Postsingular (17 page)

“Ond was so worried; he went to Gladax's house,” continued Azaroth. Image of sad-faced Ond Lutter kneeling tiny on the front porch of Gladax's huge, organic-looking mansion at dawn, the house's pillars like the trunks of trees. “Gladax promised that Chu would be okay, and she got Ond to teach her how to erase all the Lobrane records of Chu's jump-code too. So that's why your blue-spaghetti links don't work anymore. Meanwhile Gladax wants Chu to live with her like a houseboy or a pet. She thinks he's a lucky amulet against the nants. A nanteater. And Ond's staying on as Gladax's tutor, so he can be near Chu. But I'm working on a deal. I want Gladax to free those two to work with me. And I'd like to give them Chu's Knot so that someday they can come back and fix your world.”

“Gladax wants to keep Chu because of what he did on Nant Day?” said Thuy, not following most of this. “She's that worried about nants?”

“Most Hibraners think machines are jitsy.” Azaroth gestured at Sonic's tired old game display and at Jayjay's equally obsolete cell phone. “But I glow your tech, even if it
is
stupid.” Image of a beggar kneeling to walk on rough-carved wooden stilts that are exactly the same length as his shins would be if he walked erect. “I'd like to be more than a cuttlefish poacher some day,” continued Azaroth. “I'd like to program video games we can use with our telepathy. That's another reason why I want to get Ond and Chu free from Gladax. They'll be grateful and they'll help me write a game. I'd like to be able to offer them the Chu's Knot jump-code. Remember it for me, Thuy.”

“Look, Azaroth, you jump branes all the time. Why can't you just tell Ond and Chu the jump-code that
you
use?”

“I don't know the code like a machine row of beads. I know it like I breathe. We've always been able to visit the Lobrane, but each jump is a little dangerous—these creatures called subbies live in between the branes and they try and catch you. I'm here so often because of the cuttlefish—cuttles are extinct on our world, you wave. We admire them as a religious symbol, but we overdid it and ate all of ours. Hibraners pay a lot for Lobrane cuttles. I'm agile. The subbies never catch me or any of the cuttlefish I send home.”

“So why don't you send Ond and Chu back to the Lobrane just like the cuttlefish you steal,” suggested Thuy. She paused for a moment, then plowed ahead. “And maybe send me to the Hibrane so I can have a look, too.”

“I can't just brute-force jump a Lobrane human from brane to brane. The cuttlefish die when I jump them over to the Hibrane, you wave? To make it safe, a person has to jump all glowy with their personal pulse.”

“Why didn't
you
pay better attention to Chu's Knot when he made it?”

“I was too excited about having you gnomes finally see us.”

“And why is it that you're invisible over here?”

“You ask too many questions, Thuy! The branes are out of phase with each other, like two voices singing in different keys. And when we Hibraners jump across, we only change our phases by a little bit, so we show up catawampus akimbo to you. You guys and your cuttles, you're a darker kind of matter, and when you jump, you rotate through the full phase shift to match. Chu and Ond showed up chewy as a cuttlefish. Come on now, Thuy, stop stalling. I bet you can remember the Knot. A smart woman like you.”

Charmed by the chatty alien, Thuy tried once again to remember the precise details of Chu's Knot. Surely the delicate filigree was intact somewhere in her memory? But it kept slipping away.

“I can't quite get it,” she said after a bit.

“Maybe you should write a story about seeing the Knot,” suggested the Hibraner. “Art's the way to know what you don't.”

“I've been talking with people about a new
style
of writing,” said Thuy. She was an inveterate participant in online writers' groups. “Metastories and metanovels—we're all thinking about a new art form using the orphidnet.”

“Start with Orphid Night,” urged Azaroth. “Time zero. And unroll from there. Tell all your personal experiences, spill your starky guts. I'll hang in the background, setting you up for the big spike.”

“Is Gladax evil?” asked Thuy as an afterthought.

