Holy Fire (5 page)

The virtual office, with some fine display of irony, had been designed to resemble the office of a civil architect. Architects who designed actual buildings, as opposed to those who built virtual structures, tended to be rather snobbish and pushy about their intimate relation to tangible physicality. The walls around her were all corkboards, chalkboards, crayons, drafting paper, and string. All very analog and tactile. There wasn’t a data screen anywhere in the place. Except, of course, that this entire virtual environment was itself a data screen.

There was a serious mismatch between Martin Warshaw’s sophisticated memory palace and this randomly chosen and somewhat pokey little curtain unit. Against the rounded fabric walls, the corners of the virtual room looked quite nasty, with a stomach-churning visual warp. The simulation couldn’t seem to decide where to put the floor. Rims of flooring slopped up on the lower edges of the screen, like a swamped rowboat slowly going under.

A simulated window in one wall showed an arty glimpse of a fake exterior garden, but the organic shapes within the garden were disastrous. The trees were jerky half-rendered blurs, a nightmare vision of x-rayed vegetation under alien sunlight as thick as cheese. The inside of the office boasted a virtual potted plant. Its big serrated leaves looked as stiff and lifeless as waffle irons.

Mia turned in place, gazing about the virtual office cautiously. A massive framed blueprint hung on the wall to her left. It showed a vast multistory edifice—the ground-floor plans of the memory palace itself, presumably. The blueprints were lavishly annotated, in horribly blurred and tiny print. The palace looked huge, elaborate, and quite intimidating. Mia felt as if she’d unwrapped a Christmas gift and found an entire steam locomotive crammed inside it. A multi-ton coal-fired virtual jack-in-the-box.

She turned toward the center of the room. The top of the wood-grain desk boasted a single framed photograph. Mia made stepping motions in place, and managed to
reach the virtual desk without barging through it. She reached out one hand, fishing for the photo. The glove interface was hopelessly bad, full of stutter and overlap.

This was a very unhappy interface. And small wonder. No doubt this entire virtual environment was being encrypted, decrypted, reencrypted, anonymously routed through satellites and cables, emulated on alien machinery through ill-fitting, out-of-date protocols, then displayed through long-dead graphics standards. Dismembered, piped, compressed, packeted, unpacketed, decompressed, unpiped and re-membered. Worse yet, the place was old. Virtual buildings didn’t age like physical ones, but they aged in subtle pathways of arcane decline, in much the way that their owners did. A little bijou table in the corner had a pronounced case of bit-rot: from a certain angle it lost all surface tint.

The place wasn’t dead, though. A virtual gecko appeared and sneaked its way along the wall, a sure sign that little health-assuring subroutines were still working their way through the damper, darker spots in the palace’s code.

Mia got a tentative grip on the photograph. She lifted it from the desktop, and the image burst free from the frame like a hemorrhage, and leapt up onto the fabric wall of the curtain unit, flinging itself all around her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree blast of bright red pixels the size of bloody thumbprints. Mia winced, put the photo back down, and peered at it sidelong through the membrane of her wrist-fan. Objects within hand’s reach seemed a lot better realized graphically than the jittery mess up on the curtain walls.

The frame held another digital photograph of herself. A different picture this time: the very young Mia Ziemann was sitting on a threadbare red fabric couch in her red terry-cloth bathrobe, reading a paper magazine, her slim bare legs perched on a coffee table. Her hair was wet. The floor was littered with collegiate junk: fast-food packets, disks of recorded music, two unlaced walking shoes. The
young Mia was unaware of the photographer. She looked relaxed and comfortable, yet deeply intent on her magazine.

Another little keepsake of Martin’s. His posthumous message to the palace’s chosen heiress.

Mia clawed open a drawer of the virtual desk. Empty. She knocked the photo into the empty drawer and shut it.

She opened another desk drawer. Scissors, paper, pens, tape, pins. She tried repeatedly, but failed to get a decent grip on the virtual scissors. She opened another drawer. A box of colored chalk.

Mia plucked a stick of pale green chalk from the box, and turned toward the chalkboard on the far wall. She marched in place toward the chalkboard—it reeled disturbingly as she grew nearer—and she reached out, her gloved fingers pinched and the virtual chalk outstretched.

