Текст книги "Postsingular"

Автор книги: Rudy Rucker

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the foot of the stairs.

"The Man?" said Kittie, inclining her head in that direction.

"Andrew Topping," confirmed Mary Moo. "Just agree with him no matter what he says. He's rather overbearing and irritable. But all the other staffers here are quite pleasant."

Sonic was peering over Prescription John's shoulder, assessing the interface. The screen was displaying a surreal landscape modeling the San Francisco orphidnet activity. As John moved his hands, the view zoomed in and out of the user records, displaying clickstreams as colored paths through meme sculpture gardens and groves of personality trees. Now and then John would flick a fingertip to plant an ad link.

"Are all your ads for Dick Too Dibbs?" asked Thuy.

"Mostly," said Mary Moo. "Some are for businesses as well. ExaExa, I think, and Stank. I don't worry about the content. You want to stay here, you do this work."

"You can't trust Dick Too Dibbs," protested Jayjay, getting down to the purpose of their visit. "I mean, come on, the first President Dibbs got the death penalty for promoting the nants. Doesn't anyone remember anything in this country? Don't be helping the Homesteady Party. They're out to screw the little people. People like us."

"Feller says the real point of our ads is to slow down the orphidnet," said John, looking up from his screen. "Make folks unhappy with the status quo."

"Out with the old, in with the new," said Mary.

"You know it, Mary," said John. "Mary used to be a social worker. She drug-counseled me a couple of times before the orphids come."

"Drugs never appealed me," said Mary. "Too low, too dangerous. But I couldn't resist the Big Pig."

"Plant an ad here," said Sonic to Prescription John, pointing out a spot on the screen.

"You'd do fine in here, kiq," said John, placing an ad-mine.

The light on the rear wall turned green and the door swung open. A tall, pasty-faced man in a black business suit gestured to the Posse, his mouth bent into a fake smile. Using the limited local orphidnet view, Jayjay spotted a pistol in a shoulder holster under the man's coat.

"Here we go," said Kittie, stepping forward to lead the way.

"Welcome, Big Pig Posse," said the tall, doughy man, ushering them in and closing the office door. The quantum-mirrored room had two tapestry-style view screens and a red oriental rug. A humongous wood desk faced the door. To the left were a heavy wood-and-leather couch and, closer to the center of the room, a walking-chair. To the right was a grilled wall emitting a low hum. Ventilation? The view screen on the left wall showed a view of the ad-mining workroom right outside.

"I'm Andrew Topping." The man gave Kittie's hand an overly vigorous, overly long shake. "You would be Kittie Calhoun?" He turned his watchful gaze upon the others. "Sonic Sanchez, Jayjay Jimenez, Thuy Nguyen. Thanks for coming in." One by one he squeezed and pumped their hands.

"Ugh," said Thuy.

"Ugh?" echoed Andrew Topping, looking annoyed.

"Your hand," said Thuy. "Damp, invasive, an empty simulacrum of masculinity." Jayjay laughed. Good old Thuy.

Maintaining his smile, Topping asked them to sit down. Sonic, Jayjay and Kittie ended up in a row on the couch on the left. Thuy sat in the big walking-chair, the chair Craigor had delivered here. It had knees and hips both; it squatted down to a comfortable level for Thuy. Topping stood with his arms crossed, leaning back against his massive paneled desk, staring at them.

The limp plastic view screen on the wall behind the desk displayed two views of ocean waves crashing against a rocky point to send up periodic spumes of spray. The left view looked like a realtime natural image; the right view was an ultracomputed simulation, never quite managing to match the view on the left, with pesky triangles and squares popping up in the ocean foam.

The main thing about the room was the metal grill covering the right wall. Jayjay used the room's orphidnet resources to peer deeper. Finer and finer grills lay behind this grill, perhaps as many as a hundred layers of them. Unfamiliar machinery buzzed in the darkness beyond the grills.

