by Mark Budz
No way he can say no. Not only would he be crossing a witch, he’d have to deal with the wrath of João and one or two dozen compadres of Balta and Oscar—bored gangstas looking for someone to take out all their frustration and anger on. It’s not worth it. Besides, he’s not that cold-blooded. He couldn’t live with himself if he dirty-dicked the woman at this point.
He withdraws the guitar. “Why does she want me to have it? Did she tell you?”
“No. Maybe as payment.” She slides past him, anxious to see Lejandra.
“Am I free to go?” he says.
She stops just before the door, puzzled. “Why wouldn’t you be?” And then she’s gone.
Just like that, they’re going to let him leave? They aren’t worried that he’s going to report them? File a complaint with the jefe or BEAN?
The guitar feels suddenly heavier. A cross he’s been asked to carry. Doña Celia has a reason for giving it to him. He’s sure of it. Some ulterior motive or problem she’s decided to pawn off on him. The thing is, he’s stuck. If he keeps it, he’s going to get caught up in the trouble the witch is trying to avoid. If he gets rid of it, there will be hell to pay with her.
Either way, it’s a lose-lose proposition.
L. Mariachi heads home in the predawn light, dragging the guitar with him like a ball and chain. The EZ is still lit up, but the biolums are fading as the sky lightens in the east. Night peeling away from the horizon, like a bruised eyelid, to expose the onset of day. Bloodshot and bleary.
He stumbles past a club called Phallacies. It has the blue liquid crystal outline of a güera, a naked siren, flickering on the beige stucco facade. Voluptuous hips and breasts jerking from side to side with repetitive, strobelike precision. Residual pherions hang in the turgid air, conjure up an internal salsa beat and the urge to dance. An ad virus tickles the heel of his left hand, giving rise to a temporary tattune just beneath the skin and a whiff of spicy, deep-fried soytein.
He turns away. Stumbles when the güera speaks to him. “One other thing,” she says. The voice from the guitar, serrated with the electric buzz of the sign. The blue LCD sputters, flickers like candlelight on his hands and the front of the guitar, imbuing it with a votive glow.
The Blue Lady. He can see her image burning in the grain of the wood. No different from the one branded into his retinas one night, nearly half a century ago, when he needed her the most. He thought the Blue Lady was lost in the past, as dead to him as scar tissue. When he turned twelve, the power of her name and its ability to protect him from the evil of the barrio had shrunk with the years and his loss of faith. For a while, he even believed that there had been no Blue Lady, that she was simply the product of his imagination. A childhood fantasy realized only in VRcade games. Later, he decided that the Blue Lady lived in every woman. If he looked hard enough, or long enough, he would eventually find her. All he had to do was keep an open mind and he would recognize her in whatever form she took.
Now, after all this time, she has come back.
“Who is the song for?” she says.
He finds himself on his knees, gazing up at the sign, hands clasped to his chest. “You want me to play again. Is that why you’re here? Is that why the bruja gave me the guitar?”
The buzzing intensifies, distraught. “You must have written it for a reason.”
“Why now?” he asks. “After all these years.”
The liquid crystal screen falters. Undergoes a series of apoplectic palpitations and then flutters out in a fit of hyperventilation.
“Wait.” L. Mariachi raises a hand. “Don’t go.”
No answer. The güera has fallen suddenly mute. He picks up the guitar, strums a few chords, but the music fails to resuscitate her.
He feels like an idiot speaking directly to a guitar—a total pendejo. “I’ll wait for you this time. I promise.”
Not like before. He was never sure who left who. If he abandoned her, or if it was the other way around.
16
COUNTERFEIT CACHE
According to Pheidoh, the legend of the Blue Lady was born in Miami at the end of the last millennium. Rumor on the streets had it that a war was being waged between demons from hell, who lived on the evil feelings in people—hatred, jealousy, fear—and angels from heaven who drew their sustenance from light, the pinks, greens, and blues of neon signs. The demons had found gateways into the world: broken mirrors, cars with black-tinted windows, and TVs tuned to a violent program. The angels were trying to keep them at bay, stop them from killing people and taking over the world.
