Holy Fire Read online

  “You don’t play the games?”

  “Oh, heavens no. It’s really hard to get them to work, and besides the games are all awful.”

  They ate high-fiber fettucine with protein blocks in gravy, and flaked green carbohydrate. “This is really delicious,” said Brett, shoveling it in. “I don’t know why anybody ever complains about medical diets. The way you do it, it tastes really good. The flavors are so subtle. Lots better than plants and animals.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I ate nothing but infant formula until I was five,” Brett bragged. “I was strong as a horse as a little kid, I was never sick a day in my life. I could do chin-ups, I could run all day, I could beat up all the kids who were still eating stuff like milk! And vegetables! Wow, that ought to be a crime, feeding little kids vegetables. Did you ever eat vegetables?”

  “Not in about fifty years. I think it is a crime to feed vegetables to children now, actually. In California, anyway.”

  “They’re really nasty. Especially spinach. And corn is disgusting. This big lumpy yellow cob with all these little seeds on it …” Brett shuddered.

  “Do you ever eat eggs? Eggs are a good source of cholesterol.”

  “Really? I dunno, I might eat an egg if I found it in a nest somewhere.” Brett smiled beatifically and shoved her empty plate aside. “You’re a really good cook, Maya. I wish I could cook. I’m better at tinctures. You have a really big bathroom, right? Do you think I might take a bath? Would that be okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “You might have to disinfect afterward.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m very modern, Brett, I can manage that.”

  “Oh, good.”

  While Brett was bathing, Mia picked up Brett’s shed clothes, micro waved them thoroughly for hygienic purposes, then washed and dried them. The elastic-soled shoes looked as though they would melt or burst if sterilized, so Mia didn’t touch them. The shoes stank powerfully. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant smell, but there had been bare human feet in those shoes for a long time and some odd species of tame bacteria had been warmly and damply feasting inside them.

  Brett came out of the bathroom in a towel. “You’re probably gonna want to sterilize this towel,” she said contritely, and handed it over. Brett was covered with hair. Armpits, pubes, nipples. Huge flourishing glossy patches of black human fur, almost like abbreviated lingerie. The effect of all this hair was surprisingly modest and practical. Brett sat down nude and hairy on the carpeted floor, just a little self-consciously, and started rooting in her backpack.

  “That felt lovely,” she said. “Plumbing is wonderful. I’ve been sleeping in a tent for four weeks.”

  “A tent, is it? How adventurous.”

  “Yeah, mostly up under the trees in Buena Vista Park. Up in the trees mostly, in hammocks. You get terrific views of the city up there. We use the public restrooms and eat out of cartons and it’s a really cheap way to get by. It’s getting too cold for that now, though.”

  “Is it safe?”

  Brett shrugged. “This is San Francisco! Half the population is civil support. Nobody will bother you. What are they supposed to do to me, rob me? My clothes are all in stores and my designs are all in virtuality.” She pulled a little plastic vial from a pocket of the bag, then produced her rattlesnake.

  She opened the torpid animal’s gaping cotton-white jaws and jabbed its fangs, one after another, through a pinhole in the elastic top of the vial. Then she pressed its dented, scaly head with the flat of her thumb. When the snake’s fangs were loaded she stuffed it back in the bag. She took out a metal tube with a pull-off cap. She twisted a waxy taper from within the tube and began carefully anointing the spaces between her toes.

  “This is foot wax,” she explained. “Live bacteria but they can’t reproduce. They just eat up the jam and sweat and stuff so you don’t get any wild flora living on you.”

  “That’s clever.”

  “Well, you have to know how to squat, y’know! You can’t just drop everything and start sleeping under trees and bridges. If you do it right, there’s a lot of science to it. It’s an artifice.” Brett began working on her furry armpits with a roll-on.

  “Where do you keep your spare clothes?”

  Brett was surprised. “I’m a professional! If I need new clothes I just have them instanced out.” She took out her cellular netlink and began plucking her brows in its mirrored flip-up screen.