“No. It's just that she's old and she worries too much,” said Azaroth. “She's the mayor of Hibrane San Francisco, did you know that? I know her so well because she's my aunt; she's my father's dead brother Charminder's widow. She's part Dutch and mostly Chinese. Bossy and picky, but she's always nice to me. I bet she roots out my memory record of this conversation.” He laughed recklessly. “Good old Gladax!”

And then Sonic came back to the apartment and Azaroth left.

Thuy popped out of her flashback. She'd saved it all into the
Wheenk
database; it felt like a good, solid take. Thinking less formally now, and no longer for the record, she recalled the two other times she'd seen Azaroth.

The second time had been back in September. Azaroth had slid ever so slowly down a slanting sunbeam from a sunset-reddened cloud, behold! This time he'd encouraged Thuy to start sleeping with Kittie instead of with Jayjay, which didn't turn out to be that great of an idea. But at the time, Azaroth had said the switch would give Thuy more to write about, also that breaking up with Jayjay would help Thuy beat her Big Pig addiction, which had been soaking up increasing amounts of her energy and time. Oh, and Azaroth had encouraged Thuy to start linking her scattered metastories together into a single cohesive metanovel.

By then Azaroth had also talked Gladax into letting Chu and Ond range freely around the Hibrane equivalent of San Francisco. They did no harm, and the Hibraners enjoyed seeing the tiny gnomes around town. And, just as Azaroth had hoped, Chu was helping him develop a telepathy-based game. Azaroth used the word “teep” to mean “do telepathy.” Apparently he and Chu somehow used a stream of water for their game's server-computer. And Ond was advising Gladax on efficient ways to access the vast pool of Hibrane teep info. Hibrane telepathy was based on some weird quirk of the brane's physics, and had no Weblike orderliness built in.

Ond and Chu were very interested in relearning the Chu's Knot jump-code for getting home. Although it still wasn't quite safe for them to return to the Lobrane, they wanted to know that they could come home when the time came.

Azaroth assured Thuy that even if she hadn't yet written enough to remember the details of Chu's Knot, she was surely getting closer. According to Azaroth, the windings and crossings of the Knot were implicit in everything Thuy wrote, so that even when she thought she was writing about, say, what her mother, Minh, used to pack for her school lunches, she was really, at some deep level, writing about the Knot. Maybe so. The Knot still hadn't faded from Thuy's mind; often as she was drifting off to sleep, she saw it hovering before her, every loop and twist intact—but when she tried to focus on the details, they always slipped away.

The third time Thuy had seen Azaroth had been last month, right after he'd been leaning over Grandmaster Green Flash, assessing the state of the nanomachines on the dead man's skin. At that time, Azaroth had hopped over to Thuy and messaged her the news that Luty was working on turning Lobrane Earth into nants again. He said the Hibraners would do what they could to help stop Luty, but the real work was up to the Lobraners themselves. He said it would be a shame if the nants won, because then his people would never feel safe coming to visit again. He told Thuy to argue about any offers they made her in the Armory, because if she got into a fight, it would give her something heavy to write about for her metanovel, and if she found the Chu's Knot code, she could bring Ond and Chu back, and they might be the ones to turn the tide.

The weird events on the second floor of the Armory had indeed sparked a great
Wheenk
chapter, “Losing My Head”—which Thuy was in fact due to perform at Metotem in about an hour.

More and more, Thuy believed that her labyrinthine path through this postsingular world really was at some deep level tracing out the very design she'd seen Chu weave. So the reference to Azaroth on the storefront church's window made perfect sense. With ample time to spare before her reading, Thuy cut inside to check if the
rebelida ángel
was gonna make a
visita
and pass her another clue.

Right away a silent, observant little girl toddled out from among the beat old metal chairs to stare at Thuy. The congregation consisted of working-class Latinos and Filipinos, many with families in tow. A glance into the orphidnet showed that only a few of them were kiqqies; Thuy could always pick out kiqqies by noticing who was using a lot of beezie agents—to Thuy, people's beezies looked like colored mushrooms on their backs and heads.

