by Rusty Coats
"Buddy got? Jewelry Foolery. Zipper."
Levi pushed past his wife, stepping inside the cheap motel room that had been my rehab home for two weeks. He held out empty hands.
"Not another step, Levi."
His sandals skidded on the orange carpet and he stared at me, then Sunny, then Rita, who was clutching a small caldron of corrosive balm, which Levi had used to remove scorched skin from my chest. As far as weapons went, it wasn’t bad.
"Our daughter is sick, Jack,” Levi said. “Let us help her."
I dabbed spittle from Sunny’s cheeks. "You may be too late for that."
Gretchen pointed the blade at my throat. "If you've given my daughter any of your city sickness, I swear by David's Creed I will feed you to the goats."
Rita held up the caldron. "Not before I spray you with this acid."
Gretchen froze, glaring. "Who do you think you are?"
"His lover," she said simply. "I'm also a Bound daughter of Shiloh. And if I were a member of Marigolde I'd call a tribunal to strip you of your title. The Council shouldn't tolerate a priestess whose soul is so empty she can't embrace her brother."
"I could banish you for such words."
"Then banish me," Rita said. "And I'll tell everyone about the priestess who doesn't love the Sons of David for what it is, but loves it for what it is not."
The knife went heavy in Gretchen's hand. But just as I thought she was going to lower the knife, she turned it toward me and screamed: "Let go of my daughter!"
I wrapped blankets over Sunny's her legs, slopping the sheets with the red mud clinging to her sandals. I asked Levi, "Has she ever been out of Marigolde?"
"Never. But I don't see --"
"I want our belongings brought to the Council lodge – clothes, ROM discs, everything," I said. "How many Council members have arrived?"
He clutched the barbed wire hanging around his neck. "More than half."
"Call them."
More than one hundred of the most powerful men and women in the Sons of David sat at the immense Sequoia table, their faces reflected in the syrupy gloss as I entered with a sick child in my arms. Several of the High Council froze, their faces creased with scars and time. Rita followed, still carrying the caldron. My bodyguard.
The door closed behind us and we walked into the sun-bathed chamber. At the foot of the stage were our clothes and a neatly stacked column of ROMs. Beside them was my fedora, the torn visor winking from the brim. I felt the sarape itch against my raw skin and hungered for a suit. Even a cheap Tremayne.
"Seen my treasure, bright light. Minty breath."
Sunny narrated our trek with the babble of dementia, staring cloudy eyes at the sky. I'd only seen a few pre-pubescents with SDS and CNI; early studies said children didn't have the capacity for the disease because their brains weren't mature enough to absorb the online narcotic. In the clinic I'd realized Sunny was gifted. I hadn't realized she was gifted enough to be a danger to herself.
Gretchen rose as we approached the stage. The knife was gone, but the intent wasn't. When we reached the pile of belongings, I nodded to Rita to set the caldron aside, then handed her Sunny.
Levi stood and addressed the Council. "Jack Denys came to us three weeks ago as a refugee from the city. We agreed to give him and his guest asylum until a quorum could be called, in exchange for his silence. I trusted him. Jack and I served sentences in the Jasper Penal Colony." He bowed his head to me. "He has not betrayed our trust."
A short man with lambchop sideburns said, "He is burned. Is he Bound?"
Levi shook his head. "He came to us sick with pneumonia and stumbled into the Ceremony fire pit, delusional. My wife Gretchen, also of the High Council, saved him."
"I saved Marigolde," Gretchen interjected, her voice like iron. "I serve David."
Two women on the Council gave me long, appraising looks, then turned and did the same to Gretchen, eyes bright with knowledge. Finally a young Latino with the threads of a first mustache spoke. "He is the reason we sealed our borders?"
Levi nodded. "His news demanded Council attention."
"Then let him speak."
I leaned down and lifted the fedora to my scalp and smiled as the hat found its seat. I noticed the memory chip blinking under the visor, then glanced up at the Council.
"Avalon," I said, "was destroyed three weeks ago."
Glasses of ale crashed against the table as the members stared up at me, their faces wiped blank by disbelief. Levi said, "Go on."
