Aeota Read online

  Making the last turn to the site of AEOTA HQ, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The flourishing postmodern enterprise I had first visited, or the empty shell where I kept waking up after my time trips.

  But neither aspect obtained.

  Occupying an enormous footprint of land was the incredible mega-skull from the far future of Mister After All. But instead of rearing starkly bone-white, it too showed itself to be formed entirely of the DUCA rot.

  Atop the skull, the AEOTA signage proclaimed the skull’s current tenants.

  We emerged from the parked car and walked toward the door. “At least let me hold my daughter’s hand.”

  “Oh ho! How dumb do you think we are? No, there’ll be none of that monkey business.”

  We passed through a sloppy bulging parody of a door and entered a facsimile of the atrium. The same receptionist seen during my first visit was there, but of course only as a gruesome avatar of her former gorgeous self. Her equally dire coworkers came and went.

  Without necessity for clearance, Baxter and his buddies brought me and Aelita into the wobbly upper-floor office of Thomas Totenwelt Thaumas.

  Seated behind his desk on his fancy scooter, the man no longer resembled Judge Hardy so much as he looked like Mister After All. How I could not have seen the resemblance earlier, I couldn’t say.

  “Mister Ruggles! You return to us. How nice. And with your very welcome little girl. I know someone who is most eager to meet her. He has been waiting forever to get his hands on her.”

  Trying to unnerve Thaumas, I said, “I see you’ve come a long way in totalizing your affinities.”

  Thaumas’s face registered genuine puzzlement, insofar as those coarse features could.

  “What nonsense are you on about?”

  “The name of your organization.” I dredged up the acronym, which I had heard after all just about thirty-six hours ago. “The Association of Engineering Ontologists Totalizing Affinities.”

  “But that is not what our brand stands for at all! We are producers of Architecturally Engineered Organisms for Terraforming Alternities. All the splendid new constituents of the material world which you see about you come straight from our labs.”

  “Are you deranged? You didn’t create any of this. It’s all DUCA’s doing, as he floods the past with his essence.”

  Thaumas triggered his intercom. “Ms. Bagasse, would you please have Dr. Ponto come in?”

  Within half a minute, the formerly beautiful secretary—who now smelled less like a florist shop and more like a pile of imperfectly devoured crab shells under a hot sun—ushered in Microbial Matt, the bastard who had pushed me off the ledge and started this whole mad odyssey.

  “Hey, Vern, good to see you. You’re back for another tour, I take it.”

  I lunged at Ponto, but was almost immediately brought up short by Brevis Baxter.

  “Dr. Ponto, please tell our guests about the various organisms we have bred to perfect the environment.”

  Ponto launched into some gobbledygook that I paid no attention to. My mind was frantically scrabbling about the confines of its cage for a way out of this. If only I could grab ahold of Aelita, maybe she could send us away from here somehow, as when her Archean counterpart had blasted me off to Venus.

  Now Thaumas was talking again. “So you must assuredly now admit, Mister Ruggles, that there is no need to invoke imaginary entities who are responsible for these wondrous changes. All such conceptions are delusions on your part. Your mind is defective, or you would surely concede the truth. Occam’s razor still applies. The simplest answer is most likely correct. There are no fanciful creatures at the far origin and ending of our world, directing our destiny, contending for dominance. LUCA and DUCA, what is there to choose between them? No, there is only science, here and now.”

  “If there’s only your perverted human science, then who are you working for? Who wants my daughter?”

  “I didn’t say anyone wants your daughter, did I?”

  “Yes, you dirty fucker, you did!”

  Thaumas motored out in his chair from behind his desk. His identity with Mister After All had solidified even more unmistakably.

  “Let me have a closer look at her. Maybe she could be of some use to us. What a sweet little child she is. And very talented too, no doubt, with such a smart father.”

  Aelita remained unmoved by Thaumas’s approach. But she inexplicably began to whine.

  “Daddy, I’m hungry! Don’t you have anything for me?”

  “C’mon, Aelita, drop the kiddy act! Do something! Please, before it’s too late.”

  “I’m hungry, Daddy! Anything, please! Even just a candy—”

  The Famous Hades Fireball seemed to leap from my pocket into my hand. I popped the sealed inflated cellophane and the crimson sphere shot out across the space between Aelita and me like a missile.

  With her hands pinned by her guards, she snapped it out of the air like a dog with a snack or a trained seal with a fish.

  And then we were outta there faster than light.

  24. HORN, OM, SUN, HOME

  Lying flat, I opened my eyes after an indefinite period of unconsciousness, sensed and saw that I was naked under an empty sky. Turning my head, I regarded Aelita and found her in the same condition. And as on my first visit to the Archean, I could see that she was not precisely my daughter, not a little girl but rather some other more ancient vessel who shared a spiritual and physical kinship with my child.

  A warmish sun shone down on us, and I was so excited and relieved to be out of the grip of Thaumas and his crew that I jumped up happily to my feet, and took in the wider view.

