by Rudy Rucker
The shores are lined with dwellings: domed structures of nested stones, each hut with a door, two windows, and a ventilation hole in the roof. Peng birds strut in and out of the homes, knees bending backward, fluffy brown bodies bobbing up and down. They stroll along the shoreline, chatting with each other, snapping bugs from the air, wading into the shallows for frogs and minnows.
The Peng can fly, but not in the usual kind of way. Thanks to pale blue, ticklike symbiotes known as flight lice, they can make themselves weightless. Hovering like feathered blimps, the Peng use their tiny wings to maneuver. Now and then a Peng floats up a tree or cliff to peck apart a parrot’s nest or a swallow’s mud-daubed home, devouring the eggs and the fledglings.
“We Peng have been the dominant species for hundreds of thousands of years,” resumes the bass bird voice. “Our ecology has converged to a lasting equilibrium.”
A sequence of display cases flashes by, exhibiting the surprisingly few species of life on Pengö: trees and flowering plants, frogs and fish, earthworms and beetles, some smaller birds, the Peng—and no mammals.
“We revel in the simple perfection of Pengö’s biome,” quacks the narrator. “In the intellectual sphere, a similar process of refinement has taken place, raising our arts and practical crafts to a level that might seem to rule out further improvement. But great originals still emerge: wild talents like Waheer, who flourished one thousand years ago.”
The viewpoint flies back in time to a chalky cliff. The cliff is like a public art gallery; its surface is decorated with chicken scratches. Peng artists are at work, using their beaks to scar the white stone, floating and fluttering along the face of the cliff.
The artworks fall into four types: jittery ovals that shape the outlines of eggs, chevron patterns that model Peng feathers, arches that represent Peng homes, and images of a shaded ring with a pucker in the middle.
Responding to Chu’s puzzlement, the built-in glossary explains that the puckered rings represent Peng cloacas, which are the multipurpose body vents that birds of both genders use for excretion and sex. Chu bares his teeth in a reflexive gesture of disgust.
Back in the mental movie, a single grungy Peng jitters about on the higher reaches of the cliff, frantically pecking fresh images into the stone. This is Waheer. He wears his feathers tinted an unnatural shade of orange, with a defiant red Mohawk streak down the middle. Kakar, who is watching the show with the humans, caws approvingly.
Waheer’s artworks are unique. Rat-tatting like a woodpecker, he engraves skeins of stars, spiral galaxies, flaming suns, distant planets. He’s a science fiction visionary.
“Waheer’s drive for transcendence inspired Pekka to a wondrous discovery,” intones the narrator: “Peng can travel to ape worlds via Pengö’s cloaca!”
The orange-feathered Waheer cocks his head, as if harkening to a call. He glides away from his space murals and—in fast-forward—makes his way across miles of ridges, disheveled and dogged, sometimes walking, sometimes buzzing through the air like a blimp, heading ever farther south, beyond the temperate zones and into the polar wastes.
The pocked, shiny snowfields are lit by shimmering auroras, by crimson and yellow streamers that emanate from a luminous hole located precisely at planet Pengö’s south pole. Haunting alien music thrills the air. Pekka, the planetary mind, is calling Waheer to the special place.
The fuming polar vent, known as Pengö’s cloaca, is the senescent planet’s last sign of active volcanism. The hole bores into the depths like a mine shaft. At the deeper levels, an orange glow tints its mist-shrouded walls, for liquid lava lies below.
Waheer stands at the tip of an ice-glazed promontory that projects almost to the center of the smoking vent. Above him, celestial lances of auroral energy flicker across the sky
There is much to be explained about this uncanny scene. A quick montage of diagrams shows three salient facts. Firstly, Waheer, as transcendent artist, has visualized an intricate representation of his mind and body, a runic pattern containing all of his behaviors and personality quirks. Secondly, Pekka has reached through the lazy eight link to locate a suitable colony world, a planet named Pepple, populated by teekers resembling skinny green humans with three eyes. Thirdly, Pekka has forged a tight link with a gifted Pepple queen, bedazzling her with a mental image of an idealized Pepplese king.
The music swells. With a hopeful flap of his little wings, Waheer springs forward and lets himself drop like a stone.
“Our first pioneer,” says the narrator.
