He leads her across the sand, back to the graveyard and a tomb with a black velvet portrait of Elvis on the iron entrance gate. The exterior of the tomb is decorated with wrecked musical instruments—shattered guitars, gnarled trumpets, pancaked saxophones, and gap-toothed synthesizers. Piano keys glued above the entrance, beneath the feet of a winged seraphim, spell out Rock Pile. When Beto unlocks the gate and yanks it open she is doused in margarita-colored bioluminescence.
Inside, the tomb has been turned into a shrine-
cum
-gift shop. There are Rolling Stones, Phallacies, and Luvbytes action figures, autographed posters, used syringes mounted on the walls, and sealed, neatly labeled bottles on tables. The bottles—old whisky flasks, wine carafes, and canning jars—are filled with poisonously clear fluid. Bits of skin, hair, nails, and bone donated by various performers float in the liquid like preserved biological specimens or the remains of saints. Most of the patches of skin are engraved with tattoos.
“Quite the tribute,” Anthea says, examining a collection of designer nipple rings and nose studs.
Beto removes his mask, and unwraps the kaffiyeh from his head. His burnished scalp gleams, shiny with sweat. “Let’s see what you got.”
Anthea takes out the test tube, packed in dry ice and filled with blood, and gives it to Beto.
“Who’s the donor?” he asks.
“A kid we picked up on the streets a couple of days ago. He’s dying. None of the treatments he’s received so far have helped.”
Beto holds the test tube up to the light. “So I’m looking for unlicensed pherions, and pharming antiphers to counteract them.”
She nods. “The problem is, this is kind of a rush job.”
Beto lowers the tube. His eyes harden like cooling lava. “How much time do I have?”
She twists her mouth to one side. “Thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”
Beto rubs his jaw. The turnaround time is unreasonable, but it it’s not like she has a choice in the matter.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Beto says.
Anthea nods. No promises. “Thanks,” she says. Then, “How much is it going to cost?”
Beto gives her the once-over. “Depends on how much you’re willing to put out.”
TEN
Rigo wakes stiff as day-old roadkill. He can’t remember when he got home—or how. All he knows is that it was late, or early, depending on one’s point of view.
“Rise and sign,” Varda says cheerily.
Rigo raises one hand into the air, middle finger erect.
“Fine,” the IA says. “Be that way. If you want to kiss your career down the toilet, don’t blame me.”
Rigo rolls onto his back, groans as light from the window over his bed skewers his closed lids, turns his eyeballs into shish kebab. He clamps both hands over his face, rubs his throbbing temples. “What are you talking about?” His mouth is thick and dry, feels wadded with tissue.
“You have to catch the seven o’clock shuttle to Seattle.” The IA seems to take great pleasure in his pain.
Rigo blinks over corneas as raw as lanced boils. “Seattle?”
“You’re scheduled for an eight o’clock meeting at Xengineering. To discuss the Tiresias project.”
“I am?”
“Would you like to read the message?”
Rigo sits up—“Let’s see it”—can’t seem to find his wraparounds, and finally manages to focus on the wallscreen past the end of the bed. The message was sent last night by Whipplebaum’s IA, while they were all getting networked and shit-faced at the party.
It’s an ecotectural review session. On the agenda are an analysis of the latest data from the warm-blooded plants, finalization of the implementation plan, including a point-by-point checklist that’s about ten thousand items long, plus a number of last-minute miscellaneous items that include Rigo’s reclading and the linking of Varda to the group of project IAs.
Rigo checks the time. Six-thirty.
“Shit.” He bounces out of bed, takes a ten-second shower, and mists himself with the first sprayon dispenser he can find. It happens to be the Hiz Claiborne leisure suit he wore last night, only pink this time instead of chartreuse.
Fuck it.
It’s not like he’s visiting the barrio. Besides, it’s the most professional outfit he’s got in his wardrobe. Luckily, the bodyware is smart enough to keep track of wear cycles and change color. He won’t look like a total asshole.
“I called a pod,” Varda says. “It’s outside.”
“Great.”
He tumbles out of his ap, down the stairs to the sidewalk, and into the waiting shuttle.
The Low Orbit hop from San Jose to Seattle takes a half hour. From SEATAC he catches a local commute train into downtown Seattle. Fortunately, the public ecotecture in Seattle—tall, spindly trees with lacy fernlike leaves that finger the air and collect condensation—is clade-compatible with San Jose. Rigo doesn’t have to get a temporary antipher shot from the Bureau of Ecotectural Assignment and Naturalization. Dealing with BEAN can be a real pain in the ass, especially if the local office is enforcing quotas, limiting the number of clade-compatible visitors.
Fifteen minutes before eight, a pod drops him off in the vicinity of Pioneer Square, where curtain-glass buildings filmed with photovoltaic cellulose tower above squat waterfront buildings assembled out of red brick and creosote-embalmed wood. The glass windows on one such historical offer a glimpse of an upper-clade art gallery where paintings hang openly on the walls. Even for the upper-clade caucs who are able to get close to one of these masterpieces, actually touching one of them would be tantamount to suicide.
