Miss Brandymoon's Device: a novel of sex, nanotech, and a sentient lava lamp (Divided Man Book 1)

by Skelley, Rune

  Resuming his bird’s-eye position, Fin watched as the trees shed their horrid coats and began to right themselves. Here and there, small pockets of the muck remained dark. Some displayed a slight cloudiness. Some formed glossy, greenish-black crystals like obsidian or anthracite. They would give Rook an occasional twinge of regret, but that might even be a good thing.

  Fin slipped out of her head and concentrated on washing her body.

  She smiled at him. He smiled back.

  *** *** ***

  Fin approached the mass of pale spiders cautiously. Startling it would accomplish nothing good.

  He moved up to the doorway and cleared his throat. No response. He said, “Hello?” but the spidermind was silent. It didn’t want to talk, but it didn’t want him to leave.

  Fin said, quietly but sternly, “I’m not putting your Floating Wisdom back. So get over it.”

  Sadness overflowed the chamber. The mass-mind knew he would say that.

  As long as it understood.

  It did. This was futile. Fin couldn’t help.

  “Hold it. You’re the one who wanted me to come. This passive-aggressive routine isn’t going to sit well.”

  But what could he do?

  “Probably live to regret this decision...” Fin sought an entrance to the alien mind.

  It was all entrances, designed from the ground up for access. These portals were for new members. Not the kind of access Fin needed. He would need to get past the perimeter some other way. Make his own door.

  He tried to be as gentle as possible.

  Fin stood on a tiny island, a bleak hunk of basalt. A foaming opalescent sea undulated all around it, and hundreds of other islands like it. The level of the sea was falling fast, the shimmering surface receding so suddenly that at first he thought his gnarled tower of black rock was surging upward. He started studying the other lonely jagged monoliths but all hell broke loose.

  The sea came back, in the form of the next cataclysmic wave. It hammered the island and hurled tons of froth and spray far overhead. The top was swamped and Fin only narrowly avoided being swept off. The sea began to withdraw, calmly preparing for the next blitz.

  Fin wrung himself out and tried to focus on the symbolism here. The islands were token representations of the individual spiders, their present unity an approximation of what the Floating Wisdom had been. Not only was this smaller, it was looser. Vestiges of their separate personalities remained.

  Some relic of each individual was a good thing in a collective, a safeguard against the kind of callousness the Floating Wisdom displayed. The group mind would feel some empathy for the unassimilated, but these were too imperfectly arranged. Their unstable formation contributed to the depression.

  The next wave crashed through. His islet tilted a bit from the impact. He didn’t bother trying to dry off.

  The aliens still had partially understood memories of what it felt like to know everything, and were painfully aware of how much they had lost. This small collective wallowed in fear of the gaps in its understanding, when by human standards it was virtually omniscient.

  The sea was something like doubt. Not uncertainty, not lack of confidence. There was a taunting kind of saltiness in this sea. The might of all the things it didn’t know. So far, repeated drenchings with this exotic neurosis weren’t harming Fin, but it was rather unpleasant.

  If nothing changed, the surf would erode or topple all the protruding rocks. Those individual spiders would die, or perhaps detach from the collective. Eventually there would be too few to sustain even this stunted personality.

  Fin wondered why it should be up to him to save it. Was saving it even a good idea?

  He felt morally obligated. This was a person, by certain definitions, and although it was scared shitless of him it had given him its trust.

  Even the Floating Wisdom had assigned religious significance to Fin, and the spidermind worshipped him outright. It saw him as a savior.

  Might as well act the part.

  As the next breaker crashed down, he stepped from his perch and strode off.

  Walking on the sea of doubt was easy, because of the powerful countering force of his arrogance. Fin usually called it confidence, or resourcefulness, but why mince words here?

  He made his way to open water where the waves were rollers, not breakers. Much quieter.

