Crache (5 page)

He veers down a footpath that goes to a mission-style church, empty except for a few old women sequestered in prayer and frayed shawls. A rock skitters behind him. He cuts a quick glance back.

The gangstas have trailed him from the amphitheater. L. Mariachi darts left, into a palm-shaded garden with injection-molded statues of St. Francis and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Past the statues, the potted umbrella palms end and he suddenly finds himself at the westernmost edge of the EZ.

The barrier is invisible—no fence or signs announce the line—but he registers the demarcation as a faint tingle in his skin. With every step the warning amplifies. No way they’ll follow him this far. He’s not worth it.

“What are you doing?” Num Nut says.

Ahead of him loom the Rocky Mountains and the lights of Front Range City, just over the curve of the horizon. A green and yellow haze tinged with pink that stretches from Fort Collins in the north to Colorado Springs in the south. He hasn’t been to a city in years. Not since he left Mexico City.

“Don’t be stupid.” Somehow the IA manages to sound patronizing and worried at the same time.

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Tell me about it.” He’s itching like a motherfucker and his stomach is upset, but there’s no pain. Not yet.

“I don’t know what you hope to accomplish. You won’t get very far. You’ll end up in the clinic, unable to work for days.”

He keeps walking, stubbornly heading toward the light until a slow burn settles deep in his bones.

He turns. The gangstas are closing in, less than fifty meters away. Motherfuckers are persistent. Refuse to be deterred.

Another step. The heat increases. His nerves feel incandescent, as if they’re throwing off electrons. It’s getting harder to move and his lips grow numb, deadened by scorched myelin. It feels like he’s being cremated from the inside out. Tears bleed from the corners of his eyes, trail down his cheeks to the oil slick of drool and mucus glazing the stubble on his chin.

He sinks to his knees and tilts his head to the sky. “
Dulce dolor,
” he thinks.

“I’m calling for medical assistance.” The IA’s voice sounds far away and unreal, something out of a dream.

L. Mariachi collapses onto his side, his lips moving wordlessly, and sees the two gangstas walking toward him. Something sharp flashes in the lead gangsta’s hands, a bright sliver of metal or glass. L. Mariachi’s heart stutters. But there’s nothing he can do. He’s helpless as a lamb.

“Hurry,” the gangsta with the lame mustache says, “or we’re fucked.”

They grab him by the arms and drag him across the hardpan, back to the garden, where they lean him against the base of the Virgin Mary.

The gangsta with the mustache uncaps the plastic ampoule he’s carrying, jams it up L. Mariachi’s nose, and squeezes.

“Now what?” the other gangsta asks, glancing around nervously. They can’t be older than fourteen or fifteen and look like brothers. They have the same features, identical almond eyes.

“We wait,” the older one says. “Antipher will take effect in a couple of minutes.” He has the voice of authority, like he’s speaking from experience.

The gangstas squat on their haunches. What are they waiting for? They seem content to take their time, make him suffer.

From where he’s propped, L. Mariachi has a clear view of the Virgin. It looks like she’s gazing down at him instead of the Christ Child in her arms. Her expression is beatific but he’s not ready to give himself over to her loving embrace. In a few minutes, feeling starts to return to his lips and his limbs.

“Wah . . . ah?” he says.

The gangstas lean forward, elbows on their knees, and peer at him with a mixture of anxiety and expectation.

He tries again. “Wah you won?”

“We want you to play,” the older one says.

“Pway?”

The young gangsta makes a strumming motion with his right hand. “At a
limpia
for our sick aunt.”

Limpia
. Healing ceremony, spiritual cleansing.

“Wen?”

“Tonight.”

L. Mariachi shakes his head. “Don’ haf inshamen.”

“No problem,” the older gangsta says, making it clear that L. Mariachi doesn’t have a choice. “The
bruja
has a guitar.”

A
bruja
. Where did they find a witch? He didn’t know there were any traditional healers left.

L. Mariachi raises his left hand. Evidence that he can’t help, that they should find someone else.

The older gangsta grabs his hand and, misinterpreting his excuse as a gesture for help, hauls him to his feet. Together, draping his arms over their scrawny shoulders, they lead him away.

