Holy Fire

did what she could to explain her circumstances. Once the Access Bureau cops down on the first floor began to fully grasp the situation, they became quite annoyed with her. They told her they would get in touch with her, and tried to convince her to leave the premises and go back with her escorts to some other country.

Maya was disgusted by the prospect of yet more time in a hospital, and refused to go. She asked them to find Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier. With profound reluctance, they said they would do this for her, and they assigned her a number.

She and Brett sat down in an elbow-shaped waiting room on a pair of nasty pink plastic chairs. After an hour, the Helleniki medical escorts carefully checked Maya’s tracking handcuffs and her tiara monitor. They were satisfied by this inspection, so they left. After this, pretty much nothing happened.

“Boy, this is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” said Brett.

“It’s good of you to stick with me through this, Brett. I know it’s boring.”

“No, no,” said Brett, adjusting her spex, “it’s a real privilege to be your personal media coverage. I’m so touched that you had your friends call me, and give me this great opportunity. It’s a fascinating experience. I’ve always been so terrified of the authorities. I had no idea their indifference to us was so complete and so total. They really hold young people in complete contempt.”

“That’s not it. Everyone has explained to them that I’m not a young person. It’s probably because I’m American. I mean, even nowadays, it’s always extra trouble to deal with people from outside the jurisdiction.”

Brett took off her spex and gazed at the floor’s worn and ancient tiling. “I wish I hated you, Mia.”

“Why?” she said.

“Because you’re everything I always wanted to be. It should have been me involved with exciting European artifice people. It should have been me up on the catwalk. You stole my life. And now you’ve even made a difference. You’ve even hurt them. I never even dreamed that I could hurt them.”

“I’m sorry,” Maya said.

“I dreamed about doing so much. I never had the nerve to really do much of anything. I could have done something. Maybe. Don’t you think? You’re pretty, but I’m as pretty as you. You sleep with anybody, well, I’ll sleep with anybody, too. I’m from the same town as you. I’m twenty, but I’m just as smart as you were when you were twenty. Aren’t I?”

“Of course you are.”

“I have some talent. I can make clothes. You can’t make clothes. What is it you have that I don’t have?”

Maya sighed. “Well, here I am sitting in a police station. Maybe you should tell me all about it.”

“You’re not young. That’s it, isn’t it? You stole my life because you’re older than me, and stronger than me. So for you, it was always easy. I mean, maybe you can panic, maybe you can be wracked with guilt, maybe you can even be terrified out of your skin by some stupid wired-up dog. But even when you don’t know who you are, you still know who you are. You’re five times older than me, and five times stronger than me. And you just won’t get out of the way.”

“The Tete people are young. They’re young like you.”

“Yeah, and they love you, don’t they? When you were my age, they’d have thought you were a hick and an idiot. Just like they think I’m a hick and an idiot. Because that’s what I am. They’re smart and gifted and really sophisticated, and the very best I can do is lurk outside their gates and watch them and envy them terribly. At my age, you wouldn’t have done any better than me. You would have done a lot worse. You wouldn’t even let your boyfriend take you to Europe. You dumped him and married some biotechnician. You turned into a bureaucrat, Mia.”

Maya closed her eyes and leaned back in the comfortless chair. It was all so true, and all so beside the point. “I wish you wouldn’t call me Mia.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t call me Brett.”

“Well, okay … call me Mia if you have to.”

“I hate it that you don’t even hate me back. You’re just bringing me along because I’m like a little good-luck charm to you. I’m like your hamster. And you couldn’t even keep your hamster.”

“That hamster creeped me out big-time. And you’re starting to seriously bug me, too.”

“You even talk just like some woman from a hundred years ago. Everybody in the whole world must be a complete idiot! I mean, once we really look at you, it’s so obvious! Your hair is terrible. Do you know you have big lines in your neck? I mean, they’re not wrinkles, they’re not allowed to be wrinkles—but boy, they sure aren’t natural.”

“Brett, stop it. You’re not talking any sense. First you say that I’m stealing your life, and then you say you couldn’t do anything with it anyway. So what’s your big problem exactly? Sure, maybe you’d have done a lot better than me, eighty years ago. But hey, you weren’t around then. You can’t romanticize the past to somebody like me. I was there in the past, all right? Eighty years ago, we basically lived like savages. We had plagues and revolutions and mass die-off and big financial crashes. People shot each other with guns when I was young. Compared to eighty years ago, this is heaven! And now you’re just abusing me, and not making one bit of sense.”

“But Mia, I can’t make perfect sense like you can. I’m only twenty years old.”

“Oh, don’t cry, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’m twenty years old and I’m an adult. But nothing I do is important. I can’t even get a chance to prove that I’m stupid. I suspect that I probably am, and I could live with that, I swear I could. I’d do something else, I wouldn’t work in artifice, I’d just live like a little animal. I’d make babies and maybe I’d potter around in a garden or something. But I can’t even manage that much, in this big safe lovely world you’ve built for me. I can’t get anywhere at all.”

Two Czech policemen arrived. They weren’t network cops, medical cops, or artifice cops. Apparently they were just common or garden cops from Praha. They produced phonetic cards from their pink uniforms and read her an extensive list of civil rights in heavily accented English. They then placed her under arrest and booked her into the local legal system. She was charged with immigration violations and working without a permit.

They threw Brett out of the building. Brett yelled and fussed vigorously in English, but the Czech cops were patient and they put up with it and they threw her out and dusted their hands. Maya was stripped, and then dressed in dun prison coveralls. They left the monitors on her wrists and the tiara on her head.

The Praha cops took her a few blocks away to a high-rise, and installed her in a very clean holding tank. There she was able to reflect with relief that she had not yet been charged with: (a) network abuse, (b) medical fraud, (c) complicity in illegal discharge into an urban sewer system, (d) abetting the posthumous escape of an organized criminal, or (e) any number of episodes of transportation toll fraud.

Nobody bothered with her for a couple of days. She was fed on a standard and extremely healthy medical diet. She was allowed to watch television and was given a deck of cards. Robots wheeled by every hour or so and engaged her in a very limited English conversation. The jail was almost entirely deserted, very little used, and therefore extremely quiet. There were a few gypsies somewhere in a decontamination wing; at night she could hear them singing.

On the third day she threw away the tiara. She couldn’t get the bracelets loose, however.

On the fourth day Helene had her brought out for interrogation. Helene had a tiny office on the top floor of the Access Bureau. Maya was astonished at how old and small and shabby Helene’s office was. It was definitely Helene’s own office, because there were neatly framed little hand-drawn originals on the walls that probably were worth more than the entire building. But Maya herself had worked for decades in offices far better equipped.

Helene was out of mufti and in a very dashing belted pink uniform. Other than that, there was a window and a chair and a desk. And a little white dog. From behind the desk rose a very big brown dog.

Maya stared. “Hello, Plato.”

The dog cocked his ears and said nothing.

“Plato doesn’t talk now,” Helene said. “He’s resting.”

The dog was still rather gaunt, but his coat was glossy and his nose was wet. He wore no clothing, but Helene had given him a lovely new collar. “Plato looks a lot better. I’m glad.”

“Please sit down, Mrs. Ziemann.”

“Why don’t we get on a first-name basis so I won’t have to mangle your beautiful last name with my terrible Francais.”

Helene considered this. “Ciao Maya.”