Clade (26 page)

TWENTY-NINE

Where is he?” Anthea asks, one hand on Rigo’s arm. “Costa Rica. The RiboGen reclade clinic in Puntarenas.”

“The same place you were?”

Rigo nods, staring at the closed binder resting on the floor next to them. “They must be planning to reclade him. Either back to the Tiresias ecotecture or a completely different project.”

“So what happens now?” Her fingers gouge his arm. “There must be something we can do.”

“Varda?” Rigo says.

“I can remote-link you,” Varda tells him over the conference connection his IA and Doug have set up so they can all infoshare. “Direct stream.”

“I’m going, too,” Anthea says.

“All you’ll get are visuals,” Varda says. “You won’t be softwired the same way Rigo is.”

“I don’t care. It’s better than nothing.”

“ ‘Nothing is / But what is not,’ ” Doug says.

“Go to the sugar skull in the living room,” Varda tells them.

“My
calavera
?” Anthea says. “What for?”

“It has a softwire link.”

Anthea leads Rigo into the living room, over to the wooden crucifix tacked to the wall and next to it, on a small shelf, the brightly colored sugar skull she picked up in LA during a Days of the Dead celebration. The life-size skull is bone white, the sugar tinted red and green around the eye and nose sockets and embellished with frilly yellow and blue ribbons. It peers at them with tarnished tinfoil eyes.

“Softwired?” Anthea says. “I’m not sure I know what that means in the present situation.”

“The skull contains molectronics to convert biochemical information into digital signals and vice versa,” the IA says.

Rigo turns from the sugar skull to Anthea. “RiboGen or BEAN must have set up the remote link to monitor you after Ibrahim disappeared from the clinic.”

“In case he showed up here?” she says.

“Right. Through the skull, they could bombard your ap with sniffers. Or remote dose it with pherions or antiphers. That way, they wouldn’t have to set foot in the place. Could take action as soon as they located him.”

“ ‘Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye,’ ” Doug quotes, “Than twenty of their swords.’ ”

Rigo steps up to the skull. Lays both hands on the petrified lump of sugar. Sharp eyebrows and cheekbones, grainy under his fingertips. “Okay, whenever you’re ready,” he tells Varda.

Anthea’s hand squeezes his upper arm, a tourniquet of urgency and fear as they link from the room into——a birdcage of vines. Lush jungle topiary, every leaf and blossom swarming with bees and clouds of variegated butterflies. Rigo salivates at the touch of lemon and cloves tainted with tannin. He tastes eucalyptus in the brackish air, peppermint, mildew, and fresh pine resin.

“What am I looking at?” Anthea asks.

“The ribozone,” Rigo says. “Biomorph representations of ecotectural structures and data flow.”

“Where’s Ibrahim?”

“Over there,” Varda says. A pink-and-chartreuse butterfly teeters in the direction of a tropical, spindlylimbed cactus that’s twisted into the shape of a small boy pockmarked with flowers the way Maria Sanchez had acne. Under the petals the skin is shriveled and dry, starving for moisture.

Anthea walks over to the stunted figure. “This is him?”

“His clade-profile and iDNA pattern,” Varda says.

“The various types of flowers represent different pherions,” Rigo adds. “The bees and butterflies are information exchange.”

“They don’t look too healthy,” Anthea says.

It’s true. Compared to a much larger topiary figure—meticulously pruned and bursting with petunias, lilacs, goosefoot violets, and pansies—the flowers, butterflies, and bees on Ibrahim’s poorly sculpted avatar look sickly. Lethargic.

“He’s been sanitized,” Varda says. “All unregistered pherions have been purged from his system.”

“What about the slave pherion?” Anthea says.

“Officially, the unlicensed subpherion he got from Rigo has been removed. But the other three subpherions, which are legally registered, are still present and accounted for.”

“So he’s in the same situation he was when I first got him,” Anthea says, hollow. “If he doesn’t get dosed with the missing pherion soon, he’ll start to get sick again and could die.”

“Yes. It’s back to one-squared all over again.”

“Any idea what they plan to do with him?” Rigo says.

“He’s being transferred to a RiboGen research station in Nepal that is gengineering humans for low-pressure and low-oxygen environments. It uses the same warm-blooded ecotecture as Tiresias.”

“When does he leave?” Anthea asks.

If it’s not for a few days, Rigo thinks, there might be a way to save him. Petition for his release through legal channels.

