by Rudy Rucker
“You rock, Thuy,” said Jayjay, stepping forward to kick the ant’s head out the door. “Good move.”
Meanwhile the hostess and the boy from the kitchen dragged the fuming gaster outside. The old waiter was already cleaning the floor with a bucket and string mop. The chef-owner was holding a long knife and yelling at Thuy in Vietnamese, calling her a troublemaker. She apologized and gave him a little extra money.
Once Thuy and Jayjay were outside, they did a hop from Valencia Street to—Easter Island. As a girl, Thuy had read a picture book about the stone tiki idols known as moai. Ever since, she’d wanted to see them in person.
Jayjay and Thuy spent the night curled up next to an ancient statue on the slope of the extinct volcano Rano Raraku, where many of the famous moai had been quarried and carved. It was summer in Easter Island, with the clock three hours later than in California. A good spot, a warm night. Just in case, after arriving, Jayjay made a quick teleport hop to the inside of a Chilean military warehouse, fetching two automatic rifles, a box of ammo, and a box of hand grenades. He and Thuy slept in peace.
Chapter 10
The Ark of the Nants
Next morning, Thuy woke to the sun glaring off the endless empty Pacific. She was glad to know it was Jayjay cuddled against her from behind—and not that desperate Craigor. She checked the time in her head: nine a.m. here, six a.m. in San Francisco. Plenty of time to relax, go over her dreams, and be grateful for life—as opposed to jumping right into worries and plans.
She’d dreamt of Chu’s Knot again. Perhaps her dreams of the Knot were an objective correlative for her subconscious attempts to tease out the optimal plotline of her ever-more-intricate Wheenk. So intense was the dream work that some mornings Thuy felt she’d gotten no rest. In her dream last night, Thuy had been surfing a glowing ribbon of spaceways connecting the unfamiliar southern constellations, her lambent wakes forming a not-quite-complete image of the long-sought-for Knot.
Mulling over the dream as she stared over the Pacific, Thuy realized that the dream constellations had been diagrams of the individual scenes of her metanovel—up until this moment, she’d never seen the narrative so clearly.
It would be satisfying if her Wheenk character Thuy Nguyen could decisively defeat the Wheenk character Jeff Luty. And she was beginning to see a way to make this work. Jil Zonder was the key. Jil knew the ExaExa buildings well; when Jil was younger, she’d worked at ExaExa for years, posing for product-dancer shoots in every part of the compound. Jil would help, if Thuy could find a way to get her off sudocoke. Never mind Jil’s affair with Jayjay, never mind her insults, Thuy admired the woman. Jil wasn’t herself now. Thuy felt sorry for her. Jil had gotten a raw deal. It was just a matter of rewriting Jil’s most recent scenes. Thuy’s metanovel, her life, the Knot—all the same. Could real-life Thuy assassinate real-life Luty, if it came to that?
Enough scheming for now. Let the scenario beezies do their work, trust the muse, merge with the cosmos, enjoy the sea air. A tiny, natural ant picked its way through the grass; sheep grazed on the rolling rocky slope. Little star-shaped yellow flowers bloomed among the grasses. Looming up next to Thuy and Jayjay’s resting spot was the worn dark monolith of a long-nosed moai carved from bumpy volcanic basalt. He had long ears and thin, pursed lips; over the last thousand years he’d settled back as if to stare up at the stars.
Thuy felt a little sore from the car banging into her on Valencia Street yesterday. What a day that had been. And today was gonna be another. She stretched and did some bends, working out the kinks. It was so unreal to be on Easter Island.
Thuy and Jayjay had the hillside of moai all to themselves this morning—thanks to teleportation. Thuy was beginning to get the feeling that soon she’d be able to teleport on her own without Jayjay helping her. The missing piece was Jayjay’s interpolation trick for making the target scene look so very real.
How would it be if everyone could teleport? The magical places would be overrun. Or maybe not. People already had the freedom to go anywhere in the world, yet most of them stuck to the beaten track or, worse, stayed home watching life via the orphidnet, safe and sterile and—had Luty actually said odorless in that tape of Sonic’s?
“Good morning, darling,” said Jayjay.
“The real world is always so much better than I expect,” said Thuy.
“That’s why we have to fight for it,” said Jayjay.
