Holy Fire (41 page)

“I feel the wind blowing through me,” she murmured.

Olga only grunted.

She turned and looked at her hairy companion. “Olga, do you understand anything I’m telling you? I hardly understand it myself. I’ve been having such a very hard time lately. I think that—I think I’ve been having some kind of fit.”

“[You don’t understand anything,]” Olga said. “[Life is patience. You are careless, you talk too much, you hurry too much. I know how to be patient. Grief is bad, but you get over it. Guilt is bad, but you get over it. You don’t know that yet. That’s why I’m wiser than you even when I’m a monkey.]”

“I’m truly sorry about your cats. Really, I’d do anything to make it up to you.”

“[All right, so get us more stones to eat.]”

“They’re oysters, Olga. They’re oysters, and sure, I’ll get us some.” The sun was shining on the Red Sea and it was hot and real. Wading on rocks would be fun. It would be bliss to swim. She began shedding her clothes.

“Oysters,” Olga said aloud. “[Words are so funny, aren’t they.]”

T
he scandal with Helene had locked them out of the Tête. Mere scandal couldn’t stop a man of Paul’s resourcefulness. He’d found them another meeting place in the Helleniki Dimokratia. He’d arranged a major immersion for them.

Greece in early summer was lovely. It was a country that could sprout a great civilization with the sweet ease of bread sprouting mold. The resort was outside the little city of Kórinthos, in the fragrant wooded hills of the Pelopónnisos.
The resort was owned by a forty-year-old multimillionaire who had managed to make a terrific garbage strike in the poorly explored industrial wilds of eastern Deutschland. As one of the youngest truly rich people in Europe, the eccentric wildcatter delighted in doing things to annoy.

Now Paul and thirty of his vivid fellow-travelers were lounging around the resort’s glimmering pool, greased and naked and in big toga-pinned bath towels. They were in more trouble than they had ever been in their young lives, and they were in the best of spirits about it.

“Have a grape,” Benedetta said, offering a stemmed and lacquered bowl.

“Natural fruits are full of toxins,” said Maya.

“These are genetic knockouts.”

“Okay, give me a bunch.” She ate one. It was delicious. She stuffed in a handful.

“These are fabulous,” she said. “Give me more. Make me fat, ruin my stupid career.”

Benedetta laughed. Benedetta nude and laughing was a creature of intense and striking loveliness. She was like a greased naiad. They were all so effortlessly lovely, these modern young people. Immortals wrapped in togas of the finest technological rhetoric. Supernaturally healthy creatures.

“I’m hungry all the time now,” Maya said, munching her grapes. “It’s good. Now I belong to my body again. Or my body belongs to me.… ”

“It’s more fun to share the body,” said Bouboule, squeezing lotion into her palm. “I can’t reach the what-you-call, the backs of my feet. Get some boy here to rub my legs. They’re too lazy in all this sun, the boys need to work more.”

“You look better,” said Benedetta to Maya very seriously. “You mustn’t run away ever again. Take things easy now, keep control, stay close to us. We will look out for you. You know that, Maya. See?” She gestured around
the pool. “Isn’t this lovely? Aren’t we looking out for you?”

“I’m too much trouble,” Maya said.

“
I’m
trouble,” Bouboule insisted. “I am the trouble. Don’t be greedy.”

“Trouble has been very good for us,” said Benedetta. “Trouble has made our name.”

“You don’t know enough about trouble yet,” said Maya.

“But trouble made us famous. Trouble made us truly vivid. We define vivid now. Look at us! We lose the Tête, but now we relax by this beautiful pool while some rich idiot trash tycoon picks up all our bills. He thinks we’re cute, because the cops say we are dangerous. He’s a rich radical. Isn’t it lovely that there are rich radicals? We are young European chic. This is radical chic. It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“Epater les bourgeois,” said Bouboule. “Succès de scandale. The old games are the good games.”

“Don’t you read the net, Maya? They are giving our group such nice names.”

“ ‘The Ghost Children,’ “ Niko spoke up sourly. “I hate that name.”

“It sounds good in Français,” said Bouboule.

“What’s wrong with ‘the Tête crowd’?” demanded Niko, restlessly. “We always just called ourselves ‘the Tête crowd.’ ”

“It doesn’t matter what we called ourselves,” said Benedetta. “We should make up our own new name. We’re creative people. We should take control of our own publicity. I like ‘the Illuminati.’ ”

“It’s been done,” said Niko.

