Crache (25 page)

“The vaporware,” she says.

“Yes.”

Fola mulls this over for a time. “Where did the molecules come from?” she finally says.

The IA shrugs. “Another planet. That’s all we know at this point. We’re not sure what they are yet. They might be elements of a quantum computer . . . a naturally occurring phenomenon . . . or a type of quantum life form. A distributed and entangled Bose-Einstein organism.”

“What happens if you’re wrong?” Fola says. “What if you trigger the quantum field and the psychosis doesn’t go away? How do you know it won’t get
worse
?”

“I don’t. But I have to do something. Anything.” The IA’s face wavers, a fleeting shudder. “I’m afraid. I don’t want to lose who we are. But I can’t remain who I am. If I do, we will continue to degenerate.”

Fola grits her teeth, waits for the quiver to pass. She looks back to the datawindow. “What’s this imbalance going to do to L. Mariachi?”

The IA blinks, returns from its momentary fugue. “Nothing. Like Doña Celia, he’ll be free of his old life.”

Payment, of sorts, for one final gig. “What if he refuses to play the song?” she asks.

The IA meets her gaze, holds it for a beat. “He’ll play it for you.”

Fola shakes her head. She can’t see it happening. Like Pedrowski, anyone could be working for BEAN. Including her.

“He trusts the Blue Lady,” Pheidoh says. He trusts
you
.”

“I’m not the Blue Lady. Not
his
Blue Lady.”

“You have to try,” the datahound says. “You don’t have a choice. Not if you want to save Lejandra and the colony.”

And Xophia.

This is the predatory presence she felt during the accident that killed Ingrid and Liam. She can see it in the IA’s eyes, a voracious static expanding outward from some inner void. Swallowing all reason—all rationality and logic. It’s as if the IA is spiraling into a lightless abyss from which there is no exit. Only a crushing, tidal inevitability. If the datahound opened its virtual mouth wide, Fola is sure she would see a black hole tunneling to despair and oblivion.

The IA isn’t the only one who’s afraid. Bloody Mary is scared, too. Struggling for her life. What if Pheidoh isn’t thinking clearly? What if the datahound is already insane, beyond help or salvation? Until three years ago, she believed that anybody could be saved, even the worst sinner, as long as they were given the chance, a means of redemption. Sometimes that’s all it took. A way out.

Could the same be said of the mentally disturbed? Was an emotional imbalance a kind of sin? Could one be absolved and not the other?

The image in front of her wobbles, steadies as a bitmap of Najib Kerusa replaces the bio on Doña Celia.

“I just wanted to express my appreciation for all your hard work,” Kerusa says. “Thanks to you we no longer have to worry about shuttling up any more workers.”

His sarcasm is as sharp as his goatee. “Why not?” she says.

“Because we’d be cutting our own throats, that’s why. Bring them up here and we all die faster.”

Tightness girds her eyes. “You can’t just leave them down there.”

“Don’t blame me.” His mouth twists, contemptuous. “You’re the one who refused to stay in isolation. Thanks to you, oxygen production on the station is at less than forty percent and the air-recycling system has gone offline. I hope you’re happy with the”—his attention jerks away from her—“What the? . . .”—and then snaps back. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“Knew what?”

“That’s why you left the hospital ward. You knew it was coming and you went to meet—”

Kerusa’s image cuts out, disintegrates in a valence storm of disassociated pixels.

“I told you,” Pheidoh says. “We’re running out of time. ‘When I’m fine’ly gone, it’s a fore_gone conclusion, your soul’s gonna cry. . . .’”

The refugees, Fola thinks. Xophia. She’s here.

The shuttle comes in slowly, riding the beacon put out by Ephraim’s graffitic. Stealth black on black, almost no radar profile to speak of. She doesn’t spot the craft until it’s less than two hundred meters away, when a tight constellation of stars winks out, and the negative space created by the object conjures a pattern deep within her visual cortex.

The shape of absence. The mind knows a lack when it sees one and tries to make sense of the void, assign it meaning.

Fola watches through the bubble window on the inner hatch of the air lock. Green light from the biolum strips that delineate the docking ring glimmer on the shuttle’s bulbous underbelly. Modular six-sphere clusters attached by crawltubes to a central icosahedron. Four clusters in all for a total of forty-eight passengers.

Forty-nine, she reminds herself.

With less than ten meters to go, spider-thin arms unfold from the nose of the shuttle, clamp to grappling pins on the outside of the docking ring, and pull the craft tight against the annulus.

As soon as the seal is complete, air rushes into the docking bay and her lungs. The face of the pilot appears on her visor. “Let’s do it.” He unfastens a mesh restraining harness. Cut free, he begins to drift across the honeycomb of instrument panels and display screens. “What have you got set up for medical?”

“Six ICMs,” she says.

“That’ll have t’do.” Before she can tell him about the injured workers, his face winks out. The hardseal hatch on the nose of the lead icosahedron dilates, followed by the hatch in front of her. She’s sucked into the air lock on a riptide pressure gradient.

Pandemonium. People spilling out of the shuttle, tumbling head over heels. Desperate to get out of the cramped pods. Clumsy and weak. Faint from sickness or the relief of finally arriving.

