by Rudy Rucker
The next thing Thuy did was to teep a quick hello to Jayjay in the attic and find out where he’d been all night? Doctoring a painting for Bosch in the cathedral, fine. She didn’t explicitly get into the pregnancy thing with him yet. If he was interested enough he’d pick up on it himself.
And the third thing she did—which could wait no longer—was to get those frikkin’ fleas off her bod. Taking firm mental hold of the five main offenders, she teeked them into the garden, setting them down on a flat stone gilded by the rising sun.
Pioneer fleas in a new land! Each of the five had his or her own little personality—a Vince, an Elvira, a Bela, an Erzsebet, and a Nadja—not that they actually called themselves that. Unlike the uplifted critters and objects in the Lobrane, the new Hibrane minds weren’t using words.
The difference stemmed from the fact that, in the Lobrane, Lazy Eight Day had been preceded by a nanomachine-based form of telepathy and mind-amplification. The nanomachine web had served as an incubator for a race of virtual interface agents—the so-called beezies—who’d migrated right into nature’s silps, enriching them with language and a human-compatible interface.
The natural minds of the Hibrane were less verbal. Teeping into the placid consciousness of the flagstone upon whom the fleas jittered and jigged, Thuy picked up the rock’s delight at the first rays of sun, his tingly sense of the morning moisture oozing within his fissures, and his calm reliance upon the gravitational pull of mother earth. His thought stream was made of feelings rather than words.
Beneath the rock were ants, always Thuy’s favorites. Teeping them, she savored the way in which an ant colony had a silp mind that was greater than the sum of its parts. The ants had a queen, yes, but she wasn’t a ruler. The doings of the colony emerged from the hive mind. It was odd that human societies weren’t run in the same way.
Wondering about Hibrane Gaia—this world’s planetary mind—Thuy sent up a tendril of consciousness. She found a vast being who was vibrant and warm, but, lacking a human-tailored interface, quite inscrutable.
As a last step before joining Jayjay, Thuy cast her attention into the house to see how things lay. Jeroen was delightedly communing with his shoes, his water jug, and even the light rays bouncing off his bedroom wall. Aleid was conducting a quick survey of the entire contents of her house—Jayjay’s noises in the attic had set off her fears of burglars—and already she’d noticed the fresh chicken bones near Thuy’s lair. For her part, Kathelijn, the maid, was dreamily staring across town through her wall, focusing on the handsome body of Azaroth, who was washing himself with a basin in his rented room. Noticing Thuy’s spectral presence, Azaroth arranged to meet her and Jayjay in front of the city hall, which faced onto the marketplace. Things were coming to a head.
Thuy teleported herself to the attic. The pitchfork stood by the window and Jayjay fingered the strange, glowing strings of the harp.
“Thuy!” He rose and embraced her. He already knew about the embryo.
“I’m not teeking her away,” she said defiantly. “She wants to grow.”
“No problem!” exclaimed Jayjay. “What’s part of you is part of me.” His face split in a goofy smile. “Anyway—I just checked her DNA—and she’s my daughter.”
“This is real touching,” crooned the sarcastic pitchfork.
“Have we done enough for you now, Groovy?” said Jayjay, annoyed. “Are you going to help us get rid of the Peng?”
“And you have to help us get back home,” added Thuy. “I lost that special Knot code that I showed you. And Jayjay forgot it, too. You remember it, right, Groovy?”
“We’ll be on our way pretty soon,” said the pitchfork confidently. “Don’t forget I’m fixin’ to aktualize you two. I gotta plan out our route.”
“Take a very good look at me, you three,” interrupted the harp. “Remember me.”
They got one last view of the painting on the harp’s flat belly: a teeming garden with the two lovers that were Thuy and Jayjay. The demon musician beside them was, Thuy now realized, Jeroen Bosch.
The harp’s body grew rubbery. Her curved crosspiece stretched out, straightening its crook. The front wooden column broke free of the crosspiece and flopped down. The harp unkinked herself. Twang by twang, her strings snapped. The column and the crosspiece split, making rudimentary legs and arms.
The harp extruded a head, and rose to her feet. Spreading her arms, she wriggled and shook, becoming a slender green woman with three eyes.