“The Young Immortals,” said Bouboule.

“The People Who Take Paul Seriously,” said Maya.

“The Cosmos-Shattering Anarchist Goddesses,” said Niko. “Plus their boyfriends.”

“The Subjects under Investigation,” said Maya. “The Potential Defendants.”

“Those names stink,” said Niko, hurt.

“Not like my name does,” Maya said. “I’m a crazed outlaw gerontocrat who led you all into delinquency.”

Benedetta sat up, shocked. “That was stupid to say. Who says that?”

“Everyone will. Because I’m famous now, too. Once nobody knew who I was, so nobody cared. I could do anything I wanted, as long as I never made any kind of difference. Now you’re actually making a difference, and I’m in the thick of it. I’m your collaborator, but I don’t have any of your noble excuses. You may be visionaries, but I’m an illegal alien who embezzled a very valuable medical property.” Maya tapped her sternum. “I know that I can’t get away with what I’ve done. So I’m going to make them arrest me. I’ll give myself up.”

Benedetta thought this over. “I suppose you think you’re being noble,” she said slowly. “Well, you don’t understand our strategy. They seized your network server and took your palace away from us. So what? Some pet animals died. So what? Those are only little setbacks, now that we know what is possible. We’re already into other palaces. We’re under the skin of the gerontocrats. The old people can’t claw us out or push us aside anymore. Let them try! We’ll turn them inside out.”

“No, darling, it’s you who can’t understand. You’ve never been a gerontocrat, but I have. They don’t care about your virtualities. They don’t care about your silly problem with your infinite imagination. They pretend that they care what you think, because to admit they don’t care wouldn’t be polite. But they truly don’t care much about dreams. They care about actualities. They care about responsibilities. They know they’ll die someday. They know that you’ll dance on their graves. They’ll gladly forgive you anything you do, as long as they’re nice and dead first. But darling, I’m not some futurist rebel, I’m a heretic here and now. I’m dancing on their feet.”

“Maya, stop talking bad politics in English and do what
Benedetta says,” said Bouboule. “Benedetta is very smart. Oh, look! Lodewijk is kissing her!” She broke into excited Français.

Maya missed her translation wig very much. She had lost it when she fled the actress’s apartment in Praha. She had lost everything she owned through running, not that she had all that much to lose. Mostly it hurt to lose her photographs. They were rather bad photographs, but they were the best she had ever made. She had carefully stored them inside the palace. Now the palace belonged to the Widow.

Niko and Bouboule were furiously excited to see Lodewijk in a sudden clinch with Yvonne. They were chattering and giggling. Even Benedetta took intense scholastic interest. If Maya paid complete attention to the gush of Français, she could decipher maybe a word in ten. Without a film of computation at her ear, these young people were impossibly distant, a generation from another culture and another continent. A generation eighty years away from her own.

She knew them, in her way: Paul, Benedetta, Marcel, Niko, Bouboule, Eugene, Lars, Julie, Eva, Max, Renée, Fernande, Pablo, Lunia, Jeanne, Victor, Berthe, Enhedu-anna-generally-known-as-Hedda, Berthe’s weird boyfriend what’s-his-face, Lodewijk, the new guy from Copenhagen, Yvonne, who’d been more or less officially Max’s girl until about ten seconds ago, that intense young Russian sculptor with twelve fingers, the cute Indonesian teenager who’d been hanging out a lot lately and was supposedly having the affair with Bouboule’s brother.… Her friends were wonderful. She had been very lucky to catch them during the brief larval phase in which they were more or less human. They loved her, and they loved one another, but they loved one another like friends and lovers should and did, and they loved her in the way that one might love a very rare and compelling set of antique portrait photographs.
Bouboule rose with oily grace from her recliner and went to tease Yvonne and Lodewijk. Niko went along to make sure that Bouboule didn’t tease them too much, and also to enjoy the spectacle. Body language told her that much. Body language was a breeze without clothes.

Benedetta kicked out her slender legs on the woven lounger and turned to Maya. “He sent Yvonne so many poems, you see,” she said helpfully. “I just had to cry when I read them. I can’t believe that Danish poetry can make me cry.”

“Really, Benedetta, you don’t have to explain it to me. It’s my own fault for losing my nice shiny back-combed translator.”

“I like to explain things to you, Maya. I want you to understand.”

“I understand too much too well already.” She thought about it. “Benedetta, there is one thing I truly don’t understand. Why doesn’t Paul have a lover? I never see Paul with anyone.”

