Crache (16 page)

“That’s all right.” He laughs quietly to himself. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

After all, he’s a cripple. Career challenged. He’s hit his glass ceiling, isn’t rising any higher in life than the domed vat that’s got him boxed in.

That’s what the
chavo
doesn’t realize. He’s young enough, educated enough, to believe there’s a way out. He’s not like the rest of them who are trapped here. He sees himself as different. Smarter. Immune to the same psychological pitfalls.

They all thought that about themselves, at the start. They thought being a
bracero
was temporary. A job they could stop doing at any point, just walk away and go back to school, or drive a taxi, or whatever else came along.

Except nothing else ever came along. After a while, it was too late to do anything different. And before they knew it, it had become a way of life.

That’s what makes the migrants a community. The shared knowledge that they’re all caught in the same situation. No one is any better or any worse. They’ve all swallowed their pride. Bitten back on their hatred of the system. Let go of their longing for middle- or upper-clade respectability. Stuffed these feelings into a mental closet or swept them under a carpet of resignation.

Que viven los mojados!

The old battle cry sounds hollow. The slogan empty and gutted. A mockery of the defiance it once embodied.

Is that why the Blue Lady returned to him? To stir up the mud of complacency he’s mired in? Remind him of what it feels like to struggle?

Hell. It’s been too long since he fought for anything—or against anything. He swore off idealism the day his hand was trashed. Activism is a conceit of youth, reserved for people who have a future, something to look forward to. Why choose him to fight the battle?

His head aches like a motherfucker. Almost as bad as his fingers knotted around a cluster of crushed berries.

Maybe that’s why she appeared to him after so long. He’s always been a glutton for punishment. Can’t get enough.

This is no different. It’s like he’s addicted to affliction. He just hopes the pain is as sweet as it used to be, that it’s got enough sugar to dilute the quinine that’s replaced the blood pumping through his veins.

19

FEEDBACK

F
ola’s fingers uncurl from the missing cross. In its absence the ICM eyescreens press against her face, cold and dense as lead.

“I need to open an outside comlink,” she tells Pheidoh.

“To who?”

“Xophia.” The IA should have the com frequency for the shuttle from the earlier transmission. She’s tired of waiting to hear back from Ephraim on the status of the shuttle. When is it scheduled to arrive? What are the conditions onboard? Are they worse? They must be. If so, how much worse?

Other questions gnaw at her, sharp, ulcerous.

If the shuttle arrives before the evacuees, what happens to the workers? How does she bring the refugees onto the station without contaminating the quarantine zone? If the evacuees arrive before the shuttle, what happens to the refugees? What if they can’t be safely brought aboard the station? What then? They can’t be diverted to another colony. They can’t go back.

“Who are you?” the pilot says, squinting through narrowed eyes.

“Fola.” Her name seems to stick to the roof of her mouth. “I’m helping Ephraim. He can’t . . . he’s busy right now.”

“You a refugee?”

“No. I mean, not anymore. I used to be. But now I’m a worker on the Mymercia construction station.”

“Right.” He relaxes a bit, some of the tension easing at the corners of his mouth. “You ever done this before?”

“What?” The question derails her.

“I thought so.” He massages his face. His speech isn’t the only thing about him that’s gruff. His beard is a tangle, his hair a thin, bristly patch. A month’s growth in six months, his metabolism slowed during the trip by semistasis drugs. “The main thing to keep in mind when we arrive is don’t get fancy. That’s when mistakes happen and things go wrong. You know what I’m saying? No relatives or friends who could get in the way, or be a distraction. Keep it low-key, low-profile, and everything’ll be just fine. Slicker than snot.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not—right now I just need to talk to Xophia. That’s all. It’s about the disease.” Maybe if she passes on what she knows about the quanticles, that will help Xophia. A vague, grasping hope.

“We’re still twelve hours out,” the pilot goes on. “That gives you some time to prepare—make sure everything’s good to go.”

She shakes her head. “You can’t dock yet.”

“Come again?”

“The ecotecture here is failing. The warm-blooded plants are dying. Life-support on the asteroid is down and the onsite construction crew is being evacuated. You have to hold off for a while.”

“We don’t have a while.” He shakes his head. “We’re carrying one extra person. Burned up all our resources. We’re running on empty. Besides, most of us are half-dead or will be by the time we get there. If we don’t dock and get some medical attention we aren’t going to make it.”

Fola blinks as the image of the pilot is replaced by a bitcam window showing the QZ.

“I thought you should know that Kerusa plans to start shuttling workers from the surface to the station in an hour to two,” Pheidoh says.

