Fiction by Linda Nagata
Goddesses (Part 5)
(vii)
Muthaye left the house, promising to return as soon as possible. Michael did not like the sound of that. It reminded him too much of the woman from the charity, but what could he do? He had his own schedule to keep. This afternoon he was due at a publicity event on a local farm, the first to bring in a harvest of genetically engineered rice developed by a Japanese company and distributed by Global Shear.
He took another shower, and another tab of Synthetic Sleep. The pill's chemical cocktail was designed to mimic the metabolic effects of a few hours of rest. His body could not be fooled forever, but he should be okay until the evening.
In the living room, Rajban was crouching on the floor, staring out at the garden. Michael hesitated on his way to the front door. Something in her posture touched a memory in him: for a moment he was immersed again in the half-dark of a city night, and the awful silence that had followed her cold declaration, There's nothing left, Michael. I'm leaving. He felt as if his chest was made of glass, and the glass had shattered.
He shook his head. That was all long ago.
The house spoke in its soothing, feminine voice. "Your car is here." Then it repeated the news in Hindi. Rajban turned, her face an open question. Michael wished he could stay and talk to her. Instead, he put on his shades and he left.
#
The company car bounced and lurched along a dirt road in dire need of scraping. The driver was forced to dodge bicyclists and zips, an assortment of rusty old cars converted to ethylene, and hundreds of pedestrians. Fifteen miles an hour was a top speed rarely achieved, and Michael was twenty minutes late by the time he arrived at the demonstration farm.
No one noticed.
A huge canvas canopy with walls of transparent plastic had been set up in the farmyard. An air-conditioner powered by a portable generator blew an arctic chill into its interior, while outside, misters delivered fine sprays of water over the arriving guests. Michael soon found himself in conversation with an Ikeda tech and a reporter from CNN. "It's an ideal grain," the tech was saying. "Requiring less water and fertilizer than any other rice strain, while producing a polishable kernel with a high protein content."
"But," the reporter countered, "your opponents claim it's just this engineered hardiness, this ability to out-compete even the weeds that makes it a threat to the biosystem."
Michael dove into the debate with practiced ease. "Out-competing the weeds is something of an exaggeration. Ikeda rice is still a domesticated plant, requiring careful farming practices to thrive...."
Most of the afternoon was like that. The event was a press-op, and Michael's job was to sooth the usual fear of genetically engineered food plants. Most wealthier countries forbid the importation or sale of engineered crops, fearing ecological disaster, or the discovery of some previously unknown toxic quality in the new food. At least, those were the reasons most often cited. Michael suspected it was really a fear of shouldering any more responsibility. Already the land, the climate, and even the ecology of the oceans had been transformed by human activity. If the formula of life itself was now to be rewritten, what would be left outside the range of human influence? Not much. Every disaster outside of seismic instability would then fall squarely at the feet of technology.
For now it didn't matter that Ikeda rice couldn't be sold across international borders. Small farmers could peddle their excess crops to the villagers. Large farms could ship to the cities. Someday though, international markets would need to open.
#
It was late afternoon when Michael slipped free of the press parade. He took a folding chair and set it up beneath the spreading branches of a banyan tree. He had hardly sat down when a party of young men emerged from the farmhouse. They laughed and teased one another, startling a long legged bird that had been hunting on the edge of a rice paddy. As the bird took flight, Michael found himself surrounded by six smiling youths, each neatly attired in dress shirts and cotton slacks, sandals on their feet. One of them introduced himself as Kanwal. He offered Michael a banana-mango smoothie obviously rescued from the tent.
"This is my father's farm," he informed Michael proudly. Then he explained that his friends were all from nearby farms.
Michael was halfway through the tall glass when he realized it had been spiked. With vodka? That would neatly counter the Synthetic Sleep.
Kanwal proudly tapped his chest. "I am seventeen this year. I have finished my public schooling. My father wants to buy a truck. He will start a business delivering fruit to the cities." Kanwal rolled his eyes. "He says he is getting too old for farm work. He wants to drive a truck while his sons do the tough work!"
The other boys erupted in laughter. Michael grinned too. "Your old man must think a lot of you."
"Oh, I don't know," Kanwal said. "I think he just wants to hit the road to look for a new wife."
The boys giggled and moaned. "He's old," someone muttered. "But not too old!"
"He wants us to believe it, anyway," Kanwal said. "But I'm seventeen! He should be looking for a wife for me."
"Isn't that your mother's business?" Michael asked.
Kanwal shrugged. "My mother is dead three years. My youngest brother does all the cooking now."
"No sisters?"
