SEVEN
Anthea sits by the hospital bed, the drawing cradled in her lap, watching the rise and fall of Ibrahim’s chest. The images on the sketchpad exert a magnetic pull on her, as if her eyeballs are veined with slivers of iron. She can’t not look. Her gaze is drawn to the scene the way her memory is sometimes drawn to the past—repeatedly and against her will.
Like Ibrahim, Anthea was a street kid. A runaway. They have that in common. But what he’s running from is so completely outside her realm of experience it’s like those nether regions on n-teenth-century maps populated with dragons, demons and other mythic horrors.
Anthea thought she had it bad: escaping the aloof, ruthless hauteur of her mother; hanging with a bunch of twelve-year-olds who believed that ROMENTOMBED back issues of
National Geographic
were a defunct fashion magazine; distributing sexually transmitted drugs—black-market psychoactive prions that nested in the warm cozy environs of her body where they were happy to hang around indefinitely, waiting for someone to give her cold hard currency instead of a black eye and a split lip for her services.
Ironic that putting out got her out. At the age of fourteen she was approached by a Global Upreach social worker. Instead of STDs, she agreed to spread vaccines and antibiotics to people who couldn’t afford the drugs supplied by managed health care. The money was lousy, but the benefits were great. Free room, free board, and when she turned seventeen an all-expenses-paid trip to the college education of her choice.
Until then her existence as a
puta
had been pretty subsistence level. She was lucky, escaped with nothing more serious than a few ritual gang scars. What was Ibrahim’s ticket to a better future? How did he get out . . . and at what price? Where did he think he was going? Or had he been like her? Didn’t care where he went as long as it was someplace different?
Looking at the drawing, a sort of William S. Bur-roughs meets Paul Klee collage, it’s impossible to tell. No way she’ll be able to decipher it without help— Ibrahim’s or someone else’s.
At least his face is peaceful now, not the cracked-glass visage inscribed on the pad. Splintered scribbles of red, daubed with malarial puddles of yellow she speculates are eyes.
Easier to study the sunken lines of his face, bathed in the indolent afternoon haze from the window by the foot of the bed. The window is really a wallscreen, which just happens to be tuned to a realtime view outside the building, where afternoon clouds are grouping over the hunched backbone of dry hills. The crepe sprayon sheets cocoon Ibrahim like a funeral shroud. The inflatable pillow supporting his head reminds her of a sagging party balloon. By design everything is soothing powder pink. Pink is the color of health, of happiness.
Quiet movement behind her. Anthea starts, wrenches her head around à la Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
, which she had to deconstruct for a postmodern cultural history class: Psycho Cinema, the Mediagenic Expression of Supernatural Archetypes in Late Twentieth-Century Collective Consciousness.
“Well?” she asks Isa, the on-duty physician. “How’s he doing?”
“Not good.” Isa gazes past her for a moment, peering at a virtual datawindow. She’s a wiry Australian aborigine with hair that resembles a tightly coiled ensemble of pipe cleaners. “His condition is stable. For now. But I don’t know how long that will last.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“As soon as he wakes up. He’s still sedated.”
Anthea stands, sketchpad pressed to her chest with both hands. “What can you tell me about him?”
“What do you want to know?”
Everything, she’s tempted to say. Where he came from. How he got to SJ. Who his parents are. “Let’s start with what’s wrong.”
Isa purses her lips, glosses them with the tip of her tongue. “To begin with, he isn’t keyed to the local ecotecture. We’ve got him on antiphers, but that’s a temporary solution. At some point, he’ll either have to be deported or recladed.”
“Deported to where?”
“Good question. We haven’t been able to identify all the pherions in his system. We have no idea what they do or where they came from.”
“Care to venture a guess?”
Isa wets her lips. “Offhand, I’d say they were manufactured by a black-market pharm.”
Meaning they could have come from just about anywhere in the world. “What about the pherions you can identify?”
“SEA.” Southeast Asia. “But it’s difficult to say for sure because the ecotecture implemented there was modified later for Africa and South America.”
“So he could be part of that migration.”
“Or not.”
Well, that narrows it down a bit. She knows with a fair amount of certainty that he isn’t from Europe, Antarctica, or Mongolia.
“There’s another problem,” Isa tells her.
