Montezuma Strip (29 page)

A tactile that powerful had to be more than situation savvy. It had to be sensitive over a broad area of responsiveness or
it wouldn’t be able to function effectively, wouldn’t be able to react in depth to nonspecific stimuli. Furthermore, it had
to be able to acknowledge peripheral vernacular devoid of cryptics. Code words, for sure. Vitalizing phrases. But what kind
of code words, which particular phrases?

Perote was smart, but as he’d admitted, he was no Silvestre Chuautopec. How case-responsive had the unknown old genius made
his program? Flexible enough, surely, so that it could interact effectively with the most simple, unsophisticated country
folk.

Criminals were always talkative when they thought they were safe. They liked nothing better than to boast of their exploits.

His garrulous captor had supplied Cardenas with a short profile of the tactile’s developer, unfortunate and devout as he’d
been. Such an individual would make use of certain words to vitalize his matrix, his designs. Words from the Bible, pious
parlance from the historical notandum of the church. A catholic molly, so to speak.

A warm radiance harmonized in the cell and the feminine device loomed beside him. “You called out unto me, and I have come.
Have you repented?”

“Yes. Oh, yes, Holy Mother, I have repented.”

“Then I shall call a Brother to hear your confession.” The figure started to turn.

“Wait!” It was an effort to raise his voice. Was anyone monitoring this, he wondered, or had he simply activated the proper
shunt and not the queued recorder? The door stayed shut. Though he knew not how much time he had, he proceeded carefully.
“I need clarification first.”

The snowy
mater doloroso
beamed down at him, comely of form, holy of aspect. “I will help if I can. It is my function.”

“You’re the holy Madonna, the true lady?”

“I am.” The program was self-convicted, as it had to be to function properly, Cardenas knew.

“There can be no other?”

“No other but I.”

“Then if I gave you a universal replication code you couldn’t duplicate yourself?”

The womanly matrix seemed to hesitate. Cardenas tried not to hold his breath, tried not to keep glancing at the ominous rectangle
of the door. If anyone was listening, if anyone glimpsed what he was about…. With luck most of them would be sound asleep.
At the moment the lateness of the hour was his only ally, the unseen moon his sole source of encouragement.

“If you’re the one true holy Madonna,” he rushed on, “you should be able to do almost anything, even create another of yourself.
But if you can do that, then you’re not the one true Madonna and your programmi… your true self is by definition ambiguous.
Try this and maybe we’ll both gain some clarification.” And he mouthed the codex.

It was a simple and straightforward attempt to lock up the entire extortion program, using military code logic. He had no
idea what the result might be even if it worked. But even if it was the last thing he did, he felt strongly that at least
he was doing
something.

Somewhere beyond his cell an intricately folded and very deep box accepted the transmission from the open vorec and fed it
into the fiendishly brilliant designs of the late Silvestre Chuaupotec. Circuits flashed. On the far side of the state of
Sinhaloa half a small town went dark as a stealth program diverted the community’s power allocation to the basement of an
old apartment house in a certain village high up in the southern Sierra Madre Occidental.

There was a white flash as the effulgence within the cell intensified. He blinked and a second Madonna stood drifting near
his feet. Identical to the first. He held his breath.

The two maters regarded one another. Each said simultaneously, in the same optimal, benign tone of voice, “I am the true Madonna,
the holy one.”

A major truck recharge station on Transnamerican Highway Four-One flickered as if struck by lightning. The lights inside went
out, leaving twenty truckers and a handful of tourists cursing in three languages. The relevant power docks died and a transformer
blew on a nearby pole.

Within the luminous cell four Madonnas pulsed brightly enough to make the pinioned Cardenas squint. In unison singsong the
quartet examined one another and individually bespoke, “I am the true Madonna; let none doubt this.”

Within the connurb of Tepic all the streetlights suddenly went dark. An abrupt, undamped power surge blew out those on the
west side of the city, sending glass fragments flying. Fortunately it was late and few vehicles were on the roads.

The door to the cell was flung aside. Clad in starkly colored underwear and a short-sleeved cotton shirt a half-asleep Perote
stood breathing hard and waving a handgun. He and those behind him had to throw up their hands to shield their eyes.

