Deliver

2021/12/25 - around 3 a.m. for insomniac courage.

Ugh, how can I even justify Deliver? It started out as a half-baked idea two years ago and I can't say I did nearly enough baking to turn it into a workable piece of fiction in the meantime. The theme of hope from the sky grew logically out of the first scene, and it came out more comedic than originally intended, though of course whether any of the comedy is actually funny is a question of no. Also, at some point I capitulated to my incapacity for scientific grounding and deliberately insulted every possible field of science at once, from astrophysics to physiology. However, I did promise myself, as a solstice present to myself, that I'd actually post it now as a means of getting back into attempting to write fiction, for all the good it's ever done.

Yeah, well, shattap, if I were any good at this I'd be getting paid for it, so enjoy your free crap.

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Deliver

    The noonday sun bathed a tableau as immortally wholesome as country life itself. Ripe golden grains waved majestically to the horizon while rows of pigs lazed in their shaded pens. The timeless truths of life, the natural rhythms of creation drummed along to the accompaniment of chirping birds and buzzing insects. Jon let the air-conditioned car drive itself to the next five transponders, keyed in orders for more insecticide and sonic deterrents and contemplated how much of the year’s crop he’d be asked to burn to maintain the value of his stock options in the multinational conglomerate, the juridical person who owned his county.
    The corner of his eye barely registered a flash of light breaking through the sparse, wispy clouds. Then his head whipped around. The company hadn’t announced any rain through next week. Sure enough, only a few shy dregs of cirrus graced the pale blue expanse. Yet a single drop of reddish sunlight dipped molten, ever downwards. For a split second as it hid below the grains’ inflorescence, he almost dared hope that would be the end of it… then gasped at the sight of a rising dust cloud accompanied by a latent sparse roar and impact. He punched the car to a (gradual, preprogrammed, parallel-parking) halt and pointed his wrist phone to the billowing dust.
    “Call Marta.”
    After allowing the call to insist several times, a female voice grated her displeasure.
    “This better not take long Jon. Who Wants to Pluralize a Husbife on Air starts in four minutes and thirty seconds!”
    “It’s a three-minute intro that you’ve seen hundreds of times already!” - is what he wished he could exclaim. But, remembering the ‘secret’ call to a divorce lawyer she’d arranged for him to find logged into the home’s system a couple of weeks before, he merely swallowed and pointed his wrist out the car’s window:
    “Marta, look!”
    “I’ve seen dust before” he could practically hear her reaching for the screen.
    “No, something crashed out here!”
    “Crashed?”
    “From the sky, Marta!”
    “Nothing crashes” she snorted “or they’d raise hell over the wasted fuel.”
    “I’m not talking a bird or a plane. Maybe something from higher up.”
    “What, like them Kesslets? That ain’t it either. They got those lasers now.”
    That time she really did reach for the screen. He counted to ten, twice, then signed the car’s release form to be permitted to open the door outside an approved pedestrian zone and stepped out into the scorching November heat. Ten minutes later, panting and drenched in sweat, he found himself staring at a smoking, steep furrow two lanes wide, shimmering at the far end. He hurried to step on a few flaming stalks, sighed in relief that the fire wasn’t spreading and turned in place a few times. At a loss, he bit the proverbial bullet:
    “Call God.”
    The call instantly connected, displaying the familiar stern yet caring face, modeled after his own as it was for every caller but adorned with a craggy beard.
    “This is San Monte, your path from Earth to Heaven.”
    “Forgive this sinner, Father, but I am in need of guidance” he intoned the formulaic greeting. The face shifted into an accepting smile.
    “Savings be upon thee, sinner.”
    There followed a routine trudge through several scripts. No, he did not want to take advantage of the newest genetically engineered seedless kernels. No, his hogs did not require reflensing at this time. No… on second thought, yes, he did want to contribute to this week’s charity drive for homeless homing pigeons. His civic credit score could use the nudge. Though he was not permitted to see it, assuredly it could always use another nudge. At long last, having exhausted its formulae, the AI informed him he would be penalized for the risky behavior of spending so much time outside his car in the heat, and ended the call.
    Jon bit his lip and counted to ten, twice, three times. He ambled to the culprit, still spewing heat from its descent. Tearing down the longest stalks he could find, he brushed away some of the topsoil. The rock’s protruding end looked oddly yellowish, maybe fist-sized. Judging that it would cause no further mischief until he could order a plow to dig it up, he let the matter drop until tomorrow. After all, opening credits were one thing but it wouldn’t do to miss this week’s groined reveal.
    Not until the next evening did the lightweight robot roll gently among the rows to the designated location, dug in its supports, leveraged its manipulator against the visible rock and hoisted. The camera tilted a bit, then redressed. The rock hadn’t shifted. Jon, gnawing a piece of Xtr33m B4k0n out of one hand, absentmindedly increased its torque and stared, dumbly, as the camera executed a neat loop, the now upside-down drone whining out an error. After a mandatory lengthy conversation with San Monte assuring the corporation of his moral and financial penitence for mistreating one of God’s Children such, Jon shelved the matter one more day. It’s not as though he could replant the field in time anyway, and he was holding out hope the SuperMixedVenusialWrestleBowlArts ads would start running soon.

