Holy Fire (11 page)

She’d learned to get along a lot better by talking less, just by listening and watching. It was amazing how much people revealed to you, if you carefully watched their faces and what they did with their hands. Most of the time what
people were really thinking had nothing to do with the words coming out of their mouths. Men especially. All you had to do was just wriggle in the chair a little bit, and nod and smile nicely, and give them a kind of sidelong glitter of the eyes, and they just knew in their male heart of hearts that you must be perfectly okay.

Women weren’t so easy to fool that way, but even women would get all impressed if you just seemed perfectly happy and confident. Most women were very far from perfectly happy and confident. Most women really needed to complain. If you just coaxed them to complain at you, and nodded a lot, and said Oh-poor-dear and I’d-have-done-just-the-same-thing, then they would unload all sorts of things on you. They’d become all emotionally close to you and grateful. The women would go away knowing that you must be perfectly okay.

They made a big deal about her going home for convalescence. There was even press coverage—a net reporter asked her questions. He was a good-looking guy, and she started flirting with him a little bit during the interview, and he got all flustered and touched. She took the hamster home to Parnassus Avenue with her, along with the reporter. She made the reporter a nice dinner. The reporter came along like a lamb. He was very taken with her.

She was glad to have a chance to cook and eat, because they’d told her at the hospital that she had problems with her appetite. It was very true, too—if food was put in front of her she’d be happy to eat it, but if food wasn’t put in front of her then she wouldn’t miss it. She’d hear her stomach rumble and she’d get weak and maybe a little dizzy, but there wasn’t any real hunger. It seemed she’d gone a little bit food-blind somehow. She could smell food and she could taste it and she liked to eat it, but the tiara said there was some kind of glitch in her hypothalamus. They were hoping it would pass. If it didn’t pass by itself, then they’d have to do something about it.

Cooking was great—she never had to think about
cooking, she just relaxed and it flowed right out of her hands. She listened to the reporter brag for two hours about all his important contacts. She fed him and made him a tincture. He was just a kid, only forty. She was really tempted to start kissing him, but she knew that would be a critical error at this point. They’d outfitted her apartment like a telepresence site. She couldn’t even scratch without every finger being instantly recorded in real time in some 3-D medical database.

When the reporter left, she hugged and kissed him at the door. Not much of a kiss, but it was the first kiss she’d had in absolutely forever. She couldn’t believe she had gone so long without kissing anyone. It was unbelievably stupid, like trying to live without water.

Then she was alone in her apartment again. Alone, wonderfully, sweetly, and incredibly alone. Except for all her medical monitors. Just herself. And all the surveillance machines. She cleaned and washed everything and straightened it away.

When she was done with cleaning, she sat perfectly still in the apartment at the lacquered cardboard kitchen table. She had the oddest sensation. She could feel herself growing inside. Her self felt so big and free. Bigger than her body. Her self was bigger than the entire apartment. In the silence and the stillness she could feel her self pushing mutely at the windows.

She jumped up restlessly and put on a tab of Mia’s music. It was that awful yard-goods background music that people listened to nowadays, twinkly discreet music that sounded like it was stapled together out of dust. The walls were covered with hideously offensive antique paper art. The drapes looked like they had died against the walls. Someone had shriveled up inside this apartment, it was like the shrunken insides of a dead walnut. A dead woman’s wrinkly dry skin.

She tried to sleep in Mia’s bed. It was a nasty little old person’s bunk with a big ugly oxygen shroud. The mattress
had been designed to do peculiar things in the way of firm spinal support. She didn’t want her spine supported anymore, and in any case it was a very different kind of spine now. Plus her monitors itched and crunched against the sheets. She crawled out into the front room and wrapped up in a blanket on the floor.

The hamster, which was mostly nocturnal, had come awake and was gnawing vigorously on the bars of its cage. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. In the darkness. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Around midnight, something snapped. She got up, put on her underwear, kicked on her Mia slacks. Too short, they showed her ankles. Put on a Mia brassiere. A total joke, this brassiere had no connection to reality. Put on a Mia pullover. Found a really nice red jacket in the closet. The jacket fit great. Found Mia shoes that pinched a little. Found a purse. Too small. Found a big bag. Put some underwear in the bag. Put in some lipstick. A comb, a brush, a razor. Sunglasses. A book to read on the way. Some socks. Some mascara, some eyeliner. A toothbrush.

