Montezuma Strip

by Alan Dean Foster

  “I had to make use of what I inherited after I muerted him. It’s not easy to frighten a mark with a Madonna. It wasn’t until I got the idea of loading the tactile with a lethal charge that I hit on a way of intimidating people. The synchronized religious prattle makes it look to witnesses like the wrath of God is at work. After seeing it in action I’m not so sure that it isn’t more effective than a monster would’ve been.” He laughed again, an unpleasant giggle. “I’ll bet church collections are up all over the Nogales connurb.

  “It’s a pretty case-responsive program. You can give it a mission—we call it convicting an unbeliever—and it can react and respond as the situation develops, generating cohesive dialogue on the spot. There’s no way we could steady-monitor it during the process and still maintain the illusion. Takes too much crunch just to sustain the matrix. And the power requirements! It has to renew itself from one nanosecond to the next. You can imagine.

  “The general public being utterly unfamiliar with tactiles, and pretty credulous to start with, most of them accept it as genuine. I don’t have to muerte near as many people as would otherwise be necessary in your standard extortion racket.”

  “That must let you sleep easier at night.”

  “I sleep fine, thanks. Business is good and getting better. But then you were at the last meeting and you know that. You were at that meeting, weren’t you?” Again Cardenas said nothing.

  “You’re not very responsive. We’ll fix that presently.”

  “I still don’t see how you suck enough crunch to maintain it.”

  “The secret’d ring bells and whistles in Nogales, wouldn’t it? But we’re not in Nogales, and the utility companies hereabouts aren’t near as solicitous of their records. The non-wonders of modern communications. We steal what we need here, generate the program, uplink it via a pirate satellite transponder to Nogales, transfer it to our truck, and from that vitalize it inside a chosen location. If my people are intercepted or found out there’s nothing particularly incriminating in either the truck or the church you found.

  “If the worst happens all we have to do is shift our Nogales base of operations. The equipment there is easily replaced. It’s the box here which generates the program that’s critical, and nobody’s going to find it. Consider yourself an honored, if temporary, guest.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not.”

  “Suit yourself.” Perote straightened. “I think I’ve answered most of your questions. Now you can answer some of mine. I’m really curious to know just how much more, if anything, the federales know about this operation.”

  Cardenas lay down flat on the bunk, slipping his hands behind his head. “Suddenly I’m not feeling very talkative anymore. Maybe after dinner.”

  “Why waste food on a dying man?” The door opened and the two guards the inspector had sensed lying in wait just outside entered. One held a large gun, the other a power injector. Cardenas lay quiescent, awaiting them.

  The man with the injector leaned over him. The policeman smiled, closed his eyes, and as the guard reached for his upper right arm, the inspector brought both feet up to catch him solidly under the chin. He went backward in a spray of fragmented enamel. The gun roared but missed as Cardenas kipped off the bunk and closed with the stumbling, bleeding guard, using the dazed man’s bulk for cover. As Perote darted to block the portal, Cardenas leapt and somersaulted, coming up in the extortionist’s face with an elbow. Perote went careening, his nose broken.

  There were two more guards waiting at the far end of the hallway. Cardenas was in the process of quieting them when the injector slammed harshly into his back.

  VIII

  He was running down a long white corridor. Slowwwly, with his feet barely brushing the tiled surface. Friends and strangers, casual acquaintances and lawbreakers he’d helped put in prison, reached out to him. His father, who’d died when he was twelve. His mother, who smiled maternally and called him her littlest angel before collapsing into a horrid heaving mass of pustulent fungi. His adventurous older brother Felix, who’d successfully dodged flechettes and bullets in Southeast Africa, knives in Phoenix and Matamoros, only to find a writhing, painful death from the toxin of a stonefish he’d stepped on while wading with his fiancée across a sun-saturated reef in far-off Kiribati.

