Broken Mirror (11 page)

Victor thanked him and moved on. He hadn’t thought about the local black-market currency. Every shop in Oakland & Bayshore used the MeshPay system. Not so here. He needed to find a moneychanger.

A heavily graffitied hut down the street had the motas and MeshPay logos on its sign. Victor walked up to the barred window and asked for 100 AUD worth of motas.

A tall man with broad shoulders and a wide, handsome face, likely Japanese, took Victor’s bills. “Twenty percent fee,” the man said.

“Fine.”

The man pushed an ident-pad through a metal slit, and Victor held his MeshBit above it, squeezing to indicate he approved the transaction. The device chimed, and the man slid him twelve black coins with embedded gold lettering.

Victor pushed them into his pocket. The receipt the man handed him indicated that he had purchased ceramics rather than coins.

Shouting. Behind him. Victor turned. Across the street, a few thugs took turns punching a middle-aged man in the gut, holding him by his ripped suit jacket. One of the thugs noticed Victor, signaled his friends to ease up, and pointed at him.

Victor froze, hoping that he’d only imagined them taking an interest in him. His mind could be misinterpreting, projecting his fears onto the situation. But his gut told him to run.

He walked quickly. Then, hearing the thudding footsteps of the thugs behind him, he started to run. He reached a corner and almost knocked over a short old lady as he pushed past her. A bicyclist yelled and swerved around him as he darted across the street. He chanced a look behind him. The thugs turned the corner and spotted him again.

Victor bolted inside a small grocery packed with racks of vegetables and bulk grains. He trotted down the aisle, found a door to the back, and bumped into a teenage girl who pressed herself against the wall of goods to let him pass. He emerged into an alley and ran smack into someone who grabbed him and shoved him against the wall.

Two people, a man and a woman, stood in front of him. The olive-skinned man who had grabbed him had spiky black hair. The woman had skin the same color as Auntie Circe’s, and her hair was tied tautly in a bun. Both appeared to be around Victor’s age or a little older. They had the muscles and skin tone of people who sweat often.

The gang of thugs rounded the corner and hesitated when they saw Victor wasn’t alone. The spiky-haired man pulled a black stunstick with a red glowing tip from a waist holster and pointed. The thugs quickly retreated the way they’d come.

“Thanks,” Victor said.

The woman sighed and said to her companion, “This was not our fault.” She sounded foreign, European maybe.

“Don’t matter. What now?” He jerked his head toward Victor.

“Shhh,” she said. “Let’s just go.”

They jogged to the alley’s entrance. Victor followed, but when he turned the corner, they were gone.

Victor paused, trying to recover his breath and get his bearings. His face felt warm. The chase had got his blood pumping. The street was filled with honking vehicles and some kind of demonstration between two groups of people with signs in Chinese.

Victor spotted a young woman with smart-looking glasses and a book bag standing by herself. He put on his biggest smile and approached her. “Excuse me. I’m looking for Ming Pearl’s shop on Front Street. Do you know which way it is?”

She frowned. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

Victor laughed. “No one’s asked me that before.”

The young woman smiled. “Of course I know Pearl. She has the best there is.”

“Where can I find her?”

She looked him up and down. “The door with the lotus flower halfway down the block. Good luck, handsome.”

Victor followed the young woman’s directions to Front Street and came across a heavy door. Its large engraved lotus flower looked weathered and beaten, like someone had taken an axe to it. He entered. Inside the shop, the noise from the street was muffled. Ancient, dusty incandescent light bulbs hung from a cord that snaked upward into shadows. A dark and narrow aisle between towering lacquer-red bins extended toward the back of the store. Victor shuffled into the dim and stale cavern, careful not to nudge any of the precariously stacked inventory.

He approached a low desk, where a small middle-aged woman sat using an inkstick to mark a large ledger with intricate calligraphy. She wore a forest-green blazer dotted with a bright red poinsettia pattern.

Black hair like burnt steel wool haloed her head. A pair of reading glasses threatened to fall from the tip of her nose.

She said a few words in Chinese. When Victor didn’t answer, she looked up. “You want traditional medicine?” she asked.

Victor nodded.

