Collected short fiction.., p.111
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 111
And the model of Yatima’s beliefs about Yatima’s mind became the whole model of Yatima’s mind: not a tiny duplicate, or a crude summary, just a tight bundle of connections looping back out to the thing itself.
The orphan’s stream of consciousness surged through the new connections, momentarily unstable with feedback: I think that Yatima thinks that I think that Yatima thinks …
Then the symbol network identified the last redundancies, cut a few internal links, and the infinite regress collapsed into a simple, stable resonance:
I am thinking —
I am thinking that I know what I’m thinking.
Yatima said, “I know what I’m thinking.”
Inoshiro replied airily, “What makes you think anyone cares?”
For the five-thousand-and-twenty-third time, the conceptory checked the architecture of the orphan’s mind against the polis’s definition of self-awareness.
Every criterion was now satisfied.
The conceptory reached into the part of itself which ran the womb, and halted it, halting the orphan. It modified the machinery of the womb slightly, allowing it to run independently, allowing it to be reprogrammed from within. Then it constructed a signature for the new citizen — two unique megadigit numbers, one private, one public — and embedded them in the orphan’s cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys. It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to be counted.
Finally, the conceptory passed the virtual machine which had once been the womb into the hands of the polis operating system, surrendering all power over its contents. Cutting it loose, like a cradle set adrift in a stream. It was now the new citizen’s exoself: its shell, its non-sentient carapace. The citizen was free to reprogram it at will, but the polis would permit no other software to touch it. The cradle was unsinkable, except from within.
Inoshiro said, “Stop it! Who are you pretending to be now?”
Yatima didn’t need to part the navigators; ve knew vis icon hadn’t changed appearance, but was now sending out a gestalt tag. It was the kind ve’d noticed the citizens broadcasting the first time ve’d visited the flying-pig scape.
Blanca sent Yatima a different kind of tag; it contained a random number encoded via the public half of Yatima’s signature. Before Yatima could even wonder about the meaning of the tag, vis cypherclerk responded to the challenge automatically: decoding Blanca’s message, re-encrypting it via Blanca’s own public signature, and echoing it back as a third kind of tag. Claim of identity. Challenge. Response.
Blanca said, “Welcome to Konishi, Citizen Yatima.” Ve turned to Inoshiro, who repeated Blanca’s challenge then muttered sullenly, “Welcome, Yatima.”
Gabriel said, “And Welcome to the Coalition of Polises.”
Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused — oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon … but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is thinking this? Who is seeing these stars, and these citizens? Who is wondering about these thoughts, and these sights?
And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin.
Who is thinking this?
I am.
Our Lady of Chernobyl
From Our Lady of Chernobyl by Greg Egan, MirrorDanse, Sydney, 1995. (With illustrations by Shaun Tan.) First published in Interzone # 83, May 1994.
* * * * *
We knew not whether we were in heaven or on
earth, for surely there is no such splendour or
beauty anywhere upon earth.
The envoy of Prince Vladimir of Kiev,
describing the Church of the Divine Wisdom
in Constantinople, 987
It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.
S.L. Clemens, ditto, 1867
Luciano Masini had the haunted demeanor and puffy complexion of an insomniac. I’d picked him as a man who’d begun to ask himself, around two a.m. nightly, if his twenty-year-old wife really had found the lover of her dreams in an industrialist three times her age—however witty, however erudite, however wealthy. I hadn’t followed his career in any detail, but his most famous move had been to buy the entire superconducting cables division of Pirelli, when the parent company was dismembered in ‘09. He was impeccably dressed in a gray silk suit, the cut precisely old-fashioned enough to be stylish, and he looked like he’d once been strikingly handsome. A perfect candidate, I decided, for vain self-delusion and belated second thoughts.
I was wrong. What he said was: “I want you to locate a package for me.”
“A package?” I did my best to sound fascinated—although if adultery was stultifying, lost property was worse. “Missing en route from—?”
