Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  Even Cassandra, that famous, fatal priestess, herself had a story. Cassandra’s story was the famous, dreadful legend of Cassandra: I am Cassandra of Troy, and I can tell you the future. You won’t believe the future, but the future won’t stop. I am your slave, and I hate you. And you will die, and I’ll die too — but I’ll watch you die first. Because I am the prophetess Cassandra.

  Farfalla could walk out of this dreadful museum, back into the sunlight. She could do that. That was her choice, her act of will. It was time to make her free decision. Choose the future, right now.

  She could leave this scary old, new doomed place. She was almost half-free, from having run up these stairs to talk to Babi. She could run out the door of this awful place. Flee the museum of the painful past, run, run through the winding streets of Capri, to the little train, to the next zooming hydrofoil. There were so many ferries in the Capri harbor. Rushing by like clockwork. Rushing by like the passing hours of a woman’s life.

  Off this island in thirty minutes. Gone, vanished from Capri. A ticket in Napoli, a train to Milano, a bus to Ivrea. And she would breathe in peace.

  Leave all of this. Leave this space and time. Do it, Farfalla. Disappear. Eight hours of travel up the boot of Italy. A journey of eight hours starts with one single step. One, single, strong-willed step. You can walk away from this destiny, Farfalla. You don’t have to do any of this.

  Farfalla stepped up, away toward her freedom, and out of all this, forever... and then, she spun on her high heel and walked back down into the dungeon, into her dark fate.

  How strange life was.

  In the dead dentist’s dark and dreadful dungeon, everyone reveled in the gloom. Popper Bead Girl was shining in Farfalla’s absence. Without Farfalla around, Popper Bead was perky and charming. This was Popper’s big chance to be the center of attention, to make her fuss over her dead junk that nobody else ever noticed.

  Popper Bead, Gavin and Professor Milo had managed to locate something of interest— a suitcase.

  The travel case was made of thick, cracked brown leather, with iron locks, brass hasps and reinforced corners, dotted with heavy bronze studs. It was a dignified, princessly traveling case from the age of steamships. Rich people drowning and freezing in the wreck of the Titanic might have clung to a suitcase like this.

  “This suitcase has no key,” Gavin told her.

  “Is it her suitcase?” said Farfalla. She reached her hand toward the lost suitcase of the Princess Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy. Then she stopped. She didn’t have to touch the suitcase. It was radiating occult certainty.

  “There’s no way for us to know for sure, not without opening it,” judged Gavin. “But this is an old Italian suitcase. It’s the proper age, and it has American luggage labels. From New York, from Boston... and look, this one is from the Jefferson Hotel, in Richmond, Virginia.”

  “She took the key with her,” said Professor Milo. “She left this case with her good friend, the dentist, because she meant to return here, some day. Amelie Rives was a sly little minx.”

  Gavin was on one knee, examining the situation. He glanced up, bright-eyed. “Did you just say ‘minx’? I never heard anyone speak that word before.”

  “The Princess Troubetzkoy wrote historical romances. She used the word ‘minx’ all the time.”

  “The lock on her case is rusted solid,” Gavin announced. “Her key would be useless now, even if we had it in our hands.”

  Nobody seemed to know what to say about that.

  “Well, a hundred years ago, this would be a definite setback,” said Gavin. “But this is the twenty-first century! We could X-ray this suitcase. We could put in a CAT-SCAN.”

  No one said anything about that, either.

  “Maybe a nuclear magnetic resonator...” Gavin awkwardly hefted one of the handles, carved from elephant ivory. “I can hear something moving around in there! Come and listen to this, Farfalla.”

  “Why?” Farfalla hedged. She kept a careful distance from the fatal container.

  Gavin shook the suitcase violently. The ancient ivory handles squeaked like dying mice.

  Popper Bead swiftly got upset about this. Gavin stopped his antics and set the case down, gently. Then he glanced at his watch in the gloom.

  “Well,” Gavin said, “we got so close to success here... That case weighs a ton!”

  “It could be her books in there,” said Professor Milo. “Just her books and her private papers.”

