Postsingular - Rudy Rucker (classic novels TXT) 📗

“You poor Lobraners. Your tech is so rotten, so corrupt, so compromised. Listen to me. Move past computers. There may be a way that we can help.”

“How?” asked Thuy.

“Ond and Chu have a wild plan to steal my harp and unroll your lazy eight,” said Gladax. “But who among you Lobraners can pluck the Lost Chord—the forgotten harmony that no one remembers how to play?”

Thuy glanced at Jayjay. Neither of them had any idea what Gladax was talking about.

“Never mind,” continued the old Hibraner. “Just remember this: I don’t want to see you two in the Hibrane. There’s too great a danger of you bringing nants. But that’s enough chitchat. It’s time for me to get back to my tai chi. Come along, nephew.”

“You’re almost there, Thuy,” said Azaroth quickly. “Wheenk is almost done, and you’re gonna figure out Chu’s Knot. Don’t let Aunt Gladax scare you off. I’ll see you in the Hibrane. Just remember to be careful of the subbies.”

Gladax began scolding Azaroth, but then the two of them were gone.

Downstairs the front door clanked and scraped. A hubbub of voices filled the lobby; footsteps started up the stairs.

“What if they’re still following Luty’s orders!” exclaimed Thuy, rapidly reloading her P90 with a clip that Jayjay had brought.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Jayjay. “We’re on our way out. I thought of just the place to go. Here’s the link. And, know what? We can vaporize the nants with an atomic bomb. Just like how the Chinese blew up the nant eggcase on Mars.” The troops had reached the second floor landing; a preemptive burst of gunfire angled up the stairs. “Come on, Thuy, let’s hop.”

“Wait,” said Thuy. “I don’t want anyone getting hold of the antinantanium.” She grabbed the beaker of purplish fluid off Luty’s lab table and poured it down the lab sink. “Okay now. I’m bringing my gun.”

Moments later they were sitting inside a room-sized bubble in foamy black rock, a lava cave some twenty meters beneath the volcanic slopes of Easter Island. The air was stale but breathable, the space absolutely quiet and dark. Narrow fissures led from the cave to the island’s surface. The ubiquitous orphids had filtered in even here, making it possible to see.

“This is good,” said Jayjay in a satisfied tone. “I noticed this spot this morning. Nobody else can get down here anytime soon. We’ve got time to steal and arm an atomic bomb. It won’t have to be all that big of a one. It’s just a matter of reaching a high enough temperature to ionize all the matter in the nant farm.”

“If there’s time, can we set off the bomb somewhere besides here?” said Thuy. “I’d hate to hurt Easter Island.”

“Um—sure,” said Jayjay. “It’ll just mean an extra hop. Let’s take a minute and poke around in the orphidnet. I’ll look for a bomb, and you look for a place to light it off.”

But all of a sudden the orphidnet access to the outer world closed down. Virtual pink surfaces surrounded them on every side. The Big Pig!

“Open the Ark,” said her voice, rich and energized.

“No,” said Jayjay.

“It’s going to happen sooner or later,” said the Big Pig. “I’ve got you trapped.”

“You don’t really want to ruin Earth, do you?” said Thuy, trying not to lose her focus. She was already feeling slow and dumb from the loss of orphidnet mind amplification. “Just for a memory upgrade?”

“I like enhancing my mind as much as you do,” said the Big Pig petulantly. “I can tell that you miss your orphidnet agents. Well, I’m the same. I want a bigger mind. And, listen, Virtual Earth will be just as good as this one. I didn’t used to think that, but I now I do.”

“What about Ond?” said Thuy, playing for time. “Wait until I fetch Ond to spill what he knows about the orphids.”

“I already know a lot about the orphids,” said the Big Pig. “And once I spend a few minutes with the nants, I’ll know a lot about them, too. I’ll be using some little shoons to beam laser probes in at them. But sure, Thuy, that’s fine if you jump to the Hibrane and look for Ond. As I told you this morning, I plan to be optimizing the nants until midnight. Give me the nants and then go ahead and jump. And if you bring back some new information in time, then I’ll take it into account.”

“Um—I’m not quite ready to jump,” said Thuy, feeling like such the loser.

“Sorry, but I’m getting bored with this conversation,” said the Big Pig. “For me it’s taking months. Open up the Ark, Jay-jay, so I can get to work analyzing the nant farm. My shoons’ light rays can work on the nants through those glassy walls. I’ll test the nants, put my latest nanocode on them, test some more, tweak and retweak—don’t worry, I’m going to do the launch right. And you two can be the first ones on the new Virtual Earth. Vadam and Veve.”

