Hylozoic (11 page)

“Back so soon?” said Kittie, looking up. “Something's wrong!”

“Jayjay had a kind of seizure,” said Thuy. “An alien mind took him over. He reprogrammed the ocean and—oh God, it's reached here, too. Look how stupidly those branches move, all of them rocking in unison. San Francisco's gone as dull as a drum machine. Can you feel it?”

Jil and Kittie exchanged a puzzled look.

“You and Jayjay are high on Gaia?” suggested Kittie after a pause. “Pighead style? You shouldn't let him drag you down,
Thuy. Last fall you said that you'd quit being a pighead for good.”

“This is real,” said Jayjay in a low, gloomy voice. “Something strange happened to me last night.”

“You acted like a pighead,” said Jil in a mock-sweet tone. “What's strange about that? Getting high is what you're all about.”

“I'm trying to change,” said Jayjay stiffly. “But that's not the point. Last night I climbed up past lazy eight and I learned to think ten tridecillion thoughts in a second or two. And now this alien agent called a Pekklet is using me to steal the Earth's gnarl. She's making me cast malware programs into our atoms. They're called runes.”

Jil held up a lumpy strawberry, making a show of studying it. “This juicy little fella looks plenty gnarly to me.” She bit into it and grinned.

“It's gnarly because it grew
before
the change,” said Jayjay. “But the next crop of strawberries will look like—like simple cones.”

“And last night I thought I saw Hieronymous Bosch,” said Kittie, not taking her vision so seriously today. “What a party.” She guffawed. “Hey, Jayjay, did the aliens—
examine
you? Is the Pekklet beautiful? Does she give you a—”

“It's not funny!” yelled Thuy, turning red. “It's horrible. Look! This is what it's about.” She turned on the hose and let the water play onto the stones of the patio. The water traveled in a perfect parabolic arc to spread across the ground in a smooth, even pool. No droplets, no bubbles, no spray, no fun.

“I don't get what—” began Jil.

“Then look at
this
,” said Jayjay, seizing Jil's empty teacup and throwing it down to smash. The cup broke into six equalsized pieces that settled symmetrically onto the ground like the petals of a magnolia flower.

“The world is acting like a cheap-ass video game,” said Thuy. “It's almost as if we've been eaten by nanomachines and turned into sims.”

“Tell us again what happened to you, Jayjay,” said Kittie slowly.

“While I was waiting for our wave, I heard squawking and chattering,” said Jayjay. “The sound was coming from inside my head. I remembered the sound from last night—when I climbed a subdimensional beanstalk and the Pekklet locked onto me. I see visions of her as—a sexy woman in feathers.”

“
Oooh-la-la
,” said Kittie.

“The Pekklet gives me little pieces of quantum computer code,” continued Jayjay doggedly. “She calls them runes. And I've been teeking the runes onto atoms over and over.”

“He's completely spun!” exclaimed Jil. “Slushed!”

“I teeped Jayjay while it was happening just now,” said Thuy loyally. “He really was teeking little jolts to atom after atom. I think he reprogrammed the whole hundred kilometer cube of Earth's crust that's under San Francisco.”

“I was like an orchestra conductor,” said Jayjay, a little proud of his abilities. “Playing a pitch pipe for ten tridecillion musicians—one at a time.”

“Ten—what?” said Kittie, grasping for something solid to understand.

“A big number,” said Jayjay, taking comfort in the math. “You write ten tridecillion as a one followed by forty-three zeroes.”

“Oh.”

“And the squawky feather-woman Pekklet made you do this—why?” said Jil, really doubting him.

“Well—the Pekklet is working for an alien planetary mind called Pekka. And maybe Pekka wants Earth to be an old-school data center, like when they used to keep all those microchip
boxes in one building. Maybe Pekka is skimming off Earth's gnarl to run, I don't know, a corporate market-prediction engine for the feather boa industry of the Magellanic Clouds!”

Neither Jil nor Kittie laughed.

“Can't you feel the difference?” Thuy asked the other women again. “Can't you feel that your gnarl is missing?”

Jil shrugged. The conversation had trailed off. The thing was, thanks to the gnarl reduction, they didn't have enough mental focus to be properly alarmed. It was like—everything's fucked, but so what?

 

 

“I'm just coming off a horrible catfight with Nektar and Lureen,” said Kittie, willfully retreating into neighborhood gossip. “The three of us had sex together last night, but then this morning, I'm the odd woman out. They both think they're prettier than me. Old slags. I just hope Nektar lets me keep using her garage after what I said to her and Lureen. I went a little too far.”

“I'm impressed you brought them together,” said Jil, content with the conversation's familiar turn. “They used to hate each other.”

“Isn't anyone worried about Pekka and the missing gnarl?” demanded Jayjay.

“Maybe we women are sick of you always trying to be the center of attention,” snapped Thuy, turning away from the apocalypse, too. “What did you say to them, Kittie?”

“I called them rutting rhinos,” said Kittie allowing herself a slight smile.

“
That
goes in my next metanovel,” said Thuy.

“I hear you're calling it
Hive Mind
?” said Jil.

“Yeah,” said Thuy. “I'm merging with society. I'm thinking
that instead of me writing
Hive Mind, Hive Mind
will write me.”

“My best murals are like that,” said Kittie. “They paint me.” She was scrolling through images in her interactive blook. “I bet that's how it was for Hieronymus Bosch. I have his pictures here.”

“Oh, before I forget, can you pick up that cup you broke, Jayjay?” said Jil. “I don't want the kids to cut themselves.”

