Appeals Court

by Charles Stross

  “Shit and double-shit.” Ade’s tinny voice sounds upset. “They’re not trustworthy, mate. Sell you as soon as look at you, those two. She said you were hurt, but —”

  “You don’t know where she is, either,” Huw accuses.

  “Nope.” They ride along in near silence for a while.

  “What’s the big idea?” Huw asks, trying to sustain a sense of detachment. “Packing me off to bongo-bongo land to convert the cannibals is all very fucking well, but I thought you said this would be safe as houses?”

  “Um well, there’s been a kinda technical hitch in that direction,” Adrian says. “But we’ll get that sorted out, don’t you worry yer little head over it. Main thing is, you don’t wanna stay with the randroids any longer than you got to, got that? Anyway, I’m sure you can show ‘em a clean pair of heels, mate. When you get to Glory City, head for the John the Baptist Museum of Godless Evolution and make your way to the Steven Jay Gould Lies and Blasphemy Exhibit. There’s a trapdoor under the Hallucigena mock-up leading to an atheist’s hole and if you get there I’ll send someone to pick you up. ‘Kay?”

  “Wait —” Huw says, but he’s too late. The buzzing stops, just as Doc reaches over and cuffs Huw around the helmet. “What?” Huw cranks the volume on his suit radio.

  ” — said, you paying attention, boy?” Doc demands. There’s a suspicious gleam in his eye, although Huw isn’t certain it isn’t just the effect of looking at him through a thin layer of toughened glass across which stray a handful of very lost ants.

  “I was asleep,” Huw protests.

  “Bah.” Doc rubs off the ants, then grabs the brakes. “Well, son, I was just saying: only a couple of hours now until we get there…”

  * * *

  The road is unlit and there’s little traffic. What there is seems to consist mostly of high-tech bicycle rickshaws retrofitted for unapologetic hydrocarbon combustion, and ancient rusting behemoth pick-ups that belch thick blue petroleum smoke — catalytic converters and fuel cells being sins against man’s deity-designated dominance over nature. The occasional wilted and ant-nibbled wreaths plaintively underscore the messages on the tarnished and bullet-speckled road signs: KEEP RIGHT and SLOW TRUCKS.

  The landscape is dotted with buildings that have the consistency of halvah or very old cheddar. These are the remains of man’s folly and his pride, now bored out of 90 percent of their volume to fill the relentless bellies of the Hypercolony. Individually, the ants crawling across his faceplate, along his guantlets, over the sexy sizzle of the LEDs and crisped up in a crust around the flame-nozzles appear to be disjointed and uncoordinated. But now, here, confronted with the evidence of the Hypercolony’s ability to energize collective action out of its atomic units, Huw is struck with a deep, atavistic terror. There is an Other here, loose on the continent, capable of bringing low all that his kind has built. Suddenly, Huw’s familiar corporeality, the source of so much personal pride, starts to feel like a liability.

  The aircon unit makes a sputtery noise that Huw feels rather than hears through the cavaties of the michelin-suit. He’s tried wiggling its umblicus in its suit-seal, but now the air coming out of it is hot and wet and smells of burning insulation. He’s panting and streaming with sweat by the time the dim white dome of Glory City swims out of the darkness ahead to straddle the road like a monstrous concrete carbuncle. Sam guns the throttle like a tireless robot, while Doc snores in the sidecar, his mouth gaping open beneath his moustache, blurred behind the ant-crawling lexan of his faceplate. “How much longer?” he gasps, the first words he’s spoken in an hour.

  “Three miles. Then we park up and take a room for the night in Saint Pat’s Godly Irish Motel. No smoking, mind,” Sam adds. “They don’t take to the demon weed.”

  Huw stares in grim, panting silence as they take the uphill slope towards the base of the enormous, kilometers-high Fuller dome that caps the former city. Impregnated with neurotoxins, the dome is the ultimate defense against ants. They ride into the city past a row of gibbeted criminals, their caged bones picked clean by ants, then into the deserted and enormous airlock, large enough to accomodate an armoured batallion. What Huw initially takes for an old-fashioned air-shower turns out to be a gas chamber, venting something that makes his throat close when he gets a hint of a whiff of it through the suit’s broken aircon. After ten minutes of gale-force nerve-gas, most of the ants are washed away, and those that remain appear to have died. Sam produces a stiff whisk broom and brushes him free of the few thousand corpses that have become anchored by their mouth-parts to his suit, with curious gentleness, and then hands him the whisk so that he may return the favor. Then the inner doors to Glory City open wide, sucking them into the stronghold of the left-behind.

