Harsh Oases (20 page)

Feeling lost and alone, Swee’pea hastened toward the one being who might be able to help her.

Uncle Thomas resided in a living purse that clung remora-like to the outer cowl of one enormous jellyfish. The purse had been biofabbed from several different sea creatures—anemones and sea cucumbers among them. Its walls extracted oxygen from the sea and scavenged carbon dioxide from the interior. Homeostatic mechanisms spliced from hot-blooded animals insured that a livable temperature was maintained for its inhabitant

Uncle Thomas refused to modify himself for submarine living. He claimed he was too old and set in his ways to make such a stressful adaptation. Consequently, he spent every hour of every day immured in his protective purse. He occupied himself with reading and viewing material downloaded from the ideocosm.

And with raising his protégé, Swee’pea.

Uncle Thomas had taught an intellectually voracious Swee’pea everything the child knew. But the wise old horse had dangled in front of Swee’pea the promise of much more knowledge to come, when circumstances demanded or permitted dissemination.

Swee’pea hoped that now would qualify as such a time. If not now, when?

At this late hour, Uncle Thomas’s home was dark. A school of basal angelfish were nibbling at some of the purse’s exiguous fronds. The fish darted away as Swee’pea arrived. She tickled the purse’s wake-up node and waited.

A pearly light swelled inside the translucent sac. Uncle Thomas was bestirring himself. In a moment, his familiar blocky face appeared at a transparent oval in the mottled wall. Below the window, a set of rubbery green lips formed themselves out of the smartskin, preparatory to issuing dolphin-speak. Uncle Thomas’s blunt fingers could not manage the hyperflexure mudras.

Who are you? Uncle Thomas asked. What do you want?

It’s me, Uncle! Swee’pea!

Uncle Thomas did not seem surprised.

Your first change has overtaken you then, my boy. Congratulations! You are coming into your own.

Why? How?

Your body is unique. Your cells are infinitely plastic. And you contain within you a library of forms. The genomes of all the mosaics ever spliced. You can recreate them at will. And other shapes as well.

Then I can go back to what I was?

I believe so …

Teach me how!

I can’t. You’ll have to find that knowledge inside yourself somehow.

Uncle Thomas continued to look out the window with earnest sympathy, but offered no further words of encouragement or advice.

For the first time in his life, Swee’pea grew angry with his mentor. He tried to scowl, but his cetacean face was unsuited for the expression. So he whipped around, flicking his tail disrespectfully in Uncle Thomas’s face, and flashed away.

For half the night, hiding among the lower tentacles of Scyphozoa City, Swee’pea strained to re-express her old merperson somatype, to no avail. She grew more and more frustrated and angry, emotions which only seemed to interfere with whatever mental discipline might be needed to trigger the transformation.

Swee’pea began to blame her current plight on Uncle Thomas and his insistence on living in out-of-the-way Scyphozoa City. Why couldn’t they live in a modem megalopolis like Neo Seattle or Punta Arenas? Swee’pea had heard many alluring tales of these cities. Surely such hotbeds of civilization would have experts who could help an individual in such a fix? But no, they had to live in a literal backwater like Scyphozoa City! And why?

Uncle Thomas would always reply to such a question with the same answer:

You and I have enemies, child. Enemies who force us to inhabit harsh oases where we can remain unknown.

Enemies … Swee’pea would like to meet one of these imaginary foes …

Filled with self-pity, Swee’pea malingered among the writhing, predatory tentacles almost till dawn before a chance meeting solved her problem.

Two merteens dropped slowly down through the waters, tangled in a lusty embrace. Kissing, petting, the boy and girl were oblivious to Swee’pea’s presence.

Watching as the pair moved more deeply into their loving, Swee’pea felt his old male hormones surging, imagining himself in the role of the merboy.

Cells flowed and reconfigured. This time, Swee’pea was able to discern and annotate the processes by which his body morphed. Moreover, the set of procedures could apparently be catalogued and invoked as a routine.

