Harsh Oases (21 page)

Swee’pea and his Uncle Thomas had been living the lives of Diamond Thinkers for three months now, ever since driven from Scyphozoa City by the Manticore. (And hopefully that monster had perished in the grip of the big jellies.) Swee’pea felt secure in this particular harsh oasis, anonymous in his blank-faced shell. Surely they could stay here until Swee’pea completed his education and could assume the mantle and full responsibilities of the Teleological Ark.

Right this moment, however, Swee’pea was intent on finding Saffron. This particular Diamond Thinker was his favorite computational partner, and it had been too long since they had shared sex.

As he tracked the unique identity signal emitted by Saffron through the liquid hell, Swee’pea considered the latest lesson Uncle Thomas had imparted to him. It concerned something called the Categorical Imperative, which the old horse seemed to feel was essential to Swee’pea’s mission.

“This valuable insight derives from a basal human philosopher named Kant, child. Do you recall our discussion of his life?”

“Yes, Uncle. He never traveled more than a hundred kilometers from where he was born. Was Kant restricted then by a biome leash installed by his gembaitch?”

Thomas Equinas sighed. “There were no such things as biome leashes or gembaitches during Kant’s era, son. I fear your grasp of history is radically deficient as of yet.”

“I am only seven months old, Uncle.”

“Yes, yes, I’m taking that into account. But let us continue with the Categorical Imperative. It comes in two forms, a double-sided rule. Here is the first. ‘Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law of nature.’ Now, how do you interpret that?”

“Well, that’s easy. My life must be a model for others.”

“A simplistic interpretation, but good enough for a start. Now, the second formulation. ‘So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, in every case as an end in itself, never as a means.’ Please give me your restatement of that, allowing for the extension of the word ‘humanity’ to include splices as well.”

“Honor all life,” said Swee’pea without hesitation.

Uncle Thomas seemed emotionally affected by Swee’pea’s swift instinctive directness. “Hmm, yes, that will do. I daresay Kant himself would approve. All right, child, you may consider today’s lesson over …”

A diamond veil swept up in front of Swee’pea’s eyes, sealing the partial face-to-face breach between his armor and that of Uncle Thomas. This was how they met for Swee’pea’s tutoring. They had never opened their diamond suits fully to each other, since that degree of intimacy would have signaled a desire for sexual union.

And although Swee’pea loved his uncle and wanted to mate with him, something held him back from such a step. Perhaps a fear of not being reciprocated .…

Pondering the Categorical Imperative in all its permutations, Swee’pea slipped effortlessly through the molten bath, riding thermo- clines of flame. Saffron’s beacon swelled in intensity as he neared her, until finally she appeared within his telemetry vision, a scintillant humaniform gem.

Saffron bluetoothed Swee’pea while he was still a few yards off. Her voice sounded as clearly as if they had already merged suits.

“Sweetling! It’s been ’way too long!”

“How do you know how long it’s been, Saff? You haven’t even seen it yet!”

“Oh, my bad little supersplice! You didn’t miss me, did you?”

“Open up, and I’ll show you!”

Within the next minute, Swee’pea and Saffron were encased in single large diamond egg. Swee’pea had a brief flashback to some prenatal memory of his brood-pod before all non-erotic thoughts were swept away by Saffron’s embrace.

True to her name, the naked Saffron was golden all over. Her own splice heritage consisted primarily of eagle and other raptors, admixed with human. Below the neck, she was a down-covered woman. But at her collarbones commenced a ruff of proud tawny feathers, cresting atop a beaked, big-eyed face. Tiny vestigial wings big as her outspread palms graced her back.

At the moment, Swee’pea wore the guise he had adopted for his last mating: that of a male panda splice.

But as soon as he came within Saffron’s pheromonal sphere, he began to metamorphose.

Within a minute, two birdpeople were engaged in a lusty coupling, constrained only by their limited space. As their orgasms neared, their wings begin to flutter faster and faster, blurring completely at the moment of climax.