“What happens when they get here?” The pace to set up the quarantine zone has increased in the past twenty minutes.

“They jack into Intensive Care Modules and use them as temporary life-support.”

A queasy dread descends on Fola. It’s not going to work. She can’t think of any way to bring the refugees onto the station without putting the workers at risk.

She looks for Ephraim. But she can’t make out faces, they are too small, and her thoughts are a tangle, too tightly knotted to see clearly.

“There’s been a complication with Lejandra,” the IA says after a pause. “Sniffers have identified an unregistered pherion on her.”

She closes her eyes, lets out a breath, and reopens them. “What kind of pherion?”

“An antipher to one of the security pherions that guards the outer perimeter of the work camp.”

“Any idea where it came from, or how Lejandra picked it up? Is it related to the quanticles?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Show me.” It might be nothing. But right now, it’s all she’s got.

Twelve hours. Enough time to send and receive one message. After that, all bets are off.

Back in the adobe-walled courtyard, the saguaro that represents Lejandra’s clade-profile seems more withered, more skeletal. “What am I looking for?” Fola squints at the umbrella palms, scruffy circuitrees, barrel cacti, and bougainvillea atop the wall. Avoids looking at the snakes.

Pheidoh steps out of a nearby shadow. The IA is dressed in its familiar khakis and pith helmet. It pulls out its magnifying glass and inspects a low-hanging branch on one of the circuitrees. A moment later a datawindow opens in front of her to display the magnified representation of an insect.

“Is this the sniffer?”

The IA consults a private datawindow. “It’s called a snaphid.”

The ’sect looks like a cross between a snail and an aphid. Instead of legs, it has a half dozen amoebalike feet. Its mouth is a nubbed needle-thin proboscis, which it uses like a cane to feel its way along and spear the occasional rogue molecule.

“Was it here before?” Not that she would have noticed unless Pheidoh pointed it out to her.

“No. It was recently introduced to this particular clade.”

“By the politicorp?”

“No.” Pheidoh lowers the magnifying glass and the datawindow vanishes. “The Bureau of Ecotectural Assimilation and Naturalization.”

“Why BEAN?”

“Guest worker programs provide a convenient place for fugitives to hide and illegal pharmers to operate. They are also used by anticorpocracy orgs to gain access to certain clades.”

“You mean like the ICLU?”

“And the Fun Da Mentalists.”

The Fun Da Mentalists are fringe anarchists who seem to have no coherent plan to subvert the dominant paradigm other than the occasional random act of social disobedience and ecotectural sabotage. “So you think the sniffer was introduced to search for refugees and saboteurs.”

“Right. Black-market pherions or antisense blockers they might be using to mask their presence.”

Fola dents her lower lip with her teeth. “Is it possible the pherion was designed to hide the existence of the programmable matter?”

“By Bloody Mary, you mean?”

“That might explain why it suddenly showed up,” she says. “Why it wasn’t found earlier.”

“It’s possible,” the IA allows, “but not likely. The pherion doesn’t appear to have a softwire component.”

So there would be no way to remotely download it.

Pheidoh blows on the snaphid, which drops from the limb. “A more probable scenario is that the pherion is so new it slipped under radar. Or that it was manufactured shortly after the
braceros
arrived.”

“By who?”

“That’s what BEAN is trying to find out.”

“The
bruja,
” Fola says. It has to be. She came from Front Range City and was in direct contact with Lejandra. It would have been easy for her to bring it with her.

“Not necessarily.” The IA rubs the back of its neck with one hand and squints up at an invisible sun. “One other possibility is that Lejandra came into close physical proximity with someone else who entered the camp illegally in the last few hours.”

Normally most pherions couldn’t be transmitted through the air. They were too heavy, and had to be injected or sniffed. But, like any virus-based drug, some of them could be spread by a sneeze or a cough.

“What’s going to happen to Lejandra now?” If there’s one thing BEAN is famous for, it’s not turning a blind eye.

The datahound pinches its lower lip, gives it a contemplative tug. “A full biomed scan is being run on her. It’s being performed remotely, so it will take a while to get the results. In the meantime, BEAN is putting together a list of persons of interest. Workers they want to question.”

“Can’t they just release more sniffers? Isolate the source?”

“So far the pherion hasn’t shown up anywhere else in the camp, or in anyone else. It seems to have disappeared.”

Gone underground, Fola thinks. Into hiding. Which pretty much indicates that it’s not related to the quanticles or the ecotectural collapse. It’s specific to Lejandra. Something about her.

