Holy Fire (42 page)

“All right, I understand it now. It’s enormously clever, isn’t it? Now please go on in.”

He looked at her seriously, for the first time. He seemed to gaze completely through her head.

“Are you angry with me, Maya?”

“No.”

“Have I done something to hurt or offend you? Please be honest.”

“No, I’m not hurting, honestly.”

“Then please don’t refuse me when I ask you to share this experience with us. We’ll walk into the shallow end together. Very gently. I’ll stay very close. All right?”

She sighed. “All right.”

He led her by the hand like a man escorting a duchess to a quadrille. The fluid swarmed with millions of prismatic flakes. Little floating sensors, maybe. Sensors small enough to breathe. The fluid was at blood heat. They waded in. Their legs seemed to dissolve.

Inhaling it was far easier than she had ever imagined. A mouthful of it dissolved on her tongue like sorbet, and when the fluid touched her lungs they reacted with startled pleasure, like sore feet suddenly massaged. Even her eyeballs loved it. The fluid closed over her head. Visibility was very short, no farther than her fingertips. Paul held her hand. Patches of him emerged from the glittering murk: hands, elbows, a flash of naked hip.

They descended slowly, swimming. Down to the white viscous surface of the crème de menthe. It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm.
Paul dug out a double handful and it boiled in his floating hands, indescribably active, like a poem becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.

Someone frog-kicked past her and burrowed headlong into the mass of it, like a skier drowning joyfully in some impossible hot snowbank. Now she was beginning to get the hang of it. It was beyond eros, beyond skin. Skinlessness. Skinless memory. Bloody nostalgia, somatic déjà vu, neural
mono no aware
. Memories she was not allowed to have. From sensations she was not allowed to feel.

Memory came upon her like a hammer full of needles. It was nothing like pain. These were sensations far stronger than the personality. They were experiences that consciousness could not contain. Enormous powers riddling the flesh that the mind could make no sense of. A software crash for the soul.

When she came to, she was flat on her back. Paul was heaving at her ribs, hard flat-handed punches of resuscitation. Fluid gushed from her nose and mouth, and she coughed up a bucketful.

“I blew apart,” she gasped.

“Maya, don’t try to talk.”

“It blew my mind.… ”

He pressed his ear between her breasts and listened to her heartbeat.

“Where is that ambulance?” Benedetta demanded. “My God, it’s been an hour.” She was wrapped in a towel, and shivering.

Paul said, “That was so stupid of me. I’ve read about Neo-Telomeric treatment. They suspend you in a virtuality.… I should have thought that this might happen.” He kept heaving at her lungs.

Maya rolled her head on the floor and tried to look around. There was a dried and glittering snail trail where
Paul had hauled her from the pool across the chilly tiles. In the distance the others clustered, talking anxiously, looking her way. Her feet were up on blocks.

She began trembling violently.

“She’ll have another convulsion if you don’t stop,” Benedetta said.

“It’s better to convulse than to stop breathing,” he said, pushing hard.

Benedetta knelt beside her, her face in anguish. “Stop it, Paul,” she said. “She’s breathing. I think she’s conscious.” She looked up. “Will she die?”

“She almost died there in my arms. When I pulled her from the pool, the pupils of her eyes were two different sizes.”

“Can’t she live ten more years? That’s hardly anything, isn’t it? Just ten years? I know she’ll die and I’ll have to mourn her, but why should she die now?”

“Life is too short,” Paul said. “Life will always be too short.”

“I like to think so,” Benedetta said. “Truly, I hope so. I believe it with all my heart.”

T
he medical cops took her to Praha. It had something to do with a possible network-abuse case against her. Apparently most of the evidence was in Praha.

However, no one at the Access Bureau was willing to arrest her. The Czech Access Bureau cops apparently despised and distrusted Greek medical cops; it seemed to be some kind of weird European interservice rivalry. She did what she could to explain her circumstances. Once the Access Bureau cops down on the first floor began to fully grasp the situation, they became quite annoyed with her. They told her they would get in touch with her, and tried to convince her to leave the premises and go back with her escorts to some other country.

