by Rebecca Ore
I must have looked upset, because she laughed and said, “Don’t worry, they’re corrupt. We have an agreement that they’ll take off some of our contraband and pass us through as a sealed boat. After all, South Carolina would be a Third World state, the poor worse off than than in Brazil or Mexico, if it weren’t connected to the United States. Still poor enough to encourage officials to take little bites.” Loba grinned. “They know we bring in drugs, but what but drugs would keep their peach-pickers docile?”
“Drode head peach-pickers?”
“A person must be conscious to know a ripe peach from one merely partly colored,” Loba said. “Same as you cannot replace a hamburger fryer with a machine.”
I said, “I thought they did all agriculture by machine.”
“No, for some things—stabbing veins, picking tobacco, picking strawberries, breaking rich ladies’ horses—the brain, eyes, and hand must work directly.”
“And people fear becoming drode heads, so they do it cheap,” I said.
“Yes, but you must go below now I hear the customs boat coming. We’ll be in Charleston tonight.”
“All sorts of Feds there,” I said.
“Yes, but we need a port able to unload our cargo,” Loba said. “And we will all turn mulatto, as dark as is believable with our various noses, shortly after landing. You can become quite dark. We’ve merely borrowed the boat. The owners will reclaim it, we’ve already covered the appropriate bribes.”
I wondered what cargo.
By the time we got to Charleston, we had inspection papers. The harbor was a motley place: mostly African ships ranging from decent Ghanaian-built freighters and tankers to ancient patched ships from the South African mothballed navy, to Euro lux-goods container ships, and oil tankers. I wondered if the Louisiana coast was too contaminated for ships to come in to New Orleans, or if this was normal. Beside the commercial traffic, the military ships and submarines looked hyper-trig, frantically clean. Fort Sumter was now used as an agricultural quarantine site—who would want to make a memorial to the War for Slavery when most of the port’s business came from Africa?
We left the weird submarine-turned-hydrofoil and walked off something like an airport’s boarding tunnel, no gangplanks here. Five large boxes came with us in the second van driven by the girls who needed the motorized exoskeletons to walk.
I said, “Can’t you have them rebuilt with nanotech?”
“Nanotech did that to them,” Loba said. “They collect two million a year as long as they’re like that. The company is always ready to rebuild them.”
I said, “Did you all get settlements?”
“You are bright,” Loba said. “But do you want to know this?”
I said, “I don’t need to know.”
We spent five days in a voudoun temple turning dark. The mambo, who talked a lot with Loba, said, “Some of you must look Arabic, perhaps Ethiopian, but I don’t think you want all the same shade, right?”
Loba, who was now darker than quadroon, nodded. I said, “Can you make me completely black?”
The mambo said, “Your nose lacks enough flare for pure African.”
The two bird-boned girls put on mechanical support skins several orders of magnitude less startling than their motorized exoskeletons. I realized, looking at them without the framework, that they’d originally been darker. They bid us goodbye, and merged with the crowd outside the temple.
The mambo finally got my skin color exactly to suit her. Miriam and foe looked Ethiopian. Loba put artificial limbs on over her stumps. They looked almost real, but didn’t quite match her present skin color. The mambo made adjustments and sent us on our way.
The trip felt like it bisected my prior selves, the ley lines that lead from this fate to that. One self drove to New Orleans, the one escaped to California from a military camp in North Carolina. “The Feds say the people here are conservative,” I said. “They trust them. They play war games with them.”
“The Feds are arrogant. You had help in getting away. The locals are not so docile.”
“You mean they didn’t know where I was in California?”
“No, but they didn’t search for you then as diligently as they do now.”
We changed vans five times, taking old Federal 178 up from Charleston. I never saw the other van drivers. For lunch, we pulled into a small town with a strip mall, all built behind a parking lot, exposed to the hot South Carolina summer. The luncheonette had air-conditioning, various grades of powerless people in baseball caps, some women in synthetics, children beside them, still looking hopeful. Some of the pure whites among them looked like they wanted to be racist, but we might represent an African firm with uranium money, oil, chrome, agricultural produce to be cooked into rayon, paper, or synthetic fuel. Maybe we’d buy something from them—peaches, cotton, tree fiber, computer experts.
