“You! Young men!” (For the first row was always teenage boys, who are universally convinced of their indestructibility.) “You may partake in my glory by surrendering! Come. Now.” Her voice resonated (a simple matter of building a conical membrane within her chest that projected a bass note) and brought the youths forward onto the steps. “You shall be called to sacrifice your bodies in ways you may not understand by those who come after me. In time, there shall arrive here seven strange women, avatars of the Septa-Matrikyas. You must do as these travelers say with perfect obedience. Now, go.” The boys stared at her.
“I said, GO!” Her face turned blue-black; her eyes, to snakelike slits. Her teeth grew into razor-sharp fangs.
The boys staggered back, stumbling over each other and over their own feet, confronted with the image of Kali come to life. The lion rose on his hind legs and flexed his claws at their fleeing backs.
“You! Young women,” she beckoned the girls, who usually were found in a cluster off to one side. “Come. Be with me.” She was briefly pale blue, luminous with lunar softness, and emanating a fragrance of jasmine, before reverting to many-armed Durga once again. “For it shall be as it was and is:
“Through me alone all eat the food that feeds them, – each man who sees, breathes, hears the word outspoken.
“They know it not, yet I reside in the essence of the Universe. Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it.
“I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that gods and men alike shall welcome.
“I make the one I love exceeding mighty, make him nourished, a sage, and one who knows Brahman.[2]
“I turn these youthful men over to you, to keep at your feet, as I kept the Buffalo Demon Mahishasura. They shall have honor only to the degree you are honored. Each of you must live as divine warriors from this moment on. Dark-skinned, fierce women will come from far beyond the sea to teach you how to live this reality. You must learn well. You must learn all they have to teach you.”
Temple after temple, Abiba-Durga on her lion trotted implacably on. The dimness of night dispersed as the cool moon wheeled higher overhead. As the goddess moved, she and the lion both grew until they were bounding across the landscape ten meters at a step. They raced across Gujarat, across what had once been a border between two nations and was now a mere threshold. They flowed across a narrow neck of land into the wilderness south of Hyderabad. The lions trailing them—ordinary fleshly animals still—became hungry and tired. They began to break off into hunting groups to stalk the abundant antelope and deer in Keti Bunder.
She eventually stopped to sleep, heedless of her surroundings, impervious, immortal, curling up to the silky belly of her lion. As she slept, the quantum messages flickering through the ether directed her ten arms to knit together into titanic wings.
As the sun rose, so did she, and saw that she was on a great sloping plain: behind her an expanse of waving, golden reeds, and before her a great crowd of women who had felt a silent call or heard a whisper in the pre-dawn dark, to come. She seated herself on the lion’s plush golden flank, her throat and shoulders expanding as her glowing wings strained towards opposite horizons.
“This is the dawn of the new age of Isis,” she sang. The woman Abiba, couched within the goddess Durga, was astonished anew at how her voice now rang, like the bell of the rays of the ascending dawn.
“Bohra women, let your men wear the scarab. Let them assume the spur for your pleasure. Let the women who have been cut by Zarwak-Allah’s minions be revered among you as grandmothers—even the ones so young they have not yet bled!
“Let the message go out to the Kurds and the Christians as well. This is the new Age of Isis!”
She surged to her feet and turned, her wings trailing through the air with a swirling subsonic resonance that stirred the crowd’s bones. She approached the great salt marsh of Keti Bunder that had been behind her. The lion padded along, a loyal escort. A million ctenophores had wriggled their way into the shallow water of the brackish flats overnight, where they wove complex contoured mazes amongst the reeds.
She bent to pick one up and handed it to the woman nearest her.
“With these, the word is made flesh.” The woman stared as the letters, gawking at the phrase formed in the pane of skin on the animal’s back. Her eyes were wide, but they did not move across the letters, for she could not read. After a moment, Abiba-Isis’s words were softly repeated, from somewhere among the tiny creature’s ten legs. It prompted the woman almost to drop the ctenophore, but she didn’t. The others behind her, intrigued, began to pluck individual creatures from the water for themselves.
