by Rudy Rucker
“Ooookay.”
Meanwhile, Glee was teeping inside the restaurant, inspecting what the other customers had. “I want a bowl of those gray shells,” she told the waitress. “And a platter like you gave that strong, loud man with the worm of hair upon his lip.”
“That’s our manager,” said the waitress with a giggle. “I’ll tell him you called him that. Okay, then, broth, clams, and sturgeon. Want a drink?”
“The bubbling glass that man drinks,” said Glee. “I want.”
“Our summer wheat brew.”
“So tell me about life on Pepple,” Chu urged Glee as the food began arriving. “And how you met the pitchfork. The silps are shielding us; people can’t eavesdrop. Or teep me, if talking is too hard.”
“You don’t like my talk?” said Glee, almost coquettishly. She took a too large gulp of beer, gagged, shot foam from her nose, then bit into a clam.
“Don’t eat the shells, Glee. Just the soft part inside.”
“Pepple looks like Earth, but ten times so many people,” said Glee, spitting out shell fragments. “We got our lazy eight a thousand years ago. They say it was brought to us by a dragonheaded woman with an electric guitar. She played powerful chords, and the extra dimension unfurled. Before lazy eight, we had even more machines than you. Now they’ve crumbled to rust. We get what we need from the plants and animals. My lovers and I grew our own house. Lovva, Groovy, Kenee, and me—we lived in a hollow tree with windows and beds, very pleasant. A four-way marriage, you might call it, not that we commoners have those kinds of ceremonies. We have no rights, not even any locks on the doors. For millennia the hereditary aristocrats have ruled—the aristos. One of them was stalking me. Count Foppiano. And that was the—”
But then the main course arrived. Chu sipped his broth, and Glee busied herself with her sturgeon fillet. After a bit, the waitress returned.
“Do you know about dessert?” she asked Glee.
“I will,” said Glee. She teep-pointed inside the restaurant. “That brown cake your fuzzy-lip manager eats.”
“Plain vanilla ice cream for me,” said Chu. “No sauce, no cookies, just ice cream in a bowl.”
“No problem,” said the round-cheeked waitress, still studying Glee’s skin with its blended shades of emerald, thalo green, and viridian. “Tomorrow I am definitely hopping to Hungary to check out your tweaks. Can you teep me a link?”
“Glee’s data is secret for now,” said Chu. “That’s why we’re shrouded in silent silps. We’re hiding.”
“And I bet that means you can’t use credit,” said the waitress, her voice turning acid. “And I’m not teeping any money in your pockets. And you said you’re a junkie. Were you planning to skeeve off without paying? If you try that, the manager will kick your ass. The man with the worm of hair.”
“Um,” said Chu. “I wonder if we could give you Glee’s earrings? And then maybe you yourself could pay for our meal?”
“I’ve been eyeing them, actually,” said the waitress, holding out her hand. She weighed the heavy gold in her palm and teeped into the earrings’ memory. “Purchased at Macy’s today. Legit! You’ve got a deal.” She sterilized the earrings with a pulse of teek, and put them on. “After-dinner drinks not included.”
Over dessert, Chu prompted Glee to continue reminiscing. “You have Peng birds on your planet, too?”
“A thousand years ago, soon after lazy eight came to Pepple, the filthy Peng’s god, Pekka, found favor with Queen Ulla the First. Ulla was a sorceress with a unique power of mind, enabling her to cast runes into vast numbers of atoms. Generation after generation, the line of Queen Ulla has been learning this skill from her, and they make a few Peng tulpas for each court. They use them as flying steeds on their estates—with no worries about their loss of gnarl. Fortunately for the common people, they live in castles far removed from our towns. We ordinary folk sing and sweat with no interference from the musty Peng birds. But the prowling aristos are a problem.”
“And what about the pitchfork and the harp—you call them Groovy and Lovva? What did you guys do for a living?”
