Appeals Court | Page 9

cannibals is all very fucking well, but I thought you said this would be safe as houses?"
"Um well, there's been a kinda technical hitch in that direction," Adrian says. "But we'll get that sorted out, don't you worry yer little head over it. Main thing is, you don't wanna stay with the randroids any longer than you got to, got that? Anyway, I'm sure you can show 'em a clean pair of heels, mate. When you get to Glory City, head for the John the Baptist Museum of Godless Evolution and make your way to the Steven Jay Gould Lies and Blasphemy Exhibit. There's a trapdoor under the *Hallucigena* mock-up leading to an atheist's hole and if you get there I'll send someone to pick you up. 'Kay?"
"Wait --" Huw says, but he's too late. The buzzing stops, just as Doc reaches over and cuffs Huw around the helmet. "What?" Huw cranks the volume on his suit radio.
" -- said, you paying attention, boy?" Doc demands. There's a suspicious gleam in his eye, although Huw isn't certain it isn't just the effect of looking at him through a thin layer of toughened glass across which stray a handful of very lost ants.
"I was asleep," Huw protests.
"Bah." Doc rubs off the ants, then grabs the brakes. "Well, son, I was just saying: only a couple of hours now until we get there..."
#
The road is unlit and there's little traffic. What there is seems to consist mostly of high-tech bicycle rickshaws retrofitted for unapologetic hydrocarbon combustion, and ancient rusting behemoth pick-ups that belch thick blue petroleum smoke -- catalytic converters and fuel cells being sins against man's deity-designated dominance over nature. The occasional wilted and ant-nibbled wreaths plaintively underscore the messages on the tarnished and bullet-speckled road signs: KEEP RIGHT and SLOW TRUCKS.
The landscape is dotted with buildings that have the consistency of halvah or very old cheddar. These are the remains of man's folly and his pride, now bored out of 90 percent of their volume to fill the relentless bellies of the Hypercolony. Individually, the ants crawling across his faceplate, along his guantlets, over the sexy sizzle of the LEDs and crisped up in a crust around the flame-nozzles appear to be disjointed and uncoordinated. But now, here, confronted with the evidence of the Hypercolony's ability to energize collective action out of its atomic units, Huw is struck with a deep, atavistic terror. There is an Other here, loose on the continent, capable of bringing low all that his kind has built. Suddenly, Huw's familiar corporeality, the source of so much personal pride, starts to feel like a liability.
The aircon unit makes a sputtery noise that Huw feels rather than hears through the cavaties of the michelin-suit. He's tried wiggling its umblicus in its suit-seal, but now the air coming out of it is hot and wet and smells of burning insulation. He's panting and streaming with sweat by the time the dim white dome of Glory City swims out of the darkness ahead to straddle the road like a monstrous concrete carbuncle. Sam guns the throttle like a tireless robot, while Doc snores in the sidecar, his mouth gaping open beneath his moustache, blurred behind the ant-crawling lexan of his faceplate. "How much longer?" he gasps, the first words he's spoken in an hour.
"Three miles. Then we park up and take a room for the night in Saint Pat's Godly Irish Motel. No smoking, mind," Sam adds. "They don't take to the demon weed."
Huw stares in grim, panting silence as they take the uphill slope towards the base of the enormous, kilometers-high Fuller dome that caps the former city. Impregnated with neurotoxins, the dome is the ultimate defense against ants. They ride into the city past a row of gibbeted criminals, their caged bones picked clean by ants, then into the deserted and enormous airlock, large enough to accomodate an armoured batallion. What Huw initially takes for an old-fashioned air-shower turns out to be a gas chamber, venting something that makes his throat close when he gets a hint of a whiff of it through the suit's broken aircon. After ten minutes of gale-force nerve-gas, most of the ants are washed away, and those that remain appear to have died. Sam produces a stiff whisk broom and brushes him free of the few thousand corpses that have become anchored by their mouth-parts to his suit, with curious gentleness, and then hands him the whisk so that he may return the favor. Then the inner doors to Glory City open wide, sucking them into the stronghold of the left-behind.
Once inside the dome, Huw finds that Glory City bears little resemblance to any streaming media representations of pre-singularity NorAm cities he's ever seen. For one thing the roads are narrow and