Holy Fire

1

Mia Ziemann needed to know what to wear at a deathbed.

The net counseled simplicity and sincerity. Mia was a ninety-four-year-old Californian medical economist, while the prospective deceased, Martin Warshaw, had been her college sweetheart some seventy-four years previously. Mia could expect some prepared statement. There would very likely be a bequest of some sort. Conversation would involve an attempt to put Mr. Warshaw’s life into retrospective order, to supply the sense of grace and closure so desirable during life’s final chapter. She would not be asked to witness the actual moment of death.

A deathbed reunion of long-separated lovers was a challenge to etiquette, but the late twenty-first century shone in social tidiness. Dilemmas of this sort were exhaustively debated in endless rounds of calls for commentary, working papers from boards of experts, anecdotal testimonies, ethics conventions, sworn public hearings, policy manuals. No aspect of human existence escaped smoothing over by thoughtful, seasoned, and mature counsel.

Mia studied as much of this material as she could stomach. She spent the afternoon reacquainting herself with Martin Warshaw’s financial and medical records. She hadn’t seen Martin in fifty years, though she had followed his public career to some extent. Those records of Martin’s were most revealing and informative. They had made his life an open book. This was their purpose.

Mia reached a decision: black flats, support hose, a reactive girdle and cuirass, a knee-length silk dress in maroon and gray, long sleeves, high collar. A hat definitely seemed in order. No gloves. Gloves were recommended, but gloves seemed too clinical.

Mia had a blood filtration, a skin enzymation, a long bone-deep massage, a mineral bath, and a manicure. She had her hair cleaned, laminated, volumized, styled, and lacquered. She increased the saturated fat in her diet. She slept that night under a hyperbaric tent.

Next morning, November 19, Mia went into the city to look for a decent hat, some kind of hat that might truly suit her circumstances. It was a cold autumnal day in San Francisco. Fog crept in off the Bay, oozing through the leafy cliffsides of the office high-rises. She walked and shopped, and shopped and walked, for a long time. She saw nothing that could match her mood.

A dog was following her up Market Street, loping through the crowd. She stopped behind the shadowed column of a portico and stretched out her bare hand, beckoning.

The dog paused timidly, then came up and sniffed at her fingers.

“Are you Mia Ziemann?” the dog said.

“Yes, I am,” Mia said. People walked past her, brisk and purposeful, their solemn faces set, neat shoes scuffing the red brick sidewalks. Under the steady discipline of Mia’s gaze, the dog settled on his haunches, crouching at her feet.

“I tracked you from your home,” bragged the dog, panting rhythmically. “It’s a long way.” The dog wore a checkered knit sweater, tailored canine trousers, and a knitted black skullcap.

The dog’s gloved front paws were vaguely prehensile, like a raccoon’s hands. The dog had short clean fawn-colored fur and large attractive eyes. His voice came from a speaker implanted in his throat.

A car bleeped once at a tardy pedestrian, rudely breaking the subtle urban murmurs of downtown San Francisco. “I’ve walked a long way,” Mia said. “It was clever of you to find me. Good dog.”

The dog brightened at the praise, and wagged his tail. “I think I’m lost and I feel rather hungry.”

“That’s all right, nice dog.” The dog reeked of cologne. “What’s your name?”

“Plato,” the dog said shyly.

“That’s a fine name for a dog. Why are you following me?”

This sophisticated conversational gambit exhausted the dog’s limited verbal repertoire, but with the usual cheerful resilience of his species he simply changed the subject. “I live with Martin Warshaw! He’s very good to me! He feeds me well. Also Martin smells good! Except not … like other days. Not like …” The dog seemed pained. “Not like now.… ”

“Did Martin send you to follow me?”

The dog pondered this. “He talks about you. He wants to see you. You should come talk to him. He can’t be happy.” The dog sniffed at the paving, then looked up expectantly. “May I have a treat?”

“I don’t carry treats with me, Plato.”

“That’s very sad,” Plato observed.

“How is Martin? How does he feel?”

A dim anxiety puckered the hairy canine wrinkles around the dog’s eyes. It was odd how much more expressive a dog’s face became once it learned to talk. “No,” the dog offered haltingly, “Martin smells unhappy. My home feels bad inside. Martin is making me very sad.” He began to howl.

The citizens of San Francisco were a very tolerant lot, civilized and cosmopolitan. Mia could see that the passersby strongly disapproved of anyone who would publicly bully a dog to tears.

“It’s all right,” Mia soothed, “calm down. I’ll go with you. We’ll go to see Martin right away.”

The dog whined, too distraught to manage speech.

“Take me home to Martin Warshaw,” she commanded.

“Oh, all right,” said the dog, brightening. Order had returned to his moral universe. “I can do that. That’s easy.”

He led her, frisking, to a trolley. The dog paid for both of them, and they got off after three stops. Martin Warshaw had chosen to live north of Market in Nob Hill, in one of the quake-proofed high-rises built in the 2060s, a polychrome pile. It had been ambitious, by the garish standards of its period, with vividly patterned exterior tiling and a rippling mess of projecting bay windows and balconies.

Inside the building it was narcotically tranquil. The lobby offered an interior grove of hotly fragrant orange and avocado trees in portable two-ton polychrome pots. The trees were hoppingly alive with small, twittering flocks of finches.

Mia followed her canine escort into a mural-crusted elevator. They emerged on the tenth floor, onto pavement set with stone cobbles. The building’s internal lighting glowed in superrealist mimicry of northern California sunlight. People had hung laundry inside the building’s sweet breeze and light. Mia worked her way through the big potted jacarandas and bought a shrink-wrapped pack of dog treats from an automated street shop. The dog accepted a bone-shaped lozenge with polite enthusiasm.

Fragrant wisteria vines were flowering on the stone veneer of Martin’s apartment. The heavy door shunted open at a single knowing touch of the dog’s paw.

“Mia Ziemann is here!” the dog announced heartily to the empty air. The living room had the sanitary neatness of some strange old-fashioned hotel: potted palms, a mahogany media cabinet, tall brass floor lamps, a glass-topped teak table with spotless untouched glassware and hermetic jars of mixed nuts. A pair of large rats with control collars were eating lab chow from a bowl on the table.

“May I take your coat?” asked the dog.

Mia shrugged out of her tan gabard and handed it over. She was wearing what she usually wore to shop: tailored trousers and a long-sleeved blouse. Informal clothes would have to do. The dog gamely engaged in complex maneuvers with a hatstand.

Mia hung her purse. “Where is Martin?”

The dog led her to the bedroom. A dying man in patterned Japanese pajamas lay propped on pillows in a narrow bed. He was asleep or unconscious, his lined face sagging, his thin, lifeless hair in disarray.

At the sight of him, Mia almost turned and ran at once. The impulse to simply flee the room, flee the building, flee the city, was as strong and raw as any emotional impulse she had felt in years.

Mia stood her ground. Confronted with the stark reality of encroaching death, all her advice and preparation meant precisely nothing. She stood and waited for some memory—any memory—to hit her. Recognition came at last, and the dying face fell into focus.

She hadn’t seen Martin for more than fifty years. She hadn’t loved him for more than seventy. Yet here was Martin Warshaw. In what was left of his flesh.

The dog prodded Warshaw’s hand with his cold nose. Warshaw stirred. “Open the windows,” he whispered.

The dog tapped a button near the floor. Curtains rolled aside and floor-length windows shunted open onto damp Pacific air.

“I’m here, Martin,” Mia said.

He blinked in grainy astonishment. “You’ve come early.”

“Yes. I met your dog.”

“I see.” The back of the deathbed rose, propping him in a sitting position. “Plato, please bring Mia a chair.”

The dog gripped the bent wooden leg of the nearest chair and lugged it over clumsily across the carpet, puffing and whining with the effort. “Thank you,” Mia said, and sat.

“Plato,” said the dying man, “please be quiet now. Don’t listen to us, don’t talk. You may shut down.”

“May I shut down? All right, Martin.” The dog sank to the carpeted floor in deep confusion. His long furry head fell to the carpet, and he twitched a bit, as if dreaming.

The apartment was spotless and dustless and in suspiciously perfect order. By the look of it, Mia could tell that Martin hadn’t left his bed for weeks. Cleaning machines had been at the place, and civil-support personnel on their unending round of social checkups. The deathbed was discreet, but to judge by its subtle humming and occasional muted gurgle, it was well equipped.

“Do you enjoy dogs, Mia?”

“He’s a very handsome specimen,” Mia said obliquely.

The dog rose to his feet, shook himself all over, and began nosing aimlessly about the room.

“I’ve had Plato for forty years,” Martin said. “He’s one of the oldest dogs in California. One of the most heavily altered dogs in private ownership—he’s even been written up in the breeders’ magazines.” Martin smiled wanly. “Plato’s rather more famous than I am, these days.”

“I can see that you’ve done a great deal with him.”

“Oh, yes. He’s been through every procedure I’ve been through. Arterial scrubbing, kidney work, liver and lung work … I never tried any extension technique without running it through good old Plato first.” Martin folded his bony, waxlike hands above the covers. “Of course, it’s easier and cheaper to do veterinary work than posthuman extension—but I needed that sense of companionship, I suppose. One doesn’t like to go alone, into … medical experiences of such profundity.”

