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CHAPTER 11
CONSUMABLES

THE sweet rotten stench made Dominic gag. He held his nostrils and shielded his eyes from the harsh light. Penderowski's torch was no longer necessary. Scores of bare fluorescent tubes crisscrossed the ceiling in a vast grid-work that hung just at eye level, flooding every object below with a deathly greenish glare, while leaving the space above in obscurity. The light tubes intersected in two-meter squares, and Dominic had to stoop to walk under them.

"This can't be right. That miner gave you the wrong directions," the NP said. "Turn around and go back."

Dominic couldn't see Benito anywhere. As his eyes adjusted, he noticed scars on the stone floor where partition walls had been ripped out to expand the space. Scraps of metal paneling still clung to bare support beams, and a disconnected duct was left to dangle in the breeze. The breeze. Yes, Dominic felt a distinct movement of air drying the sweat on his skin, and he heard slowly revolving rotor fans in the distance.

Then he saw the coffins. Hundreds of them. Row upon row of deep metal boxes, unlidded, steaming with gaseous decay. They stretched to the farthest walls in perfect alignment like chips on a board. But they were huge, much longer and wider than the dimensions of a human body. Were these coffins meant for mass burial? He dreaded to look inside, but a morbid curiosity drew him to the nearest one. It stood on a platform, waist high, and he ducked under the light grid to see it.

"Get away from there!" A tall, buxom Euro woman came marching down an aisle between the coffins. At every third step, she bobbed her head to pass under a light tube, as if from years of practice. In her right hand, she carried a long-handled rake, and her expression was grim. "Who said you could come in here? This place is off-limits! Get out, you filthy prote!"

"Prote? I'm not—Who are you?"

Dominic stood to his full height between the light tubes and strained to see the woman's face. Then he noticed her uniform. Instead of the faded gray coverall of a protected employee, she wore the smart dress blues of an exec. Dominic squinted in the harsh light. Yes, there was the braided insignia, the Nord.Com logo.

"An exec," Dominic said. "Incredible. You're still here."

He ducked under the grid and hurried to meet her. Before he could stand upright again, the woman swung her rake and knocked him sharply in the jaw. He staggered off balance and dropped his laser torch.

"Get out, you stupid oaf! You'll contaminate the food!"

She swiped at him again, but this time, Dominic grabbed the rake before she could hit him. Crouching low, he twisted it out of her hands and turned it against her. "Madam, I'm not your enemy. Listen to me. I'm—"

"You're covered in dirt! Can't you see this is a sterile environment? Food has to be kept sanitary. Sanitary! Do you even know the word? These are biochem vats. These yeasty bugs make our food. They're extremely sensitive. Oh, you're too stupid to grasp the simplest concepts!"

The woman snatched at the rake, but Dominic dodged behind a coffin. Her cheeks darkened. "Ill-bred slacker! I work around the clock to maintain these vats. You can't possibly appreciate the fragile balance. I'm the only one with the training!"

She darted around the vat, and under the bright light, Dominic noticed a rash covering her cheeks. Her graying blonde hair looked greasy, and her hands were chapped. He'd never met an exec with such poor grooming habits. Worse, she seemed on the point of tears.

"Put down that rake! You're getting smutty prote germs all over the handle."

"Madam, I—"

She lunged toward him, and he circled farther around the vat. His jaw was starting to smart where she hit him, and he was losing patience. It didn't help when the woman shook her fists and screeched at him. "See this uniform? I know what's best! You're supposed to do what I say!"

Then she reached across the vat and caught the rake tines. They cut her hands. "You're ruining the food!" She was crying now, though she shook the rake like a madwoman. When Dominic managed to loosen her fingers from the tines, she sank down against the vat and covered her face.

At that moment, Benito reappeared. His mouth and cheeks were smeared with lumpy, brownish goo. Globs of it slid down his bare chest and spotted the enonnous striped shorts that ballooned around his knees. He glanced from one adult to the other and casually licked his fingers. The woman started bawling.

Dominic didn't know what to do. The woman knocked the back of her head against the metal vat, again and again. Her howls echoed like a bad audio feed. He explored the inside of his aching jaw with his tongue and watched her. He had never encountered hysteria before. Execs didn't yield to such displays.

