Out of a clear sky on a fine summer morning, a buckshot rattle of hailstones across the living pangolin plates of Pertinax’s rooftop announced the arrival of some mail.
Inside his cozy, low-ceilinged hutch, with its corner devoted to an easel and canvases and art supplies, its shelves full of burl sculptures, its workbench that hosted bubbling retorts and alembics and a universal proseity device, Pertinax paused in the feeding of his parrot tulips. Setting down the wooden tray of raw meat chunks, he turned away from the colorfully enameled soil-filled pots arrayed on his bright windowsill. The parrot tulips squawked at this interruption of their lunch, bobbing their feathery heads angrily on their long succulent neck stalks. Pertinax chided them lovingly, stroking their crests while avoiding their sharp beaks. Then, hoisting the hem of his long striped robe to expose his broad naked paw-feet, he hurried outdoors.
Fallen to the earth after bouncing from the imbricated roof, the hailstones were already nearly melted away to invisibility beneath the temperate sunlight, damp spots on the undulant greensward upon which Pertinax’s small but comfortable dwelling sat. Pertinax wetted a finger, raised it to gauge the wind’s direction, then directed his vision upward and to the north, anticipating the direction from which his mail would arrive. Sure enough, within a minute a lofty cloud had begun to form, a flocculent painterly smudge on the monochrome canvas of the turquoise sky.
The cloud assumed coherence and substance, drawing into itself its necessary share of virgula and sublimula omnipresent within the upper atmosphere. After another minute or two, the cloud possessed a highly regular oval outline and had descended to within five meters of the ground. Large as one of the windows in Pertinax’s hutch, the cloud halted its progress at this level, and its surface began to acquire a sheen. The sheen took on the qualities of an ancient piece of translucent plastic, such as the Overclockers might cherish. Then Pertinax’s animated mail appeared across the cloud’s surface, as the invisible components of the cloud churned in coordinated fashion.
Sylvanus’s snouty whiskered face smiled, but the smile was grim, as was his voice resonating from the cloud’s fine-grain speakers.
“Pertinax my friend, I regret this interruption of your studies and recreations, but I have some dramatic news requiring our attention. It appears that the Overclockers at their small settlement known as ‘Chicago’ are about to launch an assault on the tropospherical mind. Given their primitive methods, I doubt that they can inflict permanent damage. But their mean-spirited sabotage might very well cause local disruptions before the mind repairs itself. I know you have several projects running currently, and I would hate to see you lose any data during a period of limited chaos. I would certainly regret any setbacks to my ongoing modeling of accelerated hopper embryogenesis. Therefore, I propose that a group of those wardens most concerned form a delegation to visit the Overclockers and attempt to dissuade them from such malicious tampering. Mumbaugh has declined to participate—he’s busy dealing with an infestation of hemlock mites attacking the forests of his region—but I have firm commitments from Cimabue, Tanselle and Chellapilla. I realize that it is irksome to leave behind the comforts of your home to make such a trip. But I am hoping that I may count on your participation as well. Please reply quickly, as time is of the essence.”
Its mail delivered, the cloud wisped away into its mesoscopic constituent parts. A light misty drizzle refreshed Pertinax’s face. But otherwise he was left with only the uneasy feelings occasioned by the message.
Of course he would help Sylvanus. Interference with the tropospherical mind could not be tolerated. The nerve of those Overclockers!
Not for the first time, nor probably the last, Pertinax ruefully contemplated the dubious charity of the long-departed Upflowered.
When ninety-nine-point-nine percent of humanity had abandoned the Earth for greener intergalactic pastures during the Upflowering, the leavetakers had performed several final tasks. They had re-arcadized the whole globe, wiping away nearly every vestige of mankind’s crude twenty-second-century proto-civilization, and restocked the seas and plains with many beasts. They had established Pertinax and his fellows—a small corps of ensouled, spliced and redacted domestic animals—as caretakers of the restored Earth. They had charitably set up a few agrarian reservations for the small number of dissidents and malfunctioning humans who chose to remain behind, stubbornly unaltered in their basic capabilities from their archaic genetic baseline. And they had uploaded every vestige of existing machine intelligence and their knowledge bases to a new platform: an airborne network of miniscule, self-replenishing components, integrated with the planet’s meteorological systems.
During the intervening centuries, the remaining archaic humans—dubbed the Overclockers for their uncanny devotion to both speed and the false quantization of holistic imponderables—had gradually dragged themselves back up to a certain level of technological achievement. Now, it seemed, they were on the point of making a nuisance of themselves. This could not be tolerated.
Hurrying back into his compact domicile, Pertinax readied his reply to Sylvanus. From a small door inset in one wall, which opened onto a coop fixed to the outside wall, Pertinax retrieved a mail pigeon. He placed the docile murmuring bird on a tabletop and fed it some special seed, scooped from one compartment of a feed bin. While he waited for the virgula and sublimula within the seed to take effect, Pertinax supplied his own lunch: a plate of carrots and celery, the latter smeared with delicious bean paste. By the time Pertinax had finished his repast, cleaning his fur with the side of one paw-hand all the way from muzzle to tufted ear tips, the pigeon was locked into recording mode, staring ahead fixedly, as if hypnotized by a predator.
