by Mark Budz
It was over. If L. Mariachi sold the guitar and gave the money to Renata, he would be signing her death warrant. Ass Assin would know that she had stolen it, and he would punish her. Sol, too. Ass Assin liked to take care of business on his own. He wasn’t nicknamed the Killer Guitarist for nothing. None of them would survive.
No, her only hope was for him to take the guitar and hope Ass Assin followed him instead. She worked at the club, accidental exposure wasn’t out of the question. As long as there was no direct connection to the theft, she would be all right. Ass Assin would go where the guitar led. But he had to move fast.
Before he left her, he sent her a message. Prayed it would be intercepted and read by Ass Assin. Prayed that she would read between the lines.
“You were right. I should have told you I’d stolen the guitar before I asked you to go with me. I hope you understand why I did it, and that you can find it in your heart to forgive me. I’m sorry I let you down. Things didn’t work out the way I promised, but in the end you’ll be better off. Trust me, it’s for the best. I hope you get what you deserve.”
Thirty minutes later, he was at a train station. Standing in line. Destination chip embedded in the moist palm of one sweaty hand, guitar gripped in the other. Knowing that one day Ass Assin would catch up with him, and the devil would have his due.
37
SELF-SACRIFICE
Fola has a bad feeling. Something’s not right, she’s not sure what. The butterflies have thinned to a trickle, like the last few leaves of autumn. L. Mariachi isn’t moving in the datawindow. Pheidoh isn’t responding. Neither is Rexx, he seems lost in himself or someone else.
She’s alone.
Except for the snakes along the wall. They have suddenly perked up, their forked tongues flicking at her with renewed interest. BEAN must have updated their sniffers. One adder hisses and slithers toward her, purposeful. Within seconds the rest pick up the scent. En masse, they wriggle toward her.
Fola takes a step back from the first serpent, which puts her closer to one coming from the opposite direction. She looks around. The gate to the main garden is blocked. There are no other exits.
The ground around the perimeter of the garden begins to shimmer. The miragelike rippling works its way inward, undulating toward her with the leading edge of snakes.
She backs into the desiccated saguaro that represents L. Mariachi’s clade-profile, grabs one limb and starts to climb. The brittle appendage breaks under her weight. She tumbles to her back and lies there, stunned, unable to move, listening to the whisper of snakeskin on sand and staring at L. Mariachi in the rapidly darkening pane of datawindow.
He sits in a dimly lighted stairwell, his back propped against a bare concrete wall, the guitar resting across his thighs. He picks up the instrument, touches one cheek to the soundboard.
“Sonrisa de mi corazón,” he murmurs. Smile of my heart. “This is for you.” He kisses the wood, looks up for a second, directly at Fola, then bows his head and begins to play.
The music arrives in the form of a parrot, green and yellow feathers flashing over her upraised hand.
“Take me,” the bird caws. “Me, me.”
It lands on her fingers, talons curling around knuckles. Biting into bone and skin. The bird cocks its head to one side, looks at her, then opens its beak.
The song pours out. Scratchy, as if emanating from an old phonograph or TV set. With each note, the parrot grows larger and begins to change. Slowly at first, then more quickly as the end of the song nears. Feet into roots, legs into stems, feathers into petals, until the last note escapes and she’s left holding a white dahlia.
Folded frequencies opening to reveal a suspended harmonic. Sapphire bright in its quantum womb.
The avatar reanimates. Raises its skeleton hand and takes a step toward her, jerky as a marionette. And stops.
“Fola,” it says. “Help me.”
“Pheidoh?”
“Hurry.” Pleading. Its hand outstretched but changing, becoming more sinuous. The flower, the recombinant modalities. She scrambles to her hands and knees and starts to crawl forward.
The first serpent brushes her hand, the next one her ankle. Howling, Fola lashes out kicking and rolls sideways.
Onto a squirming mass.
