Lost Among the Stars

by Paul Di Filippo

  After passing through the tiny town of Patricia, while the trundlebug raced down the weather-tortured surface of lonely Route 130 toward the park, Ruy contemplated how he was to go about accomplishing his mission to rid the park of taggers. The task seemed straightforward enough: diplomacy, followed if necessary by threats, followed if called-for by some degree of non-lethal force. Maybe he could enlist provincial backup—maybe not. It all depended on the Mounties’ workload. But Ruy was experienced enough to know that nothing ever went easy or to plan.

  By noon Ruy was pulling into the parking lot near the Visitor’s Center. He checked in with the staff, who offered him warm welcomes, but could tender no additional information on the trespassers. Unlike Ruy, the part-time spit-and-polish rangers never ventured far into the vast interior of the Badlands, and remote surveillance was still interdicted by the intruders’ swarm of Kilobots. No tourists had brought reports back either.

  Returning to the trundlebug, Ruy retrieved Proty and pulled out packs of supplies from the storage area of the vehicle. Last to emerge was an item that resembled a suitcase composed of complexly interlocking hinged metal struts surrounding some central engine. Ruy unlatched a catch and tossed the suitcase into the air. It unfolded in mid-arc and when it landed, fully activated, revealed itself to be a Boston Dynamics Big Dog VII packbot.

  Ruy secured his supplies to the packbot—just water and MRE’s really—set Proty atop the mule, and off they marched to the northeast, Big Dog’s slick piston action a symphony of muted syncopated chuffings. Ruy’s Nuvaderm automatically adopted a flecktarn camouflage pattern closest to the environment. The refresh rate on mottling was every five seconds, though Ruy could alter that parameter.

  The Carbon Spires were half a day’s hike distant, meaning Ruy would not reach them before sunset. Not optimal, but what could he do? Rather than fret, he relished the chance to stretch his limbs and reintegrate his mind with the natural beauty of Dinosaur Park.

  When Ruy and company reached the closest natural rock formations, impossibly balanced and ornate masses of striated stone, tawny, umber and slate, Proty began to whistle the “On the Trail” portion of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, causing Ruy to laugh heartily. Had Dr. Grigori programmed this behavior to spring up at a certain visual cue, or was Proty performing some kind of more intelligent pattern-matching and response? Whatever the cause, the companionship was a nice feature.

  Stopping for a mid-afternoon meal, Ruy felt fully at ease. How different from harried and burdensome life in the city! His second skin kept him comfortable and full of energy, subtly massaging his muscles with waves of microtwitches. No unnatural noises disturbed. The temperate breezes registered like gentle caresses. Rich smells were a symphony.

  He did not derive any direct solar-generated sustenance from the Nuvaderm—that option was one token of the dingos—and so an MRE and lots of water went down heartily. Proty took some water through an extruded a-flesh siphon, but seemed otherwise content with sunlight. Big Dog ran on a CNSA-derived radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

  After just twenty minutes of meditative inactivity, Ruy got underway again, trekking expertly across the challenging terrain.

  The sun was nigh to setting when he came within sight of the first Carbon Spires. Initially, Ruy thought the lofty structures were being tinted by the slanting solar rays. But then he realized the truth. Vast portions of the Spires had been painted, in a mad swirl of abstract shapes and color fields, the purity of their untinted calcium carbonate ruined.

  Ruy experienced anger, and picked up his pace. But soon caution prevailed. No sense in bulling ahead uninformed. He decided to deploy Proty as his scout. He sent his commands to the drone through his thinking cap. Within seconds, the mass of synthetic protoplasm had reshaped itself to a close approximation of a roadrunner. Proty took off in a flash.

  Ruy put the Big Dog to sleep, aware that its chuffing would alert the intruders. He set off after Proty, keeping the drone’s telemetry in one corner of his eye.

  As darkness descended, Ruy’s Nuvaderm allowed him to see in the infrared. Sensors derived from viperine facial pits banded his chest. Their spectrum-shifted feed came to him through the thinking cap and replaced his baseline vision. Proty’s telemetry reflected the same capabilities.