    ***

    “It has been a week since the noble salt-of-the-earth Kent homestead was rocked by disaster” the reporter recited, angling her traditional blonde wig the better to whip in the breeze “but the local meteometeorologist in charge of debris denial of service has not yet explained how this space rock, which was deemed too small to reach the ground, reached the ground. Also, while most space rocks are dark in color, this one” she paused for dramatic effect, narrowed her eyes, set her jaw and dropped her voice half an octave “is yellow.”
    With that, she obeyed her car’s command to board once again and sped off down the lane. Jon stared slack-jawed, impeccably advertisement-draped in his Sunday best, alone in the field once more next to the significantly larger (and significantlier more expensive) automated combine with its dented blades. A little distance away, the yellow rock poked slightly above ground level now. The ditch dug by the plow revealed it stretching down into the soil, away from the point of impact. He walked over and caressed the golden dome, unexpectedly smooth and soft. It gave a false sense of yielding if he dug a fingernail into it but resisted any deeper harm, neither warm nor cold to the touch, its surface somehow imperceptibly crawling despite its intransigence.
    The news report never made it into vid-feeds, being deemed a moral threat to the Safe Space Publica.
    Marta picked up and left within the month, filing charges of Patriarchal Violence Via Nonconfrontationalism to the tune of half their gross worth, which somehow left him in debt for twice their (now his) property’s value plus Reparations in Perpetuity. Jon’s corpse was found two weeks later hanging from the only tree in sight. It was interred on the spot with full simulated honors by San Monte’s most pious Children in (to their algorithms’ credit) a perfectly rectangular grave, in the shadow of a golden pillar two stories tall.
    The tree, as accessory to nonstandard asset redundanciation, was then sentenced to summary axecution.

