by Rudy Rucker
“We don’t need to teach them all that,” crowed Suller. “We’ll transform the pioneer runes ourselves and pass the viralized runes directly to our new agents. All they’ll have to do is teek one rune onto one atom per Peng ranch. What a breakthrough!”
Chu felt increasingly uneasy.
“Hey, Kakar!” called Gretta. “Get off that hen and come out here.”
Kakar emerged from beneath the Bosch house, his tail feathers mussed. Floofy pranced after him, joking about hatching chicks. She teeped an image of a giant polka-dotted egg in a nest made of velvet-draped branches.
“Atta boy, Kakar!” said Suller. “Let’s try our new system. Do you want to cast some viral runes for us, Chick?”
“Negatory,” said Chick, waving them off. “I’m only here for my five percent. I’ll teep Dr. Donnie for your helpers—hey, Donnie! Send us those two Crownies we met in your parking lot—the guy with the gun and the girl with the tits.”
“Nasty, nasty mammals,” muttered Gretta.
An avid man and a young woman with a bad complexion appeared.
“Welcome, Steve and Julie from the Crown of Creation Church,” said Chick with a exaggerated bow. “You remember me—good ole Chick Moon. This fella behind me is Chu Lutter-Lundquist, a likely screwball who’s discovered a method for bringing in more Peng.”
Julie smiled, threw back her shoulders, and placed her hands on her hips, showing off her figure. “Hi, there.” She gave Chu a thoughtful look, as if she recognized him. “It’s a blessing to be here.”
“These four raggedy-ass ostriches behind me are how the Peng look when they’re not disguised,” Chick told Julie, enjoying himself. “They’re just the same as your Donnie Macon. I hope your faith is strong enough to handle the truth.”
“Dr. Macon primed us for this revelation.” Gamely hanging on to her smile, Julie shot a nervous glance at the alien birds. “ ‘We have seen through a glass darkly, but now we see the holy ones face to face.’ ”
“1 Corinthians 13:12,” put in Steve, supplying the scriptural reference. He was juggling his leather-bound Bible, seemingly oblivious to the fact that everyone could teep the pistol within its hollowed-out core.
“Bless you, my son,” said Suller, swallowing the Bible with two snaps of his beak. “Never fear, we’ve come to bring Earth into harmony with the precepts of your church. We’ll put an end to people being smarter than they’re meant to be. We’ll chasten and humble the plants and stones. Man will be the measure of all things.”
“I can’t abide a shoe or a chair acting like it’s smarter than me,” allowed Steve.
“We’re the answer to your prayers,” chirped Gretta.
“Golly!” said Julie, finally taking a moment to look around the clearing, dappled by the noontime sun. “What unusual homes.”
Chu watched as Kakar got to work teaching the viralized moth rune to the two newcomers—or trying to. Steve seemed hopeless; maybe shoes really were smarter than him. But before long, Julie had the moth rune in her head.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” she asked.
“You teek it onto an atom,” said Kakar in his know-it-all tone.
“Are you kidding? I’ve never teeked anything at all. My faith teaches that lazy eight, teeking, and mind-amplification are wrong. And the Bible doesn’t say anything at all about atoms. I’m not sure the Lord sanctions that particular theory.”
“Fine,” said Chu, feeling less and less eager to help Crownies spread Peng runes. “Who cares.”
“Coach the girl,” ordered Suller, aiming his beak at Chu. “And don’t try to skulk off by teleporting. I can shoot faster than you can think.”
Chu frowned and took Julie aside. Meanwhile, Steve sat sullenly on the sidelines, watching a basketball game in his head.
“Do you want to be stupid?” Chu asked Julie.
Julie glared at him. “Papa says the old ways are the best.”
“But now you want to learn the new ways?” said Chu, not liking the inconsistency.
“Dr. Macon says it’s my mission to bring in the Peng,” said Julie. “They’ll keep objects from being uppity. I can feel the new godliness in Killeville, and in this grove.” Her round gray eyes studied Chu. “I know you’re scoffing at me. Perhaps the Peng are aliens—but surely the Lord is using them as saints!”
“Forget your ‘Lord,’ ” said Chu. “Worship Gaia. She’s real. She wants us to bloom.”
“This guy’s a complete heathen!” exclaimed Steve, who’d started eavesdropping. “I recognize him now. I saw him fornicating on the Founders show.”
