Текст книги "Postsingular"

Автор книги: Rudy Rucker

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Thuy jumped to one side as a rubber net descended rather slowly upon the spot where she'd been standing. The woman holding it was indeed Gladax, narrow-eyed in concentration. She wore dirty green sweatpants and a cheap T-shirt with a smeared dragon print.

Thuy grabbed her red plaid coat and ran out the back of the patio into an unpaved alley. Gladax did a nimble teleportation hop to head her off, net at the ready, looking two stories tall. But even though Gladax could hop, her physical body moves were slow. Thuy dodged the net, and flung handfuls of sand and broken shells at the old woman. A bit of grit got into Gladax's eye.

"Little brat," said Gladax in a deep, slow Hibraner voice. She set to removing the mote, focusing all her attention on the task. Unobserved for this one moment, Thuy teleported herself to the Hibrane San Francisco.

She landed next to a wet dog sniffing the doorstep of the clothing store. Or, no, that was Azaroth, if you looked at him with your regular eyes. To the telepathic gaze, he was a white and tan collie-beagle with a saddle-shaped orange patch on his back.

Azaroth opened a pinhole window through his umbrella of illusion, letting Thuy see the secret of telepathic camouflage. As a writer, she understood the mental trick right away, but-now Azaroth was telling her to imitate a rat? No thanks. Drawing on her memories of her family's beloved cat, Naoko, Thuy began vibing like a Siamese. Mew.

Colorful, organic cars were rolling by in the light rain, no two of them the same. The battery-powered vehicles seemed alert and sensitive. Right inside the open garage doors of the auto repair shop, a man in overalls was in a wordless conversation with a purple car, assessing its vibes as he fit a knobby rubber tire onto one of its wheels. The shop had almost the feel of a veterinary clinic. The car-healer saw Thuy and slowly smiled. She teeped that he was one of Azaroth's friends.

Azaroth pointed toward the second-floor rooms above the auto clinic. Shrouded by their dog and cat vibes, Azaroth and Thuy teleported up there.

And landed in a giant back room heavy with years of dust. For Thuy, the room was the size of a concert hall. Rain ran down the expanses of a dirty rear window that faced the alley wall and a leafless city tree. The window looked to be some kind of plant membrane rather than actual glass. A single light-bulb in the room's upper recesses fought feebly against the gloom. Oversized organic auto parts languished on shelves that seemed to have grown right out of the walls, the parts marked with teep-tags instead of written labels. Water trickled from a tap in a great porcelain sink. Doggy Azaroth flopped down on a tired old couch: a puffball the size of a patio. Sitting next to him were an ant and a housefly.

Blinking her eyes, Thuy realized she was looking at Chu and Ond. She'd never met them before, but she knew them from a zillion news shows: Ond blond, awkward, middle-aged, slim; Chu blank-eyed with a cute, slightly sour mouth and a dark brown cap of hair.

"Welcome, Thuy," said Ond out loud. "You're doing fine with that cat imitation. I like cats a lot better than dogs." Blessedly he spoke at the same speed as Thuy. "Now grow your illusion to the size of this room. Make it like a cubical soap bubble that we're all inside." In person, Ond's voice sounded warmer than in the orphidnet archives. But-cubical bubble illusion? Thuy wasn't sure what he meant.

"He means paint your cat-self onto the ceiling, the floor, and each of the four walls," said Chu, his voice thin and sulky. "Also

the door and the windows."

"Watch us," rumbled Azaroth.

Azaroth, Ond, and Chu pushed their vibes of dog, fly, and ant out to the fringes of the room. Thuy studied what they'd done, tracing the patterns of their minds, and then she followed suit, painting her emulation of Naoko the cat onto the room.

"That's glow," said Azaroth in his slow, oozing voice, then switched to telepathy. "We can touch minds in here now. I don't think Gladax sees us under those animal shields."

"This is our secret lab," added Ond. "We come here to work on our video game and on our plan."

