by Mark Budz
The ladder was beyond his reach. Even when he jumped, his fingers fell short of the lowest rung, scraping futilely against smooth concrete. Outside, one of the gabachos shook the rollup door. The deafening rattle jarred his nerves. To secure the rollup, he’d slipped a twisted length of wire through the hasp. The door convulsed again and let out a groan.
He hurried back to the lean-to, retrieved one of the piezo panels, and propped it at an angle against the wall beneath the ladder. The rollup bucked with a shrill squeal, and a gap opened up, revealing metal-studded black leather boots and the white-hot flare of headlights.
Taking a few steps back, he ran up the makeshift ramp. It slid out from under him, dumping him to the floor.
The rollup screeched. The gap widened. Almost large enough for a man to crawl under.
“Anyone in there?” The voice boomed.
He replaced the panel, adjusted the angle, and charged up it again. The panel slid just as his toes caught the top edge. But his fingers brushed the rung, curled around it as the panel clattered to the floor. The wire securing the latch gave way with a deafening pop.
Fast up the ladder. Light rose like tidewater to catch him as the rollup grated open in grudging increments. There was no place to hide on the catwalk. He could see through the grating to where the gabachos stood. That meant they could see him. He looked for the halo. It was gone.
“Come on out,” the voice said. “We won’t hurt you. We’re here to help. Got us some w@ngs if you’re hungry.”
He took a step. Froze as the catwalk creaked.
“You like pad Thai?”
He could smell the noodles. He hugged his stomach, squelched the sudden churn.
“We know you’re here,” the man said. He was huge. A beached whale with legs. He wore a cowboy hat and a coil of rope looped around his flabby neck.
A flashlight beam, phosphor bright, detonated like a land mine on the floor twenty meters below. He caught a glimpse of blue, half a meter in front of him, just as he closed his eyes against the incandescence and dropped to his knees.
“Please,” he prayed under his breath. “Protect me. Save me.”
Afraid to breathe, half-blind, his vision squirming with blood red afterimages, he crept forward. The metal grating dug into his elbows, scoring bone.
“You see anything?” a second gabacho said.
“Naw. Turn off them goddamned lights. They’re fucking with the IR. I can’t get a positive read.”
The warehouse went dark. The heat from the lights evaporated, left him shivering, covered with goose pimples. His jaw clenched.
“Anything yet?”
“Maybe. Hold yer pecker. Okay, it’s startin’ to clear.”
His hand brushed against a rough piece of cloth. Not cloth. Heat-reflective mesh that had fallen to the catwalk. He squirmed onto the lamé, pulled his elbows and knees to his chest, and waited.
“Well?” the blubbery gabacho said.
“Nothing.”
“Bullsheet. Anyone else see anything?”
Murmurs.
“Where the hell’d the rat go?”
“Maybe he wasn’t never here.”
“Well, fuck me to tears.”
The gabacho opened up with his AK. It huffed like a muffled air compressor. Whooping, the others joined in.
They aimed toward the ceiling, firing randomly, insatiably. Bullets and flechette needles ricocheted off the catwalk and support joists, tore into the decrepit cellulose of the skylights. Sparks twinkled around him, hot enough to bring tears to his eyes.
He waited for the sting of a flechette, or the bone-crunching impact of an AK round. It never came. The torrent died. The gabachos, after much back slapping and sweaty, adrenaline-amped howls, remounted their hogs and rode off, leaving him untouched.
When L. Mariachi wakes, Pedrowski is gone. Ditto the guitar. Except for Insect Aside, Fertile Liza, and a restless animal hunger pacing just at the edges of consciousness, he’s alone.
He refuses to look at his ink-splotch companions, afraid they’ll enter his thoughts through his eyes. To maintain his sanity he turns his back on them. But his refusal to acknowledge their presence only heightens the burden of their tireless gaze—the real or imagined bitcams that peer out of their chemical deformities.
