Holy Fire

2

In volume, technical detail, and avuncular reassurance, the net’s medical advice had no archival peer. A serious life-extension upgrade was a personal crisis to rank with puberty, building a mansion, or joining an army.

The medical-industrial complex dominated the planet’s economy. Biomedicine had the highest investment rates and the highest rates of technical innovation of any industry in the world. Biomedicine was in a deliberate state of controlled frenzy, giving off enough heat to power the entire culture. In terms of government expenditure it outranked transportation, police, and what passed for defense. In what had once been called the private sector, biomedicine was bigger than chemisynthesis, almost as big as computation. Various aspects of the medical-industrial complex employed 15 percent of the planet’s working populace. The scope of gerontological research alone was bigger than agriculture.

The prize was survival. Failure deterred no one. The spectrum of research was vast and multiplex. For every life-extension treatment that was accepted for human use, there were hundreds of schemes that had never moved beyond the enormous tormented ranks of the animal models. New upgrade methods were licensed by medical ethicists. Older and less successful techniques were allowed to lapse out of practice, taking their unlucky investors with them.

There were a hundred clever ways to judge a life-extension upgrade. Stay with the blue chips and you were practically guaranteed a steady rate of survival. Volunteer early for some brilliant new start-up, however, and you’d probably outlive the rest of your generation. Keep in mind, though, that novelty and technical sweetness were no guarantees of genuine long-term success. Many lines of medical advancement folded in a spindling crash of medical vaporware, leaving their survivors internally scarred and psychically wrecked.

Medical upgrades were always improving, never steadily, but with convulsive organic jumps. Any blue-chip upgrade licensed in the 2090s would be (very roughly speaking) about twice as effective as the best available in the 2080s. There had been limit-shattering paradigmatic breakthroughs in life extension during the 2060s and 2070s. As for the 2050s, the stunts they’d been calling “medicine” back then (which had seemed tremendously impressive at the time) scarcely qualified as life extension at all, by modern standards. The medical techniques of the 2050s barely qualified as common hygienic procedures. They were even cheap.

As for the traditional medical procedures that predated the 2050s, almost every one of them had been abandoned. They were dangerous, counterproductive, based on views of biological reality that were fundamentally mistaken.

Given these circumstances, it was wise to postpone your upgrade for as long as possible. The longer you waited, the better your choices would become. Unfortunately, the natural aging process never stopped in the meantime, so waiting too long made you subject to serious cumulative damage from natural metabolic decline. Sooner or later you had to hold your nose and make your choice. Since the outcome of leading-edge research was unknown by definition, the authorities could make no guarantees. Therefore, the pursuit of longevity was declared a fundamental freedom left to the choice of the individual. The polity offered its best advice, consensually derived in endless open meetings through vast thriving packs of experts, but advice was nothing better than advice.

If you were smart or lucky, you chose an upgrade path with excellent long-term potential. Your odds were good. You would be around for quite a while. Your choice would become and remain popular. The installed base of users would expand, and that would help you quite a lot. If anything went wrong with your upgrade, there’d be plenty of expertise in dealing with it.

If you were unlucky or foolish, your short-term gains would reveal serious long-term flaws. As the years ground on, you’d become isolated, freakish, obsolescent.

The truly bad techniques were the ones that complicated your transitions to another and better upgrade. Once your quality of life was irreparably degraded, you’d have no choice but to turn your attention to the quality of your death.

There were various methods of hedging your bets. You could, for instance, be conspicuously and repeatedly good. You always voted, you committed no crimes, you worked for charities, you looked after your fellow citizens with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. You joined civil support and served on net committees. You took a tangible wholehearted interest in the basic well-being of civilization. The community officially wanted you kept alive. You were probably old, probably well behaved, and probably a woman. You were awarded certain special considerations by a polity that appreciated your valuable public spirit. You were the exact sort of person who had basically seized power in modern society.

If you were responsible in your own daily health-care practices, the polity appreciated the way in which you eased the general strain on medical resources. You had objectively demonstrated your firm will to live. Your serious-minded, meticulous approach to longevity was easily verified by anyone, through your public medical records. You had discipline and forethought. You could be kept alive fairly cheaply, because you had been well maintained. You deserved to live.

Some people destroyed their health, yet they rarely did this through deliberate intention. They did it because they lacked foresight, because they were careless, impatient, and irresponsible. There were enormous numbers of medically careless people in the world. There had once been titanic, earth-shattering numbers of such people, but hygienically careless people had died in their billions during the plagues of the 2030s and 2040s. The survivors were a permanently cautious and foresightful lot. Careless people had become a declining interest group with a shrinking demographic share.

Once upon a time, having money had almost guaranteed good health, or at least good health care. Nowadays mere wealth guaranteed very little. People who publicly destroyed their own health had a rather hard time staying wealthy—not because it took good health to become wealthy, but because it took other people’s confidence to make and keep money. If you were on a conspicuously public metabolic bender, then you weren’t the kind of person that people trusted nowadays. You were a credit risk and a bad business partner. You had points demerits and got cheap medical care.

Even the cheap treatments were improving radically, so you were almost sure to do very well by historical standards. But those who destroyed their health still died young, by comparison with the elite. If you wanted to destroy your health, that was your individual prerogative. Once you were thoroughly wrecked, the polity would encourage you to die.

It was a ruthless system, but it had been invented by people who had survived two decades of devastating general plagues. After the plagues everything had become different, in much the way that everything was different after a world war. The experience of massive dieback, of septic terror and emptied cities, had permanently removed the culture’s squeamishness. Some people died and some didn’t. Those who took steps to fight death would be methodically rewarded, and those who acted like fools would be buried with the rest.

There were, of course, some people who morally disagreed with the entire idea of technologized life extension. Their moral decision was respected and they were perfectly free to drop dead.

Mia’s choice of upgrade was known as Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification, or NTDCD. It was a very radical treatment that was very little tried and very expensive. Mia knew a great deal about NTDCD, because she was a professional medical economist. She qualified for it because she had been very careful. She chose to take it because it promised her the world, and she was in a mood to gamble.

Mia put 90 percent of her entire financial worth into a thirty-year hock to support continued research development and maintenance in NTDCD.

NTDCD was considered a particularly promising avenue of development. Medically speaking it was extremely difficult to perform. In medical upgrades, the promise and the difficulty were almost always tightly linked. Qualifying for such a lavish upgrade required an intimidating level of personal sacrifice. Patients qualifying for this treatment would have all their funds reinvested in maintenance and R&D. The funds would be returned handsomely if the avenue of upgrade paid off. If it didn’t pay off, then the donor would probably be dead before the funds came back into liquidity.

Losing years of control over one’s money was a very stiff price, but it was not the worst of it. The loss of money did not sting the way it once had stung. Money was no longer what money once had been. The polity had never been a free-market society. People dying of plague were not much impressed by free markets. The polity was a plague-panicked allocation society in which the whip hand of coercive power was held by smiling and stouthearted medical rescue personnel. And by social workers. And by very nice old people.

Mia’s forthcoming ordeal had been plotted in meticulous detail.

The first major trick was to stop eating. Her entire digestive tract would be clogged with a sterilizing putty.

The second trick was to stop breathing. Her lungs would be filled with a sterilizing oxygenating silicone fluid. These two processes would immediately kill off most of the body’s internal bacteria.

The third trick was to stop thinking. The blood-brain barrier would be scrubbed free from the capillaries of her skull and the cerebrospinal fluid would be replaced with a sterilizing saline fluid. Profound unconsciousness resulted.

The next trick, quite an advanced one, was to stop being quite so rigorously multicellular. Mia would be fetally submerged in a gelatinous tank of support fluids. Her internal metabolic needs would be supplied through a newly attached umbilical. The hair and the skin had to go. The bloodstream and lymphatic system would be opened to the support vat for the remaining course of the treatment. Red blood cell production would be shut down and the plasma replaced by a straw-colored fluid toxic to any cell which was not mammalian. All commensal organisms in the human body had to be destroyed.

Once the bacteria were thoroughly and utterly annihilated, the hunt would commence for the viruses and prions. It would take about a week to tag and destroy the genetic menagerie of imbedded human viruses. It would take about three weeks to destroy the vast metabolic cosmos of once-unsuspected human prions. These rogue proteins would mostly be shivered apart through magnetic resonance techniques.

Once this much had been accomplished, Mia would become an entirely antiseptic organism, a floating amniotic gel culture.

The DNA treatments could then commence. Intercellular repair required a radical loosening of the intracellular bonds so as to facilitate medical access through the cell surfaces of the corpus as a whole. The skinless body would partially melt into the permeating substance of the support gel. The fluidized body would puff up to two and a half times its original volume.

At this point, flexible plastic tubing could worm its way into the corpus. The skinless, bloated, and neotenically fetalized patient, riddled with piercings, would resemble an ivory Chinese doll depicting acupuncture sites.

Specific procedures would take place in the marrow of the femurs, the spine, the ventricles of the brain, the sinuses, and other deeply interiorized spaces. Toxic buildups and precipitated mineralized bodies in the arteries, gall bladder, and lymphatic system—especially the metabolically crucial coacervate deposits in the pineal gland—would be reduced or eliminated.

On a genetic level, Mia’s cells would be studied for cumulative replication errors. Precancerous and/ or junk-burdened cells would be tagged with artificial antibodies and made the targets for programmed apoptosis. Some 15 percent of the body’s cells would be killed during this period and removed by migratory artificial phagocytes. This process alone would require over a month.

The surviving cells would then be treated to a neotelomeric extension. The telomeric ends of the chromosomes were a genetic clock, wearing thin as the human cell approached its Hayflick limit of allowable replications. New telomeric material would be spliced onto the chromosomes, tricking the aging cells into believing in the fiction of their own youth. The cells would then begin replicating furiously in the nutrient broth, and the wasted body would regain its 15 percent of lost body mass.

The extremely rapid growth within a buoyant support vat was closely akin to fetal growth. It was to be expected that there would be certain developmental abnormalities, especially in the adult joints and musculature. This was an expected price for marination in a fountain of youth.

The recovery process posed its own difficulties. The skin had to be regrown, commensal bacteria had to be gently reintroduced, the interior fluids had to be painstakingly replaced with natural substances. It was not entirely certain when the patient would regain consciousness, or what that state of consciousness might entail in the way of somatic sensation.

“I believe what you’re trying to say is that this will be extremely painful,” said Mia.

Her counselor was Dr. Rosenfeld, a sharp-faced, brilliantly preserved clinician with two dark wings of hair. Dr. Rosenfeld was a man of her own age. He had taken pains to inform Mia that he still considered himself fully bound by the Hippocratic oath he had taken some seventy years previously. In Dr. Rosenfeld’s opinion, there were a few hundred million Johnny-come-lately medical technicians, and then there were actual doctors. Dr. Rosenfeld was a traditional, actual doctor. He would never allow any patient in his clinical charge to enter such a profoundly transformative state without a great deal of previous bedside manner.

“The term ‘pain,’ ” said Dr. Rosenfeld, “is a relic of folk models of mental function. We have to draw a distinction between the higher-level subjective experience of pain, and the basal-level sequence of somatic nerve transmissions. All of these practices in NTDCD would be extremely painful to a fully operational brain, but your brain is going to be considerably less than operational. Have you heard of Korsakoff’s syndrome?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Of course, in modern practice we recognize thirty-one distinct substates of Korsakoff’s.… You will be placed into one of those amnesiac modes during the procedure. It’s like a virtuality, but it’s a profound healing space. Extreme states of so-called pain may flash through certain preconscious processing centers involved in working memory, but those experiences will simply not be recorded through any normal channels. We’ll be doing constant emission scanning, and I can guarantee you that whatever preconscious events may occur will never be consciously accessible, either during the time of treatment or afterward.”

“So I’ll feel it, but I won’t feel it.”

“That’s semantics again. ‘Feel’ is a very broad and inexact folk term. So is the term ‘I,’ for that matter. Maybe we can say that there will be feelings, but there won’t be any ‘I’ to have them.” Dr. Rosenfeld smiled. “Ontology is fascinating, isn’t it? I hope we can work through this discussion without invoking René Descartes.”

“I’ve read René Descartes.”

“The old fellow was remarkably prescient about the pineal gland.” Dr. Rosenfeld spread his long-fingered, tapered, well-kept hands. “NTDCD is no mere maintenance procedure. This is the closest that humankind has yet come to genuine rejuvenation. This might be a treatment program that could put our patients on the path to immortality.”

