I got the impression Leaf was adjusting well to life on Ponce de Leon. Given that Jan was a teenage boy, it would probably be many years before he could appreciate Christy’s kindness, but she had already won his confidence in important ways.
Under her gentle prodding, he opened up to me for the first time about the refugee camp where they had been born.
“We didn’t learn anything. That’s why I have to do this crap.” He showed me his homework. It was … remedial, and that’s putting it mildly. “I actually hate Gran now. She could have at least taught us to read.”
According to Jan, he, Pippa, and Leaf had all lived with their grandmother in the refugee camp until she died a few years previously. After that, Pippa had hustled to provide for the three herself. Neither Jan nor Leaf had a kind word for their Gran, but she must have been a formidable woman.
“Wash your mouth out,” I said, forgetting that Jan was not mine to discipline. “Your grandmother raised you. You owe her everything.”
“She raised us to rule a planet that isn’t ours anymore,” Jan said. “Heck with that.” He took a handful of the pita chips Christy had put out and crunched them gloomily.
Leaf was doing her homework, tracing ABCs on a school-issue tablet. She looked up and said, “But Gran did teach us, Jan. She taught us the Code and the Tree.” I could hear the capital letters in her careful emphasis.
“That’s just poetry,” Jan scoffed.
“Leaf,” I said. “What’s the Code and the Tree?”
“Things we had to learn,” she said.
“What kind of things?”
Jan was glaring at her. “I don’t remember.”
“I bet you do remember.”
Leaf’s fist closed around the hem of her holo t-shirt and lifted it towards her mouth. She was about to revert to her old self-soothing habit.
Christy scooted closer to the little girl and put her arm around her. “It’s OK. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I honestly don’t remember! I forgot!”
“I remember,” Jan said. Suddenly sitting up, he began to chant. “This is the Code of Gessyria. Sixteen, four thousand and two through four thousand three hundred and ten. A tired grouchy cat treks green cliffs. A greedy tiger attacks. The cat tries a clever trick, growling angrily …” On he went, reciting the poem or story or whatever it was in a singsong voice. After a moment Leaf joined in. Christy and I gaped in bemusement.
You hear about the immense capacity of the human memory. It’s supposed to be damn near infinite, located in the same quantum storehouse where we Shifters keep our animal forms when not in use. But in reality, who can even remember their own phone number nowadays? These children were something else. They sounded like machines, regurgitating this gobbledygook in perfect unison, on and on. “The cat grieves above the tiger’s corpse. Three avian cannibals guzzle the crimson gore …”
“What’s it mean?” Christy whispered to me.
“Search me.” I grabbed up her phone, which was lying on the table, and set it to record, in case we found someone who was more of an expert in Darkworlds poetry.
Leaf trailed off. “That’s all I can remember.”
“Now you put me off,” Jan said.
“But I can do the Tree.”
“The Tree’s easy.” Jan clapped his hands. Again the children started chanting. “Marcello and Fiannula begat Sandhya who married David and they begat Rafael, Gabriel, and Amelia. Rafael married Chiho and they begat …” I counted thirty-two generations until Jan and Leaf finished together, triumphantly, “And Marcello and Ingrid began Cornelia and Mei and June, and Cornelia married David and begat Rafael, and Samantha married Calvin and begat Jan and Letitia, and Saul married Elodie and begat Pippa!”
Rafael. That had to be Rafael Ijiuto. I remembered that the charges against him had been dropped. He was walking around Mag-Ingat as we spoke. These children were sharing a planet with the cousin who had tried to kill them. Heckuva job, PdL PD.
“My real name’s Letitia,” Leaf said.
“Wow,” Christy said. “I don’t think I even know the names of my great-grandparents.”
“It’s very important to know where you come from,” Jan said. “But the Code is more important.”
“It’s code for something, right?” Christy said. “Is there a key to it?”
“I don’t know,” Jan said. “I never got all the way to the end. Pippa knows all of it.”
