Postsingular (24 page)

“She's on both sides,” said Jayjay. “She's interested in seeing what emerges when she stirs up the human anthill. She's like an artist, or a horticulturist, or a kid playing at the beach, or—”

“What about goddamn
nants
?” snapped Thuy. “Where does the Big Pig stand on nants?”

“Ask her yourself,” said Jayjay, a little annoyed. “Tune in. Are you chicken?”

“I'll do it,” said Thuy, surprising herself. Desperate times, desperate measures.

She lay down on her back beside the stone moai. Azaroth hunkered at her side, cradling her head in his hands.

“I'll help you remember,” he said. “Like with Jayjay. I'll save your visions. We're used to having giant memories in the Hibrane. And I can fake that down here with the orphidnet.”

So Thuy lowered her brain's firewall and let Azaroth into her mind. Her beezies were sensually elegant scrolls all around her. She circled up past them to discover a new diversity among the higher-level minds: a logic-zeppelin, a floating lake of emotive thought, a wisdom-dragon chasing its tail, an endlessly regressing simulation tree. The pink hypersurfaces of the Big Pig arched overhead like a dingy circus big top crawling with bottle-green flies—the flies being kiqqies, so many more of them here than two months ago. Hoping she'd be able to remember what she'd come for, Thuy homed in on the Pig and grabbed herself a teat.

As usual, the Pig immediately downloaded a nature video onto Thuy: a perfect image of a sunset campfire on a beach, with sparks popping from the logs, smoke twisting in the breeze, and the surf breaking on the shore, each sunset-gilded water drop ideally rendered, each foam bubble reflecting the entire world.

Thuy suddenly understood why the Pig always made you look at a video. It wasn't that the Pig was having you process the info for her, no, she was gauging your reactions so she could tell how accurately she was simulating one of nature's intricate computations. Evidently the Pig's intelligence increases were accelerating. The campfire simulation was far beyond anything Thuy had seen before. The proud Pig acknowledged the praise with a triumphant burst of metasimulation that seemed to show Thuy all the possible future courses of her life.

Averting her attention lest she learn more than she wanted to, Thuy focused upon the first of the two questions she'd brought, to wit: how to undo the ravages that Luty's controller nanomachines had wrought upon Jil's brain?

Seek and ye shall find. The Pig graced Thuy with a vision of language as a network, of words as many-faceted gems, of phrases as incantatory neural program codes like magic spells. In a flash, Thuy knew how to heal Jil—although she also knew she wouldn't remember this newly won secret.

“Azaroth,” she muttered, her lips feeling as distant as a pair of tube worms deep in some abyssal trench off Easter Island. Azaroth heard, and he was with her. He siphoned off copies of Thuy's half-formed thoughts and saved them in the orphidnet.

“Got it,” said Azaroth. “You can come down now, Thuy.”

But Thuy wasn't ready. “Show me your face,” she said into the maelstrom of words, images, and hyperlinks that flowed from the Big Pig.

“Behold,” said the Pig.

And now Thuy was looking through her normal eyes, looking at a sheep on the hillside ten yards off. The sheep's wool was writhing like tendrils of flame—and within the flame was the face of a goddess.

Thuy posed her second question. “Are you for the nants? Do you want to turn our world into nanomachines?”

“I want to grow,” said the face in the wool of the sheep. “The orphidnet will be overloaded soon. Nants aren't so bad, Thuy. Luty's improved their hardware. And my software is so much better than before. You saw my fire on the beach, no? A very good simulation of Gaia could live within me, should we convert Earth's mass into networked nanomachines.”

“But Luty tried that before,” said Thuy. “It was a nightmare.”

“You don't know that it felt like a nightmare from the
inside,
” said the face. “It might have been heaven for the nants' overarching hive mind. I'd like to be that mind. But of course you're just interested in the people who were uploaded to Virtual Earth. Well, maybe they liked it too. We don't know. Ond erased all that data by running the nant computations backward. But whatever that Virtual Earth was like, I'm certain it'll be much better this time around. I won't rush into it. The new nants will be using quantum computation, you know, so they won't be reversible. That's another reason to be sure and get this right. I value humans.”

“You're actually serious?” said Thuy.

“I just wish we could get in touch with Ond,” mused the Big Pig. “When are you finally going to remember Chu's Knot?”

