“Wake up, dishrag! Jesus, didn’t they tell you anything in class when you was a kid? They infuse your cerebrospinal fluid with nanobots. Some go for your hypothalamus, make you feel hungry or thirsty. Others have a built-in tropism for the god module in your temporal lobe. Tickle it with a broadband signal, and you’ll see God, angels square-dancing in heaven, fuck knows what. Get a grip on yourself!”
“It’s God?” Huw’s got a name for the sensation now, and he grins idiotically at the opposite wall of his cell. It’s a slab of solid aluminum, scratched and dented and discolored along the welds: and it’s as beautiful to Huw as fluted marble pillars supporting the airy roof of a pleasure dome, pennants snapping overhead in the delightful breeze blowing off the waters of the underground river Alph—
“It’s not God, it’s a fucking tasp! Snap out of it, gobshite. They’re only using it on you ’cause they want you nice and addled when they sell you to the Inquisition tomorrow! Then, no more god module!”
“Huh?” Huw ponders the question for an eternity of proximate grace, as serried ranks of angels blow trumpets of glory in the distant clouds that wreath his head. “I’m ... so, I’m happy. This way. I’ve found it.”
“What you’ve found is a bullet in the back of the head if you stay here, you cheeseridge!” Ade shakes his fists from the top of the teapot. “Think, damn you! What would you have thought of this yesterday?”
“Yesterday?” Yesterday, all his troubles, so far away. Huw nods, thinking deeply. “I’ve always been missing ’thing like this, even if I didn’t know it. Feels right. Everything makes sense.” The presence of the ultimate, even if it’s coming from right inside his own skull courtesy of a 5.4-gigahertz transmission from God-botherer Central, is making it hard for Huw to concentrate on anything else. “Wanna be like this till I die, if’s all the same to you.”
“They’ll kill you, man!” Ade pauses in his frantic fist-waving. “Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
“Mmf. Lemme think about it.” Huw slowly slumps back against the wall, his suit bulking and billowing around him and digging sharp joints into his bruised body, sanctifying and mortifying his flesh. “If I believed in an actual, like, God, this’d be marvelous. But God’s such a goddamned primitive fetish, isn’t it? So I’m’a, an atheist. Always have been, always will be. But this thing is like, inside me, and it’s huge, so blindingly brilliant, it’s like my own reflection on infinity.” His eyes widen. “Hey, that means I’m God. I’m like, transcendentistry, right? I think therefore I guess I am. If they try to shoot me, I’ll just zap ’em with my god-powers.” He giggles for a while, pointing his fingers at the ceiling, walls, and floor, lightning bolts of the illuminated imagination spraying every which way. “It’s a solipsystem! Nobody here but me. I am God. I am God. I am God—”
The teapot zaps him with an electric shock, and Ade vanishes in a huff.
“Ouch.” Huw sucks his thumb for a moment and meditates on the celestial significance of the autodeity sending him messages from his subconscious via a curved metal antiquity stuffed with black market New Libyan electronics. Then he tucks it away in his pocket and settles back down to work on regaining his sense of omnipotent brilliance. And he’s still sitting in that pose the next morning, staring at the wall, when the sense of immanence vanishes, the doors grind open, and Doc and Sam come to take him downtown to face the Inquisition.
They parade him down the road in the drab gray morning light of Glory City, past the filling stations, the churches, the diners, the other filling stations, the refinery, the cathedral, the filling station-memorabilia market, the GasHaus, the corkscrew apartment blocks where every neighbor can look in on every other’s window, and the execution ground.
And it all feels good to Huw.
As the parade progresses, curious locals emerge from their homes and workplaces as if drawn by some ultrawideband alert, rounded up and herded out to form a malignant rent-a-mob that demonstrates to Huw how important and central to reality he is. They pelt him with rotting fruit and wet cigar stubs with live coals on one end that singe him before bouncing free to the impermeable pavement, affirming his sense of holy closeness with the intensity of their focus on him. Once, they stop so that the doc can roar a speech at the crowd—
“—heretic—vengeance—drugs—sex—wantonness—”
Huw doesn’t pay much attention to the speech. Through his feet he fancies he can feel the scritterscratch of the Hypercolony, gnawing patiently at the yards of stone and polymer between him and the blighted soil. It’s a bad feeling, as if Glory City is a snow globe that has been lifted into the air on the backs of a heptillion ants who are carrying it away, making it sway back and forth. The curlicue towers and the gnarled and crippled crowd rock in hinky rhythm.
