by Rudy Rucker
Belly sagging, the laden Hrull lifted off. To make more room, she’d left her mouth ajar. The Hibrane painter—really too tall for this space—lay just inside her lips, peering out. His fingers twitched with the desire to draw the unfamiliar views of his land.
“That’s Hieronymus Bosch,” said Thuy, perched beside Jayjay on the bunk facing Chu and Glee. “The big artist? Can you even believe it? He just painted a picture onto the harp.”
“I see the little horn dog has a new girlfriend,” interrupted Jayjay, glaring at Chu.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” said Chu. “It wasn’t really my fault.”
“That’s what Thuy says, too,” snapped Jayjay. “Hrull gel must be hot stuff.”
“Oh, stop it now, Jayjay,” said Thuy. “I’m pregnant with your daughter!”
“That’s great!” said Chu, keeping his thoughts flat and shallow.
“No gel till we get back to Hrullwelt!” announced Duxy, expecting the pushers to start begging for their drug. “But it’s fine if all of you come along. The more the merrier.”
“The more pushers she bags, the more she gets paid, is what she means,” said Thuy. “And, Chu, teep all of us your Knot, will you? Groovy’s been keeping us here. Jayjay and I need to get back to where we started out.”
Chu teeped around the Knot, which miffed the pitchfork just a little bit, as he’d wanted to be the go-to guy.
“Don’t jump till I give you the say-so,” rasped Groovy. “I figured out the best way to steer you home.”
“Bossy as ever,” said Glee.
“Hey, sweet thing!” sang out Groovy, finally seeing Glee. He writhed past Chu’s knees to lean against the Pepple woman’s side. “I was hopin’ to find you. I knew that Lovva had steered you to Lobrane Earth.” He touched her cheek with his tines.
“It’s really you?” said Glee, running her green fingers along the pitchfork’s twitching handle. “I like you better with a face.”
“How’d you end up a pusher?”
“I had to leave Pepple in a big rush. It was the night after you and Lovva disappeared. For me, it’s been ten long years.”
“Thought you looked a little worn around the edges,” said Groovy. “But, hey, that’s no never mind. You’re still my gal, aren’t you? I can’t be happy with just plain Lovva. Like tea without sugar. What do you say you come back home?”
“That’s my biggest dream,” said Glee, her three eyes glowing. But then her face clouded over. “Only—the aristos will execute me. You see, I killed Count Foppiano.”
“That duke of earl who was always sniffin’ around?” said Groovy with a chuckle. “Good job! Lovva and me are fixin’ to disintegrate as many toffs as it takes to bring down the old order. We’ll still be superpowered for a few hours after we get home. Hell, Glee, you come along with me and you’ll be the godmother of the revolution!”
“I’d be sick for days and days, kicking the gel. But—maybe. You really don’t mind that I’ve grown older than you?” She batted her third eye and gave Groovy a tremulous smile. “Perhaps Lovva will be glad for that. She was always jealous of my looks.”
“You’re still smart and nasty, right? That’s what counts.”
“We’re ready to jump now,” said Jayjay, growing impatient. “Were you going to suggest a route, Groovy?”
“Oh, I’m gonna help you big time,” said the pitchfork. “By the time you get back to Yolla Bolly, you’ll kick butt on those featherdusters no doubt.”
“Well, I just hope you realize how tricky the navigation really is,” fretted Jayjay. “If we blindly head out perpendicular to this brane’s timeline, I bet we’ll hit the Lobrane at, like, one thousand B.C.”
“We’ll piss into the wind for the whole trip,” said Groovy confidently. “Fly against time’s natural flow. I laid us down a waypoint to aim for.” He teeped them an image of a whirlpool in the Planck sea.
Chu’s skin prickled. He thought of cold water covering his face and dragging him into the endless deep. “I don’t like that,” he said.
“A native aktual is the silp for this particular swirl,” said Groovy. “Her name’s Beth Gimel. She’s in tight with Art Zed, the aktual who made the beanstalk for Jay. She’s not gonna swallow you all the way down, Chu, you ain’t on today’s menu.”
“But we are?” said Thuy.
“It’s all part of the loony loop we ride,” said Groovy. “You’ll do us like we done you. Feller says, mektoub. It is written.”