The most powerful demon, feared even by Satan, was Bloody Mary. The leader of the demons cried blood, laughed when an innocent person died, and urged children to kill each other. She carried a red rosary as a weapon, and used it to whip kids before murdering them.
Allied with the homeless children against her was the Blue Lady. Yemana. That was her secret name. The street kids believed that if a child knew her real name, the Blue Lady had the power to save them. From bullets, drugs, or physical abuse.
“If something terrible was about to happen,” the IA tells Fola, “all a child had to do was call for the Blue Lady and they wouldn’t be harmed.”
The Blue Lady came from the ocean. She had pale blue skin and wore a blue robe. When she wasn’t battling demons in the streets of Miami, she and the other angels hid in the Everglades, protected by emerald palm trees and giant alligators. If a child died, that was where she went, because God had fled heaven and no one knew where He was. The Blue Lady was magic. She could bring cooling rain, ease pain with a touch, and cause a flower to bloom.
“Sometimes it was enough.” Pheidoh adjusts the white pith helmet with one hand. “Often it wasn’t.”
Bloody Mary had special abilities, too. One ability, the worst, was to turn the soul of a good person bad. It could be a brother or a sister, a friend, or a parent. It was always someone close. Someone trustworthy.
The person would feel claws scratching under their skin, then their fingers would turn to red flames. That was how you knew they were lost, that they had been captured by the demons. . . .
“The only way not to be taken over by Bloody Mary,” Pheidoh finishes, “was to do good. Be good. Every little bit of good helped the angels. And if you died you wouldn’t be captured by the demons. Your soul would go to the Everglades to live with the angels.”
Fola stares at the desiccated, human-shaped saguaro that represents Lejandra. The upraised arms are freckled with tiny holes where the flowers that would normally represent her clade-profile have died and been replaced with quantum dots. “L. Mariachi was a street kid?” she says.
“For a while. In Mexico City.”
Mexico City has whole communities that are nothing but glorified street gangs. An entire subculture of orphans and runaways. “The Blue Lady helped him survive?”
“Mostly by giving him hope, resolve.” Pheidoh pauses. Then, “Do you believe in evil?”
“It’s hard not to.”
“Do you believe that it’s possible for good to come from bad . . . or bad from good?”
“The road to hell,” Fola says. “Good intentions.”
Pheidoh takes out a pocket watch and checks the time. “He still hasn’t played the song.”
“Are you sure?” It’s been over ten hours since she sent her message. “Maybe he did, and nothing happened.”
“No. I’d know if he did.”
“I told you he wouldn’t listen to me.”
The IA replaces the watch. “You have to talk to him again.”
Fola’s beginning to think that Bloody Mary isn’t the only IA that’s tweaked. Her thoughts cycle back to the healing ceremony. “How exactly is Bloody Mary rewiring people?” At the rate things are going, figuring out how the quanticles work seems like a more productive course of action than the dubious prospect of persuading L. Mariachi to strum a few chords.
“It’s complicated,” Pheidoh says.
“So? What isn’t?�
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“It’s easier if I show you.” The IA pulls out a gargantuan magnifying glass and moves it close to a flower on the topiary figure. The petals expand, enlarged by several thousand percent. Ditto everything else in the virtual construct, until she’s surrounded by a forest of hologram fractals.
She cranes her head, peering around at the virtual data. The holofracts appear to be composed of multiple images—old still photographs and scenes from movies, television programs, news clips, commercials, and computer-generated cartoons—that have been spliced or grafted into some kind of Frankenstein collage. It’s as if each plant is made up of mass-mediated information or the mediascape has taken on an organic life of its own. Seeding, cross-pollinating, hybridizing. “What am I looking at?”
“It’s a chaotic disturbance,” the IA says. “A localized crache in the ribozone.”
Whatever a crache is.
“A recombinant cache,” Pheidoh explains, reading her confusion. “An unstable dataspace where information can be exchanged and combined in different patterns . . . or modalities.”
Okay. “What for?”
“To create virtual allotropes. Information or data elements that have two or more structural forms.”
