“I can show you what’s registered,” Varda says, “and some of what’s unregistered, through unofficial channels.”
Which means, at some level, that Varda is not entirely official—has been cut free of the standard security protocols that control what an IA has access to and what is off limits. Maybe that’s what was going on during the trip to Tiresias, why the IA has been less of a
boca
lately, more withdrawn and circumspect.
“How long have you been able to do this?” he asks.
“Do what?”
“You know. Stream things you’re not supposed to without getting caught. That sort of thing.”
No answer.
“Varda?”
“Not now,” the IA says. “I’ll wash up my act later.”
The walled garden vanishes from his wraparounds. Rigo finds himself standing in the middle of the hotel room.
“What’s going on?” he says, disoriented, alarmed by the sudden shift to reality.
“They’re coming for you,” Varda says. “Get ready.”
TWENTY-THREE
Ibrahim will turn up,” Malina tells her. “It might take a while, but I’m sure you’ll find him.”
“I don’t see how,” Anthea says, shaking her head. “Especially now that I’ve been suspended.” She doesn’t have access to the resources she did—hospital and mortuary records, politicorp security reports, updated immigration and deportation files.
“Global Upreach will take you back,” Malina says. “They can’t afford not to, girl. It’s not like they have that many qualified people.”
“Tissa didn’t sound too encouraging. She was pretty hard-assed.”
Malina waves a dismissive hand. “This is just a slap on the wrist. A pro forma disciplinary action.”
That’s one of the things Anthea likes about Malina. She’s an optimist, but practical, too. Self-reliant. Goes to church and prays, but believes in helping out God whenever she can. Isn’t afraid of a little karmic sweat. Gets that from working in a desalination plant. The two of them are seated at a big table in the communal kitchen of the four-bedroom house where Malina rents a room for her and Josué. There are three other families living with her. Two single moms with three kids, and a husband/wife with two kids. Five adults and six kids total. The whole neighborhood is that way, large single-family homes converted to high-density occupancy after the rising bay submerged half of the low-lying residential.
“I just wish I knew if he was okay or not,” Anthea says. She still has one option available for locating Ibrahim that she’s avoided so far.
“The first thing you need to do is stop beating yourself up,” Malina says. “You aren’t going to be able to help anyone at the rate you’re going. Not Ibrahim or yourself. That’s my advice, like it or not.”
As usual, Malina is right. Anthea takes a sip of vat-grown coffee. Produced in either Virginia, Georgia, or what’s left of the Carolinas, it’s got nicotine blended with the caffeine to give it extra kick. Time to set her personal issues aside, she decides, and put Ibrahim’s first, as difficult as that might be.
“Will you be able to watch Josué tomorrow night?” Malina says, scratching her nose with a dry, salt-whitened fingertip.
“I think so,” Anthea says. At this point, nothing seems certain.
“I need to know for sure,” Malina says. “If you can’t, I got to find someone else. Simple as that.”
“I know.”
“Listen, if you can’t it’s okay. I’ll get Mei to look after him like last time.” Mei is the married mom who does childcare during the day and is usually willing to watch Josué for an evening.
“It would be easier if I knew when Rigo was coming home,” Anthea says.
Malina cocks her head to one side, spilling beaded dreadlocks across one bleached cheek. “What’s eating you, girl? You want to talk about it?”
Anthea sets her coffee down. Stares out the window. Gnaws on a thumbnail until she tastes blood.
Malina leans back. Holds her hands in front of her, palms out. “No pressure,” she says. “It’s none of my business.”
“It’s just that I feel like my whole life’s a lie.”
“Shit, girl. This whole world’s a lie. What do you expect?”
“I’m talking about stuff I’ve kept from Rigo. Things I haven’t told him about myself.” Not that she’s had a lot of chances, lately. Talking to a tattune isn’t really the time or place for a serious heart-to-heart.
“We talkin’ skeletons in the closet?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a few things he ain’t told you. Moldy old compost stinking up his past. So, you’re probably even on that score.”
Anthea scrapes her lower lip with her teeth. “Still, I feel bad.”
“Why?”
“Because I haven’t been totally honest. I mean what if he finds out on his own? It should come from me first.”
