Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  “And what exactly is your population these days, mayor?” inquired Tanselle.

  “Nearly five thousand.”

  Tanselle shook her head reflectively, as if to say, thought Pertinax, Would that it were even fewer.

  After some additional civic boosterism, the party, considerably enlarged by various gawking hangers-on, arrived at a large, grassy town square, where goats and sheep grazed freely. Ranked across the lawn, tethered securely, were several small lighter-than-air balloons with attached gondolas of moderate size. The shiny lacquered patchwork fabric of the balloons lent them a circus air belied by the solemn unease which the mayor and his cohorts eyed the balloons.

  Immediately, Pertinax’s ears pricked forward at this unexpected sight and the humans’ nervous regard for the objects. “What are these for?” he asked.

  Mayor Brost replied almost too swiftly. “Oh, these little toys have half a dozen uses. We send up lightweight volunteers to spy out nearby bison herds so that our hunting parties will save some time and trouble. We make surveys from the air for our road-building. And of course, the children enjoy a ride now and then. The balloons won’t carry much more weight than a child.”

  “I’d like to examine them.”

  “Certainly.”

  Pertinax clambered down off Flossy. Standing among the humans, the top of his head just cleared their belt buckles. He was soon joined by his fellow wardens, who moved through the crowd like a band of determined furry dwarves.

  The balloons featured no burners to inflate their straining shapes. Pertinax inquired as to their source of gas.

  Highlighting the mechanisms, Mayor Brost recited proudly. “Each balloon hosts a colony of methanogenic bacteria and a food supply. Increasing the flow of nutrients makes more gas. Closing the petcocks shuts them down.”

  Pertinax stepped back warily from his close-up inspection of the balloons. “They’re highly explosive, then.”

  “I suppose. But we maintain adequate safety measures around them.”

  The wardens regrouped off to one side and consulted quietly among themselves.

  “Any explosion of this magnitude in the tropospheric mind would do no more damage than a conventional rain squall,” said Cimabue.

  “Agreed,” said Chellapilla. “But what if the explosion was meant to disperse some kind of contaminant carried as cargo?”

  “Such as?” asked Tanselle.

  “No suitably dangerous substance occurs to me at the moment,” Sylvanus said, stroking his chin whiskers.

  “Nonetheless,” cautioned Pertinax, “I have a feeling that here lies the danger facing the tropospheric mind. Let us continue our investigations for the missing part of the puzzle.”

  Pertinax returned to address the Mayor. “Our mounts need to forage, while we continue our inspection of your town. We propose to leave them here on the green. They will not bother people or livestock, but you should advise your citizens not to molest them. The Kangemu are trained to deal harshly with threats to themselves or their masters.”

  “There will of course be no such problems,” said the mayor.

  Sylvanus advised splitting their forces into two teams for swifter coverage of the human settlement, while he himself, in deference to his age and tiredness, remained behind with their mounts to coordinate the searching. Naturally, Pertinax chose to team up with Chellapilla.

  The subsequent hours found Pertinax and his lover roaming unhindered through every part of the human village. Most of the citizens appeared friendly, although some exhibited irritation or a muted hostility at the queries of the wardens. Pertinax and Chellapilla paused only a few minutes to bolt down some cold food around midafternoon before continuing their so-far fruitless search.

  Eventually they found themselves down by some primitive docks, watching the small fishing fleet of “Chicago” tie up for the evening. The fishermen, shouldering their day’s bounty in woven baskets, moved warily past the weary wardens.

  “Well, I’m stumped,” confessed Pertinax. “If they’re hiding something, they’ve concealed it well.”

  Chellapilla said, “Maybe we’re going about this wrong. Let’s ask what could harm the virgula and sublimula, instead of just expecting to recognize the agent when we see it.”

  “Well, really only other virgula and sublimula, which of course the humans have no way of fashioning.”

  “Ah, but what of rogue lobes?”

