Hylozoic Read online

  “I love the ocean’s salty taste,” said Thuy, remembering her high school surf sessions. She squirted a little spout at Jayjay. “It was creepy how bland everything seemed at our house this morning.”

  “You stopped being bland as soon as we got to San Francisco,” said Jayjay with a half smile. “Enter the dragon.”

  “Don’t even,” said Thuy, flipping her hair so the drops flew in his face. “I can’t believe you were in the subdimensions last night. And what’s up with that pitchfork? Where did the beanstalk lead to?”

  “Supposedly it ran all the way out the lazy eight axis to infinity,” said Jayjay. “The pitchfork and I climbed ten tridecillion steps up.” His symmetrical features were smooth and sincere. “The beanstalk had a name: Art Zed. He taught me about thinking faster. The pitchfork said I’m a zedhead now. And then—I can’t remember exactly. The pitchfork talked a lot. I told you the magic harp was there. She and the pitchfork are married. Lovva and Groovy. And there was . . . a tall bird.” Jayjay fell silent for a moment, worrying. “I think something bad happened then. Oh, never mind. I just want to be here now. With you.”

  “We’ll try for a wave,” said Thuy, glad to change the subject. “See the big water bumps wallowing under us? Wave embryos. They’re coming in from both the north and the south because of the tide pouring into the bay. The intersection of flows is what makes the Potato Patch so gnarly. Cowabuuuunga. Did you ever actually hear anyone say that?”

  “You know I’ve never been surfing before, Thuy. If I do catch a wave, I’m totally not standing up.” Jayjay’s suit displayed a cautious turtle-shell pattern.

  “Follow me,” said Thuy. “And listen to your surfboard.”

  She paddled ahead. Her surfboard’s name was Everooze. Everooze was eager to help her carve some curl. He was teeping into the environment, watching the ocean’s undulations. And his sensitive skin was in tune with the subtle flows of the water around them. Everooze suggested that if Thuy were to angle off to the right about thirty meters and wait there, she’d be able to catch a gigundo swell that was just now rolling in from the horizon. “Visualize, realize, actualize,” added the surfboard.

  Thuy passed the advice to Jayjay and they lay waiting at the spot that Everooze had picked. She kept her eyes on the ocean, watching for signs of the promised wave, not wanting to rely entirely upon telepathy.

  Off to the left, Mabel had caught a ride. Although she was too self-conscious to whoop, her teep image was a giant grin. Momotaro was surfing at her side. Closer to the shore, Bixie and Chu were already paddling back toward them, having caught a breaker the minute they’d arrived.

  Thuy was teeping a coolness between these two. It seemed Bixie was annoyed with Chu for having gone so far as to try and kiss her after their first ride. Poor Chu. Now he was feeling rejected and unlovable. But what did he expect? Bixie was a bit skeptical of boys in general, and not all that interested in Chu in particular.

  Meanwhile—oh, oh—here came a wave with Thuy and Jayjay’s names on it. This was almost literally true. For, like every other natural system, the wave had a resident silp, and the wave-silp knew that the two kiqqie surfers were awaiting her. In fact the wave was in teep contact with Thuy, helping to plan her launch.

  “Now,” said the wave-silp as she slid past. “Cowabunga.”

  Kicking hard, Thuy made it over the foamy lip and slid down the liquid precipice, first kneeling on the board and then standing up, with Everooze suggesting muscle moves to improve Thuy’s balance. The wave, the board, and Thuy were thinking as one.

  Teeping over her shoulder, Thuy observed that Jayjay had missed the wave. She rode the breaker another sixty meters before shooting back over the wave’s lip. Everooze helped her paddle toward her husband.

  The big wave had been the first of a set, so Thuy had to duck under two successive walls of water. When yet another wave loomed up, she stopped ducking and teleported straight to Jayjay, teeking Everooze along.

  Something was wrong. Jayjay was lying on his back on the board, slightly twitching. A fit? The twitching amped up; he was shaking all over. His skin was covered with vibrating goose bumps, like a pond in a rainstorm. His wetsuit bulged at his crotch.

  Thuy took hold of Jayjay’s board; she cradled his head so the seawater wouldn’t slop into his mouth. He was making an off-key droning sound and gently bucking his hips.

  “Jayjay?”

