“Are you insane? You were fucking a roach! What am I meant to think?”
El’s mouth twisted a little. “She’s a gift from the biolabs at Abu Dhabi University. For both of us. I was testing out all her advertised features.”
“A Kafka, for god’s sake. I’ve seen them in Cairo, you don’t need to explain them to me. Fifteen percent human genes.”
“Well, yes, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Sorry.” He raised his hands protectively in front of his face and tried not to grin. “But that’s what they are, dear. General factotum and bug of all trades.”
“What are you doing with one, that’s what I want to know? Surely for something that expensive we should have discussed—”
“No, I’m telling you. A gift! For you, really. It seems they sent one to every high-level bureaucrat in the current administration. Some potentate’s largesse, like the bestowal of the camel or virgin in days of yore.”
“Oh. Right.” Kay’s expression hardened. “In gratitude for President McMurtry’s new stance on Israel.”
“Probably. But hey, Big Mac didn’t exactly disavow American support, it was more a subtle shift in the—”
“Subtle! Subtle! About as subtle as getting home to find you screwing a bug. I’m going to bed. You can sleep on the couch. Oh, and wipe up the slime first.”
She hoped he could tell she didn’t mean it. He should be in the bed beside her. Because, really, there’s no place like home.
The Kafka, Emma, sucked in her stout belly and scrunched under the water heater. Her upstairs sleeping crate beckoned to her with its pheromone-laced organo-plastic shell, but she dared not approach it yet, given the hostility of the house’s queen female.
Trembling with the aftershock of insemination, Emma was also seething with anger. The bitch had called her a cockroach! Em gnawed at the drywall opening, shoveling the unpleasant residue aside into a white powdery pile, and dragged her carapace into the wall space. She was no more a roach than that fool Elwood was a… a… tarsier.
Beneath her forward feet, the rough-cut joists tasted of mouse droppings and something less appetizing. A cat had been in here. Not recently, though. Alert for danger, she forced herself to relax. Cockroach, indeed! Cretin! Em had eaten enough roaches to know the differences intimately—they were flat, their legs stuck out grossly, most were wingless. My belly, she told herself, settling onto it in the soothing grime, is rounded and womanly. My back is strong and mounded like the dome of a noble capitol building. My legs are sensitive and petite. I am a beetle, you stupid human cow. Hear me roar!
At the quivering tip of her abdomen, in the protruding ootheca, her rows of eggs glowed under the attentions of Elwood’s wrigglers. Babies! Soon! She yearned for motherhood.
Her irritation failed to subside. It wasn’t meant to be like this. They’d promised so much more, in the hatchery, along with their cynicism and, simultaneously, their rather pushy warrior faith. In the dim light, Em poked about and found the battered Avon paperback half-copy of Nabokov’s Pnin she’d been consuming. She managed three pages, gobbling them up as she committed the words to memory, before she fell asleep.
“I hope you’re planning on a shower before you come to bed, darling,” Kay told him, throwing off her underwear and moving in the dark. “I can’t bear the stink of the thing on you.”
Elwood’s voice came to her, from the open bathroom door, in the unlighted bedroom: “Sweetheart, you know I always—”
Kay slammed her toes into something and yelped in pain. In a moment, El was beside her, naked, smelling of rancid sex, wide-eyed. He flicked on the overhead light. “What? What’s the matter?”
“What the hell is it?” Kay cried, high-pitched. Her bare toe had struck a bulky off-white curved thing of some kind, as large as the kennel for a Bernese Mountain Dog and shiny as a polished egg, which it rather resembled. It had been squeezed in between her side of the bed and the sliding mirror fronting her closet.
“They brought it when they delivered the Kaf. It’s where she sleeps.”
“In my bedroom?”
“They abhor light, darling.”
Kay stopped rubbing her toe, which still felt as if maybe she’d broken one phalange, and looked for a handhold on the carrier. Nothing—it really was like an egg, seamless, closed.
“How does it get in?”
“You really mustn’t call her ‘it,’ sweetheart. There are provisions in the law now, I should have thought that you, of all people—”
Her questing fingers found a gap underneath. By main force she dragged the plastic shell to the end of the king-sized bed and tried to tip it over, gasping for air.
