Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

Sometimes she would lie flat on the floor and watch the ceiling. The actress’s white cats would come and sit on her chest and knead their paws and look into her face. Animal eyes from a world that knew no words and no symbols.

They were busy outside the palace, too. They had launched strikes at some of the apparently abandoned palaces, and had managed to break into three of them. They had found the physical source of Warshaw’s palace; it was datastriped through a series of servers in the Pacific island of Nauru. They were collating the palace line by line out of the Nauru networks, through Morocco, through Bologna, and eventually bit by bit into the crystalline server in the actress’s room in Praha. Once the altered palace was all in one machine, it would run a lot faster and more efficiently, they believed. Eventually she would be able to walk around with Warshaw’s palace under her own arm. Frozen into a fist-sized chunk of optically etched computational diamond.

One day in June she spent too much time next to the vapor blizzard snowflake calliope, and when she pulled the goggles off she knew she had hurt herself a little. When she closed her eyes, the world had changed on the insides of her eyelids. They had touched the utterly intimate place where she hid when she closed her eyes. There was never true blackness when you closed your eyes while waking. Activity of a sort took place behind closed eyelids. Deprived of light, the visual cortex still worked, and tried in its gray-meat not-blind way to grip at reality. And it made a little world. The intimate world behind human eyelids was gentle formless blues and dim swimming flashbulb purples and optic flecks of dun and brown. But now they had touched it somehow. They had made it a different place. They had made it something new and not Maya.

She called Benedetta. It was trouble to call her, because Benedetta was always tight and guarded now. But she had to talk.

“Benedetta, I made a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

“This isn’t going to work for me.”

“You have to be very patient,” Benedetta said very patiently. “This is a very long-term project.”

“It’s not going to work for me, because I’m not young. I’ve already been young. I was young in a different world. That world in there is your world. You’re building something I can’t even imagine. I can sympathize, and I can even help you build it, but I can’t live there, because I’m not one of you.”

“Of course you’re one of us. Don’t worry if it isn’t having much effect. This is nothing compared to what we’ll do in a hundred years.”

“I won’t live a hundred more years. I’ll never live to see the world beyond the singularity. It’s not that I don’t want to. But I just wasn’t born in time.”

“Maya, don’t give up. Don’t talk like a defeatist. You’re important to our morale.”

“I love you, and I’ll do anything to help you, but you’ll have to manage your own morale. I’m never going back in there again. I’m starting to feel and understand what it really means now. I’ll never be able to stretch that far. I don’t want that, and in my condition I don’t even need that. It might help you with your problems, but it can’t help me with mine. It will only make me worse than dead.”

“Are there things worse than dead, Maya?”

“Oh, my heavens, yes.” She hung up. Then she lay on her back on the bed to examine the featureless ceiling.

Some endless time later, the doorbell rang and roused her.

Maya rose like a sleepwalker, crossed the white fluffy carpet, opened the door.

A large brown dog released the bell. He dropped to all fours.

Then he lunged through the open door. She backed away, stumbling backward, and he stalked into the room.

“You hurt me,” he said.

“Come in, Plato. Where are your nice clothes?”

“You hurt me.”

“You don’t look well. Haven’t you been eating right? You should always watch what you eat. It’s so important to eat properly.”

“You hurt me a lot. ”

Maya backed away toward the kitchen. “Would you like a treat? I have so many treats now.”

“I hurt a lot. I hurt inside my head.” The dog stalked into the room, his matted head hung low. He sniffed at the floor and shook his filthy head. “You did it,” he said.

One of the white cats woke up, stared in amazement, and went into bottle-brush feline terror.

“Kitty, be good!” Maya shouted quickly. “Plato, I’m going to feed you now! Everything will be fine! I’ll make some calls! I’ll take care of you now! We’ll have a nice bath! We’ll get dressed, we’ll go out—”

“There are cats!” the dog howled. He attacked.

Maya screamed. White fur flew. The room exploded with animal hate. He smashed the first cat between his white-fanged jaws and it fell to the floor in convulsions. An alarm began to shriek as the cat began to die.

Maya leapt at the dog as he attacked the second cat. She tried to grab at the matted fur of his neck. He turned with enormous feral speed and ease, and bit her on the shin. It was as if she’d slammed her leg in a fanged iron door. She screamed and fell.

The cat tried hard to climb the wallpaper. The dog seized the cat’s tail with his dreadful grasping paw and threw the cat down and killed him with his teeth.

Maya yanked at the door and ran away.

She had nothing. She had no shoes. She knew the dog would come for her now. Her leg was bleeding and she stank of fear, enough fear to crush the world. She ran. She ran down the hall and into an elevator. She stood there and shook and moaned until the doors closed.

There was nothing else to do now. So she caught a train.

On the first day she stole clothes. This was very difficult now because she was so afraid. It was easy to steal things when you were perfectly happy and confident, because everyone loved pretty girls who were perfectly happy and confident. But nobody loved crazy girls who had funny stiff hair and who limped and who winced and who looked like a junkie and who carried no luggage.

The dog was inside the net. She couldn’t imagine why she’d ever thought a net was a nice thing. A net was a thing to kill fish with. Big pieces of the dog’s gray meat had grown inside the net. He had been haunting the palace, and he had used it to track her down. He was smelling after her, and he was all over the world like a kind of vapor.

The police would find her the moment she stopped running. She was very tired and very guilty and she hurt. Whenever she sat still, blind panic gripped her, and she had to go throw up.

But in the Sinai, it was summer. This wasn’t Europe. She found no release in the sensation of travel now; it felt bad and strange to be traveling. The actress was in a Red Sea resort. It was a place to go when you were very tired. The actress had naturally left strict orders not to be disturbed.

Maya convinced the staff of the spa that she had news of a death in the family. They saw that she was shattered, haunted and struck with grief, so they believed her little story and they pitied her. They were kindly people, in their little Edenic niche of desalination and pampered jungle. Their business was to care for others. They gave her a notebook and told her how to hunt for the actress’s spoor.

The actress was a furry hominid with thick black nails and hairy calloused feet. She was naked and covered in wiry black fur. People could do this sort of thing conveniently if they were willing to activate some of the human junk DNA. It wasn’t a medical activity that lengthened the life span, so it was the sort of thing that one did in a spa.

In certain modern circles it was considered very relaxing to retreat to a prehominid form. A few soothing months of very dim consciousness, with the hunt for food to keep one toned. The prehominid guests at the spa ate fruit and chased and killed small animals with sticks. They wore tracking devices and were feted once a week on carrion.