“We were performers. The Pepple art form is a blend of song, dance, and light. My mate Lovva, she teeped the music to match her songs. She chimed and twirled on stage and we three others supported her—me, Kenee, and Groovy. I shone lights from glowing rocks who were my pets, and Kenee collected money from the people who came in person or who teeped to see. Groovy knew the art of coaxing plants, so he trained fast-growing vines into stage sets for Lovva. The vines made mats of leafy coiled springs and towers like green dream clouds. Dear Groovy was clever with his hands, and very handsome, but greedy and a little dumb. He was always thinking he was made for bigger things.” Glee paused, remembering, her eyes unfocused. “One summer night there came our last concert together. I think by now it was ten years ago. Something happened. A shining crow appeared; he circled Lovva and flapped his wing and suddenly there was a cyclone on our stage—a tornado coiling high into the sky. Lovva and Groovy were lifted into it.”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. I myself had to leave my world that night, those ten years ago. Quite recently I had some teep with Lovva, and first she said she’s been in your world for over five hundred years, and then she said it feels like only a few days. I don’t understand. She used a special word: aktualized.” Glee shook her head and fell silent, brooding.
“How is it that they changed their shapes?”
“Lovva says that while you’re aktualized you can look like whatever you want. She says you can mold matter by thinking endless thoughts.”
“And the crow who brought the tornado?” said Chu, hopelessly confused. “Where did he come from?”
“According to Lovva, the crow came from your planet. I think maybe he was that man Jayjay whose wife you had sex with. And somehow he got aktualized, too.” Glee sighed. “The aktuals don’t pick you and me, do they, Chu? We only get to be pushers. I wish I could go back to Pepple. But the aristos would kill me. And I’m chained to the gel.” As they talked, the rain had begun coming down harder. Chu was obsessively teeking away the drops that drifted under the awning, unable to stop focusing on the tiny details. “I’m very tired,” said Glee. “Can we find a room?”
Checking the Portland city silp, Chu found a cheap hostel in a rough part of town—a good hiding place. He extracted twenty more dollars from their waitress for Glee’s topaz ring, and they teleported to the hostel’s dim lobby.
The clerk took their twenty without even looking at them. Once they were in their room, Glee rubbed on more gel and continued reminiscing.
“Kenee was more interested in politics than sex,” she said softly in the dark, lying on the far side of the double bed. “And maybe more interested in Lovva than in me. The night after Groovy and Lovva left, Kenee was off at a demonstration against the nobles. My stalker, Count Foppiano, saw his chance. He teleported to my bed, wanting to rape me. I teeked off his head. I called for Kenee and he helped me feed Foppiano’s body to the vorgs.” A quick teep image of omnivorous lizards the size of dogs. “Of course someone saw us. With telepathy, only the ruling classes get away with crime. And for a commoner on Pepple, harming an aristocrat means death, always. I ran away with the Hrull that night, and Kenee came along—not that he was very good as a pusher.”
“You teeked off the aristo’s head?” interrupted Chu, disturbed by the mental image. “I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.” He was lying on the flat bed beside Glee, not touching her.
“It’s hard killing someone that way,” said Glee. “People counter with their own teek, trying to hold their bodies together. But I’m strong. You’re strong, too. You’ve got what it takes to be an intergalactic pusher. If you want.”
Glee segued into spacey teep images of the Hrullwelt. It was a belt of water asteroids orbiting a central sun, a toroidal archipelago of sparkling globs. The whole system was an intergalactic trading hub. The Hrull had had lazy eight for
much longer than Pepple, maybe a million years. Their legends said the great change had been ushered in by a flying bag attached to a squalling horn.
Chu watched images of the Hrull leaping from one giant glob to the next—moving goods among warehouses, meeting with traders, making transportation deals. Thanks to their flight lice, the Hrull could tweak their gravitational mass, steering themselves along optimal orbits among the planetoids.
Beings from all the galaxies flickered in and out of the Hrullwelt, some teleporting on their own, others riding aboard Hrull. The aliens brought in samples or whole shipments of goods, examined each others’ offerings, arranged trades, and engaged pusher-powered Hrull motherships to transfer their cargoes from world to world.
Glee drifted into fantasies of Pushertown, a humanoid settlement amid the Hrullwelt planetoids, a verdant island with its own Edenic glob of sparkling sea. A few managed to retire to Pushertown, winding down their gel habits, chipping along on small doses cadged from young Hrull or from pushers still in the game. As Glee envisioned a peaceful twilight in Pushertown, her breathing grew regular and she fell asleep.
