Crache (11 page)

“I’ve located them,” Pheidoh says, standing next to her.

A datawindow opens at eye level in front of her, superimposed on the virtuality of the ribozone. Doors within doors. In the translucent pane, the grainy composite of a room forms, cobbled together out of various image-streams from surveillance bitcams in the hardfoam walls. The room is dark, a roil of dancing, candlelit shadows. When the sound kicks in, a loud burst of music, it adds a sense of urgency to the scene in which an old woman, the
bruja,
is kneeling over a slightly younger but skeletal-looking woman in a bed.

Lejandra.

Four people have gathered around the two women in a loose semicircle. None of them are playing an instrument. They appear worried. The
bruja
bends over the sick woman, kisses her on the upper chest, and then turns and spits on the floor.

The woman reminds her of the old man Xophia was caring for. Her symptoms are different, horrible black bruises that follow the outline of her bones, but she looks just as bad.

This is what’s going to happen to Xophia, Fola thinks.

The pace of the music quickens. The
bruja
stands up, holding a gourd in her clawlike hands. The image cuts to her approaching one wall, where she stops, raises the gourd to her lips, blows, and then calls out.

“Lejandra!” She beckons with one hand. “
Ven aquí
.” Come here. “Your aunt is waiting. Your uncle is waiting. Your cousins are waiting. They are calling for you to come home. La Llorona is gone. Come back to where you belong. Come back to your loved ones. Come back to yourself.”

In the foreground, a sixth person, sitting cross-legged on the bare lichenboard floor, hunches over a battered guitar that doesn’t seem capable of creating the volume of sound she’s streaming.

L. Mariachi.

From this angle Fola can’t get a good look at the musician. His head is bowed, obscuring his features. All she can see is the back of his neck and shoulders, where a toy parrot clings to his shirt collar, and his left hand on the neck of the guitar. Fingers curled around the frets in a twisted lump. Sweat streaks his dusty sprayon shirt, a sheen of perspiration varnishes the scuffed soundboard of the guitar. Ditto the balding spot on the top of his head, which is fringed with a halo of limp gray curls. The rawhide-rough skin on his neck is rent with fissure-deep wrinkles.

She turns to Pheidoh. “How old is he?”

“Fifty-eight.”

Judging by his appearance, she thought he was older. In his late sixties. “What happened to his hand?”

“He was dosed with a degenerative neurotoxin,” Pheidoh says.

“A work accident?”

“No. Another musician, the owner of a guitar he stole. That was one of the reasons he became a
bracero
. He couldn’t play music anymore.”

The view shifts. Follows the old woman as she works her way to another corner of the room and repeats the ceremony with the gourd. From this new angle, L. Mariachi still has his face down but she can make out more of his features: drooping mustache, aquiline nose, a high, flat forehead scarred by determination, despair, and long hours of physical labor. The past few years as a migrant worker haven’t been kind to him. He is tired and worn out, nearing the end of the road.

Fola winces as the tendons stand out in his neck and forearms, as strained as the metal guitar strings that are bloodying the tips of his fingers. If anything, his playing is becoming more reckless, more wild with each passing second.

No way he can go on, she thinks.

But he does; long enough for the
bruja
to shuffle to the fourth corner in the room, blow into the gourd, and call out.

Her final shout hits L. Mariachi like a physical blow. The parrot squawks in alarm, then leaps to safety as he pitches back against the wall and slumps to one side, the guitar pressed to his chest like a dead child.

The sudden absence of sound is deafening. The image freezes, and Fola wonders if maybe the transmission is hung. Then one of the boys in the room lurches toward the fallen musician, followed quickly by the others.

“What happened?” the second boy asks, coming up behind first. “What’s wrong with him?”

The boy’s father puts a hand to his forehead. “He’s burning up.”

“Ay!” his wife exclaims. “We should take him to the clinic.” She reaches for the guitar.

“No.” The
bruja
’s voice is knife sharp.

The wife jerks her hands away as if slapped. “We can’t just leave him here,” she protests.

“Why not?” the man says.

“Because if he dies, we’ll get blamed. The politicorp will say it’s our fault. Then where will we be?”