I sent the recording of their Code to myself, and then drummed my fingers on my knee, thinking. The Tree was the genealogy of the royal dynasty of the Gessyrias. That was obvious. But the Code … what was that? Did it have anything to do with the TrZam 008?
The Temple’s gonna fall with you inside it.
This information could destroy humanity.
I wondered who else knew about Jan and Leaf’s feat of memorization. “Did you recite your Code and Tree for the people at the resettlement center?”
“Are you kidding?” Jan snorted.
“They were mean,” Leaf said. “They made us pee in cups. They stuck needles in us!”
Christy and I exchanged a smile, but I felt cold inside. These kids might be in danger for what they knew.
I had to talk to Dolph. I touched my pocket and then remembered I didn’t have a phone anymore.
Well, he would be meeting me at Snakey’s. I’d fill him in then.
I glanced at the clock. Ten to eight. Crap, I had to go.
I felt a soul-sickening reluctance to leave this apartment. It felt like walking away from life itself. Of course, that was an illusion. Death had come visiting with me, and would be leaving with me. My lie of omission about IVK did not make Christy’s apartment a safe haven; it just made it another fake haven. But as I stood with Christy in the dark hallway inside the front door, I couldn’t tell the difference between my guilt, and my unsated yearning for her. It was all one big sea of crappy feelings.
She bumped her forehead lightly against my chest. “Now I’ll be lying awake all night, thinking about you,” she whispered.
“Next time,” I said into her hair. Next time, I would work out how to tell her that I had IVK.
“When?”
I let go of her. “Don’t call me. I’ll call you.”
Her smile had an edge. “I guess I asked for that.”
“No,” I explained, “I mean it. I don’t have a phone. I had to bury it under six inches of leaf mould.”
She stepped back, raised her eyebrows, and pointed her index fingers at me. “Exciting. Life.”
We were both laughing as I closed the door.
I took a roundabout route back to Estrangeiro Boulevard, picked up my truck, and reached Snakey’s by eight forty-five.
41
Snakey’s is bigger on the inside than the outside. At street level, there’s just a doorway squashed between a tattoo parlor and a curry shop, on the Strip between 70th and 71st. Downstairs, the bar sprawls through several basement-level rooms decorated with macabre trophies.
When I got there, Dolph was already occupying a barstool at the end of the counter. A girl melted off the stool next to him to make room for me. Vipe’s eldest daughter set a drink in front of me. Three fingers of Alvarado, neat. “What a day,” I said. “Cheers.”
Dolph had his phone propped up on the bartop. It showed a news feed with the sound off. Highlights from the disaster on the Buonaville road. Shifters around us looked, cursed Parsec’s name. There was a certain fatalism to their reactions. No one had really believed that Parsec would end up in jail. He never had before, and it turned out that this time was no different.
“This time is different, though,” I said under my breath to Dolph. “I genuinely think we’ve seen the last of him. He may have beaten justice, but he can’t beat the Tunjle.”
“They raided his place at Ville Verde, too,” Dolph said. “Talk about burning your bridges.”
D’Alencon would be here in a few minutes. “Got somethi
ng I want you to listen to,” I said.
Dolph was drinking boilermakers. He tipped a fresh shot of whiskey into another pint of beer. “Where’ve you been, anyway?”
I reached for his phone. “Nunak bricked mine.” I accessed my v-mail and downloaded the recording I’d sent to myself. “Listen to this. What does that sound like to you?”
“Kids?”
“Jan and Leaf.” I smiled at his expression. “Pippa’s cousins. Christy Day is fostering them—”
“You went to see her?” Dolph chortled.
Sensitive to reproach, as I couldn’t justify my entanglement with Christy to myself, either, I said, “She’s been a real friend.”
“Mike, there’s only one reason a sweet normie chick like that would be interested in you.”
“It’s my rugged good looks,” I joked, smoothing my hair.
“Dream on.” Dolph gazed into his drink. “I don’t know Ms. Day that well, but I know her type. She’s attracted to danger. It’s not just the teeth and claws. It’s the spaceships, the guns, the close calls, the questionable associates. All that shit turns her on. As much as she might want to fuck you, she wants to get inside of your world. She wants it inside of her.” He was waxing almost lyrical. “Sweet as she looks, there’s something screwed-up hiding inside, where you can’t reach.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You, my friend, need to get laid.”
