by Rudy Rucker
“Doesn’t matter,” said Jayjay. “We’re on our way out. I thought of just the place to go. Here’s the link. And, know what? We can vaporize the nants with an atomic bomb. Just like how the Chinese blew up the nant eggcase on Mars.” The troops had reached the second floor landing; a preemptive burst of gunfire angled up the stairs. “Come on, Thuy, let’s hop.”
“Wait,” said Thuy. “I don’t want anyone getting hold of the antinantanium.” She grabbed the beaker of purplish fluid off Luty’s lab table and poured it down the lab sink. “Okay now. I’m bringing my gun.”
Moments later they were sitting inside a room-sized bubble in foamy black rock, a lava cave some twenty meters beneath the volcanic slopes of Easter Island. The air was stale but breathable, the space absolutely quiet and dark. Narrow fissures led from the cave to the island’s surface. The ubiquitous orphids had filtered in even here, making it possible to see.
“This is good,” said Jayjay in a satisfied tone. “I noticed this spot this morning. Nobody else can get down here anytime soon. We’ve got time to steal and arm an atomic bomb. It won’t have to be all that big of a one. It’s just a matter of reaching a high enough temperature to ionize all the matter in the nant farm.”
“If there’s time, can we set off the bomb somewhere besides here?” said Thuy. “I’d hate to hurt Easter Island.”
“Um—sure,” said Jayjay. “It’ll just mean an extra hop. Let’s take a minute and poke around in the orphidnet. I’ll look for a bomb, and you look for a place to light it off.”
But all of a sudden the orphidnet access to the outer world closed down. Virtual pink surfaces surrounded them on every side. The Big Pig!
“Open the Ark,” said her voice, rich and energized.
“No,” said Jayjay.
“It’s going to happen sooner or later,” said the Big Pig. “I’ve got you trapped.”
“You don’t really want to ruin Earth, do you?” said Thuy, trying not to lose her focus. She was already feeling slow and dumb from the loss of orphidnet mind amplification. “Just for a memory upgrade?”
“I like enhancing my mind as much as you do,” said the Big Pig petulantly. “I can tell that you miss your orphidnet agents. Well, I’m the same. I want a bigger mind. And, listen, Virtual Earth will be just as good as this one. I didn’t used to think that, but I now I do.”
“What about Ond?” said Thuy, playing for time. “Wait until I fetch Ond to spill what he knows about the orphids.”
“I already know a lot about the orphids,” said the Big Pig. “And once I spend a few minutes with the nants, I’ll know a lot about them, too. I’ll be using some little shoons to beam laser probes in at them. But sure, Thuy, that’s fine if you jump to the Hibrane and look for Ond. As I told you this morning, I plan to be optimizing the nants until midnight. Give me the nants and then go ahead and jump. And if you bring back some new information in time, then I’ll take it into account.”
“Um—I’m not quite ready to jump,” said Thuy, feeling like such the loser.
“Sorry, but I’m getting bored with this conversation,” said the Big Pig. “For me it’s taking months. Open up the Ark, Jayjay, so I can get to work analyzing the nant farm. My shoons’ light rays can work on the nants through those glassy walls. I’ll test the nants, put my latest nanocode on them, test some more, tweak and retweak—don’t worry, I’m going to do the launch right. And you two can be the first ones on the new Virtual Earth. Vadam and Veve.”
“No,” said Jayjay once again.
“Listen,” said the Big Pig. “I can easily send a swarm of mosquito-sized shoons down here through the cracks. They’ll join together and make a golem to pry open the Ark of the Nants and smash the walls of the nant farm. And if you try to stop my golem, he’ll knock you down.”
Thuy and Jayjay tried to stall for a while longer, but then the mosquito shoons really did start showing up, some of them flashing like fireflies. The darting plastic dots weren’t satisfied with just banding together to create a slowly growing golem. The artificial insects were stinging Thuy and Jayjay every chance they got.
“I can’t take much more of this,” said Jayjay, wildly slapping at himself.
“Oh, just give the Big Pig what she wants,” said Thuy. Here in the sensory isolation of the cave—in between the mosquito bites—she was thinking about Wheenk. She had the entire database within the orphids on her skin. She was beginning to see the diverse elements of her work as fragments hurtling toward a common core. “I’ve got a feeling I’m going to the Hibrane really soon,” Thuy added. “That’ll give us one last roll of the dice.”