  No answer but his rhythmic hum. Peering into his mind, Thuy saw part of his vision: a symmetric, overripe woman dressed in feathers, her breasts and sex exposed. A girlfriend? A porn show? Her face was very strange—oh. She had no eyes. Just smooth skin.

  Thuy delved into the Gaian mind for help; Gaia was right here watching, dragonflies haloing her face. “That’s not a woman,” said Gaia. “It’s an alien projection who latched onto Jayjay last night. She’s called a Pekklet. She’s controlled by Pekka, the world-mind of a bird planet.”

  Slavishly obeying the feathered fantasy Pekklet, Jayjay was repeatedly spewing out a particular psychic pattern, an insanely intricate construct that resembled a gear-based Swiss watch with innumerable colored worms inside it, each worm twisted into a different knot. Jayjay was using his whole body to send this teek pulse to—how weird—each and every atom in the vicinity, his manic spray of femtohertz data fanning fifty kilometers out to sea, fifty kilometers inland, and a hundred kilometers deep into the Earth’s crust.

  “Can you set him free?” Thuy implored Gaia. “Can you block the Pekklet’s teep?”

  “It’s not teep,” said Gaia. “It’s a quantum entanglement connection to the Pekklet’s flesh body, hidden in the subdimensions of your cabin floor.”

  “What’s all this for?” demanded Thuy.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  Jayjay’s spell had passed; he was staring glassy-eyed into the sky.

  All around them the ocean had turned tame. The water’s tiny ripples were gone, as were the big rollers—there was nothing left but smooth, medium-sized waves.

  Stabbed by jealousy over her husband’s susceptibility to the Pekklet’s sexual teasing, Thuy gave his shoulder a rough shove. “You think she’s sexy? An eyeless alien bird?”

  “I can’t help myself,” said Jayjay despairingly. “She’s knotted into me. I’m her puppet.” He groaned and sat up on his board, taking in the scene.

  The sea was like a sloshing bathtub—limp and listless, as ordinary and uninteresting as their woods had seemed this morning. The clouds in the sky were fatuous balloons. Even Thuy was starting to feel calm and neutral again.

  “The atomic silps—they’re not computing the natural world in depth,” said Jayjay. “They’re wasting their cycles on this weird quantum computation that I programmed into them just now. No more gnarl.”

  “Let’s teleport back to Ond’s,” said Thuy. She signaled the four teenagers that they were leaving. And then they were on Ond’s patio.

  CHAPTER 5

  ALIEN TULPAS

  Jil and Kittie were drinking tea and nibbling at a bowl of strawberries. Jil was training her shoons and Kittie was studying a blook—a rhodopsin-doped sheet of plastic capable of displaying images from every corner of earth.

  “Back so soon?” said Kittie, looking up. “Something’s wrong!”

  “Jayjay had a kind of seizure,” said Thuy. “An alien mind took him over. He reprogrammed the ocean and—oh God, it’s reached here, too. Look how stupidly those branches move, all of them rocking in unison. San Francisco’s gone as dull as a drum machine. Can you feel it?”

  Jil and Kittie exchanged a puzzled look.

  “You and Jayjay are high on Gaia?” suggested Kittie after a pause. “Pighead style? You shouldn’t let him drag you down, Thuy. Last fall you said that you’d quit being a pighead for good.”

  “This is real,” said Jayjay in a low, gloomy voice. “Something strange happened to me last night.”

  “You acted like a pighead,” said Jil in a mock-sweet tone. “What’s strange abo
ut that? Getting high is what you’re all about.”

  “I’m trying to change,” said Jayjay stiffly. “But that’s not the point. Last night I climbed up past lazy eight and I learned to think ten tridecillion thoughts in a second or two. And now this alien agent called a Pekklet is using me to steal the Earth’s gnarl. She’s making me cast malware programs into our atoms. They’re called runes.”

  Jil held up a lumpy strawberry, making a show of studying it. “This juicy little fella looks plenty gnarly to me.” She bit into it and grinned.

  “It’s gnarly because it grew before the change,” said Jayjay. “But the next crop of strawberries will look like—like simple cones.”

