Holy Fire (39 page)

They followed Bruno’s direction. The result was not a normal grave. It was a conical pit with a round rim the size of a manhole cover. Bruno tossed out a few final wedges of dirt, and then explained to them the theory and craft of concealed burials.

The crux of the matter was rapid and complete decomposition. Truly high-speed decomposition caused the corpse to bloat rapidly. This side effect would disturb the surface of the grave. Therefore it was necessary to saw through the ribs up both sides, and to ventilate the intestines.

Bruno opened his valise. He had thoughtfully brought all the proper equipment. It had seen plenty of use. He had an old-fashioned ceramic bone saw, battery driven. He also had some kind of horse-doctoring veterinary hypodermic, with a great spike of a steel needle that could have stitched sheet aluminum.

Bruno now disrobed. He was covered from neck to groin in tattoos. Snakes. Roses. Handguns. Mottos in gutter Français. At least Therese had never lacked for things to read.

Bruno heartily pinched his own goosefleshed hide to show where the needle should go in. Into the thighbones.
Into the meat of the calves. Into the biceps. Into the buttocks. Into the skull. He had a little canister of some highly carnivorous rot bacterium. Eating its way out from the injection sites, the decomposer would cook him down like tallow.

After he was settled nicely into the pit, they would have to shovel the dirt around him and carefully replace the lid of sod. It was best to leave a dome of extra dirt below the lid. This looked suspicious at first, but it would look much better in the long run because of the settling. The leftover dirt had to be scattered in the forest. And of course they must remove his clothes and the tools. Nothing metal to be left around the site. Nothing to attract attention.

“Ask him if he has any metal inside of him,” Maya said. “Dental work, anything like that?”

“He says he’s not old enough to have dental work made of metal,” Therese translated. “He says the only thing on him made of solid iron is his manhood.” She began to cry.

Bruno took two canisters the size of his thumbs from the pockets of his discarded pants. He then climbed, naked and peaceable, into his grave.

He stood there, leaned back casually, and shook the first of the thumb-sized objects in his fist. He sprayed a fine layer of black paint over his right hand. He beckoned to Therese, calling out something in the argot. She came over, trudging, reluctant, afraid. He gripped her hand gently with the black-painted hand, shook her hand firmly, pulled her close, whispered, kissed her.

Then he called Maya over. He kissed her as well. A long and deep and contemplative and very bitter kiss. He trapped the nape of her neck with his left hand. He didn’t touch her with the painted black hand.

At last he released her. Maya gasped for breath, stumbled back, and almost slid into the pit with him. Bruno watched Therese for a moment. He seemed to be fighting
tears. Therese was sprawled on the ground, watching him, sobbing bitterly.

He then picked up the second object, an inhaler. He stuck the muzzle into his mouth, squeezed the trigger, and sucked in a breath. He tossed the thing aside like a dead cigar, and went into instant convulsions. He was dead in five seconds.

“Get it off!” Therese screamed. “Get it off me, get it off!” She was waving her black-stained hand, clamping her wrist left-handed.

Maya began scrubbing the painted hand with Bruno’s discarded jacket. “What is it?”

“Lacrimogen!”

“Oh my goodness.” She scrubbed harder, but rather more carefully.

“Oh, I loved him so much,” Therese howled, rocketing into hysterical grief. “Oh, I thought he’d beat me again and have sex with me in the grave. I never thought he’d give me the black hand. I wish I was dead.” She broke into frantic Deutsch. “[Where is the poison? Spray it in my mouth. No, let me kiss him, there must be poison on his tongue to kill a hundred women.]”

She began crawling toward the lip of the grave, exploding with drug-propelled grief. Maya caught her by the ankle, and hauled her back. “Stay away from him, I mean it. Get away from him, and keep away. I’m going to cut him up now.”

“[Maya, how can you! How can you saw him up and make him rot? It’s not some piece of meat, it’s Bruno!]”

“I’m sorry, darling, but once you’ve lived through the great plagues like I have, you really do learn that when people are dead, they’re just plain dead.” She could have bitten her tongue for that confession, but it didn’t matter; Therese was too far gone, beyond listening. Therese began to howl till the woods rang, great horrid wails of primal bereavement and anguish.

