Swee’pea began to blame her current plight on Uncle Thomas and his insistence on living in out-of-the-way Scyphozoa City. Why couldn’t they live in a modem megalopolis like Neo Seattle or Punta Arenas? Swee’pea had heard many alluring tales of these cities. Surely such hotbeds of civilization would have experts who could help an individual in such a fix? But no, they had to live in a literal backwater like Scyphozoa City! And why?
Uncle Thomas would always reply to such a question with the same answer:
You and I have enemies, child. Enemies who force us to inhabit harsh oases where we can remain unknown.
Enemies … Swee’pea would like to meet one of these imaginary foes …
Filled with self-pity, Swee’pea malingered among the writhing, predatory tentacles almost till dawn before a chance meeting solved her problem.
Two merteens dropped slowly down through the waters, tangled in a lusty embrace. Kissing, petting, the boy and girl were oblivious to Swee’pea’s presence.
Watching as the pair moved more deeply into their loving, Swee’pea felt his old male hormones surging, imagining himself in the role of the merboy.
Cells flowed and reconfigured. This time, Swee’pea was able to discern and annotate the processes by which his body morphed. Moreover, the set of procedures could apparently be catalogued and invoked as a routine.
Within minutes, he happily inhabited again the amphibious male body he had known for the whole four months of his life.
But now he knew he could change with the proper stimulation.
And sex seemed to be the trigger.
No longer irked at his uncle, Swee’pea swam back to Thomas’s purse.
The interior illumination still leaked from the window around Uncle Thomas’s vigilant face, and Swee’pea realized that his uncle had indeed been worried about him, but determined not to show it, for one reason or another.
Thomas’s words confirmed this.
Child! You’ve mastered the trick!
Yes! Now I can become anything.
And you must. To learn the true meaning of the lives of splices. Assimilating the precious mundane heritage of our kind is to be your education, before we go extinct. That is why your other name is the Teleological Ark.
The Teleological Ark. Suddenly Swee’pea felt a new importance suffusing him, a kind of racial manifest destiny.
For the next several weeks, Swee’pea experienced scores of different bodies, mimicking all the aquatic splices who lived in Scyphozoa City, as well as any visiting diylanders. So far, sexual desire seemed necessary to launch each change, resulting in frequent couplings—hardly a drawback to his unique course of study. But after a dozen or so encounters of this type, Swee’pea began to imagine a day when he would be able to initiate a change at will, without the trigger of lust.
Swee’pea’s activities, however, brought inevitable notice to the youth and his uncle. A protean splice was unheard of, and visitors to the city invariably carried away news of Swee’pea’s indiscreet exploits.
One morning Swee’pea and Uncle Thomas were conducting a lesson.
This merperson form is not my true form then, in any sense…? Swee’pea asked.
Not at all, replied Thomas. I chose it for you via an exterior somatic prompt once I knew this was the place where you would emerge from your egg.
It feels like the real me. Swee’pea paused thoughtfully. But then so has everything else!
Good. You should be at home in any shape—
A fleeting shadow was all that saved Swee’pea from being brutally smashed by a huge object bulleting down from above. As the flicker of shade occluded his sight, a lifetime of underwater play-reflexes caused him to dart out of the line of the attacker.
Turning around to see what had overshot him, Swee’pea confronted a monster: human, lion, scorpion, dragon. In the human mouth of the ghastly creature was a rebreather device. A water-jet backpack aided the ungainly but powerful body in its assault.
The lips on Uncle Thomas’s purse shrilled out, This is the Manticore! He wants only your death! Flee!
Enemies. Perhaps not as imaginary as he had thought.
Diving downward, Swee’pea accelerated with all his sinuous strength.
Close behind, the Manticore used his artificial propulsion device awkwardly, but with undeniable results.
He would overtake Swee’pea soon.
Unless Swee’pea could find someone or something to halt the killer.
Ahead of the fleeing merboy hung a drapery of tentacles. Was it possible that the Manticore was unaware of their danger to non-citizens?
