Chapter 8
Where The River Rends The Mountain
Tippi wanted to see the cherry blossoms, but not like this.
The pig was dangling by a tentacle, off the side of a mountain. The forest laid a deadly drop below her, and the sunlight was nonstop and everywhere.
Is the outside world always this horrid, this early in the morning? she fretted. At least my crown isn’t falling off. Wait, is that a bad thing?
“I hate picnics!” she cried.
“Embrace the fear!” rallied Xoz. “It congeals our designs!”
A hard wind of chitin and nanocarbon, the mollusk eased into his next three grips. Xoz had never gone mountaineering before, but no one could tell.
“Close your eyes if it’s too much,” advised Lina-2, from the memory crown.
“But I want to see everything!” protested Tippi. “I’m vexed, truly!”
Xoz wove across sheer cliff, shuttling the pig from one tentacle to the next. The rest of his limbs were occupied with rock, bat, and a beefy bandolier of aminospheres.
Tippi peeked over his crag-o’-mantle. Lina Prime, the solar shade, the schisto, the grimy corner, their homemade pinball machine and the tremendous odor it emanated: her entire life had disappeared behind scrub.
She took in the horizon. The sunshine stung her, so she looked at Xoz. He was opalescent, surveying his dominion at an 89-degree angle.
In Wee Sheol, Xoz carried himself with “the swagger of xenon, a noble gas.” Underwater, he maintained a mass formlessness: a fogbank of hallucinations, ever flitting forward.
But in the daylight, the octopus was beyond solid. He lumbered and heaved, his tentacles slamming the scarp. The nanocarbon suit was a clear exoskeleton, offering him tangibility in bulk.
Tippi looked down. She never thought about heights before yesterday, and it was an inopportune time to learn they were worse than depths.
“You said the sun would be fun!” she spat.
“Fall asleep, stay awake, whatever,” said Xoz. “Just stop hoofing my eye.”
The pig caught a glimpse of the supernova; it was visible in the daytime, a blot on a fantastic sunrise. The color red eluded her, so Antares registered as a smudge of morning. The supernova only looked good on Xoz.
Her friends doted over the dead star, but Tippi didn’t get it. Antares was breaking news from long ago, and none of their cosmological cooings could distract her from the cruelty of gravity.
“Stop biting me,” chided Xoz. “Yes, I’ve acquired nanocarbons, but friends do not bite.”
Out of options, Tippi pressed her eyes shut; the descent felt like floating without water.
Light crept under her eyelids. It was a novel sensation, but everything was.
Their last night in Wee Sheol was a loud one, between the staccato splat-splat of the vittles sluice malfunctioning, and the solar shade daring to open 7.08%.
The slowest protocol was wreaking havoc on the pneumatics, liquefying all rations to arrive in the droneport. As they couldn’t pack optimized gravy, Xoz broke for the cistern to retrieve aminospheres. He was discomfited by his newfound reliance on the memory crown:
“I’d hack my way in, but how does one hack a cuneiform tablet?”
Once Xoz left the crown’s 300-yard reception radius, Tippi and Lina-2 were alone, for the first time since the cherry blossoms.
The pig had a tendency to speak plain when she missed her naps.
“Do you think we’re going to die out there?” she asked.
“Considering the-”
“Nuh-uh,” said Tippi. “Death still confounds me, so please: a simple yes or no.”
“No,” said Lina.
“What makes you say that?” said the pig, brightening.
“The hard part’s already done, from where I’m sitting.”
“You are sitting in my hat,” said the teacup hypermini.
“Exactly!” said Lina-2. “We’re transcended the most difficult step!”
“Explain yourself.”
“Tippi, who knows what’s going to happen out there? We have seven days to figure that out. And where would we be if Antique Ops decided to store Xoz’s fascial stocking two shelves higher?”
“Why, I’d be eating crickets next week.”
