by Rudy Rucker
“—let the Pekklet’s quantum entanglement back in,” said Sonic.
“Maybe her connection to Jayjay is already broken for good,” suggested Stefan.
“Jumping right out of the Lobrane sounds best,” insisted Jayjay. “It’s what Thuy wants.”
Right about then the generator died and the perimeter flash dome failed.
“That’s wrong!” screamed Jayson in the next room. “There’s still a half liter of fuel!”
The Peng started woodpeckering the front door. Thuy heard the harsh screech of tearing steel.
“Outta here, Stefan,” said Sonic. “Let’s you, Jayson, and me teleport our asses down to Cruz. All the hip kiqqies went there yesterday.”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” said Stefan, brightening. “Yeah! We can leave the lab!”
“What a concept,” said Sonic, winking at Thuy. “Geeks.”
The two exited the mirrored room, slamming the heavy door behind them before the Pekklet could start anything new. Out in the control room, Sonic had to yell at Jayson for a moment. Even now, the bearded techie wanted to argue. But then the three of them were gone.
The next sound was of the Peng in the control room, squawking among each other. One of the voices was deeper than the others, bossier—that would be Blotz. Maybe the Peng were a little scared of Jayjay.
“Time for the Hibrane, Thuy,” said Jayjay. “Do you still remember the code?”
“You mean the Knot?” said Thuy, not wanting to use the pattern’s full name—which was Chu’s Knot.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Jayjay. “Show it to me fast.”
As Thuy arranged the filigreed mental pattern for teeping, a first tentative tap sounded on the door, followed by a full-on blow. A bulge formed on the inside. Thuy’s mind froze up. They weren’t going to have enough time to put together their cross-brane jump. They were doomed.
A high, fearful, buzzing sounded outside the door.
“The pitchfork!” cried Jayjay.
The Peng cawed and screeched; they stopped pecking the door. By the sound of things, they were fruitlessly threatening the pitchfork. The pitchfork’s drone grew still louder; the Peng’s voices became fuzzed and weak. And now Thuy heard their footfalls running away.
There was a moment of silence, and then something very tiny wriggled up from the floor. It was—the pitchfork, tunneling in via the subdimensions.
“Yee-haw!” he said aloud as he grew to human scale. “I stirred up the lab’s vibes so them Peng don’t feel comfortable. I been feeling guilty about helping the Pekklet weave her particle strings into yours, Jay.”
“He really talks like this?” said Thuy, somehow more surprised by the hillbilly accent than by anything else.
“Yeah,” said Jayjay, smiling for the first time today. “Groovy the pitchfork. I kind of hate him, but he makes me laugh.”
“Go away,” Thuy told the pitchfork.
“I’m the onliest friend you got,” said Groovy. “After we hook up with the harp in the Hibrane, I’ll aktualize you two. You gonna be like gods. And then Thuy here is gonna tear that Pekklet apart.”
“I’m for that,” said Thuy.
She gathered her wits and teeped Jayjay the details of Chu’s Knot: a pattern that resembled an intricately woven twine bracelet.
“I see it,” said Jayjay. “Now what?” He hadn’t made the trip to the Hibrane before.
“Focus on the image,” said Thuy softly. She felt happy and sure of herself. “Let go of your inner voice. Put yourself into the gaps between your thoughts.”
Jayjay got into the groove—and they jumped into a higher dimension, with the pitchfork following in their wake.
CHAPTER 10
ERGOT
Jayjay and Thuy flew side-by-side, their arms outstretched like superheroes, the pitchfork keeping pace. They were skimming across a vast, rolling ocean: a Planck sea of subdimensional eddies.
Although Jayjay was upset about Thuy’s unfaithfulness, his overall feeling was one of immense relief. The combination of the quantum-mirrored room and the jump out of the Lobrane seemed to have unknotted the ties to the Pekklet. For the first time in two days, he was free. Feeling like a pelican hugging a wave, he waggled his body closer to the glittering Planck frontier.
Some shapes, like lumpy plants, popped through the surface—Jayjay had seen similar beings near the beanstalk.
“Oh hell!” said Thuy. “The subbies. Don’t let them touch you. They’ll try to drag you under.” She gestured to fly higher.
