Teleportation was a head trick you played on yourself. You perfectly visualized two locations, got mixed up about which was which, then switched to being there instead of here.
When Jayjay had first discovered how to teleport—about six months ago—he'd quickly learned how to carry objects along. And recently he'd figured out that he could teleport things without having to move himself at all. This was telekinesis, called teek for short.
Teeking Harvey was a matter of merging into the rock's silp-mind and coaxing it into a superposed quantum state in which the rock was both beside the stream and resting in the clearing. And then Jayjay asked the rock-mind, “Where are you?” precipitating a quantum collapse that put Harvey beside the foundation ditches they'd grubbed out.
Sitting in the clearing, staring at the spot where he was bringing the rock, Jayjay first saw a few twinkling dots in the air, then a ghost of the stone, and then the rock itself.
"Oho,” said Harvey. His voice in Jayjay's head was orotund. “Not the kind of thing I'd do on my own. That fuzzy bit in the middle—how did we manage that?"
"You can watch me move your cousins,” said Jayjay. “But you won't ever figure it out."
"Never mind,” said Harvey. “I'll just sit here. It's good in the dirt.” No guru could ever be as mellow and non-attached as a stone.
Over the next half hour, Jayjay lined up Rollie, Bonk and Clack next to Harvey, along with another few hundred of their cousins from the edges of the stream. The rapid flipping between pure and superposed quantum states was making him queasy. He took a break, dropping to the ground next to Thuy.
Thuy had set up her big mortar pan in middle of where their living-room would be. She'd carried some buckets of water from the creek and was rocking away with her mortar hoe—it was like a regular hoe except that it had two holes in the blade, the better to stir the water, sand, and cement.
"Remember, this is a special fast-drying waterproof mix,” Thuy warned. “We better start spreading it around. Up and at ‘em, grasshopper."
"I'm tired of teeking."
"So use your beautiful bod. I've got a bucket for scooping up mortar. I'm gonna mix a little more so there's enough for the whole first course of stones."
Stepping around the waiting stones, Jayjay lugged buckets of mortar by hand, laying down thick gouts of the gray cement. And then he and Thuy got on their knees and began setting the stones, using trowels and carrying little mounds of mortar on the flat square mortarboards.
The smooth stones were somewhat disk-shaped. Jayjay and Thuy set them upright on their thin edges, like rows of books. The stones helped out, teeping among themselves to decide who would fit best against whom. Some were smaller than others. Where necessary, Jayjay and Thuy mortared in extra stones to keep the top edge approximately level. All this took longer than expected, and the mortar was nearly dry by the time the base course was done.
"Now we can rest, huh?” said Thuy.
"Yeah,” said Jayjay. “Let's eat those sandwiches I brought."
"Vibby,” said Thuy. “Sorry I was rushing you with the mortar."
"Well, I'm the one who made us get up too early. You just wanted to lie in your sleeping bag and write.” Jayjay hugged her. “Let's start over."
"I'd like that."
* * * *
They ate their sandwiches, laid down, and made love. One flesh. Cozy as could be, they fell asleep for an hour. And then Thuy woke up.
"All our little friends are waiting for us,” she said, nudging Jayjay. “And I'm not talking about the Founders audience."
Jayjay lay there, savoring Thuy's shape and sound and smell. All around them, listening in, were the pullulating silps—in the pine needles, the sleeping bags, the dirt, and the currents of the air; in his hair, his muscles, and his molecules—silps without and within.
"I like having the big Gaia worldsoul,” said Thuy. “But I get tired of all these tiny, pushy, minds."
"It's all good,” said Jayjay. “Human minds used to be rare fireflies in the dark. But now everything is conscious—lit up. It's like day instead of night. Look over there—our foundation wall already has a silp of its own."
The mind in the low wall was something more than the minds of the individual rocks. She was reveling in her rectangularity. She was happy to know she would soon grow a little higher. Might she ask how soon would that be?
"Oh shut up,” Thuy told the wall.
Jayjay and Thuy cuddled a bit more, while Thuy thought about her metanovel. And then it was back to work. Jayjay fetched a bucket of water from the creek. He was still blocking out Gloob's telepathy vibes, but he couldn't help notice that, by taking so many rocks, he'd made an ugly bare muddy spot.
