Authors: Paul di Filippo
When they were demobbed, their experiences led them to join the Moderationists, for whom they became instant and effective spokesmen.
I came along as a teratoma.
My dads kept developing these squelchy growths all over their bodies, which the bonies kept removing. One of the growths had more than usual baseline human structure to it, and my dads got the idea that it would be nice to turn it into a daughter. It cost a lot, both in eft and in compromise of their noninterventionist principles. But they were really kind of lonely, and I guess the Moderationists finally relented on the dogma part.
Naturally, I’m glad they did.
So anyhow, there my Siamese dads stood, linked by flesh and remora-cords straining fit to burst, shouting their heads off at me and Jinx, whose spike growths were turning green with contrition and purple with sorrowful anger at how innocent kids like us always got quenched in the end.
To make a long story short, we had to get rid of the spikes (but not before everyone in our cohort saw us with them), and Honeysuckle’s parents had to pay for it all, and she had her estrogen shut off for a month, and Jinx, my darling Jinx, got sent back to Asgard.
But I really am not worried. Like Jinx said, a year is not such a long time to wait till we’re franchised.
And after seeing me with a spike, there wasn’t much resistance from the poohs a month later, when I pleaded one last time for tits.
And they’re from a much classier vendor’s line than
hers
!
UP THE LAZY RIVER
1. Muscle Fatigue
Flying northwest, parallel to the interface of the River Seven bankside forest and the manicured savannah, across which herds of null-sophont cultivars roamed peacefully, Norodom Dos Santos grieved for his hyperfluid charge.
Normally, River Seven appeared from the air as a thick two-toned viscous snake, subtly pulsing in controlled opposing flows. Constrained by its mostly baseline geophysical channel, two-thirds dirty quicksilver grey and one-third matte black, it resembled a stripe of gel like the squeezings from a tube of antique toothpaste.
Today, River Seven lacked its usual luster, seemed lifeless and dispirited, victim of the unexplained changes Dos Santos was speeding to investigate.
I’m personifying the River again
, Dos Santos mildly chided himself.
What would Master Trexler think of such imprecision in one of his students?
After all, even dead, Trexler still exhibited all those old personality traits which a Turing Level Eight platform was capable of emulating, and one did not care to disappoint him.
Transferring his Synergen-grown craft to kibe autopilot (a simple TL4), Dos Santos resolved to abandon sentimentalism for work. Prompting his higher centers into microsleep, he freed up paraneurons to run deep plectic simulations of the River’s failure.
Midway through the third evocation, disaster struck.
Propulsion myofibrils ripped away from the left COfiber-polysaccharide lattice wing with a sound like a cleaver through a slab of lapinovine.
The abnormal sound instantly reawakened the River Master’s full awareness.
With a sinking feeling, Dos Santos realized his ladybug was going down.
The sudden threat to his life triggered a criticality flash that cascaded across his Sphinxco wetware mods: this mission was deeper than a simple repair call.…
Dos Santos knew better than to try to wrest control away from the kibe unit under emergency conditions—although a gut response still jerked his hands toward the control ganglia. Instead, he quickly snugged the wrist-dangling gloves of his millipore survival suit on, effectively disabling his CamNeuro digiface.
The kibe unit spoke as the gloves sealed themselves, and by then it was too late to do anything even if he had known what to do.
“I am sorry Peej Dos Santos, but conditions require your immediate immobilization.”
Nodules studded around the sides of his organiform chair burst like spore capsules. Compressed somatropic lianas sprayed out, wrapping him in an sticky biolastic net.
Out the windscreen, Dos Santos could see the line of jungle on his left rising up and around like a wall.
Dos Santos barely had time to utter the start of a prayer to the goddess of his Camspanic ancestors: “Holy Mary Kannon, Highest of Dakinis—” And then he felt the dose of
Sandman perfuse his skin.…
* * *
The birds resumed their singing slowly. The loud crack of a damaged branch finally giving way stopped them again, but they quickly found their multifarious voices once more.
One fauxvian called out over and over in a raspy human voice: “Shop here, shop here, shop here.…” An escaped urban adbird …
Fronds of orange foliage starred with orchidenias lay across the intact single-crystal windscreen, obscuring Dos Santos’s view of his new surroundings. As he struggled to free himself from the safely restraints, the kibe unit spoke.
“Please allow me, Peej Dos Santos.”
A fine mist dispersed from the ladybug’s ceiling, dissolving the vines: Catalytica Calmbalm. At the same time, Dos Santos felt various aches and pains he had hardly realized he was feeling disappear, as the mist was recognized and allowed in through his smartsuit.
He climbed out of the chair, suit slick and hair damp, and stood tentatively on the canted floor. The craft seemed stable.
“What happened?”
“The left wing suddenly lost all haemocyanin flow, and the tissue immediately degenerated below the functional threshold. Probability of spontaneous failure, point one percent. Probability of maintenance error, thirty percent. Probability of deliberately induced failure, sixty-eight percent … Wait. Abnormal protease traces registering. … Revised probability of sabotage, ninety-nine-point-six percent.”
“Sabotage …” muttered Dos Santos. “But why?”
“I have no answer to your question, Peej Dos Santos. However, despite the overwhelming evidence of nonculpability, I am required by law to supply you with the metamedium address of my manufacturer, should you wish to file a suit against them. Synergen is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Primordium Chaebol. Telecosm address is At-prim-kay—”
“Forget it.” Dos Santos began to gather equipment and supplies from an overhead ovoid locker. “How far are we from our destination?”
