Holy Fire (25 page)

“Yes, that’s it exactly! That’s just exactly how it works.”

“[Look at my face at this very moment, as I speak. A certain set of musculatures being put into play, a certain state of tensility that holds the face in readiness for a characteristic physical sequence of verbal movements—Français. Consciously, I’m not aware of shaping my face. Consciously, you’re not aware of noticing it. Nevertheless big wedges of our human brains are dedicated to the study of faces—and to the perception of language as well. Studies prove that we can recognize one another as aliens, not because of posture, genetics, or dress, but because our languages have physically shaped our faces. That’s a preconscious human perception. A translator doesn’t do that. A network doesn’t convey that. Networks and translators don’t have thought. They have only processing.]”

“Yes?”

“[So now you see me through your eyes, and hear Français through one ear, and receive machine-enunciated data through your machine-assisted ear. Something is missing. Something is also superfluous. Parts of you that you don’t comprehend can sense that it’s all a muddle.]”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “[Now I’m holding your hand while speaking to you in Francçis. Look, I’ll hold your hand in both of mine. I’ll gently stroke your hand. How does that feel?]”

“It feels just fine, Paul.”

“And how does it feel now that I’m speaking to you in English?”

Surprised, she pulled her hand away.

He laughed. “There. You see? Your reaction demonstrates
the truth. It’s the same with networks. We meet physically because we have to supplement the networks. It’s not that networks lack intimacy. On the contrary, networks are too precisely intimate, in too narrow a channel. We have to meet in a way that feeds the gray meat.”

“That’s very clever. But tell me—what would have happened if I hadn’t pulled my hand away?”

“[Then,]” said Paul with great rationality and delicacy, “[you would have been a woman of blunted perceptions. Which you are not.]” And that seemed to be pretty much the end of that.

She noticed for the first time that his right hand had a ring on the third finger. It looked like a dark engraved band—but it was not a ring at all. It was a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of Paul’s flesh.

They were sliding with enormous magnetic levitational speed through the diamond-drilled depths of the European earth. She was taking enormous pleasure in his company and she felt absolutely no desire to flirt with him. It would be like trying to throw a come-hither at a limestone stalactite. Intimacy was not a prospect that appealed. It would take a woman of enormous self-abnegation and tolerance to endure the torment of that much clarity on a day-by-day basis. If he had a girlfriend she would sit across the breakfast table from him with fork in hand, and every day she would be impaled on the four steel tines of his intelligence and his perception and his ambition and his self-regard.

Paul was gazing at her silently, clearly undergoing some very similar line of assessment. She could almost hear the high-speed crackle of neurochemical cognition seething through the wettest glandular depths of his beautiful leonine head.

She was insanely close to confessing everything. It was an extremely stupid thing to do, especially twice in a row, but she was feeling incredibly reckless today and she
wanted risk in the way that one might want oxygen and, most of all, she just really, really felt like it. She didn’t want to ever touch Paul, hold him or caress him, but she direly wanted to confess to him. To immolate herself, to force him to take real notice.

But it wouldn’t be like confessing to Emil. Poor Emil, in his own peculiar animal fashion, was outside time, un-woundable, indestructible. Paul was very actual. Paul talked about cosmic transgressions but Paul was not beyond the pale. Paul was young, he was just a young man. A young man who didn’t need her troubles.

Their eyes met. There was a sudden terrific tension between them. It would have felt like sexual attraction with anyone else. With Paul it felt like an attack of telepathy.

He stared at her. Surprise struck him visibly. His fine brows arched and his eyes widened.

“What are you thinking, Paul?”

“Sincerely?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’m wondering why I see this frivolous young beauty. Here, across this table from me.”

“Why shouldn’t I be here?” she said.

“Because it’s a facade. Isn’t it? You’re not frivolous. And I feel quite certain suddenly that you’re not young.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re very beautiful. But it’s not a young woman’s beauty. You’re terribly beautiful. There is an element of terror to your presence.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Now that I recognize that fact, it makes me wonder. What do you want from us? Are you a police spy? Are you civil support?”

