by Rudy Rucker
“Jil—” began Ond.
“Oh, Jil’s right,” said Jayjay flopping despondently into a patio chair. “I shouldn’t contact Gaia.”
“Jil’s a bitch,” said Thuy before she could stop herself. “Sorry, Ond.”
“Don’t curse at my mother,” said Bixie, as she and the three other kids reappeared, returning early from their surf outing.
“You grown-ups should be making plans,” scolded Mabel. “The surf is flat and everything’s wrong. I teeped to find out what you’re doing about it, and you’re just picking on each other and talking about stupid old paintings? Why don’t you call in the army and the air force?”
“That’d be square,” said Kittie wickedly. “I’d rather be dead than square.”
“What if things stay this way for good?” demanded Bixie. “I feel so—ugh. Like a shadow or a toon.”
“Maybe we’re better off without gnarl,” said Chu, giving the girl a pointed look. “It hurts to feel.”
“You’re all crazy!” wailed Mabel.
“Look, if nobody else will, I’m gonna contact Gaia myself,” said Thuy.
“Vintage pighead move,” muttered Jil.
“By the way, Jil, I’m sorry I called you a BITCH!” said Thuy, punching the final word. Deep down, she’d never really forgiven Jil for sleeping with Jayjay. No gnarl deficit was gonna erase that.
Jil started to get up from her seat, but Ond got in between them.
Happy to have had the last word, Thuy closed her eyes and circled up toward the great blue face of Gaia. The transition was slower than usual, and it was hard to keep her focus. But then Gaia flipped down a curly tendril to catch hold of Thuy’s psyche, pulling her to a fresh-smelling niche, vaguely chapel-like, with an elegant ultramarine figure sitting on a couch, an oceanblue woman with wave-swell breasts and kelp for hair—a Gaian avatar.
“This invasion is dreadful,” said Gaia right off. “Like parasitic vines strangling an oak. Like a plague riddling a cow’s flesh with pus-filled buboes. I’m the cow. I’m the oak. I’m considering drastic action.”
“How far has the problem spread?” asked Thuy.
“Just Yolla Bolly and San Francisco so far. Two cubes of my body, each of them a hundred kilometers on an edge. Thanks to your husband.”
“You encouraged him,” said Thuy.
“Well—he and Sonic were being interesting,” said Gaia. “I boosted them to a higher level. And then the pitchfork got involved.”
“What is that thing?” asked Thuy. “I saw him outside my house during the night.”
“Yes,” said Gaia. “The pitchfork is the partner of the magic harp. Groovy and Lovva. I’ve known about them for a few days. Basically, Groovy and Lovva are humanoids like you, but they can shift their shapes. They come from a lazy eight planet, too. Their minds are temporarily infinite, and that means they have direct matter control.”
“These are completely different aliens from Pekka and her agent? And different from the flying manta rays—assuming those are real?”
“The mantas are real,” said Gaia. “But they’re hard to see. They camouflage themselves very well. I think they’re enemies of Pekka, so that’s all to the good.”
“This is nuts,” said Thuy. “Why did you let all these weird aliens come after my husband?”
“Well, Lovva the harp’s been very nice to us—she unfurled my eighth dimension, after all. So I thought that whatever her husband, Groovy, did would be good, too. And there’s something else. Your and Jayjay’s timelines are somehow very deeply knotted with the timelines of Lovva and Groovy.”
“Oh, great,” said Thuy.
“It’s not all bad,” said Gaia. “I never knew that people could travel to lazy eight infinity via the subdimensions, and last night Jayjay got partway there. The problem is that when he and the pitchfork stopped, the pitchfork incarnated a Pekklet and, as you know, the Pekklet is puppeteering Jayjay.”
“So find the Pekklet,” said Thuy. “Kill her. I mean, she’s living right inside one of our floorboards. Come to think of it, I can pull up the board and burn it.”
“Rearranging a few molecules isn’t going to change anything,” said Gaia. “The Pekklet is ten tridecillion levels down into the subdimensions. It’s as if she were deep undersea where no storms can reach.”
“So dive in after her,” insisted Thuy. “Find her!”
“But the beanstalk is gone now,” said Gaia. “So there’s no obvious path to the Pekklet.”
“Can’t you do a sweep of the subdimensions?”