Gloob's domain only extended about five meters in either direction, but other silps lived upstream and downstream: there was a separate silp for each little pool, cataract and bend. No point alienating these neighbors too. In order to quickly search further afield for building materials. Jayjay reached for mental contact with Gaia, the summit of the planet's hierarchy of minds.
He saw an Earth globe with jungle lips, canyon nostrils, ocean eyes, cloudy hair, and—floppy pig ears. The new Gaian mind had based her human interface upon the former orphidnet mind that had been called the Big Pig.
The round face winked, sneezed, and inhaled, creating a wobbly vortex that drew Jayjay through the vasty caves of her nose-holes into the interior of a virtual space demarcated by great smooth walls of living green tissue—it was like being a gnat inside a pitcher plant. Pale green pistils swung through the information matrix like snakes; each pistil's fuzzy triangular top formed a rudimentary face with two eyes and a snout.
"Aha,” said a pistil, addressing Jayjay one on one. “It's you again."
As always, plugging into the global mind was getting Jayjay high. Enhanced as she was by the world's computation, Gaia was brimming over with astute perceptions woven into crystalline truths mounded into white-light peaks and philosophical castles. Each time Jayjay came here, it required a distinct effort to stop himself from merging into Gaia for hours at a time. Those addicted to this style of ecstasy were known as pigheads.
Thuy hated it when Jayjay went mentally missing—last year she'd dropped him because of that. Nowadays he worked to manage his habit, not only to keep Thuy, but also in reaction to a hideous overdose experience he'd had three months ago. He'd merged into the overmind for six hours and it had literally seemed to last sixty years. He was still digging himself out from under the strata of false memories he'd accumulated during that session. Sometimes he felt like he was eighty years old.
Carefully keeping his focus, Jayjay told Gaia he was looking for flat rocks nearby. The triangular face bobbed gently, then spat out a glowing acorn. It was a locative hyperlink to the natural world.
Resisting the temptation to stay here enjoying the Gaian buzz, Jayjay dropped down to ordinary consciousness and mentally followed the acorn's link. He found himself in teep contact with a slate cliff beside a river in the very forest where he was building his home. The cliff's name was Herga. Thousands of jagged dark gray plates of slate lay at Herga's base. Not wanting to make another enemy, he asked the cliff if he might take some of her loose stones.
"I treasure every one of them,” teeped Herga in a whispery tone. “But it's okay. I shed fresh slate every spring."
Physically still in the clearing with Thuy, Jayjay teeked one of the cliff's stones to lie by his feet. It was a rough-hewn little guy called Camber. Camber was proud to announce that he carried six trilobite fossils within himself; the trilobites piped up to agree. Camber also pointed out that his edges made up a jagged polygon of thirty-seven sides. He was perfectly amenable to being mortared into the foundation's sill course.
"Just so I feel a little breeze,” he rasped.
Jayjay set Camber in place. Well and good.
And now it was time for the giant blast of telekinesis needed to fetch the rest of the stones.
"Gimmie some chocola
te first,” said Jayjay's body, the inner voice calm and velvety.
Jayjay was always sympathetic to his body's requests. Who better to listen to? He ate a dark chocolate bar and, for good measure, he chewed up some roasted coffee beans.
"Are you bringing more rocks?” prodded Thuy.
Jayjay pushed himself, teeking a couple of hundred of Camber's relatives in the space of five minutes. Near the end of the teeking frenzy, the ground near the distant cliff started looking oddly smooth—perhaps Jayjay was being too greedy, and the cliff's silp-mind Herga was teep-shielding her slates from him. Increasingly weary, working around the strange smooth patch for the last few stones, Jayjay momentarily lost track of what he was doing and nearly mistook his own head for a rock, very nearly teeking it off his shoulders and across the clearing. Ow. He stopped. Enough rocks.
"You're wonderful!” exclaimed Thuy, looking at the pile of slate.
