Holy Fire

by Bruce Sterling

  “I’m just very careful.”

  “Do you have, like, osteoarthritis or incontinence or any really weird syndrome stuff?”

  “I have a bad vagus nerve,” Mia said. “I get attacks of night cramps. And I’m astigmatic.” She smiled. It was an interesting topic. She could remember when strangers made polite chitchat about the weather.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was married for a long time. When it was over, that part of life didn’t seem very important anymore.”

  “What part is very important?”

  “Responsibility.”

  “That doesn’t sound very exciting.”

  “It’s not exciting, but if you’re not responsible, you can’t take proper care of yourself. You get sick and fall apart.” This truism sounded rather fatuous, pointless, and morbid, especially for a young person. “When you live a really long time,” Mia offered carefully, “it changes everything. The whole structure of the world, politics, money, religion, culture, everything that used to be human. All those changes are your responsibility, they benefited you, they happened because of you. You have to work hard so that the polity can manage. Good citizenship is a lot of work. It needs a lot of self-sacrifice.”

  “Sure,” said Brett, and laughed. “I forgot about those parts.”

  Brett led her into a mall—a nexus of junk shops near the Haight. There was a good crowd in the place, warming the benches, window-shopping, sipping tinctures in a café. A couple of cops in pink jackets sat on their bicycles, people-watching. For the first time in many years, Mia found herself catching a suspicious glance from a police officer. Because of the company she kept.

  “Do you know this part of town?” Brett said.

  “Sure. See that collectors’ shop? They sell old media bric-a-brac, I buy paper-show things from them sometimes.”

  “Wow,” Brett marveled, “I always wondered what kind of people went into that weird old place.… ”

  Brett ducked into a dark, tiny store, a redwood-fronted hole in the wall. It sold rugs, blankets, and cheap jewelry. Mia had never been inside the place in her life. It smelled strongly, almost chokingly, of air-sprayed vanilla. The walls were densely overgrown with deep green moss.

  A tabby cat was asleep on the shop counter, sprawled lazily across the glass top. There were no human beings in sight. Brett made a beeline for a dress rack crammed in the corner. “Come see … see, this is all my stuff.”

  “All of this?”

  “No, not everything on this rack,” Brett said, sorting nimbly through the garment rack, “but this one is my design, and this one, and this one here.… I mean, I concepted these, it was Griff who instantiated them.” Mia perceived from the sudden angry crease on Brett’s smooth brow that Griff was the erring boyfriend. “This older guy, Mr. Quiroga, he’s the owner. We kind of cut a deal with him to carry our stuff.”

  “They’re very interesting designs,” Mia said. They were very peculiar.

  “You like them, really?”

  “Of course I do.” Mia pulled a red jacket from its hanger. It was made of a puffy spun plastic with tactile properties somewhere between leather, canvas, and some kind of chewable gelatin candy. Most of the jacket was candy-apple red, but there were large patches of murky blue on the elbows, neck, and hem. It had a lot of fat buttoned pockets, and a waterproof red rain hood crushed down inside a lumpy collar.

  “See how well it holds its shape?” Brett boasted. “And it doesn’t even have batteries. It’s all in the cut and the weave. Plus the Young’s modulus of the fiber.”

  “What’s it made of?”

  “Elastomers and polymers. A little woven ceramic for the high-wear spots. See, it’s durable all-weather street-wear, just right for travel! Try it on!”

  Mia slipped her arms through the padded sleeves. Brett busied herself tugging at the shoulders, then zipped it up to Mia’s chin. “It fits great!” Brett declared. It did no such thing. Mia felt as if she’d been stuffed into a monstrous fruitcake.

  Mia stepped before a narrow full-length mirror in another corner. There she saw a stranger improbably swaddled in a garish candied jacket. Maya the Gingerbread Girl. She put on her sunglasses. With the glasses, and with sufficiently bad light, she might almost look young—a very tired, puffy, sickly young woman in a kid’s ridiculous jacket. Wearing improbably tidy, adult, and conservative slacks and shoes.