  I couldn’t believe it. We were not in the healthy primordial Archean. We had been transported to DUCA’s dying era, four billion years in the future. The pustulant pestilence that had invaded my age was everywhere, just as on my last visit. Not aggressively occupying many different forms, true, yet still quietly dominant and universal.

  Aelita had come to her feet. She looked utterly subdued.

  “What happened?” I demanded. “Why are we here? I thought that Fireball was our ticket to your home, where we could regroup or something.”

  For the first time, Aelita sounded weary. “It was supposed to be. But the fact that we are here means that the Dark Archon has become too strong. We were too late. He’s won. There is nothing left except for us to acknowledge our defeat.”

  Her words pained me horribly. I grabbed her by her slim child’s shoulders and shook her. “No! We can’t give up. There must be something more we can do!”

  “There is not.”

  I slumped. “So you’ll just surrender to him when he shows up?”

  “That is my only plan.”

  “Well, I’m not going down without a fight!”

  I looked about the monoscape frantically for some sort of weapon, but of course there was nothing. Were these seaweed strands strong enough to use as a garrote? I bent down and tried to disentangle and rip out a length of the crappy fabric.

  “DUCA arrives.”

  Mister After All was levitating down from the heavens. When I could distinguish his wizened face, I saw it was beaming with vicious satisfaction.

  He alighted upon the infinite raft about five or six yards away from us. He beckoned to my daughter.

  “You must come to me now.”

  I yelled something wordless and hurled myself upon him.

  The Dark Archon batted me aside as if I were a shuttlecock. The force of the blow left me dazed. I thought maybe I had some busted ribs. I tried to lever myself up, but only made it halfway.

  Aelita was walking calmly to meet Mister After All. And with every step she aged.

  From five years old she passed through adolescence and young womanhood in just a few paces, becoming mature and beautiful. In only seconds, I got to experience what my daughter would have grown up into, all the stages of her maturation. She reminded me of the Green Lady in her flush of vitality. As she continued to walk, she
continued to age. Her twenties passed in a step or two, then she was into her middle age.

  By the time she stood face to face with Mister After All, she looked exactly like the venerable Priscilla Cohen.

  The old woman looked down at me. “Goodbye, Daddy. Trust me still.”

  A triumphant DUCA said nothing. He merely enfolded Aelita in his embrace. But his embrace did not stop when his arms met. His form flowed and expanded until he was a faceless blanket enveloping Aelita, just as his protean minions had engulfed the other Priscilla.

  A similar obscene humping peristalsis worked upon the swaddled Aelita until she was fully dissolved and absorbed. She never made a sound, my little girl, as she vanished into the gullet of a sterile futurity. Then Mister After All pulled himself back into his human semblance.

  He leered down at me. “Now she is mine forever. You, I leave here to perish.”

  Mister After All made as if to surge into the sky. But he found himself rooted.

  His feet were anchored in a pool of brilliant healthy vibrant green substance.

  He jerked up first one leg without being able to disengage from the elastic stuff, then the other.

  “No! This cannot be!”

  The green wave flowed up his body, and at the same time radiated outward across the microbial mat. Faster and faster it spread, until all was an Archean, Perelandrian green from horizon to horizon.

  Seemingly by sheer force of will DUCA had halted the green while just a few square inches of his bald crown remained unconverted. His eyes bulged and his mouth gaped helplessly.

  But the green blew past his last defenses, and he was entirely swamped.

  He began to melt away, subsumed into the microbial mat, until he was just a pair of desperate eyes embedded in the raft. Then those too were gone.

  My ribs still ached. Nonetheless I crawled to where Mister After All had vanished. Sobbing, stroking the surface with my palm to invoke some sign of Aelita, I called her name over and over.

  But there was no response. My daughter was gone forever.

  When I gave up, a curious wave of heaviness began to creep along my limbs, until it finally filled my brain with sleep.

  And I awoke and found me here on the cold hillside.

  Well, it wasn’t actually cold, and the patch of sun-kissed grass was flat. But that famous line captured what I felt.

  I was lying, all clothed, in a woodland clearing next to my car. Beautiful, multiplex reality was restored, thanks to Aelita’s sacrifice.

  The whole world seemed normal.

  Or at least as normal as it ever tended to be.

  Standing up, I felt great.

  No structure associated with AEOTA, neither mega-skull nor factory, reared in this spot. Instead, from the natural clearing a dirt road arrowed off, presumably leading back to the paved highway.

  A quick recon showed no traces of anyone here with me, now or in the obvious past. I had no option but to get in my car and drive off, alone, without the child who had accompanied me.

  Average traffic greeted me on the highway. I pointed my car toward the city.

  Partway home, I saw a familiar farm. But the spiffy unadorned barn did not bear the ghost sign proclaiming chew aeota plug. I pulled into the property.

  Philip Kendrick Langham and Martha Washington emerged, smiling.

  “Hey, dude, what’s up?”

