•
Come morning, Son prepares a new dish for her. He frigs about with a nice mix of fungoid stuff and roots, mashing it up together and spicing it with a sprinkle of berries that have passed their testing procedure: eat one today and see; eat two tomorrow and wait; and so on. Little kicks to their new world, building a ken they can live by.
She tries a spoonful and promptly throws up. "Yuck," she says. "That looks like somebody already ate it. Smells like it, too."
She can be hurtful. And she's getting moodier and moodier, says a Poppy‐like voice inside him, not going so far as to call her a flat‐out bitch. Her daily bouts of nausea are complicated by frequent headaches and emotional flare‐ups.
She herself still worries the post‐cryo repairs weren't as successful as they first hoped. Whereas Son feels as fit, maybe fitter, than he ever has, Dee Zu is sick. Really sick.
She pretends it's nothing much, but he can see she's scared. Most recently it's her swollen belly that's freaking them both out.
two & two together
The morning sicknesses have passed. What's almost worse, these days, is the claustrophobia caused by Son's unrelenting concern.
"What can I get you?"
"Nothing. Thanks. I'm okay."
"How about a nice breakfast in bed?"
"No. Please, no."
Son looks so hurt she pretends she was only joking.
He asks if he can join her for a minute or two. He wants to use her tummy as a pillow.
•
"That's right, chum," he says. "You go ahead and kick away. Come on out of there fighting."
"My God," Dee Zu says. "What are you telling her?"
"Her? How do you know it's a her?"
"I know."
"Well, I know it's a boy. I can tell from his attitude."
Dee Zu just rolls her eyes and grins, a little.
•
Was this misery standard, back when everybody was having babies? Before the Lode went down, she could have simply asked her WalkAbout. She has never known anybody who had a child. She never met Ellie, Cisco's mother. And she herself was a crèche baby, raised from an embryo deposited by an anonymous woman who had fallen victim to the mid‐'20s back‐up‐your‐babies neurosis. The Madonna virus pandemic finally precipitated a plan to recycle most, saving the rest for stem‐cell farms. But the anti‐Madonna virus attack soon brought that program up short.
Never mind. They've put two and two together and concluded beyond any real doubt she's pregnant. Which is amazing. Much better than the thought she might be dying.
And the baby seems healthy. It's like it's trying to bust out already.
•
Another thing. The house now sports a rooftop cistern. This feature must have appeared before the recent rains because the showers and toilets are working. As though in celebration of the new family member.
population boom
The Land is playing with fossilized traces of things the Boogoo ate.
– Son
invisible otherthings
He finds Eva down by the creek. She sits cross‐legged at a smooth‐surfaced, neatly rectangular protrusion of soil. She's pouring something from an invisible pot into invisible cups for two, maybe three, invisible guests. She's too busy to notice Son, the invisible observer.
"Naughty doggie," she's saying. "No, no, no." She laughs. She hums a happy tune as she deals invisible things all around the table.
"No," she says. "Don't want to. Bad doggie." Then she laughs again and says, "But you can have two cookies, okay?" She goes da‐da, da da‐da and,with a final da, da, plunks two invisible items down in front of the bad doggie.
"Eva," Son says.
"Daddy. Hi. Come, we have tea and cookies."
"It's time to go back to the house. Mommy's making a nice brunch."
"I'm full already. And Spiff is being bad. I need to talk to him some more."
"Who's Spiff?"
"A doggie."
"What?"
"He's a dog," Eva says. "A doggie."
"Where? What kind of dog?" She has never even seen a dog. "How do you know it's a dog?"
"The doggie told me he's a dog."
•
"You worry too much," Dee Zu tells him. "She's just exercising her imagination. That's good." As though she consulted an operating manual for three‐year‐old children. And it isn't surprising, she says, that Eva would construct some friends. "Who else is there to play with?"
Okay. But there could be more than mere imagination at work here. "She's talking to otherthings," he says.
"What other things?"