Her netlink began ringing urgently. She’d had it with the netlink.

“They have got to be kidding,” she announced to the empty room. “This is not my place. This is nowhere. I can’t live like this. This isn’t living. I am out of here.” She walked out of her front door and slammed it.

She hesitated on the landing, then turned, opened the door, went back in. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Come on, you stupid thing.” She opened the cage, grabbed the hamster. “Come on, you can come, too.”

S
he threw the tiara off just outside the apartment. A hospital van arrived, flashing its way up the street and parking outside her building. She ditched the earrings and all ten
finger rings on her way up Parnassus Avenue. While she waited for a taxi she slipped out of her shoes and socks and got rid of the nasty toe gadgets. The skin under there was all pale and sticky.

The taxi arrived.

Once in the taxi she shimmied out of her slacks and ditched the knee buckles and a large gluey complement of obnoxious stick-on patches. Out the window with them. On the train on the way to the airport she went to the ladies’ and shredded her way out of the breastplate, and about a dozen more patches. The patches were a big itchy pain and when they were gone her morale began to soar.

She arrived at the airport. The black tarmac was full of glowing airplanes. They had a lovely way of flexing their wings and simply jumping into the chill night air when they wanted to take off. You could see people moving inside the airplanes because the hulls were gossamer. Some people had clicked on their reading lights but a lot of the people onboard were just slouching back into their beanbags and enjoying the night sky through the fuselage. Or sleeping, because this was a red-eye flight to Europe. It was all very quiet and beautiful. There was nothing to it really.

She walked to a departure stairs and worked her way up. The stewardess spoke to her in Deutsch as she entered the aircraft. She opened her bag, pulled out the hamster, showed the hamster to the stewardess, put the hamster back in. Then she spun on her heel and walked with perfect joy and confidence right down the aisle. The stewardess didn’t do a thing.

She chose a nice brown beanbag in business class and lay down. Then a steward brought her a nice hot frappé.

At three in the morning the aircraft took off and she finally fell asleep.

When she woke up again it was eight o’clock in the morning, February 10, 2096. She was in Frankfurt.

S
he deplaned and wandered around the Frankfurt airport, lost and sticky eyed and blissfully without plans. She didn’t have any money. No cashcard, no credit. No ID. The civil-support people from the flight were deliberately checking in with the local authorities, but the Deutschland authorities didn’t bother to go looking for you if you didn’t go looking for them.

She had some water from a fountain and went to a bathroom and washed her face and hands and changed her underwear and her socks. Her face didn’t seem to need much makeup anymore, but she direly missed her makeup. Walking around without makeup made her feel far more anxious than any mere lack of ID.

She emerged from the bathroom and walked along with the other people so that no one would notice her.

The crowd led her through about a million glass-fronted halls and kiosks, down escalators into an ivygrown train station. It seemed that Deutschlanders were really fond of ivy, especially if the ivy was growing really deep underground where ivy basically had no business growing.

There was a young European girl down there with very short hair and a bright red jacket. Since she also had very short hair and a bright red jacket, she thought it would be clever to follow this young girl and do as she did. This was a very wise plan, as the girl knew just where to go. The girl fetched biscuits in a paper bag from a Deutschlander civil-support kiosk. So she fetched a bag, too. She didn’t have to pay. The biscuits were really good. She could feel the vitamin-stuffed government-subsidized nontoxic goodness racing through her grateful innards.

Once she’d wolfed down half a dozen biscuits and had some more water, she began to feel quite cozy and pleased with herself. She gave some crumbs to the hamster.

