Harsh Oases

by Paul Di Filippo

  They answered Ethan’s questions respectfully and completely at first, and I could see interest building in his self-serving brain, as he rotated the facts this way and that, seeking some advantage for himself. But then the children grew tired of his gawking and cut him off.

  “We have too much work to do. You’ve got to go now.”

  “Please, Mr. Duplessix, just leave us alone.”

  I watched Ethan’s expression change from greedy curiosity to anger. He actually threatened the children.

  “You damn kids! You need to share! Or else someone’ll just take what you’ve got!”

  I was surprised at the fervor of Ethan’s interest in Djamala. Maybe something about the dream project had actually touched a decent, imaginative part of his soul. But whatever the case, his threats gave me a valid excuse to hustle him off.

  “You can’t keep me away, Hedges! I’ll be back!”

  Izzy stood by my side, watching Ethan’s retreat.

  “Don’t worry about him,” I said.

  “I’m not worried, Parrish. Djamala can protect itself.”

  The sleeping arrangements in the tent Nia, Izzy and I shared involved a hanging blanket down the middle of the tent, to give both Izzy and us adults some privacy. Nia and I had pushed two cots together on our side and lashed them together to make a double bed. But even with a folded blanket atop the wooden bar down the middle of the makeshift bed, I woke up several times a night, as I instinctively tried to snuggle Nia and encountered the hard obstacle. Nia, smaller, slept fine on her side of the double cots.

  The night after the incident with Ethan, I woke up as usual in the small hours of the morning. Something urged me to get up. I left the cot and stepped around the hanging barrier to check on Izzy.

  Her cot was empty, only blankets holding a ghostly imprint of her small form.

  I was just on the point of mounting a general alarm when she slipped back into the tent, clad in pajamas and dew-wet sneakers.

  My presence startled her, but she quickly recovered, and smiled guiltlessly.

  “Bathroom call?” I whispered.

  Izzy never lied. “No. Just checking on Djamala. It’s safe now. Today we finished the Iron Grotto. Just in time.”

  “That’s good. Back to sleep now.”

  Ethan Duplessix had never missed a meal in his life. But the morning after Izzy’s nocturnal inspection of Djamala, he was nowhere to be seen at any of the three breakfast shifts. Likewise for lunch. When he failed to show at supper, I went to D-30.

  Ethan’s sparse possessions remained behind, but the man himself was not there. I reported his absence to Hannah Lawes.

  “Please don’t concern yourself unnecessarily, Mr. Hedges. I’m sure Mr. Duplessix will turn up soon. He probably spent the night in intimate circumstances with someone.”

  “Ethan? I didn’t realize the camp boasted any female trolls.”

  “Now, now, Mr. Hedges, that’s most ungenerous of you.”

  Ethan did not surface the next day, or the day after that, and was eventually marked a runaway.

  The third week of October brought the dreaded announcement. Lulled by the gentle autumnal weather, the unvarying routines of the camp, and by the lack of any foreshadowings, the citizens of Femaville 29 were completely unprepared for the impact.

  A general order to assemble outside by the buses greeted every diner at breakfast Shortly before noon, a thousand refugees, clad in their donated coats and sweaters and jackets, shuffled their feet on the field that doubled as parking lot, breath pluming in the October chill. The ranks of buses remained as before, save for one unwelcome difference.

  The motors of the buses were all idling, drivers behind their steering wheels.

  The bureaucrats had assembled on a small raised platform. I saw Hannah Lawes in the front, holding a loud-hailer. Her booming voice assailed us.

  “It’s time now for your relocation. You’ve had a fair and lawful amount of time to choose your destination, but have failed to take advantage of this opportunity. Now your government has done so for you. Please board the buses in an orderly fashion. Your possessions will follow later.”

  “Where are we going?” someone called out

  Imperious, Hannah Lawes answered, “You’ll find out when you arrive.”