“We have some time before that,” said Thuy. “Kiss me.”
They made love again, and just as they came, Thuy thought she saw a live moai peering at her over Jayjay’s shoulder—huge, cave-browed, luminous, a tiki god with a pursed mouth that was almost a smile.
“What?” said Jayjay, seeing the shock in Thuy’s eyes. He rolled off her to look up too. There was indeed a giant live moai standing over them, with two more behind him—glowing, translucent, thirty feet tall. Hibraners. No need to reach for the guns.
“It’s me,” said the first moai. He made a slow gesture with his hand and became familiar Azaroth, dressed in green boots, yellow bell-bottoms, a chartreuse stocking cap for his topknot, and a ruby red shirt with floppy cuffs and a long, pointed collar. “These are my Lobraner friends Thuy and Jayjay,” he informed the other two moai, one of them purple, the other green.
“Welcome to Rapa Nui, Thuy and Jayjay,” said the purplish moai. “I am Lili.” She jutted her great chin and waggled her long ears. “And this is my partner Atamu.”
“I am a chief,” said the greenish moai Atamu.
“Lili and Atamu live in Hibrane San Francisco like me,” said Azaroth. “But their families came from Hibrane Easter Island. They like to jump here because it’s easy stealing cuttles from the Lobrane Easter Island fishermen.”
“Can someone tell me what it is with you guys and cuttlefish?” said Jayjay.
“We like to eat them,” said Azaroth. “I thought you knew that. Thanks to teeping and omnividence, we fished our own cuttles extinct. Since then, the planetary mind has taught us to be more careful. In any case, our people especially dig eating the Lobrane cuttles since they’re so dense and chewy. I should also mention that cuttlefish symbolize a certain holy cuttlefisherman of ancient times. He rose from death on the triangle to found one of our great world religions.”
“What’s life like in the Hibrane, Atamu?” asked Thuy. “Azaroth hasn’t told me enough.”
“No computers,” said Atamu. “We think in our heads. We remember everything. It’s easy to teleport. We’re happy.”
“But we like the Lobrane style,” said Lili. “It’s vibby. Blinky, flashy, beep and peep. I hear Azaroth and Chu have been making a Hibrane video game, but Gladax doesn’t want the rest of us see it.”
“Gladax always thinks she knows best,” said Azaroth. “Video games are bad because she’s too old to play them, but it’s fine for her to learn Ond’s digital algorithms for teeping through the whole city’s minds at once. Good thing Ond’s doing a bad job. If our telepathy wasn’t a mess, Gladax would boss us even more.”
“Watch your tongue,” said Atamu uneasily. “Good old Gladax. Lili and I have to go process our cuttles now.”
As Atamu and Lili prepared to jump back to the Hibrane, they dropped the moai body forms they’d been wearing and took on the appearance of thirty-foot-tall Pacific islanders wearing flip-flops, T-shirts, and ragged shorts.
“How do you change how you look?” asked Thuy. “I never saw that before.”
“It’s a vibby new trick I figured out,” said Azaroth proudly. “My spike is that we can mold our orphid-based false-body images anyway we like. I wish my aunt Gladax would learn this. I couldn’t believe on Orphid Night when she showed up on the Lobrane wearing her green sweatpants and that crappy dragon T-shirt. And then she starts telling you Lobraners she’s an angel?”
“I think plenty of them believed her, Azaroth,” said Lili gently. “Gladax has mana. Don’t disrespect her. She might hear you even now. And that makes me scared.”
&nbs
p; “Good old Gladax!” said Atamu, as if repeating a formula.
“She won’t hurt me,” bragged Azaroth. “I’m family.”
“But we’re just dumpty cuttlefishers,” said Atamu, putting an end to the dangerous conversation. He did a slow tumble, folding into a flat image that became a line and vanished.
“Wait, wait,” Thuy called before Lili could disappear too. “Describe how you jump between the worlds, Lili. Jayjay and I want to figure it out, and Azaroth can’t tell us anything useful.”
“I use a special rongorongo chant,” said Lili.
“Can you teach it to me?” asked Thuy.
“The chant isn’t a row of things to say,” said Lili. “I think it all at once. Bye!”
Lili’s arms and legs shrank into her body, which turned upside down, inside out, became a disk, a line, a point—and was gone.
