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  Fabiola turned and slapped Rand’s face. Brewster restrained her from further assault, but needlessly, for she slumped into her seat in tears.

  Rand massaged his rubescent cheek. “Such a simple operation in theory, but fraught with more than its share of emotional complications.”

  * * * *

  Rand beneath her, Brewster above, Fabiola performed slow gyrations upon the twin fleshy impalements of their cocks thickening inside her. Brewster had his inner elbows locked beneath her axillaries, hands clamped behind her neck; Rand cupped her pendulous breasts. Entrained in lubricious synchronous routines, the threesome resembled in their fluid unity some tripartite hybrid not entirely dissimilar to the dualistic being which had come into life just hours ago in the surgical theater beneath their rapt gaze.

  The trio’s movements accelerated with their growing urge toward completion. Inter-responsive sounds escaped the participants: from Fabiola, a cascade of panting mewls; from Brewster, coarse-grained grunts; from Rand, soothing wordless encouragements. Within speedy minutes, their orgasms spilled over the barrier separating potential from actualized, guttural howls an operatic accompaniment to the release. Brewster slumped sideways over onto the mattress, pulling Fabiola with him and thus levering Rand onto his side: six legs tangled like the limp fronds of sea plants.

  For a time, until they regained an ease of breathing, they did not speak. Then Brewster broke the silence.

  “I should have been kinder to her. I see that now. But I was an ignorant brute.”

  Unlinked from her lovers, Fabiola rolled over onto her back, pulling the men into a cradling embrace on either side. She said, “Kinder? Perhaps. But I doubt that any of us could have dissuaded Shelly.”

  Brewster growled. “Of course, I blame the angelmakers too. They should have refused her as an unstable volunteer.”

  “What other kind would they ever get?” Rand wryly asked.

  Fabiola suddenly said, “No one’s innocent. We’re all angelmakers.”

  Brewster rose up on one elbow, glaring. “What?”

  “I mean that the four of us had a unique dynamic that drove Shelly to her fate. And also that our society as a whole demanded her transformation. We planted a slow virus of ideation within her during childhood, and it finally came awake and transcribed itself.”

  Brewster dropped back down. “I don’t know if I buy that, Fab.”

  “It’s true nonetheless.”

  Rand’s voice held a genuine perplexity. “Do you remember, Brew, something you said years ago, when we were still in school? That the four of us made a whole? Why don’t I feel a missing part now?”

  “I suppose because Shelly’s still out there in some form.”

  Fabiola volunteered, “The findings are still imprecise regarding how much individual mentation remains after hybridization.”

  Rand shuddered. “Not much I hope.”

  Brewster sat up suddenly, as if struck by inspiration. “Let’s memorialize this day. I propose that every year on the anniversary of Shelly’s ascension, we spend a holiday together.”

  “I second the motion,” said Rand.

  Fabiola gripped both their hands. “It’s unanimous. In memory of Shelly, a school reunion each year.”

  Brewster wedged his big hand into her wet crotch, enfolding her whole sex back to her anus. “And you’ll be our homecoming queen.”

  “And you the jester,” suggested Rand.

  They all laughed before they all kissed.

  * * * *

  Brewster seemed as proud of the Sacramento Rainforest as if he himself had planted each of its towering black-leaved trees, artfully draped each of its sensate lianas, animated each of its animals, programmed each of its buzzing bugs. Conducting Fabiola and Rand down one of the region’s many public trails, hot sunlight butterscotching their bare arms, he lectured in an earnest manner most unlike his bluff self outside this artificial wilderness, delivering anecdotes, statistics and philosophy.

  “You’d never believe you were walking through what was once a metropolitan concentration, now would you? Just carting away the demolition debris to the plasma incinerators took the better part of a decade. But currently you won’t find more than a few score people at any given time within a hundred-mile radius. A handful of daytrippers, some hikers and overnight campers, and a smattering of guides such as myself. One minute.”

  Brewster had halted by a tree with a diseased limb. He bent to its base and began scraping away dead leaves from around the trunk. After a few swipes, he exposed the tree’s inset partner to the communion wafer in his wrist. Mating his wafer to the wood-rimmed one, Brewster internalized the feed, then stood.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. Just planned rot.”

