Postsingular (19 page)

“Me too,” answered Jayjay. He smiled at her. “This is the same alley where we split up. Synchronicity.”

“But how deeply does Jil have her hooks into you? That woman—”

“Woman,” echoed Jayjay and embraced Thuy, sheltering her from the rain with the wings of his plastic poncho. “I only slept with Jil because I couldn't have you. Jil's no schemer; she wants to do right. She broke off with me because it was upsetting her kids. But Craigor keeps cheating on her; he's got this midlife crisis thing. And now Jil's using again. I feel sorry for her. But that's nothing like the way I feel about you, Thuy. I've always dreamed of spending my life with you. Nobody else comes close.”

Thuy wanted to melt, to cling to her man like a vine, but over his shoulder she saw the golem splashing across Valencia.

“Jayjay—”

“It's okay,” said Jayjay squeezing her tighter. “We're outta here. We'll teleport. Go in the orphidnet and look at the
Merz Boat.
And be looking at this alley with your eyes.”

Thuy followed Jayjay's link to the gently rocking deck of the bargelike
Merz Boat
with its central cabin like an oversized loaf of bread. She had a moment of double vision: water waves flowed across the alley walls. And now Jayjay linked her to a striped, silk-spinning caterpillar that crawled all over the
Merz Boat
scene, smoothing over the all-but-imperceptible gaps in the remotely viewed image, interpolating among the orphid-based data points. No orphidnet image had ever looked
this
real.

Next Jayjay showed Thuy how to weave her thoughts from scene to scene, binding the alley and the seascape together. Thuy's mind spread out. She was neither here nor there. All of her particles were in synch with each other, temporarily free of the outside world. She felt very tiny, she was falling—where? With a thump, Thuy and Jayjay landed on the soft deck of—

“Welcome to the
Merz Boat,
” whispered Jayjay. “You and me, Thuy, forever.”

The bay's riffles were faintly lit by the San Francisco lights, the reflections roughened by the endless rain. The soft plastic scow flexed with the water's gentle chop. Double-jointed mounds of Craigor's art projects stood heaped beside his little workshop at the boat's stern. Amidships, the glowing windows of a long cabin illuminated fishing nets and a big glass tank of cuttlefish. In the bow, a group of Jil's shoons chattered among themselves and called soft greetings.

“How—” began Thuy, but now one of the cabin doors opened and here came Jil Zonder. Although the night was dark, Thuy could see Jil clearly via the orphidnet: perfect bob of dark hair, straight nose and great cheekbones, almond eyes and crisply cut mouth. Thuy had always admired Jil, and even now she wanted to like her.

“You made it, Thuy!” exclaimed Jil. Seen up close, her face was tired and worn. The sudocoke was dragging her down. “I watched Jayjay watching your reading,” said Jil. “I caught the part about Topping's office having that grill connection to the ExaExa labs.” She rubbed at her temples distractedly. “Um, if you can swear you saw Luty there, I know this cop who can get a search warrant. Bim Brown, the San Francisco Chief of Police—he's a
Founders
fan. He's ready to launch a surprise raid on Exa-Exa tomorrow—last chance before Inauguration Day.”

“Aren't you giving away the surprise, talking about it out loud?” said Thuy.

“I hardly know what I'm saying anymore,” said Jil, suddenly on the point of tears. “Nobody cares about me anymore. I don't matter.”

“Do you mind that I'm here?” said Thuy uncertainly. She felt naïve and plain and stupidly perky before this suffering older woman.

“Oh, forget about my stupid fling with Jayjay,” said Jil in a flat, rapid tone. She sniffled and rubbed her nose. “Dead ashes for him, just a snack. He's such a beautiful boy. Maybe I thought I'd win Craigor back that way. As if. I hope you didn't watch us on
Founders,
Thuy?”

“No, no,” said Thuy. “Of course not.”

“Good,” said Jil, scratching her scalp. “The kids saw us almost right away, and then it was horrible and we had to stop having sex. Momotaro slugged Jayjay in the crotch. Bixie had a screaming fit. And usually she's so calm. Girls are wonderful when they're eleven. Remember being that age, Thuy? It's right before sex drags you down. I've never been so unhappy in my life.”

“But that was all two months ago, Jil,” put in Jayjay, trying to lighten the mood. “And you and I are still friends, right? I wish you and Craigor could settle back down. And of course it's for the best if you and I keep things platonic. I feel like I abused your hospitality.”

Jil shrugged and sniffled, her expression unutterably bleak.

“By the way, Thuy,” jabbered Jayjay, “in case you're wondering why I'm still on the
Merz Boat,
it's because of Azaroth, that Hibraner friend of yours? He always turns up here. He steals cuttlefish and sends them to the Hibrane to eat. Azaroth has been helping me get good at physics. Not that he's a scientist. But he remembers stuff for me. And Craigor's okay with me being here. He likes that I'm helping him teleport.”

Thuy felt an irrational pang of jealousy to learn that Azaroth was working with Jayjay as well as with her.