  Mia cleaned and put away the dishes. “How about dessert?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Something to wear? I’ll loan you something.”

  “Oh, never mind, it’s warm in here, I’m all right.”

  “A tincture, then?”

  “Can you do hot chocolate?”

  “Sure. Cacao is fun.” Mia brought out her tincture set and began reconfiguring the catalyzers and synthesizers. Little tubes of amber polyvinyl and steel alloy. Gilded O-rings. Enameled pinch-clamps. Osmosis screens. Brewers and strainers and translucent hookah chambers. Step-by-step instructions. It was something to do with your hands while people talked.

  Brett fished out her snake, and slapped it sharply on the back of the head. It recoiled at once and emitted an angry hissing rattle. Brett offered up her right forearm. The snake instantly lashed out and sank both fangs into her flesh.

  Brett gently coaxed the snake loose and petted it soothingly. Then she dabbed an ointment on the twin puncture marks. A tiny rill of blood escaped. “Ouch,” she remarked.

  “What did you put in there?”

  “Oh, the girl who gave me this stuff made me promise never to tell,” Brett said smugly. “It makes me feel safe and warm whenever I sleep in strange places.… It does make me feel nice, but it’s not really good for me. That’s why I always let it hurt some. If you do unhealthy things and you don’t let them hurt you first, then that’s a good way to get into big trouble.”

  “An animal bite must be a big infection risk.”

  “What, nasty warm-blooded germs from a nice coldblooded mouth? I don’t think so. Snakey’s really fast and clean. She’s just my good friend in my backpack.… It’s nice to have special things. And special friends.” Brett blinked, heavy lidded. She smiled.

  They had some cocoa. Brett fell asleep.

  Mia tucked a blanket over Brett and retired to her narrow bed. She shoved the hyperbaric seal away and pulled the covers to her chin and fell into uneasy reverie. Her little bedroom chamber felt dead and empty, like the paper cell of an abandoned wasps’ nest.

  She had kept thoughts of the funeral at bay all day, but now in the dark and the silence the taste of mortality began, in its subtle limbic way, to prey upon her mind. Mia began to ponder, with pitiless clarity and accuracy, the endless list of syndromes in the aging process. The endless richness and natural variety of the pathways of organic decline.

  Sutures knotting and calcifying. Cartilaginous membranes ossifying. Mineral deposits of stonelike hardness forming in the gall bladder, liver, the major arteries. Nails thickening, skin going scaly, hair thinning, graying, going all brittle. Nipples darkening, breasts sagging, ducts shrinking, glands puckering. The urogenital system, evolution’s canny trade-off of fertility for mortality, permanently bewildered. Deposits of rich bloody marrow dying out in their bony nooks and crannies, replaced by thick yellow pockets of inert fat. Loss of acuity in the retinas and in the weirdly complex machineries of the inner ear. The ancient gland that was the brain, tirelessly shifting its hormonal sediments until its reptilian backwaters filled with toxic deposits as tough to clean out as a childhood neurosis.

  Mia wasn’t sick, and she certainly wasn’t dying, but she was very far from young. She had kept her brain quite clean, but the repeated neural scrubbings had caused serious wear on certain peripheral nerves. In the lower spine, and in the long-stretched nerves of the legs. Her vagus nerve was especially bad. Her weak vagus was not a lethal threat, but the skipped heartbeats were far from pleasant.

  Mia’s
lymph duct was an endless source of trouble, corroded and congealed with ancient bile. She had passing spasms of tinnitus in the left ear and had lost the higher pitches in the right. The synovial fluid in her knuckles and wrists had lost much of its viscosity. Cells in the human lenses didn’t grow back, so there wasn’t much to do about the loss of flexion and the resultant astigmatism.

  And stress made everything worse. Stress made you grow when you were young, when you were young stress taught you lessons. But when you were old, then stress was the expressway to senility.

  She could not sleep tonight. She wasn’t young. Sharing her house with a young woman, however briefly, had brought that truth home to her. She could sense Brett’s living presence in her house, Brett’s vital heartbeat and her easy breathing, like the presence of a wild animal.