"What about the guys in the garage?" asked Thuy. "They're Azaroth's friends?"

"Yeah," said Ond. "The local Hibraners have gotten used to us. We have the run of the town. And we have jobs. I'm Gladax's tutor and Chu's her good-luck nanteater."

"Nanteater," echoed Chu, telepathically displaying an image of a long-snouted bushy-tailed anteater while he talked out loud. "When Gladax addled the jump-code in my head, she also saw my memory of Nant Day. So she thinks I'm magic against nants. Hibraners don't understand digital computers at all. Did you bring my jump-code?"

"I have the code, yes," replied Thuy. "An image of your Knot. By the way, Jeff Luty's made a new version of the nants. I'm here to ask you guys to save Earth again."

"Teep me my jump-code right now," demanded Chu.

"Okay, okay," said Thuy. "But don't instantly disappear. We need to make a plan."

"The nanteater already has a plan," said Chu in his small, emotionless voice.

Safe inside the dog-cat-fly-ant box of this room, Thuy opened her mind and let the others copy her image of the woven Celtic bracelet. To celebrate the handoff, Azaroth produced the sound of a crowd cheering.

"This seems right," said Chu examining the Knot. "I'm glad to have it back."

"Thank you, Thuy," said Ond, also studying a copy of the Knot. "You say there's more nants? Azaroth told us to expect this, and, yes, we've made a kind of plan. But-are people still mad at me? They wanted to lynch me on Orphid Night."

"Everyone likes the orphidnet fine," said Thuy. "It's been almost a year and a half."

"Over here that comes to two months and twenty four days," said Chu. "Orphid Night was the only time when the dates matched."

"First the Lobrane was behind us and now they're ahead of us," teeped Azaroth. Image of two parallel time-lines with a matching time-zero, and with the days along the lower line more densely spaced. "I saw time-zero coming, and I told Gladax," continued Azaroth. "The singularity. That's why she jumped to the Lobrane and chased down Chu." Image of Chu in a rubber net. "Gladax worries about the Lobrane infecting us with nanomachines. Fortunately our smart air currents ate your orphids right away." Image of a microscopic tornado tearing a nanomachine asunder.

"Gladax tied up Chu and blocked his telepathy with her harp, and addled the jump-code out of him," said Ond. "I made a deal so she wouldn't do worse. I showed her how to erase the jump-code from the Lobrane orphidnet, and I'm pretending to help improve her search abilities. Actually I'm making her more confused. If Gladax ever got organized, it'd be hell on the San Francisco Hibraners. She'd be nosing into everyone's business all the time."

"How come you know my Knot?" Chu asked Thuy.

"I was watching you when you did your first jump," answered Thuy. "At first I couldn't quite remember the details, but eventually I did. It's a long story: a metanovel called Wheenk ."

"Teep Wheenk to them," messaged Azaroth. "All of it. You're not really opening your mental gates, Thuy. Our telepathy band is broader than you realize. Sit down with us on the couch and relax."

So Thuy settled in and let herself do a full mind-merge with the others. They became like four eyestalks on a single mollusk. Everything that Thuy had seen and done since Orphid Night flowed over to Ond, Chu, and Azaroth. In return, she saw all the things that Ond and Chu had experienced up here.

The images grew so vivid that Thuy quite forgot herself. She fell asleep and began dreaming. At first she was dreaming about Jayjay back in the cave, and then she was over here with Azaroth, Chu, and Ond. They were skulking around in Gladax's big-ass rococo mansion with its treelike pillars and curving halls, up on a hill above North Beach, the four of them trying to free a bungee-cord-bound prisoner from Gladax's exercise room and steal Gladax's magic harp. Ond and Chu kept disagreeing about the best way to tunnel into the exercise room from below. Waiting for them to break through, and hearing the same insistent harp chord in the background for the twentieth time, Thuy flashed that she wasn't dreaming anymore. She was playing a video game with the three guys.

