Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [111]
Drug addicts in the 2090s had entire new labyrinths of gleaming pathways to the artificial paradise. The polity would not allow any conventional marketing of illicit drugs, but with a properly kitted-out tincture set, and the right series of biochemical recipes, you could make almost any drug you pleased, in quantity sufficient to kill you and a whole tea party full of friends. The polity recognized that drug manufacture and possession were unpoliceable. So they contented themselves with denying medical services to people who were wrecking their health.
The situation, like all dodgy situations in the polity, had been worked out in enormous detail. Crude compounds that could stop your heart or scar your liver clearly damaged life expectancy, so their use drew stiff medical penalties. Drugs that warped cognitive processes in tiny microgram quantities did very little metabolic damage, so they were mostly tolerated. The polity was a medical-industrial complex, a drug-soaked society. The polity saw no appeal whatever in any primitive mythos of a natural drug-free existence. The neurochemical battle with senility had placed large and powerful segments of the voting populace into permanently altered states.
Maya—or rather Mia—had met junkies before. She was always impressed by how polite junkies were. Junkies had the innate unworldly gentility that came with total indifference to conventional needs and ambitions. She’d never met a junkie who wasn’t politely eager to introduce others to the plangent transcendalities of the junkie lifestyle. Junkies would share anything: mosquitos, pills, beds, forks, combs, toothbrushes, food, and of course their drugs. Junkies were all knitted into a loose global macrame, the intercontinental freemasonry of narcotics.
Since they were allowed hearty supplies of any drug they could cook up, modern junkies were rarely violent. They rarely allowed themselves to be truly miserable. Still, they were all more or less suicidal.
Many junkies could talk with surprising poetic eloquence about the joys of internal chemistry. The most fluent and intellectualized junkies were generally the people who were most visibly falling apart. Junkies were just about the only people in the modern world who looked really sick. Junkies had boils and caries and stiff lifeless hair; junky squats had fleas and lice and sometimes that endangered species, the human pubic louse. Junkies had feet that peeled with hot itchy fungus, and noses that ran. Junkies coughed and scratched and had gummy bloodshot eyes. There were millions of people in the world who were elderly and in advanced decline, but only junkies had backslid to a twentieth-century standard of personal hygiene.
The junkies—a man and two women—made them welcome. There were two other men in the cellar as well, but they were peacefully unconscious in hammocks. The junkies were very tolerant of Brett’s heap of stuff and, with a touching investment of effort, they somehow found a threadbare blanket to cover the goods. Then the male junkie went back to his disturbed routine. He was reading aloud from an Italiano translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and had reached page 212. The two women, who were higher than kites, gave occasional bursts of rich, appreciative laughter and meditatively picked at their toenails.
Maya and Brett hoisted themselves into a double hammock. There were bloodstains in it here and there, and it smelled bad, but it had been a nicely woven hammock once and it was a lot cleaner than the floor. “Brett, how did you come to know these people?”
“Maya, can I ask you something? Just as a personal favor? My name’s really not Brett. My name’s Natalie.”
“Sorry.”
“There are two kinds of life, you know,” said Natalie, spreading herself in the swaying hammock with great expertise. “There’s the kind where you just grind on being