Chu sees a stylized image of Waheer landing in a glowing lagoon of lava, accompanied by an X-ray skeleton flash, a sharp sizzle and an olfactory whiff of sulfur and fried chicken. Waheer’s ashes form a fractal pattern of greasy swirls. The lava heaves, Waheer’s stains fold back on themselves—and a sheaf of beautiful abstract forms rises from Pengö’s cloaca, modulating the auroral streamers with the subtle song of—Waheer’s rune.
The rune signal rises heavenward and then, just beyond Pengö’s atmosphere, it veers into the eighth dimension like a river going underground only to emerge within Queen Ulla’s mind on Pepple, there to be runecast into the queen’s royal estate. The viewers catch a final glimpse of Waheer’s tulpa, working hard as a flying steed for the three-eyed nobles, carrying a fat duke along in pursuit of something like a fox.
“And he’d hoped to be a court artist,” says the voice-over with a chuckle. “Pepple has not become the most popular of our colony worlds.”
The narration resumes. “In the tradition of Waheer, Warm Worlds Realty continues spicing teeker worlds with the glorious savor of our finest citizens. We’ve made the process simple, painless, and fail-safe.”
Purposeful cheeping fills the background. Stone fences appear around the crater at the south pole, along with domed Peng houses and a double-sized meeting hall.
“Warm Worlds Realty maintains fine facilities adjacent to Pengö’s cloaca. We carefully screen the candidates for interplanetary travel. The rigorous Warm Worlds selection process ensures that, should you make the grade, you’ll be among an elite cadre of partner pioneers. Warm Worlds requires that our partner pioneers place their full economic resources in trust, and you’ll be invited to bring as many as four family members along on your unparalleled journey. To schedule a preliminary assessment of your qualifications, contact Hulda Pekkandottir at Warm Worlds Realty today!”
“Invaded by real-estate developers,” messaged Thuy privately. “I can’t frikkin’ believe this. Fix it, Jayjay.”
“I did cast that pioneer rune onto all the atoms around here,” messaged Jayjay. “I can remember the exact list of atoms. But I’m not quite sure how to put the atoms back the way they were. We better pretend to cooperate until I figure it out.”
“I hate being polite to the Peng,” teeped Thuy. “It’s worse than when I worked at Golden Lucky Restaurant Supply and my rancid boss was in love with me.”
It still intrigued Chu that people could make their outsides look different than their insides. How many personality layers did Thuy have?
“Struck dumb?” squawked Gretta, abruptly craning over to peer into Chu’s face. “Didn’t you like the movie? Oh, I see. You three are sneaking secret messages to each other. Watch your manners, rat-people. Secrets are rude. And we tulpas have superpowers.”
“You’re parasites,” said Jayjay, forgetting what he’d said about being cooperative.
Gretta cocked her head, staring at him provokingly. She snapped another moth from the air, then ate another, and another. A steady drone was drifting from Jayjay’s mouth. He had goose bumps on his skin. The dusty-winged insects were appearing from thin air. “How do you feel, Jayjay?”
Jayjay held his hands to the sides of his head. “You—I—” he gasped, stretching out his arms toward Gretta. “Stop it.”
“You’re our runecaster,” said Gretta, quite oblivious to his discomfort. “And that’s that. When I want a moth, I teep Pekka a request to start you up—and if she’s rea
dy, she has the Pekklet set you to work making a moth tulpa. Sometimes I have to wait a few minutes before Pekka notices me. It’s not like Pekka is watching us every second, you know. She’s working with a lot of teeker worlds at once. And sometimes the Pekklet has to take a nap. Don’t imagine you’re all that anyone thinks about.”
Chu was tracking the motions of Jayjay’s psyche, trying to memorize the mental moves. Each time Jayjay made a moth, he was sending atom by atom signals into the hundred kilometer by hundred kilometer by hundred kilometer volume of the Peng ranch—the cube of Earth underfoot. He was using partial Zeno speed-ups to get it done so fast.
“Oh, by the way, Pekka,” added Gretta. “Can you have Jayjay put our family’s rune onto the bodies of himself and Thuy again? They seem to have worn off. And put us onto Chu’s atoms, as well.”
Against his will, Jayjay opened his mouth and chirped. Right away, Chu felt slow and dull again, like he’d felt in San Francisco.