She blinked, shook her head, and snapped out of it. Azaroth, Ond, and Chu were slumped beside her on the giant couch, twitching their fingers as if using invisible game controllers. How long had she been here? What was Jayjay doing right now?

Thuy reached over and joggled Ond's knee. Ond fluttered his eyelids, sat up, and offered an abashed grin. "We play this game all the time," he said. "We're practicing. That running water tap over there, that's our game computer. We're the first computer programmers in the Hibrane."

"How can you use water for a computer?" demanded Thuy.

"The flow is sufficiently gnarly to function as a universal emulator, yes. Back home that would be of merely theoretical interest, but in the Hibrane we can use those gnarly natural processes for useful computation. The crucial difference is that Hibrane systems remember all their previous states. It's like every single location here has an endless memory chip plugged in. I already told you about this while we were merged. Focus, Thuy. Take a mental inventory."

Come to think of it, Thuy could indeed remember every detail of the extensive telepathic exchange she'd had with the boys before the dreamlike video game session. But now she became distracted by her powerful memory for visual forms. Glancing at Ond, for instance, she could match the little vertical wrinkle between his eyes to a crack she'd seen in the sidewalk outside and to the edge of a shell fragment she'd thrown at Gladax. Everything she saw remained accessible to her mind; it was as if her memory had become unlimited.

Savoring the feel of this strange world, Thuy looked around the room, taking in the auras of the furnishings. Although the objects didn't exactly speak English, they too remembered everything. The auto parts carried the vibes of the farms and fields where they'd been raised, of the telepathic growers who'd cajoled them into their current shapes, and of the men and women who'd handled them. The jumbo lightbulb on the ceiling had a dark-and-light ribbon memory of all the times it had been off and on, with the bright stretches patterned by subtle shadings that mirrored the wavers of past electrical currents. And when Thuy studied the beat old couch, it wordlessly teeped her the touch sensations of all the butts that had sat upon its cushioned pads in the last twenty years. Noticing this, Chu had a rare fit of giggles.

"We've been thinking that if we could give Lobrane matter this kind of built-in memory, there'd be no reason to turn Earth into nants," said Ond. "Everything would already be like a computer."

"So come home with me and tell that to the Big Pig," said Thuy, still very worried about Jayjay. "Let's go right now!"

"Telling isn't enough," said Ond. "We have to be like Prometheus and steal fire from heaven. Put more formally, we need to seed the Lobrane with the Hibrane's paranormal branespace topology."

"Huh?" Although Ond had already sent Thuy these words during the hour they'd been merged, the meaning still hadn't sunk in.

"Use pictures, Ond," suggested Azaroth.

"I believe that a single ubiquitous Hibrane factor causes telepathy, omnividence, teleportation, and expanded memory," said Ond. Image of a space-filling glow. "I find it simplest to suppose that this factor has to do with the shapes of the unseen extra dimensions of Hibrane space." Image of ten axes crossing each other at strange angles; four of the axes are endless lines and the other six bend around into tight circles. "I call the Hibrane's configuration the paranormal branespace topology. " Image of one of the circles unrolling to make an endless line. A bundle of lines appears parallel to this new line and, oddly enough, they narrow in on each other to meet at a not-too-distant vanishing point. "We need to nudge the Lobrane over to the paranormal branespace topology." Image of a snowflake dropping into supercooled water that freezes into a block of ice. "Unfortunately I'm not enough of a physicist to give more details. But-"

"Chu and I think Gladax's harp is the key," teeped Azaroth. Image of the same gold harp they'd been seeking in the video game. Its strings were luminous and strange. Its sound box was decorated with a curiously detailed oil painting. Medieval?

"Remember that when Gladax strums her harp a certain way, people can't teep," said Chu. "She strummed it in the room where I was tied up. Our idea is that if someone carries Gladax's harp to the Lobrane and strums it there, the opposite might happen. The right chord could unroll one of the dimensions of our brane's space so that everything has telepathy and endless memory."

