Postsingular - Rudy Rucker (classic novels TXT) 📗

As she arrived, her mind bloomed; every particle of her body unfurled. She found herself in a copy of the same lava cave, the space velvety dark and utterly still. She was alone—yet not alone. For everything was telepathic here.

The walls of the cave were singing a chorus; Thuy’s body parts were speaking to her; the air currents were sensually describing their kinetic flows; and twenty meters above, a moai statue was happily basking in the sun. All across this world the minds of Hibraners pulsed like musical flowers.

Thuy sat on the cave floor, gathering her wits. It made her sick to be so far from Jayjay in his time of need. Was he really going to be okay? She was half tempted to jump right back to the Lobrane. Of course, then she’d have to run the gauntlet of the subbies again. Come on, Thuy, now that you’re in the Hibrane, find Ond and invent a defense against the nants. That’s what you came for.

The stone beneath her felt crumbly; she could poke her finger right into it. Might she tunnel to the surface? Although her orphids had disappeared when she arrived, the universal Hibrane telepathy had given her the ability to see through walls. The telepathic images were richer and more true-to-life than the orphidnet images had been.

Thuy found a thin spot in the cave wall right above a dog-sized boulder on the ground. A mere six inches of foamy rock separated her from a chimneylike vent leading directly to the surface. She pulled the sleeves of her red plaid coat down over her hands and began scraping at the wall; the friable stone gave way like styrofoam or cheese. As well as being less dense, the matter moved more slowly here. The chunks of rock were drifting to the floor in slow motion.

“Huh, huh! Dig, dig!” said Thuy, recalling the phrase from a comic strip Kittie had admired. If she’d been at home with the orphidnet beezies, she could have instantly located an archived copy of Mole. But the universal telepathy of the Hibrane was nothing like so well organized.

Thuy dug on, muttering and chuckling, happy to be doing something. The rocks chanted their transformations; the air exulted in its motion-eddies; Thuy’s fingers gloated over their strength. In a minute she’d reached the chimney vent. Light spilled down from twenty meters above. She clambered up the shaft like an invading underworld gnome, her gold piezoplastic Yu Shu shoes finding purchase on the cracks and crevices of the shaft’s overgrown walls.

Thuy emerged into a summer day. Hot, around noon. She doffed her plaid coat. A moai statue loomed overhead, five or six times as big as the ones in the Lobrane. The grasses and field flowers were level with her waist. Surveying the giganticized island landscape, Thuy deduced that in the Hibrane she was effectively one foot tall.

There were other differences. The nearby moai statue had wider eyes than the ones she’d seen before; the figure’s lips were parted to show square basalt teeth. The star-shaped flowers in the grass were pink instead of yellow, the grass blades were more sharply curved. And the Hibrane Pacific waves were breaking in slow slow motion, with the surf ‘s sound dialed down to a deep bass boom.

Thuy glanced up past the dead volcano at the scattered clouds. These, at least, looked the same as before. It struck her that the edge of one cloud was quite similar to the border of a lichen patch she’d noticed on a wall of the vent she’d just climbed. As she formed this thought, she realized she’d acquired an eidetic memory for visual form. Each shape she saw was being stored intact in her Hibrane-expanded mind.

Curiouser and curiouser. Thuy used telepathic omnividence to view herself as if from outside. She was still wearing striped yellow-and-black tights, a black miniskirt, and her yellow sweater. Fine. But her hair! Finding a comb in her coat pocket, she undid her pigtail fasteners, combed out her dark locks, made a tidy part down the middle and restored her high pigtails to pristine form. She applied a little pink lipstick too.

She was hungry. She wondered if Hibrane Easter Island had a town of Hanga Roa with a Tuna-Ahi Barbecue. Reaching into the telepathic glow of the Hibrane mindscape, she located the island’s town, which indeed had an unmarked restaurant very much like the place where she and Jayjay had breakfasted.

Given that she was the size of a gnome, Thuy didn’t feel like walking all the way to town. Maybe she could teleport. She fixed her mind upon the target location and the source location: the restaurant and the grassy patch by the moai.

Whenever Jayjay had teleported, he’d invoked his specially designed interpolation agents. The interpolators compensated for the fact that orphidnet images didn’t look quite as real as your immediate surroundings. But here in the Hibrane, you didn’t need interpolators. Thuy’s remote view of the village was utterly convincing.

Using her writerly sense of correspondences, Thuy let her attention dance back and forth between her images of source and target, pairing up features, crafting the sought-for transition as if writing a segue between two of a metanovel’s scenes. As she withdrew from reality’s insistent din, she seemed to collapse in on herself.

