Paul Di Filippo - After the Collapse

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….

A small auroral screen opened up in the sky not four meters from Pertinax. He could smell the scorched molecules associated with the display.

Don Corleone appeared on the screen: one or more of the resident AIs taking a form deemed familiar from Pertinax’s recent past viewing records.

“You have done well to bring us this information, steward. We will now enforce our justice on the humans.”

Pertinax’s teeth chattered. “Puh-please try to spare my companions.”

The representative of the tropospheric mind did not deign to reply, and the screen winked out in a frazzle of sparks.

The nighted sky grew darker, if such was possible. Ominous rumbles sounded from the west. Winds began to rise.

The mind was marshalling a storm. A lightning storm. And Pertinax was riding a bomb.

Pertinax frantically shut off the feeder line to the methanogens. The balloon began to descend, but all too slowly for Pertinax’s peace of mind.

The first lightning strike impacted the ground far below, after seeming to sizzle right past Pertinax’s nose. He knew the bolt must have been farther off than that, but anywhere closer than the next bioregion was too close.

Now shafts of fire began to rain down at supernatural frequency. Turbulence rocked the gondola. Thunder deafened him. Pertinax’s throat felt raw, and he realized he had been shouting for help from the balloon or the mind or anyone else who might be around to hear.

Now the cascade of lighting was nigh incessant, one deadly strike after another on the Overclockers’ village. Pertinax knew he could stay no longer with the deadly balloon. But the ground was still some hundred meters away.

Pertinax jumped.

Behind him the balloon exploded.

Pertinax spread out his arms, transforming the big loose flaps of skin anchored from armpits to ankles into wings, wings derived from one of his ancestral strains, the sciuroptera.

After spiraling downward with some control, despite the gusts, Pertinax landed lightly, on an open patch of ground near a wooden sign that announced the “City Limits” of “Chicago.”

He had arrived just in time for the twister.

Illuminated intermittently by the slackening lightning, the stygian funnel shape tracked onto land from across the lake and stepped into the human settlement, moving in an intelligent and programmatic fashion among the buildings.

Even at this distance, the wind threatened to pull Pertinax off his feet. He scrambled for a nearby tree and held onto its trunk for dear life.

At last, though, the destruction wrought by the tropospheric mind ended, with the twister evaporating in a coordinated manner from bottom to top.

Pertinax ran back toward the town green.

The many fires caused by the lightning had been effectively doused by the wet cyclone, but still buildings smoldered. Not one stone seemed atop another, nor plank joined to plank. The few Overclocker survivors were too dazed or busy to interfere with Pertinax.

Seared streaks marked the town green, and huge divots had been wrenched up by the twister. Windblown litter made running difficult.

But a circle of lawn around the cage holding the wardens was immaculate, having been excluded from electrical blasts and then cradled in a deliberate eye of the winds.

“Is everyone all right?”

“Perty! You did it! Yes, we’re all fine. Even Cimabue is finally coming around.”

Within a short time all were freed. Pertinax clutched Chellapilla to him. Sylvanus surveyed the devastation, clucking his tongue ruefully.

“Such a tragedy. Well, I expect that once we relocate the remnant population, we can wean them off our help and back up to some kind of agrarian self-sufficiency in just a few generations.”

Pertinax felt now an even greater urgency to engender a heir or two with Chellapilla. The demands on the stewards of this beloved planet required new blood to sustain their mission down the years.

“Chell, have you decided about our child?”

“Absolutely, Perty. I’m ready. I’ve even thought of a name.”

“Oh?”

“Boy or girl, it will have to be Storm!”

Salt air stung Storm’s super-sensitive nose, although he was still several scores of kilometers distant from the coast. The temperate August sunlight, moderated by a myriad, myriad high-orbit pico-satellites, one of the many thoughtful legacies of the Upflowered, descended as a soothing balm on Storm’s unclothed pelt. Several churning registers of flocculent clouds, stuffed full of the computational particles known as virgula and sublimula, betokened the watchful custodial omnipresence of the tropospherical mind. Peaceful and congenial was the landscape around him: a vast plain of black-leaved cinnabon trees, bisected by a wide, meandering river, the whole of which had once constituted the human city of Sacramento.

Storm reined to a halt his furred and feathered steed—the Kodiak Kangemu named Bergamot was a burly, scary-looking but utterly obedient bipedal chimera some three meters tall at its muscled shoulders, equipped with a high saddle and panniers—and paused for a moment of reflection.

The world was so big, and rich, and odd! And Storm was all alone in it!

That thought both frightened and elated him.

He felt he hardly knew himself or his goals, what depths or heights he was capable of. Whether he would live his long life totally independent of wardenly strictures, a rebel, or become an obedient part of the guardian corps of the planet. Hence this journey.

A sudden lance of light breaking through a bank of clouds brightened Storm’s spirits. Despite the distinct probability that the photons had been deliberately collimated by the tropospheric mind’s manipulation of water molecules as a signal to chivvy him onward.

Anything was possible, Storm realized. His destiny rested solely on the strength of his character and mind and muscles, and the luck of the Upflowered. Glory or doom, fame or ignominy, love or enmity…. His fate remained unwritten.

And so far he had not done too badly, giving him confidence for his future.

The young warden had now traveled much further from home than he ever had in his short life. All to barge in upon a perilous restoration and salvage mission whose members had known nothing of Storm’s very existence until a short time ago.

A gamble, to be sure, but one he had felt compelled to make. Perhaps his one and only chance for an adventure before settling down.

The death of Storm’s parents, the wardens Pertinax and Chellapilla, had left him utterly and instantly adrift. Although by all rights and traditions, Storm should have stepped directly into their role as one of the several wardens of the Great Lakes bioregion, he had balked. The conventional lives his parents had led, in obedience to the customs and innate design of their species did not appeal to Storm’s nature—at least not at this moment. Perhaps his unease with his assigned lot in life was due to the unusual conditions of his conception….