Crache

by Mark Budz

  “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.”

  9

  BRUJA-HA

  By the time the gangstas finish hauling L. Mariachi to their temporary barracks, his head is throbbing to a killer downbeat and he has to pee. The real pisser is that his bladder is about to explode and he’s no longer drunk. Fucking EZ beer isn’t worth shit. In the interest of worker health and productivity, it’s been brewed to wear off quickly.

  The tambo is a cluster of recycled trailers that have been hauled out of storage in the past twenty-four hours to house the incoming braceros. Fabricated out of stucco-textured structural foam sprayed over a wire frame, the trailers are stacked like cargo containers in precise anal-retentive rows. The dirt around them is bare. The politicorp didn’t bother to spray the ground with grass to hold down the grit. A ragtag collection of umbrella palms and circuitrees furnish some UV protection and power. Not much, considering the number of migrant workers that have been sardined into the units. A bad sign. The patrón is a tightwad.

  There are more malavisos, bad omens. For one, the place is dead quiet; no traditional banda or up-tempo norteño beat blasting from any of the trailers. No thrashup synthonica to keep the blood flowing. He can’t stop thinking about the absence. It’s as if the lack of music is a wound that needs to be licked, no different from a dog cleaning a raw sore. Not because it feels good but because it hurts more not to. The lack hints at some deeper, unseen illness. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the sick woman—what the witch is trying to cure.

  These braceros are more like pollos, he thinks. The frightened chickens who used to migrate between clades illegally, covertly, by dosing themselves with black-market antiphers. This was long before the bracero work exchange program was formally institutionalized and placed under the administrative control of the Bureau of Ecotectural Assimilation and Naturalization. Now the migrants are officially BEANers. A term that is no longer derogatory, according to the politicorps, because it applies equally to everyone who signs up for the employment program, regardless of race, religion, or economic and cultural background.

  “Pinche güey,” L. Mariachi mutters under his breath. Goddamn.

  “What?” Balta, the oldest gangsta asks, steering him toward a trailer at the end of one row. The unit looks like a last-minute addition. It’s whiter than those around it, as bright and shiny as a filling in a mouthful of rotting teeth.

  “I have to take a leak,” L. Mariachi says.

  “Me, too,” the younger gangsta, Oscar, says. Grinning. As if this creates some special bond between them that transcends their background and any other differences they might have.

  “This is it,” Balta announces, pressing a thumb to an iDNA sensor on the door to let them in.

  L. Mariachi isn’t sure if the kid’s referring to the trailer or what’s about to happen. When the door opens he’s assaulted with the aroma of incense, rose-scented candles, tortillas, and hydroponic chili peppers.

  Inside the trailer is a big rectangle divided into smaller rectangular rooms by thin lichenboard panels clipped to modular fasteners. The fasteners make it possible to change the floor plan, or redecorate, but the holes they leave in the exterior walls look like shit. For the most part, these have been papered over with old videocentro movie posters, hologram printouts of pop singers downloaded from online netzines, and black silkscreen images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and innumerable saints. The furniture is standard bracero mix-and-match, a menagerie of secondhand gel cushions and pillows on folding plastic frames. Interior light is provided by peeling biolum strips stuck to the walls and the ceiling. The windows, paned with photovoltaic cellulose, are black as the night and reflect the sad-ass squalor of the place, including himself.

  A few steps into the room, Oscar locks the door behind him. Dead bolts click into place.

  He’s greeted by a man in his late forties—João, the uncle-in-law of Lejandra, the sick woman. He sports a big mustache, has watermelon seeds for eyes, and is wearing a loose sprayon tank top over the tattunes on his pectorals and biceps. One is a topless woman whose breasts rattle ka-chooka chooka when she shakes them. Another depicts a heart that drips blood. The blood trickles down his side before getting reabsorbed into his skin. He’s got scars, too. Thick keloid welts that look like permanent leeches. He’s been roughed up, and not by another bracero. The welts are the scarlet letter of a BEAN interrogation.

