Rapture of the Nerds (14 page)

“Thirsty, son?” the doc says, playfully jetting a stream of icy liquid in the air.

“Ahhh,” Huw says, nodding . Six hours in the suit with nothing but highly diruetic likker and any number of hours of direct sunlight in its insulated confines after the aircon broke down—he’s so dehydrated, he’s ready to piss snot.

“This a-way,” the doc says, and beckons with the bottle.

Huw lets Sam help him climb out of the sidecar, and he barely notices the rubbery feeling of his legs after hours of being cramped up in the little buggy. “Hotcha,” the doc says. “Come on, now, time’s a wastin’.” He gives the bottle another squeeze, and water spatters the dusty ground.

“Aaah,” Huw says, lumbering after it. He’s never felt quite this thirsty in all his days.
Real
thirsty. Thirsty as bones bleaching in the Sahara at noon during a drought.

The doc heads for a staircase behind a row of suppository-shaped elevator cages, standing open and gleaming beneath the white light of the holy sodiums overhead. Huw can barely keep up, but even if he had to drop to his knees and crawl, he’d do it. That’s holy stuff, that water, infused with the numinous glow of life itself. Didn’t the Christians have a hymn about it, “Jesus Gave Me Water”? Huw comes from a long line of trenchant Black Country atheists, a man who takes to religion the way that vegans take to huge suspicious wursts that look like cross-sectioned dachshunds, but he’s having an ecstatic experience right now, taking the stairs on trembling knees.

The doc spits on his thumb and smears the DNA across the auth-plate set in the door at the bottom of the stairs. It thinks for a long moment, then clanks open in a succession of armored layers.

“G’wan now, you’ve earned it,” the doc says, rolling the bottle into the cell behind the door.

Huw toddles after it, the Michelin suit making him waddle like he’s got a load in his diaper, but he doesn’t worry about that right now, because there’s a bottle of water with his name on it at the other side of the cell, a bottle so cold and pure that it cries out to him:
Drink me! Drink me!

He’s sucking it down, feeling the cold straight through to his skull-bone, a delicious brain freeze the size of the Universe, when the teapot rattles angrily in his thigh pocket. He’s not so thirsty anymore, but there’s something else nagging at his attention. The sound is getting him down, distracting him from the sense of illumination appearing at the back of his mind’s eye as he gulps the water, so he pulls the thing out and looks at it, relaxing as he sees the shiny metal highlights gleaming happily at him.

Adrian pops out of the teapot, so angry, he’s almost war-dancing. He curses: “Fucking suggestibility ray! Bible-thumping pud-fuckers can’t be happy unless they’ve tasped someone into ecstasy. Come on, Huw, snap out of it.”

“Go ’way,” Huw mumbles. “I’m havin’ a trash-transcential-transcendental ’sperience.” He gulps some more water then squats, leaning against the wall. Something
loves
him, something vaster than mountains and far stronger, and it’s bringing tears to his eyes. Except the teapot will have none of it.

“Wake up, dishrag! Jesus, didn’t they tell you
anything
in class when you was a kid? They infuse your cerebrospinal fluid with nanobots. Some go for your hypothalamus, make you feel hungry or thirsty. Others have a built-in tropism for the god module in your temporal lobe. Tickle it with a broadband signal, and you’ll see God, angels square-dancing in heaven, fuck knows what. Get a grip on yourself!”

“It’s
God
?” Huw’s got a name for the sensation now, and he grins idiotically at the opposite wall of his cell. It’s a slab of solid aluminum, scratched and dented and discolored along the welds: and it’s as beautiful to Huw as fluted marble pillars supporting the airy roof of a pleasure dome, pennants snapping overhead in the delightful breeze blowing off the waters of the underground river Alph—

“It’s not God, it’s a fucking tasp! Snap out of it, gobshite. They’re only using it on you ’cause they want you nice and addled when they sell you to the Inquisition tomorrow! Then, no more god module!”

“Huh?” Huw ponders the question for an eternity of proximate grace, as serried ranks of angels blow trumpets of glory in the distant clouds that wreath his head. “I’m ... so, I’m happy. This way. I’ve found it.”

