PROLOGUE

And suddenly, muzzy blue behind a sun that strummed lesions of gray somewhere, Arnau suspected sleepily, over Sardinia.

And behind him, beneath wisps of pale muslin, she shuddered, resigning herself, Arnau imagined, to another barren day with him.

Arnau leaned forward against the balcony railing, tacking into the stench of salt, squid, and pine. Groves of whitewash and lazuline freckled his gaze. Soon the Seven AM projections would commence, and The Westy would be waiting, thirty stories below, among the verdant terraces and bleary, shadowed arcades.

And again, somewhere in a cloister of sunlight, Rebecca sighed and cooed to the new day. "Arnau? What time is it, Arnau?"

By 7:20 the projections had begun their third circuit across the skies of Tages. Arnau listened for The Address as he crossed the colonnade above Carrer Diumenge. 'Look up,' The Address demanded, suddenly masculine again, its voice mortar grafting rooftops to streets, slurring ocean into breeze. A troupe of Torturists bowed their heads immediately and then resumed their ritual caulking of a teenage boy from a rival guild. Arnau watched them for a moment. Their audience, all women of course, circled and sidestepped around the exhibition, deigning their approval with a nod or two. He yanked himself from the hallucinatory abyss of the spectacle and glanced up towards the east.

A single lasa began to take form, its silhouette stenciled against the wafting lollops of calx that had become the morning sky. The projection, ambiguously epicene, careening and somersaulting across the cinders of daybreak, seemed to wink at Arnau for a moment. This one was smaller than most, about half the height of Arnau's building, with close cropped vermilion hair, its "skin" a swirling, viscous ivory, the suppleness of its torso doused with what looked like rust-colored chain mail. The lasa disappeared for a second, only to blister onto the horizon a couple of hundred meters just to the north east of the city. Arnau cupped his hands around his eyes as the apparition swelled and drew closer still to Tages, beaming down over its listless thralls that littered the island's streets. It sashayed daintily back towards its lofty stage, one foot in front of the other down an unseen catwalk, hands fluttering rhythmically in front of its face, threading the empty air with a lattice of white, slivery fingers. The hologram stopped over the Museum of the Criminal Arts and draped its arms over the building, hugging and plucking at its facade. Its eyes, each the size of a small child, were chalcedony - - But just then The Address: 'Look up', now earnestly feminine, its timbre crumbly, almost granulated, yet somehow more like a hail of gravel skittering across a pond.

So Arnau looked down and went on his way.

The Westy towered, shimmering cowl tipped forward, in the archway of Number Eighty-Eight, Passeig des Veills Sants. Across the top of the arch, slathered in fluorescent green paint, was one of The Reticulate's many slogans, advertising his services to the city: 'Why live in your own little world, when you can live in the WHOLE world? Break the information stranglehold!'

"En Arnau, I presume?"

"You're The Westerberg, then," Arnau had intended it to be a question. He tilted his head, as if to nod, but then lowered it slowly.

"No, I'm The Westy. I used to be. I still am."

Arnau started to shake his head. He glanced back at the alley, listened for the Stamina Artist, and hesitated. "Right, then. But you did send me this." Suddenly he remembered that he meant that, too, as a question. Instead, he produced a square of carbon fiche, tumbling it carefully, delicately, over his fingers.

The Westy shuffled out from under the doorway, onto the blanched street. He raised his head slightly toward Arnau. "No. The Westerberg would have sent you that." Somewhere, under rumples of soft, pleated dun, he shook his head.

Arnau tried to make eye contact, peering up under the brim of The Westy's hood. At once, the man's entire cloak sighed with swirls of glistering, almost nacreous, gray.

Arnau's gaze dropped. From somewhere among the myriad folds, The Westy extended a hand: surprisingly blunt, almost pristinely olive, knuckles dappled with dried flakes of turquoise mud. With thumb and index finger, he pinched the fiche from Arnau's hand. The Westy twisted the tab into the sunlight, a long, simian arm extended completely beyond his head, but did not bother even to glance at the object.

"He told you, I presume, about the little boys."

To Arnau, it sounded as though it should have been a query, his mind sputtering in the wake of The Westy's voice, in its total lack of inflection. He nodded at the fiche. "You can at least verify it then?"

"And why is that important to you, En Arnau?"

