Earth Thirst

by Mark Teppo

  Mere nods, and I step over to the dresser/armoire unit and pull out the bottom drawer. I grab the CO2 pistol and offer it, butt first, to Ralph.

  “What is it?” he asks, reaching for it as if it might bite him.

  “One of the Secutores agents was carrying it.”

  “Which one?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He offers me a wry grin as he plucks the gun from my hand. “No,” he says.

  “Be careful,” Mere says. “Whoever supplied that to Secutores isn't going to be very happy if they find out you have it.”

  “Yeah,” Ralph nods. “I know. He hefts the gun and looks at both of us in turn. “Thanks,” he says. “Thanks for the chance, and, uh, thanks for not killing me.” The last is directed at me.

  “No problem,” I say.

  “Shit,” he says, more to himself than to us, and with that, he darts for the exit, his sense of self-preservation finally getting through to the motion control centers of his brain.

  “So,” Mere says after the door has shut behind Ralph. “Where are we going?”

  “Easter Island,” I tell her.

  “And how are we getting there? I don't have any identification. I can't get on a plane.”

  I reach into the back pocket of my pants and produce the fruit of my recent labors. Two passports. “You get to be Madame Moreau, from France.”

  “I do?”

  “I'm your other half, but I'm local—from one of the Marquesas Islands, not far from Tahiti. We met there four years ago. You were part of our archeological tour group. I was your local guide. We feel in love, and we're finally taking our honeymoon. Easter Island for a week and then on to South America. Maybe we'll see the Nazca Lines.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well, I had to book a flight that would match our story.”

  “No, the passports. You got them in what? Three hours?”

  “I had to use what the guy had in stock.”

  “In stock? You make it sound like you went to a local head shop or something.” She slides off the bed and pads over to investigate the folio I offer her. “Where did you get this picture?”

  “Off the Internet. I think it's from some Christmas party you attended a few years ago. In Boston. At the mayor's estate. You wore a green—” I bite my tongue. A green dress. It had matched her eyes.

  She looks at the picture for a moment, one hand idly straying to the scar on her throat. “I looked good that night, didn't I?” she says softly.

  “Our flight leaves in two hours,” I say gruffly, changing the topic. But it's too late; she's already caught me.

  She already knows I was watching her. That's how I knew to step in when Kirkov went crazy, but what she's never known is how long I'd been watching her.

  The incident with Kirkov happened in March. Three months after the Christmas party where she wore the green dress.

  “I get that it's a romantic destination for a pair of newlywed archeology nuts, but why are we going there?” she asks, letting the topic drift happen. “You and I.” She shakes her passport at me. “Not these two.”

  “There's a spa on the island. The soil of Rapa Nui has particular qualities not found anywhere else.”

  “A spa?” Her eyebrows pull together. “My god, I thought I dreamed you saying that. A spa. With native children who will massage my feet? Are you serious?” She gestures toward the door through which Ralph had just left. “You broke me out of an insane asylum, which was burned down hours after we left.” She hits me on the chest with her passport. “And we're not done talking about that, by the way.”

  “I know,” I acknowledge.

  “You've just scared the shit out of a local contact—and me too, by the way. And if you're halfway not kidding with what you said, then we've got a private security company after us who seem to think they're not beholden to local laws. Or international ones, for that matter. Not to mention whoever hired them. All this, and you want to take me to a fucking spa?”

  “An Arcadian spa.”

  “Oh,” she blinks.

  I tap her passport. “Freshen up, Madame Moreau. We're leaving in twenty minutes.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The passports are functional, and getting on the flight is the least exciting hour we've had in the last day and a half.

  Mere was more right than she knew about where I got the forged passports. I had started my search in the local head shops, looking for someone who could provide me with forged passports. I could have asked Callis to make some calls, but I wasn't ready to go there. His comments about knowing me too well stung, as did the impression that he knew more about my activities than he was letting on. For the moment, I wanted to be off everyone's radar.

