Storm pulled a bloody, sobbing Jizogirl to him, clutched her tightly. He tried to imagine why he had ever sought adventure, and how he could instantly transport himself and Jizogirl and the others safely home. But hard as he pondered, throughout the sad task of creating winding sheets from the UPD, bundling up the bodies of their friends, and consigning them to the sea with a few appeals to the Upflowered, Storm could find no easy solutions.
Throughout the battle, and afterwards, their big-bellied kite had continued to pull the Squid onward, impelled by the insistent weather mind. The tropospheric intelligence seemed intent on throwing its agents against its rival without delay.
And so by the time the surviving wardens had dumped the handshark corpses overboard, washed their clotted fur, disinfected their wounds and applied antibiotics and synthskin bandages, cleansed their swords, and sluiced the offal from the deck with seawater, the jade-green island of Hawaii had come dominantly into view, swelling in size minute by minute as their craft surged on.
Storm confronted Pankey. “You’re not still thinking of hanging offshore till midnight, are you? Mauna Loa obviously knows we’re here. We can’t face another assault from more sharks.”
Pankey appeared unsure and confused. “That plan can still work. We’ll just need to put in to shore further away from Kilauea. Let’s get the coastal maps…”
Storm’s anger and anxiety boiled over. “Bugger that! The longer we have to travel overland, the more vulnerable we are!”
His expression ineffably sad, Faizai-bereft Rotifero said calmly, “I agree with our young comrade, Pankey. We need a different plan.”
“All right, all right! But what!”
Jizogirl said, “Let’s get in a little closer to shore anyhow. Maybe something we see will give us an idea.”
Pankey said, “That makes sense.”
Catmaul asked, “How will we get the weather mind to stop blowing us along?”
Normally, communication with the atmospheric entity was accomplished with programmed messenger birds that could fly high enough to have their brain states interpreted on the wing. But the wardens, overconfident about the parameters of their mission, had set out without any such intermediaries.
Pankey’s voice conveyed less than total confidence. “Old Tropo is watching us. Surely he’ll bring us to a halt safely.”
Larger and larger Hawaii bulked. Details along the gentle sloping shore became more and more resolvable.
“Is that some kind of wall?”
“I—I’m not sure….”
As predicted and hoped, when the Squid had reached a point several hundred metres offshore, it came to a gradual stop. The weather mind had pinned the kite in a barometrically dead cell between wind tweezers that kept the parasail stationary but aloft.
With their extremely sharp eyes, the wardens stared landward, unbelieving.
Ranked along the beach was a living picket of animal slaves of the volcano queen.
The main mass of the defence consisted of anole lizards. But not kawaii baseline creatures to be held with amusement in a paw. No, these anoles, unfamiliar to the mainlanders, were evidently Upflowered creations, large as elephants. And atop each anole sat a simian carrying a crudely sharpened treebranch spear. Interspersed among the legs of the anoles were a host of lesser but still formidable toothed and clawed beasts. Blotches of stony grey atop the anoles were certainly slave caps, no doubt to be found on their companions as well. The huge gaudy dewlaps of the lizards flared and shrunk, flared and shrunk ominously, a prelude to attack.
“This—this is not good,” murmured Wrinkles.
Pankey said, “We’ll sail south or north, evade them—”
Storm grew indignant. He wanted to reach out and shake some sense into Pankey. “Are you joking? Those monsters can easily pace us on land, while we sail a greater distance than they need gallop.”
Jizogirl interrupted the argument. “It’s academic, my bucks! Look!”
The anoles and their riders were wading into the surf, making straight for the Squid.
“This—this is even worse,” Wrinkles added—rather super-fluously, thought Storm, in an uncanny interval of stunned calmness.
Catmaul began yanking on one of the half-dozen kite tethers. “We have to get away! Now! Why doesn’t Tropo help us!”
Rotifero gently pulled the doe away from the cables. “Old Tropo is a stern taskmaster. He brought us here to do a job, and do it we must.”
Storm looked up in vain at the unmoving kite.
The kite!
“I have a plan! But we need to ditch our UPDs first. They’re too heavy for what I have in mind.”