  The natural precipitation cycles brought infinite numbers of virgula and sublimula down from their habitats in the clouds to ground level. When separated from the tropospheric mind in this way, the components of the mind were programmed for apoptosis. But occasionally a colony of virgula and sublimula would fail to self-destruct, instead clumping together into a rogue lobe. Isolated from the parent mind, the lobes frequently went insane before eventually succumbing to environmental stresses. Sometimes, though, a lobe could live a surprisingly long time if it found the right conditions.

  “Do you think local factors in the lake here might encourage lobe formations?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” answered Chellapilla.

  It took only another half hour of prowling the lake shore, scrambling over slippery rocks and across pebbled strands, to discover a small lobe.

  Thick intelligent slime latticed with various organic elements—pond weeds, zebra mussels, a disintegrating bird carcass—lay draped across a boulder, a mucosal sac with the processing power of a nonautonomous twenty-second-century AI. The slime was liquescently displaying its mad internal thoughts just as a mail cloud did: fractured images of the natural world, blazes of equations, shards of old human culture Ante-Upflowering, elaborate mathematical constructions. A steady whisper of jagged sounds, a schizophrenic monologue, accompanied the display.

  Pertinax stared horrified. “Uploading this fragment of chaos to the tropospheric mind would engender destabilizing waves of disinformation across the skies. The humans don’t even need to explode their balloons. Simply letting the mind automatically read the slime would be enough.”

  “We can’t allow this to happen.”

  “Let’s hurry back to the others.”

  “You damned toothy rat-dogs aren’t going anywhere.”

  A squad of humans had come stealthily upon Pertinax and Chellapilla while their attentions were engaged by the lobe. With rifles leveled at their heads, the wardens had no recourse but to raise their hands in surrender.

  Two men came to bind the wardens. The one dealing with Chellapilla twisted her arms cruelly behind her, causing her to squeal. Maddened by the sound, Pertinax broke free and hurled himself at one of the gun bearers. But a riflestock connected with his skull, and he knew only blackness.

  When Pertinax awoke, night had fallen. He found himself with limbs bound, lying in a cage improvised from thick branches rammed deep into the soil and lashed together. He struggled to rise, and thus attracted the attentions of his fellow captives.

  Similarly bound, Chellapilla squirmed across the grass to her mate. “Oh, Perty, I’m so glad you’re awake! We were afraid you had a concussion.”

  “No, I’m fine. And you?”

  “Just sore. Once you were knocked out, they didn’t really hurt me further.”

  Sylvanus’s sad voice reached Pertinax as well. “Welcome back, my lad. We’re in a fine mess now, and it’s all my fault for underestimating the harmful intentions of these savages.”

  Firelight flared up some meters away, accompanied by the roar of a human crowd. “Where are we?”

  “We’re on the town green,” said Chellapilla. “The humans are celebrating their victory over us. They slaughtered our Kangemu and are roasting them for a feast.”

  “Barbarians!”

  Tanselle spoke. “Cimabue and I are here as well, Pertinax, but he did not escape so easily as you. They clubbed him viciously when he fought back. Now his breathing is erratic, and he won’t respond.”

  “We have to do something!”

  “But what?” i
nquired Sylvanus.

  “The least we can do,” said Chellapilla, “is inform the tropospheric mind of our troubles and the threat from rogue lobe infection. Maybe the mind will know what to do.”

  Pertinax considered this proposal. “That’s a sound idea, Chell. But I suspect our pigeons have already served as appetizers.” He paused as an idea struck him. “But I know a way to reach the mind. First I need to be free. You three will have to chew my ropes off.”

  Shielded by darkness, without any guards to note their activities and interfere (how helpless the humans must have deemed them!), his three fellows quickly chewed through Pertinax’s bonds with their sturdy teeth and powerful jaws. His first action after massaging his limbs back into a semblance of strength was to take off his robe and stuff it with dirt and grass into a rough recumbent dummy that would satisfy a cursory headcount. Then, employing his own untaxed jaw muscles, he beavered his way out of the cage.

  “Be careful, Perty!” whispered Chellapilla, but Pertinax did not pause to reply.