  Cash helped, and I only had to threaten two people before I found someone who could do the work I needed. He wasn't too keen on my deadline, but I was even less keen on waiting, and he became much more accommodating when I took both the knife and gun he was threatening me with and used the sharp one to dismantle the noisy one.

  Functional is best. Functional works. Keep things simple.

  The soil is good on Rapa Nui, and while looking for Nigel is key, dirt time wouldn't hurt. My equilibrium is off, my reflexes are slow, and my thirst has returned. If I can't go back to Mother, then a trip to the garden and temple—the spa—on Easter Island is going to have to do.

  Provided it hasn't been completely filled in. Easter Island has changed dramatically over the last few hundred years, and I have some nagging memories of having been there—really nagging memories that I can't get a grip on—but Callis was right. Dirt is dirt. Sometimes we can't be too picky.

  The first leg of the flight from Adelaide is a tiny prop-job that gets us to Tahiti's Faa'a International Airport; from there, we get on a slightly larger plane and take a longer flight, one that devours most of the day. And we lose even more time, flying east against the rotation of the planet.

  “You're not a fan,” she notes, eyeing how tightly I'm holding on to the armrests of my seat.

  I manage a weak smile. “I know the science and I've watched birds fly for many, many years, but that doesn't mean I relish pretending to be one.”

  “Statistically speaking, you're more likely to die in a car accident or from lung cancer than in a plane flight.”

  Her statistics don't apply to me, and a fall from thirty thousand feet will pancake my body well enough that I might not have enough presence of mind to reconstitute. It's much like being on a boat in the middle of open sea: you tend to be hyper-aware of the ways that can really do you in and to avoid them.

  “What's your favorite bird?” she asks, diverting my attention from the window.

  “The sparrow.”

  “Really? I would have thought something more exotic like a kestrel or something.”

  “Sparrows remind me of home.”

  “Arcadia?”

  I shake my head. “There aren't many birds in Arcadia.”

  “That's surprising. Isn't it supposed to be like paradise?”

  “Blame the Romantic painters.”

  “I try to as often as possible.” Her hand falls on mine, and she gives my fingers a light squeeze. “Especially Bosch.”

  “He wasn't a Romantic,” I point out.

  “That's what his wife thought too.”

  I laugh and turn my hand over so that our palms are touching. A light shiver runs up her arm but she doesn't move her hand. “Arcadia is as much a state of mind as it is a place,” I tell her. “And it has changed too, over time. It might have been paradise once, and some will argue that it was the model for the Garden of Eden, but nothing lasts.”

  “But those who live in Arcadia”—she smiles—“those who, in their minds, dwell in Arcadia, they live longer than the rest of us, don't they?” When I nod, she continues. “How much longer?”

  “That, too, is a state of mind,” I tell her.

  “How long for you?” she persists.

  “You remember when you ask
ed me who I was thinking about earlier? Her name was Valentien. She died on the fourteenth of May, 1940, when Germany tried to wipe Rotterdam off the map. I was… I looked not much older than I do now. Well, the last few days haven't been terribly good. I'm sure I'm showing my age now.”

  “Hardly,” she snorts. “But you do age, don't you? Or is that part… that part of those half-kernel folklore stories you were talking about earlier true?”

  “I have good genes, and I heal well. That's a lot of it. ‘Aging' is a process wherein cells die and aren't replaced. Where organs fail and the body decays. If you can stop all that, you essentially stop aging.”

  “And how do you stop it?”

  “Ancient family secret.”

  “So someone knows?”

  “Once upon a time, I suppose. We have to”—I cast about for the right words—“we have to trust our intuition when it comes to new members. They have to be of the right genetic proclivity.”

  “A mutation?”

  “Somewhat. More of a throwback.”

  She smiles. “You're a knuckle-dragger? Somewhere between Homo erectus and Homo sapien?”