He set the rake down, out of her reach, picked up the torch he'd dropped and stuck it in his waistband, just at the small of his back. Eventually, the woman stopped weeping. She leaned against the vat and scowled at him. Before either of them could react, Benito stepped on the woman's shoulder and scrambled up onto the lip of the vat. He hung on the brink, half in and half out, kicking his little legs in the air, and Dominic moved closer to see what he was doing.

The vat was filled with pudding. Or something viscous and beige that resembled pudding. Oozy yellow-brown ridges marbled its surface, and it rose and fell as if breathing. Here and there, bubbles broke and spouted small gouts of steam.

"Protein-glucose base," the NP said. "Staple of the prote diet—and very weird stuff."

"How so?" Dominic bent over the vat for a closer inspection.

" 'Cause it's alive! It's made from a single, two-hundred-year-old, transgenic yeast cell."

Benito was stuffing his cheeks with both hands, and despite the revolting saccharine smell, Dominic felt a pang of appetite.

"Are you saying this stuff is two centuries old?" he sub-vocalized.

"Yeah, back when I was young, Agra.Com got hold of the patent and just kept replicating the DNA and letting it swell up. Now it's like some huge cluster organism that just won't die. You find little pieces of it everywhere."

Dominic half suspected the NP was joking. He looked around for a utensil, a spoon or dipper, but there was nothing. He examined his black, grimy fingers. After hesitating a moment, he wiped them on his equally grimy shorts, then leaned beside the boy and scooped up a handful. The stuff felt slithery and warm. He swallowed it fast and scooped up more.

"How can you stomach that stuff?" the NP said.

Dominic ignored him and slurped more brown goo. This pudding was not bad. Really not bad. He devoured one mournful after another, hardly bothering to chew. At some point, he became aware that the woman was watching. She was still sitting on the floor near his feet, and he realized he and Benito must look like a pair of animals gorging at a trough. But the thought didn't stop him. He was hungry.

Finally, he stood to his full height, studied his gooey hands, and with only the briefest hesitation, wiped them on the side of the vat. The woman glowered. He leaned against the vat and crossed his arms—and inadvertently let out a little burp.

"Where did you get the exec uniform?" he asked.

"It's mine." The woman drew her knees and elbows tight to her body.

"You're not an executive."

"I am!" She eyed him with contempt. "Glutton! I work myself to exhaustion to feed you protes. The resources I've had to stretch to feed thousands of extra mouths. I'm a better exec than those Nord.Com fools who drove us bankrupt."

"You're right, son. I just scanned her retina, and she's not in the executive database. How did you guess?" the NP asked.

Benito was trying to flop down from the vat, so Dominic helped him to the floor. "You work here all alone?" he asked the woman.

"I can do it." She rapped her knuckle against the vat, and it rang like a muffled gong. "You and your filthy child just poisoned my yeasty bugs. I'll have to dump this whole batch and start over. That's wasted resources. Not to mention backbreaking work. I should have a crew of laborers answering to me. But the protes on this ship are too good to take orders now. They want to sit on councils and vote resolutions and pretend they know what they're doing. Ha!" The woman got up and straightened her uniform. "I'm right in the middle of a crucial quality check. Don't let me find you here when I get back."

As she marched away, Dominic followed her with his eyes. A prote impersonating an exec. Why would she do that? Protes resented execs, didn't they? He watched her wandering among the rows of warm, simmering vats, and it occurred to him that this would be a safe place to leave Benito. Plenty of food. It was certainly healthier than the mines.

"Leave the brat here," said the NP. "He'll be well fed."

The NP's order grated him raw, so he didn't answer. The woman was brushing a bit of lint from her uniform. She seemed so proud of those dress blues. Odd behavior for a. prote, he thought.

"You agree about the boy, I can tell," said the NP. "We always think alike, son. Why did we ever argue?"

"You're the one with the perfect recall," Dominic answered bitterly.

As he watched the woman straighten her collar and smooth her hair, he wondered again why she would deliberately identify with people she disliked. She must be acting under some compulsive devotion to authority.

"You always started those fights. I do recall that," the NP said.

