Hylozoic (14 page)

“Yeah, I saw,” said Ond. “We'll have to try something else. But with San Francisco's gnarl being siphoned off, I can't think straight. As soon as these nosy Peng leave our yard, I'm moving down to Santa Cruz with Jil and Nektar and the kids. According to my calculations, when you leave a Peng zone, the effects wear off. I'll get back to you when I can. Be very careful, son.”

“Hey!” teeped Gretta, interrupting Chu and Ond's conversation. “I see what you're seeing: Blotz and his tacky wife Noora and their silly little daughter Pookie. It's so disgusting the way Noora holds her tail feathers pooched out to the sides. Does she really think that everyone wants to see her filthy cloaca?”

“Blotz and Noora are a high-class pair of Peng,” Suller heavily told his wife. “Just like us. Eventually we'll establish a solid chain of Peng ranches between here and San Francisco, sweetie. Then we'll be able to visit with the Blotzes; strutting from ranch to ranch, merging the matter music. I'm thinking Kakar might even get Pookie to lay him an egg. They'd be a fine match, so shut your beak, okay? Warm Worlds Realty is bringing the cream of Peng society, no doubt!”

“What a crock,” quacked Kakar. “Floofy's the one I want,
not Pookie. But, nooo, you had to bring me here. Blotz and Noora are broke losers—just like you guys. That's why you four took these stupid jobs as land developers. The cream of Peng society are the ones who are gonna actually
pay
Warm Worlds to have a ranch on Earth—if this place turns out to be livable, which I doubt. I swear I saw a rat just now.”

“Rat!” squawked Gretta, hopping several meters off the ground and staying there, curiously suspended in midair.

With abrupt fury, Suller pecked Kakar hard enough to draw blood. Screeching piteously, the younger Peng bird flexed his legs and leapt for the roof of Thuy and Jayjay's house, extending his rudimentary wings for balance. He hadn't jumped hard enough to cover the distance, but, like Gretta, he came to rest in midair. Apparently the Peng could make themselves weightless. Kakar fluttered his wings till he'd reached the roof. Safely perched, he railed at his parents.

“I hate you! I wish I'd never been hatched!”

“Ungrateful fledgling!” croaked Gretta, settling back to the forest floor. “We only came to this terrible place because you're such a wild dreamer! Going to the cliffs to be an artist with Floofy—what a mess. Ever since then, Floofy's parents have been threatening us!” Next she turned on her mate. “And now I learn you've brought
Noora
? I know all about your affair with her, Suller. No wonder you're disappointed that their ranch isn't next door.” Her voice cracked; despondently she lowered her beak.

Suller cooed softly and smoothed Gretta's feathers with his bill. Up on the roof, Kakar was examining the wound in his side. Chu almost offered to help, but he could teep that the gouge was healing fast; restored by the massed computations of the Yolla Bolly Peng ranch.

“My family . . .” teeped Suller, turning back to the humans with a sigh. “Never satisfied. Listen up, Jayjay. I can make you
an attractive proposition. I want for you to do a series of teleportation hops, a hundred kilometers at a time. At each spot you land, the Pekklet will feed you a rune for a fresh family of Peng pioneers, and you'll cast the rune into the atoms of the new ranch. The way Warm Worlds figures it, there's room for fifteen thousand ranches on Earth's land surface—what an opportunity!”

“No,” said Jayjay. “I won't do it.”

“I'll see that you're very handsomely paid for your runecasting,” continued Suller smoothly. “Presently we're in start-up mode, with only seven pioneer families committed to come here, but I'm sure we'll have a land rush down the road. If all goes well, you'll be the richest man on Earth.”

“I'd rather die.”

“You
will
help us,” said Suller coldly. “One way or another.”

“You're worried about losing the—gnarl?” Gretta asked Jayjay. She'd recovered her aplomb. Cocking her head, she turned her attention to Chu. “This boy doesn't mind the missing gnarl.”

