Idolon by Mark Budz Read Free Book Online Page B

over the square dash cut by his glasses. "You two playin' some kind of spit game?"
    "Been busy. That's all." He shifted his attention to a Miles Davis poster, preserved behind thin glassine.
    "I always liked that gurl." Lagrante grinned. "Nice hips. She gave me a call. You believe that?"
    Pelayo's gaze resettled on Lagrante. "When?"
    "This morning. Wanted to know if I could strip some corporate-secured 'skin. Or point her to someeone who could."
    "Strip? Why?"
    "She wouldn't tell me. I was wondering if you knew what was going on."
    "What did you say?"
    "I asked if she wanted to go clubbin' with me. Maybe check out my embouchure in return for my services."
    _______
    Stepping from the food court onto the street, Pelayo hunched his shoulders against the afternoon tumult of delivery trucks, stevedores, and desalination workers. His nerves flickered. He couldn't head home. Not yet. He couldn't sit still. He needed to move, to go someplace, anywhere, even if it was in circles.
    He needed to think.
    He caught a bus that slotted into the Nimitz maggrail. The articulated train took him past the South Bay desalination plants and hydroelectric wave turbines, Sausalito windmills, and finally the loose archipelago of Bodego Bay oil platforms that had been converted to aqua farms and hydrogen extraction plants.
    Pelayo leaned his head against the bubble window next to him. Combed unsteady fingers through the uncomfortably long hair of his new pseudoself. Listened to the muted sigh of wind through the tinted diamond.
    Lagrante couldn't be trusted. Pelayo knew that. The rip artist would do and say whatever it took to keep him from going to another black-market philmhead or bootlegger. They'd been doing business for two years. So far the arrangement had worked out well. Pelayo provided Lagrantewith direct source-code access to the 'skin and the philm he tested. In return, Lagrante gave him a cut of whatever he got for the pirated ware.
    But if Lagrante couldn't rip a copy of the philm, all bets were off. He had a feeling something had changed. Pelayo could no longer count on Lagrante to keep his best interests at heart.
    Or Marta's.
     
     
     

9
     
     
    Marta stepped from the magrail onto a platform jammed with agricultural workers from the hydroponics farms, greenhouses, warehouses, packaging plants, and distribution centers around the Pajaro Beach Flats.
    Her nostrils flared, taking in the smell of sweat, brine, leaky hydrogen fuel cells, rotten 'vegetables, uncollected garbage, newly baked bread, resignation, hope, and despair. She had grown up here; she hated this place and loved it. Like everyone else, she vowed to leave, yet always returned. Every path out seemed to lead back, each step part of a convoluted series of M ö bius-strip events.
    Marked by the crumbling smokestack of an old, coal-fueled power plant, the Flats extended from Moss Landing in the south to Watsonville in the north. A hundred years ago, crop irrigation wells along the coast had leached the soil dry and saltwater incursion from the Monterey Bay had poisoned the once-fertile farmland.
    As Marta walked home, a cool breeze off the Bay carried a whiff of raw sewage across the daily bustle of beggars, fast-food vendors, warewolves, and pimps. The stink seemed to be coming from the big landfill on the northernmost edge of the Flats. In the course of excavating the sedimentary layers of old tires, scrap metal, and nonbiodegradable plastic, someone must have broken a waste treatment line.
    Through the haze, Marta could just make out the canyon-walled streets cut into the landfill-like trenches in some huge archaeological dig. The dwellings there were subterrane'an — a warren of tunnels and rooms excavated from garbage and butttressed with sheet metal, rusted box springs, disscarded refrigerators, washing machines, stoves, and other kitchen appliances.
    South of the Trenches the residences moved above ground, a hodgepodge of motor homes, semi-trailers, Quonset huts, and