The faces on the balconies swim when he looks up. Some of them have horns on their foreheads. He turns away and tries to stare at a fixed point, using the ballerina’s trick of keeping his gaze still to make the world stop its whirling, but his gorge is rising, and his stomach is threatening to empty down his front.
This is not good.
He sits down hard, his armored ass klonking on the pavement, and Sam lumbers toward him. Huw holds out his hand, wanting to be helped to his feet, back to the godhead and the good trip. Just as Sam’s fingertips graze his, a woman wearing a voluminous black gown dashes out of the crowd and grabs him under the armpits, looping a harness around his chest. Where it touches his back, it gloms on hard, hyperglue nanites welding it to the suit’s surface.
“Hold on,” Bonnie breathes in his ear, and he feels like weeping, because he knows he isn’t to be redeemed after all, but tediously rescued and rehabilitated and set free.
“Bitch harlot!” says Doc. “Sodomite! Stop her!” Sam grabs for her past Huw’s shoulder, sideswipes the rounded swell of her bosom—extensively, chastely covered, this being Glory City—and jerks his hand back as though he’d been burned.
The harness around Huw’s chest tightens with rib-bruising force, dragging him backwards. He skitters for a moment before the harness lofts them both into the air, up toward the balconies ringing the curlicue towers. Bonnie, tied off to him by a harness of her own, squints nervously down at the crowd receding below them.
Huw bangs chest-first into the side of one of the towers, Bonnie’s weight knocking the breath out of him. They dangle together, twirling in the breeze like a giant booger as strong hands hoist them bodily up and over a balcony. One last, titanic heave hauls them inside, adding insult to injury in the form of a painful wedgie. Bonnie scrambles over him, unlocks her harness, and shakes out her voluminous petticoats. Huw is still dazed from the flight and gasping for breath. He’s bent over double, trying to breathe perfumed air thick with musky incense.
“You all right?”
Huw forces himself to straighten up and look around. The room is a tribute to excess: the wallpaper is printed with gold and red and black tessellations—obscene diagrams, he realizes, interpenetrating and writhing before his eyes—and the sofa is flocked with crushed purple velvet. The coffee table supports a variety of phallic implements in an assortment of improbable colors, suited to an altogether different kind of inquisition than the one that he’d been headed for.
As for the furniture, it’s inhabited by several persons of indeterminate gender, wearing outfits ranging from scanty to inappropriate for a place of worship—underwear is in fashion, but not much else is.
Bonnie’s face swims into focus before him, her blue fringe brushing his forehead: that and her hands are the only parts of her body he can see. “It’s the gnostic sexual underground,” she says. “There’s always one to be had, if you know how to look. Nobody takes it up the tradesman’s like a man with that old-time religion. No one needs it more, either. These lucky folks just figured out how to square the circle, thanks to the Bishop.”
She gives him a hard shake. “Come on,” she says. “I hit you with enough serotonin reuptake blockers to depress a hyena.” He feels a
hard tug at his throat, and she holds up a small blowdart for him to examine. “I know you’re out of the god-box.”
Huw opens his mouth to say something, and finds himself sobbing. “You took away my god-self,” he says, snotting down his three-day beard and horking back briny mouthfuls of tears and mucus.
Bonnie produces a hankie from up one sleeve of her church-modest gown and wipes his face. “Sha,” she says, stroking his hair. “Sha. Huw, I need you here and now, okay? We’re in a lot of trouble, and I can’t get us out on my lonesome. The god feeling was just head-in-a-jar stuff. You weren’t being God, you were just feeling the feeling of being God. You hate that—it’s how they feel in the cloud, once they’ve uploaded.”
Huw snuffles miserably. “Yeah,” he says.
“Yeah. Baby, I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but it’s how you want to live. If I know one person who’s equipped to cope with the distinction between sensation and simulation, it’s you. Jesus, Huw, other than these maniacs, you’re the only person I know who thinks there is a distinction.”
