“Forty-seven years, four months, nine days, three hours, forty-four minutes, and eleven point six one four seconds, to be precise. And you didn’t write, son, not once. I checked with your mom.”
“But I was—” Huw swallows again. “—being a real dick.” Also, setting the all-time record for the world’s longest adolescent snit, he doesn’t add.
“That’s all right, son.” His dad holds his arms open.
A moment later, Huw is leaning on his shoulder, bawling like a little kid. “I’m too damn old for this.” He sniffs. “I missed you, you know.”
“I do.” His dad pats his back awkwardly. “I was a dick too, if it helps. I had what I thought were plenty good reasons but I didn’t work through the fact that they weren’t good enough for you. I didn’t mean to fuck you up.”
“I didn’t mean to—” Huw takes a deep breath, then wishes his congested sinuses to clear. “—huh. Leave me a forwarding address? This time I’ll write.”
“I’ll do that, but you might not hear back from me for a long time.” His dad’s mustache twitches as he disentangles Huw from his jacket. “Now get going. Do you want to keep them in suspense forever?” And with a gentle hand in the small of Huw’s back, he propels him toward the door.
Various instances of Huw have lived through roughly two and a half trillion years of trial by simulation since he stepped through the door, but on the other side, it’s as if barely any time at all has passed. (Someone is doing some serious fancy footwork with causality, and Huw absently makes a note to investigate later.) Back in chambers he finds Bonnie running round in circles, trying to catch an agitated parrot, who is flying around the ceiling shouting, “Where’s the plaintiff? Where’s the witness? Who’s a pretty counsel? Rawk!”
“Come down here, you feathered bandit!” Bonnie is shaking his fists at the bird, and Huw works out the context from the white streaks on the back of Bonnie’s shirt.
“Trial’s over,” Huw says. His voice comes out with his usual male timbre. “We need to be going, the embassy’s packing up.”
“Trial’s what—?” Bonnie turns on him. “It’s over?”
His mum bamfs in from some corner of the embassy hyperspace, flashy teleportation spangles dissolving like hologram fireworks around her. “Huw! Am I in—? Oh.”
“Dad says hi,” he says. “The Big Zap is canceled, conditionally: As long as we keep our nose clean, eat our greens, and don’t terrorize the neighborhood, they’ll let us alone.”
“Rawk! Court is adjourned?” The parrot swoops down on his mum’s shoulder with a rattle of wing feathers.
“That’s nice, dear.” His mother smiles.
“You did it?” Bonnie stares at him. “Hey, you switched again.”
“Dad-thing is packing up the embassy; they’re leaving the solar system to us. I, uh, left a lot of myself behind back there. No, no, I’m all right—” He waves off an anxious Bonnie. “—but we need to get out of here before the embassy dismantles.” Right back to the reconstituted and re-created bedrock of Io—the Authority is nothing if not environmentally sensitive, and believes in recycling moons and small planets wherever possible. “Dad says they’re going to begin teardown immediately, so—” As he says it, a red warning sign appears in midair, hovering over the entrance to the chambers: evacuate now. It flashes, the archaic blink-tag irritant clearly contrived to get their attention. As if that isn’t enough, a fire siren spools up to an earsplitting shriek, and an unspeakable stench tickles his nostrils. “—I think he wants us out of here right now.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.” Mom rolls her eyes, then shoulder-barges the door. “David, you passive-aggressive asshole!” she shouts, waving her fist at the hyperrealistic sky above the embassy complex (where, one by one, the stars are going out), “How many times have I told you, it is not acceptable to use the kid as a back channel? You get your incarnated ass down here right now so I can have words with you: Compliance is mandatory—”
“Was she always like this?” Bonnie asks Huw sotto voce
as they follow the blinking evacuation arrows toward a rainbow archway capped by a sign reading cloud gateway.
“Uh-huh. Pretty much. Why do you think I got into casting pots?” He walks swiftly away from his mother, who is railing at the universe.
“You poor bastard.”