She returned her attention to her ledger and spoke with her face pointed at the desk. “You desperate. Non-Asians always desperate.”

“I need help. I want to stop taking Personil.”

She looked up and studied him. Her lips twitched. Judging by her unlined face she could have been anywhere between forty and seventy years old. Lowering her head again, she continued making the strange marks.

Victor said, “I can pay you.”

“You want something, you wait,” she said, then ignored him again.

Victor explored the shop for several long minutes and then returned to the desk. The woman wasn’t moving. Her face hovered over her books; her eyes were closed, as if meditating. While he watched, she opened her eyes and stood.

“They tell me I may help you,” she said.

“They?”

The herbalist leaned forward and looked at him with wide bulging eyes. “My ancestor ghosts.”

“I don’t know
—
”

She doubled over, laughing. Her lungs rattled from the strength of her hooting. “You think I’m some dumb schmuck? I was consulting my conscience.” She stood up and wiped her eyes. “My name is Pearl.”

“I’m Victor.”

“Yes, I know, but Jefferson made it sound like you . . .” Pearl cleared her throat. All traces of her accent had vanished. “I didn’t expect you so soon. It’s been a bad week. The last person with MRS I tried to help was reclassified. In a single day, she went from Three to One. I think she’s in the Humboldt facility, not a nice one, I hear. I’m not sure I can help you, but I’ll try.”

“I’m looking for black cardamom,” Victor said.

“Useless!” A hint of her accent returned. “Good only for cooking. I have something else for you.”

Pearl rummaged through the wooden cubbies lining the wall behind her desk. They lacked any sort of labeling scheme.

She turned, and her hand opened to reveal a little sachet of silk. She plopped it into a shallow ceramic bowl on her desk. “Fumewort. Don’t burn it. The combustion byproducts cause cancer
—
not that we need to worry about that anymore. Still, don’t burn. I’ll show you how to make a tincture.”

She came out from behind the desk and moved past him in short shuffling steps, her wispy hair nearly brushing his chin. She left behind a charred, woodsy smell. He picked up the sachet and followed her. Further into the back of her domain were several tables loaded with all kinds of envelopes, pouches, and boxes.

Along one wall stood a counter piled with brown glass bottles, labeled in Chinese. From a tray Pearl plucked a pipette similar to those Victor had used in his university’s laboratory. She used it to suck a clear liquid from a jar and squirt the liquid into a small glass vial. She extended her hand and demanded the pouch from him. She pinched a few brown and flaky pieces of fumewort and dropped them into the liquid. Then she added water from the tap.

“Twenty milliliters pure alcohol and one hundred milliliters water, roughly. Add one gram of the herb. Wait at least one hour. Stable at room temperature. Drink the whole thing, though you might want to mix it with fruit juice. It’s like fire going down.”

“What does it do?”

“Calms the mind. Anytime you feel panic, drink.”

“This is all I brought.” Victor held out the black coins.

Pearl looked at the coins but didn’t take them. “I’ve already been paid.”

Victor stuffed the sachet and vials into his pocket. Could a few flaky herbs really help him?

Pearl said, “I’ll see you again soon.”

“You seem sure that I’ll come back.”

Pearl smiled. “Won’t you?”

“I know you knew Jefferson Eastmore, my grandfather.”

“Of course I did. That’s why you’re here.”

“Yes, but wait. What you said earlier: you didn’t expect to see me so soon. Does that mean . . .?”

“Jefferson told me you’d be skeptical.”

Victor crossed his arms. “How did you know him?”

She looked up at him, tilting her head. “He didn’t tell you? He said he would.”

“He didn’t tell me anything!”

Pearl looked away. “The fumewort should keep you out of trouble. You know, you’re not the only one seeking answers, my friend. There are others. Come see me again. We’ll talk more.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Jefferson asked me to help you, and I will, but on my terms. Come back later,” Pearl said.

“Help me how? What did he say?”

She seemed resolved not to speak. Victor wanted to grab her blazer lapels and shake the truth out of her.

I can’t let myself think that way.

Victor left the shop in a hurry. Why would Granfa Jeff ask an herbalist to help Victor? He’d always challenged Dr. Tammet when her treatments veered toward the experimental and holistic. Did he have a change of heart about alternative therapies?