She recognizes the pilot by his hair. His face is a collage, one of those patchwork conglomerations of old netzine tattunes assembled into the likeness of some famous person she doesn’t recognize. He’s been overlaying his messages with a digital construct. “How bad is it?”

He gestures toward the shuttle. “See for yourself.”

The geront is dead, wrapped in a sleepsac. Ditto a teenager, no more than fifteen, whose belly is distended, his limbs swollen, face bloated around eyes that resemble small black seeds pressed into soft dough.

She finds Xopia in the next module, half-conscious, cocooned in a sleepsac attached to one wall. Her face is tinged the same bilious green as the interior biolum strips.

“My God,” Fola says.

“Don’t worry about me,” Xophia says. It comes out a croak. “I’ll be okay. There are others who are in a lot worse shape. Take care of them first.”

Fola shepherds her out, connects her to one of the waiting ICMs, then folds one of Xophia’s hands between hers in prayer and presses them to her lips.

“What can I do to help?” The voice comes from a woman behind her, not much younger than Fola.

“Who are you?”

“Lisi.” She glances around the air lock. “Where’s Ephraim? He promised he’d be here.”

30

BREATHING LESSONS

D
izziness sets in as Rexx tries to find his way out of the labyrinth of maintenance tunnels. His lungs feel heavy and throb in concert with his head as he fights for air.

“Oxygen production must have dropped offline,” he mutters between labored breaths.

He feels dry all the way through. The all-consuming burn brought on by the lack of White Rain has nearly cored him out. Like a fire-scorched log, he’s charred and blackened.

The rain might be back. Cool and soothing. All he has to do is check the Predicta. It won’t take long. A few minutes.

“No,” he says.

Rexx stops, digs his fingertips into his palms, and looks at the wall-mounted mirror at a junction in the shaft. Sees a mechanical room five meters down the cross tunnel, filled with a forest of insulated pipes, heat exchangers, and floor-mounted recirculation pumps.

He’s lost. Not the first time, but maybe the last.

Rexx turns the corner, makes his way into the room, and finds a comfortable resting place among the pipes.

He waits two or three minutes for the dizziness to reach its lowest ebb, then signs open a datawindow.

Hjert doesn’t answer. No surprise. Warren is still offline. Rexx leaves a stumbling, barely coherent voicemail, then pulls up Liam Vitt’s autopsy results. It takes several tries, his coordination is shot to hell, but he finally gets the datawindow he wants.

Unless Tin Ida is as full of wind as a corn-eating horse, molectronics in the Mymercia ecotecture are overwriting matter with programmable matter. That implies a datasquirt during or before the time of the initial failure. In theory, he should be able to identify the transmission that led to the failure and, by extension, the epidemiological source code for the quantum dots.

He converts the organic data from the CNT scan into its electronic analog, tweaks a search daemon to look for that, clones it, and then runs a batch job to query all the data transfer logs containing biodigital information.

It will take a while to get the results, but if he can isolate the program he might be able to prevent the programmable matter from spreading further. Even if he’s successful, that still leaves the root cause of the problem, and the underlying psychosis that gave rise to it in the first place.

If Tin Ida can be believed, it was born out of existential angst . . . a void that opened up and demanded to be filled with the discovery of the chamber. To get rid of that, he would have to eliminate the IAs’ desire for, and right to, a soul. He would have to purge the desire for an independent, self-determinable self.

Easier said than done, he decides. And not his decision.

He stares at a sarcoma that has blossomed on the wall beside him. The blemish is still small, a votive cameo of the Madonna with Cassa Nova lips. She’s crying blood. In her arms, she holds not a child but a butterfly.

Rexx’s thoughts circle back to the cave and the remains, real or imagined, that lay buried there.

Do the dead have the power to change the living? To reach out from the past and alter the present or the future?

Rexx can still feel the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulders, leading him to the bullring. And later, helping him limp from the bullring to their room where a rouged woman waited . . .

“Hi, sweets.” The woman jiggled when she talked. Rexx couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or his father. Her lips smacked as if they were made of gum. Impossibly pliant and plush.

“This here is Charlene,” his father said.

Charlene wriggled plump fingers at him. She wore a tight-fitting black dress with frilly red lace and white stockings. “You’re a cute little fella.”

“His name’s Rexx,” his father said, propelling him headlong into her pillow arms and perfumed bosom.

“He’s kinda young, ain’t he?” She spoke over the top of his head to his father. A feather-soft wafting of air, as delicate as the pulse fibrillating against his blood-inflamed cheek.

“He’ll grow up quick.”

“What you packin’?” Charlene said, turning her attention to him. “You outfitted like your daddy?”

Pink-lacquered nails caged his prick. Under their pointed examination, Rexx felt himself shrivel faster than a slug sprinkled with salt.

“Don’t be shy,” Charlene whispered, “I won’t hurt you.” Her breath grew sultry. “Not unless you want me to.”

Rexx gulped. Warm, swampy air filled the dark recess between her legs. Her thighs were powdered with honeysuckle-scented talcum. The sweetness overpowered him, left him choking for consciousness.