Pertinax positioned himself within the bird’s field of vision. “Sylvanus my peer, I enlist wholeheartedly in your mission! Although my use of the tropospheric mind is negligible compared to your own employment of the system, I do have all my statistics and observations from a century of avian migrations stored there. Should the data and its backups be corrupted, the loss of such a record would be disastrous! I propose to set out immediately by hopper for ‘Chicago.’ Should you likewise leave upon receipt of this message, I believe our paths will intersect somewhere around these coordinates.” Pertinax recited latitude and longitude figures. “Simply ping my hopper when you get close enough, and we’ll meet to continue the rest of our journey together. Travel safely.”
Pertinax recited the verbal tag that brought the pigeon out of its trance. The bird resumed its lively attitude, plainly ready to perform its share of the mail delivery. Pertinax cradled the bird against his oddly muscled chest and stepped outside. He lofted the pigeon upwards, and it began to stroke the sky bravely.
Once within the lowest layers of the tropospheric mind, the bird would have its brain states recorded by an ethereal cap of spontaneously congregating virgula and sublimula, and the bird would be free to return to its coop.
Pertinax’s message would thus enter the meterological medium and be propagated across the intervening leagues to Sylvanus. Like a wave in the ocean, the information was not dependent upon any unique set of entities to constitute its identity, and so could travel faster than simple forward motion of particles might suggest. To span the globe from Pertinax to the antipodes took approximately twelve hours, and Sylvanus lived much closer. Not as fast as the ancient quantum-entanglement methods extant in the days before the Upflowering. But then again, the pace of life among the stewards was much less frenzied than it had been among the ancestors of the Overclockers.
Having seen his mail on its way, Pertinax commenced the rest of his preparations for his trip. He finished feeding his parrot tulips, giving them a little extra to see them through his time away from home. If delayed overlong, Pertinax knew they would estivate safely till his return. Then from a cupboard he took a set of large saddlebags. Into these pouches he placed victuals for himself and several packets of multipurpose pigeon seed, as well as a few treats and vitamin pills to supplement the forage which his hopper would subsist on during the journey. He looked fondly at his neat, comfortable bed, whose familiar refuge he would miss. No taking that of course! But the hopper would provide a decent alternative. Pertinax added a few other miscellaneous items to his pack, then deemed his provisions complete.
Stepping outside, Pertinax took one fond look back inside before shutting and latching his door. He went around shuttering all the windows as a precaution against the storms that sometimes accompanied the more demanding calculations of the tropospheric mind. From the pigeon coop he withdrew three birds and placed them in a loosely woven wicker carrier. Then he took a few dozen strides to the hopper corral, formed of high walls of living ironthorn bush.
Pertinax’s hopper was named Flossy, a fine mare. The redacted Kodiak Kangemu stood three meters tall at its shoulders. Its pelt was a curious blend of chestnut fur and gray feathers, its fast-twitch-muscled legs banded with bright yellow scales along the lower third above its enormous feet. A thick strong tail jutted backward for almost half Flossy’s length.
Pertinax tossed Flossy a treat, which she snapped from the air with her long jaws. In the stable attached to the corral, Pertinax secured a saddle. This seat resembled a papoose or backpack, with two shoulder straps. Outside again, Pertinax opened the corral gate—formed of conventional timbers—and beckoned to Flossy, who obediently came out and hunkered down. Holding the saddle up above his head, Pertinax aided Flossy in shrugging into the seat. He cinched the straps, then hung his saddlebags from one lower side of the seat and the wicker basket containing the pigeons from the other. Deftly Pertinax scrambled up, employing handholds of Flossy’s fur, and ensconced himself comfortably, the seat leaving his arms free but cradling his back and neck. His head was now positioned above Flossy’s, giving him a clear view of his path. He gripped Flossy’s big upright ears firmly yet not harshly, and urged his mount around to face northeast.
“Gee up, Flossy,” said Pertinax, and they were off.
Flossy’s gait was the queerest mixture of hopping, vaulting, running and lumbering, a mode of locomotion unknown to baseline creation. But Pertinax found it soothing, and his steed certainly ate up the kilometers.
For the first few hours, Pertinax enjoyed surveying his immediate territory, quite familiar and beloved, noting subtle changes in the fauna and flora of the prairie that distance brought. In early afternoon he stopped for a meal, allowing Flossy to forage. Taking out a pigeon and prepping the bird, Pertinax recited his morning’s scientific observations to be uploaded to the tropospheric mind. Its data delivered, the bird homed back to Pertinax rather than the cottage. In less than an hour, the warden was underway again.
Pertinax fell asleep in the saddle and awoke at dusk. He halted Flossy and dismounted to make camp. With the saddle off, Flossy cropped wearily nearby. The first thing Pertinax attended to was the establishment of a security zone. A pheromonal broadcaster would disseminate the warden’s exaggerated chemical signature for kilometers in every direction, a note that all of wild creation was primed by the Upflowered to respond to. Avoidance of the distinctive trace had been built into their ancestors’ genes. (The bodily signature had to be masked for upclose work with animals.) Pertinax had no desire to be trampled in the night by a herd of bison, or attacked by any of the region’s many predators. Sentient enemies were nonexistent, with the nearest Overclockers confined by their limited capacities nearly one thousand kilometers away in “Chicago.”
