Hylozoic (3 page)

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 farther 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. 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 there 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 nearly time for the giant blast of telekinesis needed to fetch the rest of the stones. But, wait, Jayjay's body was talking to him, asking for food. 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 got to work, 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 starting 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 almost 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. 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 thousandfold 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 dam—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 as hard as stone.

“Let's teleport our love nest now!” exclaimed Thuy. “We've still got an hour till sunset.”

“It'll definitely take a dozen of us to move so much mass at once,” said Jayjay. “And it'll work best if we're all pushing from the same spot. What if we gather in Ond's driveway, right where we assembled the house. You, me, Ond, Jil, Bixie, Momotaro, Nektar, Kittie, Chu, Darlene, Craigor, and Sonic. You want to help round them up?”

“
You
round up Sonic,” said Thuy. “He'll be spaced as usual, you'll have to go there in person. For the others, it'll be enough to teep them. Meanwhile, I'll get my dad. He wants to help—even though my mother's against it.”

Thuy's voice always got tight and high when she talked about her mother. The two of them had never gotten along well, and now that Minh had been crippled by a stroke, things were even worse.

“It's like Mom thinks you're still the same bad boy you were in high school,” Thuy continued. “I can't forgive her for not coming to our little ceremony at city hall. It would have been the one last nice thing we could have done together. And now she lies there dissing you and pissing the bed. I'm terrible not to feel sorry for her.”

“Don't beat yourself up,” said Jayjay with a shrug. “
My
mother showed up at our wedding stoned, cried her head off, and asked for money. Whatever. Life is about moving on. You and me, Thuy, we're the only family that matters now.”

“Daddy will be heartbroken if I leave him out tonight. He gets so sad and lonely staying home nursing Mom all the time. And she's always such a—”

“So go get your father already,” interrupted Jayjay. “And, look Thuy, be patient with your mother today. Even if you don't want to do it for her—do it for you. You'll feel better about yourself.”

“You're nice to give me good advice,” said Thuy, hugging Jayjay's arm. “I'm glad to have someone who cares about my daily drama.”

“I'm lucky to have you,” said Jayjay, embracing her. “You make life worth living.”

“We're married, Jayjay, we're really married. Do you feel old?”