Abiba-Isis spared them no more attention. She was beginning to parch again; her skin, drawn taut, skidded across her tendons and bones like leather as she moved. With a sigh that betokened great liberation, she allowed her feet and legs to flare out once more into a skirt that expanded within the weakly saline water.
The lion’s inscrutable golden eyes watched her go.
XVII.
Take a Memo
Lou sat in his chair on the porch, savoring the cool fall air and sipping a mug of roasted dandelion root tea, scrolling down the text that showed on the eight-legged trilobite in his hand.
Suddenly, he sat upright. He almost knocked his cup over as he got up and went next door to Gabe and Birdwell’s bachelor cabin. He pounded on the door. Gabe answered in a pair of boxers, blinking in the morning light.
“Where’s that editorial assistant of mine? I have a bone to pick with him!”
“Hell if I know! He’s my roommate, not my child. What’s the big deal?”
“I made it clear I didn’t approve this format! He can suggest all he wants, but going behind my back like this is unacceptable!”
Gabe shrugged. He left the door ajar and vanished, but reappeared in a minute or two to say, “Emilio will be right out. Have a seat.” He nodded at the Adirondack chairs identical to the ones at Lou’s own cabin. Agitated, Lou didn’t sit, choosing instead to pace the narrow porch until Birdwell emerged.
“Good morning, Lou.” He filled his chest with a vigorous breath. “What can I do for you this fine, crisp morning?” He held out his hand for their usual quick shake, but Lou didn’t take it.
His hand held out the trilobite, shaking slightly. “Did you change the order of these paragraphs? After I explicitly told you not to? And after I told you why: It altered the meaning of the entire piece!”
Gabe was in his bedroom, banging things around and whistling excessively loudly.
“Oh, is that what you’re upset about?” Emilio waved a hand. “It’s minor. But you know no one was going to read that wall of text unless you gave them a reason first.”
Gabe came out, dressed and ready for his day. As he brushed past, he said cheerfully, “Hey, Lou! Great editorial today, by the way! Really grabbed me from the first word!”
Lou locked eyes with Emilio. Emilio smirked almost imperceptibly.
“I’ll let it go this time,” Lou conceded. “But listen… it would have taken only a few minutes to convince me, instead of going behind my back. When you offered to stay on as my major-domo and help me rebuild my media reach, I trusted that the line of authority was clear. I thought you were a military man who understood chain of command.”
“Yes, I was a military man. And I stand corrected. Yes, Lou, you’re right. My mistake. I apologize.” He raised his eyebrows, and Lou couldn’t help but soften. “No hard feelings?” He held out his hand again, and this time, with a show of hesitation, Lou shook it.
Both men squeezed a bit harder than was, strictly speaking, necessary.
Esther came around the bend in the path at that moment, her loose cotton dressing gown blowing airily about her hips, her curly black hair in disarray. Her eyes flicked from one man to the other.
As they turned to look at her, she smiled. “Good morning! Cooking some of those eggs we got in trade for the last trilobite.”
To Lou, “Want some?”
>
“No, thanks,” Lou said.
“Fresh eggs?” Emilio asked.
“Brown ones! I know they say they all taste the same, but I can tell. The brown ones are better.” Her dark eyes twinkled. “Can I fry you up a couple?”
“I was hoping you’d ask!” Emilio followed her down the path.
“Actually, fried eggs do sound good.” Lou’s step fell in behind them.
Inside the cabin, the men sat at the table. Esther set a cast-iron pan on the stove, then swirled a little oil in the bottom and left it to heat. She lined up six eggs in front of herself and waited, her gaze unfocused out the window. Lou scrolled on his trilobite, checking the day’s published Register to make sure there were no other errors, omissions or typos. Esther cooked the simple snack and grabbed three plates. Emilio sat at ease. Lou disregarded the object of Emilio’s gaze.
Esther bent over to put a fork by Emilio’s plate, and Lou’s nostrils flared.