Malina threads her fingers, makes clicking sounds with her ceramic rings. “You’re worried he’ll hold it against you. Use it as an excuse to break up or get what he wants.”
“I just don’t want to hurt him. Ruin what we have.” Anthea presses both hands to her forehead. “I mean, I even told his mother.”
“Then it can’t be that bad.”
“I don’t know. There are certain things that are easier to tell a woman. He might not understand.”
“Rigo’s a sensitive guy. Maybe too sensitive, from what I’ve seen. Turns the other cheek too often for his own good.”
Anthea looks up from under her hands. “That doesn’t mean he’ll understand. If he gets hurt, he could decide to walk away.” Like he did with his old hood. Turned his back on the
tigueritos
he grew up with.
“Look,” Malina says. “There’s stuff you haven’t told me, and vice versa. So what? I don’t hold it against you, and you don’t hold it against me. We respect each other’s right to privacy. He should do the same.”
“In theory.”
“No theory about it.” Malina’s fingers continue to rumba. “Look. If he gives you a hard time, tell him you forgot all about it. After all the shit you been through, it shouldn’t come as any big surprise. I mean, you told him most of what you did, right? It ain’t no big mystery.”
“This is different.”
“Well, you suffered a lot. That’s for sure. I was there for a good part of it. So I know.”
“True. But what I haven’t told him changes who I am. Everything about me. In his eyes, I’ll be a different person.”
Malina puckers her cracked lips. “Sounds to me like you’re being way too hard on yourself. Gettin’ all bent out of shape over something that ain’t even happened yet. That you’re imagining.”
“Just preparing for the worst.”
“Listen. If it’s eating you that bad, tell him. Get it off your chest. That way, least you won’t have to wonder about it no more. It’ll be out in the open.”
“Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“Not if you don’t want to tell me. I mean it, girl. You’re who you are now. All of us were different people at one time. Doesn’t have nothin’ to do with the present. Or the future.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Trust me,” Malina says. “The worst is in your head. Nothin’s ever as bad as you think it’s gonna be. It’s the shit you never give a second’s thought to that you got to worry about.”
The car is an old BMW sedan. White sheet metal trimmed with chrome, mirrored windows, the works. The sort of ominous transportation pre-millennial dictators used to cruise around in while they were subjugating the Third World, keeping it safe from socialism, communism, and illegal drug cartels. Anything but poverty, Rigo thinks. The streets of the city shimmer in the hundred degree centigrade heat. They’re jammed with electric bicycles and shaded by silver heat-reflective awnings veined with viscous red capillaries. Everyone’s wearing white burnooses made of moisture-absorbent fibers that funnel the moisture into ergonomically fitted camel packs.
“Where are you taking me?” Rigo says to Liz and Jeraldo, who are in the backseat with him, holding him in place like two unmatched bookends. The BEAN agent, wearing a slightly different shade of blue tie, is driving. He was probably a chauffeur in his former life, Rigo thinks, before settling on a career in immigration control.
“The airport,” Liz says.
“I’m going home?”
“Not immediately,” Jeraldo says. “First, you have to take a slight detour through Costa Rica. Puntarenas.”
“To get retrocladed,” Liz adds.
It was bound to happen sooner or later, Rigo thinks. The final step in cutting his connection to the corp.
“What about Claribel and Hsi-Tang?” Rigo asks. “What’s going on with them?”
“They left this morning,” Liz says.
So by the time he arrives in Puntarenas they’ll have moved on. He’ll be cut off—isolated from any direct contact with his former co-workers. He won’t even get a chance to say good-bye. Not just to the living but the dead.
Antoine. Rana. Luis. TomE. Naguib.
It’s hard to believe they’re gone. Doesn’t seem real. Rigo assumes their families have been notified and their bodies sent back, but he can’t get confirmation. No one is telling him shit.
“I have a request,” Rigo says.
Liz turns the round, polarized lens of her monocle on him. Her gaze is as chill as the air conditioning in the car. “What’s that?”
“I’ve been thinking that maybe I don’t want to go back to SJ. That I might want to reclade somewhere else.”
It takes a moment for her cool veneer to crack. “What are you talking about?”