After setting up the small scent broadcast unit, Pertinax contemplated summoning forth some entertainment. But in the end he decided he was just too tired to enjoy any of the many offerings of the tropospheric mind, and that he would rather simply go to sleep.
The upright Flossy, balanced tripodally on her long tail, was already herself half a-drowse, and she made only the softest of burblings when Pertinax clambered into her capacious marsupial pouch. Dry and lined with a soft down, the pouch smelled like the nest of some woodland creature, and Pertinax fell asleep feeling safe and cherished.
The morning dawned like the first day of the world, crisp and inviting. Emerging from his nocturnal pouch, Pertinax noted that night had brought a heavy dew that would have soaked him had he been dossing rough. But instead he had enjoyed a fine, dry, restful sleep.
Moving off a ways from the grumbling Flossy, and casting about with a practiced eye, Pertinax managed to spot some untended prairie chicken nests amidst the grassy swales. He robbed them of an egg apiece without compunction (the population of the birds was robust), and soon a fragrant omelet, seasoned with herbs from home, sizzled over a small propane burner. (Pertinax obtained the flammable gas from his universal proseity device, just as he supplied many of his needs.)
After enjoying his meal, Pertinax dispatched a pigeon upward to obtain from the tropospheric mind his positional reading, derived from various inputs such as constellational and magnetic. The coordinates, cloud-blazoned temporarily on the sky in digits meters long, informed Pertinax that Flossy had carried him nearly one hundred and fifty kilometers during their previous half-day of travel. At this rate, he’d join up with Sylvanus on the morrow, and with the others a day later. Then the five stewards would reach “Chicago” around noon of the fourth day.
Past that point, all certainty vanished. How the Overclockers would react to the arrival of the wardens, how the wardens would dissuade the humans from tampering with the planetary mind, what they would do if they met resistance—all this remained obscure.
Remounting Flossy, Pertinax easily put the uncertainty from his mind. Neither he nor his kind were prone to angst. So, once on his way, he reveled instead in the glorious day and the unfolding spectacle of a nature reigning supreme over an untarnished globe.
Herds of bisons thundered past at a safe distance during various intervals along Pertinax’s journey. Around noon a nearly interminable flock of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. A colony of prairie dogs stretching across hectares mounted a noisy and stern defense of their town.
That night replicated the simple pleasures of the previous one. Before bedding down, Pertinax enjoyed a fine display of icy micrometeorites flashing into the atmosphere. The Upflowered had arranged a regular replenishment of Earth’s water budget via this cosmic source before they left.
Around noon on the second full day of travel, with the landscape subtly changing as they departed one bioregion for another, Pertinax felt a sudden quivering alertness thrill through Flossy. She had plainly pinged the must of Sylvanus’s steed (a stallion named Bix) on the wind, and needed no help from her rider to zero in on her fellow Kodiak Kangemu. Minutes later, Pertinax himself espied Sylvanus and his mount, a tiny conjoined dot in the distance.
Before long, the two wardens were afoot and clasping each other warmly, while their hoppers boxed affectionately at each other.
“Pertinax, you’re looking glossy as a foal! How I wish I was your age again!”
“Nonsense, Sylvanus, you look splendid yourself. After all, you’re far from old. A hundred and twenty-nine last year, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, yes, but the weary bones still creak more than they did when I was a young buck like you, a mere sixty-eight. Some days I just want to drop my duties and retire. But I need to groom a successor first. If only you and Chellapilla—”
Pertinax interrupted his elder friend. “Perhaps Chellapilla and I have been selfish. I confess to feeling guilty about this matter from time to time. But the demands on our energies seemed always to preclude parentage. I’ll discuss it with her tomorrow. And don’t forget, there’s always Cimabue and Tanselle.”
Sylvanus clapped a hearty paw-hand on Pertinax’s shoulder. “They’re fine stewards, my boy, but I had always dreamed of your child stepping into my shoes.”
Pertinax lowered his eyes. “I’m honored, Sylvanus. Let me speak of this with Chell.”
“That’s all I ask. Now I suppose we should be on our way again.”
It took some sharp admonishments and a few coercive treats to convince Bix and Flossy to abandon their play for the moment and resume travel, but eventually the two wardens again raced northeast, toward their unannounced appointment with the Overclockers.
That night before turning in, Sylvanus suggested some entertainment.
“I have not viewed any historical videos for some time now. Would you care to see one?”
“Certainly. Do you have a suggestion?”
“What about The Godfather?”
“Part One?”
“Yes.”
“An excellent choice. Perhaps it will help to refresh our understanding of Overclocker psychology. I’ll send up a pigeon.”
The sleepy bird responded sharply to the directorial seed and verbal instructions, then zoomed upward. While the wardens waited for the tropospheric mind to respond, they arranged their packs and saddles in a comfortable couch that allowed them to lay back and observe the nighted skies.
In minutes a small audio cloud had formed low down near them, to provide the soundtrack. Then the high skies lit with colored cold fires.
