Holy Fire Read online

  Praise for the novels of Bruce Sterling

  HEAVY WEATHER

  “Brilliant … fascinating … exciting … A full complement of thrills.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A remarkable and individual sharpness of vision … Sterling hacks the future, and an elegant hack it is.”

  —Locus

  “So believable are the speculations that … one becomes convinced that the world must and will develop into what Sterling has predicted.”

  —Science Fiction Age

  “Sharp … intriguing … A near-future thriller.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (with William Gibson)

  “Breathtaking.”

  —The New York Times

  “Bursting with the kind of demented speculation and obsessive detailing that has made both Gibson’s and Sterling’s work stand out.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Highly imaginative … [A] splendid effort.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Smartly plotted, wonderfully crafted, and written with sly literary wit … spins marvelously and runs like a dream.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  ALSO BY BRUCE STERLING

  Novels

  The Artificial Kid

  The Difference Engine

  (with William Gibson)

  Heavy Weather

  Involution Ocean

  Islands in the Net

  Schismatrix

  Distraction

  A Good Old-Fashioned Future

  Stories

  Crystal Express

  Globalhead

  Nonfiction

  The Hacker Crackdown:

  Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

  Editor

  Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  HOLY FIRE

  A Bantam Spectra Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam Hardcover edition published October 1996

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “S” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc,

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1996 by Bruce Sterling.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79677-6

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  About the Author

  1

  Mia Ziemann needed to know what to wear at a deathbed.

  The net counseled simplicity and sincerity. Mia was a ninety-four-year-old Californian medical economist, while the prospective deceased, Martin Warshaw, had been her college sweetheart some seventy-four years previously. Mia could expect some prepared statement. There would very likely be a bequest of some sort. Conversation would involve an attempt to put Mr. Warshaw’s life into retrospective order, to supply the sense of grace and closure so desirable during life’s final chapter. She would not be asked to witness the actual moment of death.

  A deathbed reunion of long-separated lovers was a challenge to etiquette, but the late twenty-first century shone in social tidiness. Dilemmas of this sort were exhaustively debated in endless rounds of calls for commentary, working papers from boards of experts, anecdotal testimonies, ethics conventions, sworn public hearings, policy manuals. No aspect of human existence escaped smoothing over by thoughtful, seasoned, and mature counsel.

  Mia studied as much of this material as she could stomach. She spent the afternoon reacquainting herself with Martin Warshaw’s financial and medical records. She hadn’t seen Martin in fifty years, though she had followed his public career to some extent. Those records of Martin’s were most revealing and informative. They had made his life an open book. This was their purpose.

  Mia reached a decision: black flats, support hose, a reactive girdle and cuirass, a knee-length silk dress in maroon and gray, long sleeves, high collar. A hat definitely seemed in order. No gloves. Gloves were recommended, but gloves seemed too clinical.

  Mia had a blood filtration, a skin enzymation, a long bone-deep massage, a mineral bath, and a manicure. She had her hair cleaned, laminated, volumized, styled, and lacquered. She increased the saturated fat in her diet. She slept that night under a hyperbaric tent.

  Next morning, November 19, Mia went into the city to look for a decent hat, some kind of hat that might truly suit her circumstances. It was a cold autumnal day in San Francisco. Fog crept in off the Bay, oozing through the leafy cliffsides of the office high-rises. She walked and shopped, and shopped and walked, for a long time. She saw nothing that could match her mood.

  A dog was following her up Market Street, loping through the crowd. She stopped behind the shadowed column of a portico and stretched out her bare hand, beckoning.

  The dog paused timidly, then came up and sniffed at her fingers.

  “Are you Mia Ziemann?” the dog said.

  “Yes, I am,” Mia said. People walked past her, brisk and purposeful, their solemn faces set, neat shoes scuffing the red brick sidewalks. Under the steady discipline of Mia’s gaze, the dog settled on his haunches, crouching at her feet.

  “I tracked you from your home,” bragged the dog, panting rhythmically. “It’s a long way.” The dog wore a checkered knit sweater, tailored canine trousers, and a knitted black skullcap.

  The dog’s gloved front paws were vaguely prehensile, like a raccoon’s hands. The dog had short clean fawn-colored fur and large attractive eyes. His voice came from a speaker implanted in his throat.

  A car bleeped once at a tardy pedestrian, rudely breaking the subtle urban murmurs of downtown San Francisco. “I’ve walked a long way,” Mia said. “It was clever of you to find me. Good dog.”

  The dog brightened at the praise, and wagged his tail. “I think I’m lost and I feel rather hungry.”

  “That’s all right, nice dog.” The dog reeked of cologne. “What’s your name?”

  “Plato,” the dog said shyly.

  “That’s a fine name for a dog. Why are you following me?”

  This sophisticated conversational gambit exhausted the dog’s limited verbal repertoire, but with the usual cheerful resilience of his species he simply changed the subject. “I live with Martin Warshaw! He’s very good to me! He feeds me well. Also Martin smells good! Except not … like other days. Not like …” The dog seemed pained. “Not like now.… ”

  “Did Martin send you to follow me?”