  Mia rose and went in to look after the girl. In the tranquil grip of sleep the girl had slid from beneath her blanket and achieved some primal state of delicious repose. She sprawled there on the patterned carpet like an odalisque, wrapped in the kind of deeply languid erotic slumber that women achieved only in the Oriental genre paintings of nineteenth-century Frenchmen. Envy rose in Mia like poisoned smoke. She walked back to her bed and sat in it, and thought bitterly about the tissue of events that she called her life.

  She fell into a doze. At three in the morning the night cramps hit her. Her left leg jerked as if gaffed, and her calf knotted in a rock-hard spasm beneath the sheets. After a dreadful moment a secondary but even more agonizing cramp bit the sole of her left foot. Her toes bent like fishhooks and locked into place.

  Mia cried out in smothered anguish. She pounded at the cramp, knuckles smacking knotted flesh. The pain grew more severe, her body’s living strength all short-circuited and turned against itself. It was potassium and it was catecholaminic pathways and it was a lot of other stupid terminologies and it was agony. She was having a cramp attack and she was in agony. She pounded on the treacherous muscle. With a sudden little spastic kick, her calf muscle went weak, all hot rubber and blood inside. She hastily massaged her pale and bloodless foot, whimpering to herself. The tendons creaked in her foot and ankle as the cramp fought back against her grip.

  When she had tugged and eased her foot free of the evil seizure, Mia stood in her gown and limped methodically about the room. She leaned against the wall with both arms, propping herself at an angle, methodically stretching her Achilles tendons. Sleep was as far away as Stuttgart now. Her left leg felt like burnt rope.

  There was nothing mysterious about these attacks. She knew their genesis exactly: potassium deficiencies, worn sheathing in the lower spine, diffusions of stress histamines through the somatic efferent fibers of a certain vertebra, a cellular metabolic cascade—but those words were just diagnosis. Stress brought the cramps on, or a little too much exercise, and every five weeks or so they would just spike right up on their own.

  The truth was starker: she was old. Night cramps were a minor evil. People got very old, and strange new things went wrong with them, and they repaired what the racing and bursting technology allowed them to repair, and what they could not cure they endured. In certain ways, night cramps were even a good sign. She got leg cramps because she could still walk. It hurt her sometimes, but she had always been able to walk. She wasn’t bedridden. She was lucky. She had to concentrate on that: on the luckiness.

  Mia wiped her sweating forehead on her nightgown’s sleeve. She limped into the front room. Brett was still asleep. She lay there undisturbed, head on one arm, utterly at peace. The sight of her lying there flooded Mia with déjà vu.

  In a moment Mia had the memory in focus, beating at her heart like a moth in a net. Looking in one night at her sleeping daughter. Chloe at five, maybe six years old. Daniel with her, at her side. The child of their love asleep and safe, and happy in their care.

  Human lives, her human life. A night not really different from a thousand other nights, but there had been a profound joy in that one moment, an emotion like holy fire. She had known without speaking that her husband felt it, too, and she had slipped her arm around him. It had been a moment beyond speech and out of time.

  And now she was looking at a drugged and naked stranger on her carpet and that sacred moment had come back to her, still exactly what it was, what it had been, what it would always be. This stranger was not her daughter, and this moment of the century was not that other ticking moment, but none of that mattered. The holy fire was more real than time, more real than any such circumstance. She wasn’t merely having a happy memory. She was having happiness. She had become happiness.

  The hot glow of deep joy had shed its bed of ashes. Still just as full of mysterious numinous meaning. As rich and alive and authentic as any sensation she had ever had. Emotion that would last with her till death, emotion she would have to deal with in her final reckoning. A feeling bigger than her own identity. She felt the joy of it crackling and kindling inside her, and in its hot fitful glow she recognized the poverty of her life.

  No matter how carefully she guarded herself, life was too short. Life would always be too short.

