Crescent City Rhapsody

The Ellington Effect; Trading Sixes New Orleans | July 2039

Marie, on her first distant glimpse of a fifteen-foot-high float of herself assembled from black roses, burst into laughter. Hysterical, gut-busting laughter that had her doubled over and gasping. She leaned against the door frame of the balcony wiping away tears. She figured that the humor-inducing properties of the float would last a long time. Humor was rare, she’d found, without Hugo. Her doses of mandatory amusement resembled acts of desperation more than anything else.

The giant rose Marie made its way up St. Anne Street from the river and turned west on Chartres and passed just beneath her. She waved, and a mighty cheer arose from the crowd.

The float turned toward the river again. Evidently they intended to go around and around the square and fête her. The Queen of Secession! Queen of an Independent New Orleans!

Like hell. Secession was a hollow victory: What was there to secede from? It was simply a gesture of necessary pride in the face of what was happening to Atlanta and any other city that didn’t bow to whoever was in power in the disintegrating capital and conform to the increasingly strange demands that issued from various agencies. There were strong rumors that Washington, D.C., was no longer viable, and that whatever was done in the government’s name had no backing at all. Congress had either fled or was now transformed by some plague, along with the rest of Washington. Certainly, the troops stampeding through the South were not Americans, though in the beginning some units of the National Guard were mobilized. But now, apparently, the National Guard had turned on the International Federation forces. U.S. military forces had refused to cooperate with the IF despite their treaties and for a while she had hoped for rescue from them, but realized that the Articles of Secession might have confused matters somewhat. Local militias were being formed to fight the International Federation, but there was little central organization.

And now she was being feted by the people of New Orleans. She didn’t deserve their trust. She couldn’t deliver. This grand Carnival was dust in her mouth. It was not that she minded taking the blame for disappointing everyone, for leading them down some sort of garden path. But the light she’d envisioned for so long was swallowed by a morass of doubt.

They were trapped in New Orleans. They would never get to Crescent City.

Marie collapsed onto a chair on the intricate wrought-iron balcony. She had taken over the Cabildo and the Presbytère, venerable centuries’-old buildings flanking both sides of St. Louis Cathedral and looking out onto Jackson Square, and beyond that, the Mississippi. This was her operations headquarters.

Since taking Weinstein’s potion, Marie had little need of sleep. She was everywhere, on fire, nervously prodding Harold, Kalina, Jason, her legions of volunteers to work faster, better, leaner. She was a rack of bones and plagued by strange visual effects, but she didn’t care. She could work—and work hard.

And it had paid off. Crescent City was ready, bastioned by a volunteer army, a well-worked-out initiation plan for the new citizens, already functioning for the few boatloads that had already settled.

Now was the moment for which Marie had worked and planned: the public unveiling, the celebration, the exodus. People had begun crowding into the French Quarter weeks ago for this two-week Carnival that would culminate in tonight’s feast, the Festival of St. James and a celebration for Ogou, a voudoun god. Tomorrow the ferry was to have begun the first of its weekly runs to Crescent City. Those from outlying areas had come to the festival. Marie had been planning on revealing the existence of Crescent City to everyone, along with the choice of going there. So far, it was a secret. An open secret, perhaps, but she preferred that the government not have any kind of hard information about it—particularly not its location.

This moment—this celebration—was the gateway to all that she hoped would happen in the next few decades—a growing understanding of nanotechnology, as well as El Silencio and its many aspects, including that of the strange children generated in its inception. She suspected that Jason might be one. He was the right age. She had not mentioned it to him. Why spook the kid? He was astonishingly helpful.

Kalina, Zion, and many of the old Freestate children who now worked on the many facets of Crescent City had also come for the celebration. The nanobiologists and engineers had stayed behind to make sure that all would be running smoothly when the first wave of settlers arrived. When word came of the siege of Atlanta, Marie sent a frantic message to them to tell everyone to stay at the floating city.

Too late. The day after the boat from Crescent City arrived, the Mississippi was blockaded above and below with warships.

Just after dawn this morning, the ancient cannon from the museum had been used to shoot down a blimp hovering above flooded Algiers, the town across the river. Binocular observation ascertained that a snowy substance was drifting from it.

Marie feared the worst—the plague that her intelligence sources told her was enveloping the South in nanotech zones. Her zombie plague, sharpened by generations of sophistication; multiplied in volume a millionfold.

The night before a flotilla of personal watercrafts had been launched from New Orleans on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, only to be machine-gunned and sunk by the IF. Fifty or more people had been massacred on the other side of the Canal Street Wall earlier in the day after they emerged in IF territory. The IF was determined to wreak punishment on them for “intent to misuse molecular manipulation devices,” illegal under international treaties and grounds for swift and immediate action. It looked as if their ultimate intent was to draft everyone into a vast IF zombie army.

The Marie Laveau float approached her balcony again. A roar moved down the street, following the float, and apexed past the balcony from which Marie watched, waving again and trying to smile. It was a roar of approval. A roar of approval issuing from a mob of drunks, of course, but it was approval nonetheless; heart-deep and without reservation.

And thanks to her, they were now prisoners of a BioCity over which they had no deep control. The BioCity wall that had been grown around the city’s core, from Canal Street to Lake Pontchartrain on the west and down Esplanade on the east, was also a pretty effective mechanism for keeping them all contained, along with the warships.

But there was no need for IF to stage a battle. New Orleans had no military capabilities whatsoever. Containment and infection with the plague of choice were all that was needed. If Hugo had returned with what he went to get, the picture would be vastly different. The city would be capable of manufacturing all kinds of weapons. Marie was aware that some people were forming a militia, with headquarters on Bourbon Street, and collecting all the weapons in the city, but she didn’t have any hope that that would come to anything, and she was trying to discourage them. They would just be slaughtered.

A marching band blared past. Kids yelled, “Throw me something, mister!”

Marie stepped back into the coolness of the stone rooms. Though crammed with the latest generation of DNA computers, the original personality of the spaces was so strong that these present-day infringements seemed negligible as dust. The wooden floor gleamed, covered here and there by worn oriental rugs. Groups of comfortable chairs and sofas surrounded low tables like oases, and off to one side Marie’s long war table glowed with a pale light, its informational surface flat; empty. She’d told everyone to take the day off. Have fun. They all knew, of course, that this might be their last day of life as they knew it. Surely that sentiment was fueling the celebration now at hand. Still, she knew that they trusted her to pull things off—somehow. That was the way she was. She inspired confidence and trust. Erroneous, deadly confidence and trust. Her hubris would destroy them all. There would be no one left to go to the floating city.

A model of the present BioCity, holographically generated, sat on another table nearby. The tallest building was a foot high, but she could change the model with a touch to the control pad. Members of the committee could go inside any room in the entire light-city, once they enlarged it, or they could travel down its pipes and other infrastructures.

They just couldn’t change anything in the actual city. It was protected much more tightly than anyone had imagined.

What an idiot she’d been.

What would happen to all of them? Over the past few years, ever since her famous ad, people had flocked here. People in all kinds of disciplines, with all kinds of expertise.

Many of the airborne-plague experts had left two months ago when it was learned that a faulty plague, which would impel people to come to New Orleans, had been developed by radicals with intent to distribute. Those that followed the radicals hoped to intercept them, but surely they would be too late. The radicals had developed something they were calling the New Orleans Plague. It compelled its victims to raft down the waterways of the Eastern United States, filled with visions of Huckleberry Finn and early America. Apparently, it could be deadly.

That was on her head too.

She had invited the world to a siege, not a party; a war, not the intended knowledge-fest.

She watched a golden raintree catch a breath of breeze, its viney branches billowing like undersea tentacles in an exotic dance. She saw in its movement a doomed reaching out for others of its kind. She felt for her absent heart stone; she missed it constantly but felt as if something about its loss represented her standing with the universe. She had no heart, not even an external one. Her daughter hated her; she seemed to have sent Hugo to his death; the floating city was still not the New Jerusalem she’d envisioned those years ago; and for all her power, she had not even been able to free Cut Face and Shorty as her manbo had instructed her to do. New Orleans would soon become enslaved, and powerful forces were trying to destroy it.

She caught sight of herself in a tall mirror suspended on a wire that hung from the old picture molding, itself twenty feet off the floor. A gilded frame surrounded her image. In her extreme thinness, she thought she detected some sort of resemblance to the old manbo who had given her the heart stone, but she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was something about her eyes… some sadness that was new.

With a start, she realized that Hugo’s hope had come true, the hope he’d had when he created Kalina behind her back.

She cared now. Desperately.

The mirror, she recalled, was from an old ballroom, where quadrilles had been held. White men picked their quadroon and octaroon mistresses at such balls, set them up for a season or for life, depending on their whim and on what their wives would allow. No doubt at least one of her ancestors had been such a mistress. And another ancestor had been the white man who chose her. She tried to imagine herself dressed in a frilly ball gown and could not. One age of domination had ended.

Another was about to begin.

A new sound rose from the streets. She pushed the window open as wide as it would go. Drums for the Rada Ceremony. Marie thought of the costume Nightwing had created for her, a richly colored African design, its large skirt gathered at the bottom into beaded points. The drums beat, as her manbo had said, in her blood.

What good could anyone do now?

Ten minutes later, she was costumed and at the door. She ran into Jason coming up the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

“To dance.”

“Oh.” He looked at her as if he thought her insane. “Mind if I try to get some work done?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Jason was a good kid, as bright as any of those who had gathered in New Orleans to try and set up a new scientific community. Almost all of them were in Crescent City now. Jason had not wanted to go.

She paused. She yelled at him as he climbed up to the main room, “Need any help?” The fact was, she knew very little about the things one would need to know in order to help him. But guilt made her climb back up a stair or two.

He called back from the top of the stairs, “No. You’d only be in the way.”

A minute later, she was out on the street.

Jason was glad to be alone in the control room. Most BioCities were equally distributed systems, but Marie was the kind of person that always wanted to know what was going on, always wanted to be in charge. It was very wearing to be around her. She seemed to never sleep and always had an opinion.

He had tired of how the Genome Project people, recent refugees from D.C. who had set up shop in New Orleans courtesy of Marie, kept pestering him for a blood sample, and he was moderately tired of Marie, but he never tired of oysters. He wished he had some now.

As he brought up the system and opened some information windows to track the contagion that had been dropped this morning, he thought of how strange it was that he might die here. He supposed that he might be able to make it past the IF guards if he went alone and was seriously considering it, but kept putting it off.

He kept hoping there was something that he could do.

Just after dusk, a sleek diesel sailboat hugged the Mississippi shore below New Orleans. It tied up at an abandoned tobacco wharf and a dinghy was quietly lowered. Three silhouetted figures climbed down into the dinghy and began rowing upriver, keeping to the mangrove banks, and silently passed the warship that loomed just in view of the city.

Kita was much more agitated than Hugo as they neared the landing. “Watch out. Are those soldiers over there?”

“Trees,” said Hugo.

“What’s all that noise?”

“A party.” He and Tamchu rowed steadily.

“But what are all those drums I hear?”

She could not see Hugo’s face in the shadows, but she could tell he was smiling. “Voudoun drums.”

“You mean—like in witchcraft?”

“No,” said Hugo, puffing. “As in Jungian archetypes.”

“Oh. You mean, as in temporal manifestations of timeless elements of the collective unconscious?”