“I was working on that until you sat your raggedy ass down in her seat.”
I glanced around to check out the girl I’d run off. Blonde, thin, too much jewellery. Dolph could do better. “What happened to Ember?”
“She’s got a short memory. Fortunately, I do, too.”
I picked up his phone and pressed it to his ear. “So what do you think of this?”
He listened for a moment. “It sounds like when they used to make us memorize the Catechism. Except not.”
I explained how the Code and Tree appeared to be an oral history handed down in Pippa’s family. “I’m wondering if it’s related to whatever is on the TrZam 008.”
“The angry green tiger gets a craving …”Dolph’s expression suddenly changed. Leaning across the bar, he grabbed the pen right out of Vipe’s girl’s apron pocket. He started to make notes on a cocktail napkin.
T A G T G A C
“The Code. Mike. Look at that. The Code.”
“Aw shit.” I stared at the letters, finally realizing what had eluded me before.
Human DNA is made up of millions of nucleobases. These come in only four flavors: cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. All the variation among humans and alt-humans is a matter of arranging strings of nucleobases in different orders. The achievement of the Big Shift scientists was simply that they discovered the exact right order to enable Shifting. The key was lots of trial and error, and a willingness to combine simulations with large-scale in vivo experimentation.
“It’s a DNA string,” I said. “But what does it do?”
“Search me.” Dolph was still writing. “Do we have all of it?”
“No. Neither of them could remember the whole thing.”
“Does Pippa know it, too?”
“They said she knows the whole thing.”
“They’re living backups for the TrZam 008.” Dolph was making a leap, but I agreed. That would explain why Sophia had tried to capture Pippa. Even if there was no machine in the Cluster which could read the TrZam 008—as she thought—she’d be able to get the same information out of Pippa herself.
But what was it?
Dolph dragged a fingernail along the enigmatic lines of C, G, A, and T. “The Temple will fall with you inside it,” he husked, in a good imitation of Zane. “This information will destroy humanity.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. It wasn’t because of what Dolph had said. Staring into the mirror behind the optics, I had just seen Rafael Ijiuto walk into the bar.
Dolph and I twisted around on our stools.
The bar gradually fell silent. The music kept rolling on—scratchy twelve-string guitar, hoarse vocals soaked in loneliness—as Ijiuto ambled across the room and took the seat that had magically opened up two barstools down from me. In fact, the whole counter was now going begging. No one wanted to sit next to a normie.
Oh, it isn’t that you can tell by looking at people. It’s simply that Ijiuto was a stranger here. If he was a Shifter, he’d have come in animal form his first time, to prove his bona fides. He hadn’t, so he wasn’t.
There’s no sign over the door saying Shifters Only, but the message is writ in letters of feathers and fur all the way down the stairs from the street. Every stair is a cryonite block containing a dead animal of some kind, supposedly killed by Vipe himself, ranging from a chicken to a Newfoundland dog. The bar top is also made of cryonite. The preserved corpse of a native PdL flamecat floated under our drinks, jaws agape, signifying Shifter victory over the native wildlife. It’s that alpha predator thing again.
Rafael Ijiuto hitched his narrow ass on his barstool and grimaced at the flamecat. “That’s kind of gross.”
Dolph leaned across me. “They had a human being in the bar counter for a while,” he said. “Vipe got complaints, so he took it down.” This was untrue, although Vipe did sometimes talk about turning people into cryonite decorations if they pissed him off. “You volunteering as a replacement?”
Vipe’s girl flicked her hair. “I would have trouble drinking off of this one’s scrawny bod,” she said. “It would turn my stomach. What can I getcha?”
“Beer,” Ijiuto said. “Please.”
