Clade (27 page)

“What”—it comes out Wud—“happened?” Abend.

“You bled through,” Varda says. “Transferred the Puntarenas security pherions to her.”

While she was holding his arm.

“Ow lung ugh-o?”

“Three minutes, fifteen seconds” Varda says.

Rigo pulls his legs to his chest, rolls onto his knees, then inches forward at what feels like a worm’s pace. His head throbs, ripe as a sun-distended melon. He licks copper and salt from his lips. Rubs at his nose. His fingers come away red, bright with blood.

“ ’Hit.”

“Anthea’s not breathing,” Varda says. “You’re dashing out of time.”

“ ’Uck.”

“ ‘Golden lads and girls all must,’ ” Doug says, “ ‘As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.’ ”

Rigo bends over Anthea. Brushes hair from her face, revealing cyanosis-pale lips. He eases her onto her back, tilts her head back, exposing the perfect skin of her neck and the accordion ribs of her trachea.

“ ‘Let Hercules himself do what he may,’ ” Doug says to him, “ ‘The cat will mew and dog will have his day.’ ”

With a thumb, Rigo opens Anthea’s mouth. Then he inhales deeply, presses his lips to hers, and exhales, emptying himself.

THIRTY

The pod drops them off at the narrow footpath that leads into the Angel Tree park. It’s late, well past midnight. In the dark, it takes several minutes for Anthea and Rigo to wrestle his mother out of the pod. It’s hard work. With all the bone she’s put on in the last few months, she weighs about twice what she would if she wasn’t carrying two skeletons around inside her.

They prop her against the trunk of an umbrella palm, where she leans rigid as a cigar store Indian hauled out of museum storage and dusted off. Rigo fastens a biolum band around his head, hands another one to Anthea. With both of them lit up, the darkness retreats on both sides.

“I must be suicidal,” Rigo’s mother says, peering nervously down the trail. “Or maybe I have a death wish I don’t know about.”

“You’re not going to die, Mama,” Anthea says, chiding her. “I promise, we’ll be careful.”

“In your condition, you’d better be. If you slip and fall, you could be looking at a miscarriage.”

“I’ll take it slow.” Anthea pats her stomach. “A little exercise is healthy—never hurt anyone. Our little Ibrahim will be just fine.”

“I can’t believe it.” The old woman shakes her head. “
Que milagro!
I’m going to be a grandmother.
Imagínate
.”

“See,” Rigo says. “If one miracle can happen, then why not another?”

His mother frowns, dubious. “About the only sickness that’s going to be cured tonight is my constipation.”

Rigo pulls the tab on the inflatable foam boogie board he picked up at a Boardwalk souvenir shop earlier in the day, watches it inflate at her feet. “What was it you said about having faith?”

His mother rolls her eyes, lifts an imploring gaze to heaven. “Now he’s using my own words against me.”

Rigo flashes a grin. “And all this time you thought I was ignoring you. Turning a deaf ear.”

“Just because you’re in business for yourself,” she says, “doesn’t give you free license to be a smart mouth. AD Ventures. What is that, anyway? Sounds like a travel agency.”

“Architextural Design Ventures,” Rigo says. He just filed the paperwork creating the company. “Varda came up with it.”

“I just pray you don’t end up like Beto. Spend the next ten years of your life in prison.”

“Don’t worry, Mama. It’s legit.” And it is. Mostly. They have Dorit’s collection of binders, filled with extinct plants and even a few insects. Preserved genetic material that can be used to create new ecotectural systems independent of RiboGen and the other big gengineering corps. As long as RiboGen, or BEAN, doesn’t find out about the new company’s softwire capability, Anthea’s remote link to Tiresias, they’ll be fine.

Rigo keeps replaying his final conversation with Dorit, thinks he finally understands what she was trying to tell him. After the ecocaust, it was the perfect time to create a better world. Instead, the surviving corps and governments chose to resurrect all of the old comfortable institutions. Rebuild the status quo on the ruins of the entrenched cultural and social edifices they were used to living in. Tiresias is the antithesis of that. That’s why Whipplebaum wanted to control it. He knew the dangers posed by a totally new paradigm . . . the havoc it could wreak if it ever found its way into the world.

Too bad he didn’t live to see his worst fears realized.

