Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  “Pertinax, my friend, I regret this interruption of your studies and recreations, but I have some dramatic news requiring our attention. It appears that the Overclockers at their small settlement known as ‘Chicago’ are about to launch an assault on the tropospherical mind. Given their primitive methods, I doubt they can inflict permanent damage. But their mean-spirited sabotage might very well cause local disruptions before the mind repairs itself. I know you have several projects running currently, and I would hate to see you lose any data during a period of limited chaos. I would certainly regret any setbacks to my ongoing modeling of accelerated hopper embryogenesis. Therefore, I propose that a group of those wardens most concerned form a delegation to visit the Overclockers and attempt to dissuade them from such malicious tampering. Mumbaugh has declined to participate—he’s busy dealing with an infestation of hemlock mites attacking the forests of his region—but I have firm committments from Cimabue, Tanselle, and Chellapilla. I realize that it is irksome to leave behind the comforts of your home to make such a trip. But I am hoping that I may count on your participation, as well. Please reply quickly, as time is of the essence.”

  Its mail delivered, the cloud wisped away into its mesoscopic constituent parts. A light misty drizzle refreshed Pertinax’s face. But otherwise he was left with only the uneasy feelings occasioned by the message.

  Of course he would help Sylvanus. Interference with the tropospherical mind could not be tolerated. The nerve of those Overclockers!

  Not for the first time, nor probably the last, Pertinax ruefully contemplated the dubious charity of the long-departed Upflowered.

  When 99.9 percent of humanity had abandoned the Earth for greener intergalactic pastures during the Upflowering, the leavetakers had performed several final tasks. They had rearcadized the whole globe, wiping away nearly every vestige of mankind’s crude twenty-second-century protocivilization, and restocked the seas and plains with many beasts. They had established Pertinax and his fellows—a small corps of ensouled, spliced, and redacted domestic animals—as caretakers of the restored Earth. They had charitably set up a few agrarian reservations for the small number of dissidents and malfunctioning humans who chose to remain behind, stubbornly unaltered in their basic capabilities from their archaic genetic baseline. And they had uploaded every vestige of existing machine intelligence and their knowledge bases to a new platform: an airborne network of minuscule, self-replenishing components, integrated with the planet’s meteorological systems.

  During the intervening centuries, the remaining archaic humans—dubbed the Overclockers for their uncanny devotion to both speed and the false quantization of holistic imponderables—had gradually dragged themselves back up to a certain level of technological achievement. Now, it seemed, they were on the point of making a nuisance of themselves. This could not be tolerated.

  Hurrying back into his compact domicile, Pertinax readied his reply to Sylvanus. From a small door inset in one wall, which opened onto a coop fixed to the outside wall, Pertinax retrieved a mail pigeon. He placed the docile murmuring bird on a tabletop and fed it some special seed scooped from one compartment of a feed bin. While he waited for the virgula and sublimula within the seed to take effect, Pertinax supplied his own lunch: a plate of carrots and celery, the latter smeared with delicious bean paste. By the time Pertinax had finished his repast, cleaning his fur with the side of one paw-hand all the way from muzzle to tufted ear tips, the pigeon was locked into recording mode, staring ahead fixedly, as if hypnotized by a predator.

  Pertinax positioned himself within the bird’s field of vision. “Sylvanus, my peer, I enlist wholeheartedly in your mission! Although my use of the tropospheric mind is negligible compared with your own employment of the system, I do have all my statistics and observations from a century of avian migrations stored there. Should the data and its backups be corrupted, the loss of such a record would be disastrous! I propose to set out immediately by hopper for Chicago. Should you likewise leave upon receipt of this message, I believe our paths will intersect somewhere around these coordinates.” Pertinax recited latitude and longitude figures. “Simply ping my hopper when you get close enough, and we’ll meet to continue the rest of our journey together. Travel safely.”

  Pertinax recited the verbal tag that brought the pigeon out of its trance. The bird resumed its lively attitude, plainly ready to perform its share of the mail delivery. Pertinax cradled the bird against his oddly muscled chest and stepped outside. He lofted the pigeon upward, and it began to stroke the sky bravely.

