Rapture of the Nerds (11 page)

“I feel like I’ve been shat.” Huw rubs his forehead. “Where am I? Where’s Bonnie gotten to?”

“Flying the bloody ship. We can’t all sleep. Don’t worry, she’s just hunky-dory. How about you?”

“Flying.” Huw blinks. “Where the hell—?”

“You’ve been sleeping like a baby for a good long while.” Ade looks smug. “Don’t worry, we got you out of Libya one jump ahead of Rosa. You won’t be arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, for another four or five hours, why’n’t you kick back and smoke some grass? I left at least a quarter of your stash—”

“
South Carolina?”
Huw screams, nearly dropping the teapot. “Unclefucking sewage filter, what do you want to send me
there
for?”

“Ah, pecker up. They’re your coreligionists, aren’t they? You won’t find a more natural, flesh-hugging bunch on the planet than the Jeezemoids who got left behind by the Rapture. Hell, they’re the kind of down-home Luddites what make
you
look like Saint Kurzweil.”

“They’re
radioactive,
” Huw says. “And I’m an atheist. They burn atheists at the stake, don’t they?” He rummages through his skanky clothes, turning them inside out as he searches for something not so acrawl that he’d be unwilling to have it touch his nethers.

“Oh, hardly,” says Adrian. “Just get a little activated charcoal and iodine in your diet and memorize the Lord’s Prayer and you’ll be fine, sonny.”

Huw ends up tying a T-shirt around his middle like a diaper and seizing the teapot, which has developed a nasty rattle in its guts.

“Breakfast and toilet. Not in that order. Sharp.”

“That door there,” says the miniaturized Adrian, pointing.

The zeppelin turns out to be a maryceleste, crewed by capricious iffrits whose expert systems were trained by angry, resentful trade unionists in ransom for their pensions. The amount of abuse required to keep the ship on course and its commissary and sanitary systems in good working order is heroic.

Huw opens the door to the bridge, clutching his head, to find Bonnie perched on the edge of a vast, unsprung chair, screaming imprecations at the air. She breaks off long enough to scream at him. “
Get the fuck off my bridge!
” she hollers, eyes wild, fingers clawing at the armrests.

Huw leaps back a step, dropping the huge, suspicious sausage he’s been gnawing from one end of. His diaper unravels as he stumbles.

Bonnie snorts, then gets back control. “Aw, sorry, darlin’. I’m hopped up on hateballs. It’s the only way I can get enough
fucking spleen
to
make this buggery bollocky scum-sucking ship
go where I tell it.” She sighs and digs around the seat cushion, coming up with a puffer, which she inserts briefly into the corner of each eye. The tension melts out of her skinny shoulders and corded neck as Huw watches, alarmed.

“You look like a Welsh Gandhi,” she tells him, giggling. Her lips loll loose; she stands and rolls over toward him with a half-drunken wobble. Then she throws her arms around his neck and fastens her teeth on his shoulder, worrying at his trapezium.

The teapot whistles appreciatively. Bonnie gives it a savage kick that sends it skittering back into the corridor.

“You need a wash, beautiful,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be microbial. Nearly out of fresh water. Tub’s up one level.”

“Gak,” Huw says.

“’Snot so bad.”

“It’s
bugs,
” he says.

“You’re hosting about three kilos of bugs right now. What’re a few more? Go.”

Huw picks up his sausage. “You know where we’re going, right?”

“Oh aye,” she says, her eyes gleaming, then whistles a snatch of “America the Beautiful.”

“And you approve?”

“Always wanted to see it.”

“They’ll burn you at stake!”

She picks up a different puffer and spritzes each eye, then bares her teeth in a savage rictus. “I’d like to see them fucking try.
Bathe, you cretinous stenchpot!
”

Huw settles himself among the soup of heated glass beads and bacteria and tries not to think of a trillion microorganisms gnawing away at his dried skin and sweat.

He mutters transhuman curses in groaning harmony at the battered teapot—no longer hosting the avatar of a particularly annoying iffrit, but evidently hacked by Ade and his international cadre of merry pranksters. “Why South Carolina? G’wan, you. Why
there,
of all places?”