“What you’ve found is a bullet in the back of the head if you stay here, you cheeseridge!” Ade shakes his fists from the top of the teapot. “Think, damn you! What would you have thought of this yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” Yesterday, all his troubles, so far away. Huw nods, thinking deeply. “I’ve always been missing ’thing like this, even if I didn’t know it. Feels
right
. Everything makes sense.” The presence of the ultimate, even if it’s coming from right inside his own skull courtesy of a 5.4-gigahertz transmission from God-botherer Central, is making it hard for Huw to concentrate on anything else. “Wanna be like this till I die, if’s all the same to you.”

“They’ll
kill
you, man!” Ade pauses in his frantic fist-waving. “Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

“Mmf. Lemme think about it.” Huw slowly slumps back against the wall, his suit bulking and billowing around him and digging sharp joints into his bruised body, sanctifying and mortifying his flesh. “If I believed in an actual, like,
God,
this’d be marvelous. But God’s such a goddamned primitive fetish, isn’t it? So I’m’a, an atheist. Always have been, always will be. But this thing is like,
inside
me, and it’s huge, so blindingly brilliant, it’s like my own reflection on infinity.” His eyes widen. “Hey, that means
I’m
God. I’m like, transcendentistry, right? I think therefore I guess I
am
. If they try to shoot me, I’ll just zap ’em with my god-powers.” He giggles for a while, pointing his fingers at the ceiling, walls, and floor, lightning bolts of the illuminated imagination spraying every which way. “It’s a solipsystem! Nobody here but me.
I
am God. I
am
God. I am
God
—”

The teapot zaps him with an electric shock, and Ade vanishes in a huff.

“Ouch.” Huw sucks his thumb for a moment and meditates on the celestial significance of the autodeity sending him messages from his subconscious via a curved metal antiquity stuffed with black market New Libyan electronics. Then he tucks it away in his pocket and settles back down to work on regaining his sense of omnipotent brilliance. And he’s still sitting in that pose the next morning, staring at the wall, when the sense of immanence vanishes, the doors grind open, and Doc and Sam come to take him downtown to face the Inquisition.

They parade him down the road in the drab gray morning light of Glory City, past the filling stations, the churches, the diners, the other filling stations, the refinery, the cathedral, the filling station-memorabilia market, the GasHaus, the corkscrew apartment blocks where every neighbor can look in on every other’s window, and the execution ground.

And it all feels good to Huw.

As the parade progresses, curious locals emerge from their homes and workplaces as if drawn by some ultrawideband alert, rounded up and herded out to form a malignant rent-a-mob that demonstrates to Huw how important and central to reality he is. They pelt him with rotting fruit and wet cigar stubs with live coals on one end that singe him before bouncing free to the impermeable pavement, affirming his sense of holy closeness with the intensity of their focus on him. Once, they stop so that the doc can roar a speech at the crowd—

“—heretic—vengeance—drugs—sex—wantonness—”

Huw doesn’t pay much attention to the speech. Through his feet he fancies he can feel the scritterscratch of the Hypercolony, gnawing patiently at the yards of stone and polymer between him and the blighted soil. It’s a bad feeling, as if Glory City is a snow globe that has been lifted into the air on the backs of a heptillion ants who are carrying it away, making it sway back and forth. The curlicue towers and the gnarled and crippled crowd rock in hinky rhythm.

The faces on the balconies swim when he looks up. Some of them have horns on their foreheads. He turns away and tries to stare at a fixed point, using the ballerina’s trick of keeping his gaze still to make the world stop its whirling, but his gorge is rising, and his stomach is threatening to empty down his front.

This is not good.

He sits down hard, his armored ass klonking on the pavement, and Sam lumbers toward him. Huw holds out his hand, wanting to be helped to his feet, back to the godhead and the good trip. Just as Sam’s fingertips graze his, a woman wearing a voluminous black gown dashes out of the crowd and grabs him under the armpits, looping a harness around his chest. Where it touches his back, it gloms on hard, hyperglue nanites welding it to the suit’s surface.

“Hold on,” Bonnie breathes in his ear, and he feels like weeping, because he knows he isn’t to be redeemed after all, but tediously rescued and rehabilitated and set free.

“Bitch harlot!” says Doc. “Sodomite! Stop her!” Sam grabs for her past Huw’s shoulder, sideswipes the rounded swell of her bosom—extensively, chastely covered, this being Glory City—and jerks his hand back as though he’d been burned.

The harness around Huw’s chest tightens with rib-bruising force, dragging him backwards. He skitters for a moment before the harness lofts them both into the air, up toward the balconies ringing the curlicue towers. Bonnie, tied off to him by a harness of her own, squints nervously down at the crowd receding below them.