Rigo hopes the Xengineering building is expecting him. Otherwise, he could be in for a rude welcome when he tries to clear security.
“Steal a right,” Varda instructs him.
Rigo takes a right at the next street corner, stumbles into the glass pavilionesque entry to the art gallery.
Uh-oh. If the doors are open, the interior air is probably as unbreathable as the atmosphere of Your Anus, as Varda would say.
He backs quickly away from the open doorway. Too late. A perfumed gust of air wafts over him.
Holding his breath, he lurches into the street and— bleat-bleat—almost gets flattened by a muni-pod jammed with prepubescent nymphants on a school field trip to some educational point of interest.
“For your safety,” the pod informs him, via cochlear bullhorn, “avoid walking on the street. Seatrans is not liable for personal injury incurred as a result of jaywalking or other violations of traffic laws.”
The gaggle of girls titter. But other than the warm flush of embarrassment resulting from public humiliation, Rigo feels fine. No ill effects from exposure to the art gallery. No rash, watery eyes, incontinence, or the temporary paralysis symptomatic of short-term pherion poisoning. Odd. He should be experiencing some discomfort—he can still smell the toxic aroma of violets—however mild. Instead, the aroma has left him pleasantly relaxed and alert. Stranger yet, several longshoreman types stumbling into a coffee shop give him a wide berth.
Rigo hasn’t had that happen since his
tíguere
wannabe days, when he made old people and white minority types nervous just by smiling. This is different. They seem to have an active dislike of him. Not because of anything he’s doing. For some reason, they’d like to fuck him up, give him an old-fashioned Aryan beatdown, but won’t or can’t. Something is holding them back. Rigo’s seen that same look of anger and frustration in the eyes of lower-clade people forced to step off the sidewalk to make way for a slumhound.
“Fucking BEANer,” one of them mutters.
“You can say that again,” his buddy retorts, loud enough for Rigo to hear. “This ain’t no BEAN town.”
“You have seven minutes,” Varda informs him with the anal punctuality of a gray-haired, bespectacled schoolmarm.
Rigo shakes his head, lets the comments go. “How much farther?”
“One hundred meters,” the IA says. “It’s at the top of the hill.”
Rigo struggles up the steep incline to a cluster of four-story brick buildings—warehouses that have been retrofitted with unfamiliar ecotecture. Widely spaced hairlike stamens, growing on the walls, floor and ceilings, stir the air or are stirred by it. Every now and then an insect alights on one, engages in some sort of ritual congress, and then flits off purposefully. One such bug discreetly lands on him, then quickly flits off before he has a chance to swat at it. Transparent cilia, soft as down, fur the mucous panes of the windows. The place is mutant Bauhaus, some ersatz marriage of the abstract and the organic.
The door is polite and efficient—“One moment, please”—but tactilely aloof. It seems to have an aversion to physical contact, and cringes at the prospect of being touched. “That won’t be necessary,” it tells him, strident enough that he jerks back his outstretched hand. Apparently, chemical receptors embedded in the glass can sniff his pherion signature without the benefit of direct touch.
A moment later the door tells him to “Please enter,” and the mucus or whatever it is thins and evaporates, leaving only the brass doorframe in the form of a free-standing arch, reminiscent of some neoclassical garden trellis.
Inside, the floors and walls are sheet-diamond inlaid with squares of variegated lichen or moss that looks for all the world like quilted fabric. Overhead, moist cellulose-thin sheets of aspic filmed with bacteria glisten and shimmer between black anodized girders and ceiling joists.
“Ozmic,” Varda says in a kind of lysergic awe.
Rigo approaches the front desk. The receptionist is a pale waif, an ethereal being stapled to reality by hundreds of body pierces. Without the rings, pins, and metal studs to anchor her in place, Rigo has the feeling she would drift away.
“Good morning, sir”—her smile is blindingly angelic—“your meeting is in the pistachio room.”
“The pistachio room?”
A bee-sized butterfly touches down on his right wrist, flutters its blue-and-yellow wings flirtatiously for a moment, and then dissolves into his skin, leaving behind a block-print image of itself.
“Just follow your nose,” the receptionist says.
“I don’t smell—” But before Rigo can finish, the odor kicks in, strong enough to taste.
He follows the aroma from the reception area to an elevator modeled after a wrought-iron birdcage. It takes him up four floors. From there, he sniffs his way down a mullion-gridded corridor, lined with potted ferns, to a conference room illuminated by louvered skylights. The skylights are squeaky clean, miraculously free of dirt, seagull shit, or the desiccated splashprints of raindrops.
Whipplebaum and Dorit are seated at a conference table chiseled out of massive, altar-thick granite. There are twenty gray leather chairs at the table. All but three are occupied. A cloud of flitcams hovers above the table, pervasive and annoying as mosquitoes over stagnant water.