“You watched that, Steve?” said Julie, a little flirtatiously. “Oooo.”
“You watched it, too, Julie,” said Chu, suddenly seeing this in her mind.
Julie blushed. “At least I’m not addicted to some alien drug,” she rapped out. “You need to let the Savior into your life, Chu. I have a feeling that the End Times are—”
“Get to work!” cawed Suller, blackening a spot on the ground next to them.
Chu showed Julie how to teek a rune onto an atom. It was strange to meet someone like this. Living in California, Chu had imagined that everyone else was advancing right along—but it seemed large parts of the country were stubbornly in the dark.
While Julie struggled to teek, Kakar was fiddling with his copy of Ouroboros, pulling it apart and reknotting it in strange birdy ways that initially seemed random and ineffectual. But then Chu realized that Kakar’s underlying strategy was incredibly efficient. He was leveraging his redesign by drawing upon the full power of Pekka, his home planet’s mind.
Leaving Julie on her own for a minute, Chu reached out to Gaia. Her round, green face wasn’t far.
“I’m already working on it,” Gaia said before he could even start explaining. “I understand. If Kakar can make really good viral Peng runes, your race is doomed.” Her voice was like a softly gurgling fountain.
“I should have come to you sooner, Gaia,” said Chu, feeling a wash of relief. “Can you make a viral reset rune? Maybe you don’t need to use an Ouroboros-style operator at all. Maybe that was a false path.”
“Pekka has the edge on me,” said Gaia. “Her birds are diligent and they honor their world. But my humans—my humans are stoners or loners. If I can’t find this thing, it’s your own fault.”
Just then Julie finally produced a tulpa moth, and Suller ate the results. “Well done, Julie!” exclaimed the big bird. “We’ll bring in your friends, train them, and send you out. Onward Christian soldiers! Let the saints come marching in!”
“I say we convert New York City today,” proposed Duckie. “Plus L.A., Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. The sooner we take the power centers, the better.”
“Some fat real estate you’re talking about,” gloated Chick. “No more nickel-and-diming with, like, Yost, Virginia.” He raised his voice again. “Whenever you’re ready, Donnie!”
Four more Crown of Creation emissaries appeared, two men and two women, fresh-faced and eager to learn. Chu groaned inwardly at the thought of tutoring them. But just then he heard an odd squawk. Something was wrong with Floofy. Ghostly purple flames sprouted from her body, long lavender tongues stretched deep into the woods. Shit. The Peng rune error terms were amplifying even faster than expected. Those plumes were Taylor jets, the mathematical artifacts that appear when a Fourier series begins to diverge.
Floofy’s squawk rose to a desperate screech—cut short when her neck pinched in two. For a moment her jet-wreathed head hung in midair, beak soundlessly twitching. Her legs turned translucent and shriveled away. Head and body dropped to the ground. Floofy was a flickering pile of feathers—and then she was nothing at all.
“Chu’s fault!” shrilled Kakar. “His Ouroboros is no good! He knew it all along! But I can do better.”
With horror, Chu realized that Kakar had finalized his new version of the viralization operator, complete with built-in error correction. Kakar was calling it Ouroboros 2.0. And as for
Gaia’s search—she was getting nowhere.
Pushing into Kakar’s mind, Chu tried to snarf a copy of the alien’s wriggly new operator. The thing was a wild knot involving a fractal regress of loops that were braids of loops that were braids of—never mind.
“You lose, Chu!” hooted Kakar, blocking off his teep before Chu could get more than a fragment of Ouroboros 2.0. “I rule!”
“Kill Chu!” cawed bloodthirsty Gretta, just like before.
Suller had claimed he could shoot faster than Chu could teleport—but he was wrong. In a flash, Chu was on the steps of the Santa Cruz beach house his family had rented. Towels dried on the porch railing, plastic furniture lay scattered around the sandy yard. It was early afternoon, warm and sunny. The whole gang was lolling on couches in the spacious living room, resting up from lunch.
Chu’s mother, Nektar, was eating apricots with her girlfriend, Kittie. Bixie and Momotaro were talking to their surfboards, readying them for the Santa Cruz waves. Jil was fooling around with a shoon in the shape of a miniature Peng, trying to perfect its bobbing gait. Ond lay supine on a stuffed chintz sofa with his eyes closed.