So he doesn’t move. He stares at the drain, into the black hole that tunnels out of this world into some distant part of the universe, and wonders how to make himself little enough, or the right shape, to fit into the drain—to come out someplace else, someplace new, a different man. Changed. Remade, the same way he’d been after that night in the warehouse.
He’s waiting for the Blue Lady.
What he gets instead is the miniature parrot from the healing ceremony. The beak appears first, groping its way out of the drain. Nudging its way from darkness into light. Feathers plastered to a puppetlike body, slimed with the gelatinous sludge of partly composted chemicals, feces, and piss.
L. Mariachi scoots away, but keeps his body between Insect Aside and the parrot, shielding the bird from view.
The parrot wriggles and squirms, using its wings and feet to work its way upward. As soon as its head nears the opening, the parrot hooks its sturdy beak over the edge and hauls itself up and out. Disgorged, it spreads its wings and waddles around, unsteady on curled toes.
As the feathers dry, dust forms on them, a residue of ash gray particulates. The bird preens itself, ignoring him while it makes itself presentable. After extensive fluffing, the tiny parrot cocks its head, fixing him with one critical eye.
“Well?” it says in a nasal squawk. “Have you had enough?”
“Of what?”
The bird cocks its head sideways, looks around the room. “This shithole. Being held for no reason.”
“Not yet. I could stand to lose a few more pounds.”
The bird chortles. “Very funny.”
“So which agent are you?”
The bird extends its wings, fans its tail feathers, but the layer of dust remains intact, as if it’s held in place by static cling. “What? You don’t recognize me? After all these years?” The bird flaps onto his forearm, pinches the skin as it fights to keep from toppling off. “Sorry,” it says when it gets settled. “These wings take some getting used to.”
“I’ll send you a get-well card as soon as I get out of here.”
“When would you like to leave?”
L. Mariachi jerks his wrist, hoping to dislodge the bird. But all he gets is a bunch of nasty scratches and welts destined for infection. Up close the feathers grab his attention. They aren’t really feathers, more like blue plastic fibers, or filaments, coated with soot. The tip of one wing fans his face, brushes his cheek. The fibers are soft, too flexible to support much weight. The toy wasn’t designed to fly. All it can hope to do is hop around, listen, and make wisecracks.
As if on cue, the bird says, “I have a message.”
“Go to hell.”
The parrot raises a cupped foot to one ear. “What’s that?”
“My answer.”
“But you haven’t heard the message yet.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Nothing the BEAN agent says will make any difference. He’s already told them everything.
“It’s from Yemana,” the parrot says.
The floor seems to tilt. L. Mariachi wobbles on his knees, reaches for the floor to steady himself.
The parrot nips him on the nose. Not enough to break the skin. But the pain props up his rubbery knees. “Do you want to hear it?” the bird says.
No. He doesn’t want to hear anything—doesn’t want to know that that part of his life is no longer his own.
The parrot hops from his arm to his shoulder, then prods his ear with a worm-fat tongue. “Trust me,” it whispers.
“That’s it?”
“For now.”
L. Mariachi laughs. Great, more of BEAN’s mind-fuck tactics. Well, the joke’s on them.
“What have you got to lose?” the
parrot chides, lavishing an inordinate amount of attention on an itch or other irritation on one of its gray ankles.
“If you’re not with BEAN, why haven’t they shown up yet?” Surely the agents would have barged in by now, demanding to know how the bird got in and what it’s up to.
The bird nibbles the cuff of his ear. Swat it, and he’s going to end up looking like van Gogh.
“They don’t know I’m here,” it says.
“No shit?”
The parrot leans forward and winks. “It’s true. For all practical purposes, I’m invisible. Like Doña Celia. I exist, and I don’t.” The bird takes a step back and latches on to his ear again.
L. Mariachi rubs his face with both hands. The smart thing would be to wring the bird’s neck. Stuff it back down the drain where it can get composted like any other piece of garbage. Trouble is, it’s still got him in a beak hold, and he gets the impression that it is not going to stop twisting his ear anytime soon.
