Appeals Court

by Charles Stross

  “Glag-ad,” Sam gurgles, and Huw yanks down the emergency first aid kit and pulls out a gel pack that says something about burns and bites and massive tissue injuries on its side. He lays it across the top of Sam’s face, making sure to leave a hole around his mouth, then hunts out a syrette full of something morphinesque and whacks it into Sam’s upper arm. After a tense minute Sam’s whistling breaths slow and the shuddering spasms relax into something like sleep.

  How is nearly out of it by this time, drunk on a cocktail of terror, pity, pain and exhaustion. The world seems to be spinning as he hauls himself through the rear door and into the cockpit at the back of the craft. Smuggler’s swamp boat, he realises. Doc must not have wanted to show this anywhere near Glory City. As he studies the unfamiliar controls he comes to the unpleasant conclusion that he’s not going anywhere on his own. Don’t know how to operate it, and if I did, I wouldn’t know where to go, he realises. He glances out the windshield at the gathering darkness, punctuated by the evil fire-red bellies of ants that are trying their luck on the diamond-reinforced sapphire laminate. (Some of them are even leaving gouges in it.) Just a temporary reprieve …

  There’s a crackle from a grille on the dash. “Ready to accept UN jurisdiction, you miscreant?” croaks a familiar tenor. Huw stares at the speaker as floodlights come on behind him in the depths of the swamp, spearing the cab of the smuggler’s boat with a blue-white glare. “Or would you rather I crack that toy open like an egg and leave you to the ants?”

  Christ, Huw thinks. It’s not as though I know how to drive this goddamned thing, anyway. He presses a button next to the grille. “Can you hear me?” he says. He repeats this with four more likely-looking buttons until Judge Judy”s cackle answers him back.

  “You going to come along peacefully?”

  “Sure looks like it,” he says. “Do I get to stand trial somewhere civilized?”

  The judge chuckles fatalistically. “Once we shoot our way off this fucking continent and nuke it in our wake, I fully intend to drag your spotty ass back to Libya for a proper trial. Does that suit you?”

  “Down to the ground,” Huw says. “Now what?”

  * * *

  “Herro,” Ade says, popping up out of his lantern after the Judge has Huw shrink-wrapped and tossed in a narrow hold, her daleksuit and her golems filling up all the available on Sam’s boat. “Ew,” he says, when he catches sight of Sam’s ruin of a face. “That can’t be good.”

  “He’ll get fixed up once he gets to civilization,” Huw says. “Judge is taking us to Libya.” He sighs and tries to get comfortable in his enforced, plastic-wrapped vermicularitude. “The ants got Bonnie,” he adds, conversationally, his voice hollow and echoing in the cramped hold.

  “You don’t say?” Ade says. “Well, that’s too bad. Scratch one useful idiot.”

  “You know, it’s going to be a pleasure to rat you out to the UN,” Huw says. “A pleasure to get the ambassador cut free and fed to a disassembler. Your movement stinks.”

  The tiny Adrian plants its hands on its hips and cocks its head at Huw. “Useful idiots I have patience for,” he says. “Useless idiots, well, that’s something else altogether.”

  The boat judders to a halt. There’s a roar of jets overhead and a series of crashes all around them. We’re being bombed, Huw thinks. The boat bounces like a pea on a plate. “Sam, are you conscious yet?” he says, aloud. Sam doesn’t move. Just as well, he thinks, and prepares to die.

  “Oh, please spare me the drama,” Adrian says. “I radioed your position to the Bishop so that he could capture you, not kill you. The Ambassador needs a host.”

  He hears the golems slam past his hold and run out to do battle, then more jouncing crashes.

  “I have diplomatic immunity,” the Judge screeches as something drags her past his cell. A moment later, the hatch opens, and Huw and Sam are lifted, dumped into a gigantic airtight hamster-ball, sealed, and rolled away back toward Glory City.

  * * *

  “Children,” the Bishop says. He is thin and weak-chinned and watery-eyed, and his voice is familiar. It takes Huw a moment to place it, and then he remembers the voice, moist in his ear: Sinner, can you hear me?

