Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [48]
Maya tapped her ear. “I think my translator got all of that, but it didn’t seem to mean much.”
“[It’s all about freedom! Ways to seize and keep your freedom, and your individual autonomy. The way to live outside the law is to be an outlaw.]”
She thought it over. “Maybe you can steal some autonomy for a few years. But the cautious people will outlive you in the long run.”
“[That remains to be seen. The polity was created for old people, but the regime itself is not that old. At heart, they’re a bunch of panic-stricken dodderers wrapping everything in knitting yarn. They think they’ve created a thousand-year regime. The Amish have been the Amish for four hundred years. Let’s see these miserable grannies outlive the Amish.]”
The towers of Stuttgart rose over the horizon. They were four hundred stories tall and made of scaled gelatin and they looked like giant fish. Sweet little white pennants of the purest water vapor were being exhaled from the tops of the stacks. If you looked carefully you could see the walls of the towers gently breathing. Puckering and glistening, repeatedly.
“I had no idea Stuttgart looked so much like Indianapolis,” Maya said.
“You have visited Indianapolis?”
“Telepresence.”
“Oh, yes.”
She looked at the distant towers and sighed. “They say Stuttgart is the greatest city for the arts in the whole world.”
“Yes,” Ulrich said meditatively, “Stuttgart is very artificial.”
Large green hills surrounded the city. The hills were compacted rubble, from the former urban structure of Stuttgart. Stuttgart had suffered very harshly during the plagues of the forties. Most of the city had burned down after the panic-stricken population had abandoned town. The scorched infectious wreckage had been demolished by the returning survivors, and Stuttgart had been entirely rebuilt during the gaudy and visionary fifties and sixties. The architects of the new Stuttgart had had nothing left of their past to restrain them, so they’d rolled up their sleeves in a fine biomodernist frenzy and attempted to create compelling icons for their own cultural period. People often got a bit hysterical when they were trying to prove to themselves that they had some right to be survivors.
The car left the highway. The drizzle had cleared off and a pale winter sun emerged. The hillsides were very nicely wooded in leafless young chestnut trees. Occasional chunks of stained concrete rubble broke picturesquely through the topsoil.
They parked and climbed out. Ulrich set the car off to wander by itself, to come when he called for it. “[The car will be much safer out on the roads,]” he said, slipping the netlink inside his shirt on a cord. “[We don’t want to park a car next to these people.]”
They headed uphill, through the young woods. They passed two men in patchwork brown leather coats, with dark beards, metal necklaces, earrings. The men sat under a large umbrella, on folding chairs beside a small wicker table. One of the men methodically photographed every passerby. The other was chatting into a cellphone in a language Maya couldn’t recognize. As he talked and nodded and grinned, he deftly twirled a yard-long alpenstock. The stick was nicely polished, hefty, very solid. It looked as though it had seen a lot of nasty use against the sides of people’s heads.
The two guards nodded minimally as Maya and Ulrich worked their way past them, up the slope. A trickle of Euro bourgeoisie were working their way through the trees, interspersed with big knotted crowds of the aliens, who greeted one another with uncanny whoops of laughter.
They emerged in a clearing on the far side of the hill. The far slope had been taken over