Hylozoic (8 page)

“This here's my girlfriend, Lovva,” the pitchfork told Jayjay.

Oh wow. It was the same harp that Jayjay had played when he'd unfurled the eighth dimension some hundred days ago. He recognized her by her teep vibes. But unlike before, the painting on her soundbox was intact. It showed a pair of lovers beside a little blue demon playing a serenade on a golden harp of his own. The woman looked slightly Asian, with a delicacy to her features and a certain arch to her eyes. With a shock, Jayjay realized it was an image of Thuy. And the guy with her, could that be him? Beautiful. It was like seeing the solemn goddess of time bend around to bite her own toenail.

“Groovy, I don't approve,” sang the harp. “I know what you're up to. You're planning to betray the Earth.”

“I'm lost is all, Lovva,” said the pitchfork, putting on an aggrieved tone. “It ain't my fault if I don't know where to find you.”

“I'm on the other brane, Groovy,” said Lovva. Ill-tempered though she was, her contralto voice rose and fell in smooth glissandos that set the pitchfork's tines to humming along. “I'm time-skimming. I already saw you there. You show up at the house of this painter who decorates me. I think his name is Hieronymus Bosch. Eventually I'm going to play the Lost Chord there. Apparently the harpist will be that young man who's with you right now.”

For just a moment Jayjay felt like he could understand how and why the Hibrane Bosch had ended up in the woods by his cottage. But then the gears of logic dissolved into the milky glow of pleasure that was filling him here.

“This is our boy Jay,” said the pitchfork. “I'll send him over to the Hibrane directly. He already met you on the Lobrane,
so he's good to go. I called you here so's you could remind me where to send him. Also I felt like givin' you a nice funky strum.”

“You're so crude,” said the harp irritably.

“
You
the one who got lost. Needle in a frikkin' haystack.”

“Don't always criticize me!” The harp's tone rose in a sharp crescendo. This was like listening to a married couple bickering—a spaced-out married couple who continually forgot what they were talking about. Speaking of spaced-out, Jayjay felt exceedingly high from the long rush of his ten tridecillion-leaf climb. None of this seemed serious, especially not the clownish pitchfork.

“Aw, I don't mean nothing,” Groovy was telling the harp, leaning forward to give her strings a gentle flick. “Long as I can hear you, I'm happy.”

“Sweet,” said Lovva, dropping her ill humor and enjoying her mate's caresses. She sang a sweeping arpeggio. Looking down, Jayjay let his eye do a zedhead speed-up of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 saccades, traversing the Art Zed beanstalk from the bottom to the leaf upon which he'd fetched up, not that he bothered to make note of the precise path. What mattered was that he was ten tridecillion levels down into the subdimensions. Forty-three zeroes. Far out.

“You on the beam now,” said the pitchfork, watching his mind. “Eventually you'll get fully aktualized and hang with Art Zed. You'll end up coming to our world to help aktualize Lovva and me. It's all looped around.”

Once again, Jayjay had the fleeting feeling of understanding the whole time-tangled pattern. “Will I remember this?” he asked.

“Some of it,” said the pitchfork. “A little at a time. Okay, now, here comes our next mystery guest.”

“Groovy, don't!” said the harp.

The pitchfork ignored her, setting himself to buzzing again. He was using his vibrations to make something. He was creating a physical object, one atom at a time—it was an ostrichlike bird, quite large, not yet brought to life. She lay limp as a butchered goose upon the leaf. But now an external burst of teep signals pulsed into her, whizzing down the lazy eight axis from infinity. The bird squawked, got to her feet, and raised her head. She was easily eight feet tall. Disturbingly, she had no eyes.

“Woe,” sang the harp like a tragic chorus. “He's made a physical body for Pekka of Pengö to control! This creature will serve as Pekka's Earth-based agent.”

“There's one of these things in the royal caves back home,” said Groovy. “It's called a Pekklet.”

The oversized bird came high-stepping across the leaf, her clawed toes sinking in with each stride. Her fuzzy, eyeless head swiveled, as if studying Jayjay via impalpable rays. Groovy twanged his tines in Jayjay's direction, and a reckless wave of enthusiasm swept over him.

“Yoo-hoo,” yelled the besotted Jayjay, as if he had nothing to be afraid of. “Yoo-hoo!”

He drew out that last
oo
, putting some teep into it, throwing in a zedhead image of himself reflected ten tridecillion times in a pair of mirrors, making a different silly face in each reflection.

“Oh, yeah,” said the pitchfork. “You do that gooood. You got her interested in you.”

“Run, Jayjay!” shrilled the harp. “Pekka's the planetary mind of a world of ruthless colonizers.”

But the warning was too late. Pekka's agent was already standing over him, probing his mind, her will unpleasantly strong, her two-toed claws deadly. She smelled musty. With a
darting motion of her snakelike neck, she plucked off Jayjay's sweat-stained shirt; with wet gasp, she swallowed it whole, working the bolus down her long neck.

The alien being let out a series of low, sweet clucks. Dandelion fuzz sprouted from her head, growing fine tendrils that settled onto Jayjay and sank into his flesh. He had the distinct sense of hooks taking hold.

“You under her wing now, Jay,” said the pitchfork, as if in sorrow. “Pekka's agent is knotting into you. Entangling your particle strings.”

“You deliberately set him up!” repeated Lovva. “You're selling out his world! I knew this was coming, but I can hardly believe it. You're terrible, Groovy.”

