Crowe and Coyote

Crowe and Coyote VII

Updating twice today in celebration of my much better covers! Whoo! Not as good as they could be--I can't run photoshop on this thing like I'd like--but better.

Love,

EFR

*****

She spent the rest of her day watching a Soyful Noise special, one of their animated things called Noah and the Ark of Genetic Engineering, while debating the best place to begin untangling this mess. The special was for children-- especially dopey children, Moll thought uncharitably, who were both young enough and stupid enough to believe God in his omniscient wisdom truly intended Soyful Noise Incorporated to combine soy sprouts and cockroaches. In the animation, the soyroaches that provided nine tenths of Sunrise food product were bright green, and had cute little smiley faces. Moll could imagine the toy versions, stuffed with one-hundred-percent authentic Soyful Noise soybatting, flying off the shelves.

"These brave little creatures," said the narrator, voice full of artificial warmth, "make up our food. Soyful Noise scientists were so smart! They took the DNA of cockroaches and soy sprouts, two things that lived on the Earth before the Little Mistake, and put them together to make soyroaches. Because of the cockroach DNA, soybeans were hardy enough to stay alive even after the Mistake was made, and full of some yummy things called protein and iron. Thanks to Soyful Noise, and of course the Great Christus, we have enough to eat!"

A cartoon face, pink and fresh as raw chicken, swam into view. It ate the soyroaches one by one-- om, went the soundtrack. Om nom.

"Yum!" said the face. "Thank you, Great Christus! Thank you, Soyful Noise!"

"Oh, brother," Moll muttered. She turned it off with a flick of her eyes, sending it back into the abyss of percomm programming from whence it came.

She had seen soyroaches once. She didn't know when, or how she remembered. She couldn't imagine where she would have encountered them-- the Soyful Noise food vaults were more carefully guarded than Sunrise Govhouse. But she knew, somehow, they were not cheerful little green things with leaflike wings.

No. They were horrible, bulbous and quivering, barely alive, unable to move out of the ground they grew from. Their armored bodies had too many lumps, too many bulges, crooked little legs waving feebly in the air. The cockroach part of their makeup made them not only hardy, it made them protein-rich, iron-rich. A superfood. The only food, in fact, that still grew out of the acid ground.

I picked one, Moll thought, wondering. I held it in my hands. It was warm.

She had never remembered anything so distinctly. The memory, incomplete though it was, felt like a victory.

Crowe, she thought. Thelonius Crowe. The God Gestalt.

His hands had been warm too. Wide hands, powerful hands, surprisingly deft and quick in their movements. They had not twitched weakly, like the soyroaches. They had been the fast, sure hands of a decision maker. She remembered these hands touching her cheek, her brow, her lips. Twining through her long red hair.

When all else fails, he said, from some deep buried memory. When all else fails, my lost one, my queen. Remember: the sum of the parts does not equal the whole.

Remember.

And God, she almost did. Lying draped over the couch, mind burning, senses on fire. She remembered the smell of him, the smell of cheap Charpati incense, deep earth, electrical solder.That was all--a scent, a pair of hands, a face dimly glimpsed under a curtain of long dark hair.

It was maddening.

It was almost enough.

Of their own accord, Moll's hands began their wild search. Over the coffee table, under it, under the cushions of the ratty dusty couch. There was little enough in the apartment, save for mismatched furniture and Elaine's factory work gear. How many places could she have hidden it?

Behind the fridge, it turned out. Behind the fridge, under a dusty old pizza box that had gotten wedged back there in some previous frenzied bout of rummaging.

She blew the dust off the top, broke the child-safety seal around the cap. Stood there, for some minutes, in the silent kitchen, fumes from the bottle of Admiral Soyton's Triple-Distilled Blend aching in her nostrils. Something that had never occurred to her before surfaced now.

She always--always--took a drink when the half-memories grew unbearable.

It was a crutch, of course. She knew it, was not proud of it. Sunrise PD had made her undergo hours of alcoholic counseling, addiction seminars. A greater portion of her life than she liked or was willing to admit had been spent in blank grey rooms with cheerfully colored motivational holoposters on the wall, neatly kept actors mouthing slogans such as 'you can do it' and 'sobriety NOW' down over herself and other grey worn-out misfits, most of them also erasure victims in various states of dependency.

It was this thought that stayed her hand, kept her lips off the mouth of the bottle.

Most of them also erasure victims. Actually, had she ever met one of them who wasn't?

Erasure programming could keep you from speaking your true feelings about erasure. Percomm could dissolve the alcohol in your blood, leaving you completely sober after a fifth of soyka with no effects more lasting than a pressing need to pee.

In a world like this one, where even street drugs such as Bounce and Shine had been legalized and removed of their health-harming qualities, how could alcohol dependency still be an issue?

A drink whenever the half-memories became unbearable. Whenever the ghosts of her past, myriad and incomprehensible, ran riot in her blood. It sounded almost like a compulsion. A compulsion, perhaps, that was not natural. A compulsion made, not by her mind, but by the machines inside it.

Parts. Parts. Parts were not the whole.

She wondered, not for the first time, precisely what in the unholy Christus-blessed worlds of fuck had been done to her.

Before she could think about it any more--before, as she suspected, she could ruin her resolve by thinking about it-she ran into the bathroom, upended the bottle over the toilet with an audible glug. Her body screamed at her; her mind screamed. She thought through lines of fire, through pieces of a new comprehension sharp as jagged glass and just as dangerous.

Even now, she wanted to stick her face in the toilet, drink deeply of the water and the vodka and the particles of shit. She had done worse. She had done filthier. There were still a few drops in the bottle. If she stopped tilting it now, if she stopped the flush, if she drank, if she gave in. Everything would be

"Okay," Moll snarled, and managed one staccato sweep of the hand over the automatic flush.

Some part of her brain--or perhaps the machines inside her brain--imploded,or dissolved, or was simply no longer there. She saw fireworks in colors that did not in the strictest sense exist.

She felt strangely, darkly, draconically better.

She plucked the notebook paper Hardship had given her out of her back pocket. She subvoced the number there, and was not at all surprised when she heard on the other end the near-antique ringing of an actual telephone. She crouched lower over the toilet, almost unable to believe what she was doing.

"Speaking. Zacharias," said a strangely accented voice. "With what can I be helping you?"