"This Westerberg," Arnau began with half-sigh, twinges of frustration burrowing into the back of his throat. "I'm a Private-Cast Correspondent. The Westerberg," he swallowed his annoyance and remembered to use the honorific, "apparently, has hired me to do a piece on ... that." He again nodded towards The Westy's hand. All of a sudden the cloaked man's arm collapsed through the dry air; the tuft of fiche, bobbing in his fleshy fingers, almost hoary in a gleam - -Then The Westy, cowl snapped back, ebbs of gray linen puddling around his shoulders and across his chest: chuckling. He lurched forward with a stuttering little chortle, pinched Arnau's shirt pocket open, and flicked the tab into it. Drops of gray sheen ruffled the light into tiny rainbows and coagulated across the peak of his hood. As The Westy shambled over the chalky sidewalk towards the archway Arnau glimpsed his face: the right side taut, sopping with pallor, the left jowl slithering down its cheekbone like a mudslide down a ravine.

From a dingy crescent of shadow, the cloak breathed, "Ah, yes. You're one of those. From the looks of you, you can't have much of an audience base."

Arnau narrowed his eyes at the hood and nodded, slightly confused. "Right, then. I do, however, provide services to clients in the Locus [3, 5, 7, 8]. They're quite interested in the daily struggles of our little colonial exile here on Earth."

"I see. And how much of an audience can you claim here on our fair island metropolis?"

Arnau stood silent then, one hand cupped over his eyes, his gaze traipsing down the street from one blanched, pocked doorway to the next, as though The Westy had never put the question to him.

"Perhaps that's because the vast majority of people in Tages really don't care what happens in Tages, to their neighbors in Tages. Unless it has to do immediately with them, of course." The Westy, now completely motionless, sounded almost conciliatory as he said it.

Arnau turned back to the sound of the man's voice, stared into the hood, and licked his lower lip. "Why should The Westerberg be the only one to have discovered this? Why aren't there any records of these abductions with The Reticulate?"

"You just answered your own - "

"And how could a mother kidnap her own child?" Arnau looked down, squinted through one eye and jammed a couple of fingers into his breast pocket. "I mean, again, in this day and age, with The Reticulate -"

"How?" The Westy seemed to sway a step or two, farther back into the twilit little hutch. Arnau fancied that he could still make out the cloak, furrows billowing with every breath. "I would advise you to think, for yourself if possible, why, in this ... society a mother would kidnap her own son and evaporate from off the face of the island."

Arnau smirked. "You mean besides hastening the Y-chromosome on its way to ignominious irrelevance?"

"I mean besides the obvious: as an act of terrorism, either domestic or familial; the exploits of some cult; a bout of mass insanity wherein -"

"Why shouldn't I have thought of all that already?"

"Because, perhaps, your profession does not derive any of its collective remuneration from thinking? Your patron won't even pay you to affirm the details of this particular horror story, just compile them into a fashionably rambling frippery of loosely corroborated rumors." His voice had waned into a drafty reverberation now: almost metallic, each word perforated with a hissing clink.

With that Arnau winced, dropped his head to his chest and reeled, carefully, delicately, on one heel.

"It is horrible, isn't it?" The Westy shouted as the other man trudged down the street. "And you ...you are disaffected, En Arnau."

Arnau wondered, if only for a second as he walked, at the sound of The Westy yelling.

Rebecca lazed in the middle of the bedroom during the evenings, cross-legged on the floor, propped up on narrow elbows that nuzzled floppy, crosshatched pillows. Sometimes she would watch Arnau as he researched this latest story; his face glazed with the churning palette of The Reticulate's Projections, the scurf of three-dimensional typesets and symbols hobbling, then squirming, across and down his forehead, drooping from his eyelashes, from the tip of his nose.

Her partner tried to explain this story to her, as he had done for every investigation he worked on since they met. Rebecca seemed unencumbered by it all, fording the monotony with a nod and a shrug and changing the subject to something more casually solipsistic whenever possible. 'I don't see what could be so interesting about that,' she began, not bothering to even glance at her lover, the ruins of a sneer jutting from paper-thin cheeks. 'This is a new world now. Isn't it every mother's right to do with her child what she sees fit? Especially a male child ...' Mostly, she imbibed her own Private-Cast, sauntering through the filigreed labyrinths of the Locus Worlds, rustling her astonishment to the murk, slurring, breathless, to the backlight how beautiful life must be down there.

In the meantime, new leads unfolded each morning on Arnau's desk, each fresh possibility blossoming with an array of suspiciously helpful contacts. Most of the contacts were Derivatives of The Reticulate: Iñaki The Reticulate, Anton The Reticulate, Claypool The Reticulate, and so on, until finally Arnau could only guess at the magnitude of this scandal bubbling up between his eyes.