  “Is this Aeota Farm? Do you sell eggs?”

  “Afraid we can’t help you with that, bro. That’s not us. El and Double-You Floral. We raise tulips. Wholesale only.”

  “All right then. Thanks anyhow. Good luck with everything.”

  I didn’t dare return to the trailer where Yulia lived, nor to my own apartment. So I went to my office. The familiar key worked and I let myself gratefully inside.

  I surely deserved a drink. But there was no booze anywhere in the office, not even an empty bottle in the trash. After searching every niche, I suddenly realized that the old compulsion to swig some tequila at every opportunity had left me, as if a tub full of dirty water had finally ebbed down the drain.

  My Nokia weighed heavily in my pocket. I used it to call Marty Quartz.

  “Marty, it’s me, Vern. You won’t believe what happened after Aelita and I left you.”

  “Whoa man, slow down. After you and who left who?”

  “After I broke Ströma’s artificial intelligence. He’s not going to sue us, is he?”

  “I have no idea what you’ve been smoking, my lad, but you could have been kind enough to share it.”

  “But I…Never mind. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I powered up my desktop computer and checked today’s date.

  It was sixteen months before I had ever Googled “aeota.”

  I did so now again.

  Zero hits.

  My Nokia rang, almost sending me through the ceiling.

  The voice of my lawyer, Herb Scroup, said, “Vern, hello, how ya doing? Listen, I need you in the office to sign these papers for the divorce. Yulia’s guy is on my ass about it. We can’t put it off any longer.”

  “Burn them.”

  “What?”

  “Burn the papers. I’m going home.”

  The doublewide did not display the neatness of my last visit, nor the shabbiness of my abandonment years. Nor was there a tricycle or any kid’s toys lying about. Rather, the whole scene seemed to teeter on a knife’s edge of possibilities, with a different outcome awaiting on either side.

  I banged on the door like a madman. Yulia came quickly. Her face did not exactly register glee at my manifestation on her doorstep.

  “Oh, it’s you, Vern. What do you want?”

  “Yulia, baby, it’s not what I want. It’s not what you want. It’s what the universe wants. We have to get back together.”

  Suspicion warred with hope in her face. “I thought you gave up the booze.”

  “I did, I did. Or I will. Whatever. Our wishes don’t really matter. What matters is us starting a family. We really need to have a kid. Everything depends on it!”

  Yulia tried to compose her face into a stern mask. But her incompetent lips only made her look adorable—as adorable as our unborn daughter. “You’d better come in out of the sun, Vern. But just for a minute. No funny stuff. We’re still separated, remember, even if the divorce hasn’t happened yet.”

  “It’s not gonna happen, believe me.” I felt the Nokia vibrate with an incoming text.

  “Just let me get this, Yule. Then we’ll sit down and really talk.”

  The unexpected text read:

  herald unity today at home

  Followed by:

  PRINT TEXT Y/N?

  I chose yes, and the phone spat out its impossible fortune-cookie slip.

  I handed the paper to Yulia. She studied it, then looked quizzically at me.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Baby, that’s just what we’re gonna find out!”

  AEOTA

  Copyright ©Paul Di Filippo 2019

  COVER ART

  Copyright © Franco Brambilla 2019

  First published in hardcover in February 2019 by PS Publishing Ltd. by arrangement with the author, this eBook edition is published in March 2019. All rights reserved by the author. The right of Paul Di Filippo to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 978-1-78636-243-8

  PS Publishing Ltd

  Grosvenor House, 1 New Road

  Hornsea, HU18 1PG, England

  [email protected]

  www.pspublishing.co.uk

  Contents

  A E O T A

  For Deborah, my eternal mystery

  1. GLASS, BOX, CALENDAR, STARS

  2. ONE BOURBON, ONE SCOTCH, ONE SNEER

  3. AEOTA AND AEOTA

  4. LOCAVORE APOCALYPSE

  5. JUDGE DREAD

  6. A VISIT WITH MICROBIAL MATT

  7. “A TITLE ON THE DO
OR DESERVES A VAALBARA ON THE FLOOR”

  8. ROLL OUT THE WELCOME MAT

  9. INTERVIEW WITH AN ANCESTOR

  10. INTERVIEW WITH A VENUSIAN

  11. WAKING UP HIGH AND DRY

  12. HOMECOMING

  13. BEDTIME STORY

  14. INTERVIEW WITH A DESCENDANT

  15. DOUBLE, DOUBLE, OUT OF THE BUBBLE

  16. TAKE YOUR DAUGHTER TO WORK DAY

  17. RIDE WITH A WELL-KNOWN STRANGER

  18. HOLTZCLAW IN HELL

  19. CANDY FROM A STRANGER

  20. INVASION OF THE CHRONOSPORES

  21. INTERVIEW WITH AEOTA, INTERVIEW WITH AN ARTIST

  22. GO WITH THE FLOW

  23. RETURN TO AEOTA

  24. HORN, OM, SUN, HOME

  AEOTA