“I want me some glory,” muttered the pitchfork. “Pekka promised that she'll have them Earthlings puttin' up statues of me.”

“As if!” raged the harp. “A parasite like Pekka isn't going to keep her word.”

“You think?” said the pitchfork, actually surprised. His voice took on a rare note of self doubt. “Wonder if I goofed.”

“You are such a dumb hick.”

“We know that Jayjay and his gang are gonna win out,” said the pitchfork, regaining his cockiness. “Otherwise we wouldn't have seen them in our world. There's no harm in letting Pekka's birds take a shot. Everything's gonna come out in the wash.”

“Maybe so,” said Lovva. “Because I knew this was coming, I already teeped Glee. She became a Hrull pusher after we left, you know. She and her host Hrull are probably in the Lobrane already, relative to Jayjay's time.” She studied him, reading his mind. “Yes, he saw the Hrull this morning. That's good. They can teach him about the reset rune.” She heaved a tinkling sigh. “There's so much still to do before we go home and smash the aristos. And that's the only part I really care about.”

“Worryin' don't help,” said the pitchfork. “This tune's playin' itself.”

And with that, the two of them dove off the edge of the leaf and disappeared, heading in opposite directions, leaving Jayjay to face the music.

His euphoria was gone, and his confusion was rising. He didn't really understand what Pekka was, nor what it meant for this Pekklet creature to be her agent.

 

 

The mental contact from the Pekklet was itchy, squawky, raw. Thanks to all the particle strings she'd knotted into Jayjay, she had an unbreakable connection to him—stronger than mere teep. The distant planetary mind behind the Pekklet was avidly pleased to have forged an unbreakable link with a humanoid from a lazy eight world. She had huge development plans.

Aching with regret, Jayjay backed away from the Pekklet, wanting to climb down the stalk. The giant bird followed his moves as if he were a juicy beetle. She chirped blindly at him, an almost cozy sound. Jayjay's sense of connection to her was physically palpable.

To draw the link yet tighter, the ungainly fowl began reshaping herself, tucking in a bit here, growing out a lump there—until she'd taken on the form of a statuesque woman, all curves and hollows, with ruffs of fancy feathers, but again with no eyes upon her blank face. The slinky shape embraced Jayjay, cooing words of love.

An exquisite sensation of erotic pleasure filled Jayjay's mind. And in that moment of sensual bliss, he agreed to do whatever the Pekklet wanted.

With a flap of her arms, the Pekklet flipped Jayjay off the edge of the leaf. He tumbled downward like a doomed giant,
rushing past the vast tangles of the vines; he thudded onto the Subdee desert, and oozed through to his cabin floor. And now he was lying in the living room like before—but with the Pekklet controlling his mind.

His mouth dropped open and he made a tuneless hum. His penis was throbbing. An astronomical flow of information rushed through him and into the teeming night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H
aving
to fetch Jayjay from the stream bank to the house was annoying and depressing for Thuy. Some honeymoon. Once asleep, she dreamed of Jayjay as a zombie, a spider, a radioactive computer chip.

Just before dawn she woke, her mouth dry, her head pounding from the champagne. She sat upright in the lonely bed, listening. Raccoons clattered in the moonlit clearing, cleaning up the dinner's debris. The trees sighed; the stream burbled. But there was no sound of Jayjay's breathing in the living room, and when she teeped out for him, he wasn't there anymore.

She got a glass of water from the kitchen sink, surveying the empty room. The air was cool and calm. Jayjay must have gone back out soon after she'd walked him in. God
damn
him. Didn't he care about her at all? Was their marriage doomed?

If she wasn't careful, she was going to cry. To hell with that. She drank her water, peed, and went back to the bedroom. Just before she turned the light out, she noticed something outside her window: a forked branch leaning against the glass as if peeking in at her. Thuy teeped the thing, but got little reaction. Just a stick.

Suddenly she heard a noise. Running into the living room, she saw something small squirming on the floor. It was growing larger, like dough rising through a crack—oh my God, it was Jayjay! And then he was present again, sprawled on the floor, shirtless, shivering all over, with his eyes squeezed tight shut. He bucked his hips as if dreaming of sex. Thuy poked him, checking that he was real. It was so weird, the way he'd puffed up out of the floor. Had she really seen that? She couldn't seem to wake him. Never mind. At least he was here. Thuy buried herself under her covers and got a few more hours of sleep.

It was Sonic who woke her, wandering in from outside to blunder around the kitchen. He was rummaging for coffee, with his little Edgar shoon dogging his steps. Somewhere in the distance, harsh-voiced birds squawked.

“We're not moved in yet!” Thuy called to Sonic from her bed. “Nothing here for you. Go scavenge outside, bum.” She felt strange—it was as if the subliminal hum of the atoms in her body had changed pitch.

“Tried that already,” said Sonic. “The animals ate the leftovers, so I came inside for a hands-on food search. What a night. I shouldn't have slept so close to the stream. I feel like an old man. Look at our boy Jayjay. On the nod. Receiving truth. At one with the—”

“Oh, shut up,” snapped Thuy, pulling on her T-shirt and tights. “You're a creep to have gotten him so high.” She marched into the living room. “It was supposed to be our big romantic honeymoon night and now—oh God, look at that
stain—I think he came in his pants while he was tripping. Prince Charming.”

“I didn't get him high, Thuy. He did it himself. You've been around the block a few times,
chica
. You know how it works.”