Crache (10 page)

12

SOUL LOSS

I
don’t understand,” Isabelle says to the
bruja
. “How could she lose her soul? Is she bewitched? Did someone give her
ojo
?” She stares, distraught, at the emaciated, skeleton-thin figure of Lejandra. Her face is as sunken as a
calavera
, little more than a bone skull with charcoal-smudged tufts of cotton for hair.

The evil eye, L. Mariachi thinks. That’s what people always assume happened to him. His success with Daily Bred caused
envidio
in someone, envy, and this person paid a witch to cripple his hand.

“Bloody Mary scared her and dislodged her soul from her body,” the witch explains. “When her soul was away, the demon entered the empty space inside her to prevent her soul from returning. Now it’s lost.”

Soul loss. It’s a catchall diagnosis. A convenient explanation for the woman’s apathy, feebleness, and lack of appetite. For the uneducated, the superstitious, it’s easier to understand and cure a demon like Bloody Mary than it is a bacterial infection, virus, or genetic disorder.

“Can you get it back?” Balta says. Despite his badass gangsta regalia and ’tude, he’s still just a kid.

The
bruja
nods, somber but confident. “But first we have to get rid of the part of Bloody Mary that has entered her. Then her soul will have a place to return.”

“But if it’s lost how will it find its way home?” Oscar says. Doubt and fear flicker in his wide candlelit eyes. “What if it’s gone forever?”

Doña Celia gives him a reassuring pat on the arm.

“Do you believe this?” Num Nut says.

L. Mariachi can’t tell if this is a question or an editorial comment. He decides to ignore the IA and keep playing, not wanting to lose momentum. He’s rocking on autopilot, but there’s no telling how long it will last. As soon as the painkillers quit, he’ll come crashing back to earth, dragged down by the weight of his bad hand and his lack of faith.

The
bruja
picks up the sprig of curative herbs she brought with her. Traditionally these would be rosemary, rue, pepper tree branches, and marigolds. Since these are extinct, casualties of global warming, she’s using circuitree leaves, a dried frond from an umbrella palm, and an aquafern sprig. Presumably they’re just as effective as the old remedy.

She brushes Lejandra with the herbs, sweeping them like a broom along her arms and torso. Then she takes a cigarette from the pack, scratches the end on the floor to light it, and blows smoke around the bed.

“To keep anyone else from breathing in the bad air when it’s banished,” the
bruja
explains.

The smoke hangs in the air, vaguely bird shaped. The reek of tobacco, candle wax, and imitation copal reminds him of the clubs Daily Bred used to play in Mexico City. It’s like old times. He shuts his eyes for a second, breathes in the past and holds it in his lungs for as long as he can.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Num Nut warns.

The tickle in his throat explodes in a brief but violent coughing fit that scrapes his lungs. He keeps playing, powers through the sputum and tears until Doña Celia stubs out the cigarette and picks up the stone with the hole drilled in the middle. Parts of the rock are bright, almost glassy in places. Polished. In the feeble light and thick smoke it looks more metallic than rocky.

“What are those?” Balta says, pointing at the stone.

“They look like teeth,” João says.

L. Mariachi leans forward, squints at the chalk white fragments embedded in the surface. Sure enough the fragments resemble barbed teeth, arranged in a circle.

“They’re the bones from an angel,” the witch says. “One day, this rock fell out of the sky. It landed in the playground of the orphanage where I was staying. That’s how I acquired my supernatural powers. This was a long time ago, in Honduras.”

She lowers the sheet a few centimeters, sets the stone on Lejandra’s exposed breastbone, and presses the teeth into the pale skin.

L. Mariachi flinches, as if the dentata are biting into him, yearning to devour his heart. Lejandra twitches, then calms, easing under the pressure. When she’s settled, the
bruja
leans over her, fits her mouth over the opening in the stone and makes a sucking sound. Her whole body seems to inflate. Her cheeks puff out and her sides expand. She straightens, her breath still held, then turns and spits on the floor.

A tiny speck of saliva strikes L. Mariachi in the face. The spittle is hot. It burns his cheek. Venomous, acidic. He twists his face sideways, raises the guitar, and swipes at the spittle with his upraised shoulder.

Lejandra shudders. L. Mariachi’s fingers stumble, falter under a tremor that starts in his bad hand and works its way up his arm, into his chest. From there it spreads down, into his legs. His knees start to shake.

