Appeals Court Read online

  As for the furniture, it’s inhabited by several persons of indeterminate gender, wearing outfits ranging from scanty to inappropriate for a place of worship — underwear is in fashion but not much else is.

  Bonnie’s face swims into focus before him, her blue fringe brushing his forehead: that and her hands are the only parts of her body he can see. “It’s the gnostic sexual underground,” she hisses. “There’s always one to be had, if you know how to look. Nobody takes it up the tradesman’s like a man with religion. No one needs it more, either. These lucky folks just figured out how to square the circle, thanks to the Bishop.”

  She gives him a hard shake. “Come on,” she says. “I hit you with enough seratonin reuptake blockers to depress a hyena.” He feels a hard tug at his throat and she holds up a small blowdart for him to examine. “I know you’re out of the god-box.”

  Huw opens his mouth to say something, and finds himself sobbing. “You took away my god-self,” he manages to say, snotting down his beard and horking back briny mouthfulls of tears and mucus.

  Bonnie produces a hankie from up one sleeve of her church-modest gown and wipes his face. “Sha,” she says, stroking his hair. “Sha. Huw, I need you here and now, OK? We’re in a lot of trouble and I can’t get us out on my lonesome. The god feeling was just head-in-a-jar stuff. You weren’t being god, you were feeling the feeling of being god. You hate that — it’s how they feel in the cloud, once they’ve uploaded.”

  Huw snuffled. “Yeah,” he says.

  “Yeah. Baby, I’m sorry, I know it hurts, but it’s how you want to live. If I know one person who’s equipped to cope with the distinction between sensation and simulation, it’s you. Jesus, Huw, other than these maniacs, you’re the only person I know who thinks there is a distinction.”

  Huw struggles to his feet and teeters in his ridiculous trousers. Bonnie giggles.

  “What are you wearing?” she asks.

  Huw manages to crack a fractional smile. “They’re all the rage in the American Outback,” he says. “What’s that you’re wearing?”

  “A disguise. Doubles as a biohazard shield.” She swivels her hips, setting twenty kilograms of underskirts swishing. “We’re both a bit over-dressed for the occasion; let’s skin off and I’ll introduce you to the Bishop. Go on, you get started.”

  Huw begins the laborious unlatching process and gradually shucks the pants. The teapot clatters free, drawing a raised eyebrow from one of the sexually ambiguous catamites twined around a sofa arm. The vibration kicks some erratic connection back into life: Ade’s image glows softly through the deep pile carpet.

  The little avatar wrinkles its nose. “Bugger me sideways,” says Ade. “Place looks like an Italian whorehouse, minus the charm and hygiene.” He turns and looks Huw up and down. “You look a little more like your usual cheerless self, though, mate. Should I assume that you’ve joined us again in the land of the independently cognited?”

  Huw nods miserably. “I’m back,” he says. “No thanks to you. Those two assholes know you — they do business with you!”

  Adrian’s avatar has the good grace to look faintly embarrassed. Bonnie leans past Huw with a creak of whalebone and picks up the teapot. “Did I hear that right?” she asks menacingly. “You been selling stuff again?”

  “Uh.” Ade looks unrepentant. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Bonnie hisses, her eyes narrowing.

  “Um … stuff. Mostly harmless.”

  “What kind of mostly harmless stuff are we talking about here?” Huw asks, mustering up a faint echo of interest. The blissed-out resistance cadre on the sofa are showing signs of interest, too.

  “Oh, the usual, sunshine. Telescope lenses, tinfoil hats — okay, Faraday cage helmets — formicide spritzes, tactical nuclear weapons, bibles, tinned spam, that kind of thing.”

  “And in return they’re paying you in —” Huw begins, then Bonnie interrupts him.

  “— No, wait. What else are you smuggling, you rat bastard? Don’t try to hide it from me. Those neverglade-living low-lives were so eager to hand Huw over to the Fallen Congregations that they had to be trying to cover something up. Like, oh, whatever the fuck you were doing with them. What was it, Ade? Resurrection on the installment plan? Banned downloads? Are we going to get that fucking mad crow descending on us?”