“Cuando
the shit is this?” he yelled, hesitating in the portal and blocking the view of the gunmen behind him.

The four Madonnas turned to the new arrival and voiced concurrently, “I am the true Madonna, of the holy spirit.”

Cardenas clamped his eyes shut tight.

There was not enough room in the cell to hold the eight Madonnas. Several spilled out into the narrow hallway beyond. One
impinged accidentally on the guard nearest Perote. The man shuddered and clutched at his chest. His gun fell from his suddenly
limp fingers as he stumbled back against the mossy stone wall and collapsed, his eyes briefly pleading and then vacant. Perote
fought past the lifeless mass, his expression wild, eyes wide, immediate thoughts no different from those of his less imaginative
but equally panicked associates.

“I am the true Madonna,” chorused the drifting, refulgent shapes that packed the cell and spilled through the open doorway,
“of whom the word is spoken.” Eyes still shut, Cardenas turned his head as far to the left as he possibly could so that he
faced only the cool, gloomy rock wall.

Sixteen Madonnas flooded the hallway and the rooms beyond. Perote and his minions abandoned the structure, an aged shut-and-shuttered
cantina-cum-apartment building, and took to their feet or their vehicles. Sleepy inhabitants of the village, who knew not
what the frequent visitors from the
city worked at behind their modest walls and gruff security, came to their windows to view the commotion, and lingered wide-eyed
to gawk at the multitudinous incandescent Madonnas as they drifted through windows and out doors.

Thirty-two Madonnas formed a ring around the old building. Sixty-four spread out into the streets. Ingenuous artisans and
farmers, workers and technicians, alternately slammed shut their doors and windows or fell to their knees with hands clasped
fervently in front of them. One hundred twenty-eight luminant Madonnas filtered composedly through the streets, preceding
two hundred fifty-six who fanned out into the countryside, astonishing ranchers and cattle and sheep alike.

In Zacatecas all the vit stations went off the air. All of Colima went dark. In Juchipila power to the whole community of
thirty thousand evaporated as the supraheavy grid buried alongside the little mountain cantina siphoned energy from the entire
west-central portion of the Namerican national power net.

Five hundred and twelve Madonnas marched through the streets and alleys and cobbled byways of the village of Yerba Alto, beaming
at the residents, smiling at maddened cats and dogs, thoughtfully bestowing benedictions on wide-eyed, dark-haired children.

Every electrical appliance, circuit, device, shunt, and toy within a radius of two kilometers had exploded, burnt out, melted,
shorted, or otherwise shut down. Only the little village was not dark. On the contrary, it blazed with a pale radiance visible
to aircraft as far as a hundred kilometers away.

A vortex of one thousand twenty-four Madonnas invoked considerately; to the overwhelmed populace, to those who fled in mindless
panic and fear, to the fleeing Brothers of the Order, to their raging master Perote who was swept up in their hysterical flight,
and to Cardenas where he lay bound in his cell, his eyes shut tight, facing the wall, the awesome light pressing dangerously
hard against his inadequate eyelids.

“I AM THE HOLY MOTHER, THE ONE TRUE
MADONNA, THE BRINGER OF LIGHT AND HEALING,” the thousand twenty-four chorused angelically from streets and fields and rooftops
as carefully aligned photons danced and the central matrix frenzied.

On the lip of the Pacific just north of Acapulco the parallel power plant at Ketchtec, which tapped gigawatts from the thermocline
just off the coast, flickered and flared. Conduits liquefied, safeties snapped, huge transformers wailed. With a great electronic
gasp and crackle the plant’s safeties congressed and closed. Power to two states was shut off. Towns went dark, cities went
quiet, and for a brief while the landscape was as it had been a thousand years before, deserts and mountains and beaches slumbering
in darkness beneath the benign simper of the moon.

Emergency lights winked on, portable lamps were dragged from hibernation in cases and cabinets. Everywhere there was confusion,
puzzlement, anger, uncertainty, much of it directed at a power company that was quite innocent and equally as perplexed as
its disempowered customers.