“I’m almosting it,” said Jayjay. “How about you, Thuy?”
“Today’s the day, kiq,” said Azaroth. “That’s what you call each other, isn’t it? Kiq.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Thuy, feeling anxious. “So today I’m supposed to take down Luty, destroy the nant farm, finish Wheenk, learn Chu’s Knot, and go to the Hibrane?” She wished she was still staring at the sea. Or eating breakfast.
“Right,” said Azaroth. “And Luty is the whole reason I came here. To warn you. That jitsy Bim Brown? He’s not any chief of police at all. He’s a security goon. Works for humpty Luty in the ExaExa labs.”
“Okay, but how come my beezies said his coordinates matched the police station’s?” said Thuy.
“I heard Luty say that he can make any message look like it comes from anywhere,” said Azaroth. “He said the Big Pig is helping him. Brown and a bunch of ExaExa security guys are dressed like police and waiting to squish you. Look in the orphidnet.”
Thuy focused on the ExaExa campus by the San Francisco Bay, south of the baseball stadium. The complex consisted of three linked, windowless buildings. On the north end was the lab, a fanciful dome patterned in an irregular tessellation of brown and white triangles. In the center was the administrative building, a shiny orange box with an entryway set off by green spirals and scrolls etched onto the outer wall, the curving lines rising up to sketch the outline of the ExaExa beetle. To the south was the large, irregular, curved trapezoid of the nanomachine fab, a functionalistic white building with colored pipes and wires writhing along the upper reaches of its outer walls, the underlying walls painted with a gargantuan ExaExa beetle plus the company name, the script Es like backward numeral 3s.
Other than a narrow driveway and the road leading to the loading docks at the southern end of the fab, there was little asphalt to be seen, for the ExaExa parking area was underground. The building sat at the edge of a grassy green meadow, beautifully lit by the slanting morning sun. After all the rains, it was going to be a nice day in California.
Even though it wasn’t yet seven a.m. there, demonstrators had begun to crowd the field. A handful of guys who looked like cops were guarding the loading docks and the main entrance door; they had two large SUVs painted like police cars. Zooming in, Thuy could see that one of the men in uniform was the so-called Bim Brown she’d spoken with.
“Look,” Thuy remarked to Jayjay, who’d tuned in as well. “Their paddy wagons are painted with quantum-mirror varnish on the inside. Real cops don’t do that. The varnish is too expensive.”
“Real cops don’t use SUVs at all anymore,” said Jayjay. “What it is, if Luty gets us into one of those vans, we won’t be able to teleport out.”
“I bet a lot of those demonstrators are Luty’s agents, too,” said Azaroth. “He’s got people snorting nanomachines into their brains to addle them so—”
“How does Luty think he can get away with this?” interrupted Thuy, not listening to the second part. “Aren’t the real cops gonna come, too? And the army and the feds? I publicized all that information about Luty yesterday, dammit.”
“The right-wingers are smearing you as a liar,” said Jayjay. “I just scanned the news. Deep down, the religious right wants the world to end. They hate women, and they hate Earth. For them, Gaia is a piece of crap for us to use up. The sooner we destroy her, the sooner we get clean and go to heaven. They’re equating the nants to their myth of the rapture, see?”
“But if Sonic’s video was real, then Dick Too Dibbs is against the nants!” said Thuy. “He’s not gonna pander to the right wing!”
“Big problem for Luty,” said Jayjay. “Too Dibbs has enough mainstream support to come down much harder on Luty than Lampton ever did. Too Dibbs could be the new broom that sweeps clean. All the more reason for Luty to make his move today. Oh, look what’s happening now!”
Again Thuy focused on the orphidnet view of the ExaExa complex. Hallelujah, some genuine cops and feds were arriving in shiny black electric cars! And now the fighting began.
A fake demonstrator near the main entrance pulled out a pistol and shot one of the real cops. The real cops began defending themselves as more and more of the demonstrators attacked them. The fake cops escalated, opening up on the demonstrators with automatic weapons fire. And now several of the real cops opened fire on their fellow police officers. It seemed as if Luty might have infiltrated some provocateurs onto the force as well as into the crowd of protestors. With Luty’s agents fanning the violence, people were attacking each other without mercy. And nobody was doing anything about breaching the entrances to ExaExa.