  No land was visible other than the sad forest of volcanic crags. The sea looked like it went on forever, but there was something odd about the horizon. Venturing a bit farther from the island cluster, Fin spotted a rope stretched tightly at a set depth in the water. A wave took him upwards, so he waited until the next trough for another glimpse. As he bent to look closer he saw that it wasn’t a rope. It was the bottom edge of a sheet of some tough material that reached upwards out of sight. The distant, featureless horizon and vivid sunset were painted on this canvas that encircled the islands. Up close, the brushstrokes were obvious.

  A dim green glow infiltrated the water under the backdrop.

  Fin looked at the islets. The spidermind clearly believed the illusory endlessness of their sea, knew nothing of this barrier. Fin hiked along it for a while, and determined that it was stable. It seemed to be a natural part of the construct.

  Why shouldn’t it be? The sea couldn’t really be infinite, so this was a convenient bit of shorthand, just a way of saying ‘and so on.’

  He turned away from the boundary, heading back toward the islands. It had occurred to him that loitering near the perimeter might reveal its existence and bring the spiders a whole new existential dilemma. That wasn’t likely to help.

  But he thought he had an idea of what would.

  Fin planned to rearrange these rocks, tying them into a stronger whole but preserving their separate identities. He would place them in a ring, to better withstand the waves. Fin wandered among the standing stones, rising and falling with the sea. Weaving between and around them, he hummed.

  And nothing happened.

  Fin thought about shoving on some of the rocks to get them moving, but he knew that would only destabilize things and make the situation worse. He stopped and surveyed the forlorn archipelago, studied the crags and the play of mist around them, and he saw the problem.

  The spiders didn’t believe it would work. His approach seemed too simple. They expected their salvation to be more dramatic. Although Fin now understood what they wanted, he tried to think of some alternative, something that wouldn’t perpetuate their ridiculous deification of him.

  “You’re making this harder on both of us!”

  It wasn’t going to work any other way.

  From the water, he drew an outlandish bass fiddle made of brazen speculation. It was all fluted, reticulated spirals, something especially tacky from Neptune’s attic. It had tentacles like a jellyfish, stretched from an unsavory-looking orifice near the bottom to coil around the tips of the salt-encrusted trident at the top. Barnacles clinging to a nautilesque bulge controlled the instrument’s voice. Fin hoped its absurdity lent the moment sufficient spectacle, because he wasn’t sure he could top it.

  He began to play. Eerie, reverberating sounds, like whales baying at the moon.

  Now when Fin marched, the islets nearby followed. He had to admit this was fun.

  His path described a spiral, working his way around the group in several passes, entraining more spellbound rocks each time. On the fifth lap he picked up the last of the stragglers. He tightened his curve and had them neatly packed in a perfect circle at the end of the sixth lap. The next incoming wave lifted him to the top of the wall.

  It was impervious to the crashing surf now, and held a calm lagoon. Not wanting to leave this mind with a pool of gnawing doubt at its center, Fin hurled the bass into the lagoon. It sank, and the color of the liquid became rosier, spreading outward from the splash. For Rook he changed guilt into acceptance. Here he transformed doubt into wonder.

  Fin decided not to transmute the rest of the sea. An ocean of inquis
itiveness would get anyone into trouble.

  Things looked good. Fin felt proud. His sour attitude about putting on an act softened.

  He left the collective before he developed any paternal feelings for it.

  With continued coaching from Fin over the next day or so, the aliens became able to coordinate across greater distances. They could now operate their base at almost the same level as before he broke their religion, even increasing the gravity in a small block of rooms so the lovebirds would feel more at home.

  They readily agreed when Fin asked if he and Rook could spend their honeymoon on the asteroid to finish healing their relationship.

  *** *** ***

  Rook could tell Fin was trying to act solemn, but he kept snickering. She grinned at him and moved over to the bunks to root around for clothes, wondering what outfit would be most appropriate.

  Fin gave up on seriousness and said to Vesuvius, “We’re going to outer space. Wanna come along?”

  “Again?” Vesuvius murmured.

  Rook found a garbage bag full of her dresses and shed the borrowed bathrobe.

  “For real this time,” said Fin.

  “Does Mars need more women?”

  “You watch too much TV.”

