Montezuma Strip

by Alan Dean Foster

  If you could work fast enough and camouflage your place well enough to avoid the attentions of company Security, you had access to free sewage in the form of the Gulf below and plenty of fresh water, which could be unobtrusively drawn off from the check taps on the major pipes that snaked toward the beach from the east side of the plant.

  There was food, too. Fish congregated near the surface, away from the disorienting sonics that made underwater life around the deepwater intakes untenable. Except for the threat of an encounter with Security, you were safe. But you had to like the salt smell of the Gulf, the perpetual dampness, and be able to tolerate the rattle and boom of the plant, which never stopped, never shut down.

  Wormy G tied his boat up beneath the gaping maw of an old, broken piling that looked like a leviathan’s half-extracted tooth. It was too much trouble for the company to tear down, so they left it hanging and rusting for future maintenance specialists to worry about. He took the weighted end of the rope he carried aboard and threw it up and over the lowermost pipe. The weight pulled the rope, which was attached to a nearly massless nypron ladder. After securing it with a quick-release clip, he ascended. Legs straddling the pipe, he flicked the release and pulled the ladder up after him.

  Monkeylike, he made his way up through the dense, rusting forest of pipes and conduits until he reached a service walkway. A quick glance revealing that it was unoccupied, he vaulted the railing and hurried along homeward.

  His shelter was constructed of plastic panels epoxied to the circular interior of an old transfer pipe. It was tall enough to stand up in, and the opening could be closed by a hinged section of pipe he’d cut out with a borrowed torch long ago. No passerby would suspect that someone was living within.

  After latching the doorway, he turned on the air cooler. Out in the Gulf this time of year, there was no need for heat at night, only cooling. As always, it was humid and sticky. Tomorrow he could look forward to another day of temperatures approaching forty degrees and humidity up around ninety.

  The cooler struggled manfully. Eventually he slept.

  He spent the morning working on the bioprobe he’d invested six months in rebuilding. When his eyes began to hurt, he decided to go for a visit, carefully avoiding maintenance and tech crews until he reached the big globular float that hung suspended from a single cable over a patch of dark, roiling water. Three times he rapped softly on its eggshell-white flank, paused, then repeated the pattern.

  The unsuspected opening in the old float’s side gaped, and he was greeted by a wary Taichi-me. He had his glasses on as usual, Wormy noted disapprovingly.

  “You got to cut down on the vits,” he told his friend as he climbed inside the converted float. “I keep telling you, you spend too much time sucking that slop. Your brain’s gonna turn to tapioca.”

  Taichi-me wore a sheepish look as he removed the Muse lenses. He owned at least a dozen pairs, all tuned slightly differently, including a powerful Keemsang arc unit that Wormy had reluctantly helped him to restore. It could pick up direct Sat broadcasts instead of just the local air pollution.

  Next to his friend, Wormy G loomed large. Taichi-me was a skinny, bony half-Korean, half-Mex kid who kept himself in vit wafers and food by selling ashore what he could fish from the waters beneath his float home. Not seafood, but industrial salvage that drifted down with the current from the plants farther north. Sometimes he even came up with stuff that had made it all the way out the mouth of the Colorado. It wasn’t much, but Taichi-me didn’t need much. He hardly ever even went ashore anymore, preferring to lie snug and secure in his float, mezed by his glasses, bungoed out on vits.

  He was also the nearest thing Wormy G had to a best friend.

  “So how’d it go, G?” Taichi-me never called his friend Wormy. “Did you get to see her? Did you get to talk to her.” His eyes got wide. “Did you get to touch her?”

  “Fair. Yes. No. Are you kidding? I just tagged along the way I always do.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “She did look at me once, and I know that she saw me, and she didn’t say anything to that stupid neg Paco.”

  “Hey, that’s great, that’s plus, that’s muy solid!” Delighted, Taichi-me leaned back on some of the moldy pillows that lined the interior of the float.

  “Better than getting beat up.” Wormy grinned.

  Taichi-me turned to rummage through a pile of smelly equipment, produced a box of five-centimeter-square LCD screens.