“Yeah, you keep telling everyone that.”
“Open the Ark, Jayjay.”
Of course the red button on the Ark wouldn’t respond to Jayjay’s thumb. So, guiding his actions by the blinking of the flying shoons and his limited local orphidnet vision, Jayjay used Thuy’s P90 to fire a blast across the top of the Ark, busting it open.
And then, in the velvet darkness, he screamed.
“What?” cried Thuy.
“Nanomachine goo!” gasped Jayjay, his echoing voice seeming to come from every side. “The Ark of the Nants was booby-trapped! The stuff’s all over me! Oh, it tingles, it stings! Get back, Thuy! And don’t forget that—” Jayjay gurgled and fell silent. In the local orphidnet, Thuy could see that her lover was fully enveloped by rippling nanoslime. He twitched, spasmed, and dropped motionless to the stone floor.
Thuy cowered at the far end of the cave, remembering Grandmaster Green Flash’s skin with the rainbow sheen like rotten fish or rancid ham. Jayjay lay still beneath the iridescent slime. Thuy hated herself for being afraid to approach him. Tragic organ music swirled in her head. Her heart skipped a beat and seemed to explode.
And in that instant of ultimate despair, she finished Wheenk, the pieces of the metanovel coming together like a time-reversed nuclear explosion—everything fitting, everything of a piece—her adventures at the fab, her love for Jayjay, her worries about the nants, the dance she’d done down the rainy street that night exulting over her metanovel, the expression on her mother’s face at her college graduation, her father’s bare feet when he tended his tomato plants, the Easter Island boy who’d given her a cone shell today, her last kiss with Jayjay—Wheenk slamming together as heavy and whole as a sphere of plutonium, a perfected pattern in her local orphidnet.
Pain had produced artistic transcendence.
Thuy messaged a copy to the Big Pig lest the great work be lost. The Pig understood; kindly she passed it further, posting Wheenk across the global orphidnet.
And now, just as Azaroth had promised, Thuy remembered Chu’s Knot. There’d been one final twist and wrap she couldn’t visualize, but finally she had the knack; it was a bit like the time Kittie had showed her how to knit a pointed hat. Yes, the Knot was perfectly clear in Thuy’s unaided mind, hanging there in three-dimensional glory, revolving at the touch of her will, a subtly woven bracelet with several hundred crossings.
Meanwhile the Pig was tending to a cloud of orphids surrounding the nant farm. And a second cloud of orphids was attacking the vile goo that enveloped Jayjay’s inert form. Thuy hadn’t thought about Jayjay for nearly a minute. She was such a terrible, self-centered person.
“I could go to the Hibrane now,” she told the Big Pig. “But what’s the use? I don’t want to live without Jayjay.”
A streamer of goo pushed across the cave, feeling for Thuy. Nimbly she moved out of its reach.
“You don’t look quite ready to die,” said the Big Pig, sounding amused. “Anyway, Jayjay’s not dead. He’ll be fine once the orphids clean him off. I’ll be keeping him here to make sure you return. And meanwhile, I’ll put him on a dark dream. He and I will be conducting a thought experiment, you might say. Go on with you now. And I’m open to whatever you learn. But, remember, I don’t want to wait past midnight. You’ve got a little over six hours.”
Thuy focused on her mental image of Chu’s Knot
. Nothing happened. Calming her panic, she remembered to do like Ond and Jil had done. She let go of her internal voice and interrupted her endless narration of her life story. She saw the spaces between her thoughts. She saw the space between the worlds.
She was off.
Part IV
Chapter 11
The Hibrane
Thuy felt a spinning sensation, as if she were being pulled down a whirlpool. And then she was skimming low across a foamy sea, following the curves of its undulating surface, flying with her arms outstretched, no land in sight. Surely the Hibrane lay upon the sea’s far shore.
She felt vulnerable, tracing her way across this watery wasteland alone. It seemed unfair that the passage should seem to take so long, given that the Hibrane was supposedly less than a decillionth of a meter off. Space and time were weird down so close to the quantum level.