  Mia jammed her fingers through her hair, shook her head, and destroyed her coiffure.

  “That helps,” she said, peering at the mirror.

  Brett was surprised, and laughed.

  “What a lovely jacket. What else could I ever need?”

  “Better shoes,” Brett told her very seriously. “A skirt. Long earrings. No purse, get a backpack. Real lipstick, not that medicated little-old-lady stuff. Nail polish. Barrettes. Necklaces. No girdle. No brassiere, if you can help it. Especially no watch.” She paused. “And sway some more when you walk. Put some bounce in it.”

  “That seems like rather a lot.”

  Brett shrugged. “Looking vivid is mostly things you don’t have to get and don’t have to do.”

  “I don’t have the cheekbones for that kind of life anymore,” Mia said. “I talk too slowly. I don’t wave my hands enough. I don’t giggle. If I tried to dance, I’d ache for a week.”

  “You don’t have to dance. I could make you look really vivid if you wanted me to. I’m pretty good at that. I have a talent. Everyone says so.”

  “I’m sure you could do that, Brett. But why would I want you to?”

  Brett was bitterly crestfallen. Mia felt a sharp pang of guilt at having disappointed her. It was as if she’d deliberately slapped a small child in the street. “I do want the jacket,” Mia said. “I’m fond of it, I want to buy it from you.”

  “You do, really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Could you give me some grown-up money for it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean real money from a long-term investment account,” Brett said. “Certified funds.”

  “But certified funds are only for special transactions. Life extension, stock ownership, pensions, that sort of thing.”

  “No, they’re not. Certified money is the real money for the real economy. It’s the kind of money that kids like Griff and me can never get our hands on.” Brett’s young-girl eyes—warm amber brown, with sclera so white and clear that they looked almost artificial—narrowed cagily. “You don’t have to give me very much real money at all. I’d feel real happy with just a little bit of certified grown-up money.”

  “I’d like to give you some,” Mia said, “but I don’t have any way to do that. Of course I do have certified funds in my own name, but they’re all tied up in long-term capital investments, like they’re supposed to be. Nobody uses that kind of financial instrument for little everyday transactions like clothes or food. What’s wrong with a nice cashcard?”

  “You can’t start a real business without certified funds,” Brett said. “There’s all kinds of awful tax problems and insurance problems and liability problems. It’s all just part of the big conspiracy to hold young people back.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Mia said, “it’s how we ensure financial stability and reduce liquidity in the capital markets. This is truly a dull and stuffy topic, Brett, but as it happens, I’m a medical economist, and I know quite a bit about this. If you could have seen what markets were like in the twenties, or the forties, or even the sixties, then you’d appreciate modern time-based restrictions on the movement of capital. They’ve helped a lot, life’s a lot more predictable now. The whole structure of the medical-industrial complex is dependent on stable grant procedures and graduated reductions in liquidity.”

  Brett shrugged. “Oh, never mind, never mind.… I knew you’d never give me any, but I had to ask anyway. I hope you’re not mad at me.”

  “No, it’s all right. I
’m not mad.”

  Brett gazed around the shop, her lips tightening in a glossy smirk. “Mr. Quiroga’s not around. Probably doing civil support. He’s supposed to run this place, but he’s never in here when you want him.… Probably makes more treatment points from the government when he’s out spying on us kids.… Can you give me fifteen marks for it? Cash?”

  Mia took her minibank out of her purse, ratcheted fifteen market units onto a smartcard, and handed it over.

  Brett carefully stuffed the card into a pocket of her backpack, and removed a scarcely visible tag from the puffy red sleeve of the merchandise. She tucked the tag under the sleeping cat, which meowed once, reflexively. “Well, thanks a lot, Maya. Griff’d be real glad to see me make a sale. That is, if I was ever gonna see Griff again.”

  “Will you see him?”

