Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

Storm felt gut-punched. “We all need to leap at once! Now! Find a rift and bomb it!”

The remaining five wardens flung themselves free of the kite.

Focused on his gliding, Storm could not keep track of the rest of the Fellowship. Heaven-seeking spears of hot rock burst into existence randomly, a gauntlet of fiery death. Deadly vog—the volcanic fog—stole his sight and breath. He lost track of his altitude, his goal. He thought he heard cries and screams—

Out of the vog he emerged, to see the tortured ground much too close, an eye-searing, writhing active rift bisecting the terrain. He braced for a landing.

His right paw-foot caught in a crevice, and he heard bones snap. The pain was almost secondary to his despair.

Working to free his paw-foot, he heard two thumps behind him.

Pankey and Jizogirl had landed, their fur smoldering, eyes cloudy and tearful.

Jizogirl came to help free Storm’s paw-foot.

“Rotifero, Catmaul—?”

Jizogirl just shook her head.

Meanwhile, Pankey had detached a logic bomb from his bandolier, and now darted in toward the living rift. Its incredible heat stopped him some distance away. He made to throw the bomb.

Overhead, the spy gulls circled low. One screeched just as Pankey threw.

A whip of lava caught the bomb in mid-air, incinerating it but prophylactically detaching from the parent flow, frustrating the spread of the released antisense agents backward along its interrupted length.

Pankey rushed back to his comrades. “It’s no use. The bombs have to be delivered by hand. It’s up to me!”

Jizogirl said, “And me!”

“No! Only if I fail. You and Storm— Just stay with him!”

Before either Storm or Jizogirl could protest. Pankey had taken off at a run.

Storm’s nose could smell the scorched flesh of Pankey’s paw-feet as the warden dodged one whip after another.

“Remember me—!” the leader of the team called, as he hurled himself and his remaining logic bombs into the rift.

The propagation of the antisense mind-killer agents was incredibly rapid, fuelled by the high energies of the system. A deep subterranean rumble betokened the titanic struggle of intelligence against nescience. In a final spasm, the earth convulsed titanically, rippling like a shaken sheet in all directions, tossing Jizogirl down beside Storm, then bouncing them both.

The quake lasted for what seemed minutes, before dying away. Even when the shaking at ground zero had stopped, rumbles and tremors continued to radiate outward into the surrounding ocean, as the antisense assault propagated. Storm could picture undersea lava tubes collapsing, tectonic plates shifting far out to sea—

Jizogirl got shakily to her paw-feet, and helped Storm stand on his one good leg.

“Is Mauna Loa dead?” she asked.

“I think so….”

Big menacing shapes moved in the vog around them.

“What now?” she asked hopelessly.

Out of the vog, several anoles and their riders emerged. But they no longer exhibited any direction or purpose or malice. One ape clawed at his slave cap and succeeded in ridding himself of it.

Jizogirl suddenly stiffened. “Oh, no! I just thought—We need to get inland, quickly! Up on the lizard!”

The tractable anole allowed Storm to climb onboard, with an assist from Jizogirl. His broken bones throbbed. She got up behind him, grabbed him around the waist.

“How do we make this buggered thing go?”

Storm pulled his sword out and jabbed it into the anole’s shoulder. The lizard shot off, heading more or less into the interior.

“Can you tell me why this ride is necessary?”

“Tsunami! You prairie dwellers are so dumb!”

“But how?”

“The self-destruct information waves from the antisense bomb propagated faster than the physical collapse itself. When the instructions hit the furthest distal reaches of Mauna Loa out to sea, they rebounded back and met the oncoming physical collapse in mid-ocean. Result: tsunami!”

Up and up the anole skittered, leaving the Kau Desert behind and climbing the slopes of Mauna Loa. It stopped at last, exhausted, and no amount of jabbing could make it resume its flight.

Storm and Jizogirl dismounted and turned back toward the sea, the doe supporting the buck.

With the sea’s recession, the raw steaming seabed lay exposed for several hundred metres out from shore. They saw the Squid sitting lopsided on the muck.

Then the crest of the giant wave materialized on the horizon, all spume and glory and destructive power.

“Are we far enough inland, high enough up?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

The tsunami sounded like a billion lions roaring all at once.

Storm turned his face to Jizogirl’s and said, “That kiss you gave me the other night— It was very nice. Can I have another?”

Jizogirl smiled and said, “If it’s not our last, then count on lots more.”

The starspiders have plucked Anders Zilber from our midst, perhaps never to be seen again. Squealing their hypercompressed fugues of cosmic mortality and rebirth, the spiders emerged from the transfinite Wassoon spaces and harvested Anders for his greatness. I saw it; I was next to him on the stage.

Everyone mourns his loss—everyone but me, Basil Chown. Of course I’m to pay for my coldness. The idiots have convicted me of murdering him, and I’m to be executed today. As if Anders and I had been vulgar rivals in some spaceport gang—instead of the Local Cluster’s greatest metamusicians.

And what is metamusic? The one art form that ties us all together—Uppytops, Orpolese, Bulbers, the DigDawgs and the dreaded Kaang—as unalike as chalk to cheese. Thanks to the Wassoon transmitter, humanity has spread beyond the Milky Way’s swirls, encountering hundreds of other races. Some call it a pangalactic civilization—I call it a wider range of fools. But, yes, they were right to worship Anders.

Handsome, charismatic Anders. I can see the glints in his thoughtful eyes, the boyish slackness beneath his chin, the convoluted curls of his abundant hair. Generally, when out in public, a woman or gyne-poppet graced one arm, or both. Reporters and fans clustered around him, a constant retinue, endeavouring to sprinkle him with shortlife flea-cams. But despite all this worshipful attention, he, better than anyone, knew his days were numbered.

I well remember the first time he told me—I suppose that would be ten years ago by now.

We were returning from a concert tour through the Andromeda Galaxy on the far side of the Local Cluster, aboard the luxury liner Surry On Down . We’d just everted from Wassoon space into consensus reality, and I was seeing the usual post-transition shapes within the cabin walls—branched, crawling shadows like ghostly insects.

“They know my name,” remarked Anders, flicking one of the shadows with his long, crooked forefinger. His hands looked strange, but for the moment I didn’t understand why. “They want to keep me. Every time I transit, the starspiders tell me.”

“The starspiders aren’t anything real!” I exclaimed. “They’re only a post-jump hallucination. We have to believe that.”

“Cowardly foolishness, Basil. The subdimensions teem with life and history. The more we open ourselves, the richer our work.”

He pitched his voice to a cracked squeak and began jabbering at the crawling seven-pointed shapes that filled the floors, ceilings and walls. In his oddly pitched voice, Anders was telling them about—how distasteful!—an erotic hallucination he’d just had.

“I remember that!” exclaimed Mimi Ultrapower, our road agent, accompanist and—damn it all!—Anders’s lover. She was laughing as she talked. “The starspiders were inside our flesh, like giant nerve cells. I was kneading you like dough, Anders, and you were—”