She caught his tiny snort and flashed him a quick scowl.
XVIII.
The Head of a Pin
“Never going to happen!” D.D. shook her head and avoided looking at Alfred. She scooped another handful of seabutter-permeated corn out of the bowl beside her and crammed it in her mouth. On her homespun wool-stuffed pouf chair, her muumuu billowed around her. In a radial pattern on the floor around her sat snoozing drones, each holding a book. She was a plump spider in the center of a web of captured thoughts. Kittykitty sprawled at her feet, watching alertly for her to drop a kernel.
Alfred hovered around the edges of the web—like a praying mantis attracted by the buzzing, but wary of being ensnared along with its kill. “How can you say that with such certainty? You admit your physics is weak at best!”
“Was! Was!” D.D. snapped. “Since I stopped sleeping, I’ve had nothing to do but study and learn.”
Alfred frowned.
“Stopped sleeping? Really? Well, but that’s beside the point I was making about the drones. D.D., you’re a microbiologist. A good one—a great one, in fact—but not an expert in A.I.”
“And your degree was in, what? Computer science? Coding? Did you have any training in cybernetics? Did your education prepare you for building anything without plastics?”
“Exactly! But I do recognize artificial intelligence when I see it. And I see signs of it when we have all the drones up like this.” He gestured at the spiral pattern on the floor around her. “Maybe you’d see it too, if you’d get some rest so you’d have more perspective.”
Right on cue, a drone on the periphery rose, without any signal from anyone, and carried a book to settle next to the volume D.D. had been perusing. Her eyebrows flew up. “That’s it!” she murmured, her eyes flicking from one text to the other. She shoved down another mouthful of the greasy grain and chewed avidly as she read.
“See?” persisted Alfred. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! The network’s anticipating your needs based on your prior explorations, while discarding things you already know. That’s a clear sign of Bayesian analysis.” He smiled triumphantly, chin out, palms up.
“Ludicrous.” D.D. didn’t even spare him a glance as a drone hummed over with yet another text. She took up a tablet and made a series of notes on its fleshy screen. “I’m trying to determine if glass coffins will ever be popular.”
“Remains to be seen.” Alfred seized the moment of stillness to slip by the drones, towards the web’s apex. “D.D.…D.D., what’s happened to you? We were such good friends, but now it’s like you’re in a different world. I don’t understand this mental wall you’ve put up around yourself!” He knelt on the floor next to her, towering over her seated form even on his knees.
D.D. sighed. “Alright. Let’s address the elephant in the room.” She gathered her feet under her on the pouf and sat upright on her heels.
The drones spontaneously retreated to their spots in the array around her. She heaved herself to a standing position, puffing slightly with the effort, ignoring the helping hand Alfred held out.
She advanced, looking down at him sternly. “What’s she been saying to you?”
“Who?”
“Who?” she mocked. “Jessica! She’s made it no secret that she hates me. She blames me for everything. Now she’s trying to turn my few remaining friends against me. That’s why I didn’t go out to the market festival; I couldn’t face everyone, knowing how she’s been smearing me.
“I never thought you’d be so easily manipulated, though, Alfred. I thought you were my friend. At least tell me the truth: What did she say to you?”
He shook his head, kept his voice calm. “D.D., I haven’t seen Jessica since she stormed out of here that day. I know, I know—what she said was unfair. You did nothing to deserve it. Believe me, I’m 100% with you on that! But you can’t control what she says or does. You’re just sitting here, beating yourself up and hoping she feels the pain.”
Alfred’s lanky form sprang upright. He leaned over and patted her shoulder. She softened. “Look,” he said, “you’ve been holed up here too long—not sleeping, not getting any sunlight or exercise. Why don’t we take a road trip, maybe visit Gaby and Jeremy at Bolivar, away from all this drama? I know you miss that grandson of yours, but you can’t do anything about that. But you haven’t seen your namesake Deirdre in a long time, either. When they were here, you were sulking and missed your chance.”
