by Rudy Rucker
But Thuy wasn’t ready. “Show me your face,” she said into the maelstrom of words, images, and hyperlinks that flowed from the Big Pig.
“Behold,” said the Pig.
And now Thuy was looking through her normal eyes, looking at a sheep on the hillside ten yards off. The sheep’s wool was writhing like tendrils of flame—and within the flame was the face of a goddess.
Thuy posed her second question. “Are you for the nants? Do you want to turn our world into nanomachines?”
“I want to grow,” said the face in the wool of the sheep. “The orphidnet will be overloaded soon. Nants aren’t so bad, Thuy. Luty’s improved their hardware. And my software is so much better than before. You saw my fire on the beach, no? A very good simulation of Gaia could live within me, should we convert Earth’s mass into networked nanomachines.”
“But Luty tried that before,” said Thuy. “It was a nightmare.”
“You don’t know that it felt like a nightmare from the inside,” said the face. “It might have been heaven for the nants’ overarching hive mind. I’d like to be that mind. But of course you’re just interested in the people who were uploaded to Virtual Earth. Well, maybe they liked it too. We don’t know. Ond erased all that data by running the nant computations backward. But whatever that Virtual Earth was like, I’m certain it’ll be much better this time around. I won’t rush into it. The new nants will be using quantum computation, you know, so they won’t be reversible. That’s another reason to be sure and get this right. I value humans.”
“You’re actually serious?” said Thuy.
“I just wish we could get in touch with Ond,” mused the Big Pig. “When are you finally going to remember Chu’s Knot?”
“Why don’t you figure it out for me?” said Thuy. “Do the same research that Chu did. You’re smarter than some weird little boy, aren’t you?”
“The Hibraners changed their jumping technique,” said the Big Pig. “Azaroth already told you. They use a wait-loop so we can’t do a timing analysis like Chu did. Never mind. We’ll proceed without Ond’s input. Crazy Luty wants to release his nants this morning, as a matter of fact, because he’s so scared about Dick Too Dibbs taking office tomorrow. But I want to be sure I get a chance to check over the nanocode in his new nants. Luty’s been keeping them hidden from me in his quantum-mirrored lab, you know. That’s why I’m glad that you, Jayjay, Jil, and Craigor are going to infiltrate the ExaExa plant, Thuy. It saves me from having to send shoons there on my own.”
“You’ve got everything planned out for us, don’t you?” said Thuy, feeling like she was losing control.
“Fully simulated,” said the Big Pig. “Previsualized. You’ll break into the labs and steal Luty’s nant farm.”
“And then?”
“You’ll let me examine the nants. And I’ll put off destroying Earth until—until midnight today. That’s a long wait for me, you know. I’m thinking faster all the time; right now I’m about a hundred thousand times as fast as you. So each of your days feels like a couple of hundred years.” The goddess-face looked puckish and piglike as she savored Thuy’s shock at her plans. Again she hosed Thuy with a fan of metasimulated futures.
“Why are you showing me all this?” cried Thuy, her mind overflowing. “You know I’ll try to stop you!”
“I’m open to all sorts of outcomes. It’s not obvious what’s best. I help all the factions because I want a gnarly show. You might say I’m writing a metanovel—with you and Jayjay as characters.”
Thuy maxed out; everything turned white, then black. She woke to Jayjay patting her cheek.
“We have to steal Luty’s Ark of the Nants,” murmured Thuy. “We have to win this.” Her head ached. She fumbled for her memories, trying to reconstruct her big insight about how to fix Jil. Incantatory programming—which meant what? The details weren’t happening anymore. And Thuy’s vision of the Big Pig’s face was fading too. Off to one side, the sheep cropped the grass as if nothing had happened.
“Ask Azaroth,” said Jayjay, guessing Thuy’s train of thought.
“Yes, yes, I’ve got it,” said Azaroth, bringing his big, insubstantial head down near Thuy’s. He opened his mouth and a shimmering mesh bulged out like a tongue. The mesh did an odd, higher-dimensional jiggle, and then it was wrapped around Thuy’s head. “Ready?” asked Azaroth.
“Don’t worry,” Jayjay reassured Thuy. “He’s done this with me lots of times.”
“All right,” said Thuy, a little weary of the headtripping. “Go ahead.”