  “Oh, I say!” someone says from behind her, but Bonnie is so worked up she doesn’t notice. Huw glances over his shoulder and sees one of the miscellaneous perverts standing nearby, a hand clasped over his/her mouth. The perv is fish-belly pale and wears nothing but very complicated underwear. “Did you say —”

  “Just a few small downloads, lass,” Ade says cheerfully. “Nothing to get worked up about, keep your hair on.”

  “Downloads. Shit.” Bonnie breathes deeply. She’s looking pale. “Shit, that’s all I need,” she says. She puts the teapot down. “Right, we’ll have to take this up later, Huw. Right now we’ve got to go see the Bishop, and that means skin. Help me out of this thing.”

  Huw fumbles for a while with the complex catches and clasps on her dress, fuzzily aware that he’s standing very close to her and he’s not wearing any trousers. As she steps out of her costume she grabs him around the waist, squeezes him tight, and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. She’s nervous, vibrating like a live wire, and something squirms around in his throat, wanting to comfort her. “Why do we have to be naked?” he asks when she surfaces for air. “Who is this Bishop, anyway?”

  “The Bishop runs the First Church of the Teledildonic. It’s a dissident: lives in a baptismal pond, says we’ve got it all wrong and time is flowing in reverse. We’ve passed the Tower of Babel — that’s the cloud — and the Flood — warming — and now we’re ready to move back into the Garden of Eden. So we’ve got to stop wearing clothes and start fucking like bunnies.”

  “But —” Huw can feel his brain trying to twist out through his ears as he tries to accomodate this deviant theology to what he knows about the Fallen Baptist Congregations — “what’s that got to do with anything? With these folks?”

  “I say, hold it right there, pardner!” says the pale perv, running drowned-looking hands through his/her long green hair. The effect would almost be sexy if not for the medium-sized pot belly and the black rubber hedgehog-apparatus that conceals his/her crotch, studded with silvery transducers: “You’ve got it all wrong!” He/she waves a finger at Bonnie. “This isn’t the Garden of Eden, it’s the Garden of the Son of God, after the rapture, the hundred and forty-four thousand saved souls living in paradise on Earth, free from sin —”

  “What’s that, then?” asks Huw, rudely prodding in the direction of the strap-on.

  The perv draws itself up to a haughty metre-fifty: “I’ll have you know that this is the finest model chastity phallus money can buy,” s/he says, voice cracking and descending an octave: “‘s got all the sensory inputs of the real thing, wired right into my spine, but because little feller himself is tucked out of sight behind it there’s no actual genital contact. No skin, no sin.” He fondles the thing happily and shudders. Another of the prosthetically enhanced worshipers is sitting up on the sofa behind him and showing signs of interest.

  Huw backs away slowly. “Get me out of here,” he mouths at Bonnie. She nods, then reaches out and strokes the perv’s pristine love machine. “Now.” Bonnie leads him around the perv — who doubles -over in ecstasy at her touch — towards a pair of pornographically decorated hardwood doors at the rear of the room.

  Bonnie takes a deep breath. “Wish I could stay,” she calls to the three or four temple whores on the bed, “but we’ve got to see their Grace. It’s urgent. If I were you, I’d get to a safe house before the gendarmes arrive.”

  “Give him our love,” one of the omnisexuals calls behind them. They board a lift that runs sideways, down, up, and then sideways again, through a route that sends Huw’s inner ear on a loop-de-loop. They emerge into a hallway that’s carpeted with greasy-fe
eling tentacles that twine sensuously around his toes, and the walls have the sheen of waxed and oiled skin. The whole thing has the smell of Doritos and musk.

  Bonnie hands him the sack with her clothes and his ruined underpants and the teapot and pushes him ahead of her, squeezing his ass affectionately as they go.

  * * *

  The Bishop is three meters high, ten-limbed, with eight complete sets of assorted genitals, fourteen breasts, four tongues, and is impossibly hideous to contemplate. Bonnie ushers him into its presence after dickering with a pair of disturbingly toothless ministers who bar the high door.

  “Your Grace,” she says, as they step into its eucalyptus-fumed inner chamber.

  “My dear child,” it says, with one of its mouths. “It warms Our heart to see you.” It has a voice like a teenaged boy, high and uncertain. “And your companion. You are both lovely as they day He made you.”