  The dog pondered this. “He talks about you. He wants to see you. You should come talk to him. He can’t be happy.” The dog sniffed at the paving, then looked up expectantly. “May I have a treat?”

  “I don’t carry treats with me, Plato.”

  “That’s very sad,” Plato observed.

  “How is Martin? How does he feel?”

  A dim anxiety puckered the hairy canine wrinkles around the dog’s eyes. It was odd how much more expressive a dog’s face became
once it learned to talk. “No,” the dog offered haltingly, “Martin smells unhappy. My home feels bad inside. Martin is making me very sad.” He began to howl.

  The citizens of San Francisco were a very tolerant lot, civilized and cosmopolitan. Mia could see that the passersby strongly disapproved of anyone who would publicly bully a dog to tears.

  “It’s all right,” Mia soothed, “calm down. I’ll go with you. We’ll go to see Martin right away.”

  The dog whined, too distraught to manage speech.

  “Take me home to Martin Warshaw,” she commanded.

  “Oh, all right,” said the dog, brightening. Order had returned to his moral universe. “I can do that. That’s easy.”

  He led her, frisking, to a trolley. The dog paid for both of them, and they got off after three stops. Martin Warshaw had chosen to live north of Market in Nob Hill, in one of the quake-proofed high-rises built in the 2060s, a polychrome pile. It had been ambitious, by the garish standards of its period, with vividly patterned exterior tiling and a rippling mess of projecting bay windows and balconies.

  Inside the building it was narcotically tranquil. The lobby offered an interior grove of hotly fragrant orange and avocado trees in portable two-ton polychrome pots. The trees were hoppingly alive with small, twittering flocks of finches.

  Mia followed her canine escort into a mural-crusted elevator. They emerged on the tenth floor, onto pavement set with stone cobbles. The building’s internal lighting glowed in superrealist mimicry of northern California sunlight. People had hung laundry inside the building’s sweet breeze and light. Mia worked her way through the big potted jacarandas and bought a shrink-wrapped pack of dog treats from an automated street shop. The dog accepted a bone-shaped lozenge with polite enthusiasm.

  Fragrant wisteria vines were flowering on the stone veneer of Martin’s apartment. The heavy door shunted open at a single knowing touch of the dog’s paw.

  “Mia Ziemann is here!” the dog announced heartily to the empty air. The living room had the sanitary neatness of some strange old-fashioned hotel: potted palms, a mahogany media cabinet, tall brass floor lamps, a glass-topped teak table with spotless untouched glassware and hermetic jars of mixed nuts. A pair of large rats with control collars were eating lab chow from a bowl on the table.

  “May I take your coat?” asked the dog.

  Mia shrugged out of her tan gabard and handed it over. She was wearing what she usually wore to shop: tailored trousers and a long-sleeved blouse. Informal clothes would have to do. The dog gamely engaged in complex maneuvers with a hatstand.

  Mia hung her purse. “Where is Martin?”

  The dog led her to the bedroom. A dying man in patterned Japanese pajamas lay propped on pillows in a narrow bed. He was asleep or unconscious, his lined face sagging, his thin, lifeless hair in disarray.

  At the sight of him, Mia almost turned and ran at once. The impulse to simply flee the room, flee the building, flee the city, was as strong and raw as any emotional impulse she had felt in years.

  Mia stood her ground. Confronted with the stark reality of encroaching death, all her advice and preparation meant precisely nothing. She stood and waited for some memory—any memory—to hit her. Recognition came at last, and the dying face fell into focus.

  She hadn’t seen Martin for more than fifty years. She hadn’t loved him for more than seventy. Yet here was Martin Warshaw. In what was left of his flesh.

  The dog prodded Warshaw’s hand with his cold nose. Warshaw stirred. “Open the windows,” he whispered.

  The dog tapped a button near the floor. Curtains rolled aside and floor-length windows shunted open onto damp Pacific air.

  “I’m here, Martin,” Mia said.

  He blinked in grainy astonishment. “You’ve come early.”

  “Yes. I met your dog.”

  “I see.” The back of the deathbed rose, propping him in a sitting position. “Plato, please bring Mia a chair.”

  The dog gripped the bent wooden leg of the nearest chair and lugged it over clumsily across the carpet, puffing and whining with the effort. “Thank you,” Mia said, and sat.

  “Plato,” said the dying man, “please be quiet now. Don’t listen to us, don’t talk. You may shut down.”

  “May I shut down? All right, Martin.” The dog sank to the carpeted floor in deep confusion. His long furry head fell to the carpet, and he twitched a bit, as if dreaming.

  The apartment was spotless and dustless and in suspiciously perfect order. By the look of it, Mia could tell that Martin hadn’t left his bed for weeks. Cleaning machines had been at the place, and civil-support personnel on their unending round of social checkups. The deathbed was discreet, but to judge by its subtle humming and occasional muted gurgle, it was well equipped.

  “Do you enjoy dogs, Mia?”

  “He’s a very handsome specimen,” Mia said obliquely.