“Yes! And further, the diagnostics on your crown were clean! Your hat’s so old, it’s making Xoz insecure. And I’ll be straight: I don’t know what’s out there. My own ignorance of humanity is at an all-time high, and you can quintuple that delta for all else. But I do know we’ve vanquished our first foe, the serendipity of shelving. That’s my case study, and it gives me reason for optimism.”
“Also, we know Xoz.”
“Correct,” said Lina. “In his heyday, he was a renowned ordeal.”
They enjoyed each other’s company in silence, or at least as much as the megalith engines would allow.
“What if you fall off of my head?” wondered Tippi.
“You’ll just have to pick me up.”
Tippi was unsure how long she’d slept, but she felt breeze and warmth. Noise washed over her, namely an unfamiliar burble and an unceasing weeeeesh. The ground was soft and firm, like an unburstable bubble. It pulsated, ever so slightly.
Tippi opened her eyes; it was an afternoon light.
She looked down.
The pig was levitating above a wide river, between two steep hills.
Her hooves hovered dry, over the water. It was all too pretty to inspire panic.
This must be the Lenapewihittuk, she realized. And I’m above it.
One minute later, Tippi puzzled it out: she was standing on Xoz, who’d contorted himself into an invisible bivouac.
Xoz was camouflaged in the shallows, his fascial stocking affording a wild posture.
He was folded into a fortress: Tippi was underneath his pinched crag, behind arms patrolling, and atop a translucent pile of tentacles. His crag-o’-mantle was a sky-colored flesh turret, puckered thin.
The mollusk offered her a trickle of sun, and a modest moat. His skin mimicked the outside world at a clean 360°. The pig watched a cloud drift between sky and tentacle, transition pristine.
Two clues informed the pig’s eureka. First, the see-through tentacles threw a wonky shade. The pig had limited experience with daylight, but even she noticed odd shadows. Also, the mollusk couldn’t camouflage his beak; it hung out of his stocking and under his crag, like a moldering gemstone.
Tippi had never seen his beak. It was bigger than her skull, and full of poison.
Nearby, Pig Iron and the aminospheres held the beachhead, along with a chatty biomass of insects: weeeeesh.
Bees wove unhurried from flower to flower, and no-see-ums danced in riotous swarms. A sparrow darted by, and Tippi didn’t flinch.
“I can feel your hooves,” clacked the beak.
Xoz opened his beak when he patched into the memory crown, creating an asynchronous illusion of speech.
Tippi followed his example; she allowed one big word to spill out, because syllables were work.
“What do you call this shape?” she said.
“The Xozebo: a tribute to function over form. Curiously enough, this is the most ergonomic maneuver, given our mission.”
“So what’s our mission?”
“Clean my body sock, and move surreptitious. See, that’s the thing with land: you accrue schmutz.”
His submerged tentacles lit up, and Tippi saw bioluminescence bubble.
“This here’s the best stealth tech $10.919 trillion can buy,” he bragged. “For my dazzcamo to work, they had to juice my pigments, which had two big benefits: I’m better at hiding than the average ceph, and they left out the dermal recall, which is fine by me, because I don’t need some nerd manifesting churn on my face-”
Lina-2 elbowed in:
“Tippi, you’re awake!”
“Lina!” pealed the pig. “How do you like the outside world?”
“It’s not bad!” gushed the clone. “It’s cooler than expected, which means heavy industry’s long dark, and visual inspection reveals a robust arthropod population! This ecosystem’s a potpourri: the insects are natural, betinkered, and new! Those bees are a runaway synthwork, and I can’t even explain the gnats. It even appears Lymantria dispar dispar crawled back from the pit, we have Étienne Léopold Trouvelot to thank there-”
“Wait,” said Tippi. “If I was asleep, then whose-”
“Lina was free-riding in my eyes,” said The Xozebo. “Your hat requires someone’s optic nerves.”
