Hylozoic (13 page)

Chu looked at Bixie as if he'd like to say something tender but he couldn't spit it out.

And then the three of them were in the clearing in front of Thuy and Jayjay's cabin. Although it was almost noon, the air was clouded by a sullen mist rising up from the sodden forest floor. The branches of the redwoods rocked monotonously in the steady breeze. The stream's flow was utterly free of turbulence, the water's surface a regular pattern of glassy bumps.

“It's even deader than before,” said Thuy. Her hands hung dangling at her side. The San Francisco infection was wearing off from her atoms, but she felt no joy.

Their little house looked cheap and dull, and the silp that animated the house was dumb and slow. How silly she'd been to be so excited about her honeymoon.

The harsh bird cries sounded again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
tanding
in the clearing with the newlyweds, Chu felt hollow and distracted. He couldn't stop thinking about Bixie.

This morning in the ocean he'd reached out to touch her sweet face, and then he'd leaned forward to graze her downy cheek. She'd frowned and shoved him away. Why didn't Bixie like him? He'd been working so hard to heal his brain and change his demeanor. He was learning about empathy. He was more sociable than before. It was wrong to treat him like an unfeeling zombie. He heaved a wistful sigh.

Three nasty-smelling man-sized birds stalked into the woodsy clearing, moving with an urgent, stealthy gait, now and then hopping a few feet into the air and flapping their stubby wings.

They resembled grubby ostriches or rheas: long-necked dirty
brown mops on scaly stilts, anything but cute. The downward curve of their blunt beaks lent them a sour demeanor. They pecked bugs from the ground, squawking to each other as they came.

“Stop right there,” Thuy called to the unsavory birds. “Where are you from?”

The biggest one cawed his harsh response, sending along a telepathic signal that made the sounds into words.

“We are Peng from planet Pengö. I am Suller, with my ill-tempered wife Gretta and our no-good son Kakar.”

“Why do you insult us in front of the new slaves?” squawked Gretta, aiming a sharp peck at her husband's feathered body.

“We're invading your planet,” volunteered Kakar. “I think that's cool. I want to watch you mate.” Chu almost smiled at this. He liked rude kids.

“Are we supposed to shoot them?” he asked Thuy, teeping her on a private channel.

“Me first,” said Thuy, who'd just made a snap decision not to negotiate. “You hang back, Chu. You've got your whole life ahead of you.”

Holding her crystal-and-wire klusper in both hands, Thuy hit the alien fowl with brilliant yellow femtorays: first Suller, then Kakar, then Gretta.

Their striped brown feathers puffed into flame like oily rags; their legs collapsed, their flesh hissed and crackled, giving off the stench of burnt hair. As the inferno consumed the Peng, they threw back their heads in ecstasies of pain, shattering the air with spasmodic shrieks. Poor Kakar.

Chu noticed that the fire had set some of the low-hanging redwood limbs alight as well. The low-gnarl flames were shaped like symmetrical triangles.

Other than the slow crackling in the branches, all was still. The Peng smoke drifted away. But then—with a brief staticky
flicker, the aliens were back in the clearing, as solid and stinky as before. Kakar pecked up a banana slug; Gretta fluffed out her mangy mop.

“Not nice,” said Suller, strutting toward Thuy. “You need to learn some manners, my furry female friend. How about if I—”

Jayjay powered on the gobble gun. With a throaty whoosh, the tube punched a narrow round hole through the forest, a cylinder of devastation half a meter across and several hundred meters long. The pulped debris was being vacuumed into the gobble gun's tube, and a thick black coil of condensed matter oozed like excrement from the striped barrel's rear.

Already four or five redwoods across the stream had begun hugely to fall, the weakened trunks giving way with fusillades of sharp pops. Chu noted that the redwood silps were intrigued rather than upset. In their view, being a fungus-coated log was as interesting as being a leafy tree.

