by Rudy Rucker
As Stefan stepped outside, it occurred to him to wonder how much time had already passed in Los Angeles, that city of fast fads, that pen of frantic chickens with their heads cut off. Although the Hormiga Canyon air was as luminous as ever, when Stefan peered upwards he saw the night sky canopy, with a full moon bob-bob-bobbing along, rather like the bouncy ball in a sing-a-long 40s cartoon.
If Stefan and Jayson went deeper, the spacetime warp would be even stronger. They’d be visiting a real-world laboratory of dimensional wonders. Yes, Stefan wanted to go. There was no choice about that, really.
Up near the dark, blurry lip of the canyon, a black ant the size of a 1950s prop-job airliner was hard at work. With an ant’s busy clumsiness, her six legs grappled at the fibrous dirt, setting off little slides. She was groping around in the fabric of reality with her monster feelers, tugging at the substance of the canyon wall, pulling stuff loose: it looked like ropes or pipes. Cosmic strings. This ant was causing the tremors.
As she worked the fabric of the cosmos, distant houses shrank and grew as if seen through a shimmer of hot air. The black ant trundled down the valley wall, carrying a string in her jaws. The tangled bights of string glowed and shimmered; the lucid air hummed with a kind of music. The ant was unsteadily shrinking, first to the size of house, then to the size of a car, and then to the size of a cow—and now Stefan realized that those “livestock” upon the hillsides of Hormiga Canyon were all ants, too.
A herd of them gathered around the big black ant in a companionable fashion, fiddling with her string, helping with some dim nest-building agenda. They worked off instinct and smell.
Lola appeared in the door of Hyperio’s shack. She had a hand-woven string-bag over her shoulder. She still looked peaked, but with the promise of a journey home, hope had returned to her haggard face. She and old Hyperio engaged in a tender, rapid-fire farewell in Spanish. She kissed him, and Hyperio picked a red ant from his mustache. With a scowl, he flicked it from his fingertip.
The ant hit the ground scrambling, bounded up and was the size of a panther. It sniffed the fender of Jayson’s motorcycle, where the other ant had left its tag of sticky dew. Jayson doubled his fists.
“It’s harmless!” Stefan called.
But Stefan was wrong. With an abrupt lunge and a twitch of her big head, the rangy red ant snatched Stefan’s laptop from his unsuspecting grasp. She smashed the computer with the clashing machineries of her mouth; the pieces disappeared down her gullet. And then she trotted on her way.
Livid with rage, Stefan took a step or two in pursuit—but then, surprising even himself, he halted. This cosmic-string ant was paying him a compliment by eating his laptop. Somehow she’d sensed the seeds of the One True String Theory within Stefan’s flat gray box. Why else had they invaded Stefan’s home in the first place? They were there to celebrate the fact that he was King of String!
Weak-kneed with his turbulent flow of emotions, Stefan leaned against the bike.
Jayson began messing with the motorcycle, hiking up the saddlebags to make a platform that could support Lola. “You’ll be happier on the open road,” he told Stefan. “Without that idiot box leeching your psychic energy.”
“Is this bike gonna be big enough?” said Stefan.
“Down in Mexico a family of six would ride,” said Hyperio. He laid a board and a folded blanket across the saddlebags, and Lola curled up on it, making herself small. She showed her teeth in pain, then gave the boys a brave smile.
“I bet she used to be beautiful,” said Jayson. “I bet she used to look a lot like Lupe.”
“You mentioned a map?” Stefan asked Hyperio.
Hyperio handed over a heavy yellow roll of dense, spotted leather. It had a few strands of coarse fur on the edges. It was buffalo hide.
“The Seven Cities of Gold,” said Jayson, eagerly unfurling the scroll. “Quivira and Cíbola.” Jayson’s chain mail wristlets glinted in the light like the armor of a conquistador. “The Spanish never found those ‘lost cities.’ I bet anything they’re in this canyon.”
“Los Angeles is the true lost city,” said Stefan, peering over Jayson’s shoulder. Hyperio’s map left a lot to be desired. It had been drawn in blood and berry-juice by some guy who didn’t get it about longitude.
The three travelers bid Hyperio a last goodbye.
The road running up the canyon was a much trampled ant-track. The little wooden shacks gave way to simpler dug-out huts and lean-tos. It seemed that the locals had never seen—or heard—a motorcycle before; at the machine’s approach, they ran around in circles with their hands over their ears.