Lina-2 explained:
“If nobody’s looking, I can’t see any-”
“Wow!” said Tippi.
“By the way, your new hat is a crowded bunker,” observed Xoz. “So do be spare with the epigrammatic polygons.”
“Can do,” vowed the pig. “Wait, when will you sleep?”
“I’ll find the time,” he said. “Hey clone, you picking up any dregs of civilization?”
“Nothing yet,” said Lina-2.
“Well, what’s the last thing you heard?”
“It was 4,100 years back.”
The beak opened into a soundless scream:
“This shall be my expression when I learn why you never told us about this.”
“It felt so incidental,” insisted Lina-2. “It was from an unknown facility, in the Poconos. I pieced together that ‘it’d be 11:00 at the tone,’ and called back, only to find it entirely offline.”
Tippi looked to the shore, her eyes settling on the busy glade. The bugs couldn’t have been happier: weeeeesh.
“Has anyone seen another mammal?” asked the pig.
“Not yet,” said Lina-2.
Tippi’s crown shone golden, as she rode on Xoz, and Lina-2 rode on her, their path crossing the arc of sunset.
Xoz galloped south on the grassy towpath. Now that he was clean, Doctor Dirt had traded discretion for bold spring hues.
The bat and aminos laid flat on his head, and Tippi rested her jaw on Pig Iron. Xoz felt like a raspberry, coated in a slithering layer of thin slate. He raced along the pebbly flats, with the elan of someone accustomed to danger from all angles.
According to Lina-2, the local birds were “wilded manica, messenger and household breeds, mods gone recessive.” The fish were from “probably from reseedings in 2910, good for them!” The amphibians were “astoundingly poisonous given the latitude, do not eat them,” and Xoz was compelled to expel two frogs.
The towpath rolled empty and uninterrupted, through brush and gravel, the river to their right. Soon, the far treeline went impenetrable, and their path was orange with dusk.
“First day down,” said Xoz. “I scaled a mountain-”
“And I was there too!” added Tippi. “Do you want an aminosphere?”
“Those frogs stole my appetite. I did taste wood for the first time today, really had to chew it up-”
“And?”
“It came out with the frogs.”
Beyond themselves, the only trace of humankind was the towpath. Wide fields ran along the river: a sweet carpet of grass and scattered flowers, flanked by mountains. Their route had been throttled by time, and something heavy.
“I’m picking up rare metals in the soil,” relayed Xoz. “Nothing toxic or radioactive, but an appalling bouquet regardless.”
“You can still taste things with your suckers?” asked Lina-2.
“It’s like licking the world through microplastics,” said Xoz. “Which I’m also not tasting!”
The Sun ceded the last tracts of day, and the towpath lit up.
Tippi noticed this change immediately. With the daylight extinguished, the pebbled earth erupted into dusty pixels and hazy static. The spectral shimmer didn’t lay in the grass; it was in the rocks. The stones reflected the Moon, shifting and glinting.
Up in the hills, clearings murmured misty and electric, trading their bees for ghost lights.
“The region is brimming with complex alloys,” explained Lina-2. “Expensive stuff: veins of platinum, titanium, and gold, undisturbed and unnatural. Xoz, any ideas?”
“Outside of ‘they were grinding up spaceships for fun,’ you got me.”
Soon, a congregation of bugs drifted over the towpath, drawn to the bright.
Tippi was ogling the topography, and she didn’t see the swarm fly into her mouth.
Whaaaark! she oinked.
She slammed her jaw shut. Her gullet was full of bugs. The situation was untenable, so she began chewing.
“They’re edible!” she squealed.
The insects hung thick, slaying and mating. Tippi opened her mouth again, until she hit the whaaaark!
“Now this is a picnic!” she declared, loading up on moths.
Xoz joined the feast:
“Manna! Ambrosia! Dragonflies!”
Half of his arms clattered down the towpath; the other four grabbed juicy clumps out of thin air. Tippi looked back; their appetites barely left a mark. This blood orgy had no shortage of volunteers.
