Hylozoic (10 page)

 

She bid her father and aunt good-bye, then hopped to Ond's. Jil and Ond were in their kitchen having breakfast. Thuy got some coffee from them, and joined Jayjay, who was sitting on the patio.
The tree shadows were lively and complex. And the cream in the San Francisco coffee swirled the way it was supposed to.

By now Thuy's emotions were fully up to speed again. That stain on Jayjay's pants was really bugging her. Her anger budded and bloomed.

“The reason you're an addict is that you're scared of emotions,” she told him, drawing him aside. “Every time you're about to feel something, you want to run away.”

“Oh give me a break,” snapped Jayjay. “I worked my butt off yesterday. Moving the house, grilling the food, and putting up with your crazy parents. They're the reason you're so uptight.”

“Oh, now you're making remarks about my family? My father is a wonderful man.”

“So move back in with him,” said Jayjay, faking a nonchalant tone. But Thuy could teep the sadness and self-doubt in his mind. Her volatile emotions flip-flopped, and suddenly she threw her arms around him.

“Oh, Jayjay, I do love you. It's just talk. I get carried away. We can work things out, can't we?”

“I hope so, Thuy. You're all I want in this world.”

“Let's have fun surfing today. I'm glad you came.”

“You and me,” said Jayjay. “Let's go online and find some boards and wetsuits.”

Thuy and Jayjay tuned out of the visual world and into the mindweb. They drifted upward into the virtual sky, seeing the city as a grid of glowing personalities.

“Hey,” called Thuy to the world at large. “It's Thuy and Jayjay from
Founders
. We need to borrow surfboards and wetsuits for today.”

With everyone and everything linked together, people's attitudes about possessions had changed. Given that you always knew where your stuff was, you didn't have to worry about getting it back after lending it. And you didn't have to lend to
just anyone. The mindweb had a rating system in place; and if someone got a rep for trashing things, they were blocked from further borrowing until they made good on whatever damage they'd done.

Within seconds of Thuy's request, a few points of light flared up on the colorful map of San Francisco. People were eager to lend to celebs. In a just a few moments a well-off woman had equipped them with some smart boards and psipunk wetsuits that she and her boyfriend had barely used.

After teeking the goods to Ond's patio, Thuy and Jayjay undressed and pulled on their suits. In a few minutes they'd be teleporting directly to the Potato Patch break. The piezoplastic suits were like flexible display screens. Thuy's synched in with her mind flow to show a drifty pattern of hearts and ants.

“Whoah,”
said Momotaro, materializing on the patio, wearing a piezoplastic wetsuit as well. By way of miming his surprise at seeing Thuy and Jayjay, his suit showed an expanding ball of orange and yellow. “You sure you two aren't too old?”

“Jayjay's eighty,” said Thuy cheerfully. The longer she was away from Yolla Bolly, the more like herself she felt. The live-liness of nature's computations made all the difference.

“Personally I'm glad Thuy and Jayjay are coming,” said Bixie, walking out of the house, her suit showing fluffy clouds in a blue sky. “If it was just us four, it'd be—
eek
—a double date. Speaking of dates, where's Maaaabel, Momotaro?”

“Stop saying her name that way or I'll pound you.” Spiked clubs and atomic cannons flitted across the surface of Momotaro's suit. Bixie replied with an image of smug pink armor.

“I'm ready,” announced Chu, emerging from Nektar's house next door, a tidy white surfboard under his arm. His wetsuit was plain black.

“Here I am, too,” announced Mabel, alighting on the patio, lithe and lovely in the morning sun. “I was trying to borrow a
board and a suit, but nobody trusts me. Just because I've never borrowed anything here before.”

“I'll get it for you,” said Momotaro, and moments later the gear appeared.

Mabel changed clothes in the house—even though nobody had true privacy anymore, face-to-face nudity was still an issue. And then they were set. The six teleported to a spot on the seaward edge of the Potato Patch break—about a mile out to sea from the straits of the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

 

“Cold!” gasped Jayjay, paddling at Thuy's side. “I have an ice cream headache in my feet!”

The four others—the youngsters—had already propelled themselves to where the waves were actually breaking. The smart surfboards could pulse ripples along their bottoms to speed you up. But Thuy and Jayjay were in no rush to meet the waves. The Potato Patch breakers were ragged and intimidating.

“I love the ocean's salty taste,” said Thuy, remembering her high school surf sessions. She squirted a little spout at Jayjay. “It was creepy how bland everything seemed at our house this morning.”

“You stopped being bland as soon as we got to San Francisco,” said Jayjay with a half smile. “Enter the dragon.”

“Don't even,” said Thuy, flipping her hair so the drops flew in his face. “I can't believe you were in the subdimensions last night. And what's up with that pitchfork? Where did the beanstalk lead to?”

“Supposedly it ran all the way out the lazy eight axis to infinity,” said Jayjay. “The pitchfork and I climbed ten tridecillion steps up.” His symmetrical features were smooth and
sincere. “The beanstalk had a name: Art Zed. He taught me about thinking faster. The pitchfork said I'm a zedhead now. And then—I can't remember exactly. The pitchfork talked a lot. I told you the magic harp was there. She and the pitchfork are married. Lovva and Groovy. And there was . . . a tall bird.” Jayjay fell silent for a moment, worrying. “I think something bad happened then. Oh, never mind. I just want to be here now. With you.”

