Ribofunk (17 page)

“I assumed from the data that there was a certain need for overwhelming force in dealing with the renegade splice. Was I in error, Peej?”

“No, not in error. But maybe just a wee bit premature.”

* * *

After convincing Sonny to change into a relatively inconspicuous, less alarmingly destructive chassis (a BASF mechanical model nicknamed “the Washtub”), we hit the streets.

I had a destination in mind: the offices of the SPCC. Chief Priestly had mentioned them. They were an obvious source of potential coconspirators for the Kat, but I was almost certain that I’d get nothing out of them. But frankly, it was the only lead I had.

Walking through Boston’s noisy, hormone-hot streets, breathing the clean exhaust of tuktuks, I tried to do as the Chief had directed and use my putative crime-sensitive nose.

Detouring down an alley off Arlington, I surprised a pack of scavenger kibes trying to break into the Sinochem Humpty Dumpster behind a bodyshop. The pack of ownerless runaway kibes needed certain organics for their maintenance and frequently resorted to theft, as well as begging. They must have disabled the Dumpster’s flee-and-shriek circuits, for it could only rock back and forth in place and hoot dismally as they attempted forced entry into its separation chambers.

Before I could react, Sonny was barreling through the pack, scattering them left and right. A battered, unsteady nutraceutical dispenser marred with letterbomb graffiti toppled over, spinning its wheels uselessly. The rest fled.

Sonny extruded a snaky tentacle and found a socket on the crippled machine. He jacked in, and the renegade dispenser died.

“Another societal parasite terminated,” Sonny declaimed with a trace of TL4 pride.

“Yeah, great. Come on, Judge Dredd, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“Metaphor?”

I sighed.
Just
like having a kid. “Yes.”

“Filed.”

After a stop at an open-air tolkuchki so that I could grab a snack of biltong and camu camu fruit, we reached the Stuart Street offices of the NGO known as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cultivars. After fencing with a wary human receptionist, I was admitted into the offices of the director, one Peej Jane Grahame-Ballard.

Grahame-Ballard was a small woman whose skull was capped with pink pinfeathers. Clad entirely in shiny nonorganics, she was an obvious Carbaquist Reverencer, like 99 percent of the SPCC. She regarded me with a look such as an elderly splice must display when confronted with the knacker: a mix of fear, contempt, and hatred. In her wall cycled a silicrobe animation of a charming prodge and studly plug: scion and mate. I wondered if she’d offer to introduce them to Krazy Kat.

“Peej Grahame-Ballard,” I said with all the respectful gravity I could muster, after flashing my credentials, “we have reason to believe that the terrorist splice known as Krazy Kat has fled to our bioregion after the recent thwarting of his plans in Chicago. Specifically, to the metroplex area. The Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring is counting on the cooperation of all your members in the hunt for the criminal. Should the cultivar in question make any attempt to contact your organization—should you even so much as hear a rumor regarding that individual—we insist that you immediately notify us.”

Grahame-Ballard had been doing a slow burn during my speech and now boiled over. “Of course! So you can rush out and kill him! Without even a pretence of justice!”

“Justice is a word that applies only to the enfranchised, Peej. Need I remind you that for splices, we have a parallel, neatly graduated system of rules, rewards, and punishments, all formulated scientifically over many years by experts with efficiency and utilitarianism in mind. Owners are constrained from cruelty, abuse, and overwork, while splices are guaranteed food, shelter, and meaningful employment.”

“It’s slavery, pure and simple!”

“A word that has no application to any being other than a human, Peej. The transgenics are property, plain and simple, just like baseline milk cows or sheep.”

“Creatures with up to forty-nine percent human genes are
property
?”

“I didn’t make the laws, Peej. I just enforce them.”

She snorted. “And as for abuses—why, I could show you the records of things that would penetrate even that armored skin of yours and make your stupid failsafe heart go into fibrillation!”

I thought about some of the things I had seen. “I sincerely doubt that, Peej.”

“Every one of us should be ashamed to participate in such a system! Don’t you ever feel ashamed?”

“Not when I’m doing my job, Peej.”

Realizing she was getting nowhere with me, Grahame- Ballard seemed to deflate. “And your job now is to find and execute a noble creature who is plainly the moral and ethical and sentient equal of you or me.…”

“Peej,” I said, trying to keep calm, “you have not seen the bloody results of that ‘noble creature’s’ brutal actions. I have.”

“And who made him what he is? Mankind!”

I got wearily to my feet. “Peej, the Kat is one bad splice. I advise you to use a long spoon when you dine with him.”

“There are no bad splices, only bad owners.”

“If you say so.”

Back on the street I was silent for a while, letting Grahame-Ballard’s rifkinesque memes percolate uneasily through my cortex.

After a few blocks, Sonny said, “We will now be staking out Peej Grahame-Ballard? Perhaps you have surreptitiously planted dustcams on her already?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Plainly you intend to catch her dining with Krazy Kat.”

I had to replay the conversation in my head.

“Metaphor,” I sighed.

“Thank you.”

* * *

I met Xuly Beth that night in Hopcroft’s Cockaigne.

In reality, of course, I was back in our apartment in Boston and she was off on assignment somewhere up in the Arctic, twiddling with icebergs or glaciers or some other such pleasantly nonsentient and tractable phenomenon. We made it a point when she was in the field to meet at least four times a week at one virtuality site or another. Our current favorite was Hopcroft’s Cockaigne, with its candy mountains and sodapop rivers, peppermint trees and cottoncandy clouds. (Although I couldn’t imagine coming here much more: not only was the construx starting to reveal its shallowness, but lately it reminded me too much of the strange reality humanity was making of baseline Earth!)