The waitress, however, wished we’d all die before she had to serve us. She was a wiry woman of interdeterminate race—Native American, white, black, Arab trader from the coast either back in Africa centuries ago or fifty years back here, some Syrian from Charleston’s foray out into the hinterlands. She looked at us as a woman might who’s learned strangers wreck a woman’s contentment.
A sheriffs car pulled up. Two deputies got out, one lighter than the other, but neither pure white, both pure American. “Hi, Louise,” one said to the waitress, “wish they’d all rot.”
The other one said, “Feds and those tree-spiking scum both.” The two deputies looked at us, then at Louise.
Louise said, “Never can get peace for all the stirring up. The Feds invented those folks to keep up their jobs.”
Loba said, “Who are the Feds looking for?” when obviously it was us. She opened her purse with an artificial hand and pulled out her wallet.
“We don’t care,” one deputy said. “Nobody did nothing in my jurisdiction.”
Loba checked to see what she had in her wallet. “I think we have enough for four chicken dinners,” she said.
“Where you from?” Louise asked.
“Brazil,” the woman said. “But my father was an American.”
“Feds are looking for a light-skinned drode head, but I can’t figure what harm drode heads can do,” the first deputy said. “Ain’t but one of you growing out hair and she’s not half light-skinned enough.”
“Snap your fingers, Brazil,” the other deputy said.
Loba snapped her fingers, the sound slightly off, but then I was listening, not watching.
Miriam and Joe sat like they were just too road tired to get into this.
“I hate agitators and Feds both,” Louise said. “Running back and forth across the country fucking people over for causes.”
I felt that everyone in the room agreed. After centuries of being whipped poor with idealism, these people decided anyone trying to sell them a cause was evil. Even fighting for themselves, the various eyes said, was a waste of time. Someone else would make money off them, forever. Abandoned children would raid them. The Feds would bust all their cockfights and gambling joints unless they promised to cooperate in Federal anti-crime schemes. Their senators would give tax breaks to foreign corporations and give them the costs of the improved roads, the additional schools, the additional fiber-optic cables the locals couldn’t get on except as drode heads. They themselves would spend decades paying off their new masters.
They also knew we were the ones the Feds were chasing, but turning us in was too much like getting involved. Louise shoveled frozen chicken and sliced potatoes into the microwave, then into the fryer. The people started talking then, to each other.
When we got back in the van, I said, “I thought…”
Joe said, “If the Feds didn’t have us on breaking one of the Ten Commandments, the locals weren’t going to give a damn.”
Loba said, “The deputies got a good look at our money. We’ll be searched up the road if we don’t contribute to their community center fund.”
Before we l
eft the county, another set of deputies stopped us. Loba, who could drive now that she’d put on her artificial arms, looked down at the deputy.
He said, “We could use some help finding the people the Feds are looking for.”
Loba opened her purse again and handed him several hundred-dollar bills. “We will arrange a larger fund transfer later to your school board. It won’t be conspicuous, but we’ll send more every year for a while. Some people we know might want to give a grant for a public access fiber-optic cable.”
The deputy folded her money and said, “Thank you, ma’am.”
After we started up again, I said, “So, will local deputies hold us up for ransom every county we go through?”
“No, a county like that doesn’t want to share. If the next county holds us up, then this county knows it would be out a fiber-optic cable, probably even the donation to the school board.”
I asked, “Why the school board?”
“If the money actually gets used for education, it will serve them.” Loba didn’t sound like that was likely. “If the most important people, who generally run schools in places like this, keep the money, then we’ve paid off another state senator.”
“Another state senator?”
Joe said, “South Carolina is run by state senators. Can’t start a business, expand city limits, without getting a state senator’s approval.”
