Read Emperor of Gondwanaland Online
Authors: Paul Di Filippo
Emperor of Gondwanaland (56 page)
Halfway to the parking lot, he was seized by a sudden impulse and reentered the building through a side door to which he possessed the security code.
A sample of the latest iteration of Up!—several cc’s of innocuous-looking yogurt, one of four doses racked in glass vials in a fridge—fit easily into a small borrowed Igloo cooler.
Once home, Lothar turned to his computer. He swiftly discovered the number of a local escort service. He arranged for an out-call. He downed the dose of Up! and awaited the arrival of the minutely specified call girl, and anticipated his guaranteed ability to perform.
Within five minutes of swallowing the engineered bacillomyces, Lothar was completely paralyzed, with no hint of vasocongestion of the penis in sight. His trapped brain whirled in frustration. How had this happened? None of the test animals had exhibited such a loss of muscular control—
The doorbell rang and rang, and the frustrated hooker—a Cuban woman who worked under the name of Fidelina—began to curse in a very creative bilingual fashion, but Lothar failed to twitch a limb or register any chagrin at his bad manners, and eventually Fidelina stormed off.
By this point, however, Lothar didn’t care. He was too busy listening to a monologue from his bugs.
Some four million years ago, when humanity’s ancestor Lucy and her kin had barely learned to walk bipedally, a pre-Adamite race of humanoids, native to the planet, had been the dominant species on Earth. Possessed of an advanced technology and a rich culture, they and their works had been utterly wiped off the face of the globe by a combination of titanic natural disasters and mysterious extraterrestrial rivals—the former perhaps not unconnected to the latter. But before the godlike sapients had succumbed, they succeeded in preserving their legacy in a safe place.
The hominid genome.
The billions of seemingly useless base pairs known as introns—the 30,000 recognizable human genes constituted only 3 percent of the total genome—contained a wide individual selection of all the pre-Adamite genes as well as defensive mechanisms for their conservation across the millennia.
And a launch program, set to be activated should certain cellular tripwires ever be tugged by a sufficiently advanced biological probe.
Lothar’s EndoAgents had pulled those alarm strings.
Now, thanks to the handy psychosomatic interface Lothar had provided them with, the bugs were informing Lothar of all this history, running educational filmstrips in his mind.
While they were multitasking other jobs as well.
As he lay helpless on the floor, Lothar could feel innumerable changes occurring to and within his body. Tsunamis of peristalsis traveled from his feet to his head. Rumblings and creakings made his body sound like an old sailing ship in a gale. Spasms invigorated his frame. There were occasional stabs of pain, but these lasted only briefly, just until the bugs identified each neural circuit being impacted and blocked it.
By dawn of the day after he had hastily departed SEA, the half-finished, somewhat amorphous creation that was Lothar-Plus arose from the carpet and began to shamble around. Lothar was still not in control of his own muscles at this point, so he had no idea where he was going. But when he entered the kitchen, he realized that this was the obvious place the EndoAgents would bring him.
Over the next two hours, seeking fuel and mass, Lothar consumed every edible substance in his house, from boxes of Shake ’n’ Bake to cans of condensed milk, from bottles of catsup to jars of capers. He even ate several houseplants, including some that were normally toxic. The entire contents of his Zero King freezer were microwaved just to the point of chewability, then scarfed down with mechanical efficiency. The floor was littered ankle-deep with discarded packaging and chewed root balls by the time the mammoth feast was finished. Lothar’s new form bulged like a python that had swallowed a capybara.
The EndoAgents, implementing the survival parameters of the pre-Adamite launch program, and using what they had gleaned from Lothar’s mind, next directed their vessel to employ the phone.
“Good morning, Stixrude EndoAgents. How may I direct your call?”
Lothar’s voice was mucilaginous but recognizable. “Celeste, this is the one called Lothar. I am feeling unwell today, and will not appear at your temporo-spatial locus. Perhaps not for several days.”
“Oh, Dr. Stixrude, how awful! Is there anything I can do?”
“No, thank you. Communication ended.”
The EndoAgents directed Lothar to a comfortable position on his bed. Then they shut down his consciousness.
The next part was going to be messy.
Lothar awoke with no sense of anything amiss with his body or mind. Nothing felt unfamiliar, no alien mentalities lurked in his cortex. Or so he would swear. He swiveled his head tentatively, taking in his familiar bedroom. Perhaps all that impossible cellular torture and Adantean mumbo-jumbo had been a dream—?
But then his musings were interrupted. As if a switch to his perceptions had been thrown, letting exterior sensations flood in more acutely than normal, Lothar suddenly realized that his mattress was soaked, chilling his skin. He willed his scrawny arms and crippled legs to scuttle him out of bed.
Lothar found himself halfway across the room, the result of a single mighty bound, facing a full-length mirror he generally tried his best to ignore.
As best as Lothar could judge, he now stood approximately six and a half feet tall, his mind housed in a naked body that might’ve been sculpted by Michelangelo by way of Frazetta—including some impressive private parts that Up! had been designed to improve in the first place. His face evoked the familiar lines of his old countenance in the same way that a painting by Titian evoked a child’s scribble. The twisted spine and ruined legs and withered muscles that had stunted his whole existence had been transformed into masses of muscles and sinew, straight strong bones and firm flesh, all covered with an epidermis that seemed permanently tinted a rich dusky gold.
Lothar was allowed only sixty seconds of hot tears. Then his stunned weepy gratitude was replaced by a sense of mission. A vivid image of a spired, air-bridged city full of individuals such as himself popped up in his mind’s eye. The scene filled Lothar with an unlikely nostalgia. A sourceless whisper filtered through his inner ear.