Hugo chuckled. “Right.”

Tamchu said, “What are you talking about?”

“Shhh. We’re almost there.” They had reached a dilapidated wharf, which was lined with a row of deserted town houses.

“I don’t know why we have to be quiet,” said Kita in her normal voice. “I doubt that anyone could hear us if we shouted. Look. Do they have the river cordoned off?”

Hugo stopped rowing. The river pushed against them. As they drifted downriver, Hugo stood and caught a metal ladder that ran from the wharf to below the water. The boat swung around as he tied up to it. “Okay. Come on.” He climbed up to the concrete wharf; Kita and Tamchu followed. They both wore jeans and T-shirts, but Hugo wore a beige linen suit he’d had made in Paris and a purple shirt of rough raw silk. Kita had never seen anyone go through suits so quickly. Maybe that’s what Western men did.

“How are we going to get in?” It looked to Kita as if all the buildings a few blocks ahead were fused together into a wall. She saw the outline of roofs but no doors or windows in the solid surface.

“They’re not trying to keep people out,” Hugo said. “They’re trying to keep people in.” He was walking so quickly that Kita fell behind. The brick streets were ill-lit and a great din filled the air ahead of them. Kita was soaked with sweat despite the fact that it was well after dark. Maybe it wasn’t sweat; perhaps it was just the river mist collecting upon her as she moved toward that beacon of light and sound. Just moving through the air here was like swimming.

“Who’s that?” she whispered as a uniformed woman came out of the darkness, casting a lightstick here and there as she passed through the glow of a streetlight. Old dilapidated buildings with boarded windows added to the spookiness of the area. Hugo had already gone past her.

“Identification, please!” The woman’s voice rang out over the music as she strode toward them. “This city is sealed by order of the International Federation.”

Tamchu stood still until she was right in front of them. He pushed something that sparked into the woman’s chest, and she collapsed onto the ground.

“Hurry!” he said. “She’ll probably emit some kind of signal, so her fellows can find her. She did not seem to think that we might resist her. It is strange.”

“What did you do?” asked Kita, short of breath, as they ran to catch up with Hugo.

“Just stunned her,” said Tamchu. “She’ll be all right. Look, there he is.”

Hugo, in a streetlight’s circle, turned and was waving his arm to urge them onward. They caught up with him and he led them left at the next corner. He pulled up what appeared to be a sewer lid. In seconds, Kita was climbing down into a damp tunnel. She was thankful that they emerged quickly on the other side of the wall into a dark deserted section of town.

“This is even more scary,” said Kita. The music was still distant, but its tempo pulsed dimly from some of the components of the street—a random brick that glowed and darkened, a neon sign echoing the interval in light, the dance of a solitary drunk as she swayed in ragged clothing under the pulsing streetlight, her tattered scarves swirling as she moved. “It’s the CEREMONY,” she hollered at them, her voice hoarse, as they hurried past.

Hugo yelled, “Where’s Marie?”

“Marie Laveau? Where else, my friend? At the peristyle! The dance stage in Jackson Square!”

Hugo stretched forth both arms as he sprinted onward. “Man, it’s good to be home again!”

For fifteen minutes, they hurried through alleys and down deserted streets where houses rose from the edge of the sidewalk and where there were no trees. Kita said, “Are you sure you know where this place is?”

He laughed. “It’s my own heart.”

He turned down another narrow street. In front of them was a dancing mob.

Hugo waded into it.

New Orleans was aswirl with characters from Marie’s dreams. Ghede nodded from a distance, so tall his head topped most of the others in the crowd, touching the brim of his top hat with a two-fingered salute. She gazed into the dark eyes of Erzulie and was washed with an unmistakable expression of deep compassion. I love you, breathed Erzulie into Marie’s ear. Then the Goddess of Love dropped her glittering white mask for an instant and was Kalina before weaving away in the tightly packed crowd.

The energy of the crowd was growing. Marie felt as if the entire rich past of New Orleans was manifesting now: in these hours, in this dance, in this dense and potent Carnival. Was this the plague of the government, streaking through her brain like lightning?

It could not be. It was too real, too powerful, too alive.

Perhaps the Carnival was holding back the government’s plague.

Legba was in Jackson Square, dancing on the wide stage. He was an old yet powerful man, flourishing his cane as servitours gave him food and drink. Of course. He was the Guardian of the Crossroads, and the Crossroads were here now. Drummers played the sacred drums, sacred back through centuries. The backbone, the resistance, the drums that were outlawed everywhere that slavery existed. Except in New Orleans.

And they must resist now. Let them dance!

To Dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world.

Marie heard herself shout with the rest, her voice blending in chant. She danced through the sunset, danced into dusk. She danced as Agwe and knew still that she would take them to the New Jeruselum on a sacred voyage by sea. All of the gods of the voudoun pantheon danced in Jackson Square, danced in the streets of the city, danced on the roofs and in bars and on balconies.

There was even the brown dwarf, Gad, the guardian—

But—no!

“Hugo!”

And then Hugo was dancing with her, flinging his arms around as if in some mad Irish jig.

He grabbed her hands, reeled her around, and they danced in a ring like children in the mad hot night, dizzy and shouting and crying.

Very soon afterward, they trooped up the stairs to Marie’s control room, sweating and laughing. The sounds of revelry were not quite so overwhelming after they entered the stone building, but the music and drumbeats and singing were still present.

Kita followed Hugo and Marie up the stairs, with Tamchu by her side, in the wake of excited chatter, astounded by their levity. Clearly, they didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation. Even Hugo seemed to be infected by this bizarre party atmosphere. Marie had been glad to see her, yes, after all these years, but she was fawning all over Hugo—

Well. She had work to do.

“Hi. I’m Jason Peabody.”

Kita turned at the voice and saw a young man whose blond-white hair gleamed in the light from the crystal chandeliers.

“Kita,” she said, looking around. At least this seemed like a stunningly well-set-up environment. Marie had skimped on nothing. Kita began to examine the equipment.

“Oh! Are you number thirty-eight?” Jason asked.

She turned and stared at him. “How do you know?” Thirty-eight had been her code identification number when inputting information into the Apiary Project.

His smile was broad and boyish. “Marie has told me about you. I’ve been here for a few months. She said that Hugo had been sent to find you but hadn’t returned. She described your work and it reminded me of the work of number thirty-eight.”

Kita frowned. “I still don’t understand.”

“Sorry. I got my engineering license two years ago and I’ve been studying ever since. When I was in Houston, I came across a top-secret history of the Apiary Project. Every layer of input. I developed a kind of profile of everyone involved—”

“You factored the entire thing?” asked Kita, amazed.

“I guess,” said Jason. “Anyway, your breakthrough on rapid morphing just blew me away. The one using isolate human olfactory nerves to govern matter mutation on a nanoscale.”

“Ah.” Kita smiled. “Thank you. Can you tell me what’s been happening? They look pretty busy.” She nodded toward Hugo and Marie, sitting opposite one another on two deep chairs, talking.

“Yeah, I think so. Today the International Federation dropped something just across the river. Quite a few spores reached New Orleans, over on Canal Street. I tried to contain them, but they’re multiplying at a pretty fierce rate. I think that there will probably be some sort of flashover in”—he walked over to a screen he had windowed open on the interactive wall—“a hundred and forty-two minutes. At that point they’ll flood the interstices and also be released into the air. That’s about all I’ve figured out.”

Kita pushed her hair back behind one ear. She pulled a cigarette from her T-shirt pocket and lit it. She looked at Jason’s window. With her cigarette in her left hand, she used her right hand to get an analysis of the substance that was causing portions of New Orleans to mutate.

It was indeed the same process that had changed Kyoto overnight. The mobster terrorists had deeply infiltrated the International Forces around the world.

Kita muttered, not really caring whether or not Jason heard, “I was thinking that I could use my prototype city.”

“What?”

She spoke a bit louder to be heard above the din of greetings. The entire population of New Orleans seemed to be trooping in the door and hugging Hugo. “I have a prototype city stored in my DNA. But it would take at least twelve hours to decompress the information and put it into a form that I can use.” She puffed her cigarette rapidly, then pointed to Jason’s window. “There’s not enough time for that.”

“Oh,” said Jason, clearly disappointed. And—if he had more than an iota of intelligence—probably deeply terrified.

Kita said, “Well, I guess I have to do something.” According to the monitoring system Jason had set up, the contagion that had caused Kyoto to be wiped out overnight was replicating right now in well over a thousand locations in the city. The rain of assemblers must have been extremely sparse, but it really didn’t matter. One infinitesimally tiny nanotech factory could begin transforming matter at a fairly rapid rate. Though they started slowly, once these scattered patches reached a certain size, they would metastasize, so to speak, doubling their size quickly until everything in New Orleans—and probably everything for a good deal outward—would be utterly transformed and ready for the International Federation forces to move in.

“Is there anything that you you can do?” asked Jason, the tenor of his voice pushed up a notch. Now he indeed looked worried. As well he should be.

“I can try and use the Universal Assembler.”

“The what?” Jason stepped back a pace. “It doesn’t exist. No one would dare build it.”

Kita felt compassion for this young man. Perhaps among all of them here, he was best qualified to understand what she was talking about. “I’m afraid that it does.”

As far as she knew, though, the prototype had never actually been used. She was not sure what protections it contained—if any. There was a good possibility that plugging it into the system would unleash uncontrollable replication.

It might end the world as they knew it.

This was the fear of everyone associated with the development of nanotechnology. If a molecular factory was developed that was capable of transforming matter, fail-safes had to be designed into it, limits at which it would cease to reproduce. But since the Universal Assembler had been developed outside the auspices of international nanotech conventions and by the military factors that had used Dento as a smoke screen, she had no sense of assurance that it had been designed with safety in mind.

She raised her voice. “Hugo! Marie! Come over here.”

They jumped up and hurried over to her. She said quietly, “Actually, there really is no decision to make. We have only one way to stop the spread of this. And it must be started immediately.”

Ten minutes later, Kita was set up in a work station with a DNA computer interstice interface, a concentrated node of manipulative computing power. She stood before a narrow waist-high shelf that manifested touchpad controls. In front of her on the wall, she created a screen about two feet high and three feet wide.

On the table was the Universal Assembler and the spiral sketch pad in which she had recorded her Paris notes. It was less fragile than bits and needed no special equipment to access. She studied the pages as slowly as she dared, turning them until she came to the end. She went back and marked two of them with the paper clips she had requested. Then she flipped back to the beginning of that section and left the pages open flat.

She ran a few checks on New Orleans’s configuration, remembering that Hugo claimed that it was a program hobbled in some regards. It did not take her long to find that he was correct. It was like a piano with several dead keys. She could not play it as it ought to have been played. It would take quite a long time for her to analyze its defects and rectify them, particularly since she was sure that powerful stops existed within the city to prevent knowledgeable people, such as herself in particular, from playing with the parameters so painstakingly installed.

Her only choice was to take the Kyoto baseline, which was now manifesting, courtesy of Jack and the other terrorists who had put it into the hands of the corrupt International Federation, and bring it to the same configuration as Illian’s Paris system.

The Universal Assembler contained molecular manipulators that were independent of both the New Orleans and Kyoto BioCity systems. Theoretically, if all went well, Kita could direct them to take the Kyoto Plague and transmute it into the Paris configuration following the pathways Illian had forged. It was a transformation that Kita had studied in great depth and which she felt that, if she concentrated and kept cool, she could facilitate and control.