Which tells her next to nothing. “How does this tie in with Lejandra and everyone else who’s been infected?”
She thinks of the Sydney Greenstreet blemish. Wonders if it’s spread, like the lips on the skull of the gerontocrat. If Lejandra is still alive, she tells herself, Xophia must be too. She wasn’t as sick as Lejandra.
“Molectronics can only express digital information in the form of molecules,” Pheidoh says. “The biocircuits take electronic information in the form of bits and convert the binary code into messenger RNA that ribosomes use to manufacture pherions, antiphers, and other proteins. They can’t change the physical structure of the body. To do that, you have to replace normal matter with artificial matter.”
“The quanticles,” she says. They sound like the digital equivalent of pherions, a way to divide people into electronic clades instead of, or maybe in addition to, biological ones. No wonder the politicorps agreed to softwire people en masse. It gives them another level of control.
The IA mops invisible sweat from its brow again. “Artificial atoms can be programmed to physically express or recreate an electronic image. Similar to the way DNA expresses phenotype, the biological image of an organism.”
“So how come—if the properties of artificial atoms are the same as normal atoms—the quanticles are making people sick?”
“They aren’t the same. Not exactly. Because artificial atoms, and molecules, are confined to a substrate—a nanoparticle or nanofiber—they don’t undergo the same chemical re-actions as normal atoms. When a nerve formed of artificial matter replaces a regular nerve, the nerve doesn’t function exactly the way it used to.”
“So the programmable matter is like cancer. A malignant growth that takes over and kills the tissue around it.”
“In this case.”
“And transmitting the song to Bloody Mary will stop her from infecting anyone else and the ecotecture.”
The datahound’s eyes twitch rapidly. “Yes. The process will stop.”
“What about the people who are already sick? Will the quanticles inside of them continue to replicate?”
“They shouldn’t.”
But the IA isn’t sure. Not 100 percent. It’s those decimal places again and the uncertainty that lives beyond them.
The sheer amount of information streaming around her is overwhelming. It hurts to look at. She closes her eyes but can still see squirming, wriggling snippets of representational data that feel like they’re trying to invade her, reconfigure her. There’s a feeling of ill-defined purpose lurking just beneath the surface. A coldly calculated method to the madness that raises goose pimples on her real-world arms. She opens her eyes and rubs at the prickle of fear, trying to smooth the frayed ends of her nerves.
“Why is Bloody Mary trying to reprogram people and the environment in the first place?” Fola says. If she keeps her gaze fixed on Pheidoh’s face, the staccato tangle of images is bearable. Like staring at a point on the horizon to keep from getting motion sickness. “I mean, what’s the point?”
“To create something new from something old.”
What is it with IAs and ontology? It’s not just Pheidoh. Most of the IAs she’s known have this existential fascination with pop culture, stereotypes, and gnostic aphorisms. They try them on like clothes or bad costume jewelry, looking for something that fits. As if playing a role, acting out a particular social convention, archetype, or bad cliché will impart a certain consciousness or lifestyle.
“Who exactly is Bloody Mary?” Fola says. “You said she used to be an IA. But who is she now? What happened? How did she come about?”
The datahound wavers, a relapse of the digital tic that makes her think it’s going to freeze up any second.
Instead, the explorer avatar morphs, is replaced by a likeness of Nietzsche or some other dead philosopher. She’s not sure. She’s never been able to keep her German angstmeisters straight. The face has a bleak monastic intensity crowned by an unruly cloud of dark hair, and black eyes, as bright and unfathomable as moonlit water. At the same time the crache dataspace collapses, and she cycles back into the ribozone garden.
“‘Don’t regard a hesitant assertion as an assertion of hesitancy,’” the IA says.
“What?” She shakes her head at the non sequitur.
“Wittgenstein.” The datahound inclines its head to one side and cups a hand to one ear. “You have a new message.”
Her heart skips a beat. Ephraim? Xophia?
Instead, a flitcam image of Alphonse appears in a translucent window that overlays the dying sunflower of Lejandra’s face.