  Once within the lowest layers of the tropospheric mind, the bird would have its brain states recorded by an ethereal cap of spontaneously congregating virgula and sublimula, and the bird would be free to return to its coop.

  Pertinax’s message would thus enter the meterological medium and be propagated across the intervening leagues to Sylvanus. Like a wave in the ocean, the information was not dependent upon any unique set of entities to constitute its identity, and so could travel faster than simple forward motion of particles might suggest. To span the globe from Pertinax to the antipodes took approximately twelve hours, and Sylvanus lived much closer. Not as fast as the ancient quantum-entanglement methods extant in the days before the Upflowering. But then again, the pace of life among the stewards was much less frenzied than it had been among the ancestors of the Overclockers.

  Having seen his mail on its way, Pertinax commenced the rest of his preparations for his trip. He finished feeding his parrot tulips, giving them a little extra to see them through his time away from home. If delayed overlong, Pertinax knew they would estivate safely till his return. Then from a cupboard he took a set of large saddlebags. Into these pouches he placed victuals for himself and several packets of multipurpose pigeon seed, as well as a few treats and vitamin pills to supplement the forage that his hopper would subsist on during the journey. He looked fondly at his neat, comfortable bed, whose familiar refuge he would miss. No taking that, of course! But the hopper would provide a decent alternative. Pertinax added a few other miscellaneous items to his pack, then deemed his provisions complete.

  Stepping outside, Pertinax took one fond look back inside before shutting and latching his door. He went around shuttering all the windows as a precaution against the storms that sometimes accompanied the more demanding calculations of the tropospheric mind. From the pigeon coop he withdrew three birds and placed them in a loosely woven wicker carrier. Then he took a few dozen strides to the hopper corral, formed of high walls of living ironthorn bush.

  Pertinax’s hopper was named Flossy, a fine mare. The redacted Kodiak kangemu stood three meters tall at her shoulders. Her pelt was a curious blend of chestnut fur and gray feathers; her fast-twitch-muscled legs were banded with bright yellow scales along the lower third above her enormous feet. A thick strong tail jutted backwards for almost half Flossy’s length.

  Pertinax tossed Flossy a treat, which she snapped from the air with her long jaws. In the stable attached to the corral, Pertinax secured a saddle. This seat resembled a papoose or backpack, with two shoulder straps. Outside again, Pertinax opened the corral gate—formed of conventional timbers—and beckoned to Flossy, who obediently came out and hunkered down. Holding the saddle up above his head, Pertinax aided Flossy in shrugging into the seat. He cinched the straps, then hung his saddlebags from one lower side of the seat and the wicker basket containing the pigeons from the other. Deftly Pertinax scrambled up, employing handholds of Flossy’s fur, and ensconced himself comfortably, the seat leaving his arms free but cradling his back and neck. His head was now positioned above Flossy’s, giving him a clear view of his path. He gripped Flossy’s big upright ears firmly yet not harshly and urged his mount around to face northeast.

  “Gee up, Flossy,” said Pertinax, and they were off.

  Flossy’s gait was the queerest mixture of hopping, vaulting, running, and lumbering, a mode of locomotion unknown to baseline creation. But Pertinax found it soothing, and his
steed certainly ate up the kilometers.

  For the first few hours, Pertinax enjoyed surveying his immediate territory, quite familiar and beloved, noting subtle changes in the fauna and flora of the prairie that distance brought. In early afternoon he stopped for a meal, allowing Flossy to forage. Taking out a pigeon and prepping the bird, Pertinax recited his morning’s scientific observations to be uploaded to the tropospheric mind. Its data delivered, the bird homed back to Pertinax rather than the cottage. In less than an hour, the warden was under way again.

  Pertinax fell asleep in the saddle and awoke at dusk. He halted Flossy and dismounted to make camp. With the saddle off, Flossy cropped wearily nearby. The first thing Pertinax attended to was the establishment of a security zone. A pheromonal broadcaster would disseminate the warden’s exaggerated chemical signature for kilometers in every direction, a note that all of wild creation was primed by the Upflowered to respond to. Avoidance of the distinctive trace had been built into their ancestors’ genes. (The bodily signature had to be masked for up close work with animals.) Pertinax had no desire to be trampled in the night by a herd of bison, or attacked by any of the region’s many predators. Sentient enemies were nonexistent, with the nearest Overclockers confined by their limited capacities nearly one thousand kilometers away in Chicago.