Arnau spent his mornings interviewing constabulary officials, none of whom had anything noteworthy to say, insisting that sometimes people, men women, leave Tages of their own accord. The afternoons were for dowsing the annals of The Reticulate, conferring with his gallery of informants and performing background checks, whenever possible, on each of them.

He did the same for The Westy, Derivative of one Harry Westerberg Hutton. The Westerberg had been born at least seventy-five years before the advent of the Renewed Common Era somewhere in northeastern Yorkshire, of partial, circumlocutory Norwegian ancestry. That much made sense to Arnau; there was an obvious chink in the cloaked one's speech patterns, so that even when he spoke in Mallorquí (Derivative, naturally, of Catalan), the umpteenth generation patois of Tages and much of the Lower Western Mediterranean, Arnau divined a definite Teutonic pitter-patter to his cadence. The Westerberg immigrated to Locus around the beginning of the RCE, by way of some orbital world or another, where he made his fortune in government reconstruction contracts after the phage blackouts in the Moluccas. However, just some five years later, he lost that same fortune when the global junta awarded most of the rest of the planet's reconstruction to the Tages Consortium.

That, according to The Reticulate, was the sudden end of Harry Westerberg Hutton.

Arnau blinked, shrugged, and turned his attention back to his flock of sources.

Over the course of a week, the reporter had eroded the strata of would-be Reticulates to a silt of three or four of the (comparatively) most reputable. Iñaki consistently proved the most informative, lavishing a panoply of missing persons reports on Arnau. Highlighted in the pile were some two-dozen reports that featured young single mothers alleged to have abducted their own infant and toddler sons from the island.

Arnau fastidiously checked the Derivative's assertions. Each record proved legitimate, dated and signed with The Reticulate's thousand-strand encryption virus. Each alleged abductor cited in the reports was single, with no current declared partner in her life, and even returned a full-scope background evaluation when Arnau ran her: verification of live birth, Certificate of Derivation (where applicable, of course), principal psych-credit ranking, immigration status, obligatory criminal history- But they were all childless.

According to The Reticulate, every mother/kidnapper listed in Iñaki's dossier had never given birth.

Two questions, simplistic, voiceless, and pendulously rhetorical, dangled in Arnau's mind: How could a mother steal her own child, when she wasn't even a mother? And then: How could anyone even exist if The Reticulate did not say so?

A week later Arnau met The Westy at the Museum of Criminal Arts. Together they inspected the permanent exhibits on everything from cloning to cosmetic vandalism to transvestism, The Westy espousing the cultural and historical differences that hallmarked each. Each installation, it always seemed to Arnau, was in itself a jumbled repertoire of moral and ethical ambiguities: a cynical, yet vibrant, celebration of crime and the criminals of yore sodden with a dispassionately stylized projection-loop of the offense being committed.

The pair made their way towards the Arboretum, at the geometric center of the main building, which housed the more bizarre exhibits, most of which were on loan from Geneva or Lyon or some other gallery in the Upper Mediterranean. These works tended to chronicle crimes that had become passé as of the inauguration of the last century.

Arnau had never ventured this far into the museum before. He gasped and almost lost his balance as he gazed up at the Pavilion, a titanic projection of the deities of justice and retribution from all over Europe, Africa, and Asia. Esu, Tyr, Shamash, Ma'at, Zeus and a pantheon of others all hovered over a triangular obsidian dais, each vying for any stray scalp of sky sagging through the grated ceiling. There were at least a dozen other evanescent sculptures on the platform, filtering ribbons of sunlight through their outstretched lances and snarled fists. Arnau thought he recognized the one at the end of the Pavilion, obviously Old World European, probably Germanic or Celtic; he must be one of the legendary kings of Ulster he mused, or Arthur, or perhaps even Guifré the Hairy. As Arnau tottered down one angle of the dais, the illusory king lifted its chin slowly, narrowed its eyes (almost contemptuously Arnau imagined) at the reporter, and swept a ragged spearhead across its pocked blazon.

The hologram nodded, somewhere under the cornice of Arnau's eye. Its ruddy, bouffant beard was calloused with strands of dried blood.

Arnau and The Westy finally glided passed the Pavilion and into the Arboretum proper. Pennons of oak, cypress, rosewood, and camphor unfurled in front of the men. Alcoves lurked here and there in the morass, carved out of the Arboretum itself, each studded by a bouquet of plaques explaining the exhibit.