“Oh that feels horrible,” exclaimed Thuy. “Stop making Jayjay do things for you. You’ll wear him out.”
“Wait till he goes on the road for us!” said Kakar.
“Let’s get Jayjay to make us a house now,” proposed Suller.
“But not a gray rock dome!” cried Gretta. “I want something splendid and strange—an opulent fever dream that you’d only find on a savage ape planet.”
“I assume you don’t mean a shabby wooden box like theirs,” said Suller, casting a snobby glance at Thuy and Jayjay’s cottage. “We’re the top development reps here. We need a landmark home.”
“Outlandish, ostentatious, over the top,” agreed Gretta.
“So—how about a dome made of this fancy local stuff they call pink marble,” suggested Suller after a minute’s mental research. He teeped some instructions to Pekka, and shortly thereafter Jayjay moaned. A tulpa block of fine-grained stone thudded to the ground beside Chu, its rosy polished surface patterned with streaks and crystals, as full of incident as fatty Italian lunchmeat.
“Hmm,” said Gretta, running her beak along the marble. “Wonderfully smooth. But, please, for once not a dome. Thuy—you’re an egg-layer, you must have some aesthetic sense. What shape house might we adopt?”
“Go to hell.”
“Evisceration,” said Suller, sweeping his coarse, two-toed foot through the air, the claws very close to Thuy’s belly. “You know that word? Come on, woman. Give my wife an idea for a house.”
“All right, fine,” said Thuy, her voice tense and annoyed.
Chu peeped to see the image Thuy teeped the Peng. It was lifted from one of the old paintings that Kittie had been studying on Ond’s patio: The Garden of Earthly Delights by that guy Hieronymus Bosch. The top part of that picture showed a pond with four rivers branching out, each river adorned by a strange structure.
The wacky Thuy had selected one of these for the Peng house design, a pink monstrosity resembling a sandcastle, a hollow stump, and a thistle plant, adorned with a pair of questionable towers, and crowned by an arched, tapering pod that poked through a hairy ball.
“I love it!” exclaimed Gretta. “So authentic. So grotesque. Demand it for me, Suller. Be masterful.” Her husband responded with an affirmative caw.
“How do you teep the instructions to Pekka?” asked Thuy, fishing for information. “She’s so far away.”
“You wouldn’t understand, ” said Suller loftily. “You’re not a bird.”
“I think they’re using the same lazy eight connection that we use locally,” said Chu, who was observing Suller’s moves. “I guess all the lazy eight worlds are connected via the point at infinity.”
“That’s right,” said Kakar. “Pekka could actually teep Jayjay directly if she wanted to. But to have full control of him she needs a local agent. A Pekklet. Oh look, he’s about to make our house now.”
Focusing on Jayjay’s mind, now, Chu saw an image of a barebreasted, blank-faced woman in a spangled showgirl outfit. She held a feather in one hand, and a stun-stick in the other. The Pekklet? She made as if to tickle Jayjay’s privates with the feather; doggedly he waved her off.
“Lay off the sex thing,” Jayjay teeped angrily. “If you want me to cast runes for you, just ask. You don’t have to reach down into my crotch.”
“Thank you,” said Thuy.
The Pekklet’s image switched to that of a giant, eyeless Peng bird—but with the stun-stick still in readiness. All business now, she chirped Jayjay the rune for the new mansion.
Not that the rune resembled the design Thuy had selected. The rune looked like a branching tree, with a quadrillion forks along each branch, and with shiny glass balls hanging on tips. Maybe there was a ball for each molecule in the projected design? It was an effort for Chu to contemplate the rune’s full intricacy.
But it was catnip for Jayjay, he scarfed down the rune and set to casting it onto each and every atom within the Peng ranch’s hundred-kilometer cube, merging it with the Peng rune that was already in place within the atoms.
Chu tagged along for a bit, but then Jayjay picked up speed and left him in the dust. Meanwhile the air above the stream began to shimmer. The Bosch palace was taking form: twenty meters tall, molded from pink marble, a shape like a rotten, hollow stump with platforms and spires.
