Holy Fire

by Bruce Sterling

  “All right, then maybe I’ll settle for glamour. I’m a woman in a hurry. I want it so much, Josef. I just have to have it now.”

  Slowly Novak nodded. “Yes. I can see that quality about you. That’s just where your allure lies, darling … that’s it, that’s you, and that is this moment, exactly.”

  Philippe arrived at half past three to do her face. Philippe brought along a gift: a couture wig from the Emporio Vietti. This new wig boasted a built-in translation unit doing forty-seven major global languages through a translucent cord that snaked to the wearer’s right ear. It was, said Novak, “very Vietti” to pointedly ignore their purloining of the other wig and then double the ante by sending along a much nicer one.

  The wig came preprogrammed with a set of three twenties hairstyles, Vietti’s tactful method of elbowing his way into the shot. It would have been crass to turn down such a handsome gift, and one that she needed so much. But Novak was angered by this little jab from his old patron. The irritation sent Novak into a frenzy of spontaneous invention.

  “This I want from you, darling,” Novak muttered. “Let me tell you what is happening tonight. The thrill of the uncanny lies in the piquancy of oxymoron. You remember what life was like in the twenties? Well, of course you don’t. You can’t, but you must pretend that you do, just for me.… When Giancarlo and I were young in the twenties, anything seemed possible. Now it’s the nineties, and anything truly is possible—but if you’re young, you’re not allowed to do anything about those possibilities. You understand me?”

  She nodded, stone-faced, careful not to damage her cosmetics. “Yes, Josef, I do understand. I understand perfectly.”

  “The uncanny is beauty macchiato, darling, beauty just a little spotted—with the guilty, with the monstrous. That’s what Vietti really saw in you, when he said that he saw something cute. You see, my darling, in order to make this world very safe for the very old, we have changed life for the young in ways that are truly evil.”

  “Is that really fair, Josef? You’re being very harsh.”

  “Don’t interrupt me. Vietti cannot recognize that truth without recognizing his own complicity. That was why he was intrigued.” Novak waved his single arm. “Tonight, you become the long-dead youth of the gerontocracy, in a dangerous liaison with the crushed youth of modernity. An impossible conspiracy, a dreamlike violation. Something that plays at sentiment and nostalgia, but conceals a core that is a little dangerous, a little perverse. I’m going to push that old man’s face into it. He won’t see all of it, because he can’t allow himself to see the full truth; but what he can see of it, he will be forced to love.”

  They set to work. Maya lurking in svelte black by a half-dead antique virtuality engine. Maya passing a stuffed weasel and a stuffed envelope to a sullen half-naked errand boy (played by one of Brett’s Roman acquaintances). Maya in a set of virching goggles like a domino mask, letting her signet ring be kissed by the Khornaks’ burly security guard. (The glamour-struck guard was especially good in his role.) Maya spurning a packet of dope stickers and pretending to smoke a cigarette. A pensive Maya in candlelight, crouching in her high heels over a little playing-card castle of Roman bus tickets.

  Ten, then a dozen, then a score of kids showed up at the villa netsite, in their street couture. Novak fed them into the shot. Faceless and crawling at her feet, their cheap and vivid gear gone half-grotesque in shadows.

  When Maya saw the raw shots on Novak’s notebook screen, she was elated and appalled. Elated because he had made her so lovely. Appalled because Novak’s fantasy was so revelatory. He’d made her a bewitching atavism, a subterranean queen of illicit chic for a mob of half-monstrous children. Novak’s glamour was a lie that told the truth.

  Novak took a cab back to the hotel at half past one in the morning. The old man had not given so much of himself in a long time. He was palsied with an exhaustion that only a man in his one hundred twenties could manifest.

  With Novak’s departure, the Khornak brothers, who had been growing very nervous about the vivid kids, threw everyone out in a scattered welter of props and equipment.

  The kids drifted off with cheery good-byes, rattling off on bicycles, or cramming half a dozen into a cab. When Brett and Maya inventoried the borrowed props they discovered that the extras had magpied off with a dozen or so small but valuable articles. Brett was reduced to tears by this discovery. “That’s so typical,” she said. “Really, you give people a chance, a real chance for once, and what do they do with it. They just slap you in the face.”