    ***

    Word got around, especially once the earthquakes started. Academics were at long last informed, and swarmed breathlessly over the site, but ground-penetrating radar could penetrate nowhere near enough to discern the depth of the stone pillar and its chemical lattice, albeit unique, could not be industrially manufactured and patented or even preserved in manageable slivers away from the main. After that, as further prodding would’ve amounted to mere replication studies, grant money flowed down more profitable avenues, and the stalwart champions of knowledge embarked on more creditable ventures.
    By Christmas, the spire’s upper reaches showed increasingly elongated bumps which the local automata decorated with licensed trademarks as the law dictated for any tree-like structure.
    By Spring, the nearest towns found themselves staring at two more house-sized golden domes straining up through Main Street’s asphalt. The region found itself flooded time and again as the soil sank into valleys, then increasingly deep ravines around the ever-growing pillars.
    The military took interest.
    A troop transport pulled up to the town limits, soldiers disembarked and marched, to cacophonous fanfare, five abreast, boots clacking and rifles shouldered, within range of the threat. At an order they stopped and knelt. They said a prayer to San Monte, and the neon screen above the county courthouse (now lopsided along the wall sinking toward the golden intrusion) displayed a gigantic green checkmark of divine approval. At an order they couched, at another they aimed, at another a deafening fusillade pockmarked the pillar. The crowd cheered. The officer bellowed another order. They safetied and shouldered their rifles, turned smartly on their heels and, matriotic duty performed, triumphantly fanfared their way back out of town. By next morning the bullets had been absorbed into their almost closed wounds.
    Not much could be done during summer, though at the mayor’s insistence (and the townsfolk’s generous contribution) San Monte requested the Lord And/Or Lady’s Fist/Kiss 937½-th tank regiment to intervene. Gasping for breath in the few remaining buildings with functioning air conditioning, the locals watched in awe as both tanks roared defiantly around the now highrise-sized jutting stones. Treads churning the dust into a dull, wind-twisted heat shimmer, they circled and menaced until one rolled too close to the spike's surrounding crevasse where the surrounding dirt and bedrock had been subsumed into its growth. The tank spun, sprayed dirt into the dusty chasm, fired a single shell shattering the courthouse roof, then slid Newtonianly dozen by hundreds of paces abyss-wise.
    The second tank stopped for a minute. Then, reversing its treads, it blared a triumphant march through its loudspeakers as it fumed its way backwards out of town, deeming it the better part of valor to bring news of partial victory to God in person. After all, there were better enemies to fight. Enemies with faces, with eyes which could show terror. Enemies who could be pleaded with or enslaved, and publicity-shot as worthy allies or paraded before news cameras in chains for the glory of their holinesses the synod of investors.
    By the time the bunker-busters bounced, the townsfolk had turned their hopes inward. When electricity failed, the few buildings still standing had already been sliding down into the canyon around the pillar. Deep in its shadow, washed by frequent rains now tumbling from the clouds which gathered around the branching golden trunk's upper reaches, they found cool, breathable air and a clutter of mangled vehicles and demolished structures forming a crude, ever shrinking, ever shifting scaffold... but every new landslide brought fresh bounty from outside.

***

    Grandpa was old, and angry. He wanted his old world back and he had an axe which they used to build new nests as the old ones sank horizontally into the limitless golden mountain. One evening Grandson listened to Grandpa's muttering, watched gaunt and ignorant and clever and desperate, as Grandpa shuffled and stumbled across their tier, closing his half-blind, watering eyes against the dizzying abyss over which they'd been lifted, month by meters, as the mountain continued to rise. Lightning from the neverending thunderstorms sparked against the mountain's side again and again. Grandpa stopped where scaffold met world, cursed and screamed and cursed again. The nigh-invisible bird-nets swept and cracked, a few of the day's catch still fluttering hopelessly, awaiting the knife and stew-pot. The old man braced his legs and swung his axe against the world, tears streaming from his eyes. Silently, cleverly, Grandson waited and watched, swing after fruitless swing, the old man's feet slipping and bracing, the steel blade chipping into the world's crust, until with a final, mighty blow, the elder recoiled, stumbled back... back... back... tipped over the side and gave himself to the night, not even bothering to scream for help. A distant slap and creak from lower tiers and a sound of confused, exhausted, dismayed voices interspersed the repeated thunderclaps. Clever Grandson crawled out of his hiding place, looked fearlessly out to the featureless night stretching away from the world, allowed himself a few tears, then pulled down some loose sheeting and curled up to sleep beneath the scratch the axe had left in living stone.
    Morning thundered louder than usual, but as he could not remember a calm day, the boy took it in stride. All around the drizzle-hazy horizon was interrupted by smaller, kilometers-tall golden pillars sunk to the root of first contact, where molten streams revulsed against the alien upwelling diverting their billions-aged tectonic canoodling. Along the sheer, resplendent surface of the closest, sharp young eyes could, on as clear a day as this, discern a fine grid of crenelations, rectangular tops of hundreds of high-rises: the city, caught up in the new world's stretch, now more vertical at ninety degrees than it had ever stood upright. But the sight was a fairytale to Son, more concerned with the all too familiar twisting of his empty bowels.
    He glanced around for a bird to haul back to the cooking fires, but the flimsy nets had already been drawn in for the morning's catch to be traded downhill for vegetables from hundreds of levels below. Far above, the clouds offered a brief glimpse of the repeatedly trifurcating alpine canopy. Slightly above his head, Grandpa's handiwork yawned open, jagged chips already acquiring the gloss of remodeling. One chip moved. Silently, cleverly, Son observed a nail-thick, palm-width polygon of yellowish stone reposition itself against the gash's edge then gradually, over the course of a minute, extrude a single hairlike, nearly invisible proboscis inwards. Where the tip met deeper rock, a hint of foam released an acrid smell.
    Tipped off to their presence, he now noticed smaller rhomboids camouflaged here and there, laboriously pried one up, sniffed it, grazed his teeth over its hard surface, scraped at it with a fingernail. It made no effort to escape, or if it did, a hopelessly indistinguishable one. Its ciliated underside proved more yielding, and its dainty crystalline entrails powdered into a surprisingly sweetish, tart, perfectly dry offering.
    Future Pa, future Grandpa, huddling beneath his tarp beside the age-old axe, feasted.

