Ribofunk

The Bad Splice

As if blindly obedient to one of the weirder plectic neothomist catastrophe figures, my life seemed to be warping itself around strange attractors, spiraling and darting up and down cusps and caustics, pleats and furrows that led to some unpredictable yet inevitable terminal boundary condition.

And the worst part was-I couldn't tell if on balance I should be scared or glad.

Changes had swarmed through my life as thick as harvest thrips on a cloth-tree during the past few months, enough so as to necessitate a few unscheduled sessions with Doctor Varela, my BP advisor. I had thought I had seen the last of that calm and erudite Behavioral Pragmatist after he had helped me over the rough patch following my departure from the PI biz.

Since joining Boston's branch of the Protein Police, my life had been relatively simple and undemanding, despite the quirks and dangers of my new trade, and I had felt no recent need of beep counseling. But lately all that had changed, leading Doctor Varela to nod and murmur sagely over my condition, consult his snippets, and prescribe a course of

Biomet's Angstaway paired with Sciclone's VivaciTee, as well as a general adrenergic booster. The tropes seemed to be working, although I still felt a little off-parm.

But I was managing to cope well with quite a lot, I thought.

It had all started when the Big Brains in charge of the NU's Internal Recon and Security force (of which the Protein Police was a division) had laid down a couple of new ukases.

First, there were to be no more human-human teams. We were just too understaffed to permit such a luxury to continue and would remain so into the foreseeable future. What with the guaranteed prole-dole, the dwindling numbers of pure-gen, fully enfranchised humans, and the seductions of virtuality, criminality, and a million sects, cults, posses, and sets representing an infinite range of hedonism, nihilism, and every ism on the scale, potential candidates for the force were few and far between. (The same was true, of course, in every branch of the NU adminisphere; without kibes, demons, and cocktails, the whole system would have suffered instant apoptosis.)

So all the old dual-human partnerships were split up. That meant I lost K-mart Saunders, the most agreeable plug I had ever worked with. In his place, I was to choose between a var or a kibe. Well, since the death of my old var Hamster, I couldn't really work too closely with the splices and remain comfortable. That left the kibe.

The Turing Level Four kibes had just gone into general open-access production. (The Level Fives, naturally, were

already up and running, but were reserved exclusively for the use of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and other ruling bodies of the adminisphere, which liked to stay one giant step ahead of the masses they governed. And of course the Level Sixes were not far behind, close to finishing their semi-autonomous evolution.) The Toronto HQ of the Protein Police had just received a month's worth of shipments of Fours from the Bangalore macqui of Segasoft-TogaiMagic, and these had been further distributed across the continent.

The kibe cores themselves looked identical to and had the same dimensions as the old Level Threes, allowing for easy retrofitting: shiny featureless platters about as thick as a stack of a dozen ancient CD's. It was the newly evolved qubitic circuitry inside that raised their functioning to a higher level. As for the chassis that would carry the cores-well, the force's own crada had come up with several new models specifically designed for law enforcement.

So my new partner became a synthetic, syncretic personality in a mini-frisbee, capable of swapping bodies at will.

On top of this unsettling switch, the Swellheads had insisted that all the humans on the force go in for a somatic upgrade. The mucky-mucks were tired of losing officers to various preventable assaults. Baseline bodies were now considered insufficent to counter the moddies of the baddies. We had to meet them head-on, match them in the arms (and legs and brains) race.

Like most people in all walks of life, I had my share of implants and add-ons and upgrades already: simple things that had helped me in my work, like sharper peripheral

vision, stronger bones, voluntary pain shunts. But unlike some bodyartists and puzzlepluses, I had never gone in for radical modifications. What was good enough for grandpooh was good enough for me. Now I was being told that I had to change or be dropped from the force.

Swallowing my trepidations and instinctive dislike of being bossed around (after all, I wasn't an independent contractor anymore), I went into the bodyshop.

I came out sheathed in flexible imbricated skin like a pangolin's, its plates chamois-soft to the touch yet capable of turning aside sharp edges and low velocity projectiles. Additionally, my new integument from Calypte Biomed would react to the beam of a flashlight by instantly altering its refractive index. (I had once read that the quickest basal reaction in nature was found in the jaws of a certain ant, which could snap closed in a third of a millisecond. Science had considerably bettered that.) I had a paralymphatic system from Olympus Biotech that would aggressively react to micro– and nano-invaders. My arteries were reinforced with CuraTech's neo-goretex, my bones threaded with Innovir's stonefiber. My heart had an onboard Hemazyne assist, as did my lungs. I had Agouron hyperflexure in my fingers, increased haptic and proprioceptive sensitivity, and certain wetware enhancements from BioCryst not available to the general public. Finally, I could on short notice generate several highly damaging antipersonnel cytokines expressible through strategically placed exocrine glands.