“Lovva from planet Pepple,” the figure said aloud. “It’s time for the good part. Crushing the aristos. My aktualization is nearly done.” She smelled sulfurous and vegetal—like Glee.
“Wait!” said Jayjay. “You have to stay here for over five hundred years! So Thuy can steal you from Azaroth’s aunt. Otherwise there’s a terrible paradox.”
“I’ve already done that,” answered Lovva. “I traveled around a harp-shaped loop of time. Follow me soon, Groovy. We’ll make Pepple a free world.” She teleported herself away, becoming translucent, then transparent, and disappearing with a final sprinkling of glowing dots.
There was a beat of silence and then a pinpoint appeared in midair. Rapidly it grew, like an image drawing closer. It was a green alien woman with three eyes; an earlier version of Lovva coming at them from infinity. Settling in, she regarded Thuy and Jayjay with no signs of recognition. “Where are we, Groovy?” she teeped. “How did you get here before me?”
“Our worldlines are twisted all the hell around,” said the pitchfork. “You’re just coming in from being aktualized off Pepple, right?”
“It was wonderful to go past infinity, no? But, Groovy—why do you look so strange?”
“It’s a goof,” said Groovy. “I’m devilish and you’re angelic. We were laughin’ about it up thar past infinity with Thuy and Jayjay. Don’t you recall?”
“I suppose,” said Lovva, distractedly. “I keep repeating to myself the little tune they taught me. I must use it to unfurl these worlds. Remind me what else.”
“You turn yourself into a dang harp,” exclaimed Groovy. “And you stay here for five and a half centuries. That part bothers me a little. The way I heard it, we only stay aktualized for a couple of days of Pepple time.” He paused to absorb some convoluted thought that Lovva teeped to him. “Oh, that’s right. You’ll be time-skimming. Like a skipping stone.”
Still wondering what Groovy meant about seeing her and Jayjay out past infinity, Thuy went ahead and coached Lovva as she transformed herself into a harp. The shapeshifting alien pressed her arms together and stretched them out to make the crosspiece. Her belly flattened; her head retreated into her neck. Her legs swung up and fused to make a fluted front column. Her toes connected with her fingers.
Buds formed along the median of her chest and belly, sending luminous tendrils up to the crosspiece, forming the strings. Her green skin glittered and turned gold. And now a copy of Bosch’s painting on the soundbox began taking shape. Jayjay got in on this, guiding the harp as she transformed her skin into layers of oil paint.
When she was done, two pale lovers stood nude in a meadow that seethed with black lizards and tiny birds. Beside them was a pale blue demon fingering a tiny, gold harp that was shaped just like Lovva. The lizards wore little hats, flying fish drifted in the sky, the trunks of the trees had ears, and hints of moisture glistened on the lovers’ thighs.
Right about then old Bosch appeared, climbing through a trapdoor in the attic’s floor. He was in an exalted mental state of joy and terror. He carried a palette and a paintbrush.
“This is the end of the world?” he asked.
“Not the end, a new beginning,” said Jayjay. “We’ve awakened the souls of every object. You’ve been right to see things as alive, Jeroen.”
“We’ll live on?” exclaimed the grizzled artist, looking out the attic window at the marketplace. “A land of wonder.” The rising sun was slanting across the cobbles, illuminating the festive banners that trembled in the day�
�s first breeze. “Everything sings. The cloths revel in their draping. Dear God.” His face smoothed over as he bowed his head in a brief prayer.
Wondering what Jeroen saw when he prayed, Thuy reached into his mind and caught a glimpse of a blinding light at infinity—a triangular, unblinking eye. And then the artist’s meditation was done.
“What’s that devilish thing?” exclaimed Bosch, pointing to the pitchfork.
“I’m what you’d call an artist, too,” said Groovy. “Back home on Pepple, I train vines into stage sets. Sorry I can’t stay and chew the fat, but I’ve got to do some prep work.”
“Wait,” said Thuy. “Teep me Chu’s Knot first. Don’t strand us here.”
“Oh don’t get your panties in a twist,” sneered the pitchfork. “I’ll be back in the nick o’ time.” Forestalling further discussion, Groovy hyperjumped into the region between the branes. Rather then melting away as in an ordinary teleportation hop, the effect was, rather, as if he’d turned a corner in some wholly new direction. His body foreshortened, became a line, and was gone.