  I close my hand and she wraps her fingers around my fist. “Somewhere,” I say.

  “How long?” she persists.

  “A long time, Mere. A very long time.”

  * * *

  “Why were you on the Cetacean Liberty?” she asks a little while later. The flight is only half full, and the people seated near us are all catching up on the sleep they missed getting out of bed for this flight. Mere isn't interested in sleeping. Too much on her mind. “All four of you were—are—Arcadians?”

  “Yes. Our mission was to investigate the whaling fleet. We had been led to believe they were doing illegal research. They weren't catching whales for food; they were doing studies on whale tissue for use in protein therapeutics.”

  “I heard the same thing,” she says. “I was chasing a story on nootropics. A company out of Denver, Colorado. There's a complicated money structure behind them, a bunch of shells formed in the mid-'90s when the big agriculture and chemical companies started to diversify their holdings in an effort to lessen their visibility. Mitratech, Subloftco, AFH Venture Group, Petriluminent, Hyacinth Holdings, Ionophaze: there's a long list. Most of them don't even know where their money is coming from. They, in turn, fund little biotech and biochem startups that focus on one product. The product does well, though its main buyers are part of the vast web of subsidiaries who rely on that product for their own efforts, and so on and so on. It keeps on going, and I keep thinking there's one master product that all of these little pieces are contributing to, but I can't figure out what it is.

  “Anyway, this company out of Denver—Mnemosysia—is doing something with memory retention, and they've done some early Phase II tests in animals that have gotten some people at Stanford excited. There was a paper in one of the journals last year about some enzyme found in whale brains—blue whale brains—and this company thinks they've managed to replicate it in the laboratory. Groups like Prime Earth were all up in arms, of course, because the foundation of the research stems from having to, you know, dissect a blue whale brain.”

  “They're not very good at volunteering,” I point out.

  “No, they're not. So, I hear—via a circuitous chain of sources—that Mnemosysia's research is bogus. The enzyme is real enough, but their synthetic version has nasty side-effects and about a third of the efficacy of the naturally occurring enzyme. Mnemosysia is feeling pressure from someone else, someone who needs their product to work.”

  She leans toward me, her hand tightening on my arm. “This is the problem of sourcing your own product chain, right? It's like a pyramid. You need everything in each of the layers so that you can build up and reach that top point. But what happens when some part of the base doesn't work? Does the whole pyramid collapse?”

  “So Mnemosysia started looking for a shortcut.”

  “Yes. The complicating part is that Kyodo Kujira wasn't talking about who was funding them. Mnemosysia would have benefited from the research, and there's a paper trail linking both Kyodo Kujira and Mnemosysia—they'd had a few exploratory conversations—but Mnemosysia is on life support. They don't have the ready cash to fund the whaling expedition.”

  “So the money is coming from somewhere else,” I say. “And you think that company is the one who set up the tests.”

  She nods. “They used Mnemosysia as a lure, to get you to commit a team to the Cetacean Liberty.”

  “Do you think Mnemosysia knows they were set up?”

  She laughs. “When I'm really paranoid, I think Mnemosysia never had a product. I think they're a complete shell, and their only purpose was to look real enough to get your attention. But that means whoever is running things has been working on this for a long time.”

  “A long memory,” I muse.

  “There are only a couple of multi-national corporations that have that sort of corporate intelligence. Most of them go back nearly a hundred years. They got started in completely different markets—industrial chemicals, rubber, plastics. They've only drifted toward Big Ag and GMOs and biotech because their older markets have become completely poisoned with lawsuits and the market margins have all shrunk to nothing.”

  “You knew,” I realize, “you said something else on the boat. Something about a cost associated with what we were doing out there. A danger we didn't know about.”

  It is her turn to hesitate, and I find myself unconsciously leaning toward her, my curiosity aroused.

