For a full ninety seconds, his fogged brain failed to register what he was seeing, actually seeing in external reality. As far as he could tell. “They’re immature bugs!” the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants whispered in his ear. “Giant fucking larvae, dude!”
He tore at his eyes, but sure enough, the crate was filled with squirming featureless maggots the size of microwave ovens. Several had begun to pupate, enclosing themselves in the shells that would crack to discharge the adults of whatever the hell gruesome species they were.
One of his rare bad trips kicked in. The wriggling flesh hassocks creeped him out. A powerful vision seized him: roaches expanding, multiplying, filling the station from wall to wall. “Yaargh! Gotta get rid of the suckers!”
Jay hastily re-sealed the crate, and removed its PLSS unit. All he had to do now was cycle it back out to the airless cargo bay, and the unprotected bugs would die.
He pushed the crate toward the airlock. At the last moment, SpongeBob offered counsel.
“Man, somebody went to a lot of trouble to get these up here. These things must be valuable! Why not save at least one… ?”
“Good idea!”
Jay soon had a single grub hidden inside an empty suit, tethered by netting to the wall of the workspace. With luck, it would survive and not be found until he could get it back to his quarters. His humour was mellowing again. Hey, who knew what might hatch out of it? Something pretty cool, maybe.
“Great job!” said SpongeBob. “Let’s hit the dining hall for a Crabby Patty now!”
“Yeah!”
“You son of a whoring bitch!” Kay shrieked, gazing at the pink-tipped strip of paper in her trembling hand with its pink-mauve + sign. A drop of urine dripped off of it, splashed her bare foot. If the kit did not lie, her uterus was flooded with chorionic gonadotropin. Was invaded. She rooted frantically through her packs of pills. A rushed count showed none missing. What the hell? Had the bastard purchased some exhausted stock from a crooked Bolivian recycling pharmacy, via Web2Bay? Substituted the past-use-by dud product for her own contraceptives? The print was too small to tell. “I informed you it was too soon for this! I have my diplomatic career to consider, you ridiculous sentimentalist.”
In the living room, Elwood had his forehead pressed to the new patterned mat he’d extended over the parquet. Outside, the usual unearthly wailing rose from a plasticized carbon-bonded minaret erected with grudging city approval just across from the Farmer’s Market. The Adhan rose and fell, calling the faithful to early morning salat prayer. “Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasūlullāh,” El murmured ecstatically. “Hayya ‘alā Khair al-’amal.”
“Make haste toward the best thing yourself, you pig of a pig.” Wasn’t it enough that she had to put up with this ululating in Cairo, where she’d spent six weeks in a crash Arabic course using the powerful mnemonic principles of the Pole, Piotr Wozniak. “What’s the idea? And get up off the floor, you fool, you’re an Episcopalian and a third-degree Mason, not a Muslim.”
El lifted his spirochaete-laden head dazedly. “We are all part of the body of the Umma,” he explained. “So mote it be.”
“Well, something else is part of my body now, you sorry excuse. I’m pregnant!”
After a pause for pious thought, El told her, “I forgive you.”
“Will you be taking breakfast, madame?” asked the roach, putting its head in from the kitchenette. “And congratulations on the baby—I’m in the family way myself.”
Kay seized a bright green apple from a decorative bowl of wax fruit in the centre of the table, flung it at the creature; the fake apple caught in the plates of its back. “And I know who the hell the father is! Elwood, you disgust me. How could you fuck a thing like that, and then bring your soiled seed to our marriage bed?” It’s affected his mind, she thought. Infected his mind. And probably his body as well. She shuddered, feeling befouled.
“Verily,” El expounded, “prayer prevents the worshipper from indulging in anything that is undignified or indecent. That’s Surah Al-Ankabut, chapter 29, verse 46.” He got to his feet, a look of crazed passion in his eye. “They can all grow up together. They can attend Naval Prep School, in historic Newport, Rhode Island, as I did, and my father before me. Imagine them in the rigging! Six legs good!” Foam was starting to seep from the edges of his mouth.
