Hylozoic (2 page)

 

 

 

J
ayjay
awoke beside Thuy; comfortably he molded himself against her. Early sunlight filtered in through the redwoods. The newlyweds were in sleeping bags on the forest floor beneath a tree. They'd teleported here to install their home. It was the first of May.

A big blue Steller's jay perched on a jiggly thin branch overhead, cocking his head. Jayjay teeped stealthily into the bird's mind. He savored the gentle jouncing of the branch, the minute adjustments of the jay's strong claws, the breeze in his comfortable plumage; he chirped contentedly,
Chook-chook-chook-chook
, then inhaled through the nostrils of his fine black beak, relishing the smells of fruit and flesh, studying the promising scraps on the ground, assessing the large creatures beside the mound of goods; but now,
Kwaawk kwaawk kwaawk
, one of
the big animals moved her limbs. The jay released the branch, glided free, and flapped to the next tree.
Kwaawk kwaawk
.

“Kwaawk,” echoed Thuy. “That's his name.”

“All the others have that name, too?” said Jayjay.

“Yeah, but each of them says it differently.” Thuy turned to face Jayjay, giving him a kiss. “I can't believe we own this piece of land. What does that even mean? We handed over our money so that a record somewhere says, ‘Property of Jorge Jimenez and Thuy Nguyen.' But there's so many plants and animals already living here, and if you count the other silps too—it's an empire.”

“I hope they don't resent us.”

“Those nice smooth rocks by the stream like us fine,” said Thuy. “Teep into them. See how eager they are to be in our foundation walls? They like the idea of being mortared together, and of rising above the ground. Beating gravity is a big deal for a rock!”

“You're
my
big deal,” said Jayjay, teeping Thuy teeping him teeping her. The first few times that they'd telepathically mirrored each other, they'd felt themselves tobogganing toward the point-attractor of a cerebral seizure. Fortunately, you could always shut off your telepathy. With practice, Jayjay and Thuy had learned to skate around the singular zones, enjoying the bright, ragged layers of feedback—well, Jayjay enjoyed this more than Thuy. Not too long ago, he'd been addicted to merging with the planetary mind called the Big Pig. He liked head trips.

After a little more mind play, Thuy gently pushed Jayjay away. She was smiling, with her eyebrows optimistically arched. Her longish black hair hung loose, her pink lips were delicately curved. Hanging a few feet above her was a Stank shampoo ad. Thuy and Jayjay made their living as 'round-the-clock members of a reality show called
Founders
. But they'd learned to
ignore the ad icons and—above all—the vast worldwide audience. If you were doing something really private, you could always turn off your teep. But fewer and fewer things seemed private enough to bother hiding.

“You really think we can teleport a whole house this far?” asked Thuy.

“Sure,” said Jayjay. “Working alone, you and I can't teek much more than a couple of hundred kilograms at a time. But with a dozen of our friends pitching in, for sure we can move our little house here from San Francisco. We'll build the foundation today, and this evening—
alley-oop
!—we drop our cozy nest into place. Housewarming party!”

They'd already brought bags of sand and cement for the foundation, also a big flat pan for mixing the mortar, a mortar hoe to mix it with, plus a pair of mortarboards and trowels. Jayjay liked tools, and had managed to borrow these via the human mindweb. The silps in the tools were stoked about the coming job.

“It's gonna be hard moving all those stones for the foundation,” grumbled Thuy. “It's so peaceful here in the woods. I feel like lying around and thinking up a beautiful scene for my new metanovel. Or teeping with animals. Isn't this supposed to be our honeymoon?”

“We can teleport the stones instead of carrying them. Teek 'em.”

“That's work, too. When I reach out and remotely teleport a rock—I bet my brain wattage shoots up to a thousand.”

“It isn't just your
brain
that does the teeking,” said Jayjay. “We think with our whole bodies. Consciousness is everywhere.”

“Whatever,” said Thuy. “I'm just not ready to move hundreds of stones.”

“Aw, come on, Thuy,” said Jayjay. “When we were in high
school, you were always the goody-goody, not me. You're the ant and I'm the grasshopper. And the grasshopper's rarin' to go! Leap!”

