by Marc Horne
Chapter 10
Around the bend they came and they saw the Black Mountain. It shone like glass. It was a split-custody-child. Pushed up by the nature of earth. Blasted down by the fire of science.
A nuke had molded it. It curved with a parabola on its hat. It was a soil-breaching sperm whale. For two-hundred years after the nuke hit it, it had killed anyone who gazed upon it, but now it was safe. Unless you stood on top of it and tried to slide down and got turned to gravity soup.
Around it in a ring was a moving city, a camp of wood and metal and plastic and shells. It was bristly and sharp. Not some arrogant wall of concrete: a moving urchin with spears and stomachs where they were needed.
The city noticed them. It anticipated them. A gate sort of formed. Xolo turned to the boy he had brought home from another star but who was still awake, unlike his twin.
“Hey, Rocky. What’s your dad like?”
Rocky smiled his teeth out at the word ‘dad.’
“Dad’s the king of the world.”
“Yeah, dude, I know. But what’s he like.”
“Big!”
“Is he cool or is he wild?”
“Cool. But he goes wild when he has his sword.”
“Ok.”
“Or his gun.”
“Hm.”
“Or his music machine.”
“I think I get it.”
They were led through the city. Yes it was smelly, but it excited Xolo, the Automatic Assassin. He had lived a long time in space. In space, there are not enough people. You look at spreadgrids and meteor showers and you totally lose track of why humans would ever possibly get the impression they are special. You let a computer tell you who to kill.
There was a mushroom the size of a chest spinning over a fire and kids danced as it roasted, making up songs and pretending they were from the old days.
“Oh mighty fungus/share your meat among us/and when the dead men come/as fast as you we’ll run.”
They passed taverns where people raised glasses to the returning warriors. Zombies would never do that. However, that didn’t mean they were inferior. They existed in interconnected swarms, sophisticated clusters. You couldn’t really compare them.
The street was full of squirrels: a waterfall of squirrels came though the camp, stealing nuts. No one chased them but they fled like they knew that since they were stealing nuts, then someone must be chasing them. Clearly this camp had plenty of food, so no one chased them, just enjoyed the fun they were having. A middle-aged lady with a full figure laughed a lot. She was a musician with delicate fingers. She was curvy, with hair and eyes of chocolate of two slightly different flavors. She snuggled an ice-white rabbit at her breast. She raised a calm narrow eye at Gomez and his new friend. She was not a sex maniac, but like most everyone else in this camp she was definitely a big fan. Xolo and Gomez together were a lot of tough muscle just plain walking down the road. It was hard to tell she was middle aged because her skin was so smooth. It was just the way she sat, really that looked middle aged. It was a way of sitting that was satisfied and unlikely to move without excellent reason.
Xolo was vibeing on the camp atmosphere. Gomez smacked him on the back. “This is what the human race is all about, my man. Not fatties in space.”
…
Xolo submitted to an intense search. He was only carrying microgrenades, a knife and two Multishots: no cavity killers. But of course the cavities were plumbed anyway and the body scan was made. Xolo was physically perfect, an egomaniac, sexually adventurous and very patient so he objected to this treatment much less than anyone else would.
Two guards in lightweight armor escorted Xolo and Gomez to the gate of the King’s lodge. It was made of thousands of wooden spears, climbing upwards like crystals in the basic shape of a squat pyramid. It was surrounded by old but sturdy looking force field generators, but even without them it was an immensely tough looking structure although it also seemed like it could be ripped apart and taken on the road in a matter of hours like everything else in this brisling encampment.
Gomez and Xolo had to bow low to enter the lodge. It was sweaty and smelled of pine. Hot coals glowed in the center. Ten more guards and three wizardy looking dudes were inside. The king was seated on a low but elegant black wood stool.
Gomez bowed low purely for ceremony this time and then kneeled seiza style in front of his ‘liege.’ Xolo did too. He wasn’t one of those ‘fuck you’ kind of guys who had to be the center of attention at all times. He could bow, kneel and so on. Especially since he needed to get close to this king.
The king was starting to speak and Xolo’s thoughts were drifting away a little toward the Conscience Bomb that they had put in his head. That was a bad sign that the King’s scanner guys hadn’t picked up on it. If their security was so poor that they were vulnerable to these kind of attacks so there was every possibility that the Gukkool team had also sneaked a real physical explosive kind of bomb in him somewhere and would trigger it if they ever thought it would benefit them to do so.
“…returning my children.”
Xolo looked up. That was his yacht. His father had given it to him on his fifteenth birthday. Except Xolo had never known his father. But who was that intensely serious bald man walking him to a quay next to a gravelly island overlooking a lilac ocean full of tempests.
Xolo looked down. Then he looked up again. The yacht thoughts slopped away.
“You are welcome, your highness,” he said. The King was a big bear of a man: dark skinned, long stringy white beard pouring a couple of feet off his chin. He was calm and poised: whatever happened to him next, whether it was receiving a drink or a decapitating sword strike, his pose would be appropriate.
“We need to talk a little bit about that bomb in your brain. Do you know it is there?”
“Nice weather we’re having.”
“Ah, I see. Okay, well yes, let’s change the subject. Do you know why Sunny’s ship crashed?”
“I didn’t see any wreckage so I can’t tell you if it was shot down or not. But let’s face it, it was. No one crashes into anything out in the big empty unless they are trying to land on it and they screw up or unless they get shot down.”
“You think Gukkool shot them down?”
“No, I don’t think so. They were very confused and I don’t think they really wish to get mixed up with a potential death sentence like messing with the politics of Earth. Hmm, better change the subject a bit. Maybe a tea break?”
Xolo was feeling a faint ticking down at the base of his brain. The Conscience Bomb was a smart one. The bomb was sitting there encrypted in his brain tissues and it was starting to consider the possibility was that being in this sweat lodge and chatting to this king about the Gukkool family was outside of the contract that was at the heart of its cybermantic DNA. But these very smart weapons did have a downside to them, contemplated Xolo. They always hesitated to pull the trigger because that meant the end of their own bourgeoning consciousness. Even knowing about the backup that existed back on Belaarix did not sooth the mind bomb. He knew that half his consciousness came from the mind he was parasiting. When his backup was implanted in another brain, it wouldn’t be him anymore. It wouldn’t have the swagger of Xolo, the quick wit, the unusually clean synaptic pathways.
Yes, that next future other Conscience Bomb would be nothing compared to him! It would be bonded to some scurrilous mercenary sent on a mission of plunder or murder. Or some irresistible sex slave who was too beautiful to mark with a whip, but too much of animal to settled down on the yacht. It would be low down and unreliable. It wouldn’t be a slayer of sultans, savior of princesses, swimmer in oceans. Swimmer around yachts. Around yachts.
It would be nothing.
As would he, the Xolo Bomb, if it pulled that trigger. Most that was beautiful in Xolo would die the moment the bomb went off in a self-combusting, muscle clenching body pop. And the beautiful parts that were left would not really be that beautiful due to the blood-filled
crater that they would lie beneath. Even before they rotted.
And he, the Xolo Bomb. He would be all gone. Gone after having made almost no difference to the world. His only real signature was the hesitations in this conversation, the slight sweat on Xolo’s brow and the criminal act of wiping Xolo from the universe.
Yes.
This bomb was falling in love.
With Xolo.