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  I’d like to thank Theresa Croft, Rebecca Wright, Jim Thomerson, and Bruce Turner for information that I used in putting this book together. Any mistakes of biology, psychology, or geography, however, are my own.

  Rebecca Ore April 5, 1994 Critz, VA

  ONE

  A MAN AND HIS MANTIS

  Willie Hunsucker knew what the little nasty clerks whispered about him down at Social Services, “Hunsucker been on dole so long that the techs had to work the skull cutouts with abrasive grease last five times, scour them idea pits off the drodes.”

  Four of his buddies lay stretched out in interface, bodies dressed in gray welfare coveralls, bald heads, just like his, now surrounded by thick black halos, a machine puffing air down their windpipes through a hose that looked like something out of an automobile that brought air from the filter to the carburetor.

  The apprentice clerk with his wispy chin beard pulled Willie’s records up on the terminal, then showed the note he’d just scribbled to Jackson Sim’s eyes. Jackson’s eyes had just enough motor control to blink and scan. The note reappeared on the screen in yellow light dot alphanumerics. The clerk told told Willie, “You got to go to Roanoke. Van’ll take you to the vactube. Wait for the blue light. Next.”

  Jackson Sim wouldn’t remember a thing the next time he and Willie met, say at the Tibetan War Vets’ dance, full of old warriors’ tales about how high, how cold, how Chinese bulletted down the high passes in jet snowmobiles guided by satellite.

  Willie remembered how you blasted those fiberglass sleds and found no flesh smeared to paste and bone chips, just a hardened speaker giggling about how the Rimpoches fooled America into dropping all its iron and steel production down for Chinese scavengers.

  Then it had become the perfect war—all automated, and Willie’d gone home with a useless knowledge of Tibetan, three trunksful of idolatrous art that some museum would steal from him if he was fool enough to let Welfare know he had it, and a house.

  The land around the house was now part of a three-thousand-acre bio-engineered sheep and cow operation, mowers, fence-drivers, feeders, all as automated as the war. So no farming anymore, but he had the house and got on the dole.

  You hand them your head, They fit you with drodes and lock ’um with key caps.

  They feed you granola, only that wasn’t what old granola had been, it was yeast mush.

  The blue light over the back door went on, and Willie got up out of the Welfare’s metal folding chair and climbed up in the van—shaped a lot like a ChiCom bullet sled, he thought the first time he saw it—and slumped down on a seat gritty with tobacco flakes and garden muck. Willie didn’t make a garden himself—too many bugs.

  Bugs made him scream—some hallucinogenic bugs got Willie in the Tibetan village where the soldiers had gone for R & R. Willie remembered the sting—like a curare shot, deep into his calf muscle—and the four days of fucking a dream Tibetan girl who was really wadded-up bedclothes. He came out of it with a cock half-regrown in a plastic sack glued to his belly and thighs.

  No, he didn’t like to garden, find ticks bored into his neck, legs, mosquitos tiptoeing over his eyelids; all those bugs drove him into screaming fits. He used the entertainment dole credits to zap all the house bugs except for an eight-inch-high mantis trained not to bite him. The Tibetan hallie bug that got him had looked just like a damn Japanese beetle, might have even been made from Jap beetle DNA. The mantis was big enough to trust.

  A bug crawled out from under the floor mat, but Jubbie, the fat greasy white girl from up on the mountain, popped it with her red sneaker as she got in. “Hey, Willie, I saved you again. You know about Roanoke?”

  “Just we’re going.”

  Carter, the black guy who refused to do anything except play piano and dole his brain, climbed in, all bony and ashy looking, high nose like a TV Pharaoh’s despite black grey skin. He said, “What say, Jubbie?”

  The driver frowned at them. “No speculating.”

  Back at Willie’s house, the mantis was considering its options. It bellowed slightly, thorax chitin hinged with leathery skin to allow lung movements, pumping air through its spiracles. If it’d had known how to really think, not just weigh the sight of mantis kibble against the tightness of its chitin shell, it might have realized that eight-inch-high mantises did well to trade off flight for better oxygenated tissues.