“We'll try for a wave,” said Thuy, glad to change the subject. “See the big water bumps wallowing under us? Wave embryos. They're coming in from both the north and the south because of the tide pouring into the bay. The intersection of flows is what makes the Potato Patch so gnarly.
Cowabuuuunga
. Did you ever actually hear anyone say that?”

“You know I've never been surfing before, Thuy. If I do catch a wave, I'm totally not standing up.” Jayjay's suit displayed a cautious turtle-shell pattern.

“Follow me,” said Thuy. “And listen to your surfboard.”

She paddled ahead. Her surfboard's name was Everooze. Everooze was eager to help her carve some curl. He was teeping into the environment, watching the ocean's undulations. And his sensitive skin was in tune with the subtle flows of the water around them. Everooze suggested that if Thuy were to angle off to the right about thirty meters and wait there, she'd be able to catch a gigundo swell that was just now rolling in from the horizon. “Visualize, realize, actualize,” added the surfboard.

Thuy passed the advice to Jayjay and they lay waiting at the spot that Everooze had picked. She kept her eyes on the ocean, watching for signs of the promised wave, not wanting to rely entirely upon telepathy.

Off to the left, Mabel had caught a ride. Although she was too self-conscious to whoop, her teep image was a giant grin. Momotaro was surfing at her side. Closer to the shore, Bixie and
Chu were already paddling back toward them, having caught a breaker the minute they'd arrived.

Thuy was teeping a coolness between these two. It seemed Bixie was annoyed with Chu for having gone so far as to try and kiss her after their first ride. Poor Chu. Now he was feeling rejected and unlovable. But what did he expect? Bixie was a bit skeptical of boys in general, and not all that interested in Chu in particular.

Meanwhile—oh, oh—here came a wave with Thuy and Jayjay's names on it. This was almost literally true. For, like every other natural system, the wave had a resident silp, and the wave-silp knew that the two kiqqie surfers were awaiting her. In fact the wave was in teep contact with Thuy, helping to plan her launch.

“Now,” said the wave-silp as she slid past. “Cowabunga.”

Kicking hard, Thuy made it over the foamy lip and slid down the liquid precipice, first kneeling on the board and then standing up, with Everooze suggesting muscle moves to improve Thuy's balance. The wave, the board, and Thuy were thinking as one.

Teeping over her shoulder, Thuy observed that Jayjay had missed the wave. She rode the breaker another sixty meters before shooting back over the wave's lip. Everooze helped her paddle toward her husband.

The big wave had been the first of a set, so Thuy had to duck under two successive walls of water. When yet another wave loomed up, she stopped ducking and teleported straight to Jayjay, teeking Everooze along.

Something was wrong. Jayjay was lying on his back on the board, slightly twitching. A fit? The twitching amped up; he was shaking all over. His skin was covered with vibrating goose bumps, like a pond in a rainstorm. His wetsuit bulged at his crotch.

Thuy took hold of Jayjay's board; she cradled his head so the seawater wouldn't slop into his mouth. He was making an off-key droning sound and gently bucking his hips.

“Jayjay?”

No answer but his rhythmic hum. Peering into his mind, Thuy saw part of his vision: a symmetric, overripe woman dressed in feathers, her breasts and sex exposed. A girlfriend? A porn show? Her face was very strange—oh. She had no eyes. Just smooth skin.

Thuy delved into the Gaian mind for help; Gaia was right here watching, dragonflies haloing her face. “That's not a woman,” said Gaia. “It's an alien projection who latched onto Jayjay last night. She's called a Pekklet. She's controlled by Pekka, the world-mind of a bird planet.”

Slavishly obeying the feathered fantasy Pekklet, Jayjay was repeatedly spewing out a particular psychic pattern, an insanely intricate construct that resembled a gear-based Swiss watch with innumerable colored worms inside it, each worm twisted into a different knot. Jayjay was using his whole body to send this teek pulse to—how weird—each and every atom in the vicinity, his manic spray of femtohertz data fanning fifty kilometers out to sea, fifty kilometers inland, and a hundred kilometers deep into the Earth's crust.

“Can you set him free?” Thuy implored Gaia. “Can you block the Pekklet's teep?”

“It's not teep,” said Gaia. “It's a quantum entanglement connection to the Pekklet's flesh body, hidden in the subdimensions of your cabin floor.”

“What's all this for?” demanded Thuy.

“I'm not sure yet.”

Jayjay's spell had passed; he was staring glassy-eyed into the sky.

All around them the ocean had turned tame. The water's
tiny ripples were gone, as were the big rollers—there was nothing left but smooth, medium-sized waves.

Stabbed by jealousy over her husband's susceptibility to the Pekklet's sexual teasing, Thuy gave his shoulder a rough shove. “You think she's sexy? An eyeless alien bird?”

“I can't help myself,” said Jayjay despairingly. “She's knotted into me. I'm her puppet.” He groaned and sat up on his board, taking in the scene.

The sea was like a sloshing bathtub—limp and listless, as ordinary and uninteresting as their woods had seemed this morning. The clouds in the sky were fatuous balloons. Even Thuy was starting to feel calm and neutral again.

“The atomic silps—they're not computing the natural world in depth,” said Jayjay. “They're wasting their cycles on this weird quantum computation that I programmed into them just now. No more gnarl.”

“Let's teleport back to Ond's,” said Thuy. She signaled the four teenagers that they were leaving. And then they were on Ond's patio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

J
il
and Kittie were drinking tea and nibbling at a bowl of strawberries. Jil was training her shoons and Kittie was studying a blook—a rhodopsin-doped sheet of plastic capable of displaying images from every corner of earth.