  Friends quickly replaced family, all breaking apart and crumbling gruesomely before they could reach him. He was on fire himself now and watched helplessly as little flames burst forth from his fingertips and toes, his hair and genitals. He screamed and flailed at the flames, but nothing would put them out. Burning, he staggered on as the hallway before him grew darker. Teeth beckoned at the far end, sharp as scimitars, their serrated edges dripping acid and ichor. He tried to stop, to turn, to run in the opposite direction, but his feet and legs would no longer obey him. While something vast and unseen moaned expectantly, the eager jaws clashed before him like cymbals.

  A large dog, a familiar German shepherd shape, raced up behind him and locked its teeth gently on his trailing arm, ignoring the flames that poured from his blistering skin. Whimpering, it tried to slow his headlong plunge, to drag him back from those gnashing fangs.

  On the far distant shore of perception he thought he heard voices shouting. “Hold him down!… Get his legs!…”

  The burning went on for hours, but he never did quite slide into the yawning mouth. Then the fire seemed to flicker and die, leaving him scorched from the Id-side out. Pressure on his body and limbs eased, but the voices did not.

  “If he doesn’t rest,” one said, “we’ll lose him.”

  “So?” A crisp, uncaring, amoral voice, hiding the hint of an evil giggle.

  “You can’t get information out of a dead man.”

  “I’m not sure it’s worth the bother, Doc. But I’ll give you one more try. If he dies then, fuck ‘im. I can’t hang around here forever. I’ve got to get back to the flock.”

  Something was placed on a chair that was dragged close to Cardenas’s head. “Can you hear me, Federale? I’m putting my vorec here. All channels are open. When you’re ready to cooperate just start talking. The whole system here’s on auto shunt. Just say you want to start spilling info and a menu will put you on the right path and activate a nice fresh recorder to take it all down. If you’re helpful, I promise you your next vamanos will be a lot more comfortable. You’ll go quietly, even happily. But don’t take too much time to think about it, okay? I got a plane to catch.”

  He sensed bodies moving away. Once again darkness closed in around him and there were new nightmares, but these were almost reassuring in their familiarity.

  When he awoke it was dark and glacially still in the cell. A little moonlight seeped in through the single high window. He lay on his back, naked, his wrists, neck, and ankles strapped to the cot. One wrist strap was half torn through where he’d damaged it in his convulsions. The lashing across his neck prevented him from even raising his head to look around. Another, broader belt of metal mesh bisected his belly. The fabric of the cot beneath him was still wet with sweat and his entire body shivered uncontrollably. He was clammy from head to foot.

  Perote was right. Cardenas wouldn’t last through another session. Unable to wall off his professional side, he found himself wondering what they’d slipped him. A massive dose of Sericol? Senyabutamin? Nudocaine? Maybe a brew; a threatening cocktail designed to emancipate his inhibitions.

  Probably in the morning there would be more questions and then, when he again refused to provide answers, a final party. It wasn’t that Perote was particularly vicious or evil, Cardenas knew. He simply didn’t care.

  He wondered if Sergeant Delacroix and the rest of his guardians up in the circling VTOLs and out on the pave had grown restive enough by now at his lack of communication to check in on him in person, only to find his safe suit riding a mannequin to South-Central Texas.

  He didn’t even know how many days he’d lain unconscious, or how far he’d been transported from Nogales.
Far enough, he knew, for his captors to require the use of a satellite link to pursue their work.

  Well, he’d had a good life, and a self-satisfying if not especially brilliant career. So he wouldn’t see sixty. He didn’t mind dying. A federale anticipated that possibility and prepared for it from the moment of graduation from the Academy. But he could have done without the pain he was presently suffering and perhaps, even more so, the embarrassment.

  He was stripped, half dead, and bolted down. No longer a man but a lump of meat. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  Except pray.

  Auto shunt system, Perote had said. Vorec-driven menu channeler. How open was it? How “auto”? Cardenas could play a vorec the way a good contralto could play Puccini. His head ringing with the effort required for simple motion, he turned as much as he was able toward the chair on which the open verbal recognition pickup lay waiting.