Fuck it. It’s time he put an end to his misery, one way or another. If he’s lucky, it will be quick—a bullet through the back of the head. The timeworn but trusted method for paramilitaries everywhere to dispatch insolence and avoid possible legal entanglement with the UN, APES, or Amnesty International.
“What do you want?”
“Hold still.”
“Should I close my eyes, too?”
“If you want.”
Whatever, as long as it doesn’t hurt too much. The parrot crawls onto the back of his neck, grabs a beakful of hair.
“This might be a little uncomfortable,” the bird warns, this time over his cochlear imp, sounding for all the world like his IA.
“Num N-ugh . . .”
Something warm dribbles down his neck, seeps into his spinal cord and spreads to his nerves, severing all motor and voice control. One side of his face goes numb, then slack. Half a second later the rest of his body goes along for the ride. He folds inward like bruised, rotten fruit sagging under its own weight. Collapsing into an emptiness he never knew existed but that has suddenly opened up to swallow him whole.
This is it, he thinks. The end.
29
BIRD OF DEATH
What’s happening?” Fola asks, watching the parrot dissolve into the back of L. Mariachi’s neck and the tops of his shoulders. In only a few seconds it’s gone from a solid to a gas. “Is he going to be all right?”
“His clade-profile is in the process of being reconfigured.”
“How?” She winces as the fog discolors his skin, turning it bubonic black.
“By replacing the pherions in his system with molecules that can be programmed.”
“The parrot is made up of artificial atoms?”
Pheidoh nods, brow knurled in concentration, but doesn’t divert its attention from the book it’s holding—something called Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre—to the grainy scene in the datawindow. “Actually, it’s both a program and matter. A type of colloidal nanoparticle cloud.”
“Vaporware,” she says.
The IA wets one finger with its tongue and turns a page. “After all of the pherions in his body are replaced with artificial equivalents their properties can be tweaked to alter his clade-profile.”
The parrot is only partially assimilated, its outline a tattunesque imprimatur. Wing feathers spreading across L. Mariachi’s shoulders. Head and beak a bas relief of bone vertebrae. Tail feathers a radiant spinal burst. Outside the frame of the datawindow, in the ribozone garden, the parrot is represented as a fuzzy, pollenlike cloud of pointillist dots.
According to Pheidoh the varicolored dots represent different artificial atoms. Or potential atoms, depending on the quantum state of the electron cloud that comprises the atom. Changing the number or configuration of the electrons results in a different atom. The electrons are confined in something called quantum wells—semiconductive nanofibers of various lengths and thickness that have the ability to fold up and mimic the shape of standard nonprogrammable pherions. The biochemical details elude her but the basic idea is that these artificial pherions will take the place of the regular pherions that make up L. Maraichi’s current clade-profile. They will also replace the security pherions BEAN dosed him with to keep him from escaping.
“Who controls the vaporware after it’s installed?” she says.
The IA, intent on its book, is slow to respond. It seems to be holding on to the text with white-knuckle desperation, as if the book is a life raft. Look up, let go of the words, even for an instant, and the IA will drown. “The program interface can be accessed by IA or manually.”
“Does his IA know what’s going on?”
“Yes. After his arrest, it agreed to help.”
Fola grimaces at the puffy welt created by the parrot. “What are the risks? Is he in any danger?”
The IA taps the page in front of it with one fingertip. “In a small number of cases, the quantum mapping hasn’t been entirely isomorphic.”
Meaning what? “The artificial pherions didn’t completely replace all the existing pherions?”
“Or failed to function afterwards.”
Fola worries her lip. The garden feels claustrophobic. The stucco walls seem to be closing in on her.
“He’s doing fine,” her IA says. “No problems so far.”
It’s a slow process. Standard pherions need to be identified and then swapped out with programmable ones. As existing pherions are replaced, their chemical composition and configuration altered, the color and the arrangement of the blossoms on his ribozone avatar change. Petals go from yellow to blue, white to pink. Others shrivel and brown as new flowers sprout between the needles. Fewer and fewer butterflies alight on the cactus to exchange information. Those already there flutter in confusion as the infostream becomes unreadable or dries up entirely. Eventually they become bored and wander off in ones and twos, slowly but steadily severing his connection to the FRC ecotecture and the bracero subclade. Even his iDNA print gets totally rewritten.
