Holy Fire (6 page)

The bus started up again.

“I’m sorry,” Mia said meekly.

“Don’t be sorry,” the girl said. “I hate him! He’s holding me back! He thinks he can tell me what to do.”

Mia said nothing.

The girl frowned. “I never slept with any man more than twice, without him thinking he could tell me what to do!”

Mia glanced up. “How old are you?”

The girl lifted her chin. “Nineteen.”

“What’s your name?”

“Brett,” the girl announced. She was lying. “What’s your name?”

“Maya.”

Brett crossed the aisle and sat beside her. “It’s nice to meet you, Maya.”

“Likewise, Brett.”

“I’m going to Europe,” Brett announced. She began searching in her backpack again. “Stuttgart probably. That’s the biggest city for the arts in the whole world. Have you ever been to Stuttgart?”

“I’ve been to Europe a few times. Not in many years.”

“Have you been to Stuttgart since they rebuilt it?”

“No.”

“Ever been to Indianapolis?”

“I did telepresence there once. Indianapolis seems a little scary nowadays.”

Brett offered Mia a wadded paper tissue from the backpack. Mia accepted it gratefully, and blew her nose. Her tear ducts were all out of practice. They felt scorched and sore.

Brett gazed at her with frank curiosity. “You haven’t been around very much lately, have you, Maya?”

“No. I don’t suppose I have, really.”

“You want to come around with me for a while? Maybe I could show you some things. Would that be all right?”

Mia was surprised and touched. The invitation was not
entirely welcome, but the girl was trying to be sweet to her. “All right. Yes.”

Brett led her off the bus at the next stop. They began walking together down Filmore. This street was rather heavily wooded. A giraffe was methodically cropping the trees. Mia was sure that the giraffe was perfectly harmless, but it was the largest urban animal she’d ever seen roaming loose in San Francisco. It was quite an exotic beast. Someone had been busy on the city council.

Brett merely ambled along at first, but then picked up her pace. “You can walk pretty fast,” Brett said. “How old are you really?”

“I’m pushing a century.”

“You don’t look a hundred years old. You must be really smart.”

“I’m just very careful.”

“Do you have, like, osteoarthritis or incontinence or any really weird syndrome stuff?”

“I have a bad vagus nerve,” Mia said. “I get attacks of night cramps. And I’m astigmatic.” She smiled. It was an interesting topic. She could remember when strangers made polite chitchat about the weather.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was married for a long time. When it was over, that part of life didn’t seem very important anymore.”

“What part
is
very important?”

“Responsibility.”

“That doesn’t sound very exciting.”

“It’s not exciting, but if you’re not responsible, you can’t take proper care of yourself. You get sick and fall apart.” This truism sounded rather fatuous, pointless, and morbid, especially for a young person. “When you live a really long time,” Mia offered carefully, “it changes everything. The whole structure of the world, politics, money, religion, culture, everything that used to be human. All
those changes are your responsibility, they benefited you, they happened because of you. You have to work hard so that the polity can manage. Good citizenship is a lot of work. It needs a lot of self-sacrifice.”

“Sure,” said Brett, and laughed. “I forgot about those parts.”

Brett led her into a mall—a nexus of junk shops near the Haight. There was a good crowd in the place, warming the benches, window-shopping, sipping tinctures in a café. A couple of cops in pink jackets sat on their bicycles, people-watching. For the first time in many years, Mia found herself catching a suspicious glance from a police officer. Because of the company she kept.

“Do you know this part of town?” Brett said.

“Sure. See that collectors’ shop? They sell old media bric-a-brac, I buy paper-show things from them sometimes.”

“Wow,” Brett marveled, “I always wondered what kind of people went into that weird old place.… ”

Brett ducked into a dark, tiny store, a redwood-fronted hole in the wall. It sold rugs, blankets, and cheap jewelry. Mia had never been inside the place in her life. It smelled strongly, almost chokingly, of air-sprayed vanilla. The walls were densely overgrown with deep green moss.

A tabby cat was asleep on the shop counter, sprawled lazily across the glass top. There were no human beings in sight. Brett made a beeline for a dress rack crammed in the corner. “Come see … see, this is all my stuff.”

“All of this?”