In short, I was now one mean and hyperefficient slagger for the forces of goodness and justice.

I was also on a half-dozen new tropes that allowed me to integrate my new body image and sensory inputs.

It was just after this makeover that the final big change in my life occured.

I met Xuly Beth and fell in love.

Xuly Beth Vollbracht had been born in the Mercosur, grown up a gypsy waterbaby. Her parents, Rolf and Valentina, had managed a section of the Hidrovia, roving up and down that extensive artificial waterway, supervising commerce and maintenance, troubleshooting and policing. Educated and trained as a noah for the GEF, Xuly Beth had been stationed at various spots around the world (she had seen parts of APEC, CarriCom, and Scandibaltica), monitoring and remediating oceanic-atmospheric systems, before ending up in the Nova England bioregion.

We met at an official function hosted by the noahs to brief the Protein Police on the latest rogue organisms we could possibly expect to emerge from runaway marine co-evolution. (Safe as silicrobe technology was supposed to be, there were inevitable glitches.)

Luckily for me, Xuly Beth was far from repelled by my altered epidermis. It turned out that one of her first lovers had been a fishboy from the Hidrovia, and the experience had crystallized her taste for odd integuments.

Xuly Beth was the change in my life that tipped the scales toward gladness. It was the first time since my wife walked out on me that I had a functioning pair-bonding. It felt good.

And that feeling alone should have been enough to warn me that something bad was about to fall right on my head like

one of Xuly Beth's programmed heavyrains out of the seemingly clear sky.

The first notice I had of trouble was the urgent patterned pinging of my flimsy one morning as I sat at my desk. I was on scheduled fifteen-minute downtime, relaxing in a quasi-meditative state at the focus of which was a little token of her work Xuly Beth had given me. In a clear cylindrical container about as big as a pneumatic-tube message capsule, a self-sustaining miniature silicrobe twister ran its homeodynamic contortions, powered only by sunlight. Its infinite random permutations served as a Taoist exemplar of mind-wiping potency.

But even the Tao could not ultimately contend against the earcon for a Class One transmission. I resumed my mind and voiced the screen on. The face of my immediate superior appeared.

Jo Priestly looked nervous. Not an easy task for a woman who wore the ruff bordered head and snouty-toothed face of an oversized fringed lizard. (I had seen perps faint during interrogation when she simply smiled.)

''The cat's in town," she said.

"The Xuma Puma?" I asked, recalling the petty posse-leader I had more than once tangled with in the old days. "What's to worry?"

"I wish it was only the XP. No, I'm talking about the one and only cat that matters. Krazy Kat."

Now I knew why she looked worried. "I assume there's some java following for me to dethread. But maybe you could empeg it for me… "

"You heard about Chicago? How the Kat nearly caused a Second Flood?"

"Sure. But I thought he screwed up. Didn't he leave behind some cells for the first time? All the public sniffers should be programmed by now to respond as soon as he slinks by."

"True, we've got his genome mapped, and that's more than we've ever had before. But it's not good enough. The Kat doesn't have to go out in public to cause mischief. He's got friends, allies, and sympathizers galore. And not just among the other splices either. There're lots of pure-gens who support the CLF-or at least the nonviolent aspects of their platform. Groups such as the SPCC. The Kat could easily stay holed up and still cause us yotta-shit. And don't forget private transportation. The sniffers would miss anyone in a car with positive pressure seals. No, we're going to have to hit the streets if we hope to forestall whatever deviltry the Kat's got in his hat. Bone up, plug. Then get out there and use your nose."

"Kakkoii," I said. "Cool as the socket who climbed into the Sack and made it with the Farside storage ring."

The Chief was a member of the Shaker Revivalists and a doctrinaire gone-gonad. Her membranous veined ruff flushed an agitated crimson, then her face disappeared. Another earcon sounded, and down invisible lines came the petafits on the Kat.