This was Swee’pea’s only hope.
He reached the curtain of living ropes just ahead of the Manticore, then was through them.
As soon as the Manticore touched the tentacles, the strong whips reacted as if to dumb prey. Unequipped with the biological tags that every citizen of Scyphozoa City relied on to identify oneself as identical to the big jellies, the Manticore registered as no more than a mouthful of protein.
Instantly a hundred nematocysts fired, barbs with attached organic cords piercing the monster, securing him for delivery to the maw of the jellyfish.
The Manticore let out a titanic ocean-muffled roar, losing his rebreather in the process. He began to claw the tentacles and strike them with his own sting.
Swee’pea did not stay to watch the struggle, but instead returned to Uncle Thomas.
Uncle Thomas had already detached his quarters from the jelly’s cowl. The purse hung in peaceful equilibrium.
Quickly! Hold on tight to this skin!
Swee’pea obeyed his uncle’s command. When the boy was secure, Uncle Thomas activated the magneto-hydrodynamic propulsion system wetwared into the purse. The little module jetted off east at high speed, heading for an unknown destination.
As the water rushed past Swee’pea’s face, he found his mouth tightening into a sour grin.
Whatever came next, he doubted his life would ever be as idyllic as it had been here in the mothering sea.
Twenty years before Swee’pea’s birth, Mauna Loa had been the Earth’s biggest active volcano.
Then it got suddenly bigger.
A lot bigger.
Actually the world’s most enormous mountain, with a volume estimated at 10,000 cubic miles, the peak—along with its four sisters—broke the surface of the Pacific to form the island of Hawaii. Its periodic small-scale eruptions throughout human history had all been manageable if inconvenient for the residents of the island.
Until someone dropped a hardened bunker-buster nuke down its throat.
No group or individual ever came forward to claim responsibility for the assault on Long Mountain. Perhaps the perpetrators were appalled at the magnitude of their results. Various candidates had been proposed: the Sons of Dixie, the Viridians, the New Adamists, the Hanoi Sozaboys, the Otaku League, the Yogini Mamas—But no one seemed inclined to take credit for the spectacular events that followed the terrorist act.
The diamond-clad lance that was the nuke dropped from low orbit unerringly down the gullet of the volcano. It penetrated all the way through to the magma chambers before exploding. The blast enlarged the outlets for the magma and sent incalculable amounts of molten rock surging upward. Mauna Kea soon joined in.
The eruption covered the entire island in radioactive lava. Millions of lives, both human and splice, were lost. Enough soot and cinders entered the atmosphere to create several years without summers, just after the noahs had finally stabilized the global climate.
Mauna Loa continued to convulse in diminuendo for the next two decades, rendering the whole chain of islands inhospitable to most kinds of life.
But not to all.
In the main caldera, swimming perpetually through the hot roiling orange currents, beneath a pall of sulphurous gases and steam, lived the Diamond Thinkers.
To the eye of any hypothetical observer, each Diamond Thinker presented a humaniform shape seemingly composed of pure diamond.
In actuality, the diamond façade was a thin flexible smart integument surrounding and protecting a vulnerable lifeform within. The beings who chose to become Diamond Thinkers constituted a heterogeneous assortment of humans and splices.
Two of the latter happened to be named Thomas Equinas and Swee’pea.
Inside his diamond armor, Swee’pea cavorted through the boiling rockmelt. His senses were fed a steady stream of info-enhanced data on the world beyond his armor, through neural hookups. To Swee’pea’s eyes, he was plunging through a well-lit fiery color-stratified ocean. Crucial temperature data—it would not do to descend too deep, where his diamond skin would melt—registered continuously on his naked epidermis. His ears were filled with the seismic song of the massive volcano, rumbling up from deep below, chthonic chants.
Swee’pea’s job and delight in this new incarnation was simply to swim and to mate with his fellow Diamond Thinkers. By doing this, the Thinkers were performing a valuable service for the rest of the planet.