"These are all in Catalan," Arnau began, running fingertips over one of the inscribed glass tablets. He glanced up and tried to catch The Westy's eye. "Must be antiques." His voice thudded against the humid air.

The Westy nodded, the epicanthus of his hood fluttering, a speck of a smirk eclipsed by a molten cheek. "Originally they were housed in various galleries from Tarragona to Perpignan. However, over the course of the last three centuries or so they have found their way all over the Mediterranean. The Catalans' preoccupation with this sordid business eventually infected most of Western Europe. The relatively few native islanders left," he looked up and around suddenly, almost charily, "themselves a strain of Old World Catalan, have had no qualms about keeping this ... ... alive."

Arnau started to frown.

"But of course your forebears shared those same eccentric, clannish blood lines, did they not my good Arnau?" Still sheathed in the tinny half-baritone of his voice, the question dropped to the ground.

For a moment, the frown swallowed the reporter's lips.

Down a path laced with honey-grey marble demilunes, a single plaque sprouted from fresh handfuls of flaxen sand. Arnau began to read it at length: 'Maria Puig i de Casanova, 40-84 (?) of the Renewed Common Era. Author, mother, social deviant, and kidnapper. In c. RCE 70 Puig, apparently acting out a scene from her polemic children's novel 'The Day a Kangaroo Gives a Papaya', abducted her own son Carles -'

But stopped.

Suddenly The Westy stood hulking behind him, under a sallow coif of magnolia blossoms.

That night Arnau lay in bed, half a linen sheet twined around his legs. He lay there thinking about Maria Puig, about what The Westy had shown him earlier in the museum. Her entire life, Arnau thought, compressed and reduced to a glinting epitaph, riffled across my fingertips, like the lacey shadows of that magnolia tree.

And he tried to question it, to sort and catalog it: the life (now just case) of Maria Puig, some one hundred years old, the women here and now on Tages, all of it. He asked The Westy about all of it, on the terraced museum roof, with a stolid, squinty stare, without really asking at all: 'The Reticulate said all of the abductors were childless. What were some of the boys' names then?

Tell me why a woman would steal her own child.

Yes, but I still don't see how that can be such a terrible crime. Aren't children the property of their mothers? Especially male children ...'

The Westy, for his part, waited patiently, finally uncoiling prickly tendrils of logic around the reporter, the kind of monolithic, glacial logic that made it clear to Arnau that he would understand whether he chose to or not: 'The women erased the records of their sons' births and subsequent short lives from The Reticulate. This can be done easily, as even you have learned by now, if one can persuade certain amoral Derivatives and disciples of The Reticulate. That part has Iñaki and the lads especially nettled, as you can probably imagine. But you are essentially correct, and the kidnappers know it as well: if you're not in The Reticulate, you simply are not'.

To which the reporter asked, how do you know that they erased those records? How can you know that the women ever had children at all?

'For that, you will just have to take our word, En Arnau. Already there are preliminary signs that The Reticulate has been compromised no less than three hundred times in the last five months. And well ... You've done enough legwork already to see that everything else his true Derivatives have told you is at least plausible'.

Arnau started to roll his eyes - 'And a woman, my good Arnau, would do such a thing for any number of reasons. Shall I list them for you? Well, I will anyway-'

At this point, the gray cloak enumerated every possible cause, including the irrational fear that Tages officials were secretly rounding up boys from six months to six years to inflict male-specific autism on a random test population. The Westy went on; Arnau blinked and tried not to yawn: 'As for this business of crime ... certainly the government of this floating contrivance would fittingly consider it so. One cannot just take one's child, or anyone else's child for that matter, any time one feels like it. What of the orderly society and all that then? There is as well the nagging little matter of child welfare. Abduction is not the preferred way of raising children, at least not on this world. Really, I do think you've taken quite the reductionist's view of that side of the whole affair. But you are a colonial, and there's the whole question of your ancestry ...'

Arnau could not remember if The Westy coughed or cleared his throat. Not that it was important, as his waning insomnia paraphrased his recollection of the day: 'But beyond that, what do you reckon we're all here for?' The Westy's voice grew dim behind a visor of watery chartreuse and hazel, and then almost distilled green, eyes. He folded his arms and rested against a railing. 'We are, simply put, pawns. We are pawns burdened with repopulating this chasm, this Earth.'