  One of its hands slithers free of the tangle and extends before them. Bonnie bends down and kisses the ring painted on the third finger, then elbows Huw, who kneels tentatively and takes the proffered digit, which is warm and moist and pulses disturbingly.

  “Your Grace?” he says.

  “Be not afraid, child,” the Bishop says. “This meatsuit allows Us to bring the Word to Our scattered temples without having to transport Our physical person through the uncertain world. One day, all of us will be liberated by these meatsuits, free to explore our flesh in many bodies all at once.”

  “You’re uploaded?” Huw says, drawing his hand back quickly and shuffling back on his knees.

  The Bishop snorts a laugh with its rightmost face. “No, child, no. Merely telepresent. Uploading is the mortification of the flesh — this is its celebration.”

  “Your Grace,” Bonnie says, peering up at it through her fringe with her eyes seductively wide. “It has been an honor and privelege to serve you in my time here in Glory City. I’ve found my counselling duties to be very rewarding — the gender-reassignees here face unique challenges and it’s wonderful to be able to help them.”

  “Yes,” the Bishop said, crouching down. “And We’ve appreciated it very much. But We sense that you are here to ask some favor of Us now, and We wish you’d get on with it so that We could concentrate on the savage rogering we’re getting in one of Our bodies.”

  “It’s complicated,” Bonnie said. “This guy here is on the run — he was headed for the auto-da-fe when I rescued him.”

  “This is the One?” the Bishop said, putting one delicate feminine hand behind his head and pulling him closer to its big golden eyes. “The two who brought you to Glory City are not know for their extreme piety,” it says. “So why do you suppose they brought you here, rather than simply, oh, eating you or using you for spare parts?”

  Huw keeps himself from shying back with an effort of will. “I don’t know,” he says. Bonnie crowds in to another one of the Bishop’s faces. Deep within him, Huw feels a shiver of golden light, the god-feeling.

  “I think my downers are wearing off.”

  “They tasped him, so I hit him with some depressants,” Bonnie says.

  “Feels goooooood,” Huw says.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” the Bishop says. “I favor three or four hours on the tasp myself, twice a week. Does wonders for the faith. But I suppose we’d best keep your ecstasy under control for now. Phillida!” it calls, clapping two of its hands together, bringing one of the ministers running. It twines an arm between the guardian’s legs and murmurs, “Bring Us a freethinker’s cap, will you?” The minister’s toothless maw gapes open in ecstasy, and then it scurries off quickly, returning with a mesh balaclava that the Bishop fits to Huw’s head, lining up the eye- and mouth-holes.

  Huw’s golden glow recedes.

  “It’s a Faraday cage with some noise-cancellation built in to reverse any of the mind-control rays that do get through,” the Bishop says. “How did you come to be on the American Continent, anyway?”

  “It started when I ate some godvomit and smuggled it out of a patent court,” Huw says.

  The Bishop’s golden eyes widen. “Judge Rosa Guilliani’s court? In Libya? Last week? You are carrying the Ambassador?”

  “The very same,” Huw says, obscurely pleased at this notoriety. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me. Anyway, this smuggler I know — we know — Adrian, he sent me here. Said that this was the safest place to hide out.”

  Bonnie breaks in. “But now we come to find out that he’s been dealing with the two who tasped Huw —”

  “Sam and the Doc,” Huw says.

  “I know of them,” the Bishop says.

  “Selling them bootleg downloads from the Cloud.”

  “Ahh,” the Bishop says. “Excuse Us a moment.” It arches its back and screams out a long orgasmic wail. “One of Our other meatsuits is being ministered to,” it says distractedly, “and We needed to have a bit of a shout.

  “We’re pleased to know this. It explains certain pseudo-nuclear events in the outback that We’ve had word of — the Doc must be retailing anti-ant technology to the other hillbillies.”

  Bonnie shuddered. “That’s just for openers, I’m sure. Fuck knows what else Ade has sold those nutjobs.”

  “Just some downloads, he said,” Huw mumbles. “Fuck it, what did he mean by that? You can download anything; I know I did!”

