Lost Among the Stars

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Oh, Bran, I’ve so wanted this day to happen, but I never dared dream within the dream that is the afterlife that it ever could! To see you all mature, so strong and brave and wise, satisfying all my fervent but nebulous hopes as I felt you being born amidst the pain. I feel blessed, and hopeful that this rare, impossible moment can be prolonged.”

  Bran’s heart raced. “Mother, I too! I can even bear this misshapen body if it means you will get a renewed lease on life!”

  Pella’s eyes glowed with maternal adoration. “Maybe we can have it all, Bran, all that we’ve dreamed of. But my tenancy of this borrowed mortal clay feels so insecure at times, as if I were contending with another for possession, that I—”

  Pella held the back of one hand to her forehead and swayed alarmingly.

  “Mother! What’s wrong?”

  Pella straightened and grinned in a ludicrously inappropriate manner. “Nothing’s wrong, son. Just a slight megrims. I swear by Saint Valentine, it’s so. Now, if you’ll only listen to Mr. King, your father, and do as he—You shitty bastard!”

  This cause of this foul imprecation interrupting Pella’s instructive speech was the impact of Bucko’s heaved crowbar upon her shin. A welter of blue swear words followed. Surely the gentle Pella had never been prone to such outbursts.

  Bucko turned to Bran. “You told me about Trixibelle, and I knew that whore always swore by Saint Valentine. That ain’t your Ma, Bran. Not right this minute, anyhow. And no matter how much you want her to be, you could never be sure twixt one moment and the next who you was talking to.”

  Doubt and dark disappointment assailed Bran. To lose his mother almost in the same breath he had gained her! He wavered between endorsement and dismissal of Bucko’s warning. But then all uncertainty was instantly removed, along with Bran’s hopes, leaving him feeling as if his heart had been wrenched from his chest.

  With the stolen countenance of Bran’s mother suffused with wrath, Trixibelle said, “Oh, I hate your stinking guts, Bucko MacMahon! And as for you, junior—maybe I didn’t bring you into this world, but I’ll sure enough take you out of it!”

  She grabbed for General Grant’s gun and she and King wrestled for control of the weapon.

  Bucko launched himself at a distracted Jellyneck.

  Despairing yet determined, all selfish ambitions for his personal happiness fled, Bran hurled himself at the Resonator on its elevated stand, his squat form a living cannonball.

  Over and backwards the humming device toppled, to smash on the stone floor.

  A flood of celestial radiance flared, as the vril escaped through a crack in its vessel and instantly evanesced.

  Bran got awkwardly to his feet. Inhabiting his own body again felt odd and uncomfortable.

  Bucko had subdued the dwarf by throttling him.

  Bran regarded Trixibelle, the woman who had been transfigured temporarily into Pella, and whose sinful soul had ejected Pella’s spirit. The coarse doxy seemed confused by her reversion, no longer foul-mouthed. Her eyes met Bran’s. And then the oddest, saddest, most unexpected thing happened, powered perhaps by the slightest traces of vril remaining in the atmosphere.

  Trixibelle whispered in Pella’s genuine tones: “Son, it had to be this way. Live well, with my love—”

  Bran mastered the hot tears that followed this last blessing, and confronted his natural father.

  Here was the source of so much grief and pain, right from the minute the man had lured Pella away from Warner Gilead! Bran’s brief equanimity evaporated.

  Hedley King had regained control of his pistol from Trixibelle. Vibrating to Bran’s new rancor, King raised the gun in Bran’s direction.

  “You’ve ruined the labors of a lifetime!”

  “And you’ve ruined several lifetimes!”

  Still menacing Bran, King began backing away toward the exit. “I can rebuild my engine. There’s more vril to be had as well! I’ll be ruler of the world one day! And I’ll be sure to leave your mother’s soul to rot in hell!”

  Enraged, Bran hurled himself at Hedley King.

  The gun boomed, and Bran felt his pate creased. Then he collided with King and brought him down.

  The older man’s skull struck the iron footing upon which the Resonator had rested, issuing a sickening, melon-bashing sound.

  Once standing, Bran regarded his natural father, all broken and unconscious. The man’s ragged breathing suddenly clattered to a halt, like a lame horse failing.