  Rand effortlessly shrugged off his bulky pack, revealing a patch of sweaty shirt fabric beneath. “Lofters may have solved the weight problem, but I’ve yet to wear a pack that truly breathes.”

  Fabiola chimed in with her own complaint. “My feet are absolutely aching. How much farther, Brew?”

  “Just a mile or so. I swear, you two youngsters should apply for early systemic reboots. I had a couple of ’booters in here last week—ninety years old if they were a day—and they didn’t chaff me as much as you two.”

  Rand pulled his pack on again with an exaggerated show of self-sacrifice. “Can we help it if desk-play has made me and Fab soft? We can’t all spend every day slogging through the muck and mire like you do. Some of us have a civilization to run.”

  Brewster snorted. “Poking alien slimebags in cages in one case, and guiding giant gasbags into orbit in the other. Such noble pursuits. Let’s go, and no more bitching.”

  Brewster’s “mile or so” proved closer to five. But the sight at the end proved inspiring: a luxuriant greensward rolling at a slight inclination toward a posted but unbarricaded cliff edge.

  Brewster tapped his wafer with quick codes. “I’ll shut off the warnings from those posts while we’re here. I think we’re all mature enough not to tumble over the edge.”

  Shucking their packs onto the lawn, the three friends strolled toward the land’s edge. Attaining this stanchion-dotted terminus, they saw the boulder-studded Sacramento River churning turbulently some fifty feet below, a muddy snake writhing in digestion, death or birth.

  “The Rewilderness Institute has upped the flow for rafting season. If you two could have spared me more than a single day—”

  “But we couldn’t,” said Fabiola decisively. “So let’s enjoy our picnic and not spoil it with ‘might have beens.’”

  They retreated several yards from the dropoff and began to spread a feast from the contents of their packs. Soon, a large blanket played host to a dozen dishes, hot and cold. Rand popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and poured portions into the glasses outheld by his companions. After filling his own, he proposed a toast.

  “To Shelly, now five years gone, wherever she may be.”

  Glasses clinked, and were drained off. Fabiola swiped a finger past the corner of one eye, then smiled and said, “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

  Sprawled laughing on the blanket with his friends, Rand had a chicken leg halfway to his mouth when he froze as if an icicle had replaced his spine. He touched his wafer uselessly. “Oh sweet Gaia...”

  The others reacted to his alarm. “What is it, Rand?” “Spill it, boy!”

  Rand stood up, his face pale. “It’s a call from my Institute. All off-duty personnel to report immediately. But there’s no point. You’ll learn why any minute yourself.”

  The general alert came through to Brewster and Fabiola within seconds. Rand nodded at their dismay.

  “Billions of tons of Jovian volatiles on a collision course with the planet. An unprecedented d-link misreception. Estimated area of impact, middle of the North American west coast. Estimated energy release, two point five tunguskas. Estimated time of atmospheric entry, ninety seconds.”

  They had no time for any action save throwing themselves
to the ground and hugging each other.

  A noise like the fabric of spacetime ripping assaulted them. The horizon lit up as if a second sun had been born. A hot wind from a hotter hell arrived, and the ground flapped like a bedsheet hung out in hurricane.

  Torn treelimbs whipped past the three people. Ripped apart, the humans themselves rolled toward the cliff edge.

  A stanchion caught Fabiola in the gut. Frantically she clawed at it, managing to wrap her arms around it. It tilted out of its socket, but held at a rakish angle.

  The shaking earth eventually ceased its convulsions. Warily, Fabiola released her grip on the pole, crawled a few inches away from the cliff, and stood. She spit an oyster of bright blood, then looked about for Rand and Brewster.

  The men were nowhere in sight.

  She advanced cautiously but anxiously to the crumbling edge of the greensward. In the river, she thought to discern two bobbing heads and an occasional flailing arm.

  Fabiola looked into the sky. “The angels,” she murmured. Then, louder, demandingly, “The angels. Where are the angels?”

  She mumbled the answer as soon as it occured to her. “Helping the millions of others hurt in the cities. But surely there’s just one angel free for us.”