"She calls them 'otherthings.' Things that live in the Land, she says."
"Now who's letting his imagination run away with him?" Dee Zu chuckles. "Where do you get these ideas?"
"She says some of them want to help us."
spirit lode
The treehouse gets this month's first prize for novelty.
Yesterday, this was as close to a standard shade tree as you get these days. After breakfast today, they noticed a rough treehouse nesting in the embrace of its three biggest branches. A rope ladder dangled enticingly to within a meter of the ground.
"Look, look!" Eva skipped all around the grass singing "Shave‐and‐a‐hair‐cut," and saying "This is my house; I have a house. Da‐da, da da‐da."
Eva should never have been allowed to climb up there till they'd scouted the situation. Son still insisted upon going on and on about fleye‐trap chairs and Shamurais and the need to never let their guard down. Never mind Eva had laid claim to what has already become her own special place.
"Two bits!" she sings, triumphant.
•
"And we let her go up there all by herself?" Son says, not for the first time. "We didn't even check it out first?"
Dee Zu asks Eva again: "Where did the treehouse come from?"
"I know," she says.
"Okay," Dee Zu says. "Where did it come from?"
"It was the goshdarnit‐things."
"You mean the otherthings?" says Son.
"No. The goshdarnit‐things. And the nownowbits."
"Eva." Dee Zu smiles. "Please. What are these things?"
"Sputterbits. Spiff says they're send‐dent sputterbits."
"What are you talking about?"
"They also built the other house."
"What other house?"
"The big one. Our house."
"Who built it?" Dee Zu says.
"The goshdarnit‐things and nownowbits. Mostly them. And Spiff helped with my treehouse."
"Eva."
"Yes?"
"Who is Spiff?"
"My friend. I helped too."
•
Here's a theory. Might their three‐year‐old daughter be learning to use the entire Homestead as a Doll? And, if not her, then who? Eva couldn't have invented this structure all on her own. Where would she get the model? How could she know about weathered boards and rusty nail heads? Or the rope ladder, or the single plank swing that hangs on ropes beneath it, to one side of the loveseat. So how to explain it?
Son describes the spirits of the Land as spossils.
He told Dee Zu about how Auntie loved to talk to Son about the relic bits peeking through the Boogoo, obscure suggestions of older times. She used the word "palimpsest" to talk about the reading of layer upon layer of traces, some only faint and many of them obscure. So Son mixed this notion with Poppy's talk of "fossil flickers" and came up with spossils.
Dee Zu likes this word, a neat package of fossils and spores, where templates of things past express legoitic versions of the originals. As Son put it, "The Land gets to play with fossilized traces of things the Boogoo ate." As though the more complexities this nanobot superorganism consumes, and the greater their variety, the more they fertilize the complexitization of the Boogoo itself.
And the spossils get to propagate themselves or, more often, riff off novel expressions of themselves.
; •
Eva is back up in the treehouse. They can hear her talking, probably to her invisible friends. Spiff, and whoever.
Meanwhile Dee Zu is riffing ideas off this spossil notion. "So while we were in Happy Chillin," she tells Son, "the Boogoo evolved into the Land, and then the Land evolved into a Doll."
"The way our pit became a compost heap on steroids."
"Yeah. Now the whole landscape is one big compost heap."
"That's amazing." He's careful not to sound sarcastic, never mind Poppy has popped up in the back of his mind, waving his arms around and wanting to be heard.
"That's not all. Imagine the Land has absorbed the Lode. Maybe when the PlagueBot breached the malls."
"And?"
"Just think. Traces of everything humanity ever knew wind up somehow recorded in the Land. A mother lode of spossils."
"A planetary data backup."
"That's right. That's good."
"But the data is scattered, and maybe incomplete."
"And think about this. Every time we unlock that deep level in your ball, the Land has fits. Now imagine that the ball is a Lode backup. Could it be we've been feeding more Lode data into the Land? And maybe it wants more."