“Zürich.”
“To Milan?”
“Of course!” Masini almost flinched, as if the idea that he might have been shipping his precious cargo elsewhere, intentionally, caused him physical pain.
I said carefully, “Nothing is ever really lost. You might find that a strongly-worded letter from your lawyers to the courier is enough to work miracles.”
Masini smiled humorlessly. “I don’t think so. The courier is dead.”
Afternoon light filled the room; the window faced east, away from the sun, but the sky itself was dazzling. I suffered a moment of strange clarity, a compelling sense of having just shaken off a lingering drowsiness, as if I’d begun the conversation half asleep and only now fully woken. Masini let the copper orrery on the wall behind me beat twice, each tick a soft, complicated meshing of a thousand tiny gears. Then he said, “She was found in a hotel room in Vienna, three days ago. She’d been shot in the head at close range. And no, she was not meant to take any such detour.”
“What was in the package?”
“A small icon.” He indicated a height of some thirty centimeters. “An eighteenth-century depiction of the Madonna. Originally from the Ukraine.”
“The Ukraine? Do you know how it came to be in Zürich?” I’d heard that the Ukrainian government had recently launched a renewed campaign to persuade certain countries to get serious about the return of stolen artwork. Crateloads had been smuggled out during the turmoil and corruption of the eighties and nineties.
“It was part of the estate of a well-known collector, a man with an impeccable reputation. My own art dealer examined all the paperwork, the bills of sale, the export licenses, before giving his blessing to the deal.”
“Paperwork can be forged.”
Masini struggled visibly to control his impatience. “Anything can be forged. What do you want me to say? I have no reason to suspect that this was stolen property. I’m not a criminal, Signor Fabrizio.”
“I’m not suggesting that you are. So … money and goods changed hands in Zürich? The icon was yours when it was stolen?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask how much you paid for it?”
“Five million Swiss francs.”
I let that pass without comment, although for a moment I wondered if I’d heard correctly. I was no expert, but I did know that Orthodox icons were usually painted by anonymous artists, and were intended to be as far from unique as individual copies of the Bible. There were exceptions, of course—a few treasured, definitive examples of each type—but they were a great deal older than eighteenth-century. However fine the craftsmanship, however well-preserved, five million sounded far too high.
I said, “Surely you insured—?”
“Of course! And in a year or two, I may even get my money back. But I’d much prefer to have the icon. That’s why I purchased it in the first place.”
“And your insurers will agree. They’ll be doing their best to find it.” If another investigator had a head start on me, I didn’t want to waste my time—least of all if I’d be competing against a Swiss insurance firm on their home ground.
Masini fixed his bloodshot eyes on me. “Their best is not good enough! Yes, they’ll want to save themselves the money, and they’ll treat this potential loss with great seriousness … like the accountants they are. And the Austrian police will try very hard to find the murderer, no doubt. Neither are moved by any sense of urgency. Neither would be greatly troubled if nothing were resolved for months. Or years.”
If I’d been wrong about Masini’s nocturnal visions of adultery, I’d been right about one thing: there was a passion, an obsession, driving him which ran as deep as jealousy, as deep as pride, as deep as sex. He leaned forward across the desk, restraining himself from seizing my shirtfront, but commanding and imploring me with as much arrogance and pathos as if he had.
“Two weeks! I’ll give you two weeks—and you can name your fee! Deliver the icon to me within a fortnight … and everything I have is yours for the asking!”
· · · · ·
I treated Masini’s extravagant offer with as much seriousness as it deserved, but I accepted the case. There were worse ways to spend a fortnight, I decided, than consulting with informants on the fringes of the black market over long lunches in restaurants fit for connoisseurs of fine art.
