Postsingular (28 page)

And landed in a giant back room heavy with years of dust. For Thuy, the room was the size of a concert hall. Rain ran down the expanses of a dirty rear window that faced the alley wall and a leafless city tree. The window looked to be some kind of plant membrane rather than actual glass. A single lightbulb in the room's upper recesses fought feebly against the gloom. Oversized organic auto parts languished on shelves that seemed to have grown right out of the walls, the parts marked with teep-tags instead of written labels. Water trickled from a tap in a great porcelain sink. Doggy Azaroth flopped down on a tired old couch: a puffball the size of a patio. Sitting next to him were an ant and a housefly.

Blinking her eyes, Thuy realized she was looking at Chu and Ond. She'd never met them before, but she knew them from a zillion news shows: Ond blond, awkward, middle-aged, slim; Chu blank-eyed with a cute, slightly sour mouth and a dark brown cap of hair.

“Welcome, Thuy,” said Ond out loud. “You're doing fine with that cat imitation. I like cats a lot better than dogs.” Blessedly he spoke at the same speed as Thuy. “Now grow your illusion to the size of this room. Make it like a cubical soap bubble that we're all inside.” In person, Ond's voice sounded warmer than in the orphidnet archives. But—cubical bubble illusion? Thuy wasn't sure what he meant.

“He means paint your cat-self onto the ceiling, the floor, and each of the four walls,” said Chu, his voice thin and sulky. “Also the door and the windows.”

“Watch us,” rumbled Azaroth.

Azaroth, Ond, and Chu pushed their vibes of dog, fly, and ant out to the fringes of the room. Thuy studied what they'd done, tracing the patterns of their minds, and then she followed suit, painting her emulation of Naoko the cat onto the room.

“That's glow,” said Azaroth in his slow, oozing voice, then switched to telepathy. “We can touch minds in here now. I don't think Gladax sees us under those animal shields.”

“This is our secret lab,” added Ond. “We come here to work on our video game and on our plan.”

“What about the guys in the garage?” asked Thuy. “They're Azaroth's friends?”

“Yeah,” said Ond. “The local Hibraners have gotten used to us. We have the run of the town. And we have jobs. I'm Gladax's tutor and Chu's her good-luck nanteater.”

“Nanteater,” echoed Chu, telepathically displaying an image of a long-snouted bushy-tailed anteater while he talked out loud. “When Gladax addled the jump-code in my head, she also saw my memory of Nant Day. So she thinks I'm magic against nants. Hibraners don't understand digital computers at all. Did you bring my jump-code?”

“I have the code, yes,” replied Thuy. “An image of your Knot. By the way, Jeff Luty's made a new version of the nants. I'm here to ask you guys to save Earth again.”

“Teep me my jump-code right now,” demanded Chu.

“Okay, okay,” said Thuy. “But don't instantly disappear. We need to make a plan.”

“The nanteater already has a plan,” said Chu in his small, emotionless voice.

Safe inside the dog-cat-fly-ant box of this room, Thuy opened her mind and let the others copy her image of the woven Celtic bracelet. To celebrate the handoff, Azaroth produced the sound of a crowd cheering.

“This seems right,” said Chu examining the Knot. “I'm glad to have it back.”

“Thank you, Thuy,” said Ond, also studying a copy of the Knot. “You say there's more nants? Azaroth told us to expect this, and, yes, we've made a kind of plan. But—are people still mad at me? They wanted to lynch me on Orphid Night.”

“Everyone likes the orphidnet fine,” said Thuy. “It's been almost a year and a half.”

“Over here that comes to two months and twenty four days,” said Chu. “Orphid Night was the only time when the dates matched.”

“First the Lobrane was behind us and now they're ahead of us,” teeped Azaroth. Image of two parallel time-lines with a matching time-zero, and with the days along the lower line more densely spaced. “I saw time-zero coming, and I told Gladax,” continued Azaroth. “The singularity. That's why she jumped to the Lobrane and chased down Chu.” Image of Chu in a rubber net. “Gladax worries about the Lobrane infecting us with nanomachines. Fortunately our smart air currents ate your orphids right away.” Image of a microscopic tornado tearing a nanomachine asunder.