Huw pauses, contemplating the throng of diplomats, lawyers, tourists, xenophiliacs, instantiated fictional characters and various other subtypes of humanity that clutter the vestibule in front of the gate. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going home. I mean, really home. Planning on reincarnating back on Earth and holing up in the workship for at least a couple of years and not traveling anywhere.” He glances sidelong at Bonnie. “I realize that might not appeal to you as a lifestyle choice.”
Bonnie shrugs, hands in pockets. “I can visit from time to time. Or I could stick around, go walkabout if it gets too boring. If you want.”
“I want.” Huw takes his arm and leads him to the back of the queue. And in a subjective eye-blink, they’re back on Earth.
Epilogue: Verdict
There’s something not right about Huw’s new body. Or perhaps there’s something that’s changed in his mind. One way or another, he’s just not able to throw a pot the way he could.
Oh, the body looks right enough, and there’s enough actual biological material in it that he qualifies, at least marginally, as a primate. But there’s plenty of other gubbins in there, especially round about the headmeat where they decanted the version of him that stepped out of the embassy as it was being folded up to the size of a pinprick and made to vanish.
That version had demanded a very stiff drink. In person. In his pottery. On Earth. Right. Away.
He’d saved the entire fucking universe. Surely this was not too much to ask for.
And oh, how they’d fussed, begging and commanding him to at least leave an instance in the cloud for debriefing and the lecture circuit, but he’d been firm. Oh, how they’d fiddled, pestering him with questions about what he wanted his new body to be like, which upgrades and mods it should have, trying to tempt him with talented penises and none-too-subtle surrogates, such as retractable unobtanium claws and bones infused with miracle fiber and carbon nanotubes.
He’d waved them off, refusing even to take in all the wonders on offer: no, no, no, just give me back my actual, physical body, the body I would have had if none of this had taken place, if I had been a man who was born to a woman, grown to maturity in the gravity well of my ancestors.
Once he’d gotten through to them, they’d complied with a vengeance, and now Huw heaved himself out of bed every morning with the aches and pains of baseline humanity on throbbing, glorious display. He showered himself, noting the soap’s slither over every ingrowing hair, every wrinkle, every flabby nonessential extruding from his person. He squinted at the small writing on cereal packaging and held it up to the watery Welsh light that oozed through the kitchen window, moving it closer and farther in the hopes of finding the right focus-length for his corneas, which had been carefully antiqued with decades’ worth of waste products, applied with all the care of a forger re-creating a pair of exquisitely aged Levi’s.
The cloud had its little jokes, oh ho ho, yes it did, and Huw would have let it all pass but for the pots. He’d been at his wheel for three days now, and no matter how carefully he kneaded the air pockets out of his clay, wet his hands, and threw the clay down onto the spinning wheel, no matter how carefully he wet his fingers and guided the spinning clay upward and outward into a graceful, curvilinear spliney form, it always went awry. His clumsy fingers tore the clay, his clumsy hands moved too fast and collapsed the pot’s walls, his clumsy arms lost their bracing against his thighs and slipped and spattered the walls and his face with wet clay.
Huw threw his first pot at age fifteen, part of the mandatory art requirement that his parents had to stump up for as part of his homeschooling program. The minute the clay hit the wheel an
d his fingers touched the wet, sensual, spinning earth, he’d felt a jolt of recognition: Where have you been all my life? Something in his peripheral nervous system, something in his muscles recognized the clay, understood it right down to the finest grain, integrated it into his proprioception, so that it felt like a part of him. Huw has had days in his life when he had a hard time thinking clearly, days when he didn’t feel like getting out of bed.
But he’s never, ever had a day when he couldn’t throw a bloody pot.
“It’s not fair,” he tells the motes of dust and the dribbles of wet clay that fill his pottery. It really isn’t, either. This is meant to be his retirement, his recuperation, his occupational therapy. He’s a veteran, after all. A veteran with a scorching case of posttraumatic stress disorder (self-diagnosed). It’s not fair.
