Montezuma Strip (28 page)

Perote treated the dig as beneath his notice. “Old man Chuautopec slaved twenty-three years for Tamilpasoft Ltd., sculpting
mollypaths and box access technology. Then he quit, registered a couple of patents that made him independently wealthy, and
set to work trying to realize his life’s dream. It took him another twenty years before he vitalized the Madonna tactile.
That’s the story he told me. I wasn’t there for the whole slog, of course.

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw it. I thought to myself,
“That’s really something. How can I skrag some credit off this?’ “

“I’m way ahead of you.”

Perote nodded. “I forget that I’m talking to an Intuit. You’ll have to excuse me. The grubber Brothers are generally a little
slower than you.

“I did some stone thinking before I decided to run the tactile over the kind of simple folk I grew up with. Having seen what
it could do, I thought the indecisive could be quickly convinced… and used to convince others.”

Cardenas shifted uncomfortably against the abrasive, cold fabric. “I felt the tactile pull me, then saw it melt glass and
activate a weapon it was unable to lift.”

“What’d you expect? Without an available source of malleable collagen all you have to work with is sound, wave, and light
matrix. Sound can give you all the heat you need. You can melt things with it, and it adds to the verisimilitude of the human
form. The pressure you felt involved coercing a couple of gigabushels of reluctant photons. More than are used to generate
the figure. Wave pressure is enough to convince you you’re being touched by something, and to activate a sensitive switch,
but not to pick up heavy objects.”

“Then I could have resisted its pull.”

“Easily.”

Cardenas’s gaze hadn’t swerved. “How does it kill?”

Perote casually examined the back of his right hand. “It’s all coherent light and electrical fields. It can portage a whale
of a subsidiary charge. Enough to induce tachycardia in a proximate subject. Stops the heart. Or it can scramble brain impulses.
It’s a very versatile program.”

“You’re responsible for that, not this Chuautopec.”

“You know, it’s no fun having a conversation with an Intuit. You anticipate all my answers.”

“How does he feel about you appropriating his development?”

“I’m sure if he was alive he’d disapprove.” Perote regarded his prisoner calmly. “Didn’t intuit that one, did you?”

“I would have eventually.” Cardenas shivered afresh; not from fear. It was cold in the cell. “How did you know I was in your
downlink station?”

“The Madonna told me we had an intruder, of course. Some of the Brothers and I live in the building next door.”

“I was wearing security nodes designed to detect and bypass sensors.”

“This tactile’s too sophisticated for that. It’s never powered down, always on a stand-ready alert status. I call her my Versatile
Virgo.” He grinned. “Our Lady watches over her little flock.”

“Why the Madonna? Why not a nightmare monster, or a small dinosaur, or something terrifying?”

“That’s what I’d have formulated, but I’m no Silvestre Chuautopec. Nobody is, or rather was. See, he was a deeply religious
man, old Silvestre. Uncommon in this day and age. He wanted to give people something to inspire them in their beliefs, to
resuscitate the lapsed. I never did find out if his plan was to fraud his tactile Madonna off as the real thing by randomly
vitalizing it in a few churches, or simply to edify the faithful by showing what one might look like. While he was working
he babbled on and on about how he was going to spark a religious revival among the masses, by showing people that traditional
religious beliefs and modern technology could not only coexist but reinforce one another. The old bastard was no phony. He
really believed all that stuff.

“I had to make use of what I inherited after I
muerted
him. It’s not easy to frighten a mark with a Madonna. It wasn’t until I got the idea of loading the tactile with a lethal
charge that I hit on a way of intimidating people. The synchronized religious prattle makes it look to witnesses like the
wrath of God is at work. After seeing it in action I’m not so sure that it isn’t more effective than a monster would’ve been.”
He laughed again, an unpleasant giggle. “I’ll bet church collections are up all over the Nogales connurb.

“It’s a pretty case-responsive program. You can give it a mission—we call it convicting an unbeliever—and it can react
and respond as the situation develops, generating cohesive dialogue on the spot. There’s no way we could steady-monitor it
during the process and still maintain the illusion. Takes too much crunch just to sustain the matrix. And the power requirements!
It has to renew itself from one nanosecond to the next. You can imagine.