Mia only smiled. It was a claim that she had heard and read many times before. Medical entrepreneurs loved to claim that their particular line of life extension would carry patients all the way to a future transcendant medical breakthrough.

“It’s a public-relations tactic that’s been rather overblown,” Dr. Rosenfeld admitted. “Still, look at the figures and trends. It’s very clear that the speed of improvement in life extension is itself improving. Sooner or later we will hit the plateau. We’ll reach a rate of life-span improvement of one year per year. At that point, the patients will become effectively immortal.”

“Some patients,” Mia said. “Maybe.”

“I’m not saying that we’re there yet, or even that we can see it. Obviously there are many hard decades of research ahead. But with NTDCD, some of our patients may, possibly, live to see that day.”

“I didn’t ask you for any such promises, Doctor. Anyway, I’ll believe in immortality when I see it done for rats and dogs.”

“We’ve done it already for fruit flies and nematodes,” said Dr. Rosenfeld.

“I’m not a fruit fly,” Mia said.

“Too true,” said Dr. Rosenfeld. “I take your point. But you are a very special woman in a privileged position. Only forty human beings have gone through this treatment to date. Furthermore, none of them have had the exact clinical experience that you’ll be undergoing. This treatment in its present form is only two years old. There is very little postoperational experience with patients. And that is a matter that concerns us both.”

Mia nodded helpfully.

“Once you’re out of the tank, you’ll be consciously experiencing the end results of a very profound metabolic change. Once you enter your convalescence, you’re not going to be the same woman who’s sitting here in front of me right now. You’ll discover that you’re not even the mistress of your own body. You’ll have lost a lot of nervous and muscular coordination.”

Dr. Rosenfeld opened a notebook. “You’re ninety-four years old. Your records tell me that you’ve lost about 12 percent of the neuronal and glial tissue that you had when you were, say, twenty. That’s perfectly normal and natural, but NTDCD is very, very far from normal and natural. You’re going to get all that tissue back—not the original tissue, mind you, but a new infiltration of fresh brain tissue that is essentially unimprinted. And brain tissue is not something you can turn on and turn off, plug in or plug out. It’s going to be part of you. The new you.”

“How dangerous is that?”

“Let’s just say you’re going to require a lot of surveillance and counseling during the integrative process.”

“What’s the worst I can expect?”

“Very well … As you know, in the early days we had two fatalities. Catastrophic neural failure, cessation of higher functions, euthanasia. The customary ethical procedure—tragic, but customary. You could die in this treatment. That has happened.”

“And?”

“And profound dissociation. What they used to call schizoid behavior, in the old days. Some preepileptic manifestations. We understand these mental processes fairly well these days, on a cellular level. Unless there is gross physical damage, strokes, infarcts, amyloid degeneration, then we simply don’t allow our patients to enter states of dementia. We can interfere and avert most gross neuronal misbehavior.”

He leaned back in the chair. “But there are other and subtler disturbances: culture shock, anomie, postoperation letdown, a few hints of bipolar disorder. Plus good old-fashioned human mulish impatience … Human consciousness is the highest and most complex metabolic function in all of nature. We can throw medical terms at the soul, but we can’t box it up. We simply can’t give people their identity the way we might give an injection; in the end, people have to find their own souls.”

“Are you religious, Doctor?”

“Yes, I am, actually. I’m a Catholic lay brother.”

“Really. How interesting.”

“I wouldn’t advise any use of entheogens under your medical circumstances, Mia. If you want to see your Savior face-to-face, then He will wait for you. You’ll have plenty of time.” Dr. Rosenfeld smiled.

Mia nodded and wisely said nothing.

Dr. Rosenfeld hesitated. “May I ask something? When was the last time you had an orgasm?”

Mia thought it over. “I’d have to say about twenty years.”

“Very wise. I’m sure that has helped your metabolism. But you’re going to become a sexual person again, with something very close to the full complement of metabolic drives. I won’t say that’s unpleasant, because of course sexuality is very pleasant, but it won’t be easy for you. In fact, sexuality is generally the worst recuperative problem that our patients face.”

“Really. How odd.”

“People of our advanced years come to terms with a loss of libido. Our elderly patients often think they can repress sexual urges through a simple act of will. That’s a canard. If human beings could control sexuality, the human race would have ceased to exist during the Pleistocene.” He paused reflectively. “You’re postmenopausal, of course. There’s not much we can do about egg-cell lines. We wouldn’t want to do egg-cell restoration anyway, because the ethicists don’t approve. So you won’t become fertile again.”

Mia smiled. “Well, Doctor, I’ve been a young woman before. I’ve been married, I had a child. When I was young, people died from sexual diseases. Even contraception was troublesome. I’ve always been rather careful about that aspect of my life.”

“Ah, but back then you had years to get accustomed to puberty. You didn’t have a subjectively sudden dusting and cleaning of your entire limbic and hormonal systems. We’re redoing your brain, and most of the brain doesn’t think or reason. The human brain is a gland, it’s not a computer.”

Dr. Rosenfeld drummed his shining fingertips against the desktop. “People don’t live because life is a rational decision. People don’t get out of bed in the morning because of cost-benefit analysis. People don’t get into bed together because they’ve decided on that course of action through logical deduction. Sexuality is an aspect of being, and you cannot stop your being through any mental act of will. You’re going to be a ninety-four-year-old woman who can look, act, and feel like a twenty-year-old girl. Of course there will be complications.”

“Can’t I just take libido suppressants?”

“That’s an option. Libido suppressants are very popular nowadays, but I wouldn’t advise that you use them. Hormones have a strong function in physical development. Young people have a lot of hormones because young people really need those hormones, and you also need your hormones for the sake of proper development in your new brain tissue. My advice to you as your physician is that you are better off putting up with the troubles. Think of them as growing pains.”

Mia smiled. “Are you advising me to take lovers?”

“Mia …” He patiently steepled his fingers. “Even if you can find lovers, and that’s no small matter under your circumstances, taking lovers doesn’t seem to help. It’s not a simple matter. Our patients are elderly people, they’ve been through marriage, they’ve had children. They don’t want to start flirting or courting. They don’t want to commit to life partners, or start new families. They’ve already been through that aspect of human experience, they learned by it and they put it behind them. It’s not that they’re incapable of loving other people, but they’ve reached a state of deep maturity, of posthuman self-actualization. They just don’t have it in themselves to maintain a committed and passionate sexual relationship. And yet after the treatment, the drives are very strong. Our patients tend to find it distressing. It’s demeaning, and very difficult to integrate.”

“I can see that this is a matter you take very seriously, Doctor.”

“I do take it seriously. NTDCD is a very important technical development. I don’t say that merely because I myself have been working on it. The experiences of the first NTDCD patients are of crucial interest to society and polity. Please have a look at this.” Dr. Rosenfeld opened his notebook and showed her the screen.

An animation ran. A nude young man appeared. He was festooned from head to foot in what seemed to be junk jewelry. A plastic coronet. Earrings. False eyelashes. A little glued-on breastplate. Armlets. Bracelets. Ten identical finger rings. A dozen adhesive patches on his torso, groin, and thighs. Knee buckles, anklets, and shiny little toe rings. His hair was very short. He was strolling about an apartment, a bit clumsily and gawkily, and methodically petting a black cat.

“Those are positional tracking devices,” Mia said.

“Yes. Also galvanic skin response, a tiara encephalometer, basal core temperatures, stool and urine samples, and a battery of comprehensive lab tests twice a week.”

“I’ve never seen so many positional trackers on just one person. It’s as if he were doing virtuality.”

“Yes, rather. Muscular coordination is one of the critical factors in convalescence. We need complete and accurate readouts on the positioning of the limbs at all times. For tremor, palsy, cramping … Especially at night, because sleep disturbances seem to be one of our more prominent effects. The encephalometer you see him wearing is for possible strokes, infarcts, preseizure activity, neuronal or glial abnormalities.… This patient is Professor Oates, he’s been one of our stars. He’s a hundred and five.”

“My goodness.” She looked at him. He was a beautiful young man.

“He’s been most cooperative. I’m sorry to say that cooperating with us is necessarily obtrusive and cumbersome. It very much hampers one’s career and social life. Professor Oates is very kindly making the necessary sacrifices for the advancement of medical knowledge and the good of the polity.”

Mia watched the screen. The nude Professor Oates did not look particularly happy about the situation. Mia spoke carefully. “I admire his courage in making such a brave act of self-abnegation.

“Professor Oates has always been very disciplined, very public-spirited. As you might expect of him, given the situation … He was a physicist, actually. Now he says he’s giving up physics. Wants to take up architecture instead. He’s very enthusiastic about architecture. As eager as a new student.”

Mia closely studied the screen. In point of fact, although he was very attractive, Professor Oates did not look particularly human. He looked like a gifted professional actor posing for the cameras in the role of an ungainly nude undergraduate. “Would that be actual architecture, or virtual architecture?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Rosenfeld, surprised. “You could take that matter up with the professor. Naturally we have our own NTDCD civil-support group. It meets regularly on the net. Brilliant people, charming people. I must be frank, and tell you that you’ll have your share of misery—but at least you’ll be in very good company.”

Mia sat back. “Well, Professor Oates is obviously a very accomplished young man. I beg your pardon—not young. A distinguished scholar.”

“You aren’t the first to make that mistake,” said Dr. Rosenfeld, pleased. “People genuinely think they’re young, these patients. People tend to believe what they see.”

“That’s lovely. I’m glad for him. It gives me a lot of hope.”

“There is another matter. You remember the professor’s cat?” Dr. Rosenfeld reached beneath his desk and pulled out a plastic lab cage. Inside there was paper litter and a small sleeping rodent. A hamster.

“Yes?” Mia said.

“We’re going to do to this little animal what we’re going to do to you. This hamster is five years old. That’s very old for a hamster. Everything you go through, she’s going to go through. Not in the same tank with you of course, but as part and parcel of the same procedure. You’re about to become posthuman. And she’s going to become postrodent. We want you to look after her for us, when she’s done.”

“I don’t like pets.”

“This isn’t your ‘pet,’ Mia. This is a very valuable fellow entity which is about to share your unique state of being. Humor us in this, please. We know what we’re doing.” Dr. Rosenfeld tapped the cage with his thumbnail. The elderly hamster, in a doddering doze, showed no response. “There’s a big difference between surviving this procedure and truly getting well. We do want you to get well, Mia, we truly want you to be all right, and we know that this will help your healing process. We can tell a great deal by the way you choose to treat a fellow creature who’s been through your own brand of purgatory. It can be very lonely on the far side of humanity. Think of her as your lucky charm and your totem animal. Believe in her. And the best of luck to both of you.”

Mia made her will. She fasted for three days. They shaved her, all over. They stripped her. They stuffed her with the paste. Then they started on the lung work, and they narcotized her utterly. All the rest of it went into the place where experiences that cannot be experienced must.

When she awoke, it was January. She was very weak and tired and she had no hair. Her skin was blotchy and covered with lanugo, like an infant’s skin. There were cold hard rings on her fingers and something nasty and tight around her head, but they made her keep everything on. She spent most of the first two days clenching her fists, raising the fingers into eyesight, slowly and deliciously stroking her face, and sometimes deliberately licking her fingers and the cold smooth rings.

She ate the mush that they gave her, because they complained if she didn’t eat.

She had forgotten how to read.

On the third day she woke with a brisk new sense of intelligence and clarity and discovered that the little angular scrawls had become letters and words again. She opened her notebook and looked into it with a sense of absolute wonderment. It was full of the most abstruse and ridiculous economic and bureaucratic nonsense imaginable. She spent the day in gales of laughter, kicking her feet and looking at the screen and rubbing the itchy stubble on her head.

In the afternoon she climbed restlessly out of bed and began tottering about the hospital room. She put some chow and water in the hamster’s cage, but the hamster was sleeping almost all the time, just lying there inert and pink and very slightly furry. One of the nurses asked if she had given a name to the hamster. She couldn’t think of any names that would fit the circumstances, so she didn’t call the hamster anything.

In the evening her daughter called from Djakarta, but she didn’t want to speak to anyone from Djakarta. She told the nurses to say that she felt fine. She didn’t say or do much during the rest of the evening. She’d come to realize that the room was saturated with machines that were always watching her, and some of the machines were so clever that they were practically invisible.