The tuber-shaped subbies morphed into heron heads upon wiggly necks, with white-gloved cartoony bodies beneath the waves. The subbies knifed along, leaving wakes of quantum foam, tracking the travelers with hungry eyes.
“My first trip to the Hibrane went really fast,” said Thuy, uneasy at these presences. “But on the way back I got lost. And the subbies tried to eat me.”
“I can keep them mofos down,” called Groovy, his vibrating prongs wreathed in glowing mauve. “Looky here.” He swept close to the Planck sea and spat a spark. Restless as a spider, the crackling energy webbed the surface. On the instant, the subbies dropped from view.
“What are you, anyway?” Thuy asked the pitchfork.
“Might could say I’m a devil and the harp’s a god. I like to strum her real goood.” He drew out the last word with relish.
“Get real,” said Thuy.
“Okay, then,” buzzed Groovy. “Here’s real: the harp and me are humanoids from a world like yours, but right now we’re on a trip out past infinity, we’re superpowered aliens, playin’ with your world. Bringing you lazy eight and aktualization. Turnabout is fair play—you’re gonna do the same for us pretty soon. After the maelstrom.”
“If you’re a humanoid, why do you look like a pitchfork?” challenged Jayjay, not even wanting to think about the rest of what the alien had said.
“Once you an aktual, you can look like anything you like,” said the pitchfork. “A harp, a pitchfork, a crow, a bagpipe—but never mind all that. We gotta worry about crossing this here Planck sea. What with the two branes all catawampus, the jump’s much farther than before. But you can do it, Jay. Use what I taught you on that beanstalk. Pull the wife along and I’ll follow.”
Jayjay took Thuy by the hand, visualizing the endless beanstalk. Feeling light and nimble, he revolved his vision of the great vine to aim its axis in the direction they flew. And now, as he imagined a Zeno-style scramble up the stalk, he and Thuy shot forward as if in a particle accelerator.
They touched down upon a stone street in a town with no lights or teep. The mild, damp air bore the smell of human waste. It felt like spring or early summer.
A gentle thump sounded at their side: the pitchfork. Somewhere nearby, men were roaring a slow, deep-voiced song. A full moon hung above the stair-stepped gables, the buildings oddly tall.
Suddenly it struck Jayjay that his lazy eight memory was gone—taking with it a lot of the new science he’d learned. But not all of it. Looking up past the walls to the panoply of stars, he recognized the constellations. He used the north star to find the points of the compass, noted that the moon was in the west, recalled that at this time of year the full moon sets an hour or two before dawn, and drew a conclusion.
“It’s about four A.M.” he told Thuy.
“There’s no teep to check that,” she said fretfully. “This place isn’t right. Last time, the Hibrane was almost like our San Francisco, and they had lazy eight. This is some kind of primitive backwater with no silps, and our extra memory is missing. Everything’s mute. How do people live this way?”
“We’re free,” said Jayjay relishing the bucolic air. Already he was learning to ignore the bad smells. “It’s great here. No Peng, no voices in our heads, no Founders show.” He paused. “I still can’t believe you did that with Chu.”
“I can’t either,” said Thuy, her voice close by his side. In this street of moonlit buildings, her face was a faint oval. “I wasn’t in my right mind,
Jayjay. What we’ve been through the last two days—it’s insane.”
Dogs barked in courtyards nearby, perhaps annoyed by Groovy’s buzz. He was standing beside Jayjay, balancing on his handle, vibrating his prongs at an ultrasonic rate. Now he slid down a few octaves, sculpting his reverberant tones into a voice.
“I got a powerful hankerin’ to find that harp,” said the strange being. “I know it’s gonna work out. We’ve done all this before. She’s already been through most of it.”
“She has?”
“The harp is manifesting as a time loop. That’s why we’re outta synch. Seems like a god and a devil would be able to show up on the same brane, same place, same time—but Lovva, she always takes a wrong turn.”
“Once you finish with the harp, we still have to get the Peng off our planet,” said Jayjay. “Don’t forget. You owe us that much.”
“Gimme, gimme, gimme,” said Groovy dismissively. He went hopping off, his handle rapping smartly on the stones. Someone lit a lantern and swung open a casement, the window absurdly high above the ground.
A slow, draggy squeal issued from a faintly visible alley farther down the street. Horn-shod feet clattered on the stones. Shambling their way was a muddy hairy beast the size of a truck. A giant hog.