“What’s that?” Anthea says. Judging by Isa’s expression, she doesn’t want to know.
“Every cell in his body is dying. Whatever ecotecture he’s claded for provides a critical pherion, or combination of pherions, his body needs to survive.”
Anthea knits her brow. “If he’s away from it for too long he’ll die?”
“Right. It’s like he’s going through withdrawal. But instead of getting better as his system detoxes, he’s getting worse.”
Anthea glances at Ibrahim. “What kind of pherion?”
Isa shrugs. “He’s got so much crap in his system, sorting through it could take weeks.”
“So you don’t even know what it does?”
Isa shakes her head. “Sorry.”
Meaning there’s no way to synthesize a replacement. “There must be
some
thing you can do.”
“There is, and we’re already doing it. Everything we can.”
Anthea grinds her jaw from side to side, scraping her teeth along her bottom lip. “How much time does he have?”
“At the present rate of decline, a few days. Less, if the degeneration accelerates toward the end.”
“You think maybe he was in a child labor camp?” Anthea says. In some subclades, indentured workers are made physically dependent on a pherion in the ecotecture. Without the pherion, they can’t survive. Escape results in slow but certain death.
“It could also be a religious sect or conscript militia,” Isa says. “Biodependency is still legal in a lot of places.”
True. Since the implementation of gengineered plants and artificial ecologies half a century ago, biodependency has been used by governments and politicorps to control demographics—keep populations confined to certain geographical regions. In the beginning it was a necessity. The old ecology was too damaged and fragile to support even the status quo, let alone any sustainable growth. Areas of the world died off en masse, killing billions of people in the process. Starvation was rampant. The only way to preserve various segments of a population, whole societies, was to confine them to ecotectural zones capable of supporting life. Of course, nothing’s perfect. Some of the gengineered flora and fauna wasn’t as benign as originally believed, or it mutated. Either way, people had to be modified to cope with the changes. Retroviruses spliced in artificial genes designed to augment the immune system. After a few million more deaths, chemical imbalances were neutralized, equilibrium reestablished, and everything was more or less hunky-dory.
Soon, the geographic boundaries evolved along ethnic and racial lines, reshaped by the politics of the past. People settled into clades, populations with a specific biochemical signature compatible with some ecotectures, but not others. From there, it was only a short leap to clades based on specific religious, social, or political ideologies. Environment became less of a determining factor than dogma.
Which is where things stand now. Clades have gotten so granular that they can be as small as two individuals, binding one to the other. Spouse to spouse, disciples to cult leader, daughter to mother . . .
Isa touches Anthea’s arm. “Find out where he’s from,” Isa says, “and I’ll have a much better chance of figuring out what he needs.”
Anthea nods, watches Isa exit the hospital room. The sketchpad is crushed painfully to her breasts. Anthea forces the muscles in her arms to unknot, easing some of the pressure. Still, her heart aches with the pain of a phantom thrombosis—fear and anger and helplessness clotting inside her chest.
Did Ibrahim have help getting here? He must have. It’s highly unlikely he could have escaped a bioenslavement situation on his own. Did his benefactor know he would die once he’d been freed from wherever he was being held? If so, s/he may have a way to help him. All she has to do is track the person down. Figure out where Ibrahim was going. “Did you scope all that?” she asks Doug.
“Of course,” Doug quips. “I’m all-seeing and all-hearing.”
“Well, if it’s not too much trouble, can you put together a list of recent incidents of biodependent slavery, say the last six months? I want all illegal as well as legal cases, if that’s possible.”
“Yessum.”
“Have you come up with anything from the sketchpad?”
“No, ma’am, not yet I hasn’t. I’s still waitin’ on da rasta’ization enhancement and pattern rekonition anal sis.”
“I have to tell you Doug, you’re mining the depths of bad taste here.”
“True.” The IA unfurls a bouffant, melodramatic sigh. “I be da first to admit the last thing I wanna be is politic’ly co’rect.”
Anthea’s tempted to reply with an acerbic retort of her own, but bites her tongue in an effort not to encourage the behavior by dignifying it with a response. “Well then, perhaps you can find time to cross-correlate the location of each biodependent incident with images on the sketchpad.”
“Yes, massa. No problem.”
“Also, see what you can uncover on bioenslavement activity here in the States. Black-market adoption scams, pedophilia, child labor. You know.”
