“Do you feel revenged?”
She smiles at the question, one she’s asked herself a thousand times, shakes her head. “Not anymore.”
“But you did?”
“For a few years. But everything gets old, Mama, wears thin after a while. It only lasts so long.”
“Not love,” the old woman says. “Love never wears thin. If it does, it was never love to begin with.”
Anthea’s not exactly sure what she’s trying to say with this, whether it has to do with her and Rigo or her and her mother.
“Did you ever tell your mother what you were doing?” the old woman asks. “On the streets.”
“To hurt her, you mean? Make her angry? Guilty?”
“Sí.”
“No. She has a lot of money and resources. I was afraid that if she knew what I was doing she’d figure out a way to find me.”
“It sounds to me like maybe you’re the person who suffered all those years. Not her.”
“Sometimes”—this is Anthea’s greatest hope— “not knowing what happened to a person is worse than knowing.”
“You don’t want her to know if you’re dead or alive? You want to torture her by sending her to her grave in the dark?”
“I don’t want her to have closure. I don’t want her to be able to write me off as a worthless
puta
. I want her always to wonder. To never be at peace, the same way I will never be at peace.”
“You don’t have any regrets?”
“There are always regrets, Mama. You know that.”
“True.”
“Do you ever wish you hadn’t adopted Rigo?” Anthea says, thinking that maybe this is one of the old woman’s secret regrets.
“Sometimes I wish I’d been able to do more with my life. Growing up, I wanted to be an artist. It’s too late for that now. I’m not complaining. There are worse things you can do than raise children. I do wish I’d raised them differently. I made mistakes. I can see that now.”
“What kind of mistakes, Mama?” Anthea’s curious what Rigo’s mom sees as his shortcomings, his faults. Whether they sync with hers.
“I wish I’d taught Beto to respect authority more, and Rigo to question it.” She twists to one side, tugs at a crease in her dress that’s pinching the loose flesh under her left arm. Plucks it with rake-stiff fingers. “Maybe if I’d taken them on a church relief mission to India. Or Africa. Exposed them to different ways of thinking when they were younger. Before they had a chance to get set in their ways.”
“You think spending time in another culture would have given them a different perspective on life here and how to deal with it?” Anthea’s not convinced things are all that different anywhere else. In some countries, the living conditions are a lot worse. She’s worked with kids from those places. They’re just as messed, just as fucked up, as those raised here.
“It might have helped.” The old woman’s shoulders tilt in a lopsided shrug, then straighten, like a boat righting itself. “Not that it did me any good. I always thought that if I worked hard and stayed out of trouble I’d have a good life. That’s what we were told when we migrated here. Instead, I’m a victim of social engineering.”
“What do you mean, Mama?”
The old woman tries to straighten her elbow, fails. “Everything I do is controlled. Where I can go. Who I can talk to. Even my health is managed. Planned obsolescence, designed to make room for the next person in line.”
It takes a moment for Anthea to fully process this. “You’re saying the politicorp is responsible for your condition?”
“How else is the government going to manage population growth, enforce social and economic demographics? It’s the same thing that happened in St. Louis. A plague. The only difference is that now they’ve got it under control.”
“That’s a serious allegation.”
“What else am I supposed to think? After seeing what’s been done to Ibrahim, I can’t help wondering if maybe Beto’s right.”
“When did you talk to Beto?” Anthea wasn’t sure if they were on speaking terms or not. Listening to Rigo, it was hard to tell.
“A few minutes ago. While you were talking to Ibrahim.”
“What did he want?”
“He called to tell me that my FOP is triggered by a gengineered prion living in the water-recycling plants.”
“How does he know?”
“He had Rigo bring me a medication for my joints.
Except it was really a diagnostic to check for this prion. Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s got it. There are other people, too.
Viejos
, like me.”
“But how does he know it was gengineered? That it was released on purpose by the government?”
“He didn’t say. He only said I shouldn’t drink the water in my building. That it’s contaminated and will make my condition worse.”
Targeted prions. This sounds a little too close to the story concocted by BEAN about Ibrahim carrying terrorist pherions.
“He also wanted to know if I’d heard from you,” the old woman goes on. “Knew where to find you.”
Anthea’s mind spins, caught up in the white-water churn of events. “What did you say?”
“I told him I didn’t know where you were, but if I saw you I’d tell you how to get in touch with him. I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell anyone you were here without discussing it with you.”