Within minutes, he happily inhabited again the amphibious male body he had known for the whole four months of his life.

But now he knew he could change with the proper stimulation.

And sex seemed to be the trigger.

No longer irked at his uncle, Swee’pea swam back to Thomas’s purse.

The interior illumination still leaked from the window around Uncle Thomas’s vigilant face, and Swee’pea realized that his uncle had indeed been worried about him, but determined not to show it, for one reason or another.

Thomas’s words confirmed this.

Child! You’ve mastered the trick!

Yes! Now I can become anything.

And you must. To learn the true meaning of the lives of splices. Assimilating the precious mundane heritage of our kind is to be your education, before we go extinct. That is why your other name is the Teleological Ark.

The Teleological Ark. Suddenly Swee’pea felt a new importance suffusing him, a kind of racial manifest destiny.

For the next several weeks, Swee’pea experienced scores of different bodies, mimicking all the aquatic splices who lived in Scyphozoa City, as well as any visiting diylanders. So far, sexual desire seemed necessary to launch each change, resulting in frequent couplings—hardly a drawback to his unique course of study. But after a dozen or so encounters of this type, Swee’pea began to imagine a day when he would be able to initiate a change at will, without the trigger of lust.

Swee’pea’s activities, however, brought inevitable notice to the youth and his uncle. A protean splice was unheard of, and visitors to the city invariably carried away news of Swee’pea’s indiscreet exploits.

One morning Swee’pea and Uncle Thomas were conducting a lesson.

This merperson form is not my true form then, in any sense…? Swee’pea asked.

Not at all, replied Thomas. I chose it for you via an exterior somatic prompt once I knew this was the place where you would emerge from your egg.

It feels like the real me. Swee’pea paused thoughtfully. But then so has everything else!

Good. You should be at home in any shape—

A fleeting shadow was all that saved Swee’pea from being brutally smashed by a huge object bulleting down from above. As the flicker of shade occluded his sight, a lifetime of underwater play-reflexes caused him to dart out of the line of the attacker.

Turning around to see what had overshot him, Swee’pea confronted a monster: human, lion, scorpion, dragon. In the human mouth of the ghastly creature was a rebreather device. A water-jet backpack aided the ungainly but powerful body in its assault.

The lips on Uncle Thomas’s purse shrilled out, This is the Manticore! He wants only your death! Flee!

Enemies. Perhaps not as imaginary as he had thought.

Diving downward, Swee’pea accelerated with all his sinuous strength.

Close behind, the Manticore used his artificial propulsion device awkwardly, but with undeniable results.

He would overtake Swee’pea soon.

Unless Swee’pea could find someone or something to halt the killer.

Ahead of the fleeing merboy hung a drapery of tentacles. Was it possible that the Manticore was unaware of their danger to non-citizens?

This was Swee’pea’s only hope.

He reached the curtain of living ropes just ahead of the Manticore, then was through them.

As soon as the Manticore touched the tentacles, the strong whips reacted as if to dumb prey. Unequipped with the biological tags that every citizen of Scyphozoa City relied on to identify oneself as identical to the big jellies, the Manticore registered as no more than a mouthful of protein.

Instantly a hundred nematocysts fired, barbs with attached organic cords piercing the monster, securing him for delivery to the maw of the jellyfish.

The Manticore let out a titanic ocean-muffled roar, losing his rebreather in the process. He began to claw the tentacles and strike them with his own sting.

Swee’pea did not stay to watch the struggle, but instead returned to Uncle Thomas.

Uncle Thomas had already detached his quarters from the jelly’s cowl. The purse hung in peaceful equilibrium.

Quickly! Hold on tight to this skin!

Swee’pea obeyed his uncle’s command. When the boy was secure, Uncle Thomas activated the magneto-hydrodynamic propulsion system wetwared into the purse. The little module jetted off east at high speed, heading for an unknown destination.

