“I, uh—” Huw gawks at her. “Do I know you?” he asks. “You look just like this hacker—”
She shrugs irritably. “I am not responsible for my idiot clone-aunts!”
“But you—” He stops. “There are lots of you?”
“Oh yes.” She smiles tightly. “Ade, my friend, I am taking a walk. Don’t get up to anything I wouldn’t.”
“I won’t, Becky. Promise.”
“Good. I’m Maisie, though.” She climbs onto a toadstool-shaped bone and rapidly rises toward the ceiling on a pillar of something that might be muscle, but probably isn’t.
“Lovely girls,” Adrian says when she’s gone. “Where was I? Ah, yes: the ambassador.”
“Ambassador?”
“Yeah, ambassador. It’s a special kind of communications node: needs enough brains to talk to that thing in your throat and translate what you send it into something the cloud can work with. You’re the interpreter, see. We’ve been expecting it for a while, but didn’t reckon with those idiot script kiddies ending up in court. It’ll be along—”
There’s a clattering noise behind Huw, and he looks round so abruptly that he nearly falls off his sack, and though he’s feeling mellow—far better disposed toward his fellow man than he was an hour ago—it’s all Huw can do to refrain from jumping up, shrieking.
“You!” says Bonnie, clutching a large and ominously familiar black box in her arms as she slides to a halt at the foot of the spiral. “Hey, Ade, is this your party?”
The box twitches in her arms, as if something inside it is trying to escape. Huw can feel a scream welling up in his throat, and it isn’t his—it’s a scream of welcome, a paean of politics. He bites it back with a curse. “How the hell did you get that?” he says.
“Stole it while the judge was running after you,” Bonnie says. “There’s a README with it that says it needs a translator. That would be you, huh?” She looks at him with ill-concealed lust. “Prepare to plug into the ride of your life!”
“God, no,” he says.
Adrian pats his shoulder. “Pecker up. It’s all for the best.”
The box opens and the Kleinmonster bobs a curtsy at him, then warbles. His throat warbles in response. The hash has loosened his vocal cords so that there isn’t the same sense of forced labor, just a mellow, easy kind of song. His voices and the Kleinmonster’s intertwine in an aural handshake and gradually his sensoria fades away, until he’s no longer looking out of his eyes, no longer feeling through his skin, but rather he’s part of the Cloudmind, smeared across space and time and a billion identities all commingled and aswirl with unknowable convection currents of thought and deed.
Somewhere there is the Earth, the meatspace whence the Cloudmind has ascended. His point of view inverts and now the Earth is enveloped in him, a messy gobstopper dissolving in a probabilistic mindmouth. It’s like looking down at a hatched-out egg, knowing that once upon a time you fit inside that shell, but now you’re well shut of it. Meat, meat, meat. Imperfect and ephemeral and needlessly baroque and kludgy, but it calls to the cloud with a gravitic tug of racial memory.
And then the sensoria recedes and he’s eased back into his skin, singing to the Kleinmonster and its uplink to the cloud. He knows he’s x-mitting his own sensoria, the meat and the unreasoning demands of dopamine and endorphin. Ah, says the ambassador. Ah. Yes. This is what it was like. Ah.
Awful.
Terrible.
Ah.
Well, that’s done.
The Kleinmonster uncoils and stretches straight up to the ceiling, then gradually telescopes back into itself until it’s just a button of faintly buzzing nanocrud. The buzzing gains down and then vanishes, and it falls still.
Bonnie shakes his shoulders. “What happened?” she says, eyes shining.
“Got what it needed,” Huw says with a barely noticeable under-drone.
“What?”
“What? Oh, a bit of a reminder, I expect. A taste of the meat.”
“That’s it?” Bonnie says. “All that for—what? A trip down memory lane? All that fucking work and it doesn’t even want to stick around and chat?”
Huw shrugs. “That’s the cloud for you. In-fucking-effable. Nostalgia trip, fact-finding mission, what’s the difference?”
“Will it be back? I wanted to talk to it about ...” She trailed off, blushing. “I wanted to know what it was like.”