Loba said, “This is a very pragmatic state. The rich wish to stay rich. Whatever’s necessary, they’ll do. Undereducating the poor works quite well.”
Joe said, “Our state senator here takes it in drugs. We gave him a front junkie, so he isn’t registered.”
“Where does idealism come in?” I asked.
Loba said, “We’re angry. We take revenge. There is no idealism. Not even the poorest take payment in idealism any longer.”
I said, “I did.”
“Are you sure?”
Was I?
Joe said, “You wanted to learn. You wanted power. And, baby, it was always obvious you wanted revenge.”
Miriam nodded.
I said, “So much for ecology? Next come the insects?”
Miriam said, “You’ll still get to travel.”
The estate was an old house, built in 1840, sold to a regional historical society in the early 1960s, sold to the Senator around the turn of the century when he was nanofixed. The Senator promised to open the house to the public when he was in Washington, but renovations kept it closed most of the time.
His front junkie was a blonde woman who seemed to recognize Loba even with arms. She had pupils surgically, not pharmaceutically, pinned, contracted to tiny black dots, and wore visual enhancer glasses indoors. “I’m Sue. Come this way,” she said, leading us into the historical display part of the house.“
Loba read a plaque and asked, “Did the family really adopt their slaves?”
“Little alternative myth developed in the last part of the 1990s,“ Sue said. “I seriously doubt it, but by then, the mostly whites invited the mulatto kin to join them for family reunions, so, these little white lies made the get-together run smoother.”
We walked around like tourists while Miriam and Joe checked security, then we had our own family reunion in the slave quarters right behind the house.
Willie was waiting for me by the read helmet. He looked embarrassed. Dorcas was next door, checking the equipment Loba brought her from Charleston. We had to move everything with mechs since Loba didn’t want to expose more humans.
I wanted to stay with Dorcas, but Loba and Joe said, “It’s time.”
Willie said, “We can keep you from remembering, if that would be a blessing.”
“Will I wake up if you don’t like the reading?”
Joe said, “We can work with all sorts of motivations, but we can’t work with someone who plans to betray us.” No, you won’t wake up if we don’t like the reading, second threat this month.
I said, “I don’t plan to betray you, but I guess you’ve got to see that for sure.”
Loba said, “We don’t anticipate that you plan consciously to betray us now. We want to know if you might need to later, from guilt or masochism.” Joe loaded a junkie-issue syringe.
I said, “I’m tired of have other people use my brain.”
Loba said, “You hate not knowing what’s going on.” Joe pushed the needle home. They lay me down on one of the read couches as I went limp.
I didn’t remember precisely what Willie read, but felt rage, loss, self-pity, ugly little girl screaming by the roadside while the future whizzed by laughing. My worst nightmares told me they’d be with me forever. Loba and the power girls stalked them into comers where, wearing Kearney’s face and Mike’s body, they gibbered.
The nightmare didn’t break for hours, vicious enough to throw me out of sleep if I’d been in natural sleep.
I ended seeing myself as a lethally nasty piece of work, but I woke up. Loba handed me a cup of soup and said, “Eventually, the Feds will get us. But we will have gotten the insects out.”
Joe said, “We won’t let them take you alive.”
Willie said, “You’re as wounded as I am.”
I said, “Is that pity?”
Willie said, “We can help each other. Is that too much sympathy?”
I remembered something from the scan. In the middle of my worst machine-induced nightmare, where Kearney pulled my skull apart and turned tiny, walking in my brain forever, a virtual Willie offered me his left breast, a small newly grown one, the right breast only a male nipple. Willie’s fantasy or mine? I’d sucked the virtual tit and felt safe. Now I ran my fingers around my lips, wondering if I’d pursed my flesh lips for that fantasy male nipple. Did Loba and Joe watch this? I looked around, but didn’t see any video screens. “You didn’t watch?” I asked.
“Willie talked to us,” Loba said.
I was relieved, but felt my lips tingle slightly. I drank the rest of the soup and said, “So whatever my deep motivations are, I don’t need to know them?”
