Nippon genehack weevil came? When the soil turned to alcohol? Before U-Tex and HiGro and the rest all showed up so conveniently? You, who waited on the docks when the seeds came in, saw them come and then saw them sit behind their fences and guards, waiting for people with the money to buy? What traffic would I have with this sort of people? I would sooner spit on him, this calorie man. Let the PurCal devils have him, I say.'
THE TOWN WAS as Shriram had described it. Cottonwoods and willows tangled the edges of the river and over them, the remains of the bridge, some of it still spanning the river in a hazy network of broken trusses and crumbling supports. Lalji and Creo stared up at the rusting construction, a web of steel and cable and concrete, slowly collapsing into the river.
'How much do you think the steel would bring?' Creo asked.
Lalji filled his cheek with a handful of PestResis sunflower seeds and started cracking them between his teeth. He spit the hulls into the river one by one. 'Not much. Too much energy to tear it out, then to melt it.' He shook his head and spat another hull. 'A waste to make something like that with steel. Better to use Fast-Gen hardwoods, or WeatherAll.'
'Not to cover that distance. It couldn't be done now. Not unless you were in Des Moines, maybe. I heard they burn coal there.'
'And they have electric lights that go all night and computers as large as a house.' Lalji waved his hand dismissively and turned to finish securing the needleboat. 'Who needs such a bridge now? A waste. A ferry and a mulie would serve just as well.' He jumped ashore and started climbing the crumbling steps that led up from the river. Creo followed.
At the top of the steep climb, a ruined suburb waited. Built to serve the cities on the far side of the river when commuting was common and petroleum cheap, it now sprawled in an advanced state of decay. A junk city built with junk materials, as transient as water, willingly abandoned when the expense of commuting grew too great.
'What the hell is this place?' Creo muttered.
Lalji smiled cynically. He jerked his head toward the green fields across the river, where SoyPRO and HiGro undulated to the horizon. 'The very cradle of civilization, yes? AgriGen, Midwest Growers Group, PurCal, all of them have fields here.'
'Yeah? That excite you?'
Lalji turned and studied a barge chain as it wallowed down the river below them, its mammoth size rendered small by the height. 'If we could turn all their calories into traceless joules, we'd be wealthy men.'
'Keep dreaming.' Creo breathed deeply and stretched. His back cracked and he winced at the sound. 'I get out of shape when I ride your boat this long. I should have stayed in New Orleans.'
Lalji raised his eyebrows. 'You're not happy to be making this touristic journey?' He pointed across the river. 'Somewhere over there, perhaps in those very acres, AgriGen created SoyPRO. And everyone thought they were such wonderful people.' He frowned. 'And then the weevil came, and suddenly there was nothing else to eat.'
Creo made a face. 'I don't go for those conspiracy theories.'
'You weren't even born when it happened.' Lalj turned to lead Creo into the wrecked suburb. 'But I remember. No such accident had ever happened before.'
'Monocultures. They were vulnerable.'
'Basmati was no monoculture!' Lalji waved his hand back toward the green fields. 'SoyPRO is monoculture. PurCal is monoculture. Generippers make monoculture.'
'Whatever you say, Lalji.'
Lalji glanced at Creo, trying to tell if the young man was still arguing with him, but Creo was carefully studying the street wreckage and Lalji let the argument die. He began counting streets, following memorized directions.
The avenues were all ridiculously broad and identical, large enough to run a herd of megadonts. Twenty cycle- rickshaws could ride abreast easily, and yet the town had only been a support suburb. It boggled Lalji's mind to consider the scale of life before.
A gang of children watched them from the doorway of a collapsed house. Half its timbers had been removed, and the other half were splintered, rising from the foundation like carcass bones where siding flesh had been stripped away.
Creo showed the children his spring gun and they ran away. He scowled at their departing forms. 'So what the hell are we picking up here? You got a lead on another antique?'
Lalji shrugged.
'Come on. I'm going to be hauling it in a couple minutes anyway. What's with the secrecy?'
Lalji glanced at Creo. 'There's nothing for you to haul. ‘It' is a man. We're looking for a man.'
Creo made a sound of disbelief. Lalji didn't bother responding.
Eventually, they came to an intersection. At its center, an old signal light lay smashed. Around it, the pavement was broken through by grasses gone to seed. Dandelions stuck up their yellow heads. On the far side of the intersection, a tall brick building squatted, a ruin of a civil center, yet still standing, built with better materials than the housing it had served.
A cheshire bled across the weedy expanse. Creo tried to shoot it. Missed.
Lalji studied the brick building. 'This is the place.'
Creo grunted and shot at another cheshire shimmer.
Lalji went over and inspected the smashed signal light, idly curious to see if it might have value. It was rusted. He turned in a slow circle, studying the surroundings for anything at all that might be worth taking downriver. Some of the old Expansion's wreckage still had worthy artifacts. He'd found the Conoco sign in such a place, in a suburb soon to be swallowed by SoyPRO, perfectly intact, seemingly never mounted in the open air, never subjected to the angry mobs of the energy Contraction. He'd sold it to an AgriGen executive for more than an entire smuggled cargo of HiGro.
The AgriGen woman had laughed at the sign. She'd mounted it on her wall, surrounded by the lesser artifacts of the Expansion: plastic cups, computer monitors, photos of racing automobiles, brightly colored children's toys. She'd hung the sign on her wall and then stood back and murmured that at one point, it had been a powerful company…global, even.
Global.
She'd said the word with an almost sexual yearning as she stared up at the sign's ruddy polymers.
Global.
For a moment, Lalji had been smitten by her vision: a company that pulled energy from the remotest parts of the planet and sold it far away within weeks of extraction; a company with customers and investors on every continent, with executives who crossed time zones as casually as Lalji crossed the alley to visit Shriram.
The AgriGen woman had hung the sign on her wall like the head of a trophy megadont and in that moment, next to a representative of the most powerful energy company in world, Lalji had felt a sudden sadness at how very diminished humanity had become.
Lalji shook away the memory and again turned slowly in the intersection, seeking signs of his passenger. More cheshires flitted amongst the ruins, their smoky shimmer shapes pulsing across the sunlight and passing into shadows. Creo pumped his spring gun and sprayed disks. A shimmer tumbled to stillness and became a matted pile of calico and blood.
Creo repumped his spring gun. 'So where is this guy?'
'I think he will come. If not today, then tomorrow or the next.' Lalji headed up the steps of the civil center and slipped between its shattered doors. Inside, it was nothing but dust and gloom and bird droppings. He found stairs and made his way upward until he found a broken window with a view. A gust of wind rattled the window pane and tugged his mustache. A pair of crows circled in the blue sky. Below, Creo pumped his spring gun and shot more cheshire shimmers. When he hit, angry yowls filtered up. Blood swatches spattered the weedy pavement as more animals fled.
In the distance, the suburb's periphery was already falling to agriculture. Its time was short. Soon the houses would be plowed under and a perfect blanket of SoyPRO would cover it. The suburb's history, as silly and transient as it had been, would be lost, churned under by the march of energy development. No loss, from the standpoint of value, but still, some part of Lalji cringed at the thought of time erased. He spent too much time trying to recall the India of his boyhood to take pleasure in the disappearance. He headed back down the dusty stairs to Creo.
'See anyone?'
Lalji shook his head. Creo grunted and shot at another cheshire, narrowly missing. He was good, but the nearly