“The general public being utterly unfamiliar with tactiles, and pretty credulous to start with, most of them accept it as
genuine. I don’t have to
muerte
near as many people as would otherwise be necessary in your standard extortion racket.”

“That must let you sleep easier at night.”

“I sleep fine, thanks. Business is good and getting better. But then you were at the last meeting and you know that. You were
at that meeting, weren’t you?” Again Cardenas said nothing.

“You’re not very responsive. We’ll fix that presently.”

“I still don’t see how you suck enough crunch to maintain it.”

“The secret’d ring bells and whistles in Nogales, wouldn’t it? But we’re not in Nogales, and the utility companies hereabouts
aren’t near as solicitous of their records. The non-wonders of modern communications. We steal what we need here, generate
the program, uplink it via a pirate satellite transponder to Nogales, transfer it to our truck, and from that vitalize it
inside a chosen location. If my people are intercepted or found out there’s nothing particularly incriminating in either the
truck or the church you found.

“If the worst happens all we have to do is shift our Nogales base of operations. The equipment there is easily replaced. It’s
the box here which generates the program that’s critical, and nobody’s going to find it. Consider yourself an honored, if
temporary, guest.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not.”

“Suit yourself.” Perote straightened. “I think I’ve answered most of your questions. Now you can answer some of mine. I’m
really curious to know just how much more, if anything, the federales know about this operation.”

Cardenas lay down flat on the bunk, slipping his hands behind his head. “Suddenly I’m not feeling very talkative anymore.
Maybe after dinner.”

“Why waste food on a dying man?” The door opened and the two guards the inspector had sensed lying in wait just outside entered.
One held a large gun, the other a power injector. Cardenas lay quiescent, awaiting them.

The man with the injector leaned over him. The policeman smiled, closed his eyes, and as the guard reached for his upper right
arm, the inspector brought both feet up to catch him solidly under the chin. He went backward in a spray of fragmented enamel.
The gun roared but missed as Cardenas kipped off the bunk and closed with the stumbling, bleeding guard, using the dazed man’s
bulk for cover. As Perote darted to block the portal, Cardenas leapt and somersaulted, coming up in the extortionist’s face
with an elbow. Perote went careening, his nose broken.

There were two more guards waiting at the far end of the hallway. Cardenas was in the process of quieting them when the injector
slammed harshly into his back.

He was running down a long white corridor. Slowwwly, with his feet barely brushing the tiled surface. Friends and strangers,
casual acquaintances and lawbreakers he’d helped put in prison, reached out to him. His father, who’d died when he was twelve.
His mother, who smiled maternally and called him her littlest angel before collapsing into a horrid heaving mass of pustulent
fungi. His adventurous older brother Felix, who’d successfully dodged flechettes and bullets in Southeast Africa, knives in
Phoenix and Matamoros, only to find a writhing, painful death from the toxin of a stonefish he’d stepped on while wading with
his fiancée across a sun-saturated reef in far-off Kiribati.

Friends quickly replaced family, all breaking apart and
crumbling gruesomely before they could reach him. He was on fire himself now and watched helplessly as little flames burst
forth from his fingertips and toes, his hair and genitals. He screamed and flailed at the flames, but nothing would put them
out. Burning, he staggered on as the hallway before him grew darker. Teeth beckoned at the far end, sharp as scimitars, their
serrated edges dripping acid and ichor. He tried to stop, to turn, to run in the opposite direction, but his feet and legs
would no longer obey him. While something vast and unseen moaned expectantly, the eager jaws clashed before him like cymbals.

A large dog, a familiar German shepherd shape, raced up behind him and locked its teeth gently on his trailing arm, ignoring
the flames that poured from his blistering skin. Whimpering, it tried to slow his headlong plunge, to drag him back from those
gnashing fangs.

On the far distant shore of perception he thought he heard voices shouting. “Hold him down!… Get his legs!…”

The burning went on for hours, but he never did quite slide into the yawning mouth. Then the fire seemed to flicker and die,
leaving him scorched from the Id-side out. Pressure on his body and limbs eased, but the voices did not.