“No,” said Jayjay once again.

“Listen,” said the Big Pig. “I can easily send a swarm of mosquito-sized shoons down here through the cracks. They’ll join together and make a golem to pry open the Ark of the Nants and smash the walls of the nant farm. And if you try to stop my golem, he’ll knock you down.”

Thuy and Jayjay tried to stall for a while longer, but then the mosquito shoons really did start showing up, some of them flashing like fireflies. The darting plastic dots weren’t satisfied with just banding together to create a slowly growing golem. The artificial insects were stinging Thuy and Jayjay every chance they got.

“I can’t take much more of this,” said Jayjay, wildly slapping at himself.

“Oh, just give the Big Pig what she wants,” said Thuy. Here in the sensory isolation of the cave—in between the mosquito bites—she was thinking about Wheenk. She had the entire database within the orphids on her skin. She was beginning to see the diverse elements of her work as fragments hurtling toward a common core. “I’ve got a feeling I’m going to the Hibrane really soon,” Thuy added. “That’ll give us one last roll of the dice.”

“Yeah, you keep telling everyone that.”

“Open the Ark, Jayjay.”

Of course the red button on the Ark wouldn’t respond to Jayjay’s thumb. So, guiding his actions by the blinking of the flying shoons and his limited local orphidnet vision, Jayjay used Thuy’s P90 to fire a blast across the top of the Ark, busting it open.

And then, in the velvet darkness, he screamed.

“What?” cried Thuy.

“Nanomachine goo!” gasped Jayjay, his echoing voice seeming to come from every side. “The Ark of the Nants was booby-trapped! The stuff ‘s all over me! Oh, it tingles, it stings! Get back, Thuy! And don’t forget that—” Jayjay gurgled and fell silent. In the local orphidnet, Thuy could see that her lover was fully enveloped by rippling nanoslime. He twitched, spasmed, and dropped motionless to the stone floor.

Thuy cowered at the far end of the cave, remembering Grandmaster Green Flash’s skin with the rainbow sheen like rotten fish or rancid ham. Jayjay lay still beneath the iridescent slime. Thuy hated herself for being afraid to approach him. Tragic organ music swirled in her head. Her heart skipped a beat and seemed to explode.

And in that instant of ultimate despair, she finished Wheenk, the pieces of the metanovel coming together like a time-reversed nuclear explosion—everything fitting, everything of a piece—her adventures at the fab, her love for Jayjay, her worries about the nants, the dance she’d done down the rainy street that night exulting over her metanovel, the expression on her mother’s face at her college graduation, her father’s bare feet when he tended his tomato plants, the Easter Island boy who’d given her a cone shell today, her last kiss with Jayjay—Wheenk slamming together as heavy and whole as a sphere of plutonium, a perfected pattern in her local orphidnet.

Pain had produced artistic transcendence.

Thuy messaged a copy to the Big Pig lest the great work be lost. The Pig understood; kindly she passed it further, posting Wheenk across the global orphidnet.

And now, just as Azaroth had promised, Thuy remembered Chu’s Knot. There’d been one final twist and wrap she couldn’t visualize, but finally she had the knack; it was a bit like the time Kittie had showed her how to knit a pointed hat. Yes, the Knot was perfectly clear in Thuy’s unaided mind, hanging there in three-dimensional glory, revolving at the touch of her will, a subtly woven bracelet with several hundred crossings.

Meanwhile the Pig was tending to a cloud of orphids surrounding the nant farm. And a second cloud of orphids was attacking the vile goo that enveloped Jayjay’s inert form. Thuy hadn’t thought about Jayjay for nearly a minute. She was such a terrible, self-centered person.

“I could go to the Hibrane now,” she told the Big Pig. “But what’s the use? I don’t want to live without Jayjay.”

A streamer of goo pushed across the cave, feeling for Thuy. Nimbly she moved out of its reach.

“You don’t look quite ready to die,” said the Big Pig, sounding amused. “Anyway, Jayjay’s not dead. He’ll be fine once the orphids clean him off. I’ll be keeping him here to make sure you return. And meanwhile, I’ll put him on a dark dream. He and I will be conducting a thought experiment, you might say. Go on with you now. And I’m open to whatever you learn. But, remember, I don’t want to wait past midnight. You’ve got a little over six hours.”

Thuy focused on her mental image of Chu’s Knot. Nothing happened. Calming her panic, she remembered to do like Ond and Jil had done. She let go of her internal voice and interrupted her endless narration of her life story. She saw the spaces between her thoughts. She saw the space between the worlds.

She was off.