The new intelligent meteorology allowed for auroral displays at any latitude of the globe, as cosmic rays were channeled by virgula and sublimula, then bent and manipulated to excite atoms and ions. Shaped and permuted on a pixel level by the distributed airborne mind, the auroral canvas possessed the resolution of a twentieth-century drive-in screen, and employed a sophisticated palette.
Clear and bold as life, the antique movie began to unroll across the black empyrean. Snacking on dried salted crickets, the two stewards watched in rapt fascination until the conclusion of the film.
“Most enlightening,” said Sylvanus. “We must be alert for such incomprehensible motives as well as deceptions and machinations among the Overclockers.”
“Indeed, we would be foolish to anticipate any rationality at all from such a species. Their ancestors’ choice to secede from the Upflowering tells us all we need to know about their unchanged mentality.”
Mid-afternoon of the next day found Sylvanus and Pertinax hard-pressed to restrain their rambunctious hoppers from charging toward three other approaching Kodiak Kangemu. At the end of the mad gallop, five stewards were clustered in a congregation of hearty back-slapping and embraces, while the frolicking hoppers cavorted nearby.
After the general exchange of greetings and reassurances, Cimabue and Tanselle took Sylvanus one side to consult with him, leaving Pertinax and Chellapilla some privacy.
Chellapilla smiled broadly, revealing a palisade of blunt healthy brown teeth. Her large hazel eyes sparkled with affection and her leathery nostrils flared wetly. The past year since their last encounter had seen her acquire a deep ragged notch in one ear. Pertinax reached up to touch the healed wound. Chellapilla only laughed, before grabbing his paw-hand and kissing it.
“Are you troubled by that little nick, Perty? Just a brush with a wounded wolverine when I was checking a trap line for specimens last winter. Well worth the information gained.”
Pertinax found it hard to reconcile himself to Chellapilla’s sangfroid. “I worry about you, Chell. It’s a hard life we have sometimes, as isolated guardians of the biosphere. Don’t you wish, just once in a while, that we could live together…?”
“Ah, of course I do! But where would that end? Two stewards together would become four, then a village, then a town, then a city of wardens. With our long life spans, we’d soon overpopulate the world with our kind. And then Earth would be right back where it was in the twenty-second century.”
“Surely not! Our species would not fall prey to the traps mankind stumbled into before the Upflowering.”
Chellapilla smiled. “Oh, no, we’d be clever enough to invent new ones. No, it’s best this way. We have our pastoral work to occupy our intelligence, with the tropospheric mind to keep us in daily contact and face to face visits at regular intervals. It’s a good system.”
“You’re right, I suppose. But still, when I see you in the flesh, Chell, I long for you so.”
“Then let’s make the most of this assignment. We’ll have sweet memories to savor when we part.”
Pertinax nuzzled Chellapilla’s long furred neck, and she shivered and clasped him close. Then he whispered his thoughts regarding Sylvanus’s desired retirement and the needful successor child into her ear.
Chellapilla chuckled. “Are you sure you didn’t put Sylvanus up to this? You know the one exemption from cohabitation is the period of parenting. This is all a scheme to get me to clean your hutch and cook your meals on a regular basis for a few years, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I admit it. There’s never been a universal proseity device made that was as nice to hold as you.”
“Well, let me think about it for the rest of this trip, before I go off my pills. It’s true that you and I are not getting any younger, and I am inclined toward becoming a mother, especially if our child will help ease Sylvanus’s old age. But I want to make sure I’m not overlooking any complications.”
“My ever-sensible Chell! I could have dictated your reply without ever leaving my hutch.”
Chellapilla snorted. “One of us has to be the sobersided one.”
The two lovers rejoined their fellow stewards. Tanselle immediately took Chellapilla one side, in an obvious attempt to pump her friend for any gossip. The feminine whispers and giggles and sidewise glances embarrassed Pertinax, and he made a show of engaging Cimabue in a complex discussion of the latter’s researches. But Pertinax could lend only half his mind to Cimabue’s talk of fisheries and turtle breeding, ocean currents and coral reefs. The other half was still contemplating his exciting future with Chellapilla.
Eventually Sylvanus roused them from their chatter with a suggestion that they resume their journey. Bix, Flossy, Amber, Peavine and Peppergrass bore their riders north, deeper into the already encroaching forests of the Great Lakes region.
When they established camp that evening in a clearing beneath a broad canopy of lofty treetops, Sylvanus made a point of setting up a little hearth somewhat apart from his younger comrades. Plainly, he did not want to put a damper on any romantic moments among the youngsters.
The five shared supper together however. Sylvanus kept wrinkling his grizzled snout throughout the meal, until finally he declaimed, “There’s a storm brewing. The tropospheric mind must be performing some large randomizations or recalibrations. I suspect entire registers will be dumped.”
Baseline weather had been tempered by the creation of an intelligent atmosphere. Climates across the planet were more equitable and homogenous, with fewer extreme instances of violent weather. But occasionally both the moderately large and even the titanic disturbances of yore would recur, as the separate entities that constituted the community of the skies deliberately encouraged random Darwinian forces to cull and mutate their members.
“I packed some tarps and ropes,” said Cimabue, “for just such an occasion. If we cut some poles, we can erect a shelter quickly.”