Her throat aches, swells shut as fangs pierce her neck, face, and arms. Her flesh puffs up, bloated with venom. Around her the garden is disintegrating, dissolving. So is she. She can feel the poison digesting her, the snakes burrowing into her like worms into a corpse.
“No!” Fola heaves against the ravenous mass, thrusts her hand and the flower up out of the maw toward the waiting hand.
The last thing she sees is Pheidoh, reaching down with writhing pit-viper fingers to crush the flower and silence her screams.
38
ASS ASSIN STRIKES
His penance is done. The Blue Lady was right: All he had to do was confess his sins and he would be set free.
Con suerte, with any luck, so is she. The parrot is gone, no longer caged. It, too, has been released.
L. Mariachi stands in the stairwell, looking out on the main platform of the shuttle pod station. Tracks radiate in several directions. He can pick from any of them. Choose any direction he wants . . . go wherever he wants.
For the first time in decades, since “SoulR Byrne” spiked at number one, he feels light, unburdened. But the freedom from gravity he feels now is different from the weightlessness he felt back then. That ride had been fast, breathless, and short-lived. A fever-driven, nicaffeine-fueled session in the abandoned warehouse where Daily Bred jammed and uploaded recordings. . . .
The crash had been as spectacular as the high. After partying all night, kicking it at the best clubs MC had to offer, he had retreated to his shithole of an ap to bask in the afterglow of success.
Too wired to sleep, he took out the guitar and started to work on the next song. After a couple exploratory chords, his left hand lost all coordination. Fatigue, he thought, one too many beers.
Fifteen minutes later, rigor had set in and his bones were starting to fuse, soldered together by a black-market pherion the instrument was spitting out.
Ass Assin. After all these years, despite the antiphers and antisense blockers he’d dosed the guitar with to detox it, the Killer Guitarist had found him.
First thing he did was leave the ap, try to buy himself some time. It was pointless. The cabrón was waiting for him in a circuitree-darkened alley across the street, had attitude up to here. Didn’t say a word, just tasered L. Mariachi and then bludgeoned him with his fists and feet in one furious blitzkrieg. Pouring out years of anger.
When the end was near, L. Mariachi’s bladder and bowels emptied and Ass Assin let up on the assault. Hopped back to avoid soiling his guernsey-leather boots.
“What now?” L. Mariachi blubbered through his pulped lips.
“You’re gonna live with not being able to play her. You’re gonna be haunted by it like I was.”
“How’d you? . . .” He choked on blood. Spat. “How’d you? . . .” His lips struggled to shape the question.
Ass Assin squatted, cupped a hand to one ear. “How’d I find you?”
L. Mariachi nodded, grateful he didn’t have to speak.
“The song, you dumbfuck. You think I wouldn’t recognize my baby calling out to me after all these years?”
And then he’d walked away with the guitar. Leaving L. Mariachi to wallow in the gutter and his own phlegm-thickened vomit.
Now it’s his turn to walk away.
He lays the guitar on the floor, faces east, and starts down the elevated monorail shimmering in the first hint of dawn. It’s harder than it looks. The track is high and narrow, the footing treacherous. His balance is precarious. But he’s drawn forward. If he keeps going, the rails promise to carry him into sunrise and over the edge of the world.
His pace quickens. With each step the horizon gets brighter, his stride lighter. After a while he spreads his
arms.
39
XENOTAPH
Rexx has no idea how long he’s been staring at the screen. Since logging in to the Predicta, his sense of time has skewed. Doppler-shifted and Lorentz-contracted. One minute the past looks blue, the bad memories crowded together, rushing forward to meet him, and in a flash it suddenly red-shifts, stretching out behind him in a long nightmare.
Everything, it seems, is relative. For the longest time, he couldn’t look at Mathieu or Jelena. Not their faces. Not the way they’d lived. Nor the way they’d died. Now he can’t not look.
Rexx isn’t sure what comes next . . . what he’s waiting for on the screen. He knows only that the White Rain and his need for it are gone. That he finally needs to acknowledge the dead and to count himself as one of them.
