After the Collapse (5 page)

Surprised by the solid rank of mounted wardens, looming high over the car like a living wall across the dump road, the Overclockers reacted with varying degrees of confusion. But soon the driver managed to bring his steam cart to a halt, and the three officials had regained a measure of diplomatic aplomb. The passenger in the front seat climbed down, and approached Pertinax and friends. Leery of the stranger, the Kodiak Kangemus unsheathed their long thick claws a few inches. The awesome display brought the man to a halt a few meters away. He spoke, looking up and shielding his eyes against the sun.

“Hail, wardens! My name is Brost, and these comrades of mine are Kemp and Sitgrave, my assistants. As the Mayor of Chicago, I welcome you to our fair city.”

Pertinax studied Brost from above, seeing a poorly shaven, sallow baseline
Homo sapiens
with a shifty air about his hunched shoulders. Some kind of harsh perfume failed to mask completely a fug of fear and anxiety crossing the distance between Brost and Pertinax’s sharp nostrils.

Sylvanus, as eldest, spoke for the wardens. “We accept your welcome, Mayor Brost. But I must warn you that we are not here for any simple cordial visit. We have good reason to believe that certain factions among your people are planning to tamper with the tropospheric mind. We have come to investigate, and to remove any such threats we may discern.”

The Mayor smiled uneasily, while his companions fought not to exchange nervous sidelong glances among themselves.

“Tamper with those lofty, serene intelligences, who concern themselves not at all with our poor little lives? What reason could we have for such a heinous assault? No, the charge is ridiculous, even insulting. I can categorically refute it here and now. Your mission has been for naught. You might as well save yourself any further wearisome journeying by camping here for the night before heading home. We will bring you all sorts of fine provisions—”

“That cannot be. We must make our own investigations. Will you allow us access to your village?”

Mayor Brost huddled with his assistants, then faced the wardens again. “As I said, the
city
of Chicago welcomes you, and its doors are open.”

Pertinax repressed a grin at the Mayor’s emphasis on “city,” but he knew the other wardens had caught this token of outraged human dignity as well.

With much back-and-forward-and-back maneuvering, the driver finally succeeded in turning around the steam cart. Matching the gait of their hoppers to the slower passage of the cart, the wardens followed the delegation back to “Chicago.”

Beginning with outlying cabins where half-naked children played in the summer dust of their yards along with mongrels and livestock, and continuing all the way to the “city” center, where a few larger buildings hosted such establishments as blacksmiths, saloons, public kitchens and a lone bath house, the small collection of residences and businesses that was “Chicago”—scattered along the lake’s margins according to no discernible scheme—gradually assembled itself around the newcomers. Mayor Brost, evidently proud of his domain, pointed out sights of interest as they traversed the “urban” streets, down the middles of which flowed raw sewage in ditches.

“You see how organized our manufactories are,” said Brost, indicating some long low windowless sheds flanked by piles of waste byproducts: wood shavings, coal clinkers, metal shavings. “And here’s the entrance to our mines.” Brost pointed to a shack that sheltered a pit-like opening descending into the earth at a slant.

“Oh,” said Cimabue, “you’re smelting and refining raw metals these days?”

Mayor Brost exhibited a sour chagrin. “Not yet. There’s really no need. We feel it’s most in harmony with, uh, our beloved mother earth to recycle the buried remnants of our ancestors’ civilization. There’s plenty of good metal and plastic down deep where the Upflowered sequestered the rubble they left after their redesign of the globe. Plenty for everyone.”

“And what exactly is your population these days, Mayor?” inquired Tanselle.

“Nearly five thousand.”

Tanselle shook her head reflectively, as if to say, thought Pertinax,
Would that it were even fewer
.

After some additional civic boosterism the party—considerably enlarged by various gawking hangers-on—arrived at a large, grassy town square, where goats and sheep grazed freely. Ranked across the lawn, tethered securely, were several small lighter-than-air balloons with attached gondolas of moderate size. The shiny lacquered patchwork fabric of the balloons lent them a circus air belied by the solemn unease which the Mayor and his cohorts eyed the balloons.

Immediately, Pertinax’s ears pricked forward at this unexpected sight and the humans’ nervous regard for the objects. “What are these for?” he asked.