Rebecca lay next to Arnau, on her side, hunkering into the foam beneath, grinding one heel slowly into it as she infused it with a weighty breath. She rocked onto her back, snorted, and gave a tiny wheeze. Arnau shut his eyes tight and pictured the woman at his side; in the flicker of a yawn he charted the smear of freckles across the bridge of her nose, framed the pitch of her sharp cheekbones, as bangs the color of wet straw jostled over runny, russet eyebrows.

What kind of woman is she, really, Arnau demanded to himself. Would she steal her son, if she had one? Would she stay with me if she could have one? Why doesn't she care about it, the same way they do?

Shame burrowed down into the back of his scull and scalded the nape like a rash. He hated himself, in that instant, for being too afraid to think it. Why don't I care?

Arnau wanted to ask her all of it, in a whisper. And he wanted her to dream him the answers. He lay there beside her, plucking at a bristly tendon on the inside of her upper thigh.

Word came from Iñaki the next week, at exactly 8:13:43 AM on a Thursday, confirmed one hundred-thousandth of a second later by The Reticulates Claypool and Dragovan.

Arnau half expected The Westy to show up at the flat as well. Instead, a duo of constables, one so identical to the other so that Arnau first ventured that they must have been twins, guarded the doorway. The reporter turned to the one on his right and whisked the hair from the scruff of his neck. The constable inspected his brand, gingerly fingering the outer ridges, and then the tiny constellation of viral axes in the innermost oval, smothering a snicker. Arnau turned to her brusquely and sighed mightily; her lower lip was quivering beneath a swollen sneer, in an apparent attempt to keep from laughing in the reporter's face.

The inside of the flat flowered into a surreptitious symmetry of chaos. In the front room, stacks of old paper books arched into jaundiced corners corrugated with streaks of mildew. Reams of storage fiche carpeted half of the room in counterclockwise swirls, like water down a gaping drain. Tussocks of medium grey and drab pearl, cockatiel feathers Arnau quickly surmised, spilled from a cage atop a chrome and cerise jasper tabletop. On a credenza of notched, vermilion feldspar in the center of the room, the projector was still lit to Claudia Maragall's Private-Cast channel, looping through a documentary on Catalan writers from Joan Brossa to Antoni Mas de Xebrec. Arnau squatted in front of it, absorbed by the crash course in literary history. He had almost forgotten that Private-Cast actually could be good for something.

"We can't turn it off. We don't have her code," one of the twins offered from the doorway. She stepped into the front room, smiling sweetly, prettily.

Arnau bolted up, slipping forward on the balls of his feet, drew an index finger across the tip of his nose and hung his head as the policewoman sidled up next to him.

She stooped a little, cocked her head to one side, stooped a little more, and peered under, and up at, Arnau. Her eyes were daubs of watercolor: wilted blue-algae and grains of caramelized sand.

"Oh, you'll have to do better than that." She grinned and playfully poked Arnau in his ribs. "Amélia and I aren't so bad, really." The constable glanced back at her giggling partner and shook her head. "Jesus, your woman must be doing a number on you," she breathed and wormed a fist into his back pocket, knuckling his buttock slowly, tenderly.

Arnau spotted a handwritten page, listing somewhere in a rent tapestry of discolored fiches. He wriggled free of the constable and trudged towards it. The page had been crumpled and flattened and splattered with nonsensical notes, all in sapless old Catalan. The reporter scrutinized the scribbles for a minute, then two or three. They seemed to be ideas, themes, or plots, for potential stories: an extraterrestrial race investigates what they believe to be an archaeological treasure trove on an uninhabited Earth only to find an ancient mass grave of savagely murdered humans; a man travels back through alternate versions of his own past desperately seeking a lost trinket from his youth; a young woman abducted by strange but peaceful aliens returns home decades later to confront the truth about her dead father ... Claudia Maragall, Arnau concluded, fancied herself a writer.

A few paces from where he found the first page, Arnau discovered half a dozen others. Shuffled among them, its top edge waxy with fresh bird droppings, was a Certificate of Derivation, no doubt forged. Forged because the only base donor listed was Maria Puig i de Casanova.

"There weren't even any pictures, En Westy." Arnau squinted through the midday glare.

The Westy folded his arms in front of him, each hand snug in the other's sleeve. Maragall's errant cockatiel leapfrogged across the plicae of his ponderous shoulders, pecking here and there at the glistening nap of his cowl. He faced Arnau. "We could have planted some, I suppose. In any event, by now you must begin to suspect something."

"I'm far beyond suspicion, by now. Suspicion can only last a lifetime."

