Hylozoic Read online

  “Yee-haw!” hollered a voice. Groovy, the pitchfork, was in the mind space with them. Very aggressive with his tines, he pried at the base of their junk-pile observatory, toppling it to one side. Jayjay fell at some impossible angle, plunged through the very fabric of space—and slid toward wakefulness.

  He was alone, lying on his back, hearing the wind in the trees. Or, no, that sounded more like shifting sand. Or like a cyclone? In any case, it was way past time to get in bed with Thuy. He stood up and opened his eyes.

  He wasn’t in his living room. He was in a—desert? For a moment he had a sense that he was standing upside down—like a fly on a ceiling. But that impression faded away. He was in a surrealist desert landscape of hazy pastels. The dry ochre ground bore elegant washboards of ripples from the steady wind. Swirls of lavender sand drifted overhead, with a bright, chalky spot betokening the presence of a white light somewhere far overhead.

  Cactuslike plants were scattered across the parched plain, slowly moving his way, their roots like stealthy tentacles. Jayjay recalled Thuy’s tale of her journey into the subdimensions—for this was surely where he now found himself. Thuy said the thorny plantlike subbies liked nothing better than to devour a traveler’s flesh.

  Jayjay looked at his hands and slowly flexed them. Every detail in place. He was really and truly awake—but in a nightmare world. He pawed the gritty air like a blind man, not quite believing that his cozy honeymoon cabin was gone. What had he done to deserve this?

  “Let’s climb a vine,” said Groovy, suddenly at his side. The curious figure buzzed some mumbo jumbo and poked the ground with his tines. At that instant, a giant beanstalk appeared, so rapidly that it was hard to be sure if it had grown up from the ground or down from the sky. Be that as it may, it was solidly real, its stalk endlessly branching, and all of the branches draped with rustling heart-shaped leaves. The menacing subbies halted their approach and even began to drop back.

  “Just come on and climb a ways along this beanstalk, son,” said the garrulous pitchfork, thumping the heavy vine. “The stalk is a friend of mine, a native aktual name of Art Zed. Nothin’ to be afraid of. You’ll pick up some powers and you’ll meet a couple of folks. Won’t take long. And then you’ll be back home with the frau.”

  Jayjay gazed at the gently swaying vine. It gave off a pleasant, musical hum. It stretched to infinity, an endless maze of branching paths. He’d wanted to get high, hadn’t he? “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  His hands and feet found ready purchase on the stalk; he climbed upward with ease. Groovy bucked along behind him like a caterpillar. Soon they’d reached the first fork.

  “Right or left?” asked Jayjay.

  “Listen to the beanstalk,” said Groovy. “Follow his song.”

  The music seemed a bit louder to the right, a bit sweeter, so that’s the branch that Jayjay took.

  “Atta boy,” called the pitchfork, close behind him. “And keep doubling your pace. Do it like a Zeno speed-up.”

  With the coming of lazy eight, scientists had begun discussing a theoretical trick for covering the endless axis of eighth dimensional memory in a finite amount of time—they called it a Zeno speed-up. In principle, you could search the first gigabyte of your lazy eight memory in a second, the next gigabyte in half a second, the next in a quarter of a second—and at the end of two seconds, you’d have searched your whole infinite spike of eighth dimensional memory, winnowing through alef-null gigabytes, alef-null being the mathematicians’ word for the first level of infinity.

  But in practice, each step of a search took a certain amount of energy, and there seemed to be fundamental limits to the speed at which you could do things. Normal people couldn’t actually carry out Zeno speed-ups with their minds, let alone with their bodies. The nimblest human thought processes usually pooped out around ten octillion steps.

  But right now, on this leafy beanstalk, a Zeno speed-up seemed physically possible. Jayjay was reaching each successive forking twice as quickly. Right, left, left, right, right, right, left, right . . . The beanstalk’s sweet music was guiding him, and it was feeding him a strange, wonderful energy as well.

  The farther he went, the bigger the leaves became. Or maybe he was shrinking? They were the size of houses, the size of stadiums, flipping past in a blur. Limbs working mechanically, following the song, not paying much attention to which forkings he took, Jayjay chanced a glance down toward the Subdee desert below. The flat expanse shimmered like a sheet of glass, and for an instant he could glimpse the contours of his cozy living room on the other side. If he turned his viewpoint upside down, it was as if he were crawling down a lacy root system, and peering up through his cabin floor.

