Holy Fire (45 page)

“It’s all done with dubbing,” said the dog modestly. “Dubbing just above the level of the brain. Karl has brought a gift for you, from your friends. Go fetch it, Karl.”

“Good idea,” said Karl. He rose, picked up a white cane, switched it on, and trotted off unerringly.

“I really can’t appear on your show,” said Maya. “I don’t need to play roles anymore.”

“You have become an icon,” the dog said.

“I don’t much feel like an icon. Anyway, the best way to remain an icon is to avoid public overexposure. Isn’t it?”

“How Greta Garbo of you,” said the dog.

“You like old movies?” Maya said, surprised.

“Frankly, I hate old movies; I don’t even much like my own quite ancient medium of television. But I’m enormously interested in the processes of celebrity.”

“I’ve never had such a sophisticated conversation with a dog,” said Maya. “I can’t appear on your show, Aquinas, I hope you understand that. But I do like talking to you. In person, you’re so much smaller than you look on television. And you’re really interesting. I don’t know if you’re a dog or an artificial intelligence or whatever, but you’re definitely some kind of genuine entity. You’re
deep
. Aren’t you? I think you should get out of pop culture. Maybe write a book.”

“I can’t read,” the dog said.

Maya’s waffles arrived. She tucked in with gusto.

“It’s a shame to come to Des Moines for nothing,” the dog wheedled.

“Interview the mayor,” Maya said, chewing.

“I don’t think that will do.”

“Go back to Europe and interview Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier. Make her level with you.”

“Why should I do that?” said the dog, pricking up his hairy ears. “And where would I find her?”

Karl returned to the booth. The gift had come from Paul and Benedetta. Maya shoved her waffles aside and tore open the box, and then the padding. They had sent her an antique camera. The sort of hand camera that once had processed rolls of colored film. The antique machine had been retrofitted with a digital imaging plate, and a set of network jacks. It was heavy and solid and lovely. Compared to a modern camera it felt like chiseled granite.

And there was a card with it. Handwriting.

“Don’t ever believe what they say about us,” scrawled Benedetta.

“First and always we will love and forgive our heretics,” said Paul. His neat and perfect hand.

D
aniel lived in Idaho now. He had gone to earth.

She could sense the border of his private little realm. Maybe twenty acres. Nothing like wire or a fence; the difference was present in the substance of the earth. Trace elements, maybe. Maybe some aspect of his peculiar practice of gardening. Could mere intelligence make trees grow faster?

The trees, the bushes, the birds, the insects even. They didn’t feel quite right here. They felt as if someone were paying fantastic amounts of sustained attention to them. The branches were painterly branches, and the birds sang with operatic precision.

Her ex-husband was digging in the earth with a shovel.
Daniel was about four feet high now. The bones had shrunk and the spine had compacted and the muscle had pooled out around his calves and thighs in thick Neanderthal clumps. He was old and extremely strong; he looked as though he could snap the shovel in half.

“Hello, Mia,” he said in a voice rusty with disuse.

“Hello, Daniel.”

“You’ve changed,” he said, squinting. “Has it been long?”

“For me it has.”

“You look like Chloe. I’d have thought you were Chloe if I didn’t know better.”

“I still think of you as Daniel,” she confessed. “I don’t know why.”

Daniel said nothing. He retreated into his hut.

She followed him into his rude little shelter. It was lined with down and branches and dry shed leaves and perhaps eight trillion gigabytes of mycelial webbed information. He had put down roots here in Idaho. He had integrated himself into the depths of the Idaho landscape. He had become a genius loci, a spirit of place. Every tree, every bush, every flower, every caterpillar, genetically wired for sound. He didn’t merely watch over this place—in some profound sense he had
become
this place. He had become a little piece of Idaho. In the winters, he hibernated.

“Take a little water?” Daniel croaked.

“No, thanks.”

Daniel sipped collected dew from a leaf-shaped cup.

“What’s new, Daniel?”

“New,” Daniel mused. “Oh, there’s always something new. Do something about the sky, they say. Clean it up. With spores.”

“Spores,” she said.

He drank more water, wiped his fantastically furrowed brow, and seemed to rally. “Yes, the sky will be the color of fungus for a while. Should make for some interesting
sunsets. Atmospheric repair techniques. Very useful. Very farsighted, very wise. Good husbandry practice.” Daniel was trying hard to talk to her in a language she could understand. They were both bipedal creatures who walked beneath the sky, who lived in the world of daylight. That was a kind of commonality.

“I can’t believe the polity would really try a scheme like seeding the sky with fungus. I didn’t think the polity had that much imagination anymore.”

“Well, they don’t have imagination, but it’s not their idea. Other people hurt the sky in the first place. It’s a response. New monster versus old monstrosity. We are as gods, Mia. We might as well get good at it.”

“Are you a monster, Daniel? Whoever told you you were a god?”

“What do you think?”

He turned his lumpish back on her, left the hut, and went back to his work. He was a god, she decided. He hadn’t been a god when he’d been with her. He’d been her man then, a good man. He wasn’t a man any longer. Daniel was a very primitive god. A very small-scale god. A primitive steam-engine god. An amphibian god dutifully slogging the mud for some coming race of reptiles. A very minor god, maybe something like a garden gnome, a dryad, a tommy-knocker. He’d done his best with the allowable technology, but the allowable technology was just barely enough. Machines were so evanescent. Machines just flitted through the fabric of the universe like a fit through the brain of God, and in their wake people stopped being people. But people didn’t stop going on.

“I need to take your picture, Daniel,” she told him. “Stand under the light for me.”

He didn’t seem to mind. She lifted the new camera. She framed him. She knew suddenly that this was it. This was going to be her first really good picture. She could see
it in the set of his shoulders, in that astonishing landscape that he called his face. The starkness of a living soul placed far beyond necessity. She understood the two of them and the world revolving, all whole and all at once, in a bright hot blaze. Her first true picture. So real and beautiful.

The camera clicked.

About the Author

B
RUCE
S
TERLING
is the author of the nonfiction book
The Hacker Crackdown
, as well as the novels
Heavy Weather, Involution Ocean, The Artificial Kid
,
Schismatrix, Islands in the Net, Distraction, A Good Old-Fashioned Future
and the short-story collections
Crystal Express
and
Globalhead
. He co-authored, with William Gibson, the critically acclaimed novel
The Difference Engine
. He also edited
Mirrorshades
, the definitive cyberpunk anthology. He lives with his wife and daughter in Austin, Texas.