Idolon

by Mark Budz

  Van Dijk offered a polite tip of the head. "Mrs. Atherton."

  "Lisbeth," she implored. "Please. I don't see the need for formality. Do you, Giles?"

  "Have a seat, Detective." Atherton indicated a burgundy leather chair in front of the vast desk. "Can I get you anything?"

  "Thank you," van Dijk said, "but I won't be here long." He had no intention of letting either of them get too comfortable.

  "You indicated that you might have some news about our daughter," Mrs. Atherton said.

  Van Dijk nodded. "I'm afraid so."

  "Where is she?" Atherton said.

  "San Francisco."

  Mrs. Atherton leaned forward. "Is she all right?"

  "She's obviously in some kind of trouble," Atherton said. He turned from his wife to van Dijk. "Is she in custody?"

  Van Dijk pursed his lips. "Two nights ago a young woman was found dead in her apartment."

  Mrs. Atherton straightened with a sharp breath. "What makes you think that this woman is our daughter?"

  "A witness identified her by name."

  "That's all you have?" Atherton said. "A name?"

  "At this point, yes. That's why I'm here."

  "So it could be anybody," Atherton's wife said.

  "Not anybody," van Dijk said. "The young woman was seen with Uri Titov." He turned to Atherton. "I believe you've met."

  "No," Atherton said.

  "That's not what Mr. Titov says."

  Atherton paled, his face as ashen as his hair.

  "Giles?" Mrs. Atherton worried the white, lace-fringed collar of her dress. "Who is Mr. Titov? What's going on?"

  "A mistake," Atherton said, disconcerted.

  "I don't think so," van Dijk said.

  Lisbeth Atherton fixed him with a brittle glare. "What exactly do you want from us?"

  "A soft DNA sample. To confirm her identity."

  "So it might not be our Apphia," she said.

  Atherton roused himself out of his agitation. "Was this young woman 'skinned?"

  Van Dijk nodded. "Recently."

  Atherton paced. "Then why can't you ID her using the DiNA code in the 'skin?"

  "Unfortunately, the 'skin isn't registered."

  Mrs. Atherton softened with relief. "Then that settles it. Apphia's 'skin is legal. Definitely registered. So it couldn't be her."

  "The 'skin was experimental," van Dijk said. "A prerelease version in the initial stages of a clinical trial. For some reason, it wasn't registered with any of the required databases."

  "The woman was a test subject?" Atherton said. "With who?"

  "IBT."

  Mrs. Atherton stood, hands knotted around the ends of her sleeves. "That's not possible. Apphia would never put herself at risk like that. It's absurd."

  "There's a simple way to prove it," van Dijk said.

  "How did the young woman die?" Atherton asked.

  "Preliminary autopsy results indicate acute neuroleptic shock, leading to sudden respiratory and cardiac arrest."

  "What does that mean, acute neuroleptic shock?" Mrs. Atherton's gaze darted between them. "Giles?"

  "All of her autononomic functions shut down," van Dijk said. "Heart, lungs, and brain—they all stopped."

  Atherton took a moment to massage his temples.

  "What led to—what caused her to go into shock?"

  "There appears to have been a problem with the 'skin."

  "Has IBT been notified?"

  "This morning. That was the first they'd heard of it."

  Atherton peered at him from between the palms of his hands. "Why weren't they notified earlier?"

  "Titov wanted to keep it under wraps."

  "He tried to cover it up?" Mrs. Atherton said.

  "Along with the person or persons he was working for," van Dijk said.

  Mrs. Atherton looked confused. "You just said that IBT hadn't been informed. If no one else at IBT knew about it..."

  Van Dijk waited for her to connect the dots.

  "He was working for someone outside of IBT," she said.

  Beside him Atherton sagged, propped up only by the hidebound shell of his 'skin.

  "If you would like me to get a warrant for the soft DNA," van Dijk said to him, "I will be happy to do so."

  "No," Atherton said. "That won't be necessary."

  "Giles?" Mrs. Atherton sat, her hands looking lost in her lap. "Is there something I should know?"