Rigo smiles at her, cranking up the albedo. “This is the perfect time for a change. I mean, you’re going to reclade me anyway, right? Why go through the process twice? It’ll just be a lot of extra work.”
“Forget it,” Liz tells him.
“Hey, I’m just trying to take advantage of the situation,” Rigo says, “make things easier for all of us.”
“Where are you thinking of transferring?” Jeraldo says. Maybe the brother’s not such an asshole after all.
“Siberia,” Rigo says. The first thing that jumps into his mind. Too bad he didn’t have a little more time to think this out, plan ahead.
“There’s no way we can reclade you to Siberia,” Liz says. “A formal request hasn’t been submitted— hasn’t been reviewed or approved. The Puntarenas facility is not set up for a regular clade transfer. It’s out of the question.” She smirks. Folds her arms across her chest, case closed.
“I haven’t been able to submit a formal request because my e-mail’s been blocked since I came here. Which is why I’m doing it now, in the presence of an official Bureau of Ecotectural Assimilation and Naturalization representative.”
“He has a point,” the BEAN agent says.
“But a request could take days to process,” Liz snaps.
“No problem,” Rigo says. “I’ll wait.”
Liz glances past Rigo to Jeraldo. His lips are stiff, like they’ve been chiseled into stone. “What do you say we detain him for a few more days, while his request is being denied?”
“He can’t stay here,” the BEAN agent says from the front seat, his gaze flicking to the rearview mirror. “We need the hotel room. We have guests coming from China and there’s no other place else to put him. He’s your responsibility now.”
“This is bullshit,” Liz says, nostrils flaring as anger builds inside her, dark and ominous as a thunder-head.
“I have a legal right to file a petition,” Rigo says, speaking to the BEAN agent. “It doesn’t matter when or where it’s submitted.”
“That’s true,” the man says. “By law, if a request is submitted it must be formally reviewed before any other assimilation or naturalization action can be taken.”
“But this is an internal corporate reclading,” Liz argues. “It’s a private matter, not a public one. So it’s not subject to review.”
The BEAN agent shakes his head. “The law is quite clear in this regard. If a person is being retrocladed or recladed from one ecotectural system to another, then international regulations apply to the case.”
Liz’s bottom lip quivers. Palsied. Furious. “It’s my understanding that all personal clade changes are exempt.”
“Only within a specific ecotectural system. If more than one ecotecture is involved, then it’s no longer a private matter. The action is subject to governmental restrictions and protections.”
“Fine with me,” Rigo says.
“It’ll never be approved,” Liz tells him, acidic now that her legal feint has been parried. “You’re wasting your time.”
“Hey”—Rigo spreads his hands—“you never know. I could get lucky.”
“We can’t take him to Puntarenas,” Jeraldo says. “We’d have to detain him there against his will until a decision comes down. I don’t think we want to do that, do we?”
“Fuck,” Liz says, flecking the window next to her with spittle.
“So what do we do?” Jeraldo says after a pause.
They’re nearing the airport shuttle field. Ahead of them, the SSTO wavers under the sun. Here one second, gone the next. It’s not just the mind-scorching heat. A monster dust storm is kicking up, turning the sky from blue to brown. In a matter of seconds, the sun darkens and the shuttle disappears behind a roiling wall of sand, impenetrable as stone, that comes crashing down on them.
TWENTY-FOUR
Hong Kong is nothing like Anthea remembers it, and exactly the same.
The massive concrete polymer-sealed seawall that keeps the ocean from flooding the city still looms above the harbor. The emergency pumps are still in place. So are the Panama Canal–style locks that lower ships in and lift them out. The bay is as crowded as ever, everything from dinghies to freighters and tankers. Ditto the streets of downtown. Wall-to-wall taxi pods, bicycles, and foot traffic circulating in and around sidewalk kiosks, laissez-faire street vendors, and beggars.
Gone are the wide-brimmed hats and the colorful parasols people used to carry around to block the sun. On the busiest days, the streets had been a congested mass of umbrellas, jostling for position. As a child, darting between the millipede-dense legs of tourists and locals, she could always find shade. It was like living under a patchwork quilt stitched together by the omnipresent fear of ultraviolet light and malignant skin melanomas. As added value, the umbrellas kept off the torrential monsoon rains, which came down in buckets, and also prevented acid burn from either hydrochloric or sulfuric acid, depending on pollution levels and wind direction.