It had been done before. She had to remember that—and not lose her nerve. She had the template, carefully lifted from the record of Illian’s transformation of Paris. But did she have the correct catalyst? Had she left something out? She thought she knew the steps Illian had unconsciously forged. But was the record complete?

Behind her and to her sides, a tense silent crowd pressed inward, peering over one another’s heads. Someone coughed. Though the doors and windows were closed, the Carnival drums could still be heard. “Get out of my way,” Kita said. “I need to be able to move freely.” The crowd shuffled backward.

Kita picked up and examined the Universal Assembler that Hugo had placed on the table.

The philosophers’ stone.

The stainless-steel case that contained it was about the size of a credit card, bowed slightly outward so that it had a concave appearance. The word dento was embossed on it and, beneath that, a skull and crossbones. warning, extreme danger was embossed on it in many languages. Kita also found an international patent number and shook her head. There was no way to actually get at the lab inside without destroying its capabilities—which might also set off a nanotech surge.

She looked at the plug. It was about a millimeter in diameter and female. On the side of the DNA computer, which was a rectangular prism about the size of a novel, were several ports. She examined them closely, looked back at the plug. “I don’t think this will fit. Do you have any other cables sitting around?” There wasn’t time to configure and grow one. The crowd around her dissolved as everyone ran to search frantically for cables, which were actually just delicate nanoscale wires encased in plastic so they would be manageable. She heard drawers and cabinets opening and, one by one, cables were brought.

The computer itself interfaced directly with the interstice system of the city. Once plugged in, the flow of information from the Universal Assembler would translate directly to the interstice system. Kita would be able to manipulate the molecules—theoretically—using the touch-pad in front of her. The touchpad had a full alphanumeric complement, but it also had the international nanotech controls created by technicians and scientists. She would use them to quickly and easily manipulate the models she would see on her screen.

There was no way to disconnect the computer node from the rest of the city. Of course, she could probably set up some complicated firewalls if she had the time. But if the Universal Assembler was programmed to be a weapon, it wouldn’t really matter. Once the information got into the computer—any computer, city-manifested or an old-fashioned, severely limited freestanding computer—it would immediately begin disassembly, which would progress to the touchpad, to Kita if she was touching the touchpad or if some of the disassembling molecules floated through the air and landed on her skin, and then to the table, the floor…

“It might be good if all of you left,” she said, finding a cable from those piled on the table that slid into the Universal Assembler with a barely audible click. She had only to press the other end into the computer. She looked up questioningly. “It still might be possible to get away if you move quickly enough. If the worst happens, there is a possibility that the surge might be contained by some natural parameters measured in distance or governed by the mediums it encounters.”

No one left.

Kita plugged it in.

The screen was flooded with images and language of warning. Standing as if poised like an acrobat on a high wire, Kita touched the pad deftly and brought forth the waiting menu images of New Orleans, thankfully already established by Jason, with its flaring hot spots of contagion.

Magnified models of molecular manipulators poured swiftly onto the screen, showing that replication had begun instantly and was progressing rapidly. Kita tensed and willed herself to loosen up. She could not panic. She heard gasps from those around her, heard people running from the room as they lost their nerve.

Adrenaline flooded her as one of the robot arms reached into its blobby body and pulled out another like itself. That was imitated by the newly formed blobs, and before she could blink, she saw a number doubling rapidly on the screen: 16… 32… 64… 128…

A surge. A vision of the Kyoto train station filled her mind.

She was shaking. She felt Hugo’s hands on her arms. “Relax, kiddo,” he said softly.

“I can’t,” she snapped, but her brain seemed to take in some soothing essence, perhaps his scent, and her mind leaped forward. She sensed that most of the people had left the room, leaving the doors open so that cacophony of drums and music poured in. It did not bother her. It even seemed to help.

With a flick of her finger, Kita rounded up the tiny nanotech engines that could create or destroy, contained them with a bar of light, and demanded a chemical analysis. There was a free carbon bond. She called up a cubic liter of oxygen molecules and loosed them into the circle.

The activity slowed, then stopped. A minuscule amount of carbon dioxide had been created. That was all.

“It wasn’t an event,” she said, almost choking with relief. “I’m sorry. I panicked.”

Glancing at her notes, she sent the precise, complex metapheromones that Illian had helped her analyze to the hot sites all around the city. She focused on one such site, where the Kyoto Plague was doubling its size every forty-five seconds, and opened a window that gave her a real-time picture of the progress.

She realized that she was holding her breath. The Carnival sounds were a background to the drama before her eyes.

The metapheromones intuitively manufactured by Illian when she entered the Paris BioCity system as pure intelligence surrounded the Kyoto Plague molecules. One by one, they linked to the Kyoto-type molecules and transformed them into Paris-type molecules.

Kita was weak with relief. She leaned on the table and bowed her head, noticing that she was soaked in sweat.

“Is it—all right?” asked Hugo.

She nodded. “I think so. I really think so. But we still have a challenge.”

“What’s that?” asked Marie.

“This new metapheromone mix is activated in human brains by the repetition of a certain strong rhythm.”

“What is that?” asked Marie. “We can do rhythm.”

Kita paged through her notebook. “It is—”

A low distant roar filled the room and everyone was quiet. Even the music outside ceased.

“What is that?” asked Kita.

“It sounds like a tornado,” Marie said.

They all stampeded onto the balcony.

Everyone on the City of New Orleans was in a state of high expectation.

At the tail end of sunset, the train passed the first sign for New Orleans and a cheer went up. Bottles of vodka and rum were passed around. New Orleans was visible, distant and tiny, in the last rays of the setting sun, its buildings gleaming silver above an olive-green plain, hazed in the mad summer heat, shimmering beneath a pale new moon. Even Ellington was content to drop into a seat and watch as the glittering towers of the fabled city grew larger.

“I heard that there’s some kind of wall around the French Quarter,” said a woman across the aisle.

The tracks were raised above gleaming swamps where the plants were completely alien to Zeb, a prehistoric-looking mix of palms and moss-covered oaks. White herons flapped skyward as the train flashed past. The sky darkened rapidly in an afterglow of marbled orange and pink. Zeb returned to determining the rules of a new solitaire game he was creating, using his tray screen.

Then the bucolic setting was shattered by an explosion. The window in front of Zeb was plastered with mud. The train shook and Zeb crouched down in his seat.

Ray Nance, sitting next to him, patted him on the back. “Can’t nothing hurt this train. And if it did, there ain’t nothing we can do about it anyway.”

The door at the front of the car slid open and a flood of people rushed in; from their shouts, Zeb gathered that the car ahead of them had indeed been breached, despite Nance’s assurance of invulnerability. Zeb erased his game and searched for the screen that gave information about the train. The people from the forward car packed the aisles.

“More soldiers up ahead,” said Nance, using his hands to cup vision through the dark window. “Damn, my drink spilled.” He pulled a silver flagon out of his pocket and sipped from it. He offered it to Zeb. Zeb shook his head.

“I don’t see them,” said Ivie Anderson, the legendary vocalist of perfect diction recruited by Ellington. “It’s too dark.”

“Well, we sure know they’re there now.” Nance said. “That was the big news in Atlanta, remember? Nobody allowed into New Orleans by order of the IF.”

“I’m not a citizen of any International Federation,” said Ivie. “I’m a United States citizen. I’m tired of those people trying to push us around.”

“So are the people in New Orleans,” said Nance. “That’s why the IF wants to keep everybody out. They’re afraid of an uprising. Besides, New Orleans seceded, remember?”

Taut silence fell over the train car. Even Ellington, who usually had something urbane to add, was quiet.

“What else can they do?” asked Ivie.

“Oh, derail the train, bomb it, stuff like that,” someone that Zeb couldn’t see replied.

“What can we do about it?” asked Ivie.

“Not a damned thing,” replied the same voice.

“Sure there is,” said an unseen woman way at the front of the car. Her voice was thoughtful. It also sounded somewhat familiar to Zeb. They all heard the beep of system access, then silence.

“What are you doing?” asked someone else.

“Activating some really cool features of the train. Don’t bother me.”

Zeb touched his table back on, brought up the keypad, and wrote: observe defense programming taking place. A side view of the train appeared on the table. Above it the box read: Impact absorption and fire-retardant features enhanced, repair of insult progressing and scheduled to finish in 10:16 minutes. food service sacrificed for the duration. in the event of nanotech event, defenses will be switched accordingly to compensate.

This was replaced by some sort of exterior long distant views: a 180-degree fish lens of the approaching scenery, at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. As Zeb watched, the speed of the train inched upward until they were moving at two hundred miles per hour.

“Isn’t that a little fast?” he blurted out loudly. “How are we going to be able to stop in New Orleans? It’s only fifty miles away. We need to begin stopping now!”

“Seat belts fastening automatically,” said the train. A belt pushed Zeb tightly against the seat.

The train shook from another shelling and water blasted from the swamp coursed down the sides. A gash erupted in the ceiling and debris scattered across the passengers. Sheets of music whipped out the hole. Zeb glimpsed buildings, then they rose and flowed over a huge arched bridge with a roller-coaster sensation.

Outside was just a blur of colors, then Zeb was thrown forward violently. His seat belt caught him. An air bag held him captive for an instant, then deflated. Through the hole in the ceiling he heard cheering. His arm bled slightly from a small cut.

Outside was a huge crowd, a stage, a park, a statue.

New Orleans.

And Annie. He was sure the woman in the front of the car was Annie. He thought he heard her yelling for him but the mob pushed him back toward the rear exit. The sprinklers came on and soaked them. Musicians cursed and tried to shelter their instruments as they scrambled from the train.

Marie watched the scene in horror, pressed against the balcony railing by the crowd behind her.

A maglev train approached on the old L&N tracks, roaring and spitting sparks and surely moving too fast to stop without plowing through the crowd. Its snub stainless-steel nose glinted as it shot through the corridor of streetlights lining the tracks. Waves of people pushed back in a great pulsing mob.

Amazingly, the tracks were cleared just in time. The massive train halted next to the recently deserted stage. It was battered and mud-splattered. The second car was almost completely destroyed.

All was eerily silent.

Marie waited for the soldiers to come leaping from the doorways.

Instead, a conductor jumped from the rear door of the third car and placed an iron stool on the pavement.

After a moment, a man wearing a shining white tuxedo and a white top hat stepped down, holding a baton. He smiled and waved a white-gloved hand, then walked toward the stage. The crowd pushed back to allow his passage.

Then a woman in a white evening gown was helped down by the conductor. She paused and waved at the crowd, then followed the man in the white tuxedo.

More men, all wearing black tuxedos and carrying trumpets, saxophones, clarinets, and trombones, stepped down from the train and made their way to the stage. The white-tuxedoed man had spoken to someone and folding chairs were hastily carried onstage and set up. The musicians seated themselves.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the white-gloved man. His voice rang out clearly. He had the full attention of the crowd. “My name is Duke Ellington, and this is my orchestra. We are honored to be here, and of course, we love you madly. We would like to play for you a piece commissioned by Marie Laveau. We hope that she finds it suitable. And we hope that all of you will enjoy it tremendously. It is entitled Crescent City Rhapsody.”

Primal, isolate, opening notes sounded, fifths of stacked clarinets and trombones. The effect was eerie. The lights of the city dimmed, as if someone had their hand on a switch.