“You don’t understand about subdimensional space,” said Gaia. “It’s exponentially large. The level where the Pekklet’s hiding isn’t just bigger than our universe, it’s bigger than ten to the power of our universe.”
“I’m not a scientist.”
“Let’s just say that unless one of you manages to aktualize yourself and get an infinite mind, there’s no hope of finding the Pekklet.”
“So now what?” asked Thuy. “How do we fix my husband?”
“I foresee a struggle,” said Gaia, flipping her seaweed hair. A school of tiny, metallic-blue fish quivered amid the stalks. “I’m a rich prize. I have a highly evolved ecosystem and an unfurled eighth dimension. And it seems that, across the galaxies, humanoids are quite rare and valuable. You’re one of the very few types of beings who can teleport or teek.”
“So the alien birds want us, huh?” said Thuy. “And the pitchfork is helping them out. I wonder if Mabel was right. Maybe the army should nuke Yolla Bolly.”
“The filthy nukes are gone,” said Gaia. “I disintegrated all of the atomic weapons on Lazy Eight Day when the silps awoke. Your so-called leaders are covering that up. They want to keep you scared of them. But I can perfectly well wipe out Yolla Bolly and San Francisco without nukes.”
“What do you mean?” asked Thuy.
“I’m able to control my lava flows and to shift my tectonic plates. I can place volcanoes at will. Vaporizing the Yolla Bolly wilderness won’t destroy the Pekklet, but it’ll definitely disperse the atoms that Jayjay infected. I might even tip California into the sea.”
“But explosions of that size . . .”
The womanly blue figure of Gaia laughed ruefully, now more like the sky than the sea. A series of jeweled beetles sprang into flight around her cloudy head. “The firestorms, smoke, and dust could well make some of the higher organisms extinct,” she said, expressively softening her hands into tentacles. “But—species come and go. What I’m a little worried about is that—should a full cleansing require highly cataclysmic eruptions—I might break into chunks.”
“That’s unthinkable,” said Thuy, choosing her words carefully. “Not just for us, Gaia, but for you. You have to preserve yourself. You’re a beautiful warm-centered planet. You don’t want to be a frozen asteroid belt.”
“I’d rather end up that way than be the slave of alien parasites. Drastic measures, Thuy.”
“Let’s try some partial measures first. Maybe we can fix it with computer science.”
“Aha,” said Gaia, fixing Thuy with an intense, sky-blue stare. “You rise to the challenge. Very well then. I want you and Jayjay to return to your house in the woods. See what you can learn about the alien invaders whom you’ll find there. I don’t know enough about them yet. It’s hard to read their minds.”
“Are you talking about the flying stingrays?”
“No, I’m talking about things like ostrich birds. They’re called Peng. Transmitted here from Pekka’s world. Thanks to Jayjay.”
“At our camp right now?” said Thuy uneasily. “I thought we were just talking about—an infection in our atoms. A quantum computation thing.”
“Have you ever heard of matter waves, Thuy?”
“No. I’m not into physics.”
“You humans have huge new memory storage, plus the help of the silps and me—and you’re still picky about what you learn?” said Gaia impatiently. “You’re like stones. Or artichokes.”
�
�I’m writing a new metanovel,” said Thuy, defensively. “Hive Mind. I want to explore the ebb and flow of shared identities. Conscious minds used to be like isolated fireflies in the night. And now the light is everywhere. Our world is hylozoic. But I don’t have to tell you this, do I?”
“I can’t believe how long this conversation is taking,” said Gaia irritably. “Centuries of my time. Let’s stick to what I wanted tell you about matter waves. Everything is wave and particle. Think of atoms focusing matter waves on a single spot to produce a physical object. It’s like a bunch of lasers focusing light waves on a single spot to produce a tiny sun.”
“You’re talking about tulpas,” exclaimed Thuy, dredging up another obscure word that she happened to know.
“You humans are like walking bagpipes,” said Gaia wearily. “You make squeals and imagine they’re thoughts. What’s a tulpa supposed to be?”
“You’re the global hive mind, Gaia. Look up Tibetan mysticism.” Thuy’s favorite musician, Tawny Krush, had led her to this topic last year. “A tulpa’s an idea that becomes real.”