"Ah, yes. He begins to think, to ask the questions that ..." The grey cloak stopped mid-sentence.

"I found this." Arnau proffered the fake Certificate. "This, too." In the reporter's other hand was a hardcopy of Maria Puig's book.

The Westy stared at both objects but took neither. "Have you read it yet? No, of course not. I don't suppose you would have had the time. Quite the manifesto, if you ever do find the time. You see, so much of it is not actually hers. Puig was paraphasic in the very least, and most likely suffered from full-on Wernicke's. Which led to rough draft after rough draft of arrant gibberish. I mean, just from the title alone ... Fortunately, she disguised it as a children's story, so no one really noticed ... that much. But the book had to be edited anyway... and quite heavily, we believe."

"No, I think it would have helped, maybe just a little. If you had planted some pictures of the boy - a boy -, something." Arnau stepped towards the edge of the roof, eyes on the oxide-coated ground. The cockatiel heaved a squawk.

"Why, En Arnau, I can tell that you really would like to believe," The Westy asked as he slid to the reporter's side. "Look, down there. They outnumber men nearly three to one, but," he began, but halted. For the first time, his voice had breath, as though it could move the very air. "Those are the same women, the very same. Look at them. In the name of art, they pay the Torturists to caulk shut the orifices of homeless teenaged boys. They have tried, time and again, to dismantle The Reticulate because he is a threat to their comfortable little oligarchy of knowledge. Information, they insist, is a private concern, hence their invention of that horrid medium for which you work. They designed the entire concept of the Private-Cast to wrest attention away from the real problems of this world. If it doesn't directly concern them, then there is no value in it. The institution of marriage no longer convenient to them, they couple with men, only to discard us - them - once a healthy child is sired. We cannot rely on them to reseed this world. Boys - male children - will have no concept of -"

"But they built Tages," Arnau interjected. He looked up from the phosphorescent tarmac. "They built an entire society -"

"That same old chestnut, after all these years. The faces of the immigrants may change, but the indoctrination does not, apparently. When you came to Tages, I'm sure -"

"And what banner of propaganda would you hoist over me? You, and Iñaki, and The Reticulate ..."

"Oh, yes, I do rather enjoy their version. The Reticulates possess a mythos all their own, you understand. Their story of this city's founding, how their master, the one great Adnoun, gathered the first Derivatives around him - it - self on collective bended knee, in the crater of a downed orbital, under a swath of lamplight no less, is priceless."

Arnau doffed a garbled sigh and glanced down at the squalor of turquoise and faded ocher below. "Yes, well, majority rules and all that."

The Westy was reclining against a solar collector now, his cloak a fawn, chromatic sunburst raining down on the alabaster roof. Claudia Maragall's cockatiel shrugged its wings, yawned, and dusted its tatty, dainty crest against a grey hood.

Arnau spent the rest of the day in and out of the convoluted world of Maria Puig. He sat in a portside café, his face drenched in the congealing liniments of early evening sun, cradling the manuscript that had not left his hand all afternoon. The reporter thought back on the day: the duplicity of it all, The Westy, The Westy's pathetic, almost acridly comedic (but intentional?) bungling of the whole sham from the - - And it occurred to Arnau just then: They had just attempted to initiate him into their cause, such as it was, whether he wanted it or not, by fuddling him into thinking for himself, by duping him into oppugning their own sublimely outlandish reality. They had reached out to him, in their own way because they needed him, wanted him. There was a certain sadness in that.

The reporter again tried to read the printout, or at least swatches of it, marveling absent-mindedly at Puig's use of old, pre-RCE Catalan. The story itself lasted only eighty pages or so; festooned with jarringly vague metaphors, each word crinkled on the page, each page a tessellation of scraggy half-thoughts, - Perhaps, Arnau ventured blankly, slowly, that was the first step into the cavern of his novitiate.

- But it made no sense to Arnau, just as The Westy had predicted. He read some forty-odd pages of it, drearily so far, and already felt as though he had dredged through it a dozen times. Was the story supposed to be some sort of protest? And what, if anything, was Puig protesting?

Maybe they fancy themselves a new breed of Cathar, these Reticulates, the reporter thought, and then tried to remember exactly what a Cathar was. And this was my consolamentum, ineptly subliminal and melodramatic. Arnau lapped up the last drop of ooze that was his Cuban coffee.

- An unapologetically phallocentric autocracy, or an otherwise benign patriarchy that had grown - Or were the spirits of those of those two abstractions somehow synonymous?

