Hylozoic (32 page)

“We can't charge anything,” he told Glee. “And I don't have any cash. But we can ask the breezes' silps to angle most of the raindrops away from us. And we can teek away the last few drops that get through.”

They moved down the street in a cone of dryness. Glee paused to examine a shop window with silp-inhabited pottery. “Each mug is brimming with a story,” she observed.

“Sometimes Thuy sells her metanovels attached to mugs,” said Chu. It made him happy to say her name.

“I wonder what happens to her now?” said Glee. “I don't find her in the mindweb.”

“I think she and her husband went to the Hibrane with this pitchfork called Groovy,” said Chu. “I teeped it while you were shopping at Macy's.”

“Groovy the pitchfork?” Glee's voice rose. “Show me.”

Chu found the sequence. Not only could the silps show you anything on Earth, their lazy eight memories allowed you to peer into the past.

“I know this person!” exclaimed Glee, studying the mental movie. “I recognize his thoughts. It's my Groovy, yes. Normally he looks like me or Kenee, but he's changed his form. Lovva was telling me about this when she guided us here. And she is now looking like a harp, yes?”

“How—how do you know this?”

“Groovy and Lovva come from my home planet. Pepple. They were my roommates.”

“
What?
”

“More than roommates. Lovers. Especially Groovy. Lovva was prettier than me, but Groovy loved me more.” Glee smiled, showing her little teeth. “I will be telling you details later. Now we enjoy the vibby Portland. Can we eat in restaurant?” Even with her skin tightened up, she still gave off a faint smell of decaying broccoli.

“Maybe we should eat in the street,” suggested Chu. Thanks to the gel hangover, he didn't have an appetite at all. And restaurants bored him. His mind was racing with speculations about the pitchfork. “Come on and tell me about your past, Glee. Let's just share a candy bar or a slice of pizza. I bet we can panhandle enough money for that.”

“No and no,” said Glee. She teeped into the civic silp of Portland and found a recommendation for a pricy seafood place seven blocks uphill, Dez's Grotto. Although it went against Chu's normally cautious style, Glee convinced him to put off worrying about how they'd pay the bill.

They set off walking toward Dez's through the living veils of rain, Glee laughing and happy, focused on the moment. Each building interested her, and every person they passed. She was like a prisoner freed from jail. Nevertheless, just before they got to the restaurant, she ducked into an alley and pulled out her stash of Hrull gel. “So I have healthy appetite,” she said, dabbing a bit on her neck. “You don't want?”

Once again Chu declined. He was in fact feeling a little—he guessed the expression was
junk sick
. Feverish and queasy, with his joints aching and a hammer-throb in his head. But he needed to tough this out. If he kept taking gel, he'd be a slave.

Dez's Grotto had dry seating under an awning out front. Chu and Glee got an outdoor table right away.

“What do you use to dye your skin?” the waitress asked Glee, clearly impressed. She was a fresh-faced, full-lipped young woman with her rain-wriggly hair in a bun.

“This is a gene tweak my people can do,” said Glee. “I swallow sun like a plant.”

“Wow,” said the waitress, brushing mist from her round cheek. “That's, like, breatharian! I know a guy who talks about that. Where are you from?”

“She's from Budapest,” put in Chu, inwardly surprised at how easily he could lie. “She's my aunt. She's hungry, but I'm not. I'm junk sick. Do you have some plain clear broth for me? With crackers?”

“Ooookay.”

Meanwhile, Glee was teeping inside the restaurant, inspecting what the other customers had. “I want a bowl of those gray shells,” she told the waitress. “And a platter like you gave that strong, loud man with the worm of hair upon his lip.”

“That's our manager,” said the waitress with a giggle. “I'll tell him you called him that. Okay, then, broth, clams, and sturgeon. Want a drink?”

“The bubbling glass that man drinks,” said Glee. “I want.”

“Our summer wheat brew.”