She knew what he meant. It was a common sentiment. Animal bodies had always preceded human bodies into the medical frontier. “He doesn’t look forty years old. Forty, that’s a very ripe age for a dog.”

Martin reached for a bedside slate. He brushed at the reactive surface with his fingertips, then brushed his fingers back through his hair—a gesture she recognized with a shock of déjà vu, after seven long decades. “They’re wonderfully resilient animals, dogs. Remarkable how well they get on with life, even after becoming postcanine. The language skills make a difference, especially.”

Mia watched the dog nosing about the bedroom. Freed from the heavy cognitive burden of language, the dog seemed much brisker, freer, less labored, somehow more authentically mammalian.

“At first, all his speech was very clearly machine generated,” Martin said, tugging at a pillow. Color had begun to enter his face. He’d done it with his scratching at the touchscreen, and with his bed, and with the medical support gear he was using, wired into his flesh beneath the pajamas. “Just a verbal prosthetic for a canine brain. Very halting, very … gimmicky. It took ten years for the wiring to sink in, to fully integrate. But now speech is simply a part of him. Sometimes I catch him talking to himself.”

“What does he talk about?”

“Oh, nothing very sophisticated. Nothing too abstract. Modest things. Food. Warmth. Smells. He is, after all, just my old good dog—somewhere under there.” Martin gazed at his dog with undisguised affection. “Isn’t that right, boy?” The dog looked up, thumped his tail mutely.

Mia had lived through a long and difficult century. She had witnessed massive global plagues, and consequent convulsive advancements in medicine. She’d been a deeply interested witness as vast new crypts and buttresses and towers were added to the ancient House of Pain. She had professionally studied the demographics of the deaths of millions of lab animals and billions of human beings, and she had examined the variant outcomes of hundreds of life-extension techniques. She’d helped to rank their many hideous failures, and their few but very real successes. She had meticulously judged advances in medical science as a ratio of capital investment. She had made policy recommendations to various specific organs of the global medical-industrial complex. She had never gotten over her primal dread of pain and death, but she no longer allowed mere dread to affect her behavior much.

Martin was dying. He had, in point of fact, amyloid neural degeneration, partial spinal paralysis, liver damage, and kidney nephritis, all of which had led through the usual complex paths of metabolic decline to a state his records neatly summarized as “insupportable.” Mia, of course, had read his prognosis carefully, but medical analysis was a product of its terminology. Death, by stark contrast, was not a word. Death was a reality that sought people out and put its primal stamp on every fiber of their beings.

She could tell at a glance that Martin was dying. He was dying, and he was offering her platitudes about his dog rather than harsh truths about his death, because his strongest and most genuine regret in life was leaving his dog. Demands, obligations, forced you to survive. Survival was an act of obligation to lovers, to dependents, to anyone who expected survival from you. A dog, for instance. What year was this, 2095? Martin was ninety-six and his best friend was his dog.

Martin Warshaw had once loved her. That was why he had arranged this meeting, why he was launching sudden emotional demands at her after fifty years of silence. It was a complex act of duty and rage and sorrow and politesse, but Mia understood the reality of the situation, just as she understood most other things these days: rather too well.

“Do you ever do mnemonics, Mia?”

“Yes. I’ve done memory drugs. Some of the milder ones. When I need them.”

“They help. They’ve helped me. But they’re a vice, of course, if you push them.” He smiled. “I’m pushing them hard now. There’s a lot of pleasure in vice when there’s nothing left to lose. Would you like a mnemonic?” He offered her a fresh pad of stickers. Factory-sealed, holographic backing.

Mia peeled one free, examined the name and the dosage, and smoothed the sticker to her neck. To please him.

“You’d think that after all these years they’d have found a mnemonic that would open your soul like a filing cabinet.” He reached into a bedside table and pulled out a framed photograph. “Everything just in its place, everything organized, everything indexed and full of meaning. But that’s too much to ask of a human brain. Memories compact themselves, they blur. They turn to mulch, lose all color. The details go. Like a compost heap.” He showed her the photo: a young woman in a high-collared coat, lipstick, eyeliner, wind-tousled brunette hair, squinting in sunlight, half smiling. Something guarded in her smile.

The young woman was herself, of course.

Martin gazed at the photo, wrapped in mnemonic like a psychic blanket, and then he looked up at her. “Do you remember much about the two of us? It’s been a long time.”

“I can remember,” she told him. That was almost true. “I wouldn’t have come, otherwise.”

“I’ve had a decent life. The thirties, the forties … those were terrible years for most of the world, dark years, awful years, but they were very good years for me. I was working hard, and I knew that it mattered. I had what I wanted, my career, a place in the world, something real to say, and a chance to have my say.… Maybe I wasn’t happy, but I was busy, and that counts for a lot in life. It was hard work and I was glad it was hard work.”

He studied the photo, slowly, meditatively. “But for seven months, back in ’22, the year when I took this picture of you … Well, admittedly, our last two months were pretty bad, but for five months, those first five months we had together, when I loved you and you loved me, and we were young and life was fresh—I was in ecstasy. Those were truly the happiest days of my life. I’ve come to understand that now.”

It seemed wisest to say nothing at this point.

“I married four times. They were no worse than a lot of people’s marriages, but they never really took. My heart wasn’t in it, I suppose. A marriage always seems such a good idea when you’re about to commit one.”

He placed the photo aside on the bed, face up. “I’m very sorry if this is an imposition,” he said, “but to put it into perspective, here at my finale, it’s a very great privilege. To have you here with me now, Mia, physically here, to be able to tell you this straight to your face, with no pride, no spite, no selfish pretense, nothing left to lose or gain between us—it truly eases my mind.”

“I understand.” She paused, reached out. “May I?”

He let her take the picture. The paper behind the glass was crisp and new—he had reprinted the photograph recently, from some old digital source he’d kept on file somewhere, for all these years. The young woman, standing outside in some campus environment, all California palms and rain-stained marble balustrades, looked innocent and excited and ambitious and shallow.

Mia stared very hard at the young woman and felt a profound vacancy where there should have been some primal sense of identity. She and the girl in the picture had eyes of identical color, more or less the same cheekbones, something like the same chin. It was like a picture of her grandmother.

The mnemonic began to affect her. She felt no lift or tingle from the drug but life was slowly enriched with mysterious symbolic portent. She felt as if she were about to tumble into the photograph and land inside it with a splash.

His voice recalled her. “Were you happy with that man you married?”

“Yes. I was happy.” She peeled the emptied sticker from her neck with finicky precision. “It’s long over now, but it did last for many years, and while Daniel and I were a couple, my life was very rich and authentic. We had a child.”

“I’m glad for you.” He smiled again, and this time it was a smile she could recognize. “You look so well, Mia. So much yourself.”

“I’ve been very lucky. And I’ve always been careful.”

He gazed sorrowfully out the window. “You weren’t lucky when you met me,” he said, “and you were right to be careful with me.”

“You don’t have to say that. I don’t regret any of our history.” With deep reluctance, as if handing over a hostage, she gave him the photo again. “I know that we parted badly, but I always followed your work. You were clever, you were very creative. You were never afraid to speak your mind. I didn’t always agree with what you said, but I always felt proud of you. I was proud that I knew you before the rest of the world caught on.” That was true. She was so old that she could still remember when they called that kind of work “films.” Films—long strips of plastic printed with darkness and light. The memory of film, the sense and the substance of the medium of film, brought her a nostalgia sharp as broken glass.

He was insistent. “You were right to break with me. I realized later that it wasn’t about Europe at all, or about a way to change our lives. I only wanted to win that argument, I wanted to carry you off to some other continent and make you live my life.” He laughed. “I never changed. I never learned any better. Not since I was twenty years old. Not since I was five!”

Mia wiped at her eyes. “You could have given me more time for this, Martin.”

“I’m sorry. There’s simply no time left. I’ve faced down everyone else already. You were always the hardest to face.” He offered her a tissue from a drawer in the bedside.

She dabbed at her eyes, and he leaned back, his patterned shoulders denting the pillow. The neck of his pajamas fell open, showing a blood filtration web across his chest. “I’m sorry that I’m better rehearsed than you are, Mia. It was unfair of me to do this; but I’m a dramatist at heart. I’m sorry that I’ve upset you. You can go now, if you like. It was very good to see you.”

“I’m old now, Martin.” She lifted her chin. “I’m not the young woman from that photograph, no matter how well or badly we remember her. You can stage your scene just as it pleases you, I won’t walk out. I’ve never been crass.”

“I plan to die this evening.”

“I see. That soon?”

“Yes. Everything nicely tied up, very civilized, very politic.”

Mia nodded soberly. “I respect and admire your decision. I’ve often thought that I’ll go the very same way.”

He relaxed. “It’s very good of you not to argue with me. Not to spoil my exit.”

“Oh, no. No, I’d never do that.” She reached out and deliberately placed her palm against the chilly back of his hand. “Do you need anything?”

“There are details, you understand.”

“Details. Of course.”

