Harsh Oases (18 page)

Klom lifted first Sorrel’s head from the muck, and kissed her dirty cheek. He did the same for Tugger and Airey, before turning to their killer.

Bright Tide Rising’s myrmidons were attempting to put their master back together. They had already gathered up his spilled entrails and dragged his two halves into contact and were stitching golden sutures inside and out.

Klom carved the sixstrand into pieces so small that all the majestatics in the Indrajal would not suffice to repair the Horseface. The he kicked shitty, hay-speckled mud atop the carrion.

* * *

The long, harsh night was waning, with dawn a distant rumor. Klom stood, half-bewildered, in his twilit shack. In his hand he held the data-palette bearing Tugger’s genome. What good was it to him? The money to reincarnate Tugger was a sum far beyond his means. And even if somehow miraculously given the fee, Klom could engineer the conception only of Tugger’s mere doppelganger, a blank slate with no familiar consciousness shared with the original who had once saved Klom’s life.

And now Klom was in danger of losing his own life once more. His murder of Bright Tide Rising, even in self-defense, would earn him death, under the laws of the Indrajal, which were biased against twostrands.

He knew that he must run. But where?

Klom gathered up a couple of possessions: the picture of his mother, a few deva medals handed out at religious ceremonies. But then he was overwhelmed by fatigue and despair. The lack of a certain destination left him feeling hopeless. With near-suicidal unselfconcem, he dropped into his hammock and fell asleep among his rags.

Sometime in the earliest hours of morning he awoke to a wet tongue rasping his face. He flailed his arms about, confused and slow to emerge from dreams, and encountered a familiar boulder of a head bearing a fleshy protuberance.

“Tugger?”

Something hard was spat out onto his chest, bouncing off into the hammock.

By the time Klom got his eyes ungummed and open, he was alone again.

A data-palette slimed with saliva shared the hammock with him. He dried it off on his shirt and jacked it into his reader.

The palette was a triptix in Klom’s name. It registered a spendable value above the ticket price of several million taka, and listed as the bearer’s ultimate destination the fabled world of Mount Sumeru.

Klom gazed around him at the familiar shabby interior of his crib.

Already it looked distant and remote. The picture of his mother on the banks of Lake Zawinul seemed to represent a stranger. Klom sensed wordlessly that he would never return to Chaulk.

Many questions and a sense of mystery suffused him. Was Tugger somehow alive? What awaited him on Mount Sumeru?

Only travel out among the worlds of the Indrajal held hope of answers.

This story was written especially for a symposium at Georgia Tech, to which I was invited by noted professor and critic Lisa Yaszek. The theme of the conference was “Monstrous Bodies,” the science fiction of “hopeful monsters.” Initially, promised an hour or more for my speech, I was going to cobble together and present a critical essay on the topic. But then I realized something important. I’m a fiction writer, not a real critic (I just play one on certain websites). There would be plenty of scholarly discourse at the conference already. Why not offer some actual original fiction that embodied the themes of the symposium?

And so, with Lisas enthusiastic approval, I turned to my “ribofunk” future for the first time since the release of the book of the same name. This story fits into that sequence somewhere towards the end of the original volume, fairly far along in the history.

My reading met with a wonderful reception, and I had an intellectually stimulating time throughout, marveling at the amount of talent among both the faculty and student body at Georgia Tech.

Of course, not all the pleasures were intellectual, as my waistline will attest, thanks to Atlanta’s fine BBQ joints.

The monstrous body must be fed!

HARSH OASES

Thomas equinas hated to run.

But now he had no choice.

He had been entrusted with the future salvation of his kind.

An egg named Swee’pea.

And the Manticore was hot on Swee’pea’s trail.

Equinas contemplated the innocuous-looking egg resting now on his desk in its scrollworked mahogany cradle. A standard, stand-alone brood-pod, big as a baseline watermelon, the ivory-colored egg could have held any kind of embryo: mosaic or basal, cold-blooded or warm-blooded, vertebrate or invertebrate. No exterior sign pointed toward the unique destiny of the occupant.

A most hypothetical destiny, as yet. The embryo had first to survive to birth and live to adolescence.

About hating to run. This was both a philosophical and physical issue with Thomas. Both a figurative and literal disinclination. His pedigree included a large percentage of horse genes, and he had in the latter half of his life strived to minimize this part of his heritage. Running was part of what he abjured.

Of course, anyone seeing Thomas would have had little doubt as to his genetic composition. The large, liquid brown eyes, the stocky chest, the blunt horny feet and hands, his mane-like hair—all of these features betrayed the equine genes that consorted with the human, seal, raccoon and even avian codons in his cells.

As a young mosaic two decades ago, however, Thomas Equinas had loved to run. An unsophisticated healthy splice, employed on a vast African cell-phone plantation, Thomas had happily spent all his free time, after the day’s round of tending to the circuit shrubs, with the other bucks and fillies, in foot races and wrestling matches, afterwards nimbly climbing gnarly booze palms to pluck the liquor nuts from on high, returning to the ground for drunken orgies, awaking with throbbing head in the fragrant, breath-humid stables to start the cycle of mindless work and pleasure all over again.

But that had been before he learned to read.

One of the basal humans tangentially associated with the plantation had gifted—or perhaps cursed—Thomas with literacy. Her name had been Petrina, and she was a slim, blonde woman of indeterminate age who had come to the plantation to upgrade the circuit bushes one day. Her task took her a week, and during that time she was constantly out in the fields with the worker splices, sowing her upgrade viruses and checking the results of her work. During these times, Thomas had eyed her with a strange new mixture of curiosity, lust and interest. Petrina was unlike the humans who ran the plantation. She treated the splices with courtesy and genuine affection.