“Contact with Global Positioning’s navsats remains firm, and I have us located within the standard three-meter deviation. Machine Lake is approximately fifty klicks to the north. However, I managed to set us down only a hundred yards from River Seven.”
“And we’re still on the upstream bank?”
“Yes.”
“Good job.”
“Thank you, Peej Dos Santos. I hope you will take my actions into account in the event of any possible lawsuit.”
“Don’t worry, there’s not going to be any legal action. It’s plain that whoever stopped the River doesn’t want me coming to investigate. There’ll have to be a purge of all the splices on the maintenance crew back at the base.”
“Organics are inherently less trustworthy and more liable to be compromised than kibernetika, if I may say so.”
Dos Santos cracked the ladybug’s hatch, and warm, wet air blew in past a curtain of bamboon.
“Where are you going, Peej? I’ve sent out a distress call and received an acknowledgement. Would it not be wise to wait here?”
“How do I know all the other ’bugs haven’t been tampered with too? I could wait for days. No, I’ve got to finish my mission. I’m too close now to wait. And the River can’t stay down much longer.”
Patting his left breast pocket, which held the vital vial of Instruction Set which would repair the River, and adjusting the bandoliers that held his Intratec splat-pistol, extra lysing cartridges and other equipment, Dos Santos placed one booted foot over the sill.
“I must protest, Peej. Under Regulation Two-Ten of the Riparian Administration Handbook—”
“Listen,” interrupted Dos Santos. “Who’s the River Master here, you or me?”
Somehow the TL-4 kibe managed to sound wounded and resigned. “You are, Peej.”
“Correct.”
“May I make a suggestion, then?”
“Certainly.”
“At least let me accompany you. I am more capable than your low-level suit assists. Also, if you are terminated and I am later recovered, I shall be able to make a full report.”
“What a cheerful notion.”
“I am simply trying to fulfill my autofac-implanted imperatives, Peej.…”
“All right.”
Dos Santos stepped to the console and ejected the kibe, a featureless silver wafer the diameter of a hockey puck, but only half as thick. Fitting it flat into the appropriate sticktite slot on his harness, he turned to leave the disabled ladybug.
“I am now fully integrated with your suit sensors, Peej. They are of high quality.”
“I have a feeling we’ll need them,” said Dos Santos. “Activate my retinal displays, please.”
“Done.”
Dos Santos’s peripheral vision filled with translucent shimmerstats, and he stepped tentatively into the jungle.
2. Infoslam
The first report indicating that something was seriously wrong with River Seven had come a mere twelve hours ago, emanating from the kibe unit captaining one of the numerous floating autofacs-cum-general-stores that supplied the indigenous Riverside population. The unit, a mere hundred klicks fromM achine Lake, had messaged that the River’s downstream velocity was decreasing radically, dropping toward ancient baseline values or below; probes launched into the upstream side, however, still registered normal values. Continued updates revealed a steady decline in the force of the artifical current.
When other reports from further downRiver began to flood in—a tourist vessel, a passenger ferry, a fleet of sport skimmers and striders—it became obvious to Dos Santos that River Seven—his River—was dying.
Naturally, he had been in Lagos on official business at the worst possible time. Had the trouble found him at his normal post—his HQ on the shores of Machine Lake—he would have been at the source of the problem and able to take immediate action. As it was, a long trip back had been necessary first.
Now, knowing that his craft had been sabotaged, it became obvious that the attack on River Seven had been timed to take place in his predictable absence.…
Toward the unexpected abrupt end of his flight, Dos Santos knew that the downstream portion of River Seven must have been approaching total shutdown. The death of the current, as he had plotted it in Lagos, had been propagating faster than the current itself, a shut-down message of some unknown sort, passed from one flagellum-flailing silicrobe to its neighbor, and then to its neighbor’s neighbor, thus outracing the physical flow as a sheer information wave.
The continued functioning of the upstream third of River Seven was explainable by the deliberately engineered lack of communication between the two currents. Only along the nearly 2000-klick length of the upstream-downstream interface, where a thin layer of specialized downstream silicrobes performed an elaborate ciliary doesy-doe with a matching layer of upstream silicrobes, exchanging energy in a friction-eliminating dance, did any mixing occur. And the incompatible nature of the two currents, designed to avoid command snafus, had apparently succeeded in keeping the up River current alive a little longer.
But the ultimate source of upRiver silicrobes wad the downstream current, and the death of the smaller, still functioning portion of River Seven was inevitable.
From the feedstocks of Machine Lake were born all the silicrobes which comprised 50 percent by volume of the downstream River Seven channel. (The other half of the downstream channel was the traditional H
2
O from traditional sources: feeder streams, rainfall, underground aquifer connections. The missing volume of water had been long ago diverted for human consumption.) From Machine Lake the silicrobes exited, mingling with the available water in a synthetic gunmetal-colored broth. (Nanosmall, the silicrobes were of course invisible individually, presenting an homogenous appearance en masse.) Programmed to churn downstream at a steady speed, each maintaining a constant distance from the downstream shore and its neighbors, the silicrobes carried the water molecules along with them faster than mere gravity ever had.
At the mouth of River Seven, the fingerlike delta around Port Harcourt, the downstream silicrobes were triggered by the increased salinity and by info from GloPos navsats, undergoing the transformation into upstream silicrobes. Separating from their partnered water molecules (which continued out to sea as of yore), the upstream silicrobes made a coherent U-turn and headed back. Without H
2
O partners, they needed a virtual channel only half the size of the downstream one to make their way back to Machine Lake and resorption. Upstream speed was 80 percent of the downstream current.
Except today.
3. Big Muddy