Jayjay twitched the big tube with precise motions, his face clenched in concentration, working to eliminate every particle of the aliens without doing excessive damage to the woods. Chu was impressed by his poise. Once the gawky birds were wholly gone, Jayjay aimed the gobble gun upward to prune away the branches that Thuy had set alight. And then he switched it off.

Grew was saved, but in the distance other trees continued falling for a minute or two. Each splintering collapse seemed to set off another. Chu put himself into a hyperalert state, poised to teleport out of there in case the Peng retaliated.

As the crashing subsided, the air twinkled again and—the aliens recongealed yet again, firm and solid as ever. Their mood was calmly triumphant.

Deeply intrigued, Chu teeped into Thuy and Jayjay's minds, fishing for info about tulpas. Back on Ond's patio, he'd been preoccupied by his monitoring of Bixie's mood.

In short, the Peng were like holograms, but made of matter instead of light. The local atoms were skimping on the complexity of their physical interactions, and channeling their quantum computations into generating the Peng. The atoms were producing matter waves whose mutual interference patterns were solid Peng tulpas.

Teeping down into the atoms around him, Chu visualized the process in mathematical terms. He'd soaked up a ton of math in the last few years—he loved the stuff. He was seeing a Peng tulpa as being the sum of a Fourier series, like a chorus of sine waves piling up to form a spiky squiggle. As long as the local atoms kept pumping out the matter waves, the Fourier sum kept coming back. The computations generating these three grotty birds were distributed across the whole forest. It was going to be very hard indeed to rub them out.

Quietly, Chu stashed his stonker in his pants pocket. The gun was begging him to fire it, but there was no use. Meanwhile, Suller darted forward and whacked Jayjay's gobble gun with his beak, knocking the tube to the ground. Gretta did the same thing to Thuy's klusper. But,
whew
, that was the extent of the Peng payback.

As casually as ducks eating gingerbread, the two fowl pecked the guns apart and swallowed the pieces, raising their beaks high to work down the larger chunks. Meanwhile Kakar devoured the entire coiled worm of crushed matter that had emerged from the gobble gun's rear. The Peng tulpas were truly omnivorous, capable of eating anything at all. And their matter-hologram beaks were forceful as wrecking bars.

A pair of bluejays peered down from the upper branches of Grew. Kwaawk and his mate. The jays scolded and cawed, teeping their distrust of the alien birds. The tree was unhappy, too, complaining about how stiff and stereotyped her motions had
become. The local silps resented the mangy alien birds for siphoning off the richness of their inner lives.

“How did your world's furry beasts end up bigger than the feathered ones?” wondered Gretta, twitchily looking from the bluejays to the humans and back. Her teep voice came across as shrill and penetrating. “Your natural order is cockeyed. I suppose that humans evolved from rodents? Nasty, scuttling things. In primitive times, rats ate our eggs.”

“We're descended from apes,” said Thuy sullenly. “Not rats.”

“Apes, rats—it's all the same,” said Gretta airily. She had a fey mannerism of abruptly darting her head. “On Pengö, there's nothing but birds, fish, worms, and insects. Our ancestors eliminated the pesky furries many millennia ago. I suppose we'll do the same thing here.”

“Have you always had telepathy?” asked Thuy, forcing a semblance of a smile.

Closely watching her, and managing to grasp that she was worried inside, Chu felt a sudden desire to bring a true smile to Thuy's lips. Thus was born his new crush, the second of his life. Jayjay didn't notice, he was turned inward, trying to figure out how to undo the atomic changes he'd helped bring about.

“At the dawn of history, a squealing bag visited us,” said Gretta in answer to Thuy's question. “A noise-sack from a different reality. The flying bag's sacred squawks unfurled our eighth dimension. All of our objects awoke, and we came to know Pekka, the mind of our planet. Pekka is a bit like your piggish Gaia, I suppose.” Gretta arched her neck, looking around the grove. “It's interesting to be on a primitive planet where lazy eight is new.”

