Holy Fire (7 page)

“Well, you can’t have been all cold and indifferent to him, or otherwise you wouldn’t have been crying about him on a bus.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mia said. “It wasn’t him, it was the situation! It was the human condition! The posthuman condition … If I’d been crying because I regretted losing my love life, I’d have left with your boyfriend, not with you.”

“Very funny,” Brett said with an instant jealous scowl. Brett began walking faster, her elastic soles squeaking on the pavement.

“I never meant to suggest that I’d try to steal your boyfriend,” Mia said with great care. “I’m sure he’s very good-looking, but believe me, that’s not high on my list of priorities.”

They crossed Divisadero. “I know why you said all that just now,” Brett declared sullenly, after half a block. “I bet you’d feel really good about it, if you could give me some nice grown-up advice, and maybe buy my jacket or something, and so I went back to Griff and we went together to Europe and acted just like you think young lovers ought to act.”

“Why are you so suspicious?”

“I’m not suspicious. I’m just not naive. I know you think I’m like a little kid, that nineteen is a little kid. I’m not very mature, but I’m a woman. In fact I’m kind of a dangerous woman.”

“Really.”

“Yes.” Brett tossed her head. “You see, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”

“That sounds pretty serious.”

“And I don’t mind hurting people if I have to. Sometimes it’s good for them. To be hurt some. Shocked a little.” Brett’s sweet young face had a most peculiar cast.
After a long moment Mia realized that Brett was trying to look wicked and seductive. She looked about as evil as a kitten in a basket.

“I see,” Mia said.

“Are you rich, Maya?”

“In a way,” Mia said. “Yes. I’m well-to-do.”

“How’d you get that way?”

“Steady income, low expenditures, compound interest, and a long wait.” Mia laughed. “Even inanimate objects can get rich that way.”

“That’s all you ever had to do?”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds. The low expenditure is the hard part. It’s pretty easy to make money, but it’s hard not to spend money once you know that you have some.”

“Do you have a big house, Maya?”

“I have an apartment on Parnassus. By the medical center. Not too far from here, actually.”

“Is there a lot of room there?”

Mia paused. “You want to spend the night with me, is that what you’re driving at?”

“Can I, Maya? Can you take me in? Just for a night. I’ll sleep on the floor, I’m real used to it. See, I just don’t want to stay in any place where Griff might find me tonight. I need a chance to think things out on my own. Please say yes, it would really help.”

Mia thought it over. She could imagine a lot of possible harm in the situation, but the prospect somehow failed to deter her. She’d reached such an instant and intense rapport with the girl that she felt peculiar about breaking the connection, almost superstitious. She wasn’t sure that she liked Brett, any more than she would have liked a chance encounter with her own nineteen-year-old self. But still: nineteen years old! It genuinely pained her to think of denying Brett anything. “Are you hungry, Brett?”

“I could eat.” Brett was suddenly cheerful.

“I
t’s so neat and clean here,” Brett said, sweeping through Mia’s front room almost on tiptoe. “Does it always look like this?”

Mia was busying herself in her kitchen. She had never been a tidy person by nature, but during her seventies, the habit of untidiness had left her. She’d simply grown out of messiness, the way a child might shed a tooth. After that, Mia always washed the dishes, always made her bed, always picked up loose objects and filed them away. Living that way was quicker and simpler and made every kind of sense to her. Litter and disorder no longer gave her any sense of relaxation or freedom or spontaneity. It had taken her seventy years to learn how to clean up after herself, but once she had learned the trick of it, it was impossible to go back.

She had no simple way to tell Brett about this. The profundity of this change in her personality would never seem natural to a nineteen-year-old. A half-truth was simpler. “I have a civil-support woman who comes in twice a week.”

“Boy, that must be a real pain.” Brett peered at a framed piece of paper ephemera. “What is
this
thing?”

“Part of my paper collection. It’s the cover of a twentieth-century computer game.”

“What, this giant silver thing with fangs and muscles and all these war machines and stuff?”

Mia nodded. “It was a kind of virtuality but it was flat and slow and it came in a glass box.”

“Why do you collect stuff like that?”

“I just like it.”

Brett was skeptical.