A tuberous stub popped through the ocean’s slowly seething surface. Thuy felt a faint tingle, and now the rootlike stub took on the appearance of a glistening bird head, the head connected to a dimly visible humanoid form rushing along beneath the surface, pacing Thuy’s progress. The bird head twitched this way and that, tracking Thuy’s motions. Thuy had seen similar beings when she’d inched back and forth through Luty’s teleportation grill. Subbies. They scared the shit out of her.
This particular subbie was casting a spume of drops and bubbles in his wake. Thuy swerved a bit, lest the spray touch her. She felt a nightmarish terror that any contact with the subbie could trap her here, world without end. As if in response, the subbie elongated his neck toward Thuy, blinking his yellow-rimmed eyes and clacking his down-curved beak.
Thuy reached deep into herself and drew power from the completed whole of Wheenk, feeding the energy into an exponential spike of acceleration. And then—yes!—she was in the Hibrane.
As she arrived, her mind bloomed; every particle of her body unfurled. She found herself in a copy of the same lava cave, the space velvety dark and utterly still. She was alone—yet not alone. For everything was telepathic here.
The walls of the cave were singing a chorus; Thuy’s body parts were speaking to her; the air currents were sensually describing their kinetic flows; and twenty meters above, a moai statue was happily basking in the sun. All across this world the minds of Hibraners pulsed like musical flowers.
Thuy sat on the cave floor, gathering her wits. It made her sick to be so far from Jayjay in his time of need. Was he really going to be okay? She was half tempted to jump right back to the Lobrane. Of course, then she’d have to run the gauntlet of the subbies again. Come on, Thuy, now that you’re in the Hibrane, find Ond and invent a defense against the nants. That’s what you came for.
The stone beneath her felt crumbly; she could poke her finger right into it. Might she tunnel to the surface? Although her orphids had disappeared when she arrived, the universal Hibrane telepathy had given her the ability to see through walls. The telepathic images were richer and more true-to-life than the orphidnet images had been.
Thuy found a thin spot in the cave wall right above a dog-sized boulder on the ground. A mere six inches of foamy rock separated her from a chimneylike vent leading directly to the surface. She pulled the sleeves of her red plaid coat down over her hands and began scraping at the wall; the friable stone gave way like styrofoam or cheese. As well as being less dense, the matter moved more slowly here. The chunks of rock were drifting to the floor in slow motion.
“Huh, huh! Dig, dig!” said Thuy, recalling the phrase from a comic strip Kittie had admired. If she’d been at home with the orphidnet beezies, she could have instantly located an archived copy of Mole. But the universal telepathy of the Hibrane was nothing like so well organized.
Thuy dug on, muttering and chuckling, happy to be doing something. The rocks chanted their transformations; the air exulted in its motion-eddies; Thuy’s fingers gloated over their strength. In a minute she’d reached the chimney vent. Light spilled down from twenty meters above. She clambered up the shaft like an invading underworld gnome, her gold piezoplastic Yu Shu shoes finding purchase on the cracks and crevices of the shaft’s overgrown walls.
Thuy emerged into a summer day. Hot, around noon. She doffed her plaid coat. A moai statue loomed overhead, five or six times as big as the ones in the Lobrane. The grasses and field flowers were level with her waist. Surveying the giganticized island landscape, Thuy deduced that in the Hibrane she was effectively one foot tall.
There were other differences. The nearby moai statue had wider eyes than the ones she’d seen before; the figure’s lips were parted to show square basalt teeth. The star-shaped flowers in the grass were pink instead of yellow, the grass blades were more sharply curved. And the Hibrane Pacific waves were breaking in slow slow motion, with the surf’s sound dialed down to a deep bass boom.
Thuy glanced up past the dead volcano at the scattered clouds. These, at least, looked the same as before. It struck her that the edge of one cloud was quite similar to the border of a lichen patch she’d noticed on a wall of the vent she’d just climbed. As she formed this thought, she realized she’d acquired an eidetic memory for visual form. Each shape she saw was being stored intact in her Hibrane-expanded mind.
Curiouser and curiouser. Thuy used telepathic omnividence to view herself as if from outside. She was still wearing striped yellow-and-black tights, a black miniskirt, and her yellow sweater. Fine. But her hair! Finding a comb in her coat pocket, she undid her pigtail fasteners, combed out her dark locks, made a tidy part down the middle and restored her high pigtails to pristine form. She applied a little pink lipstick too.
