Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 596
could read nothing in her gaze--neither hope nor fear.
The cold wind licked at Marya’s legs, reminding her to
keep moving. She sighed and with one last lingering look,
turned her back on the monument. She walked through the
snow humming, enjoying the sensation of the ice against the
balls of her feet. It felt like... a whole new kind of real, she
decided. As she walked, she kept eyes up to drink in the mix
of new and ancient architecture in the Old Town. There were
bits here and there that must date almost back to the twentieth
century. It was hard to tell without closing her eyes, since the
only buildings that had any physical signage were those
pretending to date from the middle ages. If Marya closed her
eyes and summoned inscape, the vision of the street reappeared
festooned with data links and labels. She could walk like this
and learn all about it. Many of the tourists she passed had their
eyes firmly shut; even couples gestured and pointed things out
to one another with their eyes closed. But then, if they did that,
they saw only the recordings and representations of other
moving bodies picked up by street sensors. They would miss
the details: pigeon droppings, erratic footprints in the snow,
drifting fog from the mouths of passersby. These were the
things Marya wanted to remember about this place.
She negotiated a twisty maze of alleys until she came to a
nondescript archway in the center of a whitewashed wall. A
faint holographic nameplate in the center of the arch said, City
Records Vault 23. Marya walked through the arch into warm
dry air. A stairway led down.
As she descended, Marya closed her eyes and summoned
an ancient article from inscape. She laid the words of the
typescript over her inscape vision of the steps as she walked.
She had read the article before, when she was learning history,
but at the time she had not really understood it.