  And now the drone was racing through a canyon that seemed to terminate in a hotspot rendered as a whiteout curtain. Ruy realized that the blotch must represent a big heat source: an open fire, presumably a campfire. The encampment of the taggers? He ordered Proty to switch to normal-spectrum vision. Sure enough, the canyon walls were now lit by flickering firelight. Ruy sent Proty into stealth mode and the drone morphed out of avian form to that of slithering pancake plastered against the rock walls.

  Reaching the embouchure of the canyon, Proty halted and slyly extruded an eye on a stalk.

  Ruy saw four human figures, seated and reclining comfortably on the stone surfaces, relaxed, all in their Nuvaderm skins, all colored a dark, dark red, darker than vermilion or cinnabar or maroon. Proty’s audio telemetry brought their chatter and laughter to Ruy, though he was over a mile distant.

  Just as he was beginning to make sense of the taggers’ conversation, Ruy felt the sharp tip of some instrument poked forcefully into his back. He activated his rearward eyes: a grinning unknown fellow stood close by, arm angled to jab. The man’s Nuvaderm skin included a hood feature that framed his face in a snug oval.

  Despite the ruggedized spidersilk strength afforded by Ruy’s own Nuvaderm, the artificial skin was not impenetrable, and Ruy had no wish to test its protection against what might possibly be a ceramic-diamond blade capable of effortlessly slicing a titanium bicycle chassis in half. Could he fire a barb into the fellow before the man could react—?

  As if divining Ruy’s thoughts, the man snatched Ruy’s thinking cap off, depriving him of contact with both his skin and with Proty.

  The man said, “How about joining the party, friend?”

  “Is it okay,” Ruy asked, “if I bring my Big Dog?”

  4.

  The CO2 Bombers of Dinosaur Park

  The taggers called themselves the Vitrine Slykes, after a type of invisible creature from a popular children’s fantasy, reputed to live in the interstices between double-glazed windows. The allusion was boastful testament to their own off-the-grid lifestyle, free from consumerism or taxes, social media or jobs. How did they survive in the wild? Quite well.

  In addition to protection from the elements and a certain degree of medical care, they received nourishment from their skins, darkened to maximize photon capture and thus photosynthesis, but without falling into utter unfashionable blackness. (Neo-Goth was so mid-century!) Disdaining more radical and permanent midriff connections, they had opted for a thin nasal-drip tube running from the edge of each hood into the wearer’s nostril, sending a steady stream of fortified glucose stomachward. Hardly a gourmet diet, but completely adequate for health.

  Five Vitrine Slykes there were, all as congenial and amused with each other, joking in tribal idiolect, as a nest of otter kits. Their nominal leader, the man who had captured Ruy after spotting him with the aid of the Kilobot swarm, was Paleo Pecos Pete. The two women were named Rachel Fortinbras and Koren Lovat. The two men, Patton Mantooth and Rick Bordeaux. Who might have been sexually affiliated with whom was not immediately apparent to Ruy in the first twelve hours of his captivity.

  After Paleo Pecos Pete had secured Ruy’s wrists with a self-tightening living liana that he had removed from around his own waist, and hobbled Ruy’s ankles, they had gone to retrieve the Big Dog. From there, they had joined the rest of the Vitrine Slykes at the campfire. Cursory but not unfriendly introductions had been made. The Slykes then plundered Ruy’s MRE’s and water, enjoying a rare feast. Then Pecos Pete laid down the terms of Ruy’s imprisonment.

  “We’re just passing through these parts, hombre, no need for us to tangle more than we have. You’ll keep us company for a few more days. Then
when we’re ready to go, we’ll turn you loose.”

  Ruy was indignant at this cavalier attitude. “You’ve defaced a natural wonder, and you’re going to have to pay somehow. A fine at least, probably some community service cleaning it up. Maybe even jail time.”

  The Slykes laughed in his face.

  “Natural wonder!” said Rachel Fortinbras. The very lineaments of the big chunky gal’s frame, revealed by her form-fitting skin, expressed contempt, her wide mouth jeering. “The Spires are a manmade monument to the folly of our species. We just decided that we should highlight them in a way that brought that fact to the public’s attention.”

  “Yeah, yeah!” said Rick with what seemed a constitutional childishness. “We’re gonna bomb the shit outta ’em tomorrow! You can help!”

  “I will not take part in this sacrilege.”

  Patton, his classic Native American features solemn, said, “Be that as it may. You’re in no position to interfere, and you’ll do as Pete says.”