“I pray that you’re not sorcerers,” said Jeroen uneasily. “The leader of the mercenary troops garrisoned here, Duke Ongeluk, is quite vigilant on this score, as is my tiresome neighbor Jan Vladeracken. The Duke is close with Father Kreeft of Saint John’s Cathedral, I might add. They make blood sport of hunting heretics.”
“This has nothing to do with sin,” said Thuy, suddenly thinking of what Anja had said about Jeroen asking her for dirty sex.
Spotting the thought, Jeroen glared at her. “We didn’t do it. It was a jape. I was young, unmarried, heated by wine.”
“I’m just thinking that—” began Thuy.
“Never mind!” said Bosch, raising his palette and brush. “In the night I had another idea for my painting on the harp. So this morning I thought that, even if the world is ending, I might as well add my final touch.”
“There’s an artist for you,” said Jayjay admiringly.
“See the little harp the demon in the picture holds?” continued Bosch, bending close to Lovva’s soundbox. “The little harp should bear a painting that’s a copy of my painting on this big harp.”
“Only think the changes,” chimed the harp. “And I’ll make my skin into the proper colors.”
Bosch smiled and set his palette on the floor. “As if painting with my eyebeams? What power! Yes, let’s begin.”
“But I tell you to do this fast,” added the harp. “I’m eager to begin my tasks. I have to go into a trance so as to time-skim through the centuries. And then I’ll meet dear, stupid Groovy in Subdee, and tell him how to find me here.”
Bosch passed his sinewy hand across his brow and fixed his keen eyes on Lovva’s skin. As if formed by a skin rash, tiny pimples of fresh color emerged. Bosch’s face split in a stark grin. He was loving this. He was creating an impossibly detailed visual regress.
Lovva’s soundbox bore an image of a demon with a harp, but now the demon’s harp bore an image of a smaller demon with a harp, and this tiny harp bore a yet smaller picture of a hellish harpist, and so on—iterating down to levels that the naked eye could barely see. By way of capping the series, Bosch set a tiny triangle of ivory white at the vanishing point. The eye of God.
The harp sang a farewell chord and her mind turned glacially slow—at least as seen from the outside. It was as if she’d gone into suspended animation. She was time-skimming now.
“Speaking of painting,” said Jayjay, wanting to push himself forward a bit. “Last night went fine, Jeroen. I covered that donor portrait with a thistle like you said.”
Right on cue, Alderman Vladeracken’s hoarse voice billowed up from Bosch’s front hall. Unfortunately, Kathelijn had let him in again. And it seemed he’d teeped what Jayjay had just said.
“Fiends! Demons! You’re responsible, Bosch! Your little goblin defaced the very altar of our Lady!”
“I hate that disgusting pig,” said Thuy. “He practically tried to rape me.”
“I should kill him right now,” said Jayjay, socking his fist into his palm. “It’d be easy. Split his head like a watermelon.”
“No, no,” said Thuy. “That would make things worse. Let’s go outside. We’ll meet up with Azaroth and wait for that hillbilly pitchfork to take us home.”
“But we’ll have to confront Jan on the stairs,” said Jeroen. “Or—I suppose we could climb out the window.”
“What about your wife?” asked Thuy.
“Jan won’t bother Aleid,” said Jeroen. “Everyone’s scared of her. Her family is rich.”
“Let’s just teleport,” said Jayjay. “I’ll show you how, Jeroen. It means that we hop from spot to spot. I discovered the trick back in California. You focus on the precise image of where you want to be, you get mixed up about whether you’re here or there, and then you decide you’re there. It’s easy.”
CHAPTER 16
TO THE GIBBET!
The three hopped to the market, landing near where some guilds had lined up for the procession: butchers in their aprons, carpenters holding adzes, and bakers whitened by flour, each group with a garlanded wagon bearing a keg of beer. Monks and nuns jostled priests in fancy robes.
A band of strapping young clerics arrived, carrying a canopied litter with the dark little statue of the Virgin. Ahead of them strode a hard-faced priest with bloodshot eyes. He stared at Thuy and Jayjay, not liking what he saw.
