Complete Stories (119 page)

“I could do antskin clothes,” mused Jayson. “I could craft flexible antskin armor.”

“You see?” said Stefan loftily. “I gave you that concept. We’re a team. No wonder we feel so much at home here. This place, Hormiga Canyon, with, like, the monsters and colorful natives—_this_ is the soul of Los Angeles. That stuff we left behind, that’s nothing but Tinseltown! There today, gone tomorrow.”

Jayson looked up thoughtfully at the whizzing sky. Days and weeks were rushing by.

“Why would we want to return to that life of cheap illusion?” added Stefan, sounding braver than he felt.

“Lupe wasn’t a cheap illusion,” said Jayson. “Other people aren’t illusions. Lupe was so real. She was too real for me. I never knew enough real people, Stefan. I was always way too busy feeding the baloney machine.” Jayson turned his face away from the fire and scrunched down into the comfortless pillow of his jacket.

Stefan sat in silence, giving his stricken friend some privacy. Soon Jayson’s shoulders began twitching. He was crying? No, he was rooting in the dirt with his multitool.

“Look what I just found,” said Jayson, studying the scuffed dirt beside the blanket. “This is one of those ant strings. It glows.” He gripped the cosmic string with the strong metal jaws of his pliers. Flexing his tattooed arms, he gave it a muscular tug. The string twanged like a badly-tuned harp. A slight shudder went through the fabric of the real.

“Those spoiled academic physicists would trade in their tenure to see this!” crowed Stefan, lying down on his side to observe the phenomena. “You’ve got hold of a naked cosmic string! And listen to it! It’s humming a natural fourth with three overtones. That proves the existence of the Higgs particle!”

Jayson deftly popped the cosmic string loose from the fabric of spacetime. Torn from its context, the string coiled and rippled like a ruined Slinky. Jayson’s fingers shrank and grew like ripples in a mirrored pool. “Awesome visual effect, huh?”

The space around them shivered a bit; which seemed to have some effect on the ants in Lola’s belly. Abruptly she sat up, yowling in wordless pain. She clutched at her midriff and fled into the woods.

“At least she’s on her feet,” Jayson noted. “Maybe these space-shudders are doing the old girl some good.”

“I’m not sure you ought to pluck those strings right out of reality like that. You could set off a major antquake.”

“Hey, I’m getting away with it,” Jayson shrugged. He clacked the pliers. “I can kink this stuff. I can even cut it. Let’s see if it’ll make chain-mail.”

“Twine dimension seven, loop dimension eight,” intoned Stefan.

The air gave tiny, tortured shudders as Jayson obsessed with his craft: “Okay, you coil it into a long spring first, then you cut it into open rings. And, yeah dog, I can kind of see the higher dimensions. Twine ‘em, loop ‘em, squeeze ‘em—and the loose ends stick together like soldering wire. Chain mail.”

“I’d never have the patience for all that,” said Stefan, shaking his head.

“I’m like a cosmic ant,” said Jayson, calmly knitting away.

Stefan left to search for Lola. His tracking skills were none of the best, but when he came across a steady stream of ants, Lola wasn’t far. She was leaning against a tree. She’d retched a great bolus of ants from her innards—and her sickness had left with them. She looked much healthier.

They dozed for a few hours, rose and pushed on. Hyperio’s map got them past another tricky branching—but then they got hung up at a gnarly crossroads of five arroyos. There was a natural fountain gushing up in the river junction, a subterranean geyser of clear water, with the rivers cheerily running out from it in all five directions. Hormiga Canyon was an Escher ant-maze.

Stefan turned the precious leather map from side to side, like a monkey pretending to read a book. “I wonder if this troglodyte map-maker even knew about North and South.”

Jayson was poking in the wet black mud at the river’s edge. “Bonanza, dude! This river muck is full of loose strings!”

An orange ant the size of a miniature submarine came churning up out of the river water. Like an implacable homing missile, she ran for Stefan, seized the map and gobbled it down. And then, obeying the dictates of some distant scent signal, she scuttled away.

Stefan’s confidence cracked. “Why did you get me into this hopeless mess?” he yelled at Jayson.

“I think this was one of your grand concepts, wasn’t it?” said Jayson, not looking up. He was knitting cosmic strings into a wristband.

Lola had never given one glance at the map, so the loss of it did not concern her. She was feeling perkier today, and more than ready to give directions. Perched atop the rear fender, she offered Sacajawea-style pointed hints, and the boys followed her intuitions.