***

    The moon wobbled day by day, larger with every year, its face ever-changing, churning the distant seas at the spires' depths as it swept overhead, buffeting the emptiness between them with its wake. The earthquakes had long ceased, there being very little Earth left to quake, yet still groaned with tidal stress. From a full moon's perspective away, the pillars looked like radiating, tapering spines connected at their spherical base, each the size of a continent, regularly spaced, branching at their tops into dainty laceworks of trifurcations, first city-thick, then highway-thick, then vanishing into house-thick points. But nothing lived so high. Air had sunk as the spines subsumed the lithosphere, and had only been partly offset by venomous outgassing. Only low along their length did a reddish infestation tinge the consumer's golden perfection, a viscous smear of photosynthetic microbes struggling to melt down the rocky surface as fast as it could re-grow, splitting stone into what might pass for air and water. A precarious stalemate.
    Near the base of one particular spire, invisible from sensible interplanetary ranges, minuscule slits opened above precipitous ledges etched into the world's flank, ventillating the stubborn remnant of respiration within. From dark within where the world's healing slowed and permanent cavities could be maintained, a low chant resonated interspersing the monolith's occasional tidal tremors and the unimpeded winds twisting about it: a lilting priestly recitation answered in faithful clamor verse by verse in the timeless parental hopeful reassurance, celebrating the survival of the faithful into another year by year by year unto promised eternity. The revel continued late into the night, libated by crawlers mashed, soaked and fermented in their own shells and a sacrificial bird of such size to rival the fabled roasts of yore.
    They woke gradually the next morning, holding their groggy heads but nevertheless moving by a lifetime's, ten lifetimes', an ancestry's worth of repetition to scrape what life they could out of eternal stone. Inside, they repositioned the rhomboid herds to burn away encroaching walls, collected flammable gas and filtered water from the run-off. Outside, brushing hoarfrost from the soft peachfuzz protecting their faces, some pressed dew from the sprawling algal mat, followed by others loosing the flocks to glean its bounty, long slender pink necks curving in tandem to angle curved beaks along the walls.
    But wait! Birds squawk and dive for cover, alerting their keepers. One trembles at some unheard vibration and looks up, sees the moon, in its passing, graze the barely-visible lacework canopy enveloping the world. The world bends. They watch, uncomprehending, for minutes on end, as a myriad shallow canyons split the moon's surface, as a cloud of incandescent gravel filters down through the clear, rarefied air, Hadean ejecta settling back home in a trail of obscuring dust. The crackling of a thousand shattered mountain peaks overhead assaults their eardrums. Soon, the satellite dips toward the horizon, but the world itself shakes at its passing. They huddle inside the spire for a span, clinging to the walls' shudder and shatter, hearing air whisper through deepening cracks twenty kilometers tall. Skyscraper-sized impacts bombard the spire bases outside.
    Hours later the moon returned, sped on its downward path even as it braked and broke against the combing spire summits. The tribe's home shakes, then quakes, then ratchets back and forth, ear-splittingly tens of meters in a swing, ramming those too weak to cling to solidity against the walls. Minutes later, feeling the calamity subside, they crawl along the still shaking floor to take stock of the world around them. A sea of dust roils below them, rising with every tremulous heartbeat, all of creation resounding with the moon's passage as more and more alien stone drizzles from above. Already some are coughing, struggling for breath. They must climb, but their own home yawns shattered above them. Verticality, the eternal truth of apes' existence, has vanished.
    And yet... from almost at their feet, a mass of sky-stuff, loose but compacting under its own weight with every sprinkled kiloton, stretches forward as far as the eye can see... and upward, toward the dim tawny shadow of a neighbouring spire, still standing in defiance of the satellite's wrath. A bridge between death and the pale hope of life. No choice. They wrap birds and crawlers into bags, wrap themselves in birdskins, murder those who would refuse the journey and quarter their flesh for sustenance, and set off, mouths and noses filtered by cloth, crawling on leather-wrapped hands and feet along the jagged, shifting regolith. Tendon ropes grapple atop fallen meteorites. Some vanish in treacherous funnels of quicksand. Others die gasping and still others are murdered for life-giving moisture. Family by family dwindles out of evolution's eye. Their bravery is only outshone by their ruthlessness, their desperation by their mindless climb for breathable air: the last men to walk on the moon.
    And yet... a mere handful, untold nights after the last shudder of the satellite's impact echoes beneath the relative silence of the planet's groans and the new, unending storms under the impossible new weight pressing against the spires, witness their destination waxing golden through the dust-storm. It is not undamaged, yet still solid, a tableau as immortally wholesome as spire life itself. They hack a stairway into the algae-clad wall toward a promising crevice. They release the crawlers, nearly immortal in their lethargy, to begin fashioning a new home, tether the last pair of birds to scrape hungrily for sustenance, kiss the dewy, rancid algal mats with desperate cracked lips.
    They live.
    