In place of the parasols there is now a vaulted dome. Photovoltaic. Piezoelectric. UV reflective. Supported by black carbyne arches that span the mouth of the harbor, it reminds her of a large sleepy eyelid. A narrow slit above the seawall admits stale ocean air and the salmon pink haze of the morning sun.
She forgot how stifling it can be, the oppressive humidity that hits the skin like a warm shower. The bioremediated hills encircling the harbor are as green as ever, an algae bloom of oxygen-producing and toxin-absorbing sponge-bush. The smell of hot cooking oil, noodles, batter-fried vegetables, steamed fish, and pickled eggs turns her stomach.
Anthea’s mother has a penthouse on the top floor of an old skyscraper wrapped in curtain-glass the color of obsidian. A rectangular monolith that devours free will the way a black hole eats photons. Entering the lobby, it feels like she’s stepping into a singularity. She can feel the life being crushed out of her. Atoms and molecules ripping apart. Electrons being stripped, quarks uncharmed.
She pauses in the granite-and-glass lobby, surrounded by multicolored flutterleaves that combine and recombine in terrace planters to form different-shaped plants. As a five-year-old she would watch the leaves for hours, enthralled by the changing plantscape, and chase after them, trying to get them to go where she wanted, form new kinds of plants. Sometimes she would sit quietly and attempt to control the leaves with her mind or the force of her will. A child’s desire to control the universe. Her first experience with powerlessness. Like the world, the leaves never obeyed her wishes.
Anthea takes a deep breath to ease the tightness in her chest, and waits for signs of clade rejection. She knows the symptoms, used to lure schoolmates who had been mean to her into the lobby so she that could watch them suffer. First, intense itching of the eyes, followed in short order by searing, needle-sharp pin-pricks of pain administered with acupuncture precision.
But the building still recognizes her pherion pattern. Its antiphers haven’t been updated to exclude her.
The lobby is bustling with upper-clade activity, residents busy in a kind of purposeful Brownian motion. Morning tea. Business meetings in one of the building’s conference rooms. Lunch. Shopping. Dinner. It’s the same pattern followed de rigueur by her mother.
Anthea refuses to call ahead, to become yet another appointment in her mother’s schedule. Better to show up unannounced. The surprise factor will work in her favor—won’t give her mother a chance to put on her emotional makeup, establish the terms and conditions of her visit. Besides, Anthea doesn’t plan to stay long. No more time than it takes to make her request. She swore that she would never ask for her mother’s help for anything.
But that was for herself. This isn’t.
She waits for an elevator tube to clear out, enters the glass, teak-floored cylinder before anyone else can board, and closes the door. It slides shut, cocooning her in dry, plumeria-scented air. She presses her thumb to the iDNA pad for the penthouse.
“Welcome back, madame,” the elevator says in a soft sonorous baritone. “It’s a pleasure to serve you again. I’ve been expecting you.”
Whatever that means. Anthea decides not to ask. The elevator rises silently on a pneumatic cushion of air. Ornamental art nouveau crystal slides by, a Tiffany-esque column of lead tracery and stained glass. The ride seems shorter than she remembered, hoped. At the top, Anthea’s heart pummels her rib cage. She’s not ready for this—not yet. Almost turns around and heads back down.
The door slides open, revealing the anteroom to the penthouse. Clay tile flooring and white stucco walls gridded with maple. A folding partition screen—black lacquered wood with panes of translucent rice paper—conceals the doorway from the foyer to the front room.
Something is different. Wrong.
Anthea skirts the partition, enters the main living room. It’s empty. Nothing but gleaming hardwood floors, bare pastel walls, and sliding pine-mullioned ceiling panels that open and close skylights. Her mother’s peculiar amalgam of Mexican and Japanese aesthetic motifs. Gone is the furniture—the bamboo-frame sofas and chairs, the tables with glazed ceramic tops—the floor mats, lamps, and vases. The shelves are empty of the primitive clay sculptures she liked to collect, South American fertility symbols. The walls bare of wood-block prints depicting Japanese landscapes, and the scrolls that dripped poetry like black rain trickling down the diamond panes of the windows during a storm.