  She screamed then, a single name.

  “Shelly!”

  Not discontinuously, but riding the gravitic fluxlines of the planet, an angel swiftly descended. Arrowing for the water, it pulled up short of the surface and did something Fabiola had never seen an angel do.

  It hesitated.

  “Go!” Fabiola yelled.

  The angel dropped like a stone into the torrent. Seconds later, it emerged, grasping a human form like an eagle with its prey. Within moments, the dripping angel and its burden hovered above Fabiola.

  An unconscious Brewster dropped a few inches to the earth with a sodden thud.

  “I’ll help him! Get Rand! Get Rand!”

  The generic angel turned its emotionless iconic countenance to the human woman, then back to Brewster. Ignoring Fabiola’s orders, the angel plunged its resuscitory hands into Brewster’s chest.

  Fabiola began beating the angel’s unyielding back. “No, no, I’ll revive him. Help Rand!”

  The angel persisted in its fixed course of action. Only when Brewster puked and shudderingly began to breathe unassisted did the angel rise and fly back to the river.

  It returned five minutes later with Rand’s corpse.

  Fabiola supported Brewster half-sitting; the big man seemed only half-cognizant of his surroundings, stunned by the treachery of his paradise. Fabiola looked up at the floating angel that bore Rand in pieta formality.

  Fabiola spoke with a stern sadness. “He’s brain-dead, you fool. There’s nothing you or I can do for him here. Go discontinuous and bring him to a medical center. They might be able to do a neural reweave.”

  Instead of obeying, the angel deposited Rand’s body at Fabiola’s feet and scooped up Brewster. They vanished together.

  Fabiola stroked Rand’s brow and wept.

  “Was that you, Shelly? Was that you? You didn’t wait for me to answer your question. It felt just awful to die beneath the ice. It hurt worse than tongue can tell. But now it hurts much worse to live.”

  THE RELUCTANT BOOK

  There followed hard upon the death of Master Biobiblioplexist Vincent Holbrook the pressing question of how best to dispose of his extensive library. None of the unsentimental heirs to the moldering Holbrook estate cared to assume the daily demands of such a large collection of books. The motley assortment of assignees—amongst them various second cousins, great-nephews, and assorted ex-brothers-in-law left over from the multiple marriages of Holbrook’s two serially promiscuous sisters, Marlys and Taffy—were all a decidedly illiterate lot. No one was inclined to assume responsibility for even a limited number of the approximately five hundred volumes left forlorn at librarian Holbrook’s passing, for the selfish heirs simply had no use for such arcane objects. (Complicating matters, the Catalogue had gone missing upon Holbrook’s demise, so that an exact tally of the library’s contents was lacking.)

  A lanky, happily seedy and reclusive fellow well into his second century (although fated by a lurking cerebral aneurysm undiagnosed by his glitchy domestic homeobox never to embark upon a third), given to dressing in fusty non-regenerative clothing prone to showcasing every gravy stain and every dribble of the pungent sengchaw constantly lumped into his cheek, Holbrook had been devoted to his library, sparing no expense on housing and maintaining his collection. His own living conditions at the cavernous, crumbling mansion named Rueulroald betrayed commensurate economies. But Holbrook’s bookbarn was assuredly first class, the envy of many of his fellow MBs.

  Occasional sotto voce grumbles from his uncaring heirs during his lifetime about how the old man was wasting his money—actually, for all practical purposes, their money—on such a self-indulgent hobby failed to disturb the equanimity or enthusiasm of the doddering bibliophile. He managed to ignore even the ravings of one particularly vindictive niece who, in an act of psychic displacement transparent to everyone but herself, speculated loudly that Holbrook actually derived pleasure from the frustration of his nearest and dearest. Why else would he wantonly continue to pour their dwindling inheritance into the acquisition of new volumes and the multiplication of his existing ones?