***
    And yet...
    They dwindle.
    As the trifurcating canopy re-grows above them, as the world engulfs its new mass, then resumes the process of fixing the little remaining atmosphere, generation by generation finds less and less habitation. The microbial film begins to fail. All birds long-dead, even the crawlers sense the time for a new dormancy has come and drill deeper and deeper, protected from stone's hunger near its fist-sized seeds, to await a new shattering and be carried to new horizons.
    But the humans lack such means of survival. From tribe to family to parents to one, they dwindle. The last, the very last, waist-high by ancient standards, pushes his mother, then days later his father over the world's edge, refusing to indulge in their flesh as tradition dictated, knowing full well such tradition would buy him no time at all. In one final effort he rolls over, face cyanotic beneath its fur staring uncomprehendingly toward the trillion-twinkling glory of heaven's promise, and having retained little capacity for speech repeats the sounds his parents mumbled in times of despair, the one true faith passed down from the dawn of his species:
    "Bless this sinner with your savings..."
    - and dies.
***
    Before encountering what used to be called Earth by what used to be its inhabitants, the golden flake had drifted almost close enough to Neptune to have fallen there instead. It had spent the previous half a billion years twisting its way between gravity wells, accreting interstellar dust until it swelled ten thousand fold, then whittled down by the jets of pulsars and resonating with the echoes of entire nascent worlds toppling into their proto-stars. Its pan- and inter-galactic adventures in the billions of years after consuming this insignificant pebble would dwarf the very scope of storytelling.

    But this was the part that involved monkeys, so this is the part we want to hear.

The End