“I do, too,” insisted Chu, wanting to seem like the others. But there was something to what she said. He liked things to be predictable and orderly.

“You furries will be better off without so much emotion and self-will,” Gretta told Jayjay. “Leave the drama to us. We'll be your legends, your mythic queens and kings.”

Teeping Jayjay for his reaction, Chu was shocked to see the intensity of the man's unhappiness. Jayjay hated himself for having opened the gateway to the Peng, hated himself for being an addicted pighead, hated himself for making his wife sad.

Chu found it painful to know these feelings. In the old days, before he'd started healing his autism, he'd been unable to visualize other people's inner lives at all. Sure, it was good
to understand other people better now—but sometimes empathy was a drag.

“Why do you need a runecaster at all?” Thuy asked the aliens, twining her arm around her husband's waist.

“I'll answer that one,” teeped Kakar from the roof. “Tulpa programming happens to be one of my interests.” He hopped down into the clearing and cawed his explanation. “Each pioneer rune codes a small Peng family—bodies, brains, memories, the works. The runecaster has to be a teeker so he can program the rune into atoms, and he has to be able to think very fast so that he can do the full ten tridecillion atoms that you—”

“Spare me the geekin' details,” interrupted Thuy, which was annoying for Chu. Thuy continued, “What I'm asking is why the Peng don't frikkin'
teleport
here if they want to invade? Why make it so complicated?”

“Listen to her, Suller and Kakar,” cackled Gretta. “They don't even know.”

“Not many races can teleport and teek,” said Kakar. He raised his wings and bowed in an ironic salute. “Humans are special.”

“I've heard that all the teeker races are descended from rats,” said Gretta, twitching her head to snap a moth from the air. Jayjay shuddered and let out a faint hum.

“Apes, Mom,” said Kakar shortly. “Like Thuy said earlier. Apes are the furry things with four hands that climb in trees. Do you act so dopey on purpose? Would Dad be scared of a hen who's not as dumb as him? I don't understand how you two hatched a genius like me.”

Gretta tightened her beak, not deigning to respond to her son's insolence. Another moth appeared in the air beside her, and she caught that one, too. “Yum.”

“You're saying that only humanoids can teleport themselves?” asked Thuy, looking back and forth between her husband and the aliens. “Only humanoids can reach into atoms and reprogram them with their minds?”

“Apes, humanoids, whatever,” said Suller. “I wouldn't want to be one. Teek and teleportation come out of this neurotictype syndrome. Those three teeker emotions—what do they call them again, Kakar? I always forget.”

“Remorse, doubt, and fear,” said Kakar, scratching a steady stream of banana slugs from the dirt. “You can teep the pattern in Jayjay's head, he's already thought about it. Remorse about the past, doubt about the present, fear of the future. What if, what if, what if. The pusher crew on a Hrull mothership at the Pengö spaceport told me about it, too. Pushers have it rough.”

“
Yeah
they do,” said Suller darkly. “You Earthlings are lucky we got here before the Hrullwelt ships found you.”

Chu was thrilled by the mention of a mothership. It would be great to be in a starship crew, visiting rough spaceports on alien worlds like Pengö and the Hrullwelt—whatever that was.

“Tell us about your home planet,” he urged Suller.

“My voice is tired,” said the tall alien bird. “I've been squawking too hard. All this hassle and stress. I'll show you a—a kind of movie.”

A flow of images began in the humans' heads, richly enhanced by data links. It was an ad for Warm Worlds Realty, with headquarters at planet Pengö's south pole.

 

 

The first scene shows the Virgo Supercluster, which stretches two hundred million light-years, encompassing the M51 Group as well as the Milky Way's Local Group.

The M51 galaxies sparkle like diamonds on black velvet, and now one of them begins to grow; it's the beautifully symmetric Whirlpool Galaxy.

“We are not alone,” croons a bird's voice in deep, textured tones.

The viewpoint zooms in on a particular planet whose temperate zones are a filigree of green and blue. There are no open seas or level plains on this world, only a global maze of water channels and verdant rock ridges. A heavy frosting of ice coats the polar caps.