“If he doesn’t rest,” one said, “we’ll lose him.”

“So?” A crisp, uncaring, amoral voice, hiding the hint of an evil giggle.

“You can’t get information out of a dead man.”

“I’m not sure it’s worth the bother, Doc. But I’ll give you one more try. If he dies then, fuck ‘im. I can’t hang around here
forever. I’ve got to get back to the flock.”

Something was placed on a chair that was dragged close to Cardenas’s head. “Can you hear me, Federale? I’m putting my vorec
here. All channels are open. When you’re ready to cooperate just start talking. The whole system here’s on auto shunt. Just
say you want to start spilling info and a menu will put you on the right path and activate a nice fresh recorder to take it
all down. If you’re helpful, I promise you your next
vamanos
will be a lot more comfortable. You’ll go quietly,
even happily. But don’t take too much time to think about it, okay? I got a plane to catch.”

He sensed bodies moving away. Once again darkness closed in around him and there were new nightmares, but these were almost
reassuring in their familiarity.

When he awoke it was dark and glacially still in the cell. A little moonlight seeped in through the single high window. He
lay on his back, naked, his wrists, neck, and ankles strapped to the cot. One wrist strap was half torn through where he’d
damaged it in his convulsions. The lashing across his neck prevented him from even raising his head to look around. Another,
broader belt of metal mesh bisected his belly. The fabric of the cot beneath him was still wet with sweat and his entire body
shivered uncontrollably. He was clammy from head to foot.

Perote was right. Cardenas wouldn’t last through another session. Unable to wall off his professional side, he found himself
wondering what they’d slipped him. A massive dose of Sericol? Senyabutamin? Nudocaine? Maybe a brew; a threatening cocktail
designed to emancipate his inhibitions.

Probably in the morning there would be more questions and then, when he again refused to provide answers, a final party. It
wasn’t that Perote was particularly vicious or evil, Cardenas knew. He simply didn’t care.

He wondered if Sergeant Delacroix and the rest of his guardians up in the circling VTOLs and out on the pave had grown restive
enough by now at his lack of communication to check in on him in person, only to find his safe suit riding a mannequin to
South-Central Texas.

He didn’t even know how many days he’d lain unconscious, or how far he’d been transported from Nogales. Far enough, he knew,
for his captors to require the use of a satellite link to pursue their work.

Well, he’d had a good life, and a self-satisfying if not especially brilliant career. So he wouldn’t see sixty. He didn’t
mind dying. A federale anticipated that possibility and prepared for it from the moment of graduation from the Academy.
But he could have done without the pain he was presently suffering and perhaps, even more so, the embarrassment.

He was stripped, half dead, and bolted down. No longer a man but a lump of meat. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do
about it.

Except pray.

Auto shunt system, Perote had said. Vorec-driven menu channeler. How open was it? How “auto”? Cardenas could play a vorec
the way a good contralto could play Puccini. His head ringing with the effort required for simple motion, he turned as much
as he was able toward the chair on which the open verbal recognition pickup lay waiting.

“Our Lady,” he began, keeping his voice low but enunciating clearly. His optics were too spazzed to focus on the pickup, but
he knew it was there. He engaged all the jargon he could remember from a half-forgotten childhood, when his mother used to
send him and his brother off to church school in immaculately pressed and cleaned uniforms: the only intact and unpatched
clothes the rough-and-tumble boys owned. He struggled to call forth key phrases from the Bible as well as vorec manuals and
modulation theory.

Occasionally he paused to rave falsely in case anyone was listening in, trying to buy himself some time. Now and then he screamed,
just so they wouldn’t think he was entirely coherent and start to analyze what he was trying to do.

Of course there was no guarantee that the vorec was menued in any way to the tactile, but if all the tech for this setup was
proximate to itself, even minimally interlinked, and the Madonna program was vorec-activated and responsive to the main auto
shunt Perote had mentioned, there was just a chance that his fevered broadcast might key an electronic nerve and activate
something besides a monitor whose job it was to oversee a simple recorder.