“What about you, Jeroen?” Jayjay asked the weathered artist. “Would you like us to set you down before we leave?”
“No, no, I want to experience it all,” said Bosch. “The demonic pitchfork tells me we’ll see heaven, hell, and the Almighty Himself.”
“What you might call a figure of speech,” buzzed Groovy. “Puttin’ it in the man’s own terms.”
“I long to see the Last Things face-to-face,” continued Bosch, tapping his upper lip with his dry, narrow tongue. “And if this be but sorcery and sham—why, that’s a kind of secret wisdom, too. I’m glad to put my life into upheaval. As a youth I dreamed of being a penniless wanderer. My small success as a painter has imprisoned me for too long.”
Each of them hoping for the best, they pushed—launching Duxy across the glistening Planck sea, her mouth stuffed with Chu, Thuy, Jayjay, Glee, Bosch, Groovy, and Wobble. Once they were en route, the pitchfork flew in front, leading the way.
This time, lazy eight was in effect for the whole trip, and the travelers stayed in close teep contact. In order to fight their way up the timestream, the humans and the Pepplese pushed without letup. Their massed motive force was even a bit more than required; the surplus teek energies swelled Duxie’s pusher cone.
Drained by the steady effort, Chu grew numb and dreamy. To avoid sitting knee-to-knee with Jayjay, he’d lain down beside Bosch, the two of them staring out of Duxy’s mouth as she skimmed across the Planck sea, following Groovy’s lead.
Perhaps a half hour passed. A high range of light gray vapor had appeared on the horizon, occasionally flaring up in lofty streaks. Here and there, the surface below them seemed to boil, as if stirred by powerful eddies. And now a prodigious bubble shot up from the sea directly below Duxy, accompanied by a spout of spume.
“Stop pushing!” teeped the manta to her crew. “I want to turn aside.”
“Not now,” responded Groovy from up ahead. “We’re just gettin’ good.”
“He’s crazy!” teeped Duxy. “He’ll kill us all!”
Worn and bewildered as they were, the crew ceased their efforts. Surely it would be all right to drift for a bit and catch their bearings. But, as it happened, their cessation of effort made no difference. A fierce wind was driving them toward the anomalous zone ahead. And when Duxy tried to fight the gale, its true force become apparent. Her wind-whipped wings fluttered like ineffectual rags.
And so they continued bowling along in Groovy’s wake. As always, the interbrane air glowed, and a still brighter illumination rose from the roiled sea, casting uncanny highlights on the lean features of the weathered man at Chu’s side. Teeping through Bosch’s eyes, Chu tasted the treasure trove of tint and shape that the artist saw.
The thin air thrilled steadily with a high-pitched vibration. The ocean’s surface was beginning to tilt, as if they were flying downhill. This made the gray band along the horizon loom that much higher, like a gigantic cataract rolling into the sea, ranging to both sides as far as Chu could see.
Crosswise currents had begun ripping the sea to clotted foam. Through the seething rents, Chu could glimpse a chaos of flitting beings: the subbies. Some looked like men with the heads of birds, some like fish with human legs, all of them racing along half-submerged, pacing the travelers.
“Look out for them,” warned Thuy.
“We have to jump away from here!” teeped Duxy once again.
“Wait!” blasted Groovy. “We’re almost there.”
Bosch only stared—fascinated, fatalis
tic, slightly smiling. Perhaps for him it was as if he were already dead.
And now, directly ahead of them, the ocean surface curved very sharply down, disappearing into darkness. With an effort Chu understood. They were dots at the edge of a maelstrom that was hundreds of miles across.
Duxy let out an anguished squeal; she opened wide her mouth and spit out her passengers, forcing them forward with her cheeks. Bosch, Thuy, and Jayjay went first. Chu managed to hook his feet onto Duxy’s jaw for a moment, but little Wobble tugged him loose and let him drop after the others. The Hrull may well have meant to keep Glee, but, beckoned on by the hovering pitchfork, she gathered the courage to leap out, too.
As Chu hit the Planck sea, his immediate fear was of an attack by the subbies. But—as a small blessing—these creatures were keeping clear of the currents at the whirlpool’s verge. Looking around, he saw Bosch, Thuy, and Jayjay ahead of him, with Glee and the reckless pitchfork floating behind. Duxy hung above them, fighting the hurricane wind as Wobble nestled himself into her mouth.