“Have some popcorn,” said a comfortably ample woman, tugging the little girl out of Thuy's way. The woman wore purple lipstick and a shiny yellow silk dress. She handed Thuy a white paper bag she'd just filled from a movie-theater-style popper in a glass case. Fresh puffed kernels were blooming and cascading out of the metal popper's pan, fragrant with hot coconut oil, gritty with salt. A welcome treat. “Take a seat and enjoy the good words of Pastor Luis,” said the woman. “We're glad to have you visit. I'm Kayla.”

“Thanks,” said Thuy, stepping further in and taking a seat in a lightly padded chair in the back row. Low-key gospel music was percolating from a three-person band: a languid shiny-haired dude with an electric guitar, a turbaned woman at a keyboard, and a classic mariachi guy strumming a bass.

Pastor Luis stood upon an inexpensive oriental carpet on the dais, a short man with thinning black-dyed hair, rough skin, and horizontal wrinkles across his forehead. He wore a shiny gray suit with the pants pulled up high and held in place by a lizard-patterned belt with a too-long tip flopping down.

Pastor Luis was talking and gesturing without letup, his voice a rhythmic flow. At first Thuy couldn't make out what language he was speaking, but that didn't matter, for despite the man's unprepossessing appearance, there was an infectious energy to his motions, a hypnotic pulse to his expostulations. He was a kiqqie, with beezies bedecking him like shelf mushrooms on a forest-floor log.

Thuy relaxed and enjoyed for awhile, eating her popcorn, but then Luis paused and stared right at her, drawing info about her from the orphidnet.

“Welcome, sister Thuy,” he called in a sweet-accented tenor, speaking English now. “Azaroth be with you. Chant with us, ay, I'm calling out the rebel angel Azaroth, ay, bossed around by the rulers of the Hibrane, guiding us to revolt against Babylon, a sword against the Pharisees, ay, our counselor against the gobbling all-consuming nants. Show us your face, Azaroth, caress us with your love, ay, warm our hearts in this low, wounded world. Lead us in the invocation, Sister Kayla!”

Broadly smiling, Kayla curvetted up the aisle, dress flashing. She took the microphone from Luis and began a chant:

Over and over, Kayla and the congregation repeated those same two lines, drawing out the sounds. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found the phrases to be couched not in Spanish, but in the Gaddang language of the Philippine island of Luzon, not all that far from good old Vietnam. Thuy's grandparents had landed on Luzon when they'd fled Vietnam in a leaky boat.

One of Thuy's beezies told her the lines were two folk riddles, meaning something like:

And, continued the beezie, the answer to the first riddle was “a cuttlefish,” and the answer to the second was “the sun,” although it could just as well have been “a Hibraner” or, for that matter, “Chu's Knot.” Everything was so very deeply inter-twingled.

The chanted words overlapped, filling the air with vibrations like sacred Aums, calling another order of being into the room. Warm air eddied across Thuy; the hairs on the nape of her neck prickled up. Luis kicked aside the oriental rug to reveal a pattern inscribed on the floor, an octagon with a square drawn on the inner side of each edge—a beezie agent whispered that the pattern was a flattened hypercube—and here came Azaroth, visible in the orphidnet, or the upper part of him anyway, the lower half of his ethereal body beneath the floor. Azaroth, Thuy's self-appointed life-coach and muse, wearing a big-collared yellow shirt printed with green daisies, his arms moving as slowly as kelp drifting in a wave.

“Lots of news,” he said to Thuy, talking right past the others. “I've been snooping around the ExaExa labs. First of all, humpty Luty's sending an attack shoon to bust up your reading. He doesn't want you spreading the word that he's living in the labs. And he'd like to snatch you.” Image of a waist-high plastic golem shoon with slit eyes. “Second of all, Luty wants to launch his new nants tomorrow. He's got sudocoked-up agents all over town. So be very starky. Make a plea to the mass mind. If you're in on a big ExaExa riot, Thuy, you may finally see the light.” And then he switched to Spanish and Gaddang, giving the congregation a message of self-reliance and good will.