"Sky freaked out every time we opened the deep level. And now the Land goes berserk. Why? What does it all mean?"
"Good question."
They've witnessed every degree of expressive complexity from brute slowjoes through roachtraps and roachmen to lounger fleye‐traps, aeolian mantas, squidpods, boogoocats, the amazing blackhawk medley and the great Boogie, which almost ate them before they escaped into Happy Chillin. After their suspension, though—after what Son calls the Big Sleep—they've seen the appearance of such evolving complexities as their own Homestead, which itself pales beside the emergent ecosystem that is the Land writ large.
It's as though Dee Zu finds herself in a disarmingly benign World, however little it shows signs of settling into stable predictability. So the charm is offset by enough surprise and change to keep her on edge and sharp. And this is important, what with Eva spending more time out on the Land than here in the Homestead.
•
Eva learns stuff every day, much of it from her curious associates. She makes new friends everywhere. And not just in the usual hotspots. Most of them Son and Dee Zu never even see, bits of landscape that manifest as otherthings, goshdarnit‐things and who knows what kind of things. Some of them Eva evokes; others come looking for her. Some of them are visible, some of them aren't. Some of the invisible ones must be imaginary, some of them evidently aren't. This sometimes freaks Son out. Too often it evokes the Poppy in him.
Even Dee Zu can't say she's entirely comfortable with developments. It's as if the Land is animated by relic bio and cultural spossils, maybe relic personalities. What an idea, for example, that the Land could be possessed by traces of Leary and Ellie. But how else to explain the Homestead?
What Dee Zu has almost come around to believing: Leary—call it a learything—helped Eva negotiate the treehouse.
So it's like the spirits of Leary and probably this Ellie, the one Cisco said was his mother, what Eva calls the nownowbits, have taken a hand in shaping the Homestead and everything in it.
•
And what an idea this in turn suggests. If Leary and Ellie, why not Cisco? Even if his wet master is dead, even if his scendent shut down along with the rest of the Lode, is Cisco still with them after all?
bad doggie
Son can't believe people used to welcome this shit into their lives.
Support the Maxhappy Millennium
The voices in his head mostly rumble at the threshold of intelligibility, yet they manage to articulate these cheery exhortations. Happy slogans fit to raise Poppy cursing from his grave.
Securistatic maxhappiness!
How can that dreckmill, or propagator or whatever it is, target him right through the berm? How deep does he have to bury it? He banked the soil up with his bare hands. That was more than three years ago, before Eva was born. Every so often he shored more soil up on the mound, his new fingers tingling enough to drive him nuts, till finally the soil seemed to get the idea and continued, with only minimal encouragement, to shrug up higher and higher all on its own. Now they've got a full‐on berm between their perimeter wall and the creek.
And here's yet another voice. It gets louder as he approaches the ravine.
•
"Pay attention!"
Eva is hosting one of her creekside tea parties. She hasn't seen Son yet, or maybe she just isn't ready to acknowledge his presence. He has given up trying to tell her she isn't allowed to play by the creek.
She's addressing the sandy nook in the streambank close to where the hole lurks. Talking to what Dee Zu sometimes calls Doll Number Two.
"Come on." She pretends to be more annoyed than she really is. "That's it. Harder."
A patch of soil stirs at the base of the nook. It rises, just a bump, and then it subsides. It rises again, this time a bit farther, and subsides again. As though one of her guests is verging on visibility.
"Bad doggie," she says. Then she turns to another invisible guest. "He's not trying hard enough." She listens to something and adds, "You can be next. First we need to get Spiff."
Eva is better at evoking spossils than Son is, even better than Dee Zu. She has her retinue of things found and things not yet visible. It's anybody's guess which were already there, in some sense, and which she has herself had to negotiate. And with whose help.
"Time to go home, chum." Son puts as much gentle authority into his voice as he knows how, to not much effect.