There was so much data it overflowed the flimsy's buffers. I released a couple of my customized speculative

agents to work in background mode, setting them loose on what was known of the Kat's MO. Then I settled down for a long raster, grateful that some of my new wetware allowed for dual-track processing.

Krazy Kat had been born some ten years ago in and into frustration. His sire was a mullis who went by the gnomic name of Doctor Radius. At the time, Doc Radius was a freelancer under temp-bond to Vivus-Neopath and had just been assigned to a highly secretive project. V-N had taken an anonymous encrypted contract off the net to develop a new breed of cultivar according to certain specs. The mosaic was to consist of 50 percent felidae of various germlines, 30 percent human, 10 percent viverrine, 10 percent miscellaneous useful nucleotides. Once the juvenile splices were out of the tanks, as yet unengrammed, they were to be shipped in partial stasis-without human accompaniment-to an address that turned out to belong to a dummy abe fronting for the city government of Paris.

It turned out that the mayor of that fine city had decided to secede from the EC, after his decision to make smoking mandatory within city limits had been quashed from on high. (Tourism was down, and the mayor felt that if he could reimpose the retro ambiance of the city, the crowds would flock back… ) These new splices from V-N, all tooth and nail and cunning, were to be trained and further bred as a corps of mercenary soldiers, the backbone of a Parisian self-defense force with which the mayor could enforce his secession.

Well, needless to say, both the EC and the WTO, among other power centers of the adminisphere, frowned on such a

move and chose to express their displeasure most forcefully. (The ex-mayor was due out of stasis in another twenty years.) Upon discovering the plot, before the splices were even shipped, the authorities came down on V-N like a ton of strange matter. The firm was heavily fined, and all the special splices were ordered destroyed.

This did not sit well with Doc Radius. Like any devoted, obsessive, manifestly brain-warped artist, he had come to regard the new splices not as mere work for-hire, but as his personal, beloved magnum opus. When the destruct order came down, Doc Radius managed to make off with a single fetus. A secret fetus not on the original workorder, but one he had been tinkering with as a side project, tweaking its parameters to his liking and esthetic sense.

This was the seed that was to blossom into Krazy Kat.

Raised in eccentric isolation with only Doc R. for a parental unit, freed of the mandated dietary leashes or proprietary tattoons, Krazy Kat had turned into a dangerous monomaniac. As soon as the Kat was mature enough to reason, after about a year of accelerated and highly illegal trope dosing, he had fixated on the admittedly high-handed and wanton destruction of his fellow fetuses. Only surviving member of his aborted kind, the young Kat had gone on to study the conditions under which splices of all types served and lived amidst human society. What the Kat found apparently sent him over the edge. (And although I myself was certainly no cocktail-sucker, I had to admit that some of the excesses and abuses documented here and elsewhere were nauseating.)

At the age of five, Krazy Kat adopted the name by which the whole world would soon know him and took a vow. He would devote his life to liberating splices everywhere, waging a no-holds-barred campaign to make their "slavery" obsolete, too costly for human society to sustain.

Thus was born the Cultivar Liberation Front.

All this information had come to light shortly after Krazy Kat's first unexpected and initially inexplicable terrorist excursion, the slaughter of the board of directors of Hedonics Plus at their yearly meeting in Geneva. In the ensuing worldwide hunt for clues, the Tijuana branch of the Protein Police found Doc Radius's trashed lab, as well as the Doc himself, similarly lifelessly trashed. (At the time I had still been a loner PI, without access to this hush-hush information.) Seemingly, Radius had made the mistake of objecting to all or some of his progeny's plans and had gotten just what all humans deserved in the Kat's eyes. And although the Kat had thoroughly lysed all biomatter samples connected to his person, he had not been able or concerned enough to wipe all the audiovideo material the Doc had lovingly accumulated over the years.

I studied a still shot of the mature Kat: over two meters tall, tailed, one hundred kilos of rippling muscles under a tawny, nonbasal-striped pelt. His face was a sexy, oddly alluring, highly intelligent mix of panther, civet, and human features, marred only by what I intuited was a permanent sneer calculated to reveal a glint of sharp ivory teeth.

My speculative agents popped to the surface, shattering the Kat's image with their signature metagrafix swirls. They

had no insights into what Boston could expect from the Kat, if he were indeed in town. He seemed never to repeat himself, had no favored tactics or, ahem, catspaws, being willing to strike anywhere, anytime, through or at anyone.

