Crache (3 page)

The man grinned. “You like my adwear?”

“No.” Pompoms on her hips, emphatic. “I think it’s disgusting.” The outline of a tongue formed in the middle of his forehead. It looked poised to lick her.

“Then how come you’re staring?” the second guy said with a wink.

“I’m
not
staring.” The tongue began to morph into a phallus. Fola looked away, back toward Xophia. And felt a sting on the side of her neck.

Tried to open her eyes.

Couldn’t.

She woke sometime later. Alone, disoriented, sticky with fear. She lay on a soft gel mattress in a shuttered room. Light from the window fell across her in narrow, diffraction-grating slats. Photon-thin. Too sharp to look at. Chills wracked her, a cold fever. She felt clammy inside. Syrupy.

Where was she?
Who
was she? Panic caught her in unhinged jaws and swallowed, pulling her down into suffocating darkness.

When she woke again, it was night and cooler. With the passing of the day’s heat her fear had evaporated, and with it her belief in God.

Mostly. The deindoctrination didn’t get everything. A few stubborn neural pathways survived. Mainly the fear of missing out on eternal life, a Madonna-ish urge to remain chaste, and her friendship with Xophia.

Xophia, who had waved good-bye when Fola glanced back. A quick farewell before the agents took her.

Xophia had known. She was working undercover for the ICLU and had arranged for the agents to take her, set her free.

Because Fola was still legally contracted to the Church, and because the ICLU couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t be located by the Ignatarians and reindoctrinated, the two ICLU deprogrammers put her in contact with an unregistered IA. The IA made her an offer.

Would she be interested in reclading to a completely new environment? A gengineered ecology, radically different from any of the politicorp-designed ecotectural systems that had been built after the Armageddon of overheating, overpopulation, and overeverything, including the loss of 98 percent of the world’s pre-ecocaust species?

Would she be willing to emigrate offworld?

Would she be willing to give up everything and everyone she’d known in order to become part of the new gestalt?

Hey, hey, whaddaya say? . . .

“Fola?”

She blinks and finds herself back in the cliff-face arcology. Upside down, staring through a lightdome at the phosphor-limned petals of a solcatcher. Parabolic membranes stretched sail-taut over structural cartilage. The petals billow and spin in the faint breeze given off by the distant sun, providing thermal and electric energy for the arcology. Less than a kilometer away, the Kuiper belt is a pearl necklace.

Hard to spec if the other solcatchers in the array have opened or not. Without the softwire link, or a bitcam image, she has no way of knowing.

Air blowing somewhere, noiseless. As furtive and tentative as the breaths of the half dozen refugees she knows are hiding somewhere in the arcology. Waiting. Caught in a collective cessation of all activity.

“Fola?” Urgency frames the question, an anxious, peremptory concern. “Can you hear me?”

Pheidoh. The information agent’s voice sends a wave of comfort through her, as clear and sustained as a struck note. Hard to believe how much she’s come to rely on it—not just for information but companionship.

“I hear you.” She flips. “What’s going on?”

“Good question.”

“Where are the others?” She reorients herself, looks in the direction where Ingrid and Liam were last working. “Are they okay?”

No answer. The IA is offline again. Not only that, her biosuit is flickering, strobing between solid fabric and something more diaphanous and fuzzy. She can spec her hand through the suit, make out the tracery of bones beneath translucent flesh.

“Fola?” Liam’s face blooms on the inside of her wraparound shades. Eyes wide, brimming with fear. “Help . . .” His lips form an O as he struggles to speak and a bubble of saliva balloons from his mouth.

“Why?” she says. “What’s—?”

He stiffens. For an instant his face resembles a papier-mâché mask with black-painted eyes, nose, and the grinning, cadaverous outline of teeth. A second later he’s gone, little more than an afterimage.

The pain in her head spikes. She screams, vaguely aware of the cold, poisonous chill traveling up her arm.

5

SURFACE TENSION

W
ith one fingertip, A. Rexx traces a molecular sentence in the page of the genome he’s editing.

