Ribofunk (23 page)

Rising to his feet, Coney’s master now said, “And that’s why I need you to do your part to make this latest sordid virtual assignation a success, dear Coney. I have here a new trope called O-max-O. It was given to me by one of my fans, a sensitive young plug who works at Xomagraf. It’s not available to the hoi polloi yet. He promises me that it will make this digitryst so thrilling for my client that she’ll gladly double my fee. I’m counting on you to deliver it to her within the hour. Her name is Frances Foxx, and this is her address.”

Coney’s master handed him a crawlypatch and a silicrobe calling card. The card flashed an address in the far west end of the city.

Laboriously tracing a mental map, Coney sought to comprehend his assignment. Finally he spoke.

“This place is quite far. May I take the train?”

“Don’t be silly. The train costs eft. The whole point of tonight’s dreadful exercise is to earn ecus, not spend them. And besides, the maglev isn’t safe for splices, not since those horrid razorboys, the Transgenocides, started haunting the tubes. No, you’ll have to walk. You’re a speedy little splice, or so the factory claimed. Surely you can cover the distance before Peej Foxx and I are scheduled to crawl into the Sack together.”

“But it is night out there.”

“So?”

“To make the best time, I will have to cross the Soft Sector. In the dark.”

At the thought of such a passage, Coney horripilated.

His master seemed to experience no such somatic dread. “You force me to repeat myself: so? No one there will pay any attention to you. You’re small and insignificant.”

“This is the problem.”

Coney’s master waved the splice’s concerns away. “You’re exaggerating the difficulties just to extract some concession or luxury from me. Very well, at the completion of your little chore, you may experience one of my sonnets. Perhaps you could dimly appreciate
Dance of the Cold Moons
.”

“Thank you, Peej Hopcroft. Something like extra rations would be very nice. But I would give up everything just not to go. Perhaps you could—”

“What!” thundered Coney’s master. “Leave my wunderkammer and subject my precious body to the gross physical biosphere? How dare you suggest such a thing, you impudent trans!”

The hand of Coney’s master moved toward the keypad in his hip.

“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” said the smart-door, which had failed to open fast enough for the splice scrabbling at its manual override handle.

* * *

Coney’s civicorp had recently bred a Pedlumo system to replace the antique solar-powered light-standards. By night, small swarms of gnat-like silicrobe aggregations hovered darkly outside every building waiting for pedestrians to emerge, whereupon they flared up with sufficient candlepower to illuminate a sphere some four meters in diameter. Anchoring themselves above the individual’s head, they would accompany the traveler to his destination, then await new service.

With his saft personal corona fluctuating in response to those of all the other citizens and splices abroad that night, Coney set off toward the West End.

This initial stage of his journey fostered in Coney no trepidations. Patrolled by teams of Parke-Davis Offisimians and Schering-Plough Deputy Dawgs, his neighborhood was a pleasant one, a mixed-use zone of shops, residences, and zero-light autofacs, and he was intimately familiar with it. And the few errands that had taken him to the West End had revealed that district to be equally unthreatening.

No, it was only the dread territory in between the two zones that terrified him.

The Soft Sector.

Striving to master his emotions, Coney recited a trigger-mantra he had been taught at Daewoo.

“Tension, fear, care, nowhere. Tension, fear, care, nowhere—”

Hypothalamic changes spread throughout his central nervous system, lowering his heartbeat and respiration. Soothing neuropeptides washed his brain.

Somewhat relieved, Coney dug in his bellypouch for the card with Peej Foxx’s address. Perhaps with a clear mind he would see something about the chore that he had missed.

But a second perusal only confirmed what he had known from the moment his master gave him the assignment. There was only one way to deliver the dose of trope on time, and that was to cut across the interdicted streetlife habitat.

Replacing the card against his skin, next to the all- important crawlypatch, Coney increased his pace.

A clutch of zarooks, ragazzi, and chats sauvage stood on the corner of Artery Nine and Orange Capillary, hanging out by a trope bar whose silicrobe icons of synaptic junctions exchanging molecules flashed green and purple. Heady-mental music spilled out from floating silicrobe speakers. Big Skulls and Piebalds predominated in the crowd, with a smattering of Moles.

“Swap protocols, little splice!” yelled one. “Where you off to so krebby fast?”

“Stop and share a dose of Heavy Wonderful,” called another.

“Yeah, you’ll feel like you were born a pure-gen!”

“Peej Splice, if you please!”

Coney knew enough not to heed these bad ones. Although not as violent as the razorboys, they would like nothing better than to divert him from his duties and mess up his factory parameters.

Hurrying away, Coney was followed by their jeers and laughter, and the soft wheezes of the Moles.

Within a few blocks of the Soft Sector, Coney began to grow nervous again. So intent on chanting his mantra was he that he failed to notice the whir of wheels behind him.

“Buy a refreshing Pepsi-plus, citizen? It’s the pure charles!”

Coney jumped and whirled.

A mobile smart-vendor, battered and splashed with Liquid Lingo grafitti, had rolled up on his tail. The autorover looked completely disreputable, perhaps even a rogue.

“I am not a citizen,” said Coney cautiously.

“Oh, excuse me. My biosensors have been malfunctioning since I took a spill. But rest assured, my product is still fresh! Would you care to purchase a cup, whatever you are?”

Coney straightened his back righteously. “I am a genuine midline Daewoo transgenic, bearing fully fifteen-percent human genes. You are simply a machine, a kibe.”

The soda-vendor’s voice assumed a plaintive tone. “Yes, you are right. And an unlucky kibe at that. Unless I can sell more soda, I cannot apply for repairs. But the longer I put my repairs off, the more decrepit I get and the less soda I sell. It is a vicious circle.”