I dismissed the snippets and summoned my partner, knowing the kibe would already have assimilated the same data, in a fraction of the time. Waiting for it to arrive, I studied the swirling, captured tornado in its tube. The microweather's patternless patterns seemed to mock the chaos around me. But paradoxically, the border of chaos and stasis was where life flourished…

My partner arrived.

(The Turing Level Four kibes came with a curious legal codicil. Just as any fully enfranchised individual was legally responsible for the actions of his or her immaterial agents and demons, shards and partials, so was any owner of a TL4 ultimately accountable for its words and deeds. Mostly, corporations bore the legal brunt; but among the Protein Police, the burden had devolved to the cops themselves, as a cost-cutting measure. If my TL4 did anything contrasocial, it was my ass on the line. It was a big responsibility, almost like having a prodge. So I called my partner "Sonny.")

Today Sonny was wearing a Hexcel Enforcer chassis: a body with an armature of stonefiber bones, buckytube circulatory system, muscles crafted of imipolex and resilin, hide of super-sharkskin, distributed co-ganglia. Looking like a lumbering grey rubbery giant, the chassis boasted a neckless human-like head with mock sensory inputs designed to draw the deadly fire of any perp stupid enough to attempt an

assault on such a monster. The real audiovisual-chemo sensors were concealed at various points around the body, as was assorted weaponry. Slotted safely behind a tough protective abdominal panel was the kibe platter itself.

Sonny spoke in a pleasant tenor voice that seemed to emerge from its armpit.

"I assumed from the data that there was a certain need for overwhelming force in dealing with the renegade splice. Was I in error, Peej?"

"No, not in error. But maybe just a wee bit premature."

After convincing Sonny to change into a relatively inconspicuous, less alarmingly destructive chassis (a BASF mechanical model nicknamed "the Washtub"), we hit the streets.

I had a destination in mind: the offices of the SPCC. Chief Priestly had mentioned them. They were an obvious source of potential coconspirators for the Kat, but I was almost certain that I'd get nothing out of them. But frankly, it was the only lead I had.

Walking through Boston's noisy, hormone-hot streets, breathing the clean exhaust of tuktuks, I tried to do as the Chief had directed and use my putative crime-sensitive nose.

Detouring down an alley off Arlington, I surprised a pack of scavenger kibes trying to break into the Sinochem Humpty Dumpster behind a bodyshop. The pack of owner-less runaway kibes needed certain organics for their maintenance and frequently resorted to theft, as well as begging.

They must have disabled the Dumpster's flee-and-shriek circuits, for it could only rock back and forth in place and hoot dismally as they attempted forced entry into its separation chambers.

Before I could react, Sonny was barreling through the pack, scattering them left and right. A battered, unsteady nutraceutical dispenser marred with letterbomb graffiti toppled over, spinning its wheels uselessly. The rest fled.

Sonny extruded a snaky tentacle and found a socket on the crippled machine. He jacked in, and the renegade dispenser died.

"Another societal parasite terminated," Sonny declaimed with a trace of TL4 pride.

"Yeah, great. Come on, Judge Dredd, we've got bigger fish to fry."

"Metaphor?"

I sighed. Just like having a kid. "Yes."

"Filed."

After a stop at an open-air tolkuchki so that I could grab a snack of biltong and camu camu fruit, we reached the Stuart Street offices of the NGO known as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cultivars. After fencing with a wary human receptionist, I was admitted into the offices of the director, one Peej Jane Grahame-Ballard.

Grahame– Ballard was a small woman whose skull was capped with pink pinfeathers. Clad entirely in shiny nonorganics, she was an obvious Carbaquist Reverencer, like 99 percent of the SPCC. She regarded me with a look such as an elderly splice must display when confronted with the

knacker: a mix of fear, contempt, and hatred. In her wall cycled a silicrobe animation of a charming prodge and studly plug: scion and mate. I wondered if she'd offer to introduce them to Krazy Kat.

"Peej Grahame-Ballard," I said with all the respectful gravity I could muster, after flashing my credentials, "we have reason to believe that the terrorist splice known as Krazy Kat has fled to our bioregion after the recent thwarting of his plans in Chicago. Specifically, to the metroplex area. The Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring is counting on the cooperation of all your members in the hunt for the criminal. Should the cultivar in question make any attempt to contact your organization-should you even so much as hear a rumor regarding that individual-we insist that you immediately notify us."