"So, all right, I know that Nektar Lundquist told you to come here and foul up our operation," Topping was saying. "But maybe you don't know that I set you up to come here. The President Bernardo image who sent you to the SUV this morning? He was a spoof I put out there."

"So I was right," said Jayjay to the Posse. "And Topping is Faction X."

"Excuse me?" said Topping.

"One of my beezies hypothesized your scenario," said Jayjay. "But we came in here anyway. We were curious about you. And a little interested in quitting the Big Pig. And, yes, we're here to tell you to stop overloading the orphidnet with malware and spam. For God's sake, Topping, why are you helping Dick Too Dibbs? Don't you have any rational self-interest? With Too Dibbs in power, the world might end!"

"You'd probably like Dick Too Dibbs more than you realize," said Topping. "He doesn't support the nants at all. He's by no means an ideal representative for my employer's interests. But at least my employer has the man's ear. He's hoping to make his case so as to guide events in an optimal way. But it's by no means a sure thing."

"You're talking about Jeff Luty, right?" said Jayjay.

"I'd let Mr. Luty do his own talking," said Topping. "Should the occasion arise. Should he in fact be alive. Natural Mind's primary funding is from Jeff Luty's former company ExaExa, yes. The quantum-mirror varnish that protects our unfortunate clients-unobtainable from any other source. Public knowledge." He held out his hands for silence. "Let's get to the point. In the course of monitoring our motley advertising force, I get a good overview of the orphidnet. And you four have come to my attention. Two in particular have skill sets that could be useful to my employer. This young man; this young woman." He leveled his index finger at Sonic and then at Thuy. "I'm prepared to hire all four of you-just to have them."

For a moment Jayjay felt jealous. What about all his new physics ideas? Stop it, Jayjay. Get over yourself. An ugly, heavy scene is coming up. Watch Topping. Get your beezies to figure out the scenario. And don't forget that grill in the wall.

Sonic shook his head. "I'm not gonna work here planting those dumb-ass ads for-"

"Your skills are about Doodly Bug," Topping interrupted. "It's more than a game. It's a laboratory for exploring brane theory, multiversal quantum mechanics, and the art of Calabi-Yau manifold construction. Your work stands out, Sonic. And Thuy's metanovel-"

Suddenly Jayjay got the big picture. "Luty wants to get to the Hibrane!" he cried out. "He wants to bring back Ond Lutter to help him! He wants to neutralize the orphids and feed Earth to some new nants!"

Topping regarded Jayjay levelly. "I couldn't discuss that even if I wanted to. My wikiware has me under nondisclosure filtering. You'll be the same, once you accept your ExaExa consulting contract. That's another good reason for me to sign all four of you."

"What contract?" asked Kittie. "I mean, how much are you offering us? And what would we have to do?"

"Forget it," repeated Sonic. "We don't need ExaExa and their bullshit mind control. We've got Nektar's garage to live in, and we've got those Founders royalties happening for us too."

"Hear me out," said Topping testily. He outlined the terms of the offer. So as to block any possible disclosure of sensitive information, consultants had to install ExaExa's custom Share-Crop wikiware onto their scalp-orphids with full personal access permissions. The consultants' wikiware would feed them business-related data, and of course the wikiware would monitor the consultants' business-related thoughts and filter their instant messages. No physical office presence was required, and the pay would be just this side of bodacious.

"Bullshit," said Sonic. "Bullshit bullshit bullshit."

Jayjay looked at the two women.

"Would there be any work at all for Jayjay and me?" said Kittie, forcing a wry smile. Like Jayjay, she was disappointed not to be a main attraction. "Maybe we should take the contracts and use our money to open a Losers Club, Jayjay. But I don't know that Thuy would-"

"It's out of the question," said Thuy. "Azaroth warned me about you, Topping. You actually think I'd let you put spying wikiware bosses in my head? My creativity would go out the window. I'd have nothing to live for."

"So no, then," said Kittie, playing the leader. "Offer unanimously refused."