  Indignation and confusion bloomed in the crowd. A contradictory babble began to mount heavenward. Hannah Lawes said nothing more immediately. I assumed she was waiting for the chaotic reaction to bum itself out, leaving the refugees sheepishly ready to obey.

  But she hadn’t counted on the children intervening.

  A massed juvenile shriek brought silence in its wake. There was nothing wrong with the children gathered on the edges of the crowd, as evidenced by their nervous smiles. But their tactic had certainly succeeded in drawing everyone’s attention.

  Izzy was up front of her peers, and she shouted now, her young voice proud and confident.

  “Follow us! We’ve made a new home for everyone!”

  The children turned as one and began trotting away toward Djamala.

  For a frozen moment, none of the adults made a move. Then, a man and woman—Vonique’s parents—set out after the children.

  Their departure catalyzed a mad general desperate rush, toward a great impossible unknown that could only be better than the certainty offered by FEMA.

  Nia had been standing by my side, but she was swept away. I caught a last glimpse of her smiling, shining face as she looked back for a moment over her shoulder. Then the crowd carried her off.

  I found myself hesitating. How could I face the inevitable crushing disappointment of the children, myself, and everyone else when their desperate hopes were met by a metropolis of sticks and stones and pebbles? Being there when it happened, seeing all the hurt, crestfallen faces at the instant they were forced to acknowledge defeat, would be sheer torture. Why not just wait here for their predestined return, when we could pretend the mass insanity had never happened, mount the buses and roll off, chastised and broken, to whatever average future was being offered to us?

  Hannah Lawes had sidled up to me, loud-hailer held by her side.

  “I’m glad to see at least one sensible person here, Mr. Hedges. Congratulations for being a realist.”

  Her words, her barely concealed glee and schadenfreude, instantly flipped a switch inside me from off to on, and I sped after my fellow refugees.

  Halfway through the encampment, I glanced up to see Djamala looming ahead.

  The splendors I had seen in ghostly fashion weeks ago were now magnified and recomplicated across acres of space. A city woven of childish imagination stretched impossibly to the horizon and beyond, its towers and monuments sparkling in the sun.

  I left the last tents behind me in time to see the final stragglers entering the streets of Djamala. I heard water splash from fountains, shoes tapping on shale sidewalks, laughter echoing down wide boulevards.

  But at the same time, I could see only a memory of myself in a mined building, gun in hand, confronting a shadow assassin.

  Which was reality?

  I faltered to a stop.

  Djamala vanished in a blink.

  And I fell insensible to the ground.

  I awoke in the tent that served as the infirmary for Femaville 29. Hannah Lawes was sitting by my bedside.

  “Feeling better, Mr. Hedges? You nearly disrupted the exodus.”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “Your fellow refugees. They’ve all been bussed to their next station in life.”

  I sat up on my cot. “What are you trying to tell me? Didn’t you see the city, Djamala? Didn’t you see it materialize where the children built it? Didn’t you see all the refugees flood in?”

  Hannah Lawes’s cocoa skin drained of vitality as she sought to master what were evidently strong emotions in conflict

  “What I saw doesn’t matter, Mr. Hedges. It’s what the government has determined to have happened that matters. And the government ha
s marked all your fellow refugees from Femaville 29 as settled elsewhere in the normal fashion. Case closed. Only you remain behind to be dealt with. Your fate is separate from theirs now. You certainly won’t be seeing any of your temporary neighbors again for some time—if ever.”

  I recalled the spires and lakes, the pavilions and theaters of Djamala. I pictured Ethan Duplessix rattling the bars of the Iron Grotto. I was sure he’d reform, and be set free eventually. I pictured Nia and Izzy, swanning about in festive apartments, happy and safe, with Izzy enjoying the fruits of her labors.

  And myself the lame child left behind by the Pied Piper.

  “No,” I replied, “I don’t suppose I will see them again soon.”

  Hannah Lawes smiled at my acceptance of her dictates, but only for a moment, until I spoke again.