“He’s having a vision.” The
bruja
spits into the palm of her hand and smears the saliva onto L. Mariachi’s forehead. “It’s nothing serious.”

“What about the guitar?” the father says.

“When he wakes up, tell him it’s his. I want him to have it.”

“You think we should let him sleep here?” the older boy asks.

The
bruja
nods, stands. She shuffles to the side of the bed and begins to gather up her curative herbs and paraphernalia.

“How long do we have to look after him?” the wife asks. She follows the
bruja
to the bed while the others remain with L. Mariachi.

“Not long.” The
bruja
finishes packing her duffel bag. “Until morning. He’ll be fine then.”

The wife purses her lips unhappily, but nods.

One of the boys, the younger of the two, leaves the room. A couple of seconds later he returns with a blanket. He spreads it on the floor next to L. Mariachi. Together, the two boys and their father shift the musician onto his side and scoot the blanket under him.

When L. Mariachi is covered with the blanket the
bruja
leaves, followed by the husband and wife. The two boys stay behind, speaking in soft whispers, until their mother shows up five minutes later and orders them to bed. Shortly, the father joins his wife at the side of the bed. He puts his arm around her. She leans into him, too tired all of a sudden to hold herself up.

“Your niece will be okay,” he assures her. “We’ve done everything we can.”

“That doesn’t mean it will be enough.”

“That’s for the Virgin to decide,
sonrisa de mi corazón.
Lejandra is in God’s hands, now. Not ours.”

Fola likes that.
Sonrisa de mi corazón
. Smile of my heart.

“I can’t believe he’s here,” the woman says. She cuts a glance at L. Mariachi on the floor. “After all these years. I thought he’d have moved on by now.”

“He’ll be gone soon.”

“Not soon enough.” The woman spits air. “The
pendejo
is nothing but trouble. I just know it.”

The two of them stand like that for a while, supporting each other, before fatigue kicks in and they call it a night.

“What’s the prognosis?” Fola asks when they’ve left the room.

“For who?” Pheidoh says.

She was thinking of Lejandra. But the IA might be able to tap the biomed readout for L. Mariachi, too. “Both of them.”

“L. Mariachi is suffering from dehydration and exhaustion.”

Nothing a good night’s rest and a little water won’t cure. “What about Lejandra? Is she still infected?”

Pheidoh nods, the shadow from the IA’s pith helmet falling like a dark veil across its features.

So the ceremony didn’t work. No surprise there. Maybe now the IA will come to its senses. “Are the others at risk?”

That’s one of her main concerns at this point. Damage control.

The datahound stares, head down, as if lost in a hypnotic trance. Except for one eyelid, which is blinking so fast it looks like a hummingbird wing.

Fola reaches for the datahound but stops short, afraid that if she touches the image it will pop like a soap bubble.

“Pheidoh?” She hates the tremor in her voice. “What is it? Are you okay?”

In response the rest of the IA’s image goes into a palsied flicker. Rapidly winking in and out of existence.

“Pheidoh! Talk to me.” Fola pinches her lower lip between her teeth and curls her fingers around the absent cross below her throat. Her hand trembles, reverberating to the staccato waver. “Say something. Please?”

The datahound reanimates. “If L. Mariachi is able to send a ribozone transmission, then he should be able to receive one.”

“What just happened?” she says. “Are you all right?”

The IA frowns. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

She withdraws her hand. Fingers still curled in a shaky knot. “You looped for a second. It looked like you were about to crash.”

The datahound stares at her like she’s crazy. Maybe she is. Maybe she’s the one who seized.

“You have to talk to him,” the IA says. “Convince him to play the song.”

“‘SoulR Byrne’?” She’s never seen the IA this obsessed. Focused, yes. Desperate, no.

“It’s the only way to exorcise Bloody Mary.”

“Stop it! Just—” It hits her then. The curing ceremony is an act, a stage production. Lejandra is of secondary importance. She doesn’t matter. As far as the IA is concerned, no one matters except L. Mariachi. He’s the key. “Why?”

“Because he’ll talk to you.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

“He trusts you.”

“He doesn’t trust anyone. Not even himself.”

“He trusts the Blue Lady.”

Fola lowers her hand. Uncurls her fingers. “Who’s the Blue Lady?”