“Heirlooms. Bequests.” He gestured precisely at the empty air. “I have a bequest for you, Mia—something I think is right for you. It’s my memory palace.” A castle in virtual sand. “I want you to take possession of my palace. It can shelter you, if you ever need it. It’s ductile and it’s smart. It’s old, but it’s stable. Sometimes palaces can make a lot of trouble for people, but mine won’t make demands. It’s a good space. I’ve been very discreet with it. I’ve cleaned it out now—except a few things that I couldn’t bear to erase, things very special to me. Maybe to you, too. Mementos.”

“Why did you need such a big palace?”

“That’s a long story.”

Mia nodded a permission, and waited.

“It’s a long story because I had a long life, I suppose. They caught me out back in the sixties, you see. The big net investigations, the financial fraud scandals.” He was enjoying this chance at confession. He was swimming in mnemonic. “I was out of the directing game by that time, but I was very involved in production. I lost a lot of good investments in the legal mess, certain things I’d put aside. I didn’t ever want to get stung again, so I took some serious measures after the sixties. Built myself a serious, genuine palace, the kind the taxmen couldn’t reach. Kept my palace up ever since. A very useful space. But it can’t help me now. The government won’t cut me any exemptions for my liver and my thymus. And the amyloid thing, that’s a syndrome with just one prognosis.”

He frowned. “I hate when people play too fair, don’t you? There’s something nasty happening when there’s so much justice in the world.… They won’t outlaw alcohol, they won’t even outlaw narcotics, but when you go in for a checkup they take your blood and hair and DNA, and they map every trace of every little thing you’ve done to yourself It all goes right on your medical records and gets splashed all over the net. If you live like a little tin saint, then they’ll bend heaven and earth for you. But if you act the way I’ve acted for ninety-six years … Ever see my medical records, Mia? I used to drink a lot.” He laughed. “What’s life without a drink?”

It was, thought Mia, life without cirrhosis, ulcers, and cumulative neural damage.

“The polity. The global polity, it’s like a government run by your grandmother. A wise and kindly little old lady with a plateful of cookies and a headsman’s ax.”

Mia said nothing. She herself had a treatment rating in the ninety-eighth percentile. She was sure that Martin must know this stark and all-important fact about her life. The polity was a government run by, and for the benefit of, people just like herself.

“Martin, tell me about this palace. How can I access it?”

He took her hand, turned it palm up, and steadied it. He traced a touchscreen gesture with a trailing fingertip against her palm. Mia was awash in mnemonic now, and in his withered grip around her wrist she felt an ashen remnant of what had once been, many decades ago, a powerful eroticism. A lover’s touch, rich with youth and heat.

He released her. “Can you remember that passtouch?”

“I’ll remember it. The mnemonic will help me.” She was determined not to nervously rub the wrist that he had gripped. “I like those old gestural systems, I used to use them all the time.”

He handed her his slate. “Here. Set the palace to your thumbprint. No, Mia, the left hand. That one’s better, not on so many records.”

She hesitated. “Why should that bother me?”

“I’ve just given you the key to a fortress. You and I deserve our privacy, don’t we? We both know what life is like nowadays. People like you and me, we’re a lot older than the government is. We can even remember when governments weren’t honest.”

She pressed her left thumb to the slate. “Thank you, Martin. I’m sure your palace is a very great gift.”

“Greater than you know. It can help you with another matter, too.”

“What’s that?”

“My dog.”

She was silent.

“You don’t want poor Plato,” he said, downcast.

She said nothing.

He sighed. “I suppose I should have sold him,” he said. “But that thought was so awful. Like selling a child. I never had a child.… He suffered so much on my behalf, and he’s been through so many changes.… I thought of everyone I knew, but there was no one … among those very few people still alive that I call my friends.… No one I could really trust to take proper care of him.”

“Why me, though? You scarcely know me, these days.”

“Of course I know you,” he muttered. “I know that you’re very careful.… You were the biggest mistake I ever made. Or the biggest mistake that I never made. The regret’s much the same, either way.” He looked up, cajoling her. “Plato never asks for much. He’d be grateful for whatever you gave him. He needs someone. I don’t know what he’ll do, once I’m dead. I don’t know how he’ll take it. He’s so smart, and it costs him so much pain to think.”

“Martin, I’m very flattered that you should choose me, but that’s too much to ask. You just can’t ask that of me.”

“I know that it’s a great deal to ask. But the palace will help you, there are useful resources in there. Can’t you try him for a while? He’s no longer a mere animal. I haven’t allowed him that luxury. You could try for just a while, couldn’t you?” He paused. “Mia, I do know you. I’ve seen your records, and I know more about you than you might imagine. I never forgot you, never. Now, I think that Plato might help you.”

She said nothing. Her heart was beating quickly and oddly and there was a faint whining ring of tinnitus in her left ear. At moments like this she knew with terrible certainty that she was truly old.

“He’s not a monster. He’s just very different, very advanced. He’s worth a lot of money. If you couldn’t bear having him around, you could sell him.”

“I can’t! I won’t!”

“I see. That’s your final word?” A long judgmental moment passed between them, full of intimacy and bitterness. “You can see what I’m like, then, can’t you? Seventy years between the two of us—they’re like one day. I haven’t changed at all. Not me—and not you, either.”

“Martin, I have to be honest with you. It’s just …” She glanced at the dog, lying peacefully in the corner with his narrow canine head on his crossed paws. Then, horrifyingly against her will, the truth began pouring out of her, in jerks. “I don’t have any kind of pets. Never. My life’s not like that anymore. I live alone. I had a family once, I had a husband and a daughter, but they’re gone from my life now and I don’t talk to them. I have a career, Martin, I have a good job in medical research administration. That’s my responsibility, and that’s what I do. I look at screens and I work in economic spaces and I study grant procedures and I weigh results from research programs. I’m a functionary.”

She drew a ragged breath. “I walk in the parks, and I study the news every night, and I always vote. Sometimes I look at old films. But that’s it, that’s everything, that’s how I live. I’m the kind of person you can’t stand, and that you couldn’t ever stand.” She was weeping openly now.

He looked at her with pity. “An animal companion could help you, though. I know that he’s helped me. We owe something to animals, you know. We’ve jumped over the walls of the human condition by climbing on the backs of animals. We’re obliged to our animals.”

“An animal can’t help me. I don’t need any attachments.”

“Take the chance. Change your life a little. People have to take some chances, Mia. You’re not living, if you don’t take some chances.”

“No, I won’t. I know you think this might be good for me, but you’re wrong, it’s not good. I can’t do it. I’m not that kind of person. Stop asking me.”

He laughed. “I can’t believe that you just said that. That’s exactly what you said the very last time we argued—those were your very words!” He shook his head. “All right, all right.… I always ask too much of you, don’t I? It was stupid of me to ask this. I’m full of meddlesome plans for other people who still have lives to live. You don’t like to take chances. I know that. You were always careful, and you were wiser and smarter than me. Bad luck to you that the two of us ever met.”

An empty silence stretched between them. A little foretaste of the silence of death.

He roused himself. “Tell me that you forgive me.”

“I do forgive you, Martin. I forgive you everything. I’m sorry I wasn’t right for you. I never could do what you needed from me. I never gave you what you asked from me. Please forgive me for all that, that was my fault.”

He accepted this. She could see from the flushed look on his pallid face that he’d reached some long-sought apotheosis. He’d said everything that he wanted to say to her. His life was over now. He’d wound it up, packed it away.

“Go your way, darling,” he told her gently. “Someone that I used to be truly loved someone you used to be once. Try not to forget me.”

The dog did not rise to see her to the door. She left Martin’s apartment, numbly retrieving her purse and coat. She walked the vivid summer brightness of the halls. She took an elevator, she entered the chill of the autumnal city. She reentered the thin but very real texture of her thin but very real life. She stepped into the first taxi she found, and she went back home.

Mercedes was in the apartment, cleaning the bathroom. Mercedes came into the front room, carrying her mop and her septic sampling equipment. Mercedes wore her tidy civil-support uniform, baby blue jacket with red epaulets, slacks, and discreetly foam-soled shoes. Mercedes had fifteen elderly women on her civil-support rounds and came by twice a week to tidy up, usually in Mia’s absence. Mercedes called her civil-support work “housekeeping,” because that was a kindlier description than “social worker,” “health inspector,” or “police spy.”

“What’s happened to you?” Mercedes said in surprise, setting down her mop and her bucket of gel. “I thought you were at work.”

“I had a bad experience. A friend is dying tonight.”

Mercedes slid immediately into a role of professional sympathy. She took Mia’s coat. “Sit down, Mia. I’ll make a tincture.”

“I don’t want a tincture,” Mia said wearily, sitting at the corrugated, lacquered cardboard of her kitchen table. “He made me take a mnemonic. I’m still on it, it’s nasty.”

“What kind?” said Mercedes, tugging off her hairnet and slipping it into her jacket.

“Enkephalokrylline, two hundred fifty micrograms.”

“Oh, that’s just a nothing little mnemonic.” Mercedes fluffed her dark hair. “Have a tincture.”

“I’ll have a mineral water.”