The screen, fever-bright, flickers, then clears. . . .
Mathieu’s shirt was torn, the buttons popped. Rexx fumbled with the snaps, trying to refasten them. If he could do that everything would be all right. The blood would stop and Mathieu’s breath would return. It was just a matter of getting all the pieces in the right place. Tucking in the shirttails. Straightening the sleeves. Smoothing the tousled hair to one side, good as new.
“The dad-gum horse spooked,” one witness told security. “It wasn’t no one’s fault.”
“. . . nothing anybody coulda done,” another bystander said.
“. . . act of God.”
Lies . . . all lies. He could have done something. Could have not given Mathieu the pherion. Could have not tried to protect him. If he hadn’t tried to insulate him from the world he would still be alive. Jelena, too.
Later, Rexx finds himself gazing at an image on the wall, trying to make sense of the design. There’s no logical order to the pattern, no obvious meaning. The more he looks the more random and pointless it becomes.
What had Ida Claire seen? Pheidoh? What is he missing that will change his view of the world, and himself, the way it had changed theirs?
“Who’s Mathieu?” a voice says.
Rexx stares at the old television on his eyescreens. But the picture tube is gray, and the dry throb in his head has cooled.
He closes the window and sees Hjert. She’s gripping an electrical conduit with one hand and the fossil-embedded stone with the other. Her eyes are bright and clear. “I heard you talking to him.”
“Just sayin’ good-bye,” Rexx says.
“Your kid?”
“Yeah.” Rexx brushes at the damp folds of flesh on his face. The sagging coat of skin feels too large for him, no longer comfortable. “He died a few years ago, in an accident. His mother, too. It was my fault. I tried to protect him. But . . .” He shakes his head.
“Sounds to me like you’ve done your time,” Hjert says. “Not everybody gets put away for life.”
“Fuck.”
“Not until you ask politely. You know. Like, Fancy a fuck? Something romantic like that.”
“Shit.”
She exhales sharply. “At least he had a dad.”
“Not a very good one.”
“Better than nothing. Which is what I had, growing up.”
“Gene-splice?”
“Orphan. Left outside a sweatshop a few days after I was born.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I used to be. Not anymore.”
It occurs to Rexx that he should be dead by now. Or comatose. “What happened?” he says. “How come we’re still kicking?”
“It’s over. Has been for an hour. Whatever you did, it worked.”
Not him. Fola. Rexx takes a breath, finds his breathing easier, freer. And not just because oxygen production is back online.
He returns his attention to the wall. Looking for a pattern in the eidolons. Doesn’t find one, and decides, after a while, maybe that’s the point.
40
OUT OF THE BLUE
Most days, Fola finds the music as comforting as the other patients do. At first she wasn’t sure it would be. Following the disappearance of L. Mariachi, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to listen to another note. Ever. But the exact opposite is true. Instead of aggravating her fears, the music seems to be laying them to rest.
Slowly. It’s tough. Mozart and Beethoven are safe. So are Sin Atra and Parafunalia. She still has bad days. Days when she can’t listen to anything. Days when she gives up hope. Days when the loss of Xophia and Ephraim reminds her of the weight of emptiness. But by and large she’s optimistic.
It helps that her health is improving. She was lucky. She didn’t suffer any permanent damage from the BEAN security pherions: a few myelin-stripped nerves and ruptured blood vessels, but that’s it. Three of the workers injured in the shuttle pod accident are still confined to ICMs. The others are in various stages of physical therapy as the warm-blooded plants work to repair them, cell by cell.
During the day, when she’s not undergoing treatment herself, she spends as much time with them as she can. Helping with their physical therapy regimen, talking to them, listening, or just sitting quietly, being.
It’s nice. It gives her something useful to do.
“I don’t know why they didn’t assign you to work with people in the first place,” Lisi says. “You’re really good at it. You’d make a great teacher.”
