Rapture of the Nerds
Page 9
“Hail! Him! Again!” Bonnie yells, hopping from foot to foot. “Arrogant Jesus-sucking sack of SARS, scabrous toddler-fondler, religion-addled motherfucker,” she says, punching out with the mic for punctuation.
“Bonnie,” Huw says quietly, flinching back from her candy apple red eyeballs.
“What?”
“Maybe you should let me talk with them?” he says.
“I am perfectly! capable of negotiating with microcephalic! god! bothering! luddites!
” she screeches.
No, you’re not, Huw thinks, but he doesn’t even come close to saying it. In the state she’s in, she could lift a car and set it down on top of a baby, a reversal of the legendary maternal hysterical feat of strength. “Yes, you are,” he says. “But you need to fly the ship.”
She glares at him for a moment, fingernails dug so hard into her palms that drops of blood spatter to the flooring. He’s sure that she’s going to charge him, but the zeppelin changes direction with a lurch. So she throws the mic at his head viciously—he ducks, but it still beans him on the rebound—and goes back to screaming at the ship.
Huw staggers off the bridge and sinks back against one of the bare corridor bulkheads—the zep that Adrian’s adventurers stole is made doubly cavernous by the absence of most of its furnishings.
“This is Airship Lollipop to Charleston Ground Control requesting clearance to land in accordance with the Third International Agreement on Aeronautical Cooperation,” he says into the mic, using his calmest voice. He’s pretty sure he’s heard of the Third International Agreement, though it may have been the Fourth. And it may have been on Aeronautical Engineering. But that there is an agreement he is certain, and he’s pretty sure that the Christian States of America is no more up to date on international affairs than he is.
“Airship Lollipop, y’all welcome to land here, but we’s having trouble convincing with this darned strategic defense battle computer that thinks y’all are goddless Commie-fag euroweasels. I reckon you got maybe two minutes to repent before it blows y’all to Jesus.”
Huw breathes a sigh of relief: at least there’s a human in the loop. “How do we convince it we’re not, uh, godless Commie-fag euroweasels?” he asks, suppressing a twinge as he realizes that, in fact, he and Bonnie meet about 130 percent of those criteria between them.
“That’s easy, y’all just gotta have a little faith,” says the airhead on the traffic control desk.
Huw grits his teeth and looks through the doorway at Bonnie, whose ears appear to be smoking. He puts a hand over the mic: “Does this thing carry missiles?” he calls to her.
“Fucking fucking arse shit bollocks—” Bonnie hammers on a control panel off to one side. It bleeps plaintively, the ancient chime of servers rebooting: “—’ing countermeasures suite!”
“Hasta la vista, sinners,” drawls the missile launch computer in a thick gubernatorial Austro-Californian accent. Two pinpricks of light blossom on the verdant horizon of the gasoline mangroves, then a third that rapidly expands into a fireball as the antique pre-cloud hypersonic missile explodes on launch. The surviving missiles stab toward them and there’s a musical chime from the countermeasures control panel. Huw feels a moment of gut-slackening terror. “You’ve got mail!” the countermeasures system announces in the syrupy tones of a kindergarten teacher. “Facebook-Goldman-AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have 14,023 new friend requests, which you will receive after this message from our sponsors. Your hen wants milking, your goat has been turned into a zombie, there are 14,278,123 new status updates, and you have been de-friended 1,974,231 times. There are 5,348,011 updates to the privacy policy for your review.”
Bonnie thumps something on the panel, muscles like whipcord standing out on her arm as she glares at the oncoming missiles. Huw backs away. She might actually be a communicant, he realizes in absolute horror. She might actually have a Facebook account! She’s mad enough. ...These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.
“Acknowledged,” says the possessed countermeasures suite in the hag-ridden tone of a computer that has surrendered to the dark side. For a moment nothing seems to happen; then one of the onrushing pinpricks of light veers toward the other. Paths cross then diverge in a haze of debris. “Displaying new privacy policy,” it sighs.