Pools of water stood here and there in Hormiga Canyon’s dry river, more pools all the time. In certain dank and sticky patches—mud, maybe—huge bison had mired-in hip deep and been butchered by the locals. The boys had to dismount and coax the roaring cycle around these dicey spots, with unsteady Lola grimacing at the jolts.
The beach-ball sun and bouncing moon picked up the pace. The travelers reached a cross-marked spot on Hyperio’s map. It was a settlement of low, adobe houses, with a big stone church. The central square smelled of corn tortillas and roast pumpkin seeds. The locals, in dented straw hats and serapes, looked like extras from the set of the Fairbanks silent production of Zorro, except that they were in color, they lacked histrionic gestures, and they were audibly talking.
Eager to mooch some chow, the boys approached the stony well before the church. At the banging sound of their engine, the padre appeared at the church door. Shouting in Latin, he brandished a crucifix and a horse-whip. Jayson cranked up the gas and they rolled on.
They then entered what appeared to be a nature reserve, or, to put it more accurately, a no-kidding primeval wilderness. The human population, what little there was of it, vanished into the trees and scrub. The paths bore bear tracks, cougar tracks, deer tracks, and enormous Jersey-Devil style ant hoofprints. And the river had water in it now.
“One thing bothers me,” said Jayson as a ground sloth lumbered by, leaving tufts of reddish hair in the blackberry brambles. “Seems like the ants should get tiny when they come around us humans. Everything else matches our size: the chairs, the tables, the trees. But the ants—the ants are all kinds of sizes.”
“The ants can scale themselves to any size they need,” said Stefan. “It’s because they’re in control of the subdimensional cosmic strings.”
“Well, how come we can’t do that?” said Jayson. “We’re special-effects wizards, and ants are just a bunch of insects.”
“Twine dimension seven, loop dimension eight,” said Stefan thoughtfully. “If we could get hold of some of those strings, we just might find a way.”
The glowing air of the Hormiga Canyon air never quite dimmed, so it was up to the travelers to decide when to bivouac. They gallantly let Lola set their pace, since she was frail and weary. To judge by the way she kept spitting off the side of her little platform, the ants were churning within her.
They made camp atop a little hill above much-trampled edge of river pool. To judge by the fang-marked pigs’ knuckles buried in the mud, the pool was an excellent hunting spot.
Stefan gathered dry twigs and Lola expertly stacked a campfire. Jayson had somehow misplaced his cigarette lighter, but thanks to his multitool, he was able to conjure up a bowstring and a drill. Amazingly, a sharp stick spun fast in half-decayed wood really did smolder and ignite.
There were trout in the burbling river, fat and gullible. Stefan was able to harpoon the naive fish with the simplest kind of barbed stick. The boys ate two fire-roasted fish apiece, and when Lola only nibbled at her tasty fish, Jayson ate that one too.
An orgy of ferocious grunts and squeals drifted up from the river pool. Nobody felt quite ready to sleep. Lola lay on her side watching the fire, now and then brushing an ant from her lips. Jayson kept obsessively adjusting the screws on the carburetor.
“I’ll stretch out our fuel for as long as possible,” he explained. “Us city boys will be i
n trouble if we run out of gas.”
“Did you ever see Mysterious Island?” said Stefan, staring dreamily into the flames.
“Of course. If you mean Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island from 1961, with the giant bird, the giant crab and the giant bees. That’s a Ray Harryhausen flick. Harryhausen is the FX god!”
“Precisely. So, you know, the heroes are stranded on a wilderness island with monsters and pirates. They have to, like, totally scrounge for basic food and shelter, and also craft some really hot home-made leather clothes for the female lead…”
“That tight leather dress she had was bitchin’.”
“It sure was. So, maybe we run out of gasoline, but I don’t see how we have any big problem. I mean, we’re FX guys—basically, we are Harryhausen.”
“Huh. Maybe I’m like Ray Harryhausen,” said Jayson. “But you’re all digital.”
“Don’t sell my conceptual skills short, Jayson. We’ve spent our careers creating lavish fantasies on a limited budget. Working together, we’re full capable of scaring up tools, shelter, food and clothing in a trackless wilderness.”
Jayson narrowed his eyes. “What kinda fantasy-adventure costume you need? Nylon, spandex?”
“Antskin would suit our parameters.”
“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 wristban
d 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.
