Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [32]
Mia made her will. She fasted for three days. They shaved her, all over. They stripped her. They stuffed her with the paste. Then they started on the lung work, and they narcotized her utterly. All the rest of it went into the place where experiences that cannot be experienced must.
When she awoke, it was January. She was very weak and tired and she had no hair. Her skin was blotchy and covered with lanugo, like an infant’s skin. There were cold hard rings on her fingers and something nasty and tight around her head, but they made her keep everything on. She spent most of the first two days clenching her fists, raising the fingers into eyesight, slowly and deliciously stroking her face, and sometimes deliberately licking her fingers and the cold smooth rings.
She ate the mush that they gave her, because they complained if she didn’t eat.
She had forgotten how to read.
On the third day she woke with a brisk new sense of intelligence and clarity and discovered that the little angular scrawls had become letters and words again. She opened her notebook and looked into it with a sense of absolute wonderment. It was full of the most abstruse and ridiculous economic and bureaucratic nonsense imaginable. She spent the day in gales of laughter, kicking her feet and looking at the screen and rubbing the itchy stubble on her head.
In the afternoon she climbed restlessly out of bed and began tottering about the hospital room. She put some chow and water in the hamster’s cage, but the hamster was sleeping almost all the time, just lying there inert and pink and very slightly furry. One of the nurses asked if she had given a name to the hamster. She couldn’t think of any names that would fit the circumstances, so she didn’t call the hamster anything.
In the evening her daughter called from Djakarta, but she didn’t want to speak to anyone from Djakarta. She told the nurses to say that she felt fine. She didn’t say or do much during the rest of the evening. She’d come to realize that the room was saturated with machines that were always watching her, and some of the machines were so clever that they were practically invisible.
On the fourth day they gave her some new hard and chewy food and also some sweet things that were quite delightful. She asked for more, and pouted when they wouldn’t give her any. Then they dressed her in very nicely double-stitched blue cotton overalls and took her into a room that they said was a children’s room. There weren’t any children in it, so she had it all to herself, and it was a very nice room. It had bright colors and the lighting was as clear and fresh as summer sunlight and it had machines to swing on and climb on. She worked herself into fits of laughter climbing and swinging and tumbling off onto the padded floor, until she had kind of an accident in the coveralls. Then she made them stop so she could clean herself up.
Then she went back to her room and watched some political news on her notebook. She had a long intense chat with Dr. Rosenfeld about American politics in the 2030s. She had been intensely interested in politics during the worldwide crisis of the 2030s, and when she thought about what had happened back then, it made her so mad she could scream. She talked a great deal about her favorite stupid policies and politicians of the thirties, and she got a lot of indignation off her chest. Dr. Rosenfeld said she was coming along very well. He asked her if she had named the hamster yet. She couldn’t understand why they were getting so worked up about that topic. She didn’t much like the hamster.
On the fifth day they introduced her to another NTDCD patient named Juliet Ramachandran, a very nice young woman who was one hundred thirteen. Juliet had been blind before the treatment because of retinal degeneration, and she had a postcanine Seeing Eye dog who could talk. Mrs. Ramachandran had been in civil support for many years and had a very polished manner. Mia and Juliet and