“Put that stale rap away,” said Thuy. “It's been a long time since I was an ant. I'm all grown up now. I'm every bit as wild a kiq as you.” She rolled toward her knapsack and dug out some dried fruit. “It's too bad the rocks can't teleport themselves. Then we could just, like, teep out invitations and they'd all show up.”

“Actually we're lucky that animals and plants and objects can't teleport,” said Jayjay.

“I guess so,” said Thuy. “Otherwise Kwaawk the bluejay would be eating these raisins instead of me. And if flames could teleport? They'd eat the whole world. I wonder if Gaia is actively preventing the lower orders from teleporting.”

“I don't think it's Gaia's doing,” said Jayjay. He'd been one of the first to figure out teleportation, and he liked to hold forth about it. “The ability to teleport is peculiar to the human mind. Rats and roaches are too carefree to fuzz out and teleport. Over the millennia, we humans have evolved toward thinking ourselves into spots where we're not. It's all about remorse, doubt, and fear. As for intelligent objects—sure the silps can talk, but they don't have our rich heritage of hang-ups: our regrets about the past, our unease about the present, our anxiety about the future. Humans are used to spreading themselves across a zillion worlds of downer what-ifs. That's why we can teleport.”

“Depresso mongo,” said Thuy. “Remorse, doubt, and fear? That's all you see in your life? How about gratitude for the things that worked out—like, ahem, marrying me! What about curiosity? What about hope for a sunny tomorrow? Happy what-ifs.”

“Let's get back to the rocks,” said Jayjay, in retreat. “Even
though they can't teleport, they can tell us about their balance points. And whether they're a good match for their neighbors.”

“I can just hear them,” said Thuy. “Lay me now, mortarforker!” She liked speaking extravagantly. It was a way of rebelling against her prim upbringing. “Trowel my crack!” She got to her feet to rummage deeper in her backpack, then pulled on her striped tights and a long-sleeved yellow T-shirt.

A great shaft of sun slanted into their woodsy glen, with gnats and dust motes hovering in the light. A friendly breeze caressed the newlyweds and stirred the needles on the trees. Kwaawk the blue jay squawked.

“Everything sees us,” marveled Jayjay, putting on his baggy black pants and his green T-shirt. “Everything is alive. I like seeing inside Kwaawk's head. I think—if I wasn't a human—maybe I'd be a blue jay, or, no, I'd be a crow. They're so smart and tough.”

“I'd be a dragon,” said Thuy, filling her mouth full of nuts and chocolate. She continued her rap via teep. “Dragons are one thing my parents talked about that I really loved. The Vietnamese dragons aren't fat fire-breathers, you know. They're skinny crocodiles with snaky curves and fringed all over. Punk dragons. I'd be a dragon playing heavy rock and roll.” Thuy paused to swallow her food. “I just noticed that a water spirit here doesn't like us. The silp in this stretch of the creek.”

The mind within the narrow, burbling stream was what earlier generations would have called a genius loci, or “spirit of place.” Far from being a superstition-spawned fantasy, the silp was quite real. Silps were emergent intelligences based upon chaotic natural computations as enhanced by the ubiquitous memory storage available via the recently unfurled eighth dimension. Silps were everywhere now.

Jayjay wasn't quite sure how to address the unfriendly spirit of the stream. But Thuy plowed right ahead.

“Hi Gloob,” she said, eating another handful of gorp. “What if my husband and I build you a tiny little dam? You'll get a nice waterfall at the downstream edge, with some brook trout in the pool. We can bathe there.”

“Gloob?” said Jayjay, smiling at Thuy. “Husband? You're like Eve in Eden. Naming the creatures.”

“Gloob really
is
his name,” said Thuy. “You just have to listen. Like this.” She teeped him a mental maneuver she'd invented for converting a silp's self-image to an English name.

Jayjay listened inwardly to the crabby spirit of the stream, and, yes, Thuy was right, his name was Gloob. Gloob overlaid an image upon his eddies and lines of flow, the visage of a stern old man with trembling cheeks and curly beard. He didn't like the idea of a dam.

The friendly rocks at the stream's edge had names too: Clack, Bonk, Rollie, and Harvey. And the redwood overhead—her name was Grew. Unlike Gloob, Grew was happy to have Jayjay and Thuy as neighbors. Mammals were good for fertilizing her roots.