On the fourth day they gave her some new hard and chewy food and also some sweet things that were quite delightful. She asked for more, and pouted when they wouldn’t give her any. Then they dressed her in very nicely double-stitched blue cotton overalls and took her into a room that they said was a children’s room. There weren’t any children in it, so she had it all to herself, and it was a very nice room. It had bright colors and the lighting was as clear and fresh as summer sunlight and it had machines to swing on and climb on. She worked herself into fits of laughter climbing and swinging and tumbling off onto the padded floor, until she had kind of an accident in the coveralls. Then she made them stop so she could clean herself up.

Then she went back to her room and watched some political news on her notebook. She had a long intense chat with Dr. Rosenfeld about American politics in the 2030s. She had been intensely interested in politics during the worldwide crisis of the 2030s, and when she thought about what had happened back then, it made her so mad she could scream. She talked a great deal about her favorite stupid policies and politicians of the thirties, and she got a lot of indignation off her chest. Dr. Rosenfeld said she was coming along very well. He asked her if she had named the hamster yet. She couldn’t understand why they were getting so worked up about that topic. She didn’t much like the hamster.

On the fifth day they introduced her to another NTDCD patient named Juliet Ramachandran, a very nice young woman who was one hundred thirteen. Juliet had been blind before the treatment because of retinal degeneration, and she had a postcanine Seeing Eye dog who could talk. Mrs. Ramachandran had been in civil support for many years and had a very polished manner. Mia and Juliet and the dog all got along together very well, and had a long talk about the treatment and other things. The dog had grown all its fur back, while Juliet had a lovely silk turban. The dog was a real chatterbox, but Juliet said that was a passing phase.

Juliet kept saying the words, “Mia Ziemann.” This made her laugh.

“Do you know that your name is Mia Ziemann?”

She could tell that Juliet was getting agitated. “All right, have it your way, miazeeman, miazeeman, don’t rub it in.” Life wasn’t easy for Juliet, recovering her sight and everything. Juliet was very frank about her troubles, and kept talking about the peculiar sensation of objects “touching the backs of my eyes.” It was kinder to be gentle with poor Juliet. She decided that she would try very hard to answer whenever anyone said “Mia.”

On the sixth day she made a point of responding to “Mia,” and they began to treat her differently and better. When they asked if she had named the hamster, she said “Fred.” When they said that that was a boy’s name she said it was short for Frederika. She took the hamster out and dandled it and made sure it had its chow. They were very pleased with this behavior.

The hamster was a nasty little ratlike thing that waddled and had beady black eyes and shrunken jittery paws. It was growing some nice soft brown fur, though. One day the hamster had a kind of brief fit in its cage, but she decided not to tell anybody. It would only upset them.

On the seventh day, she realized that she had once truly been someone called Mia Ziemann, and that there was probably something pretty seriously wrong with her. She didn’t feel at all sick, however. She felt terrific, wonderful. She felt very glad to have the privilege of being whoever she might be. When she thought seriously about really being Mia Ziemann, however, there was a taste in her mouth as if she had bitten her tongue. She felt a peculiar kind of dread, as if Mia Ziemann was hiding in the closet and waiting for dark. So that Mia Ziemann could come out and caper ghostfully around the hospital room.

In the afternoon she put on some of her Mia Ziemann clothes and went for a long walk, five or six times around the hospital grounds. The Mia clothes were very well made, but unfortunately they didn’t fit. She was not only thinner and svelter but she had grown five centimeters taller. She was walking pretty well now, but there was a strange wobbling roll in her hips. During her walk, she saw quite a few people around the hospital who were truly and profoundly unhealthy. She realized how lucky she was.

In the evening she started reading net discussions from the NTDCD support group. It was very flattering to have her intelligence overestimated by such brilliant people. She felt that she ought to contribute, and that probably she had some worthwhile medical experiences to write about, but her typing had gotten all rusty somehow.

She was always very good and patient with the support people when they did the tests, even though the tests hurt her quite a bit. They had some other tests that were just puzzles: playing chess problems, doing crosswords, stacking oddly shaped blocks. The word tests were plenty tough, but when it came to stacking blocks she was a whiz. Apparently her geometric modeling skills had increased by about 15 percent. Much of this result was improved reaction time, but some of it seemed to be genuine neoneuronal integration, according to the emission results. When she’d paged through this medical prognosis, she grew very proud of her achievement, and firmly decided she would do less talking from now on and just look at pictures more. Play to her cognitive strengths. Maybe even draw some pictures, or take some photographs, or model in clay or virtuality. There were so many fabulous possibilities.

After they gave her some plasticine, she had a stroke of insight and did the hamster. She put a lot of cunning effort into the rodent’s portrayal. When they saw the results, they were delighted with her, just as she had firmly suspected they would be. They said that it would soon be time for her to be released and continue the convalescence at her newly remodeled apartment.

She’d been suspecting the truth for quite a while, but she now fully realized that the people guarding her were as dumb as bricks. It would be fairly elementary to get out from under their thumbs and go someplace else where she could pursue other activities—something a lot more interesting than hanging around eating medicated mush with a hamster. This prospect was very enticing. Her only regret was that one of the male support people was really good-looking, and she had fallen for him a little bit. It was just as well, though. Even if she’d asked him to kiss her, it would only have been one of those severe medical ethical standards things. He’d never even make it to second base.

She was answering to “Mia” all the time now. She even did some of Mia’s work. There was a trick to it, like throwing your eyes out of focus. She would relax deep inside and let the Mia feeling come up, and then she could do quite a few useful things, type a lot faster, enter passwords back in the LEL-SF Assessment Collaboratory, collate spreadsheets, examine her flowware, sign the Mia name even. She came to recognize that the Mia thing didn’t want to hurt her. The Mia wasn’t jealous, and didn’t mean her any harm at all. The Mia thing was meek and obliging and accommodating, and not very interesting. The Mia seemed to be really tired and didn’t care very much about anything. The Mia was nothing but a bundle of habits.

She’d learned to get along a lot better by talking less, just by listening and watching. It was amazing how much people revealed to you, if you carefully watched their faces and what they did with their hands. Most of the time what people were really thinking had nothing to do with the words coming out of their mouths. Men especially. All you had to do was just wriggle in the chair a little bit, and nod and smile nicely, and give them a kind of sidelong glitter of the eyes, and they just knew in their male heart of hearts that you must be perfectly okay.

Women weren’t so easy to fool that way, but even women would get all impressed if you just seemed perfectly happy and confident. Most women were very far from perfectly happy and confident. Most women really needed to complain. If you just coaxed them to complain at you, and nodded a lot, and said Oh-poor-dear and I’d-have-done-just-the-same-thing, then they would unload all sorts of things on you. They’d become all emotionally close to you and grateful. The women would go away knowing that you must be perfectly okay.

They made a big deal about her going home for convalescence. There was even press coverage—a net reporter asked her questions. He was a good-looking guy, and she started flirting with him a little bit during the interview, and he got all flustered and touched. She took the hamster home to Parnassus Avenue with her, along with the reporter. She made the reporter a nice dinner. The reporter came along like a lamb. He was very taken with her.

She was glad to have a chance to cook and eat, because they’d told her at the hospital that she had problems with her appetite. It was very true, too—if food was put in front of her she’d be happy to eat it, but if food wasn’t put in front of her then she wouldn’t miss it. She’d hear her stomach rumble and she’d get weak and maybe a little dizzy, but there wasn’t any real hunger. It seemed she’d gone a little bit food-blind somehow. She could smell food and she could taste it and she liked to eat it, but the tiara said there was some kind of glitch in her hypothalamus. They were hoping it would pass. If it didn’t pass by itself, then they’d have to do something about it.

Cooking was great—she never had to think about cooking, she just relaxed and it flowed right out of her hands. She listened to the reporter brag for two hours about all his important contacts. She fed him and made him a tincture. He was just a kid, only forty. She was really tempted to start kissing him, but she knew that would be a critical error at this point. They’d outfitted her apartment like a telepresence site. She couldn’t even scratch without every finger being instantly recorded in real time in some 3-D medical database.

When the reporter left, she hugged and kissed him at the door. Not much of a kiss, but it was the first kiss she’d had in absolutely forever. She couldn’t believe she had gone so long without kissing anyone. It was unbelievably stupid, like trying to live without water.

Then she was alone in her apartment again. Alone, wonderfully, sweetly, and incredibly alone. Except for all her medical monitors. Just herself. And all the surveillance machines. She cleaned and washed everything and straightened it away.

When she was done with cleaning, she sat perfectly still in the apartment at the lacquered cardboard kitchen table. She had the oddest sensation. She could feel herself growing inside. Her self felt so big and free. Bigger than her body. Her self was bigger than the entire apartment. In the silence and the stillness she could feel her self pushing mutely at the windows.

She jumped up restlessly and put on a tab of Mia’s music. It was that awful yard-goods background music that people listened to nowadays, twinkly discreet music that sounded like it was stapled together out of dust. The walls were covered with hideously offensive antique paper art. The drapes looked like they had died against the walls. Someone had shriveled up inside this apartment, it was like the shrunken insides of a dead walnut. A dead woman’s wrinkly dry skin.

She tried to sleep in Mia’s bed. It was a nasty little old person’s bunk with a big ugly oxygen shroud. The mattress had been designed to do peculiar things in the way of firm spinal support. She didn’t want her spine supported anymore, and in any case it was a very different kind of spine now. Plus her monitors itched and crunched against the sheets. She crawled out into the front room and wrapped up in a blanket on the floor.

The hamster, which was mostly nocturnal, had come awake and was gnawing vigorously on the bars of its cage. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. In the darkness. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Around midnight, something snapped. She got up, put on her underwear, kicked on her Mia slacks. Too short, they showed her ankles. Put on a Mia brassiere. A total joke, this brassiere had no connection to reality. Put on a Mia pullover. Found a really nice red jacket in the closet. The jacket fit great. Found Mia shoes that pinched a little. Found a purse. Too small. Found a big bag. Put some underwear in the bag. Put in some lipstick. A comb, a brush, a razor. Sunglasses. A book to read on the way. Some socks. Some mascara, some eyeliner. A toothbrush.

Her netlink began ringing urgently. She’d had it with the netlink.

“They have got to be kidding,” she announced to the empty room. “This is not my place. This is nowhere. I can’t live like this. This isn’t living. I am out of here.” She walked out of her front door and slammed it.

She hesitated on the landing, then turned, opened the door, went back in. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Come on, you stupid thing.” She opened the cage, grabbed the hamster. “Come on, you can come, too.”

She threw the tiara off just outside the apartment. A hospital van arrived, flashing its way up the street and parking outside her building. She ditched the earrings and all ten finger rings on her way up Parnassus Avenue. While she waited for a taxi she slipped out of her shoes and socks and got rid of the nasty toe gadgets. The skin under there was all pale and sticky.

The taxi arrived.

Once in the taxi she shimmied out of her slacks and ditched the knee buckles and a large gluey complement of obnoxious stick-on patches. Out the window with them. On the train on the way to the airport she went to the ladies’ and shredded her way out of the breastplate, and about a dozen more patches. The patches were a big itchy pain and when they were gone her morale began to soar.

She arrived at the airport. The black tarmac was full of glowing airplanes. They had a lovely way of flexing their wings and simply jumping into the chill night air when they wanted to take off. You could see people moving inside the airplanes because the hulls were gossamer. Some people had clicked on their reading lights but a lot of the people onboard were just slouching back into their beanbags and enjoying the night sky through the fuselage. Or sleeping, because this was a red-eye flight to Europe. It was all very quiet and beautiful. There was nothing to it really.

She walked to a departure stairs and worked her way up. The stewardess spoke to her in Deutsch as she entered the aircraft. She opened her bag, pulled out the hamster, showed the hamster to the stewardess, put the hamster back in. Then she spun on her heel and walked with perfect joy and confidence right down the aisle. The stewardess didn’t do a thing.

She chose a nice brown beanbag in business class and lay down. Then a steward brought her a nice hot frappé.

At three in the morning the aircraft took off and she finally fell asleep.

When she woke up again it was eight o’clock in the morning, February 10, 2096. She was in Frankfurt.

