Hylozoic (20 page)

“I warn you, some will set stones in the Sleeping Savior's path,” intoned Donnie Jr., holding up his hands. “Satan's flying devilfish will seek to do Him bodily harm. We must see our Shepherd into His pasture.”

“Yea, verily,” added Dr. Macon. He flashed his appalling smile. “Lead us in a hymn, Sister Vivian: ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!' ”

As the congregation raised their voices in muscular song, Thuy took the opportunity to trundle Jayjay down the aisle to rejoin Kittie, Chick, and Duckie.

“This is a nightmare,” she murmured, all but blinded by a red haze of shame, and very aware of the merriment in her huge
Founders
audience.

“On to site number two,” said Chick. “We're going for an optimal use of land, spacing the ranches ninety-five kilometers apart. I've picked out a nice location in the boonies—the hamlet of Yost, Virginia, to be precise. And after that we can step over to Charlottesville. Site three.”

“The properties in Charlottesville have appreciated very handsomely in recent years,” put in Duckie.

 

 

Materializing by the side of the road in Yost, Thuy saw fields, low mountains, and a feed wholesaler, closed for Sunday. A boarded-up gas station baked in the afternoon sun. She felt overwhelmed by the pointless vastness of the world. Was she supposed to hopscotch the whole planet opening ever more Peng ranches? Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.

Jayjay twitched and moaned.

“It's like we're bringing in Elvis's embalmed body to jump-start a mall,” remarked Chick, drawing a stick of gum from his pocket. “Except I don't see no customers.”

Small, teeped cries of protest were wafting in from the blackberry brambles, the poison ivy, the maple trees, the red dirt, the ants, the mosquitoes, and even the gray sheets of plywood covering the abandoned filling station's windows. The local hive mind. The ants had southern accents. Chorused beneath these more articulate plaints were the ten tridecillion tiny voices of the local atoms. None of them wanted to pay a gnarl tax to the Peng-producing matter waves. But they couldn't stop Jayjay.

He moaned for a few minutes, and the transformation was done. Everything was dull; the silps were still. Four Peng appeared in a pasture across the empty, cracked asphalt highway: ugly long-legged birds, craning their heads to gawk at the blank green hills and the placid cows.

“Let's move on,” said Chick, rapidly chewing his gum.

“Scared of the Peng?” said Kittie, a little mockingly.

“Once you close with a client, you scram,” said Duckie. “Before they start asking for changes.”

“Good point,” said Thuy. “I don't want these Yost Peng to ask for a palace like the Yolla Bolly Peng.” She was feeling sorry for Jayjay again. He looked so wretched and pale. The horrid Pekklet was right there in his brain, knotted in by quantum entanglement.

 

 

Charlottesville was next. They landed upon the University of Virginia's lovely great lawn, with a well-proportioned rotunda at one end and columned arcades of brick student quarters running down the sides.

Although Thuy fully expected Jayjay to begin humming
again, he lay still. She could sense Pekka trying to kick-start her husband. But, for now, his only response was to slump farther back in his wheelchair. He was temporarily worn out.

“What a relief,” said Kittie. “I hate having Jayjay cast runes onto me. They make me feel like I'm made of plastic.”

“The runes seem to wear off when you leave a Peng ranch,” said Thuy. “It takes a lot of atoms reinforcing each other to stay that dumb.”

“Like a hall full of Crownies,” said Kittie.

Just then a group of undergrads began pointing at them and yelling. Thanks to telepathy, the kids knew why Jayjay was here.

“Go home!” shouted a bearded boy. “Leave our town alone!”

“Alien stooges!” yelled a long-haired girl. “Traitors!”

Chick and Duckie hurried over to the students, intent on defusing them. The Realtors had plenty of experience with anti-development protestors.

Meanwhile, Thuy and Kittie bumped the wheelchair across the lawn to a mansion that had been retrofitted as an inn. They rented a nice pair of double rooms with a connecting door, the windows looking onto the verdant great lawn from the third floor. As in many dwellings, the inn's rooms had been cajoled into blocking teleportation. People had to buzz a clerk to get in through the inn's front door. The clerk helped them lug Jayjay in his wheelchair up the stairs, and for the moment they were safe.

While Kittie watched from a chair, Thuy laid Jayjay on one of their room's twin beds, fixed his diaper and mopped his face. He was really out of it. It wasn't just that Pekka was holding him paralyzed. He was utterly drained of energy; he'd sunken into deep slumber.

Thuy was tired, too. She lay down on the other bed, and
before she knew it, she'd napped for a couple of hours. She was awakened by Ond urgently teeping her to talk about Chu. By now he was frantic about his missing son. He was angrier with her than before. Biting back her own anger at the situation, Thuy said she'd try to find Chu soon. She closed the call and lay still, just breathing. It was early evening outside. Kittie was slouched in the chair; she looked like she'd been napping, too.

“Happy hour,” said Duckie, opening the connecting door between the two rooms. The Realtors were working on a bucket of ice and a bottle of premium local bourbon.

“We jived those students pretty good,” called Chick cheerfully. “I told them we're from Homeland Security, fighting the evil Hrull aliens. I signed them up as Hrull spotters and gave each of them a hundred bucks cash. Duckie told them it'd be a federal death rap to obstruct Jayjay because he's working for homeland defense!”

“We're problem solvers,” said Duckie, gliding into Thuy's room, with two fresh highballs in hand.

“S'good,” said Kittie, slurping.

