“You’re filthy! Put me down!”
Klom complied. Tugger, excited, raced over and jumped up to lick Klom’s face.
“Okay, let’s go get drunk. Soon I’ll be earning my wages again, so I’ll treat tonight.”
“Don’t you want to change up first?”
“The hell with it. If I get drunk enough to fall down, my clothes will be dirty already.”
The twilit, odoriferous streets and alleys of the bustee already swarmed with representatives of two dozen races. Chattering, clicking, cachinnating or cawing, the impoverished breakers and sorters, stackers and drainers, matter-modem techs and vegetable slicers all seemed determined to forget their cares and woes. Interspecies camaraderie reigned. Finery of a rudimentary sort had emerged from cheap chests and cardboard closets to adorn bodies spanning the spectrum from elongated to stubby, rugose to seamless, writhing to dignified.
Vendors with small braziers sold pungent kebabs of partchrumpf flesh. Bottles of liquor circulated freely from hand to tentacle to paw. Shadowy niches half-concealed the carnal explorations of chance-met lovers.
Klom moved through the exuberant chaos easily, the crowds parting before his mass. Sorrel and Tugger slipstreamed behind him. Klom gripped a half-empty flagon of toadchunder by its neck. A smear of partchrumpf grease ringed Sorrel’s mouth. Tugger’s tongue hung out.
At a cross-street, the crowd refused to give way for Klom and party, and he soon saw why. They had intersected a procession of marabouts and flagellants. Spinning their prayer wheels, swinging thuribles that wafted spicy fumes, the holybeings led an elaborately carven juggernaut pulled by a score of Sphinx. Hideous and benign wooden faces of devas gazed down implacably on the onlookers.
Sorrel shouted above the banging of drums, the keening of pandits, the crack of cattails threaded with bloody metal beads, and the blowing of horns. “Airey asked us to meet him later! He’s got the results from Radius Seven!”
“Where?”
“He claims we need to keep the news secret. No eavesdroppers. So he said to meet at three AM by the stockpens. No one will be in such an unlikely place at that hour.”
By two-thirty in the morning, Sorrel was growing weary. Klom’s vigor, unfettered from any brooding, ran unabated. Tugger dragged along gamely.
“Let’s find Airey so we can get to bed, Klom.”
“All right.”
The stockpens housed various softly lowing food beasts for the kitchens, behind shimmering, sizzling lines of force running from stanchion to stanchion. The noisome atmosphere insured that celebrants avoided the acreage.
“Airey!” yelled Klom semi-drunkenly into the luminance-cross-hatched blackness. “Here we are! Show yourself, man! Or are you too busy sucking the ten teats of a Milchmaid!”
Airey stepped from the shadows, hissing. “Quiet, you big rumpf! Do you want every bravo in the vicinity to come investigate your bellowings? I saw a pair of Grimjacks just a few alleys over! We’re here to discuss something extremely vital.”
Klom sobered up. “What have you learned about Tugger? What makes him so important?”
Airey flourished a data-palette, while Sorrel gripped Klom’s arm and leaned in closer. “Your foundling is a twelvestrand, Klom! An incredibly powerful deva, despite his seeming lack of sapience! Perhaps the only one of his kind. But unlike all other devas, he’s metastable on our ontological plane! And he might very well be the Book of Forgetting as well!”
“The Book of Forgetting? But—”
Airey gestured dismissively. “I know, I know, everyone has assumed for millennia that the Book was an artifact of some sort. But I’ve been doing research into the legend, and nothing in the fragments of lore is really inconsistent with the Book being a living creature. And after a little cogitation, I realized how your pet saved your life. He doesn’t travel back in time, but crosswise! He forgets one universe while remembering another. And somehow he shunted the essence of your consciousness onto an alternate timetrack along with him. A timetrack that lagged just a little beyond our moment, where your accident never happened. If you wish to quibble, this universe is not the one you were born in.”
