Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [114]
The surge of terrible insight was enough to make her scramble headlong from the building, but the cruelly revelatory power of the drug froze her in place. Suppose she did run away again. Suppose she jumped a train for Vladivostok or Ulan Bator or Johannesburg—what would happen if she ever got sick? Or if the treatment began to manifest side effects? How could she, a professional medical economist, have been so stupid? Of course a treatment as radical as NTDCD would manifest side effects—that was why they’d been wise enough to want to watch her closely in the first place. So that they could trace and study unexpected reactions. Especially in fast-growing tissue, like hair and nails …
Maya looked at her ragged fingertips and a whimper of anguish escaped her. How could she have done this to herself? She was a monster. She was a monster escaped from a cage and it was in the interests of everyone she knew, and everyone she met, to lock her up. She began to shake in abject terror.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given you so much,” Brett said with concern. “But I didn’t want you to take just a little lacrimogen, and ride it out all smug, and then make me give it up.”
“I’m a monster,” Maya said. Her lips began to tremble.
Brett put her arm around Maya’s shoulders. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” she murmured. “You’re not a monster. Everyone knows that you’re very beautiful. You’d better cry some. With lacrimogen that always helps.”
“I’m a monster,” Maya insisted, and began obediently to cry.
“I never met a beautiful woman who wasn’t deeply insecure,” said Brett.
Antonio shuffled over and looked into the hammock. “Is she all right? Is she handling it?”
“She’s not too great,” Brett said. “What’s that smell?”
“We overcooked the batch,” Antonio said. “We have to flush and start over.”
“What do you mean, flush?” Brett said tensely.
Antonio gestured at the bathroom door.
Brett sat up in the hammock, sending it swaying sickeningly. “Look, you can’t flush a bad tincture down the commode! Are you crazy? You have to decompose a bad tincture inside the set. Man, they’ve got monitors in the sewer system! You can’t just spew some bad chemical process into a city sewer. It might be toxic or carcinogenic! That makes environmental monitors go crazy!”
“We flushed bad batches before,” Antonio said patiently. “We do it all the time.”
“A bad lacrimogen run?”
“No, entheogens. But no problem.”
“You are an irresponsible sociopath with no consideration for innocent people,” Brett said mordantly, bitterly, and with complete accuracy.
Antonio grinned, maybe a little angry now, but too polite to show it. “You’re always so nasty on lacrimogens, Natalie. If you want to be so nasty, get a boyfriend. You can feel just as bad from a love affair.”
One of the women shuffled up. She was not Italian. Maybe Swiss. “Natalie, this isn’t San Francisco,” she said. “These are Roman sewers, the oldest sewers in the world. All catacombs and buried villas down there, dead temples of the virgins, drowned mosaics, Christian bones …” She blinked, and swayed a little. “Bad lacrimogen can’t make old Roman ghosts any sorrier.”
Brett shook her head. “You need to clean that tincture set, run a diagnostic, and then decompose the bad production. That’s the proper method, that’s all!”
“We’re too tired,” said Antonio. “Do you want some more or don’t you?”
“I don’t want anything out of that set,” Brett said. “Do you think I’m crazy? That could poison me!” She burst into tears.
A sleeping junkie spoke up from his hammock. He was large and bulky, with heavy, threatening brows and four days of beard. “Do you mind?” he said in Irish-tinged English. “Do read aloud, my dears, converse, enjoy yourselves. But don’t squabble and fuss. And especially, don’t weep.”
“Sorry, Kurt, very sorry,” said Antonio.