  Van Dijk took a clear plastine bag from inside his jacket and laid it on Atherton's desk. "I'm sorry," he said.

  Atherton picked up the bag. He held it up to the light to look at the Roman glass necklace and earrings inside.

  Behind him, Mrs. Atherton burst into tears.

  "Shall we go?" van Dijk asked.

  Atherton nodded. He replaced the plastine evidence bag on the desk. "I think—" He cleared his throat. On the d-splay screen, his wife covered her face with her cupped hands. After a moment, Atherton looked away. "I think that would be best," he agreed. "For everyone."

  68

  Nadice had two faces. There was the mask. And then there was the face that her grandmother had stroked while she sang Nadice to sleep.

  "Just smoothing away the wrinkles of the day," the old woman had once explained, as if the day had left a mark on her that could be removed, no different from a blouse or a pair of pants creased with wear.

  No, that wasn't right. It was really just one face, like one of those drawings that contained two images. Depending on how you looked at it, sometimes one face emerged, sometimes another one. But both faces were there in the same place at the same time.

  Like foreground and background. One couldn't exist without the other. Take one away and the other vanished.

  That's what she was now. Who she was. Take away the mask, and the rest of her would go away as well.

  She lay on the bed, the sheets rumpled and her hair a disheveled mess. In places her 'skin was stained red, but she couldn't tell if it was blood or remnants of fabric.

  Mateus lay unmoving on the floor, the gown coiled like a python around his neck. She barely recognized him. He had changed, too, dephilmed, and pale as UV-bleached bone. Only his eyes gave him away. Even sightless they felt toxic.

  Just past the edge of the mattress, she could see the balding head of another man, tipped sideways and slightly forward. One of his feet was visible on the carpet, the onyx-black leather of the shoe almost but not quite polished enough to show his face.

  Nadice looked away. She lifted her hands to the mask, exploring the contour, and something wriggled inside her, akin to a shadow rippling across the sandy bottom of a streambed. The shadow flowed over her and through her. Like blood, it filled her, kept her alive. Without the shadow—and the mask that gave it shape—she would never be whole.

  A room took shape around her, replacing the hotel room. The room had a wood-plank floor and foam-insulated sheet-metal walls, the foam backing yellowed by age and heat. Cloud-bitten light, spattered with bird shit, misted down from sheets of corrugated plastine.

  A slender thread of fear tightened inside her, drawing her taut. "What's going on?" she said.

  —Do you remember me? the shadow said.

  It was the fish that had appeared to her in Dockton, swimming through the sultry Delta air. "Yes," she said.

  —Do you want to join me? Us?

  "Where?"

  The shadow rippled, then slid across the streambed into muddy coolness.

  —This construct. Or another one.

  "Who else is here?"

  A chorus of shadows plucked at her. They schooled around her, inside of her for a moment, then departed.

  Unborn children, she thought, casting shadows onto the world.

  A shut door appeared across the room from her, a mirror image of the door to the hotel room.

  Nadice glanced back at the door that led back to the hotel room, to Mateus, to the grave of her grandmother, and Marta.

  "Go on," she imagined her grandmother saying. " 'Wh
en one door closes, another opens.'"

  Nadice hesitated.

  "It's okay," Marta whispered within her mind, or maybe only her imagination. "I understand." And let her go, releasing her with a smile.

  "Thank you," Nadice said. She pulled the door shut. Across the room, the sister door opened onto a covered porch joined by a wide walkway to other porches and other homes.

  Each door gave rise to the other, Nadice thought. Without one, the other would never exist.

  Without looking back, Nadice stepped through the doorway.

  69

  Zhenyu al-Fayoumi paced outside of the courtroom, waiting for the custody hearing to conclude.

  He'd tried in vain to hear the proceedings through the closed door. He had even considered opening it a crack and peeking inside. In the end, he paced, read part of a newzine segment he downloaded from a d-splay in one corner—a story about Uri Titov, who had been charged with murder in the death of Apphia Atherton—and watched the other people around him whose lives hung in the balance.