Saffron and Swee’pea spent a while in post-coital cuddling and talk, before Saffron said, “I’m starved! Let’s eat!”

“Good idea.”

The pair resumed their separate armors and mentally triggered their feeding cycles.

To adopt the role of a Diamond Thinker, an individual had to be modified to become autotrophic: able to subsist on light, water, air and some inorganic material, just like a plant. All these desiderata were available in the lava, thanks to the extracting and recombining abilities of the smart armor, which could pull elements in through its skin.

Now Swee’pea’s eyes, nose and mouth were automatically capped. The close-fitting interior of his suit filled with light and a nutrient broth, both of which he absorbed through his skin. A sense of repletion filled him.

When he and Saffron were finished eating, Saffron suggested that they explore a different part of the lake of fire.

“Nipper told me about a new semi-stable convection node over in the northeast quadrant. Should be some strong plectic whorls there to stoke our qubits. And the more gnarly our processing, the more eft in our personal accounts.”

Swee’pea had never taken part in an economy that utilized units of credit before becoming a Diamond Thinker, and he still had little intuitive understanding of concepts such as “earning” and “spending.” His own personal wealth meant little to him. But if Saffron wanted to boost her own earnings, he was all for helping her.

“Sure! Let’s go.”

The pair spent two whole days in the fertile convection node, a mini Jovian Red Spot, allowing their shells to integrate the weird Bernoulli and Landau-Kolmogorov effects. They would take breaks to link for sex, to eat, and to chant along with the geological chorus welling up from below.

On the third day, they detected an approaching visitor.

“Funny,” bluetoothed Saffron, “I can’t read his ID.”

Swee’pea wasn’t worried. “Probably just a newbie who accidentally shut off his beacon.”

But the next actions of the intruder dispelled any such innocent explanation.

The four-legged, spike-tailed diamond thing intercepted Swee’pea and swept him up in a rigid embrace. The downward vector of the assailant continued, an invariably fatal path to the high-temperature zone.

“Swee’pea!” yelled Saffron. “What’s happening!?”

Swee’pea struggled to no avail. “I think it must be—”

Before he could finish speaking, he felt a portal open up in front of his face, where his suit touched that of his attacker.

The Manticore’s bmtish human face leered at Swee’pea from inches away. His carrion breath laved Swee’pea’s nostrils. His dragon horns grazed Swee’pea’s cheeks.

The Manticore’s voice resembled the sound of gravel cmshed between gears. “Now at last you die!”

Then the facial portal sealed over, and they continued their suicidal, varicidal plunge to the regions where their suits would melt.

Swee’pea called out hopelessly. “Saffron! Uncle Thomas! Help me!”

And with that call, somehow he was free.

Halting his own descent with some effort, he whirled around to look for the Manticore.

Already far below him, the killer bore a rider. Gripping the killer from above, Saffron clung implacably. Her head was pressed to the Manticore’s back.

Suddenly a roar of pain from the Manticore, followed by an exclamation, filled Swee’pea’s ears.

“It bites! It bites!”

Saffron must have opened a portal through which her sharp beak could wreak an injury.

But while her assault had resulted in the freeing of Swee’pea, it had not altered the destructive downward course of the grappling combatants.

Evidently unclamping her beak from the Manticore’s flesh, Saffron managed a last communication.

“The heat, Swee’pea—so rich—it’s our mother’s womb—”

Out of range in the pyroclastic soup, Saffron and the Manticore disappeared from Swee’pea’s senses.

Weeping, cursing, Swee’pea turned and homed in on Uncle Thomas’s beacon.

In Swee’pea’s day, the great Plains of North America were still home to herds of wild shoggoths.

The blimplike, amorphous, gelatinous creatures, each as big as a bam, had been sartorized from plasmoidal slime molds, with snippets of various fungi added. Essentially large bags of cytoplasm with multiple nuclei and assorted intracellular bodies, the humongous wobbly sacs— colored a pale matte grey and smelling of sperm—cruised in sizable herds up and down the middle of the continent, subsisting on nutrients extracted from the air and soil, leaving behind temporarily bald patches of earth and trails of fertilizing ooze.