  Naked, dashing low across the yard from shadow to shadow, Pertinax reached one of the tethered balloons without being detected. Nearby stood a giant ceramic pot with a poorly fitting lid. Shards of light and sound escaped from the pot, betokening the presence of a malignant rogue lobe within. Plainly, infection of the tropospheric mind was imminent. This realization hastened Pertinax’s actions.

  First he kicked up the feed on one balloon’s colony of methanogens. That vehicle began to tug even more heartily at its tethers. Moving among the other balloons, Pertinax disabled them by snapping their nutrient feed lines. At the very least, this would delay the assault on the mind.

  Pertinax leaped onboard the lone functional balloon and cast off. He rose swiftly to the height of several meters before he was spotted. Shouts filled the night. Something whizzed by Pertinax’s head, and he ducked. A barbed projectile from one of the compressed-air guns. Pertinax doubted the weapons possessed enough force to harm him or the balloon at this altitude, but he remained hunkered down for a few more minutes nonetheless.

  Would the humans take revenge on their remaining captives? Pertinax couldn’t spare the energy for worry. He had a mission to complete.

  Within the space of fifteen minutes, Pertinax floated among the lowest clouds, the nearest gauzy interface to the tropospheric mind. Their dampness subtly enwrapped him, until he was soaked and shivering. His head seemed to attract a thicker constellation of fog.…

  A small auroral screen opened up in the sky not four meters from Pertinax. He could smell the scorched molecules associated with the display.

  Don Corleone appeared on the screen: one or more of the resident AIs taking a form deemed familiar from Pertinax’s recent past viewing records.

  “You have done well to bring us this information, steward. We will now enforce our justice on the humans.”

  Pertinax’s teeth chattered. “Puh-please try to spare my companions.”

  The representative of the tropospheric mind did not deign to reply, and the screen winked out in a frazzle of sparks.

  The night sky grew darker, if such was possible. Ominous rumbles sounded from the west. Winds began to rise.

  The mind was marshaling a storm. A lightning storm. And Pertinax was riding a bomb.

  Pertinax frantically shut off the feeder line to the methanogens. The balloon began to descend, but all too slowly for Pertinax’s peace of mind.

  The first lightning strike impacted the ground far below, after seeming to sizzle right past Pertinax’s nose. He knew the bolt must have been farther off than that, but anywhere closer than the next bioregion was too close.

  Now shafts of fire began to rain down at supernatural frequency. Turbulence rocked the gondola. Thunder deafened him. Pertinax’s throat felt raw, and he realized he had been shouting for help from the balloon or the mind or anyone else who might be around to hear.

  Now the cascade of lighting was nigh incessant, one deadly strike after another on the Overclockers’ village. Pertinax knew he could stay no longer with the deadly balloon. But the ground was still some hundred meters away.

  Pertinax jumped.

  Behind him the balloon exploded.

  Pertinax spread out his arms, transforming the big loose flaps of skin anchored from armpits to ankles into wings, wings derived from one of his ancestral strains, the sciuridae.

  After spiraling downward with some control, despite the gusts, Pertinax landed lightly, on an open patch of ground near a wooden sign that announced the “City Limits” of “Chicago.”

  He had arrived just in time for the twister.

  Illuminated intermittently by the slackening lightning, the stygian funnel shape tracked onto land from across the lake and stepped into the human settlement, moving in an intelligent and programmatic fashion among the buildings.

  Even at this distance, the wind threatened to pull Pertinax off his feet. He scrambled for a nearby tree and held on to its trunk for dear life.

  At last, though, the destruction wrought by the tropospheric mind ended, and the twister evaporated in a coordinated manner from bottom to top.

  Pertinax ran back toward the town green.

  The many fires caused by the lightning had been effectively doused by the wet cyclone, but still, buildings smoldered. Not one stone seemed atop another, nor plank joined to plank. The few Overclocker survivors were too dazed or busy to interfere with Pertinax.

  Seared streaks marked the town green, and huge divots had been wrenched up by the twister. Windblown litter made running difficult.

  But a circle of lawn around the cage holding the wardens was immaculate, having been excluded from electrical blasts and then cradled in a deliberate eye of the winds.