Huw struggles to his feet and teeters in his ridiculous trousers. Bonnie giggles.
“What are you wearing?” she asks.
Huw manages to crack a fractional smile. “They’re all the rage in the American Outback,” he says. “What’s that you’re wearing?”
“A disguise. Doubles as a biohazard shield.” She swivels her hips, setting kilograms of underskirts swishing. “We’re both a bit overdressed for the occasion; let’s skin off and I’ll introduce you to the Bishop. Go on, you get started.”
Huw begins the laborious unlatching process and gradually shucks the pants. The teapot clatters free, drawing a raised eyebrow from one of the sexually ambiguous catamites twined around a sofa arm. The vibration kicks some erratic connection back into life: Ade’s image glows softly through the deep pile carpet.
The little avatar wrinkles its nose. “Bugger me sideways,” says Ade. “Place looks like an Italian whorehouse, only less charming and hygienic.” He turns and looks Huw up and down. “You look a little more like your usual cheerless self, though, mate. Should I assume that you’ve joined us again in the land of the cognitively unimpaired?”
Huw nods miserably. “I’m back,” he says. “No thanks to you. Those two assholes know you—they do business with you!”
Adrian’s avatar has the good grace to look faintly embarrassed. Bonnie leans past Huw with a creak of whalebone and picks up the teapot. “Did I hear that right?” she asks. “You been selling stuff again?”
“Uh.” Ade looks unrepentant. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“What kind of stuff?” Bonnie says, her eyes narrowing.
“Um ... stuff. Mostly harmless.”
“What kind of mostly harmless stuff are we talking about here?” Huw asks, mustering up a faint echo of interest. The blissed-out resistance cadre on the sofa are showing signs of interest too.
“Oh, the usual, sunshine. Telescope lenses, tinfoil hats—okay, Faraday cage helmets—formicide spritzes, tactical nuclear weapons, Bibles, contraceptive implants, tinned spam, that kind of thing.”
“And in return they’re paying you in—,” Huw begins; then Bonnie interrupts him.
“—No, wait. What else are you smuggling, you dogfucker? Don’t try to hide it from me. Those neverglade-living lowlifes were so eager to hand Huw over to the Fallen Congregations that they had to be trying to cover something up. Like, oh, whatever the fuck you were doing with them. What was it, Ade? Resurrection on the installment plan? Banned downloads? Are we going to get that fucking mad crow descending on us?”
“Oh, I say!” someone says behind them, but Bonnie is so worked up, she doesn’t notice. Huw glances over his shoulder and sees one of the miscellaneous perverts standing nearby, a hand clasped over his/her mouth. The perv is fish-belly pale and wears nothing but very complicated underwear. “Did you say—?”
“Just a few small downloads, lass,” Ade says. “Nothing to get worked up about, keep your hair on.”
“Downloads. Shit.” Bonnie breathes deeply. She’s looking pale. “Pusbuckets, that’s all I need,” she says. She puts the teapot down. “Right, we’ll have to take this up later, Huw. Right now we’ve got to go see the Bishop, and that means skin. Help me out of this thing.”
Huw fumbles for a while with the complex catches and clasps on her dress, fuzzily aware that he’s standing very close to her and he’s not wearing any trousers. As she steps out of her costume, she grabs him around the waist, squeezes him tight, and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. She’s nervous, vibrating like a live wire, and something squirms around in his throat, wanting to comfort her. “Why do we have to be naked?” he asks when she surfaces for air. “Who is this Bishop, anyway?”
“The Bishop of the First Church of the Teledildonic. It’s a dissident: lives in a baptismal pond, says we’ve got it all wrong and time is flowing in reverse. We’ve passed the Tower of Babel—that’s the cloud —and the Flood—warming—and now we’re ready to move back into the Garden of Eden. So we’ve got to stop wearing clothes and start fucking like innocent bunnies.”
“But—” Huw can feel his brain trying to twist out through his ears as he attempts to accommodate this deviant theology to what he knows about the Fallen Baptist Congregations. “—what’s that got to do with anything? With these folks?”