  “You are in: So. Much. Trouble.” Judge Judy is no longer hissing like a teakettle, but her rage is still clearly barely under control. “What do the words ‘Diplomatic Immunity’ mean to you?”

  “Not an awful lot, We’re afraid,” the Bishop says, and whitters a little laugh. “We don’t much go in for formalities here in the new world, you know.”

  They’ve amputated the dalek suit’s gun and damped its public-address system, so that Judge Judy is reduced to a neutered head in a peppermill with a black robe of office draped round it, but she is still capable of giving looks that could curdle milk. Huw numbly watches her glare at the Bishop, and the Bishop’s watery answering stare.

  “What shall We do with you?” the Bishop says. “Officially, you’re dead, which is convenient, since it wouldn’t do to have the great unwashed discover that God’s will was apparently to let you go.

  “The entity who alerted Us to your presence was adamant that the sinner here should be spared. You’re host to some godvomit that many entities are interested in, and consequently, you may live. So chin up, right?”

  “I’m thrilled,” Huw says. “But I ‘spect that means that Sam here’s not going to live? Nor the judge?” Sam is zap-strapped at the ankles and wists and shoulders and knees and thighs, but it’s mostly a formality. He’s barely breathing, and the compress on his face blooms with a thousand blood-colored roses.

  “Well, of course not,” the Bishop says. “Heretics. Enemies of the state. They’re to be shoved out the lock as soon as We’re sure that they’ve got nothing of interest to impart to Us. A day, two tops. Got that, your honor? As long as you say useful things, you live.”

  The Judge sputters angrily in her peppermill.

  “Now, let’s get you off to the operating theatre,” the Bishop says.

  Huw can barely muster the will to raise an eyebrow at this. “Operating theatre?”

  “Yes. We’ve found that quadruple amputees are much more pliable and less apt to take it on the lam than the able-bodied. You’ll get used to it, trust us.”

  The servants of the Inquisition, ranged around them, titter at this.

  “Take them away,” the Bishop says, waving a hand.

  * * *

  Huw is having a dream. He’s a disembodied head whose vocal-chords thrum in three-part harmony with a whistle lodged in his stump of a throat. The song is weird and familiar, something he once sang to a beautiful girl, a girl who gave her life for him. The song is all around him, sonorous and dense, a fast de/modulation of information from the Cloud, high above, his truncated sensorium being transmitted to the curious heavens. The song is the song he sang to the beautiful girl, and she’s singing back.

  His eyes snap open. He’s on the floor of his cell, parched dry and aching, bleeding and naked. The whistle warbles deep in his throat and the floor vibrates in sympathy, with the tromping of a trillion tiny feet and the scissoring of a trillion sharpened mouth-parts.

  The ants come up through the floor and Huw squirms away from them as best as he can — but he’s still shrink-wrapped and the best he can do is hump himself inchworm style into a corner, pressed up against the wall of the dome that forms the outer wall of his cell. The song pours out of his throat, unabated by his terror. Some part of him is surprised that he’s capable of caring about anything anymore, but he does not want to be eaten by the ants, does not want to be reduced to a Huw-shaped lump of brick-red crawling insects.

  The whistle’s really going to town now. The Ambassador is having words with the hypercolony, and Huw can just barely make out the sense of the song he’s singing: Ready for upload.

  The ants have covered him, covered the walls and the floor and the ceiling, they’ve eaten through his coating of shrinkwrap, but the expected stings don’t come. Instead
, Huw is filled with the sense of vast clumps of information passing through his skin, through the delicate mucous membranes of his eyes and nostrils, through his ears and the roots of his hair, all a-crawl with ants whose every step conveys something.

  Something: the totality of the hypercolony — its weird, sprawling consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of its complexity, oozing through his pores and through the Ambassador and up to the cloud. It’s not just the ants, either — it’s everything they’ve ever eaten: everything they’ve ever disassembled.

  Somewhere in that stream is every building, every car, every tree and animal and — and every person the ants have eaten. Have disassembled.

  Bonnie is passing through him, headed for the Cloud. Well, she always did want to upload.

