“If you do not want to admit your ignorance, Crispian, I will simply tell you where you are. You are at these coordinates: sixty-three degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, and nineteen degrees, three minutes west.”
I didn’t bother using my memtax to look up that latitude and longitude, because I didn’t want to give Benno’s accusations any weight. So I just sarcastically asked, “And where exactly is that?”
“You and your crew of naïve miscreants are almost directly underneath the Katla volcano in Iceland. How far down you are, I have not yet ascertained. But I would imagine that you are quite close to the magma reservoirs, and in imminent danger of tapping them with your tunnel. Other criminal crews spaced all around the volcano are in similar positions. May I remind you that whenever Katla has gone off in the past—the last time was in 1918—it discharged as much toxic substances per second as the combined fluid discharges of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers.”
Holy shit! Could he be right? My voice quivered a little, even though I tried to control it. “And why would we be in such a place?”
“Because Los Braceros Últimos plan to unleash the Pinatubo Option.”
Now I started to really get scared.
Every school kid from first grade on knew about the Pinatubo Option, named after a famous volcanic incident of the last century. It was a geoengineering scheme of the highest magnitude, intended to flood the atmosphere with ash and other aerosols so as to cut global temperatures by a considerable fraction. Consensus wisdom had always figured it was too risky and uncontrollable a proposition.
“I cannot let you and your friends proceed with this. You must tell them to halt immediately.”
For a minute, I had almost felt myself on Benno’s side. But when he gave me that order in his know-it-all way, I instantly rebelled. All the years of growing up together, with him always the favored one, stuck in my throat.
“Like hell! We’re just doing what’s good for the planet in the fastest way possible. Los Braceros must have studied everything better than you. You’re just a kid like me!”
Benno looked at me calmly with his stoney face. “I am a Master Class Steward, and you are not.”
“Well, Mr. Master Class Steward, try and stop me!”
I started to climb to my feet when Benno tackled me and knocked me back down!
We began to wrestle. I expected to pin Benno in a couple of seconds. But that wasn’t how things went.
I had always believed my brother was a total lardass from all his FarmEarth physical inactivity. How the heck was I supposed to know that he spent two hours every weekend in some kind of martial arts training? Was I in charge of his frigging schedule? We didn’t even share the same mito-Mom!
I found myself snaffled up in about half a minute, with Benno clamping both my wrists together behind my back with just one big strong hand.
And then, with the other hand, he rawly popped out my memtax, being none too gentle.
I felt blinded! Awake, yet separated from augie space for more than the short interval it takes to swap in fresh memtax, I couldn’t access the world’s knowledge, talk to my friends, or even recall what I had had for breakfast that morning.
Next Benno stripped me of my haptic bling. Then he said, “You wait right here.”
He left, locking the bedroom door behind him.
I sat on the bed, feeling empty and broken. I couldn’t even tell you now how much time passed.
The door opened and in walked Benno, followed by his mito-Mom, Zoysia van Vollenhoven.
Aunt Zoysia always inspired instant guilt in me. Not because of anything she said or did, or any overbearing, sneering attitude, but only because of the way she looked.
Aunt Zoysia was the sexiest female I knew—and not in any kind of bulimic high-fashion designer-label manner either, like those thoroughbreds the Brazillians engineer for the runways of the world. I always thought that if Gaia could have chosen to incarnate herself, she would have looked just like Aunt Zoysia, all overflowing breasts and hips and wild mane of hair, lush wide mouth, proud nose and piercing eyes. She practically radiated exuberant joy and heartiness and sensuality. In her presence, I always got an incipient stiffy, and since she was family—even though she and I shared no genes—the stiffy was always instantly accompanied by guilt.
But this was the one time I didn’t react in the usual manner, I felt so miserable.
Aunt Zoysia came over and sat on the mattress beside me and hugged me. Even those intimate circumstances did not stir up any horniness.
“Crispian, dear, Benno has described to me the trouble you’ve gotten into. It’s all right, I completely understand. You just wanted to play with the big boys. But now, I think you’ll admit, things have gone too far, and must be brought to a screeching halt. Benno?”