Their intelligent carapaces possessed vast processing power within their moletronic circuits, only a tiny fraction of which was used to support their inhabitants. The rest was devoted to customer-mandated computing tasks, extensive simulations and predictions. The heat-energy of the volcanic environment constituted a source of free power unmatched anywhere else. But more importantly, mapping the chaotic turbulence of the lava introduced valuable creative variables into the calculations, producing insights otherwise unobtainable. The neural hookups to organic brains provided a further complexification unobtainable by empty diamond suits.
And matings between the Thinkers added a further Darwinian edge to the diamondware.
When two Diamond Thinkers met and decided to mate, their shells fused, opening to a single interior, like sleeping bags zippering together. While the shells swapped and recombined data and algorithms, so the mortals within enjoyed a traditional biological fusion.
Swee’pea, of course, derived an added benefit from these matings. He was able to assume the shape of whomever his sexual partner was, retaining that form until the next metamorphosis, thereby continuing his quest to add to his understanding of the deep nature of different splice and basal somatypes.
Swee’pea and his Uncle Thomas had been living the lives of Diamond Thinkers for three months now, ever since driven from Scyphozoa City by the Manticore. (And hopefully that monster had perished in the grip of the big jellies.) Swee’pea felt secure in this particular harsh oasis, anonymous in his blank-faced shell. Surely they could stay here until Swee’pea completed his education and could assume the mantle and full responsibilities of the Teleological Ark.
Right this moment, however, Swee’pea was intent on finding Saffron. This particular Diamond Thinker was his favorite computational partner, and it had been too long since they had shared sex.
As he tracked the unique identity signal emitted by Saffron through the liquid hell, Swee’pea considered the latest lesson Uncle Thomas had imparted to him. It concerned something called the Categorical Imperative, which the old horse seemed to feel was essential to Swee’pea’s mission.
“This valuable insight derives from a basal human philosopher named Kant, child. Do you recall our discussion of his life?”
“Yes, Uncle. He never traveled more than a hundred kilometers from where he was born. Was Kant restricted then by a biome leash installed by his gembaitch?”
Thomas Equinas sighed. “There were no such things as biome leashes or gembaitches during Kant’s era, son. I fear your grasp of history is radically deficient as of yet.”
“I am only seven months old, Uncle.”
“Yes, yes, I’m taking that into account. But let us continue with the Categorical Imperative. It comes in two forms, a double-sided rule. Here is the first. ‘Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law of nature.’ Now, how do you interpret that?”
“Well, that’s easy. My life must be a model for others.”
“A simplistic interpretation, but good enough for a start. Now, the second formulation. ‘So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, in every case as an end in itself, never as a means.’ Please give me your restatement of that, allowing for the extension of the word ‘humanity’ to include splices as well.”
“Honor all life,” said Swee’pea without hesitation.
Uncle Thomas seemed emotionally affected by Swee’pea’s swift instinctive directness. “Hmm, yes, that will do. I daresay Kant himself would approve. All right, child, you may consider today’s lesson over …”
A diamond veil swept up in front of Swee’pea’s eyes, sealing the partial face-to-face breach between his armor and that of Uncle Thomas. This was how they met for Swee’pea’s tutoring. They had never opened their diamond suits fully to each other, since that degree of intimacy would have signaled a desire for sexual union.
And although Swee’pea loved his uncle and wanted to mate with him, something held him back from such a step. Perhaps a fear of not being reciprocated .…
Pondering the Categorical Imperative in all its permutations, Swee’pea slipped effortlessly through the molten bath, riding thermo- clines of flame. Saffron’s beacon swelled in intensity as he neared her, until finally she appeared within his telemetry vision, a scintillant humaniform gem.
Saffron bluetoothed Swee’pea while he was still a few yards off. Her voice sounded as clearly as if they had already merged suits.
“Sweetling! It’s been ’way too long!”
“How do you know how long it’s been, Saff? You haven’t even seen it yet!”
