Jacob hesitated. He felt as though he should do something to help. He had no medical training. There was nowhere to carry the survivors to. His heart pounded. He gathered his wits and looked around; there was no one watching him. This was his chance at freedom.
He turned to walk away.
“Stop right there.” In Jacob’s exhausted brain, the metallic click still registered as a firearm being cocked, and he raised his arms.
“Get on the ground!” He complied.
The guard loomed over him. “Going somewhere?”
“No, sir,” Jacob said loudly into the dirt.
The guard kicked him—barely a kick, really; bumped him with a toe. Might have imagined he was being kind. “Good. Remember that. Now, come help salvage what we can from this fire.”
XX.
Indiscretion
Lou always wrote his articles in longhand on paper first; it was just how he organized his thoughts. When the machine sickness hit and there were no more computer keyboards and no more electricity, and even the petroleum-based inks and plastic keys of classic typewriters didn’t work anymore, he had secretly gloated over returning to the world of hand-written work. He enjoyed the immediacy of turning the papers over to Gabe and letting the artisan do his time-honored work of setting the type, line by line.
Now he was back to the annoyance of needing someone to transcribe his work to a digital format for him. The trilobites’ tiny screens meant that text was painstaking to enter, and Emilio’s willingness to take on this menial chore—despite the man’s previous status—made Lou appreciate the man more.
Maybe it’s made me too reluctant to question his motivations. When something’s too good to be true, it usually is.
Lou eyed Esther.
She moved about the tiny cabin, combing her hair with a fragrant oil, securing it with a carved hairpin he was sure he hadn’t seen before.
“Going out for a walk.” She was out the door before he could reply.
He tapped the page with his pencil a few times. He had to admit he was distracted. Gabe had been hard to catch up with lately, taking lots of long walks by himself or hiking down the mountain to hang out at the pub, sometimes spending the night two or three nights in a row when the weather was bad (as it got sometimes, in late fall in the Blue Ridge mountains). Subscriptions to the Register, made up of eight-legged trilobites grown on their network, had leveled off.
Lou had to face the truth: it looked like this incarnation of the Highfield Register would never have the popularity the old paper version had, so long ago in Pennsylvania.
He mentally reviewed the bitter winter that had driven the population of Highfield south by refusing to end, and the labor of hauling the huge, antique press all this way. He morosely recalled the machine that represented his family’s legacy bogging in the mud and straining the backs of the beasts who pulled it—only to be ultimately made obsolete, once again, by the trilobites’ bioelectric local communication networks.
And now, this. This was the last straw.
He whipped his jacket from the hook by the door and set off for Emilio and Gabe’s cabin. He had a pretty good idea what he’d find, and he knew how flimsy the door latches were. A good, solid kick, even from his middle-aged frame, should do it.
And the door swung open. Six steps through the tiny house into the bedroom. Esther standing naked, silent, unrepentant; Emilio fumbling to button his pants with his left hand, his right holding his handgun.
Lou’s breath rasped. His pupils flared; his hair stood up on the back of his head and neck. His mouth was dry, and his muscles twitched.
Emilio seemed calmer. Without looking down, Esther took a single step closer to the nightstand, where her clothing and holster lay.
Lou didn’t draw. He spoke to Emilio. “Let’s settle this like men. Outside.”
Emilio lowered his weapon. Nodded. “Give me a minute.”
Lou’s eyes flicked to Esther, away. He walked outside.
He took off his jacket, set his handgun on top, and paced, swinging his arms in the chill drizzle. Emilio was ten years younger and twenty pounds heavier, but Lou was five or six inches taller. And hadn’t been in any kind of physical fight in forty years. But he’d do what he had to.
Emilio stepped out and came down the steps. Esther followed a few paces behind him, fully dressed, and stopped on the porch to watch.
The men squared off, and Lou brashly took the first swing, a lunging attempt at a haymaker. Emilio ducked, grabbed Lou’s arm, and threw him across an outstretched leg.
Lou tripped and fell prone. He barely had time to roll over on his back before Emilio was on top, grounding and pounding him. The pain in his face was blinding and relentless, but he was still humiliatingly aware that Emilio wasn’t giving it his all.
Emilio paused. “You’re no fighter, old man.” He was barely breathing hard. “Give up?”
Lou felt blood trickling along his receding scalp line. He felt shame trickling down his face from within. He choked tears down and nodded, not trusting his voice.
Emilio slowly shifted his weight off his knees, alert for a feint from his bested opponent.
Lou lay regarding him silently. He felt no urge to fight anymore. It was a momentary madness that had quickly passed, leaving remorse in its wake. He rolled over and got to his feet as soon as Emilio took a step away.
Both men naturally turned to look at Esther. She was gone.
XXI.
Quantum Phineas
The Northern Equatorial Ocean Current carries debris and organisms from the mouth of the Red Sea and churns them to the east, towards the coast of India. Before the P. davisii consumed all the world’s oil and plastic, oil tankers used to take advantage of this current to make better time. Millions of cubic meters of colorful plastic debris also used to make excellent time, but with no particular volition. In the early twenty-first century, the everlasting confetti washed up on the shore of Gujarat, drifting from Egypt and the vibrantly growing consumer economies of east Africa.
