Holy Fire

by Bruce Sterling

  She tried to sleep in Mia’s bed. It was a nasty little old person’s bunk with a big ugly oxygen shroud. The mattress had been designed to do peculiar things in the way of firm spinal support. She didn’t want her spine supported anymore, and in any case it was a very different kind of spine now. Plus her monitors itched and crunched against the sheets. She crawled out into the front room and wrapped up in a blanket on the floor.

  The hamster, which was mostly nocturnal, had come awake and was gnawing vigorously on the bars of its cage. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. In the darkness. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

  Around midnight, something snapped. She got up, put on her underwear, kicked on her Mia slacks. Too short, they showed her ankles. Put on a Mia brassiere. A total joke, this brassiere had no connection to reality. Put on a Mia pullover. Found a really nice red jacket in the closet. The jacket fit great. Found Mia shoes that pinched a little. Found a purse. Too small. Found a big bag. Put some underwear in the bag. Put in some lipstick. A comb, a brush, a razor. Sunglasses. A book to read on the way. Some socks. Some mascara, some eyeliner. A toothbrush.

  Her netlink began ringing urgently. She’d had it with the netlink.

  “They have got to be kidding,” she announced to the empty room. “This is not my place. This is nowhere. I can’t live like this. This isn’t living. I am out of here.” She walked out of her front door and slammed it.

  She hesitated on the landing, then turned, opened the door, went back in. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Come on, you stupid thing.” She opened the cage, grabbed the hamster. “Come on, you can come, too.”

  She threw the tiara off just outside the apartment. A hospital van arrived, flashing its way up the street and parking outside her building. She ditched the earrings and all ten finger rings on her way up Parnassus Avenue. While she waited for a taxi she slipped out of her shoes and socks and got rid of the nasty toe gadgets. The skin under there was all pale and sticky.

  The taxi arrived.

  Once in the taxi she shimmied out of her slacks and ditched the knee buckles and a large gluey complement of obnoxious stick-on patches. Out the window with them. On the train on the way to the airport she went to the ladies’ and shredded her way out of the breastplate, and about a dozen more patches. The patches were a big itchy pain and when they were gone her morale began to soar.

  She arrived at the airport. The black tarmac was full of glowing airplanes. They had a lovely way of flexing their wings and simply jumping into the chill night air when they wanted to take off. You could see people moving inside the airplanes because the hulls were gossamer. Some people had clicked on their reading lights but a lot of the people onboard were just slouching back into their beanbags and enjoying the night sky through the fuselage. Or sleeping, because this was a red-eye flight to Europe. It was all very quiet and beautiful. There was nothing to it really.

  She walked to a departure stairs and worked her way up. The stewardess spoke to her in Deutsch as she entered the aircraft. She opened her bag, pulled out the hamster, showed the hamster to the stewardess, put the hamster back in. Then she spun on her heel and walked with perfect joy and confidence right down the aisle. The stewardess didn’t do a thing.

  She chose a nice brown beanbag in business class and lay down. Then a steward brought her a nice hot frappé.

  At three in the morning the aircraft took off and she finally fell asleep.

  When she woke up again it was eight o’clock in the morning, February 10, 2096. She was in Frankfurt.

  She deplaned and wandered around the Frankfurt airport, lost and sticky eyed and blissfully without plans. She didn’t have any money. No cashcard, no credit. No ID. The civil-support people from the flight were deliberately checking in with the local authorities, but the Deutschland authorities didn’t bother to go looking for you if you didn’t go looking for them.

  She had some water from a fountain and went to a bathroom and washed her face and hands and changed her underwear and her socks. Her face didn’t seem to need much makeup anymore, but she direly missed her makeup. Walking around without makeup made her feel far more anxious than any mere lack of ID.

  She emerged from the bathroom and walked along with the other people so that no one would notice her.

  The crowd led her through about a million glass-fronted halls and kiosks, down escalators into an ivygrown train station. It seemed that Deutschlanders were really fond of ivy, especially if the ivy was growing really deep underground where ivy basically had no business growing.

