Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [42]
“I’ll get a wig.”
“[I’ll get you seven wigs,]” Ulrich promised. He’d gone all heavy lidded. “[One for every day of the week. And clothes. You like nice clothes, don’t you? I can tell from that jacket that you’re a girl who likes nice clothes.]”
“I like vivid clothes.”
“[You ran away from home to be vivid, little mouse? Vivid people have a lot of fun.]” She’d taken his breath away for a moment, but all the kissing was having a delayed effect on Ulrich. He’d gotten his initiative back and he was having a hard time controlling his hands.
“[Necking always makes me stupid,]” Ulrich announced, meditatively massaging her left thigh. “[I should take you to a cheap hotel, but I’m going to take you to my favorite criminal den.]”
“A criminal den? How lovely. What more could I need?”
“[Better shoes,]” he told her, very seriously. “[Contact lenses. Cashcards. Wigs. Skin tint. Some pidgin Deutsch, to get by. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed.]”
They left the train in Schwabing. Ulrich took her to a squat. It was a four-story twentieth-century apartment house, in cheap and hideous yellow brick. Someone had methodically ripped all the electrical wiring out of the building, reducing it to unrentable junk. Ulrich picked up a wire-handled oil lamp from the stoop by the front door.
“[You can’t keep the health inspectors out of a squat,]” Ulrich warned her. They ignored the shattered elevator and headed up the first of several flights of darkened, reeking stairs. “[Civil-support people are stubborn pests, they are very brave. But Munchen police are very efficient and therefore lazy. They want machines to do their work, and it’s hard to bug or tap a squat when it has no electricity.]”
“How many people live in this dump?”
“[They come and they go. About fifty people. We are anarchists.]”
“All young people?”
“The dead-at-forty,” Ulrich said in English, and smiled. “[They call us young.… Old people don’t like squats. They don’t want freedom or privacy. They want their archives, cleaning machines, reclining chairs, real money, monitors and alarms everywhere, all the comforts. Truly old people never squat. They don’t feel the need.]” Ulrich leered halfheartedly. “[One of many such needs that old people no longer feel.… ]”
“Do you have parents, Ulrich?”
“[Everyone has parents. Sometimes we misplace them.]” They reached the landing on the third floor, and he lifted the hissing lamp to study her face. He looked very solemn. “[Don’t ask about my parents, and I won’t ask about yours.]”
“Mine are dead.”
“[How lovely for you,]” Ulrich said, patiently climbing stairs. “[I’d be sorry for you, if I believed that.]”
They reached a top flight, puffing for breath. They walked down a chilly hall with bare, graffiti-tagged walls. The graffiti was very subversive, neatly stenciled, highly politicized. Much of it was in English. TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE, insinuated one graffito. CONSUME MORE RESOURCES TO GRATIFY SHORT-TERM DESIRES, another suggested darkly.
Ulrich opened an ancient padlock with a metal key. The door shuddered open with a scream of hinges. The room within was dark and icy, and it stank. The interior walls had mostly been kicked out and replaced with blankets on ropes. The place smelled of slow decay and wild mice.
Ulrich slammed the door and shot a bolt. “[Isn’t this luxurious?]” he said, voice echoing in the fetid gloom. “[It’s real privacy! I don’t mean legal privacy, either. I mean that this area is physically inaccessible to surveillance.]”
“No wonder it smells like this, then.”
“[I can repair the smell.]” Ulrich methodically lit half a dozen scented candles. The room began to fill with the piercing waxy reek of tropical fruits: pineapple, mango. She doubted that Ulrich had ever tasted a pineapple or mango. Presumably that lack of direct experience made the scents more appealingly exotic.
Maya examined the stinking dive in the