What once was can be again
…
The first order of business was determining what day it was. His computer confirmed that some seventy-two hours had passed since he had last been out in the world. But now it was time to return.
Not a single item of clothing in the house sufficed to cover Lothar’s new form. But a call to the Large-and-Tall department of a men’s clothing store in town, and a liberal credit-card-authorized tip for immediate delivery, soon resulted in Lothar’s being arrayed majestically in a handsome new suit.
After he readjusted the seat and the controls to accommodate his new frame, Lothar managed to slip behind the wheel of his car and drive himself to the campus of SEA.
Celeste Foy looked up as Lothar strode boldly across the lobby. He expected her not to recognize him of course. But some outwardly indiscernible mark of his original personality registered on her sensitive, devoted nature, and she shot to her feet.
“M— Mr. Stixrude!”
Lothar had not experienced his new voice yet. So the mellifluous baritone notes that emerged when he opened his mouth were as much of a surprise to him as they were to Celeste.
“Yes, Celeste, it’s me, Lothar.”
Perhaps Celeste was
slightly
more surprised than Lothar, for at least
he
did not faint dead away, crumpling to the tiles.
Once the company nurse had taken charge of Celeste and a substitute receptionist had been put in place, Lothar ventured to his office. From his desk he summoned to an immediate conference two dozen top executives and senior researchers—including Band Jackmore and Mirelyis Sosa.
Addressing the stunned SEA officers and scientists, Lothar spoke directly and without preamble. “Ladies and gentlemen, the changes in me you are incredulously witnessing are a direct if unintentional result of the new male-performance enhancer we were testing. I would venture to argue that our original goal has been met, but has, ah, been subsumed in certain larger effects. Obviously, we are going to have to rethink the applications of this new product. But I think it’s safe to say that this particular EndoAgent—which I have reason to believe will work in both sexes, naturally—will revolutionize the world. But the release of it into society is going to be a tricky matter, requiring all our expertise, ingenuity, and compassion, as well as close consultation with every government and many nongovernmental organizations. From this moment on, I am canceling all leaves and vacations and calling upon all members of the SEA family to exert themselves to the utmost to usher in a new era of bodily perfection for all mankind. And for those of you who doubt that the person before you is truly Lothar Stixrude, I announce my willingness to submit to DNA testing to confirm my identity.”
Lothar actually had no idea whether a DNA test would show any trace of his old baseline genes, but he felt the bluff was a calculated confidence-boosting tactic.
The shouts and cheers and whistles that greeted his words clearly justified his risky tactics.
Amid the handshakes and back-clappings, Lothar sought to capture the eyes of Jackmore and Mirelyis, partly out of the very human temptation to gloat, but was surprised to see that they had apparently left the room before any of the others. Well, he supposed that they need not admire his new body wholeheartedly in order to perform their functions within the company …
The rest of the day blew by in a hurricane of reactions to Lothar’s appearance. Eventually the world at large learned of the amazing transformation, and the media descended on Stixrude. After that, an orderly chaos several magnitudes larger than any Lothar had anticipated took control.
Several days later, Lothar ended his video conference with the Pope and realized he had approximately fifteen minutes to himself before leaving to address the United Nations. A sudden realization struck him.
He hadn’t seen Rand Jackmore or Mirelyis Sosa anywhere at SEA since the day of his announcement. A strong new sense of intuition informed him that their absence signaled something amiss.
Leaving instructions with SEA’s Human Resources Department to track them down, Lothar left for New York.
Upon his return, the head of HR informed Lothar that the two missing employees had been found, in Jackmore’s apartment, and had been taken into protective custody by SEA security.
Lothar observed the two protohumans in their habitat, a sealed clean room at the labs, fitted out as a rude den with pillows to recline upon, branches to climb, and a children’s pool to wallow in. The male wore Dolce and Versace boxer shorts, while the female sported a food-speckled white lab coat. They were busy grooming each other, apparently quite content.
“As you suspected, two doses of Up! were missing,” said Carrie Doctorow, the security chief. “We found surveillance video of Sosa lifting them shortly after your first announcement to the staff. But we suspect that Jackmore actually instigated the theft.” Lothar nodded and dismissed Doctorow.
Apparently, there was plenty of space among the introns to contain the baseline
hominid
set of genes as well as the pre-Adamite ones. Why one set rather than another should serve as template for the EndoAgents, Lothar was not yet sure. But he suspected that, given the mind-reading abilities of the EndoAgents, psychological factors came into play. The subject’s mental gestalt determined his or her transformative path. Some interesting educational conditioning was going to have to precede the administration of the bugs among the general populace. Perhaps after some further research, one would even be able to convince the EndoAgents to alter a hominid to a superman. He hoped so for the sake of Jackmore and Sosa.
Sparing the pair of scratching ape-people one last glance, Lothar left them to their ancient rituals.
All day he ruminated on this new development, and on the odd intermingled ways of love and desire and ambition. And finally, on his way out of the building late that evening (Lothar had to travel in an armed and armored motorcade these days), he stopped by Celeste’s desk.
The homely woman brightened instantly at the sight of her boss. But her demeanor, as best as Lothar could gauge it, was exactly as pleasant and enthusiastic as it had been a week ago, when Lothar had crutched by. Lothar’s new form made no difference to her feelings for the man inside.
“Celeste, I’m wondering if you would care to share supper with me tonight.”
“Why, Mr. Stixrude—Lothar—of course I would!”
“Fine. Get your things and please come with me. Oh, and I assume you wouldn’t object to a small course of yogurt for dessert?”
Table of Contents
Part I - Periauricular Dampness