Maya found a sheet of alcionage in Therese’s backpack. It was pretty mild stuff, alcionage, so she reeled off six of them. Therese made no resistance when Maya stickered her neck. The impetus of her grief kept her rocking and moaning in a fetal position, clutching her tainted hand. Then the tranquilizer sandbagged her.

Maya fetched out the last of a mineralka and gave Therese’s hand a thorough wet scrubbing. It was nasty stuff, that spray-on lacrimogen. You could murder somebody with it easily. She could hardly imagine a defter way to kill.

She walked over to the lip of the grave. Bruno was still dead. A little more dead, if anything. She closed his eyes for him. Then she filled the hypodermic.

“Well, big guy,” she told him, “rest easy. You’ve found yourself a little girl who is truly happy to do this.”

It was dark by the time she was done. It had been a very nasty job. It was like some macabre parody of medical practice. But it was enough like medical practice that it felt like honest work.

Therese had recovered. Therese was young and strong. Young people could whip their way through more moods in a day than old people managed in a month. Therese tottered back with Maya to the car.

“Where’s his suitcase?” Therese said, red-eyed and trembling.

“I put it in the boot with all the clothes and tools.”

“Get it out for me.”

Therese searched through Bruno’s case with frantic eagerness. She came up with a long rectangular tray of gray metalglass alloy. She opened it.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, looking into it with awestruck joy. “I was sure he was going to cheat me.”

“I think he meant to kill you.”

“No, he didn’t. That was only a little bit of spray. He just wanted a woman to cry for him. I feel better now that I cried so much. I feel all right. I’ll never cry for him
anymore ever again. Look, Maya, look what he gave me. Look at my wonderful heirloom from my dead old man.” She showed her the little hinged tray.

It was lined in black velvet and held two dozen little spotted seashells.

“Seashells?” Maya said.

“Cowries,” Therese said. “I’m rich!” She carefully shut the tray, then slammed the suitcase shut and kicked it into the boot. “Let’s go now,” she said, clutching the tray with both hands. “Let’s go get a drink. I cried so much, and I’m so thirsty. Oh, I can’t believe I’ve really done this.” She opened the door and climbed inside.

They drove away with a rattle and crunch of brush. Suddenly Therese gazed over her shoulder, and laughed. “I can’t believe it, but I won. I’m getting away with it. Now life will be so different for me.”

“A box of little seashells,” Maya mused. The car threaded its way through the darkened woodlands, heading for an autobahn.

“It’s something that’s not trash. The world is full of trash now,” Therese said, settling back into her seat. “Virtualities and fakes. We’ve turned everything into trash. Diamonds and jewels are cheap. Coins, anyone can forge coins now. Stamps, they’re so easy to forge, it’s a laugh. Money is nothing but ones and zeroes. But Maya—
seashells
! Nobody can forge seashells.”

“Maybe those are just cheap fake trashy seashells.”

Therese opened the tray again, stabbed with anxiety. Then she smiled. “No, no. Look at these growth marks, look at this mottling. Only years and years of organic process can create a real seashell. Cowries are much too complex to be faked. These are
real
. Extinct species! So very rare! There will never be any more, ever. They’re worth a fortune! So much—so much that I can do everything now.”

“So what are you going to do with them, exactly?”

“I’m going to grow up, of course! I can leave that little
dump in the Viktualienmarkt. I can start a real store. In a real building, a high-rise! For real customers who will pay me real money. I’m very young to be a store owner, but with this in my hands, I can do it. I can get old people to work for me. I’ll hire my own accountant, and my own business lawyer. I’ll start over legally. Everything above-board. Real business books, and I’ll pay taxes!”

“Gosh, that sounds lovely.”

“It’s my dream come true. Real couture people will pay attention to me now. I’ll carry real lines of clothing from professional designers. No more of this kid stuff. Kid stuff, kid stuff, kid stuff, oh, truly I’m so, so sick of the vivid life.”

“I hope you’ll stay out of trouble with Bruno’s friends from now on.”