Now, however, there were no tankers and no plastic trash.
But in their stead were a new, rapidly-self-mutating breed of small ten-legged creatures swarming in the waters. The second-generation ctenophores reproduced at a mad pace in the wild, like their earlier cousins, who were now to be found on coastlines everywhere. They wandered wherever their tentacles led them. So it was not long before the first African ctenophore touched tentacles with the first Indian ctenophore.
Not long after that, the two iridescent beasties began their mating dance. When the African broke off his mating arm and presented it to the Indian, and she accepted it, one pi-stacked quantum spiral potentiated the next as they unreeled and rewound within her.
Abiba was, at that very moment, not at that very moment. She floated on the surface of the ocean. As the mating occurred, she felt herself instantly spread out. Her awareness distributed itself on the surface tension of the water of all the gulfs and seas of the world, impossibly thin. She imagined she might be dying; she accepted it as the release she’d long been yearning for.
But then the tension broke, disappointing her, and she was dispersed with a tremendous inaudible roar throughout the depths of the waters of the planet.
This was different than her previous ventures into quantum awareness. It was less destructive. It was more complete, encompassing her body at a human scale of being, instead of forcing her into miniscule subatomic space and exploding her to expansive interstellar distances.
As her attention resolved into something that made some sort of sense, she realized that she was everywhere any type of ctenophore was found: the marsh in Keti Bundur, the warrior sailors on the coast of Yemen, the wild ctenophores teeming off the beaches of Djibouti and Eritrea, tucked away in the pouches at the waists of all the women at Gabal Elba, hovering in some sort of flying contraption around some corpulent, pallid individual in Texas, and held in the hand of Bilqis, Favorite of the Lady, the Queen of Heaven on Earth.
>
Bilqis was issuing orders to her lieutenants, some via ctenophore and some in person, and preparing for the imminent assault of the Chinese on her stronghold.
What was left of Abiba-Durga that was human smiled indulgently. The Chinese force was so small to begin with, and so exhausted from crossing the desert, that even with their automatic weapons they would kill, at most, a hundred of the New Islamists’ thousands of warriors before being overwhelmed themselves. They did not belong here—while the Afar and Somali, Habesha and Tigray who followed Isis and looked to Bilqis for leadership, did.
But Abiba was disinclined to interfere. The energy of the commands flying from one ctenophore to another, and the order created by the commands, reminded her of a spinfoam turning itself inside out. She was mesmerized by its patterned kaleidoscopic beauty.
As the warriors assembled in ambush formations where the Chinese would most logically emerge from the desert, Abiba had an excellent view. She watched the desert-camouflaged Chinese file out from the slim cover of brushy vegetation and shallow canyons. She watched them form up and level their automatic weapons, disregarding the occasional, undisciplined rifle shots that came at them from too long a distance as the women marched forward.
They opened fire! She watched in agonizing grief as the first row of Isis warriors fell before them, but then the Chinese had to reload the greedy automatic weapons, and in those precious seconds, the second row of the New Islam troops reached their line. The women took heavy losses from handguns at close range and snipers bringing up the rear. Despite their primitive spears supplemented with a far-fewer number of guns, they finally overwhelmed the massed Chinese with pure numbers.
Abiba watched the women take a few prisoners. With curiosity, she scanned every Chinese face within range of a ctenophore’s photosensitive skin, but she didn’t recognize Li’s. Where was he? One tiny part of her, a part that was a configuration of far-flung entangled quanta and also a thought, and also a pattern of neurons firing in her still-embodied meat brain, mused on this and let it go.
She whispered through the newly-crystallized quantum network “Bilqis! Go now! Advance! Advance swiftly! The Chinese base is yours for the taking, and you have ten thousand warriors who have been denied their battle!”
The network began to shriek, every ten-armed beast its own source of the great I AM. The women began to call and respond as well. It was a magnificent cacophony! Freshly rested, armed, equipped, they began to trek across the desert. Like the herds of gnu further east, like the ancient flocks of ibis over the Nile, like the caribou in the Arctic, they moved inexorably and patiently towards the People’s Republican Army base. They encamped at sunset, wailing the songs of the Goddess back and forth late into the night.
Roni paced uneasily; there were no lights showing in the Chinese compound. Perhaps they were observing a blackout to avoid being targeted by snipers, but the fence perimeter was far enough from the buildings that that such attacks were unlikely, and the Chinese surely knew that. Abiba was frustratingly silent, and when the indigo sky over the distant eastern mountains turned cornflower blue, she contacted Bilqis, who only repeated the order to attack.
However, before the sun rose, in the greyness of predawn morning, a uniformed officer came to the double chain-link fence to parley. It was a long walk from the base. The women patiently watched him every step of the way, all the while sharpening their weapons and mending gear and tack, preparing food and pounding drums to accompany an aimless, cyclical song.
He had two subordinates with him. The three men faced the amassed women, spread across the flat land as far as they could see.
