by Mark Budz
Culero. Asshole.
“Get out of here,” L. Mariachi tells him, barely able to conceal his disgust. “It’s better if you don’t hang with me.”
“I’ll stay if you want.” Pedrowski inflates with false bravado now that he knows he’s not the target. Probably thinking about the credit it will bring his fieldwork, being present for a BEAN bust.
“There’s nothing you can do,” L. Mariachi says. “Trust me.”
No amount of talk is going to dissuade dedicated BEAN agents, not when they’re in heat-seeking mode. About to take down their quarry.
“I’ll find out what’s going on,” Pedrowski promises, earnest. “I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
L. Mariachi nods. Whatever.
Then the budding social engineer turns into a free electron and disassociates himself. Scuttles to the safety of their fellow workers, who have clumped together in a herd for support as much as protection, leaving L. Mariachi alone to face the tandem of BEAN agents headed his way. Following the curve of the vat, side by side, with measured, unhurried steps.
“Num Nut?” he says out loud.
“Yes?”
“Any idea what I’m being charged with?”
“No. I haven’t been informed.”
“Have you been given any information?”
“Only that I should advise you to cooperate fully. If you do, things will go easier for you.”
“You got any other advice?”
Num Nut doesn’t answer. His link to the IA has been severed. He’s on his own.
The BEAN agents are close now. Five meters away. They’re smiling, and not in a way that’s intended to put him at ease. Their grins are meant to intimidate—establish dominance.
L. Mariachi smiles back. “Can I help you?” Up close he can spec that the peacock agent is a dark-skinned blatino. Brazilian or Spanish ancestry. The rose agent is white with reddish freckles, and has Celtic knots engraved on his skull, etched into the bone just underneath the pale skin. Both have Frankenstein monster necks, corded with tendons, and muscled fingers that they keep flexing and unflexing, habitually, the way a cat reflexively extends and retracts its claws.
The peacock agent fingers his wraparounds. “Luis Mario Chi,” he says. It’s not a question.
“It’s pronounced ‘chee,’” L. Mariachi says. “Not like ‘chai,’ the tea.” Out of dignity maybe, or self-respect, he feels compelled to correct them.
“Does this mean you’re going to be a pain in the ass?” the rose agent asks, raising an inquisitive brow.
“I just thought you should have your facts straight.”
The rose agent turns to the peacock agent—a slow, confident pirouette. “I don’t think he’s being very cooperative, do you?”
The peacock agent’s mouth twists to one side in faux deliberation. “Maybe he’s just trying to be helpful.”
The rose agent turns back to L. Mariachi. “Is that what you were doing, trying to help us out?”
L. Mariachi can see his reflection in the mirrored bronze. Hammered into the metallic coating, his features look statuesque.
“Well?” The rose agent gnashes his teeth and assaults him with a belligerent stare.
“I just thought you should know.”
“Sounds helpful to me,” the peacock agent says. He turns to L. Mariachi. “Please come with us.”
L. Mariachi doesn’t budge. Keeps his smile pasted to his face. “I’d love to. You know. But . . .” He shrugs. Looks pointedly at his legs.
“I told you he wasn’t being very cooperative,” the rose agent whines to his other half.
“I guess not.”
The rose agent sighs, actually manages to sound disappointed. “I think he’s trying to make our job difficult, or something.”
“Resisting arrest,” the peacock agent says.
“Maybe you could give me a hand,” L. Mariachi suggests. He reaches up for assistance.
“You hear that?” the rose agent says. “He wants us to dirty our hands. Right after we washed them.”
It’s a good bet these two dudes do a lot of hand scrubbing. Enough to put Pontius Pilate to shame.
“I have a better idea,” the peacock agent says. He reaches a hand inside his bullet-proof jacket.
Uh-oh. Here it comes.
The rose agent wrinkles his forehead as his sidekick produces a squeeze ampoule that looks for all the world like an oversize rat turd. “What’s that?”
“Something to help his attitude.”