She was hungry. She wondered if Hibrane Easter Island had a town of Hanga Roa with a Tuna-Ahi Barbecue. Reaching into the telepathic glow of the Hibrane mindscape, she located the island’s town, which indeed had an unmarked restaurant very much like the place where she and Jayjay had breakfasted.
Given that she was the size of a gnome, Thuy didn’t feel like walking all the way to town. Maybe she could teleport. She fixed her mind upon the target location and the source location: the restaurant and the grassy patch by the moai.
Whenever Jayjay had teleported, he’d invoked his specially designed interpolation agents. The interpolators compensated for the fact that orphidnet images didn’t look quite as real as your immediate surroundings. But here in the Hibrane, you didn’t need interpolators. Thuy’s remote view of the village was utterly convincing.
Using her writerly sense of correspondences, Thuy let her attention dance back and forth between her images of source and target, pairing up features, crafting the sought-for transition as if writing a segue between two of a metanovel’s scenes. As she withdrew from reality’s insistent din, she seemed to collapse in on herself.
Where was she? Asking the question was enough. Pop—she was on the main street of the Hibrane version of Hanga Roa, carrying her coat under her arm. The locals had a few cars, even though they could teleport too. The cars were flimsy, as if cobbled together from organic parts: leaves, beetle wings, seashells. One car had dots like a ladybug, another bore yellow and white stripes. They all had solar cells and electric motors.
Relative to little Thuy, the single-story shops and houses were as tall as office buildings. The buildings looked to be assembled from naturally grown components as well. Overhead, shells and shiny seedpods hung upon lines stretched across the street; they’d been crafted into representational forms: a star, a candy cane, a cuttlefish holding a triangle—Thuy recalled Azaroth’s mentioning that the cuttlefish was a symbol for a Hibrane religious figure. Perhaps these were ornaments to celebrate a holiday.
All these things Thuy noticed in the first flash after landing. But the bright-clothed Hibraners were taking the bulk of her attention. A dozen of them were in view: slow-moving giants, ethnically Chilean and Polynesian. All of them were staring at Thuy, raising their arms in slow-motion alarm and widening their mouths. And at the same time they were probing Thuy’s mind. She tried her bes
t to think pleasant, innocuous thoughts, but perhaps her worries about the nants leaked through. In any case, the Hibraners were scared of her.
The air rumbled with their low-speed cries, deep and draggy as sounds heard underwater. The Hibraners wheeled about in waltz time, fleeing from the alien gnome in the striped leggings. Their slow-motion panic was spooky.
Across the street was the place like the Tuna-Ahi Barbecue, its stony walls flowing smoothly from the soil. Although the building bore no written sign, it was telepathically emanating the image of a bluefin tuna. Thuy went inside. The inn was only approximately similar to its counterpart on the Lobrane.
The interior furnishings formed naturalistic curves, with each chair or table different from the others. The lumpish bottles behind the bar had no labels; instead they bore telepathic notes. Thuy picked up that the telepathic labels were called teep-tags.
Quite a few people were dining on the patio. The chairs were made of hardened kelp stems, and the tables were disks of mother-of-pearl with further kelp stems for their legs. A slender waitress in vibrant blue was just setting down pearly platters of rice, beans, and tuna steaks for a group of six: two women, a man, a boy, and two girls. Thuy yelled and charged toward them. As she’d hoped, the diners rocked back in their curved chairs. In two quick hops, Thuy was standing on the opalescent dining table.
She grabbed hold of a tuna steak the size of her torso; to her it felt like it weighed but a pound—as the matter here was less dense. The grilled fish was warm and savory, emanating faint images of its long, vigorous life in the deeps of the sea. Thuy tore into it; rapidly scarfing down the slab of fish and a mound of rice the size of her head.
The diners remained seated around the table, intrigued by Thuy’s antics, and perhaps unwilling to abandon their food. The low burble of the three children’s laughter became audible as Thuy took a frantic slurp from a bathtub-sized glass of thin-tasting cola. One of the women was frowning and her arm was arcing ever so slowly toward Thuy’s head. Thuy stepped out of reach while loading some giant beans onto a tortilla the size of a pillow case. She strolled to the table’s edge, gobbled the wrapped-up beans, called out a thank you, and hopped down to the crushed-shell patio.