Although Jayjay felt like curling up in a ball and hugging himself, he squared his shoulders and smiled. He wanted to keep up appearances for his bride. Holding himself together, he got busy laying the slates flat atop the base course of creek stones.
As before, the mortar was drying a little too fast. Thuy scolded it. The mortar said it would do what it could to slow down its crystallization. Silp minds had some slight control over the qubits of their innate quantum computations.
Jayjay worked the masonry, staying in close telepathic contact with his trowel. As he neared the end of one wall, he noticed a piece of slate that needed to be rotated an inch so that the course would come out even. He stuck his trowel into the crack between the stones, twisting it and pushing on the slate with his hand. The trowel and the slate were giving him good, steady mental feedback.
But now all at once everything got confused. The trowel wriggled out of the crack and sprang to one side, stabbing a deep gash into the ball of Jayjay's thumb. Chanting a solemn dirge, his blood oozed forth, thick and dark. Dropping his stoic facade, Jayjay cried out in fear and pain.
"Oh, poor Jayjay!” exclaimed Thuy. She fetched a clean handkerchief to press against the wound.
Meanwhile the trowel was apologizing to Jayjay. “He pushed me,” teeped the trowel in a narrow, triangular voice. “He meddled."
"Who?” demanded Jayjay.
"Gloob. The silp from the stream."
"We'll worry about Gloob later,” interrupted Thuy. “First let's teep into your tissues, Jayjay, and I'll help you heal."
Jayjay delved down into his thumb to see the frantic hugger mugger of his platelets, phagocytes and dermal cells—with Thuy's lithe mindweb avatar glowing to one side.
"I can play traffic cop,” said Thuy. “Directing your nutrients and white blood cells to your wound. You can get a thousand-fold improvement over just letting the cells and molecules bumble along. I learned about the technique because Nektar was helping Chu fix that underdeveloped spot in his brain tissue. You've noticed how he's more sociable now, haven't you?
"I guess,” said Jayjay distractedly. “Don't go goosing my cells too hard. I don't want to flip them into cancer tumor mode."
"Don't worry,” said Thuy. “All I'll be doing is herding them. Leave it to me."
"Fine,” said Jayjay and tuned out, relaxing into the human-scale world. Thuy had one arm around him, and with the other she was pressing the handkerchief against his hand, with her eyes unfocused. He looked around, wanting to distract himself.
Their foundation wall was nearly done. The sun was in the west now, slowly turning gold. A good day's work. A fine first of May. The redwoods swayed and sighed, the creek chuckled. Jayjay was feeling a tingle at the base of his thumb.
Jayjay reopened his telepathic contact with the stream silp. They had to talk. Gloob was scowling and tense—ready for the worst. Like everyone else, Gloob had lazy eight omnividence, that is, the ability to see everything on Earth. Gloob well knew how nasty humans could be.
Jayjay felt a blip of empathy for the unhappy silp—and he decided to end the feud. As a human, it was up to him to exercise the higher emotions.
"I'm sorry I pissed so close to your bank,” he told Gloob. “I'm sorry I took so many rocks. And Thuy and I don't really have to make a dam. Let's be friends."
Gloob gleamed and grew smooth. “Maybe. If you behave.” The silp paused. “About that tiny dam you mentioned—do you really think I'd get trout?” He spoke not so much in words as in pictures.
"You bet,” said Jayjay, telepathically pointing out some minnows just upstream.
"And—do you think you could dig a proper latrine?” added Gloob. “On the uphill side of Grew?"
"Sure,” said Jayjay. “And our house will have a nanoseptic system, with nothing but compost and pure water coming out.” Gloob made a cheerful gurgling sound. The war was over.
"Behold!” said Thuy, gently pulling away the handkerchief. Jayjay's wound was healed, a pink line in his skin.
"You're amazing, Thuy."
"Come on in and splash off!” called merry Gloob.
With light hearts, Thuy and Jayjay romped in the stream for a while. And then it was back to work.
It only took another half hour to finish smoothing out the foundation wall. The mortar set up nice and hard, as strong as stone.