“Where is he?”
“Someplace called the Inferno. It looked like a bar.”
It’s not. The Inferno is actually Beto’s underground pharm. The bar scene is a digital overlay, encrypted and then interleaved with the transmission so that it appears real-world.
“Is that all?” Anthea asks.
“Sí. He said you’d know how to get there.”
“Can you watch Ibrahim for a while?”
“You think Beto can help him. Is that why he wants to see you?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Anthea says.
Anthea drops offline for the trip to the Inferno. Half an hour later, she finds herself navigating the debris-choked, half-collapsed concrete of an abandoned sewer pipe. Layers of fifty-year-old spray foam and bubblepack clog the concrete walls. Through the translucent plaque, lit by colonies of biolum bacteria, she can make out air pockets formed by rusted metal cabinets, plastic garbage cans, and storage crates where people once slept.
She’s only been to Beto’s private pharm twice, right after she was recovered enough to leave the clinic. Went there expecting to pay for services rendered. She did, just not the way she thought. Beto had a boyfriend, wasn’t interested. Instead, he asked her to pick up some product. She felt obligated, agreed to do the job. When Beto offered her a follow-up job, she turned him down. Thanks but no thanks. She didn’t want to be pimped out by a pharmer. She wanted to make her own rules—take her own risks. In retrospect, she should have taken him up on the offer. It would have been better than working as a gang banger, peddling STDs. But she was young. Had her life all figured out, knew exactly what she was doing.
So she and Beto have a history. He sniffs her coming in advance. Beto’s got early warning the way the old military industrial complex was wired with SIG-INT. To the gills. The pharm is in a side pipe. An ancient iron gate clotted with spray foam conceals the entrance, secretes a broad-spectrum pherion that induces severe intestinal cramps in most people. After a short wait, the gate swings open, ushers her into a makeshift room with diamond polymer wax sealing the walls and floor. Equipment crowds the room: pherion sequencers, rows of seed trays, laser tweezers, an old carbon nanotube SPM, scanning probe microscope. Several display screens hang from the ceiling, Japanese-like scrolls unfurled to reveal seething entoptics, realtime pictographic representations of designer molecules in various stages of development or production.
When he sees her, the first words out of his mouth aren’t, “Good to see you,” or “
Que pasa?
” but “What’s the problem?”
“BEAN,” Anthea says. “They’re looking for Ibrahim.”
Beto flips off his eyescreens, fondles the stubble on his jaw. “Where you hiding the kid, anyway?”
“Your mom’s.”
This garners an eye twitch. “I can’t fucking believe it,” he says. “She lied, said you weren’t there.”
Hard to tell if he’s pissed or just shocked. “It wasn’t like she had a choice,” Anthea says. “Not online with a shared IA.”
“I guess not.” He gives her a predatory squint. “Anyone else know he’s there?”
She shakes her head.
“Not even Rigo?” he asks.
“No,” she lies. Not that Rigo would say anything. But she wants Beto to realize how careful she’s been. It seems to work.
“I analyzed the sample you provided,” he says, wasting no time getting down to business.
“And?”
“I isolated the slave pherion, deconstructed it.”
“And?”
“The pherion is modular. Consists of four pieces. Ibrahim’s gengineered to make only three of the pieces. Three-quarters of the protein. That’s the problem. His body needs the complete protein. Otherwise, it crashes.”
And the missing piece is provided by the Tiresias ecotecture. “You can’t pharm the missing piece?”
“No. The structure’s too complicated. I can’t extrapolate it from the configuration of the other pieces. There are too many permutations. It could take years to run through all the possibilities. Find the one that interacts with the others in exactly the right way. What I need is a copy of the protein so I can sequence it directly.”
So she needs to get another blood sample from Ibrahim. Hope that he still has a high enough concentration of the slave pherion in his system to provide a complete sequence. It’s either that or wait for Rigo.
“I did manage to isolate and sequence a second pherion he’s doped with,” Beto says. “One I’ve never seen before.”
The rash-producing security pherion for Tiresias. “Were you able to create an antipher?”
Beto bares his teeth, affirmative. “But it’s only temporary.”
It’s better than nothing. At least she’ll be able to get close to Ibrahim . . . and Rigo. “What do you want for that?” she says.
“Same payment we already agreed on.”
Figures. “What if I get you a copy of the complete slave pherion?”