Blearily, Arnau read on another thirty pages. So far it was a bit of a fairytale, probably typical of pre-RCE literature: a young mother, Llucia, tries to raise a son in a violent, war-torn kingdom called Maubarón (most likely a corruption of ancient Provencal and a rather trite one at that) where women are relegated to a kind of conjugal slavery. Her soldier husband is negligent, favoring his time on the battlefield over his own family. Men have run the once benighted realm into the cursed ground, carelessly befouling the natural environment with their martial industries. Llucia, longing for a better life both for her son and herself, takes the boy from his father and flees Maubarón.

The kidnapper later returns to the kingdom, where she incites the other mothers to steal their sons (magically, there are no female children in Maubarón) and join her in the fledgling paradise she has created in the forest of Riuclar, where they can teach their sons to be men ... the kind of men women would want them to be.

Arnau began to wonder when the obligatory mother/earth goddess would make her turgid entrance.

The reporter's thoughts turned to the missing women instead, despite his best efforts. He remembered sketchily the etymology of a Castilian expression that he learned years ago: Desaparecidos, The Disappeared. Once, in the Old World, thousands of people disappeared, somewhere in South America, their children taken from them and given to other families who were more loyal to whatever regime happened to be in power at the time. Could The Westy and his cohorts - But why even worry about it now, Arnau wondered. He felt defensive for a moment, then guiltily vindicated as he recalled what The Westy said, that the reporter did not get paid to think or challenge the obvious.

Arnau could not help but explore that nebula of a question for a spare second. No, he concluded; they could not. Even Private-cast could not suppress a scandal like that with its complete lack of journalistic earnestness. Surely the Tages authorities would have the whole island shut down, beside themselves trying to find The Westy and his henchmen.

They heretics, really, but a buffoonish sort, Arnau persuaded himself half-heartedly. That was probably why the Tages authorities had never taken their attempts at dissent the least bit seriously, contrary to The Westy's charges. Just little boys desperately trying to sow the budding fields of a new status quo with salt, trying to conjure some relevance that was never theirs in the first place. And there was a certain comic pathos in that.

The reporter ran a finger around the rim of the tiny eggshell cup and glanced up at the banking sun. "The Day a Kangaroo Gives a Papaya," he sighed. He decided, finally, that he understood the story's title at least.

The walk home was pleasant enough. Serpentine trade winds from Sicily lazed all around the city, crisping the damp autumn air, robbing it of the familiar stenches of the squid mongers' stalls. Homeless boys, mostly early teens, skinny, shirtless and bald, harrowed the alleyways, propositioning idle ladies coming home from a long day at the boutiques. A Stamina Artist was beating one of the youngsters under an archway that crumbled cerulean; something about the boy having grossly overstated his skills and not being worth the amount of money she paid him.

Arnau paused and watched for a moment; the Stamina Artist's shoulders striated with sweat, soused with muscle, the boy's nose bludgeoned almost flat, his cheekbones leviathans of grungy purple.

The reporter shrugged and shook his head, gagging a chuckle. Where were The Westy and The Reticulates when you really needed them?

Above him the first lasa of the evening began taking form. Its face was a dollop of flan, scooped out of a trundling cloud. The Address said, "Look up", but Arnau could not decide if it sounded male or female.

EPILOGUE (?) He did understand why, but had it not been for the dreams, Arnau never would have answered Iñaki's summons.

It was a couple of months since his last encounter with The Westy and Arnau had gone on with his life, as much as there was to go on with. The reporter had another assignment: freelance, but not quite as freelance as he would have preferred. He was a fortnight from setting sail for Oberon to cover the Outer Dominions Cup yachting for a Private-Cast sports channel, when the dreams started.

They were particularly poignant, especially as the nights wore on. Each dream, Arnau deciphered, was a heap of the various insecurities, transmuted and compacted like schist, that he had felt since his joining with Rebecca. The minutes of each night's soliloquy were essentially the same: in the dreams, Arnau was still in the throws of the missing boys story and was . The infertility, though, was self-induced, self-inflicted, to punish his lover, and indeed all of her kind, for something ancient and unspeakable.

And yet all of this, the dreams told Arnau, was somehow The Westy's doing, The Westy who lost so much to this island, who no doubt wanted it all back.

Each morning for almost two weeks, he woke up hating the woman at his side, lathered in the shame of having to emasculate himself because of her. And each of those mornings, he reached for Rebecca, wanting to claw at her, coddling a vehement desire to grab her by the hair.

