Aeota

by Paul Di Filippo

  Aelita and I both chimed in on the “Amen.” Then Lita said, “Pass me the sushi, please.”

  Okay. I had a sophisticated kid. The apple does not fall far from the tree.

  Yulia savored her cocktail, which I had made pretty strong. Lita got apple juice. Then we all swarmed to eating like Napoleon’s troops in retreat from Russia falling upon a peasant’s well-stocked larder.

  When we were finished I said, “You guys sit, I’ll do the cleanup.”

  “Oh, sure, on the night we use paper plates.”

  “There’s still three glasses to wash. That’s gotta earn me some points.”

  I went into the kitchen and found a reasonably familiar setting in which I felt at ease. I cleaned the glasses, then impulsively looked in the freezer.

  “Hey, there’s ice cream!”

  “Yay!” came Aelita’s seconding of my implicit proposal.

  We all enjoyed a Polar Bar apiece. Aelita’s face ended up smeared with chocolate. Then Yulia said, “Just enough time for your bath and bedtime reading, girl.”

  Aelita’s solemn expression charmed the socks off me. I could get used to this domestic scene.

  “I know, Mama.”

  Yulia shepherded our daughter into the bathroom. At the door, she stopped to look back at me.

  “I’ve got plans later for you, rough customer.”

  I kicked idly around the doublewide, feeling at once foreign and utterly at home, floating a bit from the booze and the crazy day, while Aelita succumbed to being scrubbed. She emerged in pajamas decorated with those little green gremlins from, I think, Toy Story.

  “Okay,” said Yulia to me. “Your turn to parent.”

  Having seen Aelita come out of her own bedroom, I did not hesitate, but steered her right to bed. I noticed that the walls of her room were covered with her own very competent drawings. She had snagged the new issue of Aeota on the way and, once snuggled under the covers, handed it to me. I sat in an adjacent folding chair with a ripped padded seat, and began to read aloud the comic’s word balloons. The Aeota character, confronting a gnarly, involuted old man, spoke first.

  “Oh, hello, Mister After All. What are you doing here?”

  “No, Daddy! Use the Aeota voice!”

  I tried to remember what the abnormal little girl had sounded like half a billion years ago, and repeated the lines.

  “Perfect!”

  We only got halfway through the story—a surreal farrago about an invasion of Aeota’s idyllic native countryside, full of quirky non-human characters—when Aelita fell asleep. I shut off the light and exited quietly, closing her door behind me.

  I went to the bathroom, which was all steamy from someone’s recent perfumed shower. I used the toilet and the shower myself, then found the master bedroom.

  Yulia was waiting naked for me. My dick got stiff as the limb of a petrified pine tree. She hurled herself at me in the manner of her daughter, but with no innocent intent.

  We banged away for a satisfying interval, and then when I orgasmed, the world disappeared again, as it had done when I was screwing the Green Lady.

  This could become a bad habit, and definitely ruin a guy’s sex life.

  14. INTERVIEW WITH A DESCENDANT

  The sun aloft was, again, less intense than what I was used to in my everyday existence. But unlike the orb that lit the Archean, this luminary did not portray the immaturity of youth, suggestive of a more forceful and vibrant, happy heyday ahead. This was, rather, a senile sun, reddish-orange like a tangerine, slowly guttering out to a final extinction, begrudging every photon it had to share with its ungrateful planetary children.

  Disoriented as I was from the insane transition, I could still recognize that this phenomenon was all screwy, counterfactual. I knew the sun was only supposed to get hotter for the next few hundred million years. Its expansive end stages as a red giant would have meant the evaporation of the Earth. This impossible weak but stable condition was straight out of some old Superman comic or sci-fi fantasy.

  Or maybe someone had tampered with our star over the eons?

  Underneath my naked back was the familiar undulant vegetable mat, stretching as far as I could see when I tentatively sat up. But unlike the similar raft in the Archean, this gray-brown mat seemed salty and sticky and slightly putrescent, a sickly thing.

