Holy Fire

by Bruce Sterling

  Benedetta thought this over. “I suppose you think you’re being noble,” she said slowly. “Well, you don’t understand our strategy. They seized your network server and took your palace away from us. So what? Some pet animals died. So what? Those are only little setbacks, now that we know what is possible. We’re already into other palaces. We’re under the skin of the gerontocrats. The old people can’t claw us out or push us aside anymore. Let them try! We’ll turn them inside out.”

  “No, darling, it’s you who can’t understand. You’ve never been a gerontocrat, but I have. They don’t care about your virtualities. They don’t care about your silly problem with your infinite imagination. They pretend that they care what you think, because to admit they don’t care wouldn’t be polite. But they truly don’t care much about dreams. They care about actualities. They care about responsibilities. They know they’ll die someday. They know that you’ll dance on their graves. They’ll gladly forgive you anything you do, as long as they’re nice and dead first. But darling, I’m not some futurist rebel, I’m a heretic here and now. I’m dancing on their feet.”

  “Maya, stop talking bad politics in English and do what Benedetta says,” said Bouboule. “Benedetta is very smart. Oh, look! Lodewijk is kissing her!” She broke into excited Français.

  Maya missed her translation wig very much. She had lost it when she fled the actress’s apartment in Praha. She had lost everything she owned through running, not that she had all that much to lose. Mostly it hurt to lose her photographs. They were rather bad photographs, but they were the best she had ever made. She had carefully stored them inside the palace. Now the palace belonged to the Widow.

  Niko and Bouboule were furiously excited to see Lodewijk in a sudden clinch with Yvonne. They were chattering and giggling. Even Benedetta took intense scholastic interest. If Maya paid complete attention to the gush of Français, she could decipher maybe a word in ten. Without a film of computation at her ear, these young people were impossibly distant, a generation from another culture and another continent. A generation eighty years away from her own.

  She knew them, in her way: Paul, Benedetta, Marcel, Niko, Bouboule, Eugene, Lars, Julie, Eva, Max, Renée, Fernande, Pablo, Lunia, Jeanne, Victor, Berthe, Enhedu-anna-generally-known-as-Hedda, Berthe’s weird boyfriend what’s-his-face, Lodewijk, the new guy from Copenhagen, Yvonne, who’d been more or less officially Max’s girl until about ten seconds ago, that intense young Russian sculptor with twelve fingers, the cute Indonesian teenager who’d been hanging out a lot lately and was supposedly having the affair with Bouboule’s brother.… Her friends were wonderful. She had been very lucky to catch them during the brief larval phase in which they were more or less human. They loved her, and they loved one another, but they loved one another like friends and lovers should and did, and they loved her in the way that one might love a very rare and compelling set of antique portrait photographs. Bouboule rose with oily grace from her recliner and went to tease Yvonne and Lodewijk. Niko went along to make sure that Bouboule didn’t tease them too much, and also to enjoy the spectacle. Body language told her that much. Body language was a breeze without clothes.

  Benedetta kicked out her slender legs on the woven lounger and turned to Maya. “He sent Yvonne so many poems, you see,” she said helpfully. “I just had to cry when I read them. I can’t believe that Danish poetry can make me cry.”

  “Really, Benedetta, you don’t have to explain it to me. It’s my own fault for losing my nice shiny back-combed translator.”

  “I like to explain things to you, Maya. I want you to understand.”

  “I understand too much too well already.” She thought about it. “Benedetta, there is one thing I truly don’t understand. Why doesn’t Paul have a lover? I never see Paul with anyone.”

  “Maybe he’s too considerate,” Benedetta said.

  “What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Are you telling me you don’t already know all about it?” She smiled. “Is this Benedetta I’m talking to?”

  “It’s not that we didn’t try,” Benedetta said. “Of course we all tried to make time with Paul. Who wouldn’t want to be Mrs. Ideologue? Who wouldn’t want to be the genius’s favorite girl? Right? Completely lost in his heroic shadow. I want to pick up Paul’s dirty socks. I want to sew on his little buttons. That’s the life for me. Isn’t it? I want to gaze in silent adoration at darling Paul while he talks theory to my colleagues for fourteen hours straight. I want them to look at me and see that I have his heart in my little clutch bag. So that they can all die inside.”