He picks up another lump of clay, kneads it, dipping his fingers into the water with a practiced, unconscious gesture, working the water into the clay. He’s complained to the cloud, of course, but they assured him that he checksummed correctly—that is, the body they’ve built for him is the body he left with, functionally speaking. The inarguable and obvious fact that this body is different in a very significant way is of no moment to the cloud. Checksums don’t lie.
Huw pats and squeezes the clay into shape and thunks it dead bull’s-eye center into the middle of his wheel. He wets his hands again, rocks back so his tailbone is well behind him and his sitz bones are well beneath him, braces his elbows on his thighs, and makes ready to ruin another pot.
“Give it a rest already, will you?” Bonnie says from behind him. He doesn’t startle, because he’s sensed her presence for some minutes, every since she slipped into his pottery. Technically it isn’t off-limits to her, but no one apart from Huw can really feel comfortable in the narrow space with its high shelves. There’s nowhere to sit or stand apart from his wheel, and everything is covered with dried clay-dust that is hungry for hair, clothes, and skin on which to stick. So Bonnie usually hangs out in the house or walks around the valleys while Huw’s wasting clay and cursing the fates.
Huw feels somehow honor-bound to scold Bonnie for interrupting him, but the truth is that he’s quite grateful to her for giving him an excuse to down tools. So he spins on his stool and stands, putting himself right up against her. (The only way two people can stand up in his pottery at once is if they’re willing to breathe each others’ exhaust streams.)
“Fine,” he says. “Let’s get some air.”
Bonnie slips her fingers into his as they step outside, letting the pottery door squeak and slam shut with a dusty bang. “You just need practice,” she says. “Or possibly rest. In any event, it’s nothing to get upset about.”
“Easy for you to say. Your body works.” What’s more, Bonnie’s upgraded, because she’s not trying to square the circle between a lifetime of techno-asceticism and a newfound love of the cloud; she’s an unabashed transhuman on a meatvacation. She’s got the unobtanium in her bones, the eyes that can see into the infrared and detect environmental toxins, true love, and flop sweat at a hundred meters. She’s got a metabolism that politely discards any calories it doesn’t need in neat little poos that smell like roses. She’s got a peripheral nervous system that she can dial up in moments of crashing orgasm, and tamp down in moments of crashing boredom. Her body doesn’t just work, it performs. Huw pretends not to notice this.
“Oh, yours works just fine, Huw, where it counts. Listen, you’ve had your consciousness extracted from its biosubstrate, forked thousands of times, run in parallel, diffed and merged, and hauled through millions of subjective years while trying to save the universe—sorry, solar system. Then it was decanted back into an artificial, assembled substrate, with limitations that you specified, and now it’s got a few wrinkles to solve. What’s so surprising about that? If you want to throw pots, just ask your mum to bake you some pottery firmware. But stop moping and moaning. That’s not what I signed up for.”
She’s probably right. Huw knows there’s no meaningful difference between running a clayworking app that someone else wrote and a clayworking app that was algorithmically derived from a digital representation of his headmeat. But there’s a principle at stake. He can’t say what principle exactly, and he suspects that Bonnie would clobber him if he got into an argument about it with her, so he changes the subject.
“Sorry, love, you’re right. What have you been up to? Anything nice? Want to do something together today, then?”
“Arguing with missionaries, mostly. Cloud-botherers have been ringing your doorbell all week while you’ve been hiding out with the clay.”
That’s a new thing since the last time he had a body: Cloud-botherers going door to door, pressing innocents with uninterruptable sermonettes about the miraculous life that awaited all if we’d only listen to reason and take the transcendence treatment. Bonnie loathed them because she felt they put the whole movement in a bad odor with the punters. With friends like these, who needs enemies? she’d explained when he asked. No one likes a door-to-door missionary. She quite enjoyed arguing them to a standstill, and viewed it as a service to the cause, since a missionary arguing with her was a missionary who wasn't bothering the neighbors.
“Everyone needs a hobby,” he says. “Converted any of them yet?”
She doesn't say anything.
“You didn’t,” he says.