“We are here to surrender,” the leader of the Chinese contingent said.
The women muttered, irritation spreading in a wave as the information spread through the ranks, their battle-lust thwarted yet again by a disappointing opponent.
“This is a trick,” said Roni, their commander.
“No trick. We were the last stronghold of the industrial world that was destroyed. We dreamed of finding a cure for the plague and bringing the modern world back.
“But some weeks back, we had a captive. His knowledge was deemed important enough and his injuries were serious enough to justify bringing him inside for medical care. Though we followed our rigorous decontamination protocols, he somehow brought the plastic corruption within our gates. Our plastics have dissolved and we have no substitutes. We have no fuel, no electronics, no power. We are at your mercy. We want to join you and learn to live as you have learned to live, without the modern ways.”
Roni’s eyes dropped to the men’s uniforms, noting for the first time that they had no buttons on their shirts.
“Allow me to confer with my captains.”
She retreated into a large tent with ten other women, each the head of a thousand soldiers. The sun rose fully, insects began to drone, and the women grew increasingly restless in the heat.
Shortly, Roni emerged. “You may join us. The Lady’s merciful. She will accept you within our fold. But: you must conform to our ways.”
“Of course! If we are to live among you, that should go without saying!”
“Very well. Your men must be initiated first.”
“Initiated?” The commander’s face went pale. This involuntary reaction, coupled with the lack of power at the compound last night, confirmed Roni’s gut feeling that they were sincere.
“Ho! You are afraid? The big man’s afrai-aid!” she mocked him. The women all elbowed each other and guffawed.
He straightened. “Certainly not. But…is it true? Would we be—emasculated?” he croaked the last word.
Roni curled her lip in contempt. “No. We will not, as you say, emasculate you. What use would our men be to us if we gelded them? We won’t even break your feet and fold them in half, as your ancestors used to do to your women.”
The commander lifted his chin as though to argue, then thought better of it and remained silent.
Roni continued, “We will only provide you with what nature failed to provide: a brake for your urges and a tool for your women’s pleasure. As for how long it will take you to get over it, our men recover within a day. You are weaker than our people, but I don’t think by much. We’ll allow you two days, then take you home with us.
Now, open your gates.”
“Wait…”
“Do you want to do this? Or do you want to fight us?” The women behind her who held spears eagerly percussed them on the ground.
“No!” He looked helplessly over each shoulder at his subordinates. The two men waited impassively at attention. He wasn’t really expecting help from them, and he found none.
“Good.” Roni dusted her hands together. She beckoned the priestesses, already working their way forward from among the troops. They began to amass at the gate, each holding a uniquely red-painted leather sack.
The commander reluctantly walked over to the gate. “The lock…it was electronic,” he stalled.
The front priestess drew a .45 from her leather girdle and shot the hasp of the lock, strode in to the second interior gate, and destroyed that lock as well.
The women began sauntering unhurriedly inwards along the long, long drive that paralleled the runway. They spared a few resentful glances at the runway, whence the drones that had harassed them, which they called vultures, had only lately taken off. All the vultures still in the sky belonged to Isis now—only natural feathered creatures, not these obscenities of remote-controlled warfare.
The commander trotted to the head of the line, fell in next to the leisurely striding head priestess, and had a brief conversation with her, then took off at a steady jog ahead. Roni assumed he was preparing things for their initiation. She beckoned her swiftest messenger, nodded at the man. “Follow him. Contact me by ctenophore if you see the slightest sign of treachery.”
Roni began to move her troops through the gate in an orderly fashion, detailing some of them to disassemble the fence. The trickle changed graduall
y into a flood, and then a wave, then an avalanche. By midday, the women had reconfigured their same camp, just a few kilometers closer to the buildings of the Chinese military.
By the end of the day, Roni was growing irritated over dealing with the petty annoyances of life in camp. The troops camped closest to the compound were complaining of the smell where the Chinese sewage system, dependent on plastic sewage pipes, had failed. Others were grumbling about returning to Gabal Elba, seeing there was no fight to be had, or wanted to return to their seacoast homes, where the seabutter harvest was going to waste. There was a warrior who had come out pregnant, against orders, and was now having a miscarriage: a difficult disciplinary decision to be made and followed through.
The priestesses returned just as cookfires began to be lit for dinner, orange specks on the wide plain that picked up the post-sunset sienna glow above. Quite a few Chinese women followed them, Roni noticed. She roughly estimated they were about a tenth of the women stationed at the base—if the personnel were three-quarters men, as her scouts maintained.
“These are the ones who liked the idea of women being in charge,” said a priestess to her, sotto voce. The Chinese women were made comfortable at campfires and served their share of seabutter, goat, and cassava. They remained with the encampment when the priestesses returned from their night of initiating the men into their bond with the Lady, queen of vultures, source of all goodness and light, peace be upon her.
The next morning, a few of the priestesses went to the compound to check on their new initiates. They returned to report the men were all in good health; no problems, just sore and in as much pain as expected, from having the spur mounted over their pubic bones, as well as having their foreskins pierced through and pinned in place within the bell-shaped scarab.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 62