  “Is everyone all right?”

  “Perty! You did it! Yes, we’re all fine. Even Cimabue is finally coming around.”

  Within a short time all were freed. Pertinax clutched Chellapilla to him. Sylvanus surveyed the devastation, clucking his tongue ruefully.

  “Such a tragedy. Well, I expect that once we relocate the remnant population, we can wean them off our help and back up to some kind of agrarian self-sufficiency in just a few generations.”

  Pertinax felt now an even greater urgency to engender a heir or two with Chellapilla. The demands on the stewards of this beloved planet required new blood to sustain their mission down the years.

  “Chell, have you decided about our child?”

  “Absolutely, Perty. I’m ready. I’ve even thought of a name.”

  “Oh?”

  “Boy or girl, it will have to be Storm!”

  As with “Observable Things,” this piece derives its existence from the solicitation of an excellent fiction writer who just happened to be playing editor for one project. Wil McCarthy’s Once Upon a Galaxy had as its premise the restaging of fairy tales in SF terms. I immediately jumped on the saga of Puss in Boots—ahem, long before a certain green cinematic ogre started palling around with Puss—and decided to incorporate as much homage as possible to SF I had loved. Hence the presence of Larry Niven’s variable swords, Frank Herbert’s sandworms, and so forth.

  Chosen to be reprinted in two best-of-the-year anthologies, this story seems to show the esteem in which displays of “galactic core values” are still held.

  Ailoura

  The small aircraft swiftly bisected the cloudless chartreuse sky. Invisible encrypted transmissions raced ahead of it. Clearance returned immediately from the distant, turreted manse—Stoessl House, looming in the otherwise empty riven landscape like some precipice-perching raptor. The ever-unsleeping family marchwarden obligingly shut down the manse’s defenses, allowing an approach and landing. Within minutes, Geisen Stoessl had docked his small deltoid zipflyte on one of the tenth-floor platforms of Stoessl House, cantilevered over the flood-sculpted, candy-colored arroyos of the Subliminal Desert.

  Geisen unseamed the canopy and leaped easily out onto the broad sintered terrace, unpeopled at this tragic, neces
sary, hopeful moment. Still clad in his dusty expeditionary clothes, goggles slung around his neck, Geisen resembled a living marble version of some young roughneck godling. Slim, wiry, and alert, with his laughter-creased, soil-powdered face now set in solemn lines absurdly counterpointed by a mask of clean skin around his recently shielded green eyes, Geisen paused a moment to brush from his protective suit the heaviest evidence of his recent wildcat digging in the Lustrous Wastes. Satisfied that he had made some small improvement in his appearance upon this weighty occasion, he advanced toward the portal leading inside. But before he could actuate the door, it opened from within.

  Framed in the door stood a lanky, robe-draped bestient: Vicuna, his mother’s most valued servant. Set squarely in Vicuna’s wedge-shaped hirsute face, the haughty maid’s broad velveteen nose wrinkled imperiously in disgust at Geisen’s appearance, but the moreauvian refrained from voicing her disapproval of that matter in favor of other upbraidings.

  “You arrive barely in time, Gep Stoessl. Your father approaches the limits of artificial maintenance, and is due to be reborn any minute. Your mother and brothers already anxiously occupy the Natal Chambers.”

  Following the inhumanly articulated servant into Stoessl House, Geisen answered, “I’m aware of all that, Vicuna. But traveling halfway around Chalk can’t be accomplished in an instant.”

  “It was your choice to absent yourself during this crucial time.”

  “Why crucial? This will be Vomacht’s third reincarnation. Presumably this one will go as smoothly as the first two.”

  “So one would hope.”

  Geisen tried to puzzle out the subtext of Vicuna’s ambiguous comment, but could emerge with no clue regarding the current state of the generally complicated affairs within Stoessl House. He had obviously been away too long—too busy enjoying his own lonely but satisfying prospecting trips on behalf of the family enterprise—to be able to grasp the daily political machinations of his relatives.