Neurolink (19 page)

He watched the woman marching erectly among the vats, dipping a finger in each one and tasting. In the dress blue uniform, she looked like a field marshal inspecting her troops.

“Benito, you like this place?” he said. “The pudding’s yummy.”

Benito grinned.

“Right.” He ruffled the boy’s hair. The woman had wandered quite a distance, so he called out to her, “This boy will work in exchange for food.”

“That thieving vermin!” The woman waved them off. “I told you to leave. No one can do this but me.”

“Naomi. Naomi. What are you saying, sweet girl?”

Dominic spun to see where the strange voice had come from. At the far end of the bright, shadowy room, a pale shape wavered like a reflection in water. Dominic bent under the fluorescent grid to see a frail little man shuffling among the vats, feeling the rims with his outspread fingers. He was so short, he didn’t have to stoop to walk. Slowly, he advanced toward them. He wore no shirt, and every rib in his torso cast a shadow. He was bald and hairless, except for wispy white eyebrows that hung over his eyes like thatch.

“Tooksook!”

“Nick, it’s you,” the old man said. “Good, good, I’ve been looking for you. What happened to your eye?”

Dominic remembered the black eye Benito had given him, but before he could answer, the woman spoke.

“Friends of yours, Tooky? Humph.” She kept stroking and smoothing her loose, stringy hair.

Tooksook greeted her with a kiss, then shambled up and touched Dominic’s cheek.

“Ow!” Dominic drew back. The eye was tender, and his left jaw stung from that whack from the woman’s rake. His face must make quite a rainbow, he thought wryly.

“Bad luck, bad luck. But it’ll heal. Hello, Benito.”

The boy ran and clutched Tooksook around the waist.

“Let’s see, there was something for you. Yes, yes, I remember.” The old man fished an object out of his trouser pocket and gave it to the boy. It was a yellow pencil. The boy gripped the object in both hands, and Tooksook smiled so broadly, his single front tooth seemed ready to wobble loose. “Find something to write on, Benito. The floor will do. Lick the lead to make it work better. Yes, lick it.”

The boy dashed back to Dominic and held up the pencil like a trophy. Dominic had never seen the boy so delighted. Benito waited till Dominic bent and made a close examination of the pencil. Then he stuck the lead point in his small mouth and darted away between the vats.

Tooksook chuckled. He pressed the blond woman’s hand and blatantly batted his eyelashes at her. His bald head just reached her shoulder. “Naomi, sweet girl, this is Nick. The coin giver. The one I told you about. He’s been to school. He’ll know how to make your bugs breed faster.”

“This prote?” The woman rolled her eyes.

“I know nothing about food production,” Dominic said.

Tooksook merely nodded and kept talking. “Naomi is our goddess. Oh yes, dear girl. Don’t be shy. Naomi tends our garden. She feeds trash to her yeast bugs, and they bear divine fruit. It’s the most sublime occupation. Yes, yes, the most sublime. And Nick, now that you’re here—”

“No, Tooksook, listen to me. The boy can stay and work, but I have urgent business.”

“Humph. Everybody has urgent business.” Naomi jerked her hand free of Tooksook’s grasp and started knotting her hair.

Her sour attitude set Dominic on edge. “Tooksook, if you have over five thousand people here, why can’t someone help with these vats?”

Tooksook opened his mouth, but Naomi interrupted. “Protes, ha! They wouldn’t be any help to me.” She smoothed her blue uniform and peered into the vat where Dominic and the boy had eaten. Her nostrils curled. “I have enough to do without tripping over stupid protes!”

“What arrogance! You’re unbelievable,” Dominic said.

Tooksook fluttered his hands at them. “Children, please. Let’s decide how we’ll feed our guests. You’ve been to school, Nick. You understand Naomi’s magic food. I knew the moment I saw you, that you would—”

“Are you deaf, old man? I don’t know anything about food vats!”

Tooksook blinked and crammed a knuckle in his mouth. Dominic hadn’t meant to startle the old guy. He puffed a breath between his teeth. “I’m sorry, Tooksook.”

“Con him, son. Get directions to the link. You have eighteen hours, thirty-three minutes and counting.”

Con him, right. The NP reasoned just like Richter—everything was a con. His anger and regret were still as mixed up as ever. The very day of Richter’s accident, Dominic had called him a crook. But he hadn’t meant it. That morning, they’d argued over that Lindt.Com loan. His father’s refusal to approve that loan had driven Lindt.Com out of business, and ZahlenBank had scooped up the assets for pocket change. Richter called it sound practice, and Dominic called it larceny. Now he clenched his teeth as if he could bite back the word.

