“I don’t have the cheekbones for that kind of life anymore,” Mia said. “I talk too slowly. I don’t wave my hands enough. I don’t giggle. If I tried to dance, I’d ache for a week.”
“You don’t have to dance. I could make you look really vivid if you wanted me to. I’m pretty good at that. I have a talent. Everyone says so.”
“I’m sure you could do that, Brett. But why would I want you to?”
Brett was bitterly crestfallen. Mia felt a sharp pang of guilt at having disappointed her. It was as if she’d deliberately slapped a small child in the street. “I do want the jacket,” Mia said. “I’m fond of it, I want to buy it from you.”
“You do, really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Could you give me some grown-up money for it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean real money from a long-term investment account,” Brett said. “Certified funds.”
“But certified funds are only for special transactions. Life extension, stock ownership, pensions, that sort of thing.”
“No, they’re not. Certified money is the real money for the real economy. It’s the kind of money that kids like Griff and me can never get our hands on.” Brett’s young-girl eyes—warm amber brown, with sclera so white and clear that they looked almost artificial—narrowed cagily. “You don’t have to give me very much
“I’d like to give you some,” Mia said, “but I don’t have any way to do that. Of course I do have certified funds in my own name, but they’re all tied up in long-term capital investments, like they’re supposed to be. Nobody uses that kind of financial instrument for little everyday transactions like clothes or food. What’s wrong with a nice cashcard?”
“You can’t start a real business without certified funds,” Brett said. “There’s all kinds of awful tax problems and insurance problems and liability problems. It’s all just part of the big conspiracy to hold young people back.”
“No, it isn’t,” Mia said, “it’s how we ensure financial stability and reduce liquidity in the capital markets. This is truly a dull and stuffy topic, Brett, but as it happens, I’m a medical economist, and I know quite a bit about this. If you could have seen what markets were like in the twenties, or the forties, or even the sixties, then you’d appreciate modern time-based restrictions on the movement of capital. They’ve helped a lot, life’s a lot more predictable now. The whole structure of the medical-industrial complex is dependent on stable grant procedures and graduated reductions in liquidity.”
Brett shrugged. “Oh, never mind, never mind.… I knew you’d never give me any, but I had to ask anyway. I hope you’re not mad at me.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m not mad.”
Brett gazed around the shop, her lips tightening in a glossy smirk. “Mr. Quiroga’s not around. Probably doing civil support. He’s supposed to run this place, but he’s never in here when you want him.… Probably makes more treatment points from the government when he’s out spying on us kids.… Can you give me fifteen marks for it? Cash?”
Mia took her minibank out of her purse, ratcheted fifteen market units onto a smartcard, and handed it over.
Brett carefully stuffed the card into a pocket of her backpack, and removed a scarcely visible tag from the puffy red sleeve of the merchandise. She tucked the tag under the sleeping cat, which meowed once, reflexively. “Well, thanks a lot, Maya. Griff’d be real glad to see me make a sale. That is, if I was ever gonna see Griff again.”
“Will you see him?”
“Oh, he’ll come looking for me. He’s gonna sweettalk me and apologize and all, but he’s no good. He’s smart but he’s stupid, if you know what I mean. He’s never gonna really do anything. He’s never gonna really go anywhere.” Brett was restless. “Let’s go.”
They exited the mall into Pierce Street. A Pekingese police dog with a pink collar came toddling down the hill. Brett stood perfectly still and stared at the tiny dog with blank and focused hostility. When the dog had passed them, she strode on.
“I could leave tonight,” Brett declared, loosely swinging her young and perfect arms beneath the poncho. “Just step right onto a plane for Stuttgart. Well, not Stuttgart, because that would be a real crowded flight. But someplace else in Europe. Warszawa maybe. Airplanes are just like buses. They hardly ever really check to see if you’ve paid.”
“That would be dishonest,” Mia said gently.
“I’d get away with it! Hitching is easy if you have the nerve.”
“What would your parents think?”
Brett laughed harshly. “I wouldn’t get any medical checkups in Stuttgart. I’d just stay very underground in Europe, and I wouldn’t get any checkups unless I came back here. I’d have no medical records in Europe. Nobody would ever catch me. I could hitch on a plane tonight. Nobody would care.”
They were heading uphill and Mia’s calves were beginning to burn. “You’d have a hard time getting anything done in Europe without appearing on official records.”
“People travel like that all the time! You can get away with anything as long as you don’t look important.”
“What does Griff think about this?”
“Griff’s got no imagination.”
“Well, what if he comes looking for you?”
Brett’s face clouded thoughtfully. “This man you knew. Your lover. Was he really a lot like Griff?”
“Maybe.”
“What happened to him?”
“They buried him this morning.”
“Ohhh,” said Brett. “Comprehension dawns.” Delicately she touched Mia’s padded shoulder. “I get it all now. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
They walked along for a while silently. Mia tried to catch her breath. Then Brett spoke up. “I bet you secretly loved him right up to the very end.”
“No. Actually, it wasn’t at all like that.”
“But you went to his funeral today.”
“Well, yes.”
“So, I bet somewhere, deep inside, you really loved him the whole time.”
“I know that would seem more romantic,” Mia said, “but it just doesn’t work that way. Not for me, anyway. I never loved him half as much as I loved a better man later, and now I scarcely even think about him, either. Even though I was his wife for fifty years.”
“No, no, no,” Brett insisted cheerily, “I bet anything that on New Year’s Eve you take mnemonics and drink alcohol and think about your old boyfriends and cry.”
“Alcohol’s a poison,” Mia said. “And mnemonics are more trouble than they’re worth. Anyway, that’s just the way young women think that old women act. Posthuman women aren’t like that at all. We aren’t all sad or nostalgic. Really old women, who are still healthy and strong—we’re just very different. We just—we just get over all that.” She paused. “Really old men, too, some of them …”
“Well, you can’t have been all cold and indifferent to him, or otherwise you wouldn’t have been crying about him on a bus.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mia said. “It wasn’t him, it was the situation! It was the human condition! The posthuman condition … If I’d been crying because I regretted losing my love life, I’d have left with your boyfriend, not with you.”
“Very funny,” Brett said with an instant jealous scowl. Brett began walking faster, her elastic soles squeaking on the pavement.
