Cutlass low-rider with curb sensors like catfish barbells and a young but obese Tejano hunched over the tiny steering wheel. Bet it could one-eighty on a peso at sixty-five. Well, I’m just an old square bourgie fart. Except why should I hurry? I least of all people ever to walk the earth. The Rapture’s coming and it’s todo por mi culpa. He zinged around an orange Yellow Van Lines truck and back into the right lane. Probably heading into the No-Go Zone, I thought. Some monster delirio. It’s not a party unless you burn the place down at the end. Well, I agree. Have fun, hermano. Maybe I’ll drop by on the way back from MP’s. One of the odder things about the No-Go Zone was that even though some places were still clocking in at over 40 curies per square kilometer, since it covered over four thousand square miles, and there were about four hundred different roads leading into it, and since squatters don’t much care about long-term health anyway, the police speculated that the population of the NGZ area had actually gone up since the Horror. I’d been there a couple of times to buy fake identity papers and it was actually kind of great, a whole sort of lawless Pirates’ Nassau Town with a smorgasbord of meth, horse, crank, dogfighting, and preteen BJs, but actually not all that dangerous because M13 and a couple of the smaller gangs wanted to keep the carriage trade and policed the place themselves. Next, since it was a personalized feed, I got the malacological news: Sun-Min Hsu and Tobi Ramadan had described a species of nudibranch from the Line Islands area that they said might be eusocial, that is, divided into castes like ants and bees, although I couldn’t imagine how that could be possible, and I actually do know a little bit about opisthobranches. Some people think nudibranchs are the world’s most beautiful living things, with all the extruded gills and polyps in Fantasia-Phiokol colors, and other people think they’re the ugliest, and most people haven’t heard of them at all. Although to some other critter-to a lobster, say- they probably look pretty drab. Anyway, they have some unusual characteristics, including the almost unique ability to devour their prey and, instead of digesting all of it, incorporate some of its useful cells-cnidarians’ stinger cells, for instance, or photosynthesizing algae-into their own bodies. I’d miss them. Except of course I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t exist. And, experientially anyway, not existing is exactly equivalent to never having existed. So really we didn’t have a problem. Anyway, after the Jedcentric news, for some reason the car decided I’d heard all the news and now wanted to listen to a feed called Last Age of Heroes, which seemed to be having a Stones/Byrds/Doors festival. Debuting at Marker 31, DHSMV had initiated another decade of postdeconstruction on the granny laneINJURE/KILL A WORKER-$7,500 + 15 YEARS, a sign said, so temptingly that I couldn’t imagine anyone resisting the offer. At the Kissimmee exit I voice-texted Marena that I’d be there in ten minutes. Why give her any more time to stage the place? See what she’s really wearing, doing, reading, smoking, fucking, fisting, et ceteris paribus ad foetidus hepaticum. Right?
Marena’s house was just outside the south city limit of Orlando on Orchid Island, one of quite a few residential patches that weren’t only not abandoned, but were making a good-neighborly effort to muddle through as though things were normal. The faux-wrought-iron gate was open, but the dude came out of the guardhouse, made sure I was really me, and he was really polite about it. Classy. I tip-tired through the two S — curves of a long pink-concrete driveway flanked with close-packed pepper trees. There was a three-car garage, but Marena’s Cherokee was parked on the side of the big circle, with two other dark SUVs behind it, and I parked in the front of the line.
At some point, I forget when, Marena’d told me that Walt had built her house during Epcot’s early grand Utopian phase, and I’d thought she’d been exaggerating, but it turned out to be true, and the place was a nearly exact replica of some Frank Lloyd Wright house or other. From this side it looked a lot like the palaces at Uxmal, which is a Yucatec Maya city that was a big capital in the AD 900s, and which, incidentally, had been ruled by some of my ancestors, the Xiws.