Grahame– Ballard had been doing a slow burn during my speech and now boiled over. "Of course! So you can rush out and kill him! Without even a pretence of justice!"

"Justice is a word that applies only to the enfranchised, Peej. Need I remind you that for splices, we have a parallel, neatly graduated system of rules, rewards, and punishments, all formulated scientifically over many years by experts with efficiency and utilitarianism in mind. Owners are constrained from cruelty, abuse, and overwork, while splices are guaranteed food, shelter, and meaningful employment."

"It's slavery, pure and simple!"

"A word that has no application to any being other than a human, Peej. The transgenics are property, plain and simple, just like baseline milk cows or sheep."

"Creatures with up to forty-nine percent human genes are property?"

"I didn't make the laws, Peej. I just enforce them."

She snorted. "And as for abuses-why, I could show you the records of things that would penetrate even that armored skin of yours and make your stupid failsafe heart go into fibrillation!"

I thought about some of the things I had seen. "I sincerely doubt that, Peej."

"Every one of us should be ashamed to participate in such a system! Don't you ever feel ashamed?"

"Not when I'm doing my job, Peej."

Realizing she was getting nowhere with me, Grahame-Ballard seemed to deflate. "And your job now is to find and execute a noble creature who is plainly the moral and ethical and sentient equal of you or me… "

"Peej," I said, trying to keep calm, "you have not seen the bloody results of that 'noble creature's' brutal actions. I have."

"And who made him what he is? Mankind!"

I got wearily to my feet. "Peej, the Kat is one bad splice.

I advise you to use a long spoon when you dine with him."

"There are no bad splices, only bad owners."

"If you say so."

Back on the street I was silent for a while, letting Grahame-Ballard's rifkinesque memes percolate uneasily through my cortex.

After a few blocks, Sonny said, "We will now be staking out Peej Grahame Ballard? Perhaps you have surrepetitiously planted dustcams on her already?"

''What makes you say that?"

"Plainly you intend to catch her dining with Krazy Kat."

I had to replay the conversation in my head.

"Metaphor," I sighed.

"Thank you."

I met Xuly Beth that night in Hopcroft's Cockaigne.

In reality, of course, I was back in our apartment in Boston and she was off on assignment somewhere up in the Arctic, twiddling with icebergs or glaciers or some other such pleasantly nonsentient and tractable phenomenon. We made it a point when she was in the field to meet at least four times a week at one virtuality site or another. Our current favorite was Hopcroft's Cockaigne, with its candy mountains and sodapop rivers, peppermint trees and cottoncandy clouds. (Although I couldn't imagine coming here much more: not only was the construx starting to reveal its shallowness, but lately it reminded me too much of the strange reality humanity was making of baseline Earth!)

We were wearing our actual appearances, since we saw too little of each other lately to be bored by our real shapes and faces. A privacy filter insured that we were alone, despite the possibility that thousands of others might be wandering the same construx.

Sitting next to me on a bonbon rock soft as a sofa, Xuly Beth was finishing telling me about her day. "-so if this latest remediation works as well as the simulations project, the

average sea level should start to drop by a quarter-inch per year! Why, we can probably start to repopulate Bangladesh by the next decade!"

"Uh– huh, great… "

Xuly Beth brushed back her pastel-green, metal-threaded hair from her brow, revealing twin barometric bumps. Together with her current skin choice of blocky maculations, the bumps conjured up the image of a gawky, lovable juvenile giraffe.

"You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?"

"I'm sorry, Jewely-Xuly, really, I am. It's just that this business with the Kat is itching me worse than a dose of cryptoshingles. It's not like dealing with your average criminal, some two-fit holopero or leeson. There, you've got someone embedded in a societal matrix. You generally have a good idea of what such a person wants and how he'll go about getting it. But the Kat is a loner with no goal other than to cause as much disruption as possible. He could strike anywhere, anytime!"

"And doubting yourself like this is going to solve the case?"

"No, I guess not… "

Xuly Beth donned a look of concentration, fingering her meteorological head bumps in the way she had when she was really puzzling something out. After a minute or so she said, "How can the Kat cause trouble? By himself, with a gun or a bomb, he's just another lone mucker. If he wants maximal damage, he's got to involve others. In Chicago he had to co-opt that posse, the Roaches, to carry out his plans. Even if

he wants to release some deadly vector into the general population, he's got to find someone to batch it for him. He's no crick or watson himself, is he?"