  “Our Lady,” he began, keeping his voice low but enunciating clearly. His optics were too spazzed to focus on the pickup, but he knew it was there. He engaged all the jargon he could remember from a half-forgotten childhood, when his mother used to send him and his brother off to church school in immaculately pressed and cleaned uniforms: the only intact and unpatched clothes the rough-and-tumble boys owned. He struggled to call forth key phrases from the Bible as well as vorec manuals and modulation theory.

  Occasionally he paused to rave falsely in case anyone was listening in, trying to buy himself some time. Now and then he screamed, just so they wouldn’t think he was entirely coherent and start to analyze what he was trying to do.

  Of course there was no guarantee that the vorec was menued in any way to the tactile, but if all the tech for this setup was proximate to itself, even minimally interlinked, and the Madonna program was vorec-activated and responsive to the main auto shunt Perote had mentioned, there was just a chance that his fevered broadcast might key an electronic nerve and activate something besides a monitor whose job it was to oversee a simple recorder.

  A tactile that powerful had to be more than situation savvy. It had to be sensitive over a broad area of responsiveness or it wouldn’t be able to function effectively, wouldn’t be able to react in depth to nonspecific stimuli. Furthermore, it had to be able to acknowledge peripheral vernacular devoid of cryptics. Code words, for sure. Vitalizing phrases. But what kind of code words, which particular phrases?

  Perote was smart, but as he’d admitted, he was no Silvestre Chuautopec. How case-responsive had the unknown old genius made his program? Flexible enough, surely, so that it could interact effectively with the most simple, unsophisticated country folk.

  Criminals were always talkative when they thought they were safe. They liked nothing better than to boast of their exploits.

  His garrulous captor had supplied Cardenas with a short profile of the tactile’s developer, unfortunate and devout as he’d been. Such an individual would make use of certain words to vitalize his matrix, his designs. Words from the Bible, pious parlance from the historical notandum of the church. A catholic molly, so to speak.

  A warm radiance harmonized in the cell and the feminine device loomed beside him. “You called out unto me, and I have come. Have you repented?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes, Holy Mother, I have repented.”

  “Then I shall call a Brother to hear your confession.” The figure started to turn.

  “Wait!” It was an effort to raise his voice. Was anyone monitoring this, he wondered, or had he simply activated the proper shunt and not the queued recorder? The door stayed shut. Though he knew not how much time he had, he proceeded carefully. “I need clarification first.”

  The snowy mater doloroso beamed down at him, comely of form, holy of aspect. “I will help if I can. It is my function.”

  “You’re the holy Madonna, the true lady?”

  “I am.” The program was self-convicted, as it had to be to function properly, Cardenas knew.

  “There can be no other?”

  “No other but I.”

  “Then if I gave you a universal replication code you couldn’t duplicate yourself?”

  The womanly matrix seemed to hesitate. Cardenas tried not to hold his breath, tried not to keep glancing at the ominous rectangle of the door. If anyone was listening, if anyone glimpsed what he was about…. With luck most of them would be sound asleep. At the moment the lateness of the hour was his only ally, the unseen moon his sole source of encouragement.

  “If you’re the one true holy Madonna,” he rushed on, “you should be able to do almost anything, even create another of yourself. But if you can do that, then you’re not the one true Madonna and your programmi… your true self is by definition ambiguous. Try this and maybe we’ll both gain some clarification.” And he mouthed the codex.

  It was a simple and straightforward attempt to lock up the entire extortion program, using military code logic. He had no idea what the result might be even if it worked. But even if it was the last thing he did, he felt strongly that at least he was doing something.

  Somewhere beyond his cell an intricately folded and very deep box accepted the transmission from the open vorec and fed it into the fiendishly brilliant designs of the late Silvestre Chuaupotec. Circuits flashed. On the far side of the state of Sinhaloa half a small town went dark as a stealth program diverted the community’s power allocation to the basement of an old apartment house in a certain village high up in the southern Sierra Madre Occidental.

  There was a white flash as the effulgence within the cell intensified. He blinked and a second Madonna stood drifting near his feet. Identical to the first. He held his breath.