The hesitant tone of Klom’s speech conveyed a slowly dawning understanding. “But then, that means—I guess Tugger is really valuable.” Klom looked down at his pet. The being whose inherently recomplicated cellular structure allowed him to transcend limitations of space and time and leap across the multiverse was busy nibbling at his own hide for pests.
Airey laughed cynically. “That’s understating the case a million times worse than a Neftali trader misrepresents his wares! With Tugger by your side, you can lay claim to all the riches in the Indrajal.”
“I don’t want so much though,” said Klom. He gathered his friends to his side. “Just enough for the four of us to leave this hard place and retire to Chaulk—”
The next voice, a basso rumble, shocked them all, although only Klom recognized it. “I am afraid no one is going anywhere.”
Bright Tide Rising floated above them, clouded by his majestatics. The sixstrand owner of the Aspema Yards stayed silent for a long moment—possibly regarding the quartet curiously through his mutable veil, although Klom could not say for sure—before speaking at last.
“A metastable creature with twice my own information density. No wonder I was unable to read it properly. It is hard to credit such a miracle, although I have never known the scientists at Radius Seven to be mistaken before. You will now give me that data-palette.”
Airey braced his spine. “Klom paid for these tests, so they belong to him. And so does Tugger.”
“Absolutely incorrect. The creature is salvage from a ship owned by me. It is mine by terms of your employment. Your co-worker will be compensated for his find. Perhaps I will give him as much as ten thousand taka.”
Sorrel chimed in. “That’s an insult! This animal is invaluable!”
“And you three are all too stupid and primitive to properly exploit such a treasure. But I am done arguing. With the creature’s entire genome on a palette, it will be simple to rebirth him, this time without any misplaced allegiances. I have no further need of any of you.
Klom felt mentally yanked in a dozen different directions. How had this horrible situation come about, from such simple and innocent impulses? But before he could speak or act, the telecosmic corona of majestatics around Bright Tide Rising seemed to squirt four solid streams of particles, distributed along four vectors.
Klom’s watercutter practically leaped into his right hand, even as he hurled himself to one side. He felt a piercing pain in his left shoulder. But the pain did not disturb his aim.
The noise that Bright Tide Rising’s legs made in falling to the ground was followed in milliseconds by the accompanying mucky splash of his separate upper half.
Klom turned to his companions. All three were stretched out unmoving on the filthy ground. One by one, he searched their corpses for wounds. But the lancelike majestatics had pierced so cleanly, yet so fatally, that Klom could detect nothing. At least their deaths had been swift. There was very little blood, and in fact his own shoulder wound was invisible and unleaking.
Klom lifted first Sorrel’s head from the muck, and kissed her dirty cheek. He did the same for Tugger and Airey, before turning to their killer.
Bright Tide Rising’s myrmidons were attempting to put their master back together. They had already gathered up his spilled entrails and dragged his two halves into contact and were stitching golden sutures inside and out.
Klom carved the sixstrand into pieces so small that all the majestatics in the Indrajal would not suffice to repair the Horseface. The he kicked shitty, hay-speckled mud atop the carrion.
* * *
The long, harsh night was waning, with dawn a distant rumor. Klom stood, half-bewildered, in his twilit shack. In his hand he held the data-palette bearing Tugger’s genome. What good was it to him? The money to reincarnate Tugger was a sum far beyond his means. And even if somehow miraculously given th
e fee, Klom could engineer the conception only of Tugger’s mere doppelganger, a blank slate with no familiar consciousness shared with the original who had once saved Klom’s life.
And now Klom was in danger of losing his own life once more. His murder of Bright Tide Rising, even in self-defense, would earn him death, under the laws of the Indrajal, which were biased against twostrands.
He knew that he must run. But where?
Klom gathered up a couple of possessions: the picture of his mother, a few deva medals handed out at religious ceremonies. But then he was overwhelmed by fatigue and despair. The lack of a certain destination left him feeling hopeless. With near-suicidal unselfconcem, he dropped into his hammock and fell asleep among his rags.
Sometime in the earliest hours of morning he awoke to a wet tongue rasping his face. He flailed his arms about, confused and slow to emerge from dreams, and encountered a familiar boulder of a head bearing a fleshy protuberance.