  “Are you serious, Benedetta? Oh, you are. You’re serious. Oh, darling, that’s too bad.”

  “Did you ever have a really good talk with Paul? I have. Despite everything.”

  “Yes, I have,” Maya said. “He once patted me on the hand.”

  “I think it’s the cop. That’s my working hypothesis. The Widow’s our real rival. It’s his crush. A terrible crush. Isn’t that the proper word in English, ‘crush’? Anyway, it’s Helene. He wants Helene. He loves to feast with panthers.”

  “Oh, no. That can’t be true.”

  “He respects Helene. He takes her very seriously. He talks to her, even when he doesn’t have to talk to her. He wants something from Helene. He wants her validation, isn’t that the word? He wants to conquer the Widow, like climbing the Matterhorn. He needs to make her believe in him.”

  “Oh, poor Paul, poor Benedetta. Poor everybody.”

  “What does this matter to me?” said Benedetta, all lighthearted bitterness. “I’ll live for a thousand years. If I had Paul even for a hundred years, it would only be an episode. If I had Paul now, what would I do with Paul later, when things become interesting? As for the Widow, he can forget all about that. Helene is a creature of habit. She’ll never love any man who will outlive her.”

  “Oh. Well, that explains a lot. I guess.”

  “See, Maya? You’re not human. We’re not human. But we can understand. We’re artifice people. We always know it, before we can speak it aloud. We always understand much better than we think.”

  A gong rang. It was Marcel. He shouted something in Français, and then in Deutsch, and then in English. The time had come for the immersion.

  “I’m not going in,” Maya said.

  “You should swim with us, Maya. It’s good for you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This isn’t serious virtuality. It’s not holy fire. The immersion pool is only a rich man’s toy. But it’s pretty. And technically sweet.”

  Shimmering liquid gushed as the others whooped and dived in. No one surfaced.

  Benedetta wrapped her lustrous hair in a Psyche knot and pinned it. “I’m going in. I think I’ll have sex today.”

  “Who with, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Well, if I can’t find someone willing to bother, maybe I’ll try by myself.” She smiled, ran, and dived headlong. White bubbles rose, and she was gone.

  Paul patrolled the edge of the pool. Gazing in. Smiling. The picture of satisfaction.

  “That’s everyone but you and me,” he called out.

  She waved. “Don’t mind me, you go ahead.”

  He shook his head. He drew near, walking slowly, barefooted. “I can’t leave you sitting here looking so sad.”

  “Paul, why don’t you go?”

  “You’ve been talking politics with Benedetta,” Paul concluded analytically. “We didn’t take these risks, and make this effort, just to add to our own unhappiness. That would only represent a moral defeat for us. We must have a good time with our youth, or there’s so little point in being young. So you see, you simply must come in with us.”

  “Things like this frighten me.”

  “Then I’ll teach you about it,” said Paul, perching cautiously on the foot of her lounge chair. “Think of the virtuality pool as a kind of crème de menthe. All right? On the top layer is a breathable silicone fluid. We’ve put a trace of anandamine in it, just for fun. On the
bottom is a malleable liquid. It’s something like the fusible liquids that our friend Eugene uses to cast sculpture. But it’s much more advanced and much more friendly, so we can swim inside it. It’s a buoyant, tactile, breathable, immersible virtuality.”

  Maya said nothing. She tried to look very attentive.

  “The best part is the platform. The platform is a fluidic computer. It uses liquid moving through tiny locks and channels to form its logic gates. You see? We dive into the pool and we can actually breathe the very stuff of computation! And the computer instantiates itself as it runs. Soft liquid for software, hardened liquid for hardware. It abolishes certain crucial category distinctions. It’s a deeply poetic scheme. Also, it’s the sort of thing that makes gerontocrats have fits.” Paul laughed cheerfully.

  “All right, I understand it now. It’s enormously clever, isn’t it? Now please go on in.”

  He looked at her seriously, for the first time. He seemed to gaze completely through her head.