Working efficiently, the wardens built, first, a three-walled roofed enclosure for their hardy hoppers, stoutly braced between several trees, its open side to the leeward of the prevailing winds. Then they fashioned a small but sufficient tent for themselves and their packs, heavily staked to the earth. A few blankets strewn about the interior created a comfy nest, illuminated by several cold luminescent sticks. Confined body heat would counter any chill.
Just as they finished, a loud crack of thunder ushered in the storm. Safe and sound in their tent, the wardens listened to the rain hammering the intervening leaves above before filtering down to drip less heavily on their roof.
Sylvanus immediately bade his friends goodnight, then curled up in his robe in one corner, his back to them. Soon his snores—feigned or real—echoed off the sloping walls.
Swiftly disrobed, Cimabue and Tanselle began kissing and petting each other, and Pertinax and Chellapilla soon followed suit. By the time the foursome had begun exchanging cuds, their unashamed mating, fueled by long separation, was stoked to proceed well into the night.
The reintegrational storm blew itself out shortly after midnight, with what results among the mentalities of the air the wardens would discover only over the course of many communications. Perhaps useful new insights into the cosmos and Earth’s place therein had been born this night.
In the morning the shepherds broke down their camp, breakfasted and embarked on the final leg of their journey to “Chicago.” Pertinax rode his hopper in high spirits, pacing Chellapilla’s Peavine.
Not too long after their midday meal (Tanselle had bulked out their simple repast with some particularly tasty mushrooms she had carried from home), they came within sight of the expansive lake, almost oceanic in its extent, that provided the human settlement with water for both drinking and washing, as well as various dietary staples. Reckoning themselves a few dozen kilometers south of the humans, the five headed north, encountering large peaceful herds of elk and antelopes along the way.
They smelled “Chicago” before they saw it.
“They’re not burning petroleum, are they?” asked Cimabue.
“No,” said Sylvanus. “They have no access to any of the few remaining played-out deposits of that substance. It’s all animal and vegetable oils, with a little coal from near-surface veins.”
“It sure does stink,” said Tanselle, wrinkling her nose.
“They still refuse our offer of limited universal proseity devices?” Pertinax inquired.
Sylvanus shook his head ruefully. “Indeed. They are stubborn, suspicious and prideful, and disdain the devices of the Upflowered as something near-demonic. They claim that such cornucopia would render their species idle and degenerate, and destroy their character. When the Upflowered stripped them of their twenty-second-century technology, the left-behind humans conceived a hatred of their ascended brethren. Now they are determined to reclimb the same ladder of technological development they once negotiated, but completely on their own.”
Cimabue snorted. “It’s just as well they don’t accept our gifts. The UPD’s would allow them to spread their baneful way of life even further than they already have. We can only be grateful their reproductive rates have been redacted downward.”
“Come now,” said Chellapilla, “surely the humans deserve as much respect and right to self-determination as any other species. Would you cage up all the blue jays in the world simply because they’re noisy?”
“You don’t have any humans in your bioregion, Chell. See what you think after you’ve met them.”
The pathless land soon featured the start of a crude gravel-bedded road. The terminus the travelers encountered was a dump site. The oil-stained ground, mounded with detritus both organic and manufactured, repelled Pertinax’s sensibilities. He wondered how the humans could live with such squalor, even on the fringes of their settlement.
Moving swiftly down the pebbled roadway, the wardens soon heard a clanking, chugging, ratcheting riot of sound from some ways around the next bend of the tree-shaded road. They halted and awaited the arrival of whatever vehicle was producing the clamor.
The vehicle soon rounded the curve of road, revealing itself to be a heterogeneous assemblage of wood and metal. The main portion of the carrier was a large wooden buckboard with two rows of seats forward of a flatbed. In the rear, a large boiler formed of odd-shaped scavenged metal plates threatened to burst its seams with every puff of smoke. Transmission of power to the wheels was accomplished by whirling leather belts running from boiler to wood-spoked iron-rimmed wheels.
Four men sat on the rig, two abreast. Dressed in homespun and leathers, they sported big holstered side arms. The guns were formed of ceramic barrels and chambers, and carved grips. Small gasketed pump handles protruded from the rear of each gun. Pertinax knew the weapons operated on compressed air and fired only non-explosive projectiles. Still, sometimes the darts could be poison-tipped. A rack of rifles of similar construction lay within easy reach. The driver, busy with his tiller-style steering mechanism and several levers, was plainly a simple laborer. The other three occupants seemed dignitaries of some sort. Or so at least Pertinax deduced, judging from various colorful ribbons pinned to their chests and sashes draped over their shoulders.
Surprised by the solid rank of mounted wardens, looming high over the car like a living wall across the dump road, the Overclockers reacted with varying degrees of confusion. But soon the driver managed to bring his steam cart to a halt, and the three officials had regained a measure of diplomatic aplomb. The passenger in the front seat climbed down, and approached Pertinax and friends. Leery of the stranger, the Kodiak Kangemus unsheathed their long thick claws a few inches. The awesome display brought the man to a halt a few meters away. He spoke, looking up and shielding his eyes against the sun.