“But don't burrow!” cautioned Grew.

Intrigued by his newly learned ability to name the silps, Jayjay teeped into the aethereal chorus of atoms that made up his body. Each of his ten octillion atomic silps had its own distinct timbre. If he'd had the patience, he could have started converting the timbres into names to be stored in his lazy eight memory. But there were still practical limits to the sizes of mental feats that a person could do. An octillion steps was at the very edge of what you could expect to carry out in your head, even if you were as obsessive as Thuy's young friend Chu.

Teeping a bit higher up the great chain of being, Jayjay perceived the names of his organs and muscles. Larry Liver. Ben Bone. They'd still be talking after he died. At least for a while.

Gloob's scowling ropy face kept hovering in his mind's eye.
Jayjay walked over and took a pee near the stream, not right into it, but close enough to show Gloob who was boss. The little crests of the stream's riffles writhed. On the telepathic plane, Gloob was gibbering in fury. Jayjay pinched shut the channel connecting him to the angry silp. Bye, Gloob. That was one of the things that made lazy eight telepathy bearable. You could firewall things out.

“I say we build our foundation right here,” Thuy said, scratching lines in the dirt with a shovel. She was telepathically comparing her marks to the dimensions of the two-room wooden cottage that she and Jayjay had put together in San Francisco.

Jayjay picked up a shovel of his own. “Perfect spot,” he told Thuy. “It's flat, the light's good, and it's not too close to—to the stream. We'll scrape out little trenches for the cement mudsills.”

Teeping into the Gaian overmind, Jayjay and Thuy viewed Earth's gravitational field as wiggly orange lines growing out of the ground. Helpful Gaia marked off equal elevation points on the lines, making it easy to see when the ditches were level and true.

“I'll mix the mortar!” said Thuy when the digging was done. “You get the stones.”

Jayjay teeped one of stones he'd noticed before: Harvey. Harvey was the size and shape of a flattened cantaloupe. It would have been easy enough to walk over and pick him up. But Jayjay wanted to show off.

Teleportation was a head trick you played on yourself. You perfectly visualized two locations, got mixed up about which was which, then switched to being there instead of here.

When Jayjay had first discovered how to teleport—about six months ago—he'd quickly learned how to carry objects along. And recently he'd figured out that he could teleport
things without having to move himself at all. This was telekinesis, called teek for short.

Teeking Harvey was a matter of merging into the rock's silpmind and coaxing it into a superposed quantum state in which the rock was both beside the stream and resting in the clearing. And then Jayjay asked the rock-mind, “Where are you?” precipitating a quantum collapse that put Harvey beside the foundation ditches they'd grubbed out.

Sitting in the clearing, staring at the spot where he was bringing the rock, Jayjay first saw a few twinkling dots in the air, then a ghost of the stone, and then the rock itself.

“Oho,” said Harvey. His voice in Jayjay's head was orotund. “Not the kind of thing I'd do on my own. That fuzzy bit in the middle—how did we manage that?”

“You can watch me move your cousins,” said Jayjay. “But you won't ever figure it out.”

“Never mind,” said Harvey. “I'll just sit here. It's good in the dirt.” No guru could ever be as mellow and nonattached as a stone.

Over the next half hour, Jayjay lined up Rollie, Bonk, and Clack next to Harvey, along with another few hundred of their cousins from the edges of the stream. The rapid flipping between pure and superposed quantum states was making him queasy. He took a break, dropping to the ground next to Thuy.

Thuy had set up her big mortar pan in middle of where their living room would be. She'd carried some buckets of water from the creek and was rocking away with her mortar hoe—it was like a regular hoe except that it had two holes in the blade, the better to stir the water, sand, and cement.

“Remember, this is a special fast-drying waterproof mix,” Thuy warned. “We better start spreading it around. Up and at 'em, grasshopper.”

“I'm tired of teeking.”

“So use your beautiful bod. I've got a bucket for scooping up mortar. I'm gonna mix a little more so there's enough for the whole first course of stones.”

Stepping around the waiting stones, Jayjay lugged buckets of mortar by hand, laying down thick gouts of the gray cement. And then he and Thuy got on their knees and began setting the stones, using trowels and carrying little mounds of mortar on the flat square mortarboards.