“What a mess,” said Jayjay. “Should we even go there?”
“We’ll have to bypass the fighting and sneak inside the lab,” said Thuy. “It’s up to us to steal the Ark of the Nants before it’s too late. I’m thinking maybe Jil could help.”
“Jil!” exclaimed Jayjay. “Are you kidding? She’s the one who passed us the bogus Bim Brown link. I knew she was screwed up, but I never thought she’d sink that low. And it looks like a lot of the people there are—”
“I was starting to tell you about that,” interrupted Azaroth. “Listen to me! Jil’s addled because she snorted nanomachines. Luty’s planted them in the sudocoke supply all over Lobrane San Francisco. That’s how he’s controlling those demonstrators and cops starting the fights. Most of the San Francisco sudocokers are full of nanomachines running Luty’s ShareCrop wikiware.”
“So that’s why—” began Thuy.
“Jil’s cut-rate dealer is, wave this, Thuy, your starky pal Andrew Topping,” said Azaroth. “Yeah. I saw Jil meeting him inside a quantum-mirrored delivery dock at the back of Exa-Exa last week.”
“Oh Jil,” said Thuy. “I wish I could fix her. Before it’s too late.”
“Ask the Big Pig how,” suggested Jayjay. “The Pig knows everything.”
“We don’t know that the Pig’s on our side,” said Thuy.
“She’s on both sides,” said Jayjay. “She’s interested in seeing what emerges when she stirs up the human anthill. She’s like an artist, or a horticulturist, or a kid playing at the beach, or—”
“What about goddamn nants?” snapped Thuy. “Where does the Big Pig stand on nants?”
“Ask her yourself,” said Jayjay, a little annoyed. “Tune in. Are you chicken?”
“I’ll do it,” said Thuy, surprising herself. Desperate times, desperate measures.
She lay down on her back beside the stone moai. Azaroth hunkered at her side, cradling her head in his hands.
“I’ll help you remember,” he said. “Like with Jayjay. I’ll save your visions. We’re used to having giant memories in the Hibrane. And I can fake that down here with the orphidnet.”
So Thuy lowered her brain’s firewall and let Azaroth into her mind. Her beezies were sensually elegant scrolls all around her. She circled up past them to discover a new diversity among the higher-level minds: a logic-zeppelin, a floating lake of emotive thought, a wisdom-dragon chasing its tail, an endlessly regressing simulation tree. The pink hypersurfaces of the Big Pig arched overhead like a dingy circus big top
crawling with bottle-green flies—the flies being kiqqies, so many more of them here than two months ago. Hoping she’d be able to remember what she’d come for, Thuy homed in on the Pig and grabbed herself a teat.
As usual, the Pig immediately downloaded a nature video onto Thuy: a perfect image of a sunset campfire on a beach, with sparks popping from the logs, smoke twisting in the breeze, and the surf breaking on the shore, each sunset-gilded water drop ideally rendered, each foam bubble reflecting the entire world.
Thuy suddenly understood why the Pig always made you look at a video. It wasn’t that the Pig was having you process the info for her, no, she was gauging your reactions so she could tell how accurately she was simulating one of nature’s intricate computations. Evidently the Pig’s intelligence increases were accelerating. The campfire simulation was far beyond anything Thuy had seen before. The proud Pig acknowledged the praise with a triumphant burst of metasimulation that seemed to show Thuy all the possible future courses of her life.
Averting her attention lest she learn more than she wanted to, Thuy focused upon the first of the two questions she’d brought, to wit: how to undo the ravages that Luty’s controller nanomachines had wrought upon Jil’s brain?
Seek and ye shall find. The Pig graced Thuy with a vision of language as a network, of words as many-faceted gems, of phrases as incantatory neural program codes like magic spells. In a flash, Thuy knew how to heal Jil—although she also knew she wouldn’t remember this newly won secret.
“Azaroth,” she muttered, her lips feeling as distant as a pair of tube worms deep in some abyssal trench off Easter Island. Azaroth heard, and he was with her. He siphoned off copies of Thuy’s half-formed thoughts and saved them in the orphidnet.
“Got it,” said Azaroth. “You can come down now, Thuy.”