“No, not everything on this rack,” Brett said, sorting nimbly through the garment rack, “but this one is my design, and this one, and this one here.… I mean, I concepted these, it was Griff who instantiated them.” Mia perceived from the sudden angry crease on Brett’s smooth brow that Griff was the erring boyfriend. “This older guy, Mr. Quiroga, he’s the owner. We kind of cut a deal with him to carry our stuff.”

“They’re very interesting designs,” Mia said. They were very peculiar.

“You like them, really?”

“Of course I do.” Mia pulled a red jacket from its hanger. It was made of a puffy spun plastic with tactile properties somewhere between leather, canvas, and some kind of chewable gelatin candy. Most of the jacket was candy-apple red, but there were large patches of murky blue on the elbows, neck, and hem. It had a lot of fat buttoned pockets, and a waterproof red rain hood crushed down inside a lumpy collar.

“See how well it holds its shape?” Brett boasted. “And it doesn’t even have batteries. It’s all in the cut and the weave. Plus the Young’s modulus of the fiber.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Elastomers and polymers. A little woven ceramic for the high-wear spots. See, it’s durable all-weather street-wear, just right for travel! Try it on!”

Mia slipped her arms through the padded sleeves. Brett busied herself tugging at the shoulders, then zipped it up to Mia’s chin. “It fits great!” Brett declared. It did no such thing. Mia felt as if she’d been stuffed into a monstrous fruitcake.

Mia stepped before a narrow full-length mirror in another corner. There she saw a stranger improbably swaddled in a garish candied jacket. Maya the Gingerbread Girl. She put on her sunglasses. With the glasses, and with sufficiently bad light, she might almost look young—a very tired, puffy, sickly young woman in a kid’s ridiculous jacket. Wearing improbably tidy, adult, and conservative slacks and shoes.

Mia jammed her fingers through her hair, shook her head, and destroyed her coiffure.

“That helps,” she said, peering at the mirror.

Brett was surprised, and laughed.

“What a lovely jacket. What else could I ever need?”

“Better shoes,” Brett told her very seriously. “A skirt.
Long earrings. No purse, get a backpack. Real lipstick, not that medicated little-old-lady stuff. Nail polish. Barrettes. Necklaces. No girdle. No brassiere, if you can help it. Especially no
watch
.” She paused. “And sway some more when you walk. Put some bounce in it.”

“That seems like rather a lot.”

Brett shrugged. “Looking vivid is mostly things you
don’t
have to get and
don’t
have to do.”

“I don’t have the cheekbones for that kind of life anymore,” Mia said. “I talk too slowly. I don’t wave my hands enough. I don’t giggle. If I tried to dance, I’d ache for a week.”

“You don’t have to dance. I could make you look really vivid if you wanted me to. I’m pretty good at that. I have a talent. Everyone says so.”

“I’m sure you could do that, Brett. But why would I want you to?”

Brett was bitterly crestfallen. Mia felt a sharp pang of guilt at having disappointed her. It was as if she’d deliberately slapped a small child in the street. “I do want the jacket,” Mia said. “I’m fond of it, I want to buy it from you.”

“You do, really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Could you give me some grown-up money for it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean real money from a long-term investment account,” Brett said. “Certified funds.”

“But certified funds are only for special transactions. Life extension, stock ownership, pensions, that sort of thing.”

“No, they’re not. Certified money is the real money for the real economy. It’s the kind of money that kids like Griff and me can never get our hands on.” Brett’s young-girl eyes—warm amber brown, with sclera so white and clear that they looked almost artificial—narrowed cagily. “You don’t have to give me very much
real
money at all.
I’d feel real happy with just a
little bit
of certified grown-up money.”

“I’d like to give you some,” Mia said, “but I don’t have any way to do that. Of course I do have certified funds in my own name, but they’re all tied up in long-term capital investments, like they’re supposed to be. Nobody uses that kind of financial instrument for little everyday transactions like clothes or food. What’s wrong with a nice cashcard?”

“You can’t start a real business without certified funds,” Brett said. “There’s all kinds of awful tax problems and insurance problems and liability problems. It’s all just part of the big conspiracy to hold young people back.”