  Meanwhile the music of the beanstalk had segued into a voice, a man’s murmur, so very similar to Jayjay’s internal monologue that at first he mistook it for his own thoughts. But these weren’t the kinds of thoughts he normally had.

  “I’m a transfinite being,” the vine was saying. “We call ourselves aktuals. I live in Alefville. Each of our tree branches has an endless number of jiggles. My apartment building has alef-one floors, and the town has alef-two streets. My full name is—”

  An intense, skritchy sound filled Jayjay’s ears. It was like hearing someone handwrite an endlessly long phrase in a fraction of a second. But, regarded in another way, it was really just a pair of syllables, a simple name that Jayjay could very easily say, a name which, come to think of it, the pitchfork had mentioned before.

  “Art Zed?” said Jayjay.

  “Yes. Before too long, you’ll be visiting Alefville.”

  “Wow.”

  The pitchfork seized on Jayjay’s moment of dreamy wonder to give him a cartoon poke in the butt—yow! He lost hold of the vine and skidded onto a heart-shaped leaf as big as a town.

  “Hey, Jay,” said the pitchfork. He bounced along on the viridian surface, coming to a stop, balancing on the butt of his handle. “This is far enough for today. Ten tridecillion branchings. You done good. I saw you drinking in that subdimensional glow off Art Zed. You slick, boy, you a, a—call it a zedhead.”

  Teeping down into his body, Jayjay did indeed sense something different. Even if he hadn’t made it to the top of the beanstalk, the beanstalk’s voice had done something to him. His thoughts were finer and more rapid than before. He felt great, euphoric. “Zedhead?” he echoed, laughing.

  “Yeah, Jay. It means you can think longer and faster than other humans. You gonna be able to reprogram a hundred kilometers of atoms if you feel like it. Meanwhile I got some folks for you to meet. One of ’em is an old friend of yours. And the other one’s gonna get you hot.”

  Jayjay had no idea what he was doing here, so far from home, and he didn’t really trust the pitchfork. But he was feeling such well-being that it seemed like a beautiful dream. There was no rush to leave here, no rush at all.

  Stray tendrils and flowers from the beanstalk drooped down over the leaf, making a space like a festooned ballroom, quite empty.

  “They’re comin’ real soon,” said the pitchfork. He rose up to his full height and set his tines to vibrating. Something like teep signals were beaming out from him—and immediately disappearing into another dimension. He was sending signals to the Hibrane.

  Beside a fragrant bean blossom a gleaming line appeared and unfolded at impossible angles to form—a tidy harp.

  “Oh, why did you make me do this stupid extra jump over here, Groovy?” She seemed fretful and disoriented. “I still have to unfurl lazy eight on the Lobrane and the Hibrane. Well, I guess for this boy, what’s his name, that’s already happened, but, me, I’m just starting on my big time loop.”

  “This here’s my girlfriend, Lovva,” the pitchfork told Jayjay.

  Oh wow. It was the same harp that Jayjay had played when he’d unfurled the eighth dimension some hundred days ago. He recognized her by her teep vibes. But unlike before, the painting on her soundbox was intact. It showed a pair of lovers beside a littl
e blue demon playing a serenade on a golden harp of his own. The woman looked slightly Asian, with a delicacy to her features and a certain arch to her eyes. With a shock, Jayjay realized it was an image of Thuy. And the guy with her, could that be him? Beautiful. It was like seeing the solemn goddess of time bend around to bite her own toenail.

  “Groovy, I don’t approve,” sang the harp. “I know what you’re up to. You’re planning to betray the Earth.”

  “I’m lost is all, Lovva,” said the pitchfork, putting on an aggrieved tone. “It ain’t my fault if I don’t know where to find you.”

  “I’m on the other brane, Groovy,” said Lovva. Ill-tempered though she was, her contralto voice rose and fell in smooth glissandos that set the pitchfork’s tines to humming along. “I’m time-skimming. I already saw you there. You show up at the house of this painter who decorates me. I think his name is Hieronymus Bosch. Eventually I’m going to play the Lost Chord there. Apparently the harpist will be that young man who’s with you right now.”

  For just a moment Jayjay felt like he could understand how and why the Hibrane Bosch had ended up in the woods by his cottage. But then the gears of logic dissolved into the milky glow of pleasure that was filling him here.