The gene sequence is as soft as bordello velvet, smells of honeyed raspberries and belongs to a new strain of warm-blooded orchid he’s gengineering. Subsequent pages and lines of geneprint in the architext describe the complete genome of the flower.

“Line edit,” Rexx says, instructing his IA to remove a line of code from the page and thread it onto the molecular loom in the center slate of the architext.

“What magnification/location?” Ida Claire says with the deadpan formality the IA never fails to use when addressing him. As if the IA is parodying him, tailoring its speech to match the uppity manners associated with old-world caucs.

“Six hundred nanometer resolution. Interval 128–134 cM. Transcription node D1S412. Site1365.”

The thread expands into a series of brightly colored capsule-shaped genes, strung end to end, that remind him of jelly beans.

“Nucleotide sequence name?” the IA says.

“P14587.”

The sequence regulates the electroconductivity of the orchid. It’s been requisitioned by colonists on Petraea, where it’s needed to extract toxins from the raw meltage supplied by wells that have been drilled in the thick mantle of ice covering the asteroid.

“File retrieve,” Rexx says. “Petraea work library.”

A list of encrypted data set names populates the left-hand page of the architext.

“File name?”

“TG14590.”

A second series of base-pairs, shorter than the first, fills the middle panel of the architext.

“Insert . . . here.” Rexx touches a specific base-pair near one end of the P14587 sequence. In less than an eye blink, the TG14590 base-pair sequence insinuates itself seamlessly into the gene, which lengthens infinitesimally, like a snake adding vertebrae. The petals of the orchid flicker, then steady.

“The recombination appears to be viable/error free,” the IA says after the staccato waver subsides.

“Okay. Compile and reprint.”

Rexx shifts his attention from the architext—a trifold assemblage with pewter-hinged slates, a cherrywood frame, and tooled leather clasp—to gaze out the virtual office window beside him. The flower clings to a wrought-iron trellis. Pale white flecked with gold. Later, when the digital DNA has been downloaded and molectronically converted into its organic analog, he’ll visit the in-vivo greenhouse to check on the test specimen, verify that the softwire link is intact and that nothing is out of joint. It doesn’t happen very often but he likes to physically touch a plant. Until then it’s not real. Not really.

As he’s admiring his handiwork, a gate opens in the fence on the far side of the garden. Lavender and white wisteria garland the wrought-iron arch. A bent figure appears in the opening, dappled with shadows, motes of pollen, and clusters of butterflies.

Pilar Atienza. She’s gussied up in a purple sari. A yellow headband ties back her long steel gray hair, which has the thickness and texture of worsted wool. Identical to the way she wore it the one time he’d met her in person. Which tells him that the image is probably realtime, a bitcam telepresence image projected on the fabric of the ribozone rather than an in-virtu avatar.

She crosses the garden to his window. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

He shakes his head—“Naw”—and forces a smile, acutely aware of the blubbery weight of his lips.

She tips her head to the orchid. A little bow of acknowledgment or appreciation. “Very nice.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. It’s beautiful.”

“Appearances can be deceiving.”

“Really.” She cocks a brow. Quizzical? Bemused? Coquettish? “Mind if I come in?”

Rexx shrugs. He taps out a series of quick fingerstrokes that reconfigure the walls around him to accept her clade-profile and iDNA security signature. The office window widens and lengthens, creating a doorway. As soon as her image steps inside, the door reverts to a window.

“What can I do you for?” he says.

As a segue, she smoothes her sari. “I need your help.”

“With what?”

She signs open a wallscreen. The translucent rectangular screen, superimposed on the virtuality, fills one side of the room. “There’s a problem with the new Mymercia ecotecture.”

He frowns. “What kind of problem?”

A deft hand movement calls up an image of the arcology. The picture is low-rez and grainy. It displays what looks like a cathedral gourd. The warm-blooded plant covers an immense lightwell a hundred or so meters from the edge of a deep fissure. The plant appears to be dead. The outer membrane is shriveled. Ditto the array of light-gathering and focusing lenses that blister the surface. Some of the lenses have ruptured, leaving open pustules. Destroyed are the tiny pores that absorb carbon dioxide and the microminiature air locks that prevent oxygen and water loss.