  The why was simple, had anyone cared to inquire: Holbrook fancied himself a scholar, and boasted a scholar’s unswerving dedication to the pursuit of knowledge above all else. And in truth, out of his well-stocked, heavily permuted, and continually refreshed library had flowed some original contributions in a number of fields: stellar intelligence; gravitokarmic mechanics; intractability parsing; asteroidal archaeology; quantum erotogenics; string collecting; creative teratogenesis; and even those neglected twin domains, once upon a time so creatively mined, fiction and poetry. Holbrook had seen a number of successes, receiving invitations from various ahuman judging intelligences to port his findings out of his books and into the relevant cybernetic audiovisual datawebs that formed the real repositories of useful information in Holbrook’s era.

  But deriving all these entertaining and educational results from his books was an arduous and demanding task, admitting of little nonbookish relaxation or convivial pursuits even with fellow MBs. His hobby was conducive even to monomania, perhaps, and Holbrook had paid the ultimate price for his interests.

  And soon now, so would his books.

  * * * *

  MB Kratchko Stallkamp resembled a constitutionally ill-tempered, mangy crane recently denied its dinner. Stalky legs encased in yellow pipestem pantaloons; a roundish torso fluffed out with a weskin of synthetic quills fashionable over fifty years ago; hunched winglike shoulders and perpetually scrunched-down head resulting in ears nearly on a level with his Order of the Bookbinders epaulets; and a beaky nose and hard eyes intent on the main chance of spearing something. The wispy hair partially concealing his scabby scalp anomalously evoked the downy plumage of a chick. As if his avian semblance were not offputting enough, antique eyeglasses retrofitted with intelligent actilenses lent Stallkamp the impossible air of a goggling time-traveler from the Reductionist Millennia.

  Ushered from the wintry collonaded front porch into the cold corridors of Rueulroald by a gimpy Turing-five factotum (one of the few functioning servants left on the estate, an antique whom Holbrook had chosen perversely to address as “The Venerable Bede”), Stallkamp clutched to his quilled chest, as if suspicious of imminent theft, a battered leather case whose handle had long gone missing.

  “Allow me to conduct you to the mysteries,” said The Venerable Bede.

  Stallkamp barked, “What! What’s that? I’ll have no truck with mysteries of any stripe!”

  The Venerable Bede opened a panel under its left armpit and reset a switch. “Excuse me, I meant the mistresses.”

  “Very well then. Lead on.”

  Lame leg evoking a regular plastic knocking, the
factotum conducted the human visitor through many a drafty, dusty hall hung with animated tapestries whose ancient routines ran only spastically now, and through many a polycarbon-cobwebbed chamber where only the glowing LED eyes of artifical spiders illuminated their way. In one vast high-ceilinged ballroom, sentry bats squeaked from on high, alert for intrusions by any of the myriad types of rogue colonizing insects—escapees from hobbyist workbenches—that populated the dense forests around the manse, those groves themselves engineered so long ago that the names of their designers no longer erupted in spontaneous stipples from bark or leaf.

  Finally the pair reached the center of the house, a warm, well-lighted kitchen. The heady fragrance of brewing Estruvial Spice tea filled the room with a synthetic allure. In one corner of the kitchen a cot with rumpled covers indicated as plainly as speech that here had Holbrook slept, as well as taken his rudimentary meals, ceding the rest of the house to moth and decay.

  “The mysteries,” announced The Venerable Bede, then departed.

  Seated at a big wooden table with a warped and scarred top were Marlys and Taffy Holbrook. The sisters both exhibited the high-gloss perfections of the extensively reconfigured elite, although each possessed her own individual style. Marlys had had her scalp hair eliminated and facial features minimized: eyes, nose, nostrils, ears and mouth reduced to the barest pinpoint functionality across a head bare as an egg. The result sketched the nearly empty china face of a doll whose maker had run out of materials or ingenuity or both. Taffy boasted a leonine head of tawny hair framing a bestial living mask. The end of her leathery snout gleamed wetly, her whiskers vibrating with each breath. Marlys wore a pinafore and flouncy skirt, Taffy an elastic suit striped from its scooped neck to ankles.

  “MB Stallkamp,” purred Taffy. “Please, take a seat.”

  Marlys’s high voice emerged as if from a paper-bellows-and-bamboo-reed mechanism of no large size. “Yes. Join us in some tea.”

  Stallkamp waved away both offers brusquely. “No time for socializing. I’m only interested in the books.”