Holy Fire

by Bruce Sterling

  “Eugene wasn’t making a date with me, and I don’t even like Eugene. Much. Besides, why should I go to Praha? There are plenty of vivid cafés here in Munchen.”

  “Don’t be a mule, darling. Praha is a big fashion town. The Tête du Noyé is a scene. You’re a model in the rag trade, so it’s important for you to make scenes.”

  “That kind of fun sounds like a lot of work.”

  “Well, at least it’s work of a different kind. Klaudia deserves time off from the store, and so do you. Anyway, if Klaudia runs off to party without you to look after her, she’ll only get into trouble. Klaudia always does.”

  “That’s all very clever and convenient, Therese. You’re always so full of wiles and angles.”

  “I have to make arrangements. I can’t do business from an empty shop, you know that as well as I do. Get Klaudia off my hands for a little while—and take your camera, too. There are big armies of vivid women in Praha.” Therese narrowed her eyes. “Those Praha vivid girls … They have an iron grip on the fragile exotic look.”

  There was no resisting a determined Therese. Maya and Klaudia loaded their backpacks and their hangered garment bags, and caught the Praha train late Tuesday morning. Klaudia paid. Klaudia almost always paid; she had a little salary, plus a tidy allowance from her wealthy and influential Munchener parents.

  They fell headlong into their beanbags. Maya felt cranky and exhausted. Klaudia was twenty-two; the previous day of excitement and frenzied labor had only improved her mood. Klaudia was ready for anything. “[You’d better eat something, Maya,]” she said in Deutsch. “[You never eat anything.]”

  “I’m never hungry.”

  Klaudia adjusted her own earpiece translator. Despite weary years of the finest state-assisted classroom training, Klaudia’s English was highly unstable. “[Well, you’ll eat something today, or I’ll sit on you. You look so pale. Look at that wig. Can’t you even try?]” Klaudia deftly adjusted Maya’s secondhand mop of blond curls. “[You have the strangest hair, girl, you know that? Your natural hair feels more like a wig than this wig does.]”

  “That’s from my shampoo.”

  “[What shampoo? Are you trying to kid me? You never shampoo. You should let me spritz you a nice protein strengthened I know you’re trying to grow your hair out, but you should let me trim it a little. Without that wig, you look like a big ragazzina.]”

  “Ja, Klaudia, ich bin die grosse Ragazzina.”

  Klaudia gave her the look that locals always gave her when she tried her broken Deutsch—a look as if her intelligence had suddenly plummeted.

  The train pulled out of the station with the ease and silence of a skate skimming ice. The car was three-quarters full. Klaudia examined every one of the passengers in their car with her forthright Deutschlander stare. She elbowed Maya suddenly. “Na, Maya!”

  “What?”

  “[See that old lady sitting back there with the police dog and the little kid? That’s the president of the Magyar Koztarsasag.]”

  “The president of what?”

  “Hungary.”

  “Oh.” Maya shook her head. “I know we’re all supposed to call people by their own proper names nowadays, but speaking Hungarian, that’s pushing it.”

  “[She’s an important polity figure. You should go ask for the log-on address to her publicity palace.]”

  “Me? I feel so sleepy,” Maya said. “[She’s a big politician. She’ll speak English to you. What a shame she’s so badly dressed. I wish I could remember her name. You could take my picture with her.]”

  “If she’s really a politician, she’ll appreciate it if we respect her privacy.”

  “[What?]” Klaudia demanded, skeptically. “[States-people hate privacy. Government people don’t do that privacy nonsense.]”

  Maya yawned. “I don’t know what it is, but I feel so worn out today. I’m having a sinking spell. I think maybe a little nap …”

  “[I’ll get you something,]” volunteered Klaudia, squirming onto her high heels, eyes gleaming. “[A tincture. How about caffeine?]”

  “Caffeine? That’s addictive. And isn’t it awfully strong?”

  “[It’s our day off! Let’s be daring! Let’s drink caffeine and get really sternhagelvoll! We’ll run around Praha all day! Praha, the Golden City!]”

