Cold Fire

mouth, her deep laugh lines, and her leathery sun-browned skin pegged her as an outdoors woman. Her sun-bleached hair was pulled back in a pony-tail, and she wore jeans and a checkered blue shirt.
    “There is a purity in forest mud,” Louise insisted, “that can't be matched in the most thoroughly scrubbed and sterilized hospital surgery.” She tilted her face back for a moment to bask in the warm sunfall. “The purity of the natural world cleanses your soul. From that renewed purity of soul comes the sublime vapor of great poetry.”
    “Sublime vapor?” Holly said, as if she wanted to be sure that her tape recorder would correctly register every golden phrase.
    “Sublime vapor,” Louise repeated, and smiled.
    The inner Louise was the Louise that offended Holly. She had cultivated an otherworldly quality, like a spectral projection, more surface than substance. Her opinions and attitudes were insubstantial, based less on facts and insights than on whims—iron whims, but whims nonetheless—and she expressed them in language that was flamboyant but imprecise, overblown but empty.
    Holly was something of an environmentalist herself, and she was dismayed to discover that she and Louise fetched up on the same side of some issues. It was unnerving to have allies who struck you as goofy; it made your own opinions seem suspect.
    Louise leaned forward on the picnic bench, folding her arms on the redwood table. “The earth is a living thing. It could talk to us if we were worth talking to, could just open a mouth in any rock or plant or pond and talk as easily as I'm talking to you.”
    “What an exciting concept,” Holly said.
    “Human beings are nothing more than lice.”
    “Lice?”
    “Lice crawling over the living earth,” Louise said dreamily.
    Holly said, “I hadn't thought of it that way.”
    “God is not only in each butterfly—God is each butterfly, each bird, each rabbit, every wild thing. I would sacrifice a million human lives—ten million and more!—if it meant saving one innocent family of weasels, because God is each of those weasels.”
    As if moved by the woman's rhetoric, as if she didn't think it was eco-fascism, Holly said, “I give as much as I can every year to the Nature Conservancy, and I think of myself as an environmentalist, but I see that my consciousness hasn't been raised as far as yours.”
    The poet did not hear the sarcasm and reached across the table to squeeze Holly's hand. “Don't worry, dear. You'll get there. I sense an aura of great spiritual potentiality around you.”
    “Help me to understand…. God is butterflies and rabbits and every living thing, and God is rocks and dirt and water—but God isn't us?”
    “No. Because of our one unnatural quality.”
    “Which is?”
    “Intelligence.”
    Holly blinked in surprise. “Intelligence is unnatural?”
    “A high degree of intelligence, yes. It exists in no other creatures in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us, and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering, chaos, and ultimately to annihilation.”
    “God … or natural evolution didn't give us our intelligence?”
    “It was an unanticipated mutation. We're mutants, that's all. Monsters.”
    Holly said, “Then the less intelligence a creature exhibits …”
    “… the more natural it is,” Louise finished for her.
    Holly nodded thoughtfully, as if seriously considering the bizarre proposition that a dumber world was a better world, but she was really thinking that she could not write this story after all. She found Louise Tarvohl so preposterous that she could not compose a favorable article and still hang on to her integrity. At the same time, she had no heart for making a fool of the woman in print. Holly's problem was not her deep and abiding cynicism but her soft heart; no creature on earth was more certain to suffer frustration and dissatisfaction with life than a bitter cynic with a damp wad of compassion at her core.
    She put down her pen, for she would be making no notes. All she wanted to do was get away from Louise, off the playground, back into the real world—even though the real world had always struck her as just slightly less screwy than this encounter. But the least she owed Tom Corvey was sixty to ninety minutes of taped interview, which would provide another reporter with enough material to write the