Crache

by Mark Budz

  “He ain’t got a rig yet,” his father said.

  The nails withdrew, but not without a parting nip. A quick pinch that snapped his nerves as easily as a rubber band. “Well, I can’t wait till he’s outfitted.”

  “Darlin’,” his father said, standing beside them. “Can you do somethin’ about them lips? You know black dahlias ain’t my style.”

  Charlene released him from her voluptuous embrace. Rexx stumbled back, away from the soft cage of her arms.

  “What you got in mind?”

  “I like them yellow roses you had on last time.”

  “You Texans is all alike.” She pinched her lips, sulking, then reached up to one corner and peeled them off. “It’s a good thing I like all Texans.”

  “Them pink nipples would be nice, too. Not those ones that look like they got a black eye.”

  Charlene winked at Rexx. “He’s the one who’s gonna be gettin’ a black eye. If you know what I mean.”

  Rexx nodded. The lips still dangled from her fingers. She placed them in a silver case on the nightstand, opened a second case, and removed a smaller, more delicate pair of yellow petals, which she attached to the glistening canker around her mouth the same way she would a paste-on tattune.

  Charlene wet her new lips, squirmed them around a little, and then smiled. “I see you brought Rod.”

  His father patted the holster hanging at his side. “Damn straight.”

  Charlene giggled. “I hope so.”

  His father had already removed his sharkskin boots. Now he unbuckled his belt, laid the holster on the bedspread, unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them, butt naked.

  “Maybe you should leave now,” Charlene said, shifting her gaze to Rexx.

  He started for the door.

  “No,” his father said, “I want him to get an eyeful. You got a problem with that?”

  Charlene hesitated a second before giving a careless shrug. “Not if you don’t, big boy.”

  “Good.” His father motioned to a high-backed chair in the corner next to the bed. “Take a seat.”

  Rexx sat.

  His father reached down, under the enormous purse of flesh that sagged over his crotch, grunted, then straightened, revealing his half-limp nanimatronically enlarged penis. He waddled up to Charlene. “I think I’ll let you do the honors, sugar.”

  Rexx shut his eyes, and for the next half hour he heard his mother’s voice over the grunting, the squeak of the bedsprings, and the slap of flesh.

  Don’t let my heart go up in smoke, she sang, burned by the sun for eternity.

  A shrill beep yanks him back to the mechanical room. He’s sweating, greased with oily perspiration as he fumbles open a datawindow.

  “I hope you’ve got good news.” Hjert looks disheveled.

  Rexx runs the tip of his tongue along his lips, tasting salt and bile. “Why? How bad was the accident?”

  “Bad. Thirty dead. That’s not the worst of it. The orbiting station’s been infected. That means no more evacuation. We’re stuck here. On our own. On top of that, some of our IAs have dropped offline. No obvious reason. But we can’t get them back.”

  “You won’t, either. At least not anytime soon.”

  Her pupils constrict. “Why not?”

  “Because they’re responsible for the mutation. Some of ’em, anyway.”

  Her jaw bunches. “Are you sure?”

  “Do mosquitoes drink blood?”

  Her grimace dissolves into blurred incomprehension. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s complicated.” Some grievances, Rexx thinks, never end. They become not the means to an end but the end itself. “I’ll fill you in later.”

  Hjert sniffs. “Doesn’t look like there’s going to be any later. Unless you’ve found a way to put an end to all this.”

  “Not yet. I’m still workin’ on it.” Apologetic.

  “Nothin’ to be sorry about. You did what you could. Under the circumstances, I’m surprised you stuck around as long as you did. Why is a mystery to me.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I’m not so sure. We’ve all got our reasons. Whether we want to admit it or not is a different story.”

  After she’s gone, Rexx continues to stare at the empty datawindow. Next to him the butterfly twitches, peels black-velvet wings imprinted with smiling yellow dots from the wall, and flutters away.

  One of the ad hoc search daemons he initiated blinks off to one side, waiting for him to acknowledge it. The subprogram has returned with a report on background transmissions in the ribozone. Rexx skims the readout. The datastreams that it’s reporting on are for internal maintenance. Routine updates to different ecotectural subsystems during the past seventy-two hours, nothing out of the ordinary. He lifts a palsied finger to delete the report and then pauses.