"Aha," said Topping, his eyes lighting up. "Aha, aha, aha." He feinted at Sonic at the far left end of the couch, then whirled to bodily scoop up Thuy and carry her to the grilled wall. The hum behind the grating rose in pitch. A stiff breeze began drawing across the room.

Thuy wailed, trying to twist away. The others ran to her aid. Kittie was the first one to reach Topping; fruitlessly she tore at his arms. He seemed on the point of hurling Thuy against the grill-why?

Thuy moaned in fear; Jayjay saw red. He dove for Topping's waist, knocking the big man to the floor. As he fell, Topping managed to shove Thuy forward. Her head disintegrated into tiny cubes which were broken into yet-smaller blocks by the inner grills, her particles whirling into the dark hole's maw. Oddly enough, there was no blood. Thuy's head was gone. Topping tried to inch Thuy further into the grill, but now he had Sonic straddling his back.

Kittie had gone hysterical; she filled the room with harsh, rhythmic screams. Not knowing what else to do, Jayjay tugged at Thuy's legs. He half expected to see a hideous severed neck atop her shoulders but, lo, as Thuy's body pulled free, her head grew back, reassembling itself layer by layer, her component particles swarming out of the grill.

"Gun!" screamed Sonic. "His gun!" Topping had risen to a crouch, even though Sonic still clung to his back. Topping was pulling his pistol from his shoulder holster. Jayjay flung himself at the man, heavily knocking Topping and Sonic against the grill.

The equipment roared; the two men disintegrated completely-and were vacuumed through the compound gratings like dust. All gone. Peering through the local orphidnet, Jayjay saw only that same machinery back there-no ground-up bodies, no drops of blood. Sonic and Topping had been atomized by bizarre physical forces and transported to who knew where. As for Thuy: her head had gone there and come back.

"Are you okay?" Jayjay asked her.

Thuy winced and made a complex gesture with her hand.

"Jeff Luty was leaning over me. Talking really fast about the

Hibrane. I-" She broke off, unable to say more.

"Let's bail," said Kittie.

Some kind of signal escaped the office when they opened the door back to the computer room. Alarms sounded, rapid footsteps rang on the metal stairs from the ground floor. But the spindly clients behind the monitors seemed sympathetic to the three Posse members.

"Up thar!" urged Prescription John, pointing to the ladder and trapdoor where the computer cable went. "It ain't locked."

Kittie led the way, and Jayjay took the rear, with Thuy in the middle. They made it to the roof.

It felt good to breathe the open air, and to connect with the global orphidnet. Hoping against hope, Jayjay set his beezies to searching the area for Sonic-to no avail.

"Jayjay killed Sonic," said Kittie. "And nearly you too, Thuy. He's a clumsy oaf."

"Sonic's not dead," said Thuy. "That grill-it leads to an ExaExa lab. Luty is-" She put her hands on the sides of her head. "Oh oh oh. Can't talk now."

"We'll free Sonic," said Jayjay. "Wherever he is."

A police siren was approaching. The three hurried to the other side of the Armory roof and began working their way down the outside fire escape.

"We're going back to Nektar's," said Kittie. "But I don't know about you, Jayjay. You might flurb that scene, too."

"I'm going to Jil's boat," said Jayjay quickly. "You can come with me, if you want, Thuy."

"And watch you slobber over a middle-aged mom?" said Thuy, her eyes searching his face. "No thanks."

"We'll fix up my SUV, Thuy," said Kittie. "It'll be nice. I'll paint and you'll work on your metanovel."

"And you'll be crawling into Nektar's bed every chance you get," said Thuy miserably. "Nobody really loves me."

"I love you," said Jayjay, meaning it. "You know I do. If you come with me, we don't have to go to Jil's. We can go anywhere you want."

"I'm so tired," said Thuy, her voice shaking. "My head hurts. I just want to go to that nice clean room over Nektar's garage and lie down."

"Leave us the hell alone now, Jayjay," said Kittie. "The Big Pig Posse is over."