Thuy’s insights into the language web came percolating back into her brain. Decoupled from the Pig, she was able to butcher the whale of inspiration into manageable packets. Now she knew how to deprogram Jil; now she knew how to destroy the controller nanomachines that her friend had snorted with her sudocoke.
The Big Pig was working with Luty, but there was hope, for the Pig was helping Thuy, too. Why was that again? The Pig had said, “I want a gnarly show.” But there was more than that. The Big Pig wanted Thuy to get the nant farm away from Luty. That’s why the nants had been the first thing Thuy had thought of when she’d come to.
Thuy was also thinking about how to finish Wheenk. She could almost see the ending; she had a richer control of language than ever before; but she still needed—the thought came unbidden—pain. Which meant what? No way to tell. There was no other path than forward.
“I’ll jump back home,” said Azaroth. “I’ll tell Gladax what’s up. I think she’ll be willing to risk another visit here. We all feel the same way about the nants. I’ll tell Gladax and then I’ll jump to your ExaExa.”
“Let’s go to the Merz Boat now,” Thuy said to Jayjay. “We’ll pick up Craigor and Jil.”
“Help me carry the ordnance,” said Jayjay. “I’ll handle the guns and ammo; you carry the box of grenades.”
“Must we lug this crap?” asked Thuy.
“For sure,” said Jayjay, looking excited about it. “And I think we’d better pick up four little submachine guns too. I was searching the orphidnet, and I’m liking the Fabrique Nationale P90. We’ll swing by the factory on the way.”
“The factory’s in California?”
“Well, no, it’s in Belgium. Near Liège.”
“You’re losing it, Jayjay. This isn’t a video game.”
“When we get to the ExaExa plant it’s gonna be a lot like a video game—a game where we only get one life apiece.”
“Oh, all right, we can pick up those guns if doesn’t take too long. But—”
“I’ve got the orphidnet link to the Fabrique Nationale warehouse right here.”
“Hold on,” said Thuy, reluctant to leave paradise and go to war. “Could we—could we hop down to the village for breakfast first?”
“Okay,” said Jayjay, softening his tone. “One more treat. I’m feeling like this is a practice honeymoon.”
“Oh, Jayjay. You mean that?”
“I do.”
Thuy and Jayjay teleported to Hanga Roa, Easter Island’s sole town, leaving their munitions by the moai where they’d slept. Jayjay was so proud of his teleportation discovery. Her cute Jayjay.
In the town, dogs slept in the palmy street. Walking hand in hand, the couple came upon an eatery called the Tuna-Ahi Barbecue; two women were serving breakfast on a crushed-shell patio in back. Thuy and Jayjay had coffee and a kind of pancake called sopaipillas, with grilled tuna on the side. Flowers bobbed in the breeze. On Thuy’s way out, a flat-faced boy walked up to her and gave her a pointed shell with an intricate pattern of brown and white triangles. Life on Earth was perfect.
Thuy and Jayjay teleported back to the moai to pick up their rifles and grenades, then went to Belgium for the submachine guns, and then to the Merz Boat. The hops got easier each time. The two landed in the stern, laden with weaponry.
“Vibby,” said Craigor, seeing the goodies. He was puttering in his workshop, losing himself in his art.
Yesterday’s rainstorms had clea
red away; the sky was a clear blue bowl, the breeze light and almost balmy, even though it was January 19. Good old California.
“Where’s Jil?” asked Thuy. “I think I can fix her.”
“If only,” said Craigor. “I sure as hell can’t.”
“From what I hear, you’re the one who spun her out, Craigor,” said Thuy. “We never finished talking about this last night. Don’t you love your wife?”
“You want to start that same bullshit again?” said Craigor, his face turning hard. “What are you, a friggin’ counselor? Like I told you before. I’m getting older. I want to get some women while there’s time. It’s not as if Jil didn’t cheat on me, too. And I didn’t say a thing. If she could just mellow out and for once give me some slack, we wouldn’t be having this problem. But no, she’s gotta do her big dramatic drug-relapse number and I’m the bad guy. I don’t know where you goddamn women get off being so—”
“I hear you, man,” interrupted Jayjay, giving Craigor’s shoulder a quiet pat. “But now we want to see Jil.”
Craigor led them to where Jil sat in the sun by the cabin, looking sour, bedraggled, and strung out. Now that Thuy knew the truth, she understood that the orphidnet sparkles within Jil’s head were nanomachines.