“Run, Thuy!” cried Jayjay. The cobblestones were broad and high-crowned, with gaping cracks between them. At his very first step, he caught his foot and fell.
The monstrous hog was coming closer, slow but steady, snuffling his way through the fetid night. And a red-faced man in a nightgown was yelling from the window. The man’s speech was doubly incomprehensible: the voice was warped like a screwed audio clip, and the words weren’t in any language Jayjay knew.
“Don’t worry,” said Thuy, as Jayjay got to his feet. In the faint, jiggly light, he could see that she was smiling. “There’s a six-to-one spacetime scale difference between the Lobrane and the Hibrane. It’s like we’re one foot tall here—but we’re tough as steel, and faster than weasels. I’m gonna terrorize that pig.”
She flanked around the moon-silvered swine and planted a volley of kicks upon his muddy hams. Bellowing like drunken molasses, the coarse beast bucked his way past Jayjay and up the street.
Gazing at the scolding man in the high window, Thuy shook her fist and threw a stone right through his wall. The man made a triangle gesture and slammed his shutters.
“We’re fast, dense super-gnomes,” gloated Thuy.
Giant soldiers appeared around a corner, bearing lanterns, singing and swaying, with motley hats of leather and wool. The pig careened into them, producing a slow-motion pileup.
At first the soldiers laughed. But then one them spotted Jayjay and began shouting, his voice shaking the air. Slowly, terribly, the soldiers drew their swords. The blades looked twenty feet long.
“Let’s take that alley where the pig came out,” suggested Jayjay. “We need a safe place to rest.” The emotions and the runecasting had totally worn him down.
As they turned the corner into the alley, a vista opened out. The town was on a low hill, and from here Jayjay had a view across the massed buildings, pale and crisp in the moonlight. He saw stepped roofs, a church spire topped by a triangle, a city wall with gates and towers, and beyond that a river and a flat landscape stretching to the north. The sky out there was a strange shade of red. With a start, Jayjay realized the glow was from a burning village.
Torches flickered in the alley: a sooty, bloodied gang of soldiers was making their way uphill, returning from a nighttime raid, armed with crossbows and halberds, dressed in woven tights with soft boots and light cloaks, bearing shields embossed with swans and toads.
Jayjay turned back, wanting to avoid the warriors, but the besotted soldiers on the main street had drawn even with the alley’s mouth. The revelers roared a warning to the battle party—and now Jayjay and Thuy were trapped between two groups of armed, unfriendly men.
All eyes were fixed upon them. “Duivels,” rumbled the soldiers’ voices, slow and guttural. “Gnooms. Guelders!” Blades flickered and footsteps scuffed as the men squeezed closer to see the strange dwarves they’d trapped.
Suddenly the pitchfork returned, briskly pushing his way through the gathering mob. The soldiers flinched back from the curious creature’s wriggly touch.
“Found the harp!” he twanged. “She’s locked snug in an attic; she sang to me through the walls. She’s waiting for Jay to come play that Lost Chord before she goes home. She taught me the local lingo; what you might call Dutch. I can buzz it into your skulls. Then you’ll know what these bad-asses are sayin’ about you.”
“Don’t!” cried Jayjay. “You’ll hard-boil our brains!”
“Right now let’s get back to the main street,” said Thuy. “With our speed advantage, it won’t actually be that hard.”
Jayjay led the way, being careful with his feet and swiveling his head from side to side lest he miss someone coming at him with a sword. He dodged around the first two soldiers he encountered, and gave a third one a hard shove in the shin, a man wearing leather pantaloons. The guy tipped over as easily as a bowling pin. He had a heavy blond mustache and a smooth blue cap pulled low over his round head. Misliking the soldier’s stupid, implacable glare, Jayjay gave him an extra kick.
Once in the clear, Jayjay and Thuy trotted rapidly down the street, evasively weaving from side to side, easily outpacing their few pursuers. Jayjay had a bad moment of thinking he’d been struck by a crossbow bolt—but it was only Groovy tapping his shoulder.
They crossed a bridge over a little canal, cut down a side street to the right, took a left, and leaned against a house, catching their breath.
“Hold on now till I learn you Dutch,” repeated Groovy.
“You hold on,” said Thuy. “Where are we, anyway? And when?”