The rose agent takes the squeeze ampoule from his partner. Pretends to inspect it for a second before turning back to L. Mariachi. He holds out the ampoule, centimeters from L. Mariachi’s nose.
“What does this smell like to you?”
“I don’t smell anything.”
The rose agent makes a face. “It stinks to me. Just like you.” He gives the little ampoule a quick pinch.
Yellow pollenlike dust, as rank as freeze-dried urine, swirls into L. Mariachi’s eyes. Billows up his nostrils, into his sinuses and down his throat, where it discovers his lungs.
“Smell anything yet?” the rose agent asks.
L. Mariachi coughs, then clicks his teeth hard at a sudden sting in his eyes, which feels as gritty and hot as a cigarette pressed against his retinas.
“I’d say that’s a yes,” the peacock agent says.
Both of the agents are at his side. Their hands, clamped vise tight on his shoulders to steady him, shackle him in place as the burning sensation in his retinas spreads and creeps inward. Little fingers of oily smoke reach around the inside of his skull and slither into place.
When they have a firm grip, the fingers squeeze, apply pressure to his brain and give it a yank. The jerk rips at his thoughts, tears them out by the roots, separating him from the world like a dead geranium.
22
HABIT OF FORCE
As Fola follows the arrest of L. Mariachi on her eyescreens, a barrage of sidebar images clamor for attention. A man toppling face first into biovat sludge. An infant wailing at the breast of its unconscious mother. A teenage woman combing clumps of strawlike hair from her head.
Quick, stop-action segments recorded by the flitcams and bitcams scattered about the vat facility. The picture they create makes her sick to her stomach. The medical trailer brought in by the politicorp is almost an afterthought, woefully understaffed and underequipped. It has ten beds and is geared for the treatment of minor injuries, heat prostration, and dehydration. No way it can handle the massive influx of patients. Gel pads have been brought in to supplement the beds and dozens of migrants lay on the floor. Still more huddle on the bare ground outside of the makeshift clinic, faces sallow, eyes waxen.
Fola keeps waiting, praying, for a team of Jesuettes and emergency relief workers to show up, coptered in to administer to the sick braceros. She imagines them hitting the ground, commando style, as emergency relief supplies are off-loaded. Canisters of last year’s sprayon clothes, no longer fashionable, donated by Siz Claiborne or Hi Rev. Crates of obsolete military MREs, century-old food, and WHO medical supplies. The rotors of the copter churning up dust and the smell of death . . .
Even through the filter mask, the odor clotted in her mouth, choked her throat like blood she couldn’t swallow. The stench of partially decayed bodies.
The refugee camp, near a narrow canyon at the foot of the Urals, had been ravaged by a microburst that slammed into it from the upper atmosphere. The brief dust storm, powered by two-hundred-kilometer-an-hour winds, had ripped up trees, buried people alive, stripped the skin from their bones, and filled their lungs with grit. In its wake, sandblasted desolation.
The emergency response team consisted of three Jesuettes and eight World Health Organization workers. They spent two hours combing the debris. There were no survivors. Fifteen hundred people dead in two minutes. No tattered rags clung to the half-buried corpses, only desiccated tendons, too tough even for bacteria and maggots to digest.
A
skull looked up at her out of the sand. Flesh still clinging to the bone, eyes the texture and color of jellied plums.
“You okay?” Xophia said. Wind whipped her hair around her face, lashed at her pink habit.
Fola gagged. Clawed the filter mask covering her mouth, bent down, and retched on the roiling ground.
“Here.” Xophia knelt next to her, tore open a booster derm, and slapped it on the inside of her wrist.
Fola crawled away from the skull on her hands and knees. Waited for the antinausea to kick in, to quell the dry heaves convulsing her stomach and the taste of bile in her mouth.
Something half-buried and sharp pressed into her left palm. She jerked her hand away.
The cross wasn’t bone, but it had bone in it. Her fingers closed around the object and her shaking stopped, calmed for a long time.
Lejandra’s arrest is harder to stomach than L. Mariachi’s.
