The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Neither spoke, until Klapaucius said, “Well, I suppose I did let my lusts get the better of my judgment. I apologize profusely, dear Trurl. What was this servo anyhow, to come between us? Nothing! No hard feelings, I hope? Still friends?”

  Klapaucius tentatively extended a manipulator. After a moment’s hesitation, Trurl matched the gesture.

  “Always friends, dear Klapaucius! Always! Now, listen to what brought me here.” Trurl narrated his revelation about the orrery.

  “You klystron klutz! Have you forgotten so easily the Law of Retrograde Reflexivity!”

  “But the Ninth Corollary clearly states—”

  And off they went to their labors, arguing all the way.

  The Fourth Sally, or,

  The Abduction of the Palefaces

  One trillion AU’s out from the planet that had first given birth to the race of palefaces, and millions of years deep into the past, relative to their own era, the pair of master constructors focused their bevy of remote-sensing devices on the blue-green globe. Instantly a large monitor filled with a living scene, complete with haptics and sound: a primitive urban conglomeration swarming with fleshy bipedal creatures, moving about “on foot” and inside enslaved dumb vehicles that emitted wasteful puffs of gas as they zoomed down narrow channels.

  Trurl shuddered all along his beryllium spinal nodules. “How disagreeable these ‘humans’ are! So squishy! Like bags of water full of contaminants and debris.”

  “Don’t forget—these are our ancestors, after a fashion. The legends hold that they invented the first machine intelligences.”

  “It seems impossible. Our clean, infallible, utilitarian kind emerging from organic slop—”“Well, stranger things have happened. Recall how those colonies of metal-fixing bacteria on Benthic VII began to exhibit emergent behavioral complexity.”

  “Still, I can’t quite credit the legend. Say, these pests can’t reach us here, can they?”

  “Although all records are lost, I believe we’ve travelled to an era before the humans had managed to venture further than their own satellite—bodily, that is. I’ve already registered the existence of various crude intrasolar data-gathering probes. Here, taste this captured one.”

  Klapaucius offered Trurl a small bonbon of a probe, and Trurl ate it with zest. “Hmmm, yes, the most rudimentary processing power imaginable. Perhaps the legends are true. Well, be that as it may, what’s our next move?”

  “We’ll have to reach the planet under our own power. The GHC—which the human astronomers seem not to have noticed yet, by the way—must remain here, due to its immense gravitic influences. Now, once within tractor-beam range, we could simply abduct some palefaces at random. They’re powerless in comparison to our capabilities. Yet I argue otherwise.”

  “Why?” Trurl asked.

  “How would we determine their fitness for our purposes? What standards apply? What if we got weak or intractable specimens?”

  “Awful. They might die off or suicide, and we’d have to do this all over again. I hate repeating myself.”

  “Yes, indeed. So instead, I propose that we let our sample be self-determining.”

  “How would you arrange that?”

  “Simple. We show ourselves and state our needs. Any human who volunteers to come with us will be ipso facto one of the type who would flourish in a novel environment.”

  “Brilliant, Klapaucius! But wait. Are we taking a chance by such blatant interference of diverting futurity from the course we know?”

  “Not according to the Sixth Postulate of the Varker-Baley Theorems.”

  “Perfect! Then let’s be off!”

  Leaving the GHC in self-maintenance mode, the master constructors zipped across the intervening one trillion AU’s and into low Earth orbit.

  “Pick a concentration of humans,” Klapaucius graciously transmitted to his partner.

  “How about that one?” Trurl sent forth a low-wattage laser beam to highlight a large city on the edge of one continent. Even at low-wattage, however, the beam raised some flames visible from miles high.

  “As good as anyplace else. Wait, one moment—there, I’ve deciphered every paleface language in their radio output. Now we can descend.”

  The master constructors were soon hovering above their chosen destination, casting enormous shadows over wildly racing, noisy, accident-prone crowds.

  “Let us land in that plot of greenery, to avoid smashing any of these fragile structures.”