Chu was ashamed to face them—but there was no place else to go. “So here I am,” he said, walking in.
“Where’s Thuy?” said Momotaro, in a falsely bright tone.
“Don’t you dare tease him,” cried Nektar. “After all he’s been through. Poor Chu. Thank God you’re safe, dear.”
Bixie gave him a penetrating stare, seemingly on the point of saying something—but then she dropped her gaze.
“I’m not staying for long,” said Chu quickly. “Hey, Dad? Did you see what I did with Ouroboros? I was trying to get the Peng to overplay their hand. But—”
“Type two error,” said Ond, not opening his eyes to look at Chu. He was still embarrassed about that sex scene. “I’m monitoring the Yolla Bolly Peng ranch. Your Ouroboros idea was a clever approach, but it’s backfiring horribly. Kakar is making viral runes with built-in error correction routines. It looks like they’ll make for long-term tulpas. Julie just runecast a new Floofy for Kakar. Look at that bird dancing! Ha, ha. I kind of like him. He’s your friend, isn’t he, Chu? A true geek, just like us two.”
As Chu focused on the Peng, the room around him grew vague, which was just as well, what with Momotaro smirking at him and Bixie avoiding his gaze.
The exultant Kakar was in overdrive; he was processing hundreds of pioneer runes and passing them to the Crownies. The new runes were so slick and compact that even that dull-witted guy, Steve, could handle them. Chu made another attempt to wrest a full copy of Ouroboros 2.0 from Kakar’s mind, but the bird’s teep-shield was stronger than before, and smart enough to flash Chu an image of a two-toed foot kicking dirt at him.
“Julie’s hopping down the West Coast, laying a fresh Peng ranch at each stop,” announced Ond. “Man, she’s moving fast. She’s in Napa! The others are doing China, the Persian Gulf, and India. And, oh no, one of them is in New York.”
Steve the Crownie was standing in Times Square, preparing to channel all of Gotham’s gnarl into the tulpas of a single party of Peng pioneers. Parasitizing the great city’s mind was trivially simple. The Crownie tweaked a single atom in a chewed piece of gum on the sidewalk; the rune raced out across the boroughs—and the Big Apple was a gnarl-free ranch for a happy family of four Peng pioneers.
“I blew it,” said Chu, feeling blank and scared.
The local silps had picked up on the spreading fear. The Santa Cruz breeze grew fitful, the waves fell apart, pelicans wheeled uneasily in the sky.
“That Crownie girl is in Sausalito now,” exclaimed Jil. “She’ll skip over San Francisco, zap San Jose, and head for here.”
“Help us, Gaia!” cried Nektar. “Help Chu like Pekka helped Kakar!”
“Gaia’s not getting anywhere,” said Chu bitterly. “Our planet’s dumber than theirs. What I’ll have to do is find Jayjay or the pitchfork.”
“I’m ready to set off volcanoes like nobody’s ever seen,” teeped Gaia, her voice low and angry. “I’ll atomize my whole crust before I let those Peng win.”
“Don’t do that, Gaia,” said Bixie. “Chu saved you before, and he’ll save you again. Chu rules.”
Chu felt an unfamiliar sensation around his mouth. He was smiling. “Thanks, Bixie. I—I’ve been worried that you might think I’m—”
“Never mind that stuff. I like you the same. You’re my friend.”
Something crashed against the roof. Oh wow, it was Duxy’s snout. But, just now, Chu was so happy that even this seemed wonderful.
The young manta was bigger than the house. Her beating wings whirled the towels and the beach furniture into the street like confetti. “Chu,” she skirled, making the cottage’s timbers creak. “Come out and play!”
“Don’t!” cried Nektar. “Let’s teleport home to San Francisco so—”
“I can’t go to a Peng zone,” interrupted Chu. “The Peng want to kill me!”
“Chu’s our hero,” said Bixie, smiling and tossing her head. She stretched out her arms.
Chu ran across the room and hugged her. It was friendly hug, not a romantic one. Bixie didn’t feel that way about him. And maybe she never would. But suddenly that seemed okay. It was good to be friends.
As the house shook yet again, Chu marched onto the porch to face the manta. Duxy wasn’t the only Hrull out there. Some of those whirling shapes in the sky were other giant mantas, diving into the streets of Santa Cruz. They were gathering as many pushers as possible before the Peng took over.