“No. I’m not. I promise.”

“I was civil support once,” Paul said calmly. “Youth-league civil support, in Avignon. I was quite ambitious about the work, and I learned about interesting aspects of
life. But I quit, I gave it up. Because they want to make the world a better place. And I knew that I didn’t want the world to be any better. I want the world to become more interesting. Do you think that’s a crime, Maya?”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. It doesn’t seem very much like a crime.”

“I know a police spy rather well. She reminds me of you very much. She has your strange self-possession, your peculiarly intense presence as a woman. I was looking at you just now, and I realized that you look like the Widow. So it all became clear to me suddenly.”

“I’m not a widow.”

“She’s an astonishing woman. Enormously beautiful, sublime. She’s like a sphinx. Like some untouchable creature from myth. She takes a deep interest in artifice. You’ll likely meet the Widow someday. If you stay in our company.”

“This Widow person—she’s an artifice cop? I had no idea there was any such thing as a police force for artifice. What’s her name?”

“Her name is Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier.”

“Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier … My goodness, what a wonderful name she has!”

“If you don’t know Helene already, then you might not want to meet her.”

“I’m certain I don’t want to meet her. Because I’m not an informer. Actually, I’m a criminal fugitive.”

“Informer, criminal …” He shook his head. “There’s far less distinction there than one might think.”

“You’re very right as usual, Paul. It’s rather like that blurry distinction between terror and beauty. Or youth and age. Or artifice and crime.”

He stared at her in surprise. “Well put,” he said at last. “That’s just what Helene would say. She’s quite the devotee of blurry distinctions.”

“I promise that I’m not a police agent. I’d prove it to you, if I could.”

“Maybe you’re not. It’s not that civil-support people can’t be pretty, but they usually consider your kind of glamour to be suspect.”

“I’m not suspect. Why should I be suspect?”

“I suspect you because I have to protect my friends,” Paul said. “Our lives are our lives, they’re not a theoretical exercise. We’re a much put-upon generation. We have to treasure our vitality, because our vitality is methodically stifled. Other generations never faced that dilemma. Their parents fell into their graves and power fell into their laps. But we’ve never been a natural generation. We’re the first truly native posthumans.”

“And you have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”

“
Mais oui.
”

“Well, so do I. I have a whole lot of them.”

“No one asked you to become one of us.”

It was a terribly wounding thing to say. She felt as if she’d been stabbed. He stared at her in direct challenge and she was suddenly too tired to go on fencing with him. He was too young and strong and quick, and she was too upset and broken up to push him into a corner. She began to cry. “What happens now?” she asked. “Should I beg for your permission to live? I’ll beg if you want me to. Just tell me that’s what you want.”

Paul glanced anxiously around the train car. “Please don’t make a scene.”

“I have to cry! I want to cry, I deserve it! I’m not all right. I don’t have any pride, I don’t have any dignity—I don’t have anything. I’m hurt in ways you can’t even imagine. What else should I do but cry? You’ve caught me out. I’m at your mercy. You can destroy me now.”

“You could destroy us. Maybe that’s what you want.”

“I won’t do that. Give me a chance! I can be vivid. I can even be beautiful. You should let me try. Let me try, Paul—I can be an interesting case study for you.”

“I’d love to let you try,” he said. “I like to feast with
panthers. But why play games with my friends’ safety? I know nothing about you, except that you seem very pretty and very posthuman. Why should I trust you? Why don’t you simply go home?”

“Because I can’t go home. They’ll make me be old again.”

Paul’s eyes widened. She’d struck through to him, she’d touched him. Finally he handed her a kerchief. She glanced at the kerchief, felt it carefully to make sure it wasn’t computational, then wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

Paul pressed a button on the rim of the table.