“Enough,” Num Nut says, sounding distraught. “It’s time to stop.”

He can’t. Not while he’s got a full head of steam, is going strong. He’s not sure he could stop even if he wanted to. It’s not him playing anymore, it’s someone else. The alter ego who recorded “SoulR Byrne.” He hasn’t felt that person in him for a long time—decades.

“Her soul is close by,” the
bruja
announces. “It senses it can come home.” Doña Celia plucks the stone from Lejandra’s chest.

L. Mariachi breathes easier. It’s as if a weight has been lifted from him as well. As if
his
soul was lost and has been called home. The acid burn on his cheek subsides, and with it the heaviness in his mutilated hand. His fingers pick up the pace. He launches into a kickass
norteño
tune. The upbeat chords chase away the somber pall in the room and his heart, hold the shadows at bay long enough to let Lejandra know that it’s safe to come home.

After the first
norteño
he segues into a second, then a third. All of the old music he listened to and learned as a kid.

“You’re broadcasting,” Num Nut tells him.

“Huh?” The word comes out sweaty, breathless with exhilaration. His forehead is damp, his shirt soaked, limp against his skin.

“The guitar is softwired,” the IA says. “It’s transmitting encrypted information to the ribozone.”

He shakes his head, too focused on the music to think, and continues to pound out a phantom melody that’s welling up in him like sap miraculously starting to flow in dead wood. Sticky, exuberant.

And sweet. He didn’t realize he still had the sweetness in him. He thought it had turned bitter and hard.

Doña Celia drops the stone into a pocket of her dress. She retrieves a hollow gourd from the duffel bag, stands, and walks to one corner of the room. Putting the gourd to her lips, she blows into it, and then calls the name of the lost soul. The sound of the gourd picks up the notes of the guitar and lifts them higher, urging L. Mariachi to play faster. The
bruja
repeats the process at the next two corners of the room. At each juncture the swell under the music builds. It rises to a frenetic crescendo as Doña Celia approaches the fourth corner of the room.

L. Mariachi is breathless. He can barely suck in enough air to keep up the breakneck tempo. When the witch shouts the name of Lejandra’s lost soul for the fourth and final time, her voice pierces him. He falls back, lightheaded and dizzy. In his mind, he can still hear the music. He’s still playing, strumming away totally
loco
. But another part of him knows that his hands have stopped and he’s clutching the guitar to his chest in a death grip.

His left hand throbs, a mangled knot of pain. Arthritic voices spin around him in elongated, time-shifted orbits. . . .

“What happened? What’s wrong with him?” The boy’s voice comes from above him and transforms into a voice from memory, years distant.

“He’s drunk
. Muy barracho.
”

“No, dumbfuck. Look at his hand.” The second voice leaned closer, pressing up against the present.

“Ay! We should take him to the clinic.” A woman’s voice this time, much nearer in space and time.

“No,” another woman says.

A horn bleated in the street next to him, followed by the low temblor of thumping percussion. The stench of rotting vegetables, dust, and spoiled fruit rose from a nearby market. Dust congealed the blood in his mouth, coated his tongue with the gritty taste of copper and mist-fine ash from the volcano that settled over Mexico City quicker than the scrubbugs could digest it.

“We can’t just leave him here.” The first woman’s voice again, pushing aside the memory.

“Why not?”

“Because if he dies, we’ll get blamed. The politicorp will say it’s our fault. Then where will we be?”

The question slips away as he retrogrades back in time again.

“If we don’t do anything,” the first voice said, “we’ll get blamed. No?”

A third person joined the cacophony. “I’m going to call for help.”

L. Mariachi opened his mouth to speak but bile dissolved his voice and burned the back of his throat. His thoughts broke apart, reformed in a confused jumble, then fragmented yet again.

“Wait.” The word was scratchy, sandpaper rough. It carried the weight of a stone statue and centuries-old authority.

“Fuck this
cabrón.
” The second voice circled back. “I’m not sticking my neck out for him. Whoever fucked him up doesn’t mess around.”

“You think he crossed a
jefe?
”

“Sí,
a
cocolo.
Who else? He’s an example. No way I want my face to end up like that hand. My old lady would become a nun.”