"And then there'd be no reason for nants," repeated Ond. "Once the harp unrolls that extra dimension in one spot, it'll spread."

"But why are you sneaking around?" said Thuy, recalling Gladax's remarks at ExaExa. "Gladax knows you want to steal her harp. She said, and I quote, 'Ond and Chu have a wild plan to steal my harp and unroll your lazy eight.' You heard that too, didn't you, Azaroth?"

"Maybe she knows," said Azaroth, looking embarrassed. "But that doesn't mean we can't outfox her."

"Gladax knows our plans?" said Ond angrily. "And you guys already have a word for the special dimension? You call it lazy eight? Why did you hide this from me, Azaroth? Are you setting us up?"

"It's complicated," said Azaroth with a sigh. "Gladax wants you to take the harp but she doesn't. If she thought you could really unroll your lazy eight, she'd probably lend you the harp, no problem. But, on the other hand, it's hers, and it's rare, and she's stingy, and she figures you'd probably just break it, so she doesn't want you to get your hands on it at all. She's conflicted. If you want the harp, you really do have to steal it."

"Lazy eight," put in Ond, off on his own line of thought. "Yes. I understand. We use the harp to unroll our eighth dimension, which means we make our eighth dimension into an endless line. And-here's the 'lazy' part-we give the line a special metric so that our minds can reach all the way to infinity. Like how the endless decimal 0.9999999 …describes a point that's only one meter away? That's how the Hibrane already is, if you think about it. Infinity is everywhere. Lazy eight."

"Infinity," said Chu, the math word sweet in his mouth. "It's like using a cosmic vanishing point for a universal Web server. People, animals, trees, rivers, air currents, dirt-everything's in touch with lazy eight. That's why telepathy works so well in the Hibrane. That's why it's so easy to teleport."

Thuy thought of chants and mantras, of divine names and the Buddhists' cosmic Aum. "All right!" she exclaimed. "Let's steal Gladax's harp!"

"It won't be easy," teeped Azaroth. "That's why we keep practicing our starky moves inside Chu's video game. But I promise that once you do get hold of the harp, I'll run to Gladax and make sure she lets you keep it for a while. Deep down she really does want you to succeed. It's just that she's too pessimistic and selfish to make it easy."

"The nanteater has a plan," repeated Chu.

***

"Have you ever run into Hibrane versions of yourselves?" Thuy asked Ond and Chu. They'd left the hideout to walk down the street, picking their way around the giant, slow-motion shoppers. They'd dropped their telepathic animal disguises, and Azaroth wasn't with them-all part of the plan.

The rain had let up; it was a cool and cloudy afternoon of the winter holiday season. "Do you think there's two Onds, two Chus, and two Thuys?" continued Thuy.

"Two Jayjays is what you're really thinking about," said Ond, teeping into her head. "I'm guessing the two branes aren't so much like mirror images as they are like different metanovels on the same themes. There's no reason to suppose all the characters will be the same."

"Thuy misses her boyfriend," said Chu in a bratty tone.

"I'm worried about him, okay?" said Thuy. Surely the orphids had cleaned the nanoslime off Jayjay by now. But what if he was dead. What if that one brief roll in bed and shared meal of pho was to be Thuy and Jayjay's last time together? "I'm capable of worrying about other people, Chu. You could learn from me."

"It's not my fault I'm autistic," said Chu, making his voice very small.

"Don't pick on him," said Ond. "It's not easy being Chu."

"Sorry," said Thuy. "I'm all keyed up." She studied a group of giants calmly inching down the sidewalk their way. The San Francisco Highbraners were so used to seeing Ond and Chu around town that the Lobrane gnomes didn't attract all that much notice here.

"I do too worry about other people anyway," said Chu. "I worry about Bixie and about Nektar. I worry about Ond. Will Nektar ever want him back?"

"We'll sort it out when we get home," said Ond. "It's okay, Chu, I'll find someone."

