Crache (6 page)

Fola moistens her lips, chapped with sudden nervousness. “Put her through.”

Xophia has changed. Six months on the shuttle have thinned her. She looks tired. Travel weary. Fatigue occludes her eyes, shadows every movement down to the smallest eye blink. Dressed in a pink sprayon jumpsuit, she’s floating close to a recessed, wall-mounted hospital bed covered with gauzy, antiseptic blue sheets. The gauze is wrinkled, twisted around a motionless figure that could be a gerontocrat or half-starved refugee. It’s hard to know. Her view is partially blocked by a fold-down rack of linen-filled trays. Both the jumpsuit and sheets are speckled yellow-brown.

“We’re supposed to maintain radio silence during the trip,” Xophia begins. “But under the circumstances, I think it’s important for you to know what’s going on.”

A muscle in Fola’s eyelid twitches. Her throat pulses.

Xophia shifts to one side. The flitcams streaming her image shift with her, bringing the patient into view. A frail-looking geront with wax-paper skin. The guy’s bald scalp looks diseased—a hodgepodge of wrinkled tattunes that, on closer inspection, appear to be shriveled lips. Puckered, subcutaneous, cancerous. In addition to the sheets, the patient is restrained by g-mesh that limits the movement of his limbs, keeps him from bouncing around the icosahedron-shaped clinic. His face is sunken, caved in on itself. His cadaverous mouth forms a knot of determination around the siptube lodged between his teeth. The thick tube is clogged with brownish sludge. Fola can’t tell if the stuff is going in or coming out. It occurs to her that this is the source of the crusty polka dots on Xophia’s jumpsuit.

“There’s been an outbreak of some kind,” Xophia says. “Within the last twenty-four hours. A lot of people on the shuttle are starting to get sick.” She frowns in irritation as the siptube slides free or is spat out and gobs of the paste erupt from the caldera formed by the geront’s mouth, spewing in all directions.

Fola grimaces. But Xophia doesn’t seem to mind. “Since I’m the only one on board with any emergency medical training, I’ve been pretty busy.” She snags the loose end of the siptube, holds it absently. “The problem is, I have no idea what it is. According to the datastream from Earth we’re monitoring, the same thing is happening back there . . . which is weird. The bruises that are showing up—the growths that people are getting—look a lot like historical stuff you’d find in the mediasphere. Old ad images and tattunes. Pre-ecocaust, mostly. I’m wondering if maybe it’s an ad virus that mutated and went berserk. Whatever it is, it’s being transmitted electronically through the infosphere. Otherwise, there’s no way we could be infected since we haven’t been in direct physical contact with anyone else for months.”

She reinserts the siptube into the geront’s incontinent lips, swabs his mouth with a damp cloth, and replaces his bib. She completes the maneuver deftly, with practiced ease and patience.

“Anyway”—she glances up—“I just thought you should know what’s happening. A lot of the refugees on the shuttle are worried about family members and friends they left behind. But with the radio silence, there’s no way to contact them to find out what’s going on.”

That’s it. The datasquirt ends, a freeze frame with Xophia looking straight at Fola, her hand still holding the siptube in place. There’s something on her palm. A malignant black-and-white face that Fola doesn’t recognize. Then the transmission washes away in a downpour of static.

Hey, hey, whaddaya say,

Let’s all pray for Judgment Day.

“Do you want to reply?” Pheidoh asks.

Fola nods, takes a second to clear her throat and rub her nose with the back of her hand. “What was on her palm?”

“An image of Sydney Greenstreet playing the character of Ferrari in
Casablanca
.”

“Is that a digital video?”

“No. It’s an old black-and-white flat-screen movie.”

Fola hollows her cheeks as several flitcams, disguised as insects, emerge from the stained-glass foliage to transmit her image.

Five, six, seven, eight,

Meet you at the Pearly Gate.

8

HACK JOB

T
he only flesh Rexx has ever cut into with a knife, besides a steak, is the scrotum of a deformed calf at the Hello Dolly Animal Pharm.

“If you wanna be a gengineer,” his father had said, “you’re gonna learn firsthand what genes are.”

Rexx was ten at the time and had already decided that the last thing he wanted to do was follow in his father’s footsteps. Part of it was that he’d always hated his name, which was an acronym for an ancient programming language—REstructured eXtended eXecutor—that his father waxed nostalgic about whenever he got drunk. Rexx might be saddled with the name, but he could hitch himself to another wagon. A different stereotype.

“Genetics is a messy business,” his father said as he led the defective clone from the holding pen to a cutting table in the corral outside. “The sooner you learn that, the better.”

In the searing afternoon light, the scarred tabletop was stained with dried blood and had an empty tin bucket set on the ground next to it. The air was clotted with flies, the stench of burnt cow hair, pig slop, and manure.

“Gonna fix this little feller right up,” the pharm hand helping them said. “Don’t want him shootin’ his wad in the gene pool.” He winked at Rexx, then wrestled the calf onto the table, pinning it.