“Con him, son,” the NP said again. “You’re doing it to save ZahlenBank.”

Dominic drew a deep breath and put an arm around Tooksook’s shoulders. He felt the man’s bones protruding through his thin flesh. “Tooksook, your colony is running out of air. I can get what you need. Oxygen, fuel, supplies and food enough for everyone.” His lies flowed smoothly after so much practice. He swallowed and rushed the next line. “I have to meet your council on the
Dominic Jedes
’ bridge.”

“That’s my boy!” the NP gloated.

Tooksook tilted his head up and gazed into Dominic’s eyes. “Is that why you’ve come, Nick? Truly?”

The old man’s long eyebrows trembled, and Dominic had to exercise all his will to hold himself steady. The only sound was the scratch of Benito’s pencil on the damp floor. Dominic bit his lip. He didn’t mean to raise false hopes, not for gentle old Tooksook. The soup man balanced on his tiptoes, waiting for an answer, and Dominic looked back and forth from one milk white eye to the other.

After all, he wasn’t lying. If he silenced that ludicrous broadcast and put these protes under arrest, in a way, he would be making good on his promise. These people would have dependable life support again. Oxygen, food—everything they needed.

Dominic threw his head back and scowled at the ceiling. He’d accused his father of rationalizing, but it seemed he’d inherited the gift. The harsh fluorescent light grid hurt his eyes, so he shut them. Benito’s pencil scraped, and Dominic didn’t have to look to know the boy was drawing pictures of heroes. The heavy sweet reek of the vats hung in the air like nerve gas.

Naomi snapped her fingers. “Fuel, he says. Food, he says. The college grad thinks he can solve all our problems.” She had moved several squares away, and now she stood at a workbench scrubbing her rake with a ball of steel wool. “Take him to the council, Tooky. Why not? Just get him out of my vat room. And take his smutty child, too. This is not day care.”

Dominic exploded. “Madam, I’ve had enough of your attitude.”

“No, Nick.” Tooksook pawed at his arm.

“You’re not an exec. Anyone can see that.” Dominic shrugged the old man off and moved toward Naomi. He grabbed her rake and tossed it aside. When she backed up-, her head bumped the light grid, and the whole framework shivered.

“So you’ve had a little training,” Dominic went on. “That doesn’t give you the right to treat me like scum. You don’t even know who I am.”

Naomi bumped the light grid again, and the shadows danced crazily. She clutched at the bare tubes over her head.

Tooksook slipped between them. “Nick, please. The dear girl is fragile.”

But Dominic’s anger had gained too much momentum. He leaned over the woman and barked, “You’re a fraud!”

Naomi couldn’t back away from him. The vats held her trapped. She crossed her arms over her breasts and slid her hands nervously up and down her sleeves.

Tooksook tried to intervene again. “Please, Nick. Can’t you see? Our dear Naomi needs her little dream.”

Naomi began to pluck and tear at her uniform. She scratched at the braided insignia with her fingernail. “You want my uniform? Take it!” She ripped open the collar and fumbled with the zipper. Her eyes seemed not to focus. After a struggle, she got the zipper open and pulled one shoulder free. Dominic glimpsed a pale, wrinkled breast before Tooksook turned her away. “My uniform,” she repeated in an edgy voice.

“Of course it’s yours, sweet girl. No one wants to take away your uniform. Nick made a mistake. But we forgive him, don’t we? Yes, yes, we forgive him. Nick’s come to save us.”

Tooksook managed to get Naomi’s uniform zipped up again. Then he found her rake and pressed her fingers around the handle. “Dear girl. We can’t do without you. You feed us all. That’s right, use your rake. Sweet Naomi. That’s it.”

Softly, fondly, Tooksook coaxed her down the aisle of vats. With dull mortification, Dominic watched them go. He’d resorted to violence again. Violence against a mentally ill prote woman who had managed to grow enough food to sustain over five thousand people. And the worst he could say about her was, she treated him like scum.

“Eighteen hours, ten minutes, fourteen seconds,” the NP whined.