Chu himself lay awake for quite some time, muscles in agony, his head in a vise. He kept thinking about the little wad of gel that remained upon the windowsill. In connection with the gel, there was some noise he felt like shouting or teeping—but he didn’t want to feed the obsession by trying to figure out what the precise sound was.
To take his attention off the drug, Chu focused on a mental puzzle: Was there any way to emulate Jayjay’s ability to reprogram atoms so fast? It was easy for Jayjay of course. Being a zedhead, he could go into a speed-up and personally runecast a ranch’s worth of ten tridecillion atoms. Jayjay had it made, he got everything. Not only did some alien pitchfork take him climbing on an infinite beanstalk, he also was married to sexy, fragrant Thuy—
He forced his thoughts back to the problem at hand. Maybe there was some subtle trick for spreading a rune across a Peng ranch without having to touch each of its ten tridecillion atoms. What if he could find a way to make the reset rune spread itself like a virus?
Chu figured he might be smart enough to find the trick. After all, he was the one who’d solved the encryption puzzle of hyperjumping to the Hibrane by designing Chu’s Knot. It crossed his mind that he might contact Gaia for help with the viral rune problem, but he didn’t really enjoy the trippy feel of the planetary mind.
Instead he turned to the room’s ambient computation: the richly chaotic eddies in the air, the dancing dust motes, the quantum choir of atoms. Nature was a wondrous weave of quantum computations, and he was surrounded by intelligent friends.
Bascially, a rune was a quantum operator. With the silps amplifying his mind, Chu could see the space of quantum operators as a dreamy sea of filigreed billows. Certain of the operators formed something like an oyster bed, with interconnected siphons sucking in and spitting out. Others were like worms and nudibranchs crawling among the virtual shells, or like tiny crabs wriggling in the subdimensional mud. Chu drifted off to sleep, all the while exploring ways of hooking the operators together.
When he awoke, it was midmorning, the sky bright blue. He felt closer than ever to finding a way to make a rune spread across an entire Peng ranch. His dream visions were stored in his lazy eight memory. Another night or two like this, and he’d have the answer.
Glee was leaning on the windowsill, soaking up sun and watching the doings of the low-rent locals.
“Hey, you,” she said over her shoulder, noticing Chu. “Almost time to go. I’ve used up my gel. I need to find Duxy now. You’re in, right?”
Chu still felt achey and strung out. “I’ll come see her,” he heard himself say. “But I’m not sure I want to leave Earth.”
Glee teeped the Hrull whistle—and Duxy teeped back. She was lying low with her father, Wobble, on the so-called Lost Coast of Northern California, a trackless stretch of beach between Eureka and Petrolia. Glee and Chu teleported there.
The Hrull were rested and plump; in fact Duxy had doubled her size. She said she’d been seining plankton, jellyfish, squid, and salmon from the sea. Of course, Duxy and Wobble knew that Lusky was dead. As Lusky’s ex-mate, Wobble was particularly upset. For daughter Duxy, the death of Lusky was something more than an occasion to grieve: it was a metamorphic trigger for a stage of rapid growth. In a day or two, Duxy would be a mothership herself.
Glee convinced Duxy to test her burgeoning powers by coughing up a wad of gel. Glee smiled with relief as she rubbed some of the stuff onto her forehead—and right about then Chu lost control. He scooped up some gel and smeared it onto his pounding temples, onto his tight chest, onto his aching elbows—all the while teeping and singing the Hrull whistle, the very sound he’d been biting back yesterday. Duxy and Wobble giggled, but Chu didn’t care. He’d never felt better in his life.
And then the two Hrull skimmed out across the waves, searching for their day’s food. Duxy said they’d be back in a couple of hours. Chu and Glee perched on a boulder, gazing at the Pacific. The fog was far out to sea, letting the sun sparkle on the breakers.
Chu’s rush of well-being was giving him an uneasy sense of enslavement. “I’m doomed,” he told Glee.
“You can always kick the gel later on,” said Glee. “Why not enjoy what we have right now? How about a swim? Or is the water too cold? I’m tough like a kelp plant, but for you—”
“Oh, I can tell my body how to stay warm,” said Chu, glad for a distraction. “I’m tough, too.”