The structure rested astride the stream, damming it. The water flowed into a gap in the upstream side, pooling within the stump and spilling from an arched window on the downstream side. The pink palace’s ground floor thus contained a private lagoon, which was lit by horizontal glass cylinders that penetrated the stump’s walls, and the tubes were alive with—rats? Whoops! Goaded by the Suller-Pekka-Pekklet command loop, Jayjay edited the construct, changing the rats to beetles. And then the Bosch birdhouse was done.
Jutting from the stony stump’s near edge was a knobby shelf fungus, deeply concave and stuffed with straw. The nest. A slanting marble slab formed a patio beside the nest.
Two pink towers rose from the patio’s far side; they resembled penises—one squat and flaccid, one proud and tall with a mushroom cap. A transparent emerald tube rose vertically between them, with a final slab of marble balanced atop, forming a lookout.
A translucent, tapering pod angled up from the nest to graze the lookout, with the pod’s tip curling into a spiral decorated with a diamond-encrusted letter P for Peng.
Kakar floated into the air and flapped a few times to reach the nest. He crowed with pleasure from his new perch; Gretta and Suller quickly joined him.
The birds fluffed up their straw, paced out the dimensions of their patio, checked the view from their lookout, then floated down to their enclosed lagoon, making it echo with cheerful caws.
Meanwhile Chu went over the data he’d gleaned, hoping to be of use, analyzing the mathematical physics. He had observed that although the runes faded from any matter that left the self-catalyzing computation of a Peng ranch, when fresh matter drifted into a ranch, it kept its integrity. But neither he nor Jayjay could see precisely how to restore the corrupted on-ranch atoms to their original pre-Peng states.
Jayjay lay on the ground, weary and drained. Chu watched as Thuy leaned over him, giving him a drink of water, with her pigtails sticking cutely into the air. Catching Chu’s eye, she winked at him, letting him teep into her private thoughts.
Although Thuy was worried about Jayjay, she was inwardly laughing at the Peng for using this particular Bosch shape for their home. Not that, being birds, the Peng would readily perceive the symbolism of the two giant penises. Chu felt a tingle as he and Thuy shared the naughty joke.
Thuy wandered over to the stream to ask the resident silp, Gloob, how he felt about the dam, perhaps hoping to enlist the irascible being in the war against the Peng. Gloob was still sunk in low-gnarl torpor. But by the end of the day, some living, unprogrammed water should be flowing in—after all the Peng ranch only extended fifty kilometers upstream. And maybe then Gloob could help.
“Wouldn’t you like a wonderful rookery like
ours, Thuy?” called Gretta. “Send me another image by the same designer and Suller will make it up for you.”
“Our cottage is fine the way she is,” said Thuy, her smile disappearing. “We don’t want to live in a Bosch house.”
“Oh let’s give our house a new wing,” said Jayjay, playing a deeper game. “Help guide me again, Suller. Your runecaster at your service.” Chu could sense that Jayjay’s plan was to learn still more about runecasting—the better to destroy the Peng.
“I’ll have to approve the new design,” chirped Gretta, pleased. “And, yes, Suller can petition Pekka to craft a rune for it.”
“How about a comfy villa like this?” said Jayjay, teeping the birds an image of Ond’s new house in San Francisco.
“I don’t want a fat McMansion hulking over our poor cabin!” wailed Thuy. She wasn’t getting it about Jayjay’s gambit. “We haven’t yet spent one single night in bed together here!”
“The big addition will be noble,” said Gretta, ignoring Thuy. “But the walls should be pink marble to match our palace. As for the roofing—I want something terrifically extravagant.”
“Gold!” exclaimed Jayjay.
“Jerk!” screamed Thuy, stuck in a loop of low-gnarl reactivity. “You’ll turn our whole world into dull tacky crap!” She stormed past the Peng’s palace and headed down the stream.
“Come back here, you!” squawked Gretta.
Chu tasted of Jayjay’s emotions: his remorse, his yearning for reconciliation with Thuy, his determination to play along with the Peng in hopes of figuring out how to kill them.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Chu told Jayjay, and ran after Thuy himself. Yes, he definitely had a crush on this woman. Jayjay could teep this, but he didn’t take Chu as a serious romantic threat.
“Calm her down,” Jayjay teeped privately. “And watch how I build the house. Maybe when you get back we’ll kick some Peng tailfeather.”
CHAPTER 7