“Hail, wardens! My name is Brost, and these comrades of mine are Kemp and Sitgrave, my assistants. As the Mayor of Chicago, I welcome you to our fair city.”
Pertinax studied Brost from above, seeing a poorly shaven, sallow baseline Homo sapiens with a shifty air about his hunched shoulders. Some kind of harsh perfume failed to mask completely a fug of fear and anxiety crossing the distance between Brost and Pertinax’s sharp nostrils.
Sylvanus, as eldest, spoke for the wardens. “We accept your welcome, Mayor Brost. But I must warn you that we are not here for any simple cordial visit. We have good reason to believe that certain factions among your people are planning to tamper with the tropospheric mind. We have come to investigate, and to remove any such threats we may discern.”
The Mayor smiled uneasily, while his companions fought not to exchange nervous sidelong glances among themselves.
“Tamper with those lofty, serene intelligences, who concern themselves not at all with our poor little lives? What reason could we have for such a heinous assault? No, the charge is ridiculous, even insulting. I can categorically refute it here and now. Your mission has been for naught. You might as well save yourself any further wearisome journeying by camping here for the night before heading home. We will bring you all sorts of fine provisions—”
“That cannot be. We must make our own investigations. Will you allow us access to your village?”
Mayor Brost huddled with his assistants, then faced the wardens again. “As I said, the city of Chicago welcomes you, and its doors are open.”
Pertinax repressed a grin at the Mayor’s emphasis on “city,” but he knew the other wardens had caught this token of outraged human dignity as well.
With much back-and-forward-and-back maneuvering, the driver finally succeeded in turning around the steam cart. Matching the gait of their hoppers to the slower passage of the cart, the wardens followed the delegation back to “Chicago.”
Beginning with outlying cabins where half-naked children played in the summer dust of their yards along with mongrels and livestock, and continuing all the way to the “city” center, where a few larger buildings hosted such establishments as blacksmiths, saloons, public kitchens and a lone bath house, the small collection of residences and businesses that was “Chicago”—scattered along the lake’s margins according to no discernible scheme—gradually assembled itself around the newcomers. Mayor Brost, evidently proud of his domain, pointed out sights of interest as they traversed the “urban” streets, down the middles of which flowed raw sewage in ditches.
“You see how organized our manufactories are,” said Brost, indicating some long low windowless sheds flanked by piles of waste byproducts: wood shavings, coal clinkers, metal shavings. “And here’s the entrance to our mines.” Brost pointed to a shack that sheltered a pit-like opening descending into the earth at a slant.
“Oh,” said Cimabue, “you’re smelting and refining raw metals these days?”
Mayor Brost exhibited a sour chagrin. “Not yet. There’s really no need. We feel it’s most in harmony with, uh, our beloved mother earth to recycle the buried remnants of our ancestors’ civilization. There’s plenty of good metal and plastic down deep where the Upflowered sequestered the rubble they left after their redesign of the globe. Plenty for everyone.”
“And what exactly is your population these days, Mayor?” inquired Tanselle.
“Nearly five thousand.”
Tanselle shook her head reflectively, as if to say, thought Pertinax, Would that it were even fewer.
After some additional civic boosterism the party—considerably enlarged by various gawking hangers-on—arrived at a large, grassy town square, where goats and sheep grazed freely. Ranked across the lawn, tethered securely, were several small lighter-than-air balloons with attached gondolas of moderate size. The shiny lacquered patchwork fabric of the balloons lent them a circus air belied by the solemn unease which the Mayor and his cohorts eyed the balloons.
Immediately, Pertinax’s ears pricked forward at this unexpected sight and the humans’ nervous regard for the objects. “What are these for?” he asked.
Mayor Brost replied almost too swiftly. “Oh, these little toys have half a dozen uses. We send up lightweight volunteers to spy out nearby bison herds so that our hunting parties will save some time and trouble. We make surveys from the air for our road-building. And of course, the children enjoy a ride now and then. The balloons won’t carry much more weight than a child.”
“I’d like to examine them.”
“Certainly.”
Pertinax clambered down off Flossy. Standing among the humans, the top of his head just cleared their belt buckles. He was soon joined by his fellow wardens, who moved through the crowd like a band of determined furry dwarves.
The balloons featured no burners to inflate their straining shapes. Pertinax inquired as to their source of gas.
Highlighting the mechanisms, Mayor Brost recited proudly. “Each balloon hosts a colony of methanogenic bacteria and a food supply. Increasing the flow of nutrients makes more gas. Closing the petcocks shuts them down.”
Pertinax stepped back warily from his close-up inspection of the balloons. “They’re highly explosive then.”
“I suppose. But we maintain adequate safety measures around them.”
The wardens regrouped off to one side and consulted quietly among themselves.
“Any explosion of this magnitude in the tropospheric mind would do no more damage than a conventional rain squall,” said Cimabue.
“Agreed,” said Chellapilla. “But what if the explosion was meant to disperse some kind of contaminant carried as cargo?”
“Such as?” asked Tanselle.
“No suitably dangerous substance occurs to me at the moment,” Sylvanus said, stroking his chin whiskers.
“Nonetheless,” cautioned Pertinax, “I have a feeling that here lies the danger facing the tropospheric mind. Let us continue our investigations for the missing part of the puzzle.”
