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.