  I stood up, and when I did, I could see some kind of far-off structure, gleaming white. I began walking toward it, employing a sailor’s rolling gait to accommodate the mild waves.

  Hours seemed to pass. I got pretty thirsty, but didn’t care to sample the waters below the mat, suspecting them of being undrinkably foul. My sensations of thirst were remarkably painful and intense for a hallucination. And it had to be a hallucination, didn’t it?

  At the end of an interminable interval, my destination became recognizable. After a fashion.

  The structure was the horned skull of some non-human creature, and it was as big as Michigan Stadium. A hundred thousand souls could have taken up residence inside, if they had been content with single-room occupancy. The shape of the skull suggested a cross between a dragon, a platypus, and a panda—a thing that only millions of years of evolution under strange conditions could have spawned. Much too massive to be floating, it must be resting atop solid land, some weathered nub of Amasia or Novopangaea, the future continents.

  The fossil had no lower jaw, which must have come unhinged and gotten lost during its posthumous travels. But giant fangs projecting from the upper jaw and functioning as pillars served to keep the mouth entrance accessible, as if I were walking under some bone canopy into an exclusive nightclub.

  Inside the skull, light penetrated through eye sockets, ear holes, and some cranial gaps. There was nothing artificial inside, just the ivory acreage.

  “Hello! Tinidril? Aelita? Anyone home?”

  Those were the only two beings I could imagine inhabiting this place, my ancestral and Venusian girlfriends.

  My eye was attracted by a motion far, far up near the skull’s ceiling. A figure was descending, dropping down leisurely through the stuffy air with no visible means of support. At first a mere dot, it naturally assumed more definition the closer it got. When it was about thirty feet high, I recognized who it was.

  Mister After All, the crippled and contorted oldster from the Aeota comic I had just been reading to my daughter. Dressed in a raggedy black fustian suit, he sported a goatlike chin beard, axe-blade nose, rheumy eyes, and wild white tufts of hair on either side of a bald liver-spotted dome.

  He touched down lightly on the floor and leered up at me from his twisted scoliosis stance, like a crippled flamingo with its neck in a knot. His voice creaked like a desiccated wooden signboard swinging on rusty hooks in an arid desert ghost town.

  “Welcome to what must be, and what must backwards forever become.”

  “You’re DUCA. The uh, the uh—”

  “Descendant Ultimately Converged from All. But of course.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “I am seeking your cooperation. Your resistance will avail you naught in the end. I will have my way. But your cooperation will help me in some small measure. So of course, like any rational being, I prefer it.”

  “You expect me to help you extend this wasteland back in time to meet LUCA?”

  “Precisely. I need to merge with my bride. I yearn for her. She calls to me.”

  “You might yearn, pal, but I don’t hear her calling. And what’s in it for me if I help? If you change the past to be all-slime-all-the-time, where does that leave me?”

  “You will continue to have a very satisfying virtual existence within me, along with all the rest of your kind who have ever existed down the ages. But I will grant a greater agency within the emulation to those who help me. You will be like a god, able to use others as your playthings.”

  “Forget it! I’m not gonna sell out every human who ever lived.”

  Mister After All smacked his lips and tut-tutted gen
tly. “Oh, well, that’s too bad. But if I can’t get your allegiance, then I won’t brook your interference. Prepare to die.”

  His words, delivered evenly and without bravado or belligerence, were more frightening for their equanimity and assurance than any ranting threat could have been. I took a step backwards, then another—then turned and ran.

  I made it outside before he caught up to me with improbable speed, his bent legs scissoring like clockwork. In all likelihood he had been merely letting me feel an instant of false, futile freedom before he snatched it effortlessly away. He leaped upon me—the third person to do so in such a short time—and before I quite realized what was happening, we were rising through the air.

  “I shall drop you to shatter upon these ancient bones like a gull drops a clam upon a rock.”

  I squirmed and fought, but to no purpose.

  We were scores of feet above the skull when Mister After All came to a stop in midair.