A thousand twenty-four true Madonnas vanished, the energy they had been drawing upon withdrawn, temporarily cut out of the
Namerican grid. Cardenas’s desperate, careful reasoning had induced replication, which had finally collapsed under the weight
of its own truth.

He lay shivering in his cell for another six hours, well after the dawn had broken, until a passerby on his way to work heard
his hoarse, weakening shouts. Hesitantly entering the deserted cantina the man found the naked and blistered Cardenas bound
to his cot and released him. Then he went to get some of his friends, because the inspector was too feeble and drained to
walk. He was blistered not from his nightmares nor from the drugs that had induced them, but from his extended proximity to
the one true Madonna. To all of them.

There was very little left of the box and its support equipment in the basement of the attached apartment building. Whatever
half-magical programs it had contained had been
fried, not wiped, when the system had overloaded. Only automatic sprinklers had isolated the resultant flames and saved the
buildings, and Cardenas.

Local federales contacted his friends in Nogales, who immediately descended on the church of the Order of Our Lady to confiscate
everything and everyone they found there. They were subsequently guided to the sophisticated relay truck and its baffled crew
by one of the more talkative Brothers they took into custody. Brother Morales was not the only member of the Order possessed
of a loose tongue.

Perote they did not find, but Cardenas knew they would do so in time, and he fully intended to be around when that collar
of a different sort was announced.

Drink and food and rest and medicine restored him. His dark skin had saved him from a far worse burn than the one he’d suffered,
though he would have to walk gingerly for days. When he was finally able to return to Nogales everyone in the department was
almost embarrassingly solicitous of his well-being, and not just because he was the senior inspector on the force. Cardenas
was genuinely liked by his colleagues, irregardless of rank.

“I saw Charliebo,” he blurted to Pangborn as the latter was preparing to leave the inspector’s apartment after they’d watched
the Sunday game together on Cardenas’s vit.

“What?”

“You remember Charliebo. My ex-seeing-eye shepherd? The one who got vacuumed last year by that subox tunnel those two self-vacuumed
multinat renegades devised. It transposed him into a tactile defense mechanism for their system. Poor Charliebo. When I was
drowning in the worst of that bad trip he was the only friendly shape that hung with me. He tried to help me.”

The captain looked away, embarrassed. “Sure, Angel. Glad be was there for you.”

“Go ahead, patronize me. I wonder, though, if he was only in my dream. They still haven’t managed to trace the line of the
GenDyne-Parabas subox tunnel. Nobody knows where it
really goes, what it links to and doesn’t link to. Maybe there’s some kind of as yet undiscovered crossover seam between all
of these cyber things. Nobody really knows. We just build them and vitalize them and make sure they’re doing their jobs. We
don’t know what they do in their spare time. Maybe it wasn’t all a dream, all bad trip. Maybe Charliebo was really there,
jumping from box to box, using the tunnels and trying to help me.”

“I wouldn’t know about things like that, Angel.”

The inspector leaned back in his chair, feet up, one hand holding a cold Tecate Primo. “Nobody does, Shaun. Nobody does.”

The captain looked at him for a long moment, then shut the codo door quietly behind him. Cardenas checked the numerals that
floated blue above the vit screen. Twelve-twenty, Time for bed. He had another week of administrative leave in which to relax,
recover, or do nothing, as he saw fit. Plenty of time to think, and rethink, and ponder.

His gaze flicked to his home box, which occupied an alcove next to the wallscreen. It was powered up, dormant, waiting for
input. With his left hand he reached for the vorec that lay on the endtable next to his easy chair and flicked it on, holding
it up to his lips.

“Our Lady…” he began. The telltales on the home box twinkled, indicating it was receiving his transmission. He hesitated,
then flipped the vorec off and laid it aside.

A week was time to do too much thinking, he told himself. He needed to get back to work, to the reality of the district headquarters,
to the clamor and pungency of the pave. He pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the bedroom.

As he turned he thought he saw a flicker of white light flash from the cover of the box’s metallic composite case. But probably
not.

The ultimate
maquiladora.
Montezuma Strip: First World tech and Third World wages, sprawling from LA. to East Elpaso Juarez, Guyamas to Phoenix; a
thousand gangs, a million locos; and a few wealthy beyond the dreams of gods…