  Rook chose a black and white harlequin-pattern miniskirt and a shaggy black sweater. As compatible with interplanetary travel as anything else she owned. A pair of white patent leather go-go boots completed the Barbarella look.

  Fin told Vesuvius, “We’ll get you later,” and put on the black jeans and dark green shirt Rook tossed him.

  Fin climbed the ladder and opened the hatch, and Rook followed him up into the late-afternoon sunshine.

  As they edged toward the street, Fin touched her shoulder to get her attention and pointed to the front of the house. Vans from two local news affiliates flanked the driveway, their crews sipping from steaming styrofoam cups. A reporter in a long overcoat spoke into his cellphone.

  A flock of tiny, furry-winged pixies began a bacchanal in Rook’s belly.

  Attention was directed at the house, not the woods. By keeping quiet, Rook and Fin slipped away unnoticed. The oppressive storm clouds on the horizon seemed beautiful after so much time in a cavern filled with giant spiders.

  They shared a few guesses about what Kyle’s folks could have done to arouse media interest, but only came up with juvenile scenarios.

  Entering Walmart to buy supplies, they passed a newsstand. Rook’s pulse jumped and the pixies stepped up the pace of their revels. There on the front page of the Webster Daily Press was Kyle.

  “Mystery solved,” she said. Of course it was an answer that raised plenty of questions. The headline proclaimed Local Boy Makes Good. The copy made a thin pretense of asking, “Who is this guy, really?” while failing to question any of his purported miracles. Local residents gave “remarkable accounts” of how photographs of Kyle could cure warts and speed up computers.

  Kyle had stepped out from the shadows, Shaw’s successor in full. Looking at him, even in pictures, brought a tickle of his vibration low in Rook’s head, and she gripped the newspaper in her sweaty hands. Fin saw her distress and led her away, tossing the paper back on the pile.

  “With any luck, this will all blow over by the time we’re back from our honeymoon,” he said.

  “We’re going for more than 15 minutes, right?” Rook joked, but couldn’t quite shake the feeling Kyle was watching her from the newspapers. She had to stop staring at her ink-smudged fingers.

  They filled their cart with canned foods, chocolate, and, since Rook’s diaphragm was still at Marcus’s apartment, condoms. Passing by electronics on their way to the toy department to look for a travel chess board, Rook asked, “Do you think we could pick up any TV up there? I’ve heard that the signals keep going forever.”

  “Maybe the spiders can set us up with pirate satellite. I bet they could descramble all the fun channels, too.”

  “We could pretend we’re on Mystery Science Theater.”

  The rows of TVs were all tuned to the same channel, where a shrill commercial for some pointless kitchen gadget was ending. Suddenly, Kyle’s face filled the screens. Icy, insinuating echoes of his signal accompanied his appearance, and Rook gasped.

  A voice-over smugly welcomed everyone back to the special weekday Shaw Ministries broadcast, a new initiative of the flock’s new leader, Kyle Tanner!

  Kyle stood at the pulpit, wearing robes of black and deep green. “Set aside your burdens, my children,” he said gently. “Let me ease that load for you. Calm your mind, and let the Spirit exult in my light.” His voice weighed oppressively on Rook, rekindling the ember of his signal. Brook and Bramble slithered from their hiding places and smiled maliciously.

  The camera showed a shot of the audience. The pews were packed, everyone staring at Kyle with rapturous joy.

  “Place looks tacky,” Fin said.

  “That’s where... where he married me,” Rook replied. The Bramble part of her chuckled low and throaty.

  Fin squeezed her hand.

  When she’d been there it was nearly empty. Strangers had witnessed her most shameful moment. Certainly some of the things she perpetrated in private with Kyle were worthy of condemnation, even if you weren’t religious, but the wedding was her nadir. To have willingly submitted to Kyle... Why hadn’t she fled?

  Brook and Bramble said it was because she hadn’t wanted to.

  “This is scaring me,” Rook said. Low-voltage ghosts joined the pixies in her belly. Fin wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer.