“You let Emil stay with your group,” she offered at last, “and Emil’s worse than I am.”

“I’m responsible for Emil,” he said gloomily.

“What do you mean?”

“I let him take the amnesiac. I made arrangements.”

“You did? Do the others know?”

“It was a good idea. You didn’t know Emil earlier.”

A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace.

It picked its way through barely perceptible niches in the ceiling, stopped, and dropped beside their beanbags. It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam’s. “
Oui monsieur?
”

“[The mademoiselle will be having a bottle of
eau minerale
and two hundred micrograms of alcionage,]” said Paul. “[I’ll have a
limoncello
and … oh, bring us half a dozen croissants.]”

“
Très bien.
” It stalked away.

“What
was
that thing?” Maya said.

“That’s the steward.”

“I can guess that much, but what
is
it? Is it alive? Is it a
robot? Is it some kind of lobster? It sounded like it was talking with real lips and a tongue!”

Paul looked exasperated. “Do you mind? This
is
the Stuttgart express, you know.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”

Paul gazed at her silently, meditatively. “Poor Emil,” he said at last.

“Don’t tell me that! You have no right to tell me that! I’m good for him. I know I’m good for him. You don’t know anything about it.”

“
Are
you good for Emil?”

“Look, what can I do to make you trust me? You can’t just write me off, you can’t just push me out. You say you want something really strange to happen in the world. Well, I’m really strange, all right? And I’m happening.”

Paul thought this over, tapping the edge of the table with his fingertips. “Let me test your blood,” he said.

“All right. Sure.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweater.

He stood up, retrieved his backpack from the overhead compartment, opened it, rummaged about methodically and removed a blood-test mosquito. He placed the little device on the center of her forearm. It sniffed about, squatted, inserted its hair-thin beak. There was no pain at all. Maybe a tiny itch.

Paul retrieved the blood-glutted device. It bent down and unfolded its wings, which formed a display screen the width of a pair of thumbnails. Paul bent down close and stared.

“So,” he said at last. “If you want to keep your secret, you’d better not let anyone else try a blood test.”

“Okay.”

“You’re very anemic. In fact, there’s a lot of fluid inside you that isn’t even blood.”

“Yeah, those would be cellular detox detergents and some catalyzed oxygen transports.”

“I see. But there’s more than enough DNA in here for
me to establish your identity. And to turn you in to civil support. If that ever should prove necessary.”

“Look, Paul, you don’t have to take the trouble to trace my medical records. We’ve come this far—I’ll just
tell
you who I am.”

Paul forced the mosquito to disgorge on a slip of Chromatograph and folded the stained paper neatly. “No,” he said, “that’s not necessary. In fact, I don’t even think it’s wise. I don’t want to know who you are. That’s not my responsibility. And that’s certainly not what I want from you.”

“What do you want from me?”

He looked her in the eye. “I want you to prove to me that you’re not human yet still an artist.”

S
tuttgart was a big loud town. Big, loud, sticky, and green. A city of gasps, grunts, wheezes, complex organic gurglings. People liked to shout at each other in Stuttgart. People emerged in sudden pedestrian torrents from sphinctering holes in the walls.

The famous towers were frankly cyclopean but their rhythmic billowing made them seem soothingly oceanic, rather than mountainous. She could hear the monster towers breathing with a viscous, tubercular rasping. Their breath galed above the furry streets and smelled of steam and lemons.

“My family helped to build this city,” Paul volunteered, neatly skirting around a large splattered puddle of a substance much like muesli. “My parents were garbage miners.”

“ ‘Were?’ ”

“They gave it up. Garbage was like any other extractive industry. The best and richest landfills played out early. Nowadays garbage mining is mostly left to wildcatters, methane drillers, small-timers. The great garbage fortunes are gone.”

“I see.”

“No need to fret, my mother did very well by her career. I’m a child of privilege.” Paul smiled cheerfully. He was relaxed, he was glad to be home.

“Your parents are Français?”