She deplaned and wandered around the Frankfurt airport, lost and sticky eyed and blissfully without plans. She didn’t have any money. No cashcard, no credit. No ID. The civil-support people from the flight were deliberately checking in with the local authorities, but the Deutschland authorities didn’t bother to go looking for you if you didn’t go looking for them.

She had some water from a fountain and went to a bathroom and washed her face and hands and changed her underwear and her socks. Her face didn’t seem to need much makeup anymore, but she direly missed her makeup. Walking around without makeup made her feel far more anxious than any mere lack of ID.

She emerged from the bathroom and walked along with the other people so that no one would notice her.

The crowd led her through about a million glass-fronted halls and kiosks, down escalators into an ivygrown train station. It seemed that Deutschlanders were really fond of ivy, especially if the ivy was growing really deep underground where ivy basically had no business growing.

There was a young European girl down there with very short hair and a bright red jacket. Since she also had very short hair and a bright red jacket, she thought it would be clever to follow this young girl and do as she did. This was a very wise plan, as the girl knew just where to go. The girl fetched biscuits in a paper bag from a Deutschlander civil-support kiosk. So she fetched a bag, too. She didn’t have to pay. The biscuits were really good. She could feel the vitamin-stuffed government-subsidized nontoxic goodness racing through her grateful innards.

Once she’d wolfed down half a dozen biscuits and had some more water, she began to feel quite cozy and pleased with herself. She gave some crumbs to the hamster.

Inside the train station hall twelve guys in big woven ponchos and flat black hats were playing Andean folk music on pipes and guitars. These South American guys had set up a card-reader on a post, but you didn’t have to pay them if you didn’t want to. You could just sit and listen to their free music. There were plenty of free beanbags around to lie in, and there was free water, and plenty of free biscuits, and a very nice free ladies’ room. As far as she could figure it, there was no reason why she couldn’t just spend the rest of her life right here in the good old Frankfurt train station.

It was warm and cozy, and just watching all the different European people wander past with their luggage was endlessly fascinating. She felt a bit conspicuous sitting there in her public beanbag publicly nibbling her public biscuits, but she wasn’t hurting anybody. In fact, everybody who looked at her obviously thought she was great. The Deutschland people smiled at her. Men especially smiled at her quite a lot. As she killed an hour, she saw ten or twelve little kids in the crowd. Even the little kids smiled at her.

Everybody thinking they had something important to do. How pathetically amusing. Why couldn’t they just sit still and enjoy life? What was their big hurry? All this aimless running around … They were all gonna live a million years—wasn’t that the point of everything? You could just lie still in a beanbag and be at peace with the universe, perfectly happy.

She enjoyed this thoroughly, for about an hour and a half. Then she became indifferent. Openly bored. Restless. Agitated, and finally unable to sit still a moment longer. Besides, the guys from the Andes had begun to repeat the same songs again, and that whistle thing they were blowing was really irritating. She got up and chose herself a train like everybody else was doing.

Inside the train it was noisy. With talk. The train itself didn’t make any noise at all, but the people aboard were chattering and eating noodles and drinking big malts. It was an extremely fast train and as silent as an eel. It ran on tracks but it didn’t touch them. She put her bag under the seat and wished that she could understand Deutsch.

When she picked her bag up, she found the neck of the bag yawning open, and realized that her hamster had escaped. The nasty little hairbug had finally made a break for it, either inside the train, or back at the Frankfurt station. At first she was a little upset, but then she realized how funny it was. Hamster on the loose! Mass panic grips Europe! Well, good-bye, good riddance, and good luck, postrodent! No hard feelings, okay?

She got off the train at Munchen because she liked the name of the city. Once it had been Munich or Muenchen or Moenchen or even München, but the All-European Orthographic Reformation had made it into Munchen. Munchen, Munchen, Munchen. Somebody had said that Stuttgart was the greatest city for the arts in the whole world, but Stuttgart wasn’t half so pretty a name as Munchen.

She knew she would love Munchen as soon as she discovered that they were giving away pretzels at the kiosks. Not little American dry stick pretzels with iodized salt either, but big warm bready pretzels that probably had traces of actual wheat and yeast in them. In the Munchen station there were about a hundred kids from all over Europe lined up laughing for these big bracelet-sized Munchen pretzels. The Bavarian civil-support bakery people had very smug looks about this situation. You could just tell they had some kind of ulterior motive.

She gleefully munched her two giant pretzels and drank more water and then she found another and even prettier girl, with long blond hair and a blue velvet coat, and followed her. And that was how she ended up in the Marienplatz.

There was a tubestation outlet in the platz, and a gushing fountain with a circular stone railing, and a big marble column with four bronze cherubs skewering devils. A gilded Virgin Mary stood at the column’s top, doing a kind of civil reconnaissance check. There was a telepresence site in one corner, and a bunch of fashion stores with glowing and moving mannequin displays. Lots of spindly Euro pedal-bikes parked around. There were all kinds of people wandering the Marienplatz. Tourists from all over the world. Especially Indonesians.

She leaned against the edge of the fountain railing, like the other kids in the platz. The fountain had three muscular bronze statues pouring eternal streams of water from big bronze buckets. The sun was setting already, and it was plenty cold. All the kids had flushed cheeks and windblown hair and they were in jackets and colored neck wrappings and odd-looking Euro-kid boots.

Every once in a while a pair of big German-shepherd police dogs would trot by the platz, and the kids would stop talking and tighten up a little.

The Marienplatz was a beautiful plaza. She liked the way the Muncheners had taken good care of their church: peaked arches, balconies, fishy-looking stone Christian saints transcending the flesh. She especially liked the colorful medieval wooden robots up in the clock tower.

Up on the tower’s steeple, dangling by their heels high above the platz, were three naked Catholics with their arms folded in prayer. They were doing a penitential performance ritual. Not calling any outrageous attention to themselves or anything, in fact it was pretty hard to notice the Catholics up there, dangling naked by the ridged teeth of the stone Gothic spire. They were exposing the flesh to the wind and the cold, very pious and dedicated, and obviously higher than kites.

Someone spoke to her, right at her elbow. She turned, looking away from the steeple penitents. “What?” she said.

And there stood a young good-looking guy in a sheepskin jacket and sheepskin pants—basically, in fact, the guy was wearing an entire sheep, included the tanned and eyeless head, which was part of his jacket lapel. He was white and woolly-curly all over. But he had black slicked-back hair, which went well with his rather slicked-back forehead and his sloping black eyebrows. “Ah, English,” he said. “No problem, I speak English.”

“You do? Good. Hi!”

“Hi. From where are you coming?”

“California.”

“Just come to Munchen today?”

“Ja.”

He smiled. “What’s your name?”

“Maya.”

“I’m Ulrich. Welcome to my beautiful city. So you’re all alone, no parents, no boyfriend? You are standing here in the Marienplatz two hours, you don’t meet anybody, you don’t do anything.” He laughed. “Are you lost?”

“I don’t have to go anywhere in particular, I’m just passing through.”

“You are lost.”

“Well,” Maya said, “maybe I am a little lost. But at least I haven’t been spying on other people for two whole hours, like you have.”

Ulrich smiled slowly, swung a big brown backpack off his shoulders, and set it at his feet. “How could I help but to watch such a beautiful woman?”

Maya felt her eyes widen. “You really think so? Oh, dear …”

“Yes, yes! I can’t be the first man to tell you this news! You’re lovely. You’re beautiful! You’re cute like a big rabbit.”

“I bet that sounds really nice in Deutsch, Ulrich, but …”

“I’m sure I can help you. Where’s your hotel?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Well, where’s your luggage, then?”

She lifted her handbag.

“No luggage. No hotel. No place to go. No parents, no boyfriend. You got any money?”

“No.”

“How about an ID? I hope you have your ID.”

“Especially no ID.”

“So. Then you are a runaway.” Ulrich thought this over, with evident glee. “Well, I have good news for you, Miss Maya the Runaway. You’re not the only runaway to come to Munchen.”

“I was kind of thinking of taking the train back to Frankfurt tonight, actually.”

“Frankfurt! What a waste! Frankfurt is a tomb. A grave! Come with me and I’ll take you to the most famous pub in the world!”

“Why should I go anywhere with some guy who’s so terribly mean to sheep?”

Ulrich touched his sheepskin coat with a look of wounded shock. “You’re making funny! I’m not mean! I killed this sheep myself in single combat. He wanted to take my life! Come with me and I’ll take you to the famous Hofbrauhaus. They’re eating meat! And drinking beer!”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“It’s not far.” Ulrich crossed his fleecy white arms. “You want to see, or don’t you?”

“Yeah. I do want to see. Okay.”

He took her to the Hofbrauhaus, just as he had promised. There were massive stone arches outside and big brass-bound doors and uniformed civil-support people. Ulrich shrugged out of his coat, and quite neatly, in a matter of seconds, stepped deftly out of his pants. He stuffed the sheepskins into his capacious backpack. Beneath the skins he was wearing brightly patterned leotards.

Inside, the Hofbrauhaus had a vaulted ceiling with murals and ironwork and lanterns. It was wonderfully warm and smelled very powerfully of burning and stewing animal meat. A veteran brass band in odd hats and thick suspenders was playing two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old polkas, the kind of folk music that was so well worn that it slipped through your ears like pebbles down a stream. Strangers were crammed together at long polished wooden benches and tables, getting full of alcoholic bonhomie. Maya was relieved to see that most of them weren’t actually drinking the alcohol. Instead, they were drinking big cold malts and inhaling the alcohol on the side through little lipid-tagged nose snifters. This much reduced the dosage and kept the poison away from the liver.

It was loud inside. “You want to eat something?” Ulrich shouted.

Maya looked at a passing platter. Chunks of animal flesh swimming in brown juices, shredded kraut, potato dumplings. “I’m not hungry!”

“You want to drink some beer?”

“Ick!”

“What do you want, then?”

“I dunno. Just to watch everybody act weird, I guess. Is there some quiet place here where we can sit down and talk?”

Ulrich’s long brows knotted, in impatience with her, she thought, and then he methodically scanned the crowd. “Do something for me, all right? You see that old tourist lady there with the notebook?”

“Yes?”

“Go ask her if she has a tourist map. Talk to her for one minute, sixty seconds, nothing more. Ask her … ask if she can tell you where is the Chinese Tower. Then come outside the Hofbrauhaus and meet with me again. In the street.”

“Why?” She looked searchingly into his face. “You want me to do something bad.”

“A little bad maybe. But very useful for us. Go and talk to her. There’s no harm in talking.”

Maya went to stand by the old woman. The old woman was methodically and neatly eating noodles with a fork and a spoon. She was drinking a bottle of something called Fruchtlimo and was very nicely dressed. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you speak English?”

“Yes, I do, young lady.”

“Do you have a map of Munchen? In English? I’m looking for a certain place.”

“Of course I do. Glad to help.” The woman opened her notebook and deftly shuffled screens. “What do they call this place you want to go?”

“The Chinese Tower.”

“Oh, yes. I know that place. Here we go.… ” She pointed. “It’s located in the English Gardens. A park designed by Count von Rumford in the 1790s. The Count von Rumford was Benjamin Thompson, an American emigré.” She looked up brightly. “Isn’t it funny to think of a town this ancient being redesigned by one of our fellow Americans!”

“Almost as funny as Indianapolis being redesigned by an Indonesian.”

“Well,” said the woman, frowning, “that all happened long before you were born. But I happen to be from Indiana, and I was there when the Indonesians bought the city, and believe me, when that happened we didn’t think it was very funny.”

“Thanks a lot for your help, ma’am.”

“Would you like me to print you a map? I have a scroller in my purse.”

“That’s okay. I have to meet someone, I have to go now.”

“But it’s quite a long way to the tower, you might get lost. Let me just …” She paused, surprised. “My purse is gone.”

“You lost your purse?”

“No, I didn’t lose it. It was right here, right below the bench.” She glanced around, then up at Maya. She lowered her voice. “I’m afraid someone’s taken my purse. Stolen it. Oh, dear. This is very sad.”

“I’m sorry,” Maya said, inadequately.

“Now I’m afraid I’ll have to talk with the authorities.” The old woman sighed. “This is very distressing. They’ll be so embarrassed, poor things.… It’s dreadful when things like this happen to guests.”

“It’s very nice of you to think of their feelings.”

“Well, of course it’s not my loss of a few possessions, it’s the violation of civility that hurts.”

“I know that,” Maya said, “and I’m truly sorry. I wish you could take my purse instead.” She put her own bag on the table. “There’s not much in here, but I wish you could have it.”