The piece grew like an embryo or like a proof, building on itself. Rhythm pulsed through saxophones used as a bass anchor. Cornets blared in syncopated counterpoint to the saxophones, then both intertwined in a dizzying fashion and flew off on their own trajectories. The woman’s voice rose above it all: piercing; haunting.

And then the piece moved from portmanteau to body. The band began to swing with a strange powerful rhythm. It seemed unbalanced, falling-forward, yet was superbly—if barely—contained by an arrangement of sheer genius. It created a sound as shattering as that of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie when they blew the first fast riffs of bop, as strange and new as Coltrain’s sheets of sound. A scream rose from the crowd at its sheer audacity and spirit, and everyone broke into dance.

Kita, standing on the balcony, shouted, “That’s it! That’s it! How did they know?”

Hugo, standing next to her, said, “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

Jason said, “I’ve heard this before.” Then he slipped away. Kita saw him a moment later, dancing with the crowd below the balcony.

Zeb was ejected into a scene as bizarre as any that he might have imagined in recent years. It was so hot he thought he might faint; within seconds, he wanted nothing so much as to plunge into a tub of ice water. Dazed by lights and trembling in the aftermath of the explosions, Zeb shielded his eyes with his hands. There seemed to be a square in front of him, and Ellington was performing. The roar was overwhelming, comprised of voices joyful and angry, irritated and ecstatic. The people, in constant motion, looked bizarre, costumed in brilliant clothing that seemed much too hot to wear. The momentum of the mob shoved him forward.

Zeb found himself chanting with all the rest, their voices pulled forth in imperative sequence, part of the piece, as if in a channel determined by the deft composition. He was hoarse, ecstatic, and everyone was dancing, dancing in the streets.

But this was different than his years of madness. He was lucid, utterly clear. He was becoming clearer by the second, as if his mind and being were in reverse, moving with great rapidity back to that time of fierce correct intensity before he was felled by a biochemical twist of fate. He experienced an explosion in reverse, the shards of his being pulled back from the years in which they had embedded themselves, yanked by a magnetism begun by that woman in black only a week earlier…

The horns rang out his freedom. The orchestra swelled to a sweet singularity that lasted but a second, then rayed out in timed perfection into a new universe. Zeb was swept into it as on the crest of a wave inexorably nearing a shore.

He staggered, found his feet, and reentered Eden, tears streaming down his face, hugging some stranger who hugged him back, weeping equally.

“Damn, he’s good,” said the man, breaking the embrace and disappearing into the crowd.

Zeb swayed, infused by truth, then stood firm and gathered the lost years to him.

Cut Face and Shorty, commanded by Marie to go forth and celebrate, walked up Bourbon Street at about three in the morning, dropping into yet another bar and settling on stools. Shorty held up two fingers and they wrapped their hands around cold ales. The music was not all that loud in this dark room, but the band—an electric guitar, a drummer, and a bass—repeated the Ellington rhythm, which always seemed new because of its irregularity.

Shorty said, “How you be feeling?”

Cut Face took a sip of his ale. “Why you ask?”

“Because I be feeling—I don’t know. Different.”

“Yeah. Me too. Kind of like—I don’ care what Marie say.”

“You t’ink we free at last?”

Cut Face said, “Who knows it feels it, brah.”

“Jah be forgiving us. Praise be.”

They clinked glasses.

Hugo, minus his jacket and vest and sandals, leaned against the high carved footboard of Marie’s mahogany bed; she sat crosslegged at the headboard. Between them a six-inch-high table sat on the bed. On it was a bottle of iced vodka, two glasses, caviar, toast, chopped eggs, and butter. They were stuffing themselves and laughing. Ellington’s music was a distant backdrop.

“This is heaven!” said Marie.

“This is alcohol,” replied Hugo. “Alcohol and caviar.”

“Same thing to me.” Marie slathered more caviar on toast and squeezed lemon on it. After she swallowed it, she said, “Why didn’t you write?”

“I did. Many times. International mail is nonexistent now. I sent all kinds of messages. I got kind of laid up in Japan.”

“I’ll bet,” said Marie.

“No, really. I had a serious injury. Want to see the scar?”

Marie held up both hands and screwed up her face in mock horror. “No thanks! But your healers worked? You don’t really have scars, do you?”

“It was touch-and-go for a month or so. But I pulled through.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you what, Marie. It’s damned weird out there. I think you’re right. It’s the end of the world.” He sighed.

“Tell me about Tamchu. What’s he wearing around his neck?”

“I’m surprised you noticed in all the hubbub.”

“I’ve got sharp eyes. Hugo, what’s happening in Paris? All we have are rumors. What does Kita know?”

“Just calm down. I’ll fill you in on everything. If you’re nice. You look terrible. Mind telling me why?”

“Weinstein prescribed some strong medicine to keep me going. I think that someone in Crescent City will be able to figure out the next step.”

“So you’re going to be all right?” asked Hugo.

“Sure,” she said lightly.

“Don’t lie to me, Marie.”

“I’ll make it so.” She took a sip of vodka. “This Tamchu guy you were telling me about. I wonder if he might have some insight as to how we can deal with the Federation forces.”

“It’s a good possibility, but he’s had kind of a religious conversion. You’d have to convince him that you’re on the side of goodness and light. He swallowed my version of what we’re up to, but once he meets you—ow! No fair throwing forks!” Hugo brushed chopped onion from his vest.

They looked at each other for a long moment while Claude Bolling held forth.

“Don’t cry now,” said Hugo. “You’ll have me crying too and that would be pretty ugly.”

“Stick around for a while, then.”

“Nothing could make me happier.”

“We’re improvising now, Hugo. There aren’t any notes written down. We’ve digressed quite a bit from the original melody.”

“I’m with you all the way.”

“We just might make it, then.”

After his arrival, Zeb fell into a hallucinatory phantasmagoria quite the equal of his wildest imaginings for untold hours; he couldn’t judge the time. Music blasted forth everywhere. No humans lived in this world where he’d landed, only fantastic birds, beasts, and creatures for which he had no name. They all danced as if they had no bones; twisting and bending, thrusting forth arms and legs, their fingers as expressive as those of hula dancers. He was caught up in parades every half hour or so and once he was pulled onto a float where all the planets revolved around a golden naked man holding a scepter, around which twined a huge white snake. There was nothing to drink except beer, wine, and spirits, which even came out of the drinking fountains. Eventually he found his way to a rooftop by climbing a fire escape. Though it was not empty, the people wore no costumes and spoke quietly in small groups. He did not join them; he simply lay on his back and watched the stars until he fell asleep. Sometime during the dim morning hours, he was roused and helped to stumble somewhere.

He woke in a small high-ceilinged room with swirling stucco walls that opened onto a courtyard with a fountain. It contained a single iron bed, a nightstand with a lamp, a pitcher of fresh water, and a glass. He fancied he could still hear the roar of partying in the distance, though a faint slash of light on the floor told him that it was past dawn. The dogs, lying next to the bed, jumped up. Zeb dimly remembered them jumping from the train and following him gladly all night, probably getting so much to eat that they’d been sick.

A part of Zeb wanted to hide in this cave until the storm of music, dance, and color blew over. But to his surprise, he found that another part of him wanted to brave the disorientation, to test his newfound balance. He sat up on the side of his bed, poured himself a glass of water, and prepared to dress.

He was startled by a woman’s disembodied voice. “New Orleans is now in the preliminary stages of nanotech conversion. This public service announcement will inform you of your options.”

Zeb looked around, his heart beating hard. Voices. He wasn’t cured! Tears started in his eyes. With effort, he calmed himself, following a tenuous linkage of thought back to normalcy. This voice had the same quality as the one from the train. Brisk, efficient, anonymous.

It was not coming from inside his head. It was all right.

“What is your source?” he asked as he pulled on his pants.

“This is the audio function of a system that is distributed equally throughout the city. Memory will increase as interstices are reconfigured.”

“What is an interstice?” asked Zeb, pulling on his shirt but leaving it unbuttoned. He looked around but didn’t see his shoes.

“What level of information do you require?”

“The simplest, to begin with.”

“Interstices appear in every room and on many city streets. Generally they manifest as brightly colored vertical lines. They are bounded by a tough membrane that instantly self-heals if insulted. Within is a liquid medium containing a specially developed strain of E. coli, one of the first organisms to have its DNA completely mapped. The DNA of this strain of E. coli is programmed to accept and transmit information generated by receptored human users in the form of metapheromones. These metapheromones are able to penetrate the membrane, where they are instantly transformed to DNA-based information. The user can also receive information in this fashion.”

Zeb stood, went through french doors that opened onto a brick court, and watched the play of the fountain. The dawn-gray sky was clearing to blue. The showers that had drenched them periodically last night were gone. Outside on a table covered with a white cloth were a silver coffee urn, a pitcher of water, some cups, and a plate of some kind of donuts. “Keep talking,” he said. “What are ‘metapheromones’?”

The voice seemed to follow him as he walked out into the courtyard. The dogs’ claws made sharp clicks on the bricks. He drew a cup of coffee. It was sharp and strong. He poured cups of water for the dogs and set them on the bricks.

“Metapheromones were originally developed by a Japanese nanotechnology firm. They are in wide use throughout the world. Kyoto, where the headquarters are based, was recently destroyed in a nanotech surge, and—”

“What is a ‘nanotech surge’?” asked Zeb, settling into a cast-iron chair with pink-and-green-striped cushions. He remembered reading about them in The Washington Post, but the content was lost to him.

“It is the most feared of nanotech consequences. From a single nexus of specialized molecules, the conversion of matter spreads outward at varying speeds depending on the nature of the molecules the process encounters. A map of a surge might look like this.” At Zeb’s feet a flowerlike map appeared, its boundaries wavy lines that advanced slowly. “Would you like a different view?”

“No, this is fine,” said Zeb, starting on his third donut. “Is this any particular map?”

“This is actually a map of the conversion process occurring now in New Orleans. You are near point zero, so the process is about 10 percent complete.”

“I thought you said that this was a feared process,” said Zeb, finishing his first cup of coffee and rising to tap a second.

“The process is well controlled here. In Kyoto and in other places, it took the form of a surprise attack, an out-of-control event, or an accident.”

“Why is it so well controlled here?”

“Do you always ask so many questions?”

“Well, here’s another one. I’d like something more substantial to eat. Are there any good cafés around here?” He dusted powdered sugar from his hands, stood, and walked toward the arched wrought-iron gates, flanked by white urns filled with red and yellow day lilies. An enchantingly sweet scent infused the air. Zeb felt a wave of great contentment. He was happy. He loved New Orleans. Whatever was going on was magnitudes more calm and predictable than what his own head was capable of generating. As he opened the gate, he heard a woman’s voice apparently using the same kind of amplification as the more neutral voice he’d heard before. This voice had character and nuance; it was rich and full. It sounded very happy.

“Hello. My name is Marie Laveau. Many of you already know me. If you have just arrived, welcome. I apologize for any inconvenience you may have suffered, as well as for the military actions to which we may be subjected in our quest for freedom. We have just regained control of the deep functionings of the BioCity program. It is my honor to welcome those of you who arrived last night to the Free Territory of New Orleans. Conversion updates are available throughout the city, as well as information about the receptoring process. At twilight, a celebratory ball will be held in Jackson Square; everyone is invited to attend.” Her voice paused, and when it continued, Zeb thought it was choked a bit with emotion. “And before then, we invite all who wish to attend festivities in Congo Square.”

