Holy Fire

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.

The bartender, to their disquiet, now took notice of them. He slapped his notebook shut with a bang, and shuffled over. He was very old—or very sick—and walked as if his feet ached.

His face was a solid mass of gray beard—no eyebrows, no visible nose, no forehead, ears, or temples. The hairless membranes of his lips and eyelids were three pale patches in a face-smothering snarl of whiskers.

“You’re new here,” the bartender announced, through an external speaker on his suit.

“That’s right. I’m Maya, and this is Klaudia. We do couture.”

The bartender looked them over in the relatively lucid lighting directly over the mahogany bar. He had a small scabby bald patch on the crown of his head. “I like young girls in fine clothes,” he said at last, blinking. “The dog gives you any trouble, you tell him to come to old Klaus.”

Maya smiled at him sunnily. “Thank you so much. It’s very good of you to have us in to your famous establishment. We won’t be any trouble, I promise. Can we take pictures?”

“No. What are you drinking?”

“Caffeine,” Klaudia said bravely.

Klaus deftly served up two demitasses. “You want animal cream?”

“Nein danke,” said Klaudia with a scarcely perceptible shudder.

“No charge, then,” said Klaus, returning to his repair work.

Maya and Klaudia took their clattering cups and saucers to a couch-and-table set, and sat down together. Klaudia threw her ribbed cloak aside and shivered inside her pink ruffled top.

“[This sure isn’t my kind of party,]” Klaudia moaned quietly. “[I was sure there would be dancing and music and public sex and maybe some anandamines. This bar is like a tomb or something. What’s that awful music they’re playing?]”

“That’s antique acoustic analog music. There wasn’t much vertical color to the sound back in those days. The instruments were made of wood and animal organs.”

Klaudia sipped nervously at her demitasse. “[You know what the problem is, Maya? This is a party for intellectuals. It’s really stupid to be an intellectual when you’re young. You should be an intellectual when you’re a hundred years old and can’t feel anything anymore. Intellectuals are so pretentious! They don’t know how to live!]”

“Klaudia, relax, okay? It’s still early.”

The wall mural was the most warm and inviting object in the Tete du Noye. It was not glassy or screenlike at all, it was very painterly, very like a canvas. The screen had been broken up into hundreds of fragments, honeycombed cells, slowly wobbling and jostling. The moving cells swam among one another, and pulsed, and rotated, and mutated. A digital dance of the flowers.

Maya lifted her demitasse cup, formally touched it to her lower lip, and put it back on the table. She watched Klaudia fidget for a while, and then glanced at the mural again. The amber floral shapes were mostly gone, replaced by a growing majority of cool geometrical crystals.

She wasn’t quite sure how she knew it, but she realized somehow that the mural was watching her. The mural had some way to monitor people—probably cameras, hidden behind the screen. Whenever anyone looked at the mural directly, its movement slowed drastically. It only really got going when no one was looking at it.

Maya opened her backpack, and slyly watched the mural in the mirror of her makeup case. The mural knew no better, and thought it had escaped her attention. The little cells became quite lively, flinging sparks of information at one another, blossoming, conjugating, spinning, kaleidoscoping. Maya snapped her case shut, and turned to face the screen directly. The cells froze guiltily in place and crept along on their best behavior.

Eugene ambled over. “Ciao Maya!”

“Ciao Eugene.” She was glad to see him. Eugene had bathed. He’d combed his hair. He was looking very natty in a long brocade coat and stovepipe slacks.

Eugene smiled winningly. “Was ist los, Camilla?”

“Klaudia,” Klaudia said, frowning and tucking in her legs on the couch.

Eugene sat down cheerfully. “You should have logged on at the bar! That’s the custom here at the Tete. I didn’t even know you’d arrived.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Eugene.”

“Most people log on from home to say they’re coming. This scene is very netted. The Tete is our meat rendezvous. I’m pleased that you’ve come. How do you like our host?”

“I don’t much like him,” Klaudia said primly in English.

“Amazing character, isn’t he? He’s a fascinating conversationalist. Got a million stories. He was a cosmonaut.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the only Czech in the lunar colony. Stayed up on the moon all during the plague years. That’s why he wears the suit. They had those immune system problems with the long-term radiation. He tried to make it on Earth without his suit at first, but he caught the staph and it scarred him pretty bad. That’s why he went for the heavy fur.”

“I’ve never met a cosmonaut.”

“Well, you’ve met one now. Klaus owns the Tete. I gotta warn you, Klaus doesn’t much like to talk about his moon years. Most of his friends died during the blowouts and the coup and the purges. But he’s really good to the local scene. He was the only Czech lunarian, a national hero. So the Praha city council lets him do anything he wants. Klaus is no stuffy gerontocrat, he’s really been to the edge. Mit ihm konnte man Pferde stehlen.”

“You don’t have to speak Deutsch just for me,” Klaudia pouted.

“Deutsch is no problem! We got a Shqiperisan guy right over there trying to find someone here who can speak Geg. Geg, or maybe Tosk.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Tirana.”

Reluctantly, Klaudia brightened. “[I love men from Shqiperise,]” she said in Deutsch. “[They’re so industrial and romantic. What does he do?]”

“Virtualitat,” Eugene said.

“Prima.” Klaudia stood up and left.

Maya patted the couch seat next to her. “Come sit closer.”

Eugene edged over cautiously.

“Tell me something about the woman who did that wall mural.”

“How do you know a woman did it?”

“I can just tell, that’s all.”

Eugene watched the mural, which noticed his attention and slowed instantly. “It’s a cellular automata display. From the fifties, to judge by the technique. I hope she built it solid, because you’d have a pretty hard time