  One of the datasquirts loops to an encrypted address space. Rexx touches the link. There’s a slight delay, then the empty-handed Virgin gives way to . . .

  . . . a garden enclosed by a Parthenon-like colonnade of fluted white marble columns. Purple wisteria droops from the leafy capitals, is met by roses climbing up the columns from planter boxes set in the low plinth. Thick stands of bamboo screen his view between the columns. Cactustree branches form a tangled arch overhead, the limbs alive with swarms of ornisects and yellow butterflies that dart from leaf to leaf in a dizzying ballet of data transfer. A footpath in front of him winds between clumps of dry grass and spiny yucca. The path meanders to a wrought-iron gate set in an archway between two columns. Lizards scatter out of his way as he ambles up to the gate, which guards a tunnel cut into a thicket of thorny bamboo cactus.

  He reaches for the latch. “Anybody home?” he calls out.

  31

  BIRD OF LIFE

  Wake up!” the parrot squawks at L. Mariachi.

  “Un momento,” he says. In the dream, he’s trapped in an outhouse the size of a phone booth. He can’t seem to find his way out of the stinking, slat-walled room. The door has vanished. It was there when he sat down just a minute ago. But now he can’t find it. It’s driving him loco. There are only four walls, but he can’t seem to keep track of which ones he’s checked and which ones he hasn’t. It should be easy, a no-brainer, but he keeps getting confused.

  “Time’s up,” the parrot says, impatient with his disoriented fumbling. “You have to go.”

  The shrill screech hurts not only his ears but his head. It seems to come not from his cochlear imps but from somewhere inside his thoughts and nerves—a dendrite-wired, myelin-gilded cage where the parrot sits on a perch so it can shit on him. Soon his synapses will be stained white with guano. “Go where?”

  “Away.”

  From the greenhouse, the biovats, and his braceros-in-arms to life as a fugitive.

  “Later.” He’s tired. He doesn’t want to go anywhere, doesn’t have the energy or the will to move. All he needs is a little R and R and everything will return to normal. He can go back to his job and life as he’s known it for the last twenty-plus years.

  The parrot grabs hold of his nervous system with its beak and shakes its head, giving the neurons a sharp, peremptory rattle. The jolt wrenches his bowels, as if the bird is tugging on a deeply embedded fishhook that he can’t remember swallowing. “She’s waiting for you.”

  “Who?”

  “The Blue Lady.”

  Yemana? He doesn’t buy it. It’s a ploy to get him to incriminate himself. If he flees, the agents can argue that he’s guilty. That he has something to hide. Otherwise, if he’s innocent, why would he run? It will only give the assholes that much more leverage to use against him. “I don’t believe you,” he says.

  “Don’t be stupid,” the bird says. “You will never be innocent. You gain nothing by staying here.”

  L. Mariachi slumps against the wooden wall of the outhouse. The pinche bird is inside his head, no different from a dream! He clasps his hands to his scalp to hold his thoughts together, stanch the sanity leaking o
ut. After a moment he lowers his hands and stares at them in the slatted light of the outhouse, expecting to see blood.

  Instead he sees skin woven out of molectronic mesh. The fibrils in the weave are composed of fuzzy haloed points, or dots, like small beads of light strung together on invisible strands of thread.

  “Where am I?” he says. “What am I?”

  The bird cackles, a noxious guffaw. “You’re not dead, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  It sounds like something Num Nut would say if the IA weren’t offline. “What am I, then?”

  “A superposition of hardwire and softwire states. Of biochemical and biodigital information. Of programmable and nonprogrammable matter.”

  “Vete al carajo!” he murmurs. Go to hell! His clothes haven’t changed but a dim green luminosity, the color of a beer bottle unearthed from a landfill, glimmers around his bare hands and wrists.

  “Only your ribozone image is a ghost,” the parrot says, “and only in this particular subclade. In-vivo”—its voice amps up, pointed—“you can still be seen, can still die.”