The obvious starting point, though, was the courier. Her name was Gianna De Angelis: twenty-seven years old, five years in the business, with a spotless reputation; according to the regulatory authorities, not a single complaint had ever been lodged against her, by customer or employer. She’d been working for a small Milanese firm with an equally good record: this was their first loss, in twenty years, of either merchandise or personnel.
I spoke to two of her colleagues; they gave me the barest facts, but wouldn’t be drawn into speculation. The transaction had taken place in a Zürich bank vault, then De Angelis had taken a taxi straight to the airport. She’d phoned head office to say that all was well, less than five minutes before she was due to board the flight home. The plane had left on time, but she hadn’t been on it. She’d bought a ticket from Tyrolean Airlines—using her own credit card—and flown straight to Vienna, carrying the attaché case containing the icon as hand luggage. Six hours later, she was dead.
I tracked down her fiancé, a TV sound technician, to the apartment they’d shared. He was red-eyed, unshaven, hung-over. Still in shock, or I doubt he would have let me through the door. I offered my condolences, helped him finish a bottle of wine, then gently inquired whether Gianna had received any unusual phone calls, made plans to spend extravagant sums of money, or had appeared uncharacteristically nervous or excited in recent weeks. I had to cut the interview short when he began trying to crack my skull open with the empty bottle.
I returned to the office and began trawling the databases, from the official public records right down to the patchwork collections of mailing lists and crudely collated electronic debris purveyed by assorted cyberpimps. One system, operating out of Tokyo, could search the world’s digitized newspapers, and key frames from TV news reports, looking for a matching face—whether or not the subject’s name was mentioned in the caption or commentary. I found a near-twin walking arm-in-arm with a gangster outside a Buenos Aires courthouse in 2007, and another weeping in the wreckage of a village in the Philippines, her family killed in a typhoon, in 2010, but there were no genuine sightings. A text-based search of local media yielded exactly two entries; she’d only made it into the papers at birth and at death.
So far as I could discover, her financial position had been perfectly sound. No one had any kind of dirt on her, and there wasn’t the faintest whiff of an association with organized crime. The icon would have been far from the most valuable item she’d ever laid her hands on—and I still thought Masini had paid a vastly inflated price for it. Artwork—anonymous or not—wasn’t exactly the most liquid of assets. So why had she sold out, on this particular job, when there must have been a hundred opportunities which had been far more tempting?
Maybe she hadn’t been trying to sell the icon in Vienna. Maybe she’d been coerced into going there. I couldn’t imagine anyone “kidnapping” her in the middle of the airport, marching her over to the ticket office, through the security scanners and onto the plane. She’d been armed, highly trained, and carrying all the electronics she could possibly need to summon immediate assistance. But even if she hadn’t had an X-ray-transparent gun pointed at her heart every step of the way, maybe a more subtle threat had compelled her.
As dusk fell on the first day of my allotted fourteen, I paced the office irritably, already feeling pessimistic. De Angelis’s image smiled coolly on the terminal; her grieving lover’s wine tasted sour in my throat. This woman was dead—that was the crime—and I was being paid to hunt for a faded piece of kitsch. If I found the killers it would be incidental. And the truth was, I was hoping I wouldn’t.
I opened the blinds and looked down toward the city center. Flea-sized specks scurried across the Piazza del Duomo, the cathedral’s forest of mad Gothic pinnacles towering above them. I rarely noticed the cathedral; it was just another part of the expensive view (like the Alps, visible from the reception room) … and the view was just part of the whole high-class image which enabled me to charge twenty times as much for my services as any back-alley operator. Now I blinked at the sight of it as if it were an hallucination, it seemed so alien, so out of place beside the gleaming dark ceramic buildings of twenty-first century Milan. Statues of saints, or angels, or gargoyles—I couldn’t remember, and at this distance, I couldn’t really tell them apart—stood atop every pinnacle, like a thousand demented stylites. The whole roof was encrusted with pink-tinged marble, dizzyingly, surreally ornate, looking in places like lacework, and in places like barbed wire. Good atheist or not, I’d been inside once or twice, though I struggled to remember when and why; some unavoidable ceremonial occasion. In any case, I’d grown up with the sight of it; it should have been a familiar landmark, nothing more. But at that moment, the whole structure seemed utterly foreign, utterly strange; it was as if the mountains to the north had shed their snow and greenery and topsoil and revealed themselves to be giant artifacts, pyramids from Central America, relics of a vanished civilization.