"The night we came here, Ond messaged 'I love you' to Jil," confided Chu. "Do you think Jil loves Ond back, Thuy?"

"I've never heard Jil talk about Ond," said Thuy. "But we do know that she's breaking up with her husband. Could be that Ond has a chance."

"Craigor tried to make babies with Nektar," said Chu, who was bursting with all the information he'd gleaned from his merge with Thuy. "But now they don't like each other. Sex and love don't make sense."

"You're learning," said Thuy.

"While you were asleep I looked under your clothes and my weenie got stiff," Chu now told Thuy.

"That's more than enough, Chu," said Ond.

"Why not say everything, since we can read each others' minds?"

"We have that issue with the orphidnet, too," mused Thuy. "It's all a matter of what you call attention to. Being polite means not emphasizing certain things."

"You mean like-"

"I mean shut up." Thuy flashed a grin at Chu so he wouldn't take this to heart. Good for him if he thought she was sexy.

They'd come to the end of the interesting part of this street. "You want to turn around and walk back?" Ond asked Thuy.

"Sure," said Thuy. "Sooner or later she's bound to notice us." They were waiting for Gladax to pop up and capture Thuy. Part of the plan. But Gladax was being slow on the uptake, which gave Thuy time to examine the stores.

The clothes on display were funkier than at home, each item unique, and everything very colorful. Things weren't so industrialized here in the Hibrane. With no digital computers, the vibe was much more kicked back.

The leathers and wools were individually tweaked by craftspeople called coaxers. Fashion coaxers got into telepathic synch with animals' bodies so as to influence the colors and textures of the creatures' skin or hair. They coaxed fiber plants as well: cotton, sisal, flax. Some of the coaxed fabrics harbored special psychic properties. For instance, you could buy underwear that emanated shame-and-outrage vibes, positioning you as forbidden fruit.

Down the block, some well-dressed Hibraners were enjoying a late lunch in a cozy restaurant. Each plateful of food was teep-tagged with the history of how the ingredients had been produced, plus images of the chef 's preparation process, plus eating advice: "I'm crisp and lemony"; "Pry up this trout cheek to get a nice nugget of meat"; "Dip me in that green sauce."

Next door was a bar, but Thuy found it hard to teep inside, as the drinkers' vibes were screened off by the aggressive mental stylings of a so-called distractor. The distractor was visible in the doorway, a black swami with a shaved head and his muscular arms crossed. He wore a calfskin coaxed to resemble a leopard pelt. He was a living hub of links, assessing people's interests and instantly routing them to minds and scenes likely to divert their focus of attention. It took a real effort to teep past him.

But Thuy managed, and teeped a flashy woman sitting inside the bar with a man. The woman was a paid escort named Balla. Balla's vibes were delicious; she'd honed the skill of offering her short-term partners an emotional sense of intimacy and shared history-magically divorced from empathy and commitment. Seeing Balla slowly brush back a lock of hair, Thuy had the brief impression that she knew this woman-though of course the illusion was as thin as the skin of a balloon.

And then the distractor spun Thuy's attention across the street into an art gallery. Roundish sculptures like river-tumbled stones were teep-tagged to project exalted emotional states: wonder, transcendence, sensual pleasure, bliss-the vibes polished by years in the currents of the meditative artist's mind.

A bit further down the street, the Metotem Metabooks location housed something like a bookshop-but with no paper and no printed words. Although the telepathic Hibraners sometimes used the shorthand of language, they seemed never to trouble themselves with writing out words in phonetic form. Why transcribe grunts when you can read minds? Hibrane authors were more like cartoonists or directors, assembling blocks of mental states, creating networks of glyphs. Their works were embedded as teep-tags within handicraft items: tie-dyed scarves, bead necklaces, carved bits of wood.

