Rapture of the Nerds (15 page)

“Oh, the usual, sunshine. Telescope lenses, tinfoil hats—okay, Faraday cage helmets—formicide spritzes, tactical nuclear weapons, Bibles, contraceptive implants, tinned spam, that kind of thing.”

“And in return they’re paying you in—,” Huw begins; then Bonnie interrupts him.

“—No, wait. What else are you smuggling, you dogfucker? Don’t try to hide it from me. Those neverglade-living lowlifes were so eager to hand Huw over to the Fallen Congregations that they had to be trying to cover something up. Like, oh, whatever the fuck you were doing with them. What was it, Ade? Resurrection on the installment plan? Banned downloads? Are we going to get that fucking mad crow descending on us?”

“Oh, I say!” someone says behind them, but Bonnie is so worked up, she doesn’t notice. Huw glances over his shoulder and sees one of the miscellaneous perverts standing nearby, a hand clasped over his/her mouth. The perv is fish-belly pale and wears nothing but very complicated underwear. “Did you say—?”

“Just a few small downloads, lass,” Ade says. “Nothing to get worked up about, keep your hair on.”

“Downloads. Shit.” Bonnie breathes deeply. She’s looking pale. “
Pusbuckets,
that’s all I need,” she says. She puts the teapot down. “Right, we’ll have to take this up later, Huw. Right now we’ve got to go see the Bishop, and that means skin. Help me out of this thing.”

Huw fumbles for a while with the complex catches and clasps on her dress, fuzzily aware that he’s standing very close to her and he’s not wearing any trousers. As she steps out of her costume, she grabs him around the waist, squeezes him tight, and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. She’s nervous, vibrating like a live wire, and something squirms around in his throat, wanting to comfort her. “Why do we have to be naked?” he asks when she surfaces for air. “Who is this Bishop, anyway?”

“The Bishop of the First Church of the Teledildonic. It’s a dissident: lives in a baptismal pond, says we’ve got it all wrong and time is flowing in reverse. We’ve passed the Tower of Babel—that’s the cloud —and the Flood—warming—and now we’re ready to move back into the Garden of Eden. So we’ve got to stop wearing clothes and start fucking like innocent bunnies.”

“But—” Huw can feel his brain trying to twist out through his ears as he attempts to accommodate this deviant theology to what he knows about the Fallen Baptist Congregations. “—what’s that got to do with anything? With these folks?”

“I say, hold it right there, pardner!” says the pale perv, running drowned-looking hands through his/her long green hair. The effect would almost be sexy if not for the medium-sized potbelly and the black rubber hedgehog-apparatus that conceals his/her crotch, studded with silvery transducers: “You’ve got it all wrong!” He/she waves a finger at Bonnie. “This isn’t the Garden of Eden, it’s the Garden of the Son of God, after the Rapture, the hundred and forty-four thousand saved souls living in paradise on Earth, free from sin—”

“What’s
that,
then?” asks Huw, rudely prodding in the direction of the strap-on.

The perv draws itself up to a haughty meter-fifty: “I’ll have you know that this is the finest model
chastity
phallus
money can buy,” s/he says, voice cracking and descending an octave: “’S got all the sensory inputs of the real thing, wired right into my spine, but because little feller himself is tucked out of sight behind it, there’s no actual genital contact. No skin, no sin.” He fondles the thing happily and whimpers. Another of the prosthetically enhanced worshippers is sitting up on the sofa behind him and showing signs of interest.

Huw backs away slowly.
Get me out of here,
he mouths at Bonnie. She nods, then reaches out and strokes the perv’s pristine love machine. “
Now.”
Bonnie leads him around the perv—who doubles over in ecstasy at her touch—toward a pair of pornographically decorated hardwood doors at the rear of the room.

Bonnie takes a deep breath. “Wish I could stay,” she calls to the three or four temple whores on the bed, “but we’ve got to see Their Grace. It’s urgent. If I were you, I’d get to a safe house before the gendarmes arrive.”

“Give the Bishop our love,” one of the omnisexuals calls as they depart.

There is a small and overintimate lift behind the doors. It runs sideways, down, up, and then sideways again, completing a route that sends Huw’s inner ear on a loop-the-loop. They emerge into a hallway that’s carpeted with greasy-feeling tentacles that twine sensuously around his toes, and the walls have the sheen of waxed and oiled skin. It smells of Doritos and musk.