  “They wanted souvenirs, Brett. They gave us their time and we didn’t pay them a thing, so I don’t mind. Really, a stuffed weasel can’t be worth all that much.”

  “But I promised the store people I’d take good care of everything. And I let the kids in on something really special, and they robbed me.” Brett shook her head and sniffled. “They just don’t get it here, Maya. These Roman kids, they’re not like us. It’s like all the life has been squeezed out of them. They don’t do anything, they don’t even try, they just hang out on the Spanish Steps and drink frappés and read. Good heavens, these Roman kids read. You just give them some fat paper book and they’ll sit there and nod out for hours and hours.”

  “Roman kids read?” Maya encouraged, sorting shoes. “Gosh, how classical of them.”

  “It’s awful, a terrible habit! In virtuality at least you get to interact! Even with television you at least have to use visual processing centers and parse real dialogue with your ears! Really, reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat.”

  “Don’t you think reading can be useful sometimes?”

  “Sure, that’s what they all say. You get some of these guys and they take lexic tinctures and they can read like a thousand words a minute! But still, they don’t ever do anything! They just read about doing things. It’s a disease.”

  Maya stood up reluctantly. All the standing and all the fittings had made her legs ache and her feet swell. Striking and holding poses was more physically grueling than she had ever imagined. “Well, it’s too late to return any of this stuff tonight. You know any safe place we can store this junk overnight? Where do you live?”

  “I don’t think my place will do.”

  “You living up a tree again or something?”

  Brett frowned, wounded. “No! I just don’t think my place will do, that’s all.”

  “Well, I can’t carry all this weird stuff into that pricey hotel that I’m in, I’ll never even get it past the doordog.” Maya tossed her ringlets. She loved the new dark wig. It was infinitely better than hair. “Where can we squat with a closetful of prop junk at two in the morning?”

  “Well, I know a really perfect place,” said Brett, “but I probably shouldn’t take you there.”

  Brett’s friends were up at three in the morning, because they were hard and heavy tincture people. There were six of them and they lived in a damp cellar in the Trastevere that looked as if it had harbored thirty consecutive generations of drug addicts.

  Drug addicts in the 2090s had entire new labyrinths of gleaming pathways to the artificial paradise. The polity would not allow any conventional marketing of illicit drugs, but with a properly kitted-out tincture set, and the right series of biochemical recipes, you could make almost any drug you pleased, in quantity sufficient to kill you and a whole tea party full of friends. The polity recognized that drug manufacture and possession were unpoliceable. So they contented themselves with denying medical services to people who were wrecking their health.

  The situation, like all dodgy situations in the polity, had been worked out in enormous detail. Crude compounds that could stop your heart or scar your liver clearly damaged life expectancy, so their use drew stiff medical penalties. Drugs that warped cognitive processes in tiny microgram quantities did very little metabolic damage, so they were mostly tolerated. The polity was a medical-industrial complex, a drug-soaked society. The polity saw no appea
l whatever in any primitive mythos of a natural drug-free existence. The neurochemical battle with senility had placed large and powerful segments of the voting populace into permanently altered states.

  Maya—or rather Mia—had met junkies before. She was always impressed by how polite junkies were. Junkies had the innate unworldly gentility that came with total indifference to conventional needs and ambitions. She’d never met a junkie who wasn’t politely eager to introduce others to the plangent transcendalities of the junkie lifestyle. Junkies would share anything: mosquitos, pills, beds, forks, combs, toothbrushes, food, and of course their drugs. Junkies were all knitted into a loose global macrame, the intercontinental freemasonry of narcotics.

  Since they were allowed hearty supplies of any drug they could cook up, modern junkies were rarely violent. They rarely allowed themselves to be truly miserable. Still, they were all more or less suicidal.