“Ah yes, I see now,” said Gaia quickly. “Quite the elegant squeal, really. So, yes, when you go up to Yolla Bolly, you’ll be dealing with Peng tulpas. In their own way, they’re as solid as you.”
“Hundreds of Peng?”
“Not hundreds,” said Gaia, becoming a tangle of vines and leaves with bunny rabbits peeping out. “Not at all. Three Peng aliens in Yolla Bolly, and three here in San Francisco.”
“Huge aliens?”
“No, no, the tulpas aren’t much bigger than you. It takes so very much matter to generate them because the computation is a quadrillion-fold inefficient. They parasitize a hundred-kilometer cube of my substance to compute three puny bodies amounting to a cubic meter of louse-infested flesh! It’s an outrage. I hate them.”
“If there’s only three aliens at our camp, then maybe Jayjay and I do have a chance,” said Thuy. “Maybe we could kill them.” But even as she said this, she wondered if it might not be better to make friends.
“No compromises,” urged Gaia, noticing Thuy’s thought of mercy. “I’d try to kill them myself, but I don’t have that kind of finely tuned control. In any case, it’s going to be tricky. They’re not ordinary matter, after all.”
“Maybe Jayjay can erase them by undoing what he did to all those atoms,” suggested Thuy. “Like I said before. Computer science.” Not that this was a field she’d ever taken much interest in.
“Go there and see,” urged Gaia. “Meanwhile I’ll be planning my volcanoes, just in case.” Her image mutated into a dense swarm of gnats.
Thuy drew back into ordinary consciousness. She was slumped in her chair like any pighead on the nod. Jil gave her an unfriendly glance. Thuy did a remote teep check on Yolla Bolly. Although she could make out their empty cabin, the connection went sparkling and gauzy when she tried to see into the surrounding woods. The only way to size up the aliens was going to be face-to-face.
“I overheard you telling Gaia that we’re going to Yolla Bolly,” said Jayjay. “I’m ready.”
“Look!” said Chu, sounding satisfied. “We have guns.”
The men had been gathering weapons. A candy-cane striped bazooka lay on the patio beside two futuristic pistols: a smooth, blue raygun and a knotted shape of wires and crystals.
“We borrowed these from a place called Seven Wiggle Labs!” said Ond enthusiastically. “It’s run by two vibby geeks who used to work with me at ExaExa.”
“I’m a stonker,” teeped the blue raygun with the triangular fins. He had a reedy tenor voice.
“I’ll test it,” yelled Momotaro and snatched up the stonker. With a hyperactive cackle, he fired at a yellow-cushioned chair. A wavery femtoray flowed from the muzzle and the cushions’ color drained away. The chair glazed over with symmetric patterns of frost, let out a plaintive creak, and collapsed into cubes that broke into still smaller cubes that crumbled into dust.
“It’s supposed to shatter jaggedly,” complained the blue raygun via teep. “I don’t like cubes.”
“Jagged or not, that gun might slow down some aliens, huh, Thuy?” said Jayjay.
Momotaro danced across the yard, teeking stones into the air and disintegrating them in mid-flight. A couple of Jil’s shoons skipped along in his wake.
“And look at this vibby bazooka,” said Jayjay. “It’s a gobble gun.” The helical stripes of red and white were continually rotating around the outer surface of the bazooka’s tube, always in the same place, yet appearing to crawl forward—like a barber pole.
“Be sure and hold me out to one side when you shoot me,” advised the device in a solemn fat-man voice.
Meanwhile Thuy picked up the third weapon, a glittery pistol made of crystals and metal wrap. Its knobby grip was of entwined silver and copper strands. Its barrel was a wire-wrapped line of rhomboidal crystals, ranging in size from dice to ice cubes. It was like an extravagant piece of jewelry, an objet d’art. She could begin to see the allure of exotic weaponry.
“I’m the opposite of the stonker,” the gun teeped in a sweet soprano whisper. “I’m a klusper. I overload atoms with information and they vibrate faster and faster, until the target gets all crispy and bursts into flame.”
“I want to shoot at the aliens!” yelled Momotaro.
“Absolutely not,” said Jil. With a lashing gesture of her mind, she teeked the stonker from Momotaro’s grasp. It made an audible slap as it landed against her palm. “I think Thuy and Jayjay need to leave now,” she added.
“I’ll take the stonker,” said Chu. “I’m going with them. Nobody wants me around here anyway.”
