Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

“Sure,” she said skeptically.

“[Cash isn’t everything in life. We just had sex,]” Ulrich informed her, triumphantly. “[Why didn’t you ask me for money?]”

“I don’t know, I just didn’t feel like I had to.”

“[Maybe you should have asked for cash. You’re an illegal. But me, I’m a European citizen! They’ll feed me, they’ll shelter me, they’ll educate me, they’ll even entertain me, and it’s all free! If I volunteer myself, they’ll even find lovely useful things for me to do, like pulling up weeds and cleaning up forests and other healthy boring nonsense. I don’t have to steal to survive. I’m a thief because I think differently .]”

“Why don’t you resist them a bit more directly, if you’re so wonderfully radical?”

“[I want to rebel in a way that causes them the maximum shame and embarrassment, for my minimum effort and risk! Robbing tourists is optimal.]”

Maya ate her shredded Chinese protein, and looked him over. “I don’t think you really mean any of that, Ulrich. I think that you steal people’s luggage because you’re obsessive. And I think that you hoard all this junk because you can’t bear to part with any of your lovely forbidden trophies.”

Ulrich stabbed his chopsticks into the mix in his carton. A slow flush rose up the fine white milky column of his young male neck. “[That’s very perceptive, darling. That’s just the sort of thing that a motivational counselor in school would tell me. So, you’ve said it to me. So what?]”

“So, there may be some very nice things here, but they’re not the sort of things that I need. That’s what.”

Ulrich crossed his arms. “What is it you think that you need, little mouse?”

“ ‘Better shoes,’ ” she quoted. “ ‘Contact lenses. Cash-cards. Wigs. Skin tint. Some pidgin Deutsch, to get by. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed.’ ” Ulrich winced. “You have a fine memory.”

“In the short term,” she said. “Also, some forged ID would be very nice.”

“[You can forget forging ID,]” he grumbled. “[The bulls beat the forgery problem a long time ago. You’d have better luck forging the moon.]”

“But we could sell off this useless junk, and we could get all the rest of it.”

“Maybe. Probably,” he said in English. “But you are cheating me. You should have told me of your great ambitions. Before we became lovers.”

She said nothing. She was touched that he’d described the two of them as “lovers.” It showed such a sweetly adolescent will to immolation that she could scarcely bear to maneuver him, even though it was pathetically easy to do.

She ate methodically. Her judgmental silence etched its way into him like a slow-acting acid.

“[Well, I’ve been meaning to sell it all anyway,]” Ulrich told her at last, boasting, and lying. “[There are certain ways to do that. There are good ways. Interesting ways. But they’re not easy. They’re risky.]”

“Let me run all the risks,” she told him at once, crushing him with a single blow. “Why should you run any risks? That’s beneath your dignity. I see you in the starring role of the silent criminal mastermind. A European paranoiac criminal genius. Did you ever watch that old silent film, Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler ?”

“[What on earth are you babbling about?]”

“It’s very simple, Ulrich. I like risks. I love risks. I live for risks.”

“That’s marvelous,” Ulrich said. He had become very sad.

She spent two days in Munchen, running around on her stolen tubeticket, mostly favoring a place downtown called the Viktualienmarkt. This ancient shopping locale had been a food market in some preindustrial time, hence the Deutsch business about “viktuals,” but it had long since turned into a dive for kids and tourists, where there was a lot of business transacted in cash. There was still a little food around, like those ubiquitous Munchener “white sausage” concoctions, but it was mostly tourist-trap kitsch and street couture.

The street couture enthralled her. She was dying for decent cosmetics. She’d been making do with the aging caked-up crud she’d found in Ulrich’s stolen bags—there was even a bad wig in one of them—but she needed her own decisions, her own true colors, brighter, faster, looser, stranger. In the Viktualienmarkt there were whole open-air stalls of mysterious Deutschlander cosmetics. Cosmetics for cash. Lipstick— mit lichtreflektierend Farbpigmente . Very modeanzeigen. O so frivol! Radikales Liftings und Intensivpeelings. Der Kampf mit dem Spiegel. O so feminin! Schönheits-cocktail, die beruhigende Feuchtigkeitscreme. Revitalisierende! Die Wissenschaft der Zukunft! Die Eleganze die neue Diva!

Für den Körper , for the body: eau essentielle, le parfum . The perfume was voodoo. She happened to sample a traditional Parisian scent that Mia had once used on a special night sixty years ago. The evocative reek struck her such a blow of rapturous déjà vu that she dropped her bag and almost fell down in the street. Elixier des lebens! Some of it she photographed. Some of it she stole.

On the third day Ulrich piled her and a fat duffel bag of carefully chosen loot into a stolen car. They wove their way out of the city and headed for the outskirts of Stuttgart. She was wearing her jacket and a pair of slightly-too-tight sporty thermal ski pants and chic little stolen hiking boots. She had a new wig, a big curly blond mess. With a nice vivid scarf. Sunglasses. Foundation, blusher, mascara, lashes, lipstick. Nail polish, toenail polish, footwax, nutrient lotion, and a scent that made her feel more like Mia. When she felt sufficiently like Mia she knew that she could work her way out of anything.

The day was chill and drizzly. “[A friend stole this car,]” Ulrich told her. “[He took certain steps with its brain. I could rent us a car legally, of course, but then I considered our destination and cargo. I’m a bit concerned about geographical backtracking should they happen to remotely search the machine’s memory. A stolen and stupid car is safer for us.]”

“ Natürlich. ” He was so funny. She’d gotten used to him in very short order. Having sex with Ulrich was just like losing her virginity. She’d felt just the same mild disdain for the man involved and the same triumphant secret sense of having finally annihilated her childhood. Sex was like sleeping, only better exercise and more fun. It was something you did when you felt like jumbled-up blocks inside. It obliterated loneliness and when you came to on the far side of the experience there was a new sense of ease. Every time they had sex together, she came out of it feeling that much more settled inside her own skin. They’d been together three days so far and it had happened about ten times. Like ten pitons driven into a cliff, climbing high above everything that was old and Mia.

“[I wish I could strip this car completely and drive it with my own hands,]” mused Ulrich, watching Munchen’s old suburban sprawl roll by. “[That must have been a thrilling experience.]”

“Manual driving killed more people than wars.”

“[Oh, they’re always fussing about mortality rates, as if mortality rates were the only thing that mattered in life.… You should find this event rather interesting. There will be real enemies of the polity there.]”

The car found an autobahn and tore down it almost silently, at an inhumanly high rate of speed. The other European cars were streamlined and blisteringly fast, with lines and colors like half-sucked candy lozenges. Quite often you could see their owners snoozing or reading inside. “Does the polity have real enemies?”

“[Of course! Many! Countless hordes! A vast spectrum of refuseniks and dissidents! Amish. Anarchists. Andaman Islanders. Australian aborigines. A certain number of tribal Afghanis. Certain American Indians. And that’s just in the A’s!]”