  Trurl and Klapaucius stood soon amidst crushed trees and shattered boulders and bridges and gazebos, rearing higher than the majority of the buildings around them.

  “I will now broadcast our invitation in a range of languages,” said Klapaucius.

  From various speakers embedded across his form, words thundered out. Glass shattered throughout the city.

  “My mistake.”

  The volume moderated, Klapaucius’s call for volunteers went out. “—come with us. The future beckons! Leave this parochial planet behind. Trade your limited lifetimes and perspectives for infinite knowledge. Only enthusiastic and broad-minded individuals need apply….”

  Soon the giant cybervisitors were surrounded by a crowd of humans. Trurl and Klapaucius extruded interactive sensors at ground level to question the humans. One stepped boldly forward.

  “Do you understand what we are looking for, human?”

  “Yeah, sure, of course. It’s Uplift time. Childhood’s End. You’re Optimus Prime, Iron Giant. Rusty and the Big Guy. Good Sentinels. Let’s go! I’ve been ready for this all my life!”

  “Are there other humans who share your outlook?”

  “Millions! If you can believe the box-office figures.”

  On a separate plane of communication, Trurl said, “Do we need millions, Klapaucius?”

  “Better to have some redundancy to allow for possible breakage of contents during transit.”

  “Very well, human. Assemble those who wish to depart.”

  “I’ll post this on my blog, and we’ll be all set,” said the human. “One last question, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you turn into a car or plane or something else cool?”

  “No. We don’t do that kind of thing.”

  Dispatched from the GHC by remote signal, a fleet of ten thousand automated shuttles carrying ten thousand human volunteers apiece was sufficient to ferry all the humans who wished to voyage into the future out to their new home. But upon arrival, they did not immediately disembark. Once at the GHC, Trurl and Klapaucius had realized something.

  Klapaucius said, “We need to create a suitable environment on the surface of the GHC for our guests. I hadn’t anticipated having so many. I thought we could simply store one or two or a thousand safely inside our mainframes.”

  Trurl huffed with some residual ill-feeling. “Just like you kept a certain servomechanism safely inside you?”

  Klapaucius ignored the taunt. “We’ll repair the atmosphere generators. But we need a quantity of organics to layer atop the All-Purpose Buidling Material. I wonder if the humans would mind us disassembling one of their spare planets…?”

  The master constructors approached the first human they had even spoken to, who had become something of a liaison. His name was Gary.

  “Gary, might we have one of your gas-giant worlds?”

  “Sure, take it. That’s what we’ve been saving it for.”

  They actually took two. The planets known as Saturn and Jupiter, once rendered down to elemental constituents, were spread across a fair portion of the GHC, forming a layer deep enough to support an ecology. Plants and animals and microbes were brought from Earth, as well as some primitive tools. Their genomes of the flora and fauna were deciphered, and clones begain to issue forth in large quantities from modified birthing factories.

  “We are afraid you will have to lead a simple agrarian existence for the time being,” said the constructors to Gary.

  “No problemo!”

 
; The humans seemed to settle down quite well. Trurl and Klapaucius were able to turn their attention to gearing up for the trip home.

  And that’s when dire trouble reared its hidden head.

  One of the parasitical races that had infested the GHC back in the future had been known as the Chronovores of Gilliam XIII. Thought to be extirpated in the last campaign before poor Neu Trina had met her end, they had instead managed to penetrate the skin of the GHC and enter its interior, at some great remove from the time-engine. It had taken them this long to discover the crystals of frozen Planck-seconds, but discover them they had. And consumed every last one.

  Now the Chronovores resembled bloated timesinks, too stuffed to flee the justified but useless wratch of the master constructors.

  After the mindless slaughter, Trurl and Klapaucius were aghast.

  “How can we replace our precious crystals! We didn’t bring spares! We don’t have a source of raw Planck- seconds in this rude era! We’re marooned here!”

  “Now, now, good Trurl, have some electrolyte and calm down. True, our time-engine seems permanently defunct. But we are hardly marooned here.”

  “How so?”

  “You and I will go into stasis and travel at the rate of one-second-per-second back to the future.”