Suiting actions to words, Storm doffed his harness, detached the proseity device, then redonned the bandolier with just logic bombs attached.
“Stash your swords in your harnesses, and follow me!”
Not waiting to see if they obeyed, Storm leaped onto the kite cables and began to climb. He felt a rightness and force to his actions, as he threw himself into battle without thought for his own safety, only that of his comrades, and the success of their necessary mission. Here, then, was the defining moment he had sought, ever since he left home.
The angle of the cables permitted a fairly easy ascent. Soon, Storm bellyflopped onto the wind-stuffed mattress of the kite. Seconds later, his five comrades joined him, with plenty of room to spare.
Below, the swimming anoles had closed half the distance to the ship.
“We have to do this just perfectly. We sever the four inner cables completely, and the two outer ones partially. Pankey and I will do the outer ones. Get busy!”
The composite substance of the cables was only a few Mohs softer than the sword blades, making for an arduous slog. But with much effort, Wrinkles, Jizogirl, Rotifero and Catmaul got the four inner cables completely separated—they fell gracefully, with an ultimate splash!—causing the parafoil configuration to deform non-aerodynamically, attached to the ship now only by a few threads at either end.
Storm spared a look down. The anoles were too big to clamber aboard the ship. But the simians weren’t. And the apes were approaching the remaining two tethers linking kite and ship.
“Now!
Storm and Pankey sawed frantically and awkwardly in synchrony from their recumbent positions—
Twin loud pops from the high-tensioned threads, and the kite was free. Instant winds sent by an alert weather mind grabbed it and pushed it toward land.
Storm allowed himself the tiniest moment of relief and triumph and relaxation. Then he sized up what awaited them.
The terrain below showed rampant greenery of cloud forest far off to every side. But the Kilauea caldera itself loomed off-centre in a barren zone of old and new lava flows: the Kau Desert. Twenty-four kilometres away, the mother volcano Mauna Loa reared almost four times higher.
“Can we ride this all the way?” shouted Pankey.
“I hope so!” Storm replied. “Maybe we can bomb one of the magma rifts from up here!”
But his optimism soon received a dual assault.
Several slave-capped gulls stalked their kite, relaying visual feeds to the magma mind. As the kite moved deeper inland, it met attacks.
From an artificially built-up stone nozzle, under concentrated pressure, a laser-like jet of magma shot up high as the kite, narrowly missing the wardens, but spattering them with painful droplets on its broken descent. The kite fabric received numerous smelly burn holes. At the same time a fumarole unleashed billowing clouds of opaque choking sulphurous gases, which the kite sailed blindly through, at last emerging into clear air.
Gasping for breath, wiping his reddened eyes, Storm finally found his voice again.
“We’re a big easy target! We have to split up!”
Wrinkles got to his hands and knees. “Me first! I’m the best glider!”
Without any farewells, Wrinkles launched off the unsteady platform. He spread his unusually generous patagium and made graceful curves through the sky.
Jizogirl cried, “Go, Wrinkles, go!”
A lance of redhot lava shot up from an innocuous spot, and incinerated Wrinkles’s entire left side. With a wailing cry he plummeted to impact.
Storm felt gut-punched. “We all need to leap at once! Now! Find a rift and bomb it!”
The remaining five wardens flung themselves free of the kite.
Focused on his gliding, Storm could not keep track of the rest of the Fellowship. Heaven-seeking spears of hot rock burst into existence randomly, a gauntlet of fiery death. Deadly vog—the volcanic fog—stole his sight and breath. He lost track of his altitude, his goal. He thought he heard cries and screams—
Out of the vog he emerged, to see the tortured ground much too close, an eye-searing, writhing active rift bisecting the terrain. He braced for a landing.
His right paw-foot caught in a crevice, and he heard bones snap. The pain was almost secondary to his despair.
Working to free his paw-foot, he heard two thumps behind him.
Pankey and Jizogirl had landed, their fur smoldering, eyes cloudy and tearful.
Jizogirl came to help free Storm’s paw-foot.
“Rotifero, Catmaul—?”
Jizogirl just shook her head.