Down on the street, Kittie and Thuy headed back toward Nektar's, and Jayjay caught a tram toward the South San Francisco dock. He felt lonely and tired. At least he had a seat to himself. He leaned against the streetcar window, letting his mind drift out into the orphidnet. Up to the Big Pig. A hit would be good right now.

The Pig welcomed Jayjay with a video clip of a crashing wave, just like the one he'd seen in Topping's office. "Wheenk," murmured Jayjay to himself, missing Thuy. "Wheenk, wheenk, wheenk."

PART III CHAPTER 8

Thuy's Metanovel

Westinghouse yam in alleyway," said the improbable virtual spambot, formed like a waist-high two-legged sweet potato with multitudinous ruby eyes, wreathed in crackling blue sparks, peering at Thuy from a rain-wet alley off Valencia Street, the same spot where Grandmaster Green Flash had died. "Vote for Dick Too Dibbs," added the yam, once he'd caught Thuy's attention.

"Too Dibbs won the election two and a half months ago," said Thuy. She didn't bother to sic her filter dogs on the apparition. These days she enjoyed wandering the streets alone, open to the ether, playing the patterns, riding the flow. The heavier scenes went into her metanovel, which was growing at a rate of two or three minutes per day.

You could measure a metanovel's length in terms of how much access time a typical user took to finish the work, assuming they didn't set it aside. Thuy's target-length for Wheenk was eight hours, about the time it would take to read a medium-fat book.

"I like Dick," said the virtual yam, falling into step next to her, the misty rain drifting through him. "Does Dick like ye?"

"Give it a rest," said Thuy. "Too Dibbs gets inaugurated the day after tomorrow, you slushed pighead." The orphidnet was noisy with the thin cries and hoarse roars of marshmallow people already celebrating the advent of the new regime. To drown them out, Thu had her favorite Tawny Krush symphony playing, and she was enhancing the sound with violin squawks triggered by smooth gestures of her arms and legs, all but dancing down the street. She was protected from the rain by a hooded yellow slicker; under that she wore her good old yellow miniskirt, striped wool leggings, and piezoplastic Yu Shu sneakers, also a red T-shirt and red sweater she'd liberated from Nek-tar's bulging closets.

"That's you, Thuy, ain't it?" said the sparkling yam. "Prescription John here. I wanna channel that story you posted this afternoon. What was it called again? Mary Moo done showed me the link, but I ain't got the money for access. Mary says you wrote about us on the second floor at the Armory. Topping's mad."

"My metastory is called 'Losing My Head,' " said Thuy. "I'm about to perform the whole thing live and for free at Metotem, so tune in and turn on, you skeevy old stoner. Still ad-mining for Natural Mind, huh?"

"I cycled out too early, and had to re-up for spin-dry umpty-six. Mary never left. How you?"

"I'm off the Pig, yeah," said Thuy. "Thinking clearer; feeling more; building my metanovel. The new metastory is an excerpt from it. I'm in the zone, John; it feels like dreaming while being awake. And the world's helping me. This Hibraner Azaroth keeps showing up. You're part of the pudding, too. It's so perfect and synchronistic that you popped out of that particular alley. Everything's entangled. God's an artist."

"The yam's the man," said Prescription John, puffing up his tuberous orange icon. "Whoops, here comes Topping. Gotta go."

He sputtered, twinkled, and faded out-leaving Thuy with a sudden suspicion that maybe that hadn't been the true flesh-and-blood Prescription John running the yam. Maybe she'd been talking to a virtual, artificially alive Prescription John from within her "Losing My Head" metastory. Hanging around Darlene's Metotem store the other day, she'd heard some of the other metanovelists talking about times when their characters started messaging them-they referred to this not uncommon feedback phenomenon as "blowback."

Gerry Gurkin, for instance, kept having visitations from the simulated Gerry Gurkin of his autobiographical Banality, the virtual Gerry clamoring that he wanted metanovelist Gerry to edit in a girlfriend character for him to fuck. Telling this story, portly Gerry darted hot intense looks at Thuy, as if he were planning to feed a model of her to virtual Gerry, which was perfectly fine with Thuy, and she said so.

