Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [20]
“Well, yes.”
“So, I bet somewhere, deep inside, you really loved him the whole time.”
“I know that would seem more romantic,” Mia said, “but it just doesn’t work that way. Not for me, anyway. I never loved him half as much as I loved a better man later, and now I scarcely even think about him, either. Even though I was his wife for fifty years.”
“No, no, no,” Brett insisted cheerily, “I bet anything that on New Year’s Eve you take mnemonics and drink alcohol and think about your old boyfriends and cry.”
“Alcohol’s a poison,” Mia said. “And mnemonics are more trouble than they’re worth. Anyway, that’s just the way young women think that old women act. Posthuman women aren’t like that at all. We aren’t all sad or nostalgic. Really old women, who are still healthy and strong—we’re just very different. We just—we just get over all that.” She paused. “Really old men, too, some of them …”
“Well, you can’t have been all cold and indifferent to him, or otherwise you wouldn’t have been crying about him on a bus.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mia said. “It wasn’t him, it was the situation! It was the human condition! The posthuman condition … If I’d been crying because I regretted losing my love life, I’d have left with your boyfriend, not with you.”
“Very funny,” Brett said with an instant jealous scowl. Brett began walking faster, her elastic soles squeaking on the pavement.
“I never meant to suggest that I’d try to steal your boyfriend,” Mia said with great care. “I’m sure he’s very good-looking, but believe me, that’s not high on my list of priorities.”
They crossed Divisadero. “I know why you said all that just now,” Brett declared sullenly, after half a block. “I bet you’d feel really good about it, if you could give me some nice grown-up advice, and maybe buy my jacket or something, and so I went back to Griff and we went together to Europe and acted just like you think young lovers ought to act.”
“Why are you so suspicious?”
“I’m not suspicious. I’m just not naive. I know you think I’m like a little kid, that nineteen is a little kid. I’m not very mature, but I’m a woman. In fact I’m kind of a dangerous woman.”
“Really.”
“Yes.” Brett tossed her head. “You see, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”
“That sounds pretty serious.”
“And I don’t mind hurting people if I have to. Sometimes it’s good for them. To be hurt some. Shocked a little.” Brett’s sweet young face had a most peculiar cast. After a long moment Mia realized that Brett was trying to look wicked and seductive. She looked about as evil as a kitten in a basket.
“I see,” Mia said.
“Are you rich, Maya?”
“In a way,” Mia said. “Yes. I’m well-to-do.”
“How’d you get that way?”
“Steady income, low expenditures, compound interest, and a long wait.” Mia laughed. “Even inanimate objects can get rich that way.”
“That’s all you ever had to do?”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds. The low expenditure is the hard part. It’s pretty easy to make money, but it’s hard not to spend money once you know that you have some.”
“Do you have a big house, Maya?”
“I have an apartment on Parnassus. By the medical center. Not too far from here, actually.”
“Is there a lot of room there?”
Mia paused. “You want to spend the night with me, is that what you’re driving at?”
“Can I, Maya? Can you take me in? Just for a night. I’ll sleep on the floor, I’m real used to it. See, I just don’t want to stay in any place where Griff might find me tonight. I need a chance to think things out on my own. Please say yes, it would really help.”
Mia thought it over. She could imagine a lot of possible harm in the situation, but the prospect somehow failed to deter her. She’d reached such an instant and intense rapport with the girl that she felt peculiar about breaking the connection, almost superstitious. She wasn’t sure that she liked Brett, any more than she would have liked a chance encounter with her own nineteen-year-old self. But still: nineteen years old! It genuinely pained her to think of denying Brett anything. “Are you hungry, Brett?”
“I could eat.