The datahound smiles, winks. But this time it’s normal, not some spastic twitch. “You are.”

14

COEFFICIENT OF DRAG

W
hat are you doing?” Ida Claire asks as Rexx tubes from the conference room to the shuttle bay.

“You heard Kerusa. I’ve worn out my welcome.”

“So you’re leaving/giving up?”

Rexx enters the shuttle bay. The air is cooler here. A welcome relief from the stuffiness that permeates the rest of the station. He takes a deep breath. The foliage tastes sour, acerbic. Time for another dose of the temporary reclade pherion for Mymercia. Before the place really starts to get uncomfortable.

“Would you like to contact Pilar Atienza?” Claire says.

“That won’t be necessary.” He digs a squeeze vial from one pocket, inserts the tip into one nostril, and sniffs.

“She might be able to reason with Kerusa, convince him to cooperate.”

He replaces the vial. “Not likely.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me, Ida. We’ll just end up waltzin’ without Matilda.” He stretches out a hand and grabs a magnetic flux line. Feels it take him by the arm and guide him past dense bananopy plants into the geodomed air lock where his shuttle pod waits. A diffuse tangle of shadows from the glossy leaves mottles the black carbyne frame. Through the geodesic windows in the dome he can see a lancet of marigold yellow light surrounded by a teat-pink halo at the base. The stamen and petals of a solcatcher, unfolded to drink frail light.

Rexx turns his gaze from the solcatcher to the shuttle. “Flight status?” He floats toward the nose, past the aft array of puckered nozzles. The nozzles are fed by a capillary network of high-pressure microtubes connected to the shuttle’s hydrogen production and storage sacs.

“Fuel is at sixty percent. For a return to Tiresias, you should wait until they are at eighty percent.”

“How long will that take?”

“Four hours.”

He can’t wait that long. “I guess I’ll just have to take my chances.”

He signs the access code for the shuttle. A seam appears in the cyborganic skin of the pod, between two external support ribs that maintain the shape of the pressurized inner bladder.

“You have a visitor,” Claire announces.

Rexx jerks his head around, expecting to see Kerusa. Instead, Yalçin appears in the air lock, his hands spread wide to slow his forward motion.

Rexx’s adrenaline spike eases but he still feels edgy, anxious to get going.

Yalçin drifts to a stop two meters from Rexx, but continues to hold his arms spread wide, palms out.

“You didn’t waste any time getting here,” the biologist said.

“I’ve wasted enough time already.” Rexx tugs irritably at the side wattle drooping from his chin.

“I thought you might need this.” Yalçin slips an ampoule from his utility belt and nudges it toward Rexx.

Rexx curls the fingers of one hand, a cross between a tai chi finger exercise and a shadow puppet that tugs on the magnetic flux lines around the ampoule. It wobbles to a stop half a meter in front of him. The ampoule is injection-extruded diamond, a sapphire icosahedron with pewter nubs and titanium wire lace. “What is it?”

“A biosuit. You’ll need it for Mymercia.”

“What makes you think—”

Yalçin waves a hand, brushing aside the protest. “If I were you I wouldn’t waste any more time.”

Rexx retrieves the ampoule, unsnaps one of his pants pockets, and stuffs the vial inside. “What happens if Kerusa finds out you were here?”

Yalçin shrugs. “Hopefully he won’t.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“Naiana Hjert, the structural engineer, is a good person. Trustworthy. Amadou Urabazo, the mechanical engineer, was hired by Kerusa. You won’t get much help from him.”

Rexx nods, his jowls flapping. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. Thanks.”

“You might not thank me, once you get down there.” Yalçin turns, catches a flux line, and drifts out of the air lock.

Rexx turns back to the shuttle and squeezes through the opening into the pod. The membrane seals with a seamless, pressurized hiss. The inside of the pod is a honeycomb of biolum panels and hexscreens. A design that Fabergé might have come up with for an autocrat with a bee fetish. He wriggles into the g-mesh and fastens the restraints. Rubs at the tension in his cheeks, shoulder muscles knotted under his coat of skin.

“You can’t be serious,” Claire says.

“About what?”

“Going to the surface.”

Rexx’s hands begin to shake. He presses his fingers to his eyes. Algae blooms of actinic purple and red flash under the pressure.