Where was she? Asking the question was enough. Pop—she was on the main street of the Hibrane version of Hanga Roa, carrying her coat under her arm. The locals had a few cars, even though they could teleport too. The cars were flimsy, as if cobbled together from organic parts: leaves, beetle wings, seashells. One car had dots like a ladybug, another bore yellow and white stripes. They all had solar cells and electric motors.

Relative to little Thuy, the single-story shops and houses were as tall as office buildings. The buildings looked to be assembled from naturally grown components as well. Overhead, shells and shiny seedpods hung upon lines stretched across the street; they’d been crafted into representational forms: a star, a candy cane, a cuttlefish holding a triangle—Thuy recalled Azaroth’s mentioning that the cuttlefish was a symbol for a Hibrane religious figure. Perhaps these were ornaments to celebrate a holiday.

All these things Thuy noticed in the first flash after landing. But the bright-clothed Hibraners were taking the bulk of her attention. A dozen of them were in view: slow-moving giants, ethnically Chilean and Polynesian. All of them were staring at Thuy, raising their arms in slow-motion alarm and widening their mouths. And at the same time they were probing Thuy’s mind. She tried her best to think pleasant, innocuous thoughts, but perhaps her worries about the nants leaked through. In any case, the Hibraners were scared of her.

The air rumbled with their low-speed cries, deep and draggy as sounds heard underwater. The Hibraners wheeled about in waltz time, fleeing from the alien gnome in the striped leggings. Their slow-motion panic was spooky.

Across the street was the place like the Tuna-Ahi Barbecue, its stony walls flowing smoothly from the soil. Although the building bore no written sign, it was telepathically emanating the image of a bluefin tuna. Thuy went inside. The inn was only approximately similar to its counterpart on the Lobrane.

The interior furnishings formed naturalistic curves, with each chair or table different from the others. The lumpish bottles behind the bar had no labels; instead they bore telepathic notes. Thuy picked up that the telepathic labels were called teep-tags.

Quite a few people were dining on the patio. The chairs were made of hardened kelp stems, and the tables were disks of mother-of-pearl with further kelp stems for their legs. A slender waitress in vibrant blue was just setting down pearly platters of rice, beans, and tuna steaks for a group of six: two women, a man, a boy, and two girls. Thuy yelled and charged toward them. As she’d hoped, the diners rocked back in their curved chairs. In two quick hops, Thuy was standing on the opalescent dining table.

She grabbed hold of a tuna steak the size of her torso; to her it felt like it weighed but a pound—as the matter here was less dense. The grilled fish was warm and savory, emanating faint images of its long, vigorous life in the deeps of the sea. Thuy tore into it; rapidly scarfing down the slab of fish and a mound of rice the size of her head.

The diners remained seated around the table, intrigued by Thuy’s antics, and perhaps unwilling to abandon their food. The low burble of the three children’s laughter became audible as Thuy took a frantic slurp from a bathtub-sized glass of thin-tasting cola. One of the women was frowning and her arm was arcing ever so slowly toward Thuy’s head. Thuy stepped out of reach while loading some giant beans onto a tortilla the size of a pillow case. She strolled to the table’s edge, gobbled the wrapped-up beans, called out a thank you, and hopped down to the crushed-shell patio.

Looking into the Hibraners’ minds, Thuy could see that, for them, she was moving in a rapid blur. Her thank you had sounded like a shrill chirp. So now she sent the thanks telepathically and regarded the reactions.

The man’s image of Thuy was tinged with hellfire; he was wondering if she were a demon. One of the girls was seeing Thuy as a cute doll; she was visualizing Thuy perched on a silky pillow in her room. The woman who’d tried to smack Thuy saw her as a pest like a weasel or a rat. The other woman regarded Thuy as a magical agent of good luck and was imagining trapping Thuy under a bucket-shaped shell that sat by the wall. As for the boy—he was simply marveling at how fast Thuy moved. A voice came at her, speaking clearly and at the proper speed.

“Thuy,” said the voice in her head. “Get out of here fast. Crabby old Gladax is coming for you.” Accompanying the voice was a brief image of a bearded young guy with a stocking-wrapped topknot. Azaroth.

“Where do I run to?” messaged Thuy. “Can I find Ond?”

“Teleport to our version of San Francisco,” said the voice. “The sidewalk by the spot where you Lobraners have that storefront church.”

Thuy focused on the mindscape location Azaroth was showing her. She saw a wet winter morning on a busy street, with little lights glowing in the window of a secondhand clothes store where El Santo de Israel had stood. A kind of auto repair shop stood next door. The buildings looked somehow like plants or like wasp nests. “Won’t Gladax follow me there too?” worried Thuy.

“There’s a vibby way to fool a telepathic snoop,” messaged Azaroth. “It’s like acting. You warp your self-image. Like how I made myself look like a moai when you and Jayjay were waking up? I’ll show you how. Oh, oh, look out!”

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.