Holy Fire (26 page)

“Yes. We’re from Avignon originally. Half the population of Stuttgart are Français.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Paris has become a museum.” The lighting changed over the street. An enormous ribbed membrane peeled from the side of a tower and deployed itself over the neighborhood. A flock of white cranes wheeled in beneath it, landed in the streets like so many white-feathered commuters. The birds began to peck at the sidewalk, hard enough to break it into chunks.

“The finest extracts from the dumps,” Paul said, “iron, aluminum, copper, and such—their market value crashed once modern materials came into production. Cheap diamond of course, cheap diamond beats anything. But sugarglass, optical plastics, fullerenes, and aerogels”—he gestured at the cityscape around them. A small deft man with a proprietarial interest in structures four hundred stories tall. “The carbon-based products drove construction metals off the market. People in Stuttgart are progressives, they despise the shibboleths.”

“This place is a lot like Indianapolis.”

“Not at all! Nothing like it!” Paul protested. “Indianapolis was a political act, a freak by revanchist Asians. Stuttgart is serious! Stuttgart is meaningful! It is the only truly modern city in Europe! The only city whose builders truly believed in a future—rather than some endless recycling of the past.”

“I’m not sure I’d be real happy if the future looked like this.”

“It won’t. Any more than the world came to look like New York City a century ago. It was enough that for a certain period of time the world
wanted
to look like New
York City. Stuttgart is that kind of urban cynosure. It’s the only city in the world where modern society was allowed to speak with an authentic architectural voice.”

“You use the past tense, I see.”

“There won’t be many other Stuttgarts. Gerontocratic society lacks the will and energy to innovate on the grand scale. Unless, as with Stuttgart, some large city is leveled by a cataclysm and the survivors have no choice.” Paul shrugged. “Not a pleasant prospect! There may be some fanatics who consider holocaust an acceptable price for change, but I’ve studied holocaust, and holocaust is vile. The change we face has its own inexorability. There’s much to be said for survival. Live long enough, and reality will melt beneath your feet.” He paused, considering. “I’m very fond of Praha. That city surely has lessons for the world as profound as Stuttgart’s. Praha outlasted its own epoch and became a beautiful freak, a charming atavism. Praha found a second chance. Now Praha is the chrysalis for a larval form of posthumanity.”

They walked on. The skies of Stuttgart were full of aerial transports that uncoiled like butterfly tongues, adhered to a distant tower, and then rolled up neatly to the other side. These reeling walkways carried sliding capsules within their flaccid bulk. They were grotesquely efficient, like ductile pedestrian boas.

Paul led her down a long flight of stairs and beneath a solemn stone arch with a series of thick beaded curtains. The sky vanished. The air warmed. They emerged under a coarse mossy roof with humps like fabric but the apparent rigidity of concrete. The walls grew spongy and disturbed, under long brilliantly glowing strands of sun-bright optical fiber. It was hot and damp, a stony greenhouse. The air reeked of vanilla and bananas. “This is my favorite quarter of town,” said Paul. “I lived here for years before I took my teaching post. This quarter was planned and built by theorists of the edible cityscape.”

“Theorists of the what?”

“The walls here are gasketfungus. You can eat the city raw. The walls are quite nutritious.” It didn’t seem a particularly good idea to eat the fungal walls. The locals had been carving graffiti into them with some kind of herbicide. Patchy letters of wilted yellow. BENEATH THE BEACH—THE PAVEMENT. Curls of Arabic. A Kilroy face with a mess of loopy curls.

They walked beside a brilliantly lit multistory building. The open floors were marked in numbered slots. People were lying in cavities in these numbered areas, under searing artificial sunlight. The people wore spex and were covered from head to foot in big gray-green wads of dense organic fiber.

“What’s this place? A morgue?”

“It’s a public bathhouse.”

“Where’s the water?”

“It’s not water bathing, it’s exfoliation. You’re dipped in jelly and you lie under the lights. They dust you in spores and those filaments of mold take root in your skin. When the mold stops growing the machines scrape you clean with strigils. The mold peels off in sheets. All the body dirt and skin flora come away with the web. It’s very exhilarating.”

“It’s a bath in living mold?”