  “But then, you can never be sure.”

  The short-short tale, once a flourishing subtype of SF in the hands of such men as Frederic Brown, but generally neglected these days (and oddly enough, given our famous postmodern short attention spans), found a new home and patron recently in Nature magazine, under the kindly hands of editor Henry Gee. And what a prestigious place to be. I’m very honored to have made the grade.

  It’s a challenge to tell a complete narrative in a thousand words or less, and I found the writing of this piece most stimulating.

  But I managed to tell another good story, I think, in an even more compressed framework. Here, as a bonus tale, is my six-word saga from the pages of Wired magazine (November 2006): “Husband, transgenic mistress; wife: ‘You cow!’”

  I borrowed my title from the well-known Christopher Priest novel. When I contacted Chris about this, he replied, “Don’t worry—that was never my original title anyhow!”

  THE PERFECT LOVER

  Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla

  February 10, 2036

  The substrate for the cultured human-mouse brain cells was a highly reticulated wodge of aerogel contained in a homeostatic capsule big as a human’s thumb. At this moment the naked capsule sat in a dock, tethered by a GliaWire connection to a Brooksweil 5000 running at 100 petaflops. The parent machine was the size of a credit card, its “monitor” and “keyboard” hologrammatic projections.

  Two people stood by the setup. One, a genially abstracted man approximately thirty years old, wore intelligent otakuwear, full of membraneous pockets, organic sensors, interface patches and invisible circuitry. The other, a hard-eyed woman with some grey threading her bronze hair, wore the dress uniform of a Marine major, including ribbons from the Caracas campaign.

  “I don’t understand,” said the woman, “why the drone can’t be governed directly by the Brooksweil. Surely there’s enough Turingosity there.”

  “Plenty,” replied the man. “Near-human levels. But there’s no love.”

  “Love? What’s love got to do with it?”

  Filtering the conversation in realtime, the man’s clothing prompted him through an earbud with a cultural referent to a pop song over fifty years old. But he chose not to utter it. Didn’t seem likely this hardcase would appreciate any such trivial allusion. Intelligence amplification still required human discretion.

  “Love is the driver for the mission. Love will supplement the drone’s heuristics in instances where lesser imperatives would collapse. Without that emotion, the failure rate goes up an order of magnitude. And we can’t simulate love yet in the purely moletronic minds.”

  The major looked suspiciously at the little pod full of wetware, as if it might suddenly start spouting poetry through its as-yet-unattached peripherals.

  “Well, so long as it follows its directives .…”

  “Need I remind you of our past successes? DARPA and BARDA just renewed our funding at double the previous annual budget.”

  “I know, I know. But there’s so much riding on this mission. If we don’t stop this bastard Kiet the Mousekiller, we stand to lose most of the West Coast.”

  The man shuddered at the thought, and his clothes perfused his skin with some soothing neurotropes.

  Kiet the Mousekiller had begun his infamous career as a simple Thai pirate, preying on international shipping. Radicalized by the anonymous contamination of Mecca with a GPS-circumscribed green goo, he had become a terrorist, earning his sobriquet by his cunning destruction of Hong Kong Disneyland. Kiet’s latest scheme, not yet known to the public, involved a retired Japanese deep-sea drilling ship, the Chikyu, which Kiet and his backers had purchased on the open market under a false front Now docked in the Indonesian port of Balikpapan, the ship was believed to be due to sail imminently, according to best intelligence.

  Kiet’s plan was to drill down deep into a tectonic subduction zone close to America and plant and detonate a small nuclear bomb, thus triggering a tsunami larger than the one that had caused so much damage thirty years before.

  Stopping him by overt military means was politically contra-indicated by the terrorist’s current refuge with an ostensible ally. Thus, this black budget project.

  After regarding the Brooksweil’s display, the technician began disconnecting the GliaWire. “Okay, we’ll be ready for the sample in a moment. You’ve got it?”