“Thomas, I need a random sample of antenna buds from at least six bushes separated by no more than seven meters but no less than four meters.”

“Yes, Peej Petrina, right away.”

“Just call me Petrina, please, Thomas.”

“Whatever you wish—Petrina.”

Somehow, without any intentionality on Thomas’s part, he miraculously found himself rutting with Petrina one night. He had seen her standing at the flickering edge of the circle of light cast by the big bonfire that accompanied the nightly diversions of the splices, and he had gone to her, abandoning his kind for the promise of the unknown—a path he had been following ever since.

Together Thomas and Petrina moved off further into the darkness and had sex. Afterwards, lying amidst the crushed lemon grasses, Thomas could not find it within his stunned self to initiate conversation. Luckily, Petrina had plenty of questions that would loosen Thomas’s tongue. She sought earnestly to learn the parameters and dimensions of his life, and eventually stumbled upon his illiteracy.

“Why, that’s scandalous! Back home, all our splices can read. It’s essential. That’s how they improve themselves and help us more efficiently. I don’t see why it’s not the same here …”

“Perhaps—perhaps it’s because there are so many of us here, and so few humans. You say that is not the case in your land …”

“No, not at all. In fact, even the old rough parity of one splice to one human has decreased lately, as new generations of kibes with higher turingosity become embedded in superior mycoflesh bodies. These aphylumic helpers seem destined to outmode your kind, by any number of performance criteria. Already, people are referring to a period known as the Redaction, a time when splices will go extinct.”

Thomas did not understand everything Petrina was telling him, but he sensed the imminence of some doom.

Thomas dared in this intimate moment to utter a rebellious thought. “I—I would like to read, I think. But our humans seem to want to deny us anything that would bring us closer to their level.”

Petrina sat up eagerly, her breasts swaying. In the darkness, her eyes seemed to catch the glint of the many Southern Hemisphere constellations overhead.

“Why, nothing could be easier, Thomas. I’ll get a sartor to fab up a dose of literacy trope tailored to your genotype when I go into town. You’ll be reading the next day, once all the glial rewiring subsides.”

“But how will you get access to my genotype?”

“Silly horse! I’ve already got one big sample of your cells. But you can give me another if you want.”

Thomas blushed at his stupidity, but was not so embarrassed that he failed to comply with Petrina’s suggestion.

Petrina went into town the next day, but did not return immediately. Thomas almost gave up hope that she would keep her promise. But when she did show up again, she carried the promised dose of neurotropins.

Passing over the smart pill on the sly, Petrina also whispered goodbye. Thomas was too excited even to realize he would never see her again.

Thomas swallowed the tropes when out of sight of his human overseers, washing it down after his shift with a swig of booze-palm juice. Almost immediately he began to feel light-headed and confused. He left his brawling peers for the stables, where he went immediately to sleep.

When he awoke in the morning, he felt fine. And the first thing he noticed was a sign on the wall of his crib.

CAUTION

MOSAICS UNPREDICTABLE

WHEN DRUNK

As the revelation that he was actually reading struck him fully, Thomas began to weep. As the deeper implications of the sign dawned on him—that he had been wasting his life as a brutish sot—he began to weep even more forcefully.

A human overseer came by to inquire politely, “Hey what the fuck is the problem here, you stupid Var?” Thomas pulled himself together, denied any ills, and went to work.

This was the start of his new life.

Thomas began to read omnivorously. He slyly rescued from the compost heap a cell-phone that had failed several quality-control teste but still functioned well enough for his purposes. He used it to surreptitiously download texts from the ideocosm. With each book he consumed, Thomas felt his image of the world expanding and growing richer.

Thomas came particularly to relish philosophy, seeking the why of his world as well as the what. The ancient Greeks, the Germans, the twentieth-century masters like Bertrand Russell and Bob Dylan, the mid-twenty-first-century school of neo-Nozickians—all became as essential to Thomas as food.

And when he learned of the first historically recorded splice philosopher, an individual named Modest Mouse, Thomas made up his mind to become one himself.

The path to this ambitious goal was not easy, and had taken many years of travail and suffering, years of heartbreak and setbacks overcome by perseverance and ingenuity.

Thomas and his fellows had been manumitted when the cellphone plantation went bankrupt, in the wake of the introduction of communicator earwigs into the marketplace. This gesture was not as altruistic as it sounded, amounting merely to turning loose helpless plantation mosaics into the restored primitive veldt where they had to contend with wild basal predators. Somehow, Thomas had managed to survive and make his way to the nearest big city, Jo’burg, where he found a job as a house servant for a conservative family that disdained the new mycoflesh servitors. There, Thomas was able to continue his education, eventually even surreptitiously taking degree-level courses in the ideocosm.

After ten years, Thomas managed to compose and post several philosophical treatises in the ideocosm without revealing his true identity. They were accepted by the intellectual community. After a string of such successes, Thomas came out of the closet. A small media firestorm resulted among several granfalloons, which only had the effect of solidifying his new status. Grants and stipends followed, allowing him to abandon his lowly job. Since then, Thomas had become well established among both humans and splices, traveling around the world to speak and teach. He owned his own home now in the Republic of Snows, near Stockholm.

And it was here he sat now, contemplating the egg containing Swee’pea.

Thomas Equinas could pride himself on being a free, self-made splice, with several virtual books to his credit, respected by open-minded humans around the globe.