The Mimosa Effect 2

For the Sunday Scribblings prompt, “Skin.”  This is an excerpt from one of my longer stories in progress, a novella called “Catch as Catch Can.”

Brown fingers, caked with dried earth, cracked in patterns like snakeskin, thirsting for the memory of water like a long-dead riverbed.  Fingernails of clay crackled as she reached for the knob of shining metal.  There was a moment of hesitation, long enough to sour the sweet anticipation.  The beginnings of a scowl start a minor earthquake in the layers of baked mud, a mumble of curses taking shape at the back of her throat, and then she heard the familiar laboured gurgle of water, sluggishly working its way up the pipes.  There was a brief sputter, like someone no longer able to hold in laughter, and then the parched earth was flooded, a summer monsoon breaking over her, washing the brown grime down in swirling torrents into the rusted drain, bringing with it a sense of rapturous relief far more profound than anything she has ever felt within the claustrophobic foam-form temples of the Speakers.

That was the only thing she had ever splurged on, back on the Main.  The narrow metallic cubicles of the credit showers, crammed into a corner of one of the countless plastiform portable johns, with their sharp smell of disinfectant, were hardly what the average person would find romantic.  But after weeks, sometimes months, of sleeping wrapped in seconds from the NewPaper factory, and running favours for Upsiders who insisted on meeting in bars rank with cigar smoke and bad cologne, the stinging 60-second blast of achingly hot water had been more of a high than any Q-dream.  She’d step out of it after, skin raw and red, confident that anything previously alive in her mat of close-cropped hair had been boiled into non-existence.  The chlorine smell stayed in her sinuses sometimes for days, almost enough to block the fetid aroma that rode in on constant waves of smog from the Rift.

She sometimes thought that those infrequent forays into the world of the clean were the only thing that kept her alive.  The brief, vid-like encounters with strangers in coffee shops may have kept her from turning into a slack-lidded deadhead, but the tingling of scalded exfoliated flesh was the closest she got to anything real. 

She’d tried the fresh-air masks – one cred got you a lung-full, as much as you could suck back in 2 seconds – but it had just made her throat hurt and given her a hacking cough.  Once, after a particularly lucrative package delivery, she’d even sampled the dead audio vacuum of the silence booths, but it had been too much like a bad trip, every breath magnified like something from a cheesy horror vid, each heartbeat echoing through your ears like someone jackhammering inside your head.  She’d had nightmares after that, dreams of suffocating silence that had her waking with a gasping shortness of breath, clawing aside rags of NewPaper from her face, only to have the reassuring presence of urban white noise surround her once more.

Now the sound of water rushing past her ears lulled her into an almost trance-like state.  Even after being there for almost a year, the Tank was sometimes far too quiet for comfort, despite the constant hum of machinery.  And in the greenhouses, even that is muted and distant, the only other sounds coming from the timed irrigation system that mists the air at precise intervals, and the odd whirring chirp of cricket or cicada.   The Troll, with his odd incomprehensible charm, had somehow managed to convince the board that insects were necessary for a healthy microsystem.  The Upsiders had protested loudly, sure that the bugs would somehow escape to infest the enforced sterility of their pseudo-lawns and genegineered shrubs.  Gibson could have told them that she’d probably contributed more to the local insect population when she’d arrived, courtesy of her fourth-hand clothing from the Main, that the greenhouses could probably produce in a lifetime.

She dimly remembered a song from one of the preschool interactives she’d scrounged:
   Mud, mud, glorious mud
   Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood
   So follow me, follow, down to the hollow,
   And there let us wallow in glorious mud
And then the little hippopotamus would dance around, splashing through grimy brown puddles in a fit of ecstasy.

She’d thought it was cute at the time.  That was before she’d known what it was like to have to spend hours under incandescent sun-lamps up to her knees in the stuff.
 
“Time to go weeding,” was all Zheri had said by way of explanation.  Gibson’s mind had been instantly filled with happy images from Christian Family vids, mom and the kids in a backyard garden, pulling out dandelions from between sprays of perfect flowers, while butterflies fluttered around them.

Instead, she was introduced to the float-beds, a series of artificial swamp-vats where biogineered algae and other nutrient-boosted plants grew on the surface of thick, viscous brown ooze that Gibson had come to think of as the True Mud.   Something even the little dancing hippo would have shrunk away from in horror.   The smell was like nothing else she’d ever experienced.  It was purely organic, as far removed from the city-stink of the Main as Upside was from the pre-pesticide suburban backyard fantasy in the vids, seeping into her very pores as if she were a giant sponge.  Even after fifteen minutes of wasteful bliss in the Tank showers (the Troll would have flipped if he’d found out), she could still smell it her hair.