  * * *

  Huw doesn’t know how long the Ambassador holds palaver with the hypercolony, only knows that when the song is done, he is so hoarse he can barely breathe. (During a duet, do the musicians pay any attention to the emotional needs of their instruments?) Huw leans against the wall, throat raw as the Ambassador chatters to the ant colony — biological carriers for the engines of singularity, its own ancestral bootstrap code — and he can just barely grasp what’s going on. There are complex emotions here, regret and loss and irony and schadenfreude and things for which human languages hold no words, and he feels very stupid and very small as he eavesdrops on the discourse between the two hive minds. Which is, when the chips are down, a very small discourse, for the Ambassador doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit everything the ants have ever stored: it’s just a synchronization node, the key that allows the hypercolony to talk to the cloud in orbit high above it.

  And Bonnie is still dead, for all that something that remembers being her is waking up upstairs, and he’s still lying here in a cell waiting to be chopped up by barbarians, and there’s something really weirdly wrong with the way he feels in his body as if the ants have been making impromptu modifications, and as the Ambassador says goodbye to the ants a sense of despair fills him —

  The door opens.

  “Hello, my child.” It’s the other Bishop, the pansexual pervert in the polygenital suit. It winks at him: “expecting someone else?”

  Huw tries to reply. His throat hurts too much for speech just yet so he squirms up against the wall, trying to get away, for all the time an extra millimetre will buy him.

  “Oh, stop worrying,” the Bishop says indulgently. “I — ah, ah! — I just dropped by to say everything’s sorted out. Mission accomplished, I gather. The, ah, puritans are holed up upstairs watching a fake snuff video starring yourself, being disassembled for spare organs — operating theatres make for great cinema and provide a good reason for not inviting them to the auto da fe in person. Isn’t CGI great? Which means you’re mostly off the hook now, and we can sort out repatriating you.”

  “Huh?” Huw blinks, unsure what’s going on. Is this a set-up? he wonders — but there’s no reason why the lunatics would run him through something like this, is there? It’s so weird it’s got to be true. “Wh-whaargh, what do you mean?” He coughs horribly. His throat is full of something unpleasant and thick, and his chest feels sore and bloated.

  “We’re sending you home,” the Bishop says patiently. It holds up a slim hand and snaps its fingers; a pair of hermaphrodites in motley suits with bells on the tips of their pointy shoes steer in a wheelchair and go to work on Huw’s bonds with electric shears and a gentle touch. “You have our thanks for a job well done. I’d beatify you, except it’s considered bad form while the recipient is still alive, but you can rest assured that your lover is well on her way to being canonized as a full saint in the First Church of the Teledildonic. Giving up her life so that you might survive to bring the hypercolony into the full Grace of the Cloud certainly would qualify her for beatification, even if her other actions weren’t sufficient, which they are as it happens.” Slim hands lift Huw into the wheelchair and wheel him through the door.

  “I feel weird,” Huw says, voice odd in his ears. His ears? He manages to look down, and whimpers slightly.

  “Yes, that’s often one of the symptoms of beatification,” the Bishop says placidly: “the transgendered occupy a special place of honour in our communion, and to have it imposed on you by the hypercolony is a special sign of grace.” And Huw sees that it’s true, but he doesn’t feel as upset about it as he knows he ought to. The ants have given him a whole goddamn new body while the ambassador was singing a duet with them, and he — she — is about five years younger, five centimetres shorter, and if her pubes are anything to go by her hair’s going to come in two shades lighter than it was back when she was a man.

  It’s one realisation too many, so Huw zones out as the Bishop’s minions wheel her up the corridor and into an elevator while the Bishop prattles on. The explanation that the Bishop is both the leader of the Church Temporal — the fallen Baptists — and the Church Transcendental — the polyamorous perverts — passes him by. There’s some arcane theological justification for it all, references to Zoroastrian dualism, but in her depression and disorientation the main thing that’s bugging Huw is the fact that she survived — and Bonnie didn’t.

  Upstairs in whatever dwelling they’re in, there’s a penthouse suite furnished in sybaritic luxury. Carpets of silky natural growing hair, wall-hanging screens showing views from the landscapes of imaginary planets, the obligatory devotional orgy beds and sex crucifixes of the Church of Teledildonics. The Bishop leads the procession in through the door and a familiar voice squawks: “you’ll regret this!”

