ANTARCTICA: BIRUDU

I slowed the Chang to a crawl. The last sign I had seen said: Entering Birudu / Population 48 Million. And while I could see fields of house-towers in the distance, even cheaper versions of the vertical aluminum cigars that Zoom Langsin lived in, I was in the industrial side of town, where the buildings were squat, windowless, and covered with the varnish of smoke and greed.

Thirty feet ahead of the Chang stood the first man I had seen for miles. He was covered head to foot in a yellow suit with a long visor and articulated black gloves. In one hand he held a long pole with which he was poking at the bottom of a jagged overhang of a building with the measured and bored motions of an hourly worker.

When my door swung open, the biting rot of the outside air seeped into my nose even before I had inhaled. The viscous humidity soon sheened my face, and beneath the soles of my Celine-Audis, the ground was spongy and sticky like risen sourdough.

I stepped to the front of the car and cupped a hand beside my mouth. "Any yarn mills around here?"

The poker man startled. "You're not supposed to be here!" I could just make out the dark triangles of his eyes, nose, and mouth, like charcoal smudges of a sketch hidden in the glare of the plastichrome of his visor. "Get on out!" He turned to the building as a door opened.

From the medical green interior, the silhouettes of two men emerged. Shielding my eyes, I saw that the first wore a short sleeve B-shirt and shorts, while the second was dressed in a HAZMAT suit like Poker. The M-Bunny man's face was covered with a dark crust, like a blackened steak. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips shrank back from mottled black and brown teeth. While his eyes met mine for an instant, I sensed that his will and dreams had withered away to nothing but a sad residue.

I put my right arm to my face and breathed through the filtering material Pheff had hemmed into my sleeve, watching these two men walk to a trailer beyond Poker. Hazmat opened the door and pushed the M-Bunny man inside, shutting it after him. On the door, I could just make out a handwritten sign: Incubation. Below it were five interlocking black triangles.

As he returned to the building, Hazmat saw me, stopped, and raised an accusing finger. "Restricted area!"

Meanwhile Poker was idly prodding here and there. "I already told him."

Hazmat shook his head solemnly. "This is a restricted area!" The level of self-righteousness in his voice identified him as a boss. "There's a biological restriction."

My dad had surely encountered someone just like Hazmat. I thought about running at him and leveling him with a heel to the throat, but I turned to my Chang and, while still pressing my suit sleeve to my nose, got inside, quickly lowered the door, and turned the cabin air control to MAX Purify.

My hands were shaking and my stomach was acid. I had long avoided thinking about what it had been like for my father after he gave himself up. Even when Vada and I visited the M-Bunny headquarters, my anguish for Rik's regular recycle had diverted my imagination. And much later, when I had the means, I had searched for my father's past, for where he had been and what he had done-not how it had ended. But as I released the brakes, and engaged the forward motors, I was flooded with the vision of my father's last hours. He had been stuffed in some small space, allowed to get sicker so that they could scrape his skin to collect whatever viral or bacterial prize they thought he had. M-Bunny's real product wasn't corn, or the products of its mills and factories, or even more prisoners-it was biological weapons.