Mayor Brost replied almost too swiftly. “Oh, these little toys have half a dozen uses. We send up lightweight volunteers to spy out nearby bison herds so that our hunting parties will save some time and trouble. We make surveys from the air for our road-building. And of course, the children enjoy a ride now and then. The balloons won’t carry much more weight than a child.”

“I’d like to examine them.”

“Certainly.”

Pertinax clambered down off Flossy. Standing among the humans, the top of his head just cleared their belt buckles. He was soon joined by his fellow wardens, who moved through the crowd like a band of determined furry dwarves.

The balloons featured no burners to inflate their straining shapes. Pertinax inquired as to their source of gas.

Highlighting the mechanisms, Mayor Brost recited proudly. “Each balloon hosts a colony of methanogenic bacteria and a food supply. Increasing the flow of nutrients makes more gas. Closing the petcocks shuts them down.”

Pertinax stepped back warily from his close-up inspection of the balloons. “They’re highly explosive then.”

“I suppose. But we maintain adequate safety measures around them.”

The wardens regrouped off to one side and consulted quietly among themselves.

“Any explosion of this magnitude in the tropospheric mind would do no more damage than a conventional rain squall,” said Cimabue.

“Agreed,” said Chellapilla. “But what if the explosion was meant to disperse some kind of contaminant carried as cargo?”

“Such as?” asked Tanselle.

“No suitably dangerous substance occurs to me at the moment,” Sylvanus said, stroking his chin whiskers.

“Nonetheless,” cautioned Pertinax, “I have a feeling that here lies the danger facing the tropospheric mind. Let us continue our investigations for the missing part of the puzzle.”

Pertinax returned to address the Mayor. “Our mounts need to forage, while we continue our inspection of your town. We propose to leave them here on the green. They will not bother people or livestock, but you should advise your citizens not to molest them. The Kangemu are trained to deal harshly with threats to themselves or their masters.”

“There will of course be no such problems,” said the Mayor.

Sylvanus advised splitting their forces into two teams for swifter coverage of the human settlement, while he himself, in deference to his age and tiredness, remained behind with their mounts to coordinate the searching. Naturally, Pertinax chose to team up with Chellapilla.

The subsequent hours found Pertinax and his lover roaming unhindered through every part of the human village. Most of the citizens appeared friendly, although some exhibited irritation or a muted hostility at the queries of the wardens. Pertinax and Chellapilla paused only a few minutes to bolt down some cold food around mid-afternoon before continuing their so-far fruitless search.

Eventually they found themselves down by some primitive docks, watching the small fishing fleet of “Chicago” tie up for the evening. The fishermen, shouldering their day’s bounty in woven baskets, moved warily past the weary wardens.

“Well, I’m stumped,” confessed Pertinax. “If they’re hiding something, they’ve concealed it well.”

Chellapilla said, “Maybe we’re going about this wrong. Let’s ask what could harm the virgula and sublimula, instead of just expecting to recognize the agent when we see it.”

“Well, really only other virgula and sublimula, which of course the humans have no way of fashioning.”

“Ah, but what of rogue lobes?”

The natural precipitation cycles brought infinite numbers of virgula and sublimula down from their habitats in the clouds to ground level. When separated from the tropospheric mind in this way, the components of the mind were programmed for apoptosis. But occasionally a colony of virgula and sublimula would fail to self-destruct, instead clumping together into a rogue lobe. Isolated from the parent mind, the lobes frequently went insane before eventually succumbing to environmental stresses. Sometimes, though, a lobe could live a surprisingly long time if it found the right conditions.

“Do you think local factors in the lake here might encourage lobe formations?”

“There’s one way to find out,” answered Chellapilla.

It took only another half hour of prowling the lakeshore, scrambling over slippery rocks and across pebbled strands, to discover a small lobe.

Thick intelligent slime latticed with various organic elements—pondweeds, zebra mussels, a disintegrating bird carcass—lay draped across a boulder, a mucosal sac with the processing power of a non-autonomous twenty-second-century AI. The slime was liquescently displaying its mad internal thoughts just as a mail cloud did: fractured images of the natural world, blazes of equations, shards of old human culture ante-Upflowering, elaborate mathematical constructions. A steady whisper of jagged sounds, a schizophrenic monologue, accompanied the display.