  Liquid trickled down one of Bran’s cheeks. He raised a hand to feel, and found only blood from his wound.

  Bucko came to Bran’s side. To Bran’s surprise, Jellyneck went to King and began to weep. Trixibelle had vanished.

  “Let’s go, boyo,” said Bucko. “It’s all over now.”

  “One minute.” Bran rummaged among the wreckage, until he found the lock of Pella’s hair.

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  Bran turned then and walked away from the worst of his past.

  In 2012 I received an invitation to a conference dubbed simply “Fractal,” in Medellin, Colombia, organized by two of the kindest, cleverest, most exciting and innovative folks I’ve ever met: Vivi Trujillo and Hernan Ortiz. That conference was one of the best times of my life, eye-opening and exotic. I made many friends for life there, and had my horizons and mind broadened. (And waistline too, given the wonderful cuisine. Arepas are not low-cal!)

  As part of my conference presentation, I wrote a story titled “The Mood Room” and presented it live at the con. That tale has already appeared in my collection A Palazzo in the Stars. But the following story derives directly from my Colombian experience, as I think you will quickly see. Written after I got home, simply to capture some of the wonders of the event and place, I think it’s one of my most savvy tales about how different classes of people are arising under technological pressures.

  The protagonist, by the way, is modeled on another attendee at Fractal, Keiichi Matsuda. Keiichi is half-Asian, half-Anglo, not quite the ethnic mix of my hero, but possesses the same dashing good looks, savoir faire, genius, and ethical probity!

  Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy:

  A Love Story

  Handsome Kioga Matson, waking from a fitful programmed microsleep imperfectly contoured by the experimental orexin-modulating drug Ailurexant he had self-prescribed, and landing once again in yet another of those Science Parks that constituted his insular and discontiguous adopted homeland, a quasi-state composed of homogenous R&D and prototyping sites in a globe-girdling network of exclusive brainpower, had to pause a moment on consciousness’s hazier edges, an interzone fuzzed also by an ongoing bad episode of Kyoto Duck Flu against which he had been administering a powdered antiviral inhalant from NexBio, DAS939, in order to recall exactly what antiquated nation-state now hosted him.

  Looking blurrily out the window as the SonicStar plane taxied, he saw a line of modest mountains ringing, at some distance, the small corporate landing field. So this could not be Kalundborg in Denmark nor Seletar in Singapore nor Granta in the United Kingdom. But it could very well have been Sunlight in Montana, USA, or Acheson in Canada or Baikampady in India. Very disorienting.

  A glimpse of some lush emerald tropical vegetation caused the knowledge of his current destination to click into place in his memory. He had come down in Parque Arví, Medellín, Colombia. Along with other boffins Kioga was to participate in a presentation for MercoSur trade reps, his field of expertise being industrial metabolics. And he was also to spend a full glorious twenty-four hours in the presence of his fiancée, Mallory Sloper, whom he had not seen in six whole weeks.

  In theory, what bliss!

  And yet, Kioga found himself strangely unexcited at the prospect of reconnecting with his bride-to-be. He imagined with some degree of accuracy that much of their private time here would be spent firming up the endless details of their elaborate wedding next year—details that had already consumed a myriad of online hours when apart—and that rather too li
ttle time would be spent with any kind of preferable bedroom athletics. This skewed ratio of work to fun irked Kioga, and he had to strive hard to convince himself that everything would be different after they were married.

  As the ground crew wheeled a set of steps up to the opening hatch of the jet, Matson sneezed suddenly with contaminatory gale force. He fumbled out a packet of tissues and evacuated his nostrils, preparatory to blasting another hit of DAS939 into his sinuses. That task done, he woke his nap-silenced phone and, feeling somewhat guilty at his ingratitude toward Mallory’s majestic and unyielding love, rang her up. She’d be happy if he checked in immediately upon landing and disgruntled if he didn’t—though she would never admit her displeasure, instead merely affecting a certain sharpness of voice that cloaked ostensibly jovial phrases in sonic barbed wire.