“Yes, mother?”
“Please find a fresh pair of memtax for your brother. We will slave Crispian’s to ours, and bring him along for the shutdown of Los Braceros Últimos. It will be highly instructional.”
Benno went out and came back with new memtax in their organic blister pack. I wetted them and inserted them, and put on my restored haptic bling. I booted up all my apps, but still found myself a volitionless spectator to the shared augie space feed from Zoysia and Benno.
“All right, son, let’s take these sneaky bastards down.”
“Ready when you are, Mom.”
You know, I thought I was pretty slick with my Master Class privileges, could handle effectuators and the flora and fauna of various biomes pretty deftly. But riding Zoysia’s feed, I realized I knew squat.
The first thing she and Benno did was to go into God Mode, with Noclip Option, Maphack, Duping and Smurfing thrown in. That much I could follow—barely.
But after that, I was just along for the dizzying ride.
Zoysia and Benno took down Los Braceros Últimos like a military sonic cannon disabling a pack of kittens. Racing around the globe in augie space, they undercut all the many plans of the Pinatubo-heads, disabling rogue effectuators and even using legal machines in off-label ways, such as to immobilize people in meatspace. I think the wildest maneuver though was when they stampeded a herd of springboks through the remote Windhoek encampment where some of the conspirators were operating from. The eco-agitators never knew what hit them.
The whole roundup lasted barely an hour. I found myself back in my familiar and yet somehow strange-seeming bedroom, actually short of breath and sweaty. Zoysia and brother Benno were unruffled.
“Now, Crispian,” said my Aunt sweetly, no sign of the moderate outlaw blood she had spilled evident on her perfect teeth or nails, “I hope you’ve learned that privileges only come to those who have earned them, and know how to use them.”
“Yes’m.”
“Perhaps if you hung out a little more with your brother, and consented to allow him to mentor you….”
I turned to glare at Benno, but his homely, unaggressive expression defused my usual impatience and dislike. Plus, I was frankly a little frightened of him now.
“Yes’m.”
“Very well. I think then, in a few years, given the rare initiative and skills you’ve shown—even though you chose to follow an illegal path with them—you should be quite ready to join us in ensuring that people do not abuse FarmEarth.”
And of course, as I’ve often said to Anuta, wise and sexy Aunt Zoysia predicted everything just right.
Which is why I have to say goodbye now.
Something somewhere on FarmEarth is wrong!…
ANGELMAKERS
Snow sugared thickly the steeply sloping winter-dead lawn behind the great organically sprawling autonohouse, a white canvas scribbled over with small oblate bootprints and the sharp parallel tracks of sled blades, as well as the shallow worm furrows of lofter saucers. At regular intervals, black-leaved trees with precisely choreographed branches sucked every impinging photon from a December sun pale as a circle of overwashed bleached cotton pegged at the zen
ith.
Around the house, no activity save routine maintenance and materials-acquisition manifested itself. The house’s adults remained busy inside at their ludic labors. Human presence in the landscape consisted of a still line of a dozen children by the edge of the broad frozen river that demarcated the extensive lawn’s lower edge. The children on the shore flanked a set of runner tracks that extended onto the ice and terminated at a jagged hole filled with water as coarse and grey as steel wool.
The children wore colorful jellied unisuits thin as pressed-fruit strips, revealing the unisex lines of their pre-adolescent bodies. Their warmly rosy hands appeared bare, save for outlines of shivering air. Perched on their heads, upright or askew, squishy caps exhibited the silly geometries of mirror worlds. Holding their sleds and saucers, or standing beside them, the children silently contemplated the ice-surfaced river and its anomalous disfiguration.
A gentle-looking boy spoke. “She’s been under some time now. A minute almost. There are snags down there, I know.”
His statement elicited some nervous shuffling and visible expressions of empathy from his peers, except for one rough lad who taunted, “If you don’t trust the angels, Rand, dive in yourself.”