He isn’t expecting a reply, but the teapot crackles for a moment; then a translucent holo of Ade appears in the air above it, wearing a belly dancer’s outfit and a sheepish expression. “Yer wot? Ah, sorry mate. Feckin’ trade union iffrit’s trying to make an alpha buffer attack on my sprites.” The image flickers then solidifies, this time wearing a bush jacket again. “Like, why South Carolina? To break the embargo, Huw. Ever since the snake-handlers crawled outta the swamps and figured the Rapture had been and gone and left ’em behind, they’ve been waiting for a chance at salvation, so I figured I’d give them you.” Ade’s likeness grins wickedly as red horns sprout from his forehead. “You and the back channel to the ambassador from the cloud. They want to meet God so bad, I figured you’d maybe like to help the natives along.”

“But they’re radioactive!” Huw says, shaking his fist at the teapot with a rattle of yeast-scented beads. “And they’re lunatics! They won’t talk to the rest of the world, because we’re corrupt degenerate satanists; they claim sovreignty over the entire solar system even though they can’t launch a sodding rocket; and they burn dissidents to death by wiring them up to transformers! Why would I want to
help
them?”

“Because your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to open them up to the outside universe again.” Ade smirks at him from atop the teapot.

“Fuck.” Huw subsides into the fizzing bath of beads, which are beginning to itch. Moving them around brings relief, although it’s making him a little piebald. “You want to infect the Fallen Baptist Congregations with godvomit, you be my guest—just let me watch from another continent, all right?”

“That’s an idea,” says Ade, scratching his beard absentmindedly. “Shame it’s not going to fly. But tell you what, Bonnie’s one of our crack agents. Don’t you worry, we wouldn’t risk our prophet-at-large in a backwater, mate. We’ll keep you safe as houses.”

Huw thinks of Sandra Lal, the House of the Week club, and her mini-sledge, and shudders. His arse is beginning to itch as the bacteribeads try to squeeze through his ringpiece: it’s time to get out. “If this goes wrong, so help me, I am going to make you eat this teapot,” he says, picking it up. He heads downstairs to find Bonnie again and see if she’s come down far enough off the hateballs to appreciate how squeaky-clean Ade’s messiah manqué is feeling.

The big zeppelin lurches and buzzes as it chases its shadow across the black tarry beaches and the out-of-control neomangrove jungle that has run wild across the Gulf coast. The gasoline mangroves spin their aerofoil leaves in the breeze, harnessing the wind power and pumping long-chain terpenoids into their root systems, which ultimately run all the way to the hydrocarbon refineries near Beaufort. A long-obselete relic of the feverish cross-fertilization of the North American biotechnology biz with the dinosaurs of the petroleum age, they ought by rights to have made the United States the world’s biggest source of refined petrochemicals—except that since the singularity, nobody’s buying. Oil slicks glisten in the sunlight as they spread hundreds of kilometers out into the Atlantic, where they feed a whole deviant ecosystem of carbon-sequestrating petroplankton maintained by the continental quarantine authority.

Huw watches apprehensively from the observation window at the front of the bridge as Bonnie curses and swears at the iffrits, who insist that air traffic control is threatening to shoot them down if they don’t steer away from the land of the Chosen People. Bonnie’s verbal abuse of the ship ascends to new heights of withering scorn, and he watches her slicken her eyeballs with anger-up until they look like swollen golf balls, slitted and watering. The ship wants to turn itself around, but she’s insisting that it plow on.

“Hail ground control
now!
you fucking sad, obsolete piece of shit, so that for once,
just! for! once!
you will have done one genuinely
useful!
thing for
someone!
” She snarls and coughs, hacking up excess angry-up that has trickled back through her sinuses. She picks up the mic and begins to stalk the bridge like an attack comedian scouting the audience for fat men with thin dates to humiliate.

“This is Charleston Ground Control repeating direct order to vacate sovereign Christian States of America airspace immediately or be blown out of the sky and straight to Satan. Charleston Ground Control out.” The voice has the kind of robotic-slick Californian accent that tells Huw straightaway that he’s talking to a missile guidance computer rather than a human being.

“
Hail! Him! Again!
” Bonnie yells, hopping from foot to foot. “Arrogant Jesus-sucking sack of SARS, scabrous toddler-fondler, religion-addled mother
fucker
,” she says, punching out with the mic for punctuation.