  “And last night I thought I saw Hieronymous Bosch,” said Kittie, not taking her vision so seriously today. “What a party.” She guffawed. “Hey, Jayjay, did the aliens—examine you? Is the Pekklet beautiful? Does she give you a—”

  “It’s not funny!” yelled Thuy, turning red. “It’s horrible. Look! This is what it’s about.” She turned on the hose and let the water play onto the stones of the patio. The water traveled in a perfect parabolic arc to spread across the ground in a smooth, even pool. No droplets, no bubbles, no spray, no fun.

  “I don’t get what—” began Jil.

  “Then look at this,” said Jayjay, seizing Jil’s empty teacup and throwing it down to smash. The cup broke into six equalsized pieces that settled symmetrically onto the ground like the petals of a magnolia flower.

  “The world is acting like a cheap-ass video game,” said Thuy. “It’s almost as if we’ve been eaten by nanomachines and turned into sims.”

  “Tell us again what happened to you, Jayjay,” said Kittie slowly.

  “While I was waiting for our wave, I heard squawking and chattering,” said Jayjay. “The sound was coming from inside my head. I remembered the sound from last night—when I climbed a subdimensional beanstalk and the Pekklet locked onto me. I see visions of her as—a sexy woman in feathers.”

  “Oooh-la-la,” said Kittie.

  “The Pekklet gives me little pieces of quantum computer code,” continued Jayjay doggedly. “She calls them runes. And I’ve been teeking the runes onto atoms over and over.”

  “He’s completely spun!” exclaimed Jil. “Slushed!”

  “I teeped Jayjay while it was happening just now,” said Thuy loyally. “He really was teeking little jolts to atom after atom. I think he reprogrammed the whole hundred kilometer cube of Earth’s crust that’s under San Francisco.”

  “I was like an orchestra conductor,” said Jayjay, a little proud of his abilities. “Playing a pitch pipe for ten tridecillion musicians—one at a time.”

  “Ten—what?” said Kittie, grasping for something solid to understand.

  “A big number,” said Jayjay, taking comfort in the math. “You write ten tridecillion as a one followed by forty-three zeroes.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the squawky feather-woman Pekklet made you do this—why?” said Jil, really doubting him.

  “Well—the Pekklet is working for an alien planetary mind called Pekka. And maybe Pekka wants Earth to be an old-school data center, like when they used to keep all those microchip boxes in one building. Maybe Pekka is skimming off Earth’s gnarl to run, I don’t know, a corporate market-prediction engine for the feather boa industry of the Magellanic Clouds!”

  Neither Jil nor Kittie laughed.

  “Can’t you feel the difference?” Thuy asked the other women again. “Can’t you feel that your gnarl is missing?”

  Jil shrugged. The conversation had trailed off. The thing was, thanks to the gnarl reduction, they didn’t have enough mental focus to be properly alarmed. It was like—everything’s fucked, but so what?

  “I’m just coming off a horrible catfight with Nektar and Lureen,” said Kittie, willfully retreating into neighborhood gossip. “The three of us had sex together last night, but then this morning, I’m the odd woman out. They both think they’re prettier than me. Old slags. I just hope Nektar lets me keep using her garage after what I said to her and Lureen. I went a little too far.”

  “I’m impressed you brought them together,” said Jil, content with the conversation’s familiar turn. “They used to hate each other.”

  “Isn’t anyone worried about Pekka and the missing gnarl?” demanded Jayjay.

  “Maybe we women are sick of you always trying to be the center of attention,” snapped Thuy, turning away from the apocalypse, too. “What did you say to them, Kittie?”

  “I called them rutting rhinos,” said Kittie allowing herself a slight smile.

  “That goes in my next metanovel,” said Thuy.

  “I hear you’re calling it Hive Mind?” said Jil.

  “Yeah,” said Thuy. “I’m merging with society. I’m thinking that instead of me writing Hive Mind, Hive Mind will write me.”

  “My best murals are like that,” said Kittie. “They paint me.” She was scrolling through images in her interactive blook. “I bet that’s how it was for Hieronymus Bosch. I have his pictures here.”

  “Oh, before I forget, can you pick up that cup you broke, Jayjay?” said Jil. “I don’t want the kids to cut themselves.”

  “All right,” said Jayjay, squatting to pick up the shards. “Is it okay if I raid your kitchen? Maybe if I eat something, I can focus on what we have to do. This low gnarl is turning me into a pinhead.”

  “Fine,” said Jil. “Ond’s in there napping on a couch.”