The BEAN agents strike while João and the two gangstas are at work. Isabelle, who called in sick to look after Lejandra, is the only opposition the two goons face.
It’s not much of a contest. The door to the trailer, not one to question authority or disobey a direct order, does an immediate open-sesame for the duo. They don’t bother to knock or announce themselves. Just goose step in like the Gestapo, better dressed but no less insistent.
Isabelle is caught by surprise. She does her best to dissuade the agents by hurling candles at them. She manages to launch a few tapers before the peacock agent grabs her, holds her in boa constrictor arms, and crushes all resistance.
Fola gasps. Feels the breath pour out of her as Isabelle shudders and goes as limp as a rag doll.
Lejandra is too weak to do anything on her own. Roused by the commotion, she stumbles out of the bedroom, pajamas wrinkled, her hair awry. As soon as she sizes up the situation, she turns to run, and then either collapses from dizziness or bed-atrophied muscles.
The rose agent whips out a spraygun and squirts Lejandra with fast-drying sticky foam that mummifies the pajamas, immobilizing her. The peacock agent does the same with Isabelle. Then the two of them loosen the flies on their official Armani pants to pee on the floor and walls, dousing the place with urine the color of pink grapefruit juice.
Fola wrinkles her nose. “Is that normal procedure?”
“Not exactly. They’re exercising . . . creative license.”
“Seems pretty unimaginative to me.”
“They’ve had their bladders modified to manufacture security proteins,” Pheidoh says. “Their urine is dosed with sniffers and glycoprotein tags that attach to anyone who enters the trailer.”
“So they can keep track of whoever visits the family. Then follow them wherever they go and ID whoever they come in contact with.”
“As well as search them for illegal pherions.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Under the recently expanded Clade Integrity Protection Act, anybody suspected of a crime can be monitored.”
“Whatever happened to innocent before proven guilty?”
The IA, in Heidegger mode now, is examining a philosophical treatise titled Sein und Zeit, whatever that translates as. To complete the picture, the IA has adopted the image of a distinguished gentleman in his sixties or seventies. It’s wearing a conservative suit, has silver-gray hair combed back from a receding hairline, and a bristly but neatly trimmed mustache perched above plump jowls.
“It’s not always obvious if the alleged victim of a crime is an innocent bystander or an accomplice,” Pheidoh explains. “If the victim is verifiably innocent, it’s believed that this kind of surveillance can help lead authorities to the guilty party.”
When the agents have finished relieving themselves, they zip up, grab Lejandra, and toss her in the trunk of the hearse-black pod they’ve commandeered. Mission accomplished.
They don’t take Lejandra to the overcrowded clinic. They drive her to the same temporary detention center where L. Mariachi is being held. An old greenhouse that’s been converted into a storage facility. The makeshift warehouse is filled with bags of fertilizer, stacked drums of nutrient solution, cleansers, and cracked yellow light from the shrink wrap of dusty cellulose that keeps the rickety frame from collapsing. Two small rooms, just inside the main entrance, have been cleared to create holding cells. A third room next to them has been turned into an office for the agents.
They dump Lejandra on a hospital gurney that’s been put in her room, along with a respirator and a drip IV, then head to the office for a quick snack of kelp chips, instant salsa, and powdered aguas frescas in foil packets.
“I hate this Hispanic shit,” the rose agent grumbles, adding water to the plastic container of red salsa.
“It’s better than African,” the peacock agent says.
“I’ve never been there.” The rose agent drips salsa onto a chip and down the front of his suit. The stain left by the salsa disappears so fast it looks like it’s evaporating into thin air.
“You’re lucky,” the peacock agent says as he dumps lime drink powder into a paper cup filled with water. “All they have is one flavor—vegetable curd. Dried, baked, fried. You name it.”
“The best is Asian,” the rose agent says. “Chinese.”
“Or Indian,” the peacock agent says. “Tandoori’s not bad.”
While the BEAN agents talk, they monitor their captives via a wallscroll hung from the greenhouse’s tubular frame.
“How’s Lejandra?” Fola says.
“Her vitals have dropped.”