“Yes, an exacting process. They offer a little virtuality to pass the time in the tank, as you see. It’s an amenity, especially for those who live rough in the edible quarter. It’s a public service. When you’re done they paint you with the local blend of human microbes.”

“Yes, but it’s
mold.
”

“A very tame and pleasant mold. There’s no harm in it.” He paused. “I hope you’re not shocked by something as harmless as public nudity. That’s very common in Stuttgart.”

“Of course I’m not shocked by nudity, but it’s mold!”

“Such provincialism,” Paul said, half smiling. He was clearly piqued. “This was designed to be the friendliest
city in Europe. Not that the citizens are particularly friendly—they’re like people in big cities anywhere. Rather, the city’s structure is uniquely friendly to its users.”

Paul pointed across the street, where a swarm of gnats was congregating in midair with a collective basso hum. “If you were lucky enough to acquire a room in that exclusive hostel over there—why, it’s all lattice. You can eat the walls. You can carry out any human excretory function wherever you please. Wherever you sleep, a bed of moss grows beneath you to cushion you. It’s always warm and damp. Very tactile, very epidermal, very sensual, extremely civilized. Here, the microbes are all domesticated. Life is recycled, but morbid decay has been beaten. Decay is gone like a bad dream.”

“Hmmm.” She studied the side of the hostel, a shaggy damp cascade of multicolored mosses. “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound half bad.”

They ducked together into a doorway as a truck passed, soaking the environment with a dense yellow fog.

“It was a visionary scheme. A city to free its users of material bioconstraint. A source of shelter, nourishment, inspiration, and, of course, permanent safety from the terrors of plague. Perhaps this final result wasn’t intended, but the city itself is so generous that it annihilates economics. It requires a peculiarly nonpossessive nature to live here in the long term. Rebels, dreamers, philosophers … The mentally retarded also find this quarter very convenient and popular.… Over the years, the quarter has become infested with mystics.”

“Penitentes?”

“Yes, Catholic extremists of all sorts, but also many Submissionaries. Ecstatic Submissionaries, and Charismatic Submissionaries. Mohammed’s disciples. Unfortunately the Ecstatics and Charismatics are intense rivals and bitterly hate one another.”

“Isn’t that always the way.” They stepped aside as three nude women shot by on bicycles, their swollen, bricklike calves pumping furiously.

“Fanatics always hate and fear their own dissidents far more than they loathe the bourgeoisie. By that symptom shall you know them.… That failing is what cripples the fanatics. There has been violence here in Stuttgart, street brawls, even a few killings.… Did you ever take an entheogen, Maya?”

“Never, no.”

“I did. I took it here.”

She looked around. Shaggy walls, greenness, hot misty light, an urban universe of little crawling things. “What happened?”

“I saw God. God was very warm and caring and wise. I felt enormous gratitude and love for Him. It was clear strong Platonic reality, totally authentic, the light of the cosmos. It was reality as God sees it, not the fragmentary halting rationality of a human mind. It was raw mystical insight, beyond all argument. I was in the living presence of my Maker.”

“Why did you do that? Were your parents religious?”

“No, not at all. I did it because I had seen religion consume other people. I wanted to see if I would be strong enough to come out of the far side of it.”

“And?”

“And yes, I was strong enough.” Paul’s eyes grew distant. “Ah, there’s a packet tube. I have a class to teach soon. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you now.”

“You do? Oh dear.”

Paul walked to the front of the packet tube and entered an address on a keypad. A vault door shunted open. He tossed his backpack into the padded capsule. “I’m leaving you because I must,” he said patiently, “but I’m leaving you in lovely Stuttgart. I hope you’ll put your time here to good use.” The capsule vanished. Another capsule instantly
took its place. Paul hit a repeat key, crawled deftly into the padded interior, and doubled his arms around his knees. “Until we meet in Praha, Maya.”

“
Au revoir
, Paul.” She waved at him, and the door shunted with a brisk pneumatic pop.

S
he spent three strange aching days in Stuttgart, ghosting the honeycombed plazas and haunting the city’s peculiarly liberal apothecary malls. On the evening train back to Praha she collapsed into her beanbag and was left in silence and solitude. It felt so lovely to be within the familiar confines of a moving train again. She was vibrating with hormones and culture shock, and she hadn’t been eating properly. Every passing hour carried her further into new realms of experience, strange deep somatic spaces that words such as “hunger” and “weariness” scarcely seemed to describe.