The old woman looked at her for the first time, directly, eye to eye. Something quite strange happened between them then. The woman’s eyes widened and she turned pale. “Didn’t you say that you had an appointment,” she said at last in a tentative voice, “that you had an appointment, ma’am? Please don’t let me keep you.”

“Yes, okay,” Maya said, “good-bye, wiedersehen.” She left the Hofbrauhaus.

Ulrich was waiting for her outside in the street. He had put his woolly suit back on. “You take much too long,” he chided, turning. “Come with me.” He began walking up the street, to a tubestation.

On the way down the escalator Ulrich opened his brown backpack and began rooting in its depths. “Ah-hah! Yes, I knew it.” He pulled up a little featherlight earclamp. “Here, wear this on.”

Maya put the earclamp onto her right ear. Ulrich began speaking to her in Deutsch. A stream of Deutsch gibberish emerged from his lips, and the earclamp began translating on the fly.

“[This will be much better,]” the earclamp repeated, in dulcet mid-Atlantic English. “[Now we’ll be able to converse in something like intellectual parity.]”

“What?” Maya said.

“The translator works, isn’t it?” Ulrich spoke English and patted his ear anxiously.

“Oh.” Maya touched the earclamp. “Yes, it’s working.”

Ulrich slipped happily back into Deutsch. “[Well, then! Now I can demonstrate to you that I’m rather a more clever and resourceful fellow than my limited skills in English irregular grammar might indicate.]”

“You just stole that woman’s purse.”

“[Yes, I did that. It was expedient. It was too frustrating to speak to you otherwise. I was sure that a woman of her age and class would have a tourist’s translator. And who knows, perhaps there are other interesting things in the purse.]”

“What if they catch you? Catch us?”

“[They won’t catch us. When I took the purse I was in my leotards, and there was no one in brightly colored leotards recorded entering or leaving the building. There are certain techniques by which one does these appropriations safely. The craft is difficult to explain to a neophyte.]” Ulrich brushed briskly at the woolly sleeves of his jacket. “[But back to the point. I’m rather good at understanding English, not so good at speaking it.]” Ulrich laughed. “[So you can speak to me in English, and I will speak to your earpiece in Deutsch, and we’ll get on very well.]”

They reached the bottom of the escalator and began working their way through the maze of potted plants: cy-cads, ferns, gingkos. “[When someone speaks a pidgin version of your language,]” Ulrich told her, “[it’s hard not to underestimate their intellect. They always seem like such a fool. I wouldn’t care to have you underestimate me. That misapprehension would put us on entirely the wrong footing.]”

“Okay. I understand you. You can speak beautifully. But you’re a thief.”

“[Yes, we European purse-snatchers have traditionally benefited by an exquisite education.]” She could hear the tone of sarcasm in Ulrich’s Deutsch even as she heard the running translation in English. The translator had a way of punching bits of English, with just the right pitch and timbre, through the blocky syllables inside the Deutsch. This was going to take some getting used to.

They stepped aboard a tube train, and sat together in the back of the car. Ulrich didn’t bother to pay. “[It’s better to leave the scene of the crime in short order,]” he murmured. He took her handbag from her, opened it, and emptied the entire contents of the stolen purse into it, deftly hiding the operation in the cavernous depths of his own backpack. “[Here,]” he said, giving her back her own handbag. “[That’s all yours now. See what you can find that’s of use to you.]”

“This is very dishonest.”

“[Maya, you are dishonest. You are an illegal alien traveling without ID,]” Ulrich said. “[Are you ready to be honest and to go home? Do you want to honestly face the people that you ran away from?]”

“No. No, definitely, I don’t want that.”

“[Then you’re breaking the rules already. You will have to break a lot more such silly rules. You can’t get a real job without ID. You can’t get health checks, you can’t get insurance. If the police ever bother to formally question you, they will take one little sniff of your DNA and they will find out who you are. No matter where you came from in the whole wide world, no matter who you are. The polity’s medical databanks are very good.]” Ulrich rubbed his chin. “[Maya, do you know what an ‘Information Society’ is?]”

“Sure. I guess so.”

“[Europe is a true Information Society. A true Information Society is a society made of informers.]” Ulrich’s dark eyes narrowed. “[A society of ‘rats.’ ‘Sneaks.’ ‘Snitches.’ ‘Judases.’ ‘Stool pigeons.’ Is my rhetorical point penetrating that translator?]”

“Yes, it is.”

“[Then that’s a fine translator! What an excellent grasp of the Deutsch vernacular!]” Ulrich laughed cheerfully, and lowered his voice. “[München is a good place to hide, because the police here move slowly. If you’re smart and you have good friends, then you can survive in München as a runaway. But if they ever take real notice of you, then the bulls will come to arrest you. You can count on that.]”

“Are you an illegal, Ulrich?”

“[Not at all, I’m a legal Deutschlander. Twenty-three years old.]” He stretched, putting his arm behind her shoulders. “[I simply enjoy pursuing the life of a petty criminal for reasons of pleasure and ideology. Too much honesty is bad for people.]”

Maya looked inside her handbag. She felt a vague urge to complain further, but she decided to shut up when she saw what a fine haul he’d made. The minibank was useless away from its proper owner, of course, but there were a couple of cashcards in there with pin money already slotted in them. Also a Munchen tubeticket. Sunglasses. Brush and comb set. Hair lacquer. Lipstick (not her color), night cream (hydrolyzer compound), internal pH chalk (peppermint flavored). Mineral tabs for tinctures. A hypo set. Tissues. A handsome little netlink. A scroller. And a camera.

Maya fished out the camera. A little digital tourist job. It fit her hand with lovely smoothness. She peered experimentally through the lens, then turned and framed Ulrich’s face. He flinched away, and quickly shook his head.

Maya examined the camera’s readout and cleared the internal disk of photos. “You really want me to keep all this stuff?”

“I know you need it,” Ulrich said in English.

“Great.” She began carefully polishing the camera with a paper tissue.

“[I happened to look inside your bag,]” Ulrich confided, “[while you were staring up at the steeple at those crazy Catholics. I saw that there was nothing much in your bag except a half-eaten welfare pretzel and some panties spotted with rat dung. This made me very curious.]” Ulrich leaned closer. “[I declined to appropriate your useless purse. I thought it much better that I offer you my protection. I don’t know who you are, little Californian. But you are very unworldly. You won’t last long in Munchen without a friend.]”

She smiled at him sunnily. Perfectly happy and confident. “So you’re my new friend?”

“[Certainly. I’m just the kind of bad company you need.]”

“You’re very generous. With other people’s property.”

“[I’d be generous with my own property if I were allowed to have any.]” He took her hand and squeezed it, very gently. “[Don’t you trust me? You might as well trust me. We’ll have much more fun that way.]” He lifted her fingers, and lightly touched them to his lips.

She pulled her hand free, clapped her palm against the back of his neck, and leaned into him. Their faces collided. Their lips met.

Kissing him was absolute rapture. Heat rose from his sleek young neck inside the woolly collar. The smell of male human flesh in close proximity hit a core of memory within her that lit her up all over. She could feel her whole personality pucker and collapse as if her bare brain had bitten into a lemon. She began to kiss the stuffing out of him.

“[Be careful, little mouse,]” Ulrich said, tearing free with a happy gasp. “[People are watching.]”

“Can’t I kiss a guy on a subway?” she said, wiping her mouth on her coatsleeve. “What’s the harm?”

“[Not much for us,]” he agreed. “[But it might make these people remember us. That’s not smart.]”

She looked up the length of the railway car. A dozen Muncheners were staring at them. Caught out, the Deutschlanders continued to stare, with deep and solemn interest and without one shred of inhibition. Maya frowned, and raised her camera to her face in self-defense. The Deutschlanders merely smiled and waved at her, clowning for the lens. Reluctantly, she put the camera back into her purse. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“[Where do you want to go?]”

“Where can we go lie down?”

Ulrich laughed delightedly. “[It’s just as I thought. You’re a madwoman.]”

She poked his ribs. “Don’t tell me you didn’t like that, you big faker.”

“[Of course I liked it. You’re the exact sort of madwoman I’ve been looking for all my life. You’re very pretty, you know. It’s very true. You should let your hair grow out.]”

“I’ll get a wig.”

“[I’ll get you seven wigs,]” Ulrich promised. He’d gone all heavy lidded. “[One for every day of the week. And clothes. You like nice clothes, don’t you? I can tell from that jacket that you’re a girl who likes nice clothes.]”

“I like vivid clothes.”

“[You ran away from home to be vivid, little mouse? Vivid people have a lot of fun.]” She’d taken his breath away for a moment, but all the kissing was having a delayed effect on Ulrich. He’d gotten his initiative back and he was having a hard time controlling his hands.

“[Necking always makes me stupid,]” Ulrich announced, meditatively massaging her left thigh. “[I should take you to a cheap hotel, but I’m going to take you to my favorite criminal den.]”

“A criminal den? How lovely. What more could I need?”

“[Better shoes,]” he told her, very seriously. “[Contact lenses. Cashcards. Wigs. Skin tint. Some pidgin Deutsch, to get by. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed.]”

They left the train in Schwabing. Ulrich took her to a squat. It was a four-story twentieth-century apartment house, in cheap and hideous yellow brick. Someone had methodically ripped all the electrical wiring out of the building, reducing it to unrentable junk. Ulrich picked up a wire-handled oil lamp from the stoop by the front door.

“[You can’t keep the health inspectors out of a squat,]” Ulrich warned her. They ignored the shattered elevator and headed up the first of several flights of darkened, reeking stairs. “[Civil-support people are stubborn pests, they are very brave. But Munchen police are very efficient and therefore lazy. They want machines to do their work, and it’s hard to bug or tap a squat when it has no electricity.]”

“How many people live in this dump?”

“[They come and they go. About fifty people. We are anarchists.]”

“All young people?”

“The dead-at-forty,” Ulrich said in English, and smiled. “[They call us young.… Old people don’t like squats. They don’t want freedom or privacy. They want their archives, cleaning machines, reclining chairs, real money, monitors and alarms everywhere, all the comforts. Truly old people never squat. They don’t feel the need.]” Ulrich leered halfheartedly. “[One of many such needs that old people no longer feel.… ]”

“Do you have parents, Ulrich?”

“[Everyone has parents. Sometimes we misplace them.]” They reached the landing on the third floor, and he lifted the hissing lamp to study her face. He looked very solemn. “[Don’t ask about my parents, and I won’t ask about yours.]”

“Mine are dead.”

“[How lovely for you,]” Ulrich said, patiently climbing stairs. “[I’d be sorry for you, if I believed that.]”

They reached a top flight, puffing for breath. They walked down a chilly hall with bare, graffiti-tagged walls. The graffiti was very subversive, neatly stenciled, highly politicized. Much of it was in English. TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE, insinuated one graffito. CONSUME MORE RESOURCES TO GRATIFY SHORT-TERM DESIRES, another suggested darkly.

Ulrich opened an ancient padlock with a metal key. The door shuddered open with a scream of hinges. The room within was dark and icy, and it stank. The interior walls had mostly been kicked out and replaced with blankets on ropes. The place smelled of slow decay and wild mice.

Ulrich slammed the door and shot a bolt. “[Isn’t this luxurious?]” he said, voice echoing in the fetid gloom. “[It’s real privacy! I don’t mean legal privacy, either. I mean that this area is physically inaccessible to surveillance.]”

“No wonder it smells like this, then.”

“[I can repair the smell.]” Ulrich methodically lit half a dozen scented candles. The room began to fill with the piercing waxy reek of tropical fruits: pineapple, mango. She doubted that Ulrich had ever tasted a pineapple or mango. Presumably that lack of direct experience made the scents more appealingly exotic.

Maya examined the stinking dive in the romantic glow of the candlelight. “You sure have a lot of electronic gizmos in here, considering that you got no electricity.”

“[Appropriated materials.]” Ulrich nodded. “[As it happens, I share this area with three other gentlemen with similar interests. We’ve found that pooling resources is a necessity for our life outside the law.]”

He hooked the lantern on a rope that dangled from the ceiling, and set it swaying gently. Shadows swam the walls. “[We don’t live here. Under no circumstances would one keep appropriated materials in one’s regular domicile. Any serious commercial fencing operation is also quite difficult, thanks to time-based currencies, the informant network, panoptic tracing measures, and other means of gérontocratie oppression. So my comrades and I use this area as our joint storeroom, and occasionally we sleep with women in it.]”