"The Sysops were killed in an attack on Club Trocadero, Jenner Van Meter's brothel. Four thousand people also died in that attack, killed by some kind of neural tapeworm. That was all the United Nations needed. They deputized the Neuromantic Party on the condition that they destroy Avalon. It took them less than a day."
For a moment, the Council members sat like statues, as if I'd hit them with a few volts from a stun-gun. Then the room exploded in shouts of disbelief: "Nonsense!" "All those years!" "What of our members?"
They were out of their chairs now, total pandemonium, and Levi was pleading with a large black man in the center of the table, saying, "No. No. He speaks the truth."
I turned to Rita, a shrug in my eyebrows. "Quien le poner al escobel el gato?"
Rita's sharp pewter eyes had filled with pity. "You've killed the devil. The Neuromantics may have done it, but it's Jack Denys they'll remember."
"Order!" one of the members screamed. "We must have ORDER!"
It was Gretchen, standing on the great table, and when that didn't work she kicked a pitcher of dark ale. It sailed off the table and slammed through a pane of glass, leaving a jagged hole. And that worked.
Gretchen inhaled, her body swelling in the priestess robe, then pointed at me. The words came out slowly "He has my child."
Their eyes leveled on me, then on the girl in Rita's arms. The women whose eyes linked me with Gretchen now gave Sunny the same treatment, curiosity ignited.
Levi’s right eye burned. "Our daughter, Sunny. Mr. Denys summoned me this morning to tell me Sunny was very sick. But instead of letting me heal her, he held her hostage until I called this meeting."
The short man with the lambchops told me this was an outrage and demanded I let the girl go. Others agreed loudly, and within seconds they were screaming again. Sunny babbled another stream, as if joining their accusations.
I held out my arms and stared into each set of irises, silencing them, voice by voice, until I stared into the gold-flaked eyes of heredity.
"Almost twenty years ago I moved to the WPA Campus with my parents, who had been hired to build a great library in Avalon," I said. "We were living in Idaho, running the Mensa station at a federal wind farm, and when the WPA called, my parents were ecstatic. The United Nations called it the most ambitious event of our century -- a city of knowledge, a place where the Depression or the fallout or the Z-10 plague couldn't touch us -- and my parents would be building it."
The large black man in the center rubbed his scalp. "Mr. Denys, "we all know --"
"No!" I screamed. "You don't know! You couldn't know. Because while you were throwing pipe bombs onto the Campus, we were creating the future. Your Creed talks so much about hope, but what do you give your members? You send them three hundred years into the past, in some kind of pre-industrial daydream. That's not resonance. It's fiction. Resonance is what's real. And for those ten years on Campus, we had all the resonance of the world. Don't ever believe otherwise."
I walked to the center, to Levi. "But then it all crashed around us, almost in an instant. You people had been trying to destroy it since we cast the first optic grid, but you couldn't do it, you couldn't even dent it. But just as it was poised to deliver on its promises, Avalon went renegade. The WPA disbanded and the United Nations tried to sweep us under the rug. All because of the programmer's disease.
“We thought it was a rumor at first. But then they started hauling out the bodies. Septal Decay Syndrome and Chronic Neurotransmitter Im
balance, they called it. And the only place it was transmitted was Avalon."
I stroked Sunny's cool face. "After we saw enough friends turn into junkies, we learned to recognize the symptoms. The imbalance disrupted conscious and subconscious thought, so the junkies babbled, speaking to illusions and memories. The amount of serotonin deadened the brain's hunger signals, so they slowly starved to death. And their eyes," I said, peering at Sunny, "were clouded with a milky shell."
Gretchen stared at me, then at Sunny. I said: "Your daughter has programmer's disease, Gretchen. She has the eyes of a junkie."
The ROM around her neck winked sunlight. "That's impossible."
"Funny. That's just what I said."
The Council erupted with shouts, pointing at my fedora and accusing me of exposing the girl to the disease. But Levi raised his hand to silence them and said, "He was stripped of everything, obeying the Creed. He has lived as one of us."
The black man in the center obviously held the most authority. He placed a hand on Levi's shoulder and squeezed until Marigolde's leader turned around. "Levi," he said quietly, "do you have something to confess to the Council?"