  Once inside the dome, Huw finds that Glory City bears little resemblance to any streaming media representations of pre-singularity NorAm cities he’s ever seen. For one thing the roads are narrow and the buildings tall, leaning together like a sinister crowd of drunkards, the olde-world olde-town feel revived to make maximum use of the cubic volume enclosed by the dome. For another thing, about half the tallest buildings seem to be spiky towers, like the old mediaeval things back home that he associates with seamy nightclubs. It takes him a moment to realise: those are churches! He’s never imagined so many temples existing before, let alone in a single city.

  The next thing he notices are the adverts. Everywhere. On billboards and paving stones and the sides of parked monster trucks. Probably tattooed on the hides of the condemned prisoners outside, before the ants ate them. Half the ads seem to be public service announcements, and the other half seem to be religious slogans, and some are in-between: ENJOY HOST ON A SHINGLE: COMMUNION WITH ZEST HALF THE CALORIES LOWER GLYCEMIC INDEX! Whichever they are, they set his teeth on edge — so that he’s almost happy when Sam steers him into a cramped parking lot behind a tall gray slab of concrete and grunts, “this is the motel.”

  It’s about two in the morning, and Huw catches himself yawning as Sam shakes Doc awake and extracts him from the sidecar. “C’mon in,” says Doc. “Let’s get some sleep. Got a long day tomorrow, son.”

  The lobby of the motel is guarded by a fearsome-looking cast-iron gate. Huw unlatches his faceplate and heaves a breath: the air is humid and warm, cloying and laden with decay as sweet as a rotting tooth. Doc approaches the concierge’s desk while Sam hangs back, one meaty hand gripping Huw’s arm proprietorily. “Don’t you go getting no clever ideas,” Sam rumbles quietly. “Doc tagged you with a geotracker chip. You go running away, you’ll just get him riled.”

  “Uh. Okay.” Huw gulps.

  Doc is at the desk, talking to a woman whose long black dress is like a throwback to the puritan colony days and who wears a bonnet that looks like it’s nailed to her head. She’s old, showing the distressing signs of physical senescence. “Twenty cents for the suite,” she says loudly, “and fifteen for the pen.” (Deflation has taken its toll on the once-mightly dollar.) She wags a wrinkled finger under Doc’s nose: “and none o’your filth!”

  Doc draws himself up to his full height. “I assure you, I am here to do the Lord’s work,” he tells her icily. “Along with this misguided creep. And my assistant.”

  Sam pushes Huw forward. “Doc gets the presidential suite whenever he stays here,” he says. “You get to sleep in the pen.”

  “The…?”

  “‘Cause we don’t rightly trust you,” Sam says, pushing Huw towards a side-door behind the reception area. “So a little extra security is called for.”

  “Oh —” Huw says, and stops. Oh, really now, Huw would say, except that now the Doc is back with a squeeze-bottle of something liquid and so cold that it is fogged with a rime of condensation. Huw’s dryth of throat manifests, and the gob in his mouth has the viscosity of rubber-sap.

  “Thursday, Son?” the Doc says, playfully jetting a stream of icy liquid in the air.

  “Ahhh,” Huw says, nodding vigorously. Six hours in the suit with nothing but
highly diruetic likker and any number of hours of direct sunlight in its insulated confines after the aircon broke down — he’s so dehydrated he’s ready to piss snot.

  “This a-way,” the Doc says, and beckons with the bottle.

  Huw lets Sam help him climb out of the sidecar and barely notices the rubbery feeling of his legs after hours of being cramped up in the little buggy. “Hotcha,” the Doc says, “come on now, time’s a wastin’.” He gives the bottle another squeeze and water spatters the dusty ground.

  “Aaah,” Huw agrees, lumbering after it. He’s never felt quite this thirsty in all his days.