Meanwhile, Pankey had detached a logic bomb from his bandolier, and now darted in toward the living rift. Its incredible heat stopped him some distance away. He made to throw the bomb.
Overhead, the spy gulls circled low. One screeched just as Pankey threw.
A whip of lava caught the bomb in mid-air, incinerating it but prophylactically detaching from the parent flow, frustrating the spread of the released antisense agents backward along its interrupted length.
Pankey rushed back to his comrades. “It’s no use. The bombs have to be delivered by hand. It’s up to me!”
Jizogirl said, “And me!”
“No! Only if I fail. You and Storm— Just stay with him!”
Before either Storm or Jizogirl could protest. Pankey had taken off at a run.
Storm’s nose could smell the scorched flesh of Pankey’s paw-feet as the warden dodged one whip after another.
“Remember me—!” the leader of the team called, as he hurled himself and his remaining logic bombs into the rift.
The propagation of the antisense mind-killer agents was incredibly rapid, fuelled by the high energies of the system. A deep subterranean rumble betokened the titanic struggle of intelligence against nescience. In a final spasm, the earth convulsed titanically, rippling like a shaken sheet in all directions, tossing Jizogirl down beside Storm, then bouncing them both.
The quake lasted for what seemed minutes, before dying away. Even when the shaking at ground zero had stopped, rumbles and tremors continued to radiate outward into the surrounding ocean, as the antisense assault propagated. Storm could picture undersea lava tubes collapsing, tectonic plates shifting far out to sea—
Jizogirl got shakily to her paw-feet, and helped Storm stand on his one good leg.
“Is Mauna Loa dead?” she asked.
“I think so….”
Big menacing shapes moved in the vog around them.
“What now?” she asked hopelessly.
Out of the vog, several anoles and their riders emerged. But they no longer exhibited any direction or purpose or malice. One ape clawed at his slave cap and succeeded in ridding himself of it.
Jizogirl suddenly stiffened. “Oh, no! I just thought—We need to get inland, quickly! Up on the lizard!”
The tractable anole allowed Storm to climb onboard, with an assist from Jizogirl. His broken bones throbbed. She got up behind him, grabbed him around the waist.
“How do we make this buggered thing go?”
Storm pulled his sword out and jabbed it into the anole’s shoulder. The lizard shot off, heading more or less into the interior.
“Can you tell me why this ride is necessary?”
“Tsunami! You prairie dwellers are so dumb!”
“But how?”
“The self-destruct information waves from the antisense bomb propagated faster than the physical collapse itself. When the instructions hit the furthest distal reaches of Mauna Loa out to sea, they rebounded back and met the oncoming physical collapse in mid-ocean. Result: tsunami!”
Up and up the anole skittered, leaving the Kau Desert behind and climbing the slopes of Mauna Loa. It stopped at last, exhausted, and no amount of jabbing could make it resume its flight.
Storm and Jizogirl dismounted and turned back toward the sea, the doe supporting the buck.
With the sea’s recession, the raw steaming seabed lay exposed for several hundred metres out from shore. They saw the Squid sitting lopsided on the muck.
Then the crest of the giant wave materialized on the horizon, all spume and glory and destructive power.
“Are we far enough inland, high enough up?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
The tsunami sounded like a billion lions roaring all at once.
Storm turned his face to Jizogirl’s and said, “That kiss you gave me the other night— It was very nice. Can I have another?”
Jizogirl smiled and said, “If it’s not our last, then count on lots more.”
TO SEE INFINITY BARE
RUDY RUCKER AND PAUL DI FILIPPO
The starspiders have plucked Anders Zilber from our midst, perhaps never to be seen again. Squealing their hypercompressed fugues of cosmic mortality and rebirth, the spiders emerged from the transfinite Wassoon spaces and harvested Anders for his greatness. I saw it; I was next to him on the stage.
Everyone mourns his loss—everyone but me, Basil Chown. Of course I’m to pay for my coldness. The idiots have convicted me of murdering him, and I’m to be executed today. As if Anders and I had been vulgar rivals in some spaceport gang—instead of the Local Cluster’s greatest metamusicians.