Thuy was in a lonely-but-coned-off emotional state where she was ready to accept any admiration she was offered, as long as it was virtual and with no strings attached. Re: "coned off," she'd heard a woman actually saying that about herself the other day, as if she were a wreck lane or a crime site. That phrase went straight into the metanovel. The yam's "I like Dick; does Dick like ye?" seemed usable too. Oh, for sure that had been the real Prescription John. No beezie would ever talk that silly.

Light from the store windows made warm trapezoids on the shiny sidewalk, gilding the rain puddles, their surfaces wrinkled by the gusty wind. As always when she noticed gnarly natural patterns, Thuy thought of Jayjay. She missed his lean body, his voice, his smell, his physical presence. He was still living on the Merz Boat.

According to Kittie, who'd taken to watching every freaking second of Founders, Jayjay had had a little affair with Jil Zonder in November, although Jil had broken it off pretty quickly for the sake of her kids. Kittie said Jil wouldn't have gotten into the affair at all if it hadn't been that, right after his affair with Nektar, Craigor had started humping that slutty Lureen Morales up the hill. And now it looked like poor, heartbroken Jil might be drifting back into sudocoke.

Back when Jil and Jayjay's affair had actually been going on, Kittie had kept wanting to tell Thuy about the couple's intimate doings: who put what where how often, like that. For sure Thuy didn't care to process that type of info. No more than she cared to peep at Kittie and Nektar making the two-backed beast. Or, for that matter, Craigor and Lureen. Grunt, grunt, moan, moan. Thuy had given up on sex, at least for now, although she and Kittie were still roommates and fairly good friends. Oh, Jayjay, where are you?

Thuy drew even with El Santo de Israel, an evangelical storefront church that had preaching and a crowd most evenings. It was next to an auto repair shop. The church name was in the serif-heavy Old English font that some Latinos liked, and the windows were decorated with poster paints: a man wrestling an angel, a six-pointed star with Hebrew letters around it, the Christian fish symbol with an eye in the middle, and numerous chapter-and-verse scripture references. Fresh red writing on the window read: "Visita Del Rebelde Бngel Azaroth Hoy." Rebel Angel Azaroth Visiting Today.

Azaroth again. Thuy's ears began ringing as if she had a fever. The busy street scene became remote, "in quotes," a grimy surreal diorama behind shatterproof glass. Was Thuy writing her metanovel, or was the metanovel writing her?

Until now, Thuy had held back from mentioning Azaroth in Wheenk, but it was time to write him in. She mentally replayed her memories of her very first meeting with him, going over the events slowly and precisely, blending them into the material she already had.

It had happened shortly after Orphid Night, when the ethereal Hibraners had become visible, thanks to the airborne orphids adhering to the aliens' insubstantial forms and bedecking them with meshes of graphical vertices.. . .

***

As part of her then job at Golden Lucky, the Vietnamese restaurant-supply wholesaler, Thuy was researching the possibility of starting to deal in the meat of the locally caught Pharaoh cuttlefish being processed by AmphiVision, the San Francisco company that made display devices using organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores. AmphiVision was discarding the cuttles' really quite tasty flesh, and Thuy's boss, Vinh Phat, sensed a business opportunity. There was a good demand for grilled cuttlefish in the local Asian communities. Vinh had set Thuy to tracking data on the cuttlefishers, giving her access to a dragonfly spy camera.

So as it happened, Thuy was watching Craigor, Jil, Ond, Nektar, and Chu on the Merz Boat the night that Ond released the orphids. She dipped into Chu's cuttlefish datastream; she accessed the blue spaghetti link; and she paid close attention when Chu wove his Celtic-style jump-code knot from a piece of string. The knot intrigued, even fascinated, Thuy. Looking through the dragonfly, she examined it quite closely during the penultimate instant after Chu tied together the string's two loose ends, right before he disappeared into the Hibrane.