Mia smiled. “I do like it! I like the way it’s hopelessly stuck between pretending to be high-tech ultra-advanced design, and actually being crude and violent and crass. It cost a lot to design and market, because people were very impressed when you spent a lot of money back then. But it still looks botched and clunky. There used to be thousands
of copies of this game, but now they’re forgotten. I like it, because not many people are interested in that kind of old-fashioned schlock, but I am. When I look at that picture and think about it—where it came from and what it means—well, it always makes me feel more like my real self, somehow.”

“Is it worth a lot of money? It sure is ugly.”

“That box top might be worth money if it still had the game inside. There’s a few people still alive who used to play these games when they were kids. Some of them are museum fanatics, they own the antique computers, disks, cartridges, the cathode-ray tubes, everything. They all know each other through the net, and they sell each other copies of games that are still mint-in-the-box. For big-collector sums of money. But just the paper cover? No. The paper’s not worth much to anybody.”

“You don’t play the games?”

“Oh, heavens no. It’s really hard to get them to work, and besides the games are all awful.”

They ate high-fiber fettucine with protein blocks in gravy, and flaked green carbohydrate. “This is really delicious,” said Brett, shoveling it in. “I don’t know why anybody ever complains about medical diets. The way you do it, it tastes really good. The flavors are so subtle. Lots better than plants and animals.”

“Thanks.”

“I ate nothing but infant formula until I was five,” Brett bragged. “I was strong as a horse as a little kid, I was never sick a day in my life. I could do chin-ups, I could run all day, I could beat up all the kids who were still eating stuff like milk! And vegetables! Wow, that ought to be a crime, feeding little kids vegetables. Did you ever eat vegetables?”

“Not in about fifty years. I think it
is
a crime to feed vegetables to children now, actually. In California, anyway.”

“They’re really
nasty
. Especially spinach. And corn is
disgusting. This big lumpy yellow cob with all these little
seeds
on it …” Brett shuddered.

“Do you ever eat eggs? Eggs are a good source of cholesterol.”

“Really? I dunno, I might eat an egg if I found it in a nest somewhere.” Brett smiled beatifically and shoved her empty plate aside. “You’re a really good cook, Maya. I wish I could cook. I’m better at tinctures. You have a really big bathroom, right? Do you think I might take a bath? Would that be okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You might have to disinfect afterward.”

“Oh. Well, I’m very modern, Brett, I can manage that.”

“Oh, good.”

While Brett was bathing, Mia picked up Brett’s shed clothes, micro waved them thoroughly for hygienic purposes, then washed and dried them. The elastic-soled shoes looked as though they would melt or burst if sterilized, so Mia didn’t touch them. The shoes stank powerfully. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant smell, but there had been bare human feet in those shoes for a long time and some odd species of tame bacteria had been warmly and damply feasting inside them.

Brett came out of the bathroom in a towel. “You’re probably gonna want to sterilize this towel,” she said contritely, and handed it over. Brett was covered with hair. Armpits, pubes, nipples. Huge flourishing glossy patches of black human fur, almost like abbreviated lingerie. The effect of all this hair was surprisingly modest and practical. Brett sat down nude and hairy on the carpeted floor, just a little self-consciously, and started rooting in her backpack.

“That felt lovely,” she said. “Plumbing is wonderful. I’ve been sleeping in a tent for four weeks.”

“A tent, is it? How adventurous.”

“Yeah, mostly up under the trees in Buena Vista Park. Up
in
the trees mostly, in hammocks. You get terrific
views of the city up there. We use the public restrooms and eat out of cartons and it’s a really cheap way to get by. It’s getting too cold for that now, though.”

“Is it safe?”

Brett shrugged. “This is San Francisco! Half the population is civil support. Nobody will bother you. What are they supposed to do to me, rob me? My clothes are all in stores and my designs are all in virtuality.” She pulled a little plastic vial from a pocket of the bag, then produced her rattlesnake.

She opened the torpid animal’s gaping cotton-white jaws and jabbed its fangs, one after another, through a pinhole in the elastic top of the vial. Then she pressed its dented, scaly head with the flat of her thumb. When the snake’s fangs were loaded she stuffed it back in the bag. She took out a metal tube with a pull-off cap. She twisted a waxy taper from within the tube and began carefully anointing the spaces between her toes.