“Bonnie,” Huw says quietly, flinching back from her candy apple red eyeballs.

“
What?
”

“Maybe you should let me talk with them?” he says.

“I am
perfectly!
capable of negotiating with
microcephalic! god! bothering! luddites!

” she screeches.

No,
you’re
not,
Huw thinks, but he doesn’t even come close to saying it. In the state she’s in, she could lift a car and set it down on top of a baby, a reversal of the legendary maternal hysterical feat of strength. “Yes, you
are,
” he says. “But you need to fly the ship.”

She glares at him for a moment, fingernails dug so hard into her palms that drops of blood spatter to the flooring. He’s sure that she’s going to charge him, but the zeppelin changes direction with a lurch. So she throws the mic at his head viciously—he ducks, but it still beans him on the rebound—and goes back to screaming at the ship.

Huw staggers off the bridge and sinks back against one of the bare corridor bulkheads—the zep that Adrian’s adventurers stole is made doubly cavernous by the absence of most of its furnishings.

“This is
Airship Lollipop
to Charleston Ground Control requesting clearance to land in accordance with the Third International Agreement on Aeronautical Cooperation,” he says into the mic, using his calmest voice. He’s pretty sure he’s heard of the Third International Agreement, though it may have been the Fourth. And it may have been on Aeronautical Engineering. But that there is an agreement he is certain, and he’s pretty sure that the Christian States of America is no more up to date on international affairs than he is.

“
Airship Lollipop,
y’all welcome to land here, but we’s having trouble convincing with this darned strategic defense battle computer that thinks y’all are goddless Commie-fag euroweasels. I reckon you got maybe two minutes to repent before it blows y’all to Jesus.”

Huw breathes a sigh of relief: at least there’s a human in the loop. “How do we convince it we’re not, uh, godless Commie-fag euroweasels?” he asks, suppressing a twinge as he realizes that, in fact, he and Bonnie meet about 130 percent of those criteria between them.

“That’s easy, y’all just gotta have a little faith,” says the airhead on the traffic control desk.

Huw grits his teeth and looks through the doorway at Bonnie, whose ears appear to be smoking. He puts a hand over the mic: “Does this thing carry missiles?” he calls to her.

“
Fucking
fucking arse shit bollocks—” Bonnie hammers on a control panel off to one side. It bleeps plaintively, the ancient chime of servers rebooting: “—’ing
countermeasures
suite!”

“Hasta la vista, sinners,” drawls the missile launch computer in a thick gubernatorial Austro-Californian accent. Two pinpricks of light blossom on the verdant horizon of the gasoline mangroves, then a third that rapidly expands into a fireball as the antique pre-cloud hypersonic missile explodes on launch. The surviving missiles stab toward them and there’s a musical chime from the countermeasures control panel. Huw feels a moment of gut-slackening terror. “You’ve got mail!” the countermeasures system announces in the syrupy tones of a kindergarten teacher. “Facebook-Goldman-AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have 14,023 new friend requests, which you will receive after this message from our sponsors. Your hen wants milking, your goat has been turned into a zombie, there are 14,278,123 new status updates, and you have been de-friended 1,974,231 times. There are 5,348,011 updates to the privacy policy for your review.”

Bonnie thumps something on the panel, muscles like whipcord standing out on her arm as she glares at the oncoming missiles. Huw backs away.
She might actually be a communicant,
he realizes in absolute horror.
She might actually have a Facebook account!
She’s mad enough.
...These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

“Acknowledged,” says the possessed countermeasures suite in the hag-ridden tone of a computer that has surrendered to the dark side. For a moment nothing seems to happen; then one of the onrushing pinpricks of light veers toward the other. Paths cross then diverge in a haze of debris. “Displaying new privacy policy,” it sighs.

“Don’t read it!” Huw screams, but he’s too late—Bonnie has punched the console again, and messages begin scrolling across it. In the middle distance, Charleston airport’s cracked and vitrified runways are coming into view. Missile batteries off to one side cycle their launcher-erectors impotently, magazines long since fired dry at the godless Commie-fag euroweasel aid flights.

“We gotta bail out before we land, otherwise we’d have to go through customs,” she says. “That would be bad—South Carolina never ended Prohibition.”