Strange glad music began to play, a mixture of clarinets, trumpets, and clicking sticks, and a brief solo piano bridge, snappy and brisk. “Play it, Miss Lil!” shouted a distant small voice.

“What is this music?” asked Zeb, still standing in the arch, with the gates of oddly delicate wrought-iron design standing open on each side. The street before him was narrow and European-like, and down it strolled couples of every color and mix of sexes, many hand in hand, in wild headdress, subdued suits, or running shoes, shorts, and nothing else—women included.

“Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives. They never played together except in the studio. They created seminal studio recordings of jazz in the 1920s.” The voice was no longer Marie’s, but a male voice, as if Zeb had accessed a different information track. He sensed a brief image of a small smoky room at about 3 a.m. that smelled of beer, where shouts accompanied the newborn form of jazz, which zigzagged into blues momentarily and then was nothing but deep drumming of an irresistible rhythm. Sunlight slanted into the street at a sharp angle. He turned and made his way to the main street and thence, following maps which manifested fairly often, made his way toward Congo Square until the drumming became louder and he realized that he was hearing it live. The press of the crowd was intense, as if everyone in the city was crowding toward this center. Zeb grabbed a sandwich from a stand as he passed and discovered it had fried oysters in it. He tossed a few to the dogs, who were on his heels, and ate the rest.

The crowd formed small circles as he made his way to the center, each with a surrounding a drummer seated on a barrel. The drummers, using hands or sticks to pound their rhythms, were invariably black, wet with sweat, and wore only shorts.

Dancers surrounded each drummer, their heads thrown back or forward, their hands and arms moving expressively, some of them talking wildly, some singing with eyes closed.

The drumming intensified. Zeb found himself drawn to the center of the field, where a tall, carved, brightly colored wooden pole served as the nexus for a vast crowd of dancers.

Then Zeb was dancing too. He had never danced in this fashion, though he had felt this way often—as if some other entity lived within him, through him. Yet the rhythm of the dance helped organize his being, whereas before whenever he had opened himself in this way, the result had often been disorganization and chaos. This was new. He was part of the crowd, part of the cosmos, part of space, organized and organizing pure being. He continued to move, propelled by the drums, the sensation of heat sublimed into the energy that moved him.

He was ecstatic, he realized. Out of his body. Yet in his body, deeply in his body. It was fascinating, mesmerizing, and he wished it would never end. He ripped off his shirt and tossed it in the air.

“Slaves danced here in Congo Square,” said a low melodious voice right next to his ear. “They were in a place of power. They were united with their gods. They were in a magic space, at the crossroads of time and timelessness. Like us, Star Man.”

He turned. Sun Ra was there, her lovely brown face shining with sweat, smiling the biggest smile he’d ever seen.

“Ra,” he whispered, his throat choking his voice. Then he shouted. “Sun Ra! The Queen of Space and Time!” He grabbed her close to him and found he was crying, crying in a way that felt good, that was coming from the center of his being. It was the only way to express the depth of what he was going through and he could not stop. “Ra, I’m better now. I’m healed.”

But it seemed to him that the final healing only flowed into him as she held him close to her, and around them the mythic great dance of fusion and creation was danced.

The evening of the day following the great victory, Tamchu stood on a garden terrace awash with brilliant flowers as the considerable heat of the day died down, balancing Illian’s sculpture in the palm of his hand. He put his other hand atop it, hoping perhaps for the flow of some current, hoping to feel her essence generating within him the closing of a circuit through which her intensity, her very being, might flow. She had imbued it with some kind of information—but what? And how could it be accessed? He let it drop down on the chain that held it around his neck, an ungainly decoration. He sighed.

Illian was in love with this Artaud, who was actually a Bee, and half a world away besides. She had no need of him.

At least she was alive.

With this thought, the world came alight again, as if all he saw was animated by a powerful and beneficent thought. Never had he thought that he might see her again; certainly, he would not have believed that she would engender the worshipful attitude that caused this great ache in his chest.

He surveyed the brick streets below, half on guard for an assassin, half not caring if he should meet with one. He still did not know what he was doing here in this hot city. Kita and Hugo were very busy. They had used the device he had given them. Hugo had told him that it had helped in transforming the informational base of the BioCity program. Well, that was good, he supposed.

On the other side of the globe, the General was drilling her girls and perhaps even plotting some kind of vengeance, planning a future devoid of humans—or at least beings who bore little emotional resemblance to humans. He had briefly met Marie, but that was it. There was no purpose for him here, no reason. Hugo had persuaded him to come here, but what for? He already felt restless and confined. He had learned that the city was much smaller than it used to be, because the great river that bounded it had risen and overflowed across the land on the opposite shore. Huge dikes had been built around the central part of the city here, and outside the wall were graceful neighborhoods where people lived in the upper floors of old rotting mansions. A row of tall flower-crowned glass towers, like those of Illian’s Paris, contained inhabitants living with the help of a strange hodgepodge of technologies. The French Quarter, an area of about twenty square blocks, was all that remained of free New Orleans.

He did not intend to stay much longer. He might as well return to Paris and live on whatever crumbs Illian might be able to spare for him. Or perhaps he ought to try and return to Tibet. The entire world had changed; maybe that was possible now. If not, maybe he could be of service there. Perhaps he might learn how to be a Buddhist again and learn how to want to save all beings, even though he was surely chief among those who needed saving.

His stomach growled. At least that was easily remedied here.

He found his way to Jackson Square. On one corner was a large open-air café. He looked at the name and realized that this was where he was supposed to meet Hugo and Kita and Marie this evening. They were not here yet. Perhaps they would arrive soon.

He found a table by the iron railing where he could watch the sidewalk. Hugo had told him that everyone in the French Quarter would stroll past this café during the course of the night. Tamchu was sure this was a great exaggeration. He ordered coffee and jambalaya without shrimp. Its virtue was that it contained rice.

He pulled the chain over his head and once again studied Illian’s sculpture. He never tired of looking at it; it generated thought after thought, as if his eyes and mind followed one line only to be pulled aside into another, beginning a new relationship. What he was thinking of he could not have said. His order came. He slipped the chain back over his neck and sipped coffee, took a bite of spicy rice.

A man came close to his table and he started, ready to draw his knife from its sheath on his belt and defend his sorry life. Then he relaxed, amused at himself. The General would not send a man for this task!

“Excuse me,” the man said. “My name is Zeb. May I sit down?”

Tamchu forced himself to be polite. “Of course.”

The man placed a bedraggled notebook on the table and sat. His beard and hair were gray. “I couldn’t help noticing that thing you’re wearing around your neck.”

Thing! “This is a work of art created by a very great artist.” Tamchu suppressed the urge to hide it beneath his shirt.

“It… it reminds me of something,” said Zeb. “Would you mind if I looked at it more closely?”

Tamchu looked at him, seething with suspicion. “Why?”

“Where are you from?” asked Zeb.

Tamchu said nothing. He bowed his head and continued eating. Maybe this man would just go away.

“Let me show you what I do,” said Zeb and opened his notebook. He turned it around so that Tamchu could see two pages of numbers and symbols. “I’m trying to figure something out. That… work of art makes me think of it.”

“Why would that be?” asked Tamchu, feeling unaccountably jealous.

Zeb looked at the piece hungrily from across the table. “It’s something about the proportions. Almost as if it were… an edifice of thought. Perhaps even… directions.”

Studying him, Tamchu relaxed. The man’s eyes were thoughtful, yet sharp. They were friendly, honest, open. His weathered face told Tamchu that his life had been hard, yet to have a hard life and still have eyes not marred by hate or malice… that was unusual in Tamchu’s experience. He had a clear center to him, a place where anger and revenge had never existed. That showed in his eyes. He allowed Tamchu to look into his eyes for a long moment, and this too was unusual. Sometimes eye contact elicited resistance or might be a show of force or intent. His gaze was an act of revelation and trust.

Tamchu lifted Illian’s sculpture from his neck and handed it to Zeb.

Zeb held it and looked at it for a while. Then he closed his eyes as his fingers explored it, turning it this way and that. He opened his eyes and smiled. He looked exceedingly satisfied, perhaps even a bit astonished. He said, his words slow, “It is… a map of a galaxy.”

“What do you mean?”

“A galaxy is—”

“I think I know what a galaxy is. A… neighborhood of stars.”

“I guess that will do,” Zeb’s smile was gentle and not the least condescending. “This has distances and angles. But different somewhat than what they are today. Shortened. Maybe a bit skewed.”

“What do you mean?” Tamchu did not know what to think of this. Illian had studied the location of stars in a galaxy and mapped them? Well, it was not that surprising, actually, not half as surprising as many things about her.

“I surmise that this is a map from light-years ago—or at least light-minutes. A great time ago. It will take me a while to figure it out. And there are some interesting additions as well.” The man’s hands trembled slightly. Tears stood in his eyes.

“Are you all right?” asked Tamchu, sorry that he had been rude to this man, who was actually quite extraordinary.

Zeb began to laugh then in a frightening fashion, wild and high. He shook his head silently for a few moments, without stopping, as if he could not stop, then changed abruptly to a nod. “Oh yes, yes, I am perfectly all right! Perfectly! I’ve been perfected, you see! It’s just been so long. So very long. And it happens in such interesting stages. As if I’m still growing. You know, like you have stages of growth you go through and when you think you’re grown up and an adult there are still stages that you can’t possibly see and perhaps there are more human stages and possibilities…” He mopped at his face with his napkin. The waitress brought a glass of iced tea and looked at Zeb with concern.

“Why do you cry?” asked Tamchu as the waitress walked away.

“I have a lot to be sad about,” said Zeb. He squeezed lemon into his tea and took a long drink. “And I have a lot to be happy about. Sometimes I cry because I’m very happy. It’s kind of equal, I think, the sadness and the happiness. But I’ve had very few moments in my life when everything seemed perfect and this is one of them.” He sighed deeply and smiled once again at Tamchu, leaning back in his chair.

“I think that I can understand that.” This man was like the Buddhist nun for Tamchu. Something flowed from his eyes and the world was alight again, the particles burning with an inner fire. He was here, and it was all right.

He had helped this man by making this long trip, and it was enough. He needed no other purpose. Zeb’s perfection was generous. It reached out and pervaded him as well.

Jason sat in the café, sipping a cold beer and eating raw oysters. The smells of hot grease and spilled beer mingled. A spasm band on the corner sent the beat of that captivating, yet liberating rhythm through the open doorway. He could not remember having ever felt this way, and the feeling continued to last. It was one of slow controlled euphoria. But it was more than that. Things were coming together in his mind that he didn’t even know how to express.

Yet, no matter how euphoric he felt, there was a new sharp loneliness that he did not understand.

He pushed aside the basket heaped with empty shells. It looked as if he still had some time to kill. Marie had asked him to drop by the café, saying that she wanted to have a meeting, of sorts, and treat everyone to dinner. She’d intimated that she had something important to reveal. But he’d gotten hungry a bit early.

Something caught his eye a few tables away. Two men were looking at a strange sculpture that sat on the table.

He stared at it. How was it possible for this spatial thing to echo this rhythm? Yet it did. And not only that, it had been made by someone else, someone who understood.