A hideous peeping came from the kitchenette, as of a nestful of baby chicks calling their mother. Kay’s face drained of blood. No, not chicks. They probably hunted down chicks and ate them raw. And what the hell was growing inside her?
“I’m going to kill you,” she told her deluded spouse. She picked up an ornamental brass poker from the set of Ralph Lauren accessories resting beside the ornamental fake fireplace, and hoisted it lustily above her head. “I’m going to fucking murder and skin you, and then I’m driving straight to the Prince George’s clinic.”
Elwood Grackle grabbed a defensive dining room chair by its cushioned back, but left it dangling. “Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you,” he warned, “but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors. Kill them whenever you confront them and drive them from where they drove you. Surah 2, verses 190–191.”
“We’re fresh out of eggs,” Emma called in her abrasive voice. “Anyone for a sliced sausage?”
Aboard Google PowerSat #9, Jay Stoner was entertaining a visitor in his private room, a room admittedly smaller than the average terrestrial capsule-hotel accommodations. Luckily, the visitor could be cradled and compassed completely within the circle of Jay’s arms.
The gently squirming peristaltic mass of the lone surviving smuggled larva, retrieved from its hiding place, radiated a kind of numinous pet-like comfort into Jay’s quiveringly drug-sensitized brain, traversing all interspecies communication gaps and barriers. Waves of wordless approbation laved him. Damn! This thing was just like a Tribble! Shame he had killed all the others, he could’ve sold them to his fellow crew members. Life aboard the solar-power station could be harsh and boring, despite both management-approved and illicit recreations, and any additional source of comfort was always eagerly sought. But all the other bugs were irrevocably gone now, and Jay wasn’t one for crying over spilled bongwater.
Suddenly a floating copyright mark akin to Jay’s own anime tats drifted up to display itself beneath the larva’s epidermis, much like an answer appearing in the window of a Magic Eight Ball.
“N-5397-batch5,” read Jay aloud. “Aw, is dat your widdle name-ums? Uncle Jay is gonna call you Enny. Enny-wenny-wenny-henny-penny!”
Jay began to tickle the bug, and gushes of telepathic gratitude swamped his senses. “What does Enny-wenny want now? Sugar water? A widdle sweater to stay warm?”
The flood of love pouring out of the larva almost instantly transmuted to hate. Jay was stunned and saddened. But then he realized that the hate was not directed against him. Oh, no! Enny’s anger and pain represented a lashing-out against the bug’s creators, the men who had placed Enny and cousins on a one-way trip to space, away from all familiar earthly pleasures, to carry out their greedy schemes like disposable grunts on the front lines of corporate wars.
“Tell me, tell me, Enny! Who did it to you! Who must suffer your sweet, sweet ichorous revenge!”
Images marched through Jay’s brain. Arabs in their robes, state offices, a seaside city, signage—
“Yes, yes, Enny, I know who they are! Bastards! We’ll make them pay! Soon, soon, just when the shift’s about to change—”
Jay smooshed his face into the warm pulpy haggis of the larva and smothered it with kisses.
Enny seemed content to wait.
“Nothing has gone wrong, qua wrong,” Professor Al Nahyan assured Sheikh Khalifa. His glowering master did not look especially assured. “The package was intercepted somehow. We had no way of perceiving in advance—”
“Quiet.” The Lion’s fingers, scented and beautifully manicured, drummed on an acre of black glass. The great office, blue lit, w
as refrigerator cold, its master wrapped in a fur-lined dishdasha. Qutaybah shivered. “One larva is still minimally responsive, you say?”
“Yes, yes—within certain unpredictable limits. But there are very many more on the ground, naturally. Ready to give birth, if the induced mutations hold steady. Some have already been through parturition.” He checked his babbling tendency to persiflage under stress. “They are very… compulsive animals. The second generation individuals are even more potent. With 65 percent human genes, thanks to the maternal and paternal contributions, they are more anthropomorphic, and completely irresistible to either human sex. The Westerners will go extinct, wasting all their lusts on the bugs instead of breeding strong sons and modest daughters.”