  “I know of the confusion you experience every day. I do,” Kyle assured his flock. “This world places many difficult obstacles in our way. The path is hard to see. The path is hard to follow. We welcome our tests, don’t we? But still we need to see the path for what it is. We must not become lost.”

  “He’s good at that,” said Rook.

  “It’s almost like it knows what it’s saying,” Fin agreed.

  “Now is the winter of this world, as we all see,” Kyle continued, moving out from behind the pulpit. “The spiritual barrenness is all around. These are days of tests for the flock, but late in winter is just before spring’s return! Soon the Kingdom will bloom for those who’ve not been lured away.”

  The audience made appreciative noises.

  Fin watched with detached disgust.

  “This is horrible,” Rook said. Kyle’s acid green words seeped into her, and she could feel Brook and Bramble getting stronger.

  Kyle’s eyes locked on the camera. His gaze, multiplied across a dozen screens, followed wherever she went. Rook turned away, but was compelled to cast furtive glances at him over her shoulder. Snaking his presence deeper into her mind, he seemed to speak to her alone. “Many have gone astray. We pray for them, we call to them.” Each television screen was the bottom of a well. Rook steadied herself, clutching Fin’s arm so she wouldn’t fall in.

  “Every day, the twisted illusions leap in all our eyes.” Kyle turned his eyes upward, his voice quavering. “How can we keep to the path?” He locked his gaze onto the flock once more, and his tone became silky, sinister, seductive. “How can you know you are living with the righteous and just? How can you know you haven’t been deceived?”

  The camera zoomed in for an extreme close-up. Kyle’s green eyes held a feverish glow that stoked something low and primal inside Rook.

  “You shall know it through me. I absolve you of your thoughts. Through me you are assured, assured a place. Free, free of confusion. The peace and light of Heaven can be seen. I am the way. You only need to look to me, look away from the world. Look away.”

  Rook’s jaw dropped. Tearing her eyes away and looking around, she saw that a small herd of shoppers had drifted up to stare at Kyle in a mouth-breathing stupor. Rook self-consciously closed her mouth.

  Rook turned to Fin, still fixated on the television. He did not wear a sleepwalker’s bland expression. His eyes were narrowed, his jaw clenche
d, his skin reddening. She wanted to pull him away from the target of his rage, but felt too much confusion and fear. She took a steadying deep breath and touched Fin’s hand.

  The bank of televisions went black with a muffled pop. Rook and Fin both felt a clarifying rush of surprise. Leaving their cart behind, they walked out of the store. Without Kyle’s visage and voice to fuel their ardor, the princesses quieted.

  “We have to go deal with him,” Fin said.

  Rook was frantic. “He doesn’t matter to us anymore. Let’s just leave!”

  “No,” Fin said soberly. “If we walk away, when we come back he’ll have even more followers. We can’t live in a world full of Kyle-ites. Look at what’s happening back there, he’s doing evil shit to their minds. It’s not going to only be the few die-hards who always used to watch Shaw’s show, he’s getting his hooks into normal people.”

  Rook gnawed her lower lip. Fin didn’t understand how fresh it all was for her, how tenuous her peace of mind. He didn’t know about her princesses. Without breaking down again, how could she convince him to abandon this idea?

  “We can’t rush in with no plan,” she said. “We should go figure out what to do, first.”

  Fin shook his head. “Now’s the perfect time, while he’s on camera.”

  “The perfect time to do what?” Rook asked. She felt near tears.

  Fin smiled. “I just want to talk to him.”

  She shook her head. “Fin, this is crazy!” Seeing the Cathedral of Shame of TV was awful enough. To return to it, with Fin? Unthinkable.

  “If I can make him look stupid on the air, it’ll show everyone. Everyone, Rook.”

  “Don’t you see? It won’t be that way. He’ll fight you!” Rook’s voice was shrill.

  “Then let them see that. Let them see their messiah is all too human.”

  Rook knew Fin would relent if he could only understand how Kyle’s hold over her felt. “Fin, please. I don’t want to go there.” Ally. Prize. Weapon. What part would she play? And if the worst came to pass? Kyle would never allow her to escape again. “Please.”