  The superfine patrician bone structure of his beloved’s face, wrapped in seemingly poreless, peachy flesh finer than spidersilk, filled his phone’s Retina Display. Since last telephonically encountered, Mallory had changed her hairstyle to a platinum pixie cut layered with living crimson pinfeathers that tapped her scalp’s blood supply to stay perpetually vibrant.

  “Darling! You beat me to Colombia. And I so wanted to be there to meet you! But the Osaka conference ran long.”

  “It’s just as well. I’m a bit under the weather. La grippe canard. I can use a little downtime first.”

  “Well, I’m somewhere over the Pacific at the moment. ETA about two hours from now.”

  “Fine. You can wake your Prince Charming with a kiss.”

  “But of course! And then—”

  Kioga brightened. “And then?”

  “We simply have to discuss the guest list!”

  Kioga suppressed a wince. The dreaded guest list discussion had already occupied one-hundred-and-fifty-two-point-five hours of his life. He knew the stat precisely from totaling all the automatically tagged hours in his lifelog. Sometimes it seemed that this endless parsing of the relative affinity bonds of friends, relatives, and business associates would extend into infinity, finding an angel-winged Kioga still indecisively parceling out seats in the heavenly cloudbanks.

  “Of course. I can’t wait. See you soon.”

  “Mwah! Bye for now, lover.”

  * * *

  Lodgings for braintrust gypsies at Parque Arví were, of course, more or less identical with the facilities at a hundred other Science Parks, an organically efficient architecture and interior design that bespoke a kind of stern technocratic accommodation with the needs of the flesh and spirit, acknowledging that a measured slight amount of earned pampering was conducive to productivity and creativity, while any hints of hedonism would amount to a venal betrayal of a sacred, semi-public trust, not to mention stockholder bottom-line expectations.

  Kioga’s phone checked him in as he walked through the lobby, instantly making his location known to everyone in his social and business networks. Greetings and memos filled his message queue, but the phone flagged nothing for his immediate attention. A message from Jimmy Velvet, declaring boisterously that Jimmy himself would imminently be “hot-cradling in Parque Arví,” lifted Kioga’s spirits. Any time spent with Mr. James Swinburne Vervet would involve exotic inebriants, Planck-level conversation, and possible rousing altercations with offended pecksniffs and grundies of all stripes. But right now, Kioga felt relieved to have a couple of hours to himself.

  Up in his room Kioga unpacked his small bag, his essential invariant kit. He propped a dented, military-hardened, brushed aluminum digital picture frame on his dresser top. A memento of his recently deceased mother, Brenda, the frame cycled through photos of the Matson family: a sprawling, well-fed, bright-eyed Anglo clan, jolly as a whitebread Christmas pudding with one dark little raisin embedded.

  Kioga regarded that selfsame grownup raisin in the smart mirror over the dresser. (The mirror flashed a mild warning that his body temperature was one-point-seven degrees above normal, courtesy of la grippe canard.) Six-two, burnt sienna skin, hair buzzed almost to nullity, at age twenty-eight he resembled, some said, Uganda’s still vibrant elder statesman, President Frank Mugisha.

  Not exactly a phenotype in conformity with his adopted kin.

  Twenty-five years ago, in 2015, Brenda Matson had been a KBR mercenary attached to the USA’s AFRICOM forces based in Entebbe, Uganda, where they waged a cat-and-mouse contest with the fighters of al-Shabaab. Captured after a fierce firefight in the bush, Brenda Matson had been removed to a tiny remote village on the shores of Lake Kioga that hosted the terrorist cell. There she had been securely bound and dumped into a big multifamily hut, all gnarly poles, mud-walls and palm-thatched roof. Hot, smelly, claustrophobia-inducing, with manic house geckos skittering every which way.

  Brenda’s training served to tamp down but not utterly eradicate a fear that threated to swell to panic if she should divert her will for a second. Her zip-tied wrists and ankles ached. Everyone she could see, from the male fighters to the women and adolescents, were heavily armed with Chinese weapons. Everyone, in short, except for Brenda and a very charming naked boychild of three. Oddly enough, the neglected toddler, ignored by the chattering flustered and hyperactive adults, had gravitated instinctively to Brenda, eventually falling asleep against her cramped side while, numb, nervous, hungry and stinking, Brenda awaited rescue.