  “Okay,” Maya said, sinking into her pastel blue beanbag and fluttering one hand at the wrist. “Go, go. Bring me something.… ”

  Maya slumped bonelessly into the luscious depths of her beanbag and gazed up at the roof of the train car. A blank expanse of gleaming metal. This railcar was a real antique. It had been designed for advertisements, before advertising had been outlawed worldwide. Light flashed by through the bare limbs of the trackside arbors against the gleaming expanse of the roof. Flash, flash, flash.

  She emerged from her daze with a piercing ache behind both eyes. Something was really hurting her ear. She pulled it off. An earcuff. The skin of her ear was all pinched beneath it, as if she’d been wearing it for weeks. She plucked the little device off her head, held it in her hand, gazed at it blankly, then let it drop on the floor.… What was she wearing?

  She was wearing a red jacket over a long-sleeved low-cut shirtdress, a slinky number that looked and clung like lace and snakeskin. The dress ended at midthigh. She wore spangled metallic hose and high-heeled ankle boots.

  Mia got onto her feet, wobbling. She began walking unsteadily down the aisle of the train car, wobbling in the absurd boots. Her toes were pinched and her ankles ached. She felt very strange and weak—starved, headachy, shaky, really bad.

  She was alone inside a train with twenty or thirty foreigners. An alien landscape was rushing at terrific speed by the window.

  She had a very bad moment then, an all-over shudder of identity crisis and culture shock, so that she swayed where she stood and felt sweat break out all down her back. Then the nausea passed and she came out of it, and she felt extremely different.

  She was Mia Ziemann. She was Mia Ziemann and she was having a very strange reaction to the treatment.

  A dog was staring at her. It was the police dog belonging to the Magyar president. The dog was crouching on his beanbag at the edge of the aisle, looking very efficient in his strapped and buttoned police-dog uniform. His ears were cocked alertly and his eyes were fixed on Mia.

  The president of Hungary sat next to the dog, together with a ten-year-old boy. She was showing the boy the screen of her notebook, pointing into its depths with a virtuality wand, a slim and elegant access device like an ivory chopstick. The boy was gazing into the woman’s screen in primal trust and fascination, and the president was teaching him something, speaking gently in Magyar.

  The old woman had the most astonishing hands. Hands that were wrinkled and deft and strong. A face supernaturally full of character, a postmortal face. The face you had when you were a very strong-willed, very healthy, very intelligent woman a hundred and twenty years old, and you had seen many sorrows and had made many painful decisions, and you had lost all illusion, but had never lost your self-respect, or your desire to help.

  Of course this lady would speak English. She was a European intellectual, she would speak English, along with her consummate mastery of five or six other languages. She had authority—no, she was authority. So Mia would totter over to this saintly woman, and beg her help, and say, I’m sick, I’m hungry, I’m weak, I’ve lost my way, I’ve run away, I’ve broken my faith and abandoned all my duties and my obligations, I’ve done something bad, and I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, please help me.

  And the president would look at her and she would master the situation in an instant. She would not be embarrassed or upset, she would be very wise, and she would know just what to do. The president would say, My dear, be calm, sit down, rest a moment, of course we can help you. There would be networking, and explanations, and advice and guidance and food, and a warm safe place to sleep. And the blasted tatters of her life would be stitched back around Mia Ziemann,
like a big warm quilt of official forgiveness and grace.

  She stumbled forward.

  The dog said something in Deutsch.

  “What?” Mia said.

  The dog switched to English. “Are you all right, miss? Shall I call a steward? You smell a little upset.”

  The president looked up and smiled politely.

  “No,” Mia said, “no. I’m feeling much better now.”

  “What a lovely dress. What’s your name?” asked the president.

  “Maya.”

  “This fine young man is Laszlo Ferencsi,” the president said, patting the shoulder of the boy.

  “I won the school essay contest!” Laszlo piped up in English. “I get to stay with the president today!”

  Maya swallowed hard. “That’s great, kid. You must be really proud.”

  “I am the future,” Laszlo confided shyly.

  “I’m a big ragamuffin,” Maya said. She tottered to the back of the cabin, found the ladies’, knelt on the floor with a squeak of stockings, and had the dry heaves.