The familiar oak and laurel trees gave way to thirty-foot-tall tree-ferns: palm-like trunks with great punky frizz-bops of fronds. Bright, toxic-looking speckled mushrooms grew from the rich, damp soil. The tops of the cliffs had grown too high to see. And the narrow band of visible sky was flickering from light to dark to light every few seconds.

This crooked branch of Hormiga Canyon was densely cluttered with dun-colored, outsized, primitive herbivores. These prehistoric American megafauna showed little fear of humans. Small ancestral horses were striped like zebras. Long-necked camel-like creatures stank and slobbered. Carnivorous ur-pigs with flesh-rending tusks ran like the wind. The rather small and dainty Californian mastodons were merely twice the size of large elk.

It became clear that Lola was a proud, resourceful woman. Plucking dry reeds from the river’s edge, she deftly wove herself a gathering-basket. She imperiously stopped the bike to gather chow, stashing high-fiber Pleistocene bounty in the saddlebags. Cat-tail roots. Freshwater clams. Amaranth grain cut off the tops of pigweeds. When they finally bivouacked, the energized Lola bagged them a fatally innocent antelope by the simple expedient of clubbing it to death with a rock.

Jayson built them a fire, then set to work kinking his cosmic strings.

“You’ve got to become one with your craft, man,” babbled Jayson as a sweating Stefan methodically barbecued an antelope haunch. “My cosmic wristband is talking to me right now. Really. It’s saying, like, ‘Hi, I’m here.’ And, uh, ‘Thank you for making me.’ I’m fully in tune with its cosmic inner vibrations. I’m on the same cosmic wavelength. Soon I’ll be able to focus its cosmic energies.” Jayson glared up, daring Stefan to dismiss his claims.

Steadily Stefan spun the dripping, spitted meat. “Jayson, your theory is entirely plausible. These strings are quantum-mechanical. By working with the strings, you, as Man the Toolmaker, entangle yourself in their quantum state. You and your wristband form a coherent system with a unitary wave function.”

Jayson nodded, crimping away with his hard steel pliers. “And when this wristband is done and I’m wearing it, I’ll be a master of the scale dimension! Like the Hormiga Canyon ants!”

As if on cue, an ant the size of Volkswagen appeared beside the fire, sniffed a bit at the baking amaranth bread, then edged close to Jayson, watching his nimble fingers at work. Seemingly fascinated, the ant went so far as to run one of her feelers over the little swatch of chain mail.

“Shoo,” said Jayson mildly, and the ant pattered off.

“Food’s ready,” said Stefan.

As the three travelers feasted, the luminous canyon air was split with lurid, gurgling screams as monster bears and howling dire wolves culled the herds. Jayson heaped armloads of wood on their bonfire, but they didn’t sleep well at all.

When they arose, Stefan took the controls of the motorcycle so that Jayson could focus on finishing his wristlet. Lola, with her basket, sat on the rear fender, bright-eyed and chipper.

They discovered a path that bore heart-cheering human footprints. A river was nearby, running in the same direction they were traveling.

“Dig this,” said Jayson over Stefan’s shoulder. He shoved his hand forward to show off his completed wristband. It was beautiful; the light that fell upon it shattered into sparks of primary colors.

“Tongva,” murmured Lola, sniffing the air.

Part 3.

A colossal ant burst from a thicket of manzanita, bearing three fierce-looking natives. The riders were clutching the ant’s insectile bristles like Mongols holding a horse’s mane. They were deeply tanned men with filed teeth, floppy hair and bizarre patterns painted on their faces. Original Californians.

The Tongvans sprang at Jayson and Stefan; seconds later the boys were swathed in woven nets, wrapped up like pupas side by side.

The largest Tongvan leaned over Stefan. He was a wiry, dignified gentleman just over five feet tall. He’d painted an intricate pattern of fern-like scrolls around his eyes and mouth. He had a deeply skeptical, highly judgmental look, very much like an overworked immigration officer at LAX.

Lola sashayed forward and tapped the man on the shoulder. She straightened her time-worn leather shift, preened at her gray hair, and began talking in Tongvan, addressing him as “Angon.”

“Her husband!” Stefan hissed to Jayson.

It seemed Lola was telling Angon at length about what had happened to her in the impossibly complicated meantime since they’d last been together.

Angon tried to maintain his hard-guy expression, but as the facts sank in, his face began to quiver. Relative to Angon’s experience of time, it had only been a few days since Hyperio had kidnapped his young wife Lola. And now Lola was back—decades older, a sickly crone. Angon cracked and lost his composure. He rubbed his nose against Lola’s weathered cheek; the tears flowed.