  Many junkies could talk with surprising poetic eloquence about the joys of internal chemistry. The most fluent and intellectualized junkies were generally the people who were most visibly falling apart. Junkies were just about the only people in the modern world who looked really sick. Junkies had boils and caries and stiff lifeless hair; junky squats had fleas and lice and sometimes that endangered species, the human pubic louse. Junkies had feet that peeled with hot itchy fungus, and noses that ran. Junkies coughed and scratched and had gummy bloodshot eyes. There were millions of people in the world who were elderly and in advanced decline, but only junkies had backslid to a twentieth-century standard of personal hygiene.

  The junkies—a man and two women—made them welcome. There were two other men in the cellar as well, but they were peacefully unconscious in hammocks. The junkies were very tolerant of Brett’s heap of stuff and, with a touching investment of effort, they somehow found a threadbare blanket to cover the goods. Then the male junkie went back to his disturbed routine. He was reading aloud from an Italiano translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and had reached page 212. The two women, who were higher than kites, gave occasional bursts of rich, appreciative laughter and meditatively picked at their toenails.

  Maya and Brett hoisted themselves into a double hammock. There were bloodstains in it here and there, and it smelled bad, but it had been a nicely woven hammock once and it was a lot cleaner than the floor. “Brett, how did you come to know these people?”

  “Maya, can I ask you something? Just as a personal favor? My name’s really not Brett. My name’s Natalie.”

  “Sorry.”

  “There are two kinds of life, you know,” said Natalie, spreading herself in the swaying hammock with great expertise. “There’s the kind where you just grind on being very bourgeois. And there’s the kind of life where you really try to become aware.”

  “That isn’t news to me, I’m from San Francisco. So, what kind of crowbar are you using on the doors of perception, exactly?”

  “Well, I’m kind of fond of lacrimogen.”

  “Oh, no. Couldn’t you stick with something harmless like heroin?”

  “Heroin shows up in your blood and your hair and they mark it down against you. But hey, everybody’s brain has some lacrimogen. Lacrimogen’s a natural neurochemical. It’s a very vivid drug because it’s surveillance-proof. Sure, if you use too much lacrimogen, it’s a big problem, you get clinically depressed. But if you use just the right amount, lacrimogen really makes you a lot more aware.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Look, I’m a kid, all right?” Brett announced. “I mean, we both are, but I can admit that to myself, I really know just how bad that really is. You know why young people have it so hard today? It’s not just that we’re a tiny minority. Our real problem is that kids are so stoked on hormones that we live in a fantasy world. But that’s not good enough for me; I can’t live on empty hopes. I need a clear assessment of my situation.”

  “Brett, I mean Natalie, it takes a lot of maturity to live with genuine disillusionment.”

  “Well, I’ll settle for artificial disillusionment. I know it’s doing me a lot of good.”

  “I hardly see how that can be true.”

  “Then I’ll show you why it’s true. I’ll make you a bet,” Natalie declared. “We’ll both do one hundred mikes of lacrimogen, okay? If that doesn’t make you recognize at least one terrible lie about your life, I promise I’ll give up lacrimogen forever.”

  “Really? I can hardly believe you’d keep that promise.”

  “Lacrimogen’s not addictive, you know. You don’t get the sweats or withdrawals or any of that nonsense. So of course I’d give it up, if I didn’t know it was helping me.”

  “Listen, there’s a monster suicide rate with lacrimogen. Old people take lacrimogen to work up the nerve to kill themselves.”

  “No, they don’t, they take it so that they can put their lives into retrospective order. You can’t blame the drug for that. If you need to work up the nerve to kill yourself, then it’s pretty likely that you ought to go ahead and do it. People need to kill themselves nowadays, it’s a social necessity. If lacrimogen lets you see that truth, and gets you past the scared feeling and the confusion, then more power to lacrimogen.”

  “Lacrimogen is dangerous.”

  “I hate safety. I hate everything about safety. They kill the spirit with safety. I’d rather be dead than safe.”

  “But you’d really give it up? If I took it with you, and then I told you to give it up?”

