Hylozoic (16 page)

“I'll have to approve the new design,” chirped Gretta, pleased. “And, yes, Suller can petition Pekka to craft a rune for it.”

“How about a comfy villa like this?” said Jayjay, teeping the birds an image of Ond's new house in San Francisco.

“I don't
want
a fat McMansion hulking over our poor cabin!” wailed Thuy. She wasn't getting it about Jayjay's gambit. “We haven't yet spent one single night in bed together here!”

“The big addition will be noble,” said Gretta, ignoring Thuy. “But the walls should be pink marble to match our palace. As for the roofing—I want something terrifically extravagant.”

“Gold!” exclaimed Jayjay.

“Jerk!” screamed Thuy, stuck in a loop of low-gnarl reactivity. “You'll turn our whole world into dull tacky crap!” She stormed past the Peng's palace and headed down the stream.

“Come back here, you!” squawked Gretta.

Chu tasted of Jayjay's emotions: his remorse, his yearning for reconciliation with Thuy, his determination to play along with the Peng in hopes of figuring out how to kill them.

“I'll keep an eye on her,” Chu told Jayjay, and ran after Thuy himself. Yes, he definitely had a crush on this woman. Jayjay could teep this, but he didn't take Chu as a serious romantic threat.

“Calm her down,” Jayjay teeped privately. “And watch how I build the house. Maybe when you get back we'll kick some Peng tailfeather.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
huy
was already a few hundred meters down the stream. Chu tried to catch up on foot. But this proved harder than he'd expected.

Due to the loss of gnarl, the silps in the plants and rocks weren't sociable. Brambly thickets crowded one bank, and the other bank was steep and slippery. Chu was forced to pick his way along the sullen stream's uncooperative stones and sand bars. The stonker gun made an unwieldy bulge in his side pocket.

In one spot the stream was choked solid with sticks and fallen redwood logs.

“Don't bother us,” chorused the chunks of debris.

As Chu scrambled up the mossy bank to get around the
deadfall, the dirt chuckled, and his foot slipped out from under him. He fell heavily into the water, bruising his knee.

“Serves you right,” said the submerged rocks.

Nature wasn't a nurturing mother out here; the local silps were like hostile natives jeering an outsider.

Although Thuy was well ahead of him, she was aware that she was being followed. Chu could have just teleported to her then and there, but he wanted to impress her by overtaking her on his own.

The stream deepened, and he switched to walking on the tangled banks, forcing his way through stands of manzanita chaparral, the stiff branches like stern claws.

“Don't snap our twigs,” said the branches. “Or we'll really mess you up.”

Chu slogged on, temporarily focusing his teep powers on Jayjay back at the clearing. Directed by signals from Pekka, Jayjay was humming the new rune into every atom on the ranch. The rune for the new house was shaped like a dish of hollowed-out candy mints, with a trillion-legged chocolate ant within each hollow. The art of designing a rune for a particular purpose seemed utterly opaque.

Testing out the feel of runecasting, Chu copied the rune onto a carbon atom in a blackberry bush leaf. It was a little tricky getting the atom to accept the new code; you had to come at it from just the right orbital angle. Incredible to think of doing this ten tridecillion times in a row.

Snapping his attention back to his immediate surroundings, Chu realized he'd reached the edge of a ravine. Just a few meters ahead, the stream sprang out over a rocky lip, the water falling in a smooth arc that was a grotesquely simplified version of a normal cataract. It had been about eight hours since Jayjay had zapped the surrounding hundred kilometers, which wasn't quite
enough time for living water from the outer world to have flowed in this far.

Thuy was brooding by a lusterless pool at the bottom of the cliff. She glanced up at Chu without much interest; she was preoccupied with the teep image of the ugly new mansion that Jayjay had just finished creating.

Still too proud to teleport, Chu began picking his way down the side wall of the gorge. The thick humus of leaves and sticks slid beneath his feet. The shrubs were dead, brittle, and eager to break.

And now a silp dug a branch into his cheek. Chu could feel the blood beginning to flow. That was enough. With a quick, irritated motion of his mind, he teleported to the woodsy bottom of the canyon.

“My hero,” said Thuy in a sarcastic tone. “Save me, save me.” She gestured for him to sit down beside her. “Come here and I'll help fix your cut.”

The two of them focused on Chu's skin and blood cells, healing the gash. Mind tricks were harder than usual, what with everything taxed by the effort of maintaining the Peng.

“That dumb Jayjay,” muttered Thuy. Her cheeks were pink, her strawy hair was in spikes, her eyes were moist.

“He only built the extra house to learn more about tulpas,” Chu privately messaged to her. “He wants to get rid of the Peng. Come on, Thuy. You're stuck in a loop.”

“If it weren't for Jayjay, the Peng wouldn't be here in the first place,” she said sullenly.

“Jayjay knows that,” teeped Chu. “He's thinking that every second. He'd give anything to undo the damage.”

Thuy's expression softened. “That's—that's true, isn't it?” she said out loud. “Thanks for reminding me.” She reached out and touched Chu's cheek. “You've come a long way, kid.”