“
Pop,
” said a deep voice right behind Thuy, startling her. It was Craigor, materializing out of nowhere, wearing a cuttlefish-stenciled poncho like Jayjay's.

“How do you guys do that?” asked Thuy, wiping the rain from her eyes.

“I invented a new family of quantum mechanical interpolators,” said Jayjay. “I package them as little agents. You saw one just now, it looked like a caterpillar. Nobody gets hold of my interpolation agents unless I give them a onetime link. I'm beginning to build buzz for teleportation, and maybe later, I'll be taking my service public. The vibby thing is, whatever you're carrying gets teleported right along with you.”

“You used the Big Pig?” said Thuy, disappointed. A sudden gust of wind sent salt spray flying across the deck, totally drenching her.

“The winter wet T-shirt look,” said Craigor, theatrically goggling at Thuy's soggy sweater and her sagging striped tights. He was also peering under her clothes through the orphidnet; she could sense the hitcounts. Thuy looked to Jil for help.

“Don't worry about Jayjay, Thuy,” said Jil, ignoring her husband. “Jayjay's down to one Pig session every two weeks. It takes him that long to process all the stuff that Azaroth helps him remember. He's gotten so smart. I'm proud of him. Come into the cabin and dry off. You're going to catch a cold and start sniffling like me.”

“That golem shoon's on his way,” said Craigor, asserting his presence. “And he's bringing backup. See them, kiqs? Look in the orphidnet: the golem, a crocodile, a pelican, and a pterodactyl.” He messaged the links.

Thuy zoomed in on the ragged, ineluctable forms. The stubby golem shoon was a mile off, sculling toward the
Merz Boat.
He'd puffed up his body with air so as to float on the surface, and he was using his arms and legs like oars. Further away, but moving faster, was a submerged plastic crocodile beating a long, tapering tail. A pair of sinister flying shoons were just leaving the ExaExa labs in San Francisco, one resembling a pale green pelican, the other a leathery reddish pterodactyl. “Maybe your boat should swim down to the South Bay?” Thuy said to Craigor.

“No use,” said Craigor. “It's like when a Frankenstein monster is chasing you in a dream: he moves slow, but he never stops, and eventually you have to rest, and that's when he catches up.” Reflexively clowning, Craigor lurched stiff-legged toward the stern, rocking from side to side, intoning, “Me kill bad shoons. Jayjay help.”

“I'm staying with Thuy,” said Jayjay, not budging from her side.

Craigor's voice returned to normal. “If we're not ready for those attack shoons, kiq, there's gonna be no romance possibilities for you nohow. Not with Thuy and not with my wife.”

“Don't always bring that up,” said Jayjay testily. “You should be nicer to Jil.”

“Fuck you. You gonna help or not?”

“All
right,
” said Jayjay. “Give us a freakin' minute.” He hugged Thuy again, and this time she let him kiss her.

“You feel so good,” Thuy messaged privately. “Why didn't you call?”

“I missed you a lot,” messaged back Jayjay. “But I didn't want to bug you till I'd done something to make you proud. And now I've invented my own teleportation technique. It's much hipper than the Armory-to-ExaExa kludge that Luty set up with those gratings. Prav Plato says I should publish my work as a physics paper, but I'm thinking I should keep the details secret and get rich by selling onetime access links.”

“Rich would be nice,” messaged Thuy. “That way you can get a good place to live. And then maybe we—” But she didn't dare formulate her wish, not with Jil and Craigor around.

“Move it, Thuy,” said Jil, bossily tapping her on the shoulder. “Dry clothes and hot tea.” Even though Jil was frowning, her voice was creepily calm. “Jayjay has to help Craigor. After all, it's thanks to you that those attack shoons are coming here.”

“I'd better get ready,” agreed Jayjay.

So Thuy let Jil lead her into the long cabin, cozy and lit by solar-charged bud-lamps. Jil put some water on the stove while Thuy took a seat at a round piezoplastic table growing from the deck. Visible in the orphidnet were ad icons for Stank deodorant and BigBox furniture, which meant this was a top-level episode of the
Founders
show. Thuy was hoping for a cozy chat with Jil, but the other woman seemed preoccupied.

“Why don't I file my report with Bim Brown right now?” suggested Thuy finally.

“Uh, good idea. Here's Bim's link. While you do that, I'll check on the kids.” The living quarters were arranged in three blocks: first the common area with a bathroom, then the kids' two small bedrooms facing each other across a hall, and beyond that the parents' large bedroom. Thuy wondered where she and Jayjay were supposed to sleep.

The instant Thuy clicked the link Jil had given her, she had Bim Brown on a private message line, the chief sitting amid a din of background noise in a cop-station office with file cabinets, chairs, award plaques, a gun rack, and old-school display screens showing arrays of faces and annotated maps. Chief Brown looked very plausible, but Thuy felt suspicious. Why had the link worked so fast? Temporarily leaving the worries for her scenario-spinning beezies to analyze, she pressed on.

