Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (books for 7th graders .TXT) đź“•
"So there's no cure?" said Nektar. "I babysit Chu for the rest of my life?" Though Chu could be sweet, he could also be difficult. Hardly an hour went by without a fierce tantrum--and half the time Nektar didn't even know why. "I want my career back, Ond."
Nektar had majored in media studies at UCLA, where she and Ond met. Before marrying Ond, she'd been in a relationship with a woman, but they fought about money a lot, and she'd mistakenly imagined life with a man would be easier. When Ond moved them to San Francisco for his Nantel job, Nektar had worked for the SF symphony, helping to organize benefit banquets and cocktail parties. In the process
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Cut to Thuy waking up with the sun coming through a porthole. She thinks it’s Jayjay spooned against her back. But the man’s smell is wrong. And then she hears Jayjay’s voice outside. The hut’s door flies open, showing pearly sky and the silhouettes of Jayjay and Jil. Thuy looks over her shoulder at the man whose sticky private parts nestle against her thigh. Craigor. She’s naked with Craigor on the couch in Craigor’s workshop at the back of the boat.
“Musical beds,” says Craigor with a sardonic grin. “Teaching Thuy the facts of life.”
“Little Thuy does whoever she likes,” says Jil in a flat, bitter tone. “Women, men, husbands, wives—she’s playing you for a fool, Jayjay.”
“Oh, that ends it,” says Jayjay dejectedly. “Forget everything I said last night, Thuy.” He turns away.
“But Craigor snuck!” cries Thuy. “This isn’t what it looks like! Craigor carried me here while I was—”
Jayjay closes his eyes and disappears for good.
***
“Listless bastard,” Thuy spat at Jayjay as the vision wore off. “Always so quick to give up and walk away. Why won’t you fight for me? Don’t you care at all?” The waiter was picking up the money. An old man. He was embarrassed to be overhearing a lovers’ quarrel.
“What’s with you?” said Jayjay, his voice going up an octave. “What’d I do?”
The sounds of the pho parlor filtered back in. Jayjay was staring at Thuy, his brown eyes worried. “I just had a vision,” Thuy said. “One of my characters talking to me. We are definitely not going back to the Merz Boat tonight.”
“Fine,” said Jayjay. “But I’m seeing the attack ant coming down the sidewalk half a block away.”
“I am so sick of being jerked around by that life-hating geek Luty,” said Thuy, the anger still in her veins. On a sudden inspiration, she darted into the restaurant kitchen and asked the prep cook if she could borrow the heavy-duty blowtorch he was using to charbroil some peeled shallots and ginger roots for more stock. “I won’t hurt anyone,” Thuy assured him. “I need to fix something.” The cook was a boy her age, a recent immigrant. She gave him her sweetest smile. Smiling back, he handed her the torch and a lighter.
“Come on, Thuy,” said Jayjay, standing by their table. “The ant’s almost here. We gotta hop. What are you doing with that thing?”
“Teaching the ant a lesson,” said Thuy. She sat down, resting the blowtorch’s gas cylinder between her legs, one hand on the valve, the other hand holding the lighter.
The ant entered on the heels of a pair of hipsters coming in for a late evening meal. They were loudly surprised to have a four-foot-long plastic ant push past their legs like a hungry dog. The diners looked up, some of them jumping to their feet and heading through the kitchen for the back door.
“Here I am,” Thuy shrieked at the ant. “Come and get me, bit-head!”
Jayjay understood Thuy’s plan; he stood behind her, watching with an expectant grin, ready to jump in if things went badly.
But things went well, at least for Thuy, although, yes, rather badly for Luty’s ant. When the ant reared up to attack, Thuy lit the torch’s narrow, seven-inch-long flame. With one quick gesture she burnt through the ligaments connecting the ant’s head to its thorax, and then she severed the thorax from the bulging gaster in the rear. The head spun on the floor clacking its mandibles, the six-legged thorax scuttled out the restaurant door, and the smoldering gaster leaked a foul puddle.
“You watching me, Luty?” shouted Thuy into the air, holding the flaming torch high. “You’re going down tomorrow!” She remembered something Azaroth had said to her at that church; he’d told her to make a plea to the mass mind. “Any Founders fans listening in?” cried Thuy. “Jeff Luty is alive and in hiding in the ExaExa labs. Here’s the proof!” She sent out compressed copies of her “Losing My Head” metastory and of Sonic’s video. “Come at 8 a.m. tomorrow, hundreds of you, thousands. We’ll crush Luty before he can feed our Gaia to a new round of nants!”
“You rock, Thuy,” said Jayjay, stepping forward to kick the ant’s head out the door. “Good move.”
Meanwhile the hostess and the boy from the kitchen dragged the fuming gaster outside. The old waiter was already cleaning the floor with a bucket and string mop. The chef-owner was holding a long knife and yelling at Thuy in Vietnamese, calling her a troublemaker. She apologized and gave him a little extra money.
Once Thuy and Jayjay were outside, they did a hop from Valencia Street to—Easter Island. As a girl, Thuy had read a picture book about the stone tiki idols known as moai. Ever since, she’d wanted to see them in person.
Jayjay and Thuy spent the night curled up next to an ancient statue on the slope of the extinct volcano Rano Raraku, where many of the famous moai had been quarried and carved. It was summer in Easter Island, with the clock three hours later than in California. A good spot, a warm night. Just in case, after arriving, Jayjay made a quick teleport hop to the inside of a Chilean military warehouse, fetching two automatic rifles, a box of ammo, and a box of hand grenades. He and Thuy slept in peace.
