Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [81]
“I see. Can you buy me a ticket?”
“A ticket to the train station, or a ticket all the way to Stuttgart?”
“Actually, could you buy me both of those tickets? Including a round-trip ticket.”
“Why don’t you just take my Europass? It lasts till May.”
“Could I do that, Paul? That’s too generous.”
He handed her the laminated pass. “No no, I can get another smartcard from the university. Europe is full of situational perquisites.” He approached a machine and did business with it.
They boarded the Praha tube and clung to the hand straps. She looked at him. She loved the way he swept his hair back behind his ears. She admired the fine sweep of his dark mobile eyebrows, the line of his hooded eyelids. It was a comfort to be in his physical presence. He was so young.
“Tell me something else, Paul. Go on.”
“We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming epoch. An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared to bathe in cataclysm will transcend the singularity. Someday, we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous. The admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates the quotidian. It is only a matter of time, and time is our one inexhaustible resource. There is no more strength left in normality; there are only routines.”
“What you just said. It’s so beautiful.”
He smiled. “I like to think so, too.”
“I wish I were that beautiful.”
“I think you’re making a category error, my dear.”
“All right—then I wish I could do something that beautiful.”
“Perhaps you already have.” He paused. “It’s a truly interesting concept, ‘beauty.’ An intersection of three worlds …”
The tubetrain pulled into a stop in the Muzeum station and an absolute horde of tourists piled in, a jostling mess of backpacks and bags and alien chatter. They stood amid the crowd, swaying on their hand straps. He’d tried to convince her that he could disturb the universe and the two of them were standing packed amid a horde of indifferent strangers like animals in a cattle car.
It began to get very hot within the train. A muted series of cramps gnawed away deep inside her and when she had come sweating out of the far side of the pain she realized that this was a day when she could do something truly crazy. Something mad and spontaneous and psychically automatic. Levitate. Leap off a building. Throw herself on her aching belly and kiss the feet of a policeman. Fly to the moon and dig into its white chalky soil and absolutely grope for Luna … Paul looked at her with undisguised concern. She gave him her brightest smile.
At the central train station she limped off to the ladies’. She did business with hygienic machines, drank two cups of water, and departed in better order. The pretty face in the mirror, with its dilated eyes and a little dotting of sweat beneath its layered treatments, seemed to blaze with the holy fire.
Paul was being very considerate. He got them beanbags in first class with a nice fold-down table. The Stuttgart express was a very rapid train.
“I love European trains,” she babbled, her scalp glowing beneath her beret. “Even the really fast ones that spend most of their time underground.”
“Maybe you should wanderjahr to Vladivostok,” Paul said.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“It’s a tradition in our group. Vladivostok, the far edge of the Eurasian continent. You have a Eurocard now, and you said that you wanted to drift. Why not drift to Vladivostok? You’ll be alone quite a while. You can relax and marshal your thoughts. You can reach the far