Montezuma Strip (14 page)

Pale blue eyes considered as the girl addressed the lemur. “What do you think, little preman? Should we let her go?”

The sifaka had been preening its long, black-striped tail. Now it stopped to stare at the woman. “Kill the bitch,” it said
distinctly in its liquid tenor.

The matron’s eyes widened. “No, it can’t, you can’t.”

“Tear out her womb. No, let me.” The lemur leaped, landing gracefully on the now-empty cage nearest the woman. She screamed
and bolted.

“Can’t you see the girl’s controlling it?” But his terrified visitor didn’t hear. She stumbled over a pile of bagged pet food
and fell to the ground. The sifaka landed on her back,
clawing at her expensive clothes. On hands and knees the woman scrabbled toward the doorway. Behind her Gluey was cracking
up, his machinegunlike laugh only half natural. The girl in the suit wasn’t smiling.

Bloody gouges appeared in the matron’s back as the lemur’s claws dug deep. She moaned as she staggered to her feet and clawed
weakly at the door latch. The girl whispered something into the vorec that hovered at her lips and the sifaka released its
grip on the woman’s shoulders, pivoting to race toward the van on all fours.

Sobbing, the would-be customer stumbled through the portal. An instant later the merchant darted after her, thinking of the
gun secured to the underside of his front counter. Twotrick uttered an oath in spanglish and Gluey’s maniacal giggling ceased.

The girl reacted, the sensors proximate to her arms and legs, hips and head automatically transmitting her movements to the
nearest magified animal. The reticulated python whipped out and caught the shop owner around the legs, bringing him crashing
to the floor in an explosion of supplies and empty cages. The girl’s lips moved.

“Too late,
ladrón
.” The python’s voicebox had to work hard to generate an intelligible wheeze. “You sell no more magic animals.”

The merchant flopped wildly as the python threw a coil as thick as a man’s arm around his neck. It was an unnatural movement
for the big snake. Ordinarily it would slip its coils around its prey’s chest, patiently constricting as the quarry inhaled,
suffocating it. But for the moment its muscles functioned in obedience to the girl’s movements.

“Please!” Suddenly the shop owner was pleading, no longer threatening but frightened, really scared now. “You’ve already ruined
me. Enough!”

“No,” the girl murmured tightly. “No, not enough. Not this time. Not anymore, enough.” Slowly she brought her arms across
her chest. As she did so the snake’s coil, taut as steel cable, tightened convulsively around the man’s neck. He
screamed. But it was late, and dark, and the buildings on the other side of the alley were silent and deserted.

Gluey giggled when the man’s spine popped.

The girl turned away and rubbed at her eyes, too-tired orbs that seemed to belong to anyone but a sixteen-year-old.

“Let’s finish it,” she muttered determinedly. TWotrick gazed solemnly back at her and nodded.

Too much stimmed dancing had damaged the young orangutan’s leg. It took the two of them to help it out of its cage and into
the waiting van. City noises, Strip sounds, drifted into the empty alley. The merchant lay on his side, eyes gazing blankly
at the ceiling of his storeroom, his head screwed ‘round at an impossible angle. At the best speed it could manage, the python
slithered off him and headed toward the alley.

“We’ve checked with the San Juana, Nogales, and Yumarado district SPCAs and the big regional animal rights activist groups.
All of ‘em deny any knowledge. As usual, nobody knows nothing. But some outfit in San Luis calling itself the Protectors of
the Wild got a whole truckload of critters dumped on them the morning after the homicide. Half of ‘em were danspecs, endangered
species, and nearly all had been magified. Enough violations to seq the guy for twenty years if he hadn’t already been nulled.”

“You think they’re telling the truth?” Cardenas gazed out the window.

The lieutenant shrugged. “Fanatic animal freaks, who knows? Usually they’re about as cooperative as last week’s hash. But
we don’t have a thing on any of them and the Yumarado office can hardly drag people in on suspicion. Some of them say that
they’re willing to answer questions. So Yumarado asked for my best questioner. That’s you, Angel.”