Kanwal made a face. "No. Of course not. My old man wanted to get ahead, not raise a servant for another man's family. We are very modern here. We don't believe in dowry. If I had a sister, my father would have to pay her dowry. Still, it makes it hard to find a wife. My father was married when he was fifteen. Look at us. We are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. No one has a wife. Hey." He turned to his friends. "Know who's making the most money these days? The marriage broker!"
The boys guffawed again, but Michael frowned. Kanwal noticed, and responded by rubbing Michael's shoulder in a friendly way. "You have a wife?"
Michael shook his head, declining to explain to Kanwal that though he'd been married at twenty-four, it had not lasted two years. There's nothing left, Michael.
Kanwal might have read his mind. "Divorced?" he asked.
Michael scowled. "You watch too much tv."
Kanwal giggled, along with his friends. "American women like to have many husbands and only one son."
"We could use some American women here," one of the boys chimed in from the back of the group.
Michael felt the vodka inside him, dissolving his diplomacy. "Women are not toys. They're people, with their own dreams, their own ambitions."
"Oh yes," Kanwal agreed with a hearty nod. "They are goddesses." The boys all offered confirmation of this.
Kanwal went on, "This farm would be a happier place if we had a woman in the kitchen again. Hey, but no one wants to be a farmer anymore, not even my old man."
Michael sat up a little straighter. This sentiment had not been reported by his census teams. "Why do you say that? This farm has had a profitable year, despite poor weather."
"Oh, we're doing all right," Kanwal agreed. "But do you think it's easy? Laboring all day in the hot sun, and we don't even have a tractor. The water buffalo are still our tractor. It's shameful! I want to move to Bangalore, learn computers, work in an office."
"Ah Kanwal," one of his friends interrupted. "Everybody wants to work in an office, but it's the farm for us, you know it."
Kanwal gave his friend a dark look. "Not all of us. Every evening I walk all the way to town, just so I can spend half an hour at the home of a link-wallah, exploring the net. Half an hour! That's all he allows, because he has many clients, but half an hour is not enough time to get any real training – maybe if I could print out lessons, but I can't, because I don't have the paper. But I have a plan.
"I can read well. We all can. I've read every book in the two library booths at South Market. Do you know what we're doing? My friends and I? We're putting our money together to buy our own terminal. I have a friend in town who can get an uplink." Kanwal nodded, his dark eyes happy at his inner vision. "There is formal schooling online, from all over the world, and some of it at no cost. You hear how well I speak English? I learn fast. Hey." He looked at his friends again. "Maybe we're better off with no wives yet. No children to care for, right? Make our careers first. It's what the Bangalore families tell their young men." He turned back to Michael. "You have children, mister?"
"No," Michael said, feeling a sudden tightness in his gut. There's nothing left, Michael. I'm leaving.
Kanwal's brows rose in surprise. "No children? Not even from the wife who divorced you?"
"No," Michael repeated firmly, his cheeks heating with more than the torrid afternoon. She had not wanted to try again. I'm leaving.
From the back of the crowd the anonymous heckler spoke. "Hey Kanwal, waiting a few years for a wife doesn't sound too bad, but I don't think I want to wait that long."
The boys again erupted in laughter, while Michael's cheeks grew even hotter. He was only thirty two, but to be thirty two and without children... did that make him a failure in their eyes? It was a stunning thought, and one he didn't want to examine too closely.
Quickly he drained his vodka smoothie while Kanwal went right on massaging his shoulder, his dark eyes shining with confidence, and ambition. "That's right, mister. You watch us. In two years, we will all be middle class like you."
(viii)
Two in the morning, and sleep wouldn't come. Cody listened to Wade's soft snoring. She could just make out his silhouette in the faint amber glow spilling from the bathroom nightlight. Maybe new life had begun in her womb tonight, maybe not. It would be a few days before she would know.
She got out of bed, feeling a lingering stickiness between her legs. She groped for a nightshirt and pulled it on, then padded into the living room, where the curtains stood open on a sweeping view of Denver's city lights.
She always took on the toughest jobs.
So why was she so damned scared of the project at Victoria Glen? She'd looked over the specs after dinner. They'd been nasty, but Cody had dealt with worse. Kick. Kick! No sweat.
Except she was sweating. Her palms were slick, and the soles of her feet.
So? She'd been scared before. The only thing to do was face it down.
She took a long swallow from the bottle of Venezuelan water, then she got her VR helmet from a closet. Sitting on the sofa, she pulled the helmet on, encasing herself in a safe black vault. Nice, simple environment. She almost felt she could go to sleep.
Almost.
She instructed the wireless system to link with her server, where she'd stored the download of the Victoria Glen site, prepared by a redevelopment company called New Land.
She gazed at a menu, then, "Document three-seven-zero," she whispered. "Go."