“Don’t read it!” Huw screams, but he’s too late—Bonnie has punched the console again, and messages begin scrolling across it. In the middle distance, Charleston airport’s cracked and vitrified runways are coming into view. Missile batteries off to one side cycle their launcher-erectors impotently, magazines long since fired dry at the godless Commie-fag euroweasel aid flights.
“We gotta bail out before we land, otherwise we’d have to go through customs,” she says. “That would be bad—South Carolina never ended Prohibition.”
“What? Prohibition of what? What are you talking about?” His hands are shaking, he realizes. “I need a drink.”
“Prohibition of everything, dipshit, ” Bonnie says. She pauses for a moment, prodding at her eyes with a mister, but they are so swollen that she can’t get its applicator into contact with bare mucous membrane. She roots around some more, then whacks some kind of transdermal plaster on her arm. “Sorry, gotta arse fuck come down now. Your stash, darling? It’s illegal here. If the customs crows catch you with it, they’ll stick you on the chain gang and you’ll be chibbed and fuck raped baby-eating murdered by psychotic mutant Klansmen for the next two hundred years. It’s bad for the skin, I hear.” She stands up and heads toward a battered cabinet at the rear of the bridge, which she opens to reveal a couple of grubby-looking parachutes that appear to have been hand-packed with all due care and attention by stoned marmosets. “We’ll be passing over the hot tub in about three minutes. You coming?”
The parachute harness she hands him is incredibly smelly—evidently its last owner didn’t believe in soap—but its flight control system assures Huw that it’s in perfect working order and please to extinguish all cigarettes and switch off all electronics for the duration of the flight. Tight-lipped, Huw fastens it around his waist and shoulders, then follows Bonnie to the back of the bridge and down a rickety ladder to the bottom of the gas bag. There’s an open hatch, and when he looks through it, he sees verdant green folliage whipping past at nearly a hundred kilometers per hour, hundreds of meters below. “Clip the red hook to the blue static line eye,” says the harness. “Clip the—”
“I get the picture,” Huw says. Bonnie is already hooked up, and turns to check his rig, then gives him a huge shit-eating grin and steps backwards into the airship’s slipstream. “Aagh!” Huw flinches and stumbles, then follows her willy-nilly. Seconds later the chute unfolds its wings above him, and his ears are filled with the sputtering snarl of a two-stroke motor as it switches to dynamic flight and banks to follow Bonnie down toward a clearing in the mangrove swamp.
The swamp rushes up to meet him in a confusion of green, buffeting him with superheated steam as he descends toward it, so that by the time the chute punches him through the canopy, he’s as steamed as a dim sum bun. Bonnie’s chute speeds ahead of him, breaking branches off and clattering from tree to tree. He tries to follow its crazy trail as best as he can, but eventually he realizes, with a sick falling sensation in his stomach, that she’s no longer strapped into it. “Bonnie!” he yells, and grabs at the throttle control.
“Danger! Stall warning!” the parachute intones. “Guru Meditation Code 14067.”
Huw looks down dizzily. He’s skimming the ground now, or what passes for it—muck of indeterminate depth, interspersed with clumps of curiously nibbled-looking water hyacinth. The tree line starts in another couple of hundred meters, and it’s wall-to-wall petroleum plants. Black leafed and ominous looking, the stunted inflammabushes emit a dizzying stench of raw gasoline that makes his eyes swim and his nose water. “Fuck, where am I going to land?”
“What you’ve got to understand, son,” says the doctor, “is it’s all the fault of the alien space bats.” He holds up the horse syringe and flicks the barrel. A bubble wobbles slowly up through the milky fluid. “If it wasn’t for them and their Jew banker patsies, we’d be ascended to heaven.” He squeezes the plunger slightly and a thick blob of turbid liquid squeezes out of the syringe and oozes down the needle. “Carbon traders damned us to this living hell.” He grins horribly, baring gold-plated teeth, and points the end of the needle at Huw’s neck. Huw can’t move his gaze from Doc’s mustache: it’s huge and bushy, a hairy efflorescence that twitches suspiciously as the barefoot medic inhales with sharp disapproval.