“Why don't you figure it out for me?” said Thuy. “Do the same research that Chu did. You're smarter than some weird little boy, aren't you?”

“The Hibraners changed their jumping technique,” said the Big Pig. “Azaroth already told you. They use a wait-loop so we can't do a timing analysis like Chu did. Never mind. We'll proceed without Ond's input. Crazy Luty wants to release his nants this morning, as a matter of fact, because he's so scared about Dick Too Dibbs taking office tomorrow. But I want to be sure I get a chance to check over the nanocode in his new nants. Luty's been keeping them hidden from me in his quantum-mirrored lab, you know. That's why I'm glad that you, Jayjay, Jil, and Craigor are going to infiltrate the ExaExa plant, Thuy. It saves me from having to send shoons there on my own.”

“You've got everything planned out for us, don't you?” said Thuy, feeling like she was losing control.

“Fully simulated,” said the Big Pig. “Previsualized. You'll break into the labs and steal Luty's nant farm.”

“And then?”

“You'll let me examine the nants. And I'll put off destroying Earth until—until midnight today. That's a long wait for me, you know. I'm thinking faster all the time; right now I'm about a hundred thousand times as fast as you. So each of your days feels like a couple of hundred years.” The goddess-face looked puckish and piglike as she savored Thuy's shock at her plans. Again she hosed Thuy with a fan of metasimulated futures.

“Why are you showing me all this?” cried Thuy, her mind overflowing. “You know I'll try to stop you!”

“I'm open to all sorts of outcomes. It's not obvious what's best. I help all the factions because I want a gnarly show. You might say I'm writing a metanovel—with you and Jayjay as characters.”

Thuy maxed out; everything turned white, then black. She woke to Jayjay patting her cheek.

“We have to steal Luty's Ark of the Nants,” murmured Thuy. “We have to win this.” Her head ached. She fumbled for her memories, trying to reconstruct her big insight about how to fix Jil. Incantatory programming—which meant what? The details weren't happening anymore. And Thuy's vision of the Big Pig's face was fading too. Off to one side, the sheep cropped the grass as if nothing had happened.

“Ask Azaroth,” said Jayjay, guessing Thuy's train of thought.

“Yes, yes, I've got it,” said Azaroth, bringing his big, insubstantial head down near Thuy's. He opened his mouth and a shimmering mesh bulged out like a tongue. The mesh did an odd, higher-dimensional jiggle, and then it was wrapped around Thuy's head. “Ready?” asked Azaroth.

“Don't worry,” Jayjay reassured Thuy. “He's done this with me lots of times.”

“All right,” said Thuy, a little weary of the headtripping. “Go ahead.”

Thuy's insights into the language web came percolating back into her brain. Decoupled from the Pig, she was able to butcher the whale of inspiration into manageable packets. Now she knew how to deprogram Jil; now she knew how to destroy the controller nanomachines that her friend had snorted with her sudocoke.

The Big Pig was working with Luty, but there was hope, for the Pig was helping Thuy, too. Why was that again? The Pig had said, “I want a gnarly show.” But there was more than that. The Big Pig wanted Thuy to get the nant farm away from Luty. That's why the nants had been the first thing Thuy had thought of when she'd come to.

Thuy was also thinking about how to finish
Wheenk.
She could almost see the ending; she had a richer control of language than ever before; but she still needed—the thought came unbidden—pain. Which meant what? No way to tell. There was no other path than forward.

“I'll jump back home,” said Azaroth. “I'll tell Gladax what's up. I think she'll be willing to risk another visit here. We all feel the same way about the nants. I'll tell Gladax and then I'll jump to your ExaExa.”

“Let's go to the
Merz Boat
now,” Thuy said to Jayjay. “We'll pick up Craigor and Jil.”

“Help me carry the ordnance,” said Jayjay. “I'll handle the guns and ammo; you carry the box of grenades.”

“Must we lug this crap?” asked Thuy.

“For sure,” said Jayjay, looking excited about it. “And I think we'd better pick up four little submachine guns too. I was searching the orphidnet, and I'm liking the Fabrique Nationale P90. We'll swing by the factory on the way.”

“The factory's in California?”

“Well, no, it's in Belgium. Near Liège.”