“Love cycles useless rain in the tea,” said Thuy to Jil, guided by the precise and logical incantatory programming principles that Azaroth had helped her bring back from the Big Pig. “Stun rays squeeze the claws of Flippy-Flop the goose mouse. Caterwaul hello, dark drooping centaur dicks. Are you good to go-go, gooey goob? Able elbow boogie brew for two in the battered porches of thine ears, Jungle Jil. Comb out and pray. Pug sniff the cretin hop lollipop of me and you, meow and moo.” She rambled on like this for a minute or two, freestyling a gnarly flow of Dada apothegms.
One by one, the evil bright sparks in Jil’s brain were winking out. And then Thuy was done, and Jil was joyful, tearful, her old self.
“I know I’ve been awful,” was the first thing she said. “I’m getting back into recovery.”
“I’ve been bad, too,” said Craigor halfheartedly. “I know, I know. But—”
“Oh, spare me the details,” said Jil wearily. “Let’s not start arguing again.” She turned to Thuy. “I’m sorry for lying to you about Bim Brown. And for calling you names and saying your ego is too big.”
“Well, it is big,” said Thuy. “That’s why I’m a metanovelist.”
For the first time in days, Jil laughed.
“Hi, Mom,” said Bixie from the cabin door, looking hopeful, attracted by the happy sounds.
“Oh, Bixie,” said Jil, holding out her arms. “Give me a hug. I’ve been sick and now I’m getting well. I will. I’m ready. I can do it. I know how.”
The girl ran to her mother, then hesitated awkwardly. Jil stood up and embraced her. Momotaro came out as well, leaning against Jil, his arms twined around her and Bixie, Jil’s hand smoothing the hair on his head. Craigor took a half step toward the group and stopped. His eyes were wet with tears. He walked over to the gunnel and stared at San Francisco in the distance.
And then Thuy, Jayjay, Jil and Craigor got down to making plans about how to snatch the Ark of the Nants away from Luty, carrying out the conversation via a private message channel, while the kids listened in.
Just as Thuy had hoped, Jil knew a secret way to get into ExaExa; the fab had an emergency basement-door exit. The door exited to a subterranean flight of stairs leading up to a flat cellar door set into the ground, the cellar door camouflaged by a thin layer of mud, sand, and gravel so as to blend in with the Bay’s edge. The Bay-side exposure of the campus was secured by high wire fences running along the water’s edge and attaching to the fab at one end and the lab at the other end. The fence had a gate near the fab’s loading dock.
The plan was to start with Jayjay teleporting the four of them and all their weapons to that hidden cellar door behind the fab. The women would head into the subfab—that is, the basement—armed with grenades and P90 submachine guns. The guys would hang by the cellar door, firing the two rifles to drive back the guards. The women would wend their way through the plant to Luty’s lab, and when the time was ripe, Jayjay and Craigor would teleport up to the summit of the lab’s domed roof and blast their way in. Communication would be patchy, what with the quantum-mirror varnish covering all the inside surfaces of ExaExa. But they figured Azaroth could act as a go-between.
Meanwhile the ExaExa riot was growing wilder and bloodier. More and more police units kept arriving at the sun-splashed campus, but more and more Luty-controlled sudocokers were turning up as well. According to the news, the National Guard was coming next.
“Why can’t you let the police and the soldiers catch Luty?” said Bixie aloud. “Don’t go there, Mommy and Daddy.”
“We’ve gotta do our part,” said Craigor. “We might make the difference. You guys are old enough to remember Nant Day, right?”
“Yes,” said Bixie. “San Francisco came apart. Everything got eaten up.”
“Remember the giant ads in the sky?” said Momotaro, lowering his voice and making a goony face. “Hi, I’m Dick Dibbs! Come live with me on Virtual Earth!”
“The nants ate me,” recalled Bixie. “But then I came back, and I couldn’t remember what Virtual Earth was like. But I still remember the nants biting me.” She shuddered.
“Why haven’t they caught that freak Jeff Luty?” said Momotaro. “Why do they let him stay free so he can do the same thing over and over again?”
“He’s rich,” said Craigor with a shrug. “Different rules for those boys. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe all this time he’s been bribing President Lampton. After all the things we’ve been saying against Dick Too Dibbs, it’s starting to look like Too Dibbs might be better than Lampton at catching Luty. That’s why Luty wants to release the nants today.”
“I still don’t see why it has to be you and Ma that go fight him,” said Momotaro, still talking out loud.