Maya was disgusted by the prospect of yet more time
in a hospital, and refused to go. She asked them to find Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier. With profound reluctance, they said they would do this for her, and they assigned her a number.

She and Brett sat down in an elbow-shaped waiting room on a pair of nasty pink plastic chairs. After an hour, the Helleniki medical escorts carefully checked Maya’s tracking handcuffs and her tiara monitor. They were satisfied by this inspection, so they left. After this, pretty much nothing happened.

“Boy, this is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” said Brett.

“It’s good of you to stick with me through this, Brett. I know it’s boring.”

“No, no,” said Brett, adjusting her spex, “it’s a real privilege to be your personal media coverage. I’m so touched that you had your friends call me, and give me this great opportunity. It’s a fascinating experience. I’ve always been so terrified of the authorities. I had no idea their indifference to us was so complete and so total. They really hold young people in complete contempt.”

“That’s not it. Everyone has explained to them that I’m not a young person. It’s probably because I’m American. I mean, even nowadays, it’s always extra trouble to deal with people from outside the jurisdiction.”

Brett took off her spex and gazed at the floor’s worn and ancient tiling. “I wish I hated you, Mia.”

“Why?” she said.

“Because you’re everything I always wanted to be. It should have been
me
involved with exciting European artifice people. It should have been me up on the catwalk. You stole my life. And now you’ve even made a difference. You’ve even hurt them. I never even dreamed that I could hurt them.”

“I’m sorry,” Maya said.

“I dreamed about doing so much. I never had the nerve to really do much of anything. I could have done something.
Maybe. Don’t you think? You’re pretty, but I’m as pretty as you. You sleep with anybody, well, I’ll sleep with anybody, too. I’m from the same town as you. I’m twenty, but I’m just as smart as you were when you were twenty. Aren’t I?”

“Of course you are.”

“I have some talent. I can make clothes. You can’t make clothes. What is it you have that I don’t have?”

Maya sighed. “Well, here I am sitting in a police station. Maybe you should tell me all about it.”

“You’re not young. That’s it, isn’t it? You stole my life because you’re older than me, and stronger than me. So for you, it was always easy. I mean, maybe you can panic, maybe you can be wracked with guilt, maybe you can even be terrified out of your skin by some stupid wired-up dog. But even when you don’t know who you are, you
still
know who you are. You’re five times older than me, and five times stronger than me. And you just won’t get out of the way.”

“The Tête people are young. They’re young like you.”

“Yeah, and they love you, don’t they? When you were my age, they’d have thought you were a hick and an idiot. Just like they think I’m a hick and an idiot. Because that’s what I am. They’re smart and gifted and really sophisticated, and the very best I can do is lurk outside their gates and watch them and envy them terribly. At my age, you wouldn’t have done any better than me. You would have done a lot worse. You wouldn’t even let your boyfriend take you to Europe. You dumped him and married some biotechnician. You turned into a bureaucrat, Mia.”

Maya closed her eyes and leaned back in the comfortless chair. It was all so true, and all so beside the point. “I wish you wouldn’t call me Mia.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t call me Brett.”

“Well, okay … call me Mia if you have to.”

“I hate it that you don’t even hate me back. You’re just bringing me along because I’m like a little good-luck
charm to you. I’m like your hamster. And you couldn’t even keep your hamster.”

“That hamster creeped me out big-time. And you’re starting to seriously bug me, too.”

“You even
talk
just like some woman from a hundred years ago. Everybody in the whole world must be a complete idiot! I mean, once we really look at you, it’s so obvious! Your hair is terrible. Do you know you have big lines in your neck? I mean, they’re not wrinkles, they’re not allowed to be wrinkles—but boy, they sure aren’t natural.”

“Brett, stop it. You’re not talking any sense. First you say that I’m stealing your life, and then you say you couldn’t do anything with it anyway. So what’s your big problem exactly? Sure, maybe you’d have done a lot better than me, eighty years ago. But hey, you weren’t around then. You can’t romanticize the past to somebody like me. I was
there
in the past, all right? Eighty years ago, we basically lived like savages. We had plagues and revolutions and mass die-off and big financial crashes. People shot each other with guns when I was young. Compared to eighty years ago, this is heaven! And now you’re just abusing me, and not making one bit of sense.”