  “Are you angry with me, Maya?”

  “No.”

  “Have I done something to hurt or offend you? Please be honest.”

  “No, I’m not hurting, honestly.”

  “Then please don’t refuse me when I ask you to share this experience with us. We’ll walk into the shallow end together. Very gently. I’ll stay very close. All right?”

  She sighed. “All right.”

  He led her by the hand like a man escorting a duchess to a quadrille. The fluid swarmed with millions of prismatic flakes. Little floating sensors, maybe. Sensors small enough to breathe. The fluid was at blood heat. They waded in. Their legs seemed to dissolve.

  Inhaling it was far easier than she had ever imagined. A mouthful of it dissolved on her tongue like sorbet, and when the fluid touched her lungs they reacted with startled pleasure, like sore feet suddenly massaged. Even her eyeballs loved it. The fluid closed over her head. Visibility was very short, no farther than her fingertips. Paul held her hand. Patches of him emerged from the glittering murk: hands, elbows, a flash of naked hip.

  They descended slowly, swimming. Down to the white viscous surface of the crème de menthe. It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm. Paul dug out a double handful and it boiled in his floating hands, indescribably active, like a poem becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.

  Someone frog-kicked past her and burrowed headlong into the mass of it, like a skier drowning joyfully in some impossible hot snowbank. Now she was beginning to get the hang of it. It was beyond eros, beyond skin. Skinlessness. Skinless memory. Bloody nostalgia, somatic déjà vu, neural mono no aware. Memories she was not allowed to have. From sensations she was not allowed to feel.

  Memory came upon her like a hammer full of needles. It was nothing like pain. These were sensations far stronger than the personality. They were experiences that consciousness could not contain. Enormous powers riddling the flesh that the mind could make no sense of. A software crash for the soul.

  When she came to, she was flat on her back. Paul was heaving at her ribs, hard flat-handed punches of resuscitation. Fluid gushed from her nose and mouth, and she coughed up a bucketful.

  “I blew apart,” she gasped.

  “Maya, don’t try to talk.”

  “It blew my mind.… ”

  He pressed his ear between her breasts and listened to her heartbeat.

  “Where is that ambulance?” Benedetta demanded. “My God, it’s been an hour.” She was wrapped in a towel, and shivering.

  Paul said, “That was so stupid of me. I’ve read about Neo-Telomeric treatment. They suspend you in a virtuality.… I should have thought that this might happen.” He kept heaving at her lungs.

  Maya rolled her head on the floor and tried to look around. There was a dried and glittering snail trail where Paul had hauled her from the pool across the chilly tiles. In the distance the others clustered, talking anxiously, looking her way. Her feet were up on blocks.

  She began trembling violently.

  “She’ll have another convulsion if you don’t stop,” Benedetta said.

  “It’s better to convulse than to stop breathing,” he said, pushing hard.

  Benedetta knelt beside her, her face in anguish. “Stop it, Paul,” she said. “She’s breathing. I think she’s conscious.” She looked up. “Will she die?”

  “She almost died there in my arms. When I pulled her from the pool, the pupils of her eyes were two different sizes.”

  “Can’t she live ten more years? That’s hardly anything, isn’t it? Just ten years? I know she’ll die and I’ll have to mourn her, but why should she die now?”

  “Life is too short,” Paul said. “Life will always be too short.”

  “I like to think so,” Benedetta said. “Truly, I hope so. I believe it with all my heart.”

  The medical cops took her to Praha. It had something to do with a possible network-abuse case against her. Apparently most of the evidence was in Praha.

  However, no one at the Access Bureau was willing to arrest her. The Czech Access Bureau cops apparently despised and distrusted Greek medical cops; it seemed to be some kind of weird European interservice rivalry. She did what she could to explain her circumstances. Once the Access Bureau cops down on the first floor began to fully grasp the situation, they became quite annoyed with her. They told her they would get in touch with her, and tried to convince her to leave the premises and go back with her escorts to some other country.

  Maya was disgusted by the prospect of yet more time in a hospital, and refused to go. She asked them to find Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier. With profound reluctance, they said they would do this for her, and they assigned her a number.