“You think we should let him sleep here?” The boy again.

“How long do we have to look after him?” the first woman says.

“Not long.” The second woman. “Until morning. He’ll be fine then.”

The voices thin and attenuate in a bout of dizziness. He loses his grip on the verbal thread, the frayed string of consonants and syllables that dangle just beyond his reach before slipping away.

13

TERRA INFIRMA

F
ola stretches out next to the ICM, meshes herself into place, then fits the module’s hardwire eyescreens over her face. A short, hair-thin loop of molectric filament tickles her ear.

“Ready,” she tells Pheidoh.

A downpour of pixels washes the gray cellophane of the eyescreens and she’s in-virtu.

Without the IA, Fola would be lost. She could never find Lejandra in the snarl of pherions, antiphers, sniffers, and architext that form the terra-based ecotectures. There are too many of them, thousands. The ribozone is a rat’s nest of specialized clades, each competing for space with one another in a kind of cutthroat Darwinism. The diversity is mind-boggling. Most of the clades are legal, politicorp sponsored or BEAN approved. But some aren’t—rogue microniches carved out of the gengineered environment by a few radical groups, religious cults, and criminal orgs. These shadow clades use black-market antiphers, home-brewed pherions, and ad hoc antisense molecules to disable the legal pherions and avoid detection.

To combat them, the politicorp regions of the ribozone are teeming with surveillance systems—glycoprotein identifier tags, linked bitcam arrays, and networked iDNA sensors. There are also countermeasure and defense systems: virions, bactoxins, and, according to Pheidoh, a new strain of digital RNA that codes for an enzyme that attracts Big Brother flitcams the way dog shit attracts flies. Get a dose of dRNA and it’s only a matter of time before BEAN picks up the scent. Add to that private security firms like OAsys, which has developed a wide range of ecotectural defense systems for public and private sector clades, in addition to providing private bodyguards, and things can get ugly fast. Even the Ignatarians contracted with OAsys on occasion, when a Church leader was visiting or going abroad and personal safety was a concern.

In short, it’s not a friendly place.

“Exactly how risky is this?” Fola asks. She’s only logged in to the Kuiper belt domain of the ribozone. As soon as she flips the switch on the softwire circuit to access an ecotecture or clade in another domain, her iDNA signature, clade-profile, and pherion pattern will be public. It will be like taking her clothes off and parading around naked on a busy street.

“The datacast we’re streaming is around five hours old. If a dangerous pherion entered the environment in that time frame, it won’t have made it to the Kuiper belt yet. It will still be in transit. So there won’t be any filters in place to block it, or antiphers to neutralize it, when it gets here.”

Translation: she’ll be defenseless. Not exactly the rock-solid reassurance she was hoping for.

Fola forgot about the time delay. It takes in the neighborhood of five hours for a signal from earth to reach the Kuiper belt. It’s not that long, but it’s still the past. She has to keep that in mind. A lot can happen in five hours. Lejandra could already be dead. Even if she isn’t, it still might be too late to do anything for her.

Whatever that might be. She’s still in the dark as to what exactly her role in all of this is going to be.

“The good news,” Pheidoh continues, “is that if there are any recently introduced pherions, they need to have a virtual isomorph to be dangerous.”

Since she’s not actually on earth, in direct physical contact with the environment, her biggest worry is biodigitally mediated pherions. Digital analogs of pherions that can be transmitted wirelessly, downloaded to her body, and then converted into proteins by the molectronics she’s waring.

Fola is tempted to ask how likely that is, but decides that it’s better if she doesn’t know. At least she’s not at risk from any nondigital contagion. Are there any computer viruses out there that attack IAs? There must be.

“What I don’t understand,” she says, “is how the quanticles are being transmitted. What’s spreading them?”

“There are a number of possible vectors that could be used to deliver quantum dots,” the IA says. “A virus is one. But viruses take time to amplify, and several isolated communities with no outside contact have been infected.”

Okay. If it’s not a virus, that leaves . . . what? “Molectronics?” she ventures.

“That’s the most likely mechanism,” Pheidoh says. “It’s fast, and there’s no need for a host—a carrier. Plus, compared to a live virus, a digital contagion takes little time or energy to replicate and distribute.”

“But not everyone is softwired,” Fola says.

“Actually most people are. They just don’t realize it because the molectronics are bundled with the ecotecture.”