Fola hollows her cheeks. “What about L. Mariachi?”
“Still unconscious,” the datahound says without looking up. The title of the book has changed to Identity and Difference.
“Is he sick?”
“No.”
“What about the paralysis in his legs?”
“It was temporary.”
Some good news, at least, to offset the bad. “Can I see them?” Force of habit. It would feel wrong not to check on them . . . even though the information she’s streaming is several hours old.
A second datawindow, showing Lejandra, opens up next to the first, followed by a third window that displays L. Mariachi.
Unlike Lejandra, L. Mariachi doesn’t get a bed. He’s huddled on the bare concrete floor, curled around an open drain gilded with vomit. She doesn’t see a toilet in either detention cell, or a bucket for waste, so it’s a good bet the drain doubles as a latrine. The floor is crusted with scaly green flecks, the eczema of some recent chemical spill.
“Is the ecotecture in the greenhouse the same as the vat pharm?”
“No. It’s been modified by BEAN to support the detention pherion Lejandra and L. Mariachi have been dosed with.”
“Do you have a clade-profile?”
A small saguaro cactus a few meters to her right anthropomorphs, takes on the anemic shape of a person with crippled, polio-frail legs and arms. The flowers dotting the surface of the saguaro change, too. Large pink-and-blue blooms, representing new pherions, populate the gaps between the tiny white-and-yellow flowers that garnish the other saguaros in the garden. The arrangement and type of flowers represent the revamped pherion pattern describing L. Mariachi and Lejandra. With the appearance of these new flowers, butterflies emerge from the bougainvillea to transmit information, followed by bumblebees that lumber from blossom to blossom, transferring or updating instruction sets.
As she watches, the new blossoms flicker, a vague digital palsy that steadies after a moment.
“What was that?” she says.
The IA hesitates, its expression pinched into a frown. “Transient interference in the datastream.”
“Shouldn’t the other flowers have been affected?” Or the whole garden. It should have flickered, too.
“Their datafeed is on a different channel. It’s cleared up now.” The IA continues to flip through the bound pages of the latest text, seemingly unconcerned.
Fola glances back to the datawindow displayin
g Lejandra. There’s no obvious change in her condition. She shakes her head. “I still don’t understand why they have to isolate her. Couldn’t they just keep an eye on her? Or take her to a clinic in Front Range City?”
“Protective custody,” Pheidoh says.
“I thought they had to charge a person in order to detain them.”
“Her status is listed as pending,” Pheidoh tells her.
“Which means . . . what?”
“She can be held incommunicado until her situation is resolved. Until the Bureau decides whether or not to press criminal charges.”
“Held indefinitely?”
“Yes. As a security risk, all of her civil rights have been suspended, including the right to habeas corpus.”
“BEAN doesn’t have to tell anyone why she’s being detained?”
“No.”
“So she’s been classified as a security risk because of the illegal pherion. Which makes her a danger to the workers.”
The IA looks up from its philosophical tract. “Not just the workers, but the clade itself. The whole Front Range ecotectural system. That’s what BEAN is really trying to protect.”
Fola shakes her head. Almost all the illegal pherions she ran across as a Jesuette were alternative medicines—replacement drugs for the high-priced ones manufactured by the big pharmaceuticals. She never encountered one that was a threat to the environment, merely the bottom line or the status quo. “I take it L. Mariachi is being detained for the same reason,” she says.
Pheidoh nods in the direction of the datawindow showing the two agents. “They can explain it better than I can.”
“. . . possible association with subversive orgs,” the rose agent says, repositioning his wraparounds on his jar-shaped head. The agents have finished eating, are now getting down to business.
“You think that’s who this bruja is?” the peacock agent says. He seems to be the understudy. Less caucsure of himself. “A harmful free radical?”
“Damn right.”
“So what’s she doing in this shithole?”
“Recruiting new members. Lobbying for support. That’s how these asswipes operate. They target a working-class subclade they think is vulnerable, dissatisfied, and then pretend to help them out so they can be turned into sympathizers. An activist base to build on.”