Clearly this action called for much better gloves than the cheap peel-aways she was wearing. The chalk wobbled in and out of the surface of chalkboard like Dodgson’s Alice having fits in a mirror. After prolonged struggle Mia managed to shakily scrawl a random message, the first thing that had come into her head:

She added a potato-nosed Kilroy face, and, for good measure, scrawled some childish Miss Kilroy curls on Kilroy’s domed noggin. She accidentally dropped the virtual chalk, which hit the floor with an audible click and vanished. After searching for it hopelessly with her wrist-fans, Mia found herself getting seriously seasick. She unplugged the touchscreen, threw open the wall of the curtain, and stepped outside.

Swallowing bile, she unstrapped the wrist-fans and put them away. She peeled off the gloves into shredded strips and dropped them into a recycler. That had been more
than enough for a first try. If she ever entered Warshaw’s palace again, she’d use top-of-the-line datagloves from work, and some decent spex. Mia felt nauseated. And obscurely disappointed. And deeply cheated. And desolately sad.

She walked down a crooked aisle among Stuart’s phalanx of machines, breathing hard and trying to clear her head. She walked the length of the barn, down among the new machines. At the far end of the building she turned and headed back. She felt better now. Walking always helped her.

“Come with me to Europe,” a woman said aloud. Mia stopped.

“We don’t have time for Europe. Or the money,” a man grumbled. The two of them were sitting together on a blanket on the floor, in an aisle among the machines. The man wore a big padded jacket and dirty leggings and big scuffed boots; he had a pair of glittering spex propped on his forehead. The woman wore a very peculiar garment, a tentlike brown poncho somehow suspender-strapped to a baggy pair of pleated harem pants. They’d been working together at a CAD rig. They’d stripped off their manipulation gauntlets and they were sprawling on their blanket and eating biscuits from a paper bag.

They looked rather dirty. They were talking too loud. Their faces were strange: unlined, lithe. Their gestures were sharp and abrupt. They seemed very upset about something.

They were young people.

“They could spin that polymer in six days in Stuttgart,” said the girl. “Six hours, maybe.”

“Stuttgart’s not a real answer. At least here we’ve got some connections.”

“That old man only keeps us here ’cause he likes to watch us play! We need some
vivid
people. People like us. In a place where it’s happening. Not like this museum.”

“We’ll never get anywhere in Stuttgart. You know
what the rents are like in Stuttgart? Anyway, are you saying we’re not vivid? You and me? We gotta be vivid in our own way, on our own ground! It doesn’t mean anything, otherwise.”

Mia walked past them, pretending not to eavesdrop. They paid her no attention. She sought out Mr. Stuart behind his counter. Stuart was digging with a multitool in the silvery innards of a broken helmet.

“I’m done, for now,” Mia said.

“Great,” Stuart said indifferently, tucking a spex monocle into one eye.

“Tell me about those two young people over there, the ones doing CAD work.”

Stuart stared at her, his monocle gleaming. “Are you kidding? What business is that of yours?”

“I’m not asking you what networks they’re accessing,” Mia explained. “I just want to know a little about their personal lives.”

“Oh, okay, no problem,” Stuart said, relieved. “Those kids are in their twenties. Always got some little project going, you know how it is at that age. No sense of time scale, lots of energy to waste, head in the clouds. They make clothes. Try to.”

“Really.”

“Clothes for other kids. She designs them, and he instantiates them. They’re a team. It’s a kid romance. It’s cute.”

“What are their names?”

“I never asked.”

“How do they pay you for the access time?”

Stuart said nothing. Pointedly.

“Thanks,” Mia said. She went back to eavesdrop at greater length. The young people were gone. Mia quickly snagged her cashcard from the entranceway. There wasn’t much left on the card, for Stuart’s rates were very cruel to strangers. She hurried out of the building.

The boy and girl had backpacks slung over their shoulders and were walking uphill toward a bus stop.

When the bus arrived, Mia climbed aboard behind them. They sat in the back. Mia sat near them, across the aisle. They took no notice of her. Young people didn’t like to notice old people.

“This town,” the girl announced bitterly, “is boring me to death.”

