by Mark Budz
The peacock agent nods like this makes total sense, dovetails perfectly with his paranoid view of the world.
“That’s what she was doing with the woman,” the rose agent says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the bitch made her sick just so she could come in and ‘cure’ her. Look like a savior.”
“And turn public sentiment against the politicorp,” the peacock agent says.
“Exactly. All it takes is one. If the seed of dissent takes root here, it will spread elsewhere.”
“The domino effect.”
“You got it.”
“What I can’t spec is why we can’t get a reading on her. No iDNA signature, no clade-pattern. No nothing.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find out who she is soon enough.” The rose agent checks the wallscroll. “How much longer until our rockero wakes up?”
The peacock agent consults a readout on his wraparounds. “Half an hour.”
Fola grimaces. “They’re going to question him, aren’t they?” she says. “Torture him.”
She closes her eyes against the prospect. She doesn’t have it in her to watch the interrogation if it turns ugly. Not without the Mother Teresa pherions she was routinely dosed with as a Jesuette. On her own, she can’t stomach the sight of blood, or of broken bones poking through skin. She’s not strong enough.
“That’s another reason he’s been placed in solitary confinement,” Pheidoh says. “To frighten and disorient him.”
Not just him but the rest of the workers. The intent is to send a message to all of the braceros. Psychologically terrorize them.
“His background is sort of sketchy, too,” the peacock agent says. His eyebrows hunch up like formaldehyde-preserved inchworms as he squints behind his wraparounds, concentrating hard. “Age fifty-eight. Born in Juárez, Mexico. His father was Chinese, a maquiladora worker. His mother was a local prostitute. When the father took off, he and Mom lived in a Church-sponsored shelter. At the age of nine he ran away. There’s no record of him for close to a year. Not until he shows up in Mexico City, at a dance music club called the Seraphemme.”
“What’d he do there?”
“There are no employment records. But routine surveillance sweeps by the local police confirm his iDNA pattern.”
“Any evidence of illegal pharming? Gang affiliation? Or any kind of black-market activity?” the rose agent asks.
“No. He was never picked up.”
The rose agent smirks. “That just means he never got caught. How long was he there?”
“Four years. After that, he drops out of sight again. Resurfaces six months later in Puerto Vallarta as a panhandler, playing guitar on street corners for tourists.”
“How’d he get the guitar?”
The peacock agent shrugs. “It doesn’t say.”
The rose agent plucks absently at a nose hair. “My guess is he stole it. That’s why he had to leave town. Disappear for a while and start over again in PV.”
“Because the owner was after his ass.”
“Yeah.” The rose agent flicks the offending nostril hair aside. “Or someone else he fucked over.”
“You want me to see if I can find out if anyone reported a stolen guitar before he left?”
“Yeah. You might also run a query on any murders, deaths, and suicides around that time.”
Couldn’t somebody have just given the guitar to him? Fola wonders. As a gift or payment for work? But that’s not the way BEAN thinks. They’re trained to assume the worst.
“Also, see if you can find out who his friends were,” the rose agent says. “Other losers he hung around or came in regular contact with.”
The peacock agent nods. His lips move as he mutters something inaudible to his IA.
“What else have you got on him?” the rose agent says.
“After a year or so he gives up street life and starts playing at a local bar. A club called the Wild Rave’n.”
“So he’s good. Learned some shit while he was swabbing toilets back in Mexico City.”
“Yeah. After another year, he’s got a live band playing the gig with him. Daily Bred.”
“No shit. The same one that did ‘SoulR Byrne’?”
“Uh-huh. But that wasn’t until later. Early on, all they played were live shows. Didn’t start netcasting for a while.”
The rose agent whistles. “Fuckin’ A. We got us a celebrity. I always wondered what happened to that band.”
“They played together until his hand got messed. That’s the reason they broke up.”
“What’s the story with the hand?”
The peacock agent grips the sides of his wraparounds. “Tissue and nerve damage caused by an unknown agent.”
“What do you mean, unknown?”
“The hospital that treated him couldn’t find anything unusual. There was nothing abnormal in his system when they assayed him.”
“That’s hard to believe.” The rose agent shakes his head. “It was there, they just didn’t have the tools to ID it.”
“You think it’s still in him?”
“No. We would have scoped it. But we might be able to identify the agent by the type of damage it caused. There should be a similar pathology on record somewhere that we can use to ID what he got dosed with. Begin by checking for all known pherions that date back that far and were unregistered at the time.”
“Wouldn’t it still be illegal?”
“Not necessarily. Under certain conditions, it could be registered now. We know for sure it wasn’t cataloged back then or it would have shown up. If we can determine what he was taking, it will tell us a lot about what he was really involved in.”
“Besides the music?”
“Right. I have a feeling he was playing around with more than just the guitar.”
“So after the accident or whatever, he decides to become a migrant,” the peacock agent says. He scowls. “That doesn’t make sense. Why not stay in the music business? Do something else besides play the guitar?”
“Because it would have been unhealthy,” the rose agent says.
“You’re saying he was forced out?”