Gretchen leapt to her husband’s side. "I swear on the name of David! Marigolde is pure!" She turned to me, jungle panic in her eyes. "I swear, Jack. We’re pure."
I grabbed Sunny away from Rita, pulling the child out of the blanket that had swaddled her shivering body and held her out in front of me, forcing Gretchen to stare into her daughter's eyes. "Look at her," I said, "and tell me what's pure."
In my arms, Sunny waved her hands. "Dogs loose. Juice. Logical Bones."
"Oh, baby," Gretchen said, then wailed, emptying her lungs for her child.
And I knew then that she was telling the truth. As I heard Gretchen's cry, I knew she could hide nothing, because her daughter had junkie eyes.
And a junkie's bracelet.
My eyes snagged on the copper band hanging loosely around Sunny’s ankle. It had been blackened by the fire pit, but some of the carbon had rubbed off. And now patches of bright copper flashed in the sunlight.
Sunny had been boasting about her new bracelet, but I hadn't paid attention. One of the initiates must have been a junkie who tossed his rehabilitation into the purifying fires of the Binding. But now it was on Sunny's pale leg, and the carbon couldn't mask the microchip in the clasp or its diamond-shaped insignia.
NEW HOPE.
I moved Sunny into the crook of my arm and tugged at the bracelet. Prying it loose took some work; the copper mesh worked like elastic so the junkies couldn't remove the bracelets. When it came free, I said, "Gretchen," and when she turned, I handed her Sunny. She buried her face in her daughter's curls.
I held the band in the afternoon sunlight, rubbing off the carbon with my thumb. Rita watched, mesmerized. I glanced up and saw the same questions in her eyes.
Sunny had been fine when she'd come into my room, making rhymes. She'd just found this bracelet, she said. Liked it better than any others. And then she'd said "Woozy" and started to collapse, eyes already clouding over.
NEW HOPE.
Gretchen rocked her baby beneath the skylight, but when I blinked I saw the Campus, two years before they sent me away, when Cassady set up the first clinic. He’d come up with a treatment: a transdermal patch that regulated serotonin to keep the brain from starving off the body. For a while, everyone on Campus got them, showed off the sickle-moon patches as tattoos of prestige: Not only were you part of the world's most prestigious Project, you were so dedicated that you had to be inoculated to keep from killing yourself.
Only people on Campus had the disease then.
Behind me, Levi told the Council he thought they should adjourn and come back tomorrow. The Council mulled and I stared at the bracelet's microchip, feeling a terrible itch at the bottom of my brain.
While I was in Jasper, the evolution of rehab replaced patches with bracelets. The copper bands delivered the antidote and only needed its microchip checked once a year, a quick office visit. The bracelets also carried the junkie's bio and an imbedded tracking beacon so the coroners could find their bodies.
NEW HOPE.
I glanced at Gretchen, remembering what she'd said about Mother. Breaking into the Darlings' apartment, demanding autopsy reports. She was scheduled to appear before the United Nations and testify against Prohibition. She'd already split with Cassady, suspending her work to archive consciousness; couldn't trust him. Cassady was running the emergency clinics by then, hammering nails into Avalon's coffin.
"They found her with Kenny's treasure chest," Gretchen had said. "He kept jewelry and trinkets, worthless stuff."
The bracelet had become hot in my hand as I thumbed flakes off the microchip. On Campus, coroners had hauled away the dead in black zippered bags stamped with the WPA insignia. I toured Avalon for days and never had a symptom. I figured the encryption was good enough to beat the disease, too. We all thought we were invincible. Everyone but the people with those patches.
Jewelry and trinkets.
NEW HOPE.
"Jack?" Rita's voice was far away. The floor tilted under my feet as if we were cresting a deep-ocean wave. I looked up at Gretchen, but her features had become fuzzy and smeared Then her eyes widened and she backed away, clutching Sunny, whose skin was still waxy. But her eyes were clear again.
"Jack!"
A hand chopped down and knocked the bracelet out of my grasp. I watched it, eyes following stupidly as it clattered on the floor. My head felt heavy as I lifted it to stare into Rita's face, which rode an invisible carousel. I staggered, peering through the fog that had suddenly surrounded me, and the truth slammed home.