  Since it didn’t use language, perhaps it’s better to say the mantis’s neural programs were measuring growth variables. Triangular head with blue-black faceted eyes panning, it sidestepped around the mantis kibble Willie had left it before he went to fill his dole. A mass of kibble a third its present volume. Then it saw that Willie had left the lights on over its terrarium. The variables clicked, hormones cascaded through vibrating muscles. Food, warmth, stuffed tight.

  It peeled off its skin. The wings came off last, and the mantis ate furiously. When the next wet wings popped out of their cases, it inflated its lungs to the fullest and cautiously climbed by the lights into the terrarium.

  As growth torpor hit, it tried to play with rubbery feet the music that soothed its human. The lungs expanded. Oxygen filled its system.

  To keep a check on the speculating, the van driver stood with the dole people at the tube train station. The train came, stopped by the station magnetic coils. The passenger insert moved in against the train. Paying passengers to Roanoke and beyond got in before the dole people. The insert slid out again, the gap sealed, the train accelerated out as fast as possible for human comfort. Had it been all dole people, the station would have sent the train out a little faster.

  Five minutes later, Roanoke’s coils caught them.

  Willie and the other dole people went out to the coordinator who stood in her uniform waiting for them. Willie always felt like his joints weren’t fastened solid around the coordinators. They moved like military people, no slop in the hips or knees. Bam, bam, bam, follow the leader into the van and a two or three week blank. Roanoke moved coal, microbio chips, dead trees, tobacco, quartz, red clay, bits and pieces of cultured steer.

  And secret things.

  “Why they blank us the whole time?” Carter asked. “Why not just in brain dole?”

  “No speculating,” the big fat girl said before the coordinator could say it.

  Sometimes, but not in Roanoke, Willie remembered bits and patches of dole work—his brain and the computer flying a thousand alpha-whatsits, letters and numbers, ah, alphanumerics, a microsecond—bam, bam, bam, pattern and manipulation. But, nothing stayed with him in Roanoke—a whole two or three weeks blank, old electric fan noises his only memory ever.

  They all climbed in the van. “I’d like to be up at night some,” Jubbie the fat girl said wistfully. “They got good dancing on Center Street.”

  Carter spat out chewing tobacco before he got in the van, then looked at the fat girl. “Hell,” Carter said, “you can’t afford dancing those places on the dole.”

  Willie leaned back, staring at the old white wooden houses around the vactube station, wondering whether he’d remember seeing them. Sometimes, he knew he’d been to Roanoke, sometimes not. He felt a skull electrode itch—tension, they’d told him, don’t scratch and you won’t get infected.

  He twisted around so his head was between the itchy terminal and the coordinator, then brought his hand up quick and rubbed around the terminal lock caps with his knuckles, not his nails. Willie knew better than to cut his skin around the terminals before a dole session. Cuts festered inside the halo.

  Then he didn’t remember anything from there—retrowipe—and came out from under the halo dizzy, sirens in his ears, a med-tech bent over him, wiping the drode points with Betadine and recapping them, twisting the key into each cap, locking him down. Willie couldn’t tell
if the sirens were in his ears or outside, smart bombs hitting Roanoke, a psychic attack by radical Tibetan spirit masters? He never trusted them damn spirit masters, hoaxers or not.

  “Willie, you with us?” the supervisor asked.

  Willie blinked. Would he remember this? Yeah, there was that tension in his brain, like these seconds were logging on long time. But the siren? “Direh’s?” His tongue tumbled numbly in his mouth. Tried again, “Sirens?”

  “Ears ringing?”

  “Sirens.” Shit, he shouldn’t sound so dumb.

  The supervisor rolled him over and pulled two connectors out, wiped and capped the trode holes. The sirens faded. Faded, didn’t go away completely. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” the supervisor said like he really did and couldn’t say. Willie suspected he’d been put to moving war materials. Bug images flashed by the comers of his eyes—not real. They faded when he looked at them, but he shuddered just the same.

  “My time up?” Willie asked.

  “No,” the supervisor said. “But take a break.”

