Earth Thirst (32 page)

“What if we give him some money?” Mere asks. “Tell him not to go back to La Serena?”

“Where is he going to go? Does he look like a kid who could just pick up and go to another city and start over? What sort of life do you think he's going to fall into?”

“This isn't fair.”

Phoebe laughs quietly.

I lean forward. “No, it's not, but he's useful. He's a local kid. He can go many places without attracting attention. We lessen our risk of being spotted by having him be our errand boy. He's smart and he's cautious. He has a better chance with us.”

Mere's hands tighten on the steering wheel. She glances at Pedro, who has become aware that we've been talking about him. The boy twists around in his seat and stares at me. “Are you going to kill me too?” he asks in Spanish.

He's wiry, but he still has a round face, full of young innocence that probably serves him well. His brown eyes are inquisitive and intelligent, and up close, I can tell that he's as concerned about his haircut as he is his scooter.

“You're in no danger from us,” Phoebe replies in the same language.

I nod. “We're going to need your help, Pedro. You understand the risk, don't you?”

“Yes,” the boy says. “Señor, are you going to kill me later?” His voice is flat and calm, but he swallows a couple of times and his eyelids flutter. He's putting on a brave face. Helping the nice American lady who had been staying in the villa hadn't turned out the way he had hoped.

“I'm Silas,” I say, and then I nod to my left. “That's Phoebe, and like she says, you're in no danger from us. Other people, though, are going to want to talk to you. They won't be very nice. We can protect you from them. You help us, and we'll take care of you. Okay?”

He looks at Phoebe and me, and then at Mere, who has a more honest expression on her face than either Phoebe or I. “Okay,” Pedro says. “New scooter,” he adds in English, speaking for Mere's benefit. “Italian. Aprilia.”

Phoebe laughs again. “Done,” she says.

I nod to Pedro and sit back in my seat. The boy nods too, and turns back around. Mere is looking at me in the rearview mirror, her eyebrows raised.

“The boy knows how to negotiate,” I tell her. “Why wouldn't we want him along?”

* * *

The presence of Secutores in La Serena suggests two things: one, that they're working through the same suppositions as Mere and looking for Arcadian-friendly areas where we might have gone to ground; and two, our theory that they're still working on grabbing an Arcadian is sound. On a purely business level, keeping after Phoebe and me if they have access to Hyacinth, doesn't make sense. They're losing too many men trying to track us down. It's possible that Hyacinth and Secutores are working together and Secutores is cleaning up loose ends, but the fact that we haven't called Arcadia should also tell Hyacinth that they're in no immediate danger from us calling the cavalry. We're still on our own, but like I told Belfast, the enemy of my enemy might be a friend. The trick is figuring out which enemy is the right one to befriend. Or not. I know Phoebe wants to play them off each other, and I'm not convinced that isn't Escobar's plan with us and Secutores.

If I was under the gun to figure out a counteragent to the weed killer, I'd be buying time by getting my enemies to fight among themselves too. Us biting back against Secutores may give us a bit of breathing room from Hyacinth as well.

None of this solves the bigger problem of Arcadia and the poison within the Grove. And the question of how much Callis knows. I can't help but think he is the one who put me on to the idea of going to Rapa Nui.

After a few hours of driving, we stop and let Pedro and Mere eat. Phoebe and I stay in the car, talking about what we're doing next. Well, mostly I talk and Phoebe listens. There's a lot of brain dumping to do from the overnight session I did with Mere's computer.

Mere has the highly structured mind of a good reporter, and all of her research over the last week had been gathered into a tidy stack of well-labeled folders. I read journal abstracts, stockholder notices, corporate SEC filings, news articles, forum discussions, and more than a few conspiracy theory blog posts. There was no dearth of data to sift through, and it was a long night of reading and thinking. But when I finally read Mere's assessment, a short list of bullet points, I thought she was on the right track.

“She's methodical and tenacious,” Phoebe says after I've given my assessment of Mere's thinking. “Every night, she'd talk the whole time she was making dinner. She wasn't telling me what she had learned so much as summarizing it all. Out loud. It wasn't necessary for me to be in the room, but I stayed and listened. She's a good asset. A good strategist. I see why you saved her.”