  “Good riddance, human.”

  Released, I plummeted.

  I was proud I didn’t scream. But I did shut my eyes tight as a bank vault.

  The next sensation I felt was not a bone-splintering thud but a huge wet embrace. I opened my eyes.

  An enormous vegetable tendril had erupted from the ocean mat. Green and healthy looking, its anomalous bulk moved with some intelligence and direction.

  Mister After All screeched like a raptor and arrowed toward us.

  The tendril morphed to englobe me protectively, as the mat had done back in the Vaalbara room. The sphere filled with a pungent smell, and I passed out.

  15. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, OUT OF THE BUBBLE

  Waking, I instantly felt a deep déjà vu. Somehow, I knew, I had done all this before.

  I opened my eyes and realized the literal truth of my sensations.

  Once more I was recumbent upon the sandy cement floor of the empty Vaalbara room at AEOTA HQ, wearing the same clothes I had had on since breakfast, a meal that seemed millennia ago. Sunlight poured through the gashes in the roof.

  Starting miles away around midnight, my orgasm-induced astral travel had brought me to the Dying Earth to confront DUCA, and then back to this locale during daylight hours, courtesy of my tentacled rescuer, Aeota or Aelita or LUCA or the Green Lady. But what amount of time had passed? When was I? A sudden pang struck me. Could I have already lost my new life with Yulia and Aelita, after just a few hours of domestic pleasure, from being cast forward in time, in effect abandoning them with seeming heartlessness and offering no notice or explanation?

  I jumped up and raced to the ladder on the wall.

  Recently dislodged flakes of rust seemed to show it had just been used.

  I clambered up onto the platform, then rushed through the airlock into the suiting-up chamber.

  The locker where I had found my possessions in an old liquor box was empty, and the liquor box itself rested on the floor where I had once discarded it.

  I dashed through the rest of the deserted building and emerged outside just in time to see my car drive off.

  Naturally, the other me was behind the wheel, oblivious to anyone, even his doppelganger, shouting and jumping and gesticulating in the rearview mirror.

  I slumped, then turned to look at the building’s façade.

  The crumbling signage atop the place did not announce a candy company. Instead, it read:

  AEOTA MOTORS

  GREEN MACHINES FOR A GREEN FUTURE

  Did the changed sign mean that I had slipped tracks again in the multiverse? If so, would the differences be significant or trivial?

  I wouldn’t find any answers standing here, so I started to walk.

  Out on the main highway, such as it was, I expected to smell the forest fires that had accompanied my drive here. Maybe even see some distant smoke. But nada. The country air was clean as a church lavatory.

  I tried to recall if the Vern Ruggles in the car had encountered any different environmental conditions on the drive back during my earlier retreat from the ruined HQ. But no memories came to me. I figured I had been too intent on getting home then to notice.

  Now that I had attained the two-lane road, I tried to hitch a ride. But traffic was infrequent, and after a while I just gave up, figuring I’d focus on finding a phone and arranging for some old-fashioned transport. First house or business I saw, I’d make a call on a borrowed phone. Even if I had had my Nokia, I would’ve had to go old school; it didn’t support the Uber app.

  Although the strange way the device had been acting lately, who knew what magic pumpkin-and-mice coach it might have summoned for me?

  I was walking in the same direction as the adjacent traffic was flowing, so I did not see the antique yet immaculate ranger-green pickup truck until it passed me and pulled over to the shoulder not far ahead. Its storage bed was piled high with securely strapped wooden crates.

  The driver’s door opened and a bearded man got out. I felt like I should know him somehow.

  About ten feet away, I flashed on his identity.

  He was the young white hipster from the Aeota Farm, who had explained the barnside tobacco advertisement to me and given me a dozen eggs. (Had those eggs still been in my car when I drove off a few minutes ago? Another thing I could not remember, due to my distraction at the time.) Sure enough, the truck’s door bore the farm’s name and crest, and inside the cab sat his partner, the round-faced young black woman with the fountain of frizzy hair.

