Holy Fire (3 page)

“The polity. The global polity, it’s like a government run by your grandmother. A wise and kindly little old lady with a plateful of cookies and a headsman’s ax.”

Mia said nothing. She herself had a treatment rating in the ninety-eighth percentile. She was sure that Martin must know this stark and all-important fact about her life. The polity was a government run by, and for the benefit of, people just like herself.

“Martin, tell me about this palace. How can I access it?”

He took her hand, turned it palm up, and steadied it. He traced a touchscreen gesture with a trailing fingertip against her palm. Mia was awash in mnemonic now, and in his withered grip around her wrist she felt an ashen remnant of what had once been, many decades ago, a powerful eroticism. A lover’s touch, rich with youth and heat.

He released her. “Can you remember that passtouch?”

“I’ll remember it. The mnemonic will help me.” She was determined not to nervously rub the wrist that he had gripped. “I like those old gestural systems, I used to use them all the time.”

He handed her his slate. “Here. Set the palace to your thumbprint. No, Mia, the left hand. That one’s better, not on so many records.”

She hesitated. “Why should that bother me?”

“I’ve just given you the key to a fortress. You and I deserve our privacy, don’t we? We both know what life is
like nowadays. People like you and me, we’re a lot older than the government is. We can even remember when governments weren’t honest.”

She pressed her left thumb to the slate. “Thank you, Martin. I’m sure your palace is a very great gift.”

“Greater than you know. It can help you with another matter, too.”

“What’s that?”

“My dog.”

She was silent.

“You don’t want poor Plato,” he said, downcast.

She said nothing.

He sighed. “I suppose I should have sold him,” he said. “But that thought was so awful. Like selling a child. I never had a child.… He suffered so much on my behalf, and he’s been through so many changes.… I thought of everyone I knew, but there was no one … among those very few people still alive that I call my friends.… No one I could really trust to take proper care of him.”

“Why me, though? You scarcely know me, these days.”

“Of course I know you,” he muttered. “I know that you’re very careful.… You were the biggest mistake I ever made. Or the biggest mistake that I never made. The regret’s much the same, either way.” He looked up, cajoling her. “Plato never asks for much. He’d be grateful for whatever you gave him. He needs someone. I don’t know what he’ll do, once I’m dead. I don’t know how he’ll take it. He’s so smart, and it costs him so much pain to think.”

“Martin, I’m very flattered that you should choose me, but that’s too much to ask. You just can’t ask that of me.”

“I know that it’s a great deal to ask. But the palace will help you, there are useful resources in there. Can’t you try him for a while? He’s no longer a mere animal. I haven’t allowed him that luxury. You could try for just a while, couldn’t you?” He paused. “Mia, I do know you. I’ve seen your records, and I know more about you than you
might imagine. I never forgot you, never. Now, I think that Plato might help you.”

She said nothing. Her heart was beating quickly and oddly and there was a faint whining ring of tinnitus in her left ear. At moments like this she knew with terrible certainty that she was truly old.

“He’s not a monster. He’s just very different, very advanced. He’s worth a lot of money. If you couldn’t bear having him around, you could sell him.”

“I can’t! I won’t!”

“I see. That’s your final word?” A long judgmental moment passed between them, full of intimacy and bitterness. “You can see what I’m like, then, can’t you? Seventy years between the two of us—they’re like one day. I haven’t changed at all. Not me—and not you, either.”

“Martin, I have to be honest with you. It’s just …” She glanced at the dog, lying peacefully in the corner with his narrow canine head on his crossed paws. Then, horrifyingly against her will, the truth began pouring out of her, in jerks. “I don’t have any kind of pets. Never. My life’s not like that anymore. I live alone. I had a family once, I had a husband and a daughter, but they’re gone from my life now and I don’t talk to them. I have a career, Martin, I have a good job in medical research administration. That’s my responsibility, and that’s what I do. I look at screens and I work in economic spaces and I study grant procedures and I weigh results from research programs. I’m a functionary.”

She drew a ragged breath. “I walk in the parks, and I study the news every night, and I always vote. Sometimes I look at old films. But that’s it, that’s everything, that’s how I live. I’m the kind of person you can’t stand, and that you couldn’t ever stand.” She was weeping openly now.

