say, Uncle Zip?”
“They say, ’Money has no morality,’ in these voices make you want to puke. They’re proud of it.”
It was 2 a.m. in Carmody, and the Kefahuchi Tract glittered across the sky as bright as Uncle Zip’s accordion. He played another chord, and then a series of brash arpeggios that rippled one into the next. He puffed up his cheeks and began to stamp his feet. One by one, his audience slipped back into the parlour, giving weak apologetic grins to Seria Mau’s fetch. It was as if they had been waiting somewhere down Henry Street, some bar not far down, for the music to start up again. They brought bottles in brown bags, and this time one or two shy women were with them, casting glances out of the side of their eyes at Uncle Zip then looking quickly away again. Seria Mau listened to another song, then let herself fade into brown smoke.
On the face of it, Uncle Zip was solid. He dealt with the passing trade: cultivars for pleasure, sentient tattoos, also any kind of superstitious hitch and splice, like ensuring your firstborn gets the luck gene of Elvis. Every afternoon his shop was full of nervous mothers-to-be, designing their baby to have genius. “Everybody wants to be rich,” he would complain. “I made a million geniuses. Also, everybody wants to be Buddy Holly, Barbra Streisand, Shakespeare. Let me tell you: no one knows what those men looked like.” It was barely illegal. It was all, as he said, a bit of fun. There was only so far he could go. It was the modern equivalent, he said, of a kiss-me-quick hat you bought on Labour Day. Or maybe that old kind of tattoo they had back then. In the lab, though, he cut for anyone. He cut for the military, he cut for the shadow boys. He cut for viral junkies, in for the latest patch to their brain disease of choice. He cut alien DNA. He didn’t care what he cut, or who he cut for as long as they could pay.
As for his audience, they were cultivars: every one cloned—even the shy young women in the black tube skirts—from his own stemcells, deep-frozen insurance he took out the day he went to Radio Bay. They were his younger self, before he found his big secret, come to worship twice-nightly at the shrine he had made of his success.
Motel Splendido turned, nightside up, beneath the White Cat . From the parking lot, Seria Mau stared down. Carmody appeared like a sticky, abbreviated smear of light the colour or extent of which you couldn’t be sure, on its island in the curve of the southern ocean. She dawdled her fetch along its magically lighted streets. Downtown was black and gold towers, designer goods in the deserted pastel malls, mute fluorescent light skidding off the precise curves of matte plastic surfaces, the foams of lace and oyster satin. Down by the ocean, transformation dub, saltwater dub, pulsed from the bars, the soundtrack of a human life, with songs like “Dark Night, Bright Light” and others. Human beings! She could almost smell their excitement at being alive there in the warm black heart of things among the sights. She could almost smell their guilt. What was she looking for? She couldn’t say. All she could be sure of was that Uncle Zip’s hypocrisy had made her restless.
Suddenly it was dawn, and in a corner of the sea wall, where a water-stair went down to what was now new-washed empty sand, grey in the thin light of dawn, she came upon three shadow boys. Running on one-shot cultivars—the throwaway 24-hour kind, all tusks and rank-smelling muscles, sleeveless denim jackets, sores from bumping against things in an unconsidered manner—they were squatting in the dawn wind playing the Ship Game on a blanket, grunting as the bone dice tumbled and toppled, every so often exchanging high-speed datastreams like squeals of rage. Complex betting was in progress, less on the game than the contingencies of the world around it: the flight of a bird, the height of a wave, the colour of the sunlight. After every cast of the dice
“They say, ’Money has no morality,’ in these voices make you want to puke. They’re proud of it.”
It was 2 a.m. in Carmody, and the Kefahuchi Tract glittered across the sky as bright as Uncle Zip’s accordion. He played another chord, and then a series of brash arpeggios that rippled one into the next. He puffed up his cheeks and began to stamp his feet. One by one, his audience slipped back into the parlour, giving weak apologetic grins to Seria Mau’s fetch. It was as if they had been waiting somewhere down Henry Street, some bar not far down, for the music to start up again. They brought bottles in brown bags, and this time one or two shy women were with them, casting glances out of the side of their eyes at Uncle Zip then looking quickly away again. Seria Mau listened to another song, then let herself fade into brown smoke.
On the face of it, Uncle Zip was solid. He dealt with the passing trade: cultivars for pleasure, sentient tattoos, also any kind of superstitious hitch and splice, like ensuring your firstborn gets the luck gene of Elvis. Every afternoon his shop was full of nervous mothers-to-be, designing their baby to have genius. “Everybody wants to be rich,” he would complain. “I made a million geniuses. Also, everybody wants to be Buddy Holly, Barbra Streisand, Shakespeare. Let me tell you: no one knows what those men looked like.” It was barely illegal. It was all, as he said, a bit of fun. There was only so far he could go. It was the modern equivalent, he said, of a kiss-me-quick hat you bought on Labour Day. Or maybe that old kind of tattoo they had back then. In the lab, though, he cut for anyone. He cut for the military, he cut for the shadow boys. He cut for viral junkies, in for the latest patch to their brain disease of choice. He cut alien DNA. He didn’t care what he cut, or who he cut for as long as they could pay.
As for his audience, they were cultivars: every one cloned—even the shy young women in the black tube skirts—from his own stemcells, deep-frozen insurance he took out the day he went to Radio Bay. They were his younger self, before he found his big secret, come to worship twice-nightly at the shrine he had made of his success.
Motel Splendido turned, nightside up, beneath the White Cat . From the parking lot, Seria Mau stared down. Carmody appeared like a sticky, abbreviated smear of light the colour or extent of which you couldn’t be sure, on its island in the curve of the southern ocean. She dawdled her fetch along its magically lighted streets. Downtown was black and gold towers, designer goods in the deserted pastel malls, mute fluorescent light skidding off the precise curves of matte plastic surfaces, the foams of lace and oyster satin. Down by the ocean, transformation dub, saltwater dub, pulsed from the bars, the soundtrack of a human life, with songs like “Dark Night, Bright Light” and others. Human beings! She could almost smell their excitement at being alive there in the warm black heart of things among the sights. She could almost smell their guilt. What was she looking for? She couldn’t say. All she could be sure of was that Uncle Zip’s hypocrisy had made her restless.
Suddenly it was dawn, and in a corner of the sea wall, where a water-stair went down to what was now new-washed empty sand, grey in the thin light of dawn, she came upon three shadow boys. Running on one-shot cultivars—the throwaway 24-hour kind, all tusks and rank-smelling muscles, sleeveless denim jackets, sores from bumping against things in an unconsidered manner—they were squatting in the dawn wind playing the Ship Game on a blanket, grunting as the bone dice tumbled and toppled, every so often exchanging high-speed datastreams like squeals of rage. Complex betting was in progress, less on the game than the contingencies of the world around it: the flight of a bird, the height of a wave, the colour of the sunlight. After every cast of the dice
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