"Shut up." Dominic didn't want to think about the arguments with his father. The woman stooped over one of her vats and sniffed the steam. Then she stuck her finger in the pudding and tasted it. Was that her crucial quality check?

"Hell, I used to be soft like you, but I outgrew it," said the NP.

"Outgrew it? Two days ago, you didn't exist!" The vein on Dominic's forehead throbbed visibly. His father used to speak to him exactly like that.

"Awright, I just came online, but I remember everything," the genie said.

"Don't," Dominic whispered dangerously. Only when Benito jerked away from him did he realize he's spoken aloud.

He squatted and wiped the boy's chin with his tee shirt, determined to keep his cool. But despite his best efforts, the memories stalked him. Arguments with his father. Insults on both sides. Words he could never retract.

Money. That was the root of every argument. Like the Kirgiz deal. That was the latest. Kirgiz.Com wanted to trade reclaimed nuclear waste to Australia in exchange for hydroponic vegetables. The Aussies were using ancient moldy seed to clone cauliflower and rutabaga. This deal would be the first North-South enterprise since the equator turned too hot for ocean crossings.

Dominic assigned Elsa Bremen to handle the due diligence, and when Elsa said the deal was sound, he knew he had a winner. This would be ZahlenBank's chance to play a truly global role. He could already hear the news bytes: "Hands Across the Equator." "ZahlenBank Sparks Reunification."

Of course, Dominic knew the South was full of lawless thieves and bad managers. Australian business practices harked back to the twentieth century, and their banking system was abysmal. But those weren't the reasons why his father hated the deal.

"What happened to your brain?" Richter was so livid, he sprayed saliva in Dominic's face. "Did you even look at this contract? With these terms, we'll make pennies on the deutschdollar. Pennies! I didn't build ZahlenBank into a world power so we could scratch and scrape for pennies!"

"You had vision once," Dominic shouted right back. "You're getting old. Your eyes are going bad."

"I see well enough to read a balance sheet."

"Splendid. Hole up and count your money. I used to be proud of you."

The deal fell through, and to this day, no northern Com had ever formed a joint venture with the South. But what did the Kirgiz deal matter now? All Dominic remembered was that they'd wounded each other over pennies.

He watched the woman marching erectly among the vats, dipping a finger in each one and tasting. In the dress blue uniform, she looked like a field marshal inspecting her troops.

"Benito, you like this place?" he said. "The pudding's yummy."

Benito grinned.

"Right." He ruffled the boy's hair. The woman had wandered quite a distance, so he called out to her, "This boy will work in exchange for food."

"That thieving vermin!" The woman waved them off. "I told you to leave. No one can do this but me."

"Naomi. Naomi. What are you saying, sweet girl?"

Dominic spun to see where the strange voice had come from. At the far end of the bright, shadowy room, a pale shape wavered like a reflection in water. Dominic bent under the fluorescent grid to see a frail little man shuffling among the vats, feeling the rims with his outspread fingers. He was so short, he didn't have to stoop to walk. Slowly, he advanced toward them. He wore no shirt, and every rib in his torso cast a shadow. He was bald and hairless, except for wispy white eyebrows that hung over his eyes like thatch.

"Tooksook!"

"Nick, it's you," the old man said. "Good, good, I've been looking for you. What happened to your eye?"

Dominic remembered the black eye Benito had given him, but before he could answer, the woman spoke.

"Friends of yours, Tooky? Humph." She kept stroking and smoothing her loose, stringy hair.

Tooksook greeted her with a kiss, then shambled up and touched Dominic's cheek.

"Ow!" Dominic drew back. The eye was tender, and his left jaw stung from that whack from the woman's rake. His face must make quite a rainbow, he thought wryly.

"Bad luck, bad luck. But it'll heal. Hello, Benito."

The boy ran and clutched Tooksook around the waist.

"Let's see, there was something for you. Yes, yes, I remember." The old man fished an object out of his trouser pocket and gave it to the boy. It was a yellow pencil. The boy gripped the object in both hands, and Tooksook smiled so broadly, his single front tooth seemed ready to wobble loose. "Find something to write on, Benito. The floor will do. Lick the lead to make it work better. Yes, lick it."