“Your planetary mind—Pekka,” probed Thuy. “She's the
one who sent you? I heard she has a local agent here—hidden in the subdimensions? She looks like you, but bigger and with no eyes?”

“That would be the Pekklet, yes.” Gretta clacked her beak, snapped up a beetle, and returned to the topic of her home world's glorious history. “The flying noise-bag was our first miracle, and the second great miracle was when Waheer and Pekka learned to project Peng souls as runes. Thanks to Waheer's daring and to Pekka's divine wisdom, the adventurous among us can travel to teeker worlds and wear the bodies that you call tulpas.” Gretta clucked and flapped her stubby wings. “Tulpa, tulpa, tulpa.”

“I can see that we have a lot to learn from you!” said Thuy in her sweetest tone. “I'm terribly sorry about the misunderstanding with the guns.”

Chu admired Thuy's effrontery, physically expressed in the insolent curve of her neck. The only misunderstanding about the guns was that Thuy had thought they might work.

Of course, Thuy was a twenty-seven-year-old married woman—and Chu was only fourteen. But she was surprisingly attractive to him, not that he could imagine actually trying anything with a woman that age. But . . . maybe? He loved her high pigtails. And she didn't get all upset if you happened to stare, not even if you looked under her clothes. Not like Bixie.

Suller had begun berating Jayjay. “At first I was going to thank you for casting the pioneer runes that brought us here,” rasped the big bird. Overlaid by telepathy, Suller's harsh caws reminded Chu of Mr. Big, the head gangster in a video game,
Gross Polluter
, that he'd played as a kid. “I'm prepared to cut you in on a very sweet cash deal,” continued Suller. “But—instead of saying hello, you and your wife try to murder us? What kind of garbage is that? It's lucky that you're our runecaster. Otherwise—” Suller darted his head forward like
a woodpecker, bringing the tip of his diamond-hard beak to within a millimeter of Jayjay's forehead.

Reading others' emotions had never been Chu's strong point, but Suller was particularly opaque, what with his alien mind and his glassy bird eyes. It was hard to tell if he was angry right now, or if he was just practicing for being angry later.

As for Jayjay, he barely even flinched, so intent was he upon the problem of how to undo the runes that he'd cast into the atoms of the Yolla Bolly woods.

Thuy laid a gentle hand on Suller's subtly banded brown feathers, soothing him with her calm, reasonable tone. “How is it that Jayjay became your runecaster? What makes him so special?”

“He's a zedhead. He can carry out ten tridecillion atomic tweaks in a couple of seconds. And, best of all, he got snared by Pekka's agent.”

Gretta got in on the conversation, her teep signal shrill and gloating. “Jayjay saw Pekka's agent and he yelled, ‘Yoo-hoo!' ” She jiggled her head and let out a trill of mocking laughter. “The Pekklet hooked Jayjay—
zack
. Whenever Pekka needs him, he's there. Our pet runecaster. We're here to civilize another ratty teeker world.”

Suller studied Jayjay. “You've made a good start, I'll grant you that. You cast the rune for my family here in Yolla Bolly, and you cast the rune for Blotz's family in, uh, San Francisco. Wish you'd checked with me on that one, Jayjay. I didn't want Blotz and his family to end up so far away.”

“Blotz!” exclaimed Gretta. “You didn't tell me they were coming, Suller!”

Chu teeped back to his father in San Francisco to check that Ond was hearing all this. Ond was sitting by the window in a darkened room of their house. “Keep your distance from
Suller,” advised Ond. “And guess what—those San Francisco aliens Suller is talking about? They're in our backyard.”

Ond directed Chu's attention to the patio of their Dolores Heights mansion. A trio of gawky birds were out there talking to Jil and Kittie. The birds were pecking up some bread and oranges that Jil had set out for them, now and then pausing to admire the view. “Their names are Blotz, Noora, and Pookie,” continued Ond. “A father, mother, daughter trio. They came to our house because they're looking for Jayjay. He's supposed to help them do something.”

“The guns don't work against them,” Chu told his father.