  “Look what I netted this morning. What do you think, G?”

  Wormy took the plastic container and broke the seal. Most of the screens inside had sustained some water damage, but those in the center of the pack had been protected by the ones on the outside and might still be capable of accepting a charge. He told Taichi-me as much.

  “I thought they might be worth a couple of bucks.” The skinny kid sounded hopeful. “Are they color?”

  “Let’s see.”

  Wormy moved to Taichi-me’s box and plugged one of the salvaged screens into an unused vit port. It flickered but lit. The resultant picture was serviceable but not good. The second one was better. The rest were useless.

  He had to explain it all because, as an infant, Taichi-me had lost his sight in an accident, and the cheapjack job his long-since-gone parents had bought into provided for the cheapest of replacements. So Taichi-me’s thirdhand prosthetic lenses permitted him to see the world only in black and white. He retained a few pitiful early-childhood remembrances of color, which were fading rapidly with age.

  Wormy agreed to take the two usable screens into town and sell them at Moritake’s. Since they were color, they might get as much as three dollars for the clean one, a buck for the slightly damaged. Come evening he bid his friend good-bye, then boated back to shore to conceal his deflated craft and hunt up the Teslas.

  He had a new song for Anita, but first he played back his favorite wafer for his own enjoyment. He always did that before broadcasting to her. It was his little secret. Theirs revolved around the songs he composed and transmitted only to her. She was the only one who could hear them because he aimed his directional transmitter only at her glasses. He knew she received them because, when each had ended, she would turn to glance back at him. Occasionally she even smiled.

  He lived for those smiles, for the sight of her backturned face with its reflective eyeshadow highlighting her beautiful green eyes and the thermosensitive lipstick whose color intensified with the minutest rise in her body temperature. Wonderful were those special moments, as if the two of them were playing a private joke on the rest of the gang, on the whole world.

  Because only Anita could hear his songs. The little device he had built, had cobbled together out of bits and parts and scavenged knowledge and the skills inherent in his small, delicate fingers, was that precise. She could be leaning right up against that crazy Paco, and he wouldn’t hear a thing. Only his Anita.

  He eased it out of his shirt and aimed it, using the little add-on telescopic unit to line it up, and then he transmitted. He saw her twitch once, glance back in his direction, then look away. Her glasses rode her face. She was hearing the wafer, he knew. Hearing the song he’d composed only for her.

  He never knew if she liked them, but she must have liked something about them because she didn’t complain, didn’t send Paco or any of the other ninlocos back to smash the sender. He always trembled slightly when he was transmitting for fear she might do just that someday, or that he might otherwise accidentally offend her. But what was there to offend? He was careful not to reach too far, too high in his lyrics, not to make demands or even requests. In the songs he sent, he did not exist. Only her. They extolled her beauty, that was all. Her grace and her light. What girl could find such compliments displeasing, irrespective of their source?

  He followed at a respectful distance as the gang ducked under a particularly insistent clot of ambient advert neon. Tendrils of light reached for them, clutching at their hearts and their pockets. They ignored i
t and strode through, the advert colors illuminating their slick shirts and brazenly colored shorts and boots, reflecting metallically from the receiver suspenders the guys wore.

  Suddenly they halted, as if on command. Wormy frowned. Unified responses were alien to the gang. Surely they weren’t reacting to an ad. He approached closer than usual, trying to see what had so caught their attention.

  When chaos took over, he found himself swept up in the middle of it.

  Sangres. A dozen or so of them, out for a night’s mischief stroll, looking to cause some midnight miseria. There was no time for talk, for discussion, for reason. Clever homemade weapons magically appeared on both sides; the knives, the delicate little vibratos the girls carried in their culottes, the blue-and-purple titanium-niobium jewelry honed to razor sharpness for double duty.

  Wormy found himself caught, swept up in the terremoto, unable to break clear. He hunted desperately for a way through, simultaneously trying to protect himself and his precious, irreplaceable transmitter, his one link to his beloved Anita. Spotting a garbage bin, he managed to slip the transmitter under its support rack, where it would be out of harm’s way.

