Crescent City Rhapsody

PRELUDE Swiftly; With Gravity Marie | New Orleans | 2012

Marie always knew she would be murdered. Not knowing the details kept her on edge for many years.

In a way, it was a relief when it happened.

Involved in stock reports, Marie felt rather than saw the sky’s gradual blackening; welcomed the slight breath of breeze on her sweat-sheened skin: heard thunder rumble with the distant, primal pleasure she always felt during late summer when storms deluged New Orleans daily.

There was little traffic on her small bricked side street this time of day. As usual, the beat of desultory blues rose from street musicians to her office on the fourth floor of the town house that had been in her family for generations. After their usual noontime skirmish, the appetising smells of hot spices and garlic vanquished the sweetish, sickly smell of spilled beer that cooked up from the bricks around 9 a.m. like steam. Since the corner restaurant had been there for over a century, and the beer for longer than that, these smells were a part of the cycle of the day for Marie and, she liked to think, for a long line of Maries.

Her immediate background was one of wealth and opportunity. With the coming age of nanotechnology, Marie didn’t see why this could not be the lot of all.

Some disputed that such an age was coming. They didn’t know that it was already upon them. The public was told that molecular manipulation was a distant pipe dream. Their ignorance, in Marie’s opinion, was deliberately fostered to make it easy for those in control to shape the future as they pleased. Nanotech research and advances were the property of the military and of their quasi-private research arms. Stealing classified information from such places was defined as espionage.

Marie’s grandmère had raised her to believe that education and information were basic human necessities—after food and shelter. And Grandmère drilled into Marie that she had to be better than her own mother, a wild teenager who metamorphed into a beautiful jet-setter and died of an overdose when Marie was ten. But like her Grandmère, whose rum smuggling had established the basis of their fortune, Marie quickly realized that she would have to run with her lights off in dangerous waters. If she had to operate an amateur spy network in order to further the dreams she had inherited along with her money, so be it.

But Marie didn’t have to depend on foreign governments to provide her with enemies. She had plenty right at home. A recent murder trial had put away one of the most powerful members of the old-boy network, clearing her playing field considerably. The Times-Picayune ferreted out the fact that she personally paid Sharbell Dighton III. the attorney who accomplished this tricky feat, a small fortune to represent the victim.

Money was no object—at least not as long as Marie continued to invest wisely. She had a knack for it, and it was a necessity. It was her responsibility to take care of her people. And, according to Grandmère, dead for ten years now, all oppressed people.

It was not always easy to discharge these responsibilities.

Even wearing shorts and a halter top, Marie sweltered in the muggy afternoon as she sat low to the floor in a canvas sling folding chair, her favorite seat when working. Sipping strong, sweet coffee watered by melting ice, she absently noticed that the rough bricks of the wall behind her workspace lacked their usual slice of sun.

A visitor to her high-tech loft might have been surprised at its elegant hard-edged simplicity, but visitors were few. Rare tropical plants flourished in Chinese pots. French doors leading to a balcony stood open. An aromatic herbal scent pervaded the air, leavened by hot wind that banged the green shutters hooked back loosely against the streetside bricks. Though Hugo, her bodyguard and longtime friend, hated her practice of leaving windows and doors open, she could not stand being separated from the weather. At college in Chicago twenty years earlier, she had left her windows open during the coldest nights, a practice that created a daily argument which soon fell into a mannered sequence of feints and parries. But today Hugo wasn’t here to play the game.

Marie’s computer screen was an arc of about sixty degrees of flat silverish flexible material resting on the floor, a crescent of information. The apex was about four feet high. Marie like to keep a lot of information visible. Sometimes, like today, it looked like the jumble of a messy desktop, a dada collage of bright colors and odd shapes. She held the keypad on her lap. The top border of the screen shone with voudoun symbols: a snake, a drum, and the spirit of love, represented by concentric nesting hearts. Not that she knew anything about voudoun, though her name and heritage were intimately related to the practice. She was not superstitious; her rather scattered scientific and mathematical background precluded that. She had no truck with her family background of voudoun, though her grandmère, a true believer in the hybrid of African religions and Catholicism, had sternly tried to bring her around until her dying day. The images on Marie’s screen had been designed as a gift by a believing friend, of which there were many in New Orleans, and she used them because they were beautiful.

The path beneath the snake branched to include files on every person of any importance in New Orleans—and many who might seem to lack any distinguishing qualities. This information had been committed to computer only in the past few decades. Before that, such facts had been held within the minds of a long line of Marie Laveaus.

New Orleans had never been as Marie envisioned it would be in the future. Grandmère’s stories emphasized that there was no golden past to return to, unless one idealized New Orlean’s continental origins. Marie could see the possibility of something better—something completely different—glimmering in the distance. She was often described as cold and ruthless by her enemies. And perhaps that was true. She didn’t mind. The ability to inspire fear was a necessary adjunct to power.