“So tell me about life on Pepple,” Chu urged Glee as the food began arriving. “And how you met the pitchfork. The silps are shielding us; people can't eavesdrop. Or teep me, if talking is too hard.”

“You don't like my talk?” said Glee, almost coquettishly. She took a too large gulp of beer, gagged, shot foam from her nose, then bit into a clam.

“Don't eat the shells, Glee. Just the soft part inside.”

“Pepple looks like Earth, but ten times so many people,” said Glee, spitting out shell fragments. “We got our lazy eight a thousand years ago. They say it was brought to us by a dragonheaded woman with an electric guitar. She played powerful chords, and the extra dimension unfurled. Before lazy eight, we had even more machines than you. Now they've crumbled to rust. We get what we need from the plants and animals. My lovers and I grew our own house. Lovva, Groovy, Kenee, and me—we lived in a hollow tree with windows and beds, very pleasant. A four-way marriage, you might call it, not that we commoners have those kinds of ceremonies. We have no rights, not even any locks on the doors. For millennia the hereditary aristocrats have ruled—the aristos. One of them was stalking me. Count Foppiano. And that was the—”

But then the main course arrived. Chu sipped his broth, and Glee busied herself with her sturgeon fillet. After a bit, the waitress returned.

“Do you know about dessert?” she asked Glee.

“I will,” said Glee. She teep-pointed inside the restaurant. “That brown cake your fuzzy-lip manager eats.”

“Plain vanilla ice cream for me,” said Chu. “No sauce, no cookies, just ice cream in a bowl.”

“No problem,” said the round-cheeked waitress, still studying Glee's skin with its blended shades of emerald, thalo green, and viridian. “Tomorrow I am definitely hopping to Hungary to check out your tweaks. Can you teep me a link?”

“Glee's data is secret for now,” said Chu. “That's why we're shrouded in silent silps. We're hiding.”

“And I bet that means you can't use credit,” said the waitress,
her voice turning acid. “And I'm not teeping any money in your pockets. And you said you're a junkie. Were you planning to skeeve off without paying? If you try that, the manager will kick your ass. The man with the worm of hair.”

“Um,” said Chu. “I wonder if we could give you Glee's earrings? And then maybe you yourself could pay for our meal?”

“I've been eyeing them, actually,” said the waitress, holding out her hand. She weighed the heavy gold in her palm and teeped into the earrings' memory. “Purchased at Macy's today. Legit! You've got a deal.” She sterilized the earrings with a pulse of teek, and put them on. “After-dinner drinks not included.”

 

 

Over dessert, Chu prompted Glee to continue reminiscing. “You have Peng birds on your planet, too?”

“A thousand years ago, soon after lazy eight came to Pepple, the filthy Peng's god, Pekka, found favor with Queen Ulla the First. Ulla was a sorceress with a unique power of mind, enabling her to cast runes into vast numbers of atoms. Generation after generation, the line of Queen Ulla has been learning this skill from her, and they make a few Peng tulpas for each court. They use them as flying steeds on their estates—with no worries about their loss of gnarl. Fortunately for the common people, they live in castles far removed from our towns. We ordinary folk sing and sweat with no interference from the musty Peng birds. But the prowling aristos are a problem.”

“And what about the pitchfork and the harp—you call them Groovy and Lovva? What did you guys do for a living?”

“We were performers. The Pepple art form is a blend of song, dance, and light. My mate Lovva, she teeped the music to match her songs. She chimed and twirled on stage and we three others supported her—me, Kenee, and Groovy. I shone
lights from glowing rocks who were my pets, and Kenee collected money from the people who came in person or who teeped to see. Groovy knew the art of coaxing plants, so he trained fast-growing vines into stage sets for Lovva. The vines made mats of leafy coiled springs and towers like green dream clouds. Dear Groovy was clever with his hands, and very handsome, but greedy and a little dumb. He was always thinking he was made for bigger things.” Glee paused, remembering, her eyes unfocused. “One summer night there came our last concert together. I think by now it was ten years ago. Something happened. A shining crow appeared; he circled Lovva and flapped his wing and suddenly there was a cyclone on our stage—a tornado coiling high into the sky. Lovva and Groovy were lifted into it.”