“As soon as he checkmarks out,” the IA tells them, “and is given a clean invoice of health.”

Anthea sags. “So it’s over. We’ve lost him.” Her voice is dead, blunt and dull-edged with defeat. “If we help him escape and can’t get to him in time, we run the risk of killing him.”

“Maybe not,” Rigo says. “Can we spec what’s happening to him? Realtime?”

“ ‘O, woe is me,’ ” Doug says. “ ‘To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!’ ”

A translucent, rectangular window, superimposed on the ribozone construct, opens up in front of Rigo. The nested picture-in-a-picture shows Ibrahim. He’s lying on a bed in an examination room like the one where the cauc poked and prodded Rigo. His eyes are closed; he’s sleeping or unconscious. Under the intense biolums his skin is sallow, the same tarnished ivory as Anthea’s puppet.

Next to Rigo, Anthea tenses. Her breath catches, snags on a stifled cry. She reaches out with her free hand. A man appears, the same bald-headed cauc who prepped Rigo. Anthea’s hand recoils, knots into a fist as the cauc picks up Ibrahim’s right arm and adjusts a sensor pad pasted to the bony wrist.

“What about the remote link?” Rigo says. “Is there any way to stream Ibrahim the pherion he needs to survive away from the slave ecotecture? The pherion I gave him the night we were together?”

“He’s not set up for a softwire connection,” Varda says. “It’s not possible for you to remote-link with him directly.”

“What about indirectly?”

“Through the surrounding environment?” Varda says, skeptically. “A nearby plant or sensor?”

“I have something a little different in mind,” Rigo says.

The arrangement of flowers on the rosebush topiary changes as Varda uploads the clade-profile of the cauc.

“It looks lots different from Rigo’s,” Anthea says. “Are you sure this is going to work—that you can do a cross-clade transfer?”

“Guess we’ll find out,” Rigo says. Until now, the data exchange over his softwire connection has been same-clade, between him and Tiresias.

“The molectric circuitry is ecotecture-independent,” Varda tells them. “So is the digital information.”

“No problem,” Rigo says. He’s feeling optimistic.

“ ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ ” Doug says.

A third persona forms in the clump of rose-bushes . . . sprouts the familiar bouquet that identifies Rigo’s clade-profile.

“Harness yourself,” Varda tells Rigo.

He tenses, uncertain what to expect when the connection is established. A red butterfly detaches from one of his pansies, flutters in the direction of the old cauc. At the same time, a green butterfly clinging to the cauc takes off from a big tiger lily, drifts over to the pansy. Makes contact.

A faint tickle needles Rigo in the spine. Worms its way into his nerves, wriggles along myelin and leaps across receptors, riding a surge of adrenaline.

“How are you,
papi
?” Anthea says.

He can feel her gaze on him, the warm breath of her attention. “Pretty good,” he says. “No big deal.”

A wave of fatigue undercuts the rush. Body slams him. Turns his muscles into mush. All he wants to do is lie out on a beach, take a nap. He yawns, strains to keep his eyes not just open but alert. Focused.

The first butterfly is followed by a second, then a third, until there’s a steady stream of them moving back and forth. A nonstop parade. All that’s missing is confetti and music. Several of the flowers on his topiary have changed color. Ditto those on the cauc as the two of them sync up, exchange digital body fluid. A few blossoms trade places while others change shape, reveal hieroglyphic configurations of line code as they reassemble and repixelate.

On the realtime window, the white lab-coated cauc leaves the room. Shuts the door behind him.

“Shit,” Anthea says.

“He’ll come back,” Rigo says.

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll find someone else who’s remote-linkable.” At some point, Ibrahim has to come into close physical contact with a person who can transmit the pherion to him
mano y mano.

The door opens and the cauc reenters, coffee cup in hand. No wonder Rigo feels dead tired. He’s running on fumes.

“See,” Rigo says. “He just needed a pick-me-up. A little something to jump-start his gentrified metabolism.”

The cauc takes a swig, sets the cup on a desk, adjusts his eyescreens, brushes a piece of lint from one cuff, and then walks over to Ibrahim. Touches his forehead, peels back one eyelid to peer into dilated pupils.

Anthea eases her death grip on Rigo’s biceps, exhales some of the tension she’s been holding.

“Uh-oh,” Varda says.

“What?” Rigo looks around. Doesn’t see shit, but isn’t exactly sure what he’s looking for, either.