I scrumbled out. Crack. Ow. Stiff. Getting old. Damn, it was stuffy. I repocketed my wallet and phone into my shirt and left my jacket on the passenger seat. Okay. Out of habit, I locked the doors. I looked up at NNE +30 degrees to see if I could spot Comet Ixchel but there was too much smaze. Okay, here goes. I toed on the microvibration, pushed away from the car, and skated-sorry, Sleeked™-across the cement. Sleeking felt like you were doing something between ice skating and old-time four-wheel roller skating, but since your feet were flat on the ground there was a sense like you were on a buttered Teflon tray. Basically, the deal was that the treads vibrated at a very high frequency, so they’d slip around even on an ordinary road surface, and then, when the vibe wasn’t on, the action of walking on them generated electricity that they’d store for later, so there weren’t any big battery packs. I guess if they’d come out when I was seven I would have gone monkey over them, but right now they weren’t plugging my wound. Instinctively-already-I cut off the vibration with my big toes and came to a hard stop at the single doorstep. The car must have rung an alarm because before I got to the door a medium-tall Latino guy opened it.
“… Uh, Jed,” he said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said. It was Tony Sic.
(4)
“Hi,” I mumbled again. “Tony. Hi.” At first I hadn’t recognized him because he’d gotten a vicious crew cut. He was in shorts and a blue-and-white-striped Merida Futbol Club shirt with a big number 28. Huh, I thought. Huh. Wonder what’s going on. He kind of stared at me. I felt a twinge of that old-rival feeling.
He asked how I was. I said better and asked him how he was. He said something. He seemed nervouser than usual. Were he and Marena having a thing? I wondered. She’d said she was getting married to somebody-but no way, she can’t, can’t, can’t have meant she was getting married to Tony Sic. That was too ghastly to contemplate, and I’d been contemplating some ghastly stuff lately. Although why so ghastly, really? I didn’t have anything against the guy. We were sort of competitive colleagues with the Game and I’d been terribly jealous of him when I’d thought he’d get to get downloaded into 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Maya ahau, instead of me, and then when I’d gotten selected to go naturally I’d felt all guilty. He wasn’t my William Wilson, but his story was quite a bit like mine. He was a Maya speaker, he’d gotten into academics and worked with Taro, and he’d even spent some time working for one of the CPRs, the one in Ixcan that isn’t the same as Ix. Be nice to him, I thought. Remember, you’re going to kill him. Along with everybody else, of course, but still.
Eh, pues. I stepped into the dry frigidity. I’d never gotten used to the benthic depth of air conditioning in El Norte. And never would. Sic motioned me to edge past him in the narrow entryway and I started to, but then he rattled a sort of nonobjective coatrack, and I said I’d keep my jacket on and there was a sort of awkward moment. We after-youed into a little sort of vestibule. There was a Geiger tube lying on the sort of radiator housing thing, charging from a big hazardous extension tentacle, and I had to get my feet over that, and then there was an orange SleekerBoard-it had kind of runners on the bottom like on a sled, and with what looked like a pretty heavy battery on its undercarriage, which I was sure Warren would deal with in the iterations to come, or would have, rather- which I guess belonged to Max, leaning precariously against the concrete-block doorjamb, and I avoided that, and then there were all the shoes, and I got around those and took three steps and then remembered it was an Asian- style house and went back. Instead of having laces, the Sleekers were spring-loaded to sort of intelligently release your foot when you toe a thingy on the side. I parked them next to sextet of Sic’s big Diadora futbol shoes. Sic seemed to feel like he was being rude watching me but didn’t want to turn away from me, either, so he sort of backed away into the other side of the house, which didn’t seem really like him. I got a spider-sense that there were other people around. Ashley 3, probably-Marena’s housekeeper-and maybe her creepy driver with the ridiculously would-be scary name, Grgur.
“I’m in the orifice,” Marena’s voice called. Maybe she’d forgotten that I’d never been here before. Except that wasn’t like her. I looked back at Sic. He kind of indicated that it was to the right. I went to the right, across pseudoglyphish cast flagstones, through a stony living room with a sort of squashed cathedral ceiling-maybe they call it a hut ceiling? — and through a high trapezoidal door into a dimly lit room with a big table smattered with monitors and hard drives. There were big French doors on the far side with a dark garden and a narrow pool glowing phthalocyanine blue. Something stretched up and Whoa.
(5)
