“Wotcher, mate!” The djinni that materializes above the teapot is a hologram, so horribly realistic that for a moment Huw forgets his desperate need for a piss.
“Fuck you too, Ade,” he says.
“What kind of way to welcome yer old mate is that, sunshine?” Hologram-Adrian’s wearing bush jacket and shorts, a shotgun slung over one shoulder. “How yer feeling, anyway?”
“I feel like I’ve been shat.” Huw rubs his forehead. “Where am I? Where’s Bonnie gotten to?”
“Flying the bloody ship. We can’t all sleep. Don’t worry, she’s just hunky-dory. How about you?”
“Flying.” Huw blinks. “Where the hell—?”
“You’ve been sleeping like a baby for a good long while.” Ade looks smug. “Don’t worry, we got you out of Libya one jump ahead of Rosa. You won’t be arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, for another four or five hours, why’n’t you kick back and smoke some grass? I left at least a quarter of your stash—”
“South Carolina?” Huw screams, nearly dropping the teapot. “Unclefucking sewage filter, what do you want to send me there for?”
“Ah, pecker up. They’re your coreligionists, aren’t they? You won’t find a more natural, flesh-hugging bunch on the planet than the Jeezemoids who got left behind by the Rapture. Hell, they’re the kind of down-home Luddites what make you look like Saint Kurzweil.”
“They’re radioactive,” Huw says. “And I’m an atheist. They burn atheists at the stake, don’t they?” He rummages through his skanky clothes, turning them inside out as he searches for something not so acrawl that he’d be unwilling to have it touch his nethers.
“Oh, hardly,” says Adrian. “Just get a little activated charcoal and iodine in your diet and memorize the Lord’s Prayer and you’ll be fine, sonny.”
Huw ends up tying a T-shirt around his middle like a diaper and seizing the teapot, which has developed a nasty rattle in its guts.
“Breakfast and toilet. Not in that order. Sharp.”
“That door there,” says the miniaturized Adrian, pointing.
The zeppelin turns out to be a maryceleste, crewed by capricious iffrits whose expert systems were trained by angry, resentful trade unionists in ransom for their pensions. The amount of abuse required to keep the ship on course and its commissary and sanitary systems in good working order is heroic.
Huw opens the door to the bridge, clutching his head, to find Bonnie perched on the edge of a vast, unsprung chair, screaming imprecations at the air. She breaks off long enough to scream at him. “Get the fuck off my bridge!” she hollers, eyes wild, fingers clawing at the armrests.
Huw leaps back a step, dropping the huge, suspicious sausage he’s been gnawing from one end of. His diaper unravels as he stumbles.
Bonnie snorts, then gets back control. “Aw, sorry, darlin’. I’m hopped up on hateballs. It’s the only way I can get enough fucking spleen to make this buggery bollocky scum-sucking ship go where I tell it.” She sighs and digs around the seat cushion, coming up with a puffer, which she inserts briefly into the corner of each eye. The tension melts out of her skinny shoulders and corded neck as Huw watches, alarmed.
“You look like a Welsh Gandhi,” she tells him, giggling. Her lips loll loose; she stands and rolls over toward him with a half-drunken wobble. Then she throws her arms around his neck and fastens her teeth on his shoulder, worrying at his trapezium.
The teapot whistles appreciatively. Bonnie gives it a savage kick that sends it skittering back into the corridor.
“You need a wash, beautiful,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be microbial. Nearly out of fresh water. Tub’s up one level.”
“Gak,” Huw says.
“’Snot so bad.”
“It’s bugs,” he says.
“You’re hosting about three kilos of bugs right now. What’re a few more? Go.”
Huw picks up his sausage. “You know where we’re going, right?”
“Oh aye,” she says, her eyes gleaming, then whistles a snatch of “America the Beautiful.”
“And you approve?”
“Always wanted to see it.”
“They’ll burn you at stake!”
She picks up a different puffer and spritzes each eye, then bares her teeth in a savage rictus. “I’d like to see them fucking try. Bathe, you cretinous stenchpot!”
Huw settles himself among the soup of heated glass beads and bacteria and tries not to think of a trillion microorganisms gnawing away at his dried skin and sweat.
He mutters transhuman curses in groaning harmony at the battered teapot—no longer hosting the avatar of a particularly annoying iffrit, but evidently hacked by Ade and his international cadre of merry pranksters. “Why South Carolina? G’wan, you. Why there, of all places?”
He isn’t expecting a reply, but the teapot crackles for a moment; then a translucent holo of Ade appears in the air above it, wearing a belly dancer’s outfit and a sheepish expression. “Yer wot? Ah, sorry mate. Feckin’ trade union iffrit’s trying to make an alpha buffer attack on my sprites.” The image flickers then solidifies, this time wearing a bush jacket again. “Like, why South Carolina? To break the embargo, Huw. Ever since the snake-handlers crawled outta the swamps and figured the Rapture had been and gone and left ’em behind, they’ve been waiting for a chance at salvation, so I figured I’d give them you.” Ade’s likeness grins wickedly as red horns sprout from his forehead. “You and the back channel to the ambassador from the cloud. They want to meet God so bad, I figured you’d maybe like to help the natives along.”
“But they’re radioactive!” Huw says, shaking his fist at the teapot with a rattle of yeast-scented beads. “And they’re lunatics! They won’t talk to the rest of the world, because we’re corrupt degenerate satanists; they claim sovreignty over the entire solar system even though they can’t launch a sodding rocket; and they burn dissidents to death by wiring them up to transformers! Why would I want to help them?”
“Because your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to open them up to the outside universe again.” Ade smirks at him from atop the teapot.
“Fuck.” Huw subsides into the fizzing bath of beads, which are beginning to itch. Moving them around brings relief, although it’s making him a little piebald. “You want to infect the Fallen Baptist Congregations with godvomit, you be my guest—just let me watch from another continent, all right?”
“That’s an idea,” says Ade, scratching his beard absentmindedly. “Shame it’s not going to fly. But tell you what, Bonnie’s one of our crack agents. Don’t you worry, we wouldn’t risk our prophet-at-large in a backwater, mate. We’ll keep you safe as houses.”
Huw thinks of Sandra Lal, the House of the Week club, and her mini-sledge, and shudders. His arse is beginning to itch as the bacteribeads try to squeeze through his ringpiece: it’s time to get out. “If this goes wrong, so help me, I am going to make you eat this teapot,” he says, picking it up. He heads downstairs to find Bonnie again and see if she’s come down far enough off the hateballs to appreciate how squeaky-clean Ade’s messiah manqué is feeling.
The big zeppelin lurches and buzzes as it chases its shadow across the black tarry beaches and the out-of-control neomangrove jungle that has run wild across the Gulf coast. The gasoline mangroves spin their aerofoil leaves in the breeze, harnessing the wind power and pumping long-chain terpenoids into their root systems, which ultimately run all the way to the hydrocarbon refineries near Beaufort. A long-obselete relic of the feverish cross-fertilization of the North American biotechnology biz with the dinosaurs of the petroleum age, they ought by rights to have made the United States the world’s biggest source of refined petrochemicals—except that since the singularity, nobody’s buying. Oil slicks glisten in the sunlight as they spread hundreds of kilometers out into the Atlantic, where they feed a whole deviant ecosystem of carbon-sequestrating petroplankton maintained by the continental quarantine authority.