Hylozoic (7 page)

 

 

 

T
he
last guests stood around drinking and talking for a while, the trees whispering overhead, the full moon climbing into the sky, the brook babbling away. The party was down to the hard core: Sonic, Jayjay, Thuy, Craigor, and Darlene.

Thuy's hair was in messy pigtails, with stray wisps projecting on all sides. Lit by the moonlight, she looked inhumanly beautiful to Jayjay. He would have liked to get her into bed, but she was still talking about metanovels with Darlene. Craigor was passing around his bong.

Bored and bone-weary, Jayjay decided to slip away for the real high. He and Sonic made their way to the border of the moon-silvered stream and sat on the flat rock together, Sonic sipping at a bottle of champagne he'd brought along.

“Give us this day our daily rush,” said Sonic. “On the nod as thou art in heaven. Ready?”

“Hold on,” said Jayjay. It had been a while since he'd gone really deep into Gaia. He'd been a good boy. “I need to get myself together.”

“So meanwhile let's game these swirls,” said Sonic, looking down at the stream. For Sonic, all of reality was a video game. “We'll get into a linked pair of eddies and see how far we can make them go. Like a pair of backs running for a touchdown.”

They played with the vortices for a while, Gloob joining in, subtly warping his flows to raise the level of the game. But then all of a sudden Gloob focused his turbulence on a particular spot by the opposite bank.

“Outsider!” teeped the stream silp. “Danger!”

As part of his ongoing telepathic connection with the hylozoic world, Jayjay had a low-level awareness of the wriggling and scuttling of the insects, protozoa, and bacteria in the damp mulch of vegetation along the stream's banks. Something was changing.

A tiny, horned creature—invisible only moments ago—was rapidly increasing his size, growing upward from a clump of moss. Writhing and settling into his new shape, this strange apparition on the dark bank became—how odd—a two-tined pitchfork balancing on his butt end. The pitchfork glowed a dusky shade of red.

The pitchfork's handle—or leg—flexed, and his two prongs vibrated, sending out a high, singing buzz that articulated into speech—a male hillbilly voice. “Jayjay,” twanged the pitchfork. “Git high. I'll take you on the magic beanstalk. My name's Groovy.”

The pitchfork gave off a strangely flavored teep signal that echoed his spoken words with an emotive sense he was offering
something quite wonderful. “I can lead you clear to infinity.”

“The silp in that weird forked stick is talking out loud!” exclaimed Sonic, who'd finished off the champagne. “That's not right, kiq. I say we throw the stick in the fire. See what he says then.”

With an abrupt series of thumps the pitchfork hopped upstream, crashing through the underbrush. And then all was silent. The curious being had merged into the forest gloom, impossible to teep.

“He was a talking pitchfork named Groovy,” said Jayjay. “Not a stick.”

“Country cowfreak,” said Sonic, giggling. “He told us to get high.”

“Let's do that,” said Jayjay. “Never mind the rest of it.” Everything was too frikkin' weird today. Flying stingrays, a giant medieval painter, and now a talking pitchfork? He needed an out.

Jayjay and Sonic lay down, joined their minds, and spiraled up toward the piglike blue face of Gaia's interface.

“Hi, boys,” said Gaia as they sank into her ultramarine funnels. “Ready for a really good time?”

The boys swooped and sang, savoring the sensual feel of raw thought—as enhanced by Gaian mind-tendrils.

Now and then Jayjay felt something pricking at him—prongs? Surely that weird pitchfork wasn't standing over him beside the stream? He didn't have the will to leave his trance and find out for sure. If anything, the pitchfork's prods were nudging him deeper.

At some point during the night's long, chaotic journey, Jayjay felt Thuy shaking him and walking him to their now pitiful-seeming honeymoon cabin. Waggish Gaia displayed a relevant
archetype: The Groom Drunk on His Wedding Night. Not that Jayjay was truly drunk. In principle, he could snap out of his Gaia trip and be with Thuy right now.