Huw thinks of what it was like to be part of the matryoshka-brain, tries to put it into words. “I can’t quite describe it,” he says. “Not in so many words. Not right now. Give me a while, maybe I’ll manage it.” He’s got a nasty case of the pasties and he guzzles a cup of lukewarm milky tea, swirling it around his starchy tongue. “Of course, if you’re really curious, you could always join up.”
Bonnie looks away and Adrian huffs a snort. “I’ll do it someday,” she says. “Just want to know what I’m getting into.”
“I understand,” he says. “Don’t worry, I still think you’re an anti-human race-traitor, girlie. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”
“Fucking right I don’t!” Bonnie says. She’s blushing rather fetchingly.
“Right,” Huw says.
“Right.”
Huw begins to hum a little, experimenting with his new transhuman peripheral. The drone is quite nice: it reminds him vaguely of a digeridoo. Or bagpipes. He sings a little of the song from the courthouse, in two-part discord. Bonnie’s flush deepens and she rubs her palms against her thighs, hissing like a teakettle.
Huw cocks his head at her and leans forward a bit, and she grabs his ears and drags him down on top of her.
Adrian taps him on the shoulder a moment later. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, “but Judge Rosa’s bound to come looking for you eventually. We’d best get you out of Libya sharpish.”
Huw ignores him, concentrating on the marimba sensation of Bonnie’s rib cage grinding over his chest.
Adrian rolls his eyes. “I’ll just go steal a blimp or something, then, shall I?”
Bonnie breaks off worrying Huw’s ear with her tongue and teeth and says, “Fuck off awhile, will you, Adrian?”
Adrian contemplates the two of them for a moment, trying to decide whether they need a good kick round the kidneys, then turns on his heel and goes off to find Maisie, or perhaps Becky, and sort out an escape.
The entity Huw has mistaken for the whole of the cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its mutifarious sensory apparat, thinking its in-fucking-effable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. The ambassador hibernates on the safe house’s floor, prized loose from under Huw’s tailbone, where it had been digging rather uncomfortably, quite spoiling Huw’s concentration, and tossed idly into a corner. The cloud thing’s done with it for now, but its duty-cycle is hardly exhausted, and it wonders what its next use will be.
Huw moans an eerie buzz that sets Bonnie’s gut aquiver in sympathy, which is not nearly so unpleasant as it sounds.
In fact, Bonnie thinks she could rather get used to it.
Appeals Court
What finally wakes Huw is the pain in his bladder. His head is throbbing, but his bladder has gone weak on him lately—he’s been shirking having a replacement fitted—and if he doesn’t get up and find the john soon, he’s going to piss himself. So he struggles up from a sump hole of somnolence.
He opens his eyes and realizes disappointedly that he’s not back home in his own bed: he’s lying facedown in a hammock. Damn, it’s not just a bad dream. The hammock sways gently from side to side in the hot stuffy air. Light streams across him in a warm flood from one side of the room; the floor below the string mesh is gray and scuffed, and something tells him he isn’t on land anymore. Shit, he thinks, pushing stiffly against the edge and trying not to fall as the hammock slides treacherously out from under him. Why am I so tired?
His bare feet touch the ground before he realizes he’s bare-ass naked. He rubs his scalp and yawns. His veins feel as i
f all the blood has been replaced by something warm and syrupy and full of sleep. Drugs? he thinks, blinking. The walls—
Three of them are bland, gray sheets of structural plastic with doors in them. The fourth is an outward-leaning pane of plexiglas or diamond or something. A very, very long way below him he can see wave crests.
Huw gulps, his pulse speeding. Something strange is lodged in the back of his throat. He stifles a panicky whistle. There in a corner lie his battered kit bag and a heap of travel-worn clothing. He leans against the wall. There’s got to be a crapper somewhere nearby, hasn’t there? The floor, now he’s awake enough to pay attention, is thrumming with a low bass chord from the engines, and the waves are sloshing by endlessly below. As he picks at a dirty shirt, a battered copper teapot rolls away from beneath it. He swears, memories flooding back. Then he picks up the teapot and gives it a resentful rub.
“Wotcher, mate!” The djinni that materializes above the teapot is a hologram, so horribly realistic that for a moment Huw forgets his desperate need for a piss.
“Fuck you too, Ade,” he says.