An exceedingly thin and nervous-looking girl said, “Maybe we should. Or maybe we should call Fabiola’s parents.” She fingered the rim of the ceramic communion wafer bonded to her wrist without touching its responsive surfaces. “What if the angels are too busy elsewhere?”
“Have you ever known the leucotheans to fail, Shelly?” demanded the second boy.
“No, but I feel so helpless just standing here. I want to do something.”
“Fabiola won’t thank you if you spoil the story of her drowning by horning in on things.”
The boy named Rand said defensively, “Are you saying Fabiola planned this, Brewster?”
Brewster made a dismissive wave. “Of course not. Who’d be that daft? But now that it’s happened—”
At that moment another child shouted, “Look!” The crowd followed the sentry’s outstretched finger with their massed gaze.
As if from directly out of the consumptive sun, a silhouetted figure had detached itself. Swelling from antlike dot to doll-like cutout to human-scaled apparition as it dropped lower, the angel was swiftly upon them. Without hesitation, the angel plunged through the hole in the ice, sending a geyser of cold water upward, droplets bespattering the children. Too thrilled to care, they gave an instinctive collective shout of excitement and relief.
Within seconds the angel emerged from the jagged-edge opening, bearing an unconscious child. Skimming low, the angel landed amidst the children, set the body of Fabiola down in the snow, and kneeled beside the bare-headed blonde girl with the gelid blue face.
Unhesitatingly, the children formed a tight clot around the tableau of kneeling angel and child. Closest by an inch or two, the girl named Shelly peered intensely, her concentration fixed more on the angel than on her unbreathing friend.
The wingless angel was whiter than the ambient snow: platinum hair, ivory limbs. The angelic body displayed no sex, although the angel was completely unclothed. The face of the angel was composed in neutral lines from which perhaps only a depthless sadness, if any emotion whatsoever, could be teased. The angel’s eyes were featureless marbles, spheres seemingly composed of polished bone set in the ocular orbits.
The angel kneeled beside Fabiola, but applied no conventional mode of resuscitation. Instead, one arm and hand attentuated ectoplasmically, then snaked through Fabiola’s mouth and, apparently, down the girl’s throat. The angel’s other rarefied hand plunged into the child’s chest over her heart like fog through cheesecloth.
Fabiola’s body instantly arced like the tensioned arm of a loaded catapult, head and heels digging into the snow. The stolid angel remained seemingly unmoved, but withdrew those intrusive extensions, which resumed humaniform solidity. Fabiola spewed river water, gagged, then sucked in a shuddering breath, while the angel ran soothing hands up the girl’s frame, ending with hands clasping the girl’s head on either side.
Fabiola’s eyes snapped open. Her gaze locked with the angel’s blank fixity. At the same time Shelly strained forward, as if she were a bob on an invisible elastic line connecting victim and rescuer. The tableau held for a few eternal seconds, then shattered as the angel let the snowy depression again receive Fabiola’s head. Somehow the angel leaped directly from a kneeling posture into the sky.
Fabiola sat up weakly; both Rand and Brewster moved to support her, and the other children clustered closer to hear the first words from their revivified peer, a weak “I’ve come back.”
All except Shelly. Shading her eyes, the wan girl watched the angel until that never-speaking being had long disappeared.
* * * *
In coupling class, Rand and Fabiola lay sated on mussed white sheets draping a low carnalounge. Fabiola’s newly mature body had developed along her chosen lines of feminine curvature. Rand’s form likewise had fructified into a desirably ripe, slim-hipped maleness. Together, langorous limbs entangled, they resembled one of the three-hundred-year-old Bouguereaus they had studied last quintmester in art-history class. In ranks across the copulatorium, other couched couples replicated their easy indolence.
Adjacent to Fabiola and Rand on their own divan, Shelly and Brewster were lone exceptions to the class’s ruling somatopsychic fulfillment. Brewster, his innate truculence now compounded by an overdeveloped physique, rested on his back, a frown dragging his face down, arms folded across his inordinately hairy chest. Her slim lily of a body the least mature among her classmates, Shelly reclined on her side, spine convexed toward her partner, arms bowed over her head. Now Brewster spoke more loudly than was deemed polite within the copulatorium. Rand and Fabiola could not help overhearing.