Mercedes rolled Mia’s tincture set to the side of the table and sat on a kitchen stool. She decanted half a liter of distilled water, and methodically set about selecting and crushing dainty little wafers of mineral supplement. Mia’s tincture set was by far the most elaborate and most expensive kitchen fixture that Mia owned. Mia didn’t consider herself a possessive and materialistic person, but she made exceptions for tinctures. Also—to be fair—she was fond of decent clothes. She also made certain exceptions for the cardboard covers of old twentieth-century video-game and CD-ROM products. Mia had a minor weakness for antique paper ephemera.

“I suppose I’d better talk about it,” Mia said. “If I don’t talk to somebody about it, I won’t sleep tonight. I have a checkup in three days and if I don’t sleep tonight it will show.”

Mercedes looked up brightly. “You can talk to me! Of course you can tell me about it.”

“Do you have to put it all in your dossier?”

Mercedes looked wounded. “Of course I have to put it in the dossier. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t keep up my dossiers.” She fed a hissing gush of bubbles into the mineral water. “Mia, you’ve known me for fifteen years. You can trust me. Civil-support people love it when their clients talk. What else are we here for?”

Mia leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table. “I knew this man seventy years ago,” she said. “He was my boyfriend then. He kept telling me today that we haven’t changed, but of course we’ve changed. We’ve changed beyond recognition. He’s consumed himself. And me—seventy years ago, I was a young woman. I was a 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 you to tidy up, Mercedes.”

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 frappé in a crowded and noisy tourist café. She wondered glumly what her former husband would have thought of the day’s events. What he might have thought of Warshaw’s final ceremonies. Martin Warshaw had been the only genuine rival that Daniel had ever had. Would there have been some lingering trace of male jealousy there, maybe some slight satisfaction? Mia wondered if her former husband kept her in mind anymore—or if he ever thought coherently about anything or anyone at all. Daniel was in a very strange space in northern Idaho, a space beyond real possibility of contact. Mia could have called her daughter, Chloe, in Djakarta, but there was no comfort in that. Chloe would only pick at her batik and utter harangues about turns of the wheel and spiritual authenticity.

A long stroll toward Fisherman’s Wharf—Mia had managed not to think about work all day, and that was a novelty for her and, in its own way, a great accomplishment—and she arrived at her destination, a metal-clad two-story town house. A weathered redwood sign in an overgrown hedge identified the place as a for-profit netsite. Mia paid to get through the door, and once inside the cavernous building she slid a cashcard into a clock.

The proprietor ambled up. He was a lanky old gentleman, well into his second century, all knees and elbows, with a sharp beak of a nose, two absurdly large and efficient hearing aids, and a shapeless fisherman’s cap. The fisherman’s cap was an affectation, since Mr. Stuart’s scaly, corrugated skin had not seen prolonged daylight in decades. He wore a short-sleeved bile green shirt and a pair of oil-stained trousers, their belt loops hung with fold-out multitools on little metal lanyards.

Mia had not visited this netsite in thirty-seven years. The town house had been extensively rebuilt: floors and walls knocked out, windows bricked over, outer walls copper clad to reduce stray emissions. Still, Mia was unsurprised to discover the very same owner, still in the very same business, at the very same locale, and wearing what seemed to be the very same clothing. Mr. Stuart had always impressed her as the sort of man who could easily outlast a mere building.

Stuart himself looked much the same, although his nose and ears had swollen visibly in the past few decades. Growth hormone treatments and steroid adjustments were one of the more sensible and low-key life-extension strategies. Men’s noses and ears tended to swell quite a bit under that regime of treatment. Something to do with male steroids and progressive ossification in the cartilage.

Mia looked the place over. Gray sound-absorption baffles hung from the ceiling, beneath colored spaghetti tangles of power cables and fiber optics. The metal rafters were alive with twittering flocks of brown sparrows.

The floor held a bizarre collection of network access machines. The western end of Stuart’s barn contained brand-new netlinks, many with the frazzled look of prototypes. The eastern end was jammed with collectors’ items, specialized relics from the past hundred and twenty years of virtual space manipulation. Mr. Stuart had always specialized in media that were either dying or struggling to be born.

The walls were smorgasbords of crates and buckets of electronics parts. Stuart’s creaky cleaning-robot was gamely wandering about, meticulously dusting the other machines. There was a requisite sandbox for the droppings of the domesticated birds. The lighting in the place was, as always, dreadful.

“I thought you were going to put in windows,” Mia said.

“Real soon now,” Stuart told her, slitting his eyes. “Who needs windows anyway? A netsite is a window.”

“What are you running here that can handle a gestural passtouch and get me into a memory palace set up back in the sixties?”

“That depends on your setup, but all life depends on the setup,” Stuart said. Stuart had a pronounced taste for aphorisms. “Tell me about the initial parameters and the hardware it’s on.”

“I can’t tell you anything about that.”

Stuart shrugged gnomically. “You may be here quite a while, then. You want my advice, try it the simple way first. Plug a touchslate into one of those foveal curtain units and see if you can just bring up the palace right in front of you.”

“You think that might work?”

“It might. You might try it out on spex if you want more …” Stuart paused portentously. “Discretion.”

“Do you charge more for discretion, Mr. Stuart? I’m rather interested in discretion.”

“I charge just to enter my building,” Stuart said. “That’s sufficiently outrageous for most folks.” Someone yelled a long question at him from the new machines at the western end of the building—something about “naming trees” and “defuzzification.” Stuart whipped his leathery neck around like an owl. “Read the manual!” he shouted. He turned to Mia again. “Kids … Where were we, ma’am?”

“Mia.”

“What?”

“There is no manual!” the boy screamed in reply.

“Mia, M-I-A,” Mia said patiently.

“Oh,” Stuart said, tapping one hearing aid. “Nice to have you in the shop, Maya. Don’t mind the kids here, they get a little rowdy sometimes.”

“I’ll try the curtain unit and the slate, please.”

“I’ll check you in,” said Stuart.

Discretion was the sole advantage of obsolete hardware. Obsolete hardware was so bafflingly out-of-date as to be basically unpoliceable. Modern virtuality standards were far tidier, sturdier, and more sensible than the primitive, frazzled, often dangerous junk from the rest of the century. Modern data archives were astonishingly free, accessible, and open. But there were hundreds of obsolescent formats, and vast backwaters of obsolescent data, that were accessible only on machines no longer manufactured or supported. Machines of this sort could only be used by hobbyist fanatics—or by people so old that they had learned to use these machines decades ago and had never abandoned them.

Stuart gave Mia a battered touchslate and a virtuality jewel case. Mia retired to the netsite’s bathroom, with its pedestal sinks and mirrors. She washed her hands.

Mia clicked open the jewelry case, took its two featherlight earring phones, and cuffed them deftly onto her ears. She dabbed the little beauty-mark microphone to the corner of her upper lip. She carefully glued the false lashes to her eyelids. Each lash would monitor the shape of her eyeball, and therefore the direction of her gaze.

Mia opened the hinged lid of a glove font and dipped both her hands, up to the wrists, into a thick bath of hot adhesive plastic. She pulled her hands out, and waved them to cool and congeal.

The gloves crackled on her fingers as they cured and set. Mia worked her finger joints, then clenched her fists, methodically. The plastic surface of the gloves split like drying mud into hundreds of tiny platelets. She then dipped her gloves into a second tank, then pulled free. Thin, conductive veins of wetly glittering organic circuitry dried swiftly among the cracks.

When her gloves were nicely done, Mia pulled a wrist-fan from a slot below the basin. She cracked the fan against her forearm to activate it, then opened it around her left wrist and buttoned it shut. The rainbow-tinted fabric stiffened nicely. When she had opened and buttoned her second wrist-fan, she had two large visual membranes the size of dinner plates radiating from the ends of her arms.

The plastic gloves came alive as their circuitry met and meshed with the undersides of the wrist-fans. Mia worked her fingers again. The wrist-fans swiftly mapped out the shape of the gloves, making themselves thoroughly familiar with the size, shape, and movements of her hands.

The fans went opaque. Her hands vanished from sight. Then the image of her hands reappeared, cleverly mapped and simulated onto the outer surfaces of the wrist-fans. Reality vanished at the rim of the fans, and Mia saw virtual images of both her hands extended into twin circles of blue void.

Tucking the touchslate under one arm, Mia left the bathroom and walked to her chosen curtain unit. She stepped inside and shut and sealed the curtain behind her. The fabric stiffened with a sudden top-to-bottom shudder, and the machine woke itself around her. The stiff curtain fabric turned a uniform shade of cerulean. Much more of reality vanished, and Mia stood suspended in a swimming sky blue virtuality. Immersive virtuality—except, of course, for the solid floor beneath her feet, and the ceiling overhead, an insect-elbowed mess of remote locators, tracking devices, and recording equipment.

The fabric curtain was woven from glass fiber, thousands of hair-thin multicolored fiber-optic scan-lines. Following the cues from her false eyelashes, the curtain wall lit up and displayed its imagery wherever Mia’s eyesight happened to rest. Wherever her gaze moved and fell, the curtain was always ahead of her, instantly illuminated, rendering its imagery in a fraction of a second, so that the woven illusion looked seamless, and surrounded her.