And what is metamusic? The one art form that ties us all together—Uppytops, Orpolese, Bulbers, the DigDawgs and the dreaded Kaang—as unalike as chalk to cheese. Thanks to the Wassoon transmitter, humanity has spread beyond the Milky Way’s swirls, encountering hundreds of other races. Some call it a pangalactic civilization—I call it a wider range of fools. But, yes, they were right to worship Anders.
Handsome, charismatic Anders. I can see the glints in his thoughtful eyes, the boyish slackness beneath his chin, the convoluted curls of his abundant hair. Generally, when out in public, a woman or gyne-poppet graced one arm, or both. Reporters and fans clustered around him, a constant retinue, endeavouring to sprinkle him with shortlife flea-cams. But despite all this worshipful attention, he, better than anyone, knew his days were numbered.
I well remember the first time he told me—I suppose that would be ten years ago by now.
We were returning from a concert tour through the Andromeda Galaxy on the far side of the Local Cluster, aboard the luxury liner Surry On Down. We’d just everted from Wassoon space into consensus reality, and I was seeing the usual post-transition shapes within the cabin walls—branched, crawling shadows like ghostly insects.
“They know my name,” remarked Anders, flicking one of the shadows with his long, crooked forefinger. His hands looked strange, but for the moment I didn’t understand why. “They want to keep me. Every time I transit, the starspiders tell me.”
“The starspiders aren’t anything real!” I exclaimed. “They’re only a post-jump hallucination. We have to believe that.”
“Cowardly foolishness, Basil. The subdimensions teem with life and history. The more we open ourselves, the richer our work.”
He pitched his voice to a cracked squeak and began jabbering at the crawling seven-pointed shapes that filled the floors, ceilings and walls. In his oddly pitched voice, Anders was telling them about—how distasteful!—an erotic hallucination he’d just had.
“I remember that!” exclaimed Mimi Ultrapower, our road agent, accompanist and—damn it all!—Anders’s lover. She was laughing as she talked. “The starspiders were inside our flesh,
like giant nerve cells. I was kneading you like dough, Anders, and you were—”
“Hush now,” said he, as if rediscovering his sense of modesty. “Not in front of Basil.” He raised his hands in a cautioning gesture—and suddenly his voice broke into that higher register again, amazed and exultant. “Look what we did!”
He now had seven fingers on each hand.
It was I who’d brought Mimi to Earth from the colony world of Omega, near the very heart of our galactic core. Her mother was an astrophysicist investigating the central black hole, and Mimi was a recent university graduate. Using a Wassoon information channel, she sent me a delightful little metasonata, very much in my own style. Extremely flattering, a seductive move.
It had been a simple matter for me to get the Supreme Bonze of the Archonate to grant Mimi Ultrapower a position at court. I’d anticipated some exciting interplay with her, but as soon as she met Anders, she was lost to me.
I tried telling myself I didn’t mind—I had my own women-friends after all, and if Mimi wanted to worship Anders, surely that was her own affair. The bottom line remained: she was an excellent metamusician, a good travelling companion, and a fierce street-hassler.
On that first Andromeda Galaxy tour together, we worked up a three-way collaboration, “Earth Jam,” in which Anders beamed out something like a flute part, I a kind of cello line, and Mimi zeepcast a kind of intricate percussion that was like a pounding headache—except that it felt good.
Understand that our audiences weren’t hearing our metamusic—it’s more that they could feel it in their souls, like the emotive shades of a daydream. Our symbiotic zeep colonies project our metamusic directly into the minds of those around us.
Originally the Uppytops used the one-celled zeep critters as a coercive tool to rein in their slave races. But humans ingeniously repurposed the zeeps for benign purposes.
Metamusic is inherently at its best face to face, in a live performance, with realtime zeep signals washing over the nervous systems of the audience—be they mollusks, apes, or insect hives. Although it’s possible to Wassooncast a copy of a metamusical performance, these copies are, in my opinion, like pulpy videos of the love act, utterly lacking the ineffable tones and subliminal frissons of the real thing. Yes, the masses watch the Wassoncasts, but if you’re an accomplished metamusician, you’re forever in demand as a touring artist.
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