“I just wanted to let you know that we’ve been ordered to help set up a quarantine zone,” he says. “So the work teams on the asteroid can be evacuated.”
“Here? On the station?”
Alphonse gives a brusque nod. “In the offline greenhouses. They can be hermetically sealed and isolated from the rest of the station to create temporary housing and life support.”
“Is that safe? Bringing them to the station?”
“Kerusa thinks so. Besides, we don’t have much choice. The teams there are running short on resources.” He glances around the hexcell he’s in, an entry portal to a developmental section of the greenhouses reserved for future growth. The entrance has a hardseal hatch instead of a softseal membrane. Through the thick pustule of a bubble window, she can see four parallel vat cylinders, fed by hydroponics piping, that make up a single unit. The pipes run the length of the spun diamond cylinders and feed a column of five circular biovats stacked on a central support spindle. The vats, fifty meters in diameter and ten meters high, remind her of oversize petri dishes.
“What about me?” she says. “Am I going to be put in quarantine with the others?”
“I’m not sure. As soon as I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
“What will you be doing?”
“Installing sleepsacs in the vats that have already been retrofitted with temporary hexcells.” Alphonse unclips a six-pack of squeeze bottles from one of the mesh pockets on his sprayon jumpsuit. The bottles are filled with milky white mucus and have a ten-centimeter hoop or ring at one end.
A distant ache Dopplers in. Low-pitched at first, growing sharper, more urgent. She misses them. Lalya’s matter-of-factness. Yulong’s gruffness and fear of making a mistake. Even Ephraim’s negativism. She’s never been entirely certain what she brings to the tuplet. By the time her input loops back to her through the others it’s diluted, unrecognizable. She’s no longer sure who she is, or what she is. “Where are the others?” she says. “Where’s Ephraim?”
“They should be here soon,” Alphonse says.
“I need to talk to Ephraim,” she says. “It’s important.”
“We don’t have muc
h time to do the retrofit,” Alphonse says. It’s unclear if he’s heard her or not. “Life support on the surface is failing.”
Fola nibbles her lower lip. “I was interviewed by some top-level gengineer from Tiresias. Rexx. The way he talked, he was here to help fix the problem.”
Alphonse nods. “He was here for a while. I guess he met with Kerusa and the ops managers.”
“Where is he now?” Fola says.
“Gone,” Alphonse says. “He left right after the meeting. Took off, just like that.” He snaps a finger.
“How come?”
“I heard that he and Kerusa didn’t see eye to eye,” Alphonse says. “He wanted to do things his way instead of taking direction from the ops managers.”
“Did he do anything while he was here?” she asks.
“Besides pissing people off?” Alphonse’s face twists in a sour grimace. “Not as far as I know.”
He’s the person she needs to talk to about the quanticles. With luck he might be able to help Xophia, provide her with some piece of information that will halt or slow the spread of the disease on the shuttle.
“So it looks like we’re on our own,” Alphonse says. “At least for now.” He cuts a glance at the hatch hissing open behind him.
Through the diamond walls of the vat cylinders, Fola glimpses the movement of other tuplets, hard at work in individual tanks. Assembling carbyne frames. Connecting the frames into single modules. Shrink wrapping the individual modules with membrane insulation and then connecting them into hexcell clusters. At the accessway to one of the tubes she spots Kerusa. He’s wearing a heavy-duty exoskeleton and a rugged scowl, not at all happy with something he’s hearing or seeing on his wraparounds.
“Look, I have to go,” Alphonse says. He drifts toward the hatch, pulled by a magnetic flux line into the core. The wall of the vat cylinder next to him is dry. Minus any warm-blooded plants, it hasn’t had a chance to collect moisture or condensation. Light to the vats is provided by a fiber-optic grid that’s connected to a big lightdome at one end of the cylinder. The vat he’s headed toward has already been partitioned into living units. She can make out the refracted outline of hexcells. The hydroponics piping is fully operational, has been reconfigured with siptubes for drinking instead of drip lines and spray nozzles. Thin biolum strips, pasted to the frame, secrete a wan, greenish glow onto the honey yellow walls.
