Seed (38 page)

“That kid you was with,” Richard said. “One who had the Tet.”

“My brother.” Brood leaned forward, stared hard into the older boy’s face. “Where he at?” He brought the shotgun back in line with Richard’s nose as another thought occurred to him. “And where the fuck’s my wagon?”

CHAPTER 24

ove filled Sumedha…filled Satori. It cradled its children in their beds, massaged them in their early morning slumber. It heard their sleep murmurs, felt their minds travel the easy dreams of the uncomplicated.

Union. Peace.

Peace Sumedha hadn’t known since before…Satori struggled with the name. Pihadassa. Another of its children. Wife. Sister. She had left. The echo of the memory of anguish at the separation. A memory and no more. Sumedha’s memory, which was as dim to Satori as a half-remembered dream.

Satori existed in the moment, aware. No longer what it had been, no longer Sumedha either. Something more than the sum of them.

It had joined with the world. Its children rose now with the sun, and the sun brought life to its flesh, brought chlorophyll tickling to the surface of its skin, made its pores flex and exhale.

Satori lay across the ruins of old Denver, basking in the exposure of the high plains. The sun fed it sugar.

But Satori did not rest. It was not safe, not yet. Humans surrounded it.

Memory banks deep inside its central tower gurgled, steeped with human history, human striving, human knowledge. Through Sumedha’s mind, Satori now understood itself to be humanity’s single greatest achievement. A sublime and random consequence of its creators’ overdeveloped frontal lobes working in concert with their opposable thumbs.

Apsara
. The helix danced. From one species, another emerged, better suited to the world it inhabited.

But survival was struggle. This was the rule, the crucible in which the helix forged itself. Humans hunkered outside Satori’s bone-and-skin walls. They watched with hungry eyes. They rioted, fighting among themselves. Satori observed them, and understood them for what they had become, perhaps what they had always been.

Parasites.

The Fathers had been right to poison the seed, if for the wrong reason. Soon the humans would die away, leaving Satori to its cycle of summer skin and winter fur, of intake and expulsion. The production of seed, the churning of crops into energy. Satori would give life to ever finer versions of its children. An improved humanity, in sync with its environment, in sync with Satori’s cycles. They would love Satori, and Satori would love them. The Fathers had been right to kill their own. They had been right to die.

“You are still there, boy.” Satori spoke through Sumedha’s mind. The boy did not answer. Satori, though, felt him, keen and watchful. It dug into Sumedha’s memory, found the boy sitting cross-legged, naked on the floor with his hand pressed to the wall. Primitive charcoal tattoos scrolled his body.

The boy had somehow merged, just as Sumedha had done inside the pod. He had joined Satori and taken a tiny piece for himself. Satori felt a numb sensation in that part of its body, what had been Sumedha’s lab. It marveled at the wonderful graft Sumedha had created.

At first Satori had thought the boy would starve. But slowly it realized the boy had channeled photosynthetic sugars to himself. Sumedha…no,
Satori
…had delighted at the boy’s resourcefulness. And the boy, it sensed, had shared in the delight. Satori felt a strange fondness, inasmuch as one could feel fondness for a parasite.

It had dispatched an advocate, but soon lost contact with the woman’s mind. Knew she somehow now belonged to the boy. So Satori waited.

“Come out, boy. This is not your natural state.” Satori offered no alternative. The boy said nothing. He knew the alternative.

Satori turned its mind to the other humans living inside it. The remnants of the Fathers’ security detail. They had disbanded, lived now by skulking and scavenging through the city. The time, Satori decided, had come. It roused its advocates…let them hunt.

It reveled with them as, one by one, they took the humans. When they’d finished, they licked blood from delicate fingers and crooned at Sumedha, at Satori.

“Thank you, Father.”

Satori’s biolume walls turned green with love. Sumedha’s mind emerged from Satori, just enough to reflect. Joy coursed through his body, through Satori’s body, the ecstasy of connection.

At the periphery of Satori’s awareness, the boy continued to watch.

CHAPTER 25

ichard leaned on the tiller, steering the wagon along a narrow lane between a half-collapsed high-rise and the animal length of Satori’s flesh outer wall. It stank of stale sweat.

“What’s going on?” Brood asked. He sat with his back against the wagon’s water tank—which the
Chupes
had painted red, obscuring a good percentage of the wagon’s PV paint. He motioned at the migrants who crowded the wall. They glowered through the sour haze of morning cook fires that wafted from the steel and brownstone ruins of the downtown fringe. Glowered up at the thick landraces who stood atop the wall. Their silence was strange. Among them, Brood saw a lot of
Chupe
color.

“Orders.” Richard spoke the word with an officious tone. “We’re stirring up trouble today.”

“What for?”

“Orders,” Richard repeated, this time with a shrug. “Straight down the pipe from El Sol.” He seemed to mull something over, then eyed Brood with two black eyes. “I get you in there,” he cast a glance at the wall, and behind it the massive dome turning green in the morning sun, “what’s to keep me from just rolling away on this bad boy once you’re inside?” He patted the wagon’s tiller proprietarily as he wound them around a deep pit in the road. Brood answered by leveling the Mossberg Richard’s way, over a knee.

“What’s to keep me from killing you right now?”

“Told you. Juice my boy. He won’t deal with you unless I vouch.”

“You sure he can get me in?” Brood asked. Richard frowned.

“Ain’t sure of nothing, except he deals with the Tet. Beyond that, you talk to him.”

The wagon bounced through a series of deep ruts. Battery stacks shook. Brood’s teeth ground as Richard let the motor crank too high. He laid the shotgun across his lap and pulled a can of sardines from his rucksack. He eyed Richard as he unwound the lid.