  The Doc heads for a staircase behind a row of suppository-shaped elevator cages, standing open and gleaming in scratched plastic dullness by the diffuse white light of the holy sodiums overhead. Huw can barely keep up, but even if he had to drop to his knees and crawl, he’d do it. That’s holy stuff, that water, infused with the numinous glow of life itself. Did’t the Christians have a hymn about it, “Jesus Gave Me Water?” Huw comes from a long line of trenchant black country atheists, a man who takes to religion the way that vegans take to huge suspicious Polish sausages that look like cross-sectioned dachshundts, but he’s having an ecstatic experience right now, taking the stairs on trembling knees.

  The Doc spits on his thumb and smears the DNA across the auth-plate set in the door at the bottom of the stairs. It thinks for a long moment, then clanks open in a succession of matrioshkoid armour layers.

  “G’wan now, you’ve earned it, the Doc says, rolling the bottle into the cell behind the door.

  Huw toddles after it, the michelin suit making him waddle like he’s got a load in his diaper, but he can’t be arsed worrying about that right now because there’s a bottle of water with his name on it at the other side of the cell, a bottle so cold and pure that it cries out to him: drink me! Drink me!

  He’s sucking it down, feeling the cold straight through to his skull-bone, a delicious brain freeze the size of the Universe, when the teapot rattles angrily in his thigh pocket. The sound is getting him down, distracting him from the sense of illumination appearing at the back of his mind’s eye as he gulps the water, so he pulls the thing out and looks at it, relaxing as he sees the shiny metal highlights gleaming happily at him.

  Adrian pops out of the teapot, so angry he’s almost war-dancing, and he curses. “Fucking suggestibility ray — Bible-thumping pud-fuckers can’t be happy unless they’ve tasped someone into ecstasy. Come on, Huw, snap out of it.”

  “Go ‘way,” Huw mumbles irritably, “m’havin’ a trash-transcential- transcendential ‘sperience here.” He gulps some more water then squats, leaning against the wall. Something loves him, something vaster than mountains and far stronger, and it’s bringing tears to his eyes. Except the teapot will have none of it.

  “Fucking wake up! Jesus, didn’t they tell you anything in class when you was a kid? They infuse your cerebrospinal fluid with nanobots that have a built-in tropism for the god module in your temporal lobe. Tickle it with a broadband signal and you’ll see God, angels square-dancing in heaven, fuck knows what. Get a grip on yourself!”

  “It’s God.” Huw’s got a name for the sensation now, and he grins idiotically at the opposite wall of his cell. It’s a slab of solid aluminium, scratched and dented and discoloured along the welds: and it’s as beautiful to Huw as fluted marble pillars supporting the airy roof of a pleasure dome, pennants snapping overhead in the delightful breeze blowing off the waters of the underground river Alph —

  “It’s not God, it’s a fucking tasp! Snap out of it, dipshit, They’re only using it on you ‘cause they want you nice and addled for the Inquisition tomorrow! Then, no more God module!”

  “Huh?” Huw ponders the question for an eternity of proximate grace, as serried ranks of angels blow trumpets of glory in the distant clouds that wreath his head. “I’m … no, I’m happy. This way. I’ve found it.”

  “What you’ve found is a bullet in the back of the head if you stay here, fuckwad!” Ade shakes his fists from the top of the teapot. “Think, damn you! What would you have thought of this yesterday?”

  “Yesterday?” Yesterday, all his troubles, so far away. Huw nods, thinking deeply. “I’ve always been missing ‘thing like this, even f’I’didn’t know it. Feels right. Everything makes sense.” The presence of the ultimate, even if it’s coming from right inside his own skull courtesy of a 5.4 gigahertz transmission from Godbotherer Central, is making it hard for Huw to concentrate on anything else. “Wanna be like this ‘til I die, if’s all the same to you.”

  “They’ll kill you, man!” Ade pauses in his frantic fist-waving. “Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

  “Mmf. Lemme think about it.” Huw slowly slumps back against the wall, his suit bulking and billowing around him and digging sharp joints into his bruised body, sanctifying and mortifying his flesh. “If I believed in an actual, like, God, this’d’be marvellous. But God’s such a goddamned primitive fetish, isn’t it? So’m’a, an atheist. Always have been, always will be. But this thing is like, inside me, and it’s huge, so enormous and blindingly brilliant it’s like my own reflection on infinity.” His eyes widen. “Hey, that means I’m a god. I’m like, transcendentistry, right? I think therefore I guess I am. If they try to shoot me I’ll just zap ‘em with my god-powers.” He giggles for a while, pointing his fingers at the ceiling, walls and floor, lightning bolts of the illuminated imagination spraying every which way. “It’s a solipsystem! Nobody here but me. I am god. I am god. I am god —”

  The teapot zaps him with an electric shock as Ade vanishes in a huff.

