“I AM THE HOLY MOTHER, THE ONE TRUE MADONNA, THE BRINGER OF LIGHT AND HEALING,” the thousand twenty-four chorused angelically from streets and fields and rooftops as carefully aligned photons danced and the central matrix frenzied.
On the lip of the Pacific just north of Acapulco the parallel power plant at Ketchtec, which tapped gigawatts from the thermocline just off the coast, flickered and flared. Conduits liquefied, safeties snapped, huge transformers wailed. With a great electronic gasp and crackle the plant’s safeties congressed and closed. Power to two states was shut off. Towns went dark, cities went quiet, and for a brief while the landscape was as it had been a thousand years before, deserts and mountains and beaches slumbering in darkness beneath the benign simper of the moon.
Emergency lights winked on, portable lamps were dragged from hibernation in cases and cabinets. Everywhere there was confusion, puzzlement, anger, uncertainty, much of it directed at a power company that was quite innocent and equally as perplexed as its disempowered customers.
A thousand twenty-four true Madonnas vanished, the energy they had been drawing upon withdrawn, temporarily cut out of the Namerican grid. Cardenas’s desperate, careful reasoning had induced replication, which had finally collapsed under the weight of its own truth.
He lay shivering in his cell for another six hours, well after the dawn had broken, until a passerby on his way to work heard his hoarse, weakening shouts. Hesitantly entering the deserted cantina the man found the naked and blistered Cardenas bound to his cot and released him. Then he went to get some of his friends, because the inspector was too feeble and drained to walk. He was blistered not from his nightmares nor from the drugs that had induced them, but from his extended proximity to the one true Madonna. To all of them.
There was very little left of the box and its support equipment in the basement of the attached apartment building. Whatever half-magical programs it had contained had been fried, not wiped, when the system had overloaded. Only automatic sprinklers had isolated the resultant flames and saved the buildings, and Cardenas.
Local federales contacted his friends in Nogales, who immediately descended on the church of the Order of Our Lady to confiscate everything and everyone they found there. They were subsequently guided to the sophisticated relay truck and its baffled crew by one of the more talkative Brothers they took into custody. Brother Morales was not the only member of the Order possessed of a loose tongue.
Perote they did not find, but Cardenas knew they would do so in time, and he fully intended to be around when that collar of a different sort was announced.
Drink and food and rest and medicine restored him. His dark skin had saved him from a far worse burn than the one he’d suffered, though he would have to walk gingerly for days. When he was finally able to return to Nogales everyone in the department was almost embarrassingly solicitous of his well-being, and not just because he was the senior inspector on the force. Cardenas was genuinely liked by his colleagues, irregardless of rank.
“I saw Charliebo,” he blurted to Pangborn as the latter was preparing to leave the inspector’s apartment after they’d watched the Sunday game together on Cardenas’s vit.
“What?”
“You remember Charliebo. My ex-seeing-eye shepherd? The one who got vacuumed last year by that subox tunnel those two self-vacuumed multinat renegades devised. It transposed him into a tactile defense mechanism for their system. Poor Charliebo. When I was drowning in the worst of that bad trip he was the only friendly shape that hung with me. He tried to help me.”
The captain looked away, embarrassed. “Sure, Angel. Glad be was there for you.”
“Go ahead, patronize me. I wonder, though, if he was only in my dream. They still haven’t managed to trace the line of the GenDyne-Parabas subox tunnel. Nobody knows where it really goes, what it links to and doesn’t link to. Maybe there’s some kind of as yet undiscovered crossover seam between all of these cyber things. Nobody really knows. We just build them and vitalize them and make sure they’re doing their jobs. We don’t know what they do in their spare time. Maybe it wasn’t all a dream, all bad trip. Maybe Charliebo was really there, jumping from box to box, using the tunnels and trying to help me.”
“I wouldn’t know about things like that, Angel.”
The inspector leaned back in his chair, feet up, one hand holding a cold Tecate Primo. “Nobody does, Shaun. Nobody does.”
The captain looked at him for a long moment, then shut the codo door quietly behind him. Cardenas checked the numerals that floated blue above the vit screen. Twelve-twenty, Time for bed. He had another week of administrative leave in which to relax, recover, or do nothing, as he saw fit. Plenty of time to think, and rethink, and ponder.
His gaze flicked to his home box, which occupied an alcove next to the wallscreen. It was powered up, dormant, waiting for input. With his left hand he reached for the vorec that lay on the endtable next to his easy chair and flicked it on, holding it up to his lips.
“Our Lady…” he began. The telltales on the home box twinkled, indicating it was receiving his transmission. He hesitated, then flipped the vorec off and laid it aside.
A week was time to do too much thinking, he told himself. He needed to get back to work, to the reality of the district headquarters, to the clamor and pungency of the pave. He pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the bedroom.
As he turned he thought he saw a flicker of white light flash from the cover of the box’s metallic composite case. But probably not.
The ultimate maquiladora. Montezuma Strip: First World tech and Third World wages, sprawling from LA. to East Elpaso Juarez, Guyamas to Phoenix; a thousand gangs, a million locos; and a few wealthy beyond the dreams of gods…
ANGEL OF THE STRIP
And Federale Angel Cardenas, a living lie detector, is a top cop on the blistering streets of virtual reality scams and cryogenic kidnaps, where talking animals are programmed to kill, computer screens can spit murder, and even the Holy Blessed Virgin’s ghost runs extortion rackets.
Once Angel Cardenas was blind. But now he sees… straight into the heart of darkness that rules…
MONTEZUMA STRIP
Originally published under the pseudonym James Lawson, bestselling author Alan Dean Foster’s tales of the Montezuma Strip have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, and Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction.
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