But he didn't. That was the addiction thing at work. Once Jayjay got going on a run like this, he found it nearly impossible to stop. He collapsed onto the living room floor and lay motionless, knowing full well there'd be a stiff price to pay. But it was still night. Hours to go. And the flow of time was so deliciously slow. The Groom Drunk on His Wedding Night—what a hoot, what a blast.

“You're horrible,” said Thuy, and went to bed.

Although Sonic was still lying on the rock by the stream, his virtual form hung nearby like a basking whale. “Yo,” he called to Jayjay. “Let's go farther. Farther than anyone's ever been. Maybe all the weird critters we saw today are aliens. Maybe we can contact another lazy eight planet.”

“Yaar.”

Jayjay and Sonic labored in the unseen world, piling idea upon idea, energy upon energy, working their way high above the surface of the cartoony pig-eared icon that was Mother Earth. But they weren't getting all that far.

“Yee-haw!” hollered a voice. Groovy, the pitchfork, was in the mind space with them. Very aggressive with his tines, he pried at the base of their junk-pile observatory, toppling it to one side. Jayjay fell at some impossible angle, plunged through the very fabric of space—and slid toward wakefulness.

 

 

He was alone, lying on his back, hearing the wind in the trees. Or, no, that sounded more like shifting sand. Or like a cyclone? In any case, it was way past time to get in bed with Thuy. He stood up and opened his eyes.

He wasn't in his living room. He was in a—desert? For a moment he had a sense that he was standing upside down—like a fly on a ceiling. But that impression faded away. He was in a surrealist desert landscape of hazy pastels. The dry ochre ground bore elegant washboards of ripples from the steady wind. Swirls of lavender sand drifted overhead, with a bright, chalky spot betokening the presence of a white light somewhere far overhead.

Cactuslike plants were scattered across the parched plain, slowly moving his way, their roots like stealthy tentacles. Jayjay recalled Thuy's tale of her journey into the subdimensions—for this was surely where he now found himself. Thuy said the thorny plantlike subbies liked nothing better than to devour a traveler's flesh.

Jayjay looked at his hands and slowly flexed them. Every detail in place. He was really and truly awake—but in a nightmare world. He pawed the gritty air like a blind man, not quite believing that his cozy honeymoon cabin was gone. What had he done to deserve this?

“Let's climb a vine,” said Groovy, suddenly at his side. The curious figure buzzed some mumbo jumbo and poked the ground with his tines. At that instant, a giant beanstalk appeared, so rapidly that it was hard to be sure if it had grown up from the ground or down from the sky. Be that as it may, it was solidly real, its stalk endlessly branching, and all of the branches draped with rustling heart-shaped leaves. The menacing subbies halted their approach and even began to drop back.

“Just come on and climb a ways along this beanstalk, son,” said the garrulous pitchfork, thumping the heavy vine. “The stalk is a friend of mine, a native aktual name of Art Zed. Nothin' to be afraid of. You'll pick up some powers and you'll meet a couple of folks. Won't take long. And then you'll be back home with the frau.”

Jayjay gazed at the gently swaying vine. It gave off a pleasant, musical hum. It stretched to infinity, an endless maze of branching paths. He'd wanted to get high, hadn't he? “All right,” he said. “Let's go.”

His hands and feet found ready purchase on the stalk; he climbed upward with ease. Groovy bucked along behind him like a caterpillar. Soon they'd reached the first fork.

“Right or left?” asked Jayjay.

“Listen to the beanstalk,” said Groovy. “Follow his song.”

The music seemed a bit louder to the right, a bit sweeter, so that's the branch that Jayjay took.

“Atta boy,” called the pitchfork, close behind him. “And keep doubling your pace. Do it like a Zeno speed-up.”

With the coming of lazy eight, scientists had begun discussing a theoretical trick for covering the endless axis of eighth dimensional memory in a finite amount of time—they called it a Zeno speed-up. In principle, you could search the first gigabyte of your lazy eight memory in a second, the next gigabyte in half a second, the next in a quarter of a second—and at the end of two seconds, you'd have searched your whole infinite spike of eighth dimensional memory, winnowing through alef-null gigabytes,
alef-null
being the mathematicians' word for the first level of infinity.