  “Maybe,” said Gavin, “but that would be great news for you, wouldn’t it?”

  Professor Milo’s placid face wrinkled in quick dismay. “I’m afraid you don’t understand! My university has tons of paper from Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy. Amelie wrote dozens of books. Thousands of letters. Nobody reads that rubbish now! Nobody will ever read that! Where is the Cosmic Cupid?”

  Gavin glanced toward Farfalla. Her eyes met his in the gloom. There was a sudden, surging burst of silent, intimate, flawless man-to-woman communion between them. Without a word, they had agreement, a game plan, and immediate action.

  “There’s no need for panic,” Gavin announced.

  “We can find your Cosmic Cupid for you,” soothed Farfalla. “It will just take patience and the proper paperwork.”

  Gavin raised his hand. “We need to get this American suitcase exported back to the United States. I know ways to do that between working museums. They’re like an Inter-Library Loan.”

  “But I don’t want the Cosmic Cupid stuck inside some museum!” said Professor Milo.

  “Doesn’t Cupid belong in a museum?” said Farfalla.

  “No! No, because I want the Cupid. I want the Cupid for myself, privately.”

  “Look, professor,” said Gavin, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Maybe you can figure out some way to own your Cupid privately, but the first step is to figure out if there’s any statue here at all. And I think I know how to prove that. Back home in Seattle, we have some top-notch high-tech facilities that perform ‘non-invasive imaging.’ And I can help you there, because I know all those guys.”

  “Can’t you just do that now?” said Professor Milo. “Use your computer, or something.”

  “What, how, with my two hands? I’m a Futurist, I don’t have X-ray vision! The Italians are reasonable people when it comes to their heritage issues. We just need to make a good case. So, we all send an email about it, we start a wiki, and we do a Skype conference call.”

  “I don’t have any computer,” Professor Milo pointed out.

  “Well, that’ll sure slow things down by a factor of ten... But, well, we can put together a Cosmic Cupid coalition. We can find every scholar on the Internet who is interested in Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy. Then, we fill out all the Italian forms, we cross the t’s and dot the i’s. The Italians will come across for us. That’s how museum research gets done.”

  “But I’m the only one in the world who is interested!” said Professor Milo. “I am the world’s greatest authority on Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy.”

  “She was famous,” Farfalla offered gently. “She still matters to somebody on the Internet.”

  “She does not matter!” wailed Professor Milo. “I published five different scholarly papers on her, and they never got one citation! Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy was never important! She was just famous, beautiful, rich and very romantic. That’s all! Even when she was alive, all the critics knew that Amelie was a lousy writer. She was popular, but she was awful! That’s why time forgot her long ago!”

  “Maybe people will rediscover her literary merits some day,” Gavin said.

  “She never had any merits! Her writing is totally, hopelessly, awfully bad! Amelie was beautiful, blonde and gorgeous... In Capri, she was young, and happy for a while, a little honeymoon of joy... Isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough? I want to cry!”

  Popper Bead spoke up. “What is wrong with her? I told you not to come down here! This is a terrible place!”

  Farfalla still hated Popper Bead, but she h
ad to give her credit. Popper had done her best to warn them against coming down here. Nobody had paid a bit of attention to Popper’s warnings.

  Gavin glanced at his wristwatch. “Look, I hate to say this, but I need to leave this place right away. There’s a major panel this morning, sponsored by LOXY. Fabio Mascherati of LOXY is chairing that panel. Fabio’s a personal friend. He would take it badly if I didn’t show up.”

  “All those Futurists are sure to start late,” Farfalla told him.

  “I’m already late. You ladies can sort this out. I have no choice here, I really have to go.”

  Gavin Tremaine vaulted up the stairs, jumping them two at a time. He vanished from the dungeon, as if he had never existed.

  Farfalla looked at the other women. Well, here they were. Three women in the dungeon of pain, where no woman ever wanted to be.

  Three women? No, four women. Because a woman had owned that suitcase.

  8 I speak Portuguese

  9 “I’m sorry, but Dr. Malaparte is not here. She is in Anacapri, and will not be here until tomorrow.”