“Maybe he’s too considerate,” Benedetta said.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Are you telling me you don’t already know all about it?” She smiled. “Is this Benedetta I’m talking to?”

“It’s not that we didn’t try,” Benedetta said. “Of course we all tried to make time with Paul. Who wouldn’t want to be Mrs. Ideologue? Who wouldn’t want to be the genius’s favorite girl? Right? Completely lost in his heroic shadow. I want to pick up Paul’s dirty socks. I want to sew on his little buttons. That’s the life for me. Isn’t it? I want to gaze in silent adoration at darling Paul while he talks theory to my colleagues for fourteen hours straight. I want them to look at me and see that I have his heart in my little clutch bag. So that they can all die inside.”

“Are you serious, Benedetta? Oh, you are. You’re serious. Oh, darling, that’s too bad.”

“Did you ever have a really good talk with Paul? I have. Despite everything.”

“Yes, I have,” Maya said. “He once patted me on the hand.”

“I think it’s the cop. That’s my working hypothesis. The Widow’s our real rival. It’s his crush. A terrible crush. Isn’t that the proper word in English, ‘crush’? Anyway, it’s Helene. He wants Helene. He loves to feast with panthers.”

“Oh, no. That can’t be true.”

“He respects Helene. He takes her very seriously. He talks to her, even when he doesn’t have to talk to her. He wants something from Helene. He wants her validation, isn’t that the word? He wants to conquer the Widow, like climbing the Matterhorn. He needs to make her believe in him.”

“Oh, poor Paul, poor Benedetta. Poor everybody.”

“What does this matter to me?” said Benedetta, all lighthearted bitterness. “I’ll live for a thousand years. If I had Paul even for a hundred years, it would only be an episode. If I had Paul now, what would I do with Paul later, when things become interesting? As for the Widow, he can forget all about that. Helene is a creature of habit. She’ll never love any man who will outlive her.”

“Oh. Well, that explains a lot. I guess.”

“See, Maya? You’re not human. We’re not human. But we can understand. We’re artifice people. We always know it, before we can speak it aloud. We always understand much better than we think.”

A gong rang. It was Marcel. He shouted something in Français, and then in Deutsch, and then in English. The time had come for the immersion.

“I’m not going in,” Maya said.

“You should swim with us, Maya. It’s good for you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“This isn’t serious virtuality. It’s not holy fire. The immersion
pool is only a rich man’s toy. But it’s pretty. And technically sweet.”

Shimmering liquid gushed as the others whooped and dived in. No one surfaced.

Benedetta wrapped her lustrous hair in a Psyche knot and pinned it. “I’m going in. I think I’ll have sex today.”

“Who with, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, if I can’t find someone willing to bother, maybe I’ll try by myself.” She smiled, ran, and dived headlong. White bubbles rose, and she was gone.

Paul patrolled the edge of the pool. Gazing in. Smiling. The picture of satisfaction.

“That’s everyone but you and me,” he called out.

She waved. “Don’t mind me, you go ahead.”

He shook his head. He drew near, walking slowly, barefooted. “I can’t leave you sitting here looking so sad.”

“Paul, why don’t you go?”

“You’ve been talking politics with Benedetta,” Paul concluded analytically. “We didn’t take these risks, and make this effort, just to add to our own unhappiness. That would only represent a moral defeat for us. We must have a good time with our youth, or there’s so little point in being young. So you see, you simply must come in with us.”

“Things like this frighten me.”

“Then I’ll teach you about it,” said Paul, perching cautiously on the foot of her lounge chair. “Think of the virtuality pool as a kind of crème de menthe. All right? On the top layer is a breathable silicone fluid. We’ve put a trace of anandamine in it, just for fun. On the bottom is a malleable liquid. It’s something like the fusible liquids that our friend Eugene uses to cast sculpture. But it’s much more advanced and much more friendly, so we can swim inside it. It’s a buoyant, tactile, breathable, immersible virtuality.”

Maya said nothing. She tried to look very attentive.

“The best part is the platform. The platform is a fluidic
computer. It uses liquid moving through tiny locks and channels to form its logic gates. You see? We dive into the pool and we can actually
breathe
the very stuff of computation! And the computer instantiates itself as it runs. Soft liquid for software, hardened liquid for hardware. It abolishes certain crucial category distinctions. It’s a deeply poetic scheme. Also, it’s the sort of thing that makes gerontocrats have fits.” Paul laughed cheerfully.