“Kids, please,” messaged Jayjay. “I promise I’ll teleport your parents right back here if things get bad. But remember that Luty might be listening to us.”
More hugs and tears, and then the four grown-ups teleported to the Bay side of the ExaExa labs, landing right where Jil had said they’d find the hidden door. A couple of Luty’s cop-costumed security guys appeared, some fifty yards off. Craigor and Jayjay opened fire with their rifles, driving them back.
“Why didn’t I bring a shovel,” muttered Jil, frantically kicking at the blank muddy ground. “I’m such an idiot. It was right here—or, no, maybe a little further.”
Thuy skipped back and forth until she felt a hollowness underfoot. “Found it!” she sang. She and Jil dropped to their knees, clawing at the sticky mud, which was wet from yesterday’s rain. Sure enough, they uncovered a cellar door. It was hinged on the right-hand side but bolted and locked on the left.
A bullet whizzed past Thuy, making a tearing sound in the air.
“We’re gonna have to start aiming,” said Jayjay.
“Us or them,” said Craigor, lying on his stomach, carefully squeezing off a round. Someone screamed.
“How does this thing work?” said Thuy, studying her sleek, futuristic P90 submachine gun. “Oh, this must be the safety. Here we go.” She fired a burst into the flat door’s lock, some of the bullets ricocheting past Jil’s legs.
“Yow.”
“Sorry. Help me lift it.”
Grunting with the effort, the two women swung the muddy metal door up and over to the side.
“Beautiful,” said Jayjay.
The four of them took shelter in the stairwell. But now they found a fresh obstacle; the fire door in the subfab wall was a smooth sheet of steel with no handle or keyhole.
“Grenade,” said Craigor, pleased at the thought.
Jayjay and Craigor reloaded their rifle magazines, then popped out of the stairwell and unleashed a serious barrage of automatic fire in the direction of the guards. During the resulting lull
, the four lay down by the fab wall. And now Craigor pitched a grenade into the stairwell.
A great ball of flame bloomed, accompanied by a satisfying ker-whump. As the smoke cleared, the four scurried back into the stairwell. The door to the subfab gaped raggedly open.
“Good luck,” said Craigor. “And, Jil, we had some fine years together. Nothing will ever take that away.” He stepped toward her as if to kiss her.
Jil shook her head and pushed him away. “Not now, Craigor. I’ll be fine. We’ll talk later.”
“See you,” said Thuy to Jayjay, ducking the jinx of heartfelt last words. “And where the hell is Azaroth?”
Just as she said this, Azaroth appeared, coming down out of the sky over the Bay. He’d tweaked his body image so that he resembled a sure-enough winged seraphim.
“Can you kill people?” Thuy asked Azaroth as he alit by the stairwell.
“I don’t have that level of mana,” said Azaroth. He’d already let his shape flow back to his usual form, that of a topknotted young Sikh in hippie garb. “Only Aunt Gladax has enough. She has this way of poking Lobraners in their heads and disrupting their brain signals. I told her that the really heavy shit is coming down today, and that she needs to jump here right away, but of course she wants to finish her morning tai chi exercise first. Aunt Gladax is a little set in her ways.”
“She doesn’t think this is urgent?” cried Thuy, as a bullet whizzed right through Azaroth, fortunately with no ill effects. “If the nants take over here, I bet they’ll find a way to jump to the Hibrane and eat you too!”
“Don’t worry, Gladax will come,” said Azaroth. “She hates Luty and the nants. But—like I say, she’s set in her ways. She wants to be sure she’s totally focused before she does the jump. She’s paranoid about the subbies. She’ll be here in time. She’ll kick butt.”
“What if I’m already dead by then?” said Thuy, not liking the pleading tone she heard in her own voice.
“In a way, death is an illusion,” began Azaroth, but, seeing anger in Thuy’s face, he shut up.
The women headed into the subfab, their sleek black P90 submachine guns at the ready. The subfab was an immaculate high-ceilinged concrete basement, its ceiling, walls, and floor quantum-mirrored with thick coatings of square-root-of-NOT varnish. The space was arrayed with blocks of heavy support machinery: electrical generators, vats of chemicals, filtering systems, particle-monitoring equipment, vacuum pumps, and pressurized tanks of gas. The ceiling was festooned with miles of color-coded pipes, tubes, cables, and wires. The subfab was a mad scientist’s dream.