  Someone must have smashed him from behind, or maybe he was tripped and he just hit the pavement wrong. In any case, he went down hard and out.

  When the sleep went away, strange faces hovered like orbiting satellites above his own, haloed by bright lights. But they were no angels. They wore blue cool caps with integral snap-down, light-amplifying nightshades, short-sleeved blue shirts, and tropical blue slacks over running shoes. Federales.

  One of them held an object in a Teflon glove. Half of it was clotted with something like stale honey. The pointed half.

  “Why’d you do it, kid. Won’t you crazies ever learn?”

  “Do what?” Wormy mumbled dazedly. He sat up slowly, gaping dumbly at the knife.

  There were a couple of speedbikes and a cruiser nearby, and lights. Lots of lights, which did nothing to illumine the intimidating mutter of adults talking in low tones. The Teslas were gone. So were the Sangres, except one. He lay on his back, one leg crossed comically across the other, arms splayed on the pavement. Fleshy archipelagoes in a sea of his own blood.

  “Come on, niño, let’s go.” Strong hands under his shoulders, lifting him up. As consciousness returned, he began to make connections.

  “Hey, that’s not my knife,” he told them anxiously. “I don’t even own a knife, homber. I don’ kill nobody. You the ones who are crazy.”

  Another fed showed him a micropolaroid. “Prints on knife. Your prints. Knife in your hand. Sorry, niño. We got a match. You got shit.”

  Wormy was waking up real fast since someone had started running his guts through a garbage disposal. “Hey, that’s crazy, homber! That don’ make no sense.”

  “I didn’t think you ninlocos liked to make sense,” the tech replied. “I thought you liked to make crazy.”

  “No, hey, no.” He began to kick, to howl, but he had about as much chance of breaking free of the big fed as he did of winning the Sinaloa lottery.

  They threw him in the back of a cruiser and let him scream all he wanted to in the soundproofed compartment, let him pound on the opaqued glass and dig at the nyproy upholstery. By the time they reached the station, he was exhausted from fighting, unable to cry.

  He let them lead him through the bureaucratic maze, refusing to respond to questions, ignoring the faces that poked into his own with varying degrees of concern, hostility, boredom. Let them book him for murder. Allowed them to put him in a holding cell, where he ignored the cheers and jeers of fellow juvie inmates. The other occupants of his cell ignored it all in favor of continued sleep. It was late. One rolled over, squinted indifferently in his direction, coiled back to sleep.

  Wormy stumbled into the farthest corner and stood there, staring at the smooth, antiseptic polystyrene wall. He was still numb, he was not cataleptic. His brain continued to work.

  Some Tesla had gutted the Sangre. Then they had unconscioused Wormy and planted the bloody knife in his hand for the federales to find. That much was simple, obvious enough. Of course, there was no hope of the federales believing such a story. It was a tale any ninloco would tell to try to save his skin. No one would listen to a dumb street kid’s excuses. They had his prints on the knife; that was all they needed. There were no witnesses to the killing except the members of both gangs, and why should they say anything to save him? He wasn’t even a gang member. Just a goofy citizen unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the equivocado time.

  They would send him to Hermosillo, to the juvie farm there. With luck he might get out in four years. If the other inmates didn’t make tacostuff out of him first. Wormy knew he’d have nothing going for him in facility, nothing to offer except his body, which wasn’t particularly attractive. It wouldn’t matter. They would chew him up and spit him out, and nobody would give a shit, nobody at all.

  Paco. It helped to think about the sneering, good-looking neg. Maybe Paco had put the knife in his hand. Paco would do something like that. Maybe he was even the killer. Wormy felt better. It helped to have something to hate (he discovered he could hate Paco now). Something to focus his tormented thoughts on. He concentrated on Anita’s neg; on his grinning, handsome, ugly face; on his arm, which was always around dulce Anita. The muscular, powerful, tattooed arm that Wormy often envisioned feeding to the hammerheads that haunted the pilings beneath the desal plant.