Beto grins. “Do that and I’ll brew it up free of charge. That way you get two for one. The security pherion and the slave pherion.”
She hesitates—wonders for a moment if he’s lying. Bullshitting her to speed up payment. She wouldn’t put it past him.
“Deal,” she says.
They conclude the transaction. Anthea takes a vial of the Tiresias antipher. In return, she hands over a sample of her urine, which he can use to copy her upper-clade security pherion.
Beto now has a free ticket to Hong Kong. Can go almost anywhere he wants in Asia.
SEVENTEEN
Too amped to sleep, Rigo floats in the foam-walled sepulcher of his room, going over the performance specifications of the Tiresias ecotecture while he waits for the colonists to physically connect to the warm-blooded plants. It takes almost four hours to complete the link.
The datastream starts as a trickle. Sensors slowly coming online, chemical gears meshing in a clockwork dance that starts out slow and picks up speed. Pulls him along the way merengue does when he’s one with the music.
Most of the info he’s streaming is new. Isomorphic recombination. Structured antigenic resolution. Ribosome optimization. Stages of development that every meaningful relationship needs to go through in order to survive. About the time he’s ready to take a breather, sit out a few numbers, he gets a group message from Whipplebaum, sent to the implementation team, telling all of them to meet in the primary air lock.
At “Oh-ten-hundred pointed,” according to Varda.
A half hour. Barely enough time to slip back into his biosuit, gather his wits, and a quick bite to eat at the cafeteria before reporting for duty. There’s definitely a blitzkrieg feel to the whole operation at this point, a commando-style assault to get the job done quickly and efficiently. Focus is on speed and precision.
“Talk about regimented,” Naguib complains. “I feel like I can’t take a leak unless it’s on the checklist.”
“And I thought Rigo was anal retentive,” TomE quips. “A type-A stickler for detail.”
“Naw,” Antoine says. “Ol’ Rigo here is a sharing kind of guy. Never holds on to shit. Always spreads it around.”
In the air lock, a window-studded room that’s basically a colossal Buckyball with a view, they’re each issued tether cords and emergency propulsion units, little point-and-shoot cylinders of pressurized CO2 they can use to jet around when they’re leashed to the comet.
“Just what Tang needs,” Luis says. “Like he’s not flatulent enough.”
“At least he’s experienced when it comes to out-gassing,” Naguib says. “Knows what to do.”
“Yeah,” Claribel says. “He won’t hold nothing back.”
“Hey,” Hsi-Tang says, his indignation hampered by a huge grin, “practice makes perfect.”
“Thank God he’s self-contained,” Rana says. “Maybe by the time we’re finished we won’t have to worry about it.”
“Don’t count on it,” TomE says. “Not after what he just ate.”
“What did he just eat?” Rigo says.
TomE makes a face. “Cajun-spiced bean crackers with this roasted garlic cheese spread.”
Naguib leads a chorus of groans.
Then the vat team goose-steps it through a final equipment check. Subsystem IAs in Rigo’s biosuit relay pressure, temperature, oxygen-renewal, filtration, and piezoelectric status to Varda for validation and cross-check.
“You’re A-all right,” the IA says, giving him a thumbs-up.
The equipment check is followed by a quick briefing/pep talk by Whipplebaum—rah, rah—and then they all climb into a cramped lander, sardine tight. A short CO2 burst levitates the craft two meters, plus or minus, as the air lock cycles open. A second burst propels it forward at a little over six meters per second in the micro-g. Faster than that and they’ll attain escape velocity. Through gray-polarized diamond, Rigo watches the ice glide by. The horizon is a vaporous curve, thin as the edge of a lens with the approach of day. Dawn takes about three minutes. As soon as they cross the terminus line into sunlight the surface glows, as if coated by an incendiary layer of tule fog, and the ground drops away abruptly, stranding his stomach in his throat.
“The Tiresias rift,” Varda says.
The fissure is steep-walled blackness, a gaping crack in the infinite fabric of the universe. A true cosmic yoni. Rigo studies the topographic and cross-section maps on the screen of his faceplate. The cleft is several kilometers deep, cleaves all the way through the outer mantle of ice into the underlying substrata of rock. “Any idea what caused it?”
“One possibility is rapid heating and cooling. This may also have contributed to the formation of numerous gas-filled pockets in the rock core.”
“What kind of gas?”