  She and Brett sat down in an elbow-shaped waiting room on a pair of nasty pink plastic chairs. After an hour, the Helleniki medical escorts carefully checked Maya’s tracking handcuffs and her tiara monitor. They were satisfied by this inspection, so they left. After this, pretty much nothing happened.

  “Boy, this is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” said Brett.

  “It’s good of you to stick with me through this, Brett. I know it’s boring.”

  “No, no,” said Brett, adjusting her spex, “it’s a real privilege to be your personal media coverage. I’m so touched that you had your friends call me, and give me this great opportunity. It’s a fascinating experience. I’ve always been so terrified of the authorities. I had no idea their indifference to us was so complete and so total. They really hold young people in complete contempt.”

  “That’s not it. Everyone has explained to them that I’m not a young person. It’s probably because I’m American. I mean, even nowadays, it’s always extra trouble to deal with people from outside the jurisdiction.”

  Brett took off her spex and gazed at the floor’s worn and ancient tiling. “I wish I hated you, Mia.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Because you’re everything I always wanted to be. It should have been me involved with exciting European artifice people. It should have been me up on the catwalk. You stole my life. And now you’ve even made a difference. You’ve even hurt them. I never even dreamed that I could hurt them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maya said.

  “I dreamed about doing so much. I never had the nerve to really do much of anything. I could have done something. Maybe. Don’t you think? You’re pretty, but I’m as pretty as you. You sleep with anybody, well, I’ll sleep with anybody, too. I’m from the same town as you. I’m twenty, but I’m just as smart as you were when you were twenty. Aren’t I?”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I have some talent. I can make clothes. You can’t make clothes. What is it you have that I don’t have?”

  Maya sighed. “Well, here I am sitting in a police station. Maybe you should tell me all about it.�
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  “You’re not young. That’s it, isn’t it? You stole my life because you’re older than me, and stronger than me. So for you, it was always easy. I mean, maybe you can panic, maybe you can be wracked with guilt, maybe you can even be terrified out of your skin by some stupid wired-up dog. But even when you don’t know who you are, you still know who you are. You’re five times older than me, and five times stronger than me. And you just won’t get out of the way.”

  “The Tête people are young. They’re young like you.”

  “Yeah, and they love you, don’t they? When you were my age, they’d have thought you were a hick and an idiot. Just like they think I’m a hick and an idiot. Because that’s what I am. They’re smart and gifted and really sophisticated, and the very best I can do is lurk outside their gates and watch them and envy them terribly. At my age, you wouldn’t have done any better than me. You would have done a lot worse. You wouldn’t even let your boyfriend take you to Europe. You dumped him and married some biotechnician. You turned into a bureaucrat, Mia.”

  Maya closed her eyes and leaned back in the comfortless chair. It was all so true, and all so beside the point. “I wish you wouldn’t call me Mia.”

  “Well, I wish you wouldn’t call me Brett.”

  “Well, okay … call me Mia if you have to.”

  “I hate it that you don’t even hate me back. You’re just bringing me along because I’m like a little good-luck charm to you. I’m like your hamster. And you couldn’t even keep your hamster.”

  “That hamster creeped me out big-time. And you’re starting to seriously bug me, too.”

  “You even talk just like some woman from a hundred years ago. Everybody in the whole world must be a complete idiot! I mean, once we really look at you, it’s so obvious! Your hair is terrible. Do you know you have big lines in your neck? I mean, they’re not wrinkles, they’re not allowed to be wrinkles—but boy, they sure aren’t natural.”

  “Brett, stop it. You’re not talking any sense. First you say that I’m stealing your life, and then you say you couldn’t do anything with it anyway. So what’s your big problem exactly? Sure, maybe you’d have done a lot better than me, eighty years ago. But hey, you weren’t around then. You can’t romanticize the past to somebody like me. I was there in the past, all right? Eighty years ago, we basically lived like savages. We had plagues and revolutions and mass die-off and big financial crashes. People shot each other with guns when I was young. Compared to eighty years ago, this is heaven! And now you’re just abusing me, and not making one bit of sense.”