“I’m not seeing any bats,” said Lina. “Curious.”
“I have a bat,” said Xoz, as he waggled Pig Iron.
“This is no time for The Homophone Game,” said the clone.
“What’s a bat?” asked Tippi.
“Bats are like flying rats,” said Xoz.
Tippi blanched. She’d forgotten about the conversation about Not-Lina and his hambone radiant.
“That is an inaccurate description of the order Chiroptera, and you know it,” said Lina. “Anyway, these insects are not concerned by us. They don’t know to be.”
“All hail the conquerors of the protein road!” decreed Xoz. “Toss your extended family into my maw!”
Tippi yawned. Whaaaark! Her teeth were full of legs.
She curled up next to Pig Iron, positioned so the night scrapple didn’t fly up her snout, and slept, plastered in thorax.
Tippi would wake up five times to inhale insects. But, the sixth time she stirred, it was at the prodding of Lina-2:
“Wake up, you need to see this-”
“Pass the peas, please-”
“Pig! Up!” said Xoz.
She wrestled open her eyes.
On the other side of the river, in a sprawling meadow, was stone tower.
This was a human structure, drenched in dawn.
“I’d like to say it’s a century shelter,” said Lina-2. “But the building postdates my logs. Nonetheless, I’m seeing traditional Neo-Massive flourishes, namely-”
“Let’s keep going,” voted Xoz. “Look at that crumbled stone around it. That’s old sapiens lodgings; if anyone’s in the skyscraper, they’re antisocial, or dead.”
“There could be some useful information to glean, or souvenirs-”
“Well, fancy that. I have seven tentacles who need souvenirs.”
Lina-2 was about to extol the virtues of a polite introduction, but it was too late: Xoz was off, and Tippi was fording a river, mostly comatose.
Whaaaark? she slurred, as the spray splashed her snout.
“Pillage!” screamed Xoz, his battle cry noiseless. “Presents!”
Upon breaching the opposite bank, Xoz chucked Tippi and Lina-2 on some lichen. He rushed the monolith, Pig Iron ready for impactful negotiations. The terrain left him minimal cover, and he approached earthy and low, creeping and crunching.
Lina-2 was desperate for an agenda without beatings:
“We don’t yet understand the nature of this structure. It could be unwise to antagonize it-”
“How do you not know what this thing is?” balked Xoz, stretched flush against the fieldstones. “It’s a day down the road from us!”
He vaulted on to the stone tower, 40 feet up, dropping his translucence for a pugnacious fuchsia.
Six tentacles held the weathered stonework; the other two introduced the parapet to Pig Iron: BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM.
Chunks of skyscraper rained down, and the monolith gave up its secrets.
“Oh, oh!” said the tower, patching into the memory crown. “No need for that!”
The stranger’s voice was rich, like a chocolate persimmon:
“I can sense you smashing around down there. We can talk, if you like.”
Xoz addressed the stranger first:
“My name is Doctor Dirt, and this is my associate, Pig Iron. We have come to negotiate the terms of your surrender. Escape is fruitless.”
“Escape is fruit!” goaded Tippi.
The monolith guffawed:
“Travelers, my name is Big Rehoboth, and I couldn’t leave this place if I tried.”
Lina-2 took violence off the menu:
“Good morning, Big Rehoboth: I am Lenapewihittuk Institute Neural Arbiter: Serial 609732. I come with two sapients: a Sus domesticus commodus and an Enteroctopus dofleini retiarius.”
During the melee, Tippi had trotted across the field. She scooted over to the monolith and put a hoof on Big Rehoboth, flexing her menace.
“Hey pal,” she growled. “My name is Ethel Apple, and I’m a known quantity around these parts.”
“You can’t fool me, Tippi!” beamed Big Rehoboth. “You’re everyone’s favorite pig.”