I stare out the window. “The Grove thinks I had an ulterior reason.”

“Because you had fallen for a mortal?” Phoebe snorts. “It happens more often than you know, Silas. But that has little to do with anything. You're trying too hard to see a conspiracy when the basic issue is that they're idiots. They've been idiots for a long time. We could have done something. We should have. But they were too frightened.”

“It's changed too fast,” I say. “We had no idea how quickly they were going to devour the world.”

“You had no idea because you weren't paying attention. Because you were letting them gut your memories. And they did it so poorly. What could be gained by letting you remember that you've been purged?”

“So that we would think it was our choice,” I say. “It was our own decisions to let go of the past, to relieve ourselves of the burden of who we were.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, Phoebe,” I tell her. “I've been doing it for a long time.”

She laughs. “And does it make you feel any better to know how long you've been lied to? How long you've been lying to yourself?”

“No,” I say. “Of course it doesn't.” I grimace. “How much of what I feel and what I remember has been selectively placed in my head?”

“All of it,” Phoebe says matter-of-factly.

“Who is Silas then?” I wonder. “I can't be the same man I was when I became an Arcadian.”

Phoebe shakes her head. “Who Silas was doesn't matter,” she says. “You
are
Silas. Who Silas will be tomorrow or the next day or the day after that is up to you.”

“Is that why you never went back?” I ask.

“Partly,” Phoebe says after a moment of silence. She doesn't add anything more, and I figure that's all I'm going to get.

“Was it difficult?” I ask. “Fighting the urge to return to Mother?”

“I was an orphan once before,” Phoebe says, “I knew how to survive.”

Maybe that was the difference. I had been part of a family. Part of a military unit. I had craved the company of others. Needed it, in fact. Becoming an Arcadian had been an easy choice for me, in the end. I hadn't given much thought to the ramifications of my decision. I was a soldier; I was supposed to follow orders. I was supposed to be part of a group.

Had Mother taken advantage of my weaknesses?

Of course she had. If I looked back on my history from Escobar's point of view, I was a dumb grunt. Manipulated over and over again by my superiors. Told what I needed to know for any given mission. Patted on the head when I returned, bloody and triumphant.
Good dog. Here's a cookie. Now go rest for a few decades.
I wagged my tail, overjoyed to be part of a family, happy to please Mother.

“It's just another survival mechanism,” I murmur.

“What is?”

“Following orders. Being
happy to please
,” I say.

Phoebe shrugs, a twitch of her shoulders in which I'm starting to see a variety of nuances.
Isn't that the reason we do anything?
is what I read in her reaction.

“Change happens over time. Changes happen because a system reacts to stimuli. Those species that can react quickly survive. The rest die. That's the order of the world—has been for thousands of years—and we've been at the top of that pyramid for a long time. But we're afraid now. We're looking over our shoulders, wondering what it is that is coming up behind us. The fundamental problem we face is change—how are we supposed to change when we were at the top of the food chain?”

“We get knocked off,” Phoebe says. “We relearn what it is to fear.”

“Is that what Escobar wants? To make Arcadia remember fear?”

“Why would he bother? He's done with Arcadia; he's working on his own evolutionary path. He doesn't want us crowding him.”

“Right. He's growing his own flesh, his own tissue. Evolution takes a long time, especially when your body is already nearly perfect. So, he's taking a shortcut. He's crafting his own.”

Phoebe makes a face. “Genetic modification,” she says. “Splicing. Grafting.”

“Frankenstein,” I reply.

“Chimera,” she fires back.

An involuntary shiver runs up my spine.
Chimera
. She's right. Body of a lion, head of a goat, tail of snake. The commingling of disparate species into one monstrous creation that could not exist without interference from the Gods.

A chimera would not be something that Mother would birth; it was a monster that man would build.

I recall the tree farm on Rapa Nui. There had been citrons in the grove, and I hadn't looked at them closely. Were they simply citrons or had they been Bizzaria—the chimera of the Florentine citron and the sour orange? Had I walked past them without realizing what they were?