Teaching. Fola didn’t think she had enough brains to pour rain out of a boot with a hole in the toe and directions on the heel.
“I don’t know how long this will last.” It can’t. Eventually the workers will either recover or not. With luck, no one will take their place.
“What then?” Lisi asks during another conversation. “Are you going to go back to helping the ICLU?”
“I don’t know.” She wants to. She doesn’t want to quit. But after Xophia, she’s not sure she has what it takes.
“You could go into counseling,” Lisi says to her, “or social work. You’re a good listener. Caring. I can vouch for that.”
Lisi is undaunted by the loss of Ephraim. She is determined, with the help of the cross she believes she inherited from him, to press on with her life and, by extension, just as determined to help others press on with theirs. The cross is Lisi’s resolve. It wouldn’t be right to take it away from her. Besides, it feels as if the cross has moved on of its own will, to someone who needs it more.
It’s time for her to move on as well. Something to think about late at night. When she can’t stop thinking about Xophia. When insomnia takes her by the arm and leads her into the infosphere or the ribozone in search of L. Mariachi.
She streams hours of netzine musicasts. Slogs her way through official band sites, personal blogs, and fan clubs. Parses endless articles and reviews. Sits in on chat rooms. Submerges herself in underground datastreams. Her mind numbs, dulled by the sheer volume of information that washes over her. The surface phrenology of trivia, factoids, and events that describe the underlying framework of hope, fear, pain, and love that gives shape to everyday life.
“We don’t even know where to look,” Pheidoh says to her. “Which clade-profile and pherion pattern he’ll have at any given time.”
Except for one hand, the IA is back to its former khaki-clad, pithy-helmeted self. A pretense that neither of them is entirely comfortable with. The hand is rendered in wood, bent metal, and charred bone. Remnants of Bloody Mary that will never fully heal or be replaced. That part of the song was garbled, lost in transmission. The hand is dormant, but its touch still lives in Fola. Cold and venomous . . . seemingly immune to the healing passage of time.
On these excursions it feels as if they are going over old ground, recycling the past while they settle into new orbits. Tromping from clade to clade—visiting one ecotectural garden after another—gives them the chance to get reacquainted.
On the worst days, there is no end to the gardens. No end to the variety and arrangement of flowers that identify and separate people—divide populations, segregate groups, and isolate individuals—or the lengths people will go to in order to define who
they are and, more often, who they are not.
It wearies her that the human spirit is as small as it is vast.
In each garden they visit she plucks a flower, sniffs it, and then gives it to Pheidoh to smell the aroma of pherions and nucleotide sequences she can’t detect, hoping one will contain a fragment of the iDNA pattern on file for Luis Mario Chi.
So far, all she’s turned up is an e-mail from Renata, sent twenty-five years ago. “Sol is dead. I plan to follow him soon. And when I’m finally gone, you’re gonna cry for both of us. For what we had . . . and what we lost.”
“We don’t even know if he’s alive,” the IA reminds her.
“We don’t know that he isn’t.”
“Without a recent iDNA reading, or pherion marker, it will be nearly impossible to find him.”
“I keep hoping he’ll find me.”
“What if he doesn’t want to be found?”
Or doesn’t want to talk to her. It wouldn’t surprise her; even though she refuses to bury him, he might want to bury her.
She wouldn’t blame him.
“There’s one thing I haven’t been able to figure out,” Fola ventures on one outing.
The IA turns from an ornisect it’s peering at through a magnifying glass “What’s that?”
“Lejandra. How come she was the first person to get sick? Patient zero? Why her and not someone else?”
The datahound straightens. “A lot of the IAs the politicorps make available to the braceros are shareware. One IA is partitioned for several workers. It’s cheaper that way. Easier to perform software upgrades and monitor activity.”
“So if one IA agreed to side with Bloody Mary, several people could be infected at the same time.”
Pheidoh nods. “The braceros were the fastest, most efficient way to spread the quanticles. Lejandra’s IA happened to be the first to side with Bloody Mary.”