  “Ouch.” Huw sucks his thumb for a moment and meditates on the cellestial significance of the autodeity sending him messages from his subconscious via a curved metal antiquity stuffed with black-market Libyan electronics. Then he tucks it away in his pocket and settles back down to work hard on regaining his sense of omnipotent brilliance. And he’s still sitting in that pose the next morning, staring at the wall, when the sense of immanence vanishes, the doors grind open, and Doc and Sam come to take him downtown to face the Inquisition.

  * * *

  They parade him down the road in the drab grey morning light of Glory City, past the filling-stations, the churches, the diners, the other filling stations, the refinery, the filling-station-memorabilia market, the GasHaus, the corkscrew apartment blocks where every neighbor can look in on every other’s window, and the execution ground.

  And it all feels good to Huw.

  As the parade progresses, curious locals emerge from their homes and workplaces as if drawn by some ultrawideband alert, rounded up and herded out to form a malignant rent-a-mob that demonstrates to Huw how important and central to reality he is. They pelt him with rotting fruit and wet cigar stubs with live coals on one end that singe him before bouncing free to the impermeable pavement, affirming his sense of holy closeness with the intensity of their focus on him. Once, they stop so that the Doc can roar a speech at the crowd —

  “— heretic — vengeance — drugs — sex — wantonness —”

  Huw doesn’t pay much attention to the speech. Through his feet he fancies he can feel the scritterscratch of the Hypercolony, gnawing patiently at the yards of stone and polymer between him and the blighted soil. It’s a bad feeling, as if Glory City is a snow-globe that has been lifted into the air on the backs of a heptillion ants who are carrying it away, making it sway back and forth. The curlicue towers and the gnarled and crippled crowd rock in hincky rhythm.

  The faces on the balconies swim when he looks up. Some of them have horns on their foreheads. He turns away and tries to stare at a fixed point, using the ballerina’s trick of keeping his gaze still to make the world stop its whirling, but his gorge is rising, and his stomach is threatening to empty down his front.

  This is not good.

  He sits down hard, his armored ass klonking on the pavement, and Sam lumbers toward him. Huw holds out his hand, wanting to be helped to
his feet, back to the godhead and the good trip. Just as Sam’s fingertips graze his, a woman wearing a voluminous black gown dashes out of the crowd and snatches him under the armpits, looping a harness around his chest. Where it touches his back it gloms on hard, hyperglue nanites welding it to the suit’s surface.

  “Hold on,” Bonnie hisses in his ear, and he feels like weeping, because he knows he isn’t to be redeemed after all, but tediously rescued and rehabilitated and set free.

  “Bitch harlot!” screeches Doc. “Sodomite! Stop her!” Sam grabs for her past Huw’s shoulder, sideswipes the rounded swell of her bosom — extensively, chastely covered, this being Glory City — and jerks his hand back as though he’d been burned.

  The harness around Huw’s chest tightens with rib-bruising force and he’s dragged backwards, skittering over the roadway before the harness lofts them both into the air, up toward the balconies ringing the curlicue towers. Bonnie, who is tied off to him by a harness of her own, squints nervously down at the crowd receding below them.

  Huw bangs chest-first into the side of one of the towers, Bonnie’s weight knocking the breath out of him. They dangle together, twirling in the breeze like a giant booger as strong hands hoist them bodily up and over a balcony, then inside, adding insult to injury in the form of an atomic wedgie. Bonnie scrambles in after him, unlocks her harness, and shakes out her voluminous petticoats. Huw is still dazed from the flight and gasping for breath. He’s bent over double, trying to breathe perfumed air thick with musky incense.

  “You all right?”

  Huw forces himself to straighten up and look around. The room is a tribute to excess: the wallpaper is printed with gold and red and black tesselations — obscene diagrams, he realises, interpenetrating and writhing before his eyes — and the sofa is flocked with crushed purple velvet. The coffee-table supports a variety of phallic implements in an assortment of improbable colours, suited to an altogether different kind of inquisition than the one that he’d been headed for.