Still, Rigo plans to take it slow. A few test cases here and there, starting with his mother.

When the board is fully inflated he positions it on the ground. It’s a little shorter than advertised, but should work.

They load her onto the boogie board. Feet at the front, pointing forward. Head at the back where it won’t ram into anything.

“The last thing you need is a cracked skull,” Rigo jokes. “You don’t want to end up a bonehead like me.”

She gives him a look. Ha ha. Very funny.

“I wish Beto was here,” she says, full of repressed longing.

Not exactly the vote of confidence that Rigo, brother to the prodigal son, was hoping for. “Me, too, Mama. We could use some professional help with all this hard labor.”

Anthea admonishes him with a sharp jab to the ribs.

“I didn’t think I’d miss him so soon,” the old woman continues. “But I do. It’s only been five months. I can’t imagine what it will be like after another nine and a half years.”

“It won’t be that long, Mama,” Anthea says. “I’m sure he’ll get an early release for good behavior.”

“I just wish I could visit him, is all.”

As part of his rehab, Beto’s been assigned to a work clade that travels the dust belt, performing community service on assorted construction, farm, and bioremediation projects. No contact allowed.

“It’s for the best, Mama. You said so yourself.”

The old woman sighs. “I know. I wouldn’t want it any other way. But it’s not just the convicted who suffer. The family and friends they leave behind end up doing time, too. No one ever thinks of them.”

“We’re thinking of you now,” Anthea says.

They secure her firmly in place with carbyne-fiber straps. Don’t want her to slip off. “Okay” Rigo says, picking up her feet by the ankles, rickshaw-style, while Anthea takes up position in back. “Here we go.”

And they’re off, through the copse of umbrella palms, bouncing over rocks and exposed roots. The bacterial glow of their headbands is halo-bright under UV-reflective canopy. Elbows aside the blackness. They cruise by the children’s play area—with its swings, slides, and jungle gyms—then the baseball diamonds and soccer fields. The scent of grass clings to the air, a permanent stain. It takes longer than Rigo remembered to get to the shrine, the low fence plastered with photos and the park-bench-style pews. A couple of tired votive candles still sputter on the tables. The vases and bouquets of artificial flowers flicker in the light, wobble in and out of existence under the vaulted ceiling of leaves.

Drenched with sweat, Rigo pulls up to the rough-hewn altar, lowers his mother’s legs gently to the barren ground.

“This is it?” she asks as they untie her from the boogie board, tilt her to her feet so she can see the Rorschach splotch of the Angel.

“Do you see her?” Anthea asks.

“Maybe the light is wrong,” his mother says, squinting.

“It doesn’t matter,” Rigo says. “You know how it is with apparitions. You never can tell when they’re going to show up.”

“Josué saw her,” Anthea says. “Could be you just have to be in the right frame of mind.”

His mother nods. She’s holding her rosary, has it clutched in her good hand like a lifeline. “Now what?” she says.

Together—Anthea taking her feet, Rigo her armpits— they pick her up and ease her onto the table.

“Feel anything?” Rigo says after he catches his breath.

“Just the bone spurs in my neck.”

“Give it some time,” Rigo says. “Close your eyes, relax. We’re going to sit down for a few minutes.”

They go to one of the pews, take a seat. Rigo puts a hand on Anthea’s leg and she takes it, twines her fingers in his. It’s a nice night. Perfect. Things have been back to normal between them since RiboGen forced his reclade back to San Jose. A trade-off he doesn’t regret for a moment, even though he’s no longer softwired and has lost all contact with Tiresias.

After a moment, Anthea reaches into a pocket in her light sweater and takes out the box with the Day of the Dead doll. “Time to lay some old bones to rest.” She stands, goes over to one of the altar tables and sets the box among the flowers, candles, and pictures memorializing the dead.

Rigo comes up beside her. “Are you sure,
mami
?”

Anthea nods. “I don’t need her anymore. And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t need me.”

When Anthea opens the lid for one last look at the doll, Rigo swears he can hear music coming from the saxophone. Not sad but happy. He returns the up-tempo grin of the skeleton, then follows Anthea back to the pew.

“What’s the status of the remote link?” Anthea asks when they’re seated again.

“Thumbs up and running,” Varda says.