  Would he get foster custody? He could think of no reason, and a million reasons, why he shouldn't. He'd been interviewed and cleared by Social Services, DNA-printed, and retina-scanned. He'd even changed apartments, moving to a nicer, more expensive building that didn't accept flies as pets.

  In the end, though, it came down to Lisette. Did she want him, or not? She hadn't said she didn't want him. But she hadn't said she did, either.

  Maybe she just wanted to put the past behind her, and he was a painful reminder she could do without. Or maybe she was waiting to see if her mother would come back. After a month, the woman still hadn't been heard from. But she could turn up. That was the rub. Social Services wanted to keep open the option of reunification.

  Still, for all intents and purposes, Lisette had been abandoned. There was no sense keeping her in a group home any longer. It was time to move her into a more permanent living arrangement. If not with him, then with someone else..

  What would he do if the Judge denied custody to him? Go back to his flies? And what then?

  He had a grant, from the Neonoetik Institute, to study inheritance mechanisms in programmable matter.

  Al-Fayoumi checked the time. Half an hour since Lisette, her lawyer, the social worker, and the social worker's lawyer had gone in to talk to the judge. What could be taking so long? Was longer better, or worse?

  Worse, he decided. The longer things dragged on, the more questions the judge would be asking, the more reservations she would have.

  Had he become too attached to Lisette? Did he need her more than she needed him? If so, why? What did he want from her?

  Al-Fayoumi wasn't sure. Did he want Lisette to change him because he couldn't change himself? Seen in that light, his situation seemed less tenable—patently selfish. It might be better—for her—to be with someone else. After all, he had almost gotten her killed. Because of him she had seen a person killed. Those weren't the kinds of childhood memories that formed the basis for a happy life.

  Al-Fayoumi was sitting on a wooden bench along the wall, staring at the nothing between his feet, when the courtroom door opened and Lisette came out, flanked by the social worker and the two lawyers.

  No one looked pleased. Lisette stared at the ground. Was she unhappy, afraid to meet his gaze, or merely preoccupied?

  Al-Fayoumi couldn't tell. He stood up. All he could see of Lisette was the top of her head.

  "Congratulations." The social worker finally smiled. "You've been awarded full custody as a foster to adopt."

  "But?" Al-Fayoumi waited for the other shoe to drop.

  Lisette looked up, the corners of her mouth crimped. "The judge said even if my mom comes back and goes to jail, I have to visit her if she wants."

  Al-Fayoumi nodded. So reunification with her mother was still on the table.

  "For now," the social worker said. "I would have preferred a clean break, but the judge wants to keep things open in case the mother returns with a reasonable explanation. I don't think that's going to happen, but it could."

  "Even if I don't want it to," Lisette said.

  Al-Fayoumi let out a breath. "Is that it, then?"

  The social worker nodded. "I'll be in touch—to keep you up to speed on what's going on."

  And to check on them, no doubt, see how things were going.

  "Come on," Lisette said. "Let's go."

  "Where?"

  "I don't know. Someplace new, where we've never been."

  Lisette took his hand, tentatively at first, then more firmly, getting a grip on their new reality.

  70

  Each year Marta took Isobol to the Delta for summer vacation. There they spent three months in a tin-roofed shack, shaded by 150-year-old oak trees and tattered eucalyptus with peeling bark that curled like flames at sunset and set the evening sky on fire.

  "Will I get to go fishing with Uncle Pelayo?" Isobol asked on the magrail trip to Bethel Island.

  "Maybe," Marta said, carefully noncommittal. She gripped her daughter by one hand and guided her down the rickety gangplank that led from the pontoon walkway to the tall grass and soft mud of the island.

  "Please?" Isobol pursed her lips and looked at her with black eyes.

  "Let's see what Uncle Pelayo and Aunt Atossa say. If they think you're ready this year."

  Isobol pouted. "That's what you always say." She toyed with the green plastic fish attached to a chain around her neck.

  Every year, for the past five years, the fish grew slightly larger, as if paralleling the girl's growth spurts.