  L. Mariachi spreads his fingers wide and places them against the wall. Traces one wooden slat. Shakes his head. “This can’t be the ribozone.” He rechecks his face for eyescreens. “I’m not wearing any shades.”

  “You don’t need them anymore.” The bird shifts position, anchors its beak to another neural wire. This time he feels the tug in the soles of his feet, urging him to stand. “You don’t have much time. She won’t wait forever.”

  L. Mariachi wavers, teeters on the edge of insubstantiality. Nothing seems real. He doesn’t seem real, and isn’t sure what to believe anymore. It’s all a lie, a clever in-virtu construct.

  And if not? . . . He digs his fingernails into his palms. After all these years, he doesn’t want to lose her again, whoever or whatever she is. Doesn’t want to lose the part of him that brought her back. “Where is she?”

  The parrot curls and uncurls its talons in distress. “A garden in the ribozone. You have to leave as soon as possible.”

  “Why?” he says. “What’s BEAN planning to do?”

  The parrot hops around in agitation, shifting its position to peck at his lids, prize at them with its slug of a tongue. “Not BEAN. Bloody Mary.”

  “La Llorona?”

  “She’s coming, too. She’ll be here soon.”

  Bloody Mary. He shivers at the memory of her dank black tears overflowing from the holes in the pitted floor of the warehouse in Mexico City.

  “That’s why you have to leave,” the parrot says. “Why Yemana can’t come here to talk to you. She’s not ready.”

  An ominous pall settles over him. “Not ready for what?”

  “The battle with La Llorona. She can’t win it. Not yet.”

  L. Mariachi’s eyelids twitch, a fetal tic that cracks the dried mucus glomming his lashes together. “What do you mean?”

  “She needs your help.”

  “With what?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.” The parrot shakes itself, jostling him.

  The tic magnifies. L. Mariachi’s right lids split apart like a wound. He groans at the sudden onslaught of air and light. A lightning strike of pain forks through his head to the base of his skull. His eye tears up, blurs.

  The parrot dances on its perch. “If you don’t play the song, all will be lost.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to.” The bird flutters around its dendrite cage, tugging at him here, pushing at him there. “No more excuses. The Blue Lady saved your life. Now it’s time to repay the favor.”

  He owes her. It’s true. Even though, four years after saving him at the warehouse, she abandoned him at the Seraphemme.

  Or maybe this was where he finally abandoned her. Failed to recognize her. Failed to heed her warning.

  All he remembers is a woman in a white leather dress, one of the backup singers in Ass Assin’s band. They were backstage, between sets. He was spraying a second dose of scrubbugs to ensure the back rooms were clean and smelled fresh. She was primed, amped to go onstage, pacing, smoothing her long hair, tucking it behind her ears. As the club lights dimmed, she turned. Her dress flashed blue. He assumed it was the stage lights. Thought nothing of it even when Renata, guitar case in hand, found him just after the show and insisted they had to leave. Now!

  L. Mariachi sits up, massaging the memory and his eyes. As his vision clears he realizes that he hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still a prisoner in the greenhouse, watched closely by Insect Aside and Fertile Liza. The ribozone is gone. When he closes his eyes against the unrelenting glare, the slat-walled room reappears. By blinking, he can toggle between the two—switch from one worldview to another. The outhouse isn’t a dream, it’s an in-virtu representation of the real-world shithole BEAN has dumped him in.

  “All right.” He staggers to his feet. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Go to the door.” Even in-vivo, the parrot’s voice bypasses his cochlear imps. It remains embedded somewhere between thought and hearing.

  He approaches the door hesitantly, taking smaller and smaller steps, waiting for the paralysis to kick in.

  It doesn’t. He’s able to walk right up to it with only a little discomfort, a vague elastic tingling that backs off before any numbness sets in.

  “Now what?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  He shuts his eyes, finds his nose centimeters from one of the walls in the outhouse. “What am I looking for?” No door is visible.

  “Can’t you see it?”

  “Sorry.”