“Hrullwelt’s thataway!” called Groovy, pointing his tines. Lightened of her main load, and empowered by the energies stored in her teeker cone, the manta sped off like a thunderbolt.
With an abrupt lurch, Chu passed over the maelstrom’s lip and rushed headlong into the abyss. He felt the sickening sweep of descent—but then the sense of falling ceased. Looking around, he saw that the rotational forces had taken over; he was circling around an immense funnel, unfathomable in depth, with glassy sides that spun with bewildering rapidity, bearing him along. It was a scene of terrible grandeur.
Round and round the six companions swept—not with any uniform movement—but in dizzying swings and jerks that sent them sometimes only a few hundred yards, sometimes several miles, and sometimes through a full circuit of the kingdomsized whirl.
For the moment, they were too drained to think of fighting their way upward against the maelstrom’s currents, or through the cyclone winds that filled its core. And so the six coasted on, roughly grouped.
Visible within the glowing walls were the innermost recesses of the subdimensional world, alive with forms that grew the more baroque the greater the depth beneath the Planck sea’s proper surface.
The high, chiming sound within the immense spindle had taken on the quality of heraldic music. Chu formed a mental image of the whirlpool as the bell of an otherworldly trumpet whose mouthpiece lay in an infinitely distant land below. Gabriel’s trump. And now, within his mind, the music segued into speech. The maelstrom’s resident spirit was talking to him.
“I’m Beth Gimel. An aktual. Our world is filled with infinities of all sizes. In my fireplace, the burning sticks have alef-null branchings, but the subtler flames have alef-one forks. The wood and fire merges into alef-two eddies of smoke. Groovy asked me to reach through the subdimensions to make a path to infinity.”
Chu shut out the bewildering farrago and shifted his focus to the subdimensional world behind the maelstrom walls. With Bosch at his side he saw: a flying fish with a village on her back, a sow in nun’s garb, a demon with the screaming mouth of a cat, and a squalling King Bagpipe perched on a millstone with a flag. As a continuing benison, the subbies weren’t attacking. The living force of the maelstrom was keeping them away.
“We have to go home, Jayjay,” called Thuy. “Think of the baby.”
“Which way is it, Groovy?” yelled Jayjay. He paddled over and grabbed the pitchfork’s handle with his hands. “I’ll break you in half, you bastard.”
“We ain’t done yet,” said the pitchfork with a rough chortle. He executed a quick, vicious flip that catapulted Jayjay far out from the maelstrom’s glassy slope. With snickersnack movements too quick to follow, he tossed Thuy and then Bosch in Jayjay’s wake. Glee watched impassively, and Chu paddled away as quickly as he could—not that the pitchfork was coming after him.
The funnel of winds whirled Bosch, Thuy, and Jayjay toward the central axis; ever tinier, they plummeted into the profundities below. A momentary wobble in the wall gave Chu a glimpse of the full length of the tube. The funnel’s inconceivably distant nether terminus was marked by a blazing triangle of white light.
Curling his twin tines, Groovy clawed the air in exultation, “Yee-haw! You ready, Glee honey?”
“I am.”
“What about me?” called Chu over the unearthly music.
“Jayjay will be back directly.”
Glee sat astride Groovy like a witch on a broom. He flattened his tines and formed them into a rudder. Propelling himself counter to the whirlpool’s currents, the pitchfork carved a steep gyre up the maelstrom’s slope, shooting high into the air. At the last instant, he shifted his shape back to Pepplese form; he became a lanky, green, three-eyed hillbilly.
And then Glee and Groovy were gone.
So now it was just Chu and the maelstrom. He drifted for an indeterminate period of time, ever deeper, mesmerized by the chiming song that sometimes segued into the voice of the maelstrom’s aktual. Beth.
He was absorbing her notions about the alefs, which were transfinite numbers lying beyond simple infinity. Beyond the glassy walls Chu seemed to see a great white cuttlefish with alef-seven arms. Below it swayed a primeval sea cucumber, seining the currents with alef-eighteen fronds.
