Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling Read Free Book Online

bored
right now
,” the girl said.
    “You’re in a bus,” the boy pointed out, with infinite tolerance. He began to root around in his pack.
    Mia pulled her sunglasses from her purse, put them on, and pretended to gaze up the aisle of the bus. There were three dogs and a couple of cats aboard. Up near the front two well-dressed Asian men were eating from boxes with chopsticks.
    The girl opened her backpack, fished out a rattlesnake, and hung it around her neck. The snake was beautiful. Its scaly skin looked like tesselated pavement as seen from a great height. The snake stirred a little at the contact with warm flesh.
    “Don’t get tight,” the boy said.
    “I won’t get tight. Snakey’s not loaded.”
    “Well, don’t load him, then. You’re always getting tight when we argue. As if that ever settles anything.” The boy pulled an enameled comb from his bag, and ran it restlessly through his tousled hair. “Anyway, that snake would look stupid in Stuttgart. They just don’t do rattlesnakes in Stuttgart.”
    “We could do Praha. We could do Milano.” The girl toyed listlessly with the snake’s rattle. “It’s so slow here in the Bay. Nothing ever happens here. Darling, I’m miserable.” She let go of the snake and tugged at a hank of greasy brunette hair. “I can’t work if I’m miserable. You know I can’t work if I’m miserable!”
    “What am I going to do with you when you’re miserable in Europe?”
    “In Europe I’d never be miserable.”
    “Sure.”
    “You don’t think I know my own mind,” she said angrily. “That’s always been your problem.”
    “You don’t know your own mind, and you never have,” he said bluntly. “Your mind is a pain in my neck.”
    “I hate you,” the girl announced. She crammed the snake back into her backpack.
    “You should go to Europe,” Mia said aloud.
    They looked up, startled. “What?” the girl said.
    “You should go. You might as well go.” Mia’s heart skipped a beat, then started racing. “You’re very young, but you have plenty of time. Go to Europe for five weeks. Five months. Five years. Five years is nothing. You should go to Europe together, and you can get it all out of your system.”
    “I beg your pardon?” said the boy. “Did we ask for this?”
    Mia took off her sunglasses. She met their eyes.
    “Let her alone,” the girl said, quickly.
    “It’s no use going later,” Mia said. “If you wait too long, then you’ll know too much. Then it’s always all the same, no matter where you go.” She began to weep.
    “Wonderful,” the boy muttered. He stood up, grabbing the bus’s bamboo pole. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
    The girl didn’t move. “Why?”
    “Come on, she’s having some kind of attack! That’s not our problem. We’ve got problems enough.”
    “You’re not old enough for real problems,” Mia told him. “You can run a lot of risks now. You’ve got energy, and you’re free. Go ahead and run a risk. Take her to Europe.”
    The boy stared at her. “Do I look like a man who takes career advice from strange old women who cry in public buses?”
    “You look just like the kind of man … A man that I knew a long time ago,” Mia said. Her voice was trembling. Her tear ducts ached dreadfully. They stung all the way down into her nose.
    “You’re very free with advice for other people. When was the last time
you
took any kind of risk?”
    Mia wiped her burning eyes, and sniffed. “I’m taking a risk right now.”
    “Sure you are.” The boy scoffed. “Like it’s a big hazard for some gerontocrat to make fun of us! Look at you—you got your ambulances standing by for you around the clock! You got every advantage in the world! What have we got?”
    He glared at her aggressively. “You know, ma’am, even though I’m only twenty-two years old, my life feels every bit as real and worthwhile as your life does!
More
real than your life! Do you think we’re
stupid
just because we’re young? You