  Great. Not only has he been hulled by the gangstas, he’s going to turn up on a BEAN list of suspicious persons. Assuming he doesn’t get hulled permanently at the end of the evening.

  “Thanks for coming.” João offers a gruff, callused hand, each finger tattuned so it resembles a snake. “I’m glad you could make it.”

  “Sure. No problem.” L. Mariachi does his best to ignore the writhing Medusa hiss of serpents and return the squeeze. Then he quickly excuses himself and heads into the bathroom.

  The closet-size stall is windowless. There’s no way out. Not even a fan vent he can use to call for help.

  “You were lucky,” Num Nut tells him as he’s relieving himself. “It’s a good thing they showed up when they did.”

  “Yeah, right. No telling what horrible shit would have happened if they’d left me alone.”

  “For one, you could be hungover. Wallowing in self-pity.”

  L. Mariachi offlines the IA. He doesn’t want to listen to it berate him, especially if he actually has to try to play. He tucks himself in, then shambles back out to the front room.

  João’s wife, the sick woman’s aunt, is waiting there for him. She doesn’t look happy to see him, introduces herself as Isabelle. She’s in her midforties; has raven black hair tied back in a ropy braid, is rocking fresh sprayon jeans, a pretty but modest floral-print blouse, and cheap company-store wraparounds made out of pink-tinted cellophane.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.” She stands with her arms folded across her chest.

  L. Mariachi glances around, notices the faint, chalky outline of
an equilateral triangle scratched on the floor. At each corner he can just make out the shiny residue of low-grade glycerin wax. His gaze travels to the windows and hallway. Sure enough, the windowsills and doorframe have each been marked with an equi-armed cross.

  “The bruja was here already?” he says, trying not to sound too optimistic. Maybe he’s off the hook—won’t have to play for the witch after all.

  “That’s from last night,” Oscar says. “The spell didn’t work.”

  His sense of reprieve falters. So she’s coming back again tonight—moving on to the next stage of treatment.

  “She’s on her way now,” Isabelle tells them. “I just got a message from her. She’ll be here soon.”

  “You want to meet Lejandra?” João says.

  “We already told her you were coming to play,” Oscar says, working hard to play up L. Mariachi’s celebrity status as a musician, stroke his ego. “The bruja asked for you specifically.”

  “She did?” A washed-up rockero like him?

  “Come on.” Balta tugs at L. Mariachi’s sleeve.

  “Maybe we should wait for la bruja,” L. Mariachi says, hedging. There’s still a chance she won’t show.

  “We need to wake Lejandra up anyway,” Isabelle says. “For the limpia. It would make it easier if you’re there.”

  No way he’s getting out of this even if the bruja doesn’t show. They aren’t taking no for an answer. So he lets himself be led down the hallway to a bedroom in back. The room’s only window is curtained with threadbare sprayon gauze that hides the yellowed photovoltaics. Under it, the family has set up an altar table. A vase on the table sprouts a bouquet of yellow marigoldlike flowers he can’t identify. Some knockoff hybrid. There’s a cross made out of two green chili peppers tied together by a red ribbon, even a festive sugar skull. The biolum panels on the walls have been muted. The only light in the room is given off by a votive candle made out of myrrh-scented glycerin, the chipped plastic holder etched with a colorful image of the Virgin Mary cradling the Baby Jesus.

  L. Mariachi turns to the bed where Lejandra is asleep, resting uncomfortably under sweat-stained sheets. The woman, thirty-something, has a haunted look. Troubled. Her face is gaunt, her skin jaundiced but glossy. Just under the translucent flesh the bruised outline of her skeleton is visible, as if her bones have been scorched black. In contrast to her sunken cheeks and pursed lips, her tightly closed eyes are huge, bulging with fever or some other internal pressure. The pulse in her neck is rapid, as if fueled by a high-octane nightmare.