He looked at her with pity. “An animal companion could help you, though. I know that he’s helped me. We owe something to animals, you know. We’ve jumped over
the walls of the human condition by climbing on the backs of animals. We’re obliged to our animals.”

“An animal can’t help me. I don’t need any attachments.”

“Take the chance. Change your life a little. People have to take some chances, Mia. You’re not living, if you don’t take some chances.”

“No, I won’t. I know you think this might be good for me, but you’re wrong, it’s not good. I can’t do it. I’m not that kind of person. Stop asking me.”

He laughed. “I can’t believe that you just said that. That’s exactly what you said the very last time we argued—those were your very words!” He shook his head. “All right, all right.… I always ask too much of you, don’t I? It was stupid of me to ask this. I’m full of meddlesome plans for other people who still have lives to live. You don’t like to take chances. I know that. You were always careful, and you were wiser and smarter than me. Bad luck to you that the two of us ever met.”

An empty silence stretched between them. A little foretaste of the silence of death.

He roused himself. “Tell me that you forgive me.”

“I do forgive you, Martin. I forgive you everything. I’m sorry I wasn’t right for you. I never could do what you needed from me. I never gave you what you asked from me. Please forgive me for all that, that was my fault.”

He accepted this. She could see from the flushed look on his pallid face that he’d reached some long-sought apotheosis. He’d said everything that he wanted to say to her. His life was over now. He’d wound it up, packed it away.

“Go your way, darling,” he told her gently. “Someone that I used to be truly loved someone you used to be once. Try not to forget me.”

The dog did not rise to see her to the door. She left Martin’s apartment, numbly retrieving her purse and coat. She walked the vivid summer brightness of the halls. She took an elevator, she entered the chill of the autumnal city.
She reentered the thin but very real texture of her thin but very real life. She stepped into the first taxi she found, and she went back home.

M
ercedes was in the apartment, cleaning the bathroom. Mercedes came into the front room, carrying her mop and her septic sampling equipment. Mercedes wore her tidy civil-support uniform, baby blue jacket with red epaulets, slacks, and discreetly foam-soled shoes. Mercedes had fifteen elderly women on her civil-support rounds and came by twice a week to tidy up, usually in Mia’s absence. Mercedes called her civil-support work “housekeeping,” because that was a kindlier description than “social worker,” “health inspector,” or “police spy.”

“What’s happened to you?” Mercedes said in surprise, setting down her mop and her bucket of gel. “I thought you were at work.”

“I had a bad experience. A friend is dying tonight.”

Mercedes slid immediately into a role of professional sympathy. She took Mia’s coat. “Sit down, Mia. I’ll make a tincture.”

“I don’t want a tincture,” Mia said wearily, sitting at the corrugated, lacquered cardboard of her kitchen table. “He made me take a mnemonic. I’m still on it, it’s nasty.”

“What kind?” said Mercedes, tugging off her hairnet and slipping it into her jacket.

“Enkephalokrylline, two hundred fifty micrograms.”

“Oh, that’s just a nothing little mnemonic.” Mercedes fluffed her dark hair. “Have a tincture.”

“I’ll have a mineral water.”

Mercedes rolled Mia’s tincture set to the side of the table and sat on a kitchen stool. She decanted half a liter of distilled water, and methodically set about selecting and crushing dainty little wafers of mineral supplement. Mia’s tincture set was by far the most elaborate and most expensive kitchen fixture that Mia owned. Mia didn’t consider
herself a possessive and materialistic person, but she made exceptions for tinctures. Also—to be fair—she was fond of decent clothes. She also made certain exceptions for the cardboard covers of old twentieth-century video-game and CD-ROM products. Mia had a minor weakness for antique paper ephemera.

“I suppose I’d better talk about it,” Mia said. “If I don’t talk to somebody about it, I won’t sleep tonight. I have a checkup in three days and if I don’t sleep tonight it will show.”

Mercedes looked up brightly. “You can talk to me! Of course you can tell me about it.”

“Do you have to put it all in your dossier?”

Mercedes looked wounded. “Of course I have to put it in the dossier. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t keep up my dossiers.” She fed a hissing gush of bubbles into the mineral water. “Mia, you’ve known me for fifteen years. You can trust me. Civil-support people love it when their clients talk. What else are we here for?”