7

BAD SINNERGY

T
he music is as sad as it is angry. A fickle current, it carries her forward in fits and starts. First a torrent of harsh, badmash lyrics, followed by slow, amniotic chords that make her chest ache.

Don’t let my heart go

Up in smoke, burned by the sun

For eternity.

Instinctively, her right hand scrabbles for the cross. Cool, peroxide air caresses her fingertips. They close around nothing and continue to curl inward. Fingernails bite into her palms.

The cross is missing, its reassuring weight gone.

So is Ephraim. They’re no longer softwired. His absence is palpable, both a relief and a distress. It’s as if a damaged tooth has been pulled from her. The cavity left behind induces another kind of discomfort. An echo tosses fitfully in the space he once occupied.

No different from the Church after it was cut out of her.

She has nothing to anchor her. No
thing
to hang on to. Her only ballast is a vague heaviness in her lungs, brought on by the song. It seems to be the only thing holding her in place. Without it, she would float away. Her head would inflate and up she would go. Forever.

Which might not be a bad thing. Consciousness lies up there somewhere, beyond this rippling surface tension of light she can’t seem to break through.

“Fola?”

The voice yanks her out of the song. She jerks and struggles to open her eyes, afraid of slipping back into murky depths. “Pheidoh?” Her eyelids crack. Light seeps in, thick and moist between the dark lines of her lashes. Blurred diffraction-grating images clot her vision.

“How do you feel?” the IA says.

She blinks. Finds herself staring up at the cornea-thick lens of a small lightdome set in a hexagonal ceiling grid. Through the pressurized membrane she can see other hexapods, clustered together like atoms to form a large central nucleus. “Where am I?” Her voice is a scratchy whisper. The words rub against one another, dry as rain-starved grass.

“A hospicell on the construction station. You were brought here immediately after the accident.”

The accident. Liam’s face surfaces out of watery gloom, buoyed by a sudden rush of panic. Gone is the brashness. Everything has been stripped from him, except the knowledge that he’s going to die. Fola’s breath catches. She flinches at the memory of mummified skin and jaundiced eye sockets.

“It’s all right,” Pheidoh says. “You’re safe. Everything’s going to be fine.”

She tries to move and finds she’s immobilized by a sleepsac, held in place by gossamer tubes fastened to an Intensive Care Module. She glances at the grid of biolum panels, the medical equipment mounted on black-anodized racks, and a plain folding privacy screen that has been moved to the side and secured to one wall. The decor is pure Art Treko. All of the ceiling panels are featureless, depressing. There’s nothing, no one, to keep her company.

“Where’s Ephraim?” she asks. He’s dead. He has to be. That’s the emptiness she feels.

“He’s fine,” Pheidoh says.

Then why can’t she feel him? “Where?”

“Here on the station. He wasn’t involved in the accident.”

Fola draws a relieved breath, remembers that he was working in another section of the arcology.

She twists her head to the side. One of the hexcell’s walls is a window that looks out into an atrium. The atrium is the node for a hexapod. Five other cells identical to hers grouped around it. Bananopy fronds and tapestree limbs, woven together in an intricate macramé of Celtic knot designs, etch shadows onto the glass. A tight flock of scuttleaves dislodge from a limb to school like tropical fish in an aquarium.

“What about the others?” she asks. “What about Ingrid?”

“They didn’t make it,” another voice says over her cochlear implant. “You were the only survivor.”

The news is accompanied by a grainy bitcam image of a man projected onto the wallscreen in front of her. The man is older, an octogenarian at least, and wears a benevolent smile as pink as his crepe hospital sprayons.

She wills her hands to unfold, her jaw to unclench. “Who are you?”

“My name is Gilles Villaz. I’m the doctor in charge of your case.” His bushy bottlebrush eyebrows remind her of a species of hairy caterpillar, believed to be extinct, that has suddenly resurfaced in some backwater ecological niche. He has toffee-colored cough lozenges for eyes, a bulbous nose, and a hairless scalp populated with a menagerie of turtle, fish, and spider-shaped liver spots.

“How long since—” Bile froths up in her throat. She can hear Liam joking with her.
Nun of that, now
. She swallows. “How long have I been here?”

“A little over four hours.”