  Within a few hours of the geo-stabilization of her transponder-chipped person, and following an undetectable UAV survey of the scene, AFRICOM softly deposited a Bee Hive in the middle of the village.

  From the armaments package emerged hundreds of lethal thumb-sized aerial drones, rocketing on burst chemical propellants. The pack of angry discriminating bees promptly drilled straight through the skulls of all the belligerents before their fingers could even compress a trigger, leaving Brenda and the little, suddenly wailing boy the only living inhabitants of the carnage.

  When the AFRICOM forces came for her, Brenda thought she was fine.

  But that didn’t explain why she insisted irrationally on squeezing the lone young survivor tight to her chest and refusing to be parted from him, while issuing mad threats of physical assault against her comrades, even while she was being carried on a stretcher into the waiting copter.

  Kioga Matson often rehearsed this chapter of his autobiography. He recalled nothing genuine of the fateful incident, but had heard the tale so many times that he had developed vivid false memories of it. Yet oddly enough, they were all channeled from his mother’s POV. He saw himself clutched to her chest as if in some Nollywood biopic of Brenda’s life.

  Kioga’s adoption into an upper-middle-class American family ensured that, barring some grand personal failure of character, ill health or a suite of implacable vices he would slide effortlessly into the meritocracy. He failed to encounter even a whiff of racism in the exclusive enlightened realms through which he sailed as a boy and teen and young adult; developed his propensity for economics and science into expertise in the field of industrial metabolism—the discipline of charting and optimizing how raw materials and energy were turned into products and waste; and his departure from graduate school at the laudable age of twenty-three found him firmly emplaced in the Science Park network, earning an admirable salary and feeling generally fulfilled.

  His engagement to Mallory Sloper, powerful witch of the carbon-sequestration wizard clan, whom he had met three years ago at an epochal gathering in Migdal HaEmek, Israel, only reinforced his feelings of good fortune and gratitude.

  He hoped he had thanked his mother often enough for giving him this wonderful life, so far above the global norm and so far above his lot at birth. There would be no more such filial opportunities to render gratitude and love. After her exemplary stint as a grunt, Brenda Matson had graduated into the spectral ranks of international spook-dom, and just last year had gone missing in the mountains of Khövsgöl, Mongolia, on the track of a subversive group calling itself Lex Talionis.

  * * *

  Turning away from the
dresser mirror, Kioga once more affirmed his own happiness with how his life had developed.

  And yet—and yet—there was one wordless part of him, buried deep and generally ignored, that still dwelled in prelapsarian bliss on the simple shores of his natal lake.

  Kioga forwent another dose of Ailurexant and yet got a surprisingly solid natural nap. He awoke at noon—the presentation was scheduled for 2 PM—and, refreshed and wearing a trig new Buddy Cheetah smart suit in fawn and aurora orange, ambled to the commissary.

  The air here in vegetation-rich, manicured Parque Arví was wholesome and fragrant. No noise penetrated the pastoral campus from the city of five million people—rich and poor, struggling and well-off—that stretched away in all directions from the base of the lofty enclave, extending also in ramshackle vertiginous barrios halfway up the mountainside until the squatters encountered the lethal perimeter of the Science Park.

  An energetic conversational knot occupied the lobby of the dining hall, and Kioga was startled to spot Mallory thoroughly engaged with a host of fellow savants, some of whom Kioga recognized, others not. He came up behind his fiancée and gently clasped her elbow.

  “Oh, hello, dear, how are you?” She pecked his cheek. “Stuart and I got so busy on the flight talking about the latest exciting work out of Biorecro that we just couldn’t break away. They’ve increased the uptake in their transgenic poplar trees by fifteen percent!”

  Stuart Holliston, tan and swimmer-fit, bestowed upon Kioga a smile dangerously close to a smirk. “Your lovely woman has some great notions about how to monetize this, Matson. If you’re not careful, she’s going to make you both filthy rich.”

  “Oh, I’m decidedly high-maintenance, Stuart. A regular luxury sink. I’ll spend her money faster than those poplars suck up CO2.”