Anthea shivers at the memory of the shadows cast by the drops crawling across the pale floor and veined marble counters of the kitchen. “What happened?” she asks the penthouse. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know.” Its voice is cultured. Technically perfect syllables as precise as the notes in a piece by Mozart. “She didn’t indicate where she was going.”
“She just left?”
“Yes.”
Anthea goes to the south window of the room. Stares out at the wind-scalloped horizon. “When?”
“Six months ago.”
The window seems to shudder under Anthea’s unsteady breath. “When is she coming back?”
“She isn’t.”
“Never?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Anthea turns her back on the window. Gazes at the vacuum left by the departure of her mother. Twenty years ago she wished that her mother would walk away. Vanish. Die. Each morning, upon waking, she prayed that she would be alone—free. Now that the wish has come true, it feels like yet another betrayal. A cruel irony. “How come she hasn’t sold the place?”
“She wanted it to be here if you ever came home. She thought you might need a place to stay.”
“This isn’t my home.”
“It was at one time.”
“Not anymore.” Not for more than half her life.
Anthea wanders down the hallway to the bedrooms. Footsteps loud and hollow on the polished blond floor as she passes the bathroom, the granite tub and washbasin with solid brass fixtures.
“She took everything,” Anthea notes, stopping to look into her former bedroom, empty of red-and-black lacquered dresser and bed. Perhaps her mother believed she would stay here if she allowed Anthea to make the place her own, furnish it the way she wanted to suit her taste.
“Not everything,” the penthouse tells her. “She left a few items for you, in the study.”
“What kind of items?”
“I am not at liberty to say.”
In other words, she has to look for herself. Accept, or deny, her final inheritance in person.
This isn’t what she came for. She came to see if her mother—with all of her vast resources—could locate Ibrahim. Help him, maybe free him. Even if it meant losing her freedom. It was a trade she was willing to make.
Instead, she’s going to be left with—what?
Anthea climbs the spiral wrought-iron staircase to the garret. The office loft that was always off limits to Anthea. Verboten territory, where she imagined her mother performing satanic rituals. Horrific ceremonies involving arcane incantations, the blood of chickens, and burnt offerings to maintain her wealth, beauty, and power. In this slope-ceilinged office, she sold her soul. Imprisoned the souls of others. Bent them to her will. It was a sanctuary that catalyzed both envy and fear in Anthea, respect and loathing; the one place she yearned to see and fought to avoid.
No different from now. Legs enervated with dread, but at the same time enlivened with curiosity. Golem feet, magically animated, climbing one step at a time.
The room is smaller than she imagined. Cramped. A single east-facing window looks out over the harbor. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases occupy the remaining three walls. A skylight admits filtered sunlight and fresh air through hidden vents.
Most of the bookshelves are empty. But half of one wall is jammed with binders similar to the one Anthea took. Her mother has been busy over the years, obsessively adding to her collection of dead plants and insects. Anthea feels as if she’s standing in the back room of a museum, dusty with the dried residue of the past. Anthea runs a fingertip along the spines of the three-ring binders, the handmade paper laced with dried bits of grass, stems, leaves and the petals of flowers.
“They’re yours,” the penthouse says. “Willed to you, along with the house.”
Anthea chooses a binder at random, pulls it from the shelf. The handmade paper is rough, dry as a tombstone against her palm. “Is she dead?”
“No. But she’s moved on to a different life. This one no longer has anything to offer her.”
Anthea flips open the binder to a bird-of-paradise flower, paper thin between the sealed sheets of plastic. “Did she say what they’re for? What, if anything, she planned to do with them?”
“She never said anything to me, madame. I assumed that you would know what to do.”
No. She stole the first binder out of anger . . . malice. Perhaps this is her mother’s way of spiting her in return.
Anthea replaces the binder, slides it back into place. Forget it, she doesn’t want them. Her mother can keep the past. It belongs to her. She came for help, and all she’s been given are dead memories.
What did she expect? Every time she needed her mother, she wasn’t there. Why would this time be any different?
Anthea turns, descends the staircase into the empty glass-walled box. There is nothing for her here outside the echo of her own footsteps, trailing after her like cold laughter.