“All right,” said Jayjay, squatting to pick up the shards. “Is it okay if I raid your kitchen? Maybe if I eat something, I can focus on what we have to do. This low gnarl is turning me into a pinhead.”

“Fine,” said Jil. “Ond's in there napping on a couch.”

Like someone hiding from the day by pulling covers over her head, Thuy continued peering over Kittie's shoulder at the blook. The Bosch pictures glowed, rich and lovely. Kittie tapped and rubbed to zoom and pan. One of the paintings,
The Garden of Earthly Delights
, showed a frieze of naked people around a lake. In a corner, two lovers sat by a blue demon playing a harp.

“You didn't really see Bosch at our party, did you?” said Thuy. “You were drunk.”

“I feel like I saw him,” said Kittie. “A thirty-foot-tall Hibraner version of Bosch. Maybe he could have jumped here because of the way the branes' timelines are skewed. He lived in Holland around 1490, you know.”

“I wonder what that was like?”

“Actually, I've been studying up on Bosch's life for years,” said Kittie. “His homies were tripping their brains out from ergot poisoning, and torturing each other for being possessed. Bosch himself is hard to figure. Sometimes I think he didn't like sex—he makes it so cold and weird. Or maybe he
did
like sex, a lot, and he felt guilty.”

Kittie tapped an illustration in the blook, zooming in on a detail, then continued talking. “Look at the phallus-and-vulva shapes on this pink—I guess you'd call it a marble palace.”

“The magic harp's soundboard was painted just like this,” said Thuy. “The Hibrane harp that unfurled the eighth dimension. Did I tell you that Jayjay saw the harp again last night?”

“Where?”

“On, uh, that subdimensional beanstalk he says he climbed.”

“Some heavy shit's coming down,” said Kittie, shaking her head. “I never really got a good look at that harp when she was here. The subbies had been gnawing on it. And then that Hibraner Azaroth stole it right back.”

“Well, it belonged to his aunt,” said Thuy. “Come to think of it, they were part Dutch. The harp came down through their family from way back.” She regarded the chilly nudes in Kittie's blook. “Do you really think an old-master type painter would take a lowly gig like decorating a musical instrument?”

“Painters take all kinds of jobs,” said Kittie, flipping to a new image. “There's a hair-thin line between painter and bum. Did I tell you that when I was with Bosch last night, I teeped him my portfolio? He said he liked the monster series I'm painting on vans. God, I wish he'd stayed. We could work together. Krazy Kittie and Howlin' Hieronymus Hell Hearses!”

“I like the way everything in his pictures is alive,” said Thuy. “Check out the pottery jug with legs. And that hill in the background is a man on all fours. It's like Bosch saw hylozoism coming.”

“This is my favorite Bosch triptych,” said Kittie. “
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
. Saint Anthony's feelin' it. He looks just like Bosch. Yeroon is looking out at us and he's all, ‘Ain't this some waaaald shit?' Maybe he was tempted to imagine weird stuff all the time, but he was scared the visions came from the Evil One.”

“Do you guys have any kind of plan about how to fix the, ah, the missing gnarl?” interrupted Jil. While they'd been talking, Jil had been messing with her little plastic robots. “My shoons can't do much anymore.”

“I wonder if anyone besides Jayjay is spreading alien runes,” said Thuy, reluctantly getting back into crisis-management mode. Jayjay himself was in the kitchen, eating a turkey sandwich and drinking a bottle of beer, not a thought in his head. Thuy gave him a mental nudge.

“Maybe I should check with Gaia,” he said, reappearing on the patio.

“If you check with Gaia, you'll just take off on another pighead run,” sniped Jil.

“Don't you be riding him all the time,” said Thuy, mustering some anger. “You're a snotty priss-pot, Jil. You're just sour because Jayjay broke up with you to marry me. And then your husband left you. And now you're stuck with a geeky old man.”

“I'm the same age as Jil,” said Ond, emerging from the house with his thinning blond hair and sloping shoulders.

“Oh, hi Ond,” said Thuy awkwardly. “The aliens are invading and I'm freaking out.”

“I was doing a deep meditation about electricity,” said Ond. His phrase for taking a nap. “But now I'm teeping this apocalyptic scenario from you guys? An alien mind-master made Jayjay reprogram our matter? This is huge!”

“Ond will fix things now,” said Jil confidently. “You'll see. He's not like Jayjay, who's ruining the world as fast as he can.”

“Jil—” began Ond.

“Oh, Jil's right,” said Jayjay flopping despondently into a patio chair. “I shouldn't contact Gaia.”

“Jil's a bitch,” said Thuy before she could stop herself. “Sorry, Ond.”

“Don't curse at my mother,” said Bixie, as she and the three other kids reappeared, returning early from their surf outing.

“You grown-ups should be making plans,” scolded Mabel. “The surf is flat and everything's wrong. I teeped to find out what you're doing about it, and you're just picking on each other and talking about stupid old paintings? Why don't you call in the army and the air force?”

“That'd be square,” said Kittie wickedly. “I'd rather be dead than square.”

“What if things stay this way for good?” demanded Bixie. “I feel so—
ugh
. Like a shadow or a toon.”

“Maybe we're better off without gnarl,” said Chu, giving the girl a pointed look. “It hurts to feel.”

“You're all crazy!” wailed Mabel.

“Look, if nobody else will, I'm gonna contact Gaia myself,” said Thuy.

“Vintage pighead move,” muttered Jil.

“By the way, Jil, I'm sorry I called you a
BITCH
!” said Thuy, punching the final word. Deep down, she'd never really forgiven Jil for sleeping with Jayjay. No gnarl deficit was gonna erase that.

Jil started to get up from her seat, but Ond got in between them.