Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (17 page)

Rifter chic, she said. Solidarity through fashion. It's on the rise.

All in a split-second. The apparition ducked around him and continued on its way.

Sudbury's metropolitan canyons had subsided about him while he'd been walking. Endless sheets of kudzu
₄
draped closer to street-level from the rooftops, framing windows and vents with viridian foliage. The new and improved part of him started to ballpark a carbon-consumption estimate under current cloud-cover; he managed, with effort, to shut it up. He'd always wondered if the vines would be as easy to kill off as everyone expected, once they'd finished sucking up the previous century's excesses. Kudzu had been a tough mother to begin with, even before all the tinkering that had turned it into God's own carbon sink. And there was all sorts of outbreeding and lateral gene transfer going on these days, uncontrolled, unstoppable. Give the weed another ten years and it'd be immune to anything short of a flamethrower.

Now, for the first time, that didn't seem to matter. In ten years kudzu
_n
might be the least of
anyone's
problems.

It sure as hell wouldn't matter much to those poor bastards on the Strip.

* * *

They'd built this model.

It wasn't a
real
model, of course. They didn't know enough about how ßehemoth worked for that. There was no clockwork inside, nothing that led logically from
cause
to
effect
. It was just a nest of correlations, really. An n-dimensional cloud with a least-squares trajectory weaving through its heart. It guzzled data at one end: at the other it shat out a prediction. Soil moisture's 13%, weather's been clear for five days straight, porphyrins are down and micromethane's up over half a hectare of dirt in a Tillamook shipyard? That's ßehemoth country, my friend—and tomorrow, if it doesn't rain, there's an 80% chance that it'll shrink to half its present size.

Why? Anyone's guess. But that's pretty much what's happened before under similar conditions.

Rowan's field data had started them down the right path, but it was the fires that had given them an edge: each of those magnesium telltales shouted
Hey! Over here!
all the way up to geosynch. Then it was just a matter of calling up the Landsat archives for those locations, scrolling back five, six months from ignition. Sometimes you wouldn't find anything—none of the residential blazes had yielded anything useful. Sometimes the data had been lost, purged or corrupted by the usual forces of entropy. Sometimes, though—along coastlines, or in undeveloped industrial lots where heavy machinery loitered between assignments—the spec lines would change over time, photoabsorption creeping down the 680nm band, soil O
₂
fading just a touch, a whiff of acid showing up on distance pH. If you waited long enough you could even see the change in visible light. Weeds and grasses, so tough that the usual oils and effluents had long since given up trying to kill them, would slowly wilt and turn brown.

With those signatures in hand, Desjardins had begun to wean himself from blatant incendiary cues and search farther afield. It was a pretty flimsy construct, but it would've done until Jovellanos came up with a better angle. In the meantime it had been a lot better than nothing.

Until now. Now it was a lot worse. Now it was saying that ßehemoth owned a ten-kilometer stretch of the Oregon coast.

* * *

Sudbury was dressed up for the night by the time he got back to his apartment: a jumble of neon and sodium and laser spilled through his windows, appreciably dimmer now that the latest restrictions had kicked in. Mandelbrot tripped him up as he crossed the threshold, then stalked into the kitchen and yowled at the kibble dispenser. The dispenser, programmed for preset feeding times, refused to dignify the cat with an answer.

Desjardins dropped onto the sofa and stared unseeing at the cityscape.

You should have known
, he told himself.

He had known. Maybe he just hadn't quite believed it. And it hadn't been his doing, those other times. He'd just been following the trail, seeing where
others
had taken the necessary steps, feeding all those data through his models and filters for the greater good. Always for the greater good.

This time, though, there'd been no fire. The forces of containment hadn't found out about the Strip yet. So far they'd just been covering their own tracks, sterilizing every—

–
body
—

—everything that had come into contact with the source. But they didn't know how to identify ßehemoth directly, not from a distance. That was his job, and Jovellanos'.

And now it looked like the two of them had succeeded. Desjardins reflected on the difference between following a trail of ashes and blazing one's own.

Shouldn't matter. It's not like you're firing the flamethrower.

Just aiming it
.

Guilt Trip paced in his gut like a caged animal, looking for something to tear into.

Well? Do your job, for Christ's sake! Tell me what to
do!

Guilt Trip didn't work like that, of course. It was all stick and no carrot, a neurochemical censor that pounced on the slightest twinge of guilt, or conscience, or—for the mechanists in the audience—sheer amoral
fear-of-getting-caught-with-your-hand-in-the-cookie-jar
. You could call it whatever you wanted; labels didn't change the side chains and peptide bonds and carboxyl whatsits that made it work. Guilt was a neurotransmitter. Morality was a chemical. And the things that made nerves fire, muscles move, tongues wag—those were all chemicals too. It had only been a matter of time before someone figured out how to tie them all together.

Guilt Trip kept you from making the wrong decision, and Absolution let you live with yourself after making the right one. But you had to at least
think
you knew what
right
was, before either of them could kick in. They only reacted to gut feeling.