  Natalie nodded confidently. “That’s what I said. If you’re too scared to do it with me, that’s fine, I can understand that. But you’ve got no right to lecture me about it. Because you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Maya looked around the cellar. She knew she was in genuine danger now, and the threat had made the room become intensely real. The peeling walls, the cracked ceilings, and the huge and antiquated tincture set. The scattered books, the tincture bottles, the damp pillows, the broken bicycle, the underwear, the dripping tap, the rich, fruity, occluded tracheal snore from one of the unconscious junkies. Hairnets and locked shutters and the hissing rumble of a passing Roman trolley. A Brett place. She had followed Brett to this place, to this situation. She had followed Brett all the way.

  “All right, I’ll do it.”

  “Hey,” Brett called out. “Antonio.”

  Antonio stopped his measured recitation and looked up politely.

  “I’m running out of lacrimogen. I got only two doses left. Do you know where I can get some more?”

  “Sure,” Antonio said. “I can make lacrimogen. You want me to make it? For your beautiful friend? I can do it.” He put his book aside and spoke to the women in rapid Italiano. The prospect of work seemed to please them all. Naturally, the first course of action was to do some stimulants.

  “Please don’t cry too loud,” one of the women urged, rolling up her sleeves. She was very thin. “Kurt will wake up. Kurt hates it when people cry.”

  Brett produced the tag end of a roll of stickers from a glassine bag. She peeled off four ludicrously tiny adhesive dots. She attached two dots to the pulse point at her wrist, and another pair of dots to Maya’s.

  Nothing happened.

  “Don’t expect any rush of sensation,” Brett said. “This isn’t a mood-altering substance. This is a mood.”

  “Well, it’s sure not doing much for me,” Maya said with relief. “All I feel is tired and sleepy. I could use a bath.”

  “No bath here. They got a toilet. Behind that door. You don’t mind paying for this, do you, Maya? Five marks? Just to keep them in feedstocks?”

  It was technically illegal to sell drugs. You could barter them, you could give them away, you could make them yourself. Selling them was an offense. “If it will help.”

  Brett smiled, relieved. “I don’t know why Novak wanted to make you look so weird and sinister. You’re very sweet, you’re really nice.”

  “Well, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.” She’d said
that many times, and now, for the first time, she began to sense what the slogan really meant. Why vivid people had made those words their slogan, why they would say such an apparently silly thing and say it without a smile. The status quo was the sine qua non of denied desire. Desire was irrational and juicy and trasgressive. To accept desire, to surrender yourself to desire … to explore desire, to seek out gratification. It was the polar opposite of wisdom and discretion.

  And it was the core of junkie romance. Gratification as naked as geometry—the euclidean pleasures of the central nervous system, a pure form of carnality for the gray meat of the brain. An ultimate form of desire—not love, not greed, not hunger for power, just purified little molecular venoms that did marvelous intimate cellular things to gray meat. Insight swept over her in a wave. She hadn’t seen the truth of the junkie life before because she’d been so busy despising them. Now she understood them better and she pitied them. The truth and the sadness were deeply and intimately linked. It was a truth that could not be grasped unless you were sad enough to let yourself understand.

  Antonio and his two friends were busily working their tincture set. The proper use of a tincture set was something of a social art, it required composure and grace and foresight and attention to detail. The junkies had none of these qualities. They were awkward and rather clumsy and yet terribly determined. They were deeply intoxicated, so they made many small mistakes. Whenever they made a mistake they would retreat and try to think about it, and then they would mentally circle back to poke and prod and jiggle. It was like watching three little spiders gently preparing to eat a trapped and kicking insect.

  She shuddered violently, and Brett gently stroked her arm. “Don’t be afraid.”

  There hadn’t been any fear at all until Brett unleashed the word. Then of course there was fear. A cold gush of nasty fear from a brimming reservoir like a vast black ocean. What had she to fear? Why get panicky all of a sudden? There was nothing to fear. Nothing, of course, except that she had surrendered herself to desire. Desire had grown in her aging brain in gray wedges of new neural flesh. Her youthful joie de vivre was every bit as counterfeit as the arachnid twitchings of a junkie. They dreamed of the artificial paradise, but she had become the artificial paradise.