  The major’s hand strayed instinctively to her sidearm, before she reached into her pocket and removed a glassine packet. “Several hairs reclaimed from Kiet’s last visit to his favorite whorehouse.”

  Handling the homeostatic capsule nonchalantly, the man walked toward the drone.

  A stealthy tortoise with a MEMS shell, powered by the same pocket fusion reactor found inside NASA’s Sedna probe, the drone rested on a table, as innocuous as any lawn-mowing bot. A small hatch gaped in its shell. The technician installed the pod inside and closed the hatch. He took the packet, extracted the hairs, and placed them in a small perforated depression on the front of the tortoise.

  “Okay, we’re live.”

  When I came fully awake the essence of my beloved was already integrated into my soul. His beautiful face filled my inner eye, and I could taste his genome, sweeter to me than the power that flowed from my atomic heart I wanted nothing more than to be with him, to merge my soul with his, to shower him with my love. Nothing else mattered.

  And I would let nothing stand between us.

  I immediately extended my senses, sniffing the air, but met disappointment. My beloved was nowhere within range. But knowledge in my memory informed me of where I might find him! How I quivered with eagerness to race to his side! But where was the exit from this place?

  Suddenly a passage to the open air materialized above me. I activated my ventral lifter fans and rose upward.

  My lover called!

  * * *

  Banda Sea

  February 14, 2036

  I had sustained extensive damages during my voyage to my mate. He was surrounded by vigilant outlying duennas, brutish entities similar to myself who guarded him jealously. Every step of my route during the last day had been fraught with challenges. But I had met them without hesitation. Because that was what lovers did.

  My aerial capacity was now severely diminished, limited to short hops, and I currently traveled underwater, using my magneto-hydrody namic systems. My signature across the spectrum was that of a school of fish.

  All my telemetry said abort. But I would not.

  Ahead of me loomed the vessel that I had previously verified held my beloved. I knew I would have to surface to unite with him, and prepared myself.

  I shot out of the water alongside the ship, lurching evasively, to be met quickly with a hail of small-arms fire from those who were not my beloved. I triggered my infrasonics, and all my rivals collapsed in bowel-spasming pain.

  Crashing through the window of the pilothouse, I sustained further injury.

  But nothing mattered.

  For I was finally in the presence of my beloved!

  An expression of terrible ecstasy filled his face, and my soul melted with joy.

  I initiated the destabilizing quench
on the magnets surrounding my fiery heart, giving him all my love at last.

  An evanescent fountain of multi-million-degree plasma bloomed briefly aboard the Chikyu, in the fierce and tender shape of a heart.

  Here’s another example of the micro-story, in a political mode this time. I very seldom write overtly political stories, but somehow felt compelled to do so in this case. The need to explicate America’s run of horrid misfires and catastrophes was just too strong.

  On a non-political note, and testifying to my Simpsons addiction, I cannot read this story without hearing Bart Simpson’s classic line, “Why would anybody wanna touch a girl’s butt? That’s where cooties come from.”

  COOTIE BOX

  Do you want me to open up the Cootie Box again?”

  “Good god, no! Get that fucking thing out of sight! We’ll do whatever you say!”

  The President smiled like a businessman who had just cornered the market on rain. He took up the Cootie Box from his desktop—a battered little casket no bigger than a photo printer—and tucked it away in a deep open drawer.

  “Okay, Senator, that’s fine. Now that we understand each other, get your ass back there and deliver those votes!”

  I left the Oval Office, angry and saddened.

  Since the President had gotten his hands on Pandora’s Box, we were all at his mercy.

  No one had believed him at first. Especially when he kept talking about some old “cootie box.” We all just assumed he was free-associating the way he generally did, some important matter of state triggering one of his juvenile riffs. But then the reality of the Cootie Box hit us, thanks to several Presidential demonstrations. (Apparently, the box had been discovered by an NSF-funded archaeological dig in Greece, whence it had made its crooked way into the President’s hands.)