  They passed the raised walkway to the TV enclave along one shore. Still hanging on, she noted, after all this time. The wooden slats were in poor repair, rotted and broken. A few cells survived here and there, but for the most part the church had disbanded in the wake of the miscarriages. Some people just couldn't let go.

  What would Jeremy have thought? Would he be pleased with the outcome? She couldn't help wondering. Had he accomplished what he wanted with his life? His death?

  What about Concetta?

  "Are we going to go to see Nadice?" Isobol said.

  Marta squinted against the early-afternoon glare. "Yes." She cupped a hand over her darkened spex.

  Isobol folded her arms across her chest. The pout deepened. "Do we have to?"

  Marta reached for the thrust-out lower lip. She nearly pinched it between a thumb and forefinger before the pout succumbed to a giggle.

  "But it's a boring old poster," Isobol complained. "And the FEMbot doesn't even move."

  "It might be different this year," Marta said. "You never know." Overhead, high, thin cirrus clouds shredded the sky.

  "How come we always go there?" Isobol's tone crept toward a whine. "How come we never go anyplace new?"

  "It's important." Marta turned down the grass-walled path that went to Pelayo's raised shotgun shack.

  "Why?"

  "It just is. One of these days, you'll understand." Ahead, Marta could see the dirty glint of the solar-paneled roof, the piezoelectric siding, and other found tech he scavenged for resale at flea markets around Dockton.

  Despite the slow encroachment of philm—new Monet foliage here, Tiki-bar siding there—Marta liked the Delta. Dockton. The way the air shimmered, and the tall wetland grass undulated to the circadian rhythm of tides and the noonday heat. There was a quiescent movement to the place, an unhurried pulse she found it easy to sink into or that sank into her. She wasn't sure. Not that it mattered. It was one of the reasons she came. But not the only reason. Not the one that brought her back... that kept her bringing Isobol back.

  "There you are," Pelayo said. " 'Bout time." He sat on the porch behind the house, under an umbrella, listening to the unhurried slap of waves against pontoons, the chafing of wood, and the whisper of a hot breeze too weary to lift itself above a sigh.

  He had relaxed here. Something inside of him had let go, like old elastic losing a little tension, going slack but not entirely limp. C
omfortable.

  Maybe it was living with Atossa. It couldn't be Nguyet or her father. The reason Marta hadn't been able to settle here. Yet.

  Marta kept waiting for the same sense of comfort to embrace her. One of these days, she told herself.

  Eventually, she would forgive him. Pelayo had finally come clean to Marta about Concetta. How her sister had come to him late one night, asking to be 'skinned, because she was working for a cast intervention network called DART—Deprogram and Reprogram Together—and needed to go underground.

  As proof, there was the databead Jeremy had given her, listing her sister and the contact frequency for the shortwave.

  In retrospect part of her had always known. It was the only thing that made any sense. And all it proved was that Concetta had been right, that evening. Her sister had stopped being real when she got philmed. She became someone else—unrecognizable, unknowable—a grizzled philmhead who could look her in the eye, that morning behind the Get Reel, and treat her like a total stranger.

  Where was her sister now? Pelayo had stopped wondering. He had given up all hope of ever seeing her again, admitted the truth that Concetta was dead, if not literally, then figuratively, and let her go.

  Maybe that was where peace came from, accepting the inevitable, something she wasn't yet ready to do.

  Isobol ran ahead of Marta, sprinting up the steps to the porch. Pelayo picked her up, twirled her around.

  Marta mounted the stairs. The zesty aroma of jambalaya wafted from the thin-walled house. She glanced through the utility curtain covering the doorway. Atossa stood at the stove, fixing lunch. Nguyet sat at a table, preparing a divination. Rocio sat next to her, dozing in his black exosuit.

  Nguyet motioned Isobol to the table. "Time to do a reading," she cackled. "To determine how much fun you're going to have with us."

  While Nguyet performed the water divination, Marta walked over to Atossa and gave her a hug.

  "She looks good," Atossa said, peering over Marta's shoulder at the table. "Tall. Have you told her anything?"

  Marta stepped back. "Not yet."