  “Is stasis boring?”

  “By definition, no.”

  “Then let’s do it. But will the humans be all right?”

  “Oh, bother them! They’ve been the source of all our troubles so far. Let them fend for themselves.”

  So Trurl and Klapaucius entered a stasis chamber deep inside the GHC and shut the door.

  When it opened automatically, several million years later, they stretched their limbs just out of habit—for no wear and tear had ensued—swigged some electrolyte, and went to check on the humans.

  They found that the entire sphere of 317 million planets acreage was covered with an HPLD: a civilization possessing the Highest Possible Level of Development.

  And there wasn’t a robot in sight.

  “Well,” said Trurl, “it seems we shan’t be bored, anyhow.”

  Klapaucius agreed, but said “Shut up” just for old time’s sake.

  YES WE HAVE NO BANANAS

  1.

  Invasion of the Shorebirds

  Thirty years worth of living, dumped out on the sidewalk, raw pickings for the nocturnal Street Gleaners tribe. Not literally yet, but it might just as well be—would be soon, given the damn rotten luck of Tug Gingerella. He was practically as dead as bananas. Extinct!

  How was he going to manage this unwarranted, unexpected, inexorable eviction?

  Goddamn greedy Godbout!

  The space was nothing much. One small, well-used, five-room apartment in a building named The Wyandot. Bachelor’s digs, save for those three tumultuous years with Olive. Crates of books, his parents’ old Heywood-Wakefield furniture that he had inherited, cheaply framed but valuable vintage lobby poster featuring the happy image of Deanna Durbin warbling as Mary Poppins. Shabby clothes, mostly flannel and denim and Duofold, cargo shorts and Sandwich Island shirts; cast-iron cornbread skillets; favorite music on outmoded media: scratch slates, holo transects, grail packs, and their various stacked players, natch. Goodfaith Industries metal-topped kitchen table, Solace Army shelves, a painting by Karsh Swinehart (a storm-tossed sailboat just offshore from local Pleistocene Point, Turneresque by way of Thomas Cole).

  All the beloved encumbering detritus of a life.

  But a life lived to what purpose, fulfilling what early promise, juvenile dreams? All those years gone past so swiftly…

  No. Maundering wouldn’t cut it. No remedies to his problems in fruitless recriminations and regrets. Best to hit the streets of Carrollboro in search of some aid and comfort.

  Tug shuffled into a plaid lumberjacket, red-and-black Kewbie castoff that had wandered south across the nearby border like some migrating avian apparel and onto the Solace Army Store racks, took the two poutine-redolent flights down to ground level at a mild trot, energized by his spontaneous and uncharacteristic determination to act, and emerged onto Patrician Street, an incongruously named grand-dame-gone-shabby avenue cutting south and north through the Squirrel Hills district, and full of gloriously decaying sister buildings to The Wyandot, all built post-War, circa 1939: The Lewis and Jonathan, The Onondowaga, The Canandaigua, The Lord Fitzhugh, and half a dozen others.

  Mid-October in Carrollboro: sunlight sharp as honed ice-skate blades, big irregularly gusting winds off Lake Ondiara, one of the five Grands. Sidewalks host to generally maintaining citizens, everyday contentment or focus evident, yet both attitudes tempered with the global stresses of the Big Retreat, ultimate source of Tug’s own malaise. (And yet, despite his unease, Tug invariably spared enough attention to appraise all the beautiful women—and they were all beautiful—fashionably bundled up just enough to tease at what was beneath.)

  Normally Tug enjoyed the autumn season for its crisp air and sense of annual climax, prelude to all the big holidays. Samhain, Thanksgiving, the long festive stretch that began with Roger Williams’s birthday on December 21st and extended through Christmas and La Fête des Rois…

  But this year those nostalgia-inducing attractions paled, against the harsh background of his struggle to survive.

  Patrician merged with Tinsley, a more commercial district. Here, shoppers mixed with browsers admiring the big gaudy windows at Zellers and the Bay department stores, even if they couldn’t make a purchase at the moment.