Bonnie hands him the sack with her clothes and his ruined underpants and the teapot and pushes him ahead of her, squeezing his ass affectionately as they go.

The Bishop is three meters high, ten-limbed, with eight complete sets of assorted genitals, fourteen breasts, and four tongues, like an explosion in a gourmet brothel’s cloning vats. He, She, and It—the three in one—is impossibly hideous to contemplate. Bonnie ushers Huw into its presence after negotiating with a pair of disturbingly toothless ministers who bar the high door.

“Your Grace,” she says as they step into its eucalyptus-fumed inner chamber.

“My dear child,” it says with one of its mouths. “It warms Our heart to see you.” It has a voice like a teenaged boy, high and uncertain. “And your companion. You are both lovely as they day He made you.”

One of its hands slithers free of the tangle and extends before them. Bonnie bends down and kisses the ring painted on the third finger, then elbows Huw, who kneels tentatively and takes the proffered digit, which is warm and moist and pulses disturbingly.

“Your Grace?” he says.

“Be not afraid, child,” says the Bishop. “This meatsuit allows Us to bring the Word to Our scattered temples without having to transport Our physical person through the uncertain world. One day, all of us will be liberated by these meatsuits, free to explore our flesh in many bodies all at once.”

“You’re
uploaded
?” Huw says, taking his hand away quickly and shuffling back on his knees.

The Bishop snorts a laugh with its rightmost face. “No, child, no. Merely telepresent. Uploading is the mortification of the flesh—this is its
celebration
.”

“Your Grace,” Bonnie says, peering up at it through her fringe with her eyes seductively wide. “It has been an honor and privilege to serve you in my time here in Glory City. I’ve found my counseling duties to be very rewarding—the gender-reassignees here face unique challenges, and it’s wonderful to be able to help them.”

“Yes,” says the Bishop, crouching down. “And We’ve appreciated it very much. But We sense that you are here to ask some favor of Us now, and We wish you’d get on with it so that We could concentrate on the savage rogering we’re getting in one of Our bodies.”

“It’s complicated,” Bonnie says. “This guy here is on the run—he’d been captured and they were taking him to the auto-da-fé when I rescued him.”

“This is the One?” the Bishop asks, putting one delicate feminine hand behind his head and pulling him closer to its big golden eyes. “The two who brought you to Glory City are not know for their extreme piety. So why do you suppose they brought you here, rather than simply, oh, eating you or using you for spare parts?”

Huw keeps himself from shying back with an effort of will. “I don’t
know,
” he says. Bonnie crowds in to another one of the Bishop’s faces. Deep within him, Huw feels a shiver of golden light, the god feeling.

“I think my downers are wearing off.”

“They tasped him, so I hit him with some depressants,” Bonnie says.

“Feels
goooooood,
” Huw says.

“It does, doesn’t it?” the Bishop says. “I favor three or four hours on the tasp myself, twice a week. Does wonders for the faith. But I suppose we’d best keep your ecstasy under control for now. Phillida!” it calls, clapping two of its hands together, bringing one of the ministers running. It twines an arm between the guardian’s legs and murmurs, “Bring Us a freethinker’s cap, will you?” The minister’s toothless maw gapes open in ecstasy, and then it scurries off quickly, returning with a mesh balaclava that the Bishop fits to Huw’s head, lining up the eye- and mouth-holes.

Huw’s golden glow recedes.

“It’s a Faraday cage with some noise-cancelation built in to reverse any of the mind-control radiation that gets through,” the Bishop says. “How did you come to be on the American Continent, anyway?”

“It started when I ate some godvomit and smuggled it out of a patent court,” Huw says.

The Bishop’s golden eyes widen. “Judge Rosa Giuliani’s court? In Libya? Last week? I’m a big fan of her show! You are carrying the ambassador?”

“The very same,” Huw says, obscurely pleased at this notoriety. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me. Anyway, this smuggler I know—we know—Adrian, he sent me here. Said that this was the safest place to hide out.”

Bonnie breaks in. “But now we come to find out that he’s been dealing with the two who tasped Huw—”

“Sam and the doc,” Huw says.

“I know of them,” the Bishop says, its voice dripping with arch disapproval.

“Selling them bootleg downloads.”

