Hylozoic (33 page)

Chu himself lay awake for quite some time, muscles in agony, his head in a vise. He kept thinking about the little wad of gel that remained upon the windowsill. In connection with the gel, there was some noise he felt like shouting or teeping—but he didn't want to feed the obsession by trying to figure out what the precise sound was.

To take his attention off the drug, Chu focused on a mental puzzle: Was there any way to emulate Jayjay's ability to reprogram atoms so fast? It was easy for Jayjay of course. Being a zedhead, he could go into a speed-up and personally runecast a ranch's worth of ten tridecillion atoms. Jayjay had it made, he got everything. Not only did some alien pitchfork take him climbing on an infinite beanstalk, he also was married to sexy, fragrant Thuy—

He forced his thoughts back to the problem at hand. Maybe there was some subtle trick for spreading a rune across a Peng ranch without having to touch each of its ten tridecillion atoms. What if he could find a way to make the reset rune spread itself like a virus?

Chu figured he might be smart enough to find the trick. After all, he was the one who'd solved the encryption puzzle of hyperjumping to the Hibrane by designing Chu's Knot. It crossed his mind that he might contact Gaia for help with the viral rune problem, but he didn't really enjoy the trippy feel of the planetary mind.

Instead he turned to the room's ambient computation: the richly chaotic eddies in the air, the dancing dust motes, the quantum choir of atoms. Nature was a wondrous weave of quantum computations, and he was surrounded by intelligent friends.

Bascially, a rune was a quantum operator. With the silps amplifying his mind, Chu could see the space of quantum operators as a dreamy sea of filigreed billows. Certain of the operators formed something like an oyster bed, with interconnected siphons sucking in and spitting out. Others were like worms and nudibranchs crawling among the virtual shells, or like tiny crabs wriggling in the subdimensional mud. Chu drifted off to sleep, all the while exploring ways of hooking the operators together.

 

 

When he awoke, it was midmorning, the sky bright blue. He felt closer than ever to finding a way to make a rune spread across an entire Peng ranch. His dream visions were stored in his lazy eight memory. Another night or two like this, and he'd have the answer.

Glee was leaning on the windowsill, soaking up sun and watching the doings of the low-rent locals.

“Hey, you,” she said over her shoulder, noticing Chu. “Almost time to go. I've used up my gel. I need to find Duxy now. You're in, right?”

Chu still felt achey and strung out. “I'll come see her,” he heard himself say. “But I'm not sure I want to leave Earth.”

Glee teeped the Hrull whistle—and Duxy teeped back. She was lying low with her father, Wobble, on the so-called Lost Coast of Northern California, a trackless stretch of beach between Eureka and Petrolia. Glee and Chu teleported there.

The Hrull were rested and plump; in fact Duxy had doubled her size. She said she'd been seining plankton, jellyfish, squid, and salmon from the sea. Of course, Duxy and Wobble knew that Lusky was dead. As Lusky's ex-mate, Wobble was particularly upset. For daughter Duxy, the death of Lusky was something more than an occasion to grieve: it was a metamorphic trigger for a stage of rapid growth. In a day or two, Duxy would be a mothership herself.

Glee convinced Duxy to test her burgeoning powers by coughing up a wad of gel. Glee smiled with relief as she rubbed some of the stuff onto her forehead—and right about then Chu lost control. He scooped up some gel and smeared it onto his pounding temples, onto his tight chest, onto his aching elbows—all the while teeping and singing the Hrull
whistle, the very sound he'd been biting back yesterday. Duxy and Wobble giggled, but Chu didn't care. He'd never felt better in his life.

And then the two Hrull skimmed out across the waves, searching for their day's food. Duxy said they'd be back in a couple of hours. Chu and Glee perched on a boulder, gazing at the Pacific. The fog was far out to sea, letting the sun sparkle on the breakers.

Chu's rush of well-being was giving him an uneasy sense of enslavement. “I'm doomed,” he told Glee.

“You can always kick the gel later on,” said Glee. “Why not enjoy what we have right now? How about a swim? Or is the water too cold? I'm tough like a kelp plant, but for you—”

“Oh, I can tell my body how to stay warm,” said Chu, glad for a distraction. “I'm tough, too.”

So Glee and Chu waded in through the surf and swam, reveling in the sea's creatures and currents. Chu told his body to insulate him by keeping the blood out of his skin—and his body said, as politely as possible, that it knew perfectly well how to do that without a lot of stupid advice. After the first minute or two, Chu stopped feeling the cold.

Teeping down into the sea, he spotted a salmon. Glee saw it, too. She dove for the fish, but the telepathic salmon eluded her with a casual flick of his tail. With abrupt brutality, Glee teeked the fish's tiny brain right out of his skull. She clamped her teeth onto a fin and swam to the surface.

Back on shore, Chu and Glee built a cheerful campfire from driftwood, warming themselves and roasting the gutted salmon over the coals.

“Are you mad at us for killing you and eating you?” Chu teeped to the roast fish.

“I'm just the body,” answered the meat. “The one you
chased is gone. Someone has to eat me, why not you? Everything flows.”

The cooked salmon was crusty black on the outside, the inner flesh pink and succulent. Delicious. Glee took a little more Hrull gel, and Chu had some, too—why not?

It was such a beautiful day. The fog was creeping in again, spreading veils and tendrils across the sky: subtle, intricate shapes that rejoiced in the ocean airs. Chu and Glee nestled together against a friendly, sun-bleached log.