“What kind of way to welcome yer old mate is that, sunshine?” Hologram-Adrian’s wearing bush jacket and shorts, a shotgun slung over one shoulder. “How yer feeling, anyway?”
“I feel like I’ve been shat.” Huw rubs his forehead. “Where am I? Where’s Bonnie gotten to?”
“Flying the bloody ship. We can’t all sleep. Don’t worry, she’s just hunky-dory. How about you?”
“Flying.” Huw blinks. “Where the hell—?”
“You’ve been sleeping like a baby for a good long while.” Ade looks smug. “Don’t worry, we got you out of Libya one jump ahead of Rosa. You won’t be arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, for another four or five hours, why’n’t you kick back and smoke some grass? I left at least a quarter of your stash—”
“South Carolina?” Huw screams, nearly dropping the teapot. “Unclefucking sewage filter, what do you want to send me there for?”
“Ah, pecker up. They’re your coreligionists, aren’t they? You won’t find a more natural, flesh-hugging bunch on the planet than the Jeezemoids who got left behind by the Rapture. Hell, they’re the kind of down-home Luddites what make you look like Saint Kurzweil.”
“They’re radioactive,” Huw says. “And I’m an atheist. They burn atheists at the stake, don’t they?” He rummages through his skanky clothes, turning them inside out as he searches for something not so acrawl that he’d be unwilling to have it touch his nethers.
“Oh, hardly,” says Adrian. “Just get a little activated charcoal and iodine in your diet and memorize the Lord’s Prayer and you’ll be fine, sonny.”
Huw ends up tying a T-shirt around his middle like a diaper and seizing the teapot, which has developed a nasty rattle in its guts.
“Breakfast and toilet. Not in that order. Sharp.”
“That door there,” says the miniaturized Adrian, pointing.
The zeppelin turns out to be a maryceleste, crewed by capricious iffrits whose expert systems were trained by angry, resentful trade unionists in ransom for their pensions. The amount of abuse required to keep the ship on course and its commissary and sanitary systems in good working order is heroic.
Huw opens the door to the bridge, clutching his head, to find Bonnie perched on the edge of a vast, unsprung chair, screaming imprecations at the air. She breaks off long enough to scream at him. “Get the fuck off my bridge!” she hollers, eyes wild, fingers clawing at the armrests.
Huw leaps back a step, dropping the huge, suspicious sausage he’s been gnawing from one end of. His diaper unravels as he stumbles.
Bonnie snorts, then gets back control. “Aw, sorry, darlin’. I’m hopped up on hateballs. It’s the only way I can get enough fucking spleen to make this buggery bollocky scum-sucking ship go where I tell it.” She sighs and digs around the seat cushion, coming up with a puffer, which she inserts briefly into the corner of each eye. The tension melts out of her skinny shoulders and corded neck as Huw watches, alarmed.
“You look like a Welsh Gandhi,” she tells him, giggling. Her lips loll loose; she stands and rolls over toward him with a half-drunken wobble. Then she throws her arms around his neck and fastens her teeth on his shoulder, worrying at his trapezium.
The teapot whistles appreciatively. Bonnie gives it a savage kick that sends it skittering back into the corridor.
“You need a wash, beautiful,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be microbial. Nearly out of fresh water. Tub’s up one level.”
“Gak,” Huw says.
“’Snot so bad.”
“It’s bugs,” he says.
“You’re hosting about three kilos of bugs right now. What’re a few more? Go.”
Huw picks up his sausage. “You know where we’re going, right?”
“Oh aye,” she says, her eyes gleaming, then whistles a snatch of “America the Beautiful.”
“And you approve?”
“Always wanted to see it.”
“They’ll burn you at stake!”
She picks up a different puffer and spritzes each eye, then bares her teeth in a savage rictus. “I’d like to see them fucking try. Bathe, you cretinous stenchpot!”
Huw settles himself among the soup of heated glass beads and bacteria and tries not to think of a trillion microorganisms gnawing away at his dried skin and sweat.
He mutters transhuman curses in groaning harmony at the battered teapot—no longer hosting the avatar of a particularly annoying iffrit, but evidently hacked by Ade and his international cadre of merry pranksters. “Why South Carolina? G’wan, you. Why there, of all places?”