“I don’t think she’s in there,” El said. “Look, let’s just leave it there for the night, she’ll probably come in later, they’re very quiet and tidy, you know, we’re both exhausted and out of sorts, you and I, I mean, everything will look rosier after we’ve had a good night’s—”
Kay was not listening. Slamming the door between bedroom and hallway, she tugged at the old mahogany chest of drawers she’d inherited from Aunt Lil, dragging it, with a squawk of tortured Columbian structured parquet flooring, to jam the door shut, barring any direct or even furtive approach by the loathsome insect.
“Kay, it’s—She’s a person. This isn’t like you. I thought we had an arrangement?”
“Yes! But the main contract preceded the fooling-around clause. To love and honour till death us do part! You’re doing neither!”
El’s expression indicated he had a ready marital riposte. But some imp of caution dissuaded him from venting the pithy reply. Instead, he wisely hung his head, retreated to the bathroom, had a short but energetically hygienic shower, then crawled meekly into bed, carefully keeping a DMZ of six inches between himself and Kay, whose quivering silent fury scared him fully as much as the world had been terrified of Kim Jong-Il just before that dictator had been assassinated in the very act of launching assorted ICBMs. A crisis Kay had a not-insignificant part in defusing, with hard-nosed realpolitik efficiency.
Lying tensely on his back, vainly inviting sleep, Elwood Grackle remained unaware of the newly introduced and cleverly designed spirochaetes working their way up his urethra with their snicker-snack flagellae, heading with mysterious intentions much deeper into his system.
Professor Qutaybah Al Nahyan nervously fussed with his headdress in preparation for his interview with the Sheikh Khalifa. Although the professor maintained a certain formally congenial consanguinity with the ruler of Abu Dhabi—fifth cousins once removed on a great-uncle’s side—the hard facts of their relationship remained obdurate and inequal. One man was the living embodiment of their proud nation and its glorious destiny, Lion of the Prophet, while the other was a humble university instructor and researcher, educated at Oxford and Cal Tech, unmarried, living in a sparsely furnished bachelor’s condo in the Mussafah Residential neighbourhood. So today’s meeting was hardly between peers, let alone friends. It would be a master’s interrogation of his servant.
Drawing a small comb though his moustache and beard, Professor Al Nahyan sought to reassure himself that the Sheikh Khalifa would be pleased with what he had done, on his own initiative. True, he’d had to use some accounting sleight-of-hand to transfer funds from certain above-board projects to his own lab. And he had shamelessly passed off many of his classroom duties to his grad assistant, a stocky yet rather attractive American woman named Cayenne Sorbet, giving him time to work on tweaking the genome of his prized spirochaete. Also true, he had unleashed his creations on the world—via the Trojan Beetle of the Kafs—without so much as an environmental impact statement. Yet was it not all for the greater glory of Islam, a most gentle and accommodating way of spreading the faith? Surely, with such motives and goals, no discredit could redound to him.
At last the professor could dither no longer, but must make haste. Down to the condo’s basement garage, into the air-conditioned comfort of his Chinese sedan, and out to contend with the impossible tr
affic of the island city-state. Subsidized gasoline prices encouraged auto use here, unlike most of the rest of their world, suffering $200-a-barrel oil, despite the power beaming down now from orbit.
The meeting was scheduled to take place at MOPA, the Ministry of Presidential Affairs on the Corniche Road. As professor Al Nahyan pulled into the parking lot, the sharp sparkle of the ocean waters nearby pierced his eyes and gave him an instant headache. He began to suspect that this meeting would not go well.
The Sheikh, however, seemed in a fine, expansive mood when Al Nahyan was finally ushered into the presence. Four or five men in tasteless western garb and an equal number of proud yet fawning cousins in their mid-twenties and early thirties attended the potentate as he sat at ease behind a desk as large as an aircraft carrier’s launch deck. Holograms projected above the black glass desk displayed a magnificent assortment of prancing, head-tossing racing camels, presumably candidates for the Sheikh’s fabled stables. Rumours suggested that the best of these coursers were genetically modified, enhanced against all the laws of God and man. If it were so, the result, the professor had to confess, proved the infraction worth the risk. His eyes moistened to see them, even at one-tenth scale, and his heart beat faster at the thought of mounting one and wheeling away into the desert, as his ancestors had ridden for centuries in the service of the Sheikh’s own lineage. He came to his senses as the dealers in dromedarian flesh departed, puffing on large cigars, and his master faced him with a keen glance.