Sleep beckoned. But then the translator, which was still tucked into her ear, began to sing inside her ear. Very gently at first, a distant musical warbling. The music grew louder. She’d never known the device to malfunction, so she was ready when it made a kind of musical throat-clearing tone, and addressed her directly. “[Hello, user Maya.]”

“Hello?” she said.

“[This is an interactive message for you from Ohrschmuck Enterprises of Basel. We are the inventors and manufacturers of this translation necklace. Do you understand us? Please signify by orally responding ‘Yes, I understand’ in your favorite language, English.]”

“ ‘Yes, I understand.’ ”

She looked around the train car. She was speaking aloud to thin air, but no one considered this unusual behavior. They naturally assumed she was using a netlink.

“[User Maya, you’ve been in possession of the necklace for two weeks. You have already used its functionalities in
English, Italiano, Czestina, Deutsch, and Français. We hope you’ll agree that the translation service has been prompt and accurate.]”

“Yes, it certainly has.”

“[Did you notice the fine physical workmanship of our necklace? It would have been simple to do a cheap knockoff in copper and silicon, but we prefer the classic chic of real jewels. We at Ohrschmuck take pride in our traditional European craftsmanship, and your use of our shareware proves that you’re a discerning woman of taste. Any fly-by-night company can supply a working tourist translator nowadays. We at Ohrschmuck supply an entire library of modern European languages, including proprietary vocabulary segments featuring modern slang and argot. It’s no simple matter to provide our level of linguistic service.]”

“I suppose not.”

“[If you agree that our shareware necklace meets your exacting personal standards, then we think our efforts to please you should be rewarded. Doesn’t that seem just and fair, user Maya?]”

“What is it that you want from me, exactly?”

“[If you’ll simply wire us seven hundred marks, we can see to it that your translator is supplied with the very latest vocabulary updates. We also register you with our company, supply service referrals, and answer user questions.]”

“I’ll certainly send you that money if I ever come across that large a sum.”

“[We feel that we’re worth our price, user Maya. We’ll trust you to pay us. Our business is based on mutual trust. We know that you trust us. After all, you’ve been trusting our machine with the tympanum of your own right ear, a very tender and personal membrane. We feel sure that mutual respect will lead us to a long relationship. Our net-address will work from any net location in the world, and it takes cash. We look forward to hearing from you soon.]”

S
he was back in Praha by midnight, with her backpack and a shopping bag, giddy, exhausted, footsore, and in pain. But Praha looked so lovely. So solid, so inorganic, so actual, so wonderfully old. Bartolomejska Street looked lovely. The building looked lovely. She paused at Emil’s door, then went upstairs and knocked at the door of Mrs. Najadova.

“What is it?” Mrs. Najadova paused, looked Maya up and down. “What has he done to you?”

“There are certain days in a month when a woman needs time to herself. But he doesn’t understand.”

“Oh, that dirty, thoughtless brute. That’s so like him. Come in. I’m only watching television.” Mrs. Najadova put her on the couch. She found Maya a blanket and a heating pad and made her a frappé. Then she sat in a rocker fiddling contentedly with her notebook, as the television muttered aloud in Czestina.

Mrs. Najadova’s room was full of wicker baskets, jugs, bottles, driftwood, bird eggs, bric-a-brac. A blue glass vase with a bouquet of greenhouse lilies. And intensely nostalgic memorabilia of the former Mr. Najad, a great strapping fellow with a ready grin, who seemed to dote on skiing and fishing. To judge by the style of his sportswear he had been either dead or gone for at least twenty years.

Seeing the photos Maya felt a great leaping pang of pathos for all the women of the world who had married for a human lifetime, lived and loved faithfully through a human lifetime, and then outlived their humanity. All the actual widows, and the virtual widows, and those who sought widowhood, and those who had widowhood thrust upon them. You could outlive sexuality, but you never truly got over it—any more than you got over childhood.

Maya’s golden bird chimed on her breast. It had begun to chime the hours lately, with small but piercing cuckoo
sounds, a tactful referral, apparently, to the time elapsing without a payoff. She tucked the bird into her ear. It began at once to translate the mutter of the television.