Mia fumbled for a jack and plugged in the touchslate. The curtain unit recognized the smaller machine and immediately wrapped her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree touchplate display, a virtual abyss of smoky gray. Mia dabbled at the touchscreen with her gloved fingertips until a few useful displays tumbled up from its glassy depths: a cycle tachometer, a clock, a network chooser.

She picked one of San Francisco’s bigger public net gates, held her breath, and traced in Martin Warshaw’s passtouch. The wall faithfully sketched out the scrawling of her gloved fingertip, monster glyphs of vivid charcoal against the gray fabric.

The tracing faded. The curtain unit went sky blue again. Nothing much happened after that. Still, the little tachometer showed processing churning away, somewhere, somehow, out in the depths of the net. So Mia waited patiently.

After eight minutes, the tachometer vanished. The walls went stellar black, then leapt into a full-scale virtually rendition.

Mia found herself in an architect’s office. There was a big desk in simulated wood grain, and painfully gleaming brass lamps, and algorithmic swirls of simulated marble. The chairs were puffy, overstuffed, and swaddlingly comfortable. Old people’s chairs. They were the kind of chairs that top-flight furniture designers had begun making back in the 2070s, when furniture designers suddenly realized that very old people possessed all the money in the world, and that from now on very old people were going to have all the money until the end of time.

The virtual office, with some fine display of irony, had been designed to resemble the office of a civil architect. Architects who designed actual buildings, as opposed to those who built virtual structures, tended to be rather snobbish and pushy about their intimate relation to tangible physicality. The walls around her were all corkboards, chalkboards, crayons, drafting paper, and string. All very analog and tactile. There wasn’t a data screen anywhere in the place. Except, of course, that this entire virtual environment was itself a data screen.

There was a serious mismatch between Martin Warshaw’s sophisticated memory palace and this randomly chosen and somewhat pokey little curtain unit. Against the rounded fabric walls, the corners of the virtual room looked quite nasty, with a stomach-churning visual warp. The simulation couldn’t seem to decide where to put the floor. Rims of flooring slopped up on the lower edges of the screen, like a swamped rowboat slowly going under.

A simulated window in one wall showed an arty glimpse of a fake exterior garden, but the organic shapes within the garden were disastrous. The trees were jerky half-rendered blurs, a nightmare vision of x-rayed vegetation under alien sunlight as thick as cheese. The inside of the office boasted a virtual potted plant. Its big serrated leaves looked as stiff and lifeless as waffle irons.

Mia turned in place, gazing about the virtual office cautiously. A massive framed blueprint hung on the wall to her left. It showed a vast multistory edifice—the ground-floor plans of the memory palace itself, presumably. The blueprints were lavishly annotated, in horribly blurred and tiny print. The palace looked huge, elaborate, and quite intimidating. Mia felt as if she’d unwrapped a Christmas gift and found an entire steam locomotive crammed inside it. A multi-ton coal-fired virtual jack-in-the-box.

She turned toward the center of the room. The top of the wood-grain desk boasted a single framed photograph. Mia made stepping motions in place, and managed to reach the virtual desk without barging through it. She reached out one hand, fishing for the photo. The glove interface was hopelessly bad, full of stutter and overlap.

This was a very unhappy interface. And small wonder. No doubt this entire virtual environment was being encrypted, decrypted, reencrypted, anonymously routed through satellites and cables, emulated on alien machinery through ill-fitting, out-of-date protocols, then displayed through long-dead graphics standards. Dismembered, piped, compressed, packeted, unpacketed, decompressed, unpiped and re-membered. Worse yet, the place was old. Virtual buildings didn’t age like physical ones, but they aged in subtle pathways of arcane decline, in much the way that their owners did. A little bijou table in the corner had a pronounced case of bit-rot: from a certain angle it lost all surface tint.

The place wasn’t dead, though. A virtual gecko appeared and sneaked its way along the wall, a sure sign that little health-assuring subroutines were still working their way through the damper, darker spots in the palace’s code.

Mia got a tentative grip on the photograph. She lifted it from the desktop, and the image burst free from the frame like a hemorrhage, and leapt up onto the fabric wall of the curtain unit, flinging itself all around her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree blast of bright red pixels the size of bloody thumbprints. Mia winced, put the photo back down, and peered at it sidelong through the membrane of her wrist-fan. Objects within hand’s reach seemed a lot better realized graphically than the jittery mess up on the curtain walls.

The frame held another digital photograph of herself. A different picture this time: the very young Mia Ziemann was sitting on a threadbare red fabric couch in her red terry-cloth bathrobe, reading a paper magazine, her slim bare legs perched on a coffee table. Her hair was wet. The floor was littered with collegiate junk: fast-food packets, disks of recorded music, two unlaced walking shoes. The young Mia was unaware of the photographer. She looked relaxed and comfortable, yet deeply intent on her magazine.

Another little keepsake of Martin’s. His posthumous message to the palace’s chosen heiress.

Mia clawed open a drawer of the virtual desk. Empty. She knocked the photo into the empty drawer and shut it.

She opened another desk drawer. Scissors, paper, pens, tape, pins. She tried repeatedly, but failed to get a decent grip on the virtual scissors. She opened another drawer. A box of colored chalk.

Mia plucked a stick of pale green chalk from the box, and turned toward the chalkboard on the far wall. She marched in place toward the chalkboard—it reeled disturbingly as she grew nearer—and she reached out, her gloved fingers pinched and the virtual chalk outstretched.

Clearly this action called for much better gloves than the cheap peel-aways she was wearing. The chalk wobbled in and out of the surface of chalkboard like Dodgson’s Alice having fits in a mirror. After prolonged struggle Mia managed to shakily scrawl a random message, the first thing that had come into her head:

She added a potato-nosed Kilroy face, and, for good measure, scrawled some childish Miss Kilroy curls on Kilroy’s domed noggin. She accidentally dropped the virtual chalk, which hit the floor with an audible click and vanished. After searching for it hopelessly with her wrist-fans, Mia found herself getting seriously seasick. She unplugged the touchscreen, threw open the wall of the curtain, and stepped outside.

Swallowing bile, she unstrapped the wrist-fans and put them away. She peeled off the gloves into shredded strips and dropped them into a recycler. That had been more than enough for a first try. If she ever entered Warshaw’s palace again, she’d use top-of-the-line datagloves from work, and some decent spex. Mia felt nauseated. And obscurely disappointed. And deeply cheated. And desolately sad.

She walked down a crooked aisle among Stuart’s phalanx of machines, breathing hard and trying to clear her head. She walked the length of the barn, down among the new machines. At the far end of the building she turned and headed back. She felt better now. Walking always helped her.

“Come with me to Europe,” a woman said aloud. Mia stopped.

“We don’t have time for Europe. Or the money,” a man grumbled. The two of them were sitting together on a blanket on the floor, in an aisle among the machines. The man wore a big padded jacket and dirty leggings and big scuffed boots; he had a pair of glittering spex propped on his forehead. The woman wore a very peculiar garment, a tentlike brown poncho somehow suspender-strapped to a baggy pair of pleated harem pants. They’d been working together at a CAD rig. They’d stripped off their manipulation gauntlets and they were sprawling on their blanket and eating biscuits from a paper bag.

They looked rather dirty. They were talking too loud. Their faces were strange: unlined, lithe. Their gestures were sharp and abrupt. They seemed very upset about something.

They were young people.

“They could spin that polymer in six days in Stuttgart,” said the girl. “Six hours, maybe.”

“Stuttgart’s not a real answer. At least here we’ve got some connections.”

“That old man only keeps us here ’cause he likes to watch us play! We need some vivid people. People like us. In a place where it’s happening. Not like this museum.”

“We’ll never get anywhere in Stuttgart. You know what the rents are like in Stuttgart? Anyway, are you saying we’re not vivid? You and me? We gotta be vivid in our own way, on our own ground! It doesn’t mean anything, otherwise.”

Mia walked past them, pretending not to eavesdrop. They paid her no attention. She sought out Mr. Stuart behind his counter. Stuart was digging with a multitool in the silvery innards of a broken helmet.

“I’m done, for now,” Mia said.

“Great,” Stuart said indifferently, tucking a spex monocle into one eye.

“Tell me about those two young people over there, the ones doing CAD work.”

Stuart stared at her, his monocle gleaming. “Are you kidding? What business is that of yours?”

“I’m not asking you what networks they’re accessing,” Mia explained. “I just want to know a little about their personal lives.”

“Oh, okay, no problem,” Stuart said, relieved. “Those kids are in their twenties. Always got some little project going, you know how it is at that age. No sense of time scale, lots of energy to waste, head in the clouds. They make clothes. Try to.”

“Really.”

“Clothes for other kids. She designs them, and he instantiates them. They’re a team. It’s a kid romance. It’s cute.”

“What are their names?”

“I never asked.”

“How do they pay you for the access time?”

Stuart said nothing. Pointedly.

“Thanks,” Mia said. She went back to eavesdrop at greater length. The young people were gone. Mia quickly snagged her cashcard from the entranceway. There wasn’t much left on the card, for Stuart’s rates were very cruel to strangers. She hurried out of the building.