The boy dashed back to Dominic and held up the pencil like a trophy. Dominic had never seen the boy so delighted. Benito waited till Dominic bent and made a close examination of the pencil. Then he stuck the lead point in his small mouth and darted away between the vats.

Tooksook chuckled. He pressed the blond woman's hand and blatantly batted his eyelashes at her. His bald head just reached her shoulder. "Naomi, sweet girl, this is Nick. The coin giver. The one I told you about. He's been to school. He'll know how to make your bugs breed faster."

"This prote?" The woman rolled her eyes.

"I know nothing about food production," Dominic said.

Tooksook merely nodded and kept talking. "Naomi is our goddess. Oh yes, dear girl. Don't be shy. Naomi tends our garden. She feeds trash to her yeast bugs, and they bear divine fruit. It's the most sublime occupation. Yes, yes, the most sublime. And Nick, now that you're here—"

"No, Tooksook, listen to me. The boy can stay and work, but I have urgent business."

"Humph. Everybody has urgent business." Naomi jerked her hand free of Tooksook's grasp and started knotting her hair.

Her sour attitude set Dominic on edge. 'Tooksook, if you have over five thousand people here, why can't someone help with these vats?"

Tooksook opened his mouth, but Naomi interrupted. "Protes, ha! They wouldn't be any help to me." She smoothed her blue uniform and peered into the vat where Dominic and the boy had eaten. Her nostrils curled. "I have enough to do without tripping over stupid protes!"

"What arrogance! You're unbelievable," Dominic said.

Tooksook fluttered his hands at them. "Children, please. Let's decide how we'll feed our guests. You've been to school, Nick. You understand Naomi's magic food. I knew the moment I saw you, that you would—"

"Are you deaf, old man? I don't know anything about food vats!"

Tooksook blinked and crammed a knuckle in his mouth. Dominic hadn't meant to startle the old guy. He puffed a breath between his teeth. "I'm sorry, Tooksook."

"Con him, son. Get directions to the link. You have eighteen hours, thirty-three minutes and counting."

Con him, right. The NP reasoned just like Richter— everything was a con. His anger and regret were still as mixed up as ever. The very day of Richter's accident, Dominic had called him a crook. But he hadn't meant it. That morning, they'd argued over that Lindt.Com loan. His father's refusal to approve that loan had driven Lindt.Com out of business, and ZahlenBank had scooped up the assets for pocket change. Richter called it sound practice, and Dominic called it larceny. Now he clenched his teeth as if he could bite back the word.

"Con him, son," the NP said again. "You're doing it to save ZahlenBank."

Dominic drew a deep breath and put an arm around Tooksook's shoulders. He felt the man's bones protruding through his thin flesh. "Tooksook, your colony is running out of air. I can get what you need. Oxygen, fuel, supplies and food enough for everyone." His lies flowed smoothly after so much practice. He swallowed and rushed the next line. "I have to meet your council on the Dominic Jedes' bridge."

"That's my boy!" the NP gloated.

Tooksook tilted his head up and gazed into Dominic's eyes. "Is that why you've come, Nick? Truly?"

The old man's long eyebrows trembled, and Dominic had to exercise all his will to hold himself steady. The only sound was the scratch of Benito's pencil on the damp floor. Dominic bit his lip. He didn't mean to raise false hopes, not for gentle old Tooksook. The soup man balanced on his tiptoes, waiting for an answer, and Dominic looked back and forth from one milk white eye to the other.

After all, he wasn't lying. If he silenced that ludicrous broadcast and put these protes under arrest, in a way, he would be making good on his promise. These people would have dependable life support again. Oxygen, food— everything they needed.

Dominic threw his head back and scowled at the ceiling. He'd accused his father of rationalizing, but it seemed he'd inherited the gift. The harsh fluorescent light grid hurt his eyes, so he shut them. Benito's pencil scraped, and Dominic didn't have to look to know the boy was drawing pictures of heroes. The heavy sweet reek of the vats hung in the air like nerve gas.

Naomi snapped her fingers. "Fuel, he says. Food, he says. The college grad thinks he can solve all our problems." She had moved several squares away, and now she stood at a workbench scrubbing her rake with a ball of steel wool. 'Take him to the council, Tooky. Why not? Just get him out of my vat room. And take his smutty child, too. This is not day care."