Hours. Fola was certain it had been longer. Days, maybe, or weeks. Some of the tension in her loosens, calves off like ice from a glacier. If she were seriously injured, it would have taken her longer to regain consciousness. They would have kept her sedated for any viral surgery, kept her under for as long as it took to heal. So she can’t have been hurt too badly. “How soon can I leave?” Except for the atrium, the sterile atmosphere in the hexcell gives her the chills. She wants to reconnect with Ephraim and the rest of her tuplet—Alphonse, Yulong, Lalya—as well as the warm-blooded plants. Especially the plants. She misses the calming effect they have, their slow circadian thrum.

“I’m not sure.” Dr. Villaz itches his nose. “Soon, I hope.” His smile is reserved but optimistic. “You’ve been placed in isolation until you receive a clean bill of health.”

No wonder she can’t feel the softwire connection to the warm-blooded plants, the autonomic stream of biochemicals. “I feel fine.”

“A period of observation is standard. Nothing more than a precaution.”

“How come I’m not allowed to get up or move around?” It occurs to her that this might be for her own good. That she might have a few broken bones that she’s not aware of.

“When you first arrived you suffered a number of grand mal seizures. We thought it best to immobilize you, for your own protection.”

That doesn’t explain why she’s been disconnected from the plants and her tuplet.

“We should know more soon,” the doctor says, “when your latest biomed scan is complete.”

“What happened down there?”

But the doctor is gone.

“There was a temporary instability in the ecotecture,” Pheidoh says. “A transient mutation.”

“What kind of mutation?” She was under the impression that mutations were permanent. But maybe not.

The IA hesitates. “It appears that a small portion of the architext is corrupt.”

The architext is the equivalent of the Bible for an ecotectural system. It contains the lines of molecular code that define all of the pherions, genes, and clade-profiles that make up the asteroid’s artificial ecology. “How was it corrupted?” she says.

“A mistake.”

“By who?” Ingrid? she wonders. Liam? Or one of the ICLU refugees Ephraim smuggled onto the asteroid. Could one of them have accidentally done something to trigger—

“It was an IA,” Pheidoh says.

Fola blinks. “You’re kidding?” IAs almost never make a mistake. “Has it been fixed?”

“I think so.”

Pheidoh doesn’t seem too sure. More hopeful than certain. Like the jury might still be out.

“Which IA was it?” she says.

There’s a pause. “I can’t say. It’s confidential.”

The information agent sounds embarrassed—upset the way some people get when they find out that someone close to them, a family member or friend, has done something terrible—as if it were personally responsible.

“What did it feel like?” Pheidoh says.

The question catches her by surprise. “What?”

“The accident.”

Fola grimaces. Tilts her head forward to inspect her arm. It looks okay. Normal. She rubs her fingers together. They don’t feel out of the ordinary—nothing like clay or papier-mâché. “It hurt,” she finally says.

When Pheidoh doesn’t answer immediately the doctor says, “You should try to get some rest.”

Fatigue weights her lids. “No,” she protests. “Wait . . .”

The next time she wakes, the sleepsac is gone. So is the tangle of tubes connecting her to the ICM. She’s free to move around. The interior decor has changed, too. The wallscreens are dotted with Art Frisco flowers, a cheerful assortment of hot pink, lemon yellow, and lime green daisies. The ceiling panels are stained glass. But instead of saints there are delicate flower stems and long-waisted women.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Pheidoh says over her cochlear implant. “I thought a change of scenery might make you feel a little more comfortable.”

It does. She feels calmer. “Who’s the artist?”

“Mucha.”

“You have visitors,” Dr. Villaz informs her. He sounds pleased, about this or something else, she’s not sure. Either way, it’s encouraging.

The pink daisies on one of the wall panels fade to reveal the hexapod outside her cell. Her tuplet has gathered in front of the honeycomb window, anxious but smiling, trying to put on a good face. Without the softwire link between them, that’s all she has to go on. Fola doesn’t know firsthand what they’re feeling. She can guess. But it’s impossible to know for certain.

Fola shifts the position of her arms and legs, then pushes away from the ICM. She gyrates clumsily as she reorients herself, snares a magnetic flux line and drifts over to the window. Executes an unsteady pirouette so she doesn’t splat against the glass like a bug on a windshield.