Picking up on Thuy's thoughts, the owner, who actually looked a bit like a giant Darlene, stepped slowly from the store. "You're fresh from the Lobrane?" she boomed, then switched to teeping. "I'm Durga. And you're a metanovelist? Would you like to record something for me to sell?"

"Go ahead, Thuy," urged Ond. "Chu and I come here all the time. Show Wheenk to Durga. It's beautiful; you should be proud. And if you share, it'll enhance understanding between the two branes."

"Do we get a snack today?" Chu asked Durga.

Durga found some doll-sized teacups that were just right for them, although her spice cookies were the size of garbagecan lids. She broke one in pieces for them. Chu took a seat in one of the big soft chairs, studying a little metal pig that contained an animal adventure tale expressed from the point of view of a piglet. Ond and Thuy sat next to him on the big chair, Ond fondling a felt decoupage wallet that encoded a rambling, anecdotal survey of Hibrane science.

Thuy's mind was alert. Nibbling her cookie and sipping her tea, she checked out the vibes of the far-flung islands where the tea and spices had grown. And then she took a few minutes to arrange her mental representation of Wheenk along the seemingly endless spike of memory that the curious topology of Hibrane space had given her. When she was done, she teeped the images and emotions to Durga, who was sitting in a chair nearby. Right away Durga routed copies of Wheenk onto, of all things, five little cactuses in handmade pots.

"Once I sell these off, I'll make more," said Durga. "I'll give you half the profits-if you're still here to collect." She gave Thuy an empathetic smile. With amazing mental rapidity, Durga had already absorbed much of Wheenk . "I hope things work out for you and Jayjay."

Of course that set off a fresh round of self-flagellation in Thuy's head, along the lines of, "Why was I so cold to Jayjay for so long!" To distract herself from her tedious internal wheenking, Thuy teeped around the enormous room, skimming across the masses of data in the items on display. "Can I read one of these?"

"Sure. You pick. Relax and enjoy."

Thuy was just settling in with a dried gardenia that contained a romance adventure when-as they'd been expecting– Gladax appeared, old and strict. For once Gladax wasn't dressed like a street person-instead she was swathed in the virtual robes of her mayoral office. She shimmered with the diverse faces of the Hibrane San Francisco citizenry, thousands of gold-framed images cascading from her shoulders like sheets of water. A further tessellation of faces rose up behind her head like a peacock's fan. But, as before, she was carrying a net.

Ond grabbed Thuy's arm, as if restraining her. "I was about to bring her to you," Ond told Gladax in an ingratiating tone.

Thuy could see that Chu was literally biting his tongue to keep from contradicting his father. It pained the literal-minded boy to hear an untruth.

"Stand back," said Gladax, swaying her net. Her hands were like slow butterflies against the glittering mosaic of faces. The rubbery net floated down; Thuy let herself be trapped. Gladax cinched the bonds around Thuy; Ond lent a hand.

Thuy struggled, but not for real-that would come later. Already she could feel why the net was elastic. For a dense, powerful gnome, the flexible meshes posed more of a problem than brittle ropes and chains.

Gladax forced some images into Thuy's mind: views of a long, sunny room with straw mats on the floor. A gold harp sat upright at the room's end. Chinese scroll landscapes hung upon the walls. This was the exercise room in Gladax's mansion: their teleportation target. And now, pop , they were there. Teleportation was very easy with lazy eight.

Gladax's tai chi room occupied the eastern side of the first floor of the house. Tightly bound and lying on her side, Thuy was facing a long window with a view of the garden. Winter and spring flowers were in bloom: oversized poinsettias, cyclamens, irises, tulips, freesias, snowdrops, and jonquils-bright against the gray background of the lowering sky. All the petals were in shades of red. The coaxer-tweaked blossoms seemed to have a certain level of intelligence: there was a considered elegance to the way they bobbed in the breeze; more than that, they were faintly messaging a tune.