“I sho does.”
Doug will be able to mine the infosphere for that kind of data much more quickly and efficiently than she can. After all, that’s where Doug lives. His home. She wonders what the IA does in its spare time for relaxation, and decides not to open that Pandora’s box. Better not to know.
“Will tha’ be all?” Doug asks.
“For now. Thank you.”
“Den I best be off to do my chores.”
The IA drops offline. Anthea pictures it sulking in a far corner of the Web, a dog licking itself, nursing pet grievances while concocting elaborate double and triple entendres to annoy her. She really should apply for a new IA, but Doug seems to need an outlet for the repressed feelings it harbors. In a way she provides a perverse form of therapy. She feels obligated, duty-bound to endure its antics.
Anthea shifts her attention to Ibrahim. She enters the room, walks to the side of the bed, and takes one of his hands. It’s hot, sweaty, and incredibly light; the bones of his fingers feel hollow as they curl in response to hers. She returns the squeeze and his eyes flutter open, wild with fear behind the dull patina of sedatives.
She leans forward. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “You’re safe. No one is going to hurt you.”
The anxiety fades. The troubled surface of his gaze returns to complacency, and the corners of his mouth relax. “Mom?”
“Where is she, Ibrahim? Can you tell me where your mother’s at?”
He continues to stare at the ceiling, looking past her. Through her. “Am I going to die?”
Anthea inhales sharply, smells the sourness of her own apprehension. “You’re going to be fine.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I couldn’t stay. I had to leave.”
“That’s all right, sweetie. Don’t worry about that. You did what you had to do. What you thought was best.”
Anthea kisses him on the forehead. Tastes salt and the stringent tang of topical antiseptics. A faint smile curves his lips. His gaze retreats inward and his eyelids ease shut. His breathing steadies, lapses into peaceable slumber. She waits with him, letting her own tension slip away under the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Not much more she can do at the moment. She hates this part. The waiting, the sense of helplessness.
There is one thing she can do. Not exactly legal, but there are times it’s necessary to bend the rules a little to get results. Especially in a life-and-death situation. The ends justify the means.
The lab is in the basement, a Cartesian warren of tunnels. The structural diamond walls are smooth— shimmer with the silvery pearlescence of a snail trail or the interior of an abalone shell. Glassware-laden carts line the walls, next to biofreezers, blood jelly abattoirs and emergency shower nozzles. A chemical tang permeates the air, a mixture of sulfuric acid, rubbing alcohol, and airborne antiseptics that scour her lungs and sinuses for bacteria. Stringent UV light sterilizes her hair, skin, and clothes.
Anthea finds Beni in the specimen room, preparing to test a sample. He’s wearing tie-dyed scrubs and listening to a classic Lou Harrison gamelan piece from the late twentieth century.
“Hey, Beni,” she says over a clamor of gongs.
“Anthea,” Beni says. He wriggles latex-clad fingers at her, points to the surgical mask on his face, then turns toward a nearby refrigerator.
Anthea unhooks a sprayon nozzle from the wall just inside the door, mists her lower face. Seconds later, her mouth and nose covered with a thin micropore membrane, she follows Beni over to the refrigerator. Through the sheet-diamond door, she can see racks of test tubes and Eppendorf tubes. The latter look like a collection of bloodstained arrowheads that have been preserved from Little Big Horn, or maybe the Battle of Agincourt.
“When you going to put some marmalade on them bones?” Beni says, his breath fogging on the door.
“What?” she says. “I’m not sweet enough?”
“It’s not the quality I’m worried about, my dear, but the quantity.” Beni flashes an impish grin. “You know me. I like a
lot
of sugar in my diet.”
Beni is an expansive man and has a personality to match. Every little movement he makes is a good-natured jiggle, the jovial precursor to a full-bodied rumble lurking just beneath the surface. Whenever a laugh bubbles up, it erupts like a Richter-scale temblor that reduces to rubble any ill-humor in the vicinity of the epicenter. Field lines of positive energy radiate from his cheerful bulk, attract friends and acquaintances the way a sun attracts orbiting bodies. Anthea is a minor planetoid in his solar system, an infrequent visitor. But Beni is always glad to see her whenever she swings by. Always willing to lend a hand.