But in practice, each step of a search took a certain amount of energy, and there seemed to be fundamental limits to the speed at which you could do things. Normal people couldn't actually carry out Zeno speed-ups with their minds, let alone with their bodies. The nimblest human thought processes usually pooped out around ten octillion steps.

But right now, on this leafy beanstalk, a Zeno speed-up seemed physically possible. Jayjay was reaching each successive forking twice as quickly. Right, left, left, right, right, right,
left, right . . . The beanstalk's sweet music was guiding him, and it was feeding him a strange, wonderful energy as well.

The farther he went, the bigger the leaves became. Or maybe he was shrinking? They were the size of houses, the size of stadiums, flipping past in a blur. Limbs working mechanically, following the song, not paying much attention to which forkings he took, Jayjay chanced a glance down toward the Subdee desert below. The flat expanse shimmered like a sheet of glass, and for an instant he could glimpse the contours of his cozy living room on the other side. If he turned his viewpoint upside down, it was as if he were crawling down a lacy root system, and peering up through his cabin floor.

Meanwhile the music of the beanstalk had segued into a voice, a man's murmur, so very similar to Jayjay's internal monologue that at first he mistook it for his own thoughts. But these weren't the kinds of thoughts he normally had.

“I'm a transfinite being,” the vine was saying. “We call ourselves aktuals. I live in Alefville. Each of our tree branches has an endless number of jiggles. My apartment building has alef-one floors, and the town has alef-two streets. My full name is—”

An intense, skritchy sound filled Jayjay's ears. It was like hearing someone handwrite an endlessly long phrase in a fraction of a second. But, regarded in another way, it was really just a pair of syllables, a simple name that Jayjay could very easily say, a name which, come to think of it, the pitchfork had mentioned before.

“Art Zed?” said Jayjay.

“Yes. Before too long, you'll be visiting Alefville.”

“Wow.”

The pitchfork seized on Jayjay's moment of dreamy wonder to give him a cartoon poke in the butt—
yow
! He lost hold of the vine and skidded onto a heart-shaped leaf as big as a town.

“Hey, Jay,” said the pitchfork. He bounced along on the viridian surface, coming to a stop, balancing on the butt of his handle. “This is far enough for today. Ten tridecillion branchings. You done good. I saw you drinking in that subdimensional glow off Art Zed. You slick, boy, you a, a—call it a zedhead.”

Teeping down into his body, Jayjay did indeed sense something different. Even if he hadn't made it to the top of the beanstalk, the beanstalk's voice had done something to him. His thoughts were finer and more rapid than before. He felt great, euphoric. “Zedhead?” he echoed, laughing.

“Yeah, Jay. It means you can think longer and faster than other humans. You gonna be able to reprogram a hundred kilometers of atoms if you feel like it. Meanwhile I got some folks for you to meet. One of 'em is an old friend of yours. And the other one's gonna get you hot.”

Jayjay had no idea what he was doing here, so far from home, and he didn't really trust the pitchfork. But he was feeling such well-being that it seemed like a beautiful dream. There was no rush to leave here, no rush at all.

Stray tendrils and flowers from the beanstalk drooped down over the leaf, making a space like a festooned ballroom, quite empty.

“They're comin' real soon,” said the pitchfork. He rose up to his full height and set his tines to vibrating. Something like teep signals were beaming out from him—and immediately disappearing into another dimension. He was sending signals to the Hibrane.

Beside a fragrant bean blossom a gleaming line appeared and unfolded at impossible angles to form—a tidy harp.

“Oh, why did you make me do this stupid extra jump over here, Groovy?” She seemed fretful and disoriented. “I still have to unfurl lazy eight on the Lobrane and the Hibrane.
Well, I guess for this boy, what's his name, that's already happened, but, me, I'm just starting on my big time loop.”