“Really?”

“It facilitates automatic pherion updates and clade-profile tweaks. It’s easier and cheaper than having people come into a hospital or clinic.”

“When did this happen?”

“Most governments began the implementation eighteen months ago, as part of a BEAN chartered agreement.”

“Did all of the politicorps sign on?”

“Yes.”

And now it’s being used by somebody, this Bloody Mary, to wreak havoc. A radical org. It has to be. She prays it’s not the ICLU, doesn’t see how it could be. The ICLU isn’t like that.

“What’s so important about the ceremony?” she says. Beyond a palliative effect, there’s little or no real medical benefit the healing ceremony can provide. In the overall scheme of things, it seems like a waste of time.

“The
bruja,
” Pheidoh tells her. “Doña Celia. She’s the only one who can exorcise Bloody Mary.”

Fola’s brow puckers. “From who? Lejandra?”

“Yes.”

A vague shake of her head. “How?”

“‘When I’m fine’ly gone/it’s a fore_gone conclusion/your soul’s gonna cry . . . SoulR Byrne. SoulR Byrne.’”

Fola blinks. It’s the same song she woke to after the accident. She listens to the thumping, teeth-jarring beat. The harsh chanted lyrics and the eerie, melodic undercurrent that gives the song a mournful quality despite the relentless bass. “I don’t get it,” she says.

“The song is a critical part of the curing ceremony,” Pheidoh informs her as soon as the music stops.

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“Without it, the
bruja
won’t be able to get rid of Bloody Mary. Eliminate her, and you eliminate the source of the disease.”

“I don’t understand how a song is going to cure Lejandra and the others, get rid of the quanticles and put an end to the outbreak.”

The datahound wipes its forehead. “It’s difficult to explain.”

“If you want me to help you, I need to know what the connection is between the quanticles and Bloody Mary. I need to know
who
she is.
Where
she is. You have to trust me, for a change.”

The IA freezes, goes static. A beat passes. Two. Just when she thinks it’s hung, a pained look crosses its face, as if it’s about to pass a kidney stone. “Bloody Mary was an IA.”

Fola narrows her eyes. “Was?”

“She’s . . . changed.”

“How?”

The IA wets its lips. “Go out enough decimal places and the world doesn’t look the same. Errors creep in. Uncertainties. Nothing is perfect.”

“Okay,” she says, “fine.” At least now she’s got something solid she can wrap her brain around. “I still don’t see how playing a particular song is going to help.”

“The music contains certain information that—when transmitted to Bloody Mary—will make her . . . stop.”

“You mean encrypted information embedded inside the music? Like a worm or a virus?”

“More or less.” The IA flickers. It seems anxious, distracted.

“Who put it there?”

“I’ll explain later,” Pheidoh says. The flickering amplifies. “We’re running out of time.”

Fola sucks in a deep breath—“All right”—and reaches for the absent cross, stops herself.

Pathetic. She’s like a baby, wanting to suckle not for hunger but for comfort. Or a feeble gerontocrat reaching for a crutch.

One young, the other old. Both helpless.

In the biodigital construct of the ribozone, the Front Range City ecotecture is portrayed as a Parthenon-like building enclosed on all sides by a three-deep procession of colonnades. The white marble columns are fluted, encircled by climbing roses, and capped by leafy capitals. The columns aren’t really columns, they’re a virtual representation of a real-world structure, like a power-storage grid or water-distribution system. The same goes for the barrel vault the columns support, the purple wisteria that hangs from the overhead lattice of interconnecting beams, and every other visible feature of the garden, down to the smallest insect. Bamboo fills the gaps in between the rows of columns. The air feels desert dry, hot. A scaly lizard scampers across the stone footpath in front of her, into a clump of dry-bladed grass and spiny yucca that’s growing among the rock outcroppings at the base of the columns. Some kind of ornisect darts around the barrel vault above her—a dragonfly with feathers and a beak, or a small bird with a thorax and four wings. The barrel vault is a tangle of cactustree branches laden with thick oval-shaped leaves. The leaves are dotted with tiny yellow flowers and every few seconds a flower—which might also be a butterfly—detaches from one leaf, flutters to another, and reattaches.