* * *

Mere and Pedro return to the car, and Phoebe switches to the front seat to drive. We're going to drive through the afternoon and night, trying to put as much of the Atacama behind us. There's no reason to stay overlong in the desert. Pedro, his belly full of lunch, settles down in the front passenger seat and falls asleep.

I tell Mere about chimerae and the Bizzaria, the plant chimera that mixes the citron and the sour orange. By this time, I'm nearly certain the citrus trees I had seen on Rapa Nui were Bizzaria.

This strikes a chord in Mere, and she digs out her laptop and searches through her research files. Getting a hit in her data, she shows me a picture. It's a publicity still of Escobar Montoya. “Forty years ago,” Mere says, “taken during a junket at a farming initiative sponsored by Montoya Industries, the construction firm of his that made their mark in the '30s.” She points at the banner in the background. It's got the name of the farm and a logo. Laid over a stylized sunburst is a green sprig with a single fruit that has been rendered as a circle within a circle. “What's that look like?” she says, indicating the fruit.

“They're not concentric,” I note.

“If you were to consider that image as a symbolic representation, how would you classify it?”

“A circle within another circle?”

“Or a whole that contains the whole of another thing. In other words, something made from distinct objects.”

“A chimera,” I nod. “Where was this taken?”

“Somewhere up north,” she says, turning the laptop around and starting to type. “I'll need to find some Wi-Fi to check further. I don't seem to have that information saved locally.”

“Well,” I note, looking out at the sun-blasted landscape. “We're heading in the right direction, at least.”

THIRTY-SIX

A
bout a half-hour before nightfall, the western sky awash with red and orange clouds, we roll into a tiny town with a single restaurant advertising Wi-Fi access. While Phoebe and Pedro take care of gassing up the car, Mere and I head into the restaurant for a quick meal and some Internet access.

An artichoke ravioli catches my eye on the menu, and since Mere is more interested in the Wi-Fi password than food, I order her the house empanadas. The dark-eyed waitress nods knowingly as she takes out menus. She's seen too many North American couples more fascinated with checking in with their social networks than with paying attention to the local cuisine, and Mere is living up to that stereotype.

“Do you know the history of the Bizzaria?” Mere asks as she starts pulling up a variety of search results. “First found in a garden outside of Florence in the seventeenth century. People thought it was an accidental mutation.”

Florence.

Mere notices my expression. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say.

Her eyebrows pull together and her fingers fly across the keyboard. I watch her scan her computer screen, waiting to see some reaction in her eyes. It doesn't take long. She stops looking, fingers sliding across the track pad, and then she looks over the top of the laptop at me. And then back at the picture on her screen.

“Was it an accident?” she asks.

“Was what?”

“The Bizzaria?”

I shrug. “I wasn't there. I couldn't say.”

“You've been to Florence, though, haven't you?”

“I don't know, Mere. What makes you think I've been to Florence?”

She laughs, covering her mouth as soon as she starts, subsiding into a fit of giggles. “It's almost like an Interpol wanted poster, isn't it?” she says when she has regained her composure.

“The statue of David?” I ask.

She nods, trying very hard not to start giggling again.

“I had never thought of it that way,” I confess.

She scrolls down on the picture. “Is it… a completely accurate likeness?” she asks with a smile.

“It was cold that morning,” I tell her. “It was cold every morning that I posed, in fact.”

“Clearly,” she says, the giggles starting again. With some regret, she turns her attention to her other search results.

A minute later, all of the humor drains out of her face. She spins the laptop around so that I can see what she's found. The first image is the stylized sun from the farm logo, though subtly different. “Inti,” Mere says, “Incan deity. God of the sun.”

I nod and go to the next tab as directed. It's a picture of a man dressed in religious garb. He's holding a stick with a sun figure mounted to the top of it. “Who's this?” I ask. The picture is drawn in a style that is several hundred years old.

“Manco Cápac,” Mere says. “The founder of the Incan empire.”

“Looks like someone we know,” I say.

The artist has done a good rendition of Escobar Montoya, and it's not hard to see that same likeness in the sculptures in the ground-floor gallery in the Montoya building in Santiago.