I closed the blinds, and wiped the dead courier’s face from my computer screen.
Then I bought myself a ticket to Zürich.
· · · · ·
The databases had had plenty to say about Rolf Hengartner. He’d worked in electronic publishing, making deals on some ethereal plane where Europe’s biggest software providers carved up the market to their mutual satisfaction. I imagined him skiing, snow and water, with Ministers of Culture and satellite magnates … although probably not in the last few years, in his seventies, with acute lymphoma. He’d started out in film finance, orchestrating the funding of multinational co-productions; one of the photographs of him in the reception room to what was now his assistant’s office showed him raising a clenched fist beside a still-young Depardieu at an anti-Hollywood demonstration in Paris twenty years before.
Max Reif, his assistant, had been appointed executor of the estate. I’d downloaded the latest overpriced Schweitzerdeutsch software for my notepad, in the hope that it would guide me through the interview without too many blunders, but Reif insisted on speaking Italian, and turned out to be perfectly fluent.
Hengartner’s wife had died before him, but he was survived by three children and ten grandchildren. Reif had been instructed to sell all of the art, since none of the family had ever shown much interest in the collection. “What was his passion? Orthodox icons?”
“Not at all. Herr Hengartner was eclectic, but the icon was a complete surprise to me. Something of an anomaly. He owned some French Gothic and Italian Renaissance works with religious themes, but he certainly didn’t specialize in the Madonna, let alone the Eastern tradition.”
Reif showed me a photograph of the icon in the glossy brochure which had been put together for the auction; Masini had mislaid his copy of the catalog, so this was my first chance to see exactly what I was searching for. I read the Italian section in the pentalingual commentary on the facing page:
A stunning example of the icon known as the Vladimir Mother of God, probably the most ancient variation of the icons of “loving-kindness” (Greek eleousa, Russian umileniye). It depicts the Virgin holding the Child, His face pressed tenderly to His Mother’s cheek, in a powerful symbol of both divine and human compassion for all of creation. According to tradition, this icon derives from a painting by the Evangelist Luke. The surviving exemplar, from which the type takes its name, was brought to Kiev from Constantinople in the 12th century, and is now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. It has been described as the greatest holy treasure of the Russian nation.
Artist unknown. Ukrainian, early 18th century. Cyprus panel, 293 x 204 mm, egg tempera on linen, exquisitely decorated with beaten silver.
The reserve price was listed as eighty thousand Swiss francs. Less than a fiftieth what Masini had paid for it.
The aesthetic attraction of the piece was lost on me; it wasn’t exactly a Caravaggio. The colors were drab, the execution was crude—deliberately two-dimensional—and even the silver was badly tarnished. The paintwork itself appeared to be in reasonable condition; for a moment I thought there was a hairline crack across the full width of the icon, but on closer inspection it looked more like a flaw in the reproduction: a scratch on the printing plate, or some photographic intermediate.
Of course, this wasn’t meant to be “high art” in the Western tradition. No expression of the artist’s ego, no indulgent idiosyncrasies of style. It was—presumably—a faithful copy of the Byzantine original, intended to play a specific role in the practice of the Orthodox religion, and I was in no position to judge its value in that context. But I had trouble imagining either Rolf Hengartner or Luciano Masini as secret converts to the Eastern church. So was it purely a matter of a good investment? Was this nothing but an eighteenth-century baseball card, to them? If Masini’s only interest was financial, though, why had he paid so much more than the market value? And why was he so desperate to get it back?