The menu faded as a world emerged, creeping in like sunrise over a tired city. New Land had recorded a full sensory walk-through. Cody's helmet translated the digital record, synthesizing sight, sound, temperature, and encoded odors. Her lungs filled with sun-warmed air, brewed over old wood and oil-stained asphalt.
She found herself afloat, a few feet above an empty street. It ran straight, like a canalized river cutting through a landscape of vacant lots and boarded-up houses. A few sparrows popped up and down in brush that sprouted around a chain-link fence. Warning signs glared from the abandoned buildings:
Keep
out.
Hazardous
Materials site.
Danger
- No Trespassing.
It took her a minute to realize this was Victoria Street, and that first house, with its sagging porch cuddled under a steeply sloping roof, that was Randi's house. It had been the upper limit of Cody's permitted territory, and a safe place to run if ever she needed shelter. The house next to it had been a rental, with a fleet of showy cars perpetually drifting in and out of the front yard. Only a rusted hulk was left now, crumbling in the shade of a large tree leaning over a gap-toothed fence from the yard next door.
Looking at the tree, Cody felt hollow inside. Jacaranda, she realized. As a kid she'd never known its name, just enjoyed gathering the purple blossoms that showered from it in the spring. She and Tanya would have pretend weddings and toss the fallen flowers in the air. Where had they learned that? Cody couldn't guess. Neither one of them had ever seen a wedding.
The tree looked so much bigger than she remembered.
Pushing the trackball forward, she went gliding down the street, a ghost returned to haunt the old neighborhood.
She drifted past the fence. She hardly dared to look, but there it was: A tiny block of a house, built close to the ground, like a bunker. The roof had gaps in it. Head wounds. The windows were boarded up. It didn't matter. It was all there. All of it, still lurking inside her mind. She closed her eyes, and reality thickened, like flesh on the bones of the past. Little Tanya from down the block was knocking on the door, jump rope in hand. It was a hot summer evening. Cody got her own rope, and they practiced together on the sidewalk, singing seashells, taco bells, easy, ivy, over. No way they were supposed to be outside that late, but mama was still at school and Tanya's big sister was sleeping.
They sang very softly, seashells, taco bells, so Passion wouldn't come charging at them out of his girlfriend's house across the street, screaming dumb-bitches-shut-up. His motorcycle was there, but his fuck-this-fuck-that music wasn't pounding the neighborhood, so she guessed he was asleep.
They were practicing cross-arms when a tanker truck came rumbling into sight from the direction of Randi's house. They stopped jumping, to watch it go by. It was a big truck. The tank had been painted gray. It didn't have the name of any gas station on it.
"Look," Tanya said. She pointed at the truck's undercarriage and giggled. "It's peeing."
A stream of liquid ran from beneath the truck, splashing black against the street. Tanya waved at the anonymous bulk of the driver. Across the street, Passion was screaming What the fuck is that noise?
#
Cody snatched the helmet off. Her heart felt like it had melted into her arteries, a pounding starfish in her chest. Oh no, oh no. She stared at the looming shapes of furniture in the dimly-lit room. She hadn't remembered the truck in years and years. Maybe it had felt too dangerous to remember. Oh God, oh Jesus. Her palms were sweating.
Just a few seconds after the truck had passed her eyes had started burning. She ran into the house and threw up. Passion was screaming outside, shooting his gun. Cody lay on the broken tiles of the bathroom floor and cried, she felt so sick, until mama came home and moved her into bed. She didn't say anything about the truck and its stinky pee, because she should never have been out on the sidewalk.
Carefully, Cody lay the helmet on the cushion beside her. Wade was snoring softly in the bedroom. The antique clock on the mantle was ticking, ticking.
What had gone into the street that night? And on other nights, what had spilled from the kitchen drug labs? From the ubiquitous activity of auto repair? From the city's fights against rats and roaches? What had trickled through the soil, into the ground water, returning through the faucet of the kitchen sink?
Splash of clear water into a plastic cup held in a little girl's hands; the dry tang of chlorine in her throat.
There had been toxins in her body that killed her daughter. Cody had always assumed it was her fault, that she'd been incautious on a job, that somehow she had poisoned herself, but what if it wasn't so?
Her lips pressed together in a hard line. Any hazardous substance report generated by the clean up of Victoria Glen would be kept confidential by the re-development company. She'd be able to gain access only if she could offer compelling evidence of on-site injury, and that was doubtful. She'd only lived there until she was ten, until Mama got her the scholarship to Prescott Academy. Cody had left for boarding school and never had come back.
So there was only one way to learn what ten years on Victoria Street had done to her. She would have to take on the job herself.