“Ahh,” the Bishop says. “Excuse Us a moment.” It arches its back and screams out a long orgasmic wail. “One of Our other meatsuits is being ministered to,” it says distractedly: “We needed to have a bit of a shout. We’re pleased to know this. It explains certain pseudo-nuclear events in the outback that We’ve had word of—the doc must be retailing anti-ant technology to the other hayseeds.”

Bonnie shuddered. “That’s just for openers, I’m sure. Fuck knows what else Ade has sold those nutjobs.”

“Just some downloads, he said,” Huw says. “Fuck it, what did he mean by
that
? You can download anything; I know I did!”

“Downloads could be either good or bad,” the Bishop says, rubbing two disturbingly rugose hands together as if in prayer. “But first, We have more pressing temporal priorities to attend to, my children. It appears that your rescue did not go unnoticed by the puritan majority, and they will presently be calling. Moreover, this would explain a request for a flight plan and landing clearance that the airport acknowledged four hours ago—” The Bishop stops, its back arching ecstatically. “—oh! Oh!
Oh!
Closer to thee, my God!” Breasts quiver, their purple aureolae crinkling, and it screams out loud in the grip of a multiple orgasm of titanic proportions.

Huw peers out through the eye-holes of his mesh mask, which presses cold and hard into his skin. “Did you say that the law is nearby?”

“I believe they are,” the Bishop says. “Yes, there. The primary perimeter has been breached. Such a lovely front door.” It looks sternly at Bonnie. “You were reckless, child. They followed you here.”

“I took every precaution,” Bonnie says, blushing. “I’m no amateur, you know—”

Huw has a sudden sickening feeling. “It’s me,” he says. “I’m bugged with a geotracker.”

Bonnie glares at him. “You could have
said something,”
she says. “We’ve compromised the whole operation here now.”

“I was
distracted,
all right? Mind-control rays make you forgetful,
okay
?”

The Bishop clucks its tongues and gives them each a pat on their bare bottoms. “Never mind that now, children. All is forgiven. But I’m afraid that you are right, we are going to lose this temple. And I’m no more infallible than you, you know: I’ve been ever so lax with the evacuation drills here. My ministers find that they disturb their contemplation of the Almighty. I fear not for this meatsuit, but it would be such a shame to have all my lovely acolytes fall into the hands of the Inquisition. I don’t suppose that you’d be willing to help out?”

“Of course,” Bonnie says. “It’s the least we can do.”

No, the least we could do would be to get the fuck out,
Huw thinks. He glares at Bonnie, who prods him in the belly with a fingertip.

“But of course, we could also use some help of our own—”

“Quid pro quo?” the Bishop says, its quavering voice bemused now, and that irritates Huw ferociously: the law is at the door, and the Bishop thinks it’s all a tremendous lark?

“Not at all, Your Grace. We came to beg your indulgence long before we knew that there was a favor we could do for you. We need your assistance getting shut of this blighted wasteland. Transport to the coast, and an airship or a ballistic or
something
that can get us back to the civilized world.”

“And I need to shut down my geotracker,” Huw says, wondering where it has been implanted.
Somewhere painful,
Sam had told him.

“Yes, you certainly do,” the Bishop says. “You’ll find an escape-line clipped to the balcony out the third door on the right, along with some baskets. Pack the ministers in the baskets, tie them down—don’t mind if they squirm, it’s in their nature—clip the baskets to the line and toss them out the window. I’m making arrangements now for someone to catch them on the other end. If you do this small favor for me, I will, oh, I don’t know.” The Bishop idly strokes their scalps and tickles their earlobes. “Yes, that’s it. There’s a safe house on the coast, a farm where my people have been making preparations for a much more reasonable approach to dealing with the ants than godvomit and nukes. They will be delighted to shelter you for as long as it takes you to make contact with your people and get off the continent. Such a shame to see you go.” It quickly gives Bonnie directions, and Bonnie recites them back with mnemonic perfection.

There’s a distant crash that Huw feels through the soles of his bare feet. “Clothes?” he asks.

“Oh, yes, I suppose, by all means, if you must,” the Bishop says. “Cloakroom’s behind the last door on the right. A lost and found for supplicants who’ve left a little something behind in their blissful state as they left our place of worship. I’m sure we’ll have something in your size, even if it’s only OshKosh B’Gosh.”

“Fanfuckingtastic,” Huw says breathlessly as he makes a line for the door. But Bonnie catches him by the elbow, intent on one last question.

“How many are we supposed to evacuate? I don’t want to miss anyone.” There’s another thunderous crash, this one from closer by.