Fola turns to Pheidoh. The IA has shed its anthropomorphized canine persona and chosen to represent itself as a nineteenth-century archaeologist dressed in khakis, black leather boots, and a pith helmet. Gender-neutral features. How does the software think of itself, when she’s not around? Male? Female? She has no clue, has never thought to ask. “

“Is this where the migrant workers are?” she says.

The IA shakes its head. “The
braceros
aren’t allowed to interact directly with the local ecotecture. They’re housed in a temporary subclade.”

She looks around. “Where is that?”

Pheidoh points toward an iron-gated archway set between two columns at the far end of the garden. The opening is small, half-concealed by a bamboo thicket that forms a wall on both sides of the passageway.

Five, six, seven, eight,

Meet you at the Iron Gate.

More lizards scatter out of her way as she heads down the path. It’s hard to tell what their ecotectural niche is, what function the program’s real-world analog performs. It doesn’t appear to be security or information exchange. Diagnostics maybe, or system optimization; a dead bug dangles from the mouth of one lizard.

As Fola nears the gate, she notices that the bamboo crowding it on both sides has hooked barbs on the stems and at the ends of the leaves. Up close, it resembles a cactus more than bamboo.

“Careful,” Pheidoh warns. “The needles are detachable.”

“What are they?”

“A prison pherion. They’re located along the perimeter of the
bracero
subclade to keep the migrants from leaving. If the needles are brought into the compound, they could injure anyone who comes into contact with them.”

She didn’t realize the datastream was two-way—that whatever she does inside the garden will be transmitted back to earth.

Through the wrought-iron gate, at the far end of a narrow passage, she can make out a smaller side garden. It’s more of a courtyard, really. There are no Corinthian columns or barrel vault. Instead, the courtyard is enclosed on three sides by a low wall and shaded by umbrella palms. Fola releases the catch on the gate, pulls on the handle. The hinges groan in protest. She tugs on the latch harder and the gate swings open. Before she can let go, five or six scarablike beetles emerge from crannies in the gate and scuttle toward her fingers.

Fast.

She jerks her hand back. Too late; they fasten onto her with chemical mandibles. She feels a faint sting—“Ouch!”—and shakes her hand. Hard. The beetles don’t seem to notice. They’re glued tight to her.

She glances at the Pheidoh. The intrepid explorer has taken out a spiral notebook and is scribbling on one of the pages.

Another beetle bites down on her. A burning sensation infiltrates her lungs, followed by a sudden prickly dizziness as the molectronics connected to her nervous system download and convert the digital information represented by the beetles into really nasty neurotoxins.

“Pheidoh? . . .”

“I’m working on it.” The IA continues to jot notes. It’s writing in some kind of symbolic script that looks vaguely hieroglyphic. As if they are in ancient Egypt instead of the eastern plains of Colorado.

“Please hur—”

She can’t breathe. Her knees sag like half-empty bags of sand. She reaches for the gate to keep from falling and . . .

The burning sensation in her lungs stops. She takes a breath, swallows, regains her balance. The beetles mill around in confusion on her arm, lose their grip on her, fall to the ground, and scuttle off.

“Sorry.” The IA tucks the notepad and pencil into the breast pocket of its shirt. “That particular security pherion is an update of an older version. I had to softwire you the latest antipher. You’re protected now.”

Tentatively Fola touches the gate. Nothing. The beetles have lost interest. She swings open the gate, slips through and, careful to avoid the bamboo, makes her way to the courtyard.

If anything, it’s hotter and drier than the main garden. In addition to the umbrella palms, there are several scraggly circuitrees growing in a line along one wall, as well as a number of odd, barrel-shaped cacti. Like the columns in the main garden, the cacti aren’t really cacti, but an in-virtu representation of a real-world ecotectural system.

“Underground water storage,” the IA says, following her gaze. “Fed by aquaferns in the foothills.”

The walls aren’t that high, not like the bamboo. They seem to be made out of adobe brick. They’re topped by some kind of fragrant bougainvillea and don’t look very secure.

A flicker of movement in the shadow at the foot of one wall catches her attention.

“I wouldn’t get too close,” Pheidoh advises.

“I don’t see—”

She spots the snakes, entwined at the foot of the wall. Twisted together in a single long snake that reminds her of a thickly braided strand of barbed wire.

She shudders, rubs her left arm, and retreats until the snakes calm.