Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [150]
Maya looked at Suhaery. Her daughter’s husband was a stout and practical Asian businessman. He was in pillar-of-strength mode, playing the stellar role of psychic anchor. Suhaery was strolling along in his clean and pressed walking shorts on a weedy roadside in an alien country. Maya realized suddenly that Suhaery was finding this all very funny. He thought his wife’s relations were amusingly peculiar. He was right.
“What do you think about all this, Harry?” she asked.
“Mia, you look lovely. You’re like a blossoming rose. You look like Chloe on the first day I met her.”
“You shouldn’t tell her that,” Chloe scolded. “That sounds really strange and bad in about five different ways.”
Suhaery said something wicked in Malay and chuckled heartily.
“We tried to find you in San Francisco,” Chloe said, “but the people in the clinic weren’t helpful at all.”
“Yeah, I, uh, pretty much had it with all the clinic people.”
“It would have been smarter to go back under controlled care, Mom. I mean, obviously you’ve blown most of your value as an experimental subject. But still.”
“I thought about doing that, I really did,” Maya said. “I mean, if I’d run back to those meatheads and humbled myself and lived under medically defined circumstances, I probably could have repaired my medical ratings a lot, but you know something? I got no use for ’em. They’re the bourgeoisie, they’re philistines. I’m sick of ’em. It’s not that I blame them for what happened to me, but … well … I’m busy now. I have better things to do.”
“Such as?”
“I just like to walk around. Earth, sky, stars, sun. You know.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, I do photography.… The Amish, they’re such good material and they’re so good about it.… I mean, Amish children look incredibly like normal children, they are normal children, but then you can trace them decade by decade. Amish people around seventy … The natural human aging process … It’s amazing and terrifying! And yet there’s this strange organic quality to it.… The Amish are wonderful. They can tell I’m some kind of impossible monster by their standards, but they’re so sweet and good about it. They just put up with us posthumans. Like they are doing the rest of us a favor.”
Chloe thought about it. “What are you really doing with all this photography of Amish people?”
“Nothing much. My pictures still stink. I’m a lousy apprentice photographer and I got a lousy camera. But that’s okay; I need a lot of practice. Especially in framing shots properly …”
Suhaery and Chloe exchanged knowing glances. Then Chloe spoke up. “Mom, Harry and I think it would be a good idea if you came back with us to Djakarta for a while.”
“Why on earth would I want to do that?”
“There’s plenty of room in the condo, and in Asia they’re better about these things. They’re more understanding.”
“If only you had run to Indonesia,” said Suhaery indulgently. “In Europe, they’re all crazy. They never know how to rest, even when they’re rich. There is something very wrong with Europeans. They just don’t know how to live.”
“You really want your weird mother-in-law to live under your roof, Harry?”
“You’re a harmless little thing,” said Suhaery kindly. “I always liked you, Mia, even when you were very afraid of me.”
“Well, I can’t do that. No way. Sorry.”
“Mom, you need looking after. Let us look after you a little. You deserve it, you know. You sacrificed a lot for me. Years and years.”
“Forget it.”
Chloe sighed. “Mom, you’re almost a hundred years old. And they’ve cut off your treatment!”
“Do I look feeble to you? I can pass for twenty. Sure, I might live even longer if I went back to the lab and kissed up to them, but I’m okay, I’m not doing anything stupid. I eat right, I sleep like a top, and I get plenty of exercise. You see my legs now? Look at these legs! I could kick a hole right through the side of that hex barn over there.”
“Mom, stop that and listen. You’re living like a bum, like some kind of tramp. All right? You’re acting weird, you’re not acting responsibly. These other people that went through your same treatment, they