  Ruy had to agree silently that he was helpless. True, Proty remained free and a wild card. But without communication of orders from Ruy, how could the drone help? It had probably gone into default sleep mode.

  “Besides,” said Koren, “painting the spires is not even our main task. It’s just something to do while we wait for Project Cadmus—”

  “That’s enough of that,” interrupted Pete. “Let’s keep our ultimate scheme a surprise for the nice ranger. What say you, pards?”

  The Slykes agreed that their ultimate goals deserved to be hidden for a while.

  “Let’s get to sleep now,” advised Pete. “Busy day tomorrow.”

  Resigned to his captivity for the moment, Ruy found a fairly flat slab and reclined. Bound at wrists and ankles, he had a limited range of positions, and his mind was racing. But the big sky full of stars was soothing, and, cossetted by the autonomic actions of his Nuvaderm, he eventually dropped off.

  The Badlands dawn arrived with typical grandeur, its polychromatic panoply rousing the sleepers. The Slykes had no need for morning ablutions nor breakfast, their skins handling everything. Ruy, however, was starving and needed something to eat. He cadged one of his own MRE’s from his keepers and downed it greedily. Then he was able to take in the Carbon Spires.

  The Slykes had established their camp at the edge of a large irregular stony plain tufted with hardy grasses. From this arena rose the Gaudíesque synthicrobe skyscrapers, silently and imperceptibly growing even as Ruy eyed them. The tops of several of the constructions had been daubed with what seemed random slashes of hideous day-glo colors, lending the majestic spires the look of cheap plastic toys.

  Paleo Pecos Pete regarded the handiwork of the CO2 bombers with evident satisfaction. “Sweet. I figure we’ll stop after today’s stint, and go see how Cadmus is doing. No sense gilding the lily.”

  Ruy bit his tongue to keep from calling Pete a barbarian and a dozen other less flattering names.

  Pete turned to Ruy. “Rachel’s going to be your warden, warden. She took a bit of a fall the other day and is still aching a bit too much for another climb.”

  The hefty woman, who likely outweighed Ruy, grinned at her prisoner. “But not hurting enough so’s I can’t still whomp your ass if I have to.”

  “Noted,” said Ruy.

  “Okay,” Pete said, “let’s go fill our tanks.”

  The four Slykes trooped off, leaving Ruy with Rachel.

  “I’m going to sit down if it’s okay with you.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Ruy remained silent for a while, hoping Rachel might get bored and talk. But she seemed content to exist in the meditative moment, a natural enough propensity for a be-skinned wilderness-dwelling dingo. Finally Ruy asked what he hoped was a neutral question.

  “How’d Paleo Pecos Pete get his name?”

  Rachel grinned again. Despite his anger, Ruy found himself involuntarily admiring the alluring charm of her broad smile.

  “Pete was a geo-sci professor at New Mexico State U. Had a thing for fossils, all sorts of wild theories. He thought he could prove one of his crazy ideas with a little dig.”

  “So?”

  “He decided to do it on public lands at night. Pecos National Park. He got caught, convicted and terminated from the university. Stole a skin from the labs while he was awaiting sentencing and went dingo.”

  Oh, what a bad actor! Ruy grew even more dogmatic about bringing this crew in for justice.

  “How did the rest of you hook up with him?”

  “Let’s just say Pete’s a man with a vision, okay? And we bought into it.”

  Silence prevailed for a time, until the other Slykes returned.

  They walked slightly stooped forward, with their Nuvaderms featuring large camel-like humps between their shoulder blades.

  Ruy learned that the Slykes had filled bladders in their skins with water from the nearest little Badlands pond. Now the squid-derived cells in their skins were busy turning the water to colorful paint, which would be sprayed from Nuvaderm extrusions with inkjet action.

  Despite himself, Ruy was fascinated. “Could my skin do that?”

  “If you downloaded the right apps, hombre,” said Rick.

  Pete, Patton, Koren and Rick advanced to the bases of the Spires, each Slyke choosing a separate hoodoo. Then they began to climb, without equipment of any sort.

  Rachel said, “Gecko app. Works brill, but you can still fall.” She rubbed a sore elbow.

  Soon the Slykes were raisin-sized bugs high up the Spires. New rainbow desecrations began to blossom.