The boy and girl had backpacks slung over their shoulders and were walking uphill toward a bus stop.

When the bus arrived, Mia climbed aboard behind them. They sat in the back. Mia sat near them, across the aisle. They took no notice of her. Young people didn’t like to notice old people.

“This town,” the girl announced bitterly, “is boring me to death.”

“Sure,” the boy said, yawning.

“I’m bored right now,” the girl said.

“You’re in a bus,” the boy pointed out, with infinite tolerance. He began to root around in his pack.

Mia pulled her sunglasses from her purse, put them on, and pretended to gaze up the aisle of the bus. There were three dogs and a couple of cats aboard. Up near the front two well-dressed Asian men were eating from boxes with chopsticks.

The girl opened her backpack, fished out a rattlesnake, and hung it around her neck. The snake was beautiful. Its scaly skin looked like tesselated pavement as seen from a great height. The snake stirred a little at the contact with warm flesh.

“Don’t get tight,” the boy said.

“I won’t get tight. Snakey’s not loaded.”

“Well, don’t load him, then. You’re always getting tight when we argue. As if that ever settles anything.” The boy pulled an enameled comb from his bag, and ran it restlessly through his tousled hair. “Anyway, that snake would look stupid in Stuttgart. They just don’t do rattlesnakes in Stuttgart.”

“We could do Praha. We could do Milano.” The girl toyed listlessly with the snake’s rattle. “It’s so slow here in the Bay. Nothing ever happens here. Darling, I’m miserable.” She let go of the snake and tugged at a hank of greasy brunette hair. “I can’t work if I’m miserable. You know I can’t work if I’m miserable!”

“What am I going to do with you when you’re miserable in Europe?”

“In Europe I’d never be miserable.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t think I know my own mind,” she said angrily. “That’s always been your problem.”

“You don’t know your own mind, and you never have,” he said bluntly. “Your mind is a pain in my neck.”

“I hate you,” the girl announced. She crammed the snake back into her backpack.

“You should go to Europe,” Mia said aloud.

They looked up, startled. “What?” the girl said.

“You should go. You might as well go.” Mia’s heart skipped a beat, then started racing. “You’re very young, but you have plenty of time. Go to Europe for five weeks. Five months. Five years. Five years is nothing. You should go to Europe together, and you can get it all out of your system.”

“I beg your pardon?” said the boy. “Did we ask for this?”

Mia took off her sunglasses. She met their eyes.

“Let her alone,” the girl said, quickly.

“It’s no use going later,” Mia said. “If you wait too long, then you’ll know too much. Then it’s always all the same, no matter where you go.” She began to weep.

“Wonderful,” the boy muttered. He stood up, grabbing the bus’s bamboo pole. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

The girl didn’t move. “Why?”

“Come on, she’s having some kind of attack! That’s not our problem. We’ve got problems enough.”

“You’re not old enough for real problems,” Mia told him. “You can run a lot of risks now. You’ve got energy, and you’re free. Go ahead and run a risk. Take her to Europe.”

The boy stared at her. “Do I look like a man who takes career advice from strange old women who cry in public buses?”

“You look just like the kind of man … A man that I knew a long time ago,” Mia said. Her voice was trembling. Her tear ducts ached dreadfully. They stung all the way down into her nose.

“You’re very free with advice for other people. When was the last time you took any kind of risk?”

Mia wiped her burning eyes, and sniffed. “I’m taking a risk right now.”

“Sure you are.” The boy scoffed. “Like it’s a big hazard for some gerontocrat to make fun of us! Look at you—you got your ambulances standing by for you around the clock! You got every advantage in the world! What have we got?”

He glared at her aggressively. “You know, ma’am, even though I’m only twenty-two years old, my life feels every bit as real and worthwhile as your life does! More real than your life! Do you think we’re stupid just because we’re young? You don’t know half enough to offer us any advice—you don’t know a thing about us, or our lives, or our situation, or anything else. You are condescending to us.”

“No, she isn’t,” the girl said.

“You’re patronizing us!”

“Oh, she is not! Look, she’s crying, she really means it!”

“You are being profoundly impertinent!”

“Stop insulting this nice lady! She was completely right about every single thing she said!”

The bus stopped. “I’m leaving,” the boy announced. “I resent it when old people deny the validity of my experience.”

“Go ahead and run off, then,” the girl told him, folding her arms and slumping back into the seat. The boy was startled. Slowly his face darkened. He slung his pack over one shoulder and stormed off, boots clomping down the stairs.

The bus started up again.

“I’m sorry,” Mia said meekly.

“Don’t be sorry,” the girl said. “I hate him! He’s holding me back! He thinks he can tell me what to do.”

Mia said nothing.

The girl frowned. “I never slept with any man more than twice, without him thinking he could tell me what to do!”

Mia glanced up. “How old are you?”

The girl lifted her chin. “Nineteen.”

“What’s your name?”

“Brett,” the girl announced. She was lying. “What’s your name?”

“Maya.”

Brett crossed the aisle and sat beside her. “It’s nice to meet you, Maya.”

“Likewise, Brett.”

“I’m going to Europe,” Brett announced. She began searching in her backpack again. “Stuttgart probably. That’s the biggest city for the arts in the whole world. Have you ever been to Stuttgart?”

“I’ve been to Europe a few times. Not in many years.”

“Have you been to Stuttgart since they rebuilt it?”

“No.”

“Ever been to Indianapolis?”

“I did telepresence there once. Indianapolis seems a little scary nowadays.”

Brett offered Mia a wadded paper tissue from the backpack. Mia accepted it gratefully, and blew her nose. Her tear ducts were all out of practice. They felt scorched and sore.

Brett gazed at her with frank curiosity. “You haven’t been around very much lately, have you, Maya?”

“No. I don’t suppose I have, really.”

“You want to come around with me for a while? Maybe I could show you some things. Would that be all right?”

Mia was surprised and touched. The invitation was not entirely welcome, but the girl was trying to be sweet to her. “All right. Yes.”

Brett led her off the bus at the next stop. They began walking together down Filmore. This street was rather heavily wooded. A giraffe was methodically cropping the trees. Mia was sure that the giraffe was perfectly harmless, but it was the largest urban animal she’d ever seen roaming loose in San Francisco. It was quite an exotic beast. Someone had been busy on the city council.

Brett merely ambled along at first, but then picked up her pace. “You can walk pretty fast,” Brett said. “How old are you really?”

“I’m pushing a century.”

“You don’t look a hundred years old. You must be really smart.”

“I’m just very careful.”

“Do you have, like, osteoarthritis or incontinence or any really weird syndrome stuff?”

“I have a bad vagus nerve,” Mia said. “I get attacks of night cramps. And I’m astigmatic.” She smiled. It was an interesting topic. She could remember when strangers made polite chitchat about the weather.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was married for a long time. When it was over, that part of life didn’t seem very important anymore.”

“What part is very important?”

“Responsibility.”

“That doesn’t sound very exciting.”

“It’s not exciting, but if you’re not responsible, you can’t take proper care of yourself. You get sick and fall apart.” This truism sounded rather fatuous, pointless, and morbid, especially for a young person. “When you live a really long time,” Mia offered carefully, “it changes everything. The whole structure of the world, politics, money, religion, culture, everything that used to be human. All those changes are your responsibility, they benefited you, they happened because of you. You have to work hard so that the polity can manage. Good citizenship is a lot of work. It needs a lot of self-sacrifice.”

“Sure,” said Brett, and laughed. “I forgot about those parts.”

Brett led her into a mall—a nexus of junk shops near the Haight. There was a good crowd in the place, warming the benches, window-shopping, sipping tinctures in a café. A couple of cops in pink jackets sat on their bicycles, people-watching. For the first time in many years, Mia found herself catching a suspicious glance from a police officer. Because of the company she kept.

“Do you know this part of town?” Brett said.

“Sure. See that collectors’ shop? They sell old media bric-a-brac, I buy paper-show things from them sometimes.”

“Wow,” Brett marveled, “I always wondered what kind of people went into that weird old place.… ”

Brett ducked into a dark, tiny store, a redwood-fronted hole in the wall. It sold rugs, blankets, and cheap jewelry. Mia had never been inside the place in her life. It smelled strongly, almost chokingly, of air-sprayed vanilla. The walls were densely overgrown with deep green moss.

A tabby cat was asleep on the shop counter, sprawled lazily across the glass top. There were no human beings in sight. Brett made a beeline for a dress rack crammed in the corner. “Come see … see, this is all my stuff.”

“All of this?”

“No, not everything on this rack,” Brett said, sorting nimbly through the garment rack, “but this one is my design, and this one, and this one here.… I mean, I concepted these, it was Griff who instantiated them.” Mia perceived from the sudden angry crease on Brett’s smooth brow that Griff was the erring boyfriend. “This older guy, Mr. Quiroga, he’s the owner. We kind of cut a deal with him to carry our stuff.”

“They’re very interesting designs,” Mia said. They were very peculiar.

“You like them, really?”