“Sulking? Really? I don’t think avoiding embarrassment and humiliation exactly counts as sulking!”
“Okay, okay, sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean sulking. I just meant you didn’t see the baby, and I know how you love babies!”
“Apology accepted.”
“What I meant to say is, it would do you some good to spend some time with your friends, with the kids; get out, get active. C’mon, buddy. What do you say?”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What exactly are you implying now?”
“Just that you’d feel better—”
“I feel fine!”
“D.D., don’t…”
She turned away, fell back on her pouf, heavily as a dead tree trunk. “Forget it. I’m not getting into this with you. I have nothing to say.”
Alfred gazed down at his friend a moment more. The drones rose from the floor, furiously flitting around her, jerking in sync with her rage. The crinkle of pages flipping was chitinous, like insect wings. Her eyes flickered from book to book as she absorbed information at phenomenal speed.
After observing her and the drones, he eased his way further into her orbit, a gangly child jumping into a game of double-dutch. He hopped his way through until he reached the center, where he squatted eye-to-eye with her—to the apparent consternation of several hovering drones, whose access to her visual field was blocked by his body. They looped crazily about the two of them in a holding pattern.
“D.D., you have to get out of here. You haven’t left this building in months. You’re so deconditioned you can hardly walk. Your clothes don’t fit anymore. You can hardly breathe. You know as well as I do that no matter how much information you accumulate, your brain can’t think clearly unless your body’s in good shape!”
D.D. glared at him, but he maintained a level gaze suffused with kindness and compassion. The staring contest stretched in time.
“Okay,” D.D. said. “I’ll go on one condition.”
“What?” Alfred asked.
“Explain the word ‘plethora’ to me.”
“I will, once we’re on the road.”
Satisfied, Alfred rose. His place was immediately taken by the waiting drones, and she began reading frenetically once again.
He paused at the door. “Tomorrow morning. You promise?” He waited until she looked away from the books and made eye contact.
“Tomorrow morning. I promise.”
He nodded and left to pack for the trip.
XIX.
Slow and Furious
Jacob headed for the rear of the column, leading six others arou
nd the flank of the group. The rest of the crew gathered inwards and forwards, towards their ropes. Since he was going in the opposite direction, he had a clear view of the area, unlike everyone else, crowded together. He noticed that the trustee woman banging the gong was new at it, hitting the giant cast-iron skillet awkwardly and not loudly enough. She’d also set the unit up closer to the wagon traces than usual. Jacob frowned.
“Louder, you dumb slut!” the guard commanded. She leaned into a serious wind-up with the arm holding the fireplace poker and swung it towards the pan. As the two cast iron objects met, sparks flew.
Sparks!
Jacob flung himself to the ground. At the same moment, a roaring WHUMP! broiled his back.
He buried his head in his arms, fingers locked behind his neck. He held his breath. He dreaded getting up to soon, only to be hit by a second, bigger explosion. He waited for it. Listened with ringing ears. Instead, he heard only screams and moans nearby.
Slowly, he raised his head and saw the sere grass around him flaming in spots. He thought of a movie he’d seen once, where a brush fire cooked resting people alive. That made him spring up in a panic, only to realize that the little fires were quickly dying, leaving patches of blackened vegetation.
His ears hummed and the horizon spun. He reeled on his feet, his brain stunned by the shockwave.
The giant wagon itself was fully consumed in flame. He could feel its heat on his face from fifty yards away. Thirty feet of the thick pulling ropes were already consumed, the ends smoldering feebly on the blackened earth like a cartoon dynamite fuse. The gong-ringer was nowhere to be seen, nor was the guard. Presumably, they were two of the blackened lumps smoking on the singed earth around the wagon.
A flaming human form shrieked into the prairie at a sprint, flailing its arms, and then collapsed. Jacob was relieved just to be able to hear anything after the explosion, but the moans and wails of pain from prostrate people in every direction shook him. He saw a few survivors bending over the injured to render aid. Or maybe they were checking their pockets for valuables, it was hard to tell.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 61