“Tugger?”
Something hard was spat out onto his chest, bouncing off into the hammock.
By the time Klom got his eyes ungummed and open, he was alone again.
A data-palette slimed with saliva shared the hammock with him. He dried it off on his shirt and jacked it into his reader.
The palette was a triptix in Klom’s name. It registered a spendable value above the ticket price of several million taka, and listed as the bearer’s ultimate destination the fabled world of Mount Sumeru.
Klom gazed around him at the familiar shabby interior of his crib.
Already it looked distant and remote. The picture of his mother on the banks of Lake Zawinul seemed to represent a stranger. Klom sensed wordlessly that he would never return to Chaulk.
Many questions and a sense of mystery suffused him. Was Tugger somehow alive? What awaited him on Mount Sumeru?
Only travel out among the worlds of the Indrajal held hope of answers.
This story was written especially for a symposium at Georgia Tech, to which I was invited by noted professor and critic Lisa Yaszek. The theme of the conference was “Monstrous Bodies,” the science fiction of “hopeful monsters.” Initially, promised an hour or more for my speech, I was going to cobble together and present a critical essay on the topic. But then I realized something important. I’m a fiction writer, not a real critic (I just play one on certain websites). There would be plenty of scholarly discourse at the conference already. Why not offer some actual original fiction that embodied the themes of the symposium?
And so, with Lisas enthusiastic approval, I turned to my “ribofunk” future for the first time since the release of the book of the same name. This story fits into that sequence somewhere towards the end of the original volume, fairly far along in the history.
My reading met with a wonderful reception, and I had an intellectually stimulating time throughout, marveling at the amount of talent among both the faculty and student body at Georgia Tech.
Of course, not all the pleasures were intellectual, as my waistline will attest, thanks to Atlanta’s fine BBQ joints.
The monstrous body must be fed!
HARSH OASES
Thomas equinas hated to run.
But now he had no choice.
He had been entrusted with the future salvation of his kind.
An egg named Swee’pea.
And the Manticore was hot on Swee’pea’s trail.
Equinas contemplated the innocuous-looking egg resting now on his desk in its scrollworked mahogany cradle. A standard, stand-alone brood-pod, big as a baseline watermelon, the ivory-colored egg could have held any kind of embryo: mosaic or basal, cold-blooded or warm-blooded, vertebrate or invertebrate. No exterior sign pointed toward the unique destiny of the occupant.
A most hypothetical destiny, as yet. The embryo had first to survive to birth and live to adolescence.
About hating to run. This was both a philosophical and physical issue with Thomas. Both a figurative and literal disinclination. His pedigree included a large percentage of horse genes, and he had in the latter half of his life strived to minimize this part of his heritage. Running was part of what he abjured.
Of course, anyone seeing Thomas would have had little doubt as to his genetic composition. The large, liquid brown eyes, the stocky chest, the blunt horny feet and hands, his mane-like hair—all of these features betrayed the equine genes that consorted with the human, seal, raccoon and even avian codons in his cells.
As a young mosaic two decades ago, however, Thomas Equinas had loved to run. An unsophisticated healthy splice, employed on a vast African cell-phone plantation, Thomas had happily spent all his free time, after the day’s round of tending to the circuit shrubs, with the other bucks and fillies, in foot races and wrestling matches, afterwards nimbly climbing gnarly booze palms to pluck the liquor nuts from on high, returning to the ground for drunken orgies, awaking with throbbing head in the fragrant, breath-humid stables to start the cycle of mindless work and pleasure all over again.
But that had been before he learned to read.
One of the basal humans tangentially associated with the plantation had gifted—or perhaps cursed—Thomas with literacy. Her name had been Petrina, and she was a slim, blonde woman of indeterminate age who had come to the plantation to upgrade the circuit bushes one day. Her task took her a week, and during that time she was constantly out in the fields with the worker splices, sowing her upgrade viruses and checking the results of her work. During these times, Thomas had eyed her with a strange new mixture of curiosity, lust and interest. Petrina was unlike the humans who ran the plantation. She treated the splices with courtesy and genuine affection.