“I have a feeling the hand was a not-so-subtle message. A warning of what would happen to him if he didn’t change career paths.”
“Fola?” Pheidoh says.
“One other thing,” the rose agent says. He blinks, like a lightbulb has gone off in his head and temporarily stunned or blinded him. “Run a complete cryptanalysis of all of Daily Bred’s songs. Ciphertext, steganography, the works.”
“You want lyrics or music?”
“Both.”
“What am I looking for?”
“How the hell should I know? Any type of embedded or coded message that got mass mediated.”
“You think he’s still involved in something?”
“I have a feeling he might be. Something ongoing, and long term. Big. He could be the tip of a very large iceberg.”
“Fola?” Pheidoh says again. The datahound’s tone is polite but firm. “There’s something you should know.”
She tears her attention away from the bureaucratic thugs. “What?” It takes her a moment to refocus.
The IA has closed and set down its book. “There’s been an accident, in the depod area for the quarantine zone.”
Fola swallows, feels her throat tighten. Not Xophia. It can’t be. It’s too early.
“It involves the first emergency evacuation shuttle from the asteroid,” Pheidoh says. “Several workers have been critically injured.”
23
SITE GEIST
Rexx follows Hjert around the corner of a basement-level maintenance shaft, his fingers tracing the embedded fossils in the rock, as if the braillelike pattern of bone can be deciphered with his fingertips.
The shaft is dimly lit, one of several large interconnecting tunnels that provide access to the industrial processing and public utility sections of the arcology. The atmosphere in the shaft is motionless. All air circulation in
the colony has come to a dead stop. By extension, the air in his biosuit feels stagnant, enervating.
He passes a moldy splotch of kitsch on one wall. The melanoma is an ad for a new line of Gauloises nanimatronic appliqués and bacterial cosmetics, superimposed on a poster for the 1939 World’s Fair.
Rexx touches a gloved finger to the montage. It’s smooth, perfectly flush with the surface. Not just flush, the images are part of the wall. No, they are the wall . . . some new material staining the stone, spreading like coffee or blood through a napkin.
. . . metal shoes flashing. First silver, then red.
Mathieu!
Rexx’s head spins. He grabs an overhead water pipe to stanch the vertigo. It’s been a couple of hours since he dosed himself with the reclade pherion. Maybe it’s started to wear off by now, freed up enough riboswitches to trigger a smattering of White Rain. Just a few drops. Anything.
He slows to a stop in the shaft, brings up the Predicta on his eyescreens, dials in the sequence for the biodigital squirt, and waits.
Instead of the boy and the horse, a room with white lace curtains, a floor lamp, and an antique wooden rocking chair appears on the virtual television screen.
Music playing somewhere. The siren call of an old pop tune, barely audible over his cochlear implants. The sound seems to come from the speaker on the pedestal, the volume so low he wonders if the song is real or an artifact of memory.
Oh! I want to be
Your soul provider, your sole insider.
His mother had liked that song. “SoulR Byrne” by Daily Bred. The lyrics had a nostalgic quality. She played it at night, whenever his father was gone, getting shitfaced on one of his Juárez benders.
Don’t let my heart go
Up in smoke, burned by the sun
For eternity.
’Cause
When I’m fine’ly gone,
It’s a fore_gone conclusion
Your soul’s gonna cry. . . .
Rexx dreaded the song. He would lie awake in bed and feel the dark pressing in, maudlin and suffocating. He hated the way it tightened his chest, hated the awful irony in the words.
For his mother, the song provided a measure of solace. She missed her husband—missed the pair-bond pherion she’d been dosed with the day they’d married.
No different from the pherion that had bound Jelena to him, enslaved her heart and soul.
Until death do us part.
For Rexx, the lyrics contained a sadness his mother was incapable of expressing on her own. What she was really aching for, without realizing it, was her freedom. It was as if the song was a locket that held her vanished youth, to be opened every now and then after five or six vodka tonics and then resolutely put away.
Two moths in the night.
Drawn like the tide to the moon,
Our souls will unite.
“When’d you start using?” Hjert says. “Before you left for the belt or after you got here?”
She wavers in front of him, an apparition that refuses to go away. “What difference does it make?”
“Makes all the difference in the world. Says a lot about the sickness you’re carrying around inside you.”
“What sickness is that?”
“You got the sweats, can’t stop shaking. If that isn’t a fever, I don’t know what is.”
“Is that the voice of experience I’m hearin’?”
“We’re all running,” she says, “from something or toward something. Some people come here to escape a habit, and then find they can’t kick it. Others get here, and start one up because they discover it wasn’t what they thought. That they aren’t who, or what, they imagined.”
“Which one are you?”
“Let’s just say that we’re all creatures of habit, most of ’em bad, and sometimes the only way to head in the right direction is to steer away from the wrong.”
“You went to prison,” he says. “What for?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you don’t always have to know what to do, just what not to do.”
The iconography on the walls thickens, rock giving way to bric-a-brac. A straw angel stuffed into drawstring pants and a red-and-white-checked shirt. A squat Buddha with a gargoyle’s head. A hand fashioned from circuit-board hieroglyphs and white tulle lace.