  Mia heard her own voice in the silent air. When the sentence struck her ears, she felt the power of a terrible resolve. An instant decision, sudden, unconscious, unsought, but irrevocable: “I can’t go on like this.”

  2

  In volume, technical detail, and avuncular reassurance, the net’s medical advice had no archival peer. A serious life-extension upgrade was a personal crisis to rank with puberty, building a mansion, or joining an army.

  The medical-industrial complex dominated the planet’s economy. Biomedicine had the highest investment rates and the highest rates of technical innovation of any industry in the world. Biomedicine was in a deliberate state of controlled frenzy, giving off enough heat to power the entire culture. In terms of government expenditure it outranked transportation, police, and what passed for defense. In what had once been called the private sector, biomedicine was bigger than chemisynthesis, almost as big as computation. Various aspects of the medical-industrial complex employed 15 percent of the planet’s working populace. The scope of gerontological research alone was bigger than agriculture.

  The prize was survival. Failure deterred no one. The spectrum of research was vast and multiplex. For every life-extension treatment that was accepted for human use, there were hundreds of schemes that had never moved beyond the enormous tormented ranks of the animal models. New upgrade methods were licensed by medical ethicists. Older and less successful techniques were allowed to lapse out of practice, taking their unlucky investors with them.

  There were a hundred clever ways to judge a life-extension upgrade. Stay with the blue chips and you were practically guaranteed a steady rate of survival. Volunteer early for some brilliant new start-up, however, and you’d probably outlive the rest of your generation. Keep in mind, though, that novelty and technical sweetness were no guarantees of genuine long-term success. Many lines of medical advancement folded in a spindling crash of medical vaporware, leaving their survivors internally scarred and psychically wrecked.

  Medical upgrades were always improving, never steadily, but with convulsive organic jumps. Any blue-chip upgrade licensed in the 2090s would be (very roughly speaking) about twice as effective as the best available in the 2080s. There had been limit-shattering paradigmatic breakthroughs in life extension during the 2060s and 2070s. As for the 2050s, the stunts they’d been calling “medicine” back then (which had seemed tremendously impressive at the time) scarcely qualified as life extension at all, by modern standards. The medical techniques of the 2050s barely qualified as common hygienic procedures. They were even cheap.

  As for the traditional medical procedures that predated the 2050s, almost every one of them had been abandoned. They were dangerous, counterproductive, based on views of biological reality that were fundamentally mistaken.

  Given these circumstances, it was wise to postpone your upgrade for as long as possible. The
longer you waited, the better your choices would become. Unfortunately, the natural aging process never stopped in the meantime, so waiting too long made you subject to serious cumulative damage from natural metabolic decline. Sooner or later you had to hold your nose and make your choice. Since the outcome of leading-edge research was unknown by definition, the authorities could make no guarantees. Therefore, the pursuit of longevity was declared a fundamental freedom left to the choice of the individual. The polity offered its best advice, consensually derived in endless open meetings through vast thriving packs of experts, but advice was nothing better than advice.

  If you were smart or lucky, you chose an upgrade path with excellent long-term potential. Your odds were good. You would be around for quite a while. Your choice would become and remain popular. The installed base of users would expand, and that would help you quite a lot. If anything went wrong with your upgrade, there’d be plenty of expertise in dealing with it.

  If you were unlucky or foolish, your short-term gains would reveal serious long-term flaws. As the years ground on, you’d become isolated, freakish, obsolescent.

  The truly bad techniques were the ones that complicated your transitions to another and better upgrade. Once your quality of life was irreparably degraded, you’d have no choice but to turn your attention to the quality of your death.

  There were various methods of hedging your bets. You could, for instance, be conspicuously and repeatedly good. You always voted, you committed no crimes, you worked for charities, you looked after your fellow citizens with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. You joined civil support and served on net committees. You took a tangible wholehearted interest in the basic well-being of civilization. The community officially wanted you kept alive. You were probably old, probably well behaved, and probably a woman. You were awarded certain special considerations by a polity that appreciated your valuable public spirit. You were the exact sort of person who had basically seized power in modern society.