“No, it isn’t,” Mia said, “it’s how we ensure financial stability and reduce liquidity in the capital markets. This is truly a dull and stuffy topic, Brett, but as it happens, I’m a medical economist, and I know quite a bit about this. If you could have seen what markets were like in the twenties, or the forties, or even the sixties, then you’d appreciate modern time-based restrictions on the movement of capital. They’ve helped a lot, life’s a lot more predictable now. The whole structure of the medical-industrial complex is dependent on stable grant procedures and graduated reductions in liquidity.”

Brett shrugged. “Oh, never mind, never mind.… I knew you’d never give me any, but I had to ask anyway. I hope you’re not mad at me.”

“No, it’s all right. I’m not mad.”

Brett gazed around the shop, her lips tightening in a glossy smirk. “Mr. Quiroga’s not around. Probably doing civil support. He’s supposed to run this place, but he’s never in here when you want him.… Probably makes more treatment points from the government when he’s out spying on us kids.… Can you give me fifteen marks for it? Cash?”

Mia took her minibank out of her purse, ratcheted fifteen market units onto a smartcard, and handed it over.

Brett carefully stuffed the card into a pocket of her
backpack, and removed a scarcely visible tag from the puffy red sleeve of the merchandise. She tucked the tag under the sleeping cat, which meowed once, reflexively. “Well, thanks a lot, Maya. Griff’d be real glad to see me make a sale. That is, if I was ever gonna see Griff again.”

“Will you see him?”

“Oh, he’ll come looking for me. He’s gonna sweettalk me and apologize and all, but he’s no good. He’s smart but he’s stupid, if you know what I mean. He’s never gonna really do anything. He’s never gonna really go anywhere.” Brett was restless. “Let’s go.”

They exited the mall into Pierce Street. A Pekingese police dog with a pink collar came toddling down the hill. Brett stood perfectly still and stared at the tiny dog with blank and focused hostility. When the dog had passed them, she strode on.

“I could leave tonight,” Brett declared, loosely swinging her young and perfect arms beneath the poncho. “Just step right onto a plane for Stuttgart. Well, not Stuttgart, because that would be a real crowded flight. But someplace else in Europe. Warszawa maybe. Airplanes are just like buses. They hardly ever really check to see if you’ve paid.”

“That would be dishonest,” Mia said gently.

“I’d get away with it! Hitching is easy if you have the nerve.”

“What would your parents think?”

Brett laughed harshly. “I wouldn’t get any medical checkups in Stuttgart. I’d just stay very underground in Europe, and I wouldn’t get any checkups unless I came back here. I’d have no medical records in Europe. Nobody would ever catch me. I could hitch on a plane tonight. Nobody would care.”

They were heading uphill and Mia’s calves were beginning to burn. “You’d have a hard time getting anything done in Europe without appearing on official records.”

“People travel like that all the time! You can get away with anything as long as you don’t look important.”

“What does Griff think about this?”

“Griff’s got no imagination.”

“Well, what if he comes looking for you?”

Brett’s face clouded thoughtfully. “This man you knew. Your lover. Was he really a lot like Griff?”

“Maybe.”

“What happened to him?”

“They buried him this morning.”

“Ohhh,” said Brett. “Comprehension dawns.” Delicately she touched Mia’s padded shoulder. “I get it all now. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

They walked along for a while silently. Mia tried to catch her breath. Then Brett spoke up. “I bet you secretly loved him right up to the very end.”

“No. Actually, it wasn’t at all like that.”

“But you went to his funeral today.”

“Well, yes.”

“So, I bet somewhere, deep inside, you really loved him the whole time.”

“I know that would seem more romantic,” Mia said, “but it just doesn’t work that way. Not for me, anyway. I never loved him half as much as I loved a better man later, and now I scarcely even think about him, either. Even though I was his wife for fifty years.”

“No, no, no,” Brett insisted cheerily, “I bet anything that on New Year’s Eve you take mnemonics and drink alcohol and think about your old boyfriends and cry.”

“Alcohol’s a poison,” Mia said. “And mnemonics are more trouble than they’re worth. Anyway, that’s just the way young women think that old women act. Posthuman women aren’t like that at all. We aren’t all sad or nostalgic. Really old women, who are still healthy and strong—we’re just very different. We just—we just get over all
that.” She paused. “Really old men, too, some of them …”