“Tell me you didn’t run the Hercs dry before you set them to recharge.”

“What the fuck are Hercs?”

“
Chale
.” Brood took a deep breath, exhaled through tight lips. “Alright,
puto
. Let’s you and me make a deal.” He tossed Richard the sardine tin. Richard caught it one-handed, peered at it with one eye closed, then lifted it to his lips.

“You ain’t going to make no deals with me,” he said, mottled lips glistening with sardine oil. “I killed your papa.” Brood shook his head.

“Nah,
ese
. He wasn’t my papa. He just some old man, kept me and
mi hermano
. Used us like toys. You did me a favor killing him.” Brood lifted up his t-shirt, revealing the pink dimple of scar tissue above his hip, just large enough to slip his pinky into, where Richard had shot him. Then pointed at the smear of
La Chupe
red dye on the chest of Richard’s FEMAs where his own arrow had once impaled the boy. “You and me are even, you help me find my brother.”

Richard looked skeptical. He tenderly pressed the tip of an index finger to the crushed bridge of his nose, and winced. Brood let a narrow smile come to his lips, the smile of one who had a secret.

“Know what a Lobo is?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Richard said. “A wolf.”

“No. I mean those trucks the army uses.”

“I seen them.”

“I got one.” Brood let his smile grow. “You have my wagon waiting for me when me and my bro get out, it’s yours.”

….

“Nobody just walks into the pens,” Juice shouted over the roar of the Platte, which surged with spring runoff. They’d met him at the edge of a migrant shanty camp where the river churned beneath an ancient viaduct. He sat on the wagon’s edge, legs dangling, clad in ostentatiously new denim jeans, a bonanza score from some old-world cache. Proof that he was not cheap to deal with. “Those Satori fucks’ll sniff you right out, you walk in voluntary. They’re weird fuckers.”

Brood figured Juice would’ve been big in a different life. He wore no shirt and his pale skeleton looked like it was meant for serious meat. He wagged at Brood with a hand, which happened to be holding a rat spitted on a long stick.

“I got to
buy
you.”

“I’ll sell him,” Richard declared. He still stood beside the tiller. From time to time he cast a wary eye at the Mossberg, which Brood kept vigilantly pointed his way. Juice wrinkled his nose and gave Richard a sideways glance.

“You smell like shit, man. Do you know that about yourself?” Richard gave Brood a long and sober look. He said nothing.

“You buy me,
Sale vale
,” Brood told Juice. “What then? How you get me into Satori?”

“Everybody with the Tet gets into Satori. They take all the bodies in there.” Juice turned his head far to the side, biting into the rat with molars, the only teeth he had. He chewed noisily as he spoke. “I tell people they get eaten, but I don’t know, really. Probably turn them into, like, fertilizer or some shit.”

“What about live ones?” Brood asked.

“Live ones?” Juice looked baffled. “They all bodies, man. Tet kills them all.” Fear twisted in Brood’s guts.

“Every one?”

“Every one,” Juice said, then caught himself. Raised the rat as though to touch it to a specific memory. “Except once. A month or so ago they took one kid who was still kicking. Head honcho wanted him.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Weird.” Juice took another bite from the rat and thoughtfully chewed, squinting at where a group of sallow migrant girls knelt on the riverbank, washing themselves in a long eddy. “Face like a statue or something. Too perfect. Badass teeth.” He shook his head with naked jealousy. “Great fucking teeth, man. Bald. Like, no hair at all. No eyebrows, no eyelashes or nothing. He was Chinese maybe, or kind of Spic-looking, like you. Maybe a mixture of stuff.”

“No, homie. The
kid
. What’d the
kid
look like?”

“Oh.” Juice nodded. “He was weird, too. All these fucked up tats.” He traced his finger in a spiral over his broad chest. “Animals and shit.”

Brood’s hand reached out, gripped Juice’s shoulder, felt bones under the skin. Juice stopped chewing. He stared slowly down at Brood’s hand, then at Brood. Brood let go.

“That’s your bro,” Richard said. “He’s still kicking.” He pointed at the shotgun. “You mind pointing that somewhere else, now?” Brood sucked his lip and eyed the big
Chupe
, then stood the gun upright on its stock. Tension ebbed from Richard’s shoulders. “Appreciate that,” he said. Brood looked at Juice.

“So I fake having the Tet and you buy me. But I got to be dead to get in there.”

“That’s right,” Juice said. Brood shrugged.

“Then I play dead.”

“You got a look real dead, man.” Juice looked Brood up and down as though imagining Brood as a corpse. “Might work, though, if you’re dead enough.” Brood patted the Mossberg’s barrel.

“Got to get
mi amigo
in with me, cuz.”

“Now that’s a hard sell,
amigo
.”

Brood gave a shrewd smile. He took his rucksack and upended its contents on the wagon’s deck. MREs, canned corn and beans, a sleek old Glock, three grenades, an old walkie. Juice stared.

“Well shit,” he concluded after a moment. He glared suddenly at the rat bouncing on the end of his stick as though it had offended him. Pitched it away. “We’ll work it out.
Esta
fucking
bien
, man.” He held out his hand and Brood shook it.

….

They did the transaction at the foot of Snake’s skeletal high-rise. Richard dragged Brood, bound and feigning Tet rigidity, off the wagon and into the mud at Juice’s feet. Juice gave Richard a small satchel of seed. They bumped fists. Richard heaved himself back aboard the wagon, banged the motor into gear and weaved away through a lot occupied by corrugated tin shanties.

A densely muscled landrace slung Brood over its shoulder and followed Juice onto a nearby cargo elevator attached to the nose of an old corn diesel construction crane. They rode it skyward.