18 Dessembre 233 E.C.R. 06:32. Messatge urgent d'en Iñaki: "There is a vacant desalination plant just off the docks, on the other side of the inlet from the Marina Capò. Ask the harbormaster, Sr. Fernandes, for directions if you need them. Download the following viral cognates. They will disarm the plant's security system. The Westerberg will meet you there."

Arnau closed his eyes and the projection evaporated. He pricked the base of his skull with a micro-lance and waited a few seconds for the new brand to bubble through his skin. The reporter grabbed an overcoat and paused at the door for a moment. Rebecca was snoring softly.

Arnau had no trouble finding the rendezvous site. He waded across crumpled cement, eruptions of withered crabgrass dotting the pavement. There was a silhouette at the other end of the expanse, tall and somewhat broad-shouldered from what the reporter could make out. Arnau clutched his coat tighter against a sharp, chill breeze.

He called out at once, "En Westerberg?"

The shape did not move as Arnau continued his advance.

"You're trespassing, you know." The blur was now clearly a woman.

"I'm looking for someone," Arnau began, still gripping his overcoat with one hand. He dropped his head to his chest as soon as he came close enough to make eye contact. He was by no means eyelevel with her anyway.

" you're trespassing." The woman, a Stamina Artist from the way she was undressed, did little to suppress a derisive sneer. She dropped her yolk from her mounded shoulders. There was at least one hundred-fifty kilos of weight on the thing. Cinching the belt of her umber tunic, she stepped towards the smaller man. She was wearing what looked like matching, felt-covered ballet slippers. "This is my studio, after all. I'm training."

"I do apologize, but I was given this address. I'm to meet ... an of mine."

The Stamina Artist fingered Arnau's smooth chin, raising his head upright again. The reporter caught a glimpse of her bare legs; at least three times as thick as his, crisscrossed with a fine calligraphy of veins, quadriceps churning, boiling up from her skin as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. He followed those thighs up to where the tunic ended, just below her crotch. "This is my studio," she repeated, almost amiably, and smiled.

She lifted Arnau up under his armpits and tossed him over her shoulders. The reporter hit the ground and spilled across the tarmac, head cradled in his hands. He scrambled towards the woman, on his hands and knees, grabbing a heavy shard of cement as he went. Arnau stashed it in an inside pocket, stood up, and marched towards his adversary. His jaw ached and popped open as he started to speak.

"Perhaps you know where exactly I might find him? His name is West - "

The woman shook her head and swung at Arnau. He threw himself to the ground, not quite in time, taking the broad side of a fist to a cheekbone. Pain wrenched through his left eye, which swelled shut almost immediately. The reporter unsheathed the impromptu weapon, stabbing and smashing the big woman in the foot and ankle with it.

As the Stamina Artist crashed to the ground, Arnau gave a final whack to the side of her face.

"I'm here. Where are they, En Westerberg?"

The reporter's voice scuttled through daylight that smoldered through high, vaulted windows. He peered all around him and sidestepped around piles of burnt plastic, spindles of charred copper wire, and casks of melted glass. He scanned the staircases that lined both sides of the interior and dead-ended halfway up the walls in a morass of dust.

In the middle of the room hovered two dim projections. Arnau walked toward them, caressing his bloated jaw, looking over his shoulder, at his feet.

A few steps later two detailed maps of the island swirled in front of the reporter. One showed Tages' position in the Mediterranean. Arnau could make out the rest of the Balearics, Corsica, and the seabound megalopolis of Barça-Girona, all budding along a glowing, supple firmament.

Arnau glimpsed someone behind him, tiny lips whispering into the shadow of a doorway.

Arnau turned, arms extended, palms turned up, and started towards the little boy. The child held his ground, blinking, tilting his head almost quizzically.

The reporter took a long look, mouth slightly agape, beckoning words. "Are there others?"

The boy furrowed his brow and finally nodded. He could not be more than seven years old. His hair was a grimy shade of pale, his dimpled blue eyes even paler, his cheeks meaty and pink. , Arnau thought.

"I- Iñaki?"

The child blinked again. He offered a hand to Arnau just as the man grasped it. Together they walked into the dusky clutter beyond the door, towards the sound of Harry Westerberg's voice.

(Or: The Day a Kangaroo Gives a Papaya)

END

(to Ryuichi Sakamoto for the inspiration behind the title 'The Day a Kangaroo Gives a Papaya'.)