Pertinax stared horrified. “Uploading this fragment of chaos to the tropospheric mind would engender destabilizing waves of disinformation across the skies. The humans don’t even need to explode their balloons. Simply letting the mind automatically read the slime would be enough.”

“We can’t allow this to happen.”

“Let’s hurry back to the others.”

“You damned toothy ratdogs aren’t going anywhere.”

A squad of humans had come stealthily upon Pertinax and Chellapilla while their attentions were engaged by the lobe. With rifles leveled at their heads, the wardens had no recourse but to raise their hands in surrender.

Two men came to bind the wardens. The one dealing with Chellapilla twisted her arms cruelly behind her, causing her to squeal. Maddened by the sound, Pertinax broke free and hurled himself at one of the gun-bearers. But a rifle stock connected with his skull, and he knew only blackness.

When Pertinax awoke, night had fallen. He found himself with limbs bound, lying in a cage improvised from thick branches rammed deep into the soil and lashed together. He struggled to rise, and thus attracted the attentions of his fellow captives.

Similarly bound, Chellapilla squirmed across the grass to her mate. “Oh, Perty, I’m so glad you’re awake! We were afraid you had a concussion.”

“No, I’m fine. And you?”

“Just sore. Once you were knocked out, they didn’t really hurt me further.”

Sylvanus’s sad voice reached Pertinax as well. “Welcome back, my lad. We’re in a fine mess now, and it’s all my fault for underestimating the harmful intentions of these savages.”

Firelight flared up some meters away, accompanied by the roar of a human crowd. “Where are we?”

“We’re on the town green,” said Chellapilla. “The humans are celebrating their victory over us. They slaughtered our Kangemu and are roasting them for a feast.”

“Barbarians!”

Tanselle spoke. “Cimabue and I are here as well, Pertinax, but he did not escape so easily as you. They clubbed him viciously when he fought back. Now his breathing is erratic, and he won’t respond.”

“We have to do something!”

“But what?” inquired Sylvanus.

“The least we can do,” said Chellapilla, “is inform the tropospheric mind of our troubles and the threat from rogue lobe infection. Maybe the mind will know what to do.”

Pertinax considered this proposal. “That’s a sound idea, Chell. But I suspect our pigeons have already served as appetizers.” He paused as an idea struck him. “But I know a way to reach the mind. First I need to be free. You three will have to chew my ropes off.”

Shielded by darkness, without any guards to note their activities and interfere (how helpless the humans must have deemed them!), his three fellows quickly chewed through Pertinax’s bonds with their sturdy teeth and powerful jaws. His first action after massaging his limbs back into a semblance of strength was to take off his robe and stuff it with dirt and grass into a rough recumbent dummy that would satisfy a cursory headcount. Then, employing his own untaxed jaw muscles, he beavered his way out of the cage.

“Be careful, Perty!” whispered Chellapilla, but Pertinax did not pause to reply.

Naked, dashing low across the yard from shadow to shadow, Pertinax reached one of the tethered balloons without being detected. Nearby stood a giant ceramic pot with a poorly fitting lid. Shards of light and sound escaped from the pot, betokening the presence of a malignant rogue lobe within. Plainly, infection of the tropospheric mind was imminent. This realization hastened Pertinax’s actions.

First he kicked up the feed on one balloon’s colony of methanogens. That vehicle began to tug even more heartily at its tethers. Moving among the other balloons, Pertinax disabled them by snapping their nutrient feed lines. At the very least, this would delay the assault on the mind.

Pertinax leaped onboard the lone functional balloon and cast off. He rose swiftly to the height of several meters before he was spotted. Shouts filled the night. Something whizzed by Pertinax’s head, and he ducked. A barbed projectile from one of the compressed-air guns. Pertinax doubted the weapons possessed enough force to harm him or the balloon at this altitude, but he remained hunkered down for a few more minutes nonetheless.

Would the humans take revenge on their remaining captives? Pertinax couldn’t spare the energy for worry. He had a mission to complete.

Within the space of fifteen minutes, Pertinax floated among the lowest clouds, the nearest gauzy interface to the tropospheric mind. Their dampness subtly enwrapped him, until he was soaked and shivering. His head seemed to attract a thicker constellation of fog....