  After setting up the small scent-broadcast unit, Pertinax contemplated summoning forth some entertainment. But in the end he decided he was just too tired to enjoy any of the many offerings of the tropospheric mind, and that he would rather simply go to sleep.

  The upright Flossy, balanced tripodally on her long tail, was already herself half a-drowse, and she made only the softest of burblings when Pertinax clambered into her capacious marsupial pouch. Dry and lined with a soft down, the pouch smelled like the nest of some woodland creature, and Pertinax fell asleep feeling safe and cherished.

  The morning dawned like the first day of the world, crisp and inviting. Emerging from his nocturnal pouch, Pertinax noted that night had brought a heavy dew that would have soaked him had he been dossing rough. But instead he had enjoyed a fine, dry, restful sleep.

  Moving off a ways from the grumbling Flossy and casting about with a practiced eye, Pertinax managed to spot some untended prairie chicken nests amidst the grassy swales. He robbed them of an egg apiece without compunction (the population of the birds was robust), and soon a fragrant omelette, seasoned with herbs from home, sizzled over a small propane burner. (Pertinax obtained the flammable gas from his universal proseity device, just as he supplied many of his needs.)

  After enjoying his meal, Pertinax dispatched a pigeon upward to obtain from the tropospheric mind his positional reading, derived from various inputs such as constellational and magnetic. The coordinates, cloud-blazoned temporarily on the sky in digits meters long, informed Pertinax that Flossy had carried him nearly 150 kilometers during their previous half-day of travel. At this rate, he’d join up with Sylvanus on the morrow, and with the others a day later. Then the five stewards would reach Chicago around noon of the fourth day.

  Past that point, all certainty vanished. How the Overclockers would react to the arrival of the wardens, how the wardens would dissuade the humans from tampering with the planetary mind, what they would do if they met resistance—all this remained obscure.

  Remounting Flossy, Pertinax easily put the uncertainty from his mind. Neither he nor his kind were prone to angst. So, once on his way, he reveled instead in the glorious day and the unfolding spectacle of a nature reigning supreme over an untarnished globe.

  Herds of bisons thundered past at a safe distance during various intervals along Pertinax’s journey. Around noon a nearly interminable flock of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. A colony of prairie dogs stretching across hectares mounted a noisy and stern defense of their town.

  That night replicated the simple pleasures of the previous one. Before bedding down, Pertinax enjoyed a fine display of icy micrometeorites flashing into the atmosphere. The Upflowered had arranged a regular replenishment of Earth’s water budget via this cosmic source before they left.

  Around noon on the second full day of travel, with the landscape subtly changing as they departed one bioregion for another, Pertinax felt a sudden quivering alertness thrill through Flossy. She had plainly pinged the must of Sylvanus’s steed (a stallion named Bix) on the wind, and needed no help from her rider to zero in on her fellow Kodiak kangemu. Minutes later, Pertinax himself espied Sylvanus and his mount, a tiny conjoined dot in the distance.

  Before long, the two wardens were afoot and clasping each other warmly, while their hoppers boxed affectionately at each other.

  “Pertinax, you’re looking glossy as a foal! How I wish I were your age again!”

  “Nonsense, Sylvanus, you look splendid yourself. After all, you’re far from old. A hundred and twenty-nine last year, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, yes, but the weary bones still creak more than they did when I was a young buck like you, a mere sixty-eight. Some days I just want to drop my duties and retire. But I need to groom a successor first. If only you and Chellapilla—”

  Pertinax interrupted his elder friend. “Perhaps Chellapilla and I have been selfish. I confess to feeling guilty about this matter from time to time. But the demands on our energies seemed always to preclude parentage. I’ll discuss it with her tomorrow. And don’t forget, there’s always Cimabue and Tanselle.”

  Sylvanus clapped a hearty paw-hand on Pertinax’s shoulder. “They’re fine stewards, my boy, but I had always dreamed of your child stepping into my shoes.”

