The Hormone Jungle

by Robert Reed

  April has no intention of seeing Gabbro again.

  Ever.

  She is walking in an open plaza now, ignoring the looks of strangers and thinking she should sit somewhere and rest for a while. She’s still wearing the healing mask. A few more days, said the doctors, and then the damage will be well on the way to cure. By then, she thinks, I’ll have a new apartment and a new life, and people will be forgetting about the miner…what was his name? Who was it that attacked him? Probably his own people, they’ll say. Probably for reasons we’ll never learn…

  People are streaming past. Some have been awake all night, while most are clean and bright-faced and ready for the day. April chooses a living bench near the plaza, the spot affording a view and shade and a degree of anonymity. She’ll buy some fat-burning chemicals later today, then start getting herself ready for circulation again. Absolutely. She smiles behind the mask, thinking about the future. What was it she told Gabbro? That cyborgs were the people of the future? She was a fool. She was so wrong, she knows now. Last night she realized the truth. In the middle of the night, coming awake from some odd forgotten dream, she had looked at the World-Net panel fixed to the ceiling and seen a pair of fictional lovers sleeping in their wide elegant bed, like mismatched spoons. She had realized in an instant that that was the future. That’s where people were going! She can’t guess the technologies or how they’ll be implemented, but she feels sure there will come an age when everyone will be fictional. Each person will live his life with the same old-fashioned heartfelt conviction and timeless passion. Absolutely. But should tragedy strike like it’s struck April lately, the cure will be a simple process. A function of editing. Whatever is evil and sad will be dispelled neatly, buttons pushed and the effects immediate. People everywhere will live in bliss. She is sure. Sitting on the bench and smiling to herself, April almost has an urge to stand and shout at all the passing people, telling them the great good thing that she knows. Then she thinks, How would it look? A masked and crazy fat woman prophesying the end of flesh-on-blood? They’d mob me. They would hang me from these trees, all right!

  April laughs, tears seeping out from the mask’s eyes.

  Then in a little while she stands and walks on.

  “I need a couple favors. If I could ask—”

  “Certainly, Steward.” Olivia Jade looks at him, thinking that he looks better than yesterday-but not by much. She thinks he needs other pursuits, then tells him, “Anything. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m leaving for a while. Leaving Brulé.” The swelling is down in his face and hands, but is that ear burned? How did he burn it? “I’m going to Quito…Yes, that’s what I said. I’m a bodyguard for a client. I’ll be gone a few months, more or less. Would you look after things for the duration?” He is in his office outside Brulé. Olivia can see him and hear someone else in the room, somewhere just out of sight. “I’ll call you from there and set up the details.”

  She says, “Sure,” and feels a little ill. A little sad.

  He sighs and picks something off the floor. It’s a recording disk covered with a layer of drying black mud. Very odd. He says nothing about it. What he does say comes from nowhere and leaves her stunned. “The main thing revolves around money. Quiver chip money. I can’t think of anyone better to babysit it for me, for us, then Olivia and all her talented good friends.”

  She swallows and wonders, “How much money? What are you teasing me with, Steward?”

  He tells. Then, almost as an afterthought, he gives an embarrassed happy smile.

  “How much?!”

  He pulls a broken hand across his face, then says, “Dirk.” He shakes his head and tells her, “Watch the local news. Apparently he killed himself. Which was his choice. His.”

  She doesn’t know what to say.

  He says, “My client’s got some rather unique medical needs. For the next few months.” He lifts the recording disk, two swollen fingers scraping off the worst of the mud. “Quito is the best place to go. This is to save her. Some novel technologies and some big applications for the future.” He balances the disk on one fingertip, the motion boyish and brief. “Applications for Ghosts,” he says. “There’s this fellow on this disk who claims to know how to give Ghosts flesh-on-blood bodies. What do you think, Olivia?”

  “Steward?” She shakes her head, unable to follow him. “What are you telling me? I don’t see. Where do Ghosts fit in with Dirk?” Who is dead, apparently. She feels like applauding that fact. “Explain it, but this time slowly.”

  “It’s confusing,” he admits. “Here. Let me introduce my client—”

  Olivia isn’t stunned. Some part of her had already guessed there was a Flower involved…only she’s not a true Flower and Olivia can still only halfway follow the tangled story. She listens but she doesn’t listen, understands but feels remote and untouched at the same time. How insane can it become? Ghosts into Flowers? She can’t believe what she hears, even though the brunt of it seems to ring true.

  Then Steward finishes, sitting beside the beautiful creature who is wearing his clothes—the blonde hair dirty and the face smudged and the impossible effortless brief beauty still filling the room—and Steward is telling Olivia to come up with ways to use the quiver chip money. Investments. Anonymous bank accounts. Blind trusts. The trick is to make it work without telling the world who owns the wealth. There are eleven chips now, he says. They’re in a hyperfiber safe underneath his feet, meshed with World-Net and waiting. The twelfth chip is coming…and he gives a peculiar smile.

  Olivia tells him, “Whatever I can do,” and catches herself. She almost said, “Darling.”

  “One more thing,” he says. “There’s a miner who gets some money on the side. No names. He’ll probably know I’m the one, just the same.”

  “All right.”

  And when those details are finished, he announces, “I think it’s time. We should leave.” There is a vague urgency to his voice, and a tangible confidence. He doesn’t touch the Flower while they sit together, but he seems to reassure her with his looks and his voice. “Thanks, Olivia. Wish us luck?”

  “Of course.”