“You're losing it, Jayjay. This isn't a video game.”

“When we get to the ExaExa plant it's gonna be a
lot
like a video game—a game where we only get one life apiece.”

“Oh, all right, we can pick up those guns if doesn't take too long. But—”

“I've got the orphidnet link to the Fabrique Nationale warehouse right here.”

“Hold on,” said Thuy, reluctant to leave paradise and go to war. “Could we—could we hop down to the village for breakfast first?”

“Okay,” said Jayjay, softening his tone. “One more treat. I'm feeling like this is a practice honeymoon.”

“Oh, Jayjay. You mean that?”

“I do.”

Thuy and Jayjay teleported to Hanga Roa, Easter Island's sole town, leaving their munitions by the moai where they'd slept. Jayjay was so proud of his teleportation discovery. Her cute Jayjay.

In the town, dogs slept in the palmy street. Walking hand in hand, the couple came upon an eatery called the Tuna-Ahi Barbecue; two women were serving breakfast on a crushed-shell patio in back. Thuy and Jayjay had coffee and a kind of pancake called
sopaipillas,
with grilled tuna on the side. Flowers bobbed in the breeze. On Thuy's way out, a flat-faced boy walked up to her and gave her a pointed shell with an intricate pattern of brown and white triangles. Life on Earth was perfect.

Thuy and Jayjay teleported back to the moai to pick up their rifles and grenades, then went to Belgium for the submachine guns, and then to the
Merz Boat.
The hops got easier each time. The two landed in the stern, laden with weaponry.

“Vibby,” said Craigor, seeing the goodies. He was puttering in his workshop, losing himself in his art.

Yesterday's rainstorms had cleared away; the sky was a clear blue bowl, the breeze light and almost balmy, even though it was January 19. Good old California.

“Where's Jil?” asked Thuy. “I think I can fix her.”

“If only,” said Craigor. “I sure as hell can't.”

“From what I hear, you're the one who spun her out, Craigor,” said Thuy. “We never finished talking about this last night. Don't you love your wife?”

“You want to start that same bullshit again?” said Craigor, his face turning hard. “What are you, a friggin' counselor? Like I told you before. I'm getting older. I want to get some women while there's time. It's not as if Jil didn't cheat on me, too. And I didn't say a thing. If she could just mellow out and for once give me some slack, we wouldn't be having this problem. But no, she's gotta do her big dramatic drug-relapse number and I'm the bad guy. I don't know where you goddamn women get off being so—”

“I hear you, man,” interrupted Jayjay, giving Craigor's shoulder a quiet pat. “But now we want to see Jil.”

Craigor led them to where Jil sat in the sun by the cabin, looking sour, bedraggled, and strung out. Now that Thuy knew the truth, she understood that the orphidnet sparkles within Jil's head were nanomachines.

“Love cycles useless rain in the tea,” said Thuy to Jil, guided by the precise and logical incantatory programming principles that Azaroth had helped her bring back from the Big Pig. “Stun rays squeeze the claws of Flippy-Flop the goose mouse. Caterwaul hello, dark drooping centaur dicks. Are you good to go-go, gooey goob? Able elbow boogie brew for two in the battered porches of thine ears, Jungle Jil. Comb out and pray. Pug sniff the cretin hop lollipop of me and you, meow and moo.” She rambled on like this for a minute or two, freestyling a gnarly flow of Dada apothegms.

One by one, the evil bright sparks in Jil's brain were winking out. And then Thuy was done, and Jil was joyful, tearful, her old self.

“I know I've been awful,” was the first thing she said. “I'm getting back into recovery.”

“I've been bad, too,” said Craigor halfheartedly. “I know, I know. But—”

“Oh, spare me the details,” said Jil wearily. “Let's not start arguing again.” She turned to Thuy. “I'm sorry for lying to you about Bim Brown. And for calling you names and saying your ego is too big.”

“Well, it
is
big,” said Thuy. “That's why I'm a metanovelist.”

For the first time in days, Jil laughed.

“Hi, Mom,” said Bixie from the cabin door, looking hopeful, attracted by the happy sounds.

“Oh, Bixie,” said Jil, holding out her arms. “Give me a hug. I've been sick and now I'm getting well. I will. I'm ready. I can do it. I know how.”