“Where did they go?”

“I don't know. I myself had to leave my world that night, those ten years ago. Quite recently I had some teep with Lovva, and first she said she's been in your world for over five hundred years, and then she said it feels like only a few days. I don't understand. She used a special word:
aktualized
.” Glee shook her head and fell silent, brooding.

“How is it that they changed their shapes?”

“Lovva says that while you're aktualized you can look like whatever you want. She says you can mold matter by thinking endless thoughts.”

“And the crow who brought the tornado?” said Chu, hopelessly confused. “Where did he come from?”

“According to Lovva, the crow came from your planet. I think maybe he was that man Jayjay whose wife you had sex with. And somehow he got aktualized, too.” Glee sighed. “The aktuals don't pick you and me, do they, Chu? We only get to be pushers. I wish I could go back to Pepple. But the aristos would kill me. And I'm chained to the gel.” As they
talked, the rain had begun coming down harder. Chu was obsessively teeking away the drops that drifted under the awning, unable to stop focusing on the tiny details. “I'm very tired,” said Glee. “Can we find a room?”

Checking the Portland city silp, Chu found a cheap hostel in a rough part of town—a good hiding place. He extracted twenty more dollars from their waitress for Glee's topaz ring, and they teleported to the hostel's dim lobby.

The clerk took their twenty without even looking at them. Once they were in their room, Glee rubbed on more gel and continued reminiscing.

“Kenee was more interested in politics than sex,” she said softly in the dark, lying on the far side of the double bed. “And maybe more interested in Lovva than in me. The night after Groovy and Lovva left, Kenee was off at a demonstration against the nobles. My stalker, Count Foppiano, saw his chance. He teleported to my bed, wanting to rape me. I teeked off his head. I called for Kenee and he helped me feed Foppiano's body to the vorgs.” A quick teep image of omnivorous lizards the size of dogs. “Of course someone saw us. With telepathy, only the ruling classes get away with crime. And for a commoner on Pepple, harming an aristocrat means death, always. I ran away with the Hrull that night, and Kenee came along—not that he was very good as a pusher.”

“You teeked off the aristo's head?” interrupted Chu, disturbed by the mental image. “I've never heard of anyone doing that.” He was lying on the flat bed beside Glee, not touching her.

“It's hard killing someone that way,” said Glee. “People counter with their own teek, trying to hold their bodies together. But I'm strong. You're strong, too. You've got what it takes to be an intergalactic pusher. If you want.”

Glee segued into spacey teep images of the Hrullwelt. It was a belt of water asteroids orbiting a central sun, a toroidal archipelago of sparkling globs. The whole system was an intergalactic trading hub. The Hrull had had lazy eight for much longer than Pepple, maybe a million years. Their legends said the great change had been ushered in by a flying bag attached to a squalling horn.

Chu watched images of the Hrull leaping from one giant glob to the next—moving goods among warehouses, meeting with traders, making transportation deals. Thanks to their flight lice, the Hrull could tweak their gravitational mass, steering themselves along optimal orbits among the planetoids.

Beings from all the galaxies flickered in and out of the Hrullwelt, some teleporting on their own, others riding aboard Hrull. The aliens brought in samples or whole shipments of goods, examined each others' offerings, arranged trades, and engaged pusher-powered Hrull motherships to transfer their cargoes from world to world.

Glee drifted into fantasies of Pushertown, a humanoid settlement amid the Hrullwelt planetoids, a verdant island with its own Edenic glob of sparkling sea. A few managed to retire to Pushertown, winding down their gel habits, chipping along on small doses cadged from young Hrull or from pushers still in the game. As Glee envisioned a peaceful twilight in Pushertown, her breathing grew regular and she fell asleep.