“I've never had hard liquor,” said Thuy, accepting her glass anyway. The bourbon had a festive smell and a jolly demeanor. It left a sharp bite in her throat and a warm glow in her gut.

Out on the great lawn, fifty Crown of Creation Church parishioners had bussed in to defend the Sleeping Savior. The Crownies were holding hands to form a human chain in front of the inn. It felt weird to have these be the people on Thuy's side.

Meanwhile, the bearded boy and the long-haired girl had gathered twenty or thirty like-minded companions. It turned out that—surprise!—they weren't buying the load of crap the Realtors had shoveled onto them.

“And the kid in front has a frikkin' noose!” exclaimed Thuy.

She was glad she still had the stonker gun hidden in the wheelchair's seat. She found herself wondering how many people she could kill before the power ran out. That's the kind of mood she was in.

A shouting match began beneath the streetlight outside the inn.

“What bullshit,” said Chick, joining Thuy at the window, drink in hand. “The South is nowhere. What the fuck difference does it make if our clients siphon off some gnarl?
What
gnarl?”

“Don't be shallow,” reproved Duckie. “Charlottesville has a rich history. President Thomas Jefferson himself designed the rotunda and the great lawn.”

“BFD,” said Chick. “I say we hop back to Yolla Bolly before these country-fried hippies string us up.” He glanced over at Thuy. “Hubbie still on the blink?”

“He did a lot today,” said Thuy shortly. She'd decided to make their break for freedom before they went back to the Yolla Bolly Peng ranch—no matter what. But for now she kept up a smile. “Maybe if Jayjay rests a little longer, he'll be ready to go again.”

“Sounds like my husband,” said Duckie with a snicker. “He rests a lot.” The whiskey was hitting her. Thuy could practically see the cracks forming in her plastic face.

Chick shook Jayjay's foot. “Up and at 'em, runemaster! How about you teek a shot of bourbon into his stomach, Thuy? That'll put hair on his chest.”

She ignored him. Teeping Jayjay on the bed just now, she'd discovered something wonderful. He was so drained and so deeply asleep that once again Pekka and the Pekklet had stopped watching him. Big Pekka was tending to the rest of her
farflung empire, and the Pekklet was napping or maybe scratching around the subdimensions for food. They'd be checking back, of course, but right now Thuy had her shot.

She shooed Chick and Duckie from her room and slammed the door. Kittie grasped how things stood. “Let's teleport out of here fast,” she proposed.

“Let's go out to the fire escape,” said Thuy. “Remember that teleportation is blocked in here.”

Jayjay stirred in his sleep, moving naturally for the first time since last night. The room picked up on this and responded.

“Don't let him reprogram us,” teeped the creaky floorboards. “We don't want to be slaves.”

“Maybe I should let those students hop in here,” threatened the inn's faintly sour air. “We'd all be better off with Jayjay dead.”

“Just give us two minutes,” teeped Thuy, her mind seething with plans.

Down in front of the inn, someone fired a gun.

The motley crowd of students were confronting the Crown of Creation posse. Screams, thumps, and more gunshots in the dark. A fresh troop of Crownies arrived. An equal number of angry locals came teleporting to the lawn—and broke through the Sleeping Savior's defense line. Footsteps thudded on the porch; massed shoulders crashed against the inn's locked door.

Kittie and Thuy loaded Jayjay in his wheelchair and hurried down the third-floor hall to the window.

“You can have this,” said Thuy, pulling the stonker gun from under the wheelchair.

“Awesome,” said Kittie, taking it.

Downstairs the front door gave way with a sharp crack. Whoops and yelps sounded up the stairwell.

“Help me get him through the window,” said Thuy. “Once we're outside I'll—”

“—call the Hrull?” said Kittie, reading her mind. “Are you sure that—”

“I figure they can escort us to San Francisco and I'll find that the quantum-mirrored room at Seven Wiggle,” said Thuy. “And I have to try and get Chu back, too. And, to tell the truth, I'm—”

“—dying to see what it's like inside a Hrull,” completed Kittie. “You're a wildwoman, Thuy. A star.”

Footsteps were pounding up the inn's first flight of stairs.

“Hey!” called Duckie, peering after them from the door of her room. “Where do you think you're taking Jayjay?”

“Quack, quack,” said Thuy, giving the unsmiling Realtor the finger.

And then Kittie and Thuy were on the black-painted iron grillwork of the fire escape with Jayjay at their feet. The nightgray trees watched warily—maples, chestnuts, and dogwoods.

“We're leaving,” Thuy assured her surroundings. “Please block the students from teleporting right onto us. We only need a minute.” And then she teeped the wiggly squeal of the Hrull whistle. For the moment there was no response.

The students had reached the second flight of stairs; the tops of their heads were coming into view.

“Back!” yelled Kittie. She leaned in through the window, stonker gun outstretched, and fired a wavery femtoray. The top steps of the stairs shuddered into ragged chunks that clattered down to the flight below.

The students paused, uncertain—and in that moment the fundamentalists boiled up after them. The hundred-handed mob wrestled itself to a standstill. Focusing her mind, Thuy teeped the Hrull whistle again.

And now, ah yes, something flickered in the dim sky. A blacker darkness covered the inn and the lawn. Lusky had been up there all along, waiting to become visible. An acre of wobbly
flesh came gliding toward Thuy, the mouth a faintly glowing slit in the leading edge.

“Hrull!” wailed the student rebels and the Crownies, terrified in equal degrees.

“Not for me,” Kittie told Thuy. “I'm teleporting to Cruz. Luck, babe. You want the gun?”