“Aw,” said Jayson.

Angon glared down at the boys. He hollered in Tongvan and raised his flint tomahawk.

“Stick with me,” said Jayson, worming himself close to Stefan. “Abracadabra.”

Suddenly Jayson and Stefan were the size of rodents. They scampered through the nets and fled into the underbrush. The angry Tongvans crashed about while their ant mowed down ferns with her mandibles—but the boys had deftly taken shelter beneath the red parasol of a toadstool.

The giant ant lumbered off and the Tongvans abandoned their search. From their hiding place the boys watched the Tongvans wheeling Jayson’s motorcycle away, with Lola still talking.

“We’re not gonna fit in with these people at all,” said Stefan, “Hyperio was jiving us. We should head back to town right now. As it is, we’re gonna lose thirty years.”

“I say we push in further,” said Jayson. “I want to see that giant tar pit.” He studied his wristband. “What if I make us into giants and we just go grab my bike?” With a sudden popping sound, they grew back up to normal size—but no further. Jayson popped them a couple more times, trying to break through the barrier of normal scale.

“Stop it!” said Stefan, feeling dizzy and whiplashed. He steadied himself by grabbing Jayson’s arm. “Look at your wristband, dude, that link-pattern is asymmetric. You’re gonna need to weave a mirror image wristband if you want to make us grow.”

Jayson dropped them back to small size and cheesed his teeth at Stefan. “Okay, then for now we’ll be rats. Let’s skulk over and spy on the Tongvans. I want my bike back.”

The Tongvans were sitting in a semi-circle before a chiseled stone altar. Perched atop the altar was the red Indian Chief motorcycle. Skinny old Lola was entertaining the tribe by showing them the mambo. Angon looked deeply disheartened.

The boys heard a twitter, a subsonic roar. High above them, huge mandibles stood starkly outlined against the endless, towering cliffs. A monster hooked ant-foot, as thick and red and barky as any sequoia, pounded straight into the ragged fabric of space-time. The great jaws swooped down and snatched up the Indian motorcycle.

The whole canyon shivered as the titanic ant stalked away.

In the stunned excitement, Stefan and Jayson restored themselves to normal size and brazenly stole one of the Tongvans’ dugout canoes. They sped down the river with no sign of Tongvan pursuit.

Deprived of his bike and sullen about it, Jayson worked steadily on another wrist band, while Stefan sat in the prow. He used a pointed Tongvan paddle to guide them past the rocks, logs, and silent alligators that adorned the stream.

The time dilation was accelerating. The visible sky was but a bright wriggle, and the days and nights pulsed so fast that the worm of sky was a steady dim glow. The high squiggle reminded Stefan of the tentative smile Emily Yu had worn when she talked of her hopes and dreams—all long gone by now. Decades were flying past, centuries.

Calamitous sounds came from the stream ahead: a roar, a trumpeting, and some sweet, pure music, a primitive universal sound like Peruvian pan pipes or Moroccan flute. And then rapids hove into view. This was the roar. Standing amid the rapids was a herd of twenty-foot-tall mammoths with immense curved tusks. This was the trumpeting.

“The wristband’s done! Let me fasten it on you, dog.”

“Beautiful.”

Upon donning his wristband, Stefan understood all. It took but the slightest effort of his will to grow them both to a height of fifty feet.

Gingerly they sloshed through the minor puddle of the rapids, scattering the little mammoths like poodles. The toy canoe bobbed ahead of them emptily—and suddenly disappeared. The river ended in an immense, scale-free cataract, tumbling into fog. Something vast and gleaming lay beyond.

Stefan shrank them back to a scale that felt more or less normal. They stood on a boulder by the falls, leaning on each other and panting for breath, taking in the staggering view.

It was an immense glistening lake, many miles across, with endless flocks of birds slowly wheeling above it. Ants scampered about on the lake’s mirrored surface, elegant as ballet dancers, some as big as ships, others like winged dust motes. Inconceivably vast ant-feelers projected like misty towers from the pit’s distant center. In some spots the ants tessellated together to make flowing tiled carpets. Eerie cosmic string music filled the air, the sound almost unbearably haunting and sweet.

“The canyon’s core,” breathed Jayson.

But here came one last meddling ant, ineluctable as a tax collector, an officious pinkish critter the size of a school-bus. Before the boys could manage to shrink or grow, she’d seized them both in her jaws. She carried them through the mist, squirming and howling—and dropped them like trash by the mouth of a cave near the base of the falls. She hurried off on other errands.