“Of course I do.” Mia pulled a red jacket from its hanger. It was made of a puffy spun plastic with tactile properties somewhere between leather, canvas, and some kind of chewable gelatin candy. Most of the jacket was candy-apple red, but there were large patches of murky blue on the elbows, neck, and hem. It had a lot of fat buttoned pockets, and a waterproof red rain hood crushed down inside a lumpy collar.

“See how well it holds its shape?” Brett boasted. “And it doesn’t even have batteries. It’s all in the cut and the weave. Plus the Young’s modulus of the fiber.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Elastomers and polymers. A little woven ceramic for the high-wear spots. See, it’s durable all-weather street-wear, just right for travel! Try it on!”

Mia slipped her arms through the padded sleeves. Brett busied herself tugging at the shoulders, then zipped it up to Mia’s chin. “It fits great!” Brett declared. It did no such thing. Mia felt as if she’d been stuffed into a monstrous fruitcake.

Mia stepped before a narrow full-length mirror in another corner. There she saw a stranger improbably swaddled in a garish candied jacket. Maya the Gingerbread Girl. She put on her sunglasses. With the glasses, and with sufficiently bad light, she might almost look young—a very tired, puffy, sickly young woman in a kid’s ridiculous jacket. Wearing improbably tidy, adult, and conservative slacks and shoes.

Mia jammed her fingers through her hair, shook her head, and destroyed her coiffure.

“That helps,” she said, peering at the mirror.

Brett was surprised, and laughed.

“What a lovely jacket. What else could I ever need?”

“Better shoes,” Brett told her very seriously. “A skirt. Long earrings. No purse, get a backpack. Real lipstick, not that medicated little-old-lady stuff. Nail polish. Barrettes. Necklaces. No girdle. No brassiere, if you can help it. Especially no watch.” She paused. “And sway some more when you walk. Put some bounce in it.”

“That seems like rather a lot.”

Brett shrugged. “Looking vivid is mostly things you don’t have to get and don’t have to do.”

“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 real money at all. I’d feel real happy with just a little bit of certified grown-up money.”

“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.

“I never meant to suggest that I’d try to steal your boyfriend,” Mia said with great care. “I’m sure he’s very good-looking, but believe me, that’s not high on my list of priorities.”

They crossed Divisadero. “I know why you said all that just now,” Brett declared sullenly, after half a block. “I bet you’d feel really good about it, if you could give me some nice grown-up advice, and maybe buy my jacket or something, and so I went back to Griff and we went together to Europe and acted just like you think young lovers ought to act.”

“Why are you so suspicious?”

“I’m not suspicious. I’m just not naive. I know you think I’m like a little kid, that nineteen is a little kid. I’m not very mature, but I’m a woman. In fact I’m kind of a dangerous woman.”

“Really.”

“Yes.” Brett tossed her head. “You see, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”

“That sounds pretty serious.”

“And I don’t mind hurting people if I have to. Sometimes it’s good for them. To be hurt some. Shocked a little.” Brett’s sweet young face had a most peculiar cast. After a long moment Mia realized that Brett was trying to look wicked and seductive. She looked about as evil as a kitten in a basket.

“I see,” Mia said.

“Are you rich, Maya?”

“In a way,” Mia said. “Yes. I’m well-to-do.”

“How’d you get that way?”

“Steady income, low expenditures, compound interest, and a long wait.” Mia laughed. “Even inanimate objects can get rich that way.”

“That’s all you ever had to do?”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds. The low expenditure is the hard part. It’s pretty easy to make money, but it’s hard not to spend money once you know that you have some.”

“Do you have a big house, Maya?”

“I have an apartment on Parnassus. By the medical center. Not too far from here, actually.”

“Is there a lot of room there?”

Mia paused. “You want to spend the night with me, is that what you’re driving at?”

“Can I, Maya? Can you take me in? Just for a night. I’ll sleep on the floor, I’m real used to it. See, I just don’t want to stay in any place where Griff might find me tonight. I need a chance to think things out on my own. Please say yes, it would really help.”

Mia thought it over. She could imagine a lot of possible harm in the situation, but the prospect somehow failed to deter her. She’d reached such an instant and intense rapport with the girl that she felt peculiar about breaking the connection, almost superstitious. She wasn’t sure that she liked Brett, any more than she would have liked a chance encounter with her own nineteen-year-old self. But still: nineteen years old! It genuinely pained her to think of denying Brett anything. “Are you hungry, Brett?”

“I could eat.” Brett was suddenly cheerful.

“It’s so neat and clean here,” Brett said, sweeping through Mia’s front room almost on tiptoe. “Does it always look like this?”

Mia was busying herself in her kitchen. She had never been a tidy person by nature, but during her seventies, the habit of untidiness had left her. She’d simply grown out of messiness, the way a child might shed a tooth. After that, Mia always washed the dishes, always made her bed, always picked up loose objects and filed them away. Living that way was quicker and simpler and made every kind of sense to her. Litter and disorder no longer gave her any sense of relaxation or freedom or spontaneity. It had taken her seventy years to learn how to clean up after herself, but once she had learned the trick of it, it was impossible to go back.

She had no simple way to tell Brett about this. The profundity of this change in her personality would never seem natural to a nineteen-year-old. A half-truth was simpler. “I have a civil-support woman who comes in twice a week.”

“Boy, that must be a real pain.” Brett peered at a framed piece of paper ephemera. “What is this thing?”

“Part of my paper collection. It’s the cover of a twentieth-century computer game.”

“What, this giant silver thing with fangs and muscles and all these war machines and stuff?”

Mia nodded. “It was a kind of virtuality but it was flat and slow and it came in a glass box.”

“Why do you collect stuff like that?”

“I just like it.”

Brett was skeptical.

Mia smiled. “I do like it! I like the way it’s hopelessly stuck between pretending to be high-tech ultra-advanced design, and actually being crude and violent and crass. It cost a lot to design and market, because people were very impressed when you spent a lot of money back then. But it still looks botched and clunky. There used to be thousands of copies of this game, but now they’re forgotten. I like it, because not many people are interested in that kind of old-fashioned schlock, but I am. When I look at that picture and think about it—where it came from and what it means—well, it always makes me feel more like my real self, somehow.”

“Is it worth a lot of money? It sure is ugly.”

“That box top might be worth money if it still had the game inside. There’s a few people still alive who used to play these games when they were kids. Some of them are museum fanatics, they own the antique computers, disks, cartridges, the cathode-ray tubes, everything. They all know each other through the net, and they sell each other copies of games that are still mint-in-the-box. For big-collector sums of money. But just the paper cover? No. The paper’s not worth much to anybody.”

“You don’t play the games?”

“Oh, heavens no. It’s really hard to get them to work, and besides the games are all awful.”

They ate high-fiber fettucine with protein blocks in gravy, and flaked green carbohydrate. “This is really delicious,” said Brett, shoveling it in. “I don’t know why anybody ever complains about medical diets. The way you do it, it tastes really good. The flavors are so subtle. Lots better than plants and animals.”

“Thanks.”

“I ate nothing but infant formula until I was five,” Brett bragged. “I was strong as a horse as a little kid, I was never sick a day in my life. I could do chin-ups, I could run all day, I could beat up all the kids who were still eating stuff like milk! And vegetables! Wow, that ought to be a crime, feeding little kids vegetables. Did you ever eat vegetables?”

“Not in about fifty years. I think it is a crime to feed vegetables to children now, actually. In California, anyway.”

“They’re really nasty. Especially spinach. And corn is disgusting. This big lumpy yellow cob with all these little seeds on it …” Brett shuddered.

“Do you ever eat eggs? Eggs are a good source of cholesterol.”

“Really? I dunno, I might eat an egg if I found it in a nest somewhere.” Brett smiled beatifically and shoved her empty plate aside. “You’re a really good cook, Maya. I wish I could cook. I’m better at tinctures. You have a really big bathroom, right? Do you think I might take a bath? Would that be okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You might have to disinfect afterward.”

“Oh. Well, I’m very modern, Brett, I can manage that.”

“Oh, good.”

While Brett was bathing, Mia picked up Brett’s shed clothes, micro waved them thoroughly for hygienic purposes, then washed and dried them. The elastic-soled shoes looked as though they would melt or burst if sterilized, so Mia didn’t touch them. The shoes stank powerfully. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant smell, but there had been bare human feet in those shoes for a long time and some odd species of tame bacteria had been warmly and damply feasting inside them.

Brett came out of the bathroom in a towel. “You’re probably gonna want to sterilize this towel,” she said contritely, and handed it over. Brett was covered with hair. Armpits, pubes, nipples. Huge flourishing glossy patches of black human fur, almost like abbreviated lingerie. The effect of all this hair was surprisingly modest and practical. Brett sat down nude and hairy on the carpeted floor, just a little self-consciously, and started rooting in her backpack.

“That felt lovely,” she said. “Plumbing is wonderful. I’ve been sleeping in a tent for four weeks.”

“A tent, is it? How adventurous.”

“Yeah, mostly up under the trees in Buena Vista Park. Up in the trees mostly, in hammocks. You get terrific views of the city up there. We use the public restrooms and eat out of cartons and it’s a really cheap way to get by. It’s getting too cold for that now, though.”

“Is it safe?”

