Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (38 page)

She was dimly aware of muffled sounds, distant and angry, rising from somewhere outside. They were irrelevant, they made no sense. Nothing made any sense. Her mind, luminous and transparent, rotated before her. Purple stars erupted from the medulla like a freeze-framed fountain, bright perfect droplets thrown high into the cortex and frozen at apogee. Bright thoughts. Memories, amputated and cauterized. They almost looked like some kind of free-form sculpture.

Lies could be so beautiful in the telling.

Decoys

The way Aviva Lu saw it, whoever died last was the winner.

It didn't matter what you actually
did
with your life. Da Vinci and Plasmid and Ian Anderson had all done mags more than Vive or any of her friends ever would. She'd never explore Mars or write a symphony or even build an animal, at least not from scratch. But the thing was, all those people were
dead
already. Fame hadn't kept Olivia M'Benga's faceplate from shattering. Andrew Simon's charge against Hydro-Q hadn't added one rotting day to his lifespan.
Passion Play
might have been immortal, but its composer had been dust for decades.

Aviva Lu knew more about
the story so far
than all of those guys had.

It was all just one big, sprawling interactive storybook. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. If you came in halfway through, you could always pick up the stuff you'd missed—that's what tutorials and encyclopedias and Maelstrom itself were for. You could get a thumbnail History of Life right back to the time Martian Mike dropped out of the sky and started the whole thing off. Once you were dead, though, that was
it
. You'd never know what came next. The real winners, Vive figured, were the ones who saw how the story finally ended.

That said, it kind of pissed her off to realize that she'd probably made it to the finals.

That much had been obvious even before this
firewitch
thing had started burning its way across the continent. There'd been a time, she'd heard, you could just pick up and
go
places; none of these whackamole barriers going up and down all the time, like you had to shoot some kind of lottery every time you wanted to cross the street. There'd been a time when you could fight off plagues and parasites
yourself
, just using your own body systems, without having to buy a fix from some pharm who'd probably tweaked the disease in the first place so you had to buy their crummy genes. According to Vive's pater, there'd even been a time when the police themselves had been under control.

Of course, parents weren't exactly paragons of reliability. That whole generation was too busy shooting itself up with crocodilian and plant organelles to worry about getting their facts right. Not that Vive had any objections to good health—she'd been taking croc supplements herself for years. She even took proglottids and
Ascaris
eggs every now and then—she hated the idea of all those worms hatching out in her gut, but these days your immune system needed every workout it could get.

And besides, that was a
long
way from polluting your genotype with lizard DNA, even if Pfizer did have a discount this month and
wouldn't it be great to not be so dependent on outside drugs all the time, sweetie?

Sometimes Vive wondered if her parents even really knew what a species
was
any more. In fact, that was the whole problem: rather than clean the shit out of the world, people just turned themselves into coprovores. In a couple of years the human race was going to be half cockroach. If everything hadn't already melted down by then.

Meltdown, actually, was preferable. Better to tear everything down and just start over. Put everyone on the same footing for a change.

That's why Aviva Lu was here now, waiting for Lenie Clarke to show up.

Lenie Clarke was the Meltdown Madonna.

* * *

Actually, Aviva Lu wasn't exactly sure
what
Lenie Clarke was. She seemed to be an army of one. She had died, and risen again. She'd kick-started the Big One out of sheer impatience, tired of waiting for some long-overdue apocalypse that had always threatened and never delivered. She'd single-handedly broken open the Strip, led a refugee revolt whose existence N'AmPac
still
wouldn't admit to. Fire followed in her wake; anyone who opposed her was ash inside a week.

What Lenie Clarke really was, Vive had always figured, was bullshit.

There were a lot of people who thought otherwise, of course. People who swore up and down that Lenie Clarke was a real person, not just some marketing icon trying to electroshock
rifter chic
back off the slab. They said that the Meltdown Madonna actually
was
a rifter, one of N'AmPac's trained deep-seals— but that something had happened on the bottom of the ocean, something mythic. The Big One had only been a symptom, they said, of what had changed her. Now Lenie Clarke was a sorceress, able to transmute organic matter into lead or something. Now she wandered the world spreading apocalypse in her wake, and the masters she'd once served would stop at nothing to bring her down.

It made a good story—hey, any apocalypse that threatened the corpses was long overdue as far as Vive was concerned—but she'd heard too many others. Lenie Clarke was the Next Big Sensorium Personality. Lenie Clarke was a quantum AI, built in defiance of the Carnegie Protocols. Lenie Clarke was an invention of the corpses themselves, a bogeyman to scare restless civilians into obedience. For a couple of days Lenie Clarke had even been some kind of escaped microbe from Lake Vostok.

These days the stories were a lot more consistent; Lenie Clarke hadn't been anything but the Meltdown Madonna for weeks now, as far as Vive could tell. Probably the test marketers had settled on the line that would sell the most
faux
diveskins, or something. And why not? The look was in, the eyes were killer, and Vive was a much a fashion hound as anyone.

At least, that was what she'd thought until all of bloody Maelstrom started talking in one voice.