  “Downloads could be either good or bad,” the Bishop muses aloud, rubbing two disturbingly rugose limbs together slowly. “But first, We have more pressing temporal priorities to attend to, my children. It appears that your rescue did not go unnoticed by the puritan majority, and they will presently be calling. Moreover, this would explain a request for a flight plan and landing clearance that the airport acknowledged four hours ago —” the Bishop stops, its back arching ecstatically — “oh! Oh! OH! Closer to thee, my God!” Breasts quiver, their purple aureolae crinkling, and it screams out loud in the grip of a multiple orgasm of titanic proportions.

  Huw peers out through the eye-holes of his mesh mask, which presses cold and hard into his skin. “Did you say that the law is nearby?”

  “I believe they are,” the Bishop says. “Yes, there. The primary perimeter has been breached. Such a lovely front door.” It looks sternly at Bonnie. “You were reckless, child. They followed you here.”

  “I took every precaution,” Bonnie says, blushing. “I’m no amateur, you know —”

  Huw has a sudden sickening feeling. “It’s me,” he says. “I’m bugged with a geotracker.”

  Bonnie glares at him. “You could have said something, she snaps. “We’ve compromised the whole operation here now.”

  “I was distracted, all right? Mind-control rays make you forgetful, Okay?”

  The Bishop clucks its tongues and gives them each a pat on their bare bottoms. “Never mind that now, children. All is forgiven. But I’m afraid that you are right, we are going to lose this temple. And I’m no more infallible than you, you know: I’ve been ever so lax with the evacuation drills here. My ministers find that they disturb their contemplation of the Almighty. I fear not for this meatsuit, but it would be such a shame to have all my lovely acolytes fall into the hands of the Inquisition. I don’t suppose that you’d be willing to help out?”

  “Of course,” Bonnie says. “It’s the least we can do.”

  No, the least we could do would be to get the fuck out, Huw thinks. He glares at Bonnie, who prods him in the belly with a fingertip.

  “But of course, we could also use some help of our own —”

  “Quid pro quo?” the Bishop says, its quavering voice bemused now, and that irritates Huw ferociously: the law is at the door, and the Bishop thinks it’s all a tremendous lark?

  “Not at all, your Grace. We came to beg your indulgence long before we knew that there was a favor we could do for you. We need your assistance getting shut of this blighted wasteland. Transport to the coast, and an airship or a ballistic or something that can get us back to the civilized world.”


  “And I need to shut down my geotracker,” Huw says, wondering where it has been implanted. Somewhere painful, Sam had told him.

  “Yes, you certainly do,” the Bishop says. “You’ll find an escape-line clipped to the balcony out the third door on the right, along with some baskets. Pack the ministers in the baskets, tie them down (don’t mind if they squirm, it’s in their nature), clip the baskets to the line and toss them out the window — I’m making arrangements now for someone to catch them on the other end. If you do this small favor for me, I will, oh, I don’t know.” The Bishop idly strokes their scalps and tickles their earlobes. “Yes, that’s it. There’s a safe house on the coast, a farm where my people have been making preparations for a much more reasonable approach to dealing with the ants than godvomit and nukes. They will be delighted to shelter you for as long as it takes you to make contact with your people and get off the continent. Such a shame to see you go.” It quickly gives Bonnie directions, and Bonnie recites them back with mnemonic perfection.

  There’s a distant crash that Huw feels through the soles of his bare feet. “Clothes?” he asks.

  “Oh, yes, I suppose, by all means, if you must,” the Bishop says. “Cloakroom’s behind the last door on the right. A lost and found for supplicants who’ve left a little something behind in their blissful state as they left our place of worship. I’m sure we’ll have something in your size, even if it’s only Osh Kosh, b’gosh.”

  “Fanfuckingtastic,” Huw says and starts for the door, but Bonnie catches him.

  “How many to evacuate? I want to be sure we don’t miss anyone.” There’s another thunderous crash, this one from closer by.

  The Bishop’s eyes roll back into its head, then flip down. “A dozen on the premises, not counting the ones that were on the front door. It seems they’ve been liquidated already.”

  “Shit. What’ll we —” Huw dithers for a moment but Bonnie is already heading for the cloakroom door.