  “Oh, he’ll come looking for me. He’s gonna sweettalk me and apologize and all, but he’s no good. He’s smart but he’s stupid, if you know what I mean. He’s never gonna really do anything. He’s never gonna really go anywhere.” Brett was restless. “Let’s go.”

  They exited the mall into Pierce Street. A Pekingese police dog with a pink collar came toddling down the hill. Brett stood perfectly still and stared at the tiny dog with blank and focused hostility. When the dog had passed them, she strode on.

  “I could leave tonight,” Brett declared, loosely swinging her young and perfect arms beneath the poncho. “Just step right onto a plane for Stuttgart. Well, not Stuttgart, because that would be a real crowded flight. But someplace else in Europe. Warszawa maybe. Airplanes are just like buses. They hardly ever really check to see if you’ve paid.”

  “That would be dishonest,” Mia said gently.

  “I’d get away with it! Hitching is easy if you have the nerve.”

  “What would your parents think?”

  Brett laughed harshly. “I wouldn’t get any medical checkups in Stuttgart. I’d just stay very underground in Europe, and I wouldn’t get any checkups unless I came back here. I’d have no medical records in Europe. Nobody would ever catch me. I could hitch on a plane tonight. Nobody would care.”

  They were heading uphill and Mia’s calves were beginning to burn. “You’d have a hard time getting anything done in Europe without appearing on official records.”

  “People travel like that all the time! You can get away with anything as long as you don’t look important.”

  “What does Griff think about this?”

  “Griff’s got no imagination.”

  “Well, what if he comes looking for you?”

  Brett’s face clouded thoughtfully. “This man you knew. Your lover. Was he really a lot like Griff?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “They buried him this morning.”

  “Ohhh,” said Brett. “Comprehension dawns.” Delicately she touched Mia’s padded shoulder. “I get it all now. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  They walked along for a while silently. Mia tried to catch her breath. Then Brett spoke up. “I bet you secretly loved him right up to the very end.”

  “No. Actually, it wasn’t at all like that.”

  “But you went to his funeral today.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So, I bet somewhere, deep inside, you really loved him the whole time.”

  “I know that would seem more romantic,” Mia said, “but it just doesn’t work that way. Not for me, anyway. I never loved him half as much as I loved a better man later, and now I scarcely even think about him, either. Even though I was his wife for fifty years.”

  “No, no, no,” Brett insisted cheerily, “I bet anything that on New Year’s Eve you take mnemonics and drink alcohol and think about your old boyfriends and cry.”

  “Alcohol’s a poison,” Mia said. “And mnemonics are more trouble than they’re worth. Anyway, that’s just the way young women think that old women act. Posthuman women aren’t like that at all. We aren’t all sad or nostalgic. Really old women, who are still healthy and strong—we’re just very different. We just—we just get over all that.” She paused. “Really old men, too, some of them …”

  “Well, you can’t have been all cold and indifferent to him, or otherwise you wouldn’t have been crying about him on a bus.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mia said. “It wasn’t him, it was the situation! It was the human condition! The posthuman condition … If I’d been crying because I regretted losing my love life, I’d have left with your boyfriend, not with you.”

  “Very funny,” Brett said with an instant jealous scowl. Brett began walking faster, her elastic soles squeaking on the pavement.

  “I never meant to suggest that I’d try to steal your boyfriend,” Mia said with great care. “I’m sure he’s very good-looking, but believe me, that’s not high on my list of priorities.”

  They crossed Divisadero. “I know why you said all that just now,” Brett declared sullenly, after half a block. “I bet you’d feel really good about it, if you could give me some nice grown-up advice, and maybe buy my jacket or something, and so I went back to Griff and we went together to Europe and acted just like you think young lovers ought to act.”

  “Why are you so suspicious?”

  “I’m not suspicious. I’m just not naive. I know you think I’m like a little kid, that nineteen is a little kid. I’m not very mature, but I’m a woman. In fact I’m kind of a dangerous woman.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes.” Brett tossed her head. “You see, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”

  “That sounds pretty serious.”