“Our planet Pengö is ancient,” says the voice-over. “Our once molten core has all but crystallized; our continents have shattered. And thus our world's surface is a labyrinth of sea and stone.”

The view swoops into winding, interlinked fjords with twisted trees growing in every crack. Flocks of birds scythe through insect swarms and wheel above the crystal waters, diving for fish.

“Our planet's beauty reflects the perfection of Pekka, our planetary mind,” says the narrator. “And one species above all enjoys the radiance of Pekka's full favor. The Peng.”

The shores are lined with dwellings: domed structures of nested stones, each hut with a door, two windows, and a ventilation hole in the roof. Peng birds strut in and out of the homes, knees bending backward, fluffy brown bodies bobbing up and down. They stroll along the shoreline, chatting with each other, snapping bugs from the air, wading into the shallows for frogs and minnows.

The Peng can fly, but not in the usual kind of way. Thanks to pale blue, ticklike symbiotes known as flight lice, they can make themselves weightless. Hovering like feathered blimps, the Peng use their tiny wings to maneuver. Now and then a Peng floats up a tree or cliff to peck apart a parrot's nest or a
swallow's mud-daubed home, devouring the eggs and the fledglings.

“We Peng have been the dominant species for hundreds of thousands of years,” resumes the bass bird voice. “Our ecology has converged to a lasting equilibrium.”

A sequence of display cases flashes by, exhibiting the surprisingly few species of life on Pengö: trees and flowering plants, frogs and fish, earthworms and beetles, some smaller birds, the Peng—and no mammals.

“We revel in the simple perfection of Pengö's biome,” quacks the narrator. “In the intellectual sphere, a similar process of refinement has taken place, raising our arts and practical crafts to a level that might seem to rule out further improvement. But great originals still emerge: wild talents like Waheer, who flourished one thousand years ago.”

The viewpoint flies back in time to a chalky cliff. The cliff is like a public art gallery; its surface is decorated with chicken scratches. Peng artists are at work, using their beaks to scar the white stone, floating and fluttering along the face of the cliff.

The artworks fall into four types: jittery ovals that shape the outlines of eggs, chevron patterns that model Peng feathers, arches that represent Peng homes, and images of a shaded ring with a pucker in the middle.

Responding to Chu's puzzlement, the built-in glossary explains that the puckered rings represent Peng cloacas, which are the multipurpose body vents that birds of both genders use for excretion and sex. Chu bares his teeth in a reflexive gesture of disgust.

Back in the mental movie, a single grungy Peng jitters about on the higher reaches of the cliff, frantically pecking fresh images into the stone. This is Waheer. He wears his feathers tinted an unnatural shade of orange, with a defiant red Mohawk streak
down the middle. Kakar, who is watching the show with the humans, caws approvingly.

Waheer's artworks are unique. Rat-tatting like a woodpecker, he engraves skeins of stars, spiral galaxies, flaming suns, distant planets. He's a science fiction visionary.

“Waheer's drive for transcendence inspired Pekka to a wondrous discovery,” intones the narrator:
“Peng can travel to ape worlds via Pengö's cloaca!”

The orange-feathered Waheer cocks his head, as if harkening to a call. He glides away from his space murals and—in fast-forward—makes his way across miles of ridges, disheveled and dogged, sometimes walking, sometimes buzzing through the air like a blimp, heading ever farther south, beyond the temperate zones and into the polar wastes.

The pocked, shiny snowfields are lit by shimmering auroras, by crimson and yellow streamers that emanate from a luminous hole located precisely at planet Pengö's south pole. Haunting alien music thrills the air. Pekka, the planetary mind, is calling Waheer to the special place.

The fuming polar vent, known as Pengö's cloaca, is the senescent planet's last sign of active volcanism. The hole bores into the depths like a mine shaft. At the deeper levels, an orange glow tints its mist-shrouded walls, for liquid lava lies below.