Kathleen Goonan: Crescent City Rhapsody

For Skylar, Jazz, and Sean:

The best is always yet to come.

rhapsody

a literary work consisting of disconnected pieces

an instrumental composition that is irregular in form like an improvisation or free fantasia

Rhapsodies by Duke Ellington:

New Orleans Rhapsody

Creole Rhapsody

Rhapsody, Jr.

Swanee River Rhapsody

Rock ’n’ Roll Rhapsody

The baseball-sized objects exploded as they hit Earth’s atmosphere.

All burned to cinders except one.

Marie always knew she would be murdered. Not knowing the details kept her on edge for many years.

In a way, it was a relief when it happened.

Involved in stock reports, Marie felt rather than saw the sky’s gradual blackening; welcomed the slight breath of breeze on her sweat-sheened skin: heard thunder rumble with the distant, primal pleasure she always felt during late summer when storms deluged New Orleans daily.

There was little traffic on her small bricked side street this time of day. As usual, the beat of desultory blues rose from street musicians to her office on the fourth floor of the town house that had been in her family for generations. After their usual noontime skirmish, the appetising smells of hot spices and garlic vanquished the sweetish, sickly smell of spilled beer that cooked up from the bricks around 9 a.m. like steam. Since the corner restaurant had been there for over a century, and the beer for longer than that, these smells were a part of the cycle of the day for Marie and, she liked to think, for a long line of Maries.

Her immediate background was one of wealth and opportunity. With the coming age of nanotechnology, Marie didn’t see why this could not be the lot of all.

Some disputed that such an age was coming. They didn’t know that it was already upon them. The public was told that molecular manipulation was a distant pipe dream. Their ignorance, in Marie’s opinion, was deliberately fostered to make it easy for those in control to shape the future as they pleased. Nanotech research and advances were the property of the military and of their quasi-private research arms. Stealing classified information from such places was defined as espionage.

Marie’s grandmère had raised her to believe that education and information were basic human necessities—after food and shelter. And Grandmère drilled into Marie that she had to be better than her own mother, a wild teenager who metamorphed into a beautiful jet-setter and died of an overdose when Marie was ten. But like her Grandmère, whose rum smuggling had established the basis of their fortune, Marie quickly realized that she would have to run with her lights off in dangerous waters. If she had to operate an amateur spy network in order to further the dreams she had inherited along with her money, so be it.

But Marie didn’t have to depend on foreign governments to provide her with enemies. She had plenty right at home. A recent murder trial had put away one of the most powerful members of the old-boy network, clearing her playing field considerably. The Times-Picayune ferreted out the fact that she personally paid Sharbell Dighton III. the attorney who accomplished this tricky feat, a small fortune to represent the victim.

Money was no object—at least not as long as Marie continued to invest wisely. She had a knack for it, and it was a necessity. It was her responsibility to take care of her people. And, according to Grandmère, dead for ten years now, all oppressed people.

It was not always easy to discharge these responsibilities.

Even wearing shorts and a halter top, Marie sweltered in the muggy afternoon as she sat low to the floor in a canvas sling folding chair, her favorite seat when working. Sipping strong, sweet coffee watered by melting ice, she absently noticed that the rough bricks of the wall behind her workspace lacked their usual slice of sun.

A visitor to her high-tech loft might have been surprised at its elegant hard-edged simplicity, but visitors were few. Rare tropical plants flourished in Chinese pots. French doors leading to a balcony stood open. An aromatic herbal scent pervaded the air, leavened by hot wind that banged the green shutters hooked back loosely against the streetside bricks. Though Hugo, her bodyguard and longtime friend, hated her practice of leaving windows and doors open, she could not stand being separated from the weather. At college in Chicago twenty years earlier, she had left her windows open during the coldest nights, a practice that created a daily argument which soon fell into a mannered sequence of feints and parries. But today Hugo wasn’t here to play the game.

Marie’s computer screen was an arc of about sixty degrees of flat silverish flexible material resting on the floor, a crescent of information. The apex was about four feet high. Marie like to keep a lot of information visible. Sometimes, like today, it looked like the jumble of a messy desktop, a dada collage of bright colors and odd shapes. She held the keypad on her lap. The top border of the screen shone with voudoun symbols: a snake, a drum, and the spirit of love, represented by concentric nesting hearts. Not that she knew anything about voudoun , though her name and heritage were intimately related to the practice. She was not superstitious; her rather scattered scientific and mathematical background precluded that. She had no truck with her family background of voudoun , though her grandmère, a true believer in the hybrid of African religions and Catholicism, had sternly tried to bring her around until her dying day. The images on Marie’s screen had been designed as a gift by a believing friend, of which there were many in New Orleans, and she used them because they were beautiful.

The path beneath the snake branched to include files on every person of any importance in New Orleans—and many who might seem to lack any distinguishing qualities. This information had been committed to computer only in the past few decades. Before that, such facts had been held within the minds of a long line of Marie Laveaus.

New Orleans had never been as Marie envisioned it would be in the future. Grandmère’s stories emphasized that there was no golden past to return to, unless one idealized New Orlean’s continental origins. Marie could see the possibility of something better—something completely different—glimmering in the distance. She was often described as cold and ruthless by her enemies. And perhaps that was true. She didn’t mind. The ability to inspire fear was a necessary adjunct to power.

A stock trading program ran on auto in the upper-right-hand corner, using the latest complexity-based algorithms. Although she had a stranglehold on local politicians that she was certainly not going to abandon, Marie had diversified from her family’s traditions. Her wealth now came from discreet investments in the most promising of new small companies specializing in some essential facet of nanotech, though generally the application was not called nanotech, but by a much more specific name. Her holdings were an international patchwork, for one country might ban what another allowed. Since around 2005, the possibility and dangers of true self-replication had been taken much more seriously, and every possible avenue that might lead to such a development was closely scrutinized—and often snapped up and classified. But because this process was usually accomplished by appointed government committees, and because developers had powerful lobbies, many loopholes were naturally overlooked. Over the last few years, Marie had observed a pattern emerging that perhaps few people had the time or inclination to fully realize, one based not on scientific development itself, but on the commerce spun from it. She believed that it wouldn’t be much longer before self-replication, the simultaneously pursued and feared watershed, would become a reality.