“Damn it, girl. A little enthusiasm wouldn’t be out of place.”
A soft “I’m sorry” wisped out from the cage of Shelly’s arms like an escaping ghost.
Rand was not placated. “Sorry won’t cut it anymore. Why, if you were my only partner, I’d have a knot the size of houseroot in my libido.” The burly youth swung his feet to the floor and stepped over to the neighboring lounge. “On your way, Rand. I’m cutting in.”
Both Fabiola and Rand graciously consented. Her spill of golden hair whispering on the sheets, the lush Fabiola accepted the impetuous Brewster into her embrace, while Rand slipped onto the couch where Shelly still cringed. As Fabiola and Brewster began to engage, Rand slid a comforting arm around Shelly’s shoulder. She spun about and relaxed into the offered cradle of his shoulder and chest, pressing her face against him.
“Want to talk about anything?” asked Rand quietly. “Something special bothering you?”
“I just worry all the time, Rand. I can’t explain it, but it interferes with everything, not just sex.”
“What concerns you? Your future? It’s perfectly natural for young people our age to be a little worried about exactly what playwork we’ll eventually choose.”
“No, it’s not my personal future. I’m fairly clear about that. I want to be a theresan.”
Rand forebore to comment on this rather unconventional choice. “What then?”
Shelly gripped Rand’s waist tightly. “I—I worry about the people I care for. Their health, their safety—their lives. It’s all I can think about, ever since—ever since Fabiola drowned.”
For several seconds, Rand said nothing. Then: “But that was five years ago, Shelly.”
“You needn’t remind me! I’ve lived every hellish preoccupied minute of it!”
“Well, it’s just—don’t you think you should seek a detangling?”
“If I remain knotted much longer, I will. But I just want to puzzle it out by myself for a while yet.”
“It’s so odd, though.” Rand sounded genuinely perplexed. “To have such an archaic fear in this age of angels.”
At the mention of angels, Shelly stiffened. “They’re the
problem. They make our mortality more real at the same time they guard us from accidents. We’ve all come to rely on them so much, that we’ve lost a lot of old instincts of self-preservation. What if their perfection is flawed? Considering where they come from—‘such base and hybrid clay.’”
Rand balked at entering that seldom-trodden territory, the origin of the angels, and swerved instead into literary criticism. “You’re quoting Athanor. He’s not to my taste.”
Beside them, Fabiola and Brewster were noisily climaxing. The communion wafer on Fabiola’s dangling wrist clacked rhythmically against the tiled floor. Rand found himself aroused. Upon Shelly’s shy acknowledgement of his condition, he began to caress her. Quickly, they started to move together.
Their formal evaluation at the end of class cited as a demerit only Shelly’s postcoital tears.
* * * *
Alternately steamy and chill, cleansing mists billowed from the wallpores of the dimly lit freeform sauna. Subtle restorative natural fragrances and amygdaloids rode the droplets: balsam, vanilla, altozest. Self-segregating instinctively by sex, boys and girls clustered mostly in separate grottoes, as if after the intimacies of coupling class certain male and female intrabonding required reinforcing. Giggles and laughter interspersed boisterous talk.
Seated on the absorptive floor, Shelly braced her back against a pliable wall, drew her knees up to her chin and crossed her ankles in front of her sex. She made no move to join in any of the conversations around her. She passed most of the sauna session in contemplative silence, until Fabiola approached her. The smiling blonde girl dropped down gracefully beside the somber dark-haired one. Shelly’s tentative expression mixed a faint welcome with a nearly palpable disinclination to talk. Fabiola ignored the look.
“I hear you’ve decided on a career,” said Fabiola.
Visibly surprised, Shelly answered, “Why, yes, I have.”
Fabiola paused, then said, “Being a theresan seems an awfully—well, a harsh and stringent path.”
Shelly’s face now expressed an indignation matched by her tone. “How can you say that? Devoting yourself entirely to the spiritual welfare of others? It’s the most fulfilling career I can imagine.”
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 31