“It’s a real mess. Fantastic. Can I take a picture of it?”

“No.”

She gazed in wonder at the ugly clutter: bags, shoes, sporting goods, recorders, dismembered laptops, heaps of tourist clothes from raided luggage. “This place is a real archive. You got any touchscreens in here that can recognize a gestural passtouch and get me into a memory palace set up back in the sixties?”

“[I’m sorry, darling,]” said Ulrich, “[but I have no idea what you’re talking about.]” He advanced on her, arms spread.

They began kissing feverishly. The room began warming up nicely, but not so warm as to make it fun to step out of your clothes. “Where can we do it?”

“[There’s a sleeping bag over there. I stole it from a skier and it’s very warm. Big enough for two.]”

“Okay,” she said, pulling free from his insistent grip, “I want to do it, and you know that I want to do it. Right? But I know that you want to do it, worse than I want to do it. So that means I get to make the rules. Okay?”

Ulrich raised his sloping brows. “ ‘Rules?’ ”

“That’s right, Ulrich, rules. Rule number one, you don’t know who I am, or where I came from. And you don’t ever try to find out.”

“Oh, I like your idea of rules, treasure. This could be fun.”

“Rule two, you don’t brag about me to any of your ratty friends. You don’t ever say anything about me to anybody.”

“That’s very good, I am certainly no informer. That’s two rules, but …” Ulrich paused. “[You are rapidly expanding the conceptual territory.]”

“Rule three, I get to stay in this squat until you get tired of me, and you have to make sure I don’t freeze to death, and you have to watch me and make sure that I eat.”

“[We’d better work on all those proposals later,]” Ulrich said. “[They sound ambitious. Anyway, I’ve never been able to obey more than two rules at a time even under the best of circumstances.]”

That seemed sensible, given the situation. She climbed into the sleeping bag with him. They shed their clothing and embraced. There was sweet delightful groping and stroking and some vigorous heaving. It seemed to take the usual nice long time, but in reality it took about eight minutes. Which was just as well.

When he was done, she sat up in the bag. The skier’s stolen bag was lined with woven foil and by now it felt like a kitchen toaster. “That was lovely. I feel very happy now.”

“[I’m also delighted,]” Ulrich declared gallantly. He was postcoitally morose, and visibly trying to assemble a state of consciousness that was not hormonally driven. It had been a long time since she had seen this happen to a man in her company, but in its own way it was a touchingly familiar sight. She’d come to terms with the realities of male physiology a very long time ago. It would have been lovely to kiss him some more, but if he ran true to form, he would want to either eat a sandwich or go right to sleep.

“I should get us some nice food to eat,” Ulrich offered, with machinelike behavioral accuracy. “What do you like?”

“Oh, something colloidal. Something very cross-linked and tryptophan-ish.”

“[I’m sorry, what?]”

“Anything but vegetables or dead animals.”

“Okay.” Ulrich climbed methodically into his clothing. He managed a cheery wink. “[I love it when a girl wears nothing but a translation earpiece. A sight like that makes life seem so full of promise.]” He left. She heard him padlocking the door shut behind him, heard his footsteps down the hall.

The thought of being locked within the criminal den did not disturb her in the least. She got up immediately and began compulsively to clean the room. The state of disorder had been driving her crazy.

She stopped her cleaning frenzy when she discovered a little stolen laptop television. Genuine televisions, with their broadcast datastream, lack of keyboards, and miserably unilateral interface, were real oddities. She’d spent years collecting kitschy oddities from the enormous freakish garbage heaps of twentieth-century television culture, before she’d discovered the even odder CD-ROM and software media niches.

She tried turning the television on. There was no battery inside it. She began searching, and quickly discovered that all the electronic devices in the room had been deprived of their batteries. Except, of course, for the newly stolen devices that were still in her bag. She eviscerated the netlink and transplanted its battery into the laptop television. She turned the television on.

A Deutschlander talk show appeared onscreen. The host was a St. Bernard dog. He had an actress with him. Maya methodically cleaned the room as she watched the show and listened through one ear.

“[My problem is with reading,]” the dog confessed in fluent Deutsch. The dog had shaggy St. Bernard genetics, but he was very well dressed. “[Mastering speech is one matter. Any dog can do that, with the proper wiring. But reading is an entirely different level of semantic cognition. The sponsors have done their best for me—you know that as well as I do, Nadja. But I have to admit it, right here, publicly—reading is a very serious challenge for any postcanine].”

“[Poor baby,]” the actress said with genuine sympathy. “[Why fight it? They say it’s a postliterate epoch anyway.]”

“[Anyone who could say that is deeply out of touch,]” the dog said gravely and with dignity. “[Goethe. Rilke. Günter Grass. Heinrich Böll. That says it all.]”

Maya was fascinated by the actress’s clothing. The actress was wearing diaphanous military gear, greenish see-through combat pajamas, and a paratrooper’s sweater in satin. Her face was like something chiseled in cameo, and her hair was truly awe-inspiring. Her hair deserved a doctorate in fiber engineering.

“[We’re all on our own in this epoch,]” the actress mourned. “[When you think what they can do to us on set nowadays—the weird mental spaces they’re willing to put people into, in pursuit of a decent performance … And then there are the gutter net-freaks, those stinking paparazzi … But you know, Aquinas, and I mean this: You’re a dog. I know you’re a dog. It’s not any secret. But truly—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—I feel happier on your show than I would on anyone else’s.]”

The audience applauded politely.

“[That’s very sweet of you,]” the dog said, wagging his tail. “[I appreciate that more than I can say. Nadja, tell us a little about this business on-set with Christian Mancuso. What was that all about?]”

“[Well, Aquinas, just for you,]” the actress said. “[It’s certainly not something I would tell to just anyone.… But it happened like this. Christian and I are both in our sixties, we’re not young people. Of course. We’d been working together on this project for the company, Hermes Kino. We’d been within the set together for six weeks. We got along wonderfully—I was used to his company, you know, we’d emerge from the set, decompress, have dinner together, talk about the script.… Then one night, Christian took me in his arms and kissed me! I suppose we were both rather surprised by that. It seemed very sweet, though.]”

“Natürlich,” the dog agreed.

“[So we both agreed to go on the hormone course, I suppose it was his idea really.]”

The audience applauded politely.

“[So that was what we did. We took a thorough hormone course together. Sex made a lot of difference. Really, it was quite astonishing how intense the experience was. In the long run I have to say it was good for me. It did seem to open me up creatively. I enjoyed it. Quite a bit. I know Christian did, too.]”

“[How do you know that?]” the dog prompted. “[A woman knows, that’s all.… I suppose it was the most profound erotic experience of my whole life! I did things that I never would have done as a younger woman. When you are young, sex means so much to you. You get so serious and formal about it.… ]”

“[Do tell us,]” the dog suggested. “[You might as well tell us now, while you’re still in the mood.]”

“[Well, certain things like—well, we liked to play dress-up. Bed dress-up.]” She smiled radiantly. “[He enjoyed it, too, it was very delightful for both of us. A kind of drunkenness really. A hormonal bender. You can look at my medical records if you don’t believe what I’m telling you.]”

“[Dress-up?]” said the dog skeptically. “[That’s all? That seems very innocent.]”

“[Aquinas, listen. Christian and I are both professionals. You have no idea what professionals can do when we put our minds to dress-up.]”

The audience laughed, apparently on cue. “[Then what happened?]” asked the dog. “[Well,]” said the actress, “[after about eighteen months—I wouldn’t say that we’d tired of it exactly, but we’d certainly settled down. Christian came back from a routine checkup, and he had these bladder cysts. The hormones were responsible. Christian decided that he had to back off. So of course, I did the same. And the moment that happened, all the energy went out of our relationship. We became … well … slightly embarrassed with one another. We no longer tried to live and sleep together.]”

“[That’s a shame,]” the dog said, conventionally.

“[If you’re thirty, maybe it is.]” The actress shrugged. “[Once you’re sixty, you become accustomed to the facts of life.]” There was scattered applause.

The actress sat up briskly, excited. “[I’m still on very good terms with him! Truly! I would work together with Christian Mancuso at any time. Any project. He’s a fine actor! A real professional! I feel no shame or embarrassment about our sordid little carnal tryst. It was helpful to both of us. Artistically.]”

“[Would you do it again?]”

“[Well … Yes! Maybe … Probably not. No, Aquinas. Let me be very frank with you here. No, I’ll never do that again.]”

The door shrieked open. Ulrich appeared, and called out something in Deutsch. The translation earpiece was caught between the jabber of television and Ulrich’s remark. The little machine could not decide where to direct the user’s attention, so it fell into silence.

Maya turned the television off. The translator perked up again with a telltale little squeak.

“I hope you like Chinese food,” Ulrich said.

“I love Chinese.”

“[I thought you would. Little lumps of chopped-up dreck that don’t look like anything. Perfect for a Californian.]” He gave her a carton and chopsticks.

They sat together on the chilly floor, and ate. He gazed about the room. “[You’ve been moving things around.]”

“I’ve been cleaning up the place.”

“What a little treasure you are,” Ulrich said, munching solemnly.

“Why do you keep all this junk anyway? You should have sold all this stuff a long time ago.”

“[That’s not so easy. You can sell the batteries. There’s always a ready black market for batteries. The rest of this loot is all too dangerous. Better to wait for a good long while, to throw off the scent.]”

“You’ve been waiting a long time already. This junk’s all covered with dust and there’s mice living in it.”

Ulrich shrugged. “[We meant to keep a cat, but we don’t get up here often enough.]”

“Why do you rob people at all, if you’re not going to sell what you steal?”

“Oh, we sell it, we sell it!” he insisted. “We do! A little extra cash is always nice.” He poked at the air with his chopsticks. “[But that’s not our premier motivation, you see. We simply do our part to outrage the gerontocratic haute bourgeoisie.]”

“Sure,” she said skeptically.

“[Cash isn’t everything in life. We just had sex,]” Ulrich informed her, triumphantly. “[Why didn’t you ask me for money?]”

“I don’t know, I just didn’t feel like I had to.”

“[Maybe you should have asked for cash. You’re an illegal. But me, I’m a European citizen! They’ll feed me, they’ll shelter me, they’ll educate me, they’ll even entertain me, and it’s all free! If I volunteer myself, they’ll even find lovely useful things for me to do, like pulling up weeds and cleaning up forests and other healthy boring nonsense. I don’t have to steal to survive. I’m a thief because I think differently.]”

“Why don’t you resist them a bit more directly, if you’re so wonderfully radical?”

“[I want to rebel in a way that causes them the maximum shame and embarrassment, for my minimum effort and risk! Robbing tourists is optimal.]”

Maya ate her shredded Chinese protein, and looked him over. “I don’t think you really mean any of that, Ulrich. I think that you steal people’s luggage because you’re obsessive. And I think that you hoard all this junk because you can’t bear to part with any of your lovely forbidden trophies.”

Ulrich stabbed his chopsticks into the mix in his carton. A slow flush rose up the fine white milky column of his young male neck. “[That’s very perceptive, darling. That’s just the sort of thing that a motivational counselor in school would tell me. So, you’ve said it to me. So what?]”

“So, there may be some very nice things here, but they’re not the sort of things that I need. That’s what.”

Ulrich crossed his arms. “What is it you think that you need, little mouse?”

“ ‘Better shoes,’ ” she quoted. “ ‘Contact lenses. Cash-cards. Wigs. Skin tint. Some pidgin Deutsch, to get by. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed.’ ” Ulrich winced. “You have a fine memory.”

“In the short term,” she said. “Also, some forged ID would be very nice.”

“[You can forget forging ID,]” he grumbled. “[The bulls beat the forgery problem a long time ago. You’d have better luck forging the moon.]”

“But we could sell off this useless junk, and we could get all the rest of it.”

“Maybe. Probably,” he said in English. “But you are cheating me. You should have told me of your great ambitions. Before we became lovers.”

She said nothing. She was touched that he’d described the two of them as “lovers.” It showed such a sweetly adolescent will to immolation that she could scarcely bear to maneuver him, even though it was pathetically easy to do.

She ate methodically. Her judgmental silence etched its way into him like a slow-acting acid.