“Good morning,” Whipplebaum pipes cheerily. “Help yourself.” He gestures toward a buffet table offering coffee, orange juice, ice water, and a variety of bagels and pastries including pan dulce.
“I don’t see any nuts,” Varda says.
“They’re at the other table,” Rigo mutters under his breath.
He pours himself a cappuccino, grabs a danish, and takes the open chair next to Dorit, trying not to feel overly self-conscious. In his pink polyester he sticks out like a lollipop on a French dessert tray.
“Sleep well?” she asks, sipping a latte.
“Like a baby.” Rigo can’t believe the plethora of ascots and bow ties. This isn’t just a bunch of gengineers phreaking out over doughnuts. Half the attendees seem to be wearing a different cologne that contains molecularly encoded information: name, title, job description. With every breath, this data filters through Rigo’s nostrils. From there it somehow lodges in his short-term memory.
“What’s going on?” he says.
Dorit lowers her drink. “Some last-minute concerns about the new ecotecture and pherion conflicts. It seems that some of the recent data from the warm-blooded plants grown by Noogenics are suspect.”
The cappuccino scalds his tongue. “Suspect?”
“It’s probably nothing more than faulty biosensors,” Dorit muses. “Don’t you think?”
“It’s possible.” Rigo feels as if all the saliva in his mouth has suddenly drained to his bladder.
“Nevertheless, some of the Xengineering folks are uptight,” Dorit says. “They’re afraid the plants have been contaminated—maybe on purpose.”
“You mean sabotaged?”
Dorit nods. “Xengineering has brought in an ecotectural analyst from RiboGen to analyze the latest pherion data from the plants and determine if there have been any mutations that might lead to a clade conflict.”
The analyst, Harish Fallahi, is seated next to Whipplebaum. Dorit waves a dismissive hand. “It’s absurd, of course. In addition to the more-than-adequate security provided by Noogenics, the plants have built-in defenses to protect them against unauthorized access.”
“Who would want to sabotage them?” Rigo says.
“Any number of political or religious orgs,” Dorit says. “You have no idea how many people want to see this project fail.”
Then the meeting is under way. Full steam ahead. The first order of business is the timetable for “going live” on the comet. Here, Rigo’s responsibilities are presented as part of a paint-by-number schedule for job completion. He knows exactly what his vat team is supposed to do, in what order, and when. Basically, it’s no different from what they’ve been doing at Noogenics the last six months, except it’s in zero-g and the time-frame is twelve hours.
No problem.
Next on the agenda is the reclade process. For the colonists—who will live on the comet permanently in near-earth orbit—the procedure is far more time-consuming than it is for members of the temporary implementation team, which includes Rigo and his vat crew. One clinic has been set up to handle the colonists. Another will take care of the IT workers. Rigo and his team are scheduled for reclading that evening. Following the meeting, he has a couple of spare hours before LOHopping to the reclade facility for the remainder of the day. Then it’s back to San Jose for the night. He doesn’t leave for the comet until tomorrow morning, so he and Anthea can have dinner, spend some time together.
After the reclade bullet item, it’s on to system integrity and the whole sensor/mutation/sabotage question. Whipplebaum turns the meeting over to the ecotectural analyst, who takes up a position next to the wallscreen at the front of the room. He’s a thin dude, wiry and abrupt, with a walnut-hard Adam’s apple and tonsured ebony hair, which is thinning outward from the middle at the same time that it recedes inward from the edges, like a moat that is slowly drying up, progressively exposing more and more land area.
“As you know, there has been some concern regarding the integrity of the Tiresias offworld ecotecture.” Rigo can’t quite place the clipped lilt. Indian or African. “This is due to a number of biochemical changes recently detected in the warm-blooded plants.” Images of a number of artificial molecules, unfolded and folded pherions, display onscreen. “Since most of the changes were clade-specific it appeared they might not be random, but could be carefully targeted mutations.”
Fallahi pauses, his bomb ready to drop. Rigo tenses, stares at the molecules on the wallscreen, certain that one of them came from him—a snippet of DNA or clade-specific pherion that slipped into the plant while he was inside it and jammed its gears like a chemical monkey wrench. All will be revealed—and instead of going to Tiresias he’ll lose his job.
“When dealing with ecotecture,” Fallahi continues, “it’s important to look not only at the internal design but external conditions as well. Since ecotecture is intended to be an integral part of the environment, by nature it interacts with the world on many different levels. Unfortunately, more often than we would like, it does so in ways we do not intend and cannot always foresee.”
So much for premeditated foul play. Bodies shift, and clothes sigh in collective relief. Rigo remains rigid, unwilling to relax. He could be the unforeseen factor Fallahi’s talking about.
“In some situations,” Fallahi says, “a single event can lead to several different effects.” Another pause while more data populates a screen on another wall, boxing them in information. “In other cases, several unrelated factors working in concert can combine to create a single effect . . . a spontaneous self-organized instantiation.”