“That’s Father Kreeft,” said Jeroen. “And God help us, here comes Duke Ongeluk as well.”
A leathery man in floppy boots and a pale green cockade hat emerged from a sedan chair. He greeted Father Kreeft, familiarly patting the ecclesiastic’s rigid shoulder. Kreeft whispered something in the Duke’s ear, nodding his head toward Jeroen and the Lobraners.
Peasants were dispersing from a cockfight that had just broken up. The mind-amplified roosters had no interest in clawing each other to death. Next to them were some actors playing the Bible scene of the Woman Taken in Adultery. They were having a little trouble with their performance, as they kept tripping over each other’s ribald thoughts and breaking into laughter.
On every side, the merchants continued gamely hawking their wares. The locals had waited all year for this festival and they were loath to let things go off track. Doing their best to ignore the voices in their heads, they glared at the newly sentient objects as if they could force them back into dumb silence. But the caps, potatoes, sheets, and baskets were awake for good.
Now here came Alderman Jan Vladeracken pushing through the crowd, braying like the barnyard animal that he was. He buttonholed Duke Ongeluk and pointed at Thuy and her companions.
“Arrest these evil gnomes and their sorcerer, Jeroen Bosch! We’ll string up the owl and his newts as a festal offering. If you can accomplish this, I’ll see that our town increases your troops’ pay!” Vladeracken strode over to Father Kreeft and handed him a little purse that chuckled with its fatness. “We rely on your guidance in executing this sacred obligation, your grace.”
“Follow me,” Thuy said to Jayjay and Jeroen. “Azaroth will help us.” She wormed through the stockinged legs of the crowd, minding the voices of the shoes. Jayjay was right beside her, and Jeroen close behind.
They found Azaroth gazing dreamily at the fire of a great open hearth set up before the city hall: a furnace melting iron in a stone tub. Three grimy smiths were about to forge a special new bell in honor of this year’s pageant. The mold for the bell sat on the ground. Grimacing against the heat, a smelter was standing on the rim of the tub, using a pike to work loose a stone stopper so the dull-red metal could flow.
The flushed Vladeracken had kept pace better than Thuy had expected. He was almost upon them, hollering and using his teep to point them out. In his wake came Duke Ongeluk with a platoon of soldiers, and Father Kreeft with his priests.
The smelter atop the tub glanced distractedly toward Thuy, and just then his foot slipped. He teetered, flailing his arms—and tumbled int
o the lavalike metal, partly rising up, then falling down again. In his death agony, he let out a series of hideous, juicy, telepathy-enhanced screams. The silp of the molten iron sang a solemn, antiphonal response.
What put the crowd totally over the edge was that the charred bones and greasy bubbles continued the telepathic screaming long after the smelter’s spark of life was gone. Judgment Day and the torments of the damned looked to be commencing right here, right now.
Peasants snatched up sticks to whip their backs; merchants rubbed mud and ashes on their faces. The soldiers, priests, and town sheriffs began seizing God’s enemies—starting with the beggars, the jugglers, and the magicians.
Fast on their feet and nimble with their teleportation hops, Thuy, Jayjay, Azaroth, and Jeroen stayed one jump ahead of the death squads. Their flickering transformations made them look all the more like sinister sorcerers—but they were loath to wholly leave the marketplace. Jeroen in particular wanted to see what came next. And so they twinkled about the steps of the city hall, first on one side, then on the other.
Faster than could be believed, the town bailiffs trundled torture and execution equipment onto the city hall’s stone porch. There was no thought of magistrates—these were the End Times! By way of placating the angry God, His enemies were to be flogged, mutilated, and broken on the wheel, with the beheadings and hangings still to come.
“Oh no,” said Azaroth. “They’ve got Menso, Luc, and Dora.”
“And my beggar friends, too,” said Jayjay. “Maarten and Hugo.”
“We have to help them!” cried Thuy. Focusing her mind, she began teeping the prisoners the secrets of how to teleport. Keen old Dora picked up the trick immediately. As a bald, puffing monk bent over her with a pair of red-hot pincers, she grew translucent, dissolved in a puff of sparkles, and relocated to the river road outside of town.