images like a croupier lazily dealing cards. He laid up opposing profiles, Dela facing Venus, eye to eye, diamond to marble. He stared at the image, sipping at the vodka.
Is there a message?
Yes – tell Kyle we’re warm.
The English channel on the Speaking Map was broken; the system defaulted to formal Euroic, and displayed an animated loop of a flat graphic subway carriage arriving, departing, and arriving again at the station. Dela punched in her destination again, and again, the map flashed elaborate displays of routes, changes, stops and directions accompanied by the indecipherable, synthetic voice. She glanced around for assistance, and saw only the milling faces of Metro passengers, surging like a tide up and down the tunnel. Wherever she was going was, she knew, not far. She strode to the nearest “Sortie”, up a short escalator, and into the failing sunlight of the afternoon.
The surface brought no escape from the crowds, but added a suffocating dimension of thickly layered noise. In the near distance to her left, the twin towers of Notre Dame loomed, promising sanctuary. Closer, Pont Neuf beckoned, a bridge to a calmer place. From its stone rails, she could see a tongue of parkland pointing out into the river like the prow of a ship emerging from under the bridge. She went down to it, and was enveloped with a fragile quiet. The roar of traffic on the bridge above, on the streets that rimmed the river, in the skies above, all seemed suddenly muted and distant down on the island. Dela walked to the tapered tip where the weary grass gave way to stone walls which sloped down to the water. A few couples meandered among the scattered trees, or huddled on benches. She sat, grateful for the comparative solitude of the place. Across the sunflecked surface of the Seine, past the arcade of trees along the river’s far quay, she could see the Louvre.
It pulled.
Dela reached into her pouch, removed a slim alloy wallet, and flipped through it to her hotel card. The plastic wafer was imprinted with the hotel’s name, address, telephone number, and a tiny map showing its proximity to the nearest Metro station. It bore an antique magnetic ribbon which was encoded to unlock her room door. As she studied the map, her eyes strayed to the Connext card lodged next to it. Her face stared back at her from the holographic portrait embedded in a small transparent window in the card. It pre-dated the hair and eyebrow work, but was still recognizable. In the layers of lucite, the Connext slogan rippled with promise: Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.
A Surété hover shot past the island, its whining fans ruffling the surface of the Seine. She watched as it disappeared around a distant curve of the river. She thought of Ben, remembered his pride when he presented her with the exalted 5000 Class card. What she now held, however, was not the Corporate Connext that Ben had obtained for her, but her own. What she did with it would never show up on company accounts. Her fingers stroked the edges of the card, as if testing its limits, its potential. The daylight began to wane, and the river ran with darker shades. Still, her eyes bored into the museum’s distant walls.
At 10:15 the port piped, waking him. Ben surfaced slowly, lost, out of place. The only familiar element was the port-pack screen facing him. He squinted at the display, a graphic of opposing profiles, overlaid with a blank Connex’Trace record. A flashing light. The synthetic trill of the incoming call. The details of the darkened hotel room eased into focus around the screen, dragging recollection into his unwilling consciousness.
Paris
Dela
His mind jumped for her with sudden hope, and he reached for the set, reflexively keying up the call profile. It flickered onscreen, identifying the source of the call, and he froze. Bognor. Ben engaged slowly, breathing deeply.
“Benjamin, good morning. How’s the weather in Paris?” Kyle’s voice came heartily over the line. From the background sound, Ben could tell he was outside, near water, with children playing nearby. He closed his eyes, and could see English sunshine.
“It’s fine, Kyle. Bit cloudy.” His head swam with bad memories of the night before, the long vigil fuelled with coffee and cognac, and a steadily mounting anxiety. Sometime around eleven, he had punched into Connex’Trace, but it showed no record of her card being used since they’d entered the Louvre. He kept the ‘Trace active; it never changed.
“You had called.”
“Just wanted to run over the agenda for tomorrow.” Ben was concious of a near stammer in his voice. He fought it down. The waiters had ushered him onto the street at four o’clock. He’d staggered up and down the short length of street in front of the hotel, bumping into the small knots of leather-black night-people, searching helplessly. He considered approaching the concierge, the Surété, Europol, but what would he have said? Cherchez la femme?
“Pretty simple agenda, Ben.”
“Yes, I know. Just, well, Dela’s working with your boards right now, warming up nicely, actually.”
“Last I heard Dela was tongue lashing SS-Comm for tampering with her humanity.”
Ben laughed, inexpertly. He swallowed quickly, dryly. “They had some rather extreme ideas. The woman has an image, Kyle. There are limits.”
“There usually are. So what is it, Benjamin? Nothing amiss, is there?”
The beat of silence was enough to confirm it. Ben scrambled to recover. “I just need to . . . reassure my client.”
The velvet fullness of Kyle’s voice rolled over, exposing a naked, dangerous edge. “As to what?”
“What you’ve storyboarded, that’s locked, right? No surprises?” He could feel panic rising like hot mercury through his mind, shearing through the thick, woolen residuum of his sleep-patch. He began to sweat.
“No ‘tronics? No grafts? No, Ben. This is Plus-Moda. You can assure her that what we’ve boarded is what we want.”
“You know she’ll give you everything she’s got.”
“Just make sure she gives us everything we’ve contracted.” A flurry of indistinct voices crowded Kyle’s end of the line, then receded. “I’d love to chat, but I have guests. Whatever the problem is, I’d appreciate knowing it’s solved before we convene tomorrow. Let me know, won’t you?” He terminated the call without waiting for a response.
