Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [138]
Maybe they’d done something strange to it, primally changed the whole character of the ocean somehow. But there were waves rolling in, crashing against black rocks with an absolute and unhurried rhythm, under a million blue miles of hot and easy sky. “They say that drowning is really quick. It’s a good death.”
“[Don’t be stupid. Eat.]”
Maya had another oyster. Her stomach slowly eased from an anguished knot and rumbled in ecstasy.
“I’m hungry,” she said suddenly. “I can’t believe how hungry I feel. Good heavens, I think I haven’t eaten anything in days.”
“[Eat. Dead girls are worse than dead cats.]”
Maya ate another oyster, and stared out to sea. The waves glittered rhythmically. A strange intensity began to grip her. A waking up all over, as if her skin had become one giant eyelid.
The light of the world flooded within her.
She was broken inside. She knew then and there that she would always be broken inside. She would never become a single whole woman, there were scars far past healing at the very core of her being. She was a creature of pieces and seams, and she would always be pieces and seams.
But now, for the first time, all those pieces were gazing at the same thing. All of her, gripped by the same hot light, perceiving the world outside.
Then suddenly there was no window anymore. She was standing inside the world. Inhabiting the world. Not dodging through the fractured alterity within her own skull, but living and breathing in the world that the sun shone upon. It wasn’t happiness, not much like pleasure; but it was radiant experience that touched every shred inside her.
The world beneath the sun astounded her. It was a world vastly huger, and far more interesting, than any little world inside herself could ever be. That world touched her everywhere. She had only needed to really look. She was engaged within that world. Alive and aware and awake, in the clear light of day. The world was entirely, heavily, inescapably and liberatingly real.
“I feel the wind blowing through me,” she murmured.
Olga only grunted.
She turned and looked at her hairy companion. “Olga, do you understand anything I’m telling you? I hardly understand it myself. I’ve been having such a very hard time lately. I think that—I think I’ve been having some kind of fit.”
“[You don’t understand anything,]” Olga said. “[Life is patience. You are careless, you talk too much, you hurry too much. I know how to be patient. Grief is bad, but you get over it. Guilt is bad, but you get over it. You don’t know that yet. That’s why I’m wiser than you even when I’m a monkey.]”
“I’m truly sorry about your cats. Really, I’d do anything to make it up to you.”
“[All right, so get us more stones to eat.]”
“They’re oysters, Olga. They’re oysters, and sure, I’ll get us some.” The sun was shining on the Red Sea and it was hot and real. Wading on rocks would be fun. It would be bliss to swim. She began shedding her clothes.
“Oysters,” Olga said aloud. “[Words are so funny, aren’t they.]”
The scandal with Helene had locked them out of the Tête. Mere scandal couldn’t stop a man of Paul’s resourcefulness. He’d found them another meeting place in the Helleniki Dimokratia. He’d arranged a major immersion for them.
Greece in early summer was lovely. It was a country that could sprout a great civilization with the sweet ease of bread sprouting mold. The resort was outside the little city of Kórinthos, in the fragrant wooded hills of the Pelopónnisos. The resort was owned by a forty-year-old multimillionaire who had managed to make a terrific garbage strike in the poorly explored industrial wilds of eastern Deutschland. As one of the youngest truly rich people in Europe, the eccentric wildcatter delighted in doing things to annoy.
Now Paul and thirty of his vivid fellow-travelers were lounging around the resort’s glimmering pool, greased and naked and in big toga-pinned bath towels. They were in more trouble than they had ever been in their young lives, and they were in