Hylozoic (30 page)

“I guess that's fine,” murmured Jayjay, not verbalizing his lingering sense of unease. After the scabrous scene with Chu, he felt terribly unsure about what Thuy was capable of doing. Not liking the look of the premixed green, he added a touch of rose to it. “How did you find me here, Groovy?”

“After seeing Thuy, I went by Bosch's place and heard you two jawin' about the big-ass paint raid. So I snuck in here, too. Did you hear any news about Lovva?”

“She sang a hello to me from Bosch's attic. Jeroen's at a prayer meeting till dawn. All we have to do is get into his attic without waking his wife. She's pretty handy with a knife.” Jayjay paused, critically studying the paint blotches he'd just dabbed onto the panel.

“Looks like crap,” opined the pitchfork.

“How do you even see, dung-prongs?”

“I'm all about vibes, boy. Sound, light, neutrinos, quantum wazoo, dark energy yinyang—listen up, I can help you paint good. You still remember about being a zedhead, right? What I showed you up on the beanstalk?”

“But I don't have lazy eight here.”

“Look into yourself,” said the pitchfork. “You wastin' what I taught you.”

“All I know is that you made me Pekka's slave, you shit fork.” Talking to Groovy, it was easy to fall into vulgarity.

“I'm sorry about Pekka, okay? I really did think she was gonna pay me off for shoppin' your world.”

“What could Pekka possibly pay you? You're a god!”

“Well—” The pitchfork paused, as if embarrassed. “Like I keep tellin' you, back home I was a regular guy. We have a few
Peng on my planet, strictly under control, but Pekka knew to get in touch with me after I got aktualized. She said if I helped Warm Worlds Realty invade your world, she'd set you rubes to a-worshippin' me, bowin' down before statues of me and all.”

“You wanted everyone on Earth to worship you? Statues of a pitchfork? Are you fucking nuts?”

“You were supposed to be makin' statues of me the way I am back home. Ronald ‘Groovy' Blevins with green skin, three eyes, and sharp clothes. I'd relish the hell outta seein' big old icons of me. I mean, just take a look around this here church. Who wouldn't want to get the same ass-kissin' as that Jude Christ?”

“Where I come from, Christ is a great ethical teacher,” said Jayjay. “Not some ego-tripping sleazebag who'd sell a planet into slavery.”

“It all depends on your point of view, don't it?” said the pitchfork, his buzz sly and insinuating. “Anyhoo, when I asked that stuffed-shirt Suller in Yolla Bolly about Warm Worlds making good on their end of the deal, he told me I'd misunderstood Pekka's offer, or some shit like that. At least by then Lovva had called in the Hrull to teach you the reset rune.”

“There's no end to your meddling!” exclaimed Jayjay, having trouble keeping down his voice.

“We doin' you favors right and left, Jay. You sure enough
should
be worshippin' my ass.” As the pitchfork grew more confident and self-congratulatory, his buzz amplified. “What I wanted to say is that if you stop being a tight-ass and let your mind run top speed, you can let your paint do the thinkin' and that thistle will come out slick as snot.”

Jayjay only nodded. It would be folly to maintain a steady stream of noisy chatter. Taking into account the pitchfork's advice, he looked into himself as he worked, picking up sympathetic vibrations from his fingers, the brush, and the paints.
In a way it wasn't all that clear where the boundary of his body really was.

Dialing his attention higher on the size scale, he felt a sense of union with the panel, the cathedral, and the culture of the town, as well. This wasn't lazy eight telepathy like back home; it was something more internal, more organic. Everything was an aspect of the divine One.

Jayjay painted slowly, making tiny brush strokes, pecking away until the image was quite acceptable: a floppy thistle with arching thorny stalks, translucent seed pods, and pair of ravenously feeding birds. It was eldritch, outlandish, Boschian.

It was still dark outside, although it felt like he'd been working for a full day. By Hibrane measures he'd been painting perhaps four hours.

“Lookin' good,” said Groovy softly. “Let me bake that for you.” The pitchfork leaned closer and added an infrared component to his glow. In a few minutes the fresh oil paint was dry and hard, as if had been in place for months or years.

Jayjay eased the cabinet door shut, stoppered his vials, wrapped up his palette, and wiped up the stray drops of paint with his sleeves. They were done. The pitchfork doused his tines' light.

Jayjay's back and shoulders were stiff and sore. He was seeing his muscle pains as colors—not intellectually imagining this, but viscerally
feeling
washes of color in his brain. The sore muscle along the left side of his spine oozed a pale malachite green.

“I'm supposed to climb up the tower steps to a window and lower myself from there,” he whispered into the dark as he clambered down off the altar. He slid his kit and his rope under the chapel gate and painfully scaled the gate while the pitchfork clattered his lean form through. The ache in Jayjay's
right shoulder was a triangle of massicot yellow; his stiff legs were veined with ultramarine and ivory black.

Naturally the door to the tower was locked.

“Fuck this shit, Jay,” hummed the pitchfork. “I'll open up the side door.”

“Okay.”

