Mia took her minibank out of her purse, ratcheted fifteen market units onto a smartcard, and handed it over.
Brett carefully stuffed the card into a pocket of her backpack, and removed a scarcely visible tag from the puffy red sleeve of the merchandise. She tucked the tag under the sleeping cat, which meowed once, reflexively. “Well, thanks a lot, Maya. Griff’d be real glad to see me make a sale. That is, if I was ever gonna see Griff again.”
“Will you see him?”
“Oh, he’ll come looking for me. He’s gonna sweettalk me and apologize and all, but he’s no good. He’s smart but he’s stupid, if you know what I mean. He’s never gonna really do anything. He’s never gonna really go anywhere.” Brett was restless. “Let’s go.”
They exited the mall into Pierce Street. A Pekingese police dog with a pink collar came toddling down the hill. Brett stood perfectly still and stared at the tiny dog with blank and focused hostility. When the dog had passed them, she strode on.
“I could leave tonight,” Brett declared, loosely swinging her young and perfect arms beneath the poncho. “Just step right onto a plane for Stuttgart. Well, not Stuttgart, because that would be a real crowded flight. But someplace else in Europe. Warszawa maybe. Airplanes are just like buses. They hardly ever really check to see if you’ve paid.”
“That would be dishonest,” Mia said gently.
“I’d get away with it! Hitching is easy if you have the nerve.”
“What would your parents think?”
Brett laughed harshly. “I wouldn’t get any medical checkups in Stuttgart. I’d just stay very underground in Europe, and I wouldn’t get any checkups unless I came back here. I’d have no medical records in Europe. Nobody would ever catch me. I could hitch on a plane tonight. Nobody would care.”
They were heading uphill and Mia’s calves were beginning to burn. “You’d have a hard time getting anything done in Europe without appearing on official records.”
“People travel like that all the time! You can get away with anything as long as you don’t look important.”
“What does Griff think about this?”
“Griff’s got no imagination.”
“Well, what if he comes looking for you?”
Brett’s face clouded thoughtfully. “This man you knew. Your lover. Was he really a lot like Griff?”
“Maybe.”
“What happened to him?”
“They buried him this morning.”
“Ohhh,” said Brett. “Comprehension dawns.” Delicately she touched Mia’s padded shoulder. “I get it all now. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
They walked along for a while silently. Mia tried to catch her breath. Then Brett spoke up. “I bet you secretly loved him right up to the very end.”
“No. Actually, it wasn’t at all like that.”
“But you went to his funeral today.”
“Well, yes.”
“So, I bet somewhere, deep inside, you really loved him the whole time.”
“I know that would seem more romantic,” Mia said, “but it just doesn’t work that way. Not for me, anyway. I never loved him half as much as I loved a better man later, and now I scarcely even think about him, either. Even though I was his wife for fifty years.”
“No, no, no,” Brett insisted cheerily, “I bet anything that on New Year’s Eve you take mnemonics and drink alcohol and think about your old boyfriends and cry.”
“Alcohol’s a poison,” Mia said. “And mnemonics are more trouble than they’re worth. Anyway, that’s just the way young women think that old women act. Posthuman women aren’t like that at all. We aren’t all sad or nostalgic. Really old women, who are still healthy and strong—we’re just very different. We just—we just get over all that.” She paused. “Really old men, too, some of them …”
“Well, you can’t have been all cold and indifferent to him, or otherwise you wouldn’t have been crying about him on a bus.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mia said. “It wasn’t him, it was the situation! It was the human condition! The posthuman condition … If I’d been crying because I regretted losing my love life, I’d have left with your boyfriend, not with you.”
“Very funny,” Brett said with an instant jealous scowl. Brett began walking faster, her elastic soles squeaking on the pavement.
“I never meant to suggest that I’d try to steal your boyfriend,” Mia said with great care. “I’m sure he’s very good-looking, but believe me, that’s not high on my list of priorities.”
They crossed Divisadero. “I know why you said all that just now,” Brett declared sullenly, after half a block. “I bet you’d feel really good about it, if you could give me some nice grown-up advice, and maybe buy my jacket or something, and so I went back to Griff and we went together to Europe and acted just like you think young lovers ought to act.”
“Why are you so suspicious?”
“I’m not suspicious. I’m just not naive. I know you think I’m like a little kid, that nineteen is a little kid. I’m not very mature, but I’m a woman. In fact I’m kind of a dangerous woman.”
“Really.”
“Yes.” Brett tossed her head. “You see, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.”
“That sounds pretty serious.”
“And I don’t mind hurting people if I have to. Sometimes it’s good for them. To be hurt some. Shocked a little.” Brett’s sweet young face had a most peculiar cast. After a long moment Mia realized that Brett was trying to look wicked and seductive. She looked about as evil as a kitten in a basket.
“I see,” Mia said.
“Are you rich, Maya?”
“In a way,” Mia said. “Yes. I’m well-to-do.”
“How’d you get that way?”
“Steady income, low expenditures, compound interest, and a long wait.” Mia laughed. “Even inanimate objects can get rich that way.”
“That’s all you ever had to do?”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds. The low expenditure is the hard part. It’s pretty easy to make money, but it’s hard not to spend money once you know that you have some.”
“Do you have a big house, Maya?”
“I have an apartment on Parnassus. By the medical center. Not too far from here, actually.”
“Is there a lot of room there?”
Mia paused. “You want to spend the night with me, is that what you’re driving at?”
“Can I, Maya? Can you take me in? Just for a night. I’ll sleep on the floor, I’m real used to it. See, I just don’t want to stay in any place where Griff might find me tonight. I need a chance to think things out on my own. Please say yes, it would really help.”
Mia thought it over. She could imagine a lot of possible harm in the situation, but the prospect somehow failed to deter her. She’d reached such an instant and intense rapport with the girl that she felt peculiar about breaking the connection, almost superstitious. She wasn’t sure that she liked Brett, any more than she would have liked a chance encounter with her own nineteen-year-old self. But stilclass="underline" nineteen years old! It genuinely pained her to think of denying Brett anything. “Are you hungry, Brett?”
“I could eat.” Brett was suddenly cheerful.
“It’s so neat and clean here,” Brett said, sweeping through Mia’s front room almost on tiptoe. “Does it always look like this?”
Mia was busying herself in her kitchen. She had never been a tidy person by nature, but during her seventies, the habit of untidiness had left her. She’d simply grown out of messiness, the way a child might shed a tooth. After that, Mia always washed the dishes, always made her bed, always picked up loose objects and filed them away. Living that way was quicker and simpler and made every kind of sense to her. Litter and disorder no longer gave her any sense of relaxation or freedom or spontaneity. It had taken her seventy years to learn how to clean up after herself, but once she had learned the trick of it, it was impossible to go back.