“[Well, I’ve been meaning to sell it all anyway,]” Ulrich told her at last, boasting, and lying. “[There are certain ways to do that. There are good ways. Interesting ways. But they’re not easy. They’re risky.]”

“Let me run all the risks,” she told him at once, crushing him with a single blow. “Why should you run any risks? That’s beneath your dignity. I see you in the starring role of the silent criminal mastermind. A European paranoiac criminal genius. Did you ever watch that old silent film, Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler?”

“[What on earth are you babbling about?]”

“It’s very simple, Ulrich. I like risks. I love risks. I live for risks.”

“That’s marvelous,” Ulrich said. He had become very sad.

She spent two days in Munchen, running around on her stolen tubeticket, mostly favoring a place downtown called the Viktualienmarkt. This ancient shopping locale had been a food market in some preindustrial time, hence the Deutsch business about “viktuals,” but it had long since turned into a dive for kids and tourists, where there was a lot of business transacted in cash. There was still a little food around, like those ubiquitous Munchener “white sausage” concoctions, but it was mostly tourist-trap kitsch and street couture.

The street couture enthralled her. She was dying for decent cosmetics. She’d been making do with the aging caked-up crud she’d found in Ulrich’s stolen bags—there was even a bad wig in one of them—but she needed her own decisions, her own true colors, brighter, faster, looser, stranger. In the Viktualienmarkt there were whole open-air stalls of mysterious Deutschlander cosmetics. Cosmetics for cash. Lipstick—mit lichtreflektierend Farbpigmente. Very modeanzeigen. O so frivol! Radikales Liftings und Intensivpeelings. Der Kampf mit dem Spiegel. O so feminin! Schönheits-cocktail, die beruhigende Feuchtigkeitscreme. Revitalisierende! Die Wissenschaft der Zukunft! Die Eleganze die neue Diva!

Für den Körper, for the body: eau essentielle, le parfum. The perfume was voodoo. She happened to sample a traditional Parisian scent that Mia had once used on a special night sixty years ago. The evocative reek struck her such a blow of rapturous déjà vu that she dropped her bag and almost fell down in the street. Elixier des lebens! Some of it she photographed. Some of it she stole.

On the third day Ulrich piled her and a fat duffel bag of carefully chosen loot into a stolen car. They wove their way out of the city and headed for the outskirts of Stuttgart. She was wearing her jacket and a pair of slightly-too-tight sporty thermal ski pants and chic little stolen hiking boots. She had a new wig, a big curly blond mess. With a nice vivid scarf. Sunglasses. Foundation, blusher, mascara, lashes, lipstick. Nail polish, toenail polish, footwax, nutrient lotion, and a scent that made her feel more like Mia. When she felt sufficiently like Mia she knew that she could work her way out of anything.

The day was chill and drizzly. “[A friend stole this car,]” Ulrich told her. “[He took certain steps with its brain. I could rent us a car legally, of course, but then I considered our destination and cargo. I’m a bit concerned about geographical backtracking should they happen to remotely search the machine’s memory. A stolen and stupid car is safer for us.]”

“Natürlich.” He was so funny. She’d gotten used to him in very short order. Having sex with Ulrich was just like losing her virginity. She’d felt just the same mild disdain for the man involved and the same triumphant secret sense of having finally annihilated her childhood. Sex was like sleeping, only better exercise and more fun. It was something you did when you felt like jumbled-up blocks inside. It obliterated loneliness and when you came to on the far side of the experience there was a new sense of ease. Every time they had sex together, she came out of it feeling that much more settled inside her own skin. They’d been together three days so far and it had happened about ten times. Like ten pitons driven into a cliff, climbing high above everything that was old and Mia.

“[I wish I could strip this car completely and drive it with my own hands,]” mused Ulrich, watching Munchen’s old suburban sprawl roll by. “[That must have been a thrilling experience.]”

“Manual driving killed more people than wars.”

“[Oh, they’re always fussing about mortality rates, as if mortality rates were the only thing that mattered in life.… You should find this event rather interesting. There will be real enemies of the polity there.]”

The car found an autobahn and tore down it almost silently, at an inhumanly high rate of speed. The other European cars were streamlined and blisteringly fast, with lines and colors like half-sucked candy lozenges. Quite often you could see their owners snoozing or reading inside. “Does the polity have real enemies?”

“[Of course! Many! Countless hordes! A vast spectrum of refuseniks and dissidents! Amish. Anarchists. Andaman Islanders. Australian aborigines. A certain number of tribal Afghanis. Certain American Indians. And that’s just in the A’s!]”

“Prima,” Maya offered, tentatively.

“[You mustn’t think that every human being in the world has been bribed into submission and complacency, just because the polity can offer you a few rotten years of extra life.]”

“Fifty or sixty extra years. And counting.”

“[It’s a magnificent bribe,]” Ulrich admitted, “[but there are many people all over the world who refuse to be co-opted. They live outside the medical law. Outside of the polity.]”

“I know about the Amish. Amish aren’t outlaws. People admire the Amish. They envy their sincerity and simplicity. Plus the Amish still practice real agriculture. People find that very touching.”

Ulrich was wearing his sheepskin, as usual. He picked fretfully at a bare patch on the elbow. “[Yes, there’s a cheap popular vogue for the Amish. The polity turned the Amish into pop stars. That’s the polity’s primary means of subversive integration. They’ll make you a prized exhibit in their culture zoo. So they can boast of their so-called tolerance, while subverting the genuine cultural threat posed to their hegemony.]”

Maya tapped her ear. “I think my translator got all of that, but it didn’t seem to mean much.”

“[It’s all about freedom! Ways to seize and keep your freedom, and your individual autonomy. The way to live outside the law is to be an outlaw.]”

She thought it over. “Maybe you can steal some autonomy for a few years. But the cautious people will outlive you in the long run.”

“[That remains to be seen. The polity was created for old people, but the regime itself is not that old. At heart, they’re a bunch of panic-stricken dodderers wrapping everything in knitting yarn. They think they’ve created a thousand-year regime. The Amish have been the Amish for four hundred years. Let’s see these miserable grannies outlive the Amish.]”

The towers of Stuttgart rose over the horizon. They were four hundred stories tall and made of scaled gelatin and they looked like giant fish. Sweet little white pennants of the purest water vapor were being exhaled from the tops of the stacks. If you looked carefully you could see the walls of the towers gently breathing. Puckering and glistening, repeatedly.

“I had no idea Stuttgart looked so much like Indianapolis,” Maya said.

“You have visited Indianapolis?”

“Telepresence.”

“Oh, yes.”

She looked at the distant towers and sighed. “They say Stuttgart is the greatest city for the arts in the whole world.”

“Yes,” Ulrich said meditatively, “Stuttgart is very artificial.”

Large green hills surrounded the city. The hills were compacted rubble, from the former urban structure of Stuttgart. Stuttgart had suffered very harshly during the plagues of the forties. Most of the city had burned down after the panic-stricken population had abandoned town. The scorched infectious wreckage had been demolished by the returning survivors, and Stuttgart had been entirely rebuilt during the gaudy and visionary fifties and sixties. The architects of the new Stuttgart had had nothing left of their past to restrain them, so they’d rolled up their sleeves in a fine biomodernist frenzy and attempted to create compelling icons for their own cultural period. People often got a bit hysterical when they were trying to prove to themselves that they had some right to be survivors.

The car left the highway. The drizzle had cleared off and a pale winter sun emerged. The hillsides were very nicely wooded in leafless young chestnut trees. Occasional chunks of stained concrete rubble broke picturesquely through the topsoil.

They parked and climbed out. Ulrich set the car off to wander by itself, to come when he called for it. “[The car will be much safer out on the roads,]” he said, slipping the netlink inside his shirt on a cord. “[We don’t want to park a car next to these people.]”

They headed uphill, through the young woods. They passed two men in patchwork brown leather coats, with dark beards, metal necklaces, earrings. The men sat under a large umbrella, on folding chairs beside a small wicker table. One of the men methodically photographed every passerby. The other was chatting into a cellphone in a language Maya couldn’t recognize. As he talked and nodded and grinned, he deftly twirled a yard-long alpenstock. The stick was nicely polished, hefty, very solid. It looked as though it had seen a lot of nasty use against the sides of people’s heads.

The two guards nodded minimally as Maya and Ulrich worked their way past them, up the slope. A trickle of Euro bourgeoisie were working their way through the trees, interspersed with big knotted crowds of the aliens, who greeted one another with uncanny whoops of laughter.

They emerged in a clearing on the far side of the hill. The far slope had been taken over by big sloping black tents, smoldering campfires, and folding tables heaped with merchandise and junk. Dozens of used cars sat in roped-off lots, where gangs of bearded, beaded men in spangled hats and silver necklaces were loudly bargaining. Dark-eyed women walked through camp with bright striped skirts and braids and earrings and silver anklets. Astonishing numbers of children raced underfoot.

Ulrich was ill at ease, face tight, smiling mechanically. A lot of Deutschlanders picked their way among the junk tables, mostly young people, but they were far outnumbered by the aliens.

These people were truly extraordinary. She was seeing a cast of features on people’s faces like she hadn’t seen on any human being in forty years. Faces from outside of time. Crow’s-feet, age spotting, networks of crabbed lines. Women gone gray and sagging in ways in which women simply weren’t supposed to sag anymore. Ferociously patriarchal old men in barbaric finery whose walk and gestures radiated pride and even menace.

And the children—entire packs of shrieking little children. To see so many little children in one place at one time was very strange. To see large packs of children all from a single narrow ethnic group was an experience beyond the pale.

“Who are these people?” Maya said.

“[They’re tsiganes.]”

“Who?”

“[They call themselves Romany.]”

Maya tapped her ear. “My translator doesn’t seem to understand that word, either.”

Ulrich thought it over. “These people are gypsies,” he said in English. “This is a big gathering camp for European gypsies.”

“Wow. I’ve never seen so many people in one place who weren’t on medical treatments. I had no idea there were this many gypsies left in the whole world.”

Ulrich went back to Deutsch. “[Gypsies are not rare. They’re just hard to notice. The Romany have their own ways of movement and they are good at hiding. These people have been Europe’s outcasts for eight hundred years.]”

“Why aren’t the gypsies just like everybody else by now?”

“[That’s a very interesting question,]” Ulrich said, pleased to hear it brought up. “[I often wonder that myself. I might learn the truth if I became a gypsy, but they don’t let gajo do that. We’re both gajo, you know. You’re American and I’m Deutschlander, but we’re both just gajo to these people. These people are nomads, and outcasts, and thieves, and pickpockets, and swindlers, and anarchists, and dirty lumpenproletariate who don’t use life extension or birth control!]” Ulrich looked them over with a certain proprietary joy, then his smile slowly faded to a deeply troubled look. “[Still, all those fine qualities don’t prove that they’re entirely romantic and wonderful.]”

“Oh.”

“[We’re trying to sell these people some stolen property,]” Ulrich reminded her. “[They’re going to try to cheat us.]”

Three Romany men passed them, carrying a lamb. A crowd of gawking gajo gathered quickly. She couldn’t see over the shoulders of the jostling men, but she heard the lamb’s last anguished bleat, and the crowd’s eager gasp. Followed by delighted gasps and groans of shock and titillation.

“They’re killing that animal over there,” she said.

“[Yes, they are. And skinning it, and gutting it, and putting its carcass on a stick, and roasting it over a fire.]”

“Why?”

Ulrich smiled. “[Because roast mutton tastes lovely. A little bit of mutton can’t hurt you.]” His eyes narrowed. “[Also, eating the animal makes you feel better about the dirty pleasure you took in seeing it killed. The bourgeoisie … they will pay well to eat a thing that they saw killed.]”

At the base of a nearby hill, a gypsy did public stunts on a motorcycle. His ancient and incredibly hazardous vehicle had no autopilot of any kind. The spitting, fluid-powered machine beat its combustive pistons with a bestial roar and spat blue clouds of toxic smoke.

The gypsy stood on the seat, did handstands on the handlebars, roared up the hill and down, zipped up a ramp and flew over an iron barrel. He wore boots and a spangled leather jacket and he had no helmet.

At last he leapt deftly from the machine and flung his arms wide and did a brisk little jig on the damp tire-torn earth. The gajo were stunned by the man’s insane courage. They applauded wildly. Some few of them threw a thin scattering of little gleaming disks. A young Romany boy picked them eagerly from the dead winter grass as the hero wheeled his brutal machine away.