Pheidoh cocks its head to one side, as if listening intently.

“What?” she says.

“There’s a new transmission from L. Mariachi. Streamed from a security bitcam array.”

A translucent datawindow opens, the pane static-filled. Gradually, the blizzard of pixels clears, assembles into a bird’s-eye view of a deserted street. The hardpan is littered with bits of trash. Potted umbrella palms slouch in front of garish adscreens pasted to the cheap lichenboard facades of VRcades, shops, and restaurants. It’s night—or rather, early morning. The predawn sky in the east is starting to lighten, almost as bright as the halogen-blighted horizon to the west.

L. Mariachi is alone, propped against the biolum-washed wall of a dance club called Phallacies. He clutches the guitar unsteadily to his chest, as if he’s staggering under an enormous load.

“Is he drunk?” she asks.

“In pain,” Pheidoh says. “At the time of the transmission, he wasn’t authorized to receive a painkiller for his hand.”

It hurts to look at him. His features are a delirious amalgam of mascara black shadows and harsh cyanosis blue. Oxygen starved. The glow from the blue liquid crystal dancer above the entrance to Phallacies flickers at regular intervals, a tremolo effect that gives his movements a jerky quality.

He pushes himself off the wall, stumbles away from the dancer. Then Fola hears her own voice, vibrant in the cool air:
Who is the song for?

The words stop him. He stares down at the guitar, then turns toward the lewd dancer and falls on his knees, eyes uplifted, in an act of supplication. Fola’s knees throb with the remembered ache of her own pleas for strength or forgiveness.

“You want me to play again. Is that why you’re here? Is that why the
bruja
gave me the guitar?”

Her voice loops back, transmitted through the guitar:
You must have written it for a reason.

The time delay is disconcerting. She knows the questions ahead of time . . . which triggers disorienting moments of déjà vu while she’s waiting to hear his responses.

“Why now?” he asks. “After all these years?” Then, “Wait.” Raising one hand. “Don’t go.” He picks up the guitar, coaxes out a plaintive chord. “I’ll wait for you this time. I promise.”

Fola’s stomach crimps. She turns to Pheidoh. The IA has morphed into a bearded, bespectacled bohemian and is gazing at the datawindow as if deconstructing an abstract painting.

“Suggestions?” Fola asks. She doesn’t know what, if anything, the Blue Lady means to L. Mariachi at this point in his life. The last thing she wants to do is say the wrong thing, make him angry or depressed, to the point where he refuses to have anything more to do with her. If she’s not careful, she could do more harm than good.

The datahound combs its beard with pensive, long-nailed fingers. “Don’t answer.”

“You want me to play hard to get?”

“You’ve already asked him to play. If you ask him again, he might resent it or get suspicious.”

The strategy seems risky. She turns back to the five-hour-old image. L. Mariachi is still on his knees. “Do you know where he is now?”

“A sea sponge vat. That’s his scheduled work assignment.” The IA opens a second datawindow, which hangs next to the first like a companion piece in an art gallery. “This is interesting.”

In Fola’s experience “interesting” is probably the single most ominous word in the world.

“What?” she says when the datahound isn’t immediately forthcoming. All she can see are a few squiggly lines of partially decrypted ciphertext.

“The Bureau is sending a pair of agents to the biovat pharm.”

“In person?” Fola has never seen a BEAN investigator in-vivo. From everything she’s heard, she never wants to. Their rabidity is legendary.

“Two of them.” The datahound wrinkles its nose. “Rose and peacock.”

“Is that necessary?”

“They always travel in pairs. Usually, but not always, color coordinated.”

“What I mean is, that seems pretty extreme, sending them in-vivo. What are they going to do?”

“Intimate people.”

“You mean
intimidate
?”

“Only if they positively ID a suspect. Until then, the preferred modus operandi is to use indirect pressure to obtain information.”

Whatever that means.

“Often,” Pheidoh says, noticing her uncertainty, “the threat of physical force is all that’s required to beat the truth out of someone.”

“How thoughtful.” As a relief worker, she occasionally saw the victims of mental torture. Refugees and indentured workers like Xophia who would risk permanent injury or death rather than go back to worse.

The IA nods in apparent agreement. “The Bureau works hard to project an image of restraint.”

Hard to tell if the IA’s serious or echoing her sarcasm. “How soon will the agents get there?” she asks.

“Approximately fifty minutes. They’re currently en route from FRC.” Less than an hour. Not nearly enough time to send a warning.

“Do the workers at the vat pharm know they’re coming?”

“No. Surprise is also part of the information gathering strategy.”