Huw bangs chest-first into the side of one of the towers, Bonnie’s weight knocking the breath out of him. They dangle together, twirling in the breeze like a giant booger as strong hands hoist them bodily up and over a balcony. One last, titanic heave hauls them inside, adding insult to injury in the form of a painful wedgie. Bonnie scrambles over him, unlocks her harness, and shakes out her voluminous petticoats. Huw is still dazed from the flight and gasping for breath. He’s bent over double, trying to breathe perfumed air thick with musky incense.

“You all right?”

Huw forces himself to straighten up and look around. The room is a tribute to excess: the wallpaper is printed with gold and red and black tessellations—obscene diagrams, he realizes, interpenetrating and writhing before his eyes—and the sofa is flocked with crushed purple velvet. The coffee table supports a variety of phallic implements in an assortment of improbable colors, suited to an altogether different kind of inquisition than the one that he’d been headed for.

As for the furniture, it’s inhabited by several persons of indeterminate gender, wearing outfits ranging from scanty to inappropriate for a place of worship—underwear is in fashion, but not much else is.

Bonnie’s face swims into focus before him, her blue fringe brushing his forehead: that and her hands are the only parts of her body he can see. “It’s the gnostic sexual underground,” she says. “There’s always one to be had, if you know how to look. Nobody takes it up the tradesman’s like a man with that old-time religion. No one needs it more, either. These lucky folks just figured out how to square the circle, thanks to the Bishop.”

She gives him a hard shake. “Come on,” she says. “I hit you with enough serotonin reuptake blockers to depress a hyena.” He feels a hard tug at his throat, and she holds up a small blowdart for him to examine. “I
know
you’re out of the god-box.”

Huw opens his mouth to say something, and finds himself sobbing. “You took away my god-self,” he says, snotting down his three-day beard and horking back briny mouthfuls of tears and mucus.

Bonnie produces a hankie from up one sleeve of her church-modest gown and wipes his face. “Sha,” she says, stroking his hair. “Sha. Huw, I need you here and now, okay? We’re in a
lot
of trouble, and I can’t get us out on my lonesome. The god feeling was just head-in-a-jar stuff. You weren’t being God, you were just feeling the feeling of being God. You hate that—it’s how they feel in the cloud, once they’ve uploaded.”

Huw snuffles miserably. “Yeah,” he says.

“Yeah. Baby, I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but it’s how you want to live. If I know one person who’s equipped to cope with the distinction between sensation and simulation, it’s you. Jesus, Huw, other than these maniacs, you’re the only person I know who thinks there
is
a distinction.”

Huw struggles to his feet and teeters in his ridiculous trousers. Bonnie giggles.

“What
are
you
wearing
?” she asks.

Huw manages to crack a fractional smile. “They’re all the rage in the American Outback,” he says. “What’s that
you’re
wearing?”

“A disguise. Doubles as a biohazard shield.” She swivels her hips, setting kilograms of underskirts swishing. “We’re both a bit overdressed for the occasion; let’s skin off and I’ll introduce you to the Bishop. Go on, you get started.”

Huw begins the laborious unlatching process and gradually shucks the pants. The teapot clatters free, drawing a raised eyebrow from one of the sexually ambiguous catamites twined around a sofa arm. The vibration kicks some erratic connection back into life: Ade’s image glows softly through the deep pile carpet.

The little avatar wrinkles its nose. “Bugger me sideways,” says Ade. “Place looks like an Italian whorehouse, only less charming and hygienic.” He turns and looks Huw up and down. “You look a little more like your usual cheerless self, though, mate. Should I assume that you’ve joined us again in the land of the cognitively unimpaired?”

Huw nods miserably. “I’m back,” he says. “No thanks to you. Those two assholes know you—they do business with you!”

Adrian’s avatar has the good grace to look faintly embarrassed. Bonnie leans past Huw with a creak of whalebone and picks up the teapot. “Did I hear that right?” she asks. “You been selling
stuff
again?”

“Uh.” Ade looks unrepentant. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“What kind of
stuff
?” Bonnie says, her eyes narrowing.

“Um ... stuff. Mostly harmless.”

“What
kind
of mostly harmless stuff are we talking about here?” Huw asks, mustering up a faint echo of interest. The blissed-out resistance cadre on the sofa are showing signs of interest too.