“Hydrogen and oxygen.”
“From the ice?” Must be, Rigo reasons. Where else could the gas have come from?
“There may also be methane.”
Complex hydrocarbons. Rigo frowns, puzzled. “Doesn’t there normally have to be some kind of biological activity for that to happen?”
“Yes.”
Around him he can hear his team chattering softly as they joke among themselves and interface with their IAs. “So you’re saying there’s life on Tiresias? Or was at one time, in the past?”
“It’s probable the comet is extrasolar,” Varda says, “a piece of a destroyed planet from another solar system captured by the sun. Prior to being moved into near-earth orbit, the comet’s trajectory relative to the plane of the ecliptic was very steep.” The IA is rapping in encyclopedia mode, as if it’s gotten in touch with its inner librarian.
“How long ago are we talking?” Rigo asks. Might as well take advantage of this sudden moment of clarity. No telling when the IA will lapse back into its usual state of confused idiot-syncratic babble.
“Tiresias appears to be on the order of six billion years old. Several billion years older than our solar system. A precise age has not yet been confirmed.”
“What about composition?” Rigo asks.
“Some nickel and iron mixed with basalt and granite. There appear to be carbonate deposits and hydrous minerals, as well.”
Rigo’s no geologist, not by any stretch of the imagination. “Is that unusual?” he says.
“Not for a planet.”
As Rigo considers this, a Lilliputian point of light winks to life deep in the gash, followed by several others. Slowly the lights separate, metastasize into a loose globular cluster.
“What’s that?”
“A geology team,” Varda tells him. “Sent out a little while ago to investigate what appears to be a series of recent microtemblors.”
Rigo frowns . . . tries to dredge up the last earth-sciences course he took back in grade school. “I thought only a full-blown planet or a large moon could have seismic activity.” Which more or less rules Tiresias out.
“True,” Varda says.
“Then the miniquakes must be the result of something else,” Rigo says. “Like the impact of an asteroid or some other object.” He’s thinking of the Perseids, Leonids, or loose space debris from the old NASA garbage dump days. Shit that never fell back to earth and no one bothered to clean up.
“Maybe,” his IA concedes. “A bigger concern is that moving the comet into orbit might have created small stress fractures in the comet’s rock core and weakened it internally.”
Great, Rigo thinks. Just what he needs. As if the situation isn’t complicated enough. He blinks as another possibility hits him. “Could the addition of the new ecotecture be responsible?”
Varda pauses for a beat, calculating. “It’s highly unlikable. There’s not enough biomass to influence the comet’s equilibrium.”
“Are the plants in danger? I mean, were the quakes powerful enough to damage the ice they’re anchored to?”
At this stage the root system is shallow—limited to the top six meters of the ice mantle—and not very well developed or established. He envisions a nightmare scenario of the ice breaking apart, shearing off the comet in glacierlike chunks and taking the plants along for the ride.
“The structural integrity of the ice appears to be intact,” Varda reports. “Don’t worry. If anything changes, I’ll keep you looped.”
The fissure disappears behind them and Rigo his attention forward, to the plants themselves. They cluster together, gathered around a central communication/control tower like a medley of inflatable circus tents. All that’s missing are the stripes and flags, the smell of popcorn, and the carnival blare of organ grinder music. The upper framework of the spun carbyne spire is a herringbone pattern of dull silver. Scratchy cross-hatching that recalls the Eiffel Tower. Positioned in an equilateral triangle around the plants, a triad of squat calderalike cones peeks over the foreshortened horizon. Heat-blackened, diamond-walled nozzles for the thrusters that shoved the comet into orbit.
The lander slows, kicks up motes of ice in a hazy cloud that thins and boils away under the onslaught of photons. They touch down with a grating thud, and cozy up to a docking pylon fifty or so meters from the plants.
“It’s party time,” Rana says, leading the charge. “Petal to the mettle.” A favorite phrase of hers that always reminds Rigo of Varda.
Bustle and bump out of the hatch. Clip safety lines to the pylon. Fan out like a pack of spiders trailing gossamer threads of silk.
Rigo slips into team mode . . . no different than at Noogenics. Links to the sensors and runs diagnostics. Checks system integrity. Scans vital stats. Monitors everything from tissue biopsies to shear and torsional stress measurements.
At one point Whipplebaum pops up, unexpected as a jack-in-the-box, to observe how things are progressing.