A stock trading program ran on auto in the upper-right-hand corner, using the latest complexity-based algorithms. Although she had a stranglehold on local politicians that she was certainly not going to abandon, Marie had diversified from her family’s traditions. Her wealth now came from discreet investments in the most promising of new small companies specializing in some essential facet of nanotech, though generally the application was not called nanotech, but by a much more specific name. Her holdings were an international patchwork, for one country might ban what another allowed. Since around 2005, the possibility and dangers of true self-replication had been taken much more seriously, and every possible avenue that might lead to such a development was closely scrutinized—and often snapped up and classified. But because this process was usually accomplished by appointed government committees, and because developers had powerful lobbies, many loopholes were naturally overlooked. Over the last few years, Marie had observed a pattern emerging that perhaps few people had the time or inclination to fully realize, one based not on scientific development itself, but on the commerce spun from it. She believed that it wouldn’t be much longer before self-replication, the simultaneously pursued and feared watershed, would become a reality.

Once that happened, all bets were off. The floodgates would be loosed. Control over matter, on a very discreet scale, would be possible. But it seemed just as likely that molecules that could create others like themselves might engender a chain reaction until all available matter was used up, and the Earth and all living creatures were reduced to simple lifeless forms of matter.

It was a terrifying vision.

Yet, unlike most people—at least those who ventured an opinion in a public venue—Marie did not fear the development of a viable nanotech. She took a keen interest in it. There would be some point, she believed, that humanity would pass a point of no return, beyond which everything would be unimaginably changed.

She planned to be there. And she planned to take her city with her.

Marie looked away from her stock information, the varied ways in which sales, calls, and puts were progressing. She enlarged several pictures of her daughter and set them in motion so that Petite Marie danced, stuck out her tongue, played quietly in the corner of this very room, unaware that her actions were being saved.

Beauty had blessed—or cursed—most of the women in Marie’s family, quadroons and mistresses and then the free businesswomen who had laid the foundation for Marie’s present fortune. One of them had been the sister of the famous second Marie Laveau, voudoun queen of New Orleans, and the name had made its way down through several rings of cousins before alighting, solitarily, on Marie.

Until, that is, her own daughter, Petite Marie, had been born.

Marie always felt that her own face was too strong for beauty, her nose too straight and long, her chin too determined, her eyes too clear of the romantic rubbish that had ruined her mother’s life. But the ancestral pattern of beauty was reasserted in Petite Marie. This was quite obvious, even though she was only five years old. Her dark eyes were round and large; her skin, the color of gold-kissed mahogany, held a constant deep pink blush over her cheekbones. Her irascible hair flowed in a black kinky stream down her back, resisting combs, causing a daily temper of screams and threats. She was wild, merry, a delight…

And she should have arrived in Paris by now. Marie blanked the videos and rubbed a cramp at the back of her neck. She could easily verify her daughter’s physical location. She could beep up Petite Marie, or Hugo, or Al. She could check the satellite position of the jet, her own private jet. She restrained herself. Al, her husband, was greeting their daughter. He was giving her presents. Too many presents. Al’s nasty yappy little white dog was bouncing around like a Ping-Pong ball, adding to the din. Soon they’d remember Mom, staying behind to work. Alone. Any minute—any minute they would call.

At least Hugo was with Petite Marie and would remain during the long visit she would have with her father. Being a dwarf did not seem to handicap Hugo’s ability to do anything, including being a bodyguard nonpareil.

Marie clipped back the braids dangling in her face with a brusque gesture as she studied a constant feed of red, green, and yellow lines tangled in one quadrant of her screen. The lines paused; knotted in an odd rhythm. Scrying these signs was like watching the surface of the sea, divining not only that there were fish below, but their size, depth, color, direction of travel. This twinge signaled something different. And therefore important.

She called up specifics. Someone—somewhere—had sucked down a big chunk of a rather interesting small company working on artificial, trainable neural pathways. The company was called Consciousnets. She glanced at their annual report, then asked for their bills of lading for the last six months, quickly analyzed the raw materials, and told two different analysis programs to figure out who was behind this purchase.

Leaning forward, suddenly eager, she set up the process that would acquire snips of Consciousnets from here and there, gradually, in a process that might take hours or days and initially be distributed to a range of buyers with no discernible connection.

Sheer gauzy curtains billowed into the room as a gust of wind brought her back to the present. Why didn’t they call? Al’s stubborn face, that face she’d found so attractive years ago and still did, damn him, appeared on the corner of her screen as she spoke his name. She almost said, “Call,” but hesitated. No, she’d give them a few more minutes before pestering them.