“Thomas, I need a random sample of antenna buds from at least six bushes separated by no more than seven meters but no less than four meters.”
“Yes, Peej Petrina, right away.”
“Just call me Petrina, please, Thomas.”
“Whatever you wish—Petrina.”
Somehow, without any intentionality on Thomas’s part, he miraculously found himself rutting with Petrina one night. He had seen her standing at the flickering edge of the circle of light cast by the big bonfire that accompanied the nightly diversions of the splices, and he had gone to her, abandoning his kind for the promise of the unknown—a path he had been following ever since.
Together Thomas and Petrina moved off further into the darkness and had sex. Afterwards, lying amidst the crushed lemon grasses, Thomas could not find it within his stunned self to initiate conversation. Luckily, Petrina had plenty of questions that would loosen Thomas’s tongue. She sought earnestly to learn the parameters and dimensions of his life, and eventually stumbled upon his illiteracy.
“Why, that’s scandalous! Back home, all our splices can read. It’s essential. That’s how they improve themselves and help us more efficiently. I don’t see why it’s not the same here …”
“Perhaps—perhaps it’s because there are so many of us here, and so few humans. You say that is not the case in your land …”
“No, not at all. In fact, even the old rough parity of one splice to one human has decreased lately, as new generations of kibes with higher turingosity become embedded in superior mycoflesh bodies. These aphylumic helpers seem destined to outmode your kind, by any number of performance criteria. Already, people are referring to a period known as the Redaction, a time when splices will go extinct.”
Thomas did not understand everything Petrina was telling him, but he sensed the imminence of some doom.
Thomas dared in this intimate moment to utter a rebellious thought. “I—I would like to read, I think. But our humans seem to want to deny us anything that would bring us closer to their level.”
Petrina sat up eagerly, her breasts swaying. In the darkness, her eyes seemed to catch the glint of the many Southern Hemisphere constellations overhead.
“Why, nothing could be easier, Thomas. I’ll get a sartor to fab up a dose of literacy trope tailored to your genotype when I go into
town. You’ll be reading the next day, once all the glial rewiring subsides.”
“But how will you get access to my genotype?”
“Silly horse! I’ve already got one big sample of your cells. But you can give me another if you want.”
Thomas blushed at his stupidity, but was not so embarrassed that he failed to comply with Petrina’s suggestion.
Petrina went into town the next day, but did not return immediately. Thomas almost gave up hope that she would keep her promise. But when she did show up again, she carried the promised dose of neurotropins.
Passing over the smart pill on the sly, Petrina also whispered goodbye. Thomas was too excited even to realize he would never see her again.
Thomas swallowed the tropes when out of sight of his human overseers, washing it down after his shift with a swig of booze-palm juice. Almost immediately he began to feel light-headed and confused. He left his brawling peers for the stables, where he went immediately to sleep.
When he awoke in the morning, he felt fine. And the first thing he noticed was a sign on the wall of his crib.
CAUTION
MOSAICS UNPREDICTABLE
WHEN DRUNK
As the revelation that he was actually reading struck him fully, Thomas began to weep. As the deeper implications of the sign dawned on him—that he had been wasting his life as a brutish sot—he began to weep even more forcefully.
A human overseer came by to inquire politely, “Hey what the fuck is the problem here, you stupid Var?” Thomas pulled himself together, denied any ills, and went to work.
This was the start of his new life.
Thomas began to read omnivorously. He slyly rescued from the compost heap a cell-phone that had failed several quality-control teste but still functioned well enough for his purposes. He used it to surreptitiously download texts from the ideocosm. With each book he consumed, Thomas felt his image of the world expanding and growing richer.
Thomas came particularly to relish philosophy, seeking the why of his world as well as the what. The ancient Greeks, the Germans, the twentieth-century masters like Bertrand Russell and Bob Dylan, the mid-twenty-first-century school of neo-Nozickians—all became as essential to Thomas as food.
Harsh Oases Page 13
