The man pointed to a sack on the ground. 'There, my luggage.'
'What about the computer?' Lalji asked.
Bowman frowned at the machine. 'No. I don't need it.'
'But it's valuable.'
'What I need, I carry in my head. Everything in that machine came from me. My fat burned into knowledge. My calories pedaled into data analysis.' He scowled. 'Sometimes, I look at that computer and all I see is myself whittled away. I was a fat man once.' He shook his head emphatically. 'I won't miss it.'
Lalji began to protest but Creo startled and whipped out his spring gun. 'Someone else is here.'
Lalji saw her even as Creo spoke: a girl squatting in the corner, hidden by shadow, a skinny, staring, freckled creature with stringy brown hair. Creo lowered his spring gun with a sigh.
Bowman beckoned. 'Come out, Tazi. These are the men I told you about.'
Lalji wondered how long she had been sitting in the cellar darkness, waiting. She had the look of a creature who had almost molded with the basement: her hair lank, her dark eyes nearly swallowed by their pupils. He turned on Bowman. 'I thought there was only you.'
Bowman's pleased smile faded. 'Will you go back because of it?'
Lalji eyed the girl. Was she a lover? His child? A feral adoptee? He couldn't guess. The girl slipped her hand into the old man's. Bowman patted it reassuringly. Lalji shook his head. 'She is too many. You, I have agreed to take. I prepared a way to carry you, to hide you from boarders and inspections. Her,' he waved at the girl, 'I did not agree to. It is risky to take someone like yourself, and now you wish to compound the danger with this girl? No.' He shook his head emphatically. 'It cannot be done.'
'What difference does it make?' Bowman asked. 'It costs you nothing. The current will carry us all. I have food enough for both of us.' He went over to the pantry and started to pull down glass jars of beans, lentils, corn, and rice. 'Look, here.'
Lalji said, 'We have more than enough food.'
Bowman made a face. 'SoyPRO, I suppose?'
'Nothing wrong with SoyPRO,' Creo said.
The old man grinned and held up a jar of green beans floating in brine. 'No. Of course not. But a man likes variety.' He began filling his bag with more jars, letting them clink carefully. He caught Creo's snort of disgust and smiled, ingratiating suddenly. 'For lean times, if nothing else.' He dumped more jars of grains into the sack.
Lalji chopped the air with his hand. 'Your food is not the issue. Your girl is the issue, and she is a risk!'
Bowman shook his head. 'No risk. No one is looking for her. She can travel in the open, even.'
'No. You must leave her. I will not take her.'
The old man looked down at the girl, uncertain. She gazed back, extricated her hand from his. 'I'm not afraid. I can live here still. Like before.'
Bowman frowned, thinking. Finally, he shook his head. 'No.' He faced Lalji. 'If she cannot go, then I cannot. She fed me when I worked. I deprived her of calories for my research when they should have gone to her. I owe her too much. I will not leave her to the wolves of this place.' He placed his hands on her shoulders and placed her ahead of him, between himself and Lalji.
Creo made a face of disgust. 'What difference does it make? Just bring her. We've got plenty of space.'
Lalji shook his head. He and Bowman stared at one another across the cellar. Creo said, 'What if he gives us the computer? We could call it payment.'
Lalji shook his head stubbornly. 'No. I do not care about the money. It is too dangerous to bring her.'
Bowman laughed. 'Then why come all this way if you are afraid? Half the calorie companies want to kill me and you talk about risk?'
Creo frowned. 'What's he talking about?'
Bowman's eyebrows went up in surprise. 'You haven't told your partner about me?'
Creo looked from Lalji to Bowman and back. 'Lalji?'
Lalji took a deep breath, his eyes still locked on Bowman. 'They say he can break the calorie monopolies. That he can pirate SoyPRO.'
Creo boggled for a moment. 'That's impossible!'