Duxy settled onto the yard, her open mouth level with the porch. She’d grown to her full adult size—two hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip.
“Leave us alone,” cried Kittie, at Chu’s side with that same old stonker gun in her hand.
“It’s okay, Kittie,” said Chu. “I want to go with her. I have a plan. But, Duxy, only take me, okay?”
The great manta teeped her assent. With his exceptional powers of concentration, Chu was a prize. Moments later, he was inside and they were airborne.
“Hi, Chu,” said skinny Glee, lolling on her bunk, quite stoned. “Duxy has been bribing me to tag after you.”
“Can you believe how my daughter’s grown?” teeped Wobble the Hrull, wedged into a bunk like an oversized leather cushion. Chu could sense the aging Hrull’s anxiety about his fate. Once Duxy found herself a husband, her dad would be out in the cold.
“Start charging the teeker cone!” commanded Duxy.
“I’ll help push you,” said Chu. “But don’t put gel on me. I’m done with that crap for good.”
“Gel, gel, gel,” said Duxy impatiently. “That’s all you pushers talk about. You’re not getting gel before the jump anyway. This is the big one, mind you, all the way to the Hrullwelt. And if you and Glee can’t push me to the Hrullwelt alone, I’ll circle back and get that little girl that you’re so—”
“We can do it!” cried Chu.
“Fine, then,” said Duxy. “It’s time. Your whole planet’s going to be Peng ranches pretty soon. And then the Peng will start exterminating the mammals. They always do that if they can. And I’m teeping that your planetary mind wants to blow up her crust. It’s all over here. A dead end. Push.”
“Give me a just a second to catch my breath.”
Using encrypted teep, Chu fed his old Knot code to Glee.
“What’s this?” she privately teeped back.
“The key to a parallel world. The Hibrane.”
“Wonderful,” answered Glee. “I am very ready for something new.”
Down below, the other Hrull continued scooping up locals from the beaches and the sidewalks of Santa Cruz. People were panicking and trampling each other; faint screams drifted up. A tiny blond figure appeared on the town wharf, stretching out her arms for calm. Julie the Crownie. Focusing on her, Chu saw her furrowing her brow, getting ready to—
“Push!” roared Duxy.
Chu and Glee pushed—b
ut not in the direction the Hrull expected.
They shot out of space like a pinched pumpkin seed, skimming across the glassy Planck sea toward the Hibrane, searching for Jayjay, for the pitchfork—and for Thuy.
CHAPTER 15
THE MAGIC HARP
Azaroth’s upstairs room at the Muddy Eel had a single window and no lock on the door. Rather than glass panes, the window had a wooden shutter. An earthenware chamber pot peeped from beneath the bedstead like a rude joke.
“Did you say they have baths here?” asked Thuy. She felt lank and oily. Yesterday she hadn’t even had a chance to wash after that insane fuckathon with Chu. Oh God, oh God. And last night she’d slept on the ground with beggars.
“The bathhouse is in back,” said Azaroth. He talked rapidly, out of consideration for the fact that Thuy’s natural clock rate was six times as fast as his. “You just walk through the inn. It’s good. They use a spring in the bathhouse instead of canal water. The bath should be lively with so many people in town for the big market. They call it a stew.”
“Come with me,” said Thuy.
“I need a nap. Things are so wild, you’ll blend in. There’s all sorts of freaks around. Just tell Vrouw Engst you’re my guest. She’s the landlady.”
It was dark now, and the inn’s public room was filled with festive fairgoers: merchants, peasants, craftspeople, musicians, conjurors, acrobats, soldiers, actors, and surely some pickpockets. A raw-boned woman with short brown hair stood vigilantly by the kitchen door: Vrouw Engst. Speaking slow Brabants Dutch, Thuy introduced herself, saying she was Azaroth’s cousin. Showing no real surprise at her new guest’s one-foot-height, Vrouw Engst gave her a handkerchief for a towel and directed her to the bath.
It was a low-ceilinged, echoing room, lit by tallow candles. The rectangular tub was made of four low stone walls lined with varnished wood. Springwater trickled from a split boulder into a kettle; another kettle sat warming on a wood-fired stove. Though a bit smoky, the air was wonderfully moist and warm. A rear door stood slightly ajar, giving onto a kitchen garden.