  Willie was going to be remembering Roanoke Central. The supervisor strapped a call watch around Willie’s wrist and said, “You’re not so dumb you’d get lost. Come right back when it beeps.”

  Willie asked, “How much time?”

  “Couple of hours. Follow Alice out.” The man slipped him a five chip. “Have a good time, but leave your brain clean.”

  Willie, wondering a lot, followed the coordinator who’d picked him up at the vactrain. Alice, name’s Alice. Bitch is human after all. She hustled him out of Roanoke Central before he could have much of a look around, took him out to the street and said, “See the tower there, the holographic man on top of our building here.”

  The holographic man seemed suspended in a slab of plastic about three hundred feet high—he was marching, marching, constantly marching, all 250 feet of him. Willie wasn’t sure whether the man was propaganda or what. “Ain’t going no where, is he?”

  Alice looked like she didn’t know whether Willie was being extra dumb or joking. She decided not to decide, tapped his wrist, and said, “Be sure to come right back when the buzzer goes off.”

  Willie began walking toward the tower, looking at Roanoke, the jumble of old houses, pitted chrome, hearing the groan of vacuum engines sucking air out of the train tubes, smelling ozone and piss. They didn’t want me hanging around while they fixed something. He hummed his mantis’s saw leg sounds, but in a lower key. Still it comforted him as he walked away, free for a few hours, from the holographic man stuck marching embedded in plastic.

  A woman, could he get a woman for five dollars? Willie ignored the hysteria hanging around the edge of the idea, suppressed memories of his hallucinations. He wanted to be normal. Fingering the chip the supervisor had given him, he knew he couldn’t just spend it on liquor. If he got drunk, they run the kidney on him, for sure, rip up his veins for it with dull needles. Willie found a phone terminal and checked the Yellow Pad. Nice they legalized it; too bad dole doesn’t allot for cunt.

  Willie picked a brothel without a display ad, called. “At your pleasure,” a woman said. She didn’t sound sexy, more like a supervisor.

  “What can I get for five dollars chip?”

  The woman didn’t answer for a second. Willie figured she was probably key-checking her computer, a straight one without a dole brain attached. “You can look, honey.”

  He hung up, thought about trying another brothel, didn’t. just make dole man waste his time, he thought as he walked up the block. He was also obscurely relieved.

  Somewhere around here was the street with dancing and music, if those bars opened during the day. Willie almost went back to check the phone terminal, but decided to just walk. Dole man, they can just throw him out on the street, tell me don’t get drunk.

  The mantis, now eleven inches tall, roused itself and drank water from the tube sticking out of the bottle attached to the terrarium. It stared through the glass at the remaining kibble, moved legs that were still rubbery, drank more water and nibbled away an old chitin fragment stuck to its right front leg. Blurred vision triggered a lens burnishing reflex, bent legs moving over and over the bowed triangular head bent at its swivel socket with the thorax. Flakes of very thin almost clear scales came away from its eye facets. The mantis drank more water, felt loose and small inside its new shell, so raised its legs to the rim of the terrarium, awkwardly; the terrarium seemed to be smaller to the mantis. Then it adjusted to its new size and raised the middle legs and hoisted itself out, holding onto the rim with the rear legs as the front legs reached down, took an astonishing weight. The mantis hung there for a while, heavier, recalibrating muscle neurons, then dropped to the table and climbed down its rope to the floor.

  It nibbled more kibble, then saw a wasp hovering over the sink. Calculations hardwired into the mantis’s small brain ganglion kept it stiff, attentive, but the wasp wasn’t in jumping grasp.

  Finally, the mantis, bored, crawled behind the toilet bowl and let the cold from the water stiffen it.

  Willie ignored the staring shoppers by the old Hotel Roanoke’s arcade, just kept plodding along in his dole clothes, drode caps glistening in his bare skull, the black plastic call watch tight on his wrist. He felt cut out forever, which bothered him one second and left him feeling almost like a pure spectator the next. Dole’d never let me starve. Dole’s got money under my skull. Come the funeral, he knew Welfare would get it all back before they rendered his fat and burned the rest down to fine ash and spread him on a field mixed with composted sewage gook. Down again, can’t think about that. He felt the five chip in his pocket and thought maybe he could go watch naked women, start talking to them, see if he could… Women, like vacations, were totally beyond him now.