The professor neglected to add that the hybrids would be fully Islamic in their outlook, due to the onboard spirochaetes of his devising—Plan B, as it were. He was still unsure of the legitimacy of conferring Koranic knowledge on another species.
“So I understand.” The Sheikh failed to fly into a rage, which was at once a blessed relief and a phenomenon beyond all understanding. Al Nahyan wrung his sweating hands, fearing for them. But the Sheikh merely lifted one of his own and flicked his fingers. Begone, said the fingers. The endocrino-entomologist scrambled gratefully from the room, reeling with the vertigo of terror. Clearly, geopolitical and theological factors were in play here well beyond his narrow, specialized knowledge. Beyond his need to know. He crept past crisp guards in military uniform and languid courtiers arrayed like peacocks by languid couturiers. The sun, when finally he escaped into the open, beat on his naked head like a cruel blessing. Like the justice and mercy of Allah.
In the distance, a voice called from the muezzin, called the Faithful to prayer.
But contrary to all his past devotional humility, all that professor Al Nahyan could think of was the image of his plump and attractive grad assistant, Miss Cayenne Sorbet, locked in carnal embrace with a second generation Kaf.
What a waste. I’ve completely thrown my life away….
Jay oozed stealth as he air-swam down the corridors of the satellite, mingling with the dispirited workers swapping posts. Enny rested hidden in a courier’s bag strapped to Jay’s back.
“Soon, Enny, soon,” Jay muttered, drawing no suspicions from his co-workers, who were certain he was merely addressing the ghost of Phil Silvers or John Lennon or Yogi Bear, as was his wont.
At the beam-control room, Jay encountered Bob Hazzard, itching to leave, and knew he had beaten Bob’s replacement to the door. Unquestioningly eager to leave, Bob allowed Jay inside.
Jay locked the door.
Fully automated, the cybernetic mechanisms that kept the output beam of PowerSat #9 focused on the rectenna farms in the deserts of the American west needed only to be monitored for freakish drift. But of course, manual overrides existed to allow a complete shift in target.
Unpacking Enny and allowing the larva to float beside his shoulder, Jay set to work.
Plugging in the GPS coordinates of Abu Dhabi took only seconds.
Fingers poised to stroke the touchscreen and send gigawatts of searing microwave radiation down upon the unsuspecting, unprotected emirate, Jay paused and turned to Enny.
“Is this really what you want, Enny?”
The savage surety of the bug’s response was unmistakeable.
Jay stroked.
In a D.C. townhouse, a man and a woman lay insensible on the floor, while dozens of second-generation infant Kafs swarmed over them, spreading mutagenic slime trails across their skin.
Emma watched with pride and pleasure. Like the heroine in one of The Master’s best books, Lolita, she knew that innocence was much deadlier than cunning any day.
The Sheikh Khalifah relaxed in his chair. He touched hidden contacts on his great desk; the doors locked with chunky authority. The smoky, polarized windows transitioned to complete opacity. He stroked a last button, and a brocaded, gilded basket rose from beneath the floor. Within the basket, a gleaming, jewel-crusted mutant bug turned her sleepy gaze upon him, preened her antennae.
“My lord,” she said.
“Come to me, you lovely bitch,” said the Lion of the Prophet, parting his blue-silver trimmed dishdasha.
The Sheikh was suddenly forced to shield his eyes. What unexpected nova could leak through the window films?
Only a city instantly aflame.
The contents of the office burst into flame, and for a final mortal second, the Sheik Khalifah learned that roasting Kaf smelled like lobster.
WAVES AND SMART MAGMA
Salt air stung Storm’s super-sensitive nose, although he was still several scores of kilometres distant from the coast. The temperate August sunlight, moderated by myriad high-orbit pico-satellites, one of the many thoughtful legacies of the Upflowered, descended as a soothing balm on Storm’s unclothed pelt. Several churning registers of flocculent clouds, stuffed full of the computational particles known as virgula and sublimula, betokened the watchful custodial omnipresence of the tropospherical mind. Peaceful and congenial was the landscape around him: a vast plain of black-leaved cinnabon trees, bisected by a wide, meandering river, the whole of which had once constituted the human city of Sacramento.