  The two maters regarded one another. Each said simultaneously, in the same optimal, benign tone of voice, “I am the true Madonna, the holy one.”

  A major truck recharge station on Transnamerican Highway Four-One flickered as if struck by lightning. The lights inside went out, leaving twenty truckers and a handful of tourists cursing in three languages. The relevant power docks died and a transformer blew on a nearby pole.

  Within the luminous cell four Madonnas pulsed brightly enough to make the pinioned Cardenas squint. In unison singsong the quartet examined one another and individually bespoke, “I am the true Madonna; let none doubt this.”

  Within the connurb of Tepic all the streetlights suddenly went dark. An abrupt, undamped power surge blew out those on the west side of the city, sending glass fragments flying. Fortunately it was late and few vehicles were on the roads.

  The door to the cell was flung aside. Clad in starkly colored underwear and a short-sleeved cotton shirt a half-asleep Perote stood breathing hard and waving a handgun. He and those behind him had to throw up their hands to shield their eyes.

  “Cuando the shit is this?” he yelled, hesitating in the portal and blocking the view of the gunmen behind him.

  The four Madonnas turned to the new arrival and voiced concurrently, “I am the true Madonna, of the holy spirit.”

  Cardenas clamped his eyes shut tight.

  There was not enough room in the cell to hold the eight Madonnas. Several spilled out into the narrow hallway beyond. One impinged accidentally on the guard nearest Perote. The man shuddered and clutched at his chest. His gun fell from his suddenly limp fingers as he stumbled back against the mossy stone wall and collapsed, his eyes briefly pleading and then vacant. Perote fought past the lifeless mass, his expression wild, eyes wide, immediate thoughts no different from those of his less imaginative but equally panicked associates.

  “I am the true Madonna,” chorused the drifting, refulgent shapes that packed the cell and spilled through the open doorway, “of whom the word is spoken.” Eyes still shut, Cardenas turned his head as far to the left as he possibly could so that he faced only the cool, gloomy rock wall.

  Sixteen Madonnas flooded the hallway and the rooms beyond. Perote and his minions abandoned the structure, an aged shut-and-shuttered cantina-cum-apartment building, and took to their feet
or their vehicles. Sleepy inhabitants of the village, who knew not what the frequent visitors from the city worked at behind their modest walls and gruff security, came to their windows to view the commotion, and lingered wide-eyed to gawk at the multitudinous incandescent Madonnas as they drifted through windows and out doors.

  Thirty-two Madonnas formed a ring around the old building. Sixty-four spread out into the streets. Ingenuous artisans and farmers, workers and technicians, alternately slammed shut their doors and windows or fell to their knees with hands clasped fervently in front of them. One hundred twenty-eight luminant Madonnas filtered composedly through the streets, preceding two hundred fifty-six who fanned out into the countryside, astonishing ranchers and cattle and sheep alike.

  In Zacatecas all the vit stations went off the air. All of Colima went dark. In Juchipila power to the whole community of thirty thousand evaporated as the supraheavy grid buried alongside the little mountain cantina siphoned energy from the entire west-central portion of the Namerican national power net.

  Five hundred and twelve Madonnas marched through the streets and alleys and cobbled byways of the village of Yerba Alto, beaming at the residents, smiling at maddened cats and dogs, thoughtfully bestowing benedictions on wide-eyed, dark-haired children.

  Every electrical appliance, circuit, device, shunt, and toy within a radius of two kilometers had exploded, burnt out, melted, shorted, or otherwise shut down. Only the little village was not dark. On the contrary, it blazed with a pale radiance visible to aircraft as far as a hundred kilometers away.

  A vortex of one thousand twenty-four Madonnas invoked considerately; to the overwhelmed populace, to those who fled in mindless panic and fear, to the fleeing Brothers of the Order, to their raging master Perote who was swept up in their hysterical flight, and to Cardenas where he lay bound in his cell, his eyes shut tight, facing the wall, the awesome light pressing dangerously hard against his inadequate eyelids.