  Pertinax lowered his eyes. “I’m honored, Sylvanus. Let me speak of this with Chell.”

  “That’s all I ask. Now I suppose we should be on our way again.”

  It took some sharp admonishments and a few coercive treats to convince Bix and Flossy to abandon their play for the moment and resume travel, but eventually the two wardens again raced northeast toward their unannounced appointment with the Overclockers.

  That night before turning in, Sylvanus suggested some entertainment.

  “I have not viewed any historical videos for some time now. Would you care to see one?”

  “Certainly. Do you have a suggestion?”

  “What about The Godfather?”

  “Part One?”

  “Yes.”

  “An excellent choice. Perhaps it will help to refresh our understanding of Overclocker psychology. I’ll send up a pigeon.”

  The sleepy bird responded sharply to the directorial seed and verbal instructions, then zoomed upward. While the wardens waited for the tropospheric mind to respond, they arranged their packs and saddles in a comfortable couch that allowed them to lie back and observe the nighted skies.

  In minutes a small audio cloud had formed low down near them, to provide the soundtrack. Then the high skies lit with colored cold fires.

  The new intelligent meterology allowed for auroral displays at any latitude of the globe, as cosmic rays were channeled by virgula and sublimula, then bent and manipulated to excite atoms and ions. Shaped and permuted on a pixel level by the distributed airborne mind, the auroral canvas possessed the resolution of a twentieth-century drive-in screen, and employed a sophisticated palette.

  Clear and bold as life, the antique movie began to unroll across the black empyrean. Snacking on dried salted crickets, the two stewards watched in rapt fascination until the conclusion of the film.

  “Most enlightening,” said Sylvanus. “We must be alert for such incomprehensible motives as well as deceptions and machinations among the Overclockers.”

  “Indeed, we would be foolish to anticipate any rationality at all from such a species. Their ancestors’ choice to secede from the Upflowering tells us all we need to know about their unchanged mentality.”

  Midafternoon of the next day found Sylvanus and Pertinax hard-pressed to restrain their rambunctious hoppers from charging toward three other approaching Kodiak kangemu. At the end of the mad gallop, fi
ve stewards were clustered in a congregation of hearty backslapping and embraces, while the frolicking hoppers cavorted nearby.

  After the general exchange of greetings and reassurances, Cimabue and Tanselle took Sylvanus one side to consult with him, leaving Pertinax and Chellapilla some privacy.

  Chellapilla smiled broadly, revealing a palisade of blunt healthy brown teeth. Her large hazel eyes sparkled with affection, and her leathery nostrils flared wetly. The past year since their last encounter had seen her acquire a deep ragged notch in one ear. Pertinax reached up to touch the healed wound. Chellapilla only laughed, before grabbing his paw-hand and kissing it.

  “Are you troubled by that little nick, Perty? Just a brush with a wounded wolverine when I was checking a trapline for specimens last winter. Well worth the information gained.”

  Pertinax found it hard to reconcile himself to Chellapilla’s sangfroid. “I worry about you, Chell. It’s a hard life we have sometimes, as isolated guardians of the biosphere. Don’t you wish, just once in a while, that we could live together? …”

  “Ah, of course I do! But where would that end? Two stewards together would become four, then a village, then a town, then a city of wardens. With our long lifespans, we’d soon overpopulate the world with our kind. And then Earth would be right back where it was in the twenty-second century.”

  “Surely not! Our species would not fall prey to the traps mankind stumbled into before the Upflowering.”

  Chellapilla smiled. “Oh, no, we’d be clever enough to invent new ones. No, it’s best this way. We have our pastoral work to occupy our intelligence, with the tropospheric mind to keep us in daily contact and face-to-face visits at regular intervals. It’s a good system.”

  “You’re right, I suppose. But still, when I see you in the flesh, Chell, I long for you so.”

  “Then let’s make the most of this assignment. We’ll have sweet memories to savor when we part.”

  Pertinax nuzzled Chellapilla’s long furred neck, and she shivered and clasped him close. Then he whispered his thoughts regarding Sylvanus’s desired retirement and the needful successor child into her ear.