Someone who had felt the same rhythm, perhaps, as long ago as he had.

Maybe Abbie had been right.

He pushed back his chair and got up. He slowly approached the other table, thinking that he might be wrong, thinking that it was really too far to see and that his mind was playing tricks on him.

But no.

“Can I sit down?”

The man that looked Asian frowned, but the other man, an American, said, “Sure. Pull up a chair. I’m Zeb. This is—Tamchu?”

Tamchu nodded. Zeb held out his hand and Jason shook it. Tamchu reached for the sculpture.

“No, wait,” said Jason. Tamchu looked familiar. He realized that he had seen him last night with Kita and Hugo. “Do you mind if I look at this?”

“I suppose not,” Tamchu muttered.

“What do you think?” Zeb asked Jason as he picked it up and examined it.

“I don’t know. Why are you interested?” asked Jason.

“It seems to me that it possibly represents directions.” Zeb sighted down one angle, then another.

“ ‘Directions’?” Jason mistrusted the word.

“Yes. Directions to the source of the Signal.”

“What do you mean,” asked Jason, “ ‘the Signal’?”

Apparently, Zeb did not notice Jason’s sarcastic tone, for he continued in his friendly enthusiastic voice. “The original pulse cleared the way for an incoming signal, most of it out of the range of what we use for radio and television. It appears that different variations are still coming in from time to time. Here.” He pulled a notebook from the pack next to his chair and opened it. He turned to one of the pages. Jason noticed that each page, front and back, was full of equations written in a small careful hand. He turned the notebook to Jason and said, “Here. See this angle—” He pointed to a nexus on the sculpture. “Now look at this. This is one of the relationships that I got out of the original incoming data.”

Jason looked at the equations and it was as if his mind was engaged and moved into high gear. “Mind if I look through this?”

“Not at all.”

Jason felt the rhythms from the street merge with this man’s pure ascetic thought as he examined one page and then another. It was a powerful dose of truth, the truth that he had run from all his life. The truth he did not want to know. The truth that did not really matter. What mattered was life on Earth, the beauty of being human, the attempt to understand all there was to understand, here. To make things work. To help people. To do something real, instead of flying after some dangerous dream. He was only capable of catching a glimpse of what this man had discovered, uncovered, and spread out here like a glorious fireworks explosion of interstellar intelligence and where it might be coming from.

After ten minutes of slowly turning pages, Jason said, “I think that it would take me years to understand this.” He tried not to feel angry. One should not feel angry at the truth.

“It took me years to write it.”

“But where did you get your data?”

Zeb looked at him sharply. “You’re not from the government, are you?”

“God, no!” Jason started to laugh. “You’re not, are you?”

Zeb shook his head. “But a lot of this was classified and I… well, someone gave it to me. I don’t know what happened to him.”

Jason said, “You know, don’t you, that Marie Laveau, the boss of this whole shebang, is planning to someday go into space, don’t you?”

“No. I just got here last night.”

“I think she would find you very interesting. She’s built a city out in the Caribbean that she hopes to eventually enlarge enough to support a space program. She’s amazing. She wants to find out what happened to broadcasting. She wants to establish a city of free scientific inquiry.”

“I’ve heard that,” Zeb said. “You say she’ll be here later? I’m supposed to wait here for someone. Maybe I could meet Miss Laveau.” He took back his notebook and closed it. “Thank you,” he said to Tamchu and returned the sculpture.

Tamchu slipped the chain around his neck.

“Where did you get that?” Jason asked Tamchu.

“A friend made it.”

Jason continued to look at the sculpture from across the table, though he was aware that it made Tamchu uncomfortable. Whoever had made that sculpture might well be the same as himself and Abbie.

The part of him that he’d tried so hard to deny might be the most important part.

The gas lights came on, and the iron gates of Jackson Square were thrown open. A jazz combo was setting up on a stage beneath the statue of Jackson on his rearing horse. Jason saw Marie crossing the street, heading toward the café, and he waved. She saw him and waved back. Accompanying her was a tired-looking man wearing a dress shirt without a tie and black slacks.

They entered the café and made their way toward the table. Jason got up and pushed two tables together. He wondered who Marie’s guest was. He felt as if he’d met most of her inner cadre in the past few months. This man must have just arrived quite recently. He was unshaven. His shirt had streaks of dirt on it.

As the man approached, his face paled. He stared at… Zeb, that was the guy’s name. He stared at Zeb as if he were seeing a ghost.

Zeb didn’t see him; he was studying a page in his notebook.

Jason watched with interest.

Marie continued on, then, realizing that the man had stopped, turned back. “Craig? Are you all right?”

Zeb’s head jerked up. He looked at the man with Marie. He stood suddenly, knocking his chair over.

Marie looked from one to the other. “Do you know each other?”

Craig approached the table. “Zeb? Is it really you?”

“Craig? But I thought you—”

“I’m not dead,” Craig said gently. To Jason, the man’s haggard face said that he almost wished he was.

Marie stepped between them. “Introduce me, please,” she said to Craig.

“This is Dr. Zeb Aberly. The radio astronomer…”

“Oh,” said Marie thoughtfully. “Sure. I remember. The man you told me about. I sent Hugo to fetch him. Years ago.”

She smiled—much less aggressively, thought Jason, than she usually did. She looked downright gentle. “I’m Marie Laveau,” she told Zeb, holding out her hand. “Glad you could make it. Craig just got here too. But he’s been here before. He’s told me quite a lot about you.”

Looking very confused, Zeb shook Marie’s hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t really understand.”

Craig made his way around the table and picked up Zeb’s chair. “Sit down.”

Zeb resumed his seat and looked at Craig warily. “Any, uh, tracking devices in my shirt?” He grinned weakly, but only for a second.

Craig reached over and pulled Zeb’s notebook toward him. He dropped into the chair next to Zeb and flipped through a few pages. He ran one hand through his hair and sighed. “Amazing.”

His face was almost babyish, yet Jason was sure he was about the same age as Zeb, who looked weathered and old.

Craig said, so softly that Jason could barely hear over the jangle of the rapidly filling café, “Want the rest of the collection?”

Zeb stared at him. To Jason’s surprise, tears filled Zeb’s eyes. “Ellie had them, Craig. What the hell are you talking about?”

Craig looked away.

“Are they the reason she died?” The veins on Zeb’s neck stood out. “Tell me, damn it!”

Craig was silent.

Jason didn’t know who Ellie was, but something seemed to flow out of Zeb at that moment. His face lost its animation, became slack and blank.

Finally Craig began to speak. “I’m so sorry about… everything, Zeb. I did the best I could. I had to go into hiding. I think that I told you why. Remember that day on the bus? People in my own division got all whacked-out about that alien thing—”

Jason’s face warmed. He felt as if his cheeks must be flaming. He looked from Zeb’s face to Craig’s. He said, “What—?” Then he stopped himself.

They paid him no attention.

Craig continued. “Evidently, their obsession was caused by an early prototype of information nan, a precursor of what’s causing the Information Wars. Some jerk doing research for the NIH thought that we weren’t taking the alien threat seriously enough and had someone spike the punch at a New Year’s party with something he called ‘X.’ His cohorts infiltrated the worldwide intelligence community and pretty soon the meme of the deadly alien infestation that had to be rooted out had made its way around the globe.”

Zeb shook his head. “So all that alien stuff was nonsense.”

All that alien stuff was nonsense. Jason stared at the two men, wanting to believe it. Everything—the sculpture and what it implied, the long, long chase that had taken his parents as casualties, Abbie’s fool conspiracy theory that made them part of a group of victims— dropped away. A powerful sense of relief and disappointment spread through Jason. Suddenly his world was normal.

“No.” Craig was emphatic. “It wasn’t nonsense. Not at all. But the way the government—and other governments—handled it was.”

And with that, Jason’s heart was beating as fast as a rabbit’s.

Marie was as riveted by the conversation as Jason. She kept glancing over at him as if expecting him to say something.

Suddenly Kita and Hugo arrived. They began to greet Marie, but she hushed them with a gesture. They sat down and Hugo stared at Zeb for a moment, then whispered something to Kita.

Marie cleared her throat. “Zeb, Craig told me that you’re working on a Theory of Everything. A unified field theory. That you have an idea about what the Silence might be and what the incoming signals might mean.”

Jason couldn’t contain himself any longer. Who were these men who knew so much that had been kept from him, from his father and mother? “What about the—the aliens?” he demanded.

Craig seemed startled. He looked at Zeb, whose face was stony, and shrugged. “This is what we surmise might have happened. We believe that zygotes around the world—probably no more than several thousand—had DNA that was somehow mutated by the incoming signal following the first Silence. The only commonality that we could ascertain among all of the mothers we could find was that they all had a virus that seemed to manifest in no way other than to affect their fetus in such a way that their DNA was mutated. They all still had the virus. The only symptom, in some of them, was a slight cold when they first contracted it. It was not contagious.”

Jason felt Marie’s eyes on him.

She knew.

She must have always known. Ever since he came to town.

“But why?” asked Marie. “Was it a natural virus?”

“It may have been sent here,” said Craig. “But we don’t really know.”

“What was the result in the children?” asked Kita, her black eyes intent, her cool sharp tone commanding their attention. She tossed down the match with which she had just lit a cigarette and took a deep pull. Her question hung in the air. No one said anything.

Beneath the table, Jason clenched his hands together to keep from jumping up and punching Craig. And he bit his tongue—hard—to keep from shouting out with rage and sorrow at what had been done to his family.

Craig glanced at Kita. “This… has been classified for practically forever. It’s very strange, but we really don’t know what the significance might be. One result was that these children have a much stronger concentration of magnetite in their magnetoreceptors. These are sensorial cells that are intertwined with the cells that sense pheromones and other scents. They are exquisitely sensitive to electromagnetic phenomena. When they were young, they became very ill when broadcasting worked.”

“Like Illian!” shouted Tamchu. He jumped up, his coppery face alight. He continued in a low excited voice, stumbling a bit. “She— she was always sick when the radio worked. She made this.” He held his sculpture aloft. “And what are you saying?” he demanded of Craig. “That she is from outer space?”

Kita leaned forward, looping her shining black hair behind her ears. Her glance touched each of them in turn, as if including them in a seminar. “I’ve never heard this. I mean, I’ve heard about the DNA anomaly, but…”

Zeb interrupted, his voice low and so hushed that they all had to strain to hear him. He seemed to have regained interest in the conversation. “This—Illian? must know. Somehow, she must know. She made the map. But how? Why?”

“Perhaps,” said Kita, lighting another cigarette from her spent one, her hands trembling a bit as she did so. “Perhaps… there was something about the incoming signal that caused her brain to develop in certain ways. Like training. I can’t tell you how much work I’ve done in that regard. So if, as Craig claims, these children were ultrasensitive to magnetic phenomena, it could be that… you know that it was proven years ago that vertebrates such as fish and turtles, whales, and mice, and even insects create a magnetic map within their brains which is one key to their navigational powers. So,” she continued, blinking rapidly and fanning smoke from her face, “it could be… that Illian really could sense magnetic phenomena in a more intense way than the rest of us because of her mutated DNA. It seems hard to believe that she deliberately created what she knew to be a map of the cosmos. She’s an artist. I worked and spoke with her quite extensively in Paris and I didn’t really get any particular hint that she knew exactly what she was doing.”