Brett shrugged. “This is San Francisco! Half the population is civil support. Nobody will bother you. What are they supposed to do to me, rob me? My clothes are all in stores and my designs are all in virtuality.” She pulled a little plastic vial from a pocket of the bag, then produced her rattlesnake.

She opened the torpid animal’s gaping cotton-white jaws and jabbed its fangs, one after another, through a pinhole in the elastic top of the vial. Then she pressed its dented, scaly head with the flat of her thumb. When the snake’s fangs were loaded she stuffed it back in the bag. She took out a metal tube with a pull-off cap. She twisted a waxy taper from within the tube and began carefully anointing the spaces between her toes.

“This is foot wax,” she explained. “Live bacteria but they can’t reproduce. They just eat up the jam and sweat and stuff so you don’t get any wild flora living on you.”

“That’s clever.”

“Well, you have to know how to squat, y’know! You can’t just drop everything and start sleeping under trees and bridges. If you do it right, there’s a lot of science to it. It’s an artifice.” Brett began working on her furry armpits with a roll-on.

“Where do you keep your spare clothes?”

Brett was surprised. “I’m a professional! If I need new clothes I just have them instanced out.” She took out her cellular netlink and began plucking her brows in its mirrored flip-up screen.

Mia cleaned and put away the dishes. “How about dessert?”

“No, thanks.”

“Something to wear? I’ll loan you something.”

“Oh, never mind, it’s warm in here, I’m all right.”

“A tincture, then?”

“Can you do hot chocolate?”

“Sure. Cacao is fun.” Mia brought out her tincture set and began reconfiguring the catalyzers and synthesizers. Little tubes of amber polyvinyl and steel alloy. Gilded O-rings. Enameled pinch-clamps. Osmosis screens. Brewers and strainers and translucent hookah chambers. Step-by-step instructions. It was something to do with your hands while people talked.

Brett fished out her snake, and slapped it sharply on the back of the head. It recoiled at once and emitted an angry hissing rattle. Brett offered up her right forearm. The snake instantly lashed out and sank both fangs into her flesh.

Brett gently coaxed the snake loose and petted it soothingly. Then she dabbed an ointment on the twin puncture marks. A tiny rill of blood escaped. “Ouch,” she remarked.

“What did you put in there?”

“Oh, the girl who gave me this stuff made me promise never to tell,” Brett said smugly. “It makes me feel safe and warm whenever I sleep in strange places.… It does make me feel nice, but it’s not really good for me. That’s why I always let it hurt some. If you do unhealthy things and you don’t let them hurt you first, then that’s a good way to get into big trouble.”

“An animal bite must be a big infection risk.”

“What, nasty warm-blooded germs from a nice coldblooded mouth? I don’t think so. Snakey’s really fast and clean. She’s just my good friend in my backpack.… It’s nice to have special things. And special friends.” Brett blinked, heavy lidded. She smiled.

They had some cocoa. Brett fell asleep.

Mia tucked a blanket over Brett and retired to her narrow bed. She shoved the hyperbaric seal away and pulled the covers to her chin and fell into uneasy reverie. Her little bedroom chamber felt dead and empty, like the paper cell of an abandoned wasps’ nest.

She had kept thoughts of the funeral at bay all day, but now in the dark and the silence the taste of mortality began, in its subtle limbic way, to prey upon her mind. Mia began to ponder, with pitiless clarity and accuracy, the endless list of syndromes in the aging process. The endless richness and natural variety of the pathways of organic decline.

Sutures knotting and calcifying. Cartilaginous membranes ossifying. Mineral deposits of stonelike hardness forming in the gall bladder, liver, the major arteries. Nails thickening, skin going scaly, hair thinning, graying, going all brittle. Nipples darkening, breasts sagging, ducts shrinking, glands puckering. The urogenital system, evolution’s canny trade-off of fertility for mortality, permanently bewildered. Deposits of rich bloody marrow dying out in their bony nooks and crannies, replaced by thick yellow pockets of inert fat. Loss of acuity in the retinas and in the weirdly complex machineries of the inner ear. The ancient gland that was the brain, tirelessly shifting its hormonal sediments until its reptilian backwaters filled with toxic deposits as tough to clean out as a childhood neurosis.

Mia wasn’t sick, and she certainly wasn’t dying, but she was very far from young. She had kept her brain quite clean, but the repeated neural scrubbings had caused serious wear on certain peripheral nerves. In the lower spine, and in the long-stretched nerves of the legs. Her vagus nerve was especially bad. Her weak vagus was not a lethal threat, but the skipped heartbeats were far from pleasant.

Mia’s lymph duct was an endless source of trouble, corroded and congealed with ancient bile. She had passing spasms of tinnitus in the left ear and had lost the higher pitches in the right. The synovial fluid in her knuckles and wrists had lost much of its viscosity. Cells in the human lenses didn’t grow back, so there wasn’t much to do about the loss of flexion and the resultant astigmatism.

And stress made everything worse. Stress made you grow when you were young, when you were young stress taught you lessons. But when you were old, then stress was the expressway to senility.

She could not sleep tonight. She wasn’t young. Sharing her house with a young woman, however briefly, had brought that truth home to her. She could sense Brett’s living presence in her house, Brett’s vital heartbeat and her easy breathing, like the presence of a wild animal.

Mia rose and went in to look after the girl. In the tranquil grip of sleep the girl had slid from beneath her blanket and achieved some primal state of delicious repose. She sprawled there on the patterned carpet like an odalisque, wrapped in the kind of deeply languid erotic slumber that women achieved only in the Oriental genre paintings of nineteenth-century Frenchmen. Envy rose in Mia like poisoned smoke. She walked back to her bed and sat in it, and thought bitterly about the tissue of events that she called her life.

She fell into a doze. At three in the morning the night cramps hit her. Her left leg jerked as if gaffed, and her calf knotted in a rock-hard spasm beneath the sheets. After a dreadful moment a secondary but even more agonizing cramp bit the sole of her left foot. Her toes bent like fishhooks and locked into place.

Mia cried out in smothered anguish. She pounded at the cramp, knuckles smacking knotted flesh. The pain grew more severe, her body’s living strength all short-circuited and turned against itself. It was potassium and it was catecholaminic pathways and it was a lot of other stupid terminologies and it was agony. She was having a cramp attack and she was in agony. She pounded on the treacherous muscle. With a sudden little spastic kick, her calf muscle went weak, all hot rubber and blood inside. She hastily massaged her pale and bloodless foot, whimpering to herself. The tendons creaked in her foot and ankle as the cramp fought back against her grip.

When she had tugged and eased her foot free of the evil seizure, Mia stood in her gown and limped methodically about the room. She leaned against the wall with both arms, propping herself at an angle, methodically stretching her Achilles tendons. Sleep was as far away as Stuttgart now. Her left leg felt like burnt rope.

There was nothing mysterious about these attacks. She knew their genesis exactly: potassium deficiencies, worn sheathing in the lower spine, diffusions of stress histamines through the somatic efferent fibers of a certain vertebra, a cellular metabolic cascade—but those words were just diagnosis. Stress brought the cramps on, or a little too much exercise, and every five weeks or so they would just spike right up on their own.

The truth was starker: she was old. Night cramps were a minor evil. People got very old, and strange new things went wrong with them, and they repaired what the racing and bursting technology allowed them to repair, and what they could not cure they endured. In certain ways, night cramps were even a good sign. She got leg cramps because she could still walk. It hurt her sometimes, but she had always been able to walk. She wasn’t bedridden. She was lucky. She had to concentrate on that: on the luckiness.

Mia wiped her sweating forehead on her nightgown’s sleeve. She limped into the front room. Brett was still asleep. She lay there undisturbed, head on one arm, utterly at peace. The sight of her lying there flooded Mia with déjà vu.

In a moment Mia had the memory in focus, beating at her heart like a moth in a net. Looking in one night at her sleeping daughter. Chloe at five, maybe six years old. Daniel with her, at her side. The child of their love asleep and safe, and happy in their care.

Human lives, her human life. A night not really different from a thousand other nights, but there had been a profound joy in that one moment, an emotion like holy fire. She had known without speaking that her husband felt it, too, and she had slipped her arm around him. It had been a moment beyond speech and out of time.

And now she was looking at a drugged and naked stranger on her carpet and that sacred moment had come back to her, still exactly what it was, what it had been, what it would always be. This stranger was not her daughter, and this moment of the century was not that other ticking moment, but none of that mattered. The holy fire was more real than time, more real than any such circumstance. She wasn’t merely having a happy memory. She was having happiness. She had become happiness.

The hot glow of deep joy had shed its bed of ashes. Still just as full of mysterious numinous meaning. As rich and alive and authentic as any sensation she had ever had. Emotion that would last with her till death, emotion she would have to deal with in her final reckoning. A feeling bigger than her own identity. She felt the joy of it crackling and kindling inside her, and in its hot fitful glow she recognized the poverty of her life.

No matter how carefully she guarded herself, life was too short. Life would always be too short.

Mia heard her own voice in the silent air. When the sentence struck her ears, she felt the power of a terrible resolve. An instant decision, sudden, unconscious, unsought, but irrevocable: “I can’t go on like this.”