“Don’t be silly, Chu,” said Ond. “I love you, Nektar loves you, and so does Jil and your new brother and sister.”
“I want to see the aliens,” said Chu. “Maybe they’re like me. Maybe I can make friends.”
“You’d have to ask your mother,” said Ond.
“She’s asleep at Lureen’s,” said Chu. “Let me go, and I’ll be back by supper. Nektar doesn’t have to know.”
“It’s okay with me,” put in Thuy. “Chu was pretty much help on the expedition to the Hibrane.”
“Oh—all right,” said Ond with a shrug. “I’ll keep researching the situation from here. Hop right back if there’s any danger at all. I’ll be watching you.”
Chu looked at Bixie as if he’d like to say something tender but he couldn’t spit it out.
And then the three of them were in the clearing in front of Thuy and Jayjay’s cabin. Although it was almost noon, the air was clouded by a sullen mist rising up from the sodden forest floor. The branches of the redwoods rocked monotonously in the steady breeze. The stream’s flow was utterly free of turbulence, the water’s surface a regular pattern of glassy bumps.
“It’s even deader than before,” said Thuy. Her hands hung dangling at her side. The San Francisco infection was wearing off from her atoms, but she felt no joy.
Their little house looked cheap and dull, and the silp that animated the house was dumb and slow. How silly she’d been to be so excited about her honeymoon.
The harsh bird cries sounded again.
CHAPTER 6
THE PENG
Standing in the clearing with the newlyweds, Chu felt hollow and distracted. He couldn’t stop thinking about Bixie.
This morning in the ocean he’d reached out to touch her sweet face, and then he’d leaned forward to graze her downy cheek. She’d frowned and shoved him away. Why didn’t Bixie like him? He’d been working so hard to heal his brain and change his demeanor. He was learning about empathy. He was more sociable than before. It was wrong to treat him like an unfeeling zombie. He heaved a wistful sigh.
Three nasty-smelling man-sized birds stalked into the woodsy clearing, moving with an urgent, stealthy gait, now and then hopping a few feet into the air and flapping their stubby wings.
They resembled grubby ostriches or rheas: long-necked dirty brown mops on scaly stil
ts, anything but cute. The downward curve of their blunt beaks lent them a sour demeanor. They pecked bugs from the ground, squawking to each other as they came.
“Stop right there,” Thuy called to the unsavory birds. “Where are you from?”
The biggest one cawed his harsh response, sending along a telepathic signal that made the sounds into words.
“We are Peng from planet Pengö. I am Suller, with my ill-tempered wife Gretta and our no-good son Kakar.”
“Why do you insult us in front of the new slaves?” squawked Gretta, aiming a sharp peck at her husband’s feathered body.
“We’re invading your planet,” volunteered Kakar. “I think that’s cool. I want to watch you mate.” Chu almost smiled at this. He liked rude kids.
“Are we supposed to shoot them?” he asked Thuy, teeping her on a private channel.
“Me first,” said Thuy, who’d just made a snap decision not to negotiate. “You hang back, Chu. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”
Holding her crystal-and-wire klusper in both hands, Thuy hit the alien fowl with brilliant yellow femtorays: first Suller, then Kakar, then Gretta.
Their striped brown feathers puffed into flame like oily rags; their legs collapsed, their flesh hissed and crackled, giving off the stench of burnt hair. As the inferno consumed the Peng, they threw back their heads in ecstasies of pain, shattering the air with spasmodic shrieks. Poor Kakar.
Chu noticed that the fire had set some of the low-hanging redwood limbs alight as well. The low-gnarl flames were shaped like symmetrical triangles.
Other than the slow crackling in the branches, all was still. The Peng smoke drifted away. But then—with a brief staticky flicker, the aliens were back in the clearing, as solid and stinky as before. Kakar pecked up a banana slug; Gretta fluffed out her mangy mop.
“Not nice,” said Suller, strutting toward Thuy. “You need to learn some manners, my furry female friend. How about if I—”
Jayjay powered on the gobble gun. With a throaty whoosh, the tube punched a narrow round hole through the forest, a cylinder of devastation half a meter across and several hundred meters long. The pulped debris was being vacuumed into the gobble gun’s tube, and a thick black coil of condensed matter oozed like excrement from the striped barrel’s rear.