“As you can see,” Pilar says, “there’s been a failure.”

No shit. “What happened?”

She looks from the wallscreen to the side of his face. “That’s what we want you to find out.”

Surface tension. Rexx can suddenly feel it tugging at him, threatening to pull him under the smooth, unwrinkled existence of his day-to-day routine. Slow down too much, pause or change his trajectory, and he will sink. Death by coefficient of drag.

“Why me?” he says. “I don’t know squat about the design or construction specs. I wasn’t even involved in the project.”

“That’s exactly why the council would like you to head the investigation. You’re an outside observer.”

“You don’t think an internal investigation can be trusted?”

“It’s always better to have an independent opinion. Someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in the outcome. Who doesn’t have to worry about shouldering blame or pointing fingers.”

Rexx shakes his head, unconvinced, then glances back to the grisly image on the screen. “Was anyone hurt?”

“Three workers were killed.”

“How did they die?”

“We’re not sure.” She grimaces. “There’s not enough . . . there’s not much physical evidence to go on. The only remains we have is an arm. I’m afraid that’s all there is for you to autopsy.”

“I might be a lot of things, but one thing I’m not is a doctor.”

“There’s also a survivor,” Pilar says, ignoring his protest. “She’s in intensive care. Since the medical facilities on the asteroid aren’t operational yet, she was shuttled up to the station immediately, before we knew the full extent of the problem.” Pilar hesitates. “She’s still unconscious. When she wakes up we’re hoping that she can tell us something.”

If she wakes up, Rexx thinks. He can read between the lines. The prognosis isn’t good.

“Here’s her file.” Pilar squirts him the woman’s biomed readouts.

He leaves the file unopened. “I assume construction’s been put on hold.”

Pilar nods. “For now. The problem is, there are almost a thousand workers trapped on the surface. They’ve got enough air and water to last for a few days. But beyond that . . .” She lets him fill in the blank.

“Can’t you shuttle them up to the station, too?”

Pilar shakes her head, grim. “Not until we know what’s going on. We can’t take the chance that whatever happened on the surface will spread. Right now, we only have to isolate one person. That’s manageable. Nine hundred isn’t. Not with another fifteen hundred on the station who are potentially at risk.”

“You got any idea what went haywire? Preliminary clues? Theories?” Anything at all to point him in the right direction.

“No. The project manager is still analyzing the sensor data. Putting together a regression model and sequence of events.”

Rexx jerks his head in the direction of the partially collapsed lightdome. “Is that the only failure?”

“No. There are others throughout. Dead or dying plants.”

“So the entire ecotecture was affected. Not just one component.”

“Right.”

Which means that something has gone wrong at the core code level. Rexx lets out a breath. “All right,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you.”

She gives his arm a gentle squeeze, the gratitude transmitted from her nervous system to his via the interconnective tissue of the eoctecture they share. Rexx flinches at the touch, embarrassed by the Gothic immensity of his flesh. He kicks his self-consciousness into submission. Like any self-respecting cauc who comes from a long line of holier-than-thou Baptists, he’s well versed in the art of abstinence, denial, and the parsimonious communication of his true inner feelings.

His attention drifts back to the virtual flower. Even though it’s just a construct, a symbolic representation of the ecotecture he’s working in, he likes to watch the garden change and grow in response to the edits he makes. Maybe because Jelena had liked to garden, and this is one way to prop up the fantasy that on some level she really had been happy as his wife. That it wasn’t the pherions she’d been doped with as part of the arranged marriage. That it wasn’t just his father’s billions, or his mother’s upper-clade status. He likes to think that without any of those things she would have cared for him . . . despite the fact that he was the son of a first-rate bitch and had been gengineered to be as ostentatious as his Texas bloatware father. At least he hadn’t succumbed to autoerotic asphyxiation in a Juárez brothel. The fat and Jelena are gone now. All that’s left is a shell draped in elephantine folds of skin, a ponderous, wrinkled overcoat that he can’t bring himself to throw out.