Dolph chuckled at his tense expression. “Relax. You’re no one’s idea of a trophy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Rafe, here, strikes me as kind of an archetype of mainstream humanity. Hellbent on getting his way no matter what. Completely indifferent to the human cost. Prepared to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get what he wants. And to top it all, he’s such a ridiculously gifted survivor he makes cockroaches look fragile. Shoot this guy down in orbit, run him off the road, throw him in Buonaville, and he comes back from the dead and sits down next to you and orders a fucking beer.”
Ijiuto scowled. “I have diplomatic immunity.”
“Son,” Dolph said, “I hate to break it to you, but diplomatic immunity ain’t proof against claws and teeth.”
“Did I do something wrong?” Ijiuto picked up his beer and slurped it. “I don’t get why you’re threatening me. I didn’t do anything to you.”
I looked at the clock behind the bar. 21:07. D’Alencon would be here any minute. If he caught us talking to Rafael Ijiuto, it would confuse the situation, to say the least. Why had Ijiuto come looking for us, anyway? Anger sparked a slow burn in my stomach as I remembered all the things this cretinous princeling had done.
“You know, you’re right,” Dolph said to Ijiuto with a jackally grin. “It’s a waste of good invective to threaten you. I’ll just follow you when you leave and bite your throat out in a dark alley. Someone’ll steal your corpse and sell it to the biowaste processors.”
“Thanks for reminding me why I hate this planet.” Ijiuto was wearing clean but cheap business casual. What they gave him when he was freed from jail, I figured. His shirt was open at the neck. No TrZam 008.
“What happened to the crown jewels?” I said.
“Oh, boy,” Ijiuto said. “That’s what I mean about this planet. The police smashed my crown jewels up! In front of my eyes! With a hammer! If that’s what you call civilization, you can keep it.”
“So why don’t you go home?” I said, anticipating his answer.
“No money.” Ijiuto’s credit dot, exposed by a rolled-up shirt sleeve, told the story. It was black.
“The beer ain’t free,” Vipe’s girl said, following the conversation.
“That’s actually why I’m here,” Ijiuto said, seeking my gaze. His dark eyes had a soulful, puppy-dog set, but I saw a flash of calculation. “I was hoping you could give me a ride home. You still got your
spaceship, right?”
Dolph laughed. I laughed. “I’d rather give a ride to a Kimberstine haulasaur,” I said.
Vipe undulated across the floor. Ijiuto twitched his feet away from the viper the size of an anaconda. It was almost as good as having Martin with us. Swaying his head from side to side, as if preparing to strike at Ijiuto’s legs, Vipe hissed, “I think that’s enough. Out, normie.” He jerked his head at the door.
“It doesn’t say No Normies,” Ijiuto protested.
“It doesn’t say No Assholes, either,” Vipe said. “But most people take it as read.”
Dolph paid for Ijiuto’s beer. We jostled him up the stairs into the strobe-painted bustle of the Strip. Aliens and human tourists milled along the sidewalk. Ijiuto scowled and drove his hands into the pockets of his sport jacket. The holo greeter outside the tattoo parlor shimmied around him, rainbowing his dust-colored face and hair. I suddenly saw his family resemblance to Pippa, Jan, and Leaf—it was in the lost, hopeless slump of his shoulders.
“Let’s head down to the pier,” Dolph said. “Push him off the end. You can’t swim, can you, Your Highness?”
“You’re gonna be sorry,” Ijiuto said with sudden vehemence. “You’re gonna be so, so sorry. I tried to be friendly. It’s not my fault you guys are grudge-bearing animals.”
“You know, I think the Slumps would be better,” I said. “Less people around. And Mill Creek is plenty deep.”
“I could get off the planet by myself,” Ijiuto said, “if I could just find that guy, the Ek. The one who imported our stuff. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Sure,” I said. “Timmy Akhatli. I’ve got some bad fucking news for you, buddy.”
“Wh-what?”
“We killed his ass. Just like you killed Kimmie Ng. Remember her?”
I suddenly caught sight of d’Alencon getting out of a van. It was an unmarked gray van with a satellite dish on top. D’Alencon walked up to us without a smile on his face. “Late,” he said gruffly. “Sorry about that.”
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