In other words, all systems go. Rigo turns to Anthea. “How does it feel to be an angel,
mami
?”

“Fine,
papi
. I just hope your mom can say the same.”

At first Rigo worried that the molectric circuitry he doped Anthea with prior to his retroclade might cause unforeseen friction between them. But the softwire connection is just like Varda said—clade-independent. After three months, there have been no adverse effects. Thanks to the antidote Dorit gave Rigo on Tiresias for the Hong Kong slave-pherion, Anthea has even started putting on weight. Filling out nice. Some of that’s the pregnancy, but not all.

“Any word on Ibrahim?” he says.

“Nothing yet.”

A week ago, the ICLU raided all known RiboGen research facilities around the world. A coordinated assault that freed thousands of indentured test subjects. Ibrahim hasn’t turned up yet, but they keep hoping.

“You want me to online Doug?” Anthea asks. “See if it’s mined anything new?”

“Maybe later,” Rigo tells her. “Right now, I’m not really in the mood for Ogden Nash.” The IA’s latest fixation. “How are you feeling about Global Upreach?” he says. “You okay?”

Anthea sighs. “I’ll miss it,” she admits, “working one-on-one with kids.” Word finally came down that the review board had decided against her reinstatement, despite positive testimony from Tissa and her co-workers. “I guess it was time to move on,” she says philosophically. “Help people another way.”

Rigo nods, lets it go at that. She’s not bitter. Neither is he for the way RiboGen treated him. For a while, he was seriously pissed at Dorit. Blamed her for what happened to Rana, Antonio, Luis, TomE, and Naguib, until he found out through Varda that she wasn’t the only one involved in the breakup of Tiresias. Did her best to delay the explosive moment long enough so he and his team could get clear. Thanks to Whipplebaum, shit happened faster than planned. It wasn’t Dorit’s fault. The colonists couldn’t wait any longer. They had to make their break when they did or risk losing any shot at freedom.

“How’s little Ibrahim?” he says.

Anthea moves his hand to the swell of her belly. “You tell me,
papi
.”

“Feels good.” Content, Rigo lets his hand rest there, rising and falling with each breath she takes.

“There’s something you should know,” Anthea says, turning her attention to the Angel Tree table.

“Another confession?” It’s become a joke between them, a game. Something to laugh about.

“This is the last one,” she promises.

“Right.” Rigo doesn’t believe it, but at least she’s coming clean. For a while, she was spilling her guts every few minutes. Confessions have let up in the last month. Now she only gets the urge to unburden herself every couple of days. “Let’s hear it.”

“I was never here as a kid. The old woman I told you about, who was paralyzed and cured. That never happened.”

Rigo looks around. “Then what’s with all the candles and flowers? The pictures of people?”

“Everything else was true. There really was a guy who claimed he saw an angel and was supposedly cured of cancer. I guess I just wanted to make the story more real for Josué. Possible. Not something that had happened light-years in the past, to people who haven’t been alive for ages.”

Like in the Bible, Rigo thinks. “Maybe you wanted to make it more real for you, too,” he says. “Something you could believe in. That was within reach.”

“Maybe.”

A snore rumbles through the air. Loud as thunder. Rigo gets up and, Anthea at his side, goes to check on his mother. She’s dozed off, fallen asleep under the dome of stars visible between leafy gaps in the umbrella palms.

“Maybe there was another remote link back then that no one knows about or can explain,” Rigo says. “Like the Tiresias link.”

Anthea smiles, traces the lines of grain in the wood with a fingertip. “Anything’s possible,
papi
. All you have to do is believe.”

And trust, he thinks. Even if it’s only in himself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to:

Matt Bialer, agent extraordinaire, for his longtime patience and support. Juliet Ulman, for her enthusiasm, attention to detail, and keen editorial insight. Charles N. Brown, for good company, good advice, and abundant food for thought. Gary Shockley, literary debugger. Tom Rogers, ad hoc philosopher and critic at large. Scott Whitfield, physicist and explorer. And finally, all of the attendees of the Nadacon and Rockaway workshops whose early comments proved invaluable.

Don’t miss the next exciting
book from Mark Budz set in
this same universe

CRACHE

Coming from Bantam Spectra
in fall 2004