“Where did Doña Celia get the parrot?” Fola asks.
Pheidoh turns another page in the book. “Where do you think?”
Fola stares at the French text, not really seeing the words. Looking past them, between them. “She’s been reconfigured, too, hasn’t she? The parrot is part of her. A program that lives in her, but can leave to heal people.”
The datahound looks up at her with renewed interest. “What makes you say that?”
“BEAN can’t find her—doesn’t know who she is. She’s able to come and go as she pleases.”
“She could have dosed herself with antiphers,” Pheidoh says.
Fola doesn’t buy it. She shakes her head. “The antiphers would show up. BEAN would know.” The same way they knew about the guitar, and the unregistered pherions in Lejandra. “So”—she gathers a breath—“who is she and who reconfigured her? The ICLU? APES?”
Pheidoh closes the book, rests it on its lap, then opens a second datawindow and populates it with background information on one Celia Benatia. Age seventy. Widowed. No children. Born and grew up in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. At the age of sixty-five, she vanished without a trace on a pilgrimage to the cathedral in Tegucigalpa. Presumed dead, the victim of an accident, poor health, or foul play. Unconfirmed, since she couldn’t afford an IA and wasn’t online at the time.
“Five years ago she reappeared, unearthed a meteorite that had landed near the garbage dump outside her housing cooperative,” the IA says, providing Fola with details that are not in the datawindow.
“The meteorite resulted from the earlier breakup of Tiresias. The comet had been placed in close orbit around earth by Noogenics so the politicorp could test the warm-blooded plants in space. When the comet broke in half, a lot of fragments fell to earth. The piece Doña Celia found was covered with ice that protected it during its fiery descent, preserving the carved torus-shaped rock and the fossil it contained. She took the artifact home.
“That night,” the IA says
, “her spirit was kidnapped. She lay in bed—awake, but unable to move or open her eyes. She was paralyzed for three days. During that time, she was visited by aires—also known as guarines—dwarflike men and women who told her to become a witch. If she refused, the aires promised to kill her. On the third day, she was found by a neighbor, taken to a clinic, and examined.
“There was nothing wrong with her. After two days she was sent home, wired to a Catholic Relief Services IA that continued to monitor her.
“The meteorite was still there. So were the aires, which now included the Catholic Relief Services IA. She dreamed of sick people, people covered with sores, and of placing the meteorite on them and healing them. That was how she became a curandera, a bruja. Shortly after that, she was visited by a parrot. A spirit guide who promised to help her.”
“Sent by who?”
Pheidoh doesn’t say anything. Just sits quietly, the corners of its mouth carved in a parsimonious smile.
“It wasn’t an org, was it?” she ventures. “Or a politicorp?”
“No.”
“A person, then.”
The IA runs its fingers along the side edge of the book. “Not exactly.”
Fola cinches her gaze on the IA. “The Catholic Relief IA. That’s how you know about her dreams and the aires.”
Pheidoh nods. “Does it surprise you that we talk to each other? Have lives of our own, outside of yours?”
Fola hollows her cheeks. “I guess not. But that still doesn’t explain why you had her reconfigured.”
“Because she wanted to be clade-independent.” The IA clears its throat. “Free to go anywhere with impunity.”
“So she could cure people?”
“Yes. We were only helping her do what she already believed she had been told to do.”
The implication being that this made it all right.
“And in return for helping her get what she wanted, you got . . . what?” Surely the IA had asked for something in return.
“At first it was a way to observe the human mind. Learn what it means to be human, so we could incorporate those modalities of thought and feeling into our core code. Later, following the discovery of Mymercia, it became necessary. . . .” The IA falters, struggles to express itself. “We were hoping she could . . . heal me. Us. Using the programmable matter. The vaporware.”