His father pointed to the scrotum. “Them balls have got a load o’ bad shot. They got to go.”

“Go where?” Rexx said.

The pharm hand grinned, revealing thirty-two pearl-finished teeth. Each one a miniature replica of a Colt .45 grip, designed to pistol-whip his food into submission each time he took a bite.

His father grabbed Rexx by the hand, swallowing it whole in his blubbery whale-size palm, and forced Rexx’s fingers to the squishy testicles. The calf flinched. Rexx jerked.

“Feel ’em, goddamnit! Ain’t no different than yours. ’Cept maybe a tad bigger.”

The balls quivered, then steadied as the pharm hand leaned his weight onto the calf. When the calf was calm, he took out a knife and handed it to Rexx. “Here ya go.”

“Take it,” his father said.

Rexx took the knife. The handle was hot, the blade bright.

“Don’t worry,” his father said. “I’ll help ya.” With his free hand he stretched the scrotum tight around one ball. “Okay, now cut here.” He made an arc with the fingertip of his other hand.

Except for the trembling tip of the blade, Rexx remained motionless.

“Do it,” his father hissed. “If you don’t, I guarantee you won’t get within spittin’ distance of Darwin.”

Rexx inched the knife closer. His head spun. Sweat steamed off the calf, sharp and dank.

“Do it!”

Rexx closed his eyes, then, holding his breath, plunged the knife blade into the membrane. . . .

Cutting into the remains of Liam Vitt’s left forearm leaves Rexx with the same rancid burn in his throat.

Instead of a cutting table the severed limb lies in a sealed chamber, held in place under a carbon nanotube biosensor. On his eyescreens, the arm appears pale and bloated. In addition to a realtime bitcam image, he’s set up a virtual datawindow on the wallscreen behind his desk. The left pane of the window displays architext, the line-by-line molecular code that describes the composition and the structure of individual molecules and longer nucleotide sequences, including DNA. The right pane of the window displays a ribozone construct, the visual—and in Rexx’s opinion, overtly poetic—representation of this code. Information packets are rendered as butterflies. Flowers signify pherions, the viral pheromones that make up clade patterns and profiles. Trees, bushes, and other vegetation represent the physical elements in an ecotecutural system that interacts with the warm-blooded plants—everything from water reclamation and distribution systems to heat storage and power generation.

In the ribozone, Rexx is represented as a collection of vines and flowers growing on a wicker-frame figure. One nice aspect of the ribozone is that he doesn’t have to worry about coming into direct physical contact with the severed limb. It’s several thousand kilometers away on Mymercia. But to prevent anything unpleasant from contaminating him via the softwire ribozone link—a mutant strand of biodigital code, for example, that the molectronic circuits in his body could convert into live proteins—he’s set up a firewall and saturated himself with antiphers.

Rexx starts the autopsy with a close visual examination of the limb. In addition to being torn off at the elbow, the tissue shows damage from prolonged exposure to a vacuum and absolute zero. The ribozone image isn’t much prettier—a twisted branch of dead graying wood with a few shriveled flowers clinging to the bark with the tenacity of a tick.

“Ready to slice and dice?” he asks Claire.

A pause. “Yes.”

Nausea wells up from a pinprick in the base of his skull. As the queasiness spreads, his hand twitches, a prosthesis connected to some vast disquiet, intimate and yet distant. Invasive. Abruptly the nausea subsides, the tremor ends, and with it the feeling of dislocation.

Rexx works the tension from his fingers. “Let’s get started, then.”

The CNT biosensor consists of a monomol cutting wire and a sensor pad attached to the end of what is essentially a remote-operated cattle prod. The prod is controlled with a virtual glove that responds to finger kinesthetics and directs the movement of the prod a nanometer at a time in any direction. The monomol wire, strung between the horseshoe arms of a U, performs the same function as a cheese cutter. It carves off carpaccio-thin slices of skin and bone for analysis. The sensor pad is little more than a glorified brush. It bristles with billions of hairlike carbon nanotubes that have been functionalized at the tip with probe molecules. By running the pad over a slice of tissue, Rexx can determine its exact structure and composition. If anything out of the ordinary is present—a corrupted molecule, mutated nucleotide sequence, or foreign protein—it should show up.

Rexx moves the sensor tip into place over the sample, and slowly brushes it over the surface. Immediately, molecular code populates the architext window and a butterfly lands on a knuckle on the hand, updating the ribozone construct with data gathered by the probe.

The work is tedious. He doesn’t have time to cross-section the entire arm, start at one end and work his way down. At a few molecules per slice, that would take centuries. Instead he relies on Claire for input on where to gather random samples.