He isn’t expecting a reply, but the teapot crackles for a moment; then a translucent holo of Ade appears in the air above it, wearing a belly dancer’s outfit and a sheepish expression. “Yer wot? Ah, sorry mate. Feckin’ trade union iffrit’s trying to make an alpha buffer attack on my sprites.” The image flickers then solidifies, this time wearing a bush jacket again. “Like, why South Carolina? To break the embargo, Huw. Ever since the snake-handlers crawled outta the swamps and figured the Rapture had been and gone and left ’em behind, they’ve been waiting for a chance at salvation, so I figured I’d give them you.” Ade’s likeness grins wickedly as red horns sprout from his forehead. “You and the back channel to the ambassador from the cloud. They want to meet God so bad, I figured you’d maybe like to help the natives along.”
“But they’re radioactive!” Huw says, shaking his fist at the teapot with a rattle of yeast-scented beads. “And they’re lunatics! They won’t talk to the rest of the world, because we’re corrupt degenerate satanists; they claim sovreignty over the entire solar system even though they can’t launch a sodding rocket; and they burn dissidents to death by wiring them up to transformers! Why would I want to help them?”
“Because your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to open them up to the outside universe again.” Ade smirks at him from atop the teapot.
“Fuck.” Huw subsides into the fizzing bath of beads, which are beginning to itch. Moving them around brings relief, although it’s making him a little piebald. “You want to infect the Fallen Baptist Congregations with godvomit, you be my guest—just let me watch from another continent, all right?”
“That’s an idea,” says Ade, scratching his beard absentmindedly. “Shame it’s not going to fly. But tell you what, Bonnie’s one of our crack agents. Don’t you worry, we wouldn’t risk our prophet-at-large in a backwater, mate. We’ll keep you safe as houses.”
Huw thinks of Sandra Lal, the House of the Week club, and her mini-sledge, and shudders. His arse is beginning to itch as the bacteribeads try to squeeze through his ringpiece: it’s time to get out. “If this goes wrong, so help me, I am going to make you eat this teapot,” he says, picking it up. He heads downstairs to find Bonnie again and see if she’s come down far enough off the hateballs to appreciate how squeaky-clean Ade’s messiah manqué is
feeling.
The big zeppelin lurches and buzzes as it chases its shadow across the black tarry beaches and the out-of-control neomangrove jungle that has run wild across the Gulf coast. The gasoline mangroves spin their aerofoil leaves in the breeze, harnessing the wind power and pumping long-chain terpenoids into their root systems, which ultimately run all the way to the hydrocarbon refineries near Beaufort. A long-obselete relic of the feverish cross-fertilization of the North American biotechnology biz with the dinosaurs of the petroleum age, they ought by rights to have made the United States the world’s biggest source of refined petrochemicals—except that since the singularity, nobody’s buying. Oil slicks glisten in the sunlight as they spread hundreds of kilometers out into the Atlantic, where they feed a whole deviant ecosystem of carbon-sequestrating petroplankton maintained by the continental quarantine authority.
Huw watches apprehensively from the observation window at the front of the bridge as Bonnie curses and swears at the iffrits, who insist that air traffic control is threatening to shoot them down if they don’t steer away from the land of the Chosen People. Bonnie’s verbal abuse of the ship ascends to new heights of withering scorn, and he watches her slicken her eyeballs with anger-up until they look like swollen golf balls, slitted and watering. The ship wants to turn itself around, but she’s insisting that it plow on.
“Hail ground control now! you fucking sad, obsolete piece of shit, so that for once, just! for! once! you will have done one genuinely useful! thing for someone!” She snarls and coughs, hacking up excess angry-up that has trickled back through her sinuses. She picks up the mic and begins to stalk the bridge like an attack comedian scouting the audience for fat men with thin dates to humiliate.
“This is Charleston Ground Control repeating direct order to vacate sovereign Christian States of America airspace immediately or be blown out of the sky and straight to Satan. Charleston Ground Control out.” The voice has the kind of robotic-slick Californian accent that tells Huw straightaway that he’s talking to a missile guidance computer rather than a human being.
Rapture of the Nerds Page 8
