Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [148]
Maya and Helene jostled for space inside the window frame. “I’m going out after her,” Maya announced, putting her knee on the sill.
“No, you’re not. You’re in police custody. Sit down.”
“I won’t!”
Helene turned and said something in Français to the dogs. The white dog left at a brisk little run, slipping through the open door. Plato stood up, fixed his silent eyes on Maya, and growled deep in his throat. Maya sat down.
Helene leaned out the window.
“Get out of my sight, cop,” shouted Brett. “I have a perfect right to kill myself. You can’t take that away from me.”
“I agree that is your civil right,” Helene said. “No one is trying to deprive you of your rights. But you’re not thinking clearly. You’re very distraught, and it’s clear you have been taking drugs. Killing yourself will not change anything.”
“Of course it will,” said Brett. “It will change everything, for me.”
“This is very wrong,” said Helene intensely. She was doing her best to be soothing. “It will hurt everyone who loves you. If you’re doing this for a cause, it will only discredit you in the eyes of all sensible people.” Helene glanced back hastily into the room. “Is she one of Paul’s people?” she hissed. “I’ve never seen her.”
“She’s just some kid,” Maya said.
“What was her name again?”
“Natalie.”
Helene stuck her head out again. “Natalie, look here! Natalie, stop it! Natalie, talk to me.”
“You think I want to live forever,” Natalie said. And she jumped.
Maya rushed to the window. Natalie was lying crushed in the midst of a distant little crowd. People were talking into netlinks, calling for help and advice.
“I can’t bear to look,” Helene said, and shuddered. She pulled back into the room, and took Maya by the arm.
Maya wrenched free.
“I’ve seen this so many times,” Helene said wearily. “They just do it. They just take possession of themselves and end their lives. It’s an act of enormous will.”
“You should have let me go out there after her.”
Helene shut the window with a bang. “You are in my charge, you are under arrest. You are not going anywhere, and you are not killing yourself. Sit down.”
Plato rose and began to bark. Helene caught at his collar. “Poor things,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “We have to let them go. There is no choice.… Poor things, they are only human beings.”
Maya slapped her face.
Helene looked at her in shocked surprise, then, slowly, turned her other cheek. “Do you feel better now, darling? Try the other one.”
6
America had never quite caught on about trains. Americans were historically obsessed with individual cars. Maya couldn’t afford a car. She could hitchhike sometimes if she wanted to. Mostly she could walk.
So she was walking through rural Pennsylvania. She had come to love the simple physical process of putting one foot in front of another. She liked the clarity of walking, the way that walking put you outside the rules and deep inside a tangible, immediate world. Nothing illegal about walking all by yourself. Walking cost nothing, and it wasn’t traceable. A sweet and quiet way to drop off somebody else’s stupid official map.
She had a sun hat, and a backpack, and a change of clothes. She had a cheap camera. She had a canteen and a little spare food; the sort of food one could chew on quite a while. She had a rather old but very decent pair of well-engineered and highly indestructible walking shoes. And she had nobody bothering her. She was alone, she was just herself now. To gently become herself, with no one watching and counting her heartbeats, free to savor the infinite thereness of the world, free to get her own grip on the quotidian—it was a series of little astonishments.
She liked Pennsylvania because there was so little fuss made about this particular corner of the world. She much preferred this sort of place now. All the fussy and glamorous places were far too brittle. Of course it was hard to find any genuine place to hide, in an era when all law, almost all media, and even most art could be phoned in; but the places that seemed entirely