  There was a young European girl down there with very short hair and a bright red jacket. Since she also had very short hair and a bright red jacket, she thought it would be clever to follow this young girl and do as she did. This was a very wise plan, as the girl knew just where to go. The girl fetched biscuits in a paper bag from a Deutschlander civil-support kiosk. So she fetched a bag, too. She didn’t have to pay. The biscuits were really good. She could feel the vitamin-stuffed government-subsidized nontoxic goodness racing through her grateful innards.

  Once she’d wolfed down half a dozen biscuits and had some more water, she began to feel quite cozy and pleased with herself. She gave some crumbs to the hamster.

  Inside the train station hall twelve guys in big woven ponchos and flat black hats were playing Andean folk music on pipes and guitars. These South American guys had set up a card-reader on a post, but you didn’t have to pay them if you didn’t want to. You could just sit and listen to their free music. There were plenty of free beanbags around to lie in, and there was free water, and plenty of free biscuits, and a very nice free ladies’ room. As far as she could figure it, there was no reason why she couldn’t just spend the rest of her life right here in the good old Frankfurt train station.

  It was warm and cozy, and just watching all the different European people wander past with their luggage was endlessly fascinating. She felt a bit conspicuous sitting there in her public beanbag publicly nibbling her public biscuits, but she wasn’t hurting anybody. In fact, everybody who looked at her obviously thought she was great. The Deutschland people smiled at her. Men especially smiled at her quite a lot. As she killed an hour, she saw ten or twelve little kids in the crowd. Even the little kids smiled at her.

  Everybody thinking they had something important to do. How pathetically amusing. Why couldn’t they just sit still and enjoy life? What was their big hurry? All this aimless running around … They were all gonna live a million years—wasn’t that the point of everything? You could just lie still in a beanbag and be at peace with the universe, perfectly happy.

  She enjoyed this thoroughly, for about an hour and a half. Then she became indifferent. Openly bored. Restless. Agitated, and finally unable to sit still a moment longer. Besides, the guys from the Andes had begun to repeat the same songs again, and that whistle thing they were blowing was really irritating. She got up and chose herself a train like everybody else was doing.

  Inside the train it was noisy. With talk. The train itself didn’t make any noise at all, but the people aboard were chattering and eating noodles and drinking big malts. It was an extremely fast train and as silent as an eel. It ran on tracks but it didn’t touch them. She put her bag under the seat and wished that she could understand Deutsch.

  When she picked her bag up, she found the neck of the bag yawning open, and realized that her hamster had escaped. The nasty little hairbug had finally made a break for it, either inside the train, or back at the Frankfurt station. At first she was a little upset, but then she realized how funny it was. Hamster on the loose! Mass panic grips Europe! Well, good-bye, good riddance, and good luck, postrodent! No hard feelings, okay?

  She got off the train at Munchen because she liked the name of the city. Once it had been Munich or Muenchen or Moenchen or even München, but the All-European Orthographic Reformation had made it into Munchen. Munchen, Munchen, Munchen. Somebody had said that Stuttgart was the greatest city for the arts in the whole world, but Stuttgart wasn’t half so pr
etty a name as Munchen.

  She knew she would love Munchen as soon as she discovered that they were giving away pretzels at the kiosks. Not little American dry stick pretzels with iodized salt either, but big warm bready pretzels that probably had traces of actual wheat and yeast in them. In the Munchen station there were about a hundred kids from all over Europe lined up laughing for these big bracelet-sized Munchen pretzels. The Bavarian civil-support bakery people had very smug looks about this situation. You could just tell they had some kind of ulterior motive.

  She gleefully munched her two giant pretzels and drank more water and then she found another and even prettier girl, with long blond hair and a blue velvet coat, and followed her. And that was how she ended up in the Marienplatz.

  There was a tubestation outlet in the platz, and a gushing fountain with a circular stone railing, and a big marble column with four bronze cherubs skewering devils. A gilded Virgin Mary stood at the column’s top, doing a kind of civil reconnaissance check. There was a telepresence site in one corner, and a bunch of fashion stores with glowing and moving mannequin displays. Lots of spindly Euro pedal-bikes parked around. There were all kinds of people wandering the Marienplatz. Tourists from all over the world. Especially Indonesians.