•
Eva's good at making things. And so is Dee Zu. She conceived Eva after only a few episodes, a couple with him and one with Cisco. Yet here it is nearly four more years of love‐making later, and nothing. What does that tell you? That's what he keeps asking himself. But he isn't sure of the answer. Despite himself, an image comes to mind of Dee Zu and Cisco making love, sitting up and facing each other back there in the still‐smoking Eden. It's hard not to wonder why Dee Zu hasn't become pregnant again.
Never mind. Son is basically Eva's father. Nothing will change that. And Dee Zu is his woman. Though he isn't allowed to say that; he has to say "companion." Buddies plus, is what they are. Be that as it may. Making love with her is usually about as good as life gets. That, and hanging out with Eva.
These thoughts trigger an emotion so vast, so deep, he never suspected anybody could feel this way. It's different from what he felt for Auntie. Or for Gran‐Gran or Poppy, even at the best of times. In ways he wouldn't be able to explain, this love lies in part outside himself. It's something organic, embracing a larger enterprise and the parts he and others can play in it.
At the same time he has to subdue a terror. Never before has he had so much to lose.
Black thunderclouds far to the north present a remote threat to this gloriously sunny day, and Son rubs absentmindedly at his little finger. Meanwhile the soil is especially electric today. Or maybe his feet are unusually sensitive. Dee Zu says her gray foot sometimes prickles enough to drive her crazy.
•
Another reason Son likes this woman, sometimes she reminds him of Auntie in her biohistorian mode.
"I like your spossil idea," Dee Zu tells him. "The Boogoo as a self‐organizing system comprising untold trillions of disassemble‐assembler bots, and this thing retains templates of whatever it assimilates. These spossils then serve as algorithms for local self‐organizations within the larger one. Something like that."
"Sounds right." Though he really has no idea.
"But it must be more than that. Where does it get its energy, for example?"
"Auntie believed it partnered with bacteria and stuff. Like the mats around Ahuk."
Dee Zu looks at him with new respect, or so he wants to think. "Did she have anything else to say about that?"
"She talked about a global microbial superorganism. She s
aid it must have somehow survived everything from the Troubles to the Boogoo, not to mention about 3.8 billion years of shit before that."
"And now it's partnering with the Boogoo?"
"Yeah."
"Symbiosis."
"That's the word she used."
"Wow."
"Yeah."
Dee Zu looks around at the Homestead and at the Land beyond it, maybe with new respect.
incarnations
Hamming it up, tongue hanging out, Spiff goes "Woof, woof."
"Woof!" Eva replies.
She laughs and laughs, while Spiff gets on his hind legs and performs a limping pass at a spirited dance.
This approximation to an ancient robotic dog appeared shortly after a landslip dammed the creek upstream to reveal the old wadi‐bottom hole for all of a morning. Dee Zu wants to believe there's no necessary relation between the two events.
In any case, ever since he's been Eva's constant companion. Except when she's in the house. Never mind how spirited his dance, Spiff moves as though mired in molasses. In the same way the slowjoes or the men with hooked sticks were bound to their Boogoo substrate, Spiff's legs are mere legoitic extrusions of the Land; he can only glide along over the surface, his feet never leaving the ground.
For some reason, furthermore, he can't transition from the yard to the house. He works his forefeet up on the threshold, but that's it. He can't lift his paws clear to get in, and the floor won't recognize his paws.
•
"And now?" Spiff drops back down on all fours. Heeerrre's Poof."
"Poof," says Eva. "Poof, Poof."
Spiff goes, "Grufflegruffle." He could be laughing.
"Mummy! Daddy! Look."
"My God," Dee Zu says. "Where did that come from?"
"Watch!" Eva tickles the creature's tummy.
It chuckles.
"See?" She screams with laughter. "That's how we tell which end is the head."
Son and Dee Zu can't help but laugh along. At the same time they're horrified.
"His name is Poof!"
"And where did you meet Poof?"
"I made him."
"Made him? How?"
"I talked to the Land. It showed me things, and we told it which ones were right."
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