“What did they throw at him?”

“[Coins. Silver coins. The gypsies are silversmiths. You deal in old coins if you want to deal seriously with gypsies. Their use of coins deeply confuses all modern taxmen and auditors.]”

“A black market in old metal money,” Maya said. “That’s klasse.” She tasted the word. “Klasse. Super.”

“[Yes, today we’ll be bartering our tiresome bunch of stolen luggage for some silver coins. Coins are easier to hide and store and carry.]”

“Will they be genuine silver coins? I mean, genuine historical European currency?”

“[We’ll see. If some gypsy tries to pick our pockets or break our heads, then yes, they’re probably real coins. Otherwise, they’re useless slugs. Lead. Fakes.]”

“You’re making these Romany people sound really awful.”

“Awful? What makes them awful?” Ulrich shrugged. “[They never declared a war. They never started a pogrom. They never enslaved another people. They have no God, no kings, no government. They are their own masters. So, they despise us and they rob us and flout our rules. They are an alien people, truly outside society. I’m a thief and you’re an illegal, but compared to them, you and I are spoiled children of the polity, we are nothing but amateurs.]” He sighed. “[I like the Romany and I even admire them, but to them, I’ll always be just another gajo fool.]”

The gypsies were selling paper flowers, clothespins, carpet beaters, brooms, coconut mats, quilts, old clothes, used tires, car upholstery. Some of the tables offered luck charms and herbal perfumes and various weird species of curdled tincture. The gypsies seemed fanatically attached to their aging cars and trucks, their bulging multicolored trailers all plated and enameled. There were even some sheep on exhibit, clipped and groomed like museum pieces, and some horses in jingling harness that looked as if they were meant to do actual horse work.

Spirited bargaining was going on, with a lot of arm waving and beard stroking, but not many goods were actually changing hands. What’s more, the women posted at the tables didn’t seem to be taking retail work to heart. “Ulrich, this is really interesting. But this isn’t major economic activity.”

“[What do you expect? There aren’t any efficient, industrial gypsies. Gypsies who get efficient and industrial don’t stay gypsies.]”

“I can’t believe they’re not on extension treatments. They don’t get checkups or anything? Why not? Why do they want to live and die like this? What’s really driving them?”

“You’re very curious, treasure.” Ulrich crossed his fleecy arms. “[All right, I’ll tell you. Fifty years ago, there were gypsy pogroms all over Europe. People said that dirty gypsies carried plague. They said the gypsies broke the quarantines. And people, absolutely normal civilized European people, picked up hatchets and shovels and chains and iron bars and ran to Romany ghettos and Romany camps and they beat the Romanies and tortured them and raped them and set fire to their homes.]”

Maya felt stunned. She gaped at him. “Well, those were dreadful times. All kinds of aberrations …”

“No aberrations at all!” Ulrich declared cheerfully. “[Racism is very authentic. Despising other people and wanting them dead—that’s a dear and precious thing to the human soul. It never has to be taught to anyone. People do it every single chance they get.]”

He shrugged. “[You want the real truth about gypsies? This is Europe, and it’s the end of the twenty-first century. The people in power today were alive sixty years ago, during those plagues and those gypsy pogroms. Today, they don’t kill gypsies. No, today, when they notice the gypsies at all, they act like superficial sentimentalists and genteel snobs who need a feudal relic to coddle and patronize. But another pogrom would happen tomorrow if there were another plague.]”

“That’s a dreadful thing to say.”

“[Dreadful, but it’s very true. The Romany probably were carrying the plague, Maya, that’s the funny part. And you know something even funnier? If the Romany weren’t complete racial chauvinists themselves, then we’d have absorbed the last one of them centuries ago.]”

“You’re being very nasty, Ulrich. Are you trying to shock me? There aren’t going to be any more plagues. The plagues are all over. We exterminated every one of the plagues.”

Ulrich snorted skeptically. “[Don’t let me spoil your fun, treasure. You wanted to come here to do business, not me. You have the list of goods, don’t you? Go see if you can sell something.]”

Maya left him. She gathered her courage and approached a gypsy woman at a table. The woman was wearing a patterned shawl and smoking a short clay pipe.

“Hello. Do you speak English?”

“A little English.”

“I have some items that are useful to travelers. I want to sell them.”

The woman thought this over. “Give me your hand.” She leaned forward, minutely examined Maya’s palm, then sat back down on her folding canvas seat. She puffed a blip of smoke. “You’re a cop.”

“I’m not a cop, ma’am.”

She looked Maya up and down. “Okay, maybe you don’t know you’re a cop. But you’re a cop.”

“I’m not polizei.”

The woman pulled the pipe from her mouth and pointed with the stem. “You are not a little girl. You dress like a little girl, but that’s a lie. You can fool the little boy over there, but you don’t fool me. Go away and don’t come back.”

Maya left in a hurry. She was badly shaken. She began to hunt for someone dealing at a table who wasn’t a gypsy.

She found a young Deutschlander woman with styled reddish hair and bee-stung lips and a big consignment of used clothes. This situation looked a lot more promising.

“Hi. Do you speak English?”

“Okay, sure.”

“I have some things I want to sell. Clothes, and some other things.”

The woman nodded slowly. “That’s a nice jacket. Très chic.”

“Thanks. Danke.”

The woman stared at her in forthright Deutschlander fashion. She had two precise arcs for brows and long crimped lashes. “You live in Munchen, yes? I saw that jacket at the Viktualienmarkt. You came to my shop twice, to look at clothes.”

“Really?” Maya said, with a sinking feeling. “I’m staying in Munchen, but I’m just passing through.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

“Californian?”

“Yes.”

“Los Angeles?”

“Bay Area.”

“I could have guessed San Francisco. They do that work in polymer. You know, they could have done that jacket in Stuttgart in just a few hours. Better, too.”

Ulrich came over. The woman glanced up at him. “Ciao Jimmy.”

“Ciao Therese.”

They began speaking in Deutsch. “[New girlfriend?]”

“[Yes.]”

“[She’s very pretty.]”

“[I think so, too.]”

“[Trying to move some product?]”

“[Not to you, treasure,]” said Ulrich glibly and in haste. “[I’d never move product in Munchen, I don’t burn people where I live. She doesn’t know any better, so that’s why I came over to stop this. No harm done. All right?]”

“She called you ‘Jimmy,’ “ Maya realized.

“I answer to that name sometimes,” Ulrich said in English.

Therese laughed. She spoke to Maya in English. “You poor little sausage! You love your new boyfriend? He’s a real wonder-boy, your Jimmy. He’s all heart.”

Ulrich frowned. “She made a little mistake, that’s all.”

“I don’t love him,” Maya said loudly. She took off her sunglasses. “I just need some things.”

“What?”

“Contact lenses. Silver money. Wigs. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed. And I want to learn some Deutsch so I can stop being such an idiot.”

“She’s an illegal,” Ulrich said, hand closing on Maya’s upper arm. “The poor little thing is hot.”

Therese looked at the pair of them. “What are you trying to sell?”

Ulrich hesitated. “Give her the list,” he said at last.

Therese looked it over. “I can move this stuff. If it’s in good condition. Where is it?”

“In the boot of my car.”

She looked surprised. “[Jimmy, you’ve got a car?]”

“[It’s on loan from Herr Shrottplatz.]”

“[You sure can pick nice friends.]”

Ulrich turned to Maya and smiled sourly. “[I forgot to mention junkies in my former list of interest groups opposed to the current order.]”

“[Twenty big dimes,]” Therese told him, bored.

“[Thirty dimes.]”

“[Twenty-five.]”

“[Twenty-seven.]

“[Go and fetch it, then. Let’s see the goods.]”

“Come on,” Ulrich said, tugging at Maya’s arm.

Therese spoke up. “Leave the Yankee for a minute. I want to practice my English.”

Ulrich thought it over. “Don’t do something stupid,” he said to Maya, and left.

Therese looked her over, judgmental and cool. “You like nice boys?”

“They have their uses, I guess.”

“Well, that one’s not a nice boy.”

Maya smiled. “Well, I know that.”

“When did you get into München? When did he pick you up?”

“Three days ago.”

“What, three days and you’re already here in a camp and dealing? You must really like clothes,” Therese said. “What’s your name?”

“Maya.”

“What are you in München for? Who’s after you? Cops?”

“Maybe.” She hesitated, then took the risk. “I think mostly it’s medical people.”

“Medical people? What about your parents?”

“No, not my parents, that’s for sure.”

“Well, then,” said Therese, with an air of cosmopolitan assurance, “you can forget about the medical people. The medical people never do a thing to investigate, because they know that in the long run you’ll have to come to them. And the cops—well, the cops in Munchen never do much about runaways unless they’ve got the parents behind them, pushing.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“Sleep under bridges. Eat pretzels. You’ll get along. And you should dump the boyfriend there. That kid is ugly. One of these days, the bulls will break his head open and stir his brains like porridge. And I’m not going to shed one tear, either.”

“He’s been telling me about European radical politics.”

“Munchen isn’t a good town for that topic, darling,” said Therese, wryly. “What’s your hair look like when you’re not wearing that wig?”

Maya pulled off her scarf and wig. After a moment, she dropped them on the table.

“Take off the jacket and turn around for me,” Therese said.

Maya peeled off her jacket and turned slowly in place.

“You have truly interesting bone structure. You swim a lot?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Maya said, “I did a lot of swimming just lately.”

“I think I could use a girl like you. I’m not so bad. You can ask around town about me, anyone will tell you that Therese is okay.”

“Are you offering me a job?”

“You could call it a job,” Therese said. “It’s couture, it’s apparel, it’s the rag trade. You know the rag trade, don’t you? It means you can have some rags and maybe a place to sleep.”

“I really need a job,” Maya said. Quite suddenly, she began to cry. “Never mind me crying,” she said, wiping her cheeks, “it’s so funny, it comes so easily lately. But please let me have the job, I just need a place where I can be okay for a while and try to be more like myself.”

Therese was touched. “Come over here around the table and sit down.”

Maya walked around the table and sat obediently in Therese’s folding fabric chair. “I’ll be okay soon, really, I’m not as silly as this usually, I’ll work really hard, truly.”

“Calm down, girl, stop babbling. Tell me something. How old are you?”

“I think I’m about two weeks old.”

Therese sighed. “When was the last time you ate a decent meal?”

“I don’t remember.”

Therese stooped and dug around under the table. She came up with a bag of government granola and a mineral water. “Here. Eat this. Drink that. And remember, you steal one pin from me and I kick you into the street.” She looked downhill. “Joy of joys. Here comes your boyfriend.”

Maya tasted the granola. The granola was fabulous. She jammed an entire handful into her mouth and munched like a hamster.

Ulrich, red-faced and puffing, dropped the duffel bag onto the tabletop. “Let’s talk business.”

“Prima,” Therese said. “[By the way, I just hired your girlfriend for my shop.]”

“[What?]” Ulrich laughed. “[You’re kidding, right? She can’t even speak to the customers.]”

“[I don’t need another salesgirl, I need a mannequin.]”

“[Therese, this is really shortsighted and counterproductive of you. I have to say I’m disappointed. You’re doing this just to spite me,]” Ulrich said. “[I thought you’d gotten over that little contretemps we had before.]”

“[Me? Spiteful? Never! This girl is pretty, she can’t talk much, and she’s got a real bird in her head. She’s a perfect mannequin.]”

“You shouldn’t trust this woman,” Ulrich told Maya in English. “She says you’re crazy.”

“So did you,” Maya said, munching. She glugged some mineral water. “It’s a job and I’m an illegal. It’s a really good break for me. Of course I’m gonna take it. What did you expect?”

Ulrich flushed, slowly. “I did everything you asked from me. I never broke even one of your rules. You’re not being very grateful.”

Maya shrugged. “Jimmy, there’s a million girls in the Marienplatz. Go pick up some other girl. I’ll be fine now.”

Ulrich yanked the bag from the table and slung it over his shoulder. “[If you think you’re moving up in society by going to work in this cow’s stupid little shop, you’ll soon learn differently. If you want to go, go! But don’t think you can come crawling back to the life of freedom!]”

“Her shop’s got heating,” Maya pointed out.

Ulrich turned in fury and lurched away.

There was a long silence. “Girl, you are really cold,” Therese said at last. Half-admiring.