Marie was sitting back in her chair with her arms crossed, an extremely satisfied look on her face. She had gathered all these people together on purpose. Zeb was apparently a happy accident. Icing on the cake. But he was not entirely necessary. This guy Craig, Kita, and himself… Marie, with all her snooping and spying, had put all these human puzzle pieces together and was just waiting for her goddamned synergy to happen…

And Jason couldn’t stand it any longer. “She doesn’t!”

The shout burst from him in spite of himself, in spite of the long years of hiding, the early training burned into him, the imperative to lie low, to remain secret. He jumped up, spilling drinks as he jarred the table, and held on to the edges of the table with both hands as tightly as if it were saving him from drowning.

They were all staring at him now. It was a moment suspended in time for Jason. A jazz trio down the block and a reggae band in the square were an undertone to the other conversations in the café, which continued unabated. He smelled magnolia blossoms and wondered crazily if they were in bloom now or just someone’s perfume… “I mean—”

“What Jason means is that he doesn’t know either,” said Marie, her face alight with something Jason couldn’t read.

“That’s right,” said Jason, mopping his forehead with a napkin he grabbed from the table. “And I’m one of those fucked-up—mutated— things that you guys tracked down.” Now he was shouting directly at Craig. “You killed my father! You drove my mom nuts! I hate all of this shit!”

Craig stood, his furrowed face even more defeated-looking, and reached a hand toward Jason. “It wasn’t me. Really. I was trying to—”

Jason ignored Craig’s hand. “I don’t care.” He shoved through the welter of chairs toward the sidewalk. He didn’t stop when one fell backward with a clatter.

“Where are you going?” Marie stood up and looked as if she were on full alert.

“Away.”

Marie came around the table and held him by the shoulders in a light but steely grip. He’d never been so close to her. Her eyes and face were oddly intoxicating, powerfully compelling. Now he knew how she kept everyone under her thumb.

“Jason, please don’t go. If you stay, you can help us understand what’s going on. Don’t you see? This is what Crescent City is all about. Learning. Trying to find out what’s happened. Trying to get through the difficult times ahead. We need people like you. Even if it weren’t for this, we would need you. I’ve come to depend on you. Please.”

Jason slipped from Marie’s grip. He stopped at the end of the table and surveyed the strange assortment of people in front of him.

Tamchu, who knew another woman like Abbie, like himself, who seemed to have taken a completely different turn. Kita, who almost singlehandedly developed the strange and marvelous Flower Cities that were becoming the shelter from the storm of barbarism and ignorance out in the wasteland the world was becoming. Craig, to whom he could never imagine speaking civilly. Zeb, some kind of strange genius working on the source of the delicious musical signal that had haunted and twisted his entire life. Hugo, whom Marie called her Billy Strayhorn, her collaborator. And Marie, who had moved heaven and Earth to build this new citadel that she called Crescent City.

He had to hand it to Marie. Somehow she’d pulled this off. Everyone at the table knew a lot more than they had ten minutes ago.

Including him.

“I really… don’t have anything to add.” His throat was sore from shouting. He took a sip from someone’s water and gestured toward Tamchu’s sculpture. “I don’t know anything like that. I’m just human. That’s what matters. Making this world a better place. Not turning into a form of light, like my mother did.” He blinked back tears and continued, his voice stronger. “Not flying off into space, like my lover plans to do. You’ve got plenty of help. The rest of the world doesn’t. I want to help the rest of the world. You have a hundred engineers better than me in Crescent City.”

“But—”

Jason had never before seen Marie look desperate, even when the city was falling apart.

He wavered for only a second. He shook his head. “I won’t be used, Marie. I don’t want to be understood. I don’t want to be studied. I don’t want to disgorge whatever I might know, which is nothing. I’ve been at the mercy of this persecution all my life and I just want to forget it. I want to grow up. I want to be a part of the world I’ve always been separated from. I don’t want to live on an island. I’ve always been on an island. Don’t you understand?”

“I understand,” Tamchu said.

Jason was completely wrung-out. He stood for a second, thinking that there was something he ought to do. Then he unbuttoned his shirt pocket and pulled out a laser sphere wrapped in the customary felt pouch. He reached past Hugo and Kita and gave it to Zeb.

“What’s this?” Zeb asked.

“It has a lot of information from the Houston Space Center in it. It might come in handy.”

“I guess,” said Zeb, barely glancing at it. “But—”

“Nice meeting you,” said Jason and walked out of the café.

He heard Marie call his name but did not turn around. Two women veering into the café almost knocked him down. One said to the other, “Annie, look! There’s Zeb, right where he told me to meet him. He’ll be so excited to see you.”

It was getting dark. Jason walked four blocks, trying to shut his ears to the music, the beat, the euphoria that echoed through his body, threatening to make him believe that the most important thing in the world was to leave it and to spend the rest of his life figuring out how and where to go.

Jason arrived at the towers flanking the French Quarter on Canal Street. The levees had been built up so that much of the year the streets were dry, but it did not take a very heavy rain or much of a rise in the river to flood the streets. These skyscrapers were linked by high barricades. They were Flower buildings. Most of the city’s information was generated and exchanged here, though interstices ran throughout the city and many blocks had their own Flower.

He took the elevator to the sixth floor. He walked to the Genome Project door and opened it.

As he expected, several clerks and lab assistants were at work. Most everyone in New Orleans was on a twenty-four-hour shift schedule. They had probably ignored the crisis, the soldiers, and the Carnival here. They were pretty no-nonsense.

A young man at a reception desk asked, “Can I help you?”

“I want to add my genetic information to the project.”

He beamed at Jason. “Good! I’ll call up the form for you.” He sat at a console and in a minute rose and told Jason to take the seat. “There. Name, date of birth, all that. Just put your finger there.”

Jason rested his finger in a depression, felt a slight needle puncture, then the sting of antiseptic. Next to name he entered jason peabody. He filled in all the blanks.

By the time he finished and stood up, a light was flashing above his console. The attendant rushed over. He looked at Jason. “Can you please wait here? This is very important.” He hurried away.

Jason left and closed the door behind him. He took the elevator to the ground floor and pushed open the emergency exit on the west side of the building.

He stepped into the street as alarms sounded and made sure the door was locked firmly behind him.

He was Outside once again.

The street was empty beneath the full moon. He walked a few blocks, saw flickering firelight and soldiers playing cards, and turned north for a block or two. He crossed under an empty interstate bridge. Water lapped beneath it; he headed north again until he came to the tail of the flooded area and went around it, picked up the road on the other side. It was pleasant; much cooler than during the day. Most of this area had been wiped out by flooding. After a mile or two, he came to a low rise on which stood a row of deserted shacks. They made him nostalgic, in an odd way, for all that he’d seen while bumming around the country.

A bike leaned against the front porch of one of them. Jason yelled into the shack, “Anybody home?” But of course everyone was long gone.

He hopped on and was delighted to find that it had a generator light that brightened as he pedaled.

He continued north. It felt good to be back on the road.

Stars. Silence. A distant destination.

He settled into the rhythm of flatland pedaling.

Ride Out

Tamchu was very happy to be back at work.

The night was moonless; the rush of the river loud. It drowned the dip of his oars. He enjoyed using his expertise to silently board the warship, to deal with the two soldiers who tried to stop him, to find his way to the air circulation unit where he sprayed the filter with a metapheromone cocktail of Kita’s design, which, within fifteen minutes, would infiltrate the rooms of all the sleeping soldiers. He then made his way to the operations room, where, as planned, his cohorts had taken care of those on watch. They were, as he suspected, of a variety of nationalities, male and female. They sat or lay in attitudes of restful ease, soon to wake happy in the service of Marie Laveau. He made the hand-slapping gesture with his colleagues that showed solidarity. They began installing the new virtual reality training program at one end of the room; he looked at his watch and counted down the seconds. He switched on the microphone for the ship’s speaker system, which was exactly where it had been in his virtual run-through, and spoke into it.

“Hello. I am your new captain. You will now obey me. If any one of you betrays any sign of disloyalty, your messmates will kill you. You will enjoy obeying me. Muster out.”

Marie had told him that she wanted him to go Singapore. That suited him. He was excited about it. She had shared some of her plans with him; they had to do with using nanotech to travel to space and reestablish radio communication. She had been wild with gratitude for the information he’d brought from Illian. Marie envisioned a voudoun galaxy, in which everyone lived in some place she called the crossroads, some sort of intersection from what he gathered. He envisioned a Buddhist galaxy. Perhaps they might not be so different. At any rate, Marie was alive. He knew, because the particles of life were on fire for him and burning with a white light, that she did not think so. He read on her face the record of some tremendous failure. But to be human was to fail. The grander one’s plan, the easier it was to fail. Her plans were the plans of life, not the plans of death, and he was deeply glad that Hugo had found him and brought him here.

He saw through the window the troops gathering below on the enormous deck. He removed from his pocket the list of commands they were to carry out and leaned over the microphone.

Thirty-six hours later, Marie watched the USS Columbia set off toward Crescent City, overflowing with passengers. Many jokers were still smashing bottles of champagne across the railings of the boat and practically everywhere—a boat much more antique than she’d expected to find in this day and age. It meant that the IF and the National Guard consisted of a lot of posturing. They lacked a lot of important technology. Perhaps much of it had been destroyed when Washington had surged.

Yet they could still be deadly, and she didn’t want to underestimate them.

Over the course of two weeks, the warship made four round trips. The Be Happy cruise ship was preparing to leave on its fifth and final trip on a blue-skied morning of astounding clarity. A morning that put fear in Marie’s heart.

She and Hugo were breakfasting on the roof.

“Hugo, remember the morning before Alexandra hit?”

Hugo put down his poppyseed muffin. “Oh.”

“I’m not saying that this resemblance means that we’ll have a hurricane within thirty-six hours. Or less. But the barometer is dropping too.”

“I hear that up north they’re setting up some kind of trading network. Going to call it the Rural Network. Maybe we ought to set up something similar in the Caribbean. At least to trade weather information.” Hugo was silent for a few minutes. “Marie, come with me today. Please.” He finished his muffin and wiped his hands on his napkin. He swigged the rest of his coffee. “There’s really no reason for you to stay. Even for a few days.”

“I’ll think about it.” She felt a pang about leaving her headquarters. Its spacious rooms and landing-facing balcony were both soothing and efficacious. She was able to keep an eye on things. The Flower atop her building was an orchid. Or at least it looked like an orchid. The air was still and unusually cool.

“What’s that sound?” Marie stood and went to the railing. “There they are.” Approaching the landing was a rough raft, about twenty feet on a side. In the center was a torn, mud-stained wigwam that looked as if it had been made with an old white sheet. On it, half a dozen people stood, waving with tremendous excitement and shouting. “More rafters with the New Orleans Plague. Good. You can take them to Crescent City. I hope that our plans to rescue the ones that come after we leave work out.”

Hugo responded predictably. “Marie, they are not your responsibility.” He said that several times a day.

“Bullshit,” she said, straightening.

“You didn’t create the New Orleans Plague.”

“I engendered it, more or less.”

Hugo joined her at the railing and pointed downriver. “There’s the Columbia coming around the bend. Right on time. But that sky looks almost green. Look. There on the horizon.”

“It’s your imagination.”

“I don’t think so. How many people are left?”

