Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

A sleeping junkie spoke up from his hammock. He was large and bulky, with heavy, threatening brows and four days of beard. “Do you mind?” he said in Irish-tinged English. “Do read aloud, my dears, converse, enjoy yourselves. But don’t squabble and fuss. And especially, don’t weep.”

“Sorry, Kurt, very sorry,” said Antonio. He carried a plastic-sealed pannikin behind the bathroom door. An ancient chain rattled, and water gurgled.

Kurt sat up. “My, our new guest is very lovely.”

“She’s on lacrimogen,” Brett said defensively.

“Women need a man when they’re on lacrimogen,” rumbled Kurt. “Come cuddle up with me, darling. Cry yourself to sleep.”

“I’d never sleep with anyone so dirty,” Maya blurted.

“Women on lacrimogen are also very tactless,” Kurt remarked. He turned away onto his side with a hammocky squeak.

There was silence for a while. Finally, Antonio picked up his book again and began to read aloud again.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Brett whispered to Maya.

“What’s that?”

“Let’s lie down.”

They lay down together in the hammock. Brett put both her arms around Maya’s neck and looked into her eyes. They were both feeling so much pain that there was nothing but deep solace in the gesture. They were like two women who had crawled together from a burning car.

“I’m never going to make it,” Brett said. A tear rolled slowly down her nose and fell onto Maya’s cheek. “I want to do clothes, that’s all I want. But I’ll never make it. I’ll never be as good as Giancarlo Vietti. He’s a hundred and twelve years old. He has every file ever posted on couture, every book ever written. He’s had his own couture house for seventy-five years. He’s a multimillionaire with an enormous staff of people. He has everything, and he’s going to keep it forever. There’s just no way to challenge him.”

“He’ll have to die someday,” Maya said.

“Sure. Maybe. But by that time I’ll be ninety. I’ll never get a chance to really live until I’m ninety. Vietti got to start young, he got to have experience, he got to be king of the world through this whole century. I’ll never have that experience. By the time I’m ninety, I’ll be turned to a stone.”

“If he won’t let you play in his world, then you’ll have to make your own world.”

“That’s what all the vivid people say, but the old people won’t let us. They won’t give us anything but a sandbox. They won’t give us real money or real power or any real chances.” She drew a ragged breath. “And this is the very worst. Even if we had those things, we’d never be as good as they are. Compared to the gerontocrats, we’re trash, we’re kitsch, we’re stupid little amateurs. I could be the most vivid girl in the world and I’d still be just a little girl. The gerontocrats, they’re like ice on a pond. We’re so deep down we’ll never see the honest light of day. By the time our turn comes around, we’ll be so old that we’ll be cold blind fish, worse than Vietti is, a hundred times worse. And then the whole world will turn to ice.”

She burst into wracking sobs.

Kurt sat up again. He was angry this time. “Do you mind? Who asked you here? If you can’t get a grip, get out!”

“That’s why I love junkies!” Brett shouted shrilly, sitting up red-faced and weeping. “Because they go where gerontocrats never go. To wrap up in a fantasy and die. Look at this place! This is what the whole world looks like when you’re not allowed to live!”

“Yeah, okay, that’s enough,” agreed Antonio, carefully putting down his book. “Kurt, throw the little idiot out. Kick her hard into the street, Kurt.”

“You kick her out,” Kurt said, “you let her in.”

There was a sudden violent burst from the bathroom. A blast of explosive compression. The door flew open and banged the wall hard enough to break a hinge.

Everyone stared in amazement. There were gurglings, then a sudden violent burst. Sewage jetted obliquely from the toilet and splattered the ceiling. Then rusty bolts snapped and the commode itself jumped from its concrete moorings and tumbled into the cellar.

A gleaming machine with a hundred thrashing legs came convulsing from the sewer. It was as narrow as a drainpipe and its thick metal head was a sewage-stained mass of bristles and chemical sensors. It grabbed at the doorframe with thick bristle-footed feet, and its hindquarters gouted spastic jets of white chemical foam.

It arched its plated sinuous back and howled like a banshee.

“Don’t run, don’t run,” Kurt shouted, “they punish you more if you run,” but of course everyone ran. They all leapt to their feet and scrambled up the stairs and out the door like a pack of panicked baboons.

Maya ran as well, dashing out into the damp and chilly Roman street. Then she turned and ran back into the squat.

She snatched up her backpack. The sewer guardian was sitting half-buried in an enormous wad of foaming sealant. It turned at her, aimed camera eyes at her, lifted two flanges on its neck, and began flashing red alarm lights. It then said something very ominous in Italiano. Maya turned and fled.

She reached the hotel at five in the morning. It had begun to rain a little, misting and damp.

She tottered into the hotel bar, knees buckling. It would have been lovely to go anywhere else, but she was tired of having no place to go. At least the walk and the lonely ride on an empty Roman trolley had given her something like a plan.

She would wait until Novak woke up, and then she would confess everything to him. Maybe, somehow, he would conquer his disgust and anger and take pity on her. Maybe he would even intercede somehow. And if he didn’t, well, he deserved the chance to turn her in. The chance to avenge himself properly.

The cops in Praha seemed a little odd, so maybe they would be gentler about it than cops in Roma, or cops in Munchen, or cops in San Francisco. And she owed Novak that much; she owed him the truth. She owed the old man the truth after throwing her worthless self into his life.

She sat at a barstool, which whirled beneath her. The world went black for a moment and spun like a carousel. The dull realization struck her that she hadn’t eaten all day. It had never once occurred to her to eat.

The bar was deserted. A bartender emerged from a staff door behind the bar. It was five in the morning, but maybe the doordog had tipped him off. The bartender strode over, a picture of solicitous concern. He was handsome and dapper and an infinitely better human being than she was. The hotel had very nice staffers, Roman people in their forties, kids who made it their business to serve the rich. “Signorina?”

“I need a drink,” Maya groaned.

The bartender smiled gallantly. “A long night, signorina? An unlucky night? May I suggest a triacylglycerol frappé?”

“Great. Make that a double. And don’t spare the saturated fats.”

He brought her a tall frappé and a squat little clear protein chaser and a fluted bowl of Roman finger snacks. The first cold mouthful hit her such a metabolic shock that she almost passed out. But then it warmed inside her and began to seep into her famished bloodstream.

By the time the frappé was half gone, the panic had left her. She was able to sit up straight on the barstool. She stopped trembling, and kicked off her shoes. The bartender wandered tactfully to the end of the bar and engaged in some menu-pecking ritual with a partially disassembled house robot.

She opened her backpack and fetched out her compact and looked at her face and shuddered. She scraped the worst of the damage off with a cream-wipe and touched fresh lipstick on.

A Roman in elegant evening dress wandered into the bar from the direction of the house casino. He tapped on the bar with the edge of a poker chip and ordered caffeine macchiato. She could tell from the brittle look on his powdered and aquiline face that the tables had been cruel to him tonight.