“I know where Jeff Luty is,” Thuy told Chief Brown. “I saw him in the ExaExa labs.”

“That's a big break for us,” he answered, his deep voice reassuring. “Don't go away. I'll open up a notarized encryption channel so you can record your account. Here it is.”

A sort of funnel appeared, and Thuy recounted her sighting of Luty. To speed things up, she pasted in some material directly from “Losing My Head,” which happened to include an image of Luty with his lank ponytail. There was no reason that legal evidence couldn't take the form of a poetic rant.

“Excelente,”
said Brown when she was done. “We'll try and bag Luty tomorrow morning. With any luck, he uses deadly force to resist arrest, my officers reply in kind, and Too Dibbs doesn't get the chance to pardon him. Case frikkin' closed.”

“You're telling me this?” said Thuy, surprised.

“What it is. Luty tried to kill every single person on Earth with those nants. I'd call that genocide. And I'm hearing he's pumped to do it again.”

“Can I come and watch the raid?”

“I'll be wanting the whole
Merz Boat
posse in on this. You kiqs have special friends, special powers. We might need it all. Be outside the ExaExa labs by eight a.m. latest.”

Bim Brown broke the connection and Thuy was alone in the
Merz Boat
's common room. She used the orphidnet to peer into the dark bedrooms, looking for Jil. Bixie and Momotaro were asleep in their rooms, and Jil herself was sitting on the bed alone in the master bedroom, her head down over her lap. Crying—or doing sudocoke?

Feeling guilty for prying, Thuy switched to watching Craigor and Jayjay, who were readying a combine device made of a four-foot lump of piezoplastic atop three ten-meter lengths of black pipe. The lump was beige, with a hatched surface that made it look vaguely like an internal organ. Arms protruded from its middle, with hands grasping a black metal cane. The lump had eyes and a toothy mouth at its top end, which was crowned by a black top hat bearing white lettering: “Mr. Peanut.” One of Craigor's gaga Dada jokes. Art for art's sake. You had to hand it to the guy, obnoxious though he was. Meanwhile, the attack shoons were fifteen minutes away.

Jil bounced out from the bedrooms, carrying a towel, jeans, and a sweater. Her eyes were bright and watchful. Thuy changed into the dry clothes, almost expecting Jil to put a sexual move on her, so charged was the atmosphere. But Jil just made two cups of tea and seated herself at the round table across from Thuy.

“You think the men can handle the attackers?” said Thuy, wanting to talk.

“I bet they can,” said Jil. She reached into her pants pocket and set a little silver box on the table beside her teacup. “You want a hit?”

“You're, um, using again?” said Thuy. “Not to judge you, of course. I used to watch
Founders,
so I know your backstory. You were in recovery, weren't you?”

“Until last week,” said Jil, using a silver straw to blast two snorts from her stash box. “But Craigor's still cheating on me. It's like all of a sudden he's scared his life is slipping away and he has to score all these different women. I wish I could just accept having an open marriage. But I can't. And now he's seeing Lureen Morales. And even that would be okay if only Jayjay—” Jil had been talking faster and faster, but now her voice trailed off. She stared off into space, riding her rush.

The way she'd said Jayjay's name set off alarm bells in Thuy's head. “You're still in love with him?” blurted Thuy. “Even after breaking up?”

“Ratings spike,” said Jil, her mouth curving into a stoned smirk. Her eyes were dancing. She snapped shut her silver box and shoved it back in her pants. “Feel the hitcounts? Time to promote your metanovel. Is it
Wheenk
? I didn't say that Jayjay and I
broke up,
Thuy. I said we stopped
having sex.
Jayjay's very hot. He makes me feel young. Is that so bad?”

Temporarily at a loss, Thuy checked their images in the orphidnet—like a TV soap actor glancing over at the monitor. She noticed points of light inside Jil's head. Devices in Jil's brain? Or was that a sudocoke thing?

“What?” snapped Jil, defiantly glaring at her.

“Um, tell me about Jayjay's teleporting,” essayed Thuy.

Jil cocked her head, her mouth half open, processing the input. “Jayjay discovered it thanks to that Hibraner Azaroth,” she said finally. “Azaroth figured out a way to use the orphidnet for remembering complicated things. Azaroth gets into close orphidnet contact with Jayjay when he's on the Pig, and he saves off orphidnet images of Jayjay's mental states for him. The beezies like Jayjay, they give him all the space he needs in the orphidnet. Azaroth says he wants to help bring Ond and Chu back from the Hibrane. Ond loves me, you know.”

“Oh everyone loves Jil,” said Thuy sarcastically. “And I know all about Azaroth. He's
my
Hibrane friend, too.”

“Mainly he steals cuttlefish from the wholesalers,” said Jil, slowing down again. “I don't fully trust him.”

“Azaroth told me that he asked you about Chu's Knot, Jil, and you wouldn't help. You went to the Hibrane, didn't you? You touched the Knot.”