He'd never lamented the Trip's lack of direction before. He'd never needed it. Sure, it would freeze him in an instant if he tried to hack his own credit rating, but in terms of actual caseload it rarely did more than nudge him toward the blindingly obvious. Lose-lose situations were his stock-in-trade. Amputate the part or lose the whole? Nasty, but obvious. Kill ten to save a hundred? Wring your hands, bite the bullet, get stoned afterward. But never any question about what to
do
.

How many people did I seal off to keep a lid on that brucellosis outbreak in Argentina? How many did I flood out in TongKing when I cut the power to their sumps?

Necessary steps had never bothered him before. Not like this.
Alice and all her snide comments about seeing the world in black-and-white. Bullshit. I saw the grays, I saw
millions
of grays. I just knew how to pick the lightest shade.

Not any more.

* * *

He could pinpoint the moment that things had changed, almost to the second: when he'd seen a 'scaphe built for the deep sea and a cockpit built for the near sky, locked together in a desperate embrace, falling.

It had not been a commercial lifter on a routine flight; he'd checked the records. Officially, nothing had fallen into the Pacific at the heart of the Big One, because—officially—nothing had been there to fall. It had been sent secretly to Ground Zero, and then it had been shot down.

It made no sense that the same authority would have committed both acts.

That implied factions in opposition. It implied profound disagreement over what constituted the greater good (or the
Interests of the Overlords
, which Jovellanos insisted was all the Trip
really
ensured). Someone in the bureaucratic stratosphere—someone who knew far more about ßehemoth than did Achilles Desjardins—had tried to evacuate the rifters before the quake. Apparently they'd felt that pre-emptive murder was not justified in the name of containment.

And someone else had stopped them.

Which side was Rowan affiliated with? Who was
right
?

He hadn't told Jovellanos about the 'scaphe. He'd even done a passable job of forgetting about it himself, keeping things nice and simple, focusing on the mouse at hand until the whale on the horizon became a vague blur, almost invisible. He'd known in the back of his mind he wouldn't be able to keep it up for long; eventually they'd come up with a reliable index, some combination of distance spec and moisture and pH that pointed the finger at the invader. But he hadn't expected it so soon. They'd been working with old data, shipyard samples contaminated by industrial effluents, potential incursions three or four hectares large at most. Noise-to-signal problems alone should have held them back for weeks.

But you didn't need much rez to catch a beachhead ten kilometers long. Desjardins had kept his eyes down, and the whale on the horizon had run right into him.

Mandelbrot stood in the doorway, stretching. Claws extruded from their sheaths like tiny scimitars.

"
You
wouldn't have any trouble at all," Desjardins said. "You'd just go for maximum damage, right?"

Mandelbrot purred.

Desjardins buried his face in his hands.
So what do I do now? Figure things out for
myself
?

He realized, with some surprise, that the prospect wouldn't have always seemed so absurd.

Drugstore

"Amitav."

He startled awake: a blanketed skeleton on the sand. Gray and dim in the visible predawn gloom, hot and luminous in infrared. Sunken eyes, exuding hatred on all wavelengths from the moment they opened.

Sou-Hon Perreault stared down at him from three meters up. Well-fed refugees, freshly awakened on all sides, edged away and left Amitav in the center of an open circle.

Several others—teenagers, mostly, a little less robust than most—stayed nearby, looking up at the 'fly with undisguised suspicion. Perreault blinked within her headset; she'd never seen so many hostile faces on the Strip before.

"How pleasant," Amitav said in a low voice. "To wake with a big round hammer hanging over my head."

"Sorry." She moved the 'fly off to one side, wobbling its trim tabs to effect a bobbing mechanical salute (then wondered if he could even see it with his merely human eyes). "It's Sou-Hon," she said.

"Who else," the stickman said dryly, rising.

"I—"

"She is not here. I have not seen her in some time."

"I know. I wanted to talk to you."

"Ah. About what?" The stickman began walking down the shore. His—

Friends? Disciples? Bodyguards?

—began to follow. Amitav waved them off. Perreault set the botfly to heel at his side; the entourage dwindled slowly to stern. On either side, anonymous bundles—curled on thermafoam, wrapped in heat-conserving fabric—stirred and grunted irritably in the gray halflight.

"A cycler was vandalized last night," Perreault said. "A few kilometers north of here. We'll have to fly out a replacement."

"Ah."

"It's the first time something like this has happened in
years
."

"And we both know why that is, do we not?"

"People rely on those machines. You took food from their mouths."

"I?
I
did this?"

"There were lots of witnesses, Amitav."

"Then they will tell you I had nothing to do with it."

"They told me it was a couple of teenagers. And
they
told me who put them up to it."

The stickman stopped and turned to face the machine at his side. "And all these witnesses you speak of. All these poor people that I have robbed of food. None of them did anything to
stop
the vandals? All those people, and they could not stop two boys from stealing the food from their mouths?"

Sheathed in her interface, Perreault sighed. Over a thousand klicks away the botfly snorted reverb. "What do you have against the cyclers, anyway?"

"I am not a fool." Amitav continued down the shore. "It is not all proteins and carbohydrates you are feeding us. I would rather starve than eat poison."

"Antidepressants aren't
poison
! The dosages are very mild."

"And so much more convenient than dealing with the anger of real people, yes?"