Pertinax returned to address the Mayor. “Our mounts need to forage, while we continue our inspection of your town. We propose to leave them here on the green. They will not bother people or livestock, but you should advise your citizens not to molest them. The Kangemu are trained to deal harshly with threats to themselves or their masters.”
“There will of course be no such problems,” said the Mayor.
Sylvanus advised splitting their forces into two teams for swifter coverage of the human settlement, while he himself, in deference to his age and tiredness, remained behind with their mounts to coordinate the searching. Naturally, Pertinax chose to team up with Chellapilla.
The subsequent hours found Pertinax and his lover roaming unhindered through every part of the human village. Most of the citizens appeared friendly, although some exhibited irritation or a muted hostility at the queries of the wardens. Pertinax and Chellapilla paused only a few minutes to bolt down some cold food around mid-afternoon before continuing their so-far fruitless search.
Eventually they found themselves down by some primitive docks, watching the small fishing fleet of “Chicago” tie up for the evening. The fishermen, shouldering their day’s bounty in woven baskets, moved warily past the weary wardens.
“Well, I’m stumped,” confessed Pertinax. “If they’re hiding something, they’ve concealed it well.”
Chellapilla said, “Maybe we’re going about this wrong. Let’s ask what could harm the virgula and sublimula, instead of just expecting to recognize the agent when we see it.”
“Well, really only other virgula and sublimula, which of course the humans have no way of fashioning.”
“Ah, but what of rogue lobes?”
The natural precipitation cycles brought infinite numbers of virgula and sublimula down from their habitats in the clouds to ground level. When separated from the tropospheric mind in this way, the components of the mind were programmed for apoptosis. But occasionally a colony of virgula and sublimula would fail to self-destruct, instead clumping together into a rogue lobe. Isolated from the parent mind, the lobes frequently went insane before eventually succumbing to environmental stresses. Sometimes, though, a lobe could live a surprisingly long time if it found the right conditions.
“Do you think local factors in the lake here might encourage lobe formations?”
“There’s one way to find out,” answered Chellapilla.
It took only another half hour of prowling the lakeshore, scrambling over slippery rocks and across pebbled strands, to discover a small lobe.
Thick intelligent slime latticed with various organic elements—pondweeds, zebra mussels, a disintegrating bird carcass—lay draped across a boulder, a mucosal sac with the processing power of a non-autonomous twenty-second-century AI. The slime was liquescently displaying its mad internal thoughts just as a mail cloud did: fractured images of the natural world, blazes of equations, shards of old human culture ante-Upflowering, elaborate mathematical constructions. A steady whisper of jagged sounds, a schizophrenic monologue, accompanied the display.
Pertinax stared horrified. “Uploading this fragment of chaos to the tropospheric mind would engender destabilizing waves of disinformation across the skies. The humans don’t even need to explode their balloons. Simply letting the mind automatically read the slime would be enough.”
“We can’t allow this to happen.”
“Let’s hurry back to the others.”
“You damned toothy ratdogs aren’t going anywhere.”
A squad of humans had come stealthily upon Pertinax and Chellapilla while their attentions were engaged by the lobe. With rifles leveled at their heads, the wardens had no recourse but to raise their hands in surrender.
Two men came to bind the wardens. The one dealing with Chellapilla twisted her arms cruelly behind her, causing her to squeal. Maddened by the sound, Pertinax broke free and hurled himself at one of the gun-bearers. But a rifle stock connected with his skull, and he knew only blackness.
When Pertinax awoke, night had fallen. He found himself with limbs bound, lying in a cage improvised from thick branches rammed deep into the soil and lashed together. He struggled to rise, and thus attracted the attentions of his fellow captives.
Similarly bound, Chellapilla squirmed across the grass to her mate. “Oh, Perty, I’m so glad you’re awake! We were afraid you had a concussion.”
“No, I’m fine. And you?”
“Just sore. Once you were knocked out, they didn’t really hurt me further.”
Sylvanus’s sad voice reached Pertinax as well. “Welcome back, my lad. We’re in a fine mess now, and it’s all my fault for underestimating the harmful intentions of these savages.”
Firelight flared up some meters away, accompanied by the roar of a human crowd. “Where are we?”
“We’re on the town green,” said Chellapilla. “The humans are celebrating their victory over us. They slaughtered our Kangemu and are roasting them for a feast.”
“Barbarians!”
Tanselle spoke. “Cimabue and I are here as well, Pertinax, but he did not escape so easily as you. They clubbed him viciously when he fought back. Now his breathing is erratic, and he won’t respond.”
“We have to do something!”
“But what?” inquired Sylvanus.
“The least we can do,” said Chellapilla, “is inform the tropospheric mind of our troubles and the threat from rogue lobe infection. Maybe the mind will know what to do.”
Pertinax considered this proposal. “That’s a sound idea, Chell. But I suspect our pigeons have already served as appetizers.” He paused as an idea struck him. “But I know a way to reach the mind. First I need to be free. You three will have to chew my ropes off.”