“This is foot wax,” she explained. “Live bacteria but they can’t reproduce. They just eat up the jam and sweat and stuff so you don’t get any wild flora living on you.”

“That’s clever.”

“Well, you have to know how to squat, y’know! You can’t just drop everything and start sleeping under trees and bridges. If you do it right, there’s a lot of science to it. It’s an artifice.” Brett began working on her furry armpits with a roll-on.

“Where do you keep your spare clothes?”

Brett was surprised. “I’m a professional! If I need new clothes I just have them instanced out.” She took out her cellular netlink and began plucking her brows in its mirrored flip-up screen.

Mia cleaned and put away the dishes. “How about dessert?”

“No, thanks.”

“Something to wear? I’ll loan you something.”

“Oh, never mind, it’s warm in here, I’m all right.”

“A tincture, then?”

“Can you do hot chocolate?”

“Sure. Cacao is fun.” Mia brought out her tincture set and began reconfiguring the catalyzers and synthesizers. Little tubes of amber polyvinyl and steel alloy. Gilded O-rings. Enameled pinch-clamps. Osmosis screens. Brewers and strainers and translucent hookah chambers. Step-by-step instructions. It was something to do with your hands while people talked.

Brett fished out her snake, and slapped it sharply on the back of the head. It recoiled at once and emitted an angry hissing rattle. Brett offered up her right forearm. The snake instantly lashed out and sank both fangs into her flesh.

Brett gently coaxed the snake loose and petted it soothingly. Then she dabbed an ointment on the twin puncture marks. A tiny rill of blood escaped. “Ouch,” she remarked.

“What did you put in there?”

“Oh, the girl who gave me this stuff made me promise never to tell,” Brett said smugly. “It makes me feel safe and warm whenever I sleep in strange places.… It does make me feel nice, but it’s not really good for me. That’s why I always let it hurt some. If you do unhealthy things and you don’t let them hurt you first, then that’s a good way to get into big trouble.”

“An animal bite must be a big infection risk.”

“What, nasty warm-blooded germs from a nice coldblooded mouth? I don’t think so. Snakey’s really fast and clean. She’s just my good friend in my backpack.… It’s nice to have special things. And special friends.” Brett blinked, heavy lidded. She smiled.

They had some cocoa. Brett fell asleep.

Mia tucked a blanket over Brett and retired to her narrow bed. She shoved the hyperbaric seal away and pulled the covers to her chin and fell into uneasy reverie. Her
little bedroom chamber felt dead and empty, like the paper cell of an abandoned wasps’ nest.

She had kept thoughts of the funeral at bay all day, but now in the dark and the silence the taste of mortality began, in its subtle limbic way, to prey upon her mind. Mia began to ponder, with pitiless clarity and accuracy, the endless list of syndromes in the aging process. The endless richness and natural variety of the pathways of organic decline.

Sutures knotting and calcifying. Cartilaginous membranes ossifying. Mineral deposits of stonelike hardness forming in the gall bladder, liver, the major arteries. Nails thickening, skin going scaly, hair thinning, graying, going all brittle. Nipples darkening, breasts sagging, ducts shrinking, glands puckering. The urogenital system, evolution’s canny trade-off of fertility for mortality, permanently bewildered. Deposits of rich bloody marrow dying out in their bony nooks and crannies, replaced by thick yellow pockets of inert fat. Loss of acuity in the retinas and in the weirdly complex machineries of the inner ear. The ancient gland that was the brain, tirelessly shifting its hormonal sediments until its reptilian backwaters filled with toxic deposits as tough to clean out as a childhood neurosis.

Mia wasn’t sick, and she certainly wasn’t dying, but she was very far from young. She had kept her brain quite clean, but the repeated neural scrubbings had caused serious wear on certain peripheral nerves. In the lower spine, and in the long-stretched nerves of the legs. Her vagus nerve was especially bad. Her weak vagus was not a lethal threat, but the skipped heartbeats were far from pleasant.

Mia’s lymph duct was an endless source of trouble, corroded and congealed with ancient bile. She had passing spasms of tinnitus in the left ear and had lost the higher pitches in the right. The synovial fluid in her knuckles and wrists had lost much of its viscosity. Cells in the human
lenses didn’t grow back, so there wasn’t much to do about the loss of flexion and the resultant astigmatism.