Cardenas didn’t turn away from the view. Focus of law
enforcement on the Montezuma Strip between East San Juana and Elpaso Juarez, the Nogales Police Complex leaned west toward
the distant green monument of Tumacacori. North to Phoenix, south to Guyamas, east and west to the sea, the
maquiladora
plants of the Strip ingested raw materials and basic components from around the world and through application of massive
quantities of skill and labor transformed them into consumer goods, unwanted excess heat, and enough nighttime light to drown
out the desert stars.

Millions of people worked in the Strip’s vast multinat design and assembly facilities; mask sculptors, compilers, fabrication
artists, whitecoats from all over Namerica, each hoping to rise through the ranks, each aspiring to a codo in Phoenix or Guyamas,
San Juana or Felipe. In the rush to achieve, to succeed, to survive, there was little time left to devote to abstract moral
crusades. Those remained the province of the truly idle, the entertainers and industrialists of LaLa or the Big CMC.

To sate their consciences they gave money, and time when it was convenient and efficacious. Then they hurried back to their
sumptuous homes and careers, content that they’d done their humanitarian duty until the next TV headlines made them uneasy
afresh and they sensed it was time for their next egalitarian fix. Celebrities shot up on moral rectitude.

The true animal rights activists were more dedicated. For them convictions were more than a hobby. They fought, and marched,
and struggled to put across their philosophy.

But to the best of Cardenas’s knowledge they didn’t murder those they disagreed with. Until, possibly, now.

“What about the woman who was in the store?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “She was pretty shook up. Managed to get a quick statement out of her before her husband hustled
her out of Tucson. He’s some fancy doctor back East. You saw the transcript. Three crazy kids, animals that went gonzo, one
that attacked her. Not much detail on the kids. One black, one white, one spanglo. Since when have ninlocos started taking
an interest in animal rights?” He shook his
head. “Doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing in it for them. Too bad she didn’t witness the actual homicide. From her description
none of the intruders was big enough to have killed the owner, but that doesn’t make him any less dead. Maybe there was a
fourth party she didn’t see. Given her state of mind at the time it’s not an unreasonable assumption.”

Cardenas nodded. The coroner’s pictures made it look as if the shop owner had been strangled with an anchor chain.

He hopped an express induction shuttle west, the crowded high-speed public transport following the approximate line of the
old U.S.-Mexican border. The plastic car smelled of disinfectant and spanglish fast food. The local from Yumarado Central
dropped him off two blocks from the station, where a bored investigator went over the details of the murder with him one more
time and finished by pumping the official line into his notex. The crunch included the address of every local organization
with an interest in animal rights and endangered species.

He checked out the Friends of the Earth office first, then the Nature Conservancy people, then the Yumarado arcomplex SPCA.
No one he talked to expressed much sympathy for the dead pet store owner. All were violently opposed to the semilegal concept
of magimals, whether the involved was a representative of a rare species or just a common mutt. They thought the concept barbaric.
Cardenas didn’t argue with them; he just moved on.

He’d saved the offices of the Protectors of the Wild for last, since it was on their doorstep that the animals liberated from
the pet shop had been deposited. The young man who agreed to talk to him wore the beatific expression of the self-anointed.
His office was cantilevered out over the lower Colorado canal. As Cardenas took a seat an ocean-going freighter went plugging
past, headed downriver on its way
back to the Golfo de California. The docks where it had dropped its cargo lay farther upstream. In this part of the arcomplex
the canal was lined with offices and expensive codos.

“Nice place,” Cardenas commented, taking in the posters of big-eyed animals and lush rainforest that filled the walls.

“We’re fortunate to have a sponsorial legacy,” the young man told him. “We’ve already told the local police everything we
know.”

Cardenas smiled. He was a small man, deceptively muscular. His drooping dark mustache, flecked with gray, and his deepset
eyes gave him the appearance of a commiserating basset hound. Behind that harlequin visage lurked skill, talent, and a glittering
intelligence.

“I know. I don’t mean to take much of your time, but just to satisfy the people in Nogales, tell me. Please.” He smiled hopefully.

The younger man sighed. It was midsummer and he wore a white thermosensitive cool suit. It was ten
A.M
. and already the temperature outside had risen to forty-seven Celsius, on its way to a predicted forty-nine.

