Hylozoic (35 page)

 

 

Floofy was skinnier and nimbler than the other Peng. She wore her feathers dyed purple and black. She pecked at the forest floor and at the redwood trunks, exclaiming over the grubs and ants. And then she walked forward, head bobbing on her
S
-curved neck, her teep communications allusive, outré, incomprehensible.

By way of greeting, she teeped Kakar an image of a jar of honey with an emerald dragonfly inside. The dragonfly's face looked like Kakar's.

Kakar ran toward Floofy, rhythmically twittering. He strutted back and forth, bucking his head and raking the ground with his muscular two-toed feet. With a quick tattoo of his beak, he embossed a little carving on a stone. Floofy watched with interest, her tail feathers slowly parting. Kakar crowed and leapt into the air; Floofy did the same. It was nice to see Kakar so happy. The lovebirds withdrew to the pool beneath the Bosch house for some serious billing and cooing.

“Well done!” Suller told Chu. “I'll bring in the Realtors now. I've been making plans with them.”

“I'm not going on any worldwide tour like you wanted Jayjay to do,” said Chu.

“Not a problem,” said Duckie Tarrington, materializing with her fellow Realtor, Chick Moon. “Now that anyone can be a runecaster, we'll train a special corps.” Duckie's plastic face creased in an optimized smile. “It's very nice to meet you,
Chu. I've heard so much about you.” Her earrings flashed with the motions of her head.

“Howdy,” said Chick, shaking Chu's hand. He was dressed like a rancher tycoon, in a powder-blue denim business suit with gray piping around the lapels. “That Peng minister, Dr. Donnie Macon, he says his followers are rarin' to dial down the gnarl. Trust the dumb-ass fundies to help aliens invade.” Chick let out a dry chuckle. “So how about this mumbo jumbo rune converter of yours, Chu—is it simple enough for a purple-assed baboon? Can you teach it to them Crownies?”

“We don't need to teach them all that,” crowed Suller. “We'll transform the pioneer runes ourselves and pass the viralized runes directly to our new agents. All they'll have to do is teek one rune onto one atom per Peng ranch. What a breakthrough!”

Chu felt increasingly uneasy.

“Hey, Kakar!” called Gretta. “Get off that hen and come out here.”

Kakar emerged from beneath the Bosch house, his tail feathers mussed. Floofy pranced after him, joking about hatching chicks. She teeped an image of a giant polka-dotted egg in a nest made of velvet-draped branches.

“Atta boy, Kakar!” said Suller. “Let's try our new system. Do you want to cast some viral runes for us, Chick?”

“Negatory,” said Chick, waving them off. “I'm only here for my five percent. I'll teep Dr. Donnie for your helpers—hey, Donnie! Send us those two Crownies we met in your parking lot—the guy with the gun and the girl with the tits.”

“Nasty, nasty mammals,” muttered Gretta.

An avid man and a young woman with a bad complexion appeared.

“Welcome, Steve and Julie from the Crown of Creation Church,” said Chick with a exaggerated bow. “You remember
me—good ole Chick Moon. This fella behind me is Chu Lutter-Lundquist, a likely screwball who's discovered a method for bringing in more Peng.”

Julie smiled, threw back her shoulders, and placed her hands on her hips, showing off her figure. “Hi, there.” She gave Chu a thoughtful look, as if she recognized him. “It's a blessing to be here.”

“These four raggedy-ass ostriches behind me are how the Peng look when they're not disguised,” Chick told Julie, enjoying himself. “They're just the same as your Donnie Macon. I hope your faith is strong enough to handle the truth.”

“Dr. Macon primed us for this revelation.” Gamely hanging on to her smile, Julie shot a nervous glance at the alien birds. “ ‘We have seen through a glass darkly, but now we see the holy ones face to face.' ”

“1 Corinthians 13:12,” put in Steve, supplying the scriptural reference. He was juggling his leather-bound Bible, seemingly oblivious to the fact that everyone could teep the pistol within its hollowed-out core.

“Bless you, my son,” said Suller, swallowing the Bible with two snaps of his beak. “Never fear, we've come to bring Earth into harmony with the precepts of your church. We'll put an end to people being smarter than they're meant to be. We'll chasten and humble the plants and stones. Man will be the measure of all things.”

“I can't abide a shoe or a chair acting like it's smarter than me,” allowed Steve.

“We're the answer to your prayers,” chirped Gretta.

“Golly!” said Julie, finally taking a moment to look around the clearing, dappled by the noontime sun. “What unusual homes.”

Chu watched as Kakar got to work teaching the viralized moth rune to the two newcomers—or trying to. Steve seemed
hopeless; maybe shoes really
were
smarter than him. But before long, Julie had the moth rune in her head.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” she asked.

“You teek it onto an atom,” said Kakar in his know-it-all tone.

“Are you
kidding
? I've never teeked anything at all. My faith teaches that lazy eight, teeking, and mind-amplification are wrong. And the Bible doesn't say anything at all about atoms. I'm not sure the Lord sanctions that particular theory.”

“Fine,” said Chu, feeling less and less eager to help Crownies spread Peng runes. “Who cares.”

“Coach the girl,” ordered Suller, aiming his beak at Chu. “And don't try to skulk off by teleporting. I can shoot faster than you can think.”

Chu frowned and took Julie aside. Meanwhile, Steve sat sullenly on the sidelines, watching a basketball game in his head.

“Do you
want
to be stupid?” Chu asked Julie.

Julie glared at him. “Papa says the old ways are the best.”

“But now you want to learn the new ways?” said Chu, not liking the inconsistency.