  She leaned against the edge of the fountain railing, like the other kids in the platz. The fountain had three muscular bronze statues pouring eternal streams of water from big bronze buckets. The sun was setting already, and it was plenty cold. All the kids had flushed cheeks and windblown hair and they were in jackets and colored neck wrappings and odd-looking Euro-kid boots.

  Every once in a while a pair of big German-shepherd police dogs would trot by the platz, and the kids would stop talking and tighten up a little.

  The Marienplatz was a beautiful plaza. She liked the way the Muncheners had taken good care of their church: peaked arches, balconies, fishy-looking stone Christian saints transcending the flesh. She especially liked the colorful medieval wooden robots up in the clock tower.

  Up on the tower’s steeple, dangling by their heels high above the platz, were three naked Catholics with their arms folded in prayer. They were doing a penitential performance ritual. Not calling any outrageous attention to themselves or anything, in fact it was pretty hard to notice the Catholics up there, dangling naked by the ridged teeth of the stone Gothic spire. They were exposing the flesh to the wind and the cold, very pious and dedicated, and obviously higher than kites.

  Someone spoke to her, right at her elbow. She turned, looking away from the steeple penitents. “What?” she said.

  And there stood a young good-looking guy in a sheepskin jacket and sheepskin pants—basically, in fact, the guy was wearing an entire sheep, included the tanned and eyeless head, which was part of his jacket lapel. He was white and woolly-curly all over. But he had black slicked-back hair, which went well with his rather slicked-back forehead and his sloping black eyebrows. “Ah, English,” he said. “No problem, I speak English.”

  “You do? Good. Hi!”

  “Hi. From where are you coming?”

  “California.”

  “Just come to Munchen today?”

  “Ja.”

  He smiled. “What’s your name?”

  “Maya.”

  “I’m Ulrich. Welcome to my beautiful city. So you’re all alone, no parents, no boyfriend? You are standing here in the Marienplatz two hours, you don’t meet anybody, you don’t do anything.” He laughed. “Are you lost?”

  “I don’t have to go anywhere in particular, I’m just passing through.”

  “You are lost.”

  “Well,” Maya said, “maybe I am a little lost. But at least I haven’t been spying on other people for two whole hours, like you have.”

  Ulrich smiled slowly, swung a big brown backpack off his shoulders, and set it at his feet. “How could I help but to watch such a beautiful woman?”

  Maya felt her eyes widen. “You really think so? Oh, dear …”

  “Yes, yes! I can’t be the first man to tell you this news! You’re lovely. You’re beautiful! You’re cute like a big rabbit.”

  “I bet that sounds really nice in Deutsch, Ulrich, but …”

  “I’m sure I can help you. Where’s your hotel?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Well, where’s your luggage, then?”

  She lifted her handbag.

  “No luggage. No hotel. No place to go. No parents, no boyfriend. You got any money?”

  “No.”

  “How about an ID? I hope you have your ID.”

  “Especially no ID.”

  “So. Then you are a runaway.” Ulrich thought this over, with evident glee. “Well, I have good news for you, Miss Maya the Runaway. You’re not the only runaway to come to Munchen.”

  “I was kind of thinking of taking the train back to Frankfurt tonight, actually.”

  “Frankfurt! What a waste! Frankfurt is a tomb. A grave! Come with me and I’ll take you to the most famous pub in the world!”

  “Why should I go anywhere with some guy who’s so terribly mean to sheep?”

  Ulrich touched his sheepskin coat with a look of wounded shock. “You’re making funny! I’m not mean! I killed this sheep myself in single combat. He wanted to take my life! Come with me and I’ll take you to the famous Hofbrauhaus. They’re eating meat! And drinking beer!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “It’s not far.” Ulrich crossed his fleecy white arms. “You want to see, or don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I do want to see. Okay.”