  A bored voice approaching. “Danny Mendez; let’s go.” Wormy turned. A tired guard stood outside the grille. Probably just getting off shift; indifferent to his surroundings, thinking of home. “C’mon, niño, get your lazy ass in gear.”

  Wormy’s eyes flicked to the occupied bunk bed. Its occupant slept soundly. Instinctively, he moved forward. It was dark; the guard was into himself. This probably wouldn’t go any farther than the gate, he knew, but he had nothing to lose by finding out. Maybe a kick or a fist in the groin when he was discovered, but he could deal with that. It lay in the future.

  The guard hardly glanced at him. “Got your street clothes on; good.” He pivoted.

  Wormy followed, hardly daring to breathe. Was there a chance? Everything had happened real fast. Time enough for confusion to linger. This wasn’t an adult prison, wasn’t maximum-security nada.

  The guard led him through the gate, into the jail’s outer offices. Danny Mendez, Wormy told himself. The name blazed itself into his brain. I am Danny Mendez, and I need, want, deserve to get the hell out of here.

  He tried to keep his head down without being obvious about it. The checkout clerk was equally busy, didn’t bother to look up from her box screen. She assumed that the guard knew what he was doing. The guard assumed likewise of the clerk.

  They had him sign for the personal effects of the innocent Mendez. Wormy accepted them without protest. A little money, a credcard he could jerk around, a cheap Indonesian watch. A packet of thermosensitive condoms, a half-pack of sense sticks. He pocketed it all.

  The guard led him to the back door of the jail, mumbled something about staying out of trouble, and nudged him out into the night.

  Wormy stood there a moment, staring at the damp, humid back street. Then he started walking. Not too fast. Probably they wouldn’t discover the mistake until Mendez awoke or somebody expecting him on the outside started making inquiries.

  Only after he hit the alleys did he start running. He ran until his heart threatened to burst through his sallow chest, ran until he had to stop because the pain in his throat was choking him. Then he cautiously began to retrace his steps, until he was back at the scene of the fight.

  The feds were gone, along with the corpse of the unfortunate Sangre. The transmitter was where he had secreted it, untouched and unharmed. He slipped it back into the front pocket of his shorts and headed for the beach.

  Taichi-me found him in his pipe, working under a battery-powered light. “Hey, G, I ain’t seen you in days, homber? What you doin’?�
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  Wormy said nothing, did not look up. He didn’t have the right equipment, didn’t have decent parts, and it was hard doing what he was trying to do. But he’d thought about it a lot. It was possible. He could do it. Paco was his inspiration. Taichi-me moved close to peer over his friend’s shoulder.

  “That’s your girl toy, ain’t it?”

  “Shut up,” Wormy muttered.

  The younger man backed off. “Take it easy. Didn’t mean nothing.” He looked hurt. Wormy sighed.

  “It’s Okay. I’m just having a hard time.” He turned back to the improvised workbench. “I’m going looking for somebody. Not Anita.”

  “Sure.” Taichi-me shrugged. “You let me know if I can help, okay?”

  “You can’t. Not with this. I just need time.”

  “Sure, homber. I’ll wait. Vit you later.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He knew the feds would find him eventually if he stayed in Penasco. After they realized their mistake, they’d start broadcasting the holos they’d taken of him. Sooner or later somebody would recognize one and call him in. Except for Taichi-me, he knew he couldn’t rely on the discretion of the desal plant’s inhabitants. Not where real reward money was involved. He had to find out what he needed to know before that happened, had to finish some things while he still had time.

  It took him plenty days and still he wasn’t sure it would work. But he didn’t see how he could make it any better. He went looking for the Teslas.

  He didn’t find them, and when he went later that night to talk it over with Taichi-me, his friend was gone. Where the big float that the kid had converted into a home had hung, there was only a frayed cable, dangling in the humidity like a severed nerve. Flying fish darted through the Promethean pilings below while the moon hinted at the ghostly presence of mantas.

  “Taichi-me! Goddamn it!” He wrung his hands. Had they pried him out first or just cut him free, not realizing that there might be a living, breathing human being inside? Had the float been salvaged or just dumped?