“I say, hold it right there, pardner!” says the pale perv, running drowned-looking hands through his/her long green hair. The effect would almost be sexy if not for the medium-sized potbelly and the black rubber hedgehog-apparatus that conceals his/her crotch, studded with silvery transducers: “You’ve got it all wrong!” He/she waves a finger at Bonnie. “This isn’t the Garden of Eden, it’s the Garden of the Son of God, after the Rapture, the hundred and forty-four thousand saved souls living in paradise on Earth, free from sin—”
“What’s that, then?” asks Huw, rudely prodding in the direction of the strap-on.
The perv draws itself up to a haughty meter-fifty: “I’ll have you know that this is the finest model chastity phallus money can buy,” s/he says, voice cracking and descending an octave: “’S got all the sensory inputs of the real thing, wired right into my spine, but because little feller himself is tucked out of sight behind it, there’s no actual genital contact. No skin, no sin.” He fondles the thing happily and whimpers. Another of the prosthetically enhanced worshippers is sitting up on the sofa behind him and showing signs of interest.
Huw backs away slowly. Get me out of here, he mouths at Bonnie. She nods, then reaches out and strokes the perv’s pristine love machine. “Now.” Bonnie leads him around the perv—who doubles over in ecstasy at her touch—toward a pair of pornographically decorated hardwood doors at the rear of the room.
Bonnie takes a deep breath. “Wish I could stay,” she calls to the three or four temple whores on the bed, “but we’ve got to see Their Grace. It’s urgent. If I were you, I’d get to a safe house before the gendarmes arrive.”
“Give the Bishop our love,” one of the omnisexuals calls as they depart.
There is a small and overintimate lift behind the doors. It runs sideways, down, up, and then sideways again, completing a route that sends Huw’s inner ear on a loop-the-loop. They emerge into a hallway that’s carpeted with greasy-feeling tentacles that twine sensuously around his toes, and the walls have the sheen of waxed and oiled skin. It smells of Doritos and musk.
Bonnie hands him the sack with her clothes and his ruined underpants and the teapot and pushes him ahead of her, squeezing his ass affectionately as they go.
The Bishop is three meters high, ten-limbed, with eight complete sets of assorted genitals, fourteen breasts, and four tongues, like an explosion in a gourmet brothel’s cloning vats. He, She, and It—the three in one—is impossibly hideous to contemplate. Bonnie ushers Huw into its presence after negotiating with a pair of disturbingly toothless ministers who bar the high door.
“Your Grace,” she says as they step int
o its eucalyptus-fumed inner chamber.
“My dear child,” it says with one of its mouths. “It warms Our heart to see you.” It has a voice like a teenaged boy, high and uncertain. “And your companion. You are both lovely as they day He made you.”
One of its hands slithers free of the tangle and extends before them. Bonnie bends down and kisses the ring painted on the third finger, then elbows Huw, who kneels tentatively and takes the proffered digit, which is warm and moist and pulses disturbingly.
“Your Grace?” he says.
“Be not afraid, child,” says the Bishop. “This meatsuit allows Us to bring the Word to Our scattered temples without having to transport Our physical person through the uncertain world. One day, all of us will be liberated by these meatsuits, free to explore our flesh in many bodies all at once.”
“You’re uploaded?” Huw says, taking his hand away quickly and shuffling back on his knees.
The Bishop snorts a laugh with its rightmost face. “No, child, no. Merely telepresent. Uploading is the mortification of the flesh—this is its celebration.”
“Your Grace,” Bonnie says, peering up at it through her fringe with her eyes seductively wide. “It has been an honor and privilege to serve you in my time here in Glory City. I’ve found my counseling duties to be very rewarding—the gender-reassignees here face unique challenges, and it’s wonderful to be able to help them.”
“Yes,” says the Bishop, crouching down. “And We’ve appreciated it very much. But We sense that you are here to ask some favor of Us now, and We wish you’d get on with it so that We could concentrate on the savage rogering we’re getting in one of Our bodies.”
“It’s complicated,” Bonnie says. “This guy here is on the run—he’d been captured and they were taking him to the auto-da-fé when I rescued him.”
“This is the One?” the Bishop asks, putting one delicate feminine hand behind his head and pulling him closer to its big golden eyes. “The two who brought you to Glory City are not know for their extreme piety. So why do you suppose they brought you here, rather than simply, oh, eating you or using you for spare parts?”
Rapture of the Nerds Page 11