“Fine steeds, eh?”
“Yes indeed, sir.”
“And what of your own little breeding experiments, eh? Eh?” The Sheikh laughed a booming, deep-chested laugh that rattled the professor’s equanimity if not the bomb-proof three-ply windows. “Are we on target for the, uh, transformation of the infidels?”
Al Nahyan nervously found a chair, but dared not sit, though his knees knocked.
“Second stage insertion has begun, sir. A container of larvae has been ferried up the San Francisco de Quito skyhook, packaged for orbital transport by Virgin as solar cell panels. I anticipate shuttle deployment above Ecuador within the hour. We’ll take down those Google power-sats in a matter of days.”
The Sheikh’s face set hard, considering who knew what complexities of realpolitik. He tilted his bearded head, then, and reached for the humidor.
“The Kafirs, the infidels, will not know what hit them. A cigar, doctor?”
Melatonin-plus carried Kay through a night racked, in the deepest crevices of her jetlag-shocked body, by exhaustion and disgust. When the alarm beeped at ten in the morning she was still asleep—miracle of pharmaceutical science!—and when she flung her legs over the side of the bed she was hardly any closer to full consciousness. Her toes banged into the roach kennel as she stumbled to the bathroom.
“Damn you, El!” she shrieked, but the chest of drawers had been pulled ajar and he was long gone, into Beltway wonk territory, no doubt greasing his way along the corridors of D.C. power, such as it was any more. The pain in her toe seemed out of all proportion to the impact; maybe she had broken a bone. Shit! Now she’d have to fit an X-ray appointment in with all the rest of her impossibly burdened schedule. “Planner on,” she shouted furiously to the system, and through the scrubbing and gurgling of her morning ablutions dictated her modified timetable. The odour of freshly-brewed automated coffee floated to her under the door from the kitchenette, and something more. Could it be a toasted muffin with orange marmalade? Heavenly! It made her laugh and brightened her mood. She’d surely put the fear of reprisal into the brute. For Elwood to stay home and make her breakf—
“Good morning, madame,” the Kafka said, peering out from behind the refrigerator. “Would we care for an egg?”
Speechless, half-blinded by a rush of blood to her brain, Kay stopped on one foot (the uninjured one) and stared through squinted eyes at the gleaming kitchenette. One of her failings, she was prepared to admit, and certainly one of Elwood’s, was to let the conapt pile up ever grungier with unwashed plates and cups and glasses, half-empty containers from the classiest takeoutlets in Maryland, a dead imported wine bottle or two from the Rhone Valley in Germany or the Illawarra in Australia abandoned on its side under the couch. The help were meant to deal with it, one day a week, but since Big Mac’s punitive expulsions of the wetbacks it was impossible to get any help at all, let alone the good kind. Yet now everything in sight was redeemed, renewed, polished. Had the roach been bending its many elbows to the task?
“No egg,” she said weakly. “Just bring me a cup of coffee and that muffin. I’ll be in my study.”
The creature turned away obediently, no hint of the saucy impudence of last night, but as Kay left the room she caught a glimpse of something horrible and disturbing. A kind of pulsing puce-hued bag protruded from the Kaf’s hindquarters. An egg case? Dear Christ, was the thing enceinte? Was it about to give birth in the kitchen? She couldn’t handle it. Her mind shifted sideways to the problem Sheikh Khalifa posed to the Free World from his seat of power in the United Arab Emirates. If only she had been able to make the Egyptians see that the Emirates were as much a threat to them as to the West—
In the hallway, her bare toes came down on something hard and sharp, something that scattered and rattled. White, stripped bones, with a quite largish crunched skull, as big as a—
Kay screamed at the top of her lungs, and ran for her iPhone, punched Elwood’s direct link. “Get back here this minute,” she shrieked. “Your fucking sex toy has eaten the cat.”