So Glee and Chu waded in through the surf and swam, reveling in the sea’s creatures and currents. Chu told his body to insulate him by keeping the blood out of his skin—and his body said, as politely as possible, that it knew perfectly well how to do that without a lot of stupid advice. After the first minute or two, Chu stopped feeling the cold.
Teeping down into the sea, he spotted a salmon. Glee saw it, too. She dove for the fish, but the telepathic salmon eluded her with a casual flick of his tail. With abrupt brutality, Glee teeked the fish’s tiny brain right out of his skull. She clamped her teeth onto a fin and swam to the surface.
Back on shore, Chu and Glee built a cheerful campfire from driftwood, warming themselves and roasting the gutted salmon over the coals.
“Are you mad at us for killing you and eating you?” Chu teeped to the roast fish.
“I’m just the body,” answered the meat. “The one you chased is gone. Someone has to eat me, why not you? Everything flows.”
The cooked salmon was crusty black on the outside, the inner flesh pink and succulent. Delicious. Glee took a little more Hrull gel, and Chu had some, too—why not?
It was such a beautiful day. The fog was creeping in again, spreading veils and tendrils across the sky: subtle, intricate shapes that rejoiced in the ocean airs. Chu and Glee nestled together against a friendly, sun-bleached log.
Chu began feeling horny again. He was getting used to Glee’s rotten smell, and to her weird third eye. Maybe soon they’d be lovers?
“Us?” said Glee, reading Chu’s mind. “How sweet of you to think that.” Gently she rubbed his penis through his pants, staring at him as if trying to make up her mind. “I don’t want,” she said presently. The insinuating motions of her fingers stopped. “I don’t want you living like me. You know how Kenee died? He overdosed. Most pushers go out that way. Hardly anyone manages to retire. Pushertown is a dream.”
“Overdosed?” echoed Chu, flushed and confused.
“Pushers get extra gel rations when they find a fresh teeker world. And I am the one who found Earth—because Lovva teeped me where to find it. I got the reward, but Kenee was greedy. He rubbed the whole bonus stash into his skin. Fifteen minutes later he was dead.” Glee sighed and shook her head. “Someday that may be me. It’s no life for you, Chu. Go away while you can.”
“Don’t listen to her!” teeped Duxy, gliding down through the fog, her wingspan now grown to twenty feet. She settled on the stony beach, Wobble at
her side. “I need you, Chu. You’re strong. I can find you a better partner than Glee. Glee’s nearly used up. We can kidnap that little girl you keep thinking about. Bixie.” Duxy’s teep signal took on a slimy, leering quality. “I’ll put gel on her and you’ll teach her Thuy’s moves.” With his penis still stiff, Chu was almost tempted by the suggestion, but at the same time he was horrified. Bixie was too fine for this life.
“No,” he said, drawing strength from the ubiquitous silps.
Duxy lunged at him, trying to swallow him whole—but she wasn’t quite big enough yet. All she could fit into her mouth were Chu’s head and shoulders. Undaunted, the manta tried to stun him with gel from the pusher cone at the back of her throat.
But before Duxy’s dangling uvula could touch Chu’s face, he’d teleported out of there. Where to? The Yolla Bolly Peng ranch. He figured it for a place where he’d have a chance of kicking the gel. The cantankerous Peng would fend off the Hrull with their femtorays.
“Come with me,” Chu teeped to Glee in the fraction of a second before he left. “Save yourself.”
“I can’t change now,” teeped Glee, the words tinged with hopelessness. “I’m in too deep. I’ve been doing this for ten years.”
“But you heard Duxy,” Chu teeped back. “She’s ready to ditch you.” Conversing at the speed of thought, they were squeezing a full conversation into the blink of an eye.
“One last payday and I’m out of this game,” responded Glee.
“People in videos always get killed right after they say that.”
“I’ll miss you, kid.” Glee’s teep signal was weary, knowing, bittersweet.
CHAPTER 14
VIRAL RUNES
And then Chu was in Yolla Bolly. He found the Peng rooting in the dirt near their strange pink house.