“But Mia, I can’t make perfect sense like you can. I’m only twenty years old.”

“Oh, don’t cry, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’m twenty years old and I’m an adult. But nothing I do is important. I can’t even get a chance to prove that I’m stupid. I suspect that I probably am, and I could live with that, I swear I could. I’d do something else, I wouldn’t work in artifice, I’d just live like a little animal. I’d make babies and maybe I’d potter around in a garden or something. But I can’t even manage that much, in this big safe lovely world you’ve built for me. I can’t get anywhere at all.”

Two Czech policemen arrived. They weren’t network cops, medical cops, or artifice cops. Apparently they were
just common or garden cops from Praha. They produced phonetic cards from their pink uniforms and read her an extensive list of civil rights in heavily accented English. They then placed her under arrest and booked her into the local legal system. She was charged with immigration violations and working without a permit.

They threw Brett out of the building. Brett yelled and fussed vigorously in English, but the Czech cops were patient and they put up with it and they threw her out and dusted their hands. Maya was stripped, and then dressed in dun prison coveralls. They left the monitors on her wrists and the tiara on her head.

The Praha cops took her a few blocks away to a high-rise, and installed her in a very clean holding tank. There she was able to reflect with relief that she had not yet been charged with: (a) network abuse, (b) medical fraud, (c) complicity in illegal discharge into an urban sewer system, (d) abetting the posthumous escape of an organized criminal, or (e) any number of episodes of transportation toll fraud.

Nobody bothered with her for a couple of days. She was fed on a standard and extremely healthy medical diet. She was allowed to watch television and was given a deck of cards. Robots wheeled by every hour or so and engaged her in a very limited English conversation. The jail was almost entirely deserted, very little used, and therefore extremely quiet. There were a few gypsies somewhere in a decontamination wing; at night she could hear them singing.

On the third day she threw away the tiara. She couldn’t get the bracelets loose, however.

On the fourth day Helene had her brought out for interrogation. Helene had a tiny office on the top floor of the Access Bureau. Maya was astonished at how old and small and shabby Helene’s office was. It was definitely Helene’s own office, because there were neatly framed little hand-drawn originals on the walls that probably were
worth more than the entire building. But Maya herself had worked for decades in offices far better equipped.

Helene was out of mufti and in a very dashing belted pink uniform. Other than that, there was a window and a chair and a desk. And a little white dog. From behind the desk rose a very big brown dog.

Maya stared. “Hello, Plato.”

The dog cocked his ears and said nothing.

“Plato doesn’t talk now,” Helene said. “He’s resting.”

The dog was still rather gaunt, but his coat was glossy and his nose was wet. He wore no clothing, but Helene had given him a lovely new collar. “Plato looks a lot better. I’m glad.”

“Please sit down, Mrs. Ziemann.”

“Why don’t we get on a first-name basis so I won’t have to mangle your beautiful last name with my terrible Français.”

Helene considered this. “Ciao Maya.”

“Ciao Helene.” She sat.

“I’m sorry, but business kept me out of the city a few days.”

“That’s all right. What’s a few days to the likes of us?”

“How good of you to be so public-spirited. I wish you’d shown that much patience under medical surveillance.”

“Touché,” Maya murmured.

Helene said nothing. She gazed dreamily out the office window.

Maya said nothing in return. She examined the peeling lacquer on her fingernails.

Maya was the first to break. “I can wait as long as you can,” Maya blurted, boasting, and lying. “I love your decor.”

“Do you know they spent a hundred thousand marks on your treatment?”

“A hundred thousand, three hundred and twelve.”

“And you took it in your head to dash off for a little European vacation.”

“Would it help if I said I was sorry? Of course I’m not a bit sorry, but if it would help anybody, then I’d act real polite.”

“What
does
make you sorry, Maya?”