  Chapter Seven: Tomorrow’s Trends in Web Couture

  Gavin had assumed that preaching in a chapel would be easy. But the acoustics in the medieval chapel were dreadful. It had something to do with the host of display screens.

  Gavin sat in the front row, but still couldn’t follow the rapid Italian of the panelists. He slipped translation headphones over his ears. Most of the other Futurists were also wearing headphones. Everyone alone together, in his or her own private world.

  Fabio Mascherati was this panel’s moderator. Fabio had personally picked the guests for LOXY’s major panel on future fashion trends. Fabio’s favorite fashion “thought leaders” did not look very fashionable. They wore neat, black European intellectual’s clothes, and looked like cut-out cartoons.

  There was a philosopher on Fabio’s panel, because every Italian cultural panel had to have a philosopher. There was a television host who made Italian fashion documentaries. There was a sober female politician from Brussels. Her European committee handed out grants to “centers of regional excellence.” Centers like Milan, for instance, the home of LOXY.

  There was also one Paris fashionista, sitting on stage like a hostage. In European high fashion, Milan and Paris had it in for each other. They were like Apple and Microsoft.

  Europeans could be scary people. They said such nice, sweet, guarded, phony things about one another in public. Intellectual European panels like this one were about Europeans assuring themselves, over and over, that they wouldn’t massacre each other anymore.

  The European Union was a huge empire where the lambs walked around on the lions’ backs. There was a suppressed violence to European life that got on Gavin’s nerves. You never heard Europeans address deep, dark issues in a frank, honest, way: “Hi, I’m from Italy and you’re from France! Remember when you French guys bombed us in World War Two?”

  Europeans had their ghosts to remember things like that.

  Italians were supremely good at hiding facts. Nobody could match them at this. A ceremonious people, the Italians. The public appearance, the live human presence, gesture and speech, the human breath, the flesh and blood- - that strongly appealed to Italians. Italian listeners were never bored by empty speeches. Italians loved a warm, positive, high-toned performance.

  It wasn’t all just pleasant blather, either. Every once in a while, there would be a good stinging insult in an Italian speech. Just one good elbow-swinging zinger, to show that Italian life wasn’t all peaches and lemon meringue.

  The Italian philosopher was talking about the loss of middle-class aspiration and the emergence of new forms of material culture. Gavin took this opportunity to open his computer and pretend to take notes. Actually, Gavin was catching up on his Twitter stream. “Twitter” was the web service where the Internet people in the audience were passing their secret messages.

  There was a megaton of Twitter secret-messaging going on at the Futurist Congress, but almost all of it was in Portuguese. The Italians were much too busy respecting their Italian philosopher. They hung on his every empty word.

  The Italian philosopher wound it up. The French fashion designer was the next to speak. He left his transparent stackable chair, and turned on the big screen with a click of his thumb.

  He spoke to the crowd in Italian. An amazing feat for a French guy. Normally, the French assumed that every decent person in the world spoke French.

  This French businessman was very lucid and clear. He’d come to Capri with a solid, practical agenda. He was well-rehearsed. He even directly addressed the topic of the LOXY panel: why Europeans would shop for their clothes on the Web of the future.

  His detailed PowerPoint presentation highlighted the Web’s advantages for a major fashion house. Market segmentation. Reduced inventory. Integration of production with demand. Customer relations management. The change in user generations.

  The children of the Baby Boomers were coming onto the fashion scene and the Web was their way of life. The Digital Natives had never known a world without a Web. They loved the Web. They were its slaves.

  Micro-targeted promotion campaigns. Outreach to markets in Brazil, Indonesia, and the Gulf States. Web-savvy Moslem women in Iran could shop for sexy lingerie while never leaving Moslem seclusion.

  Gavin sat up in his front-row chair. This was the kind of presentation he really liked: real, red-meat, commercial Futurism.