Chu began feeling horny again. He was getting used to Glee's rotten smell, and to her weird third eye. Maybe soon they'd be lovers?

“Us?” said Glee, reading Chu's mind. “How sweet of you to think that.” Gently she rubbed his penis through his pants, staring at him as if trying to make up her mind. “I don't want,” she said presently. The insinuating motions of her fingers stopped. “I don't want you living like me. You know how Kenee died? He overdosed. Most pushers go out that way. Hardly anyone manages to retire. Pushertown is a dream.”

“Overdosed?” echoed Chu, flushed and confused.

“Pushers get extra gel rations when they find a fresh teeker world. And I am the one who found Earth—because Lovva teeped me where to find it. I got the reward, but Kenee was greedy. He rubbed the whole bonus stash into his skin. Fifteen minutes later he was dead.” Glee sighed and shook her head. “Someday that may be me. It's no life for you, Chu. Go away while you can.”

“Don't listen to her!” teeped Duxy, gliding down through the fog, her wingspan now grown to twenty feet. She settled on the stony beach, Wobble at her side. “I need you, Chu. You're strong. I can find you a better partner than Glee. Glee's nearly used up. We can kidnap that little girl you keep thinking about.
Bixie.” Duxy's teep signal took on a slimy, leering quality. “I'll put gel on her and you'll teach her Thuy's moves.” With his penis still stiff, Chu was almost tempted by the suggestion, but at the same time he was horrified. Bixie was too fine for this life.

“No,” he said, drawing strength from the ubiquitous silps.

Duxy lunged at him, trying to swallow him whole—but she wasn't quite big enough yet. All she could fit into her mouth were Chu's head and shoulders. Undaunted, the manta tried to stun him with gel from the pusher cone at the back of her throat.

But before Duxy's dangling uvula could touch Chu's face, he'd teleported out of there. Where to? The Yolla Bolly Peng ranch. He figured it for a place where he'd have a chance of kicking the gel. The cantankerous Peng would fend off the Hrull with their femtorays.

“Come with me,” Chu teeped to Glee in the fraction of a second before he left. “Save yourself.”

“I can't change now,” teeped Glee, the words tinged with hopelessness. “I'm in too deep. I've been doing this for ten years.”

“But you heard Duxy,” Chu teeped back. “She's ready to ditch you.” Conversing at the speed of thought, they were squeezing a full conversation into the blink of an eye.

“One last payday and I'm out of this game,” responded Glee.

“People in videos always get killed right after they say that.”

“I'll miss you, kid.” Glee's teep signal was weary, knowing, bittersweet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A
nd
then Chu was in Yolla Bolly. He found the Peng rooting in the dirt near their strange pink house.

“Invader!” squalled Gretta.

“It's just Chu, Mom,” teeped Kakar. “He's a good guy.”

“You better not be planning another attack on us,” teeped Suller in his usual bullying tone.

Once again, Chu attempted a lie—not only mouthing the words, but also forming the thoughts in the conscious part of his brain, practically believing the lie himself.

“I admire the Peng,” he said. “You're awesome. I'll help you save our world from the Hrull.” Surely the Peng were vain and desperate enough to believe him.

But no. Chu was going to need more practice. When it came to lying, the rest of the world had a big head start on him.

“He came here because he doesn't want the Hrull to make him a pusher,” cawed Kakar. “He's hooked on the gel.”

“Yes, I need your protection,” admitted Chu.

“Maybe the boy is brilliant enough to be our new runecaster,” mused Gretta.

“I'm the genius around here,” bragged Kakar. “My girlfriend Floofy and I were the best new artists on Pengö.”

“You should never have taken Floofy to the carving cliffs,” chided Gretta once again. “She's too high caste for the likes of us. It brought trouble on our family, your running around with that chick.”

“Thanks a lot, Mom,” said Kakar. “Did it ever occur to you that Floofy saw something in me? And that she was grateful to me for helping her become an artist? With Floofy backing me, I had a chance of hitting the big time like Waheer. I covered half a cliff with my carvings. But then Dad had to murder us all, forcing us into that lava pit.”

“We're the lead pioneers on a new planet,” said Suller. “That's fame enough.”

“We're ghosts on a monkey world. I hate it here.”

“So, um, how is it that some people become zedheads?” interrupted Chu. “I'd need that skill for casting a pioneer rune onto a whole ranch of atoms.” Or for casting—he thought privately to himself—the reset rune!

“It's all about digging down toward infinity through the subdimensions,” said Kakar irritably. “There's some kind of transfinite beings at the very bottom. Under Subdee.”

“I'd rather not go through Subdee,” said Chu. Although he loved dreaming about odd worlds, his past trips across the Planck sea had given him a fear of the subbies. “There's got to be another way. Why don't you coach me about runecasting, Kakar?”

“Show him some runes, Kakar,” urged Suller. “Tell him what the other runecasters do.”

“A waste of time,” said Kakar haughtily. “Ape-boy doesn't have the mental reach.”

Chu came right back at him. “You're too birdbrained to know how smart I am.”

“You wish,” clucked Kakar.

The two of them were a well-matched pair of low-empathy know-it-alls. After a few more insults, they started working together, with Pekka's moth rune as their test case.

Kakar held the rune clearly on display in his mind. It was an outlandish pupa that resembled a spiky conch shell with smaller conch shells growing from each of its cusps—and still smaller shells upon those—down through ten or twenty levels. The shape was tinted a vast number of shades between pink and green.