As the water rushed past Swee’pea’s face, he found his mouth tightening into a sour grin.

Whatever came next, he doubted his life would ever be as idyllic as it had been here in the mothering sea.

Twenty years before Swee’pea’s birth, Mauna Loa had been the Earth’s biggest active volcano.

Then it got suddenly bigger.

A lot bigger.

Actually the world’s most enormous mountain, with a volume estimated at 10,000 cubic miles, the peak—along with its four sisters—broke the surface of the Pacific to form the island of Hawaii. Its periodic small-scale eruptions throughout human history had all been manageable if inconvenient for the residents of the island.

Until someone dropped a hardened bunker-buster nuke down its throat.

No group or individual ever came forward to claim responsibility for the assault on Long Mountain. Perhaps the perpetrators were appalled at the magnitude of their results. Various candidates had been proposed: the Sons of Dixie, the Viridians, the New Adamists, the Hanoi Sozaboys, the Otaku League, the Yogini Mamas—But no one seemed inclined to take credit for the spectacular events that followed the terrorist act.

The diamond-clad lance that was the nuke dropped from low orbit unerringly down the gullet of the volcano. It penetrated all the way through to the magma chambers before exploding. The blast enlarged the outlets for the magma and sent incalculable amounts of molten rock surging upward. Mauna Kea soon joined in.

The eruption covered the entire island in radioactive lava. Millions of lives, both human and splice, were lost. Enough soot and cinders entered the atmosphere to create several years without summers, just after the noahs had finally stabilized the global climate.

Mauna Loa continued to convulse in diminuendo for the next two decades, rendering the whole chain of islands inhospitable to most kinds of life.

But not to all.

In the main caldera, swimming perpetually through the hot roiling orange currents, beneath a pall of sulphurous gases and steam, lived the Diamond Thinkers.

To the eye of any hypothetical observer, each Diamond Thinker presented a humaniform shape seemingly composed of pure diamond. In actuality, the diamond fa
ç
ade was a thin flexible smart integument surrounding and protecting a vulnerable lifeform within. The beings who chose to become Diamond Thinkers constituted a heterogeneous assortment of humans and splices.

Two of the latter happened to be named Thomas Equinas and Swee’pea.

Inside his diamond armor, Swee’pea cavorted through the boiling rockmelt. His senses were fed a steady stream of info-enhanced data on the world beyond his armor, through neural hookups. To Swee’pea’s eyes, he was plunging through a well-lit fiery color-stratified ocean. Crucial temperature data—it would not do to descend too deep, where his diamond skin would melt—registered continuously on his naked epidermis. His ears were filled with the seismic song of the massive volcano, rumbling up from deep below, chthonic chants.

Swee’pea’s job and delight in this new incarnation was simply to swim and to mate with his fellow Diamond Thinkers. By doing this, the Thinkers were performing a valuable service for the rest of the planet.

Their intelligent carapaces possessed vast processing power within their moletronic circuits, only a tiny fraction of which was used to support their inhabitants. The rest was devoted to customer-mandated computing tasks, extensive simulations and predictions. The heat-energy of the volcanic environment constituted a source of free power unmatched anywhere else. But more importantly, mapping the chaotic turbulence of the lava introduced valuable creative variables into the calculations, producing insights otherwise unobtainable. The neural hookups to organic brains provided a further complexification unobtainable by empty diamond suits.

And matings between the Thinkers added a further Darwinian edge to the diamondware.

When two Diamond Thinkers met and decided to mate, their shells fused, opening to a single interior, like sleeping bags zippering together. While the shells swapped and recombined data and algorithms, so the mortals within enjoyed a traditional biological fusion.

Swee’pea, of course, derived an added benefit from these matings. He was able to assume the shape of whomever his sexual partner was, retaining that form until the next metamorphosis, thereby continuing his quest to add to his understanding of the deep nature of different splice and basal somatypes.