Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

“In my bedroom ?”

“They abhor light, darling.”

Kay stopped rubbing her toe, which still felt as if maybe she’d broken one phalange, and looked for a handhold on the carrier. Nothing—it really was like an egg, seamless, closed.

“How does it get in ?”

“You really mustn’t call her ‘it,’ sweetheart. There are provisions in the law now, I should have thought that you, of all people—”

Her questing fingers found a gap underneath. By main force she dragged the plastic shell to the end of the king-sized bed and tried to tip it over, gasping for air.

“I don’t think she’s in there,” El said. “Look, let’s just leave it there for the night, she’ll probably come in later, they’re very quiet and tidy, you know, we’re both exhausted and out of sorts, you and I, I mean, everything will look rosier after we’ve had a good night’s—”

Kay was not listening. Slamming the door between bedroom and hallway, she tugged at the old mahogany chest of drawers she’d inherited from Aunt Lil, dragging it, with a squawk of tortured Columbian structured parquet flooring, to jam the door shut, barring any direct or even furtive approach by the loathsome insect.

“Kay, it’s—She’s a person. This isn’t like you. I thought we had an arrangement?”

“Yes! But the main contract preceded the fooling-around clause. To love and honour till death us do part! You’re doing neither!”

El’s expression indicated he had a ready marital riposte. But some imp of caution dissuaded him from venting the pithy reply. Instead, he wisely hung his head, retreated to the bathroom, had a short but energetically hygienic shower, then crawled meekly into bed, carefully keeping a DMZ of six inches between himself and Kay, whose quivering silent fury scared him fully as much as the world had been terrified of Kim Jong-Il just before that dictator had been assassinated in the very act of launching assorted ICBMs. A crisis Kay had a not-insignificant part in defusing, with hard-nosed realpolitik efficiency.

Lying tensely on his back, vainly inviting sleep, Elwood Grackle remained unaware of the newly introduced and cleverly designed spirochaetes working their way up his urethra with their snicker-snack flagellae, heading with mysterious intentions much deeper into his system.

Professor Qutaybah Al Nahyan nervously fussed with his headdress in preparation for his interview with the Sheikh Khalifa. Although the professor maintained a certain formally congenial consanguinity with the ruler of Abu Dhabi—fifth cousins once removed on a great-uncle’s side—the hard facts of their relationship remained obdurate and inequal. One man was the living embodiment of their proud nation and its glorious destiny, Lion of the Prophet, while the other was a humble university instructor and researcher, educated at Oxford and Cal Tech, unmarried, living in a sparsely furnished bachelor’s condo in the Mussafah Residential neighbourhood. So today’s meeting was hardly between peers, let alone friends. It would be a master’s interrogation of his servant.

Drawing a small comb though his moustache and beard, Professor Al Nahyan sought to reassure himself that the Sheikh Khalifa would be pleased with what he had done, on his own initiative. True, he’d had to use some accounting sleight-of-hand to transfer funds from certain above-board projects to his own lab. And he had shamelessly passed off many of his classroom duties to his grad assistant, a stocky yet rather attractive American woman named Cayenne Sorbet, giving him time to work on tweaking the genome of his prized spirochaete. Also true, he had unleashed his creations on the world—via the Trojan Beetle of the Kafs—without so much as an environmental impact statement. Yet was it not all for the greater glory of Islam, a most gentle and accommodating way of spreading the faith? Surely, with such motives and goals, no discredit could redound to him.

At last the professor could dither no longer, but must make haste. Down to the condo’s basement garage, into the air-conditioned comfort of his Chinese sedan, and out to contend with the impossible traffic of the island city-state. Subsidized gasoline prices encouraged auto use here, unlike most of the rest of their world, suffering $200-a-barrel oil, despite the power beaming down now from orbit.

The meeting was scheduled to take place at MOPA, the Ministry of Presidential Affairs on the Corniche Road. As professor Al Nahyan pulled into the parking lot, the sharp sparkle of the ocean waters nearby pierced his eyes and gave him an instant headache. He began to suspect that this meeting would not go well.

The Sheikh, however, seemed in a fine, expansive mood when Al Nahyan was finally ushered into the presence. Four or five men in tasteless western garb and an equal number of proud yet fawning cousins in their mid-twenties and early thirties attended the potentate as he sat at ease behind a desk as large as an aircraft carrier’s launch deck. Holograms projected above the black glass desk displayed a magnificent assortment of prancing, head-tossing racing camels, presumably candidates for the Sheikh’s fabled stables. Rumours suggested that the best of these coursers were genetically modified, enhanced against all the laws of God and man. If it were so, the result, the professor had to confess, proved the infraction worth the risk. His eyes moistened to see them, even at one-tenth scale, and his heart beat faster at the thought of mounting one and wheeling away into the desert, as his ancestors had ridden for centuries in the service of the Sheikh’s own lineage. He came to his senses as the dealers in dromedarian flesh departed, puffing on large cigars, and his master faced him with a keen glance.

“Fine steeds, eh?”

“Yes indeed, sir.”

“And what of your own little breeding experiments, eh? Eh?” The Sheikh laughed a booming, deep-chested laugh that rattled the professor’s equanimity if not the bomb-proof three-ply windows. “Are we on target for the, uh, transformation of the infidels?”

Al Nahyan nervously found a chair, but dared not sit, though his knees knocked.

“Second stage insertion has begun, sir. A container of larvae has been ferried up the San Francisco de Quito skyhook, packaged for orbital transport by Virgin as solar cell panels. I anticipate shuttle deployment above Ecuador within the hour. We’ll take down those Google power-sats in a matter of days.”

The Sheikh’s face set hard, considering who knew what complexities of realpolitik. He tilted his bearded head, then, and reached for the humidor.

“The Kafirs, the infidels, will not know what hit them. A cigar, doctor?”

Melatonin-plus carried Kay through a night racked, in the deepest crevices of her jetlag-shocked body, by exhaustion and disgust. When the alarm beeped at ten in the morning she was still asleep—miracle of pharmaceutical science!—and when she flung her legs over the side of the bed she was hardly any closer to full consciousness. Her toes banged into the roach kennel as she stumbled to the bathroom.

“ Damn you, El!” she shrieked, but the chest of drawers had been pulled ajar and he was long gone, into Beltway wonk territory, no doubt greasing his way along the corridors of D.C. power, such as it was any more. The pain in her toe seemed out of all proportion to the impact; maybe she had broken a bone. Shit! Now she’d have to fit an X-ray appointment in with all the rest of her impossibly burdened schedule. “Planner on,” she shouted furiously to the system, and through the scrubbing and gurgling of her morning ablutions dictated her modified timetable. The odour of freshly-brewed automated coffee floated to her under the door from the kitchenette, and something more. Could it be a toasted muffin with orange marmalade? Heavenly! It made her laugh and brightened her mood. She’d surely put the fear of reprisal into the brute. For Elwood to stay home and make her breakf—