Loba said, “You always wanted to belong, but not to the people who hurt you. We’ve been your people before. We educated you, rescued you.”
“But you don’t entirely trust me,” I said.
Joe said, “You hate being predictable. And we are sorry about Martin Fox.”
“And the Feds won’t rest until they kill us all, no deposit, no return.”
“Yes,” Willie said. “We’ll be like soldiers forever.”
I knew that was terrible for him. I wanted to be able to protect him. I wanted him to grow that breast and nurse me from it.
Willie said, “I thought you were impossibly hard-edged until I saw your dreams.”
“Can you make them stop?” I said.
“You have to learn from them,” Miriam said.
Loba said, “Dorcas needs lab assistants. We’ve got software for you.”
Willie helped me up off the couch. I felt wrung out, but safe for now. The most powerful beast on the planet had challengers now. Go, insects, go.
We went into the next room and saw Dorcas checking out the DNA sequencer.
She looked at us and said, “Loba brought me feral mantises.”
Willie said, “We better get to work. We never know how much time we have.”
We lay down again under our hoods and began to design wasps with hostility to human anger and neuroleptic stings. Then crop-tending bugs, plowers, harvesters, and guardians, to reduce human stress even further.
Dorcas said, “And better petroleum flies.”
Loba asked, “What’s the common factor?”
I said, “Humans are stress-breeders, so we’ve got to make them happy about losing power. If we rely on something other than ourselves, then we have to cooperate more with the natural world. Humans are also lazy. Bugs that till the soil and don’t just steal from us will make us Nature’s dependants.”
Willie said, “Sharing power.”
Loba looked dubious, but went away. Wh
en we broke for dinner, she wore templates for arm-building nanotech machines. I said, “I thought you hated the machine world.”
Loba said, “We hate it and use it, just like all other humans.”
Joe said, “We can’t stay here more than a couple days. Laurel’s coming with Little Red so we can pack and move on.”
Miriam said, “Make some nice wasp for the Senator.”
We left him a wasp egg calculated to provide his favorite drug without a front junkie. Sue let a nanomachine unpin her pupil muscles and left with us.
The Senator died in a freak car accident a couple of weeks after we left, we heard on the news. Also, new welfare clients in New York sued the system to get the new holeless net systems. We never heard any more about us over public news, the Feds not wanting to advertise their failures.
Teach them Feds to be so clever.
FOURTEEN
DOWN A STRANGLED RIVER
Dorcas decided the closest analog to the group’s mode of operations was to army ants. She was the queen producing eggs. Then, while the eggs went through diapause and earlier hatches pupated, the group would pack its geodesic domes and move on, carrying eggs and pupae in the backs of buses, limos, and vans, across the South, through North Carolina, Tennessee.
The group gave Dorcas everything she’d ever wanted as a researcher: equipment, materials, all the DNA Loba’s friends could steal, her two computer-enhanced lab technicians, her human-brain-enhanced teraflop computer. She didn’t have to publish, didn’t have to even teach graduate students, much less undergraduates. And nobody asked her to make recommendations on other people’s grant proposals or to publish. She couldn’t publish. Dorcas giggled. All she could do was applied science. Insect engineering. Invertebrate art.
As winter set in, the group reached Davenport, Iowa. Dorcas looked at the Mississippi caught between flood walls and asked Loba, “What do we do now?”
Loba said, “After Willie and Allison distribute the last batch of the little wasps, we head downstream.”
Dorcas designed a wonderful wasp that responded to sulfur dioxides. Pollute, and it stung anything warm-blooded near a sulfur dioxide source. Dorcas almost gave it the large size of her earlier neuroleptic wasps, but Loba suggested a tiny social creature, a blend of bee and hornet. Dorcas decided that her large wasps could be easily spotted, followed in the air. This baby was smaller than a honeybee, with the pesticide resistance of Manhattan cockroaches and a sting that made humans intensely happy but unable to drive or operate heavy machinery. The group felt happiness undermined humans better than anything else.