Mia leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table. “I knew this man seventy years ago,” she said. “He was my boyfriend then. He kept telling me today that we haven’t changed, but of course we’ve changed. We’ve changed beyond recognition. He’s consumed himself. And me—seventy years ago, I was a young woman. I was a girl, I was his girl. I’m not a girl anymore. Nowadays I’m someone who used to be a woman.”

“That’s kind of an odd way to put it.”

“It’s the truth. I’m not his woman, I haven’t been anyone’s woman for a long time. I don’t have lovers. I don’t love anyone. I don’t look after anyone. I don’t kiss anyone, I don’t hug anyone, I don’t cheer anyone up. I don’t have a family. I don’t have hot flashes, I don’t have monthlies. I’m a postsexual person, I’m a postwomanly person. I’m a crone. I’m a late-twenty-first-century techno-crone.”

“You look like a woman to me.”

“I dress like a woman. That’s all very calculated and deliberate.”

“I know what you mean,” Mercedes admitted. “I’m sixty-five. Pretty much past it. Not too sorry to see it go. Being a woman—the really hard part of womanhood—it’s not the sort of life you’d wish on a friend.”

“It was very wearing,” Mia said. “He was very polite about it, but just being near him exhausted me. The worst part was that there’s no clean break between me and my earlier life. My romantic life, my sexual life. I could remember how exciting it had been. How flattering. Being pursued by some large energetic insistent good-looking boy. How it felt when I let him catch me. The mnemonic made it all a lot worse.”

“Most people would say that clean breaks are bad for you. That you have to come to terms with that aspect of your former life, and integrate it so you can put it to rest and get beyond it.”

Therapeutic suggestions irritated Mia in direct ratio to their tact. “I did have to come to terms with my earlier life today. I’m not a bit happier for it.”

“Are you sorry he’s dying? Are you grieving?”

“I’m a little sorry.” Mia sipped the mineral water. “I wouldn’t call this grief. It’s too thin for grief.” The water felt good. Very simple things conveyed most of the pleasure in her life. “I wept some today. It felt really bad to cry. I haven’t wept in five years.” She touched her swollen eyes. “It feels like there’s membrane damage.”

“Was there a bequest?”

“No,” Mia lied smoothly.

“There’s always some kind of bequest,” Mercedes prodded.

Mia paused. “There was one, but I refused it. He had a postcanine dog.”

“I knew it,” Mercedes said. “It’s the pet, or the house. If they die really young, then maybe they worry about
their kid. People never invite you to a deathbed scene unless they want you to tidy up for them somehow.”

“Maybe they just want
you
to tidy up, Mercedes.”

Mercedes shrugged. “I tidy up. Tidiness is my life.” Mercedes was always very patient. “I can see there’s something else you want to get off your chest. What is it?”

“Nothing, not really anything.”

“You just don’t want to tell me yet, Mia. You might as well tell me about it now. While you’re still in the mood.”

Mia stared at her. “You don’t have to tidy me up quite so thoroughly. I’m perfectly all right. I had a shock, but I’m not going to do anything strange.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that, Mia. The situation is very strange. The world is extremely strange now. You live all alone and you don’t have people you can trust to advise you and prop you up. Except for your work, you’re not fulfilling any social roles. You could go off-kilter real easily.”

“When have you ever known me to go off-kilter?”

“Mia, you’re smarter than me, and you’re older than me, and you’re a lot richer than I am, but you’re not the only person like you in the world. I know a lot of people just like you. People like you are brittle.”

Mercedes waved her blue-jacketed arm around the apartment. “This stuff you’ve been calling your life all these years, this isn’t normality. It isn’t safety, either. It’s just routine. Routine is not normality. You’re not allowed any so-called normality. There’s no such thing as a genuine normality for a ninety-four-year-old posthuman being. Life extension is just not a natural state of affairs, and it’s never going to be natural, and you can’t ever make it natural. That’s your reality. My reality too. And that’s why the polity sends me around here twice a week. To look around and tidy up and listen to you.”

Mia said nothing.

“Go on and be that way,” Mercedes told her. “I’m very
sorry you had a hard time today. A friend’s death can hit us harder than we think. Even dull people can’t keep the same routine forever, and you’re not dull. You’re just very guarded, and very possessive of an old-fashioned emotional privacy that no one really needs nowadays.”