  All around him, he saw women in silk, alpaca, silver, furs, and looked at them so hungrily that a couple became nervous, had him put on the street.

  He went outside behind the officer without protesting. The call watch beeped and he looked for the tower, walked to it, then saw the marching man hologram and went inside. He stopped remembering beyond the door…

  … then awake again, trembling, his skin feeling lumpy as though bugs were under it. No, a delusion. He looked up at the supervisor as he and aides removed the halo. Am I broken? Willie never remembered this happening before and began to cry weakly.

  “Damn, man, we don’t want to have to drug you too far down,” the supervisor said.

  “Get someone else and let him…” the woman who’d picked him up at the station said.

  “No, Jubbie’s unstable and I don’t trust Carter.”

  “I didn’t spend your five-chip,” Willie said, hoping they’d be nice to him.

  “Oh, Willie.” The supervisor patted his shoulder. It all disappeared again…

  … and Willie walked around a landscape like valley Tibet, rhododendrons and orchids, too gaudy to be real. His mantis, bigger now, eight-year-old child-sized, thorax bellowing air in and out of its body, came up to him and rubbed its rear legs together, making a deeper version of that soothing music his real-life mantis made. This wasn’t real life, but Willie didn’t worry as long as his mantis made its music.

  He wondered if he could talk here. “Funny, all the pets they let me have is just a bug.” A Rimpoche be behind this, spirit walking me away. He thought vaguely about astral projection.

  Then the bugs moved toward him, a wave of them. He and his mantis grabbed them, threw them various directions. Suddenly, Willie knew he was moving war material, lots of it. They trusted him, not the fat girl, not Carter, because he’d been a soldier.

  With a security clearance, he remembered that now. He hadn’t always been on the dole, wasn’t born to the dole. The mantis turned to look at him. The bugs were gone.

  Behind the peaks towering over the valley lightning flashed. Willie knew he’d targeted atomics, thrown hallie bugs in after. Hallie bugs that gas a man into brain-choking visions.
/>   I couldn’t help it. But having the war work from Roanoke was sweet, no battlefields.

  The mantis said, “But you threaten the planet.” Willie knew that the mantis meant humans, not him in particular.

  “What you going to do about it?”

  “We respond quickly,” the mantis said. “You remake us and we respond even more quickly, genes unstable from the splicing.”

  I’m unstable from all the stuff they run through my head. I could remember all of it. Willie realized he’d remember this, in this form. Maybe he knew more.

  The mantis looked to the left, as if hearing something. “You’ve started to stop forgetting. I don’t know how, but you’re learning to make your own data nests.”

  What will I remember? The mantis was still listening to something on the left when …

  Willie was shivering, sitting in the van with the fat girl and Jubbie. He felt his face—depilated—and his head, still bald. They were back in Stuart leaving the vac tube; he’d been walking on automatic up to just now.

  “Three weeks?” he asked the driver.

  “Yeah, man, three weeks.”

  Willie’d smuggled out memories of Roanoke this time, other memories his brain had hallucinated up—rhodedenrons, orchids, and a four-foot-tall talking mantis. Bugs, bombs over the peaks. “And any news we miss?”

  The driver stiffened.

  Willie felt the chip the supervisor had given him—five dollars. He’d sell some plasma once he tested the amnesia drugs out of his system. “Must be some news.”

  Jubbie said, “They did a neutron on Nakchuka. Not that there wasn’t anybody home.”

  “Ain’t nobody home but butterflies and Yetis,” Willie said.

  “And bugs,” Jubbie said.

  Willie went cold around the spine. “You a bitch,” Carter said.

  “What about the neutron, Willie?”

  “Neutron? Wouldn’t make sense.”

  “No speculating,” the driver told them. The van pulled up by Bicycle Parking. Willie got out, found his bike, unlocked it with his fingerprint, and began riding home. Maybe I bombed some bugs moving in on India? His testicles drew up as high as they could, just thinking about bugs, round bugs.