Inside the train station hall twelve guys in big woven
ponchos and flat black hats were playing Andean folk music on pipes and guitars. These South American guys had set up a card-reader on a post, but you didn’t have to pay them if you didn’t want to. You could just sit and listen to their free music. There were plenty of free beanbags around to lie in, and there was free water, and plenty of free biscuits, and a very nice free ladies’ room. As far as she could figure it, there was no reason why she couldn’t just spend the rest of her life right here in the good old Frankfurt train station.

It was warm and cozy, and just watching all the different European people wander past with their luggage was endlessly fascinating. She felt a bit conspicuous sitting there in her public beanbag publicly nibbling her public biscuits, but she wasn’t hurting anybody. In fact, everybody who looked at her obviously thought she was great. The Deutschland people smiled at her. Men especially smiled at her quite a lot. As she killed an hour, she saw ten or twelve little kids in the crowd. Even the little kids smiled at her.

Everybody thinking they had something important to do. How pathetically amusing. Why couldn’t they just sit still and enjoy life? What was their big hurry? All this aimless running around … They were all gonna live a million years—wasn’t that the point of everything? You could just lie still in a beanbag and be at peace with the universe, perfectly happy.

She enjoyed this thoroughly, for about an hour and a half. Then she became indifferent. Openly bored. Restless. Agitated, and finally unable to sit still a moment longer. Besides, the guys from the Andes had begun to repeat the same songs again, and that whistle thing they were blowing was really irritating. She got up and chose herself a train like everybody else was doing.

Inside the train it was noisy. With talk. The train itself didn’t make any noise at all, but the people aboard were chattering and eating noodles and drinking big malts. It
was an extremely fast train and as silent as an eel. It ran on tracks but it didn’t touch them. She put her bag under the seat and wished that she could understand Deutsch.

When she picked her bag up, she found the neck of the bag yawning open, and realized that her hamster had escaped. The nasty little hairbug had finally made a break for it, either inside the train, or back at the Frankfurt station. At first she was a little upset, but then she realized how funny it was. Hamster on the loose! Mass panic grips Europe! Well, good-bye, good riddance, and good luck, postrodent! No hard feelings, okay?

S
he got off the train at Munchen because she liked the name of the city. Once it had been Munich or Muenchen or Moenchen or even München, but the All-European Orthographic Reformation had made it into Munchen. Munchen, Munchen, Munchen. Somebody had said that Stuttgart was the greatest city for the arts in the whole world, but Stuttgart wasn’t half so pretty a name as Munchen.

She knew she would love Munchen as soon as she discovered that they were giving away pretzels at the kiosks. Not little American dry stick pretzels with iodized salt either, but big warm bready pretzels that probably had traces of actual wheat and yeast in them. In the Munchen station there were about a hundred kids from all over Europe lined up laughing for these big bracelet-sized Munchen pretzels. The Bavarian civil-support bakery people had very smug looks about this situation. You could just tell they had some kind of ulterior motive.

She gleefully munched her two giant pretzels and drank more water and then she found another and even prettier girl, with long blond hair and a blue velvet coat, and followed her. And that was how she ended up in the Marienplatz.

There was a tubestation outlet in the platz, and a gushing
fountain with a circular stone railing, and a big marble column with four bronze cherubs skewering devils. A gilded Virgin Mary stood at the column’s top, doing a kind of civil reconnaissance check. There was a telepresence site in one corner, and a bunch of fashion stores with glowing and moving mannequin displays. Lots of spindly Euro pedal-bikes parked around. There were all kinds of people wandering the Marienplatz. Tourists from all over the world. Especially Indonesians.

She leaned against the edge of the fountain railing, like the other kids in the platz. The fountain had three muscular bronze statues pouring eternal streams of water from big bronze buckets. The sun was setting already, and it was plenty cold. All the kids had flushed cheeks and windblown hair and they were in jackets and colored neck wrappings and odd-looking Euro-kid boots.

Every once in a while a pair of big German-shepherd police dogs would trot by the platz, and the kids would stop talking and tighten up a little.

The Marienplatz was a beautiful plaza. She liked the way the Muncheners had taken good care of their church: peaked arches, balconies, fishy-looking stone Christian saints transcending the flesh. She especially liked the colorful medieval wooden robots up in the clock tower.