“Dr. Macon says it's my mission to bring in the Peng,” said Julie. “They'll keep objects from being uppity. I can feel the new godliness in Killeville, and in this grove.” Her round gray eyes studied Chu. “I know you're scoffing at me. Perhaps the Peng
are
aliens—but surely the Lord is using them as saints!”

“Forget your ‘Lord,' ” said Chu. “Worship Gaia. She's real. She wants us to bloom.”

“This guy's a complete heathen!” exclaimed Steve, who'd started eavesdropping. “I recognize him now. I saw him fornicating on the
Founders
show.”

“You watched that, Steve?” said Julie, a little flirtatiously. “
Oooo
.”

“You watched it, too, Julie,” said Chu, suddenly seeing this in her mind.

Julie blushed. “At least I'm not addicted to some alien drug,” she rapped out. “You need to let the Savior into your life, Chu. I have a feeling that the End Times are—”

“Get to work!” cawed Suller, blackening a spot on the ground next to them.

Chu showed Julie how to teek a rune onto an atom. It was strange to meet someone like this. Living in California, Chu had imagined that everyone else was advancing right along—but it seemed large parts of the country were stubbornly in the dark.

While Julie struggled to teek, Kakar was fiddling with his copy of Ouroboros, pulling it apart and reknotting it in strange birdy ways that initially seemed random and ineffectual. But then Chu realized that Kakar's underlying strategy was incredibly efficient. He was leveraging his redesign by drawing upon the full power of Pekka, his home planet's mind.

Leaving Julie on her own for a minute, Chu reached out to Gaia. Her round, green face wasn't far.

“I'm already working on it,” Gaia said before he could even start explaining. “I understand. If Kakar can make really good viral Peng runes, your race is doomed.” Her voice was like a softly gurgling fountain.

“I should have come to you sooner, Gaia,” said Chu, feeling a wash of relief. “Can you make a viral
reset rune
? Maybe you don't need to use an Ouroboros-style operator at all. Maybe that was a false path.”

“Pekka has the edge on me,” said Gaia. “Her birds are diligent and they honor their world. But my humans—my humans are stoners or loners. If I can't find this thing, it's your own fault.”

Just then Julie finally produced a tulpa moth, and Suller ate the results. “Well done, Julie!” exclaimed the big bird. “We'll bring in your friends, train them, and send you out. Onward Christian soldiers! Let the saints come marching in!”

“I say we convert New York City today,” proposed Duckie. “Plus L.A., Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. The sooner we take the power centers, the better.”

“Some fat real estate you're talking about,” gloated Chick. “No more nickel-and-diming with, like, Yost, Virginia.” He raised his voice again. “Whenever you're ready, Donnie!”

Four more Crown of Creation emissaries appeared, two men and two women, fresh-faced and eager to learn. Chu groaned inwardly at the thought of tutoring them. But just then he heard an odd squawk. Something was wrong with Floofy. Ghostly purple flames sprouted from her body, long lavender tongues stretched deep into the woods. Shit. The Peng rune error terms were amplifying even faster than expected. Those plumes were Taylor jets, the mathematical artifacts that appear when a Fourier series begins to diverge.

Floofy's squawk rose to a desperate screech—cut short when her neck pinched in two. For a moment her jet-wreathed head hung in midair, beak soundlessly twitching. Her legs turned translucent and shriveled away. Head and body dropped to the ground. Floofy was a flickering pile of feathers—and then she was nothing at all.

“Chu's fault!” shrilled Kakar. “His Ouroboros is no good! He knew it all along! But I can do better.”

With horror, Chu realized that Kakar had finalized his new version of the viralization operator, complete with built-in error correction. Kakar was calling it Ouroboros 2.0. And as for Gaia's search—she was getting nowhere.

Pushing into Kakar's mind, Chu tried to snarf a copy of the alien's wriggly new operator. The thing was a wild knot involving
a fractal regress of loops that were braids of loops that were braids of—never mind.

“You lose, Chu!” hooted Kakar, blocking off his teep before Chu could get more than a fragment of Ouroboros 2.0. “I rule!”

“Kill Chu!” cawed bloodthirsty Gretta, just like before.

 

 

Suller had claimed he could shoot faster than Chu could teleport—but he was wrong. In a flash, Chu was on the steps of the Santa Cruz beach house his family had rented. Towels dried on the porch railing, plastic furniture lay scattered around the sandy yard. It was early afternoon, warm and sunny. The whole gang was lolling on couches in the spacious living room, resting up from lunch.

Chu's mother, Nektar, was eating apricots with her girlfriend, Kittie. Bixie and Momotaro were talking to their surfboards, readying them for the Santa Cruz waves. Jil was fooling around with a shoon in the shape of a miniature Peng, trying to perfect its bobbing gait. Ond lay supine on a stuffed chintz sofa with his eyes closed.

Chu was ashamed to face them—but there was no place else to go. “So here I am,” he said, walking in.

“Where's Thuy?” said Momotaro, in a falsely bright tone.

“Don't you dare tease him,” cried Nektar. “After all he's been through. Poor Chu. Thank God you're safe, dear.”

Bixie gave him a penetrating stare, seemingly on the point of saying something—but then she dropped her gaze.

“I'm not staying for long,” said Chu quickly. “Hey, Dad? Did you see what I did with Ouroboros? I was trying to get the Peng to overplay their hand. But—”

“Type two error,” said Ond, not opening his eyes to look at Chu. He was still embarrassed about that sex scene. “I'm
monitoring the Yolla Bolly Peng ranch. Your Ouroboros idea was a clever approach, but it's backfiring horribly. Kakar is making viral runes with built-in error correction routines. It looks like they'll make for long-term tulpas. Julie just runecast a new Floofy for Kakar. Look at that bird dancing! Ha, ha. I kind of like him. He's your friend, isn't he, Chu? A true geek, just like us two.”