“Oh, not many.” Her smile felt strained even to her. “A skeleton crew. Look. They’re retrieving the rafters. Good.”

“Too bad they’re all incurable,” said Hugo.

“Well,” said Marie. She sighed. “We’ll find a cure. At some point. Until then, they’ll just have to imagine that they’re on a raft with Huck Finn, riding into the heart of America.”

“Like him, they won’t find what they expected.”

Marie had never seen Hugo furious before. He was usually completely in control. But now he was screaming from the bridge of the Be Happy through a megaphone. “Get onboard, Marie! Now!”

The wind was rising. Unmistakably. In the past eight hours, the sky had clouded over and now heavy drops splatted on the landing. Marie’s long thin dress blew back against her.

“Cut Face and Shorty and I will come on the ketch!” she yelled back, though she knew he couldn’t hear her. He knew the plan. He just hadn’t agreed to it. “The storm will be over in a day or two!” Her straw hat blew off her head and skidded across the landing into the river.

Hugo would leave. Kita was now in Crescent City, and she was pregnant. Though smoking no longer held the same deadly potential as it used to, she had stopped smoking once she knew. Marie was as thrilled as Hugo. She’d taken to calling him Pops. It really irritated him. Everyone else was there too—Craig, Zeb, the invaluable nanotechnologist Annie, Sun Ra…

Everyone, she thought a bit sadly, except Jason.

Kita had carried with her the astonishing Universal Assembler. She hoped to create an environment in which she could study it and its powers safely. She was still astounded, she said, that all had come out as well as it had, but attributed it to good design and forethought rather than to luck.

Marie gave a last wave as the ship pulled away ponderously from the landing. No matter what the storm might dish out, the ship could take it, as long as it was in deep water. But it could make good speed. She was pretty sure that it would make it out to the city before the storm’s swirling fury reached its peak.

She turned away from the boat, no longer able to hear Hugo’s imprecations, and walked through deserted Jackson Square. Birds escaping the storm flocked overhead. Sycamore trees released their dry leaves and bent beneath the wind; palms flailed. Cut Face emerged from a café where loud reggae music was playing.

“Hi, Robert.”

He grinned and saluted her. “Damn good job, Marie. After de storm, we head on out, eh?”

“I wish you’d left on the boat.”

“Now you know that is not what we choose to do. So you jus’ sit tight now.”

“This area is pretty low.”

“We be heading for Magnolia Tower soon, eh?”

“Yeah. If I don’t see you there in two hours, I’ll come and drag you over there myself.”

A Bee blew past overhead. They always reminded her of the woman bicycling through the sky in The Wizard of Oz. So incongruous. But everything was—now.

She took her time walking to her apartment, savoring every step. She’d walked to school as a child down these streets. Gone for ice cream with her mother and Grandmère, three generations of women on an evening stroll on a hot summer’s evening while the sun sank low on the Mississippi River. Even though every detail had been recreated in Crescent City in a tiny quadrant of its vast area, it did not sit on holy ground. There really wasn’t any point. It was a fantasy recreation for the benefit of others. It did not fool her.

In the St. Louis #1 Cemetary was buried the original Marie Laveau, her namesake. Marie smiled. No doubt her life had seemed just as tumultuous, just as much lived on the edge. African culture and identity were fading into ancestral memory during her time, and she fought to keep them alive and to give them power and majesty. Louis Armstrong had fired off a gun a few blocks away on a fateful New Year’s Eve and been sentenced to the Waif’s Home, where a strict bandmaster gave him the discipline to help him bridge the gap between amateur and professional and where he had for the first time in his life been assured of eating regular meals every single day. Untold numbers of krewes had labored over their costumes and floats. Slave ships from Africa had put in here, and their chained surviving human cargo sold like cattle. That was here too, and she didn’t care if that sank along with the entire South, but that suffering and that will to survive and that strength was in her blood and in the very African-laid bricks on which she walked.

Her daughter, Kalina Marie Laveau, was in Crescent City now and ready, after a long teenage rebellion, to pick up the reins should it be necessary. Marie had great faith in the power of Crescent City, the power of human knowledge. But if that could not be done, she had made her peace. She had done what she had set out to do.

Marie arrived at the home in which she had been born, opened the gate, pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

These thick walls had weathered countless hurricanes and floods. She touched the swirling plaster for a moment: cool, and she seemed to know the lines of the swirls by heart. She smiled. Probably because she’d colored over them when she was a child to illuminate their pattern and had received a good switching from Grandmère.

She ignored her rooms of antiques, all of which were programmed into Crescent City now. Anyone could have one of these very Queen Anne chairs in their very own quarters if they wished, with identical upholstery. But then what was the point? Perhaps a simple celebration of form instead of rarity. Funny how the age of nanotechnology delivered both more and less than she had ever imagined that it might. But they were still only on its threshold.

She climbed to the top floor. Her office; her citadel. She had not been here in ages. She threw open the french doors to let in the fresh air. They slammed back in the rising wind.

She sat once again in the chair, the very chair in which she had sat when this all had begun. When she had passed out of the old world and into the new.

She did not activate Petite Marie’s holograms, nor did she have to. They had not been replicated in Crescent City. They were etched in her memory, and she was the only one to whom it mattered. Petite Marie danced infinitely in her heart. Merry and naughty. All that she ever would be. Each one of us was interrupted at some point, Marie mused, and at that point death rounded us into a kind of perfection, a finished work.

She sat there for a long time, thinking.

A window shattered, waking her from reverie.

She stepped out onto the balcony. Wind no longer allowed her tendriled golden raintree to dance, but pulled its viney branches horizontal to the street. She figured it to be forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour.

She looked down on the street where so long ago Cut Face and Shorty had juggled their guns and killed her. Was she even in the same universe? Had it perhaps all been some sort of postdeath dream?

She held tight to the railing and knew its truth.

Then she was startled by an explosion.

It was dull, deep, and huge. It was the result of massive explosions.

Dynamite.

As in the destruction of earthworks.

She heard more explosions. The Federation must have blown the levees.

It wouldn’t be long before the river’s surge reached the city.

Cut Face and Shorty were in a low part of town. In a low part of town and partying with the aid of unlimited beer.

They were too far to reach before the surge would arrive. She sent a message via the interstice, which still glowed, telling them to get to safety. Then she ran to her desk and called up New Orleans. It popped up holographically.

She knew it by heart.

She pulled on her programming gloves, trembling. Be cool, Marie. Now, of all times in your life, be real, real cool.

She picked up the building on the corner of the block where they were and set it on top of theirs. That was the best she could do in a hurry. It was not sophisticated. But it indicated that matter was to be transferred to that building. That it was to grow, and with all possible speed without melting. The pelting rain would keep it cool. The goddamned flood would cool it too. She touched the solidify command pad. It said, “Do you really want to do this? Let me inform you of the possible—”

“Yes!” Marie shouted. “I want to do this!” They would be able to climb to the top of it, perhaps—

Then the door to her room slammed open. Cut Face and Shorty rushed in.

“Damn, Marie, we thought you still be here,” said Shorty. “Because you so crazy.”

“They’ve blown the levee,” she said. “We’ll be drowned.”

“Nah,” said Shorty. “We got a plan. Hurry now.” He yanked an old jacket out of her closet and flung it at her. She pulled it on and followed them to the roof. A rowboat with a small engine sat there, seemingly attached to the roof by some sort of skirt. Of course, it had been grown. But who had initiated it?

“How did this get here?” she asked.

Shorty laughed. “You t’ink you be da only one who knows how to use da city? We grew it from da bar. Started it a few hours ago. We know you probably be lingering here too long. Didn’t know da damned soldiers would blow da levee, though. Now get in.” He heaved the canvas bag he’d been carrying over the side.

“It not be quite finished,” said Cut Face, looking underneath. “Still attached.” He pulled out a pocketknife and began cutting the membranous connections through which the matter of the boat had flowed.

Marie looked off across the city in astonishment. “It’s coming,” she said, but could not hear her own voice over the wind.

A tremendous gray wave, beneath a gray sky, crested toward them about half a mile away. It moved like the coil of a snake, ponderously, building on the river and rushing outward across the recent swamps. Cold rain slashed her face; soaked her dress.

Shorty grabbed her arm and made her climb in the boat, which they’d loosened from the roof. She settled on a seat, looked down, and didn’t see any holes. Maybe it would float. She smiled at Shorty, who was facing her, and picked up one of the oars with both hands. Cut Face squeezed next to her and picked up the other.

“Ready?” she asked. Suddenly she felt wonderful.

Brown water filled the streets swiftly. It rose to the top of the building and flooded over it in a large swell, lifting the boat. For an instant, Marie was afraid that they might be swept down into the street on the other side of the block as if they were going over a waterfall, but Shorty held fast to a rope tied to something she couldn’t see. He lashed his end around one of the seats. For ten minutes, the water rose steadily and then the main swell had passed, leaving only a rushing current of water that was several feet higher than her roof.

Then the rope snapped. They swirled crazily over Bourbon Street and almost smashed into the top floor of her Uncle Rob’s old bar.

“Now what?” she screamed, trying to overwhelm the wind’s shrieking.

“Row like hell!” shouted Cut Face in her ear.

They slowly made their way toward the nearest tower, which was swaying. Bees were pushed helplessly through the sky; the bioinformational petals were stripped from the gathered interstice cables. A huge sheet of glass popped out ten stories above them and glided downward, landing on the water with a loud smack a hundred feet away. “I don’t think this is a good idea!” Marie shouted.

Cut Face nodded and they changed tack.

The wind and current brought them near the bell tower of the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. Marie pulled with all her might and they managed to smash right into it. Marie hooked her arms over the open ledge and scrambled in; in a minute, they were all inside. Shorty untied the boat’s rope from his waist and tied it around a stone pillar. He pulled the boat close and retrieved the bag he’d flung inside.

Above, the bell tolled sonorously. They climbed to the highest level, about thirty feet above the water, and looked out.

Marie felt the brunt of the wind. It would probably get worse. If they were lucky, this sturdy old tower would not crumble. Below her only the top stories of the old houses were visible. Perhaps no one would ever live in them again.

But they had been well lived in, in their time.

She listened to the tolling of the bell, fancied that its regular tones took on a new rhythm, the rhythm of one of the passages of Crescent City Rhapsody.

A rhapsody was a work of many pieces stitched together. That was what New Orleans had been.

And that was what it would be again. Stitched together out of what was best in this strange transmuting world.

She envisioned her shining city, far out in the sea, a place of refuge and a place of consolidation. A place of hope. A springboard to the future. A link to the cosmos.

“This is my l’wa,” she said, not shouting, but talking to herself. “I didn’t lose my heart. It was always here. And I have always served it.” She stared off into the distance, which was all hard rain and whitecaps breaking on roofs.

“Who you talking to?” yelled Shorty.

“My manbo,” yelled Marie. They grinned at each other.

“Thirsty?” Cut Face pulled a bottle of champagne from the bag and popped the cork.

They passed the bottle around.

And after a while, they danced to the music of the wind.

Final Note

It was night when the Be Happy gained its first view of Crescent City.

Zeb stood on deck, holding the railing tightly. Ra was next to him. The city rose from the dark sea in swooping lines of light.

He looked up at the stars. Deep contentment washed through him.

There were mysteries in the heavens. There always had been. No matter what he discovered in the new life ahead, there always would be.

What joy.