“Nothing much to say. The lady who opens for us every morning found one of our transit enclosures filled with new animals,
each group neatly separated into compatible cages. The note pinned on the gate just said, ‘Refugees: take care of them.’ That’s
what we’ve been doing.”

“I understand most of them have already been dispersed?”

The man nodded, looking pleased, as though he expected Cardenas to challenge him. “Police wanted them impounded as evidence,
but we got an animal habeas corpus fast. Most of them are already at or on their way to appropriate parks or reserves, where
they belong. The domestics are being given away as fast as we can do the operations and find homes for them. There are a lot
of people who still like unmagified pets. Birds that act like birds instead of stage performers. Cats that don’t do housework.”

“For what it’s worth,” Cardenas told him, “I don’t believe
in the modifications either. The best friend I ever had was a seeing-eye dog. Nobody had to program him to look out for me.”

It took some of the edge off his host’s attitude. “I didn’t know. We’ve fought for prohibiting legislation ever since the
technique was introduced, but it’s a new area of law and getting animal rights codified is a difficult slog. Too many people
haven’t made up their minds yet. It’s tough when your kid gets a dog for Christmas and the neighbor’s boy gets a puppy that
can fetch water from the bathroom, turn the pages of a book, and sing you to sleep while saying “I’m your best friend.’ It’s
unnatural and more than a little sick, but it sells.” He made a face. “Novelty always sells.”

“It hasn’t been proved that the magified animal suffers,” Cardenas felt compelled to point out.

“Not if it’s treated properly, no. Forget for a moment that it beggars the question of animal dignity and human responsibility.
We’ve got files of horror stories; kids overworking their magimals, exhausting them to death. Animals used for illegal purposes.
Sloppy installation and maintenance work. Pornography. You name it, I can show it to you.”

“We have our own files,” Cardenas reminded the man.

“But not our sources. People will come to us who don’t want to get involved with the federales. Let me show you just one example.”
He pulled a vorec from his pocket and addressed it quietly. The wallscreen to his left came to life.

Cardenas was interested. He’d never seen a magified alligator before.

The big reptile had been laid open along the back, the thick skin peeled aside to expose the deep red musculature beneath.

As his host spoke, the image zoomed in close to show the tiny controller unit that had been installed atop the gator’s spine.
Microscopic metallic filaments extended from the unit to the gator’s legs, tail, and skull. The program chip had been extracted
and lay atop the control unit. It was the size of a pinhead. Nearby lay a tiny plastic square from whose slick black surface
four miniature joysticks protruded. Using them,
the manipulator could electrically stimulate the animal’s muscles to expand and contract according to carefully prepared programs,
making it walk, run, jump, or execute any number of complex muscular activities, natural or anthropomorphized. Or the control
pad could be set aside in favor of automatic programs.

“The owner had the poor creature fitted with an attack chip,” the man explained. “Using the controller he could make it stand
on its hind legs and tail and fight off burglars. When he wasn’t around, the gator patrolled his place of business according
to an exhaustive protection sequence. The talk portion of the chip supplied the animal’s voicebox with some pretty intimidating
language.”

“I still marvel at how they make them speak,” Cardenas murmured.

The man smiled grimly as the wallscreen blanked. “If you want your magimal to talk you have to pay for a properly installed
artificial larynx. In every higher creature except man the larynx is elevated so the animal can breathe and drink at the same
time. That’s why unmodified apes and dogs can’t say so much as ‘hello.’ Neither can human babies under three months of age,
until their own voiceboxes begin to descend into the throat. But graft in a second, lowered larynx and animals can form words
just as effectively as the rest of us.

“Set the control chip to stimulate the second larynx according to preprogrammed patterns the same way it stimulates specific
muscles elsewhere in the body and you’ve got an animal that can ‘talk’. Except that it isn’t talking any more than the football-playing
grizzlies you’ve seen on TV are playing football. It’s all being run by programs or humans manipulating controllers.

“As much as we might’ve disliked this guy and what he was doing, we didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him.
Even if the local federales don’t believe us.”