“Three miles. Then we park up and take a room for the night in Saint Pat’s Godly Irish Motel. No smoking, mind,” Sam adds.
Huw stares in grim, panting silence as they take the uphill slope toward the base of the massive, kilometers-high Fuller dome that caps the former city. Impregnated with neurotoxins, the dome is the ultimate defense against the Hypercolony. They ride into the city past a row of gibbeted criminals, their caged bones picked clean by ants, then into the deserted and gaping air lock, large enough to accommodate an armored batallion. What Huw initially takes for an old-fashioned air-shower turns out to be a gas chamber, venting something that makes his throat close when he gets a hint of a whiff of it through the suit’s broken aircon. After ten minutes of gale-force nerve gas, most of the ants are washed away, and those that remain appear to have died. Sam produces a stiff whisk broom and, with curious gentleness, brushes him free of the few thousand corpses that have become anchored by their mouthparts to his suit. They he hands Huw the whisk so that he may return the favor. Only after they are all thoroughly decontaminated do the inner doors to Glory City open wide, sucking them into the stronghold of the left-behind.
Once within the dome, Huw finds that Glory City bears little resemblance to any media representations of pre-singularity NorAm cities he’s ever seen. For one thing, the roads are narrow and the buildings tall, leaning together like a sinister crowd of drunkards, the olde-world, olde-town feel revived to make maximum use of the cubic volume enclosed by the dome. For another thing, about half the tallest buildings seem to be spiky towers, like the old medieval things back home that he associates with seamy nightclubs. It takes him a moment to realize: Those are churches! He’s never imagined so many temples existing before, let alone in a single city.
The next thing he notices are the adverts. They’re everywhere. On billboards and paving stones and the sides of parked monster trucks. (And, probably, tattooed on the hides of the condemned prisoners outside before the ants ate them.) Half the ads are public service announcements, and the other half are religious slogans. It’s hard to know which category some go in: enjoy christ on a shingle: all the zest half the calories lower glycemic index! Whichever they are, they set his teeth on edge—so that he’s almost happy when Sam steers him into a cramped parking lot behind a tall gray slab of concrete and grunts, “This is the motel.”
It’s about two in the morning, and Huw catches himself yawning as Sam shakes Doc awake and extracts him from the sidecar. “C’mon in,” says Doc. “Let’s get some sleep. Got a long day tomorrow, son.”
The lobby of the motel is guarded by a fearsome-looking cast-iron gate. Huw unlatches his faceplate and heaves a breath: the air is humid and warm, cloying and laden with decay as sweet as a rotting tooth. Doc approaches the concierge’s desk while Sam hangs back, one meaty hand gripping Huw’s arm proprietorially. “Don’t you go getting no clever ideas,” Sam says like a quiet earthquake. “Doc tagged you with a geotracker chip. You go running away, you’ll just get him riled.”
“Uh. Okay.” Huw dry-swallows the muck lining his teeth.
Doc is at the desk, talking to a woman in long black dress. She wears a bonnet that looks like it’s nailed to her head, and she’s old, showing all the distressing signs of physical senescence. “Twenty cents for the suite,” she says, “and fifteen for the pen.” (Post-imperial deflation has taken its toll on the once-mighty dollar.) She wags a wrinkled finger under Doc’s nose: “And none of your filth!”
Doc draws himself up to his full height. “I assure you, I am here to do the Lord’s work,” he says. “Along with this misguided creep. And my assistant.”
Sam pushes Huw forward. “Doc gets the presidential suite whenever he stays here,” he says. “You get to sleep in the pen.”
“The—?”
“’Cause we don’t rightly trust you,” Sam says, pushing Huw toward a side door behind the reception area. “So a little extra security is called for.”
“Oh—,” Huw says, and stops. Oh, really now, Huw would say, except that the doc is holding at arm’s-length a squeeze bottle of something liquid and so cold that it is fogged with a rime of condensation. Huw’s throat is dry: suddenly he’s unable to ignore it.
“Thirsty, son?” the doc says, playfully jetting a stream of icy liquid in the air.
“Ahhh,” Huw says, nodding . Six hours in the suit with nothing but highly diruetic likker and any number of hours of direct sunlight in its insulated confines after the aircon broke down—he’s so dehydrated, he’s ready to piss snot.
“This a-way,” the doc says, and beckons with the bottle.
Huw lets Sam help him climb out of the sidecar, and he barely notices the rubbery feeling of his legs after hours of being cramped up in the little buggy. “Hotcha,” the doc says. “Come on, now, time’s a wastin’.” He gives the bottle another squeeze, and water spatters the dusty ground.
“Aaah,” Huw says, lumbering after it. He’s never felt quite this thirsty in all his days. Real thirsty. Thirsty as bones bleaching in the Sahara at noon during a drought.
The doc heads for a staircase behind a row of suppository-shaped elevator cages, standing open and gleaming beneath the white light of the holy sodiums overhead. Huw can barely keep up, but even if he had to drop to his knees and crawl, he’d do it. That’s holy stuff, that water, infused with the numinous glow of life itself. Didn’t the Christians have a hymn about it, “Jesus Gave Me Water”? Huw comes from a long line of trenchant Black Country atheists, a man who takes to religion the way that vegans take to huge suspicious wursts that look like cross-sectioned dachshunds, but he’s having an ecstatic experience right now, taking the stairs on trembling knees.
The doc spits on his thumb and smears the DNA across the auth-plate set in the door at the bottom of the stairs. It thinks for a long moment, then clanks open in a succession of armored layers.
“G’wan now, you’ve earned it,” the doc says, rolling the bottle into the cell behind the door.
Huw toddles after it, the Michelin suit making him waddle like he’s got a load in his diaper, but he doesn’t worry about that right now, because there’s a bottle of water with his name on it at the other side of the cell, a bottle so cold and pure that it cries out to him: Drink me! Drink me!
He’s sucking it down, feeling the cold straight through to his skull-bone, a delicious brain freeze the size of the Universe, when the teapot rattles angrily in his thigh pocket. He’s not so thirsty anymore, but there’s something else nagging at his attention. The sound is getting him down, distracting him from the sense of illumination appearing at the back of his mind’s eye as he gulps the water, so he pulls the thing out and looks at it, relaxing as he sees the shiny metal highlights gleaming happily at him.
Adrian pops out of the teapot, so angry, he’s almost war-dancing. He curses: “Fucking suggestibility ray! Bible-thumping pud-fuckers can’t be happy unless they’ve tasped someone into ecstasy. Come on, Huw, snap out of it.”
“Go ’way,” Huw mumbles. “I’m havin’ a trash-transcential-transcendental ’sperience.” He gulps some more water then squats, leaning against the wall. Something loves him, something vaster than mountains and far stronger, and it’s bringing tears to his eyes. Except the teapot will have none of it.
“Wake up, dishrag! Jesus, didn’t they tell you anything in class when you was a kid? They infuse your cerebrospinal fluid with nanobots. Some go for your hypothalamus, make you feel hungry or thirsty. Others have a built-in tropism for the god module in your temporal lobe. Tickle it with a broadband signal, and you’ll see God, angels square-dancing in heaven, fuck knows what. Get a grip on yourself!”