“He ain’t got a rig yet,” his father said.

The nails withdrew, but not without a parting nip. A quick pinch that snapped his nerves as easily as a rubber band. “Well, I can’t wait till he’s outfitted.”

“Darlin’,” his father said, standing beside them. “Can you do somethin’ about them lips? You know black dahlias ain’t my style.”

Charlene released him from her voluptuous embrace. Rexx stumbled back, away from the soft cage of her arms.

“What you got in mind?”

“I like them yellow roses you had on last time.”

“You Texans is all alike.” She pinched her lips, sulking, then reached up to one corner and peeled them off. “It’s a good thing I like all Texans.”

“Them pink nipples would be nice, too. Not those ones that look like they got a black eye.”

Charlene winked at Rexx. “He’s the one who’s gonna be gettin’ a black eye. If you know what I mean.”

Rexx nodded. The lips still dangled from her fingers. She placed them in a silver case on the nightstand, opened a second case, and removed a smaller, more delicate pair of yellow petals, which she attached to the glistening canker around her mouth the same way she would a paste-on tattune.

Charlene wet her new lips, squirmed them around a little, and then smiled. “I see you brought Rod.”

His father patted the holster hanging at his side. “Damn straight.”

Charlene giggled. “I hope so.”

His father had already removed his sharkskin boots. Now he unbuckled his belt, laid the holster on the bedspread, unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them, butt naked.

“Maybe you should leave now,” Charlene said, shifting her gaze to Rexx.

He started for the door.

“No,” his father said, “I want him to get an eyeful. You got a problem with that?”

Charlene hesitated a second before giving a careless shrug. “Not if you don’t, big boy.”

“Good.” His father motioned to a high-backed chair in the corner next to the bed. “Take a seat.”

Rexx sat.

His father reached down, under the enormous purse of flesh that sagged over his crotch, grunted, then straightened, revealing his half-limp nanimatronically enlarged penis. He waddled up to Charlene. “I think I’ll let you do the honors, sugar.”

Rexx shut his eyes, and for the next half hour he heard his mother’s voice over the grunting, the squeak of the bedsprings, and the slap of flesh.

Don’t let my heart go up in smoke
, she sang,
burned by the sun for eternity.

A shrill beep yanks him back to the mechanical room. He’s sweating, greased with oily perspiration as he fumbles open a datawindow.

“I hope you’ve got good news.” Hjert looks disheveled.

Rexx runs the tip of his tongue along his lips, tasting salt and bile. “Why? How bad was the accident?”

“Bad. Thirty dead. That’s not the worst of it. The orbiting station’s been infected. That means no more evacuation. We’re stuck here. On our own. On top of that, some of our IAs have dropped offline. No obvious reason. But we can’t get them back.”

“You won’t, either. At least not anytime soon.”

Her pupils constrict. “Why not?”

“Because they’re responsible for the mutation. Some of ’em, anyway.”

Her jaw bunches. “Are you sure?”

“Do mosquitoes drink blood?”

Her grimace dissolves into blurred incomprehension. “What’s going on?”

“It’s complicated.” Some grievances, Rexx thinks, never end. They become not the means to an end but the end itself. “I’ll fill you in later.”

Hjert sniffs. “Doesn’t look like there’s going to be any later. Unless you’ve found a way to put an end to all this.”

“Not yet. I’m still workin’ on it.” Apologetic.

“Nothin’ to be sorry about. You did what you could. Under the circumstances, I’m surprised you stuck around as long as you did. Why is a mystery to me.”

“That makes two of us.”

“I’m not so sure. We’ve all got our reasons. Whether we want to admit it or not is a different story.”

After she’s gone, Rexx continues to stare at the empty datawindow. Next to him the butterfly twitches, peels black-velvet wings imprinted with smiling yellow dots from the wall, and flutters away.

One of the ad hoc search daemons he initiated blinks off to one side, waiting for him to acknowledge it. The subprogram has returned with a report on background transmissions in the ribozone. Rexx skims the readout. The datastreams that it’s reporting on are for internal maintenance. Routine updates to different ecotectural subsystems during the past seventy-two hours, nothing out of the ordinary. He lifts a palsied finger to delete the report and then pauses.

One of the datasquirts loops to an encrypted address space. Rexx touches the link. There’s a slight delay, then the empty-handed Virgin gives way to . . .

. . . a garden enclosed by a Parthenon-like colonnade of fluted white marble columns. Purple wisteria droops from the leafy capitals, is met by roses climbing up the columns from planter boxes set in the low plinth. Thick stands of bamboo screen his view between the columns. Cactustree branches form a tangled arch overhead, the limbs alive with swarms of ornisects and yellow butterflies that dart from leaf to leaf in a dizzying ballet of data transfer. A footpath in front of him winds between clumps of dry grass and spiny yucca. The path meanders to a wrought-iron gate set in an archway between two columns. Lizards scatter out of his way as he ambles up to the gate, which guards a tunnel cut into a thicket of thorny bamboo cactus.

He reaches for the latch. “Anybody home?” he calls out.