“Harp says this town goes by the name of ’s-Hertogenbosch,” responded the pitchfork. The modulated whine of his voice was making the dogs bark again. “We’re in the Duchy of Brabant, and it’s early on Saturday the twenty-fifth of June, 1496, anno domini. Here’s your language lesson!” His hum rose to a furious buzz.
The intricate sound assaulted Jayjay, swarming into his head like hornets. His mind bubbled with words and idioms, with syllables and phonemes. He felt unaccustomed twitches in his tongue, fresh shades of feeling in his throat. In the dark beside him, Thuy groaned. And then, finally, the buzzing stopped. Jayjay felt earthier than before, lower and more irascible—he felt Dutch.
“Joepie!” said Groovy. “Means yee-haw. I’m off to fetch your pal.” With that he stumped off. Jayjay couldn’t think what “pal” the pitchfork was talking about now—all he knew was that he was nearing the end of his rope. Had Groovy really said 1496?
Once again a window overhead flew open and a burgher with a lantern leaned out to yell. Reckless with exhaustion, Jayjay answered the man on his own terms.
“Shit-eater!” he hollered in fluent Brabantian Middle Dutch. “Come out here and I’ll shove that lantern down your gullet, you addle-pated, pig-faced son of a whore!”
To Jayjay’s chagrin, the man clattered down the stairs of his house.
“He understood you!” said Thuy with a weak chuckle. “Let’s scurry off. We’re darling elves spreading good cheer.”
Hastening down the lane that had led them here, they bumped into a one-legged man with a wooden crutch.
“Greetings, friend,” said Jayjay in the local tongue. “Can we follow you home?”
“We’re poor outcasts,” added Thuy, also speaking Brabants Dutch.
“Unclean dwarves despised by the Almighty,” said the one-legged man, sizing them up. “I’m Maarten. I’ll show you to a haven for the likes of us. Carry my booty and we’ll make better speed.”
Jayjay took a cloth sack from Maarten’s shoulder; it held scavenged garbage. The beggar led them through a narrow space between a hedge and wall, across a moonlit vegetable garden, through a squeaky gate, and down a sandy path that debouched
into a cobbled courtyard.
A group of ill-favored figures were gathered around a low fire. A three-legged kettle of soup simmered on the coals. Some of the company lay stretched out asleep, others were sitting up. Jayjay placed Maarten’s sack at the fire’s edge. A legless man in a striped blouse showed his teeth and emptied the sack: a fish head, a bone, a soft cabbage, a stale half loaf of dark brown bread. He pitched the first three items into the kettle, gnawed a bit of the hard bread, and passed the loaf to his neighbor.
Maarten nodded toward a large stone building abutting the courtyard. “The monastery of the Brotherhood of Saint Anthony,” he said. “The Antonites are charitable to us. You can rest by our fire as long as you like. I’ll fetch you some wine.”
Sitting down between Thuy and the legless man, Jayjay looked around the circle of figures. Some lacked limbs, others had twisted spines or egregious harelips, some stared into the flames with haunted eyes.
“I’m Hugo,” said the legless man. He had short-cropped hair and large, dark eyes. “Sinner that I am, I suffer from a plague that consumes my flesh: Saint Anthony’s fire. My limbs loosen and drop. Would you like to see my talisman?”
Not waiting for an answer, Hugo reached into his striped blouse and drew out a small bundle of white cloth. Carefully he flattened out the cloth on the courtyard stones, revealing a leathery, mummified foot with the ankle bone sticking out. “Mine,” said Hugo, a catch in his voice. “As a boy I danced on a rope and chased the maids; now I beg in the marketplace.”
“Ick,” said Thuy, rather loudly. Hugo let it pass.
“Here,” said Maarten, hobbling over with a large bowl of dark wine in one hand. “The Antonites gave us a cask tonight. One of our number is scheduled for surgery in the morn.” He pointed across the courtyard at a puffy beggar hunkered by the small wine barrel. “Lubbert. His leg is quite putrescent, poor soul.”
Taking the large bowl, Jayjay noticed that Maarten’s skin was flushed and ulcerous and that he was missing several fingers. But, what the hell, Jayjay drank some of the wine, just to show he was one of the gang. It was a surprisingly good red, quite light, and smooth as silk. Maybe it would help him sleep. Thuy was already lying on her side, pillowing her cheek on her hands. She had the right idea.