Bowman shrugged. 'For you, perhaps. But for a knowledgeable man? Willing to dedicate his life to DNA helixes? More than possible. If one is willing to burn the calories for such a project, to waste energy on statistics and genome analysis, to pedal a computer through millions upon millions of cycles. More than possible.' He wrapped his arms around his skinny girl and held her to him. He smiled at Lalji. 'So. Do we have any agreement?'
Creo shook his head, puzzling. 'I thought you had a money plan, Lalji, but this…' He shook his head again. 'I don't get it. How the hell do we make money off this?'
Lalji gave Creo a dirty look. Bowman smiled, patiently waiting. Lalji stifled an urge to seize the lantern and throw it in his face, such a confident man, so sure of himself, so loyal…
He turned abruptly and headed for the stairs. 'Bring the computer, Creo. If his girl makes any trouble, we dump them both in the river, and still keep his knowledge.'
Lalji remembered his father pushing back his thali, pretending he was full when dal had barely stained the steel plate. He remembered his mother pressing an extra bite onto his own. He remembered Gita, watching, silent, and then all of them unfolding their legs and climbing off the family bed, bustling around the hovel, ostentatiously ignoring him as he consumed the extra portion. He remembered roti in his mouth, dry like ashes, and forcing himself to swallow anyway.
He remembered planting. Squatting with his father in desert heat, yellow dust all around them, burying seeds they had stored away, saved when they might have been eaten, kept when they might have made Gita fat and marriageable, his father smiling, saying, 'These seeds will make hundreds of new seeds and then we will all eat well.'
'How many seeds will they make?' Lalji had asked.
And his father had laughed and spread his arms fully wide, and seemed so large and great with his big white teeth and red and gold earrings and crinkling eyes as he cried, 'Hundreds! Thousands if you pray!' And Lalji had prayed, to Ganesha and Lakshmi and Krishna and Rani Sati and Ram and Vishnu, to every god he could think of, joining the many villagers who did the same as he poured water from the well over tiny seeds and sat guard in the darkness against the possibility that the precious grains might be uprooted in the night and transported to some other farmer's field.
He sat every night while cold stars turned overhead, watching the seed rows, waiting, watering, praying, waiting through the days until his father finally shook his head and said it was no use. And yet still he had hoped, until at last he went out into the field and dug up the seeds one by one, and found them already decomposed, tiny corpses in his hand, rotted. As dead in his palm as the day he and his father had planted them.
He had crouched in the darkness and eaten the cold dead seeds, knowing he should share, and yet unable to master his hunger and carry them home. He wolfed them down alone, half-decayed and caked with dirt: his first true taste of PurCal.
In the light of early morning, Lalji bathed in the most sacred river of his adopted land. He immersed himself in the Mississippi's silty flow, cleansing the weight of sleep, making himself clean before his gods. He pulled himself back aboard, slick with water, his underwear dripping off his sagging bottom, his brown skin glistening, and toweled himself dry on the deck as he looked across the water to where the rising sun cast gold flecks on the river's rippled surface.
He finished drying himself and dressed in new clean clothes before going to his shrine. He lit incense in front of the gods, placed U-Tex and SoyPRO before the tiny carved idols of Krishna and his lute, benevolent Lakshmi, and elephant-headed Ganesha. He knelt in front of the idols, prostrated himself, and prayed.
They had floated south on the river's current, winding easily through bright fall days and watching as leaves changed and cool weather came on. Tranquil skies had arched overhead and mirrored on the river, turning the mud of the Mississippi's flow into shining blue, and they had followed that blue road south, riding the great arterial flow of the river as creeks and tributaries and the linked chains of barges all crowded in with them and gravity did the work of carrying them south.
He was grateful for their smooth movement downriver. The first of the locks were behind them, and having watched the sniffer dogs ignore Bowman's hiding place under the decking, Lalji was beginning to hope that the trip would be as easy as Shriram had claimed. Nonetheless, he prayed longer and harder each day as IP patrols shot
