Sam returns with a serious-looking anime-bike dangling from each hand. “alt.pave-the-earth,” he says, setting them down. His voice is bemused, professorial. “I’ll go get the sidecar.”
“He’ll need a space suit,” Doc calls after him. “What’re you, about a medium?”
Huw, staring wordlessly at the stretched and striated bikes with their angular moldings, opens his mouth. “I’m a 107-centimeter chest,” he says.
“Ah, we don’t go in for that metric eurofaggotry around here, son. Don’t really matter much. Space suits never fit too good. You’ll get used to it. It’s only six hours.”
Sam returns with a low-slung sidecar under one arm and a suit of Michelin Man armor over his shoulders.
“It’s very ergonomic,” he says tectonically as he sits the suit down next to Huw’s folding lawn chair, then goes to work attaching the car to one of the bikes.
Huw fumbles with the Michelin suit, eventually getting the legs pulled on.
“Binds a bit at the crotch,” he says, hoping for some sympathy.
“Yeah, it’ll do that,” says Doc.
Huw modestly turns his back and reaches down to adjust himself. As he does so, he fumbles with the familiar curve of the brass teapot. Peeking down, he sees a phosphorescent miniature holographic Ade staring back up at him.
“Quick! Hide me,” Adrian says.
Huw puts his hand where he’d expect to find a pocket, and a little hatch pops open, exposing a hollow cavity in the thigh. He sneaks the teapot into it and dogs the hatch shut. “I’m ready, I think,” he says, turning round again.
Doc and Sam have already suited up; they’re waiting impatiently for Huw to get ready. The bikes are bolted either side of the sidecar, and Doc waves Huw into the cramped seat in the middle. Waddling in the suit, clutching a portable aircon pack, Huw has a hard time climbing in. Everything sounds muffled except the whirr of the helmet fans. A pronounced smell of stale BVDs and elderly rubber assaults his nose periodically, as if the suit is farting in his face. “Let’s go,” Sam says, and they kick off toward the doorway, which irises open to admit a trickling rain of ants as the bikes roar and spurt gouts of flame against the darkness.
The blast of the jet engines doesn’t die down, nor does the laser-show strobing off the pixelboards on the outsized fuel tanks, but somehow Huw manages to snooze through the next couple of hours: it’s probably the moonshine. Doc is rambling at length about some recondite point of randite ideology, illuminating his own rugged self-reliance with the merciless glare of A-is-A objectivist clarity, but after a few minutes Huw discovers two controls on his chest plate that raise his opinion of the suit designers: a drinking straw primed with white lightning, and the volume control on the radio. As his sort-of jailers drive him along a potholed track lined with the filigree skeletons of ant-nibbled trees, he kicks back and tries to get his head together. If it wasn’t for the eventual destination, he could almost begin to enjoy himself, but there’s a nagging sense of weirdness in his stomach (where the godvomit still nestles, awaiting a communicative impulse) and he can’t help worrying about what he’ll do once they get to Glory City.
An indeterminate time passes, and Huw is awakened by a sharp prodding pain near his bladder. “Uh.” He lolls in the suit, annoyed.
“Psst, keep it quiet. They think you’re sleeping.” The prodding sensation goes away, replaced by a buzzing voice from just north of his bladder.
“Ade?” Huw whispers.
“No, it’s the tooth fairy. Listen, have you seen Bonnie?”
“Not lately. She went for—” Huw pauses. “You know I landed bad?”
“Shit. So that’s why you’re with Doc. Have they got her?”
“No.” Huw desperately wants to scratch his head in puzzlement, but his arms are folded down inside the sidecar and he doesn’t dare let Sam or Doc figure he’s awake. “Look, I woke up and the doctor—is he a real doc?—was trying to fix my neck. A motor fell on my head. Bonnie got him to help, but then she left and I haven’t seen her.”
“Cholera and crummy buttons.” Ade’s tinny voice sounds upset. “They’re not trustworthy, mate. Sell you as soon as look at you, those two. She said you were hurt, but—”
“You don’t know where she is, either,” Huw says.
“Nope.” They ride along in near silence for a while.
“What’s the big idea?” Huw asks, trying to sustain a sense of detachment. “Packing me off to bongo-bongo land to convert the cannibals is all very fucking well, but I thought you said this would be safe as houses?”
“Um, well, there’s been a kinda technical hitch in that direction,” Adrian says. “But we’ll get that sorted out, don’t you worry yer little head over it. Main thing is, you don’t wanna stay with the randroids any longer than you have to, got that? Show ’em a clean pair of heels, mate. When you get to Glory City, head for the John the Baptist Museum of Godless Evolution and find the Steven Jay Gould Lies and Blasphemy exhibit. There’s a trapdoor under the Hallucigenia mock-up leading to an atheist’s hole, and if you get there, I’ll send someone to pick you up. ’Kay?”
“Wait—,” Huw says, but he’s too late. The buzzing stops, just as Doc reaches over and cuffs Huw around the helmet. “What?” Huw cranks the volume on his suit radio.
“—said, you paying attention, boy?” Doc demands. There’s a suspicious gleam in his eye, although Huw isn’t certain it isn’t just the effect of looking at him through a thin layer of toughened glass across which wander a handful of very lost ants.
“I was asleep,” Huw says.
“Bah.” Doc rubs off the ants, then grabs the brakes. “Well, son, I was just saying: only a couple of hours now until we get there. ...”
The road is unlit and there’s little traffic. What there is seems to consist mostly of high-tech bicycle rickshaws retrofitted for unapologetic hydrocarbon combustion, and ancient rusting behemoth pickups that belch thick blue petroleum smoke—catalytic converters and fuel cells being sins against man’s deity-designated dominance over nature. The occasional wilted and ant-nibbled wreaths plaintively underscore the messages on the tarnished and bullet-speckled road signs: keep right and slow trucks.
The landscape is dotted with buildings that have the consistency of halvah. These are the remains of man’s folly and his pride, now bored out of 90 percent of their volume to fill the relentless bellies of the Hypercolony. Individually, the ants crawling across his faceplate—also along his gauntlets, over the sexy sizzle of the LEDs, and crisped up in a crust around the flame-nozzles—appear to be disjointed and uncoordinated. But now, here, confronted with the evidence of the Hypercolony’s ability to coordinate collective action from its atomic units, Huw is struck with a deep, atavistic terror. There is an Other here, loose on the continent, capable of bringing low all that his kind has built. Suddenly, Huw’s familiar corporeality, the source of so much personal pride, starts to feel like a liability.
The aircon unit makes a sputtery noise that Huw feels rather than hears through the cavities of the michelin-suit. He’s tried wiggling the aircon umblicus in its suit-seal, but now the air coming out of it is hot and wet and smells of burning insulation. He’s panting and streaming with sweat by the time the dim white dome of Glory City swims out of the darkness ahead to straddle the road like a monstrous concrete carbuncle. Sam guns the throttle like a tireless robot, while Doc snors in the saddle, his mouth gaping open beneath his mustache, blurred behind the ant-crawling Lexan of his faceplate. “How much longer?” Huw says, the first words he’s spoken in an hour.