The rubber net lurched, slamming Thuy's knee into her chin. She saw stars. Grunting with effort, Gladax was hauling the net into the air, using a rope through a pulley in the ceiling. Annoyed at being so roughly handled, Thuy made her first really serious effort to tear out of the net. But to no avail. The elastic meshes absorbed her kicks, only to snap back the harder.

The net rose higher, bringing Thuy's face even with Glad-ax's. Gladax had set aside her mayoral trappings; she was back to looking like a sloppy old woman in dark green sweatpants and a souvenir T-shirt.

"I'll have to addle that jump-code away from you," Gladax told Thuy. She secured the net. And now she extruded a slender rod of light from the tip of her forefinger; the glowing probe was six or seven inches in length. "If you cooperate, this won't have to hurt you. I have a very delicate touch."

"All I want is to stop Luty's nants," cried Thuy. "You want that too. Don't stick that thing in my head. Let me-let me take your harp back to the Lobrane and I'll leave right away."

Gladax snorted impatiently. "Upstart gnome. That harp's been in my family for over twenty generations. From the Dutch side. You wouldn't know how to use it. You'd ruin it, likely as not. Or let the subbies steal it from you while you're jumping branes."

Thuy could telepathically sense Ond and Chu in the street outside Gladax's mansion. They were supposed to save her by tunneling up through the floor. But right now they were arguing rather than digging in. Uneasily Thuy recalled how poorly the father and son had done in their practice video games.

Gladax leaned closer, narrowing her finger ray to the thinness of a knitting needle. She pursed her lips in concentration, humming to herself. As the net rotated, Thuy went into a frenzy of kicking and stopped only when her knee collided with her chin again. Big dogs were barking somewhere nearby. Thuy saw the garden, a door, the wispy paintings, and, at the other end of the room, the gold-leafed harp, small by Hibrane standards, but nearly as tall as Thuy. Its strings were as linear flaws in space, like transparent tubes warping the view of the wall. The soundbox had colors on it.

Gladax hopped over to the antique harp. "I'm going to isolate you now," she said. "I wouldn't want you to be messaging anything to your little friends."

Maybe Thuy should teleport herself out of here before-

ZONGGG

-it was too late. Gladax had struck the harp. The sweet, icky chord hung in the air. There was no way to be at ease with the harp's vibration, which showed no sign of damping down. Everything on the psychic plane was wavy, messy, screwed up. Telepathy was impossible. Thuy no longer heard the songs of the flowers or the quarreling of Chu and Ond. But, thank God, she heard the calm voice of Azaroth, low and slow. He'd just walked into the tai chi room, talking aloud.

"It's about your garden, Aunt Gladax," said Azaroth. "Sorry to interrupt. I got a message from the plant-coaxer. He's too shy to teep you himself. Some of the flowers want to change color."

"What!" exclaimed Gladax, taking the bait. "I told those flowers they have to stay red right through to the end of the Cuttlemas holidays."

"You'd better come outside and explain it to the flowers yourself," rumbled Azaroth. "This little Lobraner-Thuy, isn't it? Should I watch her for you?"

"I don't trust you alone with her," said Gladax. "I know you two are friends. You come out to the garden with me, nephew. My harp will keep Thuy isolated. My harp likes to sing." Gladax inched open the door to the garden and inhaled a deep breath of fresh air. "I need to settle my nerves. That chord is so dreadful. It curdles the auras."

"Do you really have to addle Thuy?" asked Azaroth.

"I have to erase her knowledge of the jump-code, and thanks to her I'll have to addle Ond and even Chu again. I suppose you know those two gnomes were planning to tunnel into my house. I just sicced my new dogs on them. I'm not such an old fool as you and those jitsy Lobraners think-you and your silly animal disguises. And, no, I'm not letting the clumsy gnomes take my precious harp."

A long uneasy silence. "I never underestimate you, Aunt Gladax," said Azaroth finally, his face a polite mask.

"It'll be easier for me to addle Thuy if she cooperates," said Gladax. "I really don't want to hurt the girl. Can't you have a word with her?"