With the surname Stoner, a man was doomed from birth to a certain fate. Nominative determinism was a potent cosmic force, creating a Filipino Roman Catholic Cardinal named Sin, not to mention that top Harley Street neurologist, Lord Brain, Fellow of the Royal Society. So no-one among Jayant Vishnu Stoner’s co-workers aboard Google PowerSat #9 was surprised at Jay’s penchant for ingesting, smoking, injecting, popping, perfusing, snorting, or transcranially/magnetically inducing any illicit stimulant that fell to his questing hand. They regarded as just another workplace perk his amusing propensity for chatting with amiable hallucinations, a luser’s gag, they assumed, meant to entertain them during their endless orbital days.
With his long funky dreads and his migratory subdermal flock of CGI tattoos, his fascination with jam-band music (his iQuant held 10,000 Phish tracks alone) and his slacker work habits, Jay surfed leisurely through his duties as solar-panel installer like a toasted postmodern peon of the space age. Only Jay’s bosses were ignorant of his potentially dangerous non-compliance with management-approved modalities of employment. They were too busy surveying their stock options and charting the exact moment when they could prematurely retire.
Google’s network of PowerSats was nearing the edge of critical mass, the ability to produce a quantity of non-petroleum energy able to rival—and eventually displace—old dirty sources like gas and soft coal, the bountiful curse that had contributed so much pollution to China. These megawatts of clean power beamed by microwave to lacy terrestrial rectenna farms had already brought down the price of a barrel of oil from $250 to $200! Of course, as pointy-headed economists had warned, that cost reduction immediately led to an outburst of SUV purchases burning this cheaper fuel—but every solution has its drawbacks. Soon, the new paradigm of carbon-free power would be a reality, and the global economy would surge forward on a solid footing, no longer indebted to tyrants and dictators or greedy CEOs.
Not that Jay subscribed to any such high-minded idealism. It wasn’t as if he had yearned or studied for this position. He had lucked into this job as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement. Google had failed to defend its search hog adequately against all the latest viruses, and the rogue program SnapDragon had snared the name and stats of Jayant Vishnu Stoner, and the randomly selected names and stats of several hundred other innocents. Their photos and full details immediately popped out whenever the search-term “FBI most wanted” was entered. In return for this gross defamation (and several
false arrests, plus one fatal shooting), the victims were offered a choice: a job with Google, or a cash settlement. In a moment of sober practicality, Jay had taken the employment and training option.
So here he was, geared up in a nifty, sleek Dava Newman BioSuit against the unforgiving cargo bay vacuum of Google PowerSat #9, helping to unload the Virgin Galactic Ship Victoria Beckham, out of Quito Skyhook and now a good part of the way around the planet. In the satellite’s microgravity, the bulky waffle-patterned organo-plastic crates were easy to shift and slot, allowing Jay to focus on the Widespread Panic tune pumping through his earbuds, and the low-level buzz created by his consumption of a morning fetal-cell-and-absinthe cocktail. Floating in a lazy haze, Jay was only a little surprised when Mr. Mxyzptlk showed up. The derby-wearing imp from the fifth dimension was a welcome confidante. Jay paused his iQuant and greeted him happily.
“Mxy, my man! What’s down?”
Speaking around his cigar, Mr. Mxyzptlk told him, “Feast your peepers on the crate with the pliss scabbed on.”
Jay focused blearily through the distortions of his merry high. Sure enough, one crate packaged as solar cell panels also featured an attached Portable Life-Support System. Weirdness! Why would dead power mechanisms engineered for the nullity of high-orbit require livestock temperature and atmosphere regulation? This shit had to be contraband! The PowerSat crew enjoyed frequent illicit shipments of porn, pets, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and transfats, and this had to be one such—although the usually reliable grapevine had not alerted Jay in advance.
“Think I’ll just skim a little off the top, Mxy! Thanks for the heads-up!”
“No grind,” Mxy said. With a shouted “Kltpzyxm!” the imp vanished.
Exhibiting a druggie’s exaggerated slyness, Jay guided the selected crate out of sight of his busy co-workers, through an airlock, and into the adjacent shirtsleeves environment of the large room where Manned Manoeuvering Units were repaired. The workspace, festooned with spare parts, was luckily unoccupied, sparing him any need to blurt out an absurd excuse for his presence. Still in his suit, Jay cracked the seals of the crate with fumbling eagerness, anticipating familiar goodies.
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