The mystery pulled at Victor
—
the same pull he recognized from past slides into blankspace, a precarious feeling. He couldn’t trust himself. He needed to stay on the narrow path of sanity. He wasn’t going to see Pearl again.

He nearly bumped into a table on the sidewalk crammed full of little trinkets, pieces of jewelry, and slips of paper rolled into tiny scrolls. One jade figure caught his eye, and he picked it up and paid for it with two of his motas. A perfect present for Elena. She was right. He
had
pushed her away. Now it was up to him to bring them closer together again.

Victor returned without incident to the safer side of the bay, retrieved his car from the parking structure, and drove home. Back in his neighborhood, he walked to the Freshly Juice shop and bought a simple carrot-based concoction rich in beta-carotene and antioxidants, and stopped at a general store for a bottle of the strongest, purest alcohol he could find.

Thank the Laws Class Threes are allowed to buy alcohol
.

At home, he made a batch of twelve tinctures and waited, sitting on his living room floor, meditating to regain his calm after a tumultuous day. The painting on the wall undulated, an impressionistic rendering of a galaxy full of colorful stars. His eyes unfocused. Whenever the vaguest hint of blankspace intruded, he pushed it out of his consciousness. A few times in his life, the run-up to a blank episode had been accompanied by a wave of euphoria, a feeling so powerful, so positive, he almost wanted to court the blankness, but he feared it meant his mind was deteriorating, and more often the blankness was just blank.

His MeshBit timer pinged. Victor got up, went to the kitchen, poured the fumewort tincture into the juice bulb aperture, and held his thumb over the opening while he sloshed the mixture.

He drank the whole thing in several gulps.

It tasted sweet and umami. Only the subtlest hints of earth and alcohol cut through the familiar taste of carrot juice.

Victor scanned his mind and body. The beating of his heart and his breath felt characteristically uneven. He paced, pushing away the suspicion that Pearl had tricked him. When his gaze fell on the file of medical records on his coffee table, he retreated to the kitchen. He heated a prepared meal and ate it quickly, burning the roof of his mouth.

It was past noon. He couldn’t stay in his apartment freaking out over nothing. Victor drove to the Gene-Us campus and hurried across the parking lot, entering through a side-door shortcut near his office. He sat at his desk, adjusting the brightness on the array of vidscreens in front of him, fully intending to spend the next few hours diving into the work that had piled up in his absence.

A jagged line traced the usage of computing resources for a large batch of proto-cancer gene screenings. He looked at reports on the gene sequencers’ performance, including error rates in the sequencing flow, idle processing capacity in the Gene-Us computer network, and bottlenecks in the transfer of data from the sequencing machines to the Bose-Drive storage rooms. He’d seen outputs like these hundreds of times before, but it felt like he was seeing the data for the first time. He pulled up another log containing thousands of lines of code and looked for anomalies. In a flash, he understood where a subunit of the algorithm was looping, getting stuck on itself as it churned through millions of sequenced base pairs, filling the log with junk data interspersed with the good.

Sweat formed in his armpits, and he wiped his forehead. He made edits on the fly, breaking the department protocol of cross-checking changes with another analyst, and reran the test. The loops had disappeared. The updated algorithm resulted in a 23 percent efficiency gain.

The fair-haired, pink-skinned male analyst next to him wheeled his chair over and asked, “What are you hooting about?”

Victor pointed to the screen. “This took me less than five minutes.”

The analyst cocked his head, reading. Then his lips parted in a broad smile, showing slightly yellowed teeth. “You’re kidding me. Send me your log.”

Victor swiped the records into the analyst’s queue. A minute or so later, his colleague whistled. “That’s incredible. Can I get you to look at something I’ve been working on?”

Victor wheeled over and watched a coding matrix rise on the vidscreen.

The analyst said, “I know there’s a mismatch in here, but I
—
”

“There,” Victor said, gently moving the analyst’s hand off the touchpad and zooming in with his fingers. “I’ll bet it’s keyed off the wrong reference sequence. Check the library files from the Human Genome Initiative’s feed. They might have updated them without telling us.”

The analyst grabbed Victor’s arm as if to verify he was really there. “What’s got into you?”