“I won't be a kid forever,” said Chu. “I'll have girlfriends. If only Bixie wasn't so—”

“Bixie got mad at you for wanting to kiss her, huh?” said Thuy out loud, smiling at him. “You've never kissed a girl at all, have you?” She puckered her lips and make a smooching noise. “Once you get some practice, you'll know to move in fast. Before your prey can bolt.” Lips still puckered, she regarded him through half-lidded eyes. Maybe she was playing this up for the audience watching her live on the
Founders
show. Maybe she was trying to get Jayjay's attention. Maybe—

Heart pounding, Chu bobbed his head forward to plant a kiss. Thuy was fast as a snake. Perhaps his lips grazed hers for a nanosecond, but then she was off to the side, tut-tutting him. “I'm a married woman, Chu! Nearly twice your age.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, that's giving up too easy. If you really want to kiss a girl, you have to keep trying. Unless she's making it very clear that she wants you to stop. Ambiguity, Chu. Mixed signals.” Again she was pouting her lips.

Chu lunged at Thuy, got his arms around her and—she wriggled loose and slapped his uninjured cheek.
Smack!
The sting brought tears to his eyes.

“Why—” he began. “I thought—”

“Just showing you the ropes,” said Thuy. “If you're good, I'll give you a second lesson some time.” She batted her eyelashes, then shook her head. “I'm pretty upset about our cottage. I can't see living there at all. And the Peng have invaded San Francisco, too. This could be the end of everything.” She heaved a sigh.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Chu leaned in and kissed her. She let him. She opened her lips and they touched tongues. The inside of Thuy's mouth was a wonderful
magic cave. She hugged Chu tight, pressing her lithe body against his.

“But that's really enough,” said Thuy, taking hold of his shoulders and holding him out at arm's length. She was breathing fast. “I'm not myself. You go try all this on Bixie. Could be that none of us have much time left.” Suddenly her eyes widened and she let out a scream.

 

 

Turning around, Chu saw a pair of smooth shapes hovering by the waterfall, leathery flying manta rays with gently undulating wings, each of them three meters across.

“Oh my God,” said Thuy. “These are the creatures Jayjay was talking about before. I didn't believe him.”

“I'm Wobble,” teeped one of the mantas. He had pulsing leopard dots on his back. His virtual voice had a choked quality, like a man talking while swallowing bread. “And this is my daughter Duxy. We're Hrull. We came to help you against the Peng.”

“You—you flew here?” asked Chu.

“We came in a mothership,” said Wobble. “Duxy's mother, Lusky. My wife. You'll meet her later.”

The weightless manta rays drifted toward Chu. They were like meat blankets, with toothless letter-slot mouths and flecked yellow eyes. He could feel a gentle breeze from the slow, graceful flapping of their fleshy wings. Slow pink spirals rotated upon Duxy's hide.

“I'm here,” Chu's stonker gun reminded him.

Chu drew the blue raygun from his pants. “Stay back,” he warned the Hrull. “I can freeze you into dust.”

“
Ooo
, femtotech,” teeped Duxy, her virtual voice like a gargling soprano's. “It's fluky how every primate world goes
through the same stages. Put away the gun, Chu. We Hrull don't kill. Instead we fly and we hide. You don't have levitation, do you? We have little friends to help us do that. Flight lice.” She crinkled the skin around her eyes. A smile. She teeped their attention to the oddly shining, pale blue creatures that dotted her hide—no more than two dozen of them, the size of fleas. The flight lice had no eyes; their legs were buried in the mantas' flesh.

“Like on the Peng!” said Thuy.

“Those filthy birds got the flight lice from us,” said Duxy. “But don't be asking us for flight lice till we've got a good trade relationship. It took the Peng a thousand years of negotiating to get them. Finally we traded the lice for complete food chains of marine life to seed our thousand seas.”

“Are you from a lazy eight world, too?” asked Chu.

“A flying wind-sack visited us a long time ago,” said Wobble. “The bag had a skinny horn that played a sound that unfurled an extra dimension.” The Peng had mentioned something like this, too. Chu visualized a flying scrotum blasting away with a dicklike horn. He found himself thinking about sex a lot these days.

“On top of lazy eight telepathy, we have teleportation, too,” Thuy was saying. “We can hop from place to place. Can you do that?”

“We hire teekers like you to help us,” said Duxy. “We call them pushers.”

“One of our pushers got a teep message that the Peng were about to invade you,” said Wobble. “That's how we found Earth, as a matter of fact. Our pusher got a nice reward for sharing her information. Not that—”

“Let's show him what Lusky looks like,” interrupted Duxy. “Our spaceship, Chu. You'll like her.”

Mentally following Wobble's teep pointer, Chu and Thuy
viewed an empty field of shale fragments at the base of a high, airy cliff. Or, wait, the field wasn't empty. As Chu watched, a truly enormous manta ray came into focus; she'd been lying camouflaged upon the scree.

The mothership manta was an acre of smooth leather, with a central hump the size of a barn. Her skin flashed fizzy purple and yellow circles. A visual greeting. Her sharp tail twitched.

“Hey there, Chu,” came the monster's teep voice, deep and round as the echo from a cave. “You're a likely lad. Good luck in your battle against the Peng! Whether or not you win, I'd like you to join my crew. I happen to need a new pusher.”

Wow. Chu liked the thought. Traveling across the galaxies in a Hrull mothership would be like old-school space opera. As a pusher, he'd be teleporting the ship across space to other planets. And, once he was gone, maybe certain people like Bixie and Thuy would start missing him.

“Kakar said it's a bad life being a Hrull pusher,” warned Thuy, as if she cared. “What if being a pusher is horribly dull? What if the Hrull paralyze you and make you into a zombie? What if Lusky cuts out her pushers' brains and plugs them in like chips?”