“We’re in the subdimensional zone for true,” said Beth Gimel. “With the reciprocals of alef-ninety, alef-billion, alefalef-ten and more. Levels below levels, all the way down. The transfinite numbers are as quirky and individualistic as the finite integers. The march of alefs is an inexhaustible source of surprise. Yes, I know it’s too much for you. But Thuy and Jayjay understand.”
As his helical descent continued, Chu’s mind began feeling lighter than ever before, more agile. Perhaps he was a zedhead now, capable of teeking ten tridecillion atoms in a row. But what use was that, if he was stuck between the branes forever? Although he felt rested enough to attempt flying away, he had no idea which direction led home.
He recalled an incident from Thuy’s metanovel, Wheenk, about how she’d made her own way back from the interbrane. She’d reached out with her mind and found the warm pulse of the one who loved her: Jayjay.
But Chu had nobody who cared for him that way. His parents were fond of him, sure, but they were busy with their own lives and, truth be told, he was a bit of a burden. As for Bixie—probably they’d never be more than friends. He was a loner. He was doomed.
But all the while, the whirlpool was changing. The sides of the vast funnel became less steep, the gyrations of the whirl less violent. The bottom of the gulf rose and, for a wonder, the maelstrom flattened out. Beth Gimel was gone.
A moment passed. A last fat bubble burbled from the depths, bearing within it—a glistening crow. He cawed, rose into the air, and circled Chu. A subbie?
“Don’t worry,” teeped the apparition in a friendly tone. “It’s me, Jayjay. I’m still in aktualized form.”
“I’m totally lost,” said Chu. “Please don’t be mad at me anymore.”
“No matter. Never mind. Jeroen and Thuy and I have done so many things since then. But we’re not finished. You have to help us save Earth from the Peng. I want to spray that Hrull reset rune onto every atom of Earth. I’ll finish the job I tried to do before. It’ll be easy for me now. I can think endlessly fast.”
“Endlessly fast,” said Chu, almost able to smile. “I’m a zedhead, so Jayjay is an aktual. Always a step ahead.”
The crow feathered his wings and hovered above Chu, watching him with bead-bright eyes. “There’s one catch,” he teeped. “With all the jumping around, I’ve forgotten the details of the reset rune. I probably could have gotten it from someone in Alefville, but I didn’t think of that. And I’d rather not go back up there now. Do you remember it?”
“Um—no,” said Chu looking into himself. “But maybe we could figure it out. When you say you can think endlessly fast—does that mean you can see the end of every search?”
“Th
at’s a good way to put it,” said Jayjay. “Like, when I want to change my shape, I scan through all the possible ways to reprogram my atoms—and I find the best one.”
“Everything is always easy for you,” said Chu enviously
“Can you help me or not?” said Jayjay, with an impatient swoop at Chu’s head. “Or would you rather stay here alone?”
Something sharp nicked Chu’s leg. A fish holding an ax. With the maelstrom gone, the subbies were closing in. Quickly he lifted himself into the air. “I’m ready. I can help. Don’t we have to wait for Thuy?”
“I’m hoping she’s gonna meet me at the cabin. We left Alefville in a rush. Just follow me.”
The two touched down by the cottage in Yolla Bolly, Jayjay in crow form, and Chu still wearing the purple pants and green T-shirt he’d bought on Valencia Street—two days ago? He wasn’t the least bit wet. After all, the Planck sea wasn’t really water.
CHAPTER 18
TRANSFINITE
The pink Peng McMansions were still in place, and the redwood branches were swaying like metronomes. Fortunately it was nighttime. Suller, Gretta, Kakar, and Floofy were asleep. Chu took a seat on the cottage’s moonlit porch steps.
While Jayjay flapped around the clearing, checking things out, Chu teeped across the planet. The viral Peng runes had been a complete success. Squawky tulpas were everywhere, riding high, strutting and pecking, killing off the mammals one by one. In contrast, nature’s gnarl-deprived silps were stereotyped, stiff, sullen. The clouds, the ocean, the air—everything was as fake and lame as a low-grade virtual reality.
As for the human mindweb, the U.S. teep broadcasts were limited to ads for the Homesteady party and religious broadcasts from the Crown of Creation Church. And the media situation was no better in other lands. Each nation’s rulers had thrown in their lot with the triumphant Peng. Creativity didn’t matter to the politicos. Docility and predictability were preferred.