  Ruy sighed dramatically and stalked away with his back to the sacrilege.

  “Hey, don’t wander off too far!”

  Ruy took up a perch on a massive flat-topped boulder and tried to calm himself and to plan. If only he could retrieve his thinking cap—

  The Slykes aloft worked tirelessly, but Rachel, Ruy ascertained with sidelong glances, was growing bored. Around noon she apparently reached the limits of her dispassionate oneness with existence. She joined Ruy on his boulder.

  “Hey, wanna fool around?”

  Ruy just goggled. Suddenly the lines of Rachel’s breast and haunches looked positively pornographic.

  “C’mon, I’m not a monster! It’ll be fun. You must be a little horny, aren’t you? Wearing the skin always stokes an undercurrent of horniness—at least for me. And I’ve had sex with the other four so many times in every possible way that I could really go for someone new.”

  Rachel’s breasts were indeed very shapely. “I don’t like to have sex wearing the skin,” Ruy said, realizing even as he spoke how priggish he sounded.

  “Oh, no problem. We’ll unzip.”

  “What about some privacy?”

  “Got that covered too. Lie down.”

  Cautiously, Ruy complied. Rachel lay atop him, synthetic skin to synthetic skin.

  Ruy suddenly felt his skin splitting in the standard shedding protocol, under some override instructions from Rachel’s suit, transmitted either wetly or via übertooth. Even the inseams of the suit’s arms and legs were opening! But instead of exposing him to the air, his rogue skin melded its edges to Rachel’s similarly unfurling armor, green to red, like two Christmas-themed sleeping bags being zipped together. Ruy felt Rachel’s bare flesh against his chest. Her nasal feeding tube retracted itself with an icky snot-slurping noise.

  Soon, by wriggling most pleasantly, the humans were able to disengage themselves completely from the migrating Nuvaderm sleeves and legs. Rachel’s suit, the upper half of a hemisphere, had stretched and stiffened like a tent, under some app Ruy did not recognize. The conjoined neckhole, now positioned above their heads, admitted light and air like a porthole. His own green skin had inflated noticeably, like a thin air mattress, a capability heretofore unrecognized. (What bad apps had Rachel infected it with?) The lovers were cocooned in an organic shell.

  Rachel’s thinking cap had been revealed when her hood retracted. Ruy c
ontemplated snatching it, but was soon too busy. Kissing, biting, squeezing, Rachel got into cowgirl mode atop Ruy. God, her thighs were like iron! Still liana’d—a condition that loaned an extra layer of kinkiness to the situation, as if any more exoticism were needed—he coped manfully. She found him more than ready, and guided him into her wetness.

  They had sex three times in three-quarters of an hour, then collapsed in exhaustion.

  Rachel said, “Nice ride, pardner.” Ruy just grinned with a measure of uneasy guilt.

  When the Nuvaderm tent became psychologically oppressive, though still environmentally friendly, they began the intricate process of redonning their separate suits.

  Finally separate and re-skinned, they noted the Slykes descending the Spires. Rachel became hardnosed again, and glared at Ruy.

  “If you—”

  “I am not,” said Ruy, “the kind to molt and tell.”

  5.

  Gertie Goes for a Walk

  All during the long hike to the mysterious Cadmus site, Koren Lovat glared at Ruy. He couldn’t be sure, however, if she were jealous that he had had sex with Rachel, or that Rachel had had sex with him. Ultimately, the nice distinction seemed trivial in terms of Ruy’s comfort index.

  Paleo Pecos Pete led the parade, cheerful as a prairie dog in its warren. His mood had brightened when, a day after leaving the Spires, he had evidently received some mysterious telemetry.

  “Ah, the dragon teeth are almost ripe! This will be magnificent!”

  Pete refused to disclose more to Ruy at that moment, and so he had hiked on in ignorance. No further intimacy with Rachel occurred to enliven the trek. And the other Slykes were taciturn at best. Their idiolect stymied Ruy’s eavesdropping.

  Finally the little band reached the banks of the Red Deer River. Naturally, conditions were more fertile here, although still harsh by most North American measures. Colorful grasses abounded, as well as the occasional cottonwood. Butterflies and birds stitched the air. The friable soil of the valley stretched expansively on either side of the watercourse.