Thuy was investigating all these things with a sense of doing a job for Golden Lucky, alone with the family cat Naoko in her frilly bedroom at her parents' house, working online after hours, not immediately understanding the transformative impact of what was going down. But then she looked out her window past her parents' neighbors' identical houses; she saw the orphidoutlined hills of San Francisco; and suddenly she got the picture. Game over. Everything was changed forever, and Thuy no longer needed to play the good girl. Not quite letting herself think about what she was doing, she packed a bag and headed for her high-school boyfriend, Jayjay. Thanks to the orphidnet, it was easy to find him. He was living with Sonic in a shell of a house in the Mission-some developer had gutted it for a retrofit and had then run out of funds.

Azaroth manifested himself to Thuy three days after Orphid Night. By then the Big Pig had emerged, and Thuy, Jayjay, and Sonic had learned about suckling on the pig, which meant that Thuy woke up woozy. She sat up in bed, looking around Jayjay's ugly, junked squat, and then, in the orphidnet, she saw a glowing eye the size of a melon peering in the window. It was a Hibraner, a thirty-foot-tall man of light. He wore flashy clothes: purple bell-bottoms and a green shirt with yellow stripes. He reached through the wall to caress Thuy; she felt his ethereal body as a warm air-current.

"It's glow to talk with you," Azaroth messaged, his voice coming through the orphidnet connection in Thuy's head. The voice sounded boyish, eager, perhaps a bit nerdy. He accompanied his speech with a rich stream of images. "I'm Azaroth from the Hibrane. And you're …?"

"Thuy," she said aloud, causing Jayjay to stir in his sleep. Sonic wasn't around; he'd already gone out to look for food. Thuy switched to subvocal speech. "Should I be scared? What kind of name is Azaroth, anyway?"

"My grandparents were from Ludhiam in the Punjab. They worked in a bicycle factory. As he prepared to emigrate, my father, Puneet, made a hobby of studying the world's religions. He named me after a Babylonian demon. Azaroth is a starky god. Good name for starky me." Azaroth pushed his head and shoulders into the room as well. He had dark, liquid eyes and a beaky nose. He wore his long hair in a topknot enclosed by a pale green stocking that matched his shirt.

One of Jayjay and Sonic's now-outmoded game consoles was running a rapid-fire demo loop. Azaroth peered at it, fascinated.

"Do you want something from me?" Thuy asked.

"Chu's Knot," Azaroth said. "You know, that vibby tangle of string the boy tied off before he jumped to our world? That's Chu's Knot. You saw it. I saw you seeing it. I was here stealing Craigor's cuttlefish. We like to eat them."

"Chu's Knot," echoed Thuy, not really surprised. She'd been thinking obsessively about the Knot lately, even in her dreams. It seemed reasonable that a Hibrane alien would want to know about the most fascinating thing she'd ever seen. She settled her pillow against the wall, ready for conversation. "Why exactly do you need it?"

"I want to help Chu come home."

"He's still in the Hibrane? Why not ask him about the Knot?"

"My Aunt Gladax caught Chu on Orphid Night and made him forget," said Azaroth. "Chu's father Ond got away. For a little while." Azaroth flashed Thuy a vision of Chu wrapped in a rubber net suspended by bungee cords in the middle of a very large room-it seemed to be a personal gym or exercise room in a hilltop mansion with a view of nighttime San Francisco and the twinkling Golden Gate Bridge. The vision was accompanied by a mind-numbing hum. "Bouncy Chu. Aunt Gladax is very paranoid about your nanomachines-even though we're sure that all the orphids on your boys were crushed by our smart air as soon as they arrived. You'd be better off if your air

got smart too."

"How do you mean?"

"Lazy eight. It's how we do telepathy in the Hibrane. Better than orphids. Too hard to explain right now. Can you tell me the jump-code so I can pass it on to Chu and Ond? Maybe they can even make your air smart too."

"And that would be good?"

"Oh yes. Hylozoic."

"All I know is that Chu posted the blue spaghetti version of the jump-code right before he left," said Thuy, not quite sure she should help this strange-talking alien.