  Carrollboro’s economy was convulsing and churning in weird ways, under the Big Retreat. Adding ten percent more people to the city’s population of two-hundred-thousand had both boosted and dragged down the economy, in oddly emergent ways. The newcomers were a representatively apportioned assortment of rich, poor and middle-class refugees from all around the world, sent fleeing inland by the rising seas. “Shorebirds” all, yet differently grouped.

  The poor, with their varied housing and medical and educational needs, were a drain on the federal and state government finances. They had settled mostly in the impoverished Swillburg and South Wedge districts of Carrollboro.

  The skilled middle-class were undercutting wages and driving up unemployment rates, as they competed with the natives for jobs in their newly adopted region, and bought up single-family homes in Maplewood and Parkway.

  And the rich—

  The rich were driving longtime residents out of their unsecured rentals, as avaricious owners, seeking big returns on their investments, went luxury condo with their properties.

  Properties like The Wyandot, owned by Narcisse Godbout.

  Thoughts of his heinous landlord fired Tug up and made him quicken his pace.

  Maybe Pavel would have some ideas that could help.

  2.

  Ocarina City

  Just a few blocks away from the intersection of Tinsley with Grousebeck, site of the Little Theatre and Tug’s destination, Tug paused before Dr. Zelda’s Ocarina Warehouse, the city’s biggest retailer of fipple flutes.

  Carrollboro had been known as Ocarina City ever since the late 1800s.

  The connection between metropolis and instrument began by chance in the winter of 1860, when an itinerant pedlar named Leander Watts passed through what was then a small town of some five-thousand inhabitants, bearing an unwanted crate full of Donati “Little Goose” fipple flutes, which Watts had grudugingly accepted in Manhattan in lieu of cash owed for some other goods. But thanks to his superb salesmanship, Watts was able to unload on the citizens of Carrollboro the whole consignment of what he regarded as useless geegaws.

  In their heimal isolation and recreational desperation, the citizens of Carrollboro had latched on to the little ceramic flutes, and by spring thaw the city numbered many self-taught journeymen and master players among the populace.

  From Carrollboro the fascination with ocarinas had spread nationally, spiking and dying away and spiking again over the subsequent decades, although never w
ith such fervor as at the epicenter. There, factories and academies and music-publishing firms and cafes and concert halls and retail establishments had sprung up in abundance, lending the city its nickname and music-besotted culture.

  Today the window of Dr. Zelda’s held atop russet velvet cushions the Fall 2010 models from Abimbola, von Storch, Tater Innovator, Xun Fun, Charalambos, and many other makers. There were small pendant models, big two-handed transverse models, and the mammoth three-chambered types. Materials ranged from traditional ceramics to modern polycarbonates, and the surface decorations represented an eye-popping decorative range from name designers as varied as Fairey, Schorr and Mars.

  Piped from outdoor speakers above the doorway came the latest ocarina hit, debuting on the Billboard charts at Number Ten, a duet from Devandra Banhart and Jack Johnson, “World Next Door.”

  Tug himself was a ham-fingered player at best. But his lack of skill did not deter his covetous admiration of the display of instruments. But after some few minutes of day-dreaming fascination, he turned away like a bum from a banquet.

  Simply another thing he couldn’t afford just now.

  3.

  Unplanned Obsolescence

  The Art Vrille movement that had swept the globe in the 1920s and 1930s had left behind several structures in Carrollboro, not the least of which was the Little Theatre. An ornate music-box of a structure, it had plainly seen better days, with crumbling stucco ornaments, plywood replacement of lapidary enamelled tin panels, and a marquee with half its rim’s lightbulbs currently missing.

  Today, according to that marquee, the Little Theatre was running a matinee in one of its four rooms, subdivided from the original palace-like interior: a double feature consisting of Diana Dors in The Girl Can’t Help It and Doris Day in Gun Crazy. Tug had seen both films many times before, and was glad he wasn’t the projectionist for them. Tonight, though, he anticipated his duty: screening the first-run release of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Early reviews had Brendan Fraser nailing the role.