Adipose. Jelena had coined the nickname—a term of endearment. “You’re my Fats Domino and my Phat Chantz,” she told him once, “all rolled into one.”

Without the artificial pair-bond created by pherions, he was all hat and no cattle. So plug-ugly no one in their right mind would be physically attracted to him. On her own Jelena would never have found him cute or cuddly, an overstuffed teddy bear worthy of a pet name. Without the pherions, she would never have endured the blubbery groping that led to Mathieu, the only good thing to ever come out of him. And in the end even that had been taken away.

The coffins were made of injection-molded diamond. They had flower petals embedded just beneath the surface. Lilies of the valley for his wife, and violets for his son, whose favorite color had been purple.

The flowers—thought to be extinct until a couple of years ago when a few dried specimens had been found pressed between the pages of a scrapbook in Hong Kong—had cost more than the coffins and been paid for by his mother. Except for a picture-frame oval at face level, the petals completely covered the corpses. Other than Rexx, no one at the funeral wanted to remember the way his loved ones had died—only the way they’d lived. For Rexx, there was no way to separate their life from their death. That was the way he thought of them, as a single life undifferentiated from his own. His mother, a venerable sesquicentenarian who’d been born before the ecocaust and survived the die-off, seemed indifferent to their passing. As far as Rexx could spec, she felt nothing, not even fatalistic resignation. She was hardened against death—not just in herself but in others. She refused to discuss the accident, arguing that nothing could be gained by fixating on the details.

“An exercise in futility, my dear boy,” she said. “Pointless.”

It was the same attitude she’d adopted after his father’s less than noble passing south of the border.

“A horse rears for no reason,” she argued. “Tragic, yes. Worth killing yourself over, no.”

No. Not for no reason. The horse reared because . . .

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” his mother said, giving his arm a firm squeeze, “it’s that life goes on.”

Her hand lingered. Intimate. Possessive. They stood outside the small chapel, in the granite-walled foyer of the mausoleum where the caskets would be interred. The chapel, modeled after one of the great pyramids, was a platinum-and-glass affair with sharp angles, tinted windows, and fountains that cascaded into reflective ponds.

“You never liked Jelena,” he said. She had opposed the marriage from day one—which had been arranged by his father—and done everything she could to sabotage it.

“That’s not true.” His mother removed her ruby-gloved hand, leaving behind the extinct odor of geraniums. “She was very . . . industrious.”

He didn’t have the energy, or desire, to translate the euphemism. He was beyond caring. Beyond
her
.

“Mathieu was a fine boy,” she allowed, the gold brooch in the front of her collar offering a sympathetic flash. “What will you do now?”

“I haven’t decided,” he said, the lie as dry as a bleached bone in his mouth. He met her gaze, the jaundiced apathy limning her eyes. All life had evaporated from her, leaving behind a dry residue. A bathtub ring of indifference.

“It’s important to do
some
thing,” she said, “
any
thing. It doesn’t matter what. I assume you’re working on a project.”

He nodded. A saline-resistant grass for Alaska’s emergent wetlands. The senior management team at Sygnostics—the gengineering corp he worked for—was hoping to develop a clade-compatible version for Siberia.

“Good. You’ll find that work obligations and commitments can be a blessing at a time like this.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. Unable to add, “I’ll be fine,” but allowing the implication to hang in the air.

It seemed to be enough. Satisfied, his mother withdrew into her hard outer shell of platinum lamé and bacteria-complected skin.

Two weeks later he was gone, recladed, riding a shuttle that would take him to the Kuiper belt along with twelve other emigrants looking for someone or something else.

Rexx blinks, shifts his attention from the orchid to the architext. “File close,” he tells his IA.

“Do you want to save your changes?” Ida Claire says.

“That’d be dandy.”

Maybe the IA’s unfriendliness is a heuristic fluke, something it has no control over, like bad gas or a weak bladder. Then there’s the IA’s name. Another barb? There’s no way to know. There aren’t enough caucs on Tiresias to establish a statistical basis for the IA’s behavior toward him.