  “Perhaps.” The Bishop is calm, and Huw sees why fairly rapidly.

  Judge Guilliani spins her chair round and glares at him, then her eyes fasten on the wheelchair. “What happened here?” she demands.

  “The alien artefact you so urgently seek,” the Bishop says with heavy irony. “It has accomplished its task, and we are blessed by the fallout. Its humble human vessel who you see before you —” a hand caresses Huw’s shoulder — “is permanently affected by the performance, and we are deeply relieved.”

  “Its. Task.” Guilliani is aghast. “Are you insane? You let it out?”

  “Certainly.” The Bishop smirks. And we are all the ah, ah, better for it.” He pauses for a moment, sneezes convulsively, and shudders orgasmically. “Oh! Oh! That was good. Oh my. Yes, ah, the cloud has re-established its communion with the North American continent, and I feel sure that the hypercolony is deeply relieved to have offloaded almost two decade’s worth of uploads — everything that has happened since the Rapture of the Nerds, in fact.”

  “Ah.” Guillani glares at the Bishop, then gives it up as a bad job — the Bishop doesn’t intimidate easily. “Who’s this?” she demands, staring at Huw.

  “This? Don’t you recognize her?” The Bishop simpers. “She’s your creation, after all. And you’re going to take very good care of her, aren’t you?”

  “Gack,” says Huw, blanching. She tries to lever herself out of the wheelchair but she’s still weak as a baby.

  “If you think I’m —” a puzzled expression crawls over the Judge’s face. “Why?” she demands. She peers closer at Huw and hisses to herself: “you, you little rat-bastard! Court is in session —”

  “— Because the Ambassador she carries is the main pacemaker for all uploads from the North American continent, and if you don’t look after her the Cloud will be very pissed-off with you. And so will the hypercolony. Oh, and if you don’t promise to look after her, you aren’t going home. Is that good enough for you?”

  “Ahem,” says Guilliani. She squints at Huw, eyebrows beetling evilly. “Main pacemaker for a whole continent? Is that true?”

  Huw nods, unable to trust her throat.

  “Hmm.” Guilliani clears her throat. “Then, goddamnit, I hereby find you not guilty of everything in general and nothing in particular. All charges are dismissed.” She glares at the Bishop. “I’ll even get her enrolled in the witness resettlement progr
am. Will that do for now?”

  Huw shudders, but the Bishop nods agreeably. “Yes, that will be sufficient,” he says condescendingly. “Just remember, you wouldn’t want the hypercolony to come calling, er, crawling, would you?”

  The judge nods, meek submission winning out over bubbling rage.

  “Very well. There appears to be a jet with diplomatic clearance on final approach into Charleston right now. Shall we go and put you it?”

  * * *

  Halfway across the Atlantic, Huw falls into a troubled sleep, cuddled restlessly in her first-class berth. Sitting up-front in Ambassador class, the Judge mutters darkly to herself, occasionaly glancing nervously over her shoulder in the direction of Huw and her passenger. Far above them, the Cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its mutifarious sensory apparati, thinking its ineffable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. Now it’s got someone to talk to downstairs, signals synchronized by the beat of Huw’s passenger, it grows positively voluble: catching up with the neighbourhood gossip, chuckling and chattering about the antics of those loveable but dim dreaming apes who remain below.

  Huw’s dreaming she’s back at Sandra Lal’s house, in the aftermath of that memorable party that started this whole thing off. Only she’s definitely she — wearing her new body, aware of it but comfortable in it at the same time. She’s in the kitchen, chewing over epistemology with Bonnie. A sense of sadness spills over him but Bonnie laughs at something, waving — Bonnie is male, this time — at the window. Then he holds out his hand to Huw. Huw walks into his embrace and they hold each other for a long time. Bonnie doesn’t say anything but his question is clear in Huw’s head as she leans her chin on his shoulder. “Not yet,” Huw says sleepily. “I’m not ready for that. Not ‘til I’ve kicked Ade’s butt halfway into orbit and cleared it with the judge. They’re making you a saint, did you know that?”