  He took her to the Hofbrauhaus, just as he had promised. There were massive stone arches outside and big brass-bound doors and uniformed civil-support people. Ulrich shrugged out of his coat, and quite neatly, in a matter of seconds, stepped deftly out of his pants. He stuffed the sheepskins into his capacious backpack. Beneath the skins he was wearing brightly patterned leotards.

  Inside, the Hofbrauhaus had a vaulted ceiling with murals and ironwork and lanterns. It was wonderfully warm and smelled very powerfully of burning and stewing animal meat. A veteran brass band in odd hats and thick suspenders was playing two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old polkas, the kind of folk music that was so well worn that it slipped through your ears like pebbles down a stream. Strangers were crammed together at long polished wooden benches and tables, getting full of alcoholic bonhomie. Maya was relieved to see that most of them weren’t actually drinking the alcohol. Instead, they were drinking big cold malts and inhaling the alcohol on the side through little lipid-tagged nose snifters. This much reduced the dosage and kept the poison away from the liver.

  It was loud inside. “You want to eat something?” Ulrich shouted.

  Maya looked at a passing platter. Chunks of animal flesh swimming in brown juices, shredded kraut, potato dumplings. “I’m not hungry!”

  “You want to drink some beer?”

  “Ick!”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “I dunno. Just to watch everybody act weird, I guess. Is there some quiet place here where we can sit down and talk?”

  Ulrich’s long brows knotted, in impatience with her, she thought, and then he methodically scanned the crowd. “Do something for me, all right? You see that old tourist lady there with the notebook?”

  “Yes?”

  “Go ask her if she has a tourist map. Talk to her for one minute, sixty seconds, nothing more. Ask her … ask if she can tell you where is the Chinese Tower. Then come outside the Hofbrauhaus and meet with me again. In the street.”

  “Why?” She looked searchingly into his face. “You want me to do something bad.”

  “A little bad maybe. But very useful for us. Go and talk to her. There’s no harm in talking.”

  Maya went to stand by the old woman. The old woman was methodically and neatly eating noodles with a fork and a spoon. She was drinking a bottle of something called Fruchtlimo and was very nicely dressed. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you speak English?”<
br />
  “Yes, I do, young lady.”

  “Do you have a map of Munchen? In English? I’m looking for a certain place.”

  “Of course I do. Glad to help.” The woman opened her notebook and deftly shuffled screens. “What do they call this place you want to go?”

  “The Chinese Tower.”

  “Oh, yes. I know that place. Here we go.… ” She pointed. “It’s located in the English Gardens. A park designed by Count von Rumford in the 1790s. The Count von Rumford was Benjamin Thompson, an American emigré.” She looked up brightly. “Isn’t it funny to think of a town this ancient being redesigned by one of our fellow Americans!”

  “Almost as funny as Indianapolis being redesigned by an Indonesian.”

  “Well,” said the woman, frowning, “that all happened long before you were born. But I happen to be from Indiana, and I was there when the Indonesians bought the city, and believe me, when that happened we didn’t think it was very funny.”

  “Thanks a lot for your help, ma’am.”

  “Would you like me to print you a map? I have a scroller in my purse.”

  “That’s okay. I have to meet someone, I have to go now.”

  “But it’s quite a long way to the tower, you might get lost. Let me just …” She paused, surprised. “My purse is gone.”

  “You lost your purse?”

  “No, I didn’t lose it. It was right here, right below the bench.” She glanced around, then up at Maya. She lowered her voice. “I’m afraid someone’s taken my purse. Stolen it. Oh, dear. This is very sad.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maya said, inadequately.

  “Now I’m afraid I’ll have to talk with the authorities.” The old woman sighed. “This is very distressing. They’ll be so embarrassed, poor things.… It’s dreadful when things like this happen to guests.”

  “It’s very nice of you to think of their feelings.”

  “Well, of course it’s not my loss of a few possessions, it’s the violation of civility that hurts.”

  “I know that,” Maya said, “and I’m truly sorry. I wish you could take my purse instead.” She put her own bag on the table. “There’s not much in here, but I wish you could have it.”