Ben sat with the unit pressed to his ear, and distantly heard the automatic teller break into the line, announce the charges and account allocation, deliver a brief international long distance advertising message, and vacate the circuit. The cell spewed empty static into his ear. Absently, he took the headset off and wiped the sweat from his hands on the edge of the bed. His stomach was churning, and he could feel the enclosed universe of his room slowly rotating. He grasped for an anchor, and fixed his attention to the image on the monitor. The opposing profiles stared mutely into each other’s eyes, different than he remembered. Different, because now they were the same. The two faces were identical. And into the perfect goblet-shaped space between them, came her voice, muffled but real, not chipped.
“Benjamin?” His head turned to the door that joined their rooms. “Ben, you’re awake, I heard you.”
“Dela?” Relief rushed through him like a drug, and he bounded to the door.
“Ben, I’m fine, I’m perfectly alright.” She sounded safe, familiar, close. Excited. His hands stroked the melamine door panel as if it were her skin.
“Where’ve you been, babe?” he probed, gently. She did not respond, that he could hear. He pressed his forehead to the door. “Can I come in?”
“Ben, before you – I should, well,” her voice bubbled with confusion, like a child unsure whether to share a secret.
He felt his nerves sharpening. “What is it, babe? This is Ben, tell me.”
“Ben, I can’t, I just – well, this is something …” Her voice trailed away into a fog of emotion. He heard her draw a deep breath. “Just come see, okay?”
He fumbled into a kimono, slipped the doorlock with his card, and stepped into her room. The lights were off and window shields closed, but the darkness was richer, deeper than in his room. Full of her. He scanned the room, but could see no movement. His eyes lingered on a still form in the centre of the room. As he stared at it, the shape sharpened to a familiar contour. Hesitantly, he reached toward the lightpad. Dela’s voice came from the darkness.
“No – use daylight. Only daylight.”
He moved like a somnambulist through the dark, his eyes now locked on the looming, immobile form. He reached the window, and eased a slat of the shield open. The light entered the room like a scythe, and revealed her.
The hair was gone, cut into a soft coif of natural fibre. Lifeless, it lay against her head, perfectly framing the newly classical contour of her face. The lips were trimmed, the brows smoothed away. The swath of silk rustled across the wider, whiter hips. His eyes travelled up, over the moulded poetry of the torso, and saw, at last, the finished piece in its entirety.
“Perfect, aren’t they?” she whispered.
They were. The left, severed vertically at the shoulder. The right, sixteen centimetres longer. The stumps were as clean as sawn marble.
With a slow, controlled movement, she raised her head to speak. The rest of her body remained perfectly immobile. Her voice was plaintive. “Tell me they’re perfect, Ben.”
He gazed at the empty space at her sides, speechless. He saw her whole, and felt as if he were hallucinating, such was the surreal perfection of what she had made. He forced his eyes away, and saw, dimly, a pair of generic cyprosthetics tangled on the bed.
“They’ve got mine on ice,” she continued, “In the clinic.”
“Amsterdam,” he murmured, his voice dull with shock.
She nodded. “I can get them back anytime. Couple of hours and I’m whole. Ben, what do you think?”
“Dela, it’s … it’s exquisite. But such a price.”
“I used my personal account,” she said, misunderstanding, “They won’t charge the company.” She suddenly came fully alive, and spun through the room, her stumped arms trailing a shadowed whirlwind of flesh and silk. She moved, with perfect professional timing, from pose to pose, freezing in classic postures, and the disfigurement vanished into a mist of ancient familiarity. She was Mother of the Earth, Woman of the Ages, Goddess of the Gods. She melted back into the attitude of the de Milo, then snapped her head to fix him with the look. “We could do some serious work with this, Ben, don’t you think?” Dumbly, he nodded. His eyes still refused to accept how naturally she moved, the ease with which she filled the space with, without – without them. He could never have imagined – Her voice broke through, suddenly tender. “I mean it Ben. This one’s for us. We call the shots. We’ll get home, find some space, even pirate some real film, if we can. Make it immortal. Can we try that? Can you still get real film, Ben?”
“Probably in Amsterdam, I could. You can get anything in Amsterdam, I hear.”
Anything, anywhere, anytime.
She strode over, the easy grace and power of her stride contradicting the crippled, helpless shoulders, and kissed him. “What a team.” The eyes sparkled, familiar suns in the new landscape of her face.
“Home tomorrow,” he said, with no emotion. “Session.” It was almost a question. “I better call?”
She straightened, her armless torso rising like the hood of a cobra. “You’ll handle it, Ben. If they know what’s good for them…” She smiled. He managed a weak smile in response, nodded vaguely. He turned, and walked for the door. He stopped, looked back at her, still fighting to grasp it. “You are the best. No-one can touch you.” His voice sounded strangely grateful.
Ben returned to his room, and sat for a long time, alone. In the corners of his eyes, pale blue images of her seemed to hang in the dusty light, evaporating as he glanced to confront them. The air seemed chilled with the memory of her severed arms, fresh but bloodless wounds, dead flesh cooling slowly, crowned with diamond eyes.
He pushed away the morbid whispers, remembered instead her majesty, her magnificence. He had never dared imagine … He was trembling, physically, with some strange hybrid of elation and fear.
Ben pulled a miniature bottle of coca-water from the bedstand bar, emptied it into a tumbler, and drank a swallow, then waited for his breathing to slow. He gazed for a moment at the display on the monitor, then deleted the image, and engaged a call-port. He pulled the headset on and heard distant connections clicking into place. Finally, a recorder answered. “Kyle,” Ben said, his chest inexplicably tight, “It’s Benjamin. Everything’s fine. Everything’s on.
Is there a message?
Yes. We have her. We have our Venus.
“See you tomorrow.”