My mother was searching Kenny Darling's room for the bracelet that killed him.
"My God, Rita," I said. "They faked it. They faked the whole thing."
In Gretchen's arms, Sunny began to cry.
The Council sat behind the table, hushed as jurors. Sunny sobbed, the narcotic effects of the bracelet dying away. Levi stood in the center of the stage, his hair shook loose in wild vines. "Please accept my apologies to the Council. Mr. Denys is still under the effects of pneumonia. He is delusional."
I fixed my milky eyes on him. "I'm seeing clear enough, Levi."
Levi’s voice grated with sarcasm "Hasn't the Council entertained you enough?"
I sagged in the pew. My brain felt sluggish, moving in spasms. When I closed my eyes, I heard the whispered speculations in Echo Wharf about the programmer's disease that had killed Saito and Jana. I felt the years blow across my face like the white powder that billowed from the crematoriums, the remains of Avalon. All of it a lie.
Rita knelt beside me. She whispered, "What are you saying, Jack?"
I spoke like a stuttering child. "SDS and CNI are fuh-fakes. The suh-symptoms are in the bracelets, not Avuh-Avalon. My muh-mother knew it. Surgeon General DeMaster knew it. But they killed them."
"The Sons of David?"
I glanced at Levi through clouds of glaucoma, then at his daughter. Then I stared at the New Hope insignia on the bracelet. "No."
"Let's adjourn," Levi announced. "We'll meet tomorrow and discuss how to tell our members the fate of Avalon."
I grabbed the rail and lifted myself off the pew. The fedora's blinking chip became clearer, but my brain still felt as if someone had poured glue over the synapses.
I said: "I wouldn't do that yet."
Gretchen turned and the ROM converted sunlight to prisms. "What?"
Levi jumped off the stage and strode toward me. "Enough games, Jack."
I pointed at the bracelet. "Put it on."
The invitation struck him as funny. "Jack, you must have gotten into an herbal remedy or two. I --"
"Go ahead." I let go of the pew rail. "If you're pure, you have nothing to worry about, right? The bracelet only affects junkies. Put it on, Levi."
His right eye darted to the Council members, then fell on the copper band. At the sight of the embedded microchip, a s
ick dread washed over his face. He flashed his wife a glance of desperate apology, then turned to me and said, "No."
I cocked a thumb at the Council. "Then tell them."
His eye widened. "I didn't..."
"But you knew about it."
He brought a hand to his face. "Yes."
Gretchen stepped between us and grabbed her husband's arm. "Levi?"
Levi covered his face with his hands. But Gretchen wouldn't be ignored. She shook his arm violently. "Levi?"
"It's true," he blurted, the words tumbling like rocks. "There is no programmer's disease. The tests, the patches, the rehab clinics, all of it. They faked it all."
Gretchen's head rocked back as if Levi had struck her. The Council members leaned forward. Gretchen released her grip, reconsidered and grabbed him again, hard.
"How long?"
Levi appeared not to have heard her. He had begun to cry, his broad shoulders twitching under his robe. Gretchen wrenched his hand away from his face. When he looked away she grabbed him by the chin, and shouted: "How long have you known?"
Levi's tears disappeared into the briars of his beard. "Always."
Gretchen’s hand fell against her side and her mouth fell open. "You," she croaked, then inhaled and tried again. "You knew? I thought my parents were crazy and you knew all the time that they were right? They were right? Oh, God, Levi."
She brought her fist up to her face, shoving a tear off her cheek. Then she let her fist fly, beating Levi’s shoulders, shouting, "You knew?!"
Rita bent over and picked up the bracelet, turned it over and studied the chip. She squinted up at me, combed back her hair and shook her head. "My mother's a junkie, Jack. She was a junkie before she got her bracelet."
"No, she wasn't," I said. "Let Levi tell you. He was an intern at the Campus clinic during Construction, before he became a terrorist for the Sons of David. He worked with Cassady on the first cases, back when they were using patches." I interrupted Levi's public beating. "Tell her, Levi. How many people got SDS and CNI from Avalon?"
He bowed his head. "None."
"What?" Rita's fingernails turned white on the pew.