“Gladax tied up Chu and blocked his telepathy with her harp, and addled the jump-code out of him,” said Ond. “I made a deal so she wouldn't do worse. I showed her how to erase the jump-code from the Lobrane orphidnet, and I'm pretending to help improve her search abilities. Actually I'm making her more confused. If Gladax ever got organized, it'd be hell on the San Francisco Hibraners. She'd be nosing into everyone's business all the time.”

“How come you know my Knot?” Chu asked Thuy.

“I was watching you when you did your first jump,” answered Thuy. “At first I couldn't quite remember the details, but eventually I did. It's a long story: a metanovel called
Wheenk
.”

“Teep
Wheenk
to them,” messaged Azaroth. “All of it. You're not really opening your mental gates, Thuy. Our telepathy band is broader than you realize. Sit down with us on the couch and relax.”

So Thuy settled in and let herself do a full mind-merge with the others. They became like four eyestalks on a single mollusk. Everything that Thuy had seen and done since Orphid Night flowed over to Ond, Chu, and Azaroth. In return, she saw all the things that Ond and Chu had experienced up here.

The images grew so vivid that Thuy quite forgot herself. She fell asleep and began dreaming. At first she was dreaming about Jayjay back in the cave, and then she was over here with Azaroth, Chu, and Ond. They were skulking around in Gladax's big-ass rococo mansion with its treelike pillars and curving halls, up on a hill above North Beach, the four of them trying to free a bungee-cord-bound prisoner from Gladax's exercise room and steal Gladax's magic harp. Ond and Chu kept disagreeing about the best way to tunnel into the exercise room from below. Waiting for them to break through, and hearing the same insistent harp chord in the background for the twentieth time, Thuy flashed that she wasn't dreaming anymore. She was playing a video game with the three guys.

She blinked, shook her head, and snapped out of it. Azaroth, Ond, and Chu were slumped beside her on the giant couch, twitching their fingers as if using invisible game controllers. How long had she been here? What was Jayjay doing right now?

Thuy reached over and joggled Ond's knee. Ond fluttered his eyelids, sat up, and offered an abashed grin. “We play this game all the time,” he said. “We're practicing. That running water tap over there, that's our game computer. We're the first computer programmers in the Hibrane.”

“How can you use water for a computer?” demanded Thuy.

“The flow is sufficiently gnarly to function as a universal emulator, yes. Back home that would be of merely theoretical interest, but in the Hibrane we can use those gnarly natural processes for useful computation. The crucial difference is that Hibrane systems remember all their previous states. It's like every single location here has an endless memory chip plugged in. I already told you about this while we were merged. Focus, Thuy. Take a mental inventory.”

Come to think of it, Thuy could indeed remember every detail of the extensive telepathic exchange she'd had with the boys before the dreamlike video game session. But now she became distracted by her powerful memory for visual forms. Glancing at Ond, for instance, she could match the little vertical wrinkle between his eyes to a crack she'd seen in the sidewalk outside and to the edge of a shell fragment she'd thrown at Gladax. Everything she saw remained accessible to her mind; it was as if her memory had become unlimited.

Savoring the feel of this strange world, Thuy looked around the room, taking in the auras of the furnishings. Although the objects didn't exactly speak English, they too remembered everything. The auto parts carried the vibes of the farms and fields where they'd been raised, of the telepathic growers who'd cajoled them into their current shapes, and of the men and women who'd handled them. The jumbo lightbulb on the ceiling had a dark-and-light ribbon memory of all the times it had been off and on, with the bright stretches patterned by subtle shadings that mirrored the wavers of past electrical currents. And when Thuy studied the beat old couch, it wordlessly teeped her the touch sensations of all the butts that had sat upon its cushioned pads in the last twenty years. Noticing this, Chu had a rare fit of giggles.

“We've been thinking that if we could give Lobrane matter this kind of built-in memory, there'd be no reason to turn Earth into nants,” said Ond. “Everything would already be like a computer.”

“So come home with me and tell that to the Big Pig,” said Thuy, still very worried about Jayjay. “Let's go right now!”