“Oh, my bad little supersplice! You didn’t miss me, did you?”
“Open up, and I’ll show you!”
Within the next minute, Swee’pea and Saffron were encased in single large diamond egg. Swee’pea had a brief flashback to some prenatal memory of his brood-pod before all non-erotic thoughts were swept away by Saffron’s embrace.
True to her name, the naked Saffron was golden all over. Her own splice heritage consisted primarily of eagle and other raptors, admixed with human. Below the neck, she was a down-covered woman. But at her collarbones commenced a ruff of proud tawny feathers, cresting atop a beaked, big-eyed face. Tiny vestigial wings big as her outspread palms graced her back.
At the moment, Swee’pea wore the guise he had adopted for his last mating: that of a male panda splice.
But as soon as he came within Saffron’s pheromonal sphere, he began to metamorphose.
Within a minute, two birdpeople were engaged in a lusty coupling, constrained only by their limited space. As their orgasms neared, their wings begin to flutter faster and faster, blurring completely at the moment of climax.
Saffron and Swee’pea spent a while in post-coital cuddling and talk, before Saffron said, “I’m starved! Let’s eat!”
“Good idea.”
The pair resumed their separate armors and mentally triggered their feeding cycles.
To adopt the role of a Diamond Thinker, an individual had to be modified to become autotrophic: able to subsist on light, water, air and some inorganic material, just like a plant. All these desiderata were available in the lava, thanks to the extracting and recombining abilities of the smart armor, which could pull elements in through its skin.
Now Swee’pea’s eyes, nose and mouth were automatically capped. The close-fitting interior of his suit filled with light and a nutrient broth, both of which he absorbed through his skin. A sense of repletion filled him.
When he and Saffron were finished eating, Saffron suggested that they explore a different part of the lake of fire.
“Nipper told me about a new semi-stable convection node over in the northeast quadrant. Should be some strong plectic whorls there to stoke our qubits. And the more gnarly our processing, the more eft in our personal accounts.”
Swee’pea had never taken part in an economy that utilized units of credit before becoming a Diamond Thinker, and he stil
l had little intuitive understanding of concepts such as “earning” and “spending.” His own personal wealth meant little to him. But if Saffron wanted to boost her own earnings, he was all for helping her.
“Sure! Let’s go.”
The pair spent two whole days in the fertile convection node, a mini Jovian Red Spot, allowing their shells to integrate the weird Bernoulli and Landau-Kolmogorov effects. They would take breaks to link for sex, to eat, and to chant along with the geological chorus welling up from below.
On the third day, they detected an approaching visitor.
“Funny,” bluetoothed Saffron, “I can’t read his ID.”
Swee’pea wasn’t worried. “Probably just a newbie who accidentally shut off his beacon.”
But the next actions of the intruder dispelled any such innocent explanation.
The four-legged, spike-tailed diamond thing intercepted Swee’pea and swept him up in a rigid embrace. The downward vector of the assailant continued, an invariably fatal path to the high-temperature zone.
“Swee’pea!” yelled Saffron. “What’s happening!?”
Swee’pea struggled to no avail. “I think it must be—”
Before he could finish speaking, he felt a portal open up in front of his face, where his suit touched that of his attacker.
The Manticore’s bmtish human face leered at Swee’pea from inches away. His carrion breath laved Swee’pea’s nostrils. His dragon horns grazed Swee’pea’s cheeks.
The Manticore’s voice resembled the sound of gravel cmshed between gears. “Now at last you die!”
Then the facial portal sealed over, and they continued their suicidal, varicidal plunge to the regions where their suits would melt.
Swee’pea called out hopelessly. “Saffron! Uncle Thomas! Help me!”
And with that call, somehow he was free.
Halting his own descent with some effort, he whirled around to look for the Manticore.
Already far below him, the killer bore a rider. Gripping the killer from above, Saffron clung implacably. Her head was pressed to the Manticore’s back.
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