Shielded by darkness, without any guards to note their activities and interfere (how helpless the humans must have deemed them!), his three fellows quickly chewed through Pertinax’s bonds with their sturdy teeth and powerful jaws. His first action after massaging his limbs back into a semblance of strength was to take off his robe and stuff it with dirt and grass into a rough recumbent dummy that would satisfy a cursory headcount. Then, employing his own untaxed jaw muscles, he beavered his way out of the cage.
“Be careful, Perty!” whispered Chellapilla, but Pertinax did not pause to reply.
Naked, dashing low across the yard from shadow to shadow, Pertinax reached one of the tethered balloons without being detected. Nearby stood a giant ceramic pot with a poorly fitting lid. Shards of light and sound escaped from the pot, betokening the presence of a malignant rogue lobe within. Plainly, infection of the tropospheric mind was imminent. This realization hastened Pertinax’s actions.
First he kicked up the feed on one balloon’s colony of methanogens. That vehicle began to tug even more heartily at its tethers. Moving among the other balloons, Pertinax disabled them by snapping their nutrient feed lines. At the very least, this would delay the assault on the mind.
Pertinax leaped onboard the lone functional balloon and cast off. He rose swiftly to the height of several meters before he was spotted. Shouts filled the night. Something whizzed by Pertinax’s head, and he ducked. A barbed projectile from one of the compressed-air guns. Pertinax doubted the weapons possessed enough force to harm him or the balloon at this altitude, but he remained hunkered down for a few more minutes nonetheless.
Would the humans take revenge on their remaining captives? Pertinax couldn’t spare the energy for worry. He had a mission to complete.
Within the space of fifteen minutes, Pertinax floated among the lowest clouds, the nearest gauzy interface to the tropospheric mind. Their dampness subtly enwrapped him, until he was soaked and shivering. His head seemed to attract a thicker constellation of fog….
A small auroral screen opened up in the sky not four meters from Pertinax. He could smell the scorched molecules associated with the display.
Don Corleone appeared on the screen: one or more of the resident AIs taking a form deemed familiar from Pertinax’s recent past viewing records.
“You have done well to bring us this information, steward. We will now enforce our justice on the humans.”
Pertinax’s teeth chattered. “Puh-please try to spare my companions.”
The representative of the tropospheric mind did not deign to reply, and the screen winked out in a frazzle of sparks.
The nighted sky grew darker, if such was possible. Ominous rumbles sounded from the west. Winds began to rise.
The mind was marshalling a storm. A lightning storm. And Pertinax was riding a bomb.
Pertinax frantically shut off the feeder line to the methanogens. The balloon began to descend, but all too slowly for Pertinax’s peace of mind.
The first lightning strike impacted the ground far below, after seeming to sizzle right past Pertinax’s nose. He knew the bolt must have been farther off than that, but anywhere closer than the next bioregion was too close.
Now shafts of fire began to rain down at supernatural frequency. Turbulence rocked the gondola. Thunder deafened him. Pertinax’s throat felt raw, and he realized he had been shouting for help from the balloon or the mind or anyone else who might be around to hear.
Now the cascade of lighting was nigh incessant, one deadly strike after another on the Overclockers’ village. Pertinax knew he could stay no longer with the deadly balloon. But the ground was still some hundred meters away.
Pertinax jumped.
Behind him the balloon exploded.
Pertinax spread out his arms, transforming the big loose flaps of skin anchored from armpits to ankles into wings, wings derived from one of his ancestral strains, the sciuroptera.
After spiraling downward with some control, despite the gusts, Pertinax landed lightly, on an open patch of ground near a wooden sign that announced the “City Limits” of “Chicago.”
He had arrived just in time for the twister.
Illuminated intermittently by the slackening lightning, the stygian funnel shape tracked onto land from across the lake and stepped into the human settlement, moving in an intelligent and programmatic fashion among the buildings.
Even at this distance, the wind threatened to pull Pertinax off his feet. He scrambled for a nearby tree and held onto its trunk for dear life.
At last, though, the destruction wrought by the tropospheric mind ended, with the twister evaporating in a coordinated manner from bottom to top.
Pertinax ran back toward the town green.
The many fires caused by the lightning had been effectively doused by the wet cyclone, but still buildings smoldered. Not one stone seemed atop another, nor plank joined to plank. The few Overclocker survivors were too dazed or busy to interfere with Pertinax.
Seared streaks marked the town green, and huge divots had been wrenched up by the twister. Windblown litter made running difficult.
But a circle of lawn around the cage holding the wardens was immaculate, having been excluded from electrical blasts and then cradled in a deliberate eye of the winds.
“Is everyone all right?”
“Perty! You did it! Yes, we’re all fine. Even Cimabue is finally coming around.”
Within a short time all were freed. Pertinax clutched Chellapilla to him. Sylvanus surveyed the devastation, clucking his tongue ruefully.
“Such a tragedy. Well, I expect that once we relocate the remnant population, we can wean them off our help and back up to some kind of agrarian self-sufficiency in just a few generations.”
Pertinax felt now an even greater urgency to engender a heir or two with Chellapilla. The demands on the stewards of this beloved planet required new blood to sustain their mission down the years.
“Chell, have you decided about our child?”
“Absolutely, Perty. I’m ready. I’ve even thought of a name.”
“Oh?”
“Boy or girl, it will have to be Storm!”