Dominic didn’t want to, but he found himself thinking about Penderowski again and wishing he hadn’t taken that light. Maybe it was the accumulation of fatigue. He pressed his knuckles on the vat rim, and from nowhere, another memory assaulted him, a day when he was seventeen years old, fresh out of college, wearing the smart dress blues of a junior trader, riding up the executive elevator with his father. It was his first day at the Bank, and his father spent the morning proudly showing him around and explaining the job. Dominic hung on every word.

“Protes are children, son. Our duty is to protect them. Think of the marketplace as one big fragile ecosystem that feeds us all. We execs have to watch over it and keep it safe. That’s our trust, and ZahlenBank’s the heart of it.”

Surely, there was a time when his father believed those words.

Dominic felt a tug at his waistband and looked down. Benito wanted to show him something. Vacantly, he let himself be led through the vats, and there on the floor under a glowing fluorescent tube, he found Benito’s sketch of a tall stick figure with a square head and enormous feet. In one hand, the figure held a laser torch streaming radiance. Dominic couldn’t mistake the portrait. He patted the boy’s shoulder and said nothing.

Benito tugged at him again and held up the yellow pencil. Dominic saw the lead had broken. It was a stubby, old-fashioned mechanical device with a button to extend or retract the graphite point. Dominic clicked it a few times to extrude more lead, then handed it back to the boy.

“Zzzh!” The boy grinned and dropped to the floor to start drawing again. Dominic realized that was the first happy sound he’d heard Benito make.

Behind him, Tooksook said, “Nick, you should hurry, yes? The council’s expecting you. Come, come, I’ll show you the way.”

“Naomi?” Dominic asked.

“Naomi’s lying down. She’s very tired.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Of course you didn’t.” The old man squeezed his arm. “Benito, come along. Yes, bring your pencil. We’re going to find the
Dominic Jedes
.”

Dominic offered Tooksook the laser torch, but he said he wouldn’t need it. They wound through the vats toward the spot where Tooksook had first appeared, and there in the ceiling was an open hatch.

Tooksook pointed at it and beamed. “Up you go. Straight up to the bridge.”

DOMINIC
pulled himself up through the ceiling hatch and smacked his head hard against a rock roof. Before he could say a word, Tooksook slid the hatch shut, leaving them in darkness. Dominic couldn’t stand. The ceiling was too low. He had to creep along the corridor and feel with his knuckles. He rubbed the bruised place on his head, another colorful lump for his collection. Straight up, the old man said. Splendid.

He switched on the laser torch. The place smelled of fungus and fresh cement, and the torch beam glistened along sweating, chiseled walls. The tunnel slanted upward at a slight incline. Steps were notched into the rock, and a short way ahead, the stairway curved out of sight. When Benito disappeared around the corner, Dominic puffed a sigh. “Right, Benito. You lead.” He hunched over like a skulking primate and followed.

Around the first bend, the tunnel widened and veered downward. Someone had strung a row of electric bulbs, and in the weak light, Dominic made out shrouded forms suspended along the walls. Hammocks. Six people were sleeping here. He heard snoring. Then he saw a young woman sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth and fanning herself with a broken plate. As she watched him pass, her intense blue eyes reflected the lights.

Farther along, he found Benito squatting with four or five naked children, discussing something on the floor. Dominic bent over and directed his torch beam to see what they found so interesting. In the bright light, the nest of gutterbugs erupted like a living volcano, and shiny black insects skittered in all directions. Dominic jerked back in disgust.

“Benito, let’s keep moving.” He had to drag the boy away. The children were squealing and racing to catch the bugs.

“Blow me if this tunnel leads up!” the NP groused. “That old geezer doesn’t know up from upside down.”

Dominic couldn’t argue. As the tunnel slanted farther down, he felt the beginnings of panic. He was as lost as ever, and time was running short. Should he go back or forward? He had no idea how to find his way out!

“This is what the Orgs wanted,” he muttered under his breath.

“Your heart’s racing, son. I’m gonna synthesize a little something to calm you.”

“Damn you to hell! You leave my body chemistry alone.”

“I’m concerned for your health. Why don’t you trust me?”

Dominic plodded on without speaking. His father must have had good intentions when he created the NP, but the result was obnoxious. His father couldn’t possibly have meant things to turn out this way. Dominic stubbed his toe and cursed. This passage had more twists than a—a gutterbug trail, he thought with black humor. The stone steps led ever downward, and in every feasible space, people had set up living quarters. He saw cargo webbing strung up as hammocks and shipping crates transformed into a dozen different styles of table, shelf and chair. If nothing else, these protes were clever at building things.