Storm reined to a halt his furred and feathered steed—the Kodiak Kangemu named Bergamot was a burly, scary-looking but utterly obedient bipedal chimera some three metres tall at its muscled shoulders, equipped with a high saddle and panniers—and paused for a moment of reflection.
The world was so big, and rich, and odd! And Storm was all alone in it!
That thought both frightened and elated him.
He felt he hardly knew himself or his goals, what depths or heights he was capable of. Whether he would live his long life totally independent of wardenly strictures, a rebel, or become an obedient part of the guardian corps of the planet. Hence this journey.
A sudden lance of light breaking through a bank of clouds brightened Storm’s spirits. Despite the distinct probability that the photons had been deliberately collimated by the tropospheric mind’s manipulation of water molecules as a signal to chivvy him onward.
Anything was possible, Storm realized. His destiny rested solely on the strength of his character and mind and muscles, and the luck of the Upflowered. Glory or doom, fame or ignominy, love or enmity…. His fate remained unwritten.
And so far he had not done too badly, giving him confidence for his future.
The young warden had now travelled much further from home than he ever had in his short life. All to barge in upon a perilous restoration and salvage mission whose members had known nothing of Storm’s very existence until a short time ago.
A gamble, to be sure, but one he had felt compelled to make. Perhaps his one and only chance for an adventure before settling down.
The death of Storm’s parents, the wardens Pertinax and Chellapilla, had left him utterly and instantly adrift. Although by all rights and traditions, Storm should have stepped directly into their role as one of the several wardens of the Great Lakes bioregion, he had balked. The conventional lives his parents had led, in obedience to the customs and innate design of their species did not appeal to Storm’s nature—at least not at this moment. Perhaps his unease with his assigned lot in life was due to the unusual conditions of his conception….
Some twenty years ago, five wardens, Storm’s parents among them, had undertaken an expedition to the human settlement of “Chicago,” one of the few places where those degraded homo sap remnants who had disdained the transcendence of the Upflowering still dwelled. During that dangerous enforcement action, which resulted in the destruction of the human village by the tropospheric mind, Storm had been conceived. Those suspenseful and tumultuous prenatal circumstances seemed to have left him predisposed to a characteristic restless thrill-seeking.
His conception and birth among the strictly reproductively regulated wardens had been sanctioned so that Storm might grow up to be a replacement for the elderly ward
en Sylvanus, who, at age one-hundred-and-twenty-eight, had already begun to ponder retirement.
And so Storm was raised in the cozy little prairie home—roofed with pangolin tiles, pots of greedy, squawking parrot tulips on the windowsill—shared by Pertinax and Chellapilla. His first two decades of life had consisted of education and play and exploration in equal measures. His responsibilities had been minimal.
Which explained his absence from the routine surveying expedition where his parents had met their deaths.
A malfunctioning warden-scent broadcaster had failed to protect their encampment from a migratory herd of galloping aurochs, and Storm’s parents had perished swiftly at midnight in each other’s arms in their tent.
Sylvanus, all grey around his muzzle and ear tufts, his once-sinewy limbs arthritic as he closed in on his second century, condoled with Storm.
“There, there, my poor boy, cry all you want. I know I’ve drained my eyes already on the trip from home to see you. Your parents were smart and capable and loving wardens, and lived full lives, even if they missed reaching a dotage such as mine. You can be proud of them. They always honoured and fulfilled the burdens bestowed on our kind by the Upflowered.”
At the mention of the posthumans who had spliced and redacted Storm’s species out of a hundred baseline genomes, Storm felt his emotions flipflopping from sadness to anger.
“Don’t mention the Upflowered to me! If not for them, my mother and father would still be alive!”
Sylvanus shook his wise old head. “If not for the Upflowered, none of our kind would exist at all, my son.”
“Rubbish! If they wanted to create us, they should have done so without conditions.”
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