  Like someone hiding from the day by pulling covers over her head, Thuy continued peering over Kittie’s shoulder at the blook. The Bosch pictures glowed, rich and lovely. Kittie tapped and rubbed to zoom and pan. One of the paintings, The Garden of Earthly Delights, showed a frieze of naked people around a lake. In a corner, two lovers sat by a blue demon playing a harp.

  “You didn’t really see Bosch at our party, did you?” said Thuy. “You were drunk.”

  “I feel like I saw him,” said Kittie. “A thirty-foot-tall Hibraner version of Bosch. Maybe he could have jumped here because of the way the branes’ timelines are skewed. He lived in Holland around 1490, you know.”

  “I wonder what that was like?”

  “Actually, I’ve been studying up on Bosch’s life for years,” said Kittie. “His homies were tripping their brains out from ergot poisoning, and torturing each other for being possessed. Bosch himself is hard to figure. Sometimes I think he didn’t like sex—he makes it so cold and weird. Or maybe he did like sex, a lot, and he felt guilty.”

  Kittie tapped an illustration in the blook, zooming in on a detail, then continued talking. “Look at the phallus-and-vulva shapes on this pink—I guess you’d call it a marble palace.”

  “The magic harp’s soundboard was painted just like this,” said Thuy. “The Hibrane harp that unfurled the eighth dimension. Did I tell you that Jayjay saw the harp again last night?”

  “Where?”

  “On, uh, that subdimensional beanstalk he says he climbed.”

  “Some heavy shit’s coming down,” said Kittie, shaking her head. “I never really got a good look at that harp when she was here. The subbies had been gnawing on it. And then that Hibraner Azaroth stole it right back.”

  “Well, it belonged to his aunt,” said Thuy. “Come to think of it, they were part Dutch. The harp came down through their family from way back.” She regarded the chilly nudes in Kittie’s blook. “Do you really think an old-master type painter would take a lowly gig like decorating a musical instrument?”

  “Painters take all kinds of jobs,” said Kittie, flipping to a new image. “There’s a hair-thin line between painter and bum. Did I tell you that when I was with Bosch last night, I teeped him my portfolio? He said he liked the monster series I’m painting on vans. God, I wish he’d stayed. We could work together. Krazy Kittie and Howlin’ Hieronymus Hell Hearses!”

  “I like the way everything in his pictures is alive,” said Thuy. “Check out the pottery jug with legs. And tha
t hill in the background is a man on all fours. It’s like Bosch saw hylozoism coming.”

  “This is my favorite Bosch triptych,” said Kittie. “The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Saint Anthony’s feelin’ it. He looks just like Bosch. Yeroon is looking out at us and he’s all, ‘Ain’t this some waaaald shit?’ Maybe he was tempted to imagine weird stuff all the time, but he was scared the visions came from the Evil One.”

  “Do you guys have any kind of plan about how to fix the, ah, the missing gnarl?” interrupted Jil. While they’d been talking, Jil had been messing with her little plastic robots. “My shoons can’t do much anymore.”

  “I wonder if anyone besides Jayjay is spreading alien runes,” said Thuy, reluctantly getting back into crisis-management mode. Jayjay himself was in the kitchen, eating a turkey sandwich and drinking a bottle of beer, not a thought in his head. Thuy gave him a mental nudge.

  “Maybe I should check with Gaia,” he said, reappearing on the patio.

  “If you check with Gaia, you’ll just take off on another pighead run,” sniped Jil.

  “Don’t you be riding him all the time,” said Thuy, mustering some anger. “You’re a snotty priss-pot, Jil. You’re just sour because Jayjay broke up with you to marry me. And then your husband left you. And now you’re stuck with a geeky old man.”

  “I’m the same age as Jil,” said Ond, emerging from the house with his thinning blond hair and sloping shoulders.

  “Oh, hi Ond,” said Thuy awkwardly. “The aliens are invading and I’m freaking out.”

  “I was doing a deep meditation about electricity,” said Ond. His phrase for taking a nap. “But now I’m teeping this apocalyptic scenario from you guys? An alien mind-master made Jayjay reprogram our matter? This is huge!”

  “Ond will fix things now,” said Jil confidently. “You’ll see. He’s not like Jayjay, who’s ruining the world as fast as he can.”