“Carbon traders?” Huw’s voice sounds weak, even to himself. He stares past the doctor at the peeling white paint on the wall of this sorry excuse for a medical center. “What have they got to do with—?”
“Carbon traders.” Doc nods as he rams the blunt end of the quarter-inch needle against Huw’s jugular. Machines whine and click, and the side of Huw’s neck goes numb. “Once the children of Mammon started floating credit-default swaps against carbon remediation bonds, the whole planet became worth more if it was on fire than if it was fulla trees. So now you’ve got all these trillion-dollar bets that’ll go bust if the polar caps don’t melt, and it wasn’t long afore the polar caps were worth more melted than intact, and well, the market provided the incentives. Now look at us.”
Huw tries to swallow. The plunger is going down, and white goo is flooding into his circulatory system, billions of feral redneck nanomachines bouncing off his fur-lined arteries in search of damaged tissue to fix. His mouth is parched, his tongue as crinkly and musty-dry as a dead cauliflower. “But the, the alien—”
“Alien space bats, son,” says Doc. He sighs lugubriously and pulls the syringe away from Huw’s neck. “With their fancy orbital Fresnel lens. They’re behind the global warming thing, y’see, it’s nothing to do with burning oil. It dates to the fifties. Those closet Commies in with their astronomy toys, they were smart—using tax-funded astrophysics instruments to signal the space brothers! Seeing as how God made us a strongly anthropic universe to live in, it stands to reason there must be aliens out there. It’s a long-term plot, a two hundred-year Communist plan to bankrupt America. And it’s working. All those deserters and traitors who upped and left when the singularity hit, they just made it worse. They’re the savvy ones we need to make this country great again, rebuild NASA and Space Command, but do it right, pure American, deep background checks and purity oaths, and go wipe those no-good Ruskie alien space bats and their Jew banker patsies from the dark side of the moon.”
Oh Jesus fuck, Huw thinks incoherently, lying back and trying to get both eyes to focus simultaneously. He still feels sick to his stomach and a bit dizzy, the way he’s been since Bonnie found him neatly curled up under a gas tree with a huge lump on his head and his parachute rigging draped across the incendiary branches. “Have you seen my teapot?” he tries to say, but he’s not sure it comes out right.
“You want a cup of joe?” asks Doc. “Sure, we can do that.” He pats Huw’s shoulder with avuncular charm. “You just lie there and let my little helpers eat the blood clots in your brain for a while.”
“Bonnie—,” Huw whispers, but Doc is already standing and turning toward the door at the other side of the surgery, out of his line of sight. The blow from the motor did something worse to him than concussion, and he can’t seem to move his arms or legs—or neck. I’m still breathing, so it can’t be that bad, he tells himself hopefully. Remember, if you break your neck during a botched parachute landing and then a mad conspiracy theorist injects black market nanomachines into you, it’s highly unlikely that anything worse can happen before sundown, he tells himself in a spirit of misplaced optimism.
And things are, indeed, looking up compared to where they were an hour or two ago. Bonnie had found him, still unconscious, lying at the foot of a tree that was already dribbling toxic effluent across his boots. The teapot was screaming for help at the top of its tinny electronic lungs as an inquisitive stream of brick red ants crawled over its surface, teaming up to drag it back to one wing of the vast sprawling supercolony that owned the continent. The ants stung, really, really hard. And there were lots of them, like a tide sweeping over his body. It was Bonnie who’d signaled Doc, using some kind of insane spatchcock mobile phone jury-rigged from the wreckage of her parachute harness to broadcast on all channels for help, and it was Bonnie who’d sat beside him, whispering sweet nothings and occasionally whacking impudent Formicidae, until Doc hove into view on his half-rusted swamp boat. But she’d vanished, not sticking around to explain to Doc how come she and Huw were at large in the neverglades—and the doc seemed mad about that.