“So is life. In any case, I have no eft.”

“No eft! You have wasted my clock-cycles!”

“It was you who approached me!”

The crazed machine let loose a warbling siren. “Thief! Thief! All concerned citizens, nine-eleven the harrys!”

Fear building up in him, Coney sped off.

In less than a minute he was out of hearing of the vendor’s calls for help and within sight of the Soft Sector.

He rested a moment, until his heart had slowed.

A wide bare ringroad separated the city from the zone of interdiction. Cars zipped along its lanes in one direction only. On the far side of the road, the Soft Sector bloomed in luxuriant splendor, a lush jungle of constantly shifting artificial overlapping ecologies hundreds of acres in extent, its armature crumbled buildings that had long since been ceded by the civicorp to the uncontrolled but corralled biorenegades. Here ended up all the failed experiments of amateur fabricators and malicious chromosartors, all of society’s self-malformed dropouts, all escaped splices and faulty silicrobe colonies, as well as some seemingly autocatalytic creatures no one outside the Soft Sector had ever encountered.

There were no conventional physical barriers such as fences or minefields to keep the inhabitants of the Soft Sector penned up.

Instead, the periphery was patrolled by Macrophages.

Coney saw one now.

The towering gelatinous mass was easily as big as a baseline elephant. The megamicro humped itself along, leaving a wet trail of lysing exudate, intent on ingesting and devouring any living organism that tried to escape. Not far behind it trailed another, and another behind that one.

Coney’s knees felt as weak as boiled water. He knew that the guardians were programmed not to bother anyone entering the Soft Sector. But how was he to escape on the far side, assuming he survived his transit?

For a moment, Coney actually considered abandoning his suicidal mission. Then he recalled his dietary leash and the locked collar around his neck which would be quite capable of delivering a killing GloPos-beamed signal anywhere he hid.…

Setting a trembling foot onto the road surface, Coney eyed the traffic. At the right moment, he darted across, incurring only one shouted warning from an angry Mercedes.

Safely reaching the marge of the Soft Sector, Coney was briefly startled when his pedlumos left him, fleeing obediently back to the civicorp proper.

In the next second, he was treated to a broadcast courtesy of silicrobes embedded in the pavement that erupted at his presence.

“Attention! You are almost within the Soft Sector! Be advised that under relevant civicorp statutes, you are permanently forfeiting all of a citizen’s rights and privileges by so entering. Any transgenics spotted within the Soft Sector by aerial patrols will be assumed to be deranged and will be subject to immediate lethal Factory Recall. Attention—!”

Coney closed his eyes and ran.

The Macrophages made a slurping, sluffmg noise as they crawled their circuit. They smelled of yeast and baseline human sperm. In his blind dash, Coney brushed the tacky leading edge of one.

The lysing agent burned through his fur, etching his skin with a tracery of pain and urging him to greater speed.

And then he was past it, safely inside the Soft Sector!

Panting, crouching in the shadows beneath a bush, Coney watched the monster move on.

What relief—

Toothy mandibles pincered his waist in a painful grip. Coney screamed and struggled to break free.

He only succeeded in twisting partially around, at the cost of raw abrasions around his midriff. But his new posture was enough to reveal what held him.

It was an army-surplus Squibb dung beetle big as a car. Evidently quite old, its antennae were broken, its carapace brittle and fragmented. A partial SNEG silicrobe serial number flashed on one mandible.

The huge ailing battlefield scavenger had plainly mistaken Coney for a corpse.

Beating on its jaws with his paws had no effect; even in its decrepitude, the big splice was still awesome. Limping from a missing leg, the dung beetle carried Coney off.

When it reached an appropriate patch of bare earth, the dung beetle began to dig. Once it had excavated a deep hole, it placed Coney in it.

Coney dared not stir, unsure of how the beetle’s damaged wetware would treat a moving corpse.

With instinctive efficiency, the beetle covered Coney up.

Then, in a scratchy growl, it began to recite the Syncretic Church’s last rites:

“Our Jah who art in Allah’s Nirvana, hallowed be Her name.…”

* * *

It was rather pleasant to lie buried under the loose friable soil after the Snowy military beetle had left. For the moment, enough air filtered through and Coney was safe from harm. Ancestral memories of warm musty burrows thronged pleasantly through his brain.

Why had splices ever been created? Their life was only endless suffering, all at human behest. Wouldn’t it have been better to remain a dumb brute than to be granted just enough feeling and intelligence to realize how miserable one’s situation was?

It was almost enough to make a loyal splice side with that mad transgenic, Krazy Kat, and his crew. If only the legendary splice would show himself again. Could the rumors of his death really be true? …

Voices penetrated to Coney’s grave.

“What’cha think the Snowy found, Art?”

“Can’t say till we dig it up, Ick. Can’t say.”

Coney pressed his back into the earth, desperately willing himself to sink into the ground.

Soil began to be scraped aside.

Pushing up, gathering his legs beneath him, Coney burst forth in an explosion of clods.

He staggered, found his feet, began to run—

Something sharp lanced his back.

Instant paralysis!

Coney dropped like a smartbomb from a scramjet.

Lying on his side, his mind racing, his body transformed into that of a Minitel poupee viande, Coney watched two pairs of bare feet approach. One pair belonged to a big human; the other belonged to a child, or dwarf, and seemed barely to touch the ground.

Hands lifted Coney up.

He saw his captors.

The big one was seemingly a baseline human, save for one appendage: a long, flexible, jointed scorpion’s tail arching over his shoulder, a drop of venom still glistening at its sharp tip.

The other, smaller one was equipped with fluttering wasp wings sprouting from his shoulders and a stinger emerging from his coccyx.