  “One second.” The parrot scrabbles about in his head, prodding and jarring neurons. All the activity leaves him dizzy. The spinning lasts until the bird quiets down and the ribozone repixelates, revealing the boards of a door. “What about now?” the bird asks him.

  L. Mariachi reaches for the latch.

  “Not yet!” The bird flaps in alarm.

  L. Mariachi freezes. The tips of his fingers are tingling. He withdraws his hand and the icy pinpricks subside. “What’s going on?” he says.

  “The security system loops through a series of different pherion patterns. The sequence is random. That way, a single antipher or antisense blocker has only a small chance of breaching the system.”

  So how is he supposed to get out?

  “The pherion pattern changes every five seconds. When the configuration you’re keyed to clicks in, you’re clear to go.”

  “That’s all the time I have?” Five seconds isn’t long enough to empty his bladder.

  “Get ready,” the bird says.

  “What happens if I don’t—”

  “Now!” The parrot leaps from its perch, beats its wings madly against the inside of his rib cage.

  L. Mariachi’s heart surges. He lunges forward and fumbles with the latch . . . can’t get it open. The pinche bolt is stuck, refuses to budge. He can feel the seconds slipping through his fingers.

  “Hurry!”

  The panicked squawk unnerves him. He yanks on the latch, twisting the bolt hard. It slides free, along with a few layers of skin, and the door bangs open. He falls headfirst out of the room. His toe catches a crack in the concrete floor and he sprawls on his belly, fighting for air.

  Except for the shaft of light coming through the doorway, the greenhouse is pitch black. It’s night.

  He rolls over, righting himself, and stares back at his cell. The outside walls are clad, floor to ceiling, in aluminum-backed biolum panels. Basically, the cell is a box of light.

  “Get up, stand up,” the parrot says, biting a part of the cage that corresponds to a nerve in his tailbone.

  He stands, looks around. Makes out a few amorphous piles of stacked boxes and barrels. “What time is it?”

  “An hour before dawn.”

  The place is graveyard quiet. “Is Pedrowski here?”

  “No.” The bird attacks a sudden itch under one wing—his left armpit. “BEAN released him and gave him access
to the records that he requested.”

  “For cooperating with them?”

  “Yes.”

  L. Mariachi spits on the floor in disgust. He knew that madre couldn’t be trusted. “What records?”

  “Can we discuss this later?” the parrot says. It’s getting antsy.

  “What records?” L. Mariachi repeats. He’s not budging until he finds out exactly what Pedrowski sold out for.

  The parrot capitulates. “Individual purchase records for the EZ. Who spent how much, where, and on what.”

  “That’s it? How many beers a person drank? The number of VRcade games they played?”

  The parrot’s head bobs up and down in his. “He wanted to study buying patterns in a closed population relative to habits and other meme-mediated behavior.”

  L. Mariachi shakes his head. It’s almost laughable, the depths of triviality some shitheads will sink to. “Where to now?” he says.

  “There’s an exit to your right.”

  Even with the light spilling from the room behind him, he can barely see where he’s going. The windows are charcoal smudges, the skylights a grid of starlit aluminum. He makes his way past an open office and stops. Crumpled drink pouches and plastic wrappers litter the desk. Slobs. The guitar reclines on a form-molding chair, just inside of the doorway. The face has a couple of fresh scuffs and scratches.

  “Take it,” the parrot says.

  He cops a glance over his shoulder, then darts inside the office. As he reaches for the guitar, metal glints from the shadows at the back of the room.

  L. Mariachi spins.

  Lejandra lies on a hospital gurney shoved against one wall, along with a stainless-steel IV stand. Her eyes are shut, her breathing wan. She’s emaciated. She can’t weigh more than fifty kilos, and looks like a charred skeleton. Joan of Arc after the flames have had their fill.

  L. Mariachi reaches for one hand, stops, his fingers curled inward. “I thought the ceremony worked.”

  In response, her head lolls to one side on the pillow. Her eyes open.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “She’s being moved to an offsite ICU,” Num Nut says. “BEAN thinks she might still be valuable and doesn’t want to lose her.”