“Of course I will,” Therese said. “No matter what you think about the polity, well … they are making the world
better
. They really are! Bruno’s gangsters—well, the police have got them. It’s the medical thing, and the money, and the surveillance.… It’s working. The bad boys are dying from it. Every year, less and less of them. The criminal classes are dying. They’re very old and they were very strong for a long time but they are going away now, like a disease. There is something tragic there, but … but it’s a great political accomplishment.”

Maya sighed wearily. “Maybe I shouldn’t have stickered you with quite so many tranquilizers.”

“Don’t say that. It’s not true. Can’t you see how happy I am? You should be happy with me.” She looked into Maya’s face. “What changed you so much, Maya? Why aren’t you cheerful like you were in Munchen?”

“You’re having mood swings, darling. Try not to talk so much. Let’s get some rest. I’m very tired.”

Therese shrank back in her seat. “Of course you’re very tired. You were so brave. I’m sorry, Maya.… Thank you so much.”

They were silent a long time. Therese wept a little more. Finally she fell asleep.

In the passing lights of rural Europe, Therese’s face was a picture of peace. “You’re on the other side now,” Maya told her gently. “Now you’re a perfect little bourgeoise. I can’t believe it really works like this. I can’t believe it works so well. I let a world like this happen. I did it, it was my fault, this was just the kind of world I wanted. I can’t believe you’re so anxious to live in a world that I couldn’t stand to live in for one moment longer. I have to be an outlaw just to live and breathe, and now there’s no way back for me. And the Widow is onto me now. She knows. I just know that she knows. She’d arrest me right now, except that she’s patient and gentle. You know who the Widow is?”

The sleeping Therese hugged her tray a little closer.

“Don’t ever find out,” Maya said.

R
eworking the palace presented considerable difficulties. Foremost among them was the difficult fact that something was alive inside it. It had taken Benedetta and her friends quite a while to track down this troubling presence. It was Martin’s dog. Plato was loose in the memory palace.

Martin had linked the dog’s organic brain directly to his virtuality. This was not a medical process approved for human beings, for many good reasons. Neural activity was an emergent and highly nonlinear phenomenon. Brains grew, they metabolized from a physical organic substrate. When software tried to grow in tandem with a brain, the result was never a smooth symbiosis of thought and computation. It was usually a buzzing, blooming mess. Left alone it became artificial insanity.

Benedetta showed her the hidden wing of the palace where the dog’s brain had been at work. The cyborganic
mélange had grown for years in knobs and layers, immense frottages and glittering precipitates, a maze like coral and oatmeal. The neural augmentation wasn’t dead yet, but they had found the links to the dog’s wetware, and blocked them off. There were monster pearls in it here and there, massive spinning nodules like bad dreams that would never melt.

Since Warshaw’s death, the dog’s mental processes had broken through the floors in five places. The abandoned mentality jetted through the broken floors like sea urchins.

“What does this look like in code?” Maya said.

“Oh, it’s such wonderful code. You couldn’t parse this code in a million years.”

“Do you really think it was helping him think?”

“I don’t think dogs think the way we think, but this is definitely mammalian cognitive processing. Warshaw had his palace netlinked into the dog’s head. Very sophisticated for the time. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the stunts they work on lab animals nowadays. But for the 2060s, this was broad bandwidth and very rapid baud rate. There must be antennas woven all through the dog’s spine.”

“Why?”

“We speculate that he meant to hide some data inside the dog. Possibly move the whole palace into the dog’s nervous system. That sort of visionary nonsense was very big in the 2060s. People believed anything in those days. They romanticized computers and mysticized virtualities. There was a lot of weird experimentation. They thought anything was possible, and they didn’t have much sense. But Warshaw was no programmer. He was just old and rich. And reckless.”

“Is the dog still on-line in here?”

“That’s not the way to phrase it, Maya. The dog never had little doggy gloves or little doggy goggles. He never experienced the palace as a palace at all, he just infested it. Or it infested him.… Maybe Warshaw thought he could
live in here as well, someday. Pull up all his physical traces and vanish into textures of pure media. People thought that was possible, until they tried it a bit, and learned how hard it was. Warshaw did a silly movie about that once.”

“You’ve seen Martin Warshaw’s movies? Really?”

“We have made it our business to dig them up.”

“Do you like Warshaw’s movies?”

“He was a primitive.”

“This doesn’t look primitive to me.”