Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [46]
“I don’t know, I just didn’t feel like I had to.”
“[Maybe you should have asked for cash. You’re an illegal. But me, I’m a European citizen! They’ll feed me, they’ll shelter me, they’ll educate me, they’ll even entertain me, and it’s all free! If I volunteer myself, they’ll even find lovely useful things for me to do, like pulling up weeds and cleaning up forests and other healthy boring nonsense. I don’t have to steal to survive. I’m a thief because I think differently.]”
“Why don’t you resist them a bit more directly, if you’re so wonderfully radical?”
“[I want to rebel in a way that causes them the maximum shame and embarrassment, for my minimum effort and risk! Robbing tourists is optimal.]”
Maya ate her shredded Chinese protein, and looked him over. “I don’t think you really mean any of that, Ulrich. I think that you steal people’s luggage because you’re obsessive. And I think that you hoard all this junk because you can’t bear to part with any of your lovely forbidden trophies.”
Ulrich stabbed his chopsticks into the mix in his carton. A slow flush rose up the fine white milky column of his young male neck. “[That’s very perceptive, darling. That’s just the sort of thing that a motivational counselor in school would tell me. So, you’ve said it to me. So what?]”
“So, there may be some very nice things here, but they’re not the sort of things that I need. That’s what.”
Ulrich crossed his arms. “What is it you think that you need, little mouse?”
“ ‘Better shoes,’ ” she quoted. “ ‘Contact lenses. Cash-cards. Wigs. Skin tint. Some pidgin Deutsch, to get by. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed.’ ” Ulrich winced. “You have a fine memory.”
“In the short term,” she said. “Also, some forged ID would be very nice.”
“[You can forget forging ID,]” he grumbled. “[The bulls beat the forgery problem a long time ago. You’d have better luck forging the moon.]”
“But we could sell off this useless junk, and we could get all the rest of it.”
“Maybe. Probably,” he said in English. “But you are cheating me. You should have told me of your great ambitions. Before we became lovers.”
She said nothing. She was touched that he’d described the two of them as “lovers.” It showed such a sweetly adolescent will to immolation that she could scarcely bear to maneuver him, even though it was pathetically easy to do.
She ate methodically. Her judgmental silence etched its way into him like a slow-acting acid.
“[Well, I’ve been meaning to sell it all anyway,]” Ulrich told her at last, boasting, and lying. “[There are certain ways to do that. There are good ways. Interesting ways. But they’re not easy. They’re risky.]”
“Let me run all the risks,” she told him at once, crushing him with a single blow. “Why should you run any risks? That’s beneath your dignity. I see you in the starring role of the silent criminal mastermind. A European paranoiac criminal genius. Did you ever watch that old silent film, Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler?”
“[What on earth are you babbling about?]”
“It’s very simple, Ulrich. I like risks. I love risks. I live for risks.”
“That’s marvelous,” Ulrich said. He had become very sad.
She spent two days in Munchen, running around on her stolen tubeticket, mostly favoring a place downtown called the Viktualienmarkt. This ancient shopping locale had been a food market in some preindustrial time, hence the Deutsch business about “viktuals,” but it had long since turned into a dive for kids and tourists, where there was a lot of business transacted in cash. There was still a little food around, like those ubiquitous Munchener “white sausage” concoctions, but it was mostly tourist-trap kitsch and street couture.
The street couture enthralled her. She was dying for decent cosmetics. She’d been making do with the aging caked-up crud she’d found in Ulrich’s stolen bags—there was even a bad wig in one of them—but she needed her own decisions, her own true colors, brighter, faster, looser, stranger. In the Viktualienmarkt there were whole open-air stalls of mysterious Deutschlander cosmetics. Cosmetics for cash. Lipstick—mit