"No, not as far as I know… "

"So if you just start shaking down all the criminal sources of such things, you're bound to run into a signal that leads back to the Kat!"

I let out a sigh rather more hopeful than not. "You're right, of course. I should have thought of that angle myself. Nothing's hopeless. I guess I was just letting the magnitude of the case get me down. Plus someone I had to interview today said some things that made me wonder why I do what I do."

Xuly Beth stood up. "I knew it. You're just not thinking straight because you're missing your little weather-girl. Well, she has just what you need… "

Xuly Beth disappeared, exiting the construx without even using a popup menu. In a few seconds she was back.

"I'm in my Sack, dear."

I didn't need to have my arm-or any other body part-twisted.

Breaking my neurolink to the telecosm, I found myself back in Boston. I took my Sack out of its maintenance rack, tickled it open, and climbed in.

You could have a strictly neuro-induced orgasm in virtuality, but for some strange reason-maybe lesser bandwidth, maybe something to do with sheldrakean fields-it just wasn't identical with a Sack-administered full-body experience.

Back in Cockaigne, Xuly Beth and I went into a naked-bodied clinch, fell to the ground, and began to tear up the turf. Back home and in the Arctic, two Sacks were thrashing.

I was sure that if the Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring knew that a side-effect of the somatic up-grade they insisted I have was heightened orgasms, they would have deducted something from my pay.

When the break finally came, it wasn't precisely from the criminal front. Rather, it was from an allied set of outcasts, self-exiled eccentrics despised by the majority of consensusmemed, post-reedpair citizens.

The Incubators.

The Incubators had figured in a previous case of mine, when I was still paired with K-mart. A new blight that affected only third-generation pumptrees from Hybritech had sprung up, and we suspected that the Incubators might have been somehow responsible for it. They had never exhibited any such terrorist inclinations before, but like most despised minorities, they were perpetual suspects whenever anything went wrong.

Since the metro relied on pumptrees and their enormous taproots for its water supply, there was immense pressure from the adminisphere to crack the case. So K-mart and I came down rather hard on the Incubators at the time. And what was worse, the misfits had been proven innocent, the

cause of the new plague eventually being traced to a mutant smut that was able to prey on hematic vegetation.

So when, a few days after Xuly Beth and I had had our morale-boosting talk and telefuck, an anonymous demon showing only bland metagrafix delivered a tip that the Incubators had recently done a big job for a secretive client, I was aware I wouldn't be welcomed back with open arms.

But I was used to that.

Sonny was wearing a Boston Scientific chassis shaped like a small tank with multiple tentacles and spray nozzles. I knew the unit was effective, but it looked ridiculous. Not that I cared, since the possibility of a real lead at last had me higher than a dose of Kiss-the-sky.

"Hey, Dalek," I said, "let's go visit some pariahs."

Sonny lumbered after me. "Certainly, Doctor What."

"That's 'Who.'"

"The advantages inherent in the fuzzy logic circuits of a Turing Level Four device necessarily involve the ability to compromise data in a creative manner."

The Incubators had taken over an abandoned antique petroleum storage tank on the waterfront. The property was currently contested and in limbo, as the legal mess from the collapse of the petroleum industry was still being sorted out, some decades after the fall. Sooner or later, the new owners would find a use for the land and the squatters would be kicked out. But right now, it was all theirs.

At the makeshift sphincter door in the side of the tank facing the harbor, Sonny and I paused. "Stay out here and watch my back," I told the kibe.

"An instruction with contradictory semantics which I am fully capable of rationalizing."

I shook my head ruefully.

Cleaned up with Transcell Scrubbing Bubbles, the inside of the tank bore little residual scent. What it did smell like was a combination of mold, decay, dirty bandages, and sick breath.

And one additional, puzzling underscent that I couldn't quite place, even with my enhanced senses.

Dimly lit by scattered bioluminescent globes stuck here and there from floor to domed ceiling, the interior of the tank was filled with a mockcoral scaffolding.

From the organically fractal scaffolding hung the Incubators, in their various slings and cocoons, like basal gypsy-moth larvae in their tents.

I boosted my vision, but couldn't spot anyone down at my level. So I shouted up, "Protein Police! Is Smallpox here?"

There was no answer, but I saw a shifting among the calcite girders. A figure began to descend.