Next morning, Thuy woke to the sun glaring off the endless empty Pacific. She was glad to know it was Jayjay cuddled against her from behind—and not that desperate Craigor. She checked the time in her head: nine a.m. here, six a.m. in San Francisco. Plenty of time to relax, go over her dreams, and be grateful for life—as opposed to jumping right into worries and plans.
She’d dreamt of Chu’s Knot again. Perhaps her dreams of the Knot were an objective correlative for her subconscious attempts to tease out the optimal plotline of her ever-more-intricate Wheenk. So intense was the dream work that some mornings Thuy felt she’d gotten no rest. In her dream last night, Thuy had been surfing a glowing ribbon of spaceways connecting the unfamiliar southern constellations, her lambent wakes forming a not-quite-complete image of the long-sought-for Knot.
Mulling over the dream as she stared over the Pacific, Thuy realized that the dream constellations had been diagrams of the individual scenes of her metanovel—up until this moment, she’d never seen the narrative so clearly.
It would be satisfying if her Wheenk character Thuy Nguyen could decisively defeat the Wheenk character Jeff Luty. And she was beginning to see a way to make this work. Jil Zonder was the key. Jil knew the ExaExa buildings well; when Jil was younger, she’d worked at ExaExa for years, posing for product-dancer shoots in every part of the compound. Jil would help, if Thuy could find a way to get her off sudocoke. Never mind Jil’s affair with Jayjay, never mind her insults, Thuy admired the woman. Jil wasn’t herself now. Thuy felt sorry for her. Jil had gotten a raw deal. It was just a matter of rewriting Jil’s most recent scenes. Thuy’s metanovel, her life, the Knot—all the same. Could real-life Thuy assassinate real-life Luty, if it came to that?
Enough scheming for now. Let the scenario beezies do their work, trust the muse, merge with the cosmos, enjoy the sea air. A tiny, natural ant picked its way through the grass; sheep grazed on the rolling rocky slope. Little star-shaped yellow flowers bloomed among the grasses. Looming up next to Thuy and Jay-jay’s resting spot was the worn dark monolith of a long-nosed moai carved from bumpy volcanic basalt. He had long ears and thin, pursed lips; over the last thousand years he’d settled back as if to stare up at the stars.
Thuy felt a little sore from the car banging into her on Valencia Street yesterday. What a day that had been. And today was gonna be another. She stretched and did some bends, working out the kinks. It was so unreal to be on Easter Island.
Thuy and Jayjay had the hillside of moai all to themselves this morning—thanks to teleportation. Thuy was beginning to get the feeling that soon she’d be able to teleport on her own without Jayjay helping her. The missing piece was Jayjay’s interpolation trick for making the target scene look so very real.
How would it be if everyone could teleport? The magical places would be overrun. Or maybe not. People already had the freedom to go anywhere in the world, yet most of them stuck to the beaten track or, worse, stayed home watching life via the orphidnet, safe and sterile and—had Luty actually said odorless
in that tape of Sonic’s?
“Good morning, darling,” said Jayjay.
“The real world is always so much better than I expect,” said Thuy.
“That’s why we have to fight for it,” said Jayjay.
“We have some time before that,” said Thuy. “Kiss me.”
They made love again, and just as they came, Thuy thought she saw a live moai peering at her over Jayjay’s shoulder—huge, cave-browed, luminous, a tiki god with a pursed mouth that was almost a smile.
“What?” said Jayjay, seeing the shock in Thuy’s eyes. He rolled off her to look up too. There was indeed a giant live moai standing over them, with two more behind him—glowing, translucent, thirty feet tall. Hibraners. No need to reach for the guns.
“It’s me,” said the first moai. He made a slow gesture with his hand and became familiar Azaroth, dressed in green boots, yellow bell-bottoms, a chartreuse stocking cap for his topknot, and a ruby red shirt with floppy cuffs and a long, pointed collar. “These are my Lobraner friends Thuy and Jayjay,” he informed the other two moai, one of them purple, the other green.
“Welcome to Rapa Nui, Thuy and Jayjay,” said the purplish moai. “I am Lili.” She jutted her great chin and waggled her long ears. “And this is my partner Atamu.”
“I am a chief,” said the greenish moai Atamu.
“Lili and Atamu live in Hibrane San Francisco like me,” said Azaroth. “But their families came from Hibrane Easter Island. They like to jump here because it’s easy stealing cuttles from the Lobrane Easter Island fishermen.”
“Can someone tell me what it is with you guys and cuttlefish?” said Jayjay.
“We like to eat them,” said Azaroth. “I thought you knew that. Thanks to teeping and omnividence, we fished our own cuttles extinct. Since then, the planetary mind has taught us to be more careful. In any case, our people especially dig eating the Lobrane cuttles since they’re so dense and chewy. I should also mention that cuttlefish symbolize a certain holy cuttlefisherman of ancient times. He rose from death on the triangle to found one of our great world religions.”
“What’s life like in the Hibrane, Atamu?” asked Thuy. “Azaroth hasn’t told me enough.”
“No computers,” said Atamu. “We think in our heads. We remember everything. It’s easy to teleport. We’re happy.”
“But we like the Lobrane style,” said Lili. “It’s vibby. Blinky, flashy, beep and peep. I hear Azaroth and Chu have been making a Hibrane video game, but Gladax doesn’t want the rest of us see it.”
“Gladax always thinks she knows best,” said Azaroth. “Video games are
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