He’s not sure what he’s looking for. Mymercia isn’t like any of the other Kuiper belt arcologies. It’s been modeled after a nineteenth-century tropical island. The interior design temperature is a balmy fifteen degrees centigrade. Ten degrees warmer than Tiresias and Petraea. In keeping with the jungle theme, the plants are based on species that were once indigenous to old-growth equatorial forests. Parasol palms. Bananopy leaves. Hanging tapestree vines that decorate the arcology’s warren of arboretums. Eighty percent of the biome is located on the face of the kilometer-deep chasm. The asteroid has been rotated so the canyon wall faces the sun at all times. A large solcatcher array gathers additional light and power.

What makes the warm, wet biome possible is the large quantity of ice on the asteroid. Not just on the surface but below, locked up in hydrous minerals. The geology of Mymercia is atypical. Mixed in with the usual nickel and iron are basalt and granite as well as carbonate deposits. This composition is similar to Tiresias and, along with the six-billion-year age, hints at an extrasolar origin. It’s believed that the two Kuiper belt objects may have formed a single chunk at one time. Seismic analysis indicates the presence of numerous gas-filled pockets in the rock core of the asteroid, some fairly large, filled with hydrogen, oxygen, and possibly methane.

Less than an hour in, his hands start to cramp, and he has to take a break. Give his fingers a rest.

“I feel like I’m pissin’ down a gopher hole,” he says. So far there are no anomalous readings. “What’s the status of the latest datasquirt from Mymercia?”

“Still pending.”

He’s waiting for the arcology’s construction manager to transmit sensor readouts from just prior to the accident. This includes not only biological readings but physical measurements of material properties such as thermal load, expansion, contraction, shear, and torsional stress.

“What seems to be the problem?” he says.

“I have no idea.”

Rexx curls and uncurls his fingers, cracks his knuckles, then gets back to work.

Five minutes later, as he slices off a wafer of bone, a flower petal flares to life on the dead limb in the ribozone, then evaporates.

He shifts his attention to a jumbled line of text associated with the burst. “What the heck was that?”

“Unknown,” Claire says. “The atomic structure is not on file.”

Rexx frowns, his loose jowls sagging precariously. “You’re telling me the molecule, nucleotide sequence, or whatever, isn’t cataloged in
any
library?”

“Correct.”

So the gobbledygook isn’t from another ecotecture. It hasn’t been accidentally copied or inserted during construction. Seed plants cultivated in greenhouse vats on established arcologies are often used to kick-start the growth of a warm-blooded biosystem. Occasionally, these seedlings are defective, or suffer damage before being transplanted. But in this particular instance, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

“A random mutation, then,” he ventures. “Or sabotage.” There aren’t many other possibilities.

“There’s nothing to suggest sabotage.”

Rexx repositions the biosensor pad, ratchets up the bitcam magnification until the atoms on the surface of the tissue sample are a collection of acnelike bumps, and goes in for a closer look. In the location where the flower bloomed, there’s nothing but a crater. A quantum hole.

He noses around for a few minutes, sniffing each of the nearby atoms with the tip of the probe. “Where’d it go?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not registering anything.”

Rexx massages the wrinkles of skin on his forehead. “It can’t have just up and disappeared.”

He spends the next two hours dissecting the arm, shaving off nanometer segments, before pausing to take stock. “Any bright ideas?”

“No.”

He returns to the line of gibberish in the architext. “Is there any way to model the damn thing with the information we have—figure out what the hell it is, and what it does, that way?”

“Not without nucleotide/instruction sequences.”

“So what I’m hearin’ is that we need a physical sample. Or we can’t do squat. Is that about the size of it?”

“Yes.”

“What about . . . what’s her name—?” Rexx knocks his forehead with the heel of his hand. “The survivor.”

“Fola Hanani.”

“Right.” He repeats the name to himself. He’s seen her face three or four times on the biomed scans, but can’t raise a clear image of her. It’s as if he’s already buried her. Given her up for dead. “How’s she doin’?”

“I don’t have her updated/current condition. Her latest biomed readout hasn’t arrived.”

“It’s overdue? By how long?”

“Two hours and six minutes.”

“No sensor readings yet either, I s’pose. What the hell’s going on over there?”

Rexx doesn’t wait for an answer. He signs out of the ribozone and drops offline.

Finds himself floating under the lightdome of his hexcell. It’s night. His side of the Tiresias arcology has rotated away from the sun. Stars, as hard and bright as rhinestones, gleam on the ivory white ribs of the geodesic dome and the blue anodized grid of thermal mesh that insulates the faux marble walls of the room. The veil-thin curtains ripple with an unspoiled image of west Texas scrub, circling buzzards, and a sky smeared with mucus yellow clouds.

Rexx gazes at the desertscape for a spell, then reorients himself relative to the room’s magnetic flux lines. The sheet-diamond floor, inlaid with tiles of pressed lichen, flips to become the ceiling. The lightdome becomes a pond of black water littered with sequins.

“Arrange for a shuttle pod,” he says.

“Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?” He lassos a flux line and rides the current to the door.

“You can’t. You don’t know what you’re getting into.” The IA sounds alarmed at the prospect.

“You’re probably right,” Rexx admits. “But I’ve chewed about as much cud here as I can.”