“Well, only a little. She was such a silly thing, one of the newly reincarnated, and all her arguments for uploading were really daft. I had her in for some tea, and she stayed for hours. Came back the next day to say I’d changed her mind, and she was going to work to show people why they shouldn’t disembody.” Bonnie shrugs. “I guess some people just aren’t happy unless they’ve got a cause.”
“But you got rid of them?” Huw asks.
“Yes, it’s safe to come out now.”
Huw glances at the window. It’s afternoon, and the light will be fading before long. Which means it’s time to clear up, wash up, and think about fixing some dinner. “I’m just about through here,” he says. “Put the kettle on? I’ll be through in a quarter of an hour.”
Bonnie heads for the house, leaving Huw to the mundane routine of cleaning up and shutting the pottery—the trouble with real clay is that you can’t hit Save and expect it to still be malleable tomorrow—and check that the kiln has enough fuel. He washes thoroughly to get the reddish powder off his hands and arms, then latches the door behind him and ambles, whistling tunelessly, through the kitchen garden toward the back door.
Bonnie is in the kitchen, slaving over a hot reactor. Huw may have previously banished electricity from his home, but Bonnie has other ideas, and some domestic give-and-take—or push-and-shove—has resulted in her installing a fuel cell system and some bizarre extreme cooking tech in the niche where once a mechanical refrigerator had whirred. The reactor isn’t radioactive, but given enough energy and random garbage to break down, it can brew up just about any biomolecular soup she orders. Right now she’s trying to get the damn thing to cough up a prefabricated megatherium steak, but judging from the amount of cussing, something is persistently going wrong. “This festering pile keeps suggesting alternatives,” she says as Huw closes the door. “Why would anyone want to eat koala? They’re saturated with eucalyptus oil. ...”
“Maybe it thinks you’ve got a cold?” Huw asks. “Hey, you’re not subscribing to a Plague of the Month club?” There are some aspects of historic reenactment that are too gross even for Huw.
“No. A-choo!” Bonnie rubs at her nose. “Oh dear.”
“It’s probably hay fever.”
“I’ll have to get my immune system tweaked again. Ech. Do you feel like peeling some spuds?”
So it is that Huw is up to his armpits in cold water, scrubbing (he doesn’t hold with that peeling fetish) a bunch of wholesome organic home-grown potatoes when the doorbell rings.
“I’ll get it—” Bonnie is off while Huw is still dripping. “—you, you fucker!
”
“Wotcher, chick,” says a cheery, familiar, and utterly unwelcome voice. “Is His Ambassadorship available?”
Huw palms a couple of oversized pink fir apples in one hand and grabs the cast-iron poker from its spot by the stove. “Ade,” he says as he heads for the front hall, “the embassy is closed. Go away.”
“You what? And here was I, thinking you’d like your bike back!” Ade is leaning against the inside of the front door, one arm wrapped around Bonnie’s shoulders: Bonnie’s expression suggests that she can’t make up her mind whether to kiss him or bite him. Huw can just discern, behind them, the frame of a long-lost friend.
“My bike? That’d be good. But the embassy is still closed.” Huw leans against the passage wall, the poker lowered. He has Ade’s number: knows how to deal with him. No violence needed, just a reinforced concrete wall. “You are an absolute arse, Ade. Every time I have run into you, you have comprehensively fucked up my life while making out that it was my fault, and the one time I needed you to get off your behind and do something for all our sakes, you cocked it up. There’s an old saying about never attributing to a conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. So I hope you can understand that, while you’re welcome to stop by for a cup of tea, I am out of your emergent factional whatsits now and forevermore. Clear?”
“You don’t have to be like that,” Ade says. He sounds wounded. Bonnie punches him on one shoulder: he lets go of her. “I just wanted to thank you for your work, what did you think I’m about? I’m not some kinda supervillain, mate! And look at you, don’t you think it turned out for the best? We’re still here. The Authority didn’t deliver the Big Zap, the cloudie fundamentalists didn’t dismantle the—”
A shadow moves behind Ade, and there is a noise like an old-style electric door buzzer. Ade drops, twitching in the grip of a full-on Taser spazz-out.
Rapture of the Nerds Page 28