“Telling isn't enough,” said Ond. “We have to be like Prometheus and steal fire from heaven. Put more formally, we need to seed the Lobrane with the Hibrane's paranormal branespace topology.”

“Huh?” Although Ond had already sent Thuy these words during the hour they'd been merged, the meaning still hadn't sunk in.

“Use pictures, Ond,” suggested Azaroth.

“I believe that a single ubiquitous Hibrane factor causes telepathy, omnividence, teleportation, and expanded memory,” said Ond. Image of a space-filling glow. “I find it simplest to suppose that this factor has to do with the shapes of the unseen extra dimensions of Hibrane space.” Image of ten axes crossing each other at strange angles; four of the axes are endless lines and the other six bend around into tight circles. “I call the Hibrane's configuration the
paranormal branespace topology.
” Image of one of the circles unrolling to make an endless line. A bundle of lines appears parallel to this new line and, oddly enough, they narrow in on each other to meet at a not-too-distant vanishing point. “We need to nudge the Lobrane over to the paranormal branespace topology.” Image of a snowflake dropping into supercooled water that freezes into a block of ice. “Unfortunately I'm not enough of a physicist to give more details. But—”

“Chu and I think Gladax's harp is the key,” teeped Azaroth. Image of the same gold harp they'd been seeking in the video game. Its strings were luminous and strange. Its sound box was decorated with a curiously detailed oil painting. Medieval?

“Remember that when Gladax strums her harp a certain way, people can't teep,” said Chu. “She strummed it in the room where I was tied up. Our idea is that if someone carries Gladax's harp to the Lobrane and strums it there, the opposite might happen. The right chord could unroll one of the dimensions of our brane's space so that everything has telepathy and endless memory.”

“And then there'd be no reason for nants,” repeated Ond. “Once the harp unrolls that extra dimension in one spot, it'll spread.”

“But why are you sneaking around?” said Thuy, recalling Gladax's remarks at ExaExa. “Gladax
knows
you want to steal her harp. She said, and I quote, ‘Ond and Chu have a wild plan to steal my harp and unroll your lazy eight.' You heard that too, didn't you, Azaroth?”

“Maybe she knows,” said Azaroth, looking embarrassed. “But that doesn't mean we can't outfox her.”

“Gladax knows our plans?” said Ond angrily. “And you guys already have a word for the special dimension? You call it lazy eight? Why did you hide this from me, Azaroth? Are you setting us up?”

“It's complicated,” said Azaroth with a sigh. “Gladax wants you to take the harp but she doesn't. If she thought you could really unroll your lazy eight, she'd probably lend you the harp, no problem. But, on the other hand, it's hers, and it's rare, and she's stingy, and she figures you'd probably just break it, so she doesn't want you to get your hands on it at all. She's conflicted. If you want the harp, you really do have to steal it.”

“Lazy eight,” put in Ond, off on his own line of thought. “Yes. I understand. We use the harp to unroll our
eighth
dimension, which means we make our eighth dimension into an endless line. And—here's the ‘lazy' part—we give the line a special metric so that our minds can reach all the way to infinity. Like how the endless decimal 0.9999999 …describes a point that's only one meter away? That's how the Hibrane already is, if you think about it. Infinity is everywhere. Lazy eight.”

“Infinity,” said Chu, the math word sweet in his mouth. “It's like using a cosmic vanishing point for a universal Web server. People, animals, trees, rivers, air currents, dirt—everything's in touch with lazy eight. That's why telepathy works so well in the Hibrane. That's why it's so easy to teleport.”

Thuy thought of chants and mantras, of divine names and the Buddhists' cosmic Aum. “All right!” she exclaimed. “Let's steal Gladax's harp!”

“It won't be easy,” teeped Azaroth. “That's why we keep practicing our starky moves inside Chu's video game. But I promise that once you do get hold of the harp, I'll run to Gladax and make sure she lets you keep it for a while. Deep down she really does want you to succeed. It's just that she's too pessimistic and selfish to make it easy.”

“The nanteater has a plan,” repeated Chu.