  Klaudia found her in the ladies’, hauled her out, and bullied her into eating. Once the nutrient broth had hit her system, Maya’s morale began to soar.

  Klaudia gently clipped the translator back onto Maya’s head. “[I knew you were in trouble when you left your earpiece.… It’s a good thing Therese sent me along to look after you! You don’t have any more sense than a rabbit! Even a rabbit knows enough to eat.]”

  Maya dabbed cooling sweat from her forehead. “Rabbits never have my problems unless they’ve done something really postlagomorphian.”

  “[No wonder Eugene likes you. You talk just as crazy as he does. You better stick close to me at this party tonight. These artifice characters are real stuck-up oddballs.]”

  Maya gazed out the window and sipped pale broth from her spoon. It felt so good to be someone new. So good to be herself. So good to be alive. It was much, much more important to be alive than to be anyone in particular. Thick Bohemian forest outside the train window, the branches just beginning to leaf out for spring. Then they were silently sliding at very high velocity on skeletal arches over intensely cultivated green fields. Vast irrigated stands of tall and looming gasketfungus.

  The giant fungi weren’t plants. They’d been designed to transmute air, water, and light into fats, carbohydrates, and protein, with a bioengineered efficiency previously unknown to the world of nature. A field of engineered gasketfungus could feed a small town. The fungi were two stories tall: dense, green, leafless, square edged, and as riddled as a sponge. Once you got used to the monsters, they were rather pretty. And it was nice that they were pretty, because they covered most of rural Europe.

  They spent the afternoon in the center of Praha. In Mala Strana. In the Old Town, Stare Mesto. Cobbled squares. Cathedrals. Spires and ancient brick and footworn stone. Gilded steeples, railings, bridges, damply gleaming statuary. The river Vltava. Architecture centuries old.

  Klaudia shopped frenetically, and methodically stuffed Maya with fast food from the street stalls. The tasty nourishing grease hit Maya like a drug, and her world grew easy and comfortable. Everything was cheerful, everything was making sense.

  They took their cameras to the Karel Bridge. This was not the peak of the tourist season, but Praha was always in vogue. Praha was an artifice town, a couture town. People came here to show off.

  Of course most of the tourists were old people. Most of everyone was old people. And old women had never dressed so beautifully, never carried chic so well into such advanced years. The bridge was aswarm with older women, Europe’s female gerontocrats, ladies who were poised, serene, deeply experienced, deliberate, and detached. Firm but gentle femmes du monde, who were all the more tolerant of human foibles since they were left with very few of their own. Gracious women who knew how to listen, distinguished women who could love their enemies until those enemies fell into little pieces. Beautiful, clever, accomplished women, gently quivering with the electricity of determined and long-tested ego.

  Old women in winter glissade jackets, in porous-weave two-tone nattiere sweaters. Old women in smart, self-contained business suits of pinkish apricot, poilu blue, eucalyptus. Women in stylish padded winter pajamas of pale yellow and crepuscular blue. Hard sleek hairstyles without a trace of gray, bobbed and parted at the side, with cape-scarves flung over one shoulder and neatly pinned with seashell brooches. Surplice fronts and fringed lapels, mousselines, failles, polycarbon chiffons, marquisettes, matelassés, rich crepes, and restrained lamés. Sheath dresses over the sleek planar lines of unobtrusive medical cuirasses. A slender postsexual profile with a waistline that seemed to start at midthigh, breaking into smart flounces and chic little gouts of astrakhan and breitschwantz. Beautiful teeming masses of posthuman women.

  The old men in the crowd dressed with columnar forbidding dignity in belted coats and dark medical vests and tailored jackets, as if they’d outgrown the prospect of intimate human contact. The old men looked suave and unearthly and critically detached, a race of scholarly ice kings who walked so slowly in their beautifully polished shoes that it seemed they were being paid by the step.

  And then the vivid people. They were a minority of course, but they were less of a minority in Praha, and that made them bold and intense.