  “And I don’t mind hurting people if I have to. Sometimes it’s good for them. To be hurt some. Shocked a little.” Brett’s sweet young face had a most peculiar cast. After a long moment Mia realized that Brett was trying to look wicked and seductive. She looked about as evil as a kitten in a basket.

  “I see,” Mia said.

  “Are you rich, Maya?”

  “In a way,” Mia said. “Yes. I’m well-to-do.”

  “How’d you get that way?”

  “Steady income, low expenditures, compound interest, and a long wait.” Mia laughed. “Even inanimate objects can get rich that way.”

  “That’s all you ever had to do?”

  “It’s not as easy as it sounds. The low expenditure is the hard part. It’s pretty easy to make money, but it’s hard not to spend money once you know that you have some.”

  “Do you have a big house, Maya?”

  “I have an apartment on Parnassus. By the medical center. Not too far from here, actually.”

  “Is there a lot of room there?”

  Mia paused. “You want to spend the night with me, is that what you’re driving at?”

  “Can I, Maya? Can you take me in? Just for a night. I’ll sleep on the floor, I’m real used to it. See, I just don’t want to stay in any place where Griff might find me tonight. I need a chance to think things out on my own. Please say yes, it would really help.”

  Mia thought it over. She could imagine a lot of possible harm in the situation, but the prospect somehow failed to deter her. She’d reached such an instant and intense rapport with the girl that she felt peculiar about breaking the connection, almost superstitious. She wasn’t sure that she liked Brett, any more than she would have liked a chance encounter with her own nineteen-year-old self. But still: nineteen years old! It genuinely pained her to think of denying Brett anything. “Are you hungry, Brett?”

  “I could eat.” Brett was suddenly cheerful.

  “It’s so neat and clean here,” Brett said, sweeping through Mia’s front room almost on tiptoe. “Does it always look like this?”

  Mia was busying herself in her kitchen. She had never been a tidy person by nature, but during her seventies, the habit of untidiness had left her. She’d simply grown out of messiness, the way a child might shed a tooth. After that, Mia always washed the dis
hes, always made her bed, always picked up loose objects and filed them away. Living that way was quicker and simpler and made every kind of sense to her. Litter and disorder no longer gave her any sense of relaxation or freedom or spontaneity. It had taken her seventy years to learn how to clean up after herself, but once she had learned the trick of it, it was impossible to go back.

  She had no simple way to tell Brett about this. The profundity of this change in her personality would never seem natural to a nineteen-year-old. A half-truth was simpler. “I have a civil-support woman who comes in twice a week.”

  “Boy, that must be a real pain.” Brett peered at a framed piece of paper ephemera. “What is this thing?”

  “Part of my paper collection. It’s the cover of a twentieth-century computer game.”

  “What, this giant silver thing with fangs and muscles and all these war machines and stuff?”

  Mia nodded. “It was a kind of virtuality but it was flat and slow and it came in a glass box.”

  “Why do you collect stuff like that?”

  “I just like it.”

  Brett was skeptical.

  Mia smiled. “I do like it! I like the way it’s hopelessly stuck between pretending to be high-tech ultra-advanced design, and actually being crude and violent and crass. It cost a lot to design and market, because people were very impressed when you spent a lot of money back then. But it still looks botched and clunky. There used to be thousands of copies of this game, but now they’re forgotten. I like it, because not many people are interested in that kind of old-fashioned schlock, but I am. When I look at that picture and think about it—where it came from and what it means—well, it always makes me feel more like my real self, somehow.”

  “Is it worth a lot of money? It sure is ugly.”

  “That box top might be worth money if it still had the game inside. There’s a few people still alive who used to play these games when they were kids. Some of them are museum fanatics, they own the antique computers, disks, cartridges, the cathode-ray tubes, everything. They all know each other through the net, and they sell each other copies of games that are still mint-in-the-box. For big-collector sums of money. But just the paper cover? No. The paper’s not worth much to anybody.”