  The French businessman sensed that he was on a roll. Paris had the Milanese reeling. And then he brought out his killer application: high-tech, French augmented reality. Réalité augmentée! Yes! Oui! Si! French women could use augmented reality to model imaginary, cyber-generated clothes. With augmented reality, the fashion house could take the client’s exact proportions (no matter how she lied about her body), and tailor clothing precisely for her. She would be able to see how imaginary clothes, on her own body, in any color, any fabric, and the fashion would never cut a stitch of real cloth until she had ordered and paid.

  The French designer displayed his imaginary cyber-clothing. Gavin switched into the Twitter backchannel to see the audience response.

  Not too great. The Italians were getting nasty. Spoken Italian tended to whip by Gavin, but he could read Italian just fine. My grandma’s dog wouldn’t be caught dead in that. // Those are cheap rubber clothes for computer-game figures. // It’s like set design for the Smurfs.

  The Parisian gentleman was sweating it now, but he then brought out the big finish. The “Carla Effect.”

  Carla Bruni. There she was. A virtual Carla Bruni! A golden video of the willowy songbird, strolling around — no, Carla was sauntering, gliding — up on the larger-than-life display screen. Carla Bruni, in her Paris-tailored get-up as the First Lady of France.

  Mr. Paris had cold facts and figures on what happened to French exports whenever Premiere Dame Carla Bruni dismounted from a French jet. Fashion earthquakes occurred when Carla alighted upon some primitive, backward locale, say, London. The French called that the “Carla Effect.” And the “Carla Effect” could be measured in euros, dollars, and pounds. For the first time in history, a First Lady’s charm could be monetized.

  Mr. Paris had recovered his aplomb. The Italian audience adored Carla Bruni, because Carla Bruni was, in fact, Italian. She was Italian, and French by marriage, and her dad was Brazilian. The Carla Effect promised the future!

  Then he sat down to the panel’s only round of applause.

  Fabio Mascherati summed up the panel’s remarks, looking cool and crisp. Fabio’s LOXY was a Web retail company, based in Milan, that sold posh Milanese clothes. Fabio, therefore, had practical and informative things to say about tomorrow’s trends in Web couture. On Twitter, though, nobody could care less.

  On the Twitter backchannel, it was all Carla Bruni. They were bewitched by Carla Bruni, they just couldn’t get over her. Even the Brazilians were keenly interested in Carla. The Brazilian futurists were askin
g many innocent questions about Carla — her Carla-ness, her Carla-osity. The Italians were burningly eager to discuss every last little doing of “the Green-Eyed Italian Witch.” They were so proud of her!

  What a romantic story Carla Bruni had. Romance fiction was too small for the world-conquering Carla Bruni. Carla’s father was not her mother’s husband. In fantastic, soap-opera fashion, Carla hadn’t known the truth about her own father until she was an adult. Her father was Brazilian. The Italian-French-supermodel-pop-singer First Lady of France was half-Brazilian.

  The news of Carla’s Brazilian heritage set off an instant Twitter Carnaval. Linked pictures of Carla suddenly showed up on Twitter. The Internet had never lacked for languorous, sexy photos of Carla Bruni. Carla had been a European supermodel, so there were vast archives of a seminude Carla, in all her slumberous, gym-toned glory. Carla had changed the world by lying on top of it in lingerie.

  Here was the basic Futurist scenario. A President of France had his back to the wall, in the worst political trouble of his life. Because his wife was divorcing him, while he still held office. An awful scandal. Disasters like that are simply not supposed to happen in France.

  And then this stunningly beautiful girl — a goddess, a witch, an unearthly, paranormal creature — comes by the Elysee Palace with her guitar, to talk about recording policy on the Internet. Carla was worried about her music royalties, like every other doomed musician in the world.

  Eight months later, and Carla Bruni is a princess of music. Just like Eliza said, in her artless, hopeful, teen-girl fashion, but for real, in broad daylight. A princess of music whose new best-frenemy is the glamorous Princess Letizia of Spain.

  Carla is a princess of music, married to the President of France — she gives away all her music royalties to an orphanage. An orphanage in Haiti. An orphanage in Haiti for the children of AIDS victims.