Surface tension, he thinks. Tightening its grip.

“You’re no different than anyone else here,” Pilar Atienza once said. “You pretend to be, but you’re not.”

Rexx floated in her office, not bothering to clip himself into a fixed seat. He didn’t plan to stay long. “How’s that?”

Outside the window behind the gyroscope assemblage of her desk, the lightdomes and greenhouse geodesics of the arcology descended in steps to the Tiresias icescape and one of the original warm-blooded plants inhabited by the first colonists.

“You’re still running,” she said.

“From what?”

“Not
what
.
Who.
”

A solcatcher petal flared, blue, then red, over the fish-eye curve of the horizon. “The only person I ever ran from was Myrtle Bumgardner in the first grade.”

Pilar tilted her head and cocked an eye at him. “Oh really?”

“I’m happy with myself just the way I am.” Rexx pulled on his neck scrotum and stretched it obscenely.

An amused shake of her head. “You are not a clown, Rexx. You’re not fooling anyone except yourself.”

Jelana had had a similar way of chiding him, haranguing him in small, suggestive ways. Her tone unfailingly bright and unimpeachable, as carefully tailored and immune to reproach as a designer dress.

“What you’re sayin’ is, the joke’s on me.”

“Yes. I’m afraid you’re in for one hell of a punch line.” Pilar gestured toward the window. “Do you know why most people come here?”

“The weather?”

Pilar smiled. “They want to escape. The clades, poverty, a bad relationship. The past. They think the plants will change them, that having a different body chemistry will make everything different, better somehow. That
they
will be different—better.”

Was she talking about the White Rain? Was that why she had asked him here? Rexx didn’t see how. Unless the RNA was activated, it looked normal on a biomed scan. And the drug itself was masked. He’d been careful to conceal it.

Rexx let go of the pinched flap of skin. “I don’t want to escape,” he said. “I just want to forget.”

The tremor in his hands is worse, and with it the detached, unsettling sensation of prosthetic manipulation. Fingers shaking, he calls up the Philco Predicta and switches on the power.

The program interface is slow to load. Longer than the two-second time delay from Tiresias. When the TV finally comes online, the screen is scratched with static and scuffed by images. Voices ghost his thoughts, a faint monochromatic murmur.

“Mathieu! Get down! Get away from there!”

“But Mom said—”

“I don’t care what your mother said!”

“—it’s not dangerous.”

A fuzzy, indistinct face turns to look at Rexx from out of the screen. The boy is standing on a split-rail fence. He’s wearing a white cowboy hat and silver-spurred boots.

Rexx twists his hand to the right, sees the virtual volume knob rotate in response to the command.

Nothing happens.

“Dad?” Mathieu’s face puckered in consternation as the animals in the petting zoo shied away. “How come the animals don’t like me? Are they afraid of me?”

Rexx increases the volume.

A horse appears in the background, blurred, trotting toward the fence.

Where was the clown? Every rodeo he’d ever been to had a clown. There was supposed to be a clown.

Rexx logs out of the program. Sweat trembles on his upper lip, percolates through the tributary of wrinkles on his forehead.

The squirt failed. Instead of a pleasant downpour he’s suffering a sudden drought, the immediate result of which is a parched migraine in his left temple. He needs to find a lab. In a lab he can manually activate the riboswitch.

The station makes the most sense. But Kerusa would never authorize it. Even if he manages to convince Yalçin to help, iDNA sensors on the station will report his presence and there will be hell to pay.

That leaves Mymercia. It’s a twenty-minute trip. If what Yalçin said about Hjert is accurate, he should be able to find what he needs there.

“Talk to me,” Rexx says, halfway through the five-kilometer flight.

“About what?”

“Anything.” Anything to distract him from the nausea and the slow loss of equilibrium that’s leaking out of his inner ear, like air from a balloon. “Mymercia. What can you tell me about it?”

“Unlike most KBOs,” the IA says, “which are solid water, Mymercia is composed of approximately seventy percent rock and thirty percent water. This ratio is similar to Pluto’s. But because Mymercia is smaller than Pluto it’s more dense/planetlike. Closer to what one would expect for Earth.”