Groovy bent his handle, crouching low enough to feed one of his tines into the side door's keyhole. A brisk click and the door swung open.

 

 

Thonis was nowhere to be seen, but the beggars were still there.

“Greetings, Jayjay,” said a small, dark-eyed form beside the door.

Thinking fast, Jayjay grabbed Groovy by the handle and rested the aktualized being on his shoulder, trying to minimize the strangeness of what the beggars saw.

“Hugo?” he essayed. “It's you?”

“We're shunning the Antonites' courtyard tonight. Lubbert died.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“He was a good friend,” said Hugo. “Too bad you two didn't get along. He bled to death after the amputation this morning.” Hugo sighed. “And now I suppose he's in hell. Or, more likely, nowhere. My alms were good today because I'm sad. That always helps. Do you want some wine?”

“No, no. Did you happen to see a young guy waiting for me out here?”

“He left as soon as you went inside. Were you robbing the silver off the altars? Did you remember to empty the poor box, too?”

“Uh, no.”

“Hold that door open for me, and I'll keep quiet about seeing you here.”

“Good-bye,” said Jayjay, as Hugo dragged himself into the cathedral.

“Farewell.”

The full moon had sunk below the horizon. It was nearly dawn. Jayjay sank the paint kit in the canal, but kept the chimneysweep's rope and grapple. After a brief, intense argument, the pitchfork agreed to guide him to the Muddy Eel before they went to meet the harp.

As it turned out, the tavern wasn't far out of the way; it lay in a side street across the marketplace from Bosch's house. A few drab, bleary people were stumbling around the inn's public room. Jayjay saw no sign of Thuy but—oh shit, here came Jan Vladeracken, just emerging from the bathhouse behind the inn, fastening up his baggy silk pantaloons. Apparently he'd used the Swan Brotherhood's all-night vigil as a cover for visiting a prostitute while his wife slept.

“Bosch's devil!” exclaimed big Jan. “And he's carrying a rope and a pitchfork.” The alderman didn't seem nearly so befuddled as at suppertime. Perhaps the vigil had done him some good, what little bit of it he'd actually attended.

Jayjay hurried out the door into the street; he wanted nothing to do with the alderman. But now Vladeracken noticed something else.

“Green paint!” roared the bully, running after him.

With his six-to-one speed-up factor, Jayjay should have been able to elude the big man. But he was tired and sore. And the oversized cobbles were so slick with piss and vomit that he had to carefully pick his way. Suddenly Vladeracken was upon him.

“Hands off!” buzzed Groovy. Lively as a magic cudgel, he
upended himself onto his prongs and whacked Vladeracken across the shins, making the man bellow in pain.

And then Jayjay and the pitchfork were down the street and across the triangular marketplace. Even now the space was peopled, both with drunks and with the pious, who were tending to the Virgin's processional pageantry.

“Your Thuy's sleeping in the basement,” said the pitchfork, delicately feeling the air with his prongs. “I can hear her breathing, and the rustling of the straw bed.”

“I'm so glad,” sighed Jayjay, close to tears.

“So how do we get at the harp before Jeroen gets back?” asked Groovy, sizing up Bosch's house. “I can climb the wall like an inchworm, but you—”

“Carry up my hook and set it into the sill of that little attic window. And then I'll climb the rope.”

“Yeah, boy.”

 

 

Dawn was breaking with a sweet pink glow as Jayjay climbed the rope. A couple of bystanders saw him, but they didn't say anything. Jayjay pulled the rope up after him.

As he and the pitchfork pried open the attic window, Lovva sang a soft, rippling greeting. She looked the same as before: a gilded triangle with her front edge carved like a classical column, her crosspiece on top a shapely double curve, and her rear edge a hollow wooden soundbox. A scene was newly painted upon the soundbox, an image of two lovers listening to the music of a winged, pale blue demon playing a little harp shaped just like Lovva. The lovers resembled Jayjay and Thuy. Bosch had refined their faces before supper last night.

Haloed with a vermilion glow; Groovy skipped across the
floor to twine around the harp, passionately caressing her curious strings.

Downstairs Aleid cried out in her sleep.

Savoring the beauty of the harp's voice, Jayjay tiptoed across the attic floor. The harp was speaking to him, asking him to play the Lost Chord.

“Get off her,” Jayjay told the pitchfork. “Time for me to do my thing.”

Groovy thudded to one side. Downstairs, Bosch and his wife were arguing about whether they were being robbed.

Jayjay took his place behind the soundbox of the shoulder-high harp. He still knew the Lost Chord, yes, knew it in his muscles, nerves, and bones. Feeling like he had all the time in the world, he stretched out his arms and began to play.

The mellow notes blended like coats of runny paint, melding into gorgeous shades of sensation. That was the underpainting. And now Jayjay plucked a few extra notes as highlights, exactly here, precisely there. Space twitched, yawned, and awoke.

Jayjay lifted free his hands. He was done. Lovva continued playing on her own, sending the runes to every nook of the planet, unfurling the eighth dimension throughout this part of the Hibrane.

As of now, everyone on Hibrane Earth could see everything. And everything was alive.