The shoggoths did not reproduce in great numbers, thanks to the dictates of their original designers. But when they did, it was a sight to behold. Like their basal slime mold ancestors, they would go sessile, erecting large stalks containing fruiting bodies full of spores. Upon release, the spores would darken the skies like clouds of ancient passenger pigeons.

This extensive territory had been ceded to the shoggoths during the decades of mega-tomadoes, artifacts of the Greenhouse Effect. Gradually draining of population for a century, due to cultural factors, the American Midwest had been easy to finally empty out, in the face of the destructive storms. Humanity had chosen to migrate to bastions where they could huddle more safely while trying to repair the damaged climate. Recent successes along those lines meant that humans could probably re-populate the Great Plains now. But they seemed to be in no rush.

And anyway, their niche had already been occupied.

Swee’pea knew that Uncle Thomas felt uneasy around the Centaurs. Their mixed horse and human composition echoed his in a twisted fashion. Whereas Thomas appeared mostly human below the neck, and horsey above, the Centaurs were fashioned on the opposite plan, resembling the classical Greek creatures of myth. But what bothered Thomas more than their mirror-image somatypes was their dumbness.

The Centaurs had been engineered with a minimum of intelligence, as mounts for various athletic competitions. They were hardly brighter than baseline equines, and Thomas experienced shame for that portion of his heritage which he shared with the capricious, balky, mute and rough-edged beasts. He was reminded too vividly of his own insensate days on the cell-phone plantation, before the coming of Petrina.

Of course, what the Centaurs lacked in intelligence, the Cynocephali more than supplied.

An individual Cynocephalus resembled nothing so much as the Egyptian god Anubis: jackal head on a human frame. As a race, they were sharp-witted, sardonic, proud and excitable, capable of great acts of bravery.

Their lifestyle demanded the latter. For the Cynocephali, along with their Centaurs, had adopted the ways and technologies of the pre-Columbian Native Americans, migrating to follow the shoggoth herds on which they lived.

And bringing down a shoggoth was no easy task.

Right now, Swee’pea was about to participate in his own first hunt.

Sitting on his Centaur mount amidst his fellows, beneath the rich blue bowl of the sky, Swee’pea appeared indistinguishable from his companions. His frequent matings within the tribe had locked his somatype into their mode.

(Oh, he had tried mating with one of the Centaurs when he and Uncle Thomas had first arrived at their new refuge, after their escape from Mauna Loa. But although he had succeeded in mimicking a Centaur in shape, in mass he was no match for the big splices, metamorphosing into a dwarf version that could hardly sustain the forces of mating in either male or female form. Swee’pea couldn’t summon mass out of nowhere, helpful as it would have been. After all, his abilities weren’t magic!)

Bare-chested, wearing his facial paint and breechclout, holding his feather-decorated spears, Swee’pea shared the fierce pride of the Cynocephali males who were on the verge of risking their lives to supply their kin with sustenance.

Off in the distance, the herd of shoggoths marked as targets rolled slowly across the grasslands, producing squelching noises, thunderous crepitations. Breezes carried their scent to the hunters.

Swee’pea’s own lonely and singular relative, Uncle Thomas, swam into the boy’s mind now. Elderly before Swee’pea had been born, the old mosaic had been failing of late. Their haunted hegira through the harsh oases had taken much out of him. Swee’pea wondered sadly if Uncle Thomas would even live to see his protégé attain his first birthday next week. That milestone seemed particularly important to the old philosopher, for some reason. Thomas had striven of late to impart so much knowledge to Swee’pea that the boy’s head was frequently left churning with novel ideas and startling facts. One reason he had insisted on taking part in the hunt today was actually to escape further lessons, to give his overworked brain a chance to rest.