Rexx leans his head back and listens as much to the soothing mechanical drone of the words as the content. The white noise equivalent of methadone, good enough to take the edge off the dry thrombosis in his skull.

The planetoid is small, barely thirty kilometers in diameter at its widest point, and has a number of albedo features, bright and dark regions on the surface. The bright areas are ice. The dark areas are the result of organic material and photochemical reactions caused by gamma rays. The surface temperature varies between –235° C in the brightest regions and –210° C in the darkest. The arcology has been built in deep central rima, or fissure. The bottom three-quarters of the fissure is filled with ice, a four-kilometer-deep frozen lake.

“The biggest question/issue,” Claire says, “is the KBO’s age—around six billion years—and the origin of the complex/organic molecules in the surface ice. Part of the reason for establishing an arcology on Mymercia, in addition to easing population pressure on Tiresias and Petraea, is to determine where the object came from.”

The transition from moving toward an asteroid to “falling” as the shuttle pod touches down, catapults him into a dizzy tailspin. It takes a few minutes for his brain to reset. It doesn’t help that the horizon is more myopic and foreshortened than Tiresias’s, as if he’s looking at it through the lens of a high-power magnifying glass.

To squelch his vertigo, Rexx focuses his attention on the arcology. The construction site is lit by an array of biolum Kliegs. In the monochrome green of the panels, he can make out a circular catena of smaller satellite domes around the central lightdome. The size of a cathedral dome, it sits in the middle of a hollow depression, bounded on one side by the fissure and on the other by a hogback ridge punctuated with several knoblike hills. Beyond this, the long shallow depression turns into a small convex plain that curves into blackness. The next structures to become visible are those parts of the cliff-face arcology that rise above the rim of the canyon. Mainly the flat-topped shuttle pad towers—three squat, stemlike cylinders with window perforations, most of them dark, that accommodate much of the colony’s commercial space and provide access to the rest of the arcology. Residential quarters are in the tiered balconies that jut out from the rock. The industrial, agricultural, and public service sectors are located underground, deep in the hollowed-out bowels of the asteroid.

“Prepare to dock,” Claire says.

Rexx takes out the tinted ampoule, uncaps the atomizer, and sprays himself with rose-scented nanofoam. The foam is sticky. It spreads quickly, dissolving his existing clothing and covering his skin with a translucent film. The biosuit encases him from head to toe. Piezoelectrics take shape in the pearlescent sheen, followed by a resham pattern of thermoelectrics.

The top of one of the landing towers has expanded into a disk, as flat and dull as a tarnished penny. Under the makeshift landing lights, he sees a radial array of individual docking stations, antherlike clinodomes that open to admit a shuttle pod then close again. The airtight membrane between the carbyne frame supports is veined with a circuit board network of biolum threads, diamondoid fibers, and molectronic filaments as iridescent as abalone.

No one meets him as he exits the shuttle pod. The air is stale and humid, strangely fetid. Sweat beads on his brow, tickles his underarms.

There are no magnetic flux lines to guide him. He has to push off from the shuttle pod to approach a hexagon sealed with an algae-spotted membrane that looks like plastic food wrap that’s gone moldy.

“I’m sorry,” the portal says, reading his iDNA profile. “You are not authorized to enter. Please contact customs for clearance. Thank you for your cooperation.”

Doors are the worst bureaucrats. “Have you been able to get in touch with Hjert?” Rexx asks Claire.

“No. You have a message from Kerusa.”

“Fuck him. He’s shit on a bootheel. Right now, I’m more interested in talking to Hjert.”

“One moment.”

A beat later the structural engineer comes online. Her face pixelates on the inside of his eyescreens, an unsteady flitcam image of platinum hair loops, gold neck rings, and sepia lips pressed tight and thin. “What’s going on? What the hell you think you’re doing, coming down here like this?”

Rexx amps up the signal strength of the datastream so he can see her more clearly against the background image of the air lock. “I thought I’d give you a hand.”

Her eyes anneal, hard and shiny as brass rivets. “That’s not what Kerusa says.”

“Kerusa wouldn’t know a gift horse if it kicked him in the ass.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“No. Personally I couldn’t care less about his ass. Right now I’m more interested in getting into a lab and figuring out what’s killing off your plants.”