  “Upper Management at Prime Earth knew,” she admits. “They knew Kyodo Kujira's fleet wasn't whaling, but they didn't tell Captain Morse. I didn't know why, and at first, I thought my source had been wrong, but then the four of you showed up in Adelaide and I knew. Mnemosysia was a lure. The whole setup was about Arcadia.”

  I swallow heavily and look away. Confirmation of what I told Callis. Arcadia is at risk. He's right. There is some poison in our roots.

  “Something happened to one of your team—Nigel—when you went out to the whaler. Was it the weed killer?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Different dispersal method, but it was the same agent.”

  “And it's fatal to you, to your kind?”

  “Eventually,” I force the word out of my tight throat.

  “Why do they want to kill you?”

  “For the same reason any homeowner wants to get rid of any pernicious weed that is marring their otherwise pristine lawn.”

  She nods. “You said ‘steward' earlier. You mean it, don't you? In, like, a global sense.”

  “Yes. But it's more than just us versus whoever wants us gone.” I nod around at the other passengers. “Everyone is contributing to the disease that is slowly wiping us out. These companies think they can fix things with GMO seeds and new pesticides, but they don't have the long view. They're denying what the rest of humanity is doing every day.”

  “Doing what?”

  “You're killing the planet, Mere. All of you. It's ecocide.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Once we reach Rapa Nui, we pass through customs at Mataveri International Airport without much trouble. The agent inspecting our single suitcase raises an eyebrow at our minimalist packing until I say the word “honeymoon” and glance suggestively at Mere, who has the good grace to blush appropriately. The agent smirks, his eyes lingering on Mere's breasts, and stamps our passports, a quaint custom that hasn't gone out of style on Rapa Nui. It's the first real mark of approval these papers have seen.

  Outside the airport, the air is warm and turgid. I have a headache from all the sun, and I collapse on the hard seats in the back of a cab, leaning to the side so that my head is out of the direct sunlight. I'm wearing my optics and they're dialed all the way down. I hear Mere ask the cabbie to take us to the best hotel on the island. “Yes,” she says in response to his reply. “The Hanga Roa Royal Resort is fine.”

  The car lurches off, and we ride in silence
for a few minutes. The windows of the cab are rolled down, and there is little breeze. The scent of Mere's skin wafts through the cab.

  “Are they all like that?” she asks suddenly. “Looking inland.”

  I don't have to open my eyes to know what she's talking about. The moai, one of the impassive stone heads the island is known for.

  I grunt enough of a response for her to know I'm listening.

  “I've seen pictures,” she says, “but it's a matter of context, I guess. You see the heads, and you know they're on an island and that they're remnants of some strange Cargo Cult religion. You just assume, I guess, that they're all facing outward.”

  “They were tribute, built by the natives in recognition of the clan leaders,” I tell her. “Kind of like the pyramids in Egypt. Most of the moai were knocked over and broken shortly after the European discovery of the island. Inter-clan conflicts. You tend to break the other team's stuff, you know?”

  She slaps my leg playfully and her touch is almost enough to get me to open my eyes. “Men,” she says. “It never changes, does it?”

  I think of the reasons why the Achaeans came east, their army covering the Plain of Skamandros like black ants. “No, it doesn't.”

  * * *

  The day clerk at the hotel finds us a mid-sized suite on the inland side of the hotel, and I hang back as Mere crosses to the heavy curtains and pulls them open. There's a sliding door behind them, and a narrow balcony. Mere opens the door and lets the warm air in as she steps out onto the balcony. The sun is a hand's-width over the horizon—the ragged edge of the dome of Rano Kau, one of the three volcanoes that make up the island. Lightening my optics a few clicks, I step up to the sliding glass door, bracing myself for what I'm going to see, what I've been avoiding.

  But I have to.

  “You look like someone ran over your dog,” she says when she notices my expression.

  “This island used to be covered with trees,” I sigh. “I knew there had been a collapse, but I hadn't been…” I hadn't been paying attention.