  “This is our boy Jay,” said the pitchfork. “I’ll send him over to the Hibrane directly. He already met you on the Lobrane, so he’s good to go. I called you here so’s you could remind me where to send him. Also I felt like givin’ you a nice funky strum.”

  “You’re so crude,” said the harp irritably.

  “You the one who got lost. Needle in a frikkin’ haystack.”

  “Don’t always criticize me!” The harp’s tone rose in a sharp crescendo. This was like listening to a married couple bickering—a spaced-out married couple who continually forgot what they were talking about. Speaking of spaced-out, Jayjay felt exceedingly high from the long rush of his ten tridecillion-leaf climb. None of this seemed serious, especially not the clownish pitchfork.

  “Aw, I don’t mean nothing,” Groovy was telling the harp, leaning forward to give her strings a gentle flick. “Long as I can hear you, I’m happy.”

  “Sweet,” said Lovva, dropping her ill humor and enjoying her mate’s caresses. She sang a sweeping arpeggio. Looking down, Jayjay let his eye do a zedhead speed-up of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 saccades, traversing the Art Zed beanstalk from the bottom to the leaf upon which he’d fetched up, not that he bothered to make note of the precise path. What mattered was that he was ten tridecillion levels down into the subdimensions. Forty-three zeroes. Far out.

  “You on the beam now,” said the pitchfork, watching his mind. “Eventually you’ll get fully aktualized and hang with Art Zed. You’ll end up coming to our world to help aktualize Lovva and me. It’s all looped around.”

  Once again, Jayjay had the fleeting feeling of understanding the whole time-tangled pattern. “Will I remember this?” he asked.

  “Some of it,” said the pitchfork. “A little at a time. Okay, now, here comes our next mystery guest.”

  “Groovy, don’t!” said the harp.

  The pitchfork ignored her, setting himself to buzzing again. He was using his vibrations to make something. He was creating a physical object, one atom at a time—it was an ostrichlike bird, quite large, not yet brought to life. She lay limp as a butchered goose upon the leaf. But now an external burst of teep signals pulsed into her, whizzing down the lazy eight axis from infinity. The bird squawked, got to her feet, and raised her head. She was easily eight feet tall. Disturbingly, she had no eyes.

  “Woe,” sang the harp like a tragic chorus. “He’s made a physical body for Pekka of Pengö to control! This creature will serve as Pekka’s Earth-based agent.”

  “There’s one of these things in the royal caves back home,” said Groovy. “It’s called a Pekklet.”

  The oversized bird came high-stepping across the leaf, her clawed toes sinking in with each stride. Her fuzzy, eyeless head swiveled, as if studying Jayjay via impalpable rays. Groovy twanged his tines in Jayjay’s direction, and a reckless wave of enthusiasm swept over him.

  “Yoo-hoo,” yelled the besotted Jayjay, as if he had nothing to be afraid of. “Yoo-hoo!”

  He drew out that last oo, putting some teep into it, throwing in a zedhead image of himself reflected ten tridecillion times in a pair of mirrors, making a different silly face in each reflection.

  “Oh, yeah,” said the pitchfork. “You do that gooood. You got her interested in you.”

  “Run, Jayjay!” shrilled the harp. “Pekka’s the planetary mind of a world of ruthless colonizers.”

  But the warning was too late. Pekka’s agent was already standing over him, probing his mind, her will unpleasantly strong, her two-toed claws deadly. She smelled musty. With a darting motion of her snakelike neck, she plucked off Jayjay’s sweat-stained shirt; with wet gasp, she swallowed it whole, working the bolus down her long neck.

  The alien being let out a series of low, sweet clucks. Dandelion fuzz sprouted from her head, growing fine tendrils that settled onto Jayjay and sank into his flesh. He had the distinct sense of hooks taking hold.

  “You under her wing now, Jay,” said the pitchfork, as if in sorrow. “Pekka’s agent is knotting into you. Entangling your particle strings.”

  “You deliberately set him up!” repeated Lovva. “You’re selling out his world! I knew this was coming, but I can hardly believe it. You’re terrible, Groovy.”

  “I want me some glory,” muttered the pitchfork. “Pekka promised that she’ll have them Earthlings puttin’ up statues of me.”

