Hylozoic (31 page)

 

 

 

A
fter
Chu said good-bye to Thuy, he had to stand there while Glee rooted around inside Lusky's dead body, which was really gross of her. But he'd gotten to like the alien woman well enough that he waited for her.

Though Chu still didn't know anything about Glee's past, she seemed like a good-natured person who'd had bad luck. He'd noticed that she got pleasure out of whatever tiny variations of routine they experienced inside Lusky; she was always alert and commenting on things. He felt sorry for her for being hooked on the gel.

“Now I've got enough for a couple of days,” said Glee, picking her way back through the rubble. She was wearing a sunny smile, holding up a scrap of Hrull skin in which she'd wrapped the gel she'd salvaged. “Want a taste?”

“That stuff's bad for you, Glee,” said Chu, shaking his head. “Let's keep moving.”

As they started off, Chu glanced back down the street for a last look at Thuy, still standing over the supine Jayjay, the sun low in the sky behind her. He waved farewell, and then the bulk of the dead Hrull was between them. Chu could hardly believe he and Thuy had been doing it a few minutes ago. He felt dizzy from that, and from the aftereffects of the gel.

Although Chu was keeping his teep anonymized so people couldn't readily spot him, he was still visible via the silps, especially if someone had a general idea where to look for him. Feeling paranoid, he double-checked to make sure he was logged out of the
Founders
show—and found that he and Thuy had been officially fired, at the behest of the corporate sponsors. All right. It would be fine with Chu to be out of the public eye. But, yeah, the money had been nice. Thanks to his
Founders
work, he had his own bank account.

In some ways he felt just as mature as Thuy. Had sex with her damaged him? For sure he was upset—and ashamed to have been seen. But, more than anything, he was surprised. He'd never realized sex would be so—what was the right phrase? Hashing his nonverbal memories into a key, Chu searched Gaia's word hoard for a match, finding:
Knobbly, exiguous, redolent, all-encompassing
, and
gnarly
.

That word again. Thuy and Jayjay were always going off about gnarl, but sometimes gnarly things weren't so wonderful. Particularly if they involved other people and if you were on the autism spectrum.

By way of checking the audience reaction to his sexual initiation, Chu peeped into a personal Gaia feed that he'd designed; it tracked all teep mentions of his name. A few of the comments were sympathetic or admiring; but many were
mean and moralistic. The harshest were from people who seemed also to be lusting for him. Yuck.

In the real world, everyone that Chu and Glee passed on the street was staring at them: a three-eyed green alien and the underage boy from that
Founders
sex scene, both of them naked. Too much.

One of the stores in the block after Lusky had a pile of pants and shirts on a table on the sidewalk. Chu tried a pair of skinny purple jeans and a green T-shirt; the garments claimed they'd be perfect for him. Hylozoic Earth's intelligent objects tended to like being put to use. Chu teeped credit to the store's distracted owner, who was concerned about Glee's odor and the crashed Hrull next door.

Observing the purchase, Glee became very enthused about the little shop's clothes. Her excitement touched the once-blind heart of Chu. He told her he'd be happy to buy her anything she liked. After much deliberation—which just about drove the owner over the edge—Glee selected a flimsy summer shift of lilac gauze. The dress claimed that it went well with Glee's green skin—and convinced her to accessorize her look with a maroon cloche hat that the dress had befriended.

Having green skin wasn't unheard of in the Mission; people had been tinting themselves for several years now. And Glee's extreme skinniness could pass for a fanatical level of fitness. With her hat pulled down over her third eye, she looked almost normal, at least for this part of town. But she did have that sulfurous smell.

In the sunset-gilded street, a teleport flash-crowd had formed, with fresh ghostly forms appearing and solidifying every second. People were yelling surprisingly rude things. It was time to go. Chu was thinking that Glee might enjoy visiting some bigger stores. Hiding their trail by closing off incoming teep, Chu and Glee hopped to Union Square.

 

 

Even with the Peng siphoning off gnarl, San Francisco remained lively. Store lights gleamed in the dusk; the square buzzed with foot traffic. Glee looked around, taking it in, happy to be rubbing elbows.

Chu passed her his credit information, and she headed straight for Macy's, tightening her pores to keep the broccoli odor down. Chu himself relaxed on a bench in the square, trying to keep his anonymity. It wouldn't last long—soon someone's pattern-recognizing search routine would single him out, or Glee would charge a goody to his account and the sniffers would target Union Square, or some online agent would decrypt and trace the “I'm fine” text message that he'd just sent to his parents.

The clouds on the horizon were rimmed in dying shades of gold and lilac. How was Thuy doing? Routing his access through an encrypted channel, Chu teeped toward Seven Wiggle labs. Thuy and Jayjay had locked themselves into a quantum-mirrored teep-blocked room there. Sonic and the lab geeks yelled something about Thuy and Jayjay going to the Hibrane, and then they took off. The Peng arrived to peck at the inner room's door. Jayjay's weird pitchfork chased off the Peng for a minute, but then the pitchfork disappeared. The Peng came back and broke down the door to the inner room. It was empty. Maybe Thuy and Jayjay had made it to the Hibrane. Sensing Chu's telepathic gaze, squawky Blotz sent a mind-trace toward him. Chu broke the connection.