“Sure,” the boy said, yawning.

“I’m bored
right now
,” the girl said.

“You’re in a bus,” the boy pointed out, with infinite tolerance. He began to root around in his pack.

Mia pulled her sunglasses from her purse, put them on, and pretended to gaze up the aisle of the bus. There were three dogs and a couple of cats aboard. Up near the front two well-dressed Asian men were eating from boxes with chopsticks.

The girl opened her backpack, fished out a rattlesnake, and hung it around her neck. The snake was beautiful. Its scaly skin looked like tesselated pavement as seen from a great height. The snake stirred a little at the contact with warm flesh.

“Don’t get tight,” the boy said.

“I won’t get tight. Snakey’s not loaded.”

“Well, don’t load him, then. You’re always getting tight when we argue. As if that ever settles anything.” The boy pulled an enameled comb from his bag, and ran it restlessly through his tousled hair. “Anyway, that snake would look stupid in Stuttgart. They just don’t do rattlesnakes in Stuttgart.”

“We could do Praha. We could do Milano.” The girl toyed listlessly with the snake’s rattle. “It’s so slow here in the Bay. Nothing ever happens here. Darling, I’m miserable.” She let go of the snake and tugged at a hank of greasy brunette hair. “I can’t work if I’m miserable. You know I can’t work if I’m miserable!”

“What am I going to do with you when you’re miserable in Europe?”

“In Europe I’d never be miserable.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t think I know my own mind,” she said angrily. “That’s always been your problem.”

“You don’t know your own mind, and you never have,” he said bluntly. “Your mind is a pain in my neck.”

“I hate you,” the girl announced. She crammed the snake back into her backpack.

“You should go to Europe,” Mia said aloud.

They looked up, startled. “What?” the girl said.

“You should go. You might as well go.” Mia’s heart skipped a beat, then started racing. “You’re very young, but you have plenty of time. Go to Europe for five weeks. Five months. Five years. Five years is nothing. You should go to Europe together, and you can get it all out of your system.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the boy. “Did we ask for this?”

Mia took off her sunglasses. She met their eyes.

“Let her alone,” the girl said, quickly.

“It’s no use going later,” Mia said. “If you wait too long, then you’ll know too much. Then it’s always all the same, no matter where you go.” She began to weep.

“Wonderful,” the boy muttered. He stood up, grabbing the bus’s bamboo pole. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

The girl didn’t move. “Why?”

“Come on, she’s having some kind of attack! That’s not our problem. We’ve got problems enough.”

“You’re not old enough for real problems,” Mia told him. “You can run a lot of risks now. You’ve got energy, and you’re free. Go ahead and run a risk. Take her to Europe.”

The boy stared at her. “Do I look like a man who takes career advice from strange old women who cry in public buses?”

“You look just like the kind of man … A man that I knew a long time ago,” Mia said. Her voice was trembling. Her tear ducts ached dreadfully. They stung all the way down into her nose.

“You’re very free with advice for other people. When was the last time
you
took any kind of risk?”

Mia wiped her burning eyes, and sniffed. “I’m taking a risk right now.”

“Sure you are.” The boy scoffed. “Like it’s a big hazard for some gerontocrat to make fun of us! Look at you—you got your ambulances standing by for you around the clock! You got every advantage in the world! What have we got?”

He glared at her aggressively. “You know, ma’am, even though I’m only twenty-two years old, my life feels every bit as real and worthwhile as your life does!
More
real than your life! Do you think we’re
stupid
just because we’re young? You don’t know half enough to offer us any advice—you don’t know a thing about us, or our lives, or our situation, or anything else. You are condescending to us.”

“No, she isn’t,” the girl said.

“You’re patronizing us!”

“Oh, she is not! Look, she’s crying, she really means it!”

“You are being profoundly impertinent!”

“Stop insulting this nice lady! She was completely right about every single thing she said!”

The bus stopped. “I’m leaving,” the boy announced. “I resent it when old people deny the validity of my experience.”

“Go ahead and run off, then,” the girl told him, folding her arms and slumping back into the seat. The boy was startled. Slowly his face darkened. He slung his pack over one shoulder and stormed off, boots clomping down the stairs.