Now
that
had been wild. Half of Maelstrom might have been wildlife, but the other half was spam filters; there was just no
way
that anyone could have pulled that off, even the corpses. But she'd seen it herself, on her own (only slightly illegal) wristwatch: everyone she knew had seen it on theirs, or heard it from some matchmaker, or even seen it printed across personal visors that
should
have been hawking drugs or Levi's:
Lenie Clarke is closing on Yankton. Lenie Clarke is in trouble. Lenie Clarke needs your help.

Now. Cedar and West Second.

Whatever Lenie Clarke was, she had
very
powerful friends to pull off something like that. All of a sudden Vive found herself taking rifter chic very seriously indeed. Lindsey'd said they were all being used—someone with
really
long arms must be building a bandwagon as cover for something else, Carnegie knew
what
exactly—and Lindsey was probably right. So what? They were decoys for something, but that something was headed
here
, and whatever it was, Vive was going to be part of it.

It was gonna be a great ride.

* * *

Les beus
knew it, too.

There were two kinds of uniforms swarming across the concourse: police and rifters.
Les beus
bristled with shockprods and botflies and armored exoskels. The rifters had their fake diveskins and their cheap white contacts. Everything else, Vive knew, was bravado. Maelstrom had called out, and they'd come on faith and adrenaline. By now it was pretty obvious that faith wasn't all that necessary; the enforcer presence was more than enough evidence that
something
big was in town.

So far, nothing had exploded. Both sides were still jockeying for position, maybe pretending—to those scattered pedestrians who still hadn't grabbed the bone and vanished—that there was really nothing to worry about. The police had cordoned off whole sections of the concourse, not herding yet but well into corral mode. For their part, the rifters were testing the perimeter; milling along halls and slidewalks, dodging back and forth across the exoskel lines, always stopping just short of anything the antibodies could cite afterward as
provocation
. Botflies swarmed overhead like big black eggs, taking pre-game footage of everything.

Both sides were behaving really well, all things considered. Which made sense, kind of, since neither side was mainly there for the other. Vive figured things would heat up pretty quick once the star attraction showed up.

Her watch beeped. That was a surprise: the opposition always jammed the local frequencies way in advance, before anything even broke out. It kept people from organizing on the fly.

"Yeah?"

"Hey, we got through!" Lindsey's voice.

"Yeah," Vive said. "Forces of darkness slow on the draw today."

"I forgot to say I want mustard. Oh, and Jen wants a samosa."

"As well as a dog, or instead?"

"Instead."

"'Kay." Lindsey and Jen were at the perimeter, keeping an eye on enemy movements while Vive went for supplies. They were all veterans now, pros with two or three actions under their belts. All of them had been gassed or shocked at least once. Jen had even spent a night in a pacifier, from which they'd all learned a timely lesson in the importance of pre-game nourishment: POWs didn't get fed for at least the first twelve hours—bad enough in any case, but worse when you'd gotten yourself all 'dorphed up for the party. Cranking your BMR
really
brought on the munchies.

There was a row of vending machines lined up on the far wall of the concourse: medbooths, fashion dispensers, arrays of prepackaged foods. Vive shouldered her way through the crowd, homing in on a holographic Donair turning in space like some edible Holy Grail.

Someone grabbed her from behind.

Before she could react she was inside one of the medbooths, pushed up against the sensor panel. A woman with shoulder-length blond hair pinned her there, one hand splayed against Vive's sternum. She wasn't on the team; she had a visor across her eyes, and a backpack, and the rest of her wasn't rifter either. A pissed-off pedestrian maybe, caught in the swarm.

The medbooth door hissed shut behind her, blocking the deciblage from outside. The woman leaned back, opening a bit of a space in the crowded enclosure.

"What
is
this?" the woman said.

"This is
really
rude," Vive snapped back. "Also kidnapping or something probably. Not that those—"

"Why are you—" The woman paused. "Why the costume? What's going on?"

"It's a street party. I guess you never got invit—"

The woman leaned fractionally closer. Vive shut up. There was something about this situation that was starting to give her serious pause.

"Answer me," the crazy woman said.

"We're—we're rifters," Vive told her.

"Right."

"Lenie Clarke's in town. Haven't you heard?"

"Lenie Clarke." The crazy woman took her hand off Vive's chest. "No shit."

"None at all."

A sudden dim sound, like distant surf, filtered in from outside. The crazy woman didn't seem to notice.

"This is insane." She shook her head. "What are you going to do, exactly, when Lenie Clarke shows up?"

"Look, we're just here to see what happens. I don't make up the threads, all right?"

"Get an autograph, maybe. Get a gram of flesh or two, if there's enough to go around."

Suddenly, that voice had turned very flat and very scary.

She could kill me,
Vive thought.

She kept her own voice sweet and reasonable. Meek, even: "We're not hurting you. We're not hurting
anyone
."

"
Really
." The crazy woman leaned in close. "You sure about that? Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even
is
?"

Vive broke.

It wasn't a plan. At least it wasn't a very good one. The medbooth barely held both of them, and the door was behind the crazy woman: there was no room
around
. Vive just sprang forward like a cornered dog, tried desperately to squirm past. Both fell back into the door; the door, obligingly, slid open.