Holy Fire

“I can guess that much, but what is it? Is it alive? Is it a robot? Is it some kind of lobster? It sounded like it was talking with real lips and a tongue!”

Paul looked exasperated. “Do you mind? This is the Stuttgart express, you know.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”

Paul gazed at her silently, meditatively. “Poor Emil,” he said at last.

“Don’t tell me that! You have no right to tell me that! I’m good for him. I know I’m good for him. You don’t know anything about it.”

“Are you good for Emil?”

“Look, what can I do to make you trust me? You can’t just write me off, you can’t just push me out. You say you want something really strange to happen in the world. Well, I’m really strange, all right? And I’m happening.”

Paul thought this over, tapping the edge of the table with his fingertips. “Let me test your blood,” he said.

“All right. Sure.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweater.

He stood up, retrieved his backpack from the overhead compartment, opened it, rummaged about methodically and removed a blood-test mosquito. He placed the little device on the center of her forearm. It sniffed about, squatted, inserted its hair-thin beak. There was no pain at all. Maybe a tiny itch.

Paul retrieved the blood-glutted device. It bent down and unfolded its wings, which formed a display screen the width of a pair of thumbnails. Paul bent down close and stared.

“So,” he said at last. “If you want to keep your secret, you’d better not let anyone else try a blood test.”

“Okay.”

“You’re very anemic. In fact, there’s a lot of fluid inside you that isn’t even blood.”

“Yeah, those would be cellular detox detergents and some catalyzed oxygen transports.”

“I see. But there’s more than enough DNA in here for me to establish your identity. And to turn you in to civil support. If that ever should prove necessary.”

“Look, Paul, you don’t have to take the trouble to trace my medical records. We’ve come this far—I’ll just tell you who I am.”

Paul forced the mosquito to disgorge on a slip of Chromatograph and folded the stained paper neatly. “No,” he said, “that’s not necessary. In fact, I don’t even think it’s wise. I don’t want to know who you are. That’s not my responsibility. And that’s certainly not what I want from you.”

“What do you want from me?”

He looked her in the eye. “I want you to prove to me that you’re not human yet still an artist.”

Stuttgart was a big loud town. Big, loud, sticky, and green. A city of gasps, grunts, wheezes, complex organic gurglings. People liked to shout at each other in Stuttgart. People emerged in sudden pedestrian torrents from sphinctering holes in the walls.

The famous towers were frankly cyclopean but their rhythmic billowing made them seem soothingly oceanic, rather than mountainous. She could hear the monster towers breathing with a viscous, tubercular rasping. Their breath galed above the furry streets and smelled of steam and lemons.

“My family helped to build this city,” Paul volunteered, neatly skirting around a large splattered puddle of a substance much like muesli. “My parents were garbage miners.”

“ ‘Were?’ ”

“They gave it up. Garbage was like any other extractive industry. The best and richest landfills played out early. Nowadays garbage mining is mostly left to wildcatters, methane drillers, small-timers. The great garbage fortunes are gone.”

“I see.”

“No need to fret, my mother did very well by her career. I’m a child of privilege.” Paul smiled cheerfully. He was relaxed, he was glad to be home.

“Your parents are Francais?”

“Yes. We’re from Avignon originally. Half the population of Stuttgart are Francais.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Paris has become a museum.” The lighting changed over the street. An enormous ribbed membrane peeled from the side of a tower and deployed itself over the neighborhood. A flock of white cranes wheeled in beneath it, landed in the streets like so many white-feathered commuters. The birds began to peck at the sidewalk, hard enough to break it into chunks.

“The finest extracts from the dumps,” Paul said, “iron, aluminum, copper, and such—their market value crashed once modern materials came into production. Cheap diamond of course, cheap diamond beats anything. But sugarglass, optical plastics, fullerenes, and aerogels”—he gestured at the cityscape around them. A small deft man with a proprietarial interest in structures four hundred stories tall. “The carbon-based products drove construction metals off the market. People in Stuttgart are progressives, they despise the shibboleths.”

“This place is a lot like Indianapolis.”

“Not at all! Nothing like it!” Paul protested. “Indianapolis was a political act, a freak by revanchist Asians. Stuttgart is serious! Stuttgart is meaningful! It is the only truly modern city in Europe! The only city whose builders truly believed in a future—rather than some endless recycling of the past.”

“I’m not sure I’d be real happy if the future looked like this.”

“It won’t. Any more than the world came to look like New York City a century ago. It was enough that for a certain period of time the world wanted to look like New York City. Stuttgart is that kind of urban cynosure. It’s the only city in the world where modern society was allowed to speak with an authentic architectural voice.”

“You use the past tense, I see.”

“There won’t be many other Stuttgarts. Gerontocratic society lacks the will and energy to innovate on the grand scale. Unless, as with Stuttgart, some large city is leveled by a cataclysm and the survivors have no choice.” Paul shrugged. “Not a pleasant prospect! There may be some fanatics who consider holocaust an acceptable price for change, but I’ve studied holocaust, and holocaust is vile. The change we face has its own inexorability. There’s much to be said for survival. Live long enough, and reality will melt beneath your feet.” He paused, considering. “I’m very fond of Praha. That city surely has lessons for the world as profound as Stuttgart’s. Praha outlasted its own epoch and became a beautiful freak, a charming atavism. Praha found a second chance. Now Praha is the chrysalis for a larval form of posthumanity.”

They walked on. The skies of Stuttgart were full of aerial transports that uncoiled like butterfly tongues, adhered to a distant tower, and then rolled up neatly to the other side. These reeling walkways carried sliding capsules within their flaccid bulk. They were grotesquely efficient, like ductile pedestrian boas.

Paul led her down a long flight of stairs and beneath a solemn stone arch with a series of thick beaded curtains. The sky vanished. The air warmed. They emerged under a coarse mossy roof with humps like fabric but the apparent rigidity of concrete. The walls grew spongy and disturbed, under long brilliantly glowing strands of sun-bright optical fiber. It was hot and damp, a stony greenhouse. The air reeked of vanilla and bananas. “This is my favorite quarter of town,” said Paul. “I lived here for years before I took my teaching post. This quarter was planned and built by theorists of the edible cityscape.”

“Theorists of the what?”

“The walls here are gasketfungus. You can eat the city raw. The walls are quite nutritious.” It didn’t seem a particularly good idea to eat the fungal walls. The locals had been carving graffiti into them with some kind of herbicide. Patchy letters of wilted yellow. BENEATH THE BEACH—THE PAVEMENT. Curls of Arabic. A Kilroy face with a mess of loopy curls.

They walked beside a brilliantly lit multistory building. The open floors were marked in numbered slots. People were lying in cavities in these numbered areas, under searing artificial sunlight. The people wore spex and were covered from head to foot in big gray-green wads of dense organic fiber.

“What’s this place? A morgue?”

“It’s a public bathhouse.”

“Where’s the water?”

“It’s not water bathing, it’s exfoliation. You’re dipped in jelly and you lie under the lights. They dust you in