“How are you?” Alphonse asks, concerned. “They refuse to tell us anything about your condition.”

“I feel fine,” she says. “Except that I miss you all.” She rubs her arms, chafing at the absence.

“We were worried sick,” Lalya says.

The rest of them nod in unison.

“What about you?” Fola says. “Is everyone okay?”

“We’re fine,” Ephraim says. He looks less confident than he sounds. His lips are crimped tight.

All of them are nervous, apprehensive. The tension is contagious. She can feel it even without a shared nervous system. “What’s going on?” she says. “Do you have any idea what happened yet?”

“Are you kidding?” Yulong snorts, gruff as usual. “They haven’t told us shit.” A former vat rat who worked for a major engineering politicorp, she has the least respect of any of them for authority.

“We’re cut off from the asteroid,” Lalya says, matter-of-fact. “That’s what. They shut down the softwire link to the ecotecture so it can’t contaminate us.”

“From the mutation?”

“If that’s what it is,” Ephraim says.

Which explains why she’s in isolation, under observation. If Mymercia was affected, then the orbiting station is vulnerable. The ecotecture is identical. Since she was brought to the station after the accident, that makes her a risk, a potential carrier.

Fola adjusts the orientation of her arms and legs, stabilizing herself. “Is the station in any danger?”

“Not if we’re disconnected,” Ephraim says. She knows him well enough to know that he’s trying to convince himself as much as her and the others.

“That doesn’t mean we haven’t already been compromised,” Yulong snips. “It just might not have shown up yet, that’s all.”

“If the softwire link is down,” Lalya says, “then whatever infected the ecotecture down there can’t be transmitted to us.”

“We hope,” Yulong says. “If it has, we’ll be the last to know.”

“Construction’s been put on hold,” Alphonse says. “Right now, that’s all we know.”

They seem to be in the middle of an ongoing argument, one that doesn’t include her.

“So what have you been doing in the meantime?” Fola says, anxious to change the subject. Not only does she feel left out but she finds the discord irritating. She doesn’t have the energy or the patience right now to deal with their bickering. It seems pointless. How did she ever put up with it?

Ephraim grinds his teeth in frustration. “Not much we
can
do.” He’s worse than the rest of them put together when it comes to sitting around.

“We’ve been analyzing sensor data,” Alphonse says. “The last datasquirt from the solcatchers. With luck the sensor readings will be able to tell us something about the system failure.”

“Unless the sensors are wacked,” Yulong says. “They could’ve been looping bad data.”

“True,” Alphonse allows.

Looping, Fola thinks. She remembers standing in a circle. Pudgy Imanol Ealo on one side of her. Snooty Tatjana Soffel on the other. Her fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Udman, leaning over to whisper in her ear. A phrase.

“Your turn,” Ms. Udman told her. “Remember to speak clearly.”

Fola turned to Imanol, whose breath smelled of peppered soytein, and whispered the phrase into his ear. She formed each word carefully, the way she did her letters. Imanol giggled and whispered the phrase to the next person, who whispered it to the next person, and so forth. The phrase was “cystic fibrosis,” and by the time it got all the way around the circle it came out as “sixty-five roses.”

Bad data. Even if the input was good, all it took was a tiny misinterpretation here, a slight mistranslation there. She had spoken clearly, yet the phrase had come out wrong.

Garbage out didn’t always mean garbage in.

“Are you all right?” Pheidoh asks when everyone has left.

She nods. “Just tired.” Instead of energizing her, the visit had the opposite effect. She’s exhausted.

“According to your biomed readings your blood pressure is elevated. So is your heart rate.”

“It’s just that . . .” She shakes her head. Bad sinnergy. That’s what the Jesuettes called it whenever people weren’t in group-hug mode.

“Maybe you should rest—”

“No.” She’s too amped to sleep.

“—or eat.”

No way she can eat. Her stomach is cramped, ulcerous.

“You have a message,” Pheidoh says after a moment.

“Who is it?” Other than Ephraim, she can’t imagine who would want to talk to her.

“Xophia.”

Fola blinks. Stares.

“The transmission is encrypted and was squirted over an unauthorized channel,” the IA warns.