  “As if!” raged the harp. “A parasite like Pekka isn’t going to keep her word.”

  “You think?” said the pitchfork, actually surprised. His voice took on a rare note of self doubt. “Wonder if I goofed.”

  “You are such a dumb hick.”

  “We know that Jayjay and his gang are gonna win out,” said the pitchfork, regaining his cockiness. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have seen them in our world. There’s no harm in letting Pekka’s birds take a shot. Everything’s gonna come out in the wash.”

  “Maybe so,” said Lovva. “Because I knew this was coming, I already teeped Glee. She became a Hrull pusher after we left, you know. She and her host Hrull are probably in the Lobrane already, relative to Jayjay’s time.” She studied him, reading his mind. “Yes, he saw the Hrull this morning. That’s good. They can teach him about the reset rune.” She heaved a tinkling sigh. “There’s so much still to do before we go home and smash the aristos. And that’s the only part I really care about.”

  “Worryin’ don’t help,” said the pitchfork. “This tune’s playin’ itself.”

  And with that, the two of them dove off the edge of the leaf and disappeared, heading in opposite directions, leaving Jayjay to face the music.

  His euphoria was gone, and his confusion was rising. He didn’t really understand what Pekka was, nor what it meant for this Pekklet creature to be her agent.

  The mental contact from the Pekklet was itchy, squawky, raw. Thanks to all the particle strings she’d knotted into Jayjay, she had an unbreakable connection to him—stronger than mere teep. The distant planetary mind behind the Pekklet was avidly pleased to have forged an unbreakable link with a humanoid from a lazy eight world. She had huge development plans.

  Aching with regret, Jayjay backed away from the Pekklet, wanting to climb down the stalk. The giant bird followed his moves as if he were a juicy beetle. She chirped blindly at him, an almost cozy sound. Jayjay’s sense of connection to her was physically palpable.

  To draw the link yet tighter, the ungainly fowl began reshaping herself, tucking in a bit here, growing out a lump there—until she’d taken on the form of a statuesque woman, all curves and hollows, with ruffs of fancy feathers, but again with no eyes upon her blank face. The slinky shape embraced Jayjay, cooing words of love.

  An exquisite sensation of erotic pleasure filled Jayjay’s m
ind. And in that moment of sensual bliss, he agreed to do whatever the Pekklet wanted.

  With a flap of her arms, the Pekklet flipped Jayjay off the edge of the leaf. He tumbled downward like a doomed giant, rushing past the vast tangles of the vines; he thudded onto the Subdee desert, and oozed through to his cabin floor. And now he was lying in the living room like before—but with the Pekklet controlling his mind.

  His mouth dropped open and he made a tuneless hum. His penis was throbbing. An astronomical flow of information rushed through him and into the teeming night.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE MISSING GNARL

  Having to fetch Jayjay from the stream bank to the house was annoying and depressing for Thuy. Some honeymoon. Once asleep, she dreamed of Jayjay as a zombie, a spider, a radioactive computer chip.

  Just before dawn she woke, her mouth dry, her head pounding from the champagne. She sat upright in the lonely bed, listening. Raccoons clattered in the moonlit clearing, cleaning up the dinner’s debris. The trees sighed; the stream burbled. But there was no sound of Jayjay’s breathing in the living room, and when she teeped out for him, he wasn’t there anymore.

  She got a glass of water from the kitchen sink, surveying the empty room. The air was cool and calm. Jayjay must have gone back out soon after she’d walked him in. Goddamn him. Didn’t he care about her at all? Was their marriage doomed?

  If she wasn’t careful, she was going to cry. To hell with that. She drank her water, peed, and went back to the bedroom. Just before she turned the light out, she noticed something outside her window: a forked branch leaning against the glass as if peeking in at her. Thuy teeped the thing, but got little reaction. Just a stick.

  Suddenly she heard a noise. Running into the living room, she saw something small squirming on the floor. It was growing larger, like dough rising through a crack—oh my God, it was Jayjay! And then he was present again, sprawled on the floor, shirtless, shivering all over, with his eyes squeezed tight shut. He bucked his hips as if dreaming of sex. Thuy poked him, checking that he was real. It was so weird, the way he’d puffed up out of the floor. Had she really seen that? She couldn’t seem to wake him. Never mind. At least he was here. Thuy buried herself under her covers and got a few more hours of sleep.