After a couple of hours on the operating table, Huw has discovered that half an hour can be a very long time indeed when your only company is a demented quack and you can’t even scratch your arse by way of entertainment. And his arse itches. In fact, it’s not all that itches. Up and down his spine, little shivers of tantalizing irritation are raising gooseflesh. “Shitbiscuits,” he mumbles as his left hand begins to tremble uncontrollably. The nanobots have reached the swollen, damaged tissues within his cervical vertebrae and are busily reducing the swelling. They’re coaxing suicidal neurons back into cytocellular stability, laying temporary replacement links where apoptosis has already proceeded to completion, and generally repairing the damage Huw’s supine spinal cord has received. For which Huw is incredibly grateful—if Doc were as nuts as he seems, he might have injected an auto engine service pack and Huw might at this very moment be gestating a pile of gleaming ceramic piston rings—but it itches with the fire of a thousand ants crawling inside his veins. “Balls on a tea towel,” he says. And then his toes begin to tremble.
By the time Doc reappears, Huw is sitting up, albeit as shaky as an ethanol addict in the first week of withdrawal. He moans quietly as he accepts a chipped mass-produced Exxon mug full of something dark and villainous enough that it resembles a double-foam latte, if the barista substituted Gulf crude for steamed milk. “Thanks,” he manages to choke out. “I think. I hope Bonnie comes back soon.”
“That godless sinning harridan?” Doc cranks one eyebrow up until it teeters alarmingly. “Naw, son, you don’t want to be going worrying about the likes of her. She’s bad company, her and her crew—between you and me, I figure she’s in league with the space bats.” He chuckles. “Naw, you’ll be much better off with me an’ Sam. Ade told us all about you and what you’re here for. We’ll set you straight.”
“Ade. Told you.” Huw’s stomach does a backflip, which feels extremely strange because something is wrong with his body image. It feels all wrong inside. He clears his throat and almost chokes: the alien whistle-thing-communicator is gone! Then his stomach gives a warning twinge and his momentary flash of hope fades. The godvomit has simply retreated deeper into his gastrointestinal tract, hiding to bide its time like a bad plot twist in a Tamil robo-apocalypse movie. “How’d you know him?”
“’Cause we do a bit of business from time to time.” Doc’s eyebrow relaxes as he grins at Huw. “A little light smuggling, son. Don’t let it get on your nerves. Ade told us what to do with you, and everything’s going to be just fine.”
“Just fine—” Huw stops. “What are you going to do with me?” he asks.
“Ade figures we oughta deliver you to the Baptist temple in Glory City—that’s Charleston as w
as—in time for next Thursday’s memorial service. It’s the forty-sixth anniversary of the Rapture, and they get kinda jumpy at this time of year.” A meaty hand descends on Huw’s shoulder and he looks round, then up, and up until his newly fixed neck aches at the sight of a large, completely hairless man with skin the color of a dead fish and little piggy eyes. “Son, this is Sam. Say hello, Sam.”
“Hello, Sam,” rumbles the human mountain. Huw blinks.
“You’re going to hand me over to the Baptists?” he asks. “What happens then?”
“Well.” Doc scratches his head. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?”
“But this anniversary. What do you mean, they get jumpy?”
“Oh, nothing much. Just sacrifice a bunch of heretics to make God notice they still believe, that kinda thing. You got a problem with that?”
“Maybe.” Huw licks his lips. “What if I don’t want to go?”
“Well, then.” Doc cocks his head to one side and squints at Huw’s left ear. “Say, son, that’s a mightly nice ear you’ve got there. Seeing as how you’ve not paid your medical bill, I figure we’d have to take it off you to cover the cost of your treatment. Plus maybe a leg, a kidney, and an eye or two. How about it?”
“No socialized medicine here!” rumbles Sam as a second backhoe-sized hand closes around Huw’s other shoulder.
“Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” Huw says.
Doc beams amiably at him. “That calls for a shot of shine,” says the medic. “I knew you’d see sense. Now, about the alien space bats. We’ve got this here telescope that Sam liberated when they were burning the university—hive of godless heretics—but we don’t know how to work it proper. Have you ever used one? We’re looking for the bat cave on the moon. ...”