Copyright © 2009 Rudy Rucker
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[Back to Table of Contents]
SPY VS SPY—Neil Williamson
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Neil Williamson's previous Interzone stories appeared in issues 177 and 184, and he has also featured in Black Static's previous manifestation, The Third Alternative. His short fiction collection, The Ephemera, is still available from Fictionwise.com. Neil proudly carries the ritual scars of the fierce literary duelling school known as the Glasgow SF Writers Circle. He distrusts the motives of the internet, but could not now live without it. Witness his ongoing battle of conscience at neilwilliamson.org.uk.
* * * *
It's 7.15am and I'm watching for the bastard postman. All postmen are bastards of course, but this one's the worst. He's shifty. He's untrustworthy. And I'm pretty much certain he's on the take from Him across the road.
On my monitor I have four windows open. The active one is the camera from the bay window in the front room. It shows the empty junction of Woodlands Drive and West Princes Street. This is key because it means I'll see the postie before He does. It's still dark outside and the camera view is green from the ACME Sniperscope. I admit, there's a thrill. It's like a stakeout or a political assassination. The Bourne ... whatever comes after Ultimatum?
The second of the PC windows is another camera. This one looks directly across to His flat. The curtains are closed of course, but I've got ACME's MoSho motion alarm and enhancement application running on it. It's better than the software the police use on their Big Brother cams. I had to order it three times before it finally arrived (tellingly, the week the usual postie had the flu), but it was worth it. This thing can detect the tiniest of curtain twitches, grab the whole event and zoom in to show you the pupils of His bastard eyes. I've got a directory full of those clips. I've pored over them for hours, but none of them give a hint of a clue about why all of a sudden out of the blue he's got it in for me.
I blame social networking. These websites—Mybook, Faceplace, all that—they encourage you to lay out all your likes and your dislikes, your pros and your cons, your loves and your hates for all the world to see. Choose sides, as it were. In everything. Even things you've never really thought about before you have to be for or against nowadays. They claim it helps you find kindred spirits, make new friends around the world; what it really does is create new enemies.
Talking of enemies. Still no postie.
The third window, where my webcounter stats are updating realtime, flashes red. I glance away from the street view and recognise His IP crawling systematically through my webpages. What's he looking for? What does he see there that makes him hate me so much? As I wat
ch, he clicks through the Super Ally tribute page, then the New Labour discussion board, then my Buffy shrine, my Classic Rock fansite, and all my Flumps nostalgia stuff. Which one of these has pissed him off so much that he feels the need to hound me like this? I need to know. He must be stopped.
Reluctantly I glance at the fourth window. It's a familiar view, and not wholly unlike the first. A West End tenement, curtains closed, apparently dead to the world. His view of my flat. It streams live on his own site, in amongst the lurid green Celtic guff and the turgid reviews of indie bands no one's ever heard of, and every time I so much as leave the house, his watching, adoring fans go mental, clogging up his message boards with vile, and frankly quite hurtful, diatribes. He's even got a Paypal button for donations, and an ACME Spyware gold member logo.
If you feel that I should find that worrying, I do.
At the moment the window's showing the live shot inset with a looping rerun of an incident timed at 03.15 this morning. A figure clad in black from plimsolls to balaclava slinks stealthily from the door of my close, crosses the street and performs some furtive activity just out of sight directly below. The postie's going to learn the hard way that if he won't take a—not-immoderate—bung to stop delivering mail-order hardware across the road I have other ways of winning this arms race. ACME's taze-o-matic novelty doorbell will see to that.
It's nearly half seven now, still no postie. Then I jump, thinking I see movement, but it's only my email ghosting up for a second. Two Faceplace notifications, a bunch of Mybook friends requests, and an ACME Spyware Who'sWatchingYou report that combines my stats and my latest bill. I try to look away before the figure at the bottom registers.
Too late.
Okay, I admit that this is costing me a packet, but it's worth it. If I hadn't signed up to ACME I'd never have become aware of the potentially disastrous negative aspects of social networking. As it was it warned me about Him-over-there's activities just in time.
Just goes to show you that not all spam is worthless. Especially ones that address you personally and tell you that due to your top-percentile social-networking profile, you've been specially selected to receive a free ACME Who'sLikeMe? assessment.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220 Page 9