  And he’s gone. Steward is gone. Olivia stares up at the whiteness for a very long while, feeling nothing. Feeling what? She hunts for sorrow but it isn’t there. She thinks she should feel happy, at least a little bit, if what Steward promises is true. A body? She might be walking around Brulé in some kind of body! What will I do when I’m flesh-on-blood again? she wonders. What will be first? She doesn’t know. She can’t imagine. She’s always dreamed for this chance, but now it’s here and what she wants…oh, well…

  Quietly, ever so quietly, Olivia starts to laugh.

  On the wide walkway descending into the tubetrain station is a hole deeper than perhaps any other on the Earth. It serves as a tourist curiosity and an advertisement, reaching clear to the Earth’s mantle and the famous mines. When people stand along the high railings, they can hear the distant unmistakable roaring of the drills working. Diluted vapors drift out of the hole, and a steady hot wind blows, and several armored boxes are adorned with holo signs that read: “SUPPORT THE FUTURE. SUPPORT THE DREAM.” Generous children and the rare adult will slip money into slots on the boxes—a small gesture designed to make them feel a part of things.

  Toby is coming down the walkway scared. He still believes that the police will be watching for him, is certain that they will have cameras and the AIs studying every face. But in this crush of people, he hopes, a solitary Gardener will escape undetected. Praise the Prophet. A train is leaving for the south in a little while. He’ll buy a last-class ticket and count the minutes before Brulé is something behind him, something that cannot reach him. This is the future he goes toward, all right. Not some enormous loud hole in the dead ground, but something where he is a major player. So why be scared? he asks himself. The Prophet protects the worthy. Isn’t he proof? Isn’t he?

  At one point the walkway narrows.

  Bod
ies press against bodies. Like in Quito, he tells himself. He thinks how he’ll have to get accustomed to the feeling. Elbows begin to shove at him. He shoves back, keeping his webbed hands out of easy view. And the walkway spreads out now, doubling its size. Toby can see the polished gray floor and people cutting this way and that. He hasn’t been here for a year now, and he wasn’t moving downward. He had arrived. Which line? he wonders. Which is the last-class section? Oh, yes. He spies a sign and moves toward it, cutting across the general flow. He ignores curses, pressing on. He feels safe now. No one has spotted him and he can count the meters to the staging area. Hurry, hurry! And then, at just the last instant, he sees something he never expected. There’s a red splotch of hair taller than the average head, and bandages on the familiar face. That neighbor of his…Steward? What’s he doing? Toby wonders. Here, of all places. Here!

  Steward doesn’t see him, isn’t looking his way just now.

  Toby notices the hands and something pained in the walk, and he studies what he wears—a long robe of some kind, thin and bulky as though the man is carrying a large bundle next to his body. What is it? For an instant, passing against one of the bright signs, a shape is betrayed underneath the robe. A vague suggestion of…what? He can’t tell. It’s there and gone and now Steward is turning to look his way, toward Toby, and he dips his head in response and slows himself and tries looking thoroughly average. A moment passes. Two. And now he looks up again, relieved to see the red-haired man passing from view. Toby continues, wondering about those hands and the bandages on the face and what kinds of scars will he wear in the future. A strange, strange man. He knows it. He thinks of the two of them and how he always felt that they had common ground, suffering alone like they did. A shame they never talked…he feels certain, absolutely certain, as he takes one last glance toward…hey, what’s that?

  For a moment, just a moment, he thinks he sees someone walking next to Steward. Huddling beside him. Halfway obscured by the long sheer robe…

  …impossible, of course.

  He must be seeing things in the station’s gloom.

  And now Toby pauses one last time, turning once and using all of his senses. He absorbs Brulé’s corruption once again. And very faint, but undeniably real, is a peculiar sort of stink. A wonderful stink. Sweet and husky and infectious, yes, and Toby thinks it’s something from Garden. It’s that fine. But for his life he can’t name it.

  Chiffon asks, “What are you thinking?” Her voice is soft, almost a whisper. He wishes she wouldn’t make noise, wouldn’t risk being overheard. He wishes he could see her now instead of the Chiffon-shaped patch of distorted shadow beneath the robe. There’s too much light for the holo tricks to work their best. There are too many people for them to be too bold. They’re in the staging area for first class, standing near the back, and Chiffon pokes him once in the side and asks again, “What’s on your mind?”

  He’s thinking about the tubetrain to Quito—faster than floaters, and they’ll have their own cabin. Good. And he’s also thinking about Minus and Dirk, of course. What else? Sometimes Chaz is in his head, and Yellowknife, and images of tidy elegant brothels somewhere in the wilds of Quito. That’s where they’ll start looking for help for Chiffon. And yes, Chiffon. He can’t stop himself, and he won’t even try. He’s imagining her saved, reborn again and for always, and maybe the world changed with it. All of mankind. There’s no knowing what might happen from these new tricks. He gets lost just trying. So he swings back to more prosaic stuff—her and him returning to Brulé; them living out their lives together and making the money work for them. What’s he thinking? That’s got to be the hardest question in the world.

  He looks down at the shadow under his robe, saying, “The pearls. Do you have both strands?”

  “The necklaces? Sure.” She takes them from a pocket. They appear in his hand as if by magic. One strand he puts around his own neck, careful that no one is watching. And the other strand goes on Chiffon, hanging in the empty air and halfway obscured by the holos. On the fuzzy brink of reality. It’s an odd illusion, and he laughs. He can’t tell what he’s thinking. Everything. He’s thinking everything.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she says, her voice mischievous and her hands wandering.

  “Well, that’s part of it,” he says. “Hormones,” he says, and he gazes out at all the faces waiting, feeling a warm, sweet tingle radiating up through his tired, tired bones.

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