girl, I was his girl. I’m not a girl anymore. Nowadays I’m someone who used to be a woman.”
“That’s kind of an odd way to put it.”
“It’s the truth. I’m not his woman, I haven’t been anyone’s woman for a long time. I don’t have lovers. I don’t love anyone. I don’t look after anyone. I don’t kiss anyone, I don’t hug anyone, I don’t cheer anyone up. I don’t have a family. I don’t have hot flashes, I don’t have monthlies. I’m a postsexual person, I’m a postwomanly person. I’m a crone. I’m a late-twenty-first-century techno-crone.”
“You look like a woman to me.”
“I dress like a woman. That’s all very calculated and deliberate.”
“I know what you mean,” Mercedes admitted. “I’m sixty-five. Pretty much past it. Not too sorry to see it go. Being a woman—the really hard part of womanhood—it’s not the sort of life you’d wish on a friend.”
“It was very wearing,” Mia said. “He was very polite about it, but just being near him exhausted me. The worst part was that there’s no clean break between me and my earlier life. My romantic life, my sexual life. I could remember how exciting it had been. How flattering. Being pursued by some large energetic insistent good-looking boy. How it felt when I let him catch me. The mnemonic made it all a lot worse.”
“Most people would say that clean breaks are bad for you. That you have to come to terms with that aspect of your former life, and integrate it so you can put it to rest and get beyond it.”
Therapeutic suggestions irritated Mia in direct ratio to their tact. “I did have to come to terms with my earlier life today. I’m not a bit happier for it.”
“Are you sorry he’s dying? Are you grieving?”
“I’m a little sorry.” Mia sipped the mineral water. “I wouldn’t call this grief. It’s too thin for grief.” The water felt good. Very simple things conveyed most of the pleasure in her life. “I wept some today. It felt really bad to cry. I haven’t wept in five years.” She touched her swollen eyes. “It feels like there’s membrane damage.”
“Was there a bequest?”
“No,” Mia lied smoothly.
“There’s always some kind of bequest,” Mercedes prodded.
Mia paused. “There was one, but I refused it. He had a postcanine dog.”
“I knew it,” Mercedes said. “It’s the pet, or the house. If they die really young, then maybe they worry about their kid. People never invite you to a deathbed scene unless they want you to tidy up for them somehow.”
“Maybe they just want
Mercedes shrugged. “I tidy up. Tidiness is my life.” Mercedes was always very patient. “I can see there’s something else you want to get off your chest. What is it?”
“Nothing, not really anything.”
“You just don’t want to tell me yet, Mia. You might as well tell me about it now. While you’re still in the mood.”
Mia stared at her. “You don’t have to tidy me up quite so thoroughly. I’m perfectly all right. I had a shock, but I’m not going to do anything strange.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that, Mia. The situation is very strange. The world is extremely strange now. You live all alone and you don’t have people you can trust to advise you and prop you up. Except for your work, you’re not fulfilling any social roles. You could go off-kilter real easily.”
“When have you ever known me to go off-kilter?”
“Mia, you’re smarter than me, and you’re older than me, and you’re a lot richer than I am, but you’re not the only person like you in the world. I know a lot of people just like you. People like you are brittle.”
Mercedes waved her blue-jacketed arm around the apartment. “This stuff you’ve been calling your life all these years, this isn’t normality. It isn’t safety, either. It’s just routine. Routine is not normality. You’re not allowed any so-called normality. There’s no such thing as a genuine normality for a ninety-four-year-old posthuman being. Life extension is just not a natural state of affairs, and it’s never going to be natural, and you can’t ever make it natural. That’s your reality. My reality too. And that’s why the polity sends me around here twice a week. To look around and tidy up and listen to you.”
Mia said nothing.
“Go on and be that way,” Mercedes told her. “I’m very sorry you had a hard time today. A friend’s death can hit us harder than we think. Even dull people can’t keep the same routine forever, and you’re not dull. You’re just very guarded, and very possessive of an old-fashioned emotional privacy that no one really needs nowadays.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
Mercedes looked at her solemnly. The silence stretched. Mercedes was not deceived. No woman could be a heroine to her maid.