  The dog rose to his feet, shook himself all over, and began nosing aimlessly about the room.

  “I’ve had Plato for forty years,” Martin said. “He’s one of the oldest dogs in California. One of the most heavily altered dogs in private ownership—he’s even been written up in the breeders’ magazines.” Martin smiled wanly. “Plato’s rather more famous than I am, these days.”

  “I can see that you’ve done a great deal with him.”

  “Oh, yes. He’s been through every procedure I’ve been through. Arterial scrubbing, kidney work, liver and lung work … I never tried any extension technique without running it through good old Plato first.” Martin folded his bony, waxlike hands above the covers. “Of course, it’s easier and cheaper to do veterinary work than posthuman extension—but I needed that sense of companionship, I suppose. One doesn’t like to go alone, into … medical experiences of such profundity.”

  She knew what he meant. It was a common sentiment. Animal bodies had always preceded human bodies into the medical frontier. “He doesn’t look forty years old. Forty, that’s a very ripe age for a dog.”

  Martin reached for a bedside slate. He brushed at the reactive surface with his fingertips, then brushed his fingers back through his hair—a gesture she recognized with a shock of déjà vu, after seven long decades. “They’re wonderfully resilient animals, dogs. Remarkable how well they get on with life, even after becoming postcanine. The language skills make a difference, especially.”

  Mia watched the dog nosing about the bedroom. Freed from the heavy cognitive burden of language, the dog seemed much brisker, freer, less labored, somehow more authentically mammalian.

  “At first, all his speech was very clearly machine generated,” Martin said, tugging at a pillow. Color had begun to enter his face. He’d done it with his scratching at the touchscreen, and with his bed, and with the medical support gear he was using, wired into his flesh beneath the pajamas. “Just a verbal prosthetic for a canine brain. Very halting, very … gimmicky. It took ten years for the wiring to sink in, to fully integrate. But now speech is simply a part of him. Sometimes I catch him talking to himself.”

  “What does he talk about?”

  “Oh, nothing very sophisticated. Nothing too abstract. Modest things. Food. Warmth. Smells. He is, after all, just my old good dog—somewhere under there.” Martin gazed at his dog with undisguised affection. “Isn’t that right, boy?” The dog looked up, thumped his tail mutely.

  Mia had lived through a long and difficult century. She had witnessed massive global plagues, and consequent convulsive advancements in medicine. She’d been a deeply interested witness as vast new crypts and buttresses and towers were added to the ancient House of Pain. She had professionally studied the demographics of the deaths of millions of lab animals and billions of human beings, and she had examined the variant outcomes of hundreds of life-extension techniques. She’d helped to rank their many hideous failures, and their few but very real successes. She had meticulously judged advances in medical science as a ratio of capital investment. She had made policy recommendations to va
rious specific organs of the global medical-industrial complex. She had never gotten over her primal dread of pain and death, but she no longer allowed mere dread to affect her behavior much.

  Martin was dying. He had, in point of fact, amyloid neural degeneration, partial spinal paralysis, liver damage, and kidney nephritis, all of which had led through the usual complex paths of metabolic decline to a state his records neatly summarized as “insupportable.” Mia, of course, had read his prognosis carefully, but medical analysis was a product of its terminology. Death, by stark contrast, was not a word. Death was a reality that sought people out and put its primal stamp on every fiber of their beings.

  She could tell at a glance that Martin was dying. He was dying, and he was offering her platitudes about his dog rather than harsh truths about his death, because his strongest and most genuine regret in life was leaving his dog. Demands, obligations, forced you to survive. Survival was an act of obligation to lovers, to dependents, to anyone who expected survival from you. A dog, for instance. What year was this, 2095? Martin was ninety-six and his best friend was his dog.

  Martin Warshaw had once loved her. That was why he had arranged this meeting, why he was launching sudden emotional demands at her after fifty years of silence. It was a complex act of duty and rage and sorrow and politesse, but Mia understood the reality of the situation, just as she understood most other things these days: rather too well.

  “Do you ever do mnemonics, Mia?”

  “Yes. I’ve done memory drugs. Some of the milder ones. When I need them.”

  “They help. They’ve helped me. But they’re a vice, of course, if you push them.” He smiled. “I’m pushing them hard now. There’s a lot of pleasure in vice when there’s nothing left to lose. Would you like a mnemonic?” He offered her a fresh pad of stickers. Factory-sealed, holographic backing.

  Mia peeled one free, examined the name and the dosage, and smoothed the sticker to her neck. To please him.

  “You’d think that after all these years they’d have found a mnemonic that would open your soul like a filing cabinet.” He reached into a bedside table and pulled out a framed photograph. “Everything just in its place, everything organized, everything indexed and full of meaning. But that’s too much to ask of a human brain. Memories compact themselves, they blur. They turn to mulch, lose all color. The details go. Like a compost heap.” He showed her the photo: a young woman in a high-collared coat, lipstick, eyeliner, wind-tousled brunette hair, squinting in sunlight, half smiling. Something guarded in her smile.