A lot of the members of the Incubators were immobilized by their perpetual, modified, nonconsuming diseases. That's why I had called for Smallpox, who had been one of the relatively active ones last time. (They were all noncontagious, though. Their propathogen ideology, however dogmatic, didn't extend to the point where they would have provoked a martyring backlash from the public.)

At last the climbing figure reached the floor and began to approach, limping in rags. I could see that it was indeed the riddled and cratered Smallpox.

"What do you want?" the pathogen-host demanded. "Can't you just let us cultivate our smallchain, low-gnomic refugees in peace? Isn't it bad enough that you high-gnomic imperialists have wiped the globe clean of so many innocent invisible lifeforms? Do you have to persecute our pitiful rescue mission too?"

"Listen, Smallpox, I don't care what you and Leprosy and Syphilis and Measles and Mumps and Polio and all the rest of your sick crew do with your own lives. But when I hear that you might be supplying contaminants to a bigtime terrorist, that's when you've crossed the line."

Smallpox cringed. "We didn't supply anybody with anything."

"Oh, no? That's not what I heard."

Smallpox turned to leave. "Go away," he muttered. "You can't prove anything."

I grabbed the small man by his rags, picked him up, and stuck my face into his raddled visage.

"Listen, my friend-how would you like to be cured?"

Smallpox blanched. "You-you wouldn't!"

"Try me."

"You murderer!" He began to kick. "All right, put me down, I'll talk."

I did, but kept alert for any funny moves.

"We have to earn a little eft somehow, you know," Smallpox began to whine. "And not many people will deal with us. So when we were approached with this assignment, we could hardly refuse. And besides, it was a technical challenge right up our alley."

"How's that?"

"This character-now, understand, I never actually saw him, so I couldn't know he was a baddie-kibes conducted the whole business-anyway, this plug wanted us to create a fast-acting, orally administered prion-based vector that would take up residence in the thalamus and upset the Llinas function."

I couldn't believe my ears. The Llinas function was the evolutionarily designed means whereby the thalamus, the brain's master clock, bound all sensory input and cortical responses into a coherent second-by-second gestalt of the universe. Even the big cricks hesitated to mess with such a core function.

"You're telling me that you've created an agent that will basically destroy a person's timebinding facility?"

"More or less. But all lifeforms are equal, and the prions will flourish without actually killing their hosts."

Sonny must have been reading my vital signs and detected my nervous concern, because he burst in like a mechanical octopus.

"Peej, what's to be done?"

"Wrap 'em."

Sonny's nozzles came alive, and within thirty seconds the Incubators were all enmeshed in sticky tangles. I called for a pickup and relayed what I had learned to Chief Priestly.

And that was the end of the easy part.

The entire complement of the UPCM, as well as hundreds of representatives from a dozen other bioregional and continental

agencies, were now on the track of the Kat. The next day, after receiving Chief Priestly's faint praise (and implied condemnation for not somehow suspecting the Incubators sooner), I, too, was back on the streets.

The night of my discovery, I had met Xuly Beth in Cockaigne for what felt like the last time. The candyland had never seemed shallower. Postsex, as we were silently resting, she said, "Be careful, won't you?"

"Sure. Don't I have Sonny to watch over me?"

She laughed. "Turing is spinning in his grave!" Growing serious, she asked, "You still carry a poqetpal, even after your upgrades, right?"

"Of course. It's always smart to have a backup connection to the metamedium."

Xuly Beth fingered her bumps. "Good, good… "

The Incubators had all been thoroughly interrogated without revealing any further clues about where Krazy Kat was hiding. Sonny and I explored a half dozen random possibilities without success. And all the time, something in the back of my mind was tickling my efferents.

Back at HQ, I took precious downtime to stare at the tornado-mandala.

And that's when it surfaced.

The odd scent in the tank.

I recognized it at last.

It was the scent of the Mats.

"Holy loas!" I said. "Sonny, come on!"

I didn't tell anyone where I was going, in case it turned out to be a wild virus chase.

And as Doctor Varela would later show me, maybe I unconsciously wanted a one on-one confrontation with the creature who had caused me so much frustration.

The UPCM kept a boathouse on the harbor. I signed out a swath-small waterplane area twin hull-and was soon zipping out to se a a t a good speed.

"We checked out the Mats when our assignment was first given," protested Sonny, wearing a Hughes chassis today that resembled a multilegged Hallucinagenia out of the Burgess Shale.