Dominic exploded. "Madam, I've had enough of your attitude."

"No, Nick." Tooksook pawed at his arm.

"You're not an exec. Anyone can see that." Dominic shrugged the old man off and moved toward Naomi. He grabbed her rake and tossed it aside. When she backed up-, her head bumped the light grid, and the whole framework shivered.

"So you've had a little training," Dominic went on. "That doesn't give you the right to treat me like scum. You don't even know who I am."

Naomi bumped the light grid again, and the shadows danced crazily. She clutched at the bare tubes over her head.

Tooksook slipped between them. "Nick, please. The dear girl is fragile."

But Dominic's anger had gained too much momentum. He leaned over the woman and barked, "You're a fraud!"

Naomi couldn't back away from him. The vats held her trapped. She crossed her arms over her breasts and slid her hands nervously up and down her sleeves.

Tooksook tried to intervene again. "Please, Nick. Can't you see? Our dear Naomi needs her little dream."

Naomi began to pluck and tear at her uniform. She scratched at the braided insignia with her fingernail. "You want my uniform? Take it!" She ripped open the collar and fumbled with the zipper. Her eyes seemed not to focus. After a struggle, she got the zipper open and pulled one shoulder free. Dominic glimpsed a pale, wrinkled breast before Tooksook turned her away. "My uniform," she repeated in an edgy voice.

"Of course it's yours, sweet girl. No one wants to take away your uniform. Nick made a mistake. But we forgive him, don't we? Yes, yes, we forgive him. Nick's come to save us."

Tooksook managed to get Naomi's uniform zipped up again. Then he found her rake and pressed her fingers around the handle. "Dear girl. We can't do without you. You feed us all. That's right, use your rake. Sweet Naomi. That's it."

Softly, fondly, Tooksook coaxed her down the aisle of vats. With dull mortification, Dominic watched them go. He'd resorted to violence again. Violence against a mentally ill prote woman who had managed to grow enough food to sustain over five thousand people. And the worst he could say about her was, she treated him like scum.

"Eighteen hours, ten minutes, fourteen seconds," the NP whined.

Dominic didn't want to, but he found himself thinking about Penderowski again and wishing he hadn't taken that light. Maybe it was the accumulation of fatigue. He pressed his knuckles on the vat rim, and from nowhere, another memory assaulted him, a day when he was seventeen years old, fresh out of college, wearing the smart dress blues of a junior trader, riding up the executive elevator with his father. It was his first day at the Bank, and his father spent the morning proudly showing him around and explaining the job. Dominic hung on every word.

"Protes are children, son. Our duty is to protect them. Think of the marketplace as one big fragile ecosystem that feeds us all. We execs have to watch over it and keep it safe. That's our trust, and ZahlenBank's the heart of it."

Surely, there was a time when his father believed those words.

Dominic felt a tug at his waistband and looked down. Benito wanted to show him something. Vacantly, he let himself be led through the vats, and there on the floor under a glowing fluorescent tube, he found Benito's sketch of a tall stick figure with a square head and enormous feet. In one hand, the figure held a laser torch streaming radiance. Dominic couldn't mistake the portrait. He patted the boy's shoulder and said nothing.

Benito tugged at him again and held up the yellow pencil. Dominic saw the lead had broken. It was a stubby, old-fashioned mechanical device with a button to extend or retract the graphite point. Dominic clicked it a few times to extrude more lead, then handed it back to the boy.

"Zzzh!" The boy grinned and dropped to the floor to start drawing again. Dominic realized that was the first happy sound he'd heard Benito make.

Behind him, Tooksook said, "Nick, you should hurry, yes? The council's expecting you. Come, come, I'll show you the way."

"Naomi?" Dominic asked.

"Naomi's lying down. She's very tired."

"I didn't mean to—"

"Of course you didn't." The old man squeezed his arm. "Benito, come along. Yes, bring your pencil. We're going to find the Dominic Jedes."

Dominic offered Tooksook the laser torch, but he said he wouldn't need it. They wound through the vats toward the spot where Tooksook had first appeared, and there in the ceiling was an open hatch.

Tooksook pointed at it and beamed. "Up you go. Straight up to the bridge."

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