Certainly he shouldn't stay in San Francisco indefinitely. By way of further assessing his current situation, he tuned in on the national news stream—and found growing alarm over the crashed body of Lusky. A chorus of high-profile voices
were shrilly denouncing the Hrull; loudest among them were the “resurrected” preachers of the Crown of Creation Church. And, paddling onto the tsunami of buzz, President Dick Too Dibbs had decided to give a national speech—starting right now!

The new president's popularity had been slipping ever since his inauguration day, which had also been Lazy Eight Day, when everything woke up. With the world gone hylozoic, the whole idea of governments based upon human power elites was seeming increasingly dumb.

“This week our planet has made contact with two alien races,” intoned Dick Too Dibbs, speaking in his matter-of-fact Kentucky accent. “One is good, and one is evil. The Peng are personable birds who walk on two legs; the Hrull are depraved flying devilfish.”

Dick Too Dibb's cousin Dick Dibbs had been president before him. The first president Dibbs had been convicted and executed for treason after unleashing the nants. Dick Too Dibbs claimed he'd learned from his cousin's mistakes, and during his first hundred days in office, he'd acted quite reasonable. But that was over now. At the behest of his party's fundamentalist supporters, he was throwing his support behind the Peng.

The president continued his speech, describing the Peng occupation of San Francisco and Yolla Bolly in glowing terms, depicting Suller and Blotz as problem-solving diplomats who'd come to make Earth a better world. He went so far as to hint that the Peng might be of divine origin. He didn't acknowledge the fact that they were now in charge of the Crown of Creation Church. Nor did he explicitly mention the phenomenon of gnarl reduction—he only made some vague remarks about the Peng having the potential to calm tensions worldwide.

It occurred to Chu that the majority of Americans wouldn't
even notice the missing gnarl. “Flat like me,” he thought with a twinge. He truly had to learn to appreciate chaos, and to be as unpredictable as Jayjay and Thuy.

Just then, as a kind of gift from his subconscious, Chu thought of acting out the phrase
knuckle walkers
, which his mother, Nektar, often used when discussing the members of the Dibbs Homesteady Party. In the dusk, he began lumbering around his bench, bent over with his fists to the pavement, a caveman in synch with the voice of President Dick Too Dibbs.

“
Ga hoink
,” he grunted. “
Yurk yurk!
”

Moving on to the Hrull, President Too Dibbs deplored the flying mantas as diabolic slavemasters. To pep up his presentation, he threw in a clip of today's Hrull-instigated sex act between the vile kiqqie Thuy Nguyen and her innocent victim, an autistic boy of fourteen.

This brought Chu up short. The fog of shame closed in. As if on cue, dots twinkled above his bench. A heavyset woman took solid form, teleporting in to confront him. She had short, glossy hair, a smooth face, and a dark mole on her chin.

“I've come to help,” said the woman. “I'm bringing you in for abuse counseling.”

Was she from the police? Who knew. With so many virtual agents winnowing the global data stream, anyone could have found him by now.

The woman wore a self-aiming, shoulder-mounted stun gun. The stun gun's nasty little silp claimed he'd shoot if Chu even thought about teleporting out. While Chu considered his options, the stocky woman slapped a quantum-mirrored “dunce cap” onto his head to block his teleporting ability—and handcuffed his wrists so that he couldn't tear the cap off.

Suddenly, Glee materialized, back from Macy's, happy in a strapless cream silk evening dress, and with a silk headband
instead of a hat. She'd acquired some pricey gold earrings and a topaz ring as well. A real dent in Chu's bank account.

“Leave my friend alone,” Glee teeped to the plump matron.

“Stay clear, ma'am,” frowned the woman, her face curdling into lumps. She turned as if to threaten Glee with her stun gun—and in that instant, Glee's pusher-strength mind made an irritated gesture that sent the gun high above the Earth's atmosphere, closely followed by Chu's handcuffs and dunce cap.

Glee unfastened her headband and turned the glare of her golden third eye upon Chu's would-be abductor. “You. Leave. Now.” This was the first time Glee had spoken aloud.

Utterly spooked, the coplike woman grew transparent and teleported away.

Before anything else could happen, Chu guided Glee on a second hop, this one to—randomly—Portland, Oregon.

 

 

They landed beside a fountain and a café. Glee readjusted her headband. “It is better here,” she said, speaking slowly. She sounded like someone from Hungary, not that Chu knew much about the world other than what he'd seen in videos. “I am disliking the Peng as much as you,” continued Glee in her warm, draggy voice. “At home we have Peng, too, but they live only in the aristos' castles.”

“Hide us now, Gaia,” said Chu aloud—and good old Gaia told the Portland silps not to pass on positional information about Chu and Glee's location. The lively Portland silps stood ready to help, unlike the Peng-drained silps of San Francisco or Yolla Bolly.

Glee and Chu were in a shopping district near the river, past dusk now, with laidback local grungers ambling down
the shiny walkways, drifting in and out of warm-lit bars and cafés, chatting to each other in stores with fogged windows.

Teeping into the fine spring rain, Chu had a moment of illumination, seeing each and every tiny vibrating droplet. What beauty, what intricacy, what plenty. The native natural world was wonderful when the Peng weren't skimming off the gnarl. He'd had never really appreciated this before. He was growing all the time.

“More shopping now!” said Glee, still talking out loud. She was enjoying herself. “I want to buy raincoat.” She found an olive and yellow-checked overshirt that went well with her green skin and her new cream dress. A moot point in any case, for Chu now realized that he shouldn't use his credit account in Portland, lest he once again alert the people searching for them.