Al wouldn’t live in New Orleans. He claimed it was too dangerous. Marie thought that was just an excuse; he was simply homesick. All his communication to her since he had returned to Paris had the same content. She could almost hear his delightful accent as she glanced again at his smiling brown face: I’ve lived in your country; now you live in mine. Come to Paris, to my worn, pleasant rooms piled high with books, forgo your heritage, honor our marriage, become civilized and leave your obsession with the future in a haze of flowering spring trees and strolls along the Seine and my delightful cooking.

His cooking! The lazybones had given up his trendy new restaurant on Royal Street once they’d married. He had the staying power of a midge. He always hoped to lure her to Paris; she saw that now. He pined and moped so that she sent him back, for a month’s vacation that turned into half a year, and then he and Petite Marie pined and moped for one another. Well, they’d have a good time without her. Marie had work to do. And unfortunately he was right about the danger. But that was everywhere. It followed her. It would follow her anywhere. Her family was relatively safe—as long as she wasn’t around.

The brief jump of a fake siren below her window startled her, then the sound stopped abruptly. Just kids playing. Uneasy, she rose, crossed the dark polished wooden floor, strewn with Petite Marie’s toys, kicked aside a puzzle piece with her bare foot, and stepped out onto the balcony. Marie ignored the cozy tableau of wrought-iron chairs ranged around the small table where she took her morning coffee and grasped the railing so tightly her knuckles whitened. She should have gone with her daughter. She hadn’t realized that she would miss her so much. Tall palms in massive pots bent in the wind, their fronds clicking. A riot of red geraniums and yellow hibiscus were sheltered by an ivied brick wall. For a second Marie scanned the street for the bulletproof limo that would bring Petite Marie home from school, then caught herself. Just as well the little one had left for a while. She had started to complain about Hugo sitting at the back of the classroom each day. It was an elite school and the administration had insisted that, with all the wealthy people sending their children there, their security was already fine, thank you. Money, as usual, had prevailed. Some parents objected to the bodyguard as an everpresent reminder that violence could burst into their children’s classroom: others welcomed him.

Well, surely she could stand being away from her child for a month or so. Though danger to both of them would be lifelong, so much so that she’d put off having a child for many years, she had lately been able to make certain provisions that very few people in the world could afford. Provisions for alternatives that very few even knew existed, pulled together as they were from so many sources…

Marie took a deep breath. She’d give them another five minutes before she called. She watched the street show below as she had all her life, though today it held little interest. Two jugglers, in shimmering purple and yellow clown suits and masks sparkling with obsolete computer circuits, spun pins through the air in intricate rhythm. Their huge mirrored shoes flashed with the last ray of sunlight as black clouds boiled across the sky. The French Quarter was locked into a curiously uneven anachronism, based solely on the desires of those who lived there. Solar cars, where limited street access existed, were fine; they were noiseless. Other exterior trappings of technology, such as satellite dishes, were banned. On the other hand, she was free to land a small helicopter on her specially reinforced roof any time of the day or night. She could pretty much do as she pleased, being on the board of just about everything imaginable and having plenty of money to contribute—and plenty of secrets to reveal should the lure of money prove inadequate.

A blast of cold wind hit her, and on either side of her head, massive hanging pots of ferns pirouetted in unison, a row of dancers schooled by the wind’s wild grace. Though the crowd around them was dispersing beneath the first fat drops of rain, the clowns juggled on intrepidly.

Maybe she would go to Paris. Al was quite wily, in his way. She smiled despite her worry. Could she hold the invisible reins of the city from halfway around the world? Al thought her despotic, old-fashioned. No, she told him earnestly, these are my people; this is my home. I have great plans for my city.

Your city! She could hear his snort even now.

A razor’s edge of rain hissed up the narrow street, chilling her with sweet cold wind and ozone. It swept across her tin roof with a pounding roar and steamed briefly on the street bricks below. The two black musicians dashed for cover, leaving rain-sheened chairs. Tourists huddled beneath store awnings.

The phone’s ring was faint, but she turned, gladness blossoming. It must be them. Petite Marie was safe in Al’s Paris flat.

Then a glint from the street caught her vision, an odd motion of one of the clowns. She paused because he was pointing one of the pins at her… and the whoop of the fake siren filled the air.

Paralyzed, Marie had a second to experience her heart pounding in terror, heard her own cry in the roar of the storm as if it were that of someone else, felt rough bricks skin her face and arms as she spun to the floor of the balcony from the force of the bullets. Above her one of the fern pots exploded in a shower of dirt and shards.

She heard the soft beep that signaled the shutdown of her vital functions, which would call them… even now, they were on the way. A minute, no more.

Among her ragged thoughts a thread of gratefulness spun briefly— at least Petite Marie was safe. The timing was perfect.

Then she died.