"That part I know," said Azaroth. "But all the Lobrane links to the spaghetti jump-code are dead now. I'm asking if you yourself know the short version by heart. Chu's Knot."

"I don't exactly remember the Knot," said Thuy.

"That humpty Gladax," said Azaroth, shaking his head. "Up in the Hibrane, she cut up Chu's Knot-I'm talking about his tangled piece of string, right-and then she addled the Knot-knowing away from him." Image of old Gladax focusing her narrow eyes upon a wildly bouncing Chu in that exercise room. She strikes an old-fashioned harp at one end of the room. The bouncing stops. Gladax leans over Chu, an energy ray poking from of her finger. Slowly, precisely, she reaches into Chu's head, crooning to keep the boy still.

"Ond was so worried; he went to Gladax's house," continued Azaroth. Image of sad-faced Ond Lutter kneeling tiny on the front porch of Gladax's huge, organic-looking mansion at dawn, the house's pillars like the trunks of trees. "Gladax promised that Chu would be okay, and she got Ond to teach her how to erase all the Lobrane records of Chu's jump-code too. So that's why your blue-spaghetti links don't work anymore. Meanwhile Gladax wants Chu to live with her like a houseboy or a pet. She thinks he's a lucky amulet against the nants. A nanteater. And Ond's staying on as Gladax's tutor, so he can be near Chu. But I'm working on a deal. I want Gladax to free those two to work with me. And I'd like to give them Chu's Knot so that someday they can come back and fix your world."

"Gladax wants to keep Chu because of what he did on Nant Day?" said Thuy, not following most of this. "She's that worried about nants?"

"Most Hibraners think machines are jitsy." Azaroth gestured at Sonic's tired old game display and at Jayjay's equally obsolete cell phone. "But I glow your tech, even if it is stupid." Image of a beggar kneeling to walk on rough-carved wooden stilts that are exactly the same length as his shins would be if he walked erect. "I'd like to be more than a cuttlefish poacher some day," continued Azaroth. "I'd like to program video games we can use with our telepathy. That's another reason why I want to get Ond and Chu free from Gladax. They'll be grateful and they'll help me write a game. I'd like to be able to offer them the Chu's Knot jump-code. Remember it for me, Thuy."

"Look, Azaroth, you jump branes all the time. Why can't you just tell Ond and Chu the jump-code that you use?"

"I don't know the code like a machine row of beads. I know it like I breathe. We've always been able to visit the Lobrane, but each jump is a little dangerous-these creatures called subbies live in between the branes and they try and catch you. I'm here so often because of the cuttlefish-cuttles are extinct on our world, you wave. We admire them as a religious symbol, but we overdid it and ate all of ours. Hibraners pay a lot for Lobrane cuttles. I'm agile. The subbies never catch me or any of the cuttlefish I send home."

"So why don't you send Ond and Chu back to the Lobrane just like the cuttlefish you steal," suggested Thuy. She paused for a moment, then plowed ahead. "And maybe send me to the Hibrane so I can have a look, too."

"I can't just brute-force jump a Lobrane human from brane to brane. The cuttlefish die when I jump them over to the Hibrane, you wave? To make it safe, a person has to jump all glowy with their personal pulse."

"Why didn't you pay better attention to Chu's Knot when he made it?"

"I was too excited about having you gnomes finally see us."

"And why is it that you're invisible over here?"

"You ask too many questions, Thuy! The branes are out of phase with each other, like two voices singing in different keys. And when we Hibraners jump across, we only change our phases by a little bit, so we show up catawampus akimbo to you. You guys and your cuttles, you're a darker kind of matter, and when you jump, you rotate through the full phase shift to match. Chu and Ond showed up chewy as a cuttlefish. Come on now, Thuy, stop stalling. I bet you can remember the Knot. A smart woman like you."

Charmed by the chatty alien, Thuy tried once again to remember the precise details of Chu's Knot. Surely the delicate filigree was intact somewhere in her memory? But it kept slipping away.

"I can't quite get it," she said after a bit.