“By the way,” Mercedes said at last, “that nasty strain of fungus is back in your bathroom. Where have you been walking?”
“I walk for exercise,” Mia said. “I just drift around town. I don’t keep track.”
“Try leaving your shoes outside the door for a while, okay? And don’t take long showers. That Coccidioides is hell.”
“Okay. I’ll do that.”
“I have to leave now,” Mercedes said, getting up. “I’ve got another round to do. But you call me if you need anything. Call me anytime. Don’t be embarrassed to call. Being called is good for me.”
“Okay, Officer,” Mia said. Mercedes made a face, collected her gear, and left.
Martin Warshaw was put to rest on the afternoon of the twenty-first, out in the old mass grave in Palo Alto. The day was bright and clear and the sprawling grounds of the former plague site had never looked greener, calmer, or more contemplative. Mia recognized no one at the ceremony. No one took the trouble to recognize her.
The nineteen elderly people who attended the ceremony were all very much of a type. Hollywood people had never been afraid of the knife. The Beautiful People had always been particularly eager to seize on any artifice of youth. Fifty years ago, people of this sort had been medical pioneers. Now they were genuinely and irretrievably old. Their primitive techniques, the biomedical cutting edge during the 2030s and 2040s, were hopelessly dated and crude. Now they truly looked the role of pioneers: very scarred and tired and hardscrabble.
Attendants opened the hinged white lid of the emulsifier, took the thin shroud from Martin’s wasted, puckered body, and slid him, with reverent care, feetfirst into the seething gel. The scanners set to work, Martin’s final official medical imaging. Gentle ultrasonics shook the body apart, and when the high-speed rotors began to churn, the emulsifier’s ornamental flowerbeds trembled a bit. Autopsy samplers caught up bits of the soup, analyzed genetic damage, surveyed the corpse’s populations of resident bacteria, hunted down and cataloged every subsymptomatic viral infection and prion infestation, and publicly nailed down the cause of death (self-administered neural depressant) with utter cybernetic certainty. All the data was neatly and publicly filed on the net.
Someone—Mia never discovered who—had asked a Catholic priest to say a few words. The young priest was very eager, and meant well. He was very exalted on entheogens, so filled with fiery inspiration that he was scarcely able to speak. When the priest finished his transcendant rant, he formally blessed the gel. The tiny crowd drifted from the site in twos and threes.
A necropolitan engraved Martin’s portrait, name, and dates onto the emulsifier’s cream white wall. Martin Warshaw (1999–2095) had become a colored patch the size of the palm of Mia’s hand, neatly ranked beside three hundred and eighty-nine other people, the previous occupants of this device. Mia tarried, gazing across the bright rows of funereal photoengravings. The sweet presence of all these human faces made it seem almost a kindly machine, a machine that meant well.
Mia summoned a taxi at the edge of the cemetery grounds. While she waited, she spotted a fawn-colored dog skulking in the oleanders. The dog wore no clothing and displayed no particular signs of intelligence. She stared at the dog as she waited for her taxi, but when she tried to approach him, the dog vanished into the bushes. She felt vaguely foolish once the dog had gone. Large brown dogs were common enough.
Mia left the taxi at the tube station, ducked under the conduit-riddled Californian earth, and emerged at the Public Telepresence Point at Coit Tower. Telegraph Hill was her favorite site when she was away from San Francisco. Whenever she traveled she’d link back to this site periodically, for a restorative taste of Bay Area urban sensory access. Mia had done telepresence to sites in cities all over the world, but she never fell in love with cities unless she could walk them. San Francisco was one of the world’s great walking cities. That was why she lived in San Francisco. That, and a great deal of habit. She set out on foot.
On the Embarcadero, Mia sipped a hot frappe in a crowded and noisy tourist cafe. She wondered glumly what