  Young men. Lots of bold and intense young men, that surplus of men that every generation boasted before the male mortality rate kicked in. Swaggering young bravos with lucid unlined skin like angels, because acne was as dead as smallpox. They favored gleaming jackets and odd heavy boots and patterned neckscarves. It was a generation of young men fed from birth on biochemical ambrosia, with perfect teeth and perfect eyesight and lithe, balletic posture. The real dandies among the boys wore decorative translator earcuffs, and didn’t mind a dusting of blusher to accentuate the cheekbones.

  Vivid women. Black-sleeved print dresses, garishly patterned fabric shawls, swirling postiche capes, gunmetal shoegloves with zesty little flip-up ankle collars. Patterned frocks, flirty short jackets, lots of lacquer red. Backpacks with little bells and clattering bangles, and very serious lipstick. Praha had a vogue for checkered winter gloves nicked off at the fingertips for the emergence of daggerlike lacquered nails. Big serious cinching waistline belts, belts that threw the hips out. And décolletage, whole hot hormonal acres of décolletage, even in winter. Big cushiony vivid cleavage that went beyond allure and became a political statement.

  The young women were thrilled to be photographed. They laughed at her and clowned for the camera. Many people in Praha, even the kids, wore spex, but nobody wore glasses anymore. Corrective lenses were a prosthetic device as dead as the ivory pegleg.

  Praha was giving her new insight.

  She found herself suddenly understanding the profound alliance between old European city centers and young Europeans. All the world’s real and serious business took place in the giant, sophisticated, intelligent high-rise rings around the downtowns—buildings with advanced infrastructure, buildings with the late twenty-first century embedded in their diamond bones and fiber-optic ligaments.

  Still, those in power could not bring themselves to demolish their architectural heritage. To destroy their own cultural roots was to leave themselves without even the fiction of an alternative, marooned in a terrible vacuity of postindustrial pragmatism. They prized those aging bricks and those moldering walls and, for oddly similar reasons, Europe’s young people were similarly prized, and similarly sidelined.

  Young kids lurking in old cities. They formed an urban symbiosis of the profoundly noneconomic, a conjunction of the indestructible past with a future not yet allowed to be.

  Maya and Klaudia dressed in a ladies’ and left their bags in a public locker. The Tête de Noyé was in Opatovicka Street, a three-story building with a steeply pitched tiled roof. You entered it by walking up a short set of worn stone steps with ornate iron railings, and then directly down a rather longer set of wooden steps into the windowless basemen
t, where they kept the bar. All this stepping up and down made very little architectural sense, but the building was at least five hundred years old. It had been through so many historic transitions that it had a patina like metamorphic rock.

  Klaudia and Maya were met at the foot of the stairs by an elderly spotted bulldog in a tattered sweater and striped shorts, possibly the ugliest intelligent animal Maya had ever seen. “Who asked ya here?” demanded the dog in English, and he growled with unfeigned menace.

  Maya looked quickly around the bar. The place was lit by a few twinkly bluish overheads and the pale glow of a rectangular wallscreen. The bar smelled like seaweed, like iodine. Maybe like blood. Twenty people scattered in it, dim hunched forms slumped in couches around low tables. Many of them were wearing spex. She could see faint pools of lit virtuality squeezing out around the rims of their lenses. There was no sign of Eugene.

  “That guy over there invited us,” Maya lied glibly, pointed, and waved. “Hey!” she shouted. “Na mensch! Ciao!”

  Naturally some male stranger at a far table looked up and politely waved back at them. Maya breezed past the dog.

  “Na Maya!” Klaudia whispered, sticking close. “[We are way overdressed for this. This place is a morgue.]”

  “I love it here,” said Maya, perfectly happy and confident. She went to the bar.

  Faint analog instrumental music was playing, muted and squeaky. The bartender was studying an instruction screen and repairing a minor valve on an enormously ramified tincture set. The tincture set stretched the length of the mahogany bar, weighed four or five tons, and looked as if its refinery products could demolish a city block.

  The bartender wore a thin, ductile, transparent decontamination suit. This was the kind of gear that courageous civil-support people had once used when cleaning out plague sites. The bartender was naked beneath his gleaming airtight veil. His unclothed body in the plastic suit was covered head to foot in thick gray fur. From a distance, his dense body hair looked very much like a gray wool sweater-trouser set.