"I know. But that's not to say that Krazy Kat wasn't elsewhere then, and on the Mats now."

"Possibly. I wish I had been able to confirm your hunch as to the origin of that smell."

"There was no time. Do you want to risk having those prions loosed on the human populace?"

"Then kibes would rule Boston."

I stared at the robot, but on this model there was no expression to interpret.

"A joke. Of the type that partners make to each other."

"Oh. Ha– ha."

It took an hour to reach the Mats, out around the Georges Bank, but I could smell them before I could see them.

The vast collection of cyanobacteri a a nd diatoms carpeted several thousand square kilometers of sea, looking like a mushy ectoplasmic rug, floating meatloaf. Source of multipurpose biomass, home to a flourishing ecology of both basal and biofabbed useful and edible creatures, the Mats were cultivated for humanity by special-purpose, low-intelligence kibes.

One or more of which the Kat must have subverted and sent to do his bidding.

At the landward edge of the Mats, a small floating station anchored to the seafloor served the rare human visitors: an OTEC power plant, a beacon, an emergency habitat.

We docked. I wasn't attempting to be quiet, since there was nowhere for the Kat to go or hide.

''Watch the boat," I told Sonny.

"Until otherwise needed."

I climbed onboard the gently rocking deck of the lonely, midocean outpost.

In the north, I could see curious stormclouds massing in a previously clear sky. But I couldn't spare any thought or attention for the weather. My whole being was attuned to picking up the presence of the Kat. But so far, nothing.

That was why I was so surprised when, as I approached one side of the platform, his paw burst from the water and clamped around my ankle.

He yanked, I went down, but not in, as I grabbed onto a stanchion. Feeling resistance, the Kat exploded out of the water and onto the deck. He kicked, I rolled, found my feet, and confronted him in a fighter's crouch.

"Sonny!" I yelled.

"Coming, Pee-" said the kibe.

Then there was a splash.

Two harvesters had clambered aboard the swath and dumped Sonny overboard. My partner had gone to swim with the fishes. And he couldn't swim.

That left me and the Kat.

I suppose I should have been honored to be one of the few humans ever to directly confront the legendary splice. But instead I was scared into almost a Blankie-wearing state. After the way he had so easily brought me down, I had to run an emergency mantra just to stay cool.

Even dripping wet, fur plastered to his noble body, ears flattened to his skull, Krazy Kat looked every bit the Byronic antihero. There was something regal and wild about him and, I could see how his image had captivated so many to his doomed cause.

"Give it up, Kat, and I promise you won't get hurt," I bluffed.

His voice mixed purr and snarl, his whiskers twitched. "No, just imprisoned and reviled, made to kiss my inferior's boots!"

"Better to live than to die."

"Not on those terms!"

"Your call," I said, then held my palm out to him in a gesture like a traffic kibe's.

Antipersonnel spray-blistering, blinding, stifling-lanced out from my exocrine glands and caught the Kat in the face.

Roaring, he launched himself at me despite the pain. We hit the plates, and I felt his teeth in my neck, piercing my imbricated skin. My grip on his shoulders meant nothing to him.

I guessed I was about to find out how good neo-goretex veins were.

Things started to get black, and I thought my vision was going.

But it turned out to be the clouds above.

And as I looked in disbelief, all hell broke loose.

Lightning, thunder, rain in buckets, then the final punch: a microburst of wind similar to the kind that could and had leveled whole tracts of forest in pre GEF days.

The Kat and I were sluiced off the bucking station and into the sea. Beneath the waves, I finally managed to break his hold-or did he release me? In any case, I was free.

I fought my way to the surface There was no sigh of the Kat.

Instead there was a fleet of approaching swaths, into one of which I was soon unceremoniously hauled.

We searched for the Kat with eyes and instruments and remotes for several hours, but of that bad, bad splice there was no sign. He had gone to feed the hungry sea, or perhaps not. Though escape seemed impossible.

Before we left, we even managed to track clown Sonny and raise it from the ocean floor. The kibe had been heading back on the bottom under its own power and probably would have made it, if its brick hadn't run down.

The first call I took after getting patched up was from Chief Priestly, who dished out her usual mix of puffery and abuse.

The second one was from Xuly Beth.

"Isn't Global Positioning wonderful?" she said, joyfully teary-eyed.

"And aren't I lucky to have a friend in high places?"

"The stratosphere, to be precise," said Xuly Beth.