Appeals Court

by Charles Stross

  Appeals Court

  by Charles Stross &

  Cory Doctorow

  What finally wakes Huw is the pain in his bladder. His head is throbbing, but his bladder has gone weak on him lately — 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 to find that he’s lying face-down in a hammock. 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 any more. 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 realises he’s bare-ass naked. He shakes his head, yawning. His veins feel as if all the blood has been replaced by something warm and syrupy and full of sleep. Drugs? he think, blinking. The walls —

  Three of them are bland, gray sheets of structural plastic with doors in them. The fourth is an outward-leaning sheet of plexiglass or diamond or something. And 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 is 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. “Shitfuckpissbugger,” he swears, memories flooding back. Then he picks the teapot up and gives it a resentful rub.

  “Wotcher, mate!” The djinn 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 mumbles.

  “What kind of way to welcome yer old mate is that, sunshine?” Hologram-Adrian’s wearing bush jacket, pith helmet and shorts, a shotgun slung over one shoulder. “How yer feeling, anyway?”

  “I feel like shit.” Huw rubs his forehead. “Like I’ve been shat. 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 Judge 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 co-religionists, aren’t they? You won’t find a more natural, flesh-hugging bunch on the planet than the Jesonians who got left behind in the Geek Rapture. Hell, they’re the kind of down-home Luddites what make you look like Buck Rogers.”

  “They’re radioactive,” Huw wails. “And I’m an atheist. They burn atheists at the stake, don’t they?” He rummages through his skanky clothes, turning them inside out and outside in as he searches for something not so a-crawl 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 tiny Adrian.

  * * *

  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 to keep 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 clawed into the arm-rests.

  Huw leaps back a step, dropping the huge, suspicious sausage he’s been gnawing at. 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 Ghandi,” she tells him, giggling. Her lips loll loose; she stands and 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 replies.

  “‘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. She whistled 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.

  “Bastard scum bastard,” he mumbles at the battered teapot — a one-time host for a cultural guidance iffrit to the People’s Magical Libyan Jamahiriya, and now 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 and a pith helmet. “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 tiny red horns sprout from his forehead. “You and the backchannel 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 even la
unch 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 slyly at him from atop the teapot.

  “Fuck.” Huw subsides in a fizzing bath of beads, with 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 get the fuck away before the shooting starts.”

  “That’s the idea,” says Ade, scratching his beard absent-mindedly. “Bonnie’s one of our crack agents. We don’t wanna risk one of our best prophets-at-large in a backwater, mate. You’ll be safe as houses.”

  Huw thinks of Sandra Lal, the house of the month club, and her mini-sledge, and shudders. His arse is beginning to itch as the bacteribeads try to squeeze through his puckered 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 shakes his head, then 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 manque is feeling.

  * * *

  The big zeppelin lurches and buzzes as it chases its shadow across the sandy beaches and 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 US 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 kilometres 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 plough 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 with a cough, 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 single out in her routine.

  “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.

  “HAIL! HIM! AGAIN!” Bonnie yelled, hopping from foot to foot. “Arrogant Jesus-sucking sack of SARS, scabrous toddler-fondler, religion-addled motherfucker,” she continues, 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 kind of hysterical strength he’s heard that mothers possess at moments of extreme duress. “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, and then 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 absense 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 sure of, 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 argumentating with this-here strategic defense battle computer that thinks y’all are goddless commie-fag euroweasels. I reckon you’se got maybe two minutes to repent before it blows y’all to Jesus.”

  Huw breaths 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 realises 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 ahand over the mike: “does this thing carries 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 bus explodes on launch. The surviving Patriots stab towards 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. “AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have new voice mail, which will follow automatically after this message from our sponsors: click the pink furry button to access our extensive range of introductory offers, the pink fuzzy button to access our customer accounts database, the pink lozenge to see how AOL can help you —”

  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 realises in absolute horror. She might actually be an AOL screen name — she’s mad enough … These days, tales of what AOL did with their users during the Singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

  “Acknowledged,” says the possessed countermeasures suite, in the hag-ridden tones 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 towards the other. Paths cross then diverge in a haze of debris. “You’ve got mail,” 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 airports’ cracked and vitrified runways are coming into view. Missile batteries off to one side cycle their launcher-erectors impoten
tly, magazines long since fired dry at the robot-piloted godless commie-fag euroweasel aid flights.

  “We gotta bail out before we land, otherwise we’d have to go through customs,” she says brightly. “That would be bad — South Carolina never ended prohibition.”

  “What?” Huw shakes his head again. “Prohibition of what? What are you talking about?” His hands are shaking, he realises. “I need a drink.”

  “Prohibition of grass 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 redneck klansmen for the next two hundred years. It’s bad for the skin, I hear.” She stands up and heads towards 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 carefully hand-packed 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 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 kilometres per hour, hundreds of metres below. “Clip the red hook to the blue static line eye,” says the harness. “Clip the —”

  “I get the picture,” Huw mutters. 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 towards a clearing in the mangrove swamp.