“Almost there,” Hjert tells him.
“Good,” Rexx says. He has a side stitch, the pain wedged like a machete between his ribs.
A faint current of air tugs at him. Natural convection, not the forced circulation of a ventilation fan.
Abruptly the surreality ends, as if a boundary has been reached, an intertidal zone that marks the transition from one environment to another. Ahead of him the maintenance shaft ends, blocked by a cave-in. The aneurysm has exposed an egg-shaped hollow above the ceiling, rough, concave.
A ruptured gas pocket. Rubble drifts uneasily near the floor. But he can see small dust particles rising slowly in the micrograv, drawn upward like smoke through a cranny at the apex of the hollow.
“This is it,” she says, craning her neck to peer at the cleft.
In the dim light of the dust-covered biolums the cleft looks tight and rough edged. No support struts have been brought in, or structural mucus applied, to shore up the walls and ceiling.
“How old is the cave-in?” Rexx asks. Judging by the amount of debris still in the air, it was fairly recent.
“A few minutes before the ecotectural failure,” Hjert says. “It was picked up on seismic. I sent a team down to investigate, but when the disaster hit, things went crazy. I didn’t find out about this”—she gestures at the fossil—“until a couple of hours ago. As soon as I did, I came down to check things out myself.”
Rexx turns the stone over in his hand. “Who found it?”
“One of the workers. Pocketed it, then forgot all about it.” She gauges the distance to the tight fissure. “Ready?”
“Give me a second.” Rexx takes a deep breath and presses one hand to his side. He can’t seem to catch his wind.
“You should know that your blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature are all dangerously elevated,” Warren advises him.
“Noted,” Rexx says. “Thanks.”
Hjert nods. “Follow me.” She pushes off expertly from the floor, and glides with the ease of a fish into the cranny.
Rexx launches himself at the opening. Feels a jackhammer surge of adrenaline tighten his stomach, as if he’s getting ready to slide onto the back of a Brahma bull.
Thirteen years old, dry mouthed with terror, waiting to see if he would survive the next 2.5 seconds . . . or if he would be hurled to the ground and trampled into an early grave.
The rodeo had been a birthday present. It was also a convenient excuse for his father to spend a few days debauching in Mexico.
The Crooked W Ranch where they stayed was private. Upper-clade. The kind of resort that was invitation only, off-limits to all but the privileged few.
“Not even BEAN will lay a finger on this place,” his father had bragged on the flight there. A stealthy helipod jump across the Rio Grande, into the Mexican state of Chihuahua and the Sierra de la Tasajara Mountains. The night moonless and bleak. Airless, it seemed. As if they were moving too fast to breathe, outpacing both sound and oxygen.
“Nothing that happens will ever come back to bite you in the ass,” his old man said. The swagger in the statement seemed calculated to reassure him.
“What are we gonna do?” Rexx said, his voice cracking from puberty and nerves. His nose tingling with the antipher he’d been dosed with.
“Whatever we want. You got an itch, the Crooked Dubya is the place to scratch it. No questions asked, if you know what I mean.” His father’s wink was lurid and stank of anticipation.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well”—his father chuckled and draped a heavy arm across Rexx’s back—“that is what we’re gonna find out.”
Together. Whether he wanted to or
not.
“The thing to keep in mind,” his father rattled on, “is that you don’t have to be embarrassed about nothing you do. Not before and not after. You leave your guilt here. Think of it as a revival. A place where you can unburden yourself without fear of reprisal or shame, then go home a better person. You want to be a better person, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Damn right you do. We all do.” His father gripped his shoulder, gave it an affectionate squeeze. “And the best way to do that is to recognize your weaknesses, to embrace and accept your demons. If you deny them, in the end you will only make them stronger. You understand what I’m tryin’ to tell you?” He sounded drunk, not just with expectation, but passion.
“I think so,” Rexx said.
“Good.” His father patted him on the back of the neck. The pat was part invitation and part blessing. It promised belonging, trust, the intimacy of shared secrets and a common purpose—destiny even. Soon Rexx would be part of an elite org, privy to knowledge that only a few had.
His father’s fingers tightened, squeezing the nape of his neck. “There’s only one rule.”
Rexx tensed.
“It’s forbidden to tell your mother or anyone else about this place. That includes anything you might see, hear, or do here. Is that clear?”
Rexx tried to nod.
His father’s grip relaxed in what felt like relief, anxious to be supportive again—encouraging.
Rexx squirmed under the weight of the embrace, drawn to the bond it established between them and at the same time repulsed by the burden of betrayal it laid on him.
The ranch nestled in a box canyon, surrounded on three sides by vertical rock cliffs. They arrived sometime after midnight and were met by the muffled strains of Texas swing and a short bandy-legged man wearing cloned reptilian boots, blue jeans, a beige shirt, and a white ten-gallon Stetson.
“Like father, like son, I see.” The man chortled, shaking his father’s hand and then extending one to Rexx. “Billy Bob, at your service.”