  “Hey man, you need a ride?”

  “Yes! Yes, I do! Where are you going?”

  “Into the city to make a delivery.”

  “Perfect! You can’t imagine how grateful I am.”

  “Slide in then.”

  I went to the passenger door. The woman had already scooted her butt over to the middle of the bench seat.

  We were on the road again in just a few seconds.

  “I’m Vern Ruggles.”

  “You didn’t tell us your name a few hours ago when we chatted,” said the woman.

  Okay, so there was some useful continuity.

  “I’m Philip Kendrick Langham. And this is Martha Washington.”

  The woman’s name activated another college-age literary memory, about the same vintage as my Perelandra reading experience, pertaining to a certain graphic novel.

  “Who’s the president of the USA?” I asked.

  The woman scowled. “Erwin Rexall.”

  My face must have looked as if I had stumbled onto a dozen bloody corpses. I could feel a cold sweat break out across my brow.

  The man and woman both laughed uproariously.

  “Just messing with you,” Martha said. “My folks named me after the Frank Miller story, and I can’t resist seeing if anyone picks up on it.”

  “So the president isn’t Erwin Rexall.”

  “Nah, it’s still him.”

  “That’s the only time I have ever been grateful to hear that.”

  “What happened to your car?” Langham said.

  “A close friend needed it more than I did.”

  “Well, that’s pretty generous of you.”

  “You’d do the same in my shoes, I’m sure.”

  The rest of the ride into the city was passed with general pleasantries. Langham and Washington were good people, if a tad naive.

  “I really think the future will be better than the present,” Washington said at one point, earning a sage nod from Langham.

  “Well, I myself am definitely working toward such a goal,” I said.

  Back in the city, I could not reasonably ask my saviors to detour from their deadline-determined delivery route—a series of restaurants and organic grocery co-ops—and so by the time they dropped me off at my office and we said our pleasant farewells, it was much later than my avatar’s visit there.

  I secured my spare office key from its hiding place under a large flowerpot next to the rickety elevator on my level. Inside, my counterpart had considerately left some tequila for me and I drained the bot
tle. I dug out some cash from my safe—not that my reserves were sizable—and called for a conventional cab.

  I had plenty of time to think, on the way to the Palmer Old Ditch Trailer Park. But I conceived of no surefire plan of action.

  Passing midichlorian comics, I had a whimsical impulse to stop in, hoping maybe for a quickie with the clerk. But the place was dark and shuttered for the night.

  I had the cabbie drop me off at the low-rent estate’s entrance. Darkness had descended. I worked my way circuitously around to Yulia’s doublewide, trying not to look like a peeping tom or cat burglar. Maybe any fellow residents who spotted me would recognize me as a neighbor and assume I was just out for a stroll. Although what they would think if they had seen me enter Yulia’s home but not exit by any conventional means was another matter.

  Eventually I hunkered down behind a bridal veil shrub not far from the trailer. I heard laughter and voices from inside but couldn’t make out any words. That was okay. The whole night was still fresh in my memory.

  It got to be roughly the hour when Aelita had fallen asleep. Any time now I’d start having sex with Yulia, then presumably vanish into the future that hosted DUCA. I had some half-assed plan in mind to rush back in when she started screaming at my sudden disappearance and pretend I had leaped up and fallen out a window or something. But for that story to make any sense at all, wouldn’t I have to be naked? Should I start stripping now?

  As things happened, the necessity to act was removed from me.

  I heard my own copulatory grunting and groans reach a crescendo inside the trailer. (“If this timeline is rocking, don’t come knocking.”) Then, at the moment of my climax I felt what I could only term a kind of doubling of my consciousness, a fleeting overlay of two identities, past and present, Vern and Vern +1, as my existential loop closed.

  And then I was back in bed, naked atop Yulia, filling the cosmic niche my earlier self had just involuntarily vacated.

  Yulia grabbed my ears and pulled my face down for a kiss.

  “Was that good for you, honey?”