We were wearing our actual appearances, since we saw too little of each other lately to be bored by our real shapes and faces. A privacy filter insured that we were alone, despite the possibility that thousands of others might be wandering the same construx.

Sitting next to me on a bonbon rock soft as a sofa, Xuly Beth was finishing telling me about her day. “—so if this latest remediation works as well as the simulations project, the average sea level should start to drop by a quarter-inch per year! Why, we can probably start to repopulate Bangladesh by the next decade!”

“Uh-huh, great …”

Xuly Beth brushed back her pastel-green, metal-threaded hair from her brow, revealing twin barometric bumps. Together with her current skin choice of blocky maculations, the bumps conjured up the image of a gawky, lovable juvenile giraffe.

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

“I’m sorry, Jewely-Xuly, really, I am. It’s just that this business with the Kat is itching me worse than a dose of cryptoshingles. It’s not like dealing with your average criminal, some two-fit holopero or leeson. There, you’ve got someone embedded in a societal matrix. You generally have a good idea of what such a person wants and how he’ll go about getting it. But the Kat is a loner with no goal other than to cause as much disruption as possible. He could strike anywhere, anytime!”

“And doubting yourself like this is going to solve the case!

“No, I guess not.…”

Xuly Beth donned a look of concentration, fingering her meteorological head bumps in the way she had when she was really puzzling something out. After a minute or so she said, “How can the Kat cause trouble? By himself, with a gun or a bomb, he’s just another lone mucker. If he wants maximal damage, he’s got to involve others. In Chicago he had to co-opt that posse, the Roaches, to carry out his plans. Even if he wants to release some deadly vector into the general population, he’s got to find someone to batch it for him. He’s no crick or watson himself, is he?”

“No, not as far as I know.…”

“So if you just start shaking down all the criminal sources of such things, you’re bound to run into a signal that leads back to the Kat!”

I let out a sigh rather more hopeful than not. “You’re right, of course. I should have thought of that angle myself. Nothing’s hopeless. I guess I was just letting the magnitude of the case get me down. Plus someone I had to interview today said some things that made me wonder why I do what I do.”

Xuly Beth stood up. “I knew it. You’re just not thinking straight because you’re missing your little weather-girl. Well, she has just what you need.…”

Xuly Beth disappeared, exiting the construx without even using a popup menu. In a few seconds she was back.

“I’m in my Sack, dear.”

I didn’t need to have my arm—or any other body part—twisted.

Breaking my neurolink to the telecosm, I found myself back in Boston. I took my Sack out of its maintenance rack, tickled it open, and climbed in.

You could have a strictly neuro-induced orgasm in virtuality, but for some strange reason—maybe lesser bandwidth, maybe something to do with sheldrakean fields—it just wasn’t identical with a Sack-administered full-body experience.

Back in Cockaigne, Xuly Beth and I went into a naked-bodied clinch, fell to the ground, and began to tear up the turf. Back home and in the Arctic, two Sacks were thrashing.

I was sure that if the Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring knew that a side-effect of the somatic upgrade they insisted I have was heightened orgasms, they would have deducted something from my pay.

* * *

When the break finally came, it wasn’t precisely from the criminal front. Rather, it was from an allied set of outcasts, self-exiled eccentrics despised by the majority of consensus-memed, post-reedpair citizens.

The Incubators.

The Incubators had figured in a previous case of mine, when I was still paired with K-mart. A new blight that affected only third-generation pumptrees from Hybritech had sprung up, and we suspected that the Incubators might have been somehow responsible for it. They had never exhibited any such terrorist inclinations before, but like most despised minorities, they were perpetual suspects whenever anything went wrong.

Since the metro relied on pumptrees and their enormous taproots for its water supply, there was immense pressure from the adminisphere to crack the case. So K-mart and I came down rather hard on the Incubators at the time. And what was worse, the misfits had been proven innocent, the cause of the new plague eventually being traced to a mutant smut that was able to prey on hematic vegetation.

So when, a few days after Xuly Beth and I had had our morale-boosting talk and telefuck, an anonymous demon showing only bland metagrafix delivered a tip that the Incubators had recently done a big job for a secretive client, I was aware I wouldn’t be welcomed back with open arms.

But I was used to that.

Sonny was wearing a Boston Scientific chassis shaped like a small tank with multiple tentacles and spray nozzles. I knew the unit was effective, but it looked ridiculous. Not that I cared, since the possibility of a real lead at last had me higher than a dose of Kiss-the-sky.

“Hey, Dalek,” I said, “let’s go visit some pariahs.”

Sonny lumbered after me. “Certainly, Doctor What.”

“That’s ‘Who.’”

“The advantages inherent in the fuzzy logic circuits of a Turing Level Four device necessarily involve the ability to compromise data in a creative manner.”

The Incubators had taken over an abandoned antique petroleum storage tank on the waterfront. The property was currently contested and in limbo, as the legal mess from the collapse of the petroleum industry was still being sorted out, some decades after the fall. Sooner or later, the new owners would find a use for the land and the squatters would be kicked out. But right now, it was all theirs.

At the makeshift sphincter door in the side of the tank facing the harbor, Sonny and I paused. “Stay out here and watch my back,” I told the kibe.

“An instruction with contradictory semantics which I am fully capable of rationalizing.”

I shook my head ruefully.

Cleaned up with Transcell Scrubbing Bubbles, the inside of the tank bore little residual scent. What it did smell like was a combination of mold, decay, dirty bandages, and sick breath.

And one additional, puzzling underscent that I couldn’t quite place, even with my enhanced senses.

Dimly lit by scattered bioluminescent globes stuck here and there from floor to domed ceiling, the interior of the tank was filled with a mockcoral scaffolding.