“Fine,” Rigo says. “No problem.”
“Good.” Whipplebaum’s mood is tight-ass dictatorial. “Carry on. Be sure to let me know if you encounter anything unusual.”
After this brief exhortation to the front-line troops by the corporate general—
El Jefe
incarnate—it’s back to the trenches.
Rigo can’t actually go inside the plants, but gets a chance to check out the interior when Dorit comes online. Her image materializes like a wraith on the surface of his faceplate. She’s in a small room, her private living quarters maybe, suspended below a curved ceiling that’s pocked with bubble lenses, tiny pustules of overripe light that feel swollen, ready to burst.
“I just wanted to say good-bye,” she says. “While I had the chance.”
“How is it?” he asks. She looks luminous. Radiant as the Virgin Mary in an old oil painting. Different but still recognizably human. At least on the outside. An elderly woman with a second skeleton like his mother. Only difference is, hers is on the outside and protects her, gives her the strength to go on.
“I’m happier than I’ve been in years.” She says this sadly. As if she hasn’t yet abandoned the skin of her former self. Reconciled herself to the future.
“I’m glad,” Rigo says. And he is. He wants only the best for her, wishes her all the contentedness in the world.
“There’s something I want to give you,” she says. “A gift, which I trust you will share with someone else.”
“Sure.” He’s uncertain how she’s going to get anything to him, sealed up in the ecotecture.
She picks up a vial, opens her mouth, and mists her tongue. Rigo feels the spritz instantly, a numb tingle that marinates his mouth with the taste of blood oranges.
“What is it?” he asks. A pherion of some sort, he specs, assembled via the direct link he shares with her and the warm-blooded plants. But what
kind
of pherion? That’s the question.
“Think of it as design-space key,” she says. “The means to unlock any number of possible futures.”
Whatever that means. “Who’s it for?” Rigo says, wondering how, exactly, he’s supposed to pass the gift on.
“A mutual . . . friend.”
Either regular comlink encryption isn’t enough or she’s being deliberately vague for some other reason.
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“You will. The thing to remember, dear, is that
every
thing is arbitrary. Nothing
had
to happen the way it did. Nothing
has
to be the way it is. The world is always ripe for change.”
Rigo doesn’t get the feeling she’s fucking with him—not like some people—but he’s definitely feeling short-circuited, having a hard time wrapping his head around her mumbo jumbo.
Dorit leans forward, as if to place her face close to his. “Take our dear Arnez, for example.”
“Whipplebaum?”
Dorit’s image bobs in a zero-g approximation of a nod. “He was afraid RiboGen would lose control of Tiresias. That we were being given too much initial freedom, and would eventually attempt to break free of our corporate sponsor.”
By “we” Rigo gathers she means the colonists.
“So he took matters into his own hands,” Dorit continues, “measures to ensure we could never become fully self-sufficient or self-governing—that we would always need something only he or another old cauc could provide.”
Rigo frowns. “Measures?”
The corners of Dorit’s mouth droop, clown-face sad. “He arranged to infect the warm-blooded plants with a slave pherion. One that’s remote-linkable to the ecotecture. That way if we decided to declare our independence, he would have an ace up his sleeve. A way to stop us from becoming autonomous.”
“The overpressurization and sensor failure in the plants,” Rigo says. “The supposedly harmless quantum superposition of states. You’re telling me it was all set up by Whipplebaum?”
Dorit applauds him with a philanthropic smile. “Not to mention that ‘accidental’ tear in your biosuit.”
“So it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d reported being exposed to the plants. I still would’ve been picked for the mission.” From the sound of things, it would have actually cemented the decision. A quiver runs through his safety line, a faint vibratory thrum that sets him on edge.
“Arnez needed a vector,” Dorit says. “Somebody remote-linked to Tiresias who could be used to transmit the assembler code for the slave pherion.”
“Then how come you’re talking to me now?” he asks. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to be infected?” Unless, of course, the colony is already compromised. In which case, it doesn’t matter.
“No,” she says. “We’re practicing safe communications. Blocking that particular instruction set.”
“So you knew ahead of time,” he says. “When?”
“After the party. The non-Tiresias part of your clade-profile had changed from when we first met.”
At Salmon Ella’s. Before the biosuit tear and his exposure to the plants. Which is why she had touched him. To establish a base pherion and iDNA reading she could refer to later.