“ ‘One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,’ ” Doug intones over the conference link, “ ‘So fast they follow.’ ”

“That’s really helpful,” Rigo says, “tells me a lot. Maybe you could repeat it for me in English.”

Outside the frame of the realtime window, a butterfly the size of a bat emerges from the leaves of an overhanging tree, lands on a branch of his avatar, and morphs into a black-anodized beetle with scimitar pincers.

“What the fuck is that?” Rigo says.

Neither IA responds. Meanwhile, the beetle is promptly making its way up the limbs of his avatar with Götterdämmerung certainty. Seems to know exactly where it’s going and what it intends to do when it gets there.

“Security pherion,” Varda says, after its time-delay hiccup.

Shit. Rigo rests his forehead against the front edge of the shelf. “How come you didn’t warn me there was security?”

“What did you expect? A walk in the cake?”

Several more gargantuan butterflies appear out of the surrounding foliage . . . change into beetles as soon as they attach to him. Rigo groans. If this keeps up, it won’t be long before he finds himself in a disaster of Homeric proportions.

“You want to tell me what the hell these things—?”

The first beetle bites him, sinks its mandibles into the stem of a violet and starts to grind away, like a dog gnawing a bone. An acid rash blooms under Rigo’s skin. A slow, formic burn that stirs up the smell of ammonia and the poisonous taste of lead. His stomach clenches. He swallows at the queasiness. Grits his teeth. His pulse races. He’s got heart palpitations the way Lady Chatterly had orgasms.

“Don’t worry,” Varda says. “You’re doped with antiphers.”

These turn out to be Lilliputian ants that swarm to his rescue. What they lack in size, they try to make up for in numbers. Problem is, the Puntarenas ecotecture boasts first-rate security. It’s armed to the teeth. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Rigo is fighting a losing battle. It’s only a matter of time before he’s overwhelmed. History.

“Download status?” he asks.

“Almost complete,” Varda says.

Rigo grimaces. “Can’t you speed up the transfer rate? I’m getting eaten alive here.” The feeling in his extremities is gone, and a frigid paralysis is creeping toward his chest and lungs.

“It won’t be long now,” Varda says.

“You can say that again.”

The carnage intensifies. Dead bees join the snipped flowers littering the ground at his feet. Rigo breathes deep, can’t seem to get any air. The palpitations have slowed to a lethargic pace. Long time between beats, and getting longer. He can’t feel Anthea’s grip anymore. He opens his mouth. No words come out. His lips and tongue are elephantine. All he can manage is a slurred grunt.

“End of the line,” Varda announces. Cochlear attenuation stretches the IA’s voice into taffy. Elastic, fiber-thin words.

Rigo blinks. His vision remains blurred. Singed black from macular degeneration and retinal decay. The cloud of butterflies around his avatar looks amorphous, in chaotic disarray just before they disintegrate, turn to ash and settle to the ground in a funeral veil of black that darkens the inside of his wraparounds.

“Rigo? Can you hear me?”

The words detonate at the base of his skull. A big-bang flare that expands from a singularity, spreads into the darkness like a newborn universe. Rigo swallows, chokes on vomit, coughs.

“Get it up,” the voice says. “Anthea needs you.”

Varda. The IA’s exhortation Dopplers in, siren urgent, high-pitched.

Face pressed hard to the floor, carpet smashed against his cheek and the crumpled foil of his wraparounds, Rigo flails for consciousness. Light seeps in around one edge of the collapsible frame, a knife-edge sliver. Scalpel sharp, it slices open his eyelids. Hurts like a motherfucker as it cuts his eyeballs.

“Hurry,” Varda says.

“ ‘To unpathed waters, undreamed shores,’ ” another voice says, chorusing in.

“Anthea?” Rigo struggles to lift his head. Lets it fall back down.

“ ‘When sorrows come,’ ” the second voice says, “ ‘they come not single spies, / But in battalions.’ ”

Not Anthea. Doug.

Rigo reaches out a hand. Encounters braided strands of hair, spread out across the carpet.

Panic gores him. The hair is trembling. He follows one strand to cold skin caught in the grip of a spasm. His hand shakes in response, the seizure looping back with closed-circuit amplification. His spine shudders, his teeth rattle.

“Rise and sign,” Varda says. “Up and atom. Vibrate a leg.”

Rigo winces. Opens his eyes. Blinks away tears. Anthea is collapsed on the floor next to him. Splayed arms and legs. Mouth open, eyes closed. Blue-tinged skin. Except for the twitching, she’s not moving.