Westinghouse yam in alleyway,‖ said the improbable virtual spambot, formed like a waisthigh 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.‖
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―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
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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 Ángel 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 p.94
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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 p.95
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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 p.96
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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.
―Maybe you should write a story about seeing the Knot,‖ suggested the Hibraner. ―Art‘s the
way to know what you don‘t.‖
―I‘ve been talking with people about a new style of writing,‖ said Thuy. She was an
inveterate participant in online writers‘ groups. ―Metastories and metanovels—we‘re all thinking about a new art form using the orphidnet.‖
―Start with Orphid Night,‖ urged Azaroth. ―Time zero. And unroll from there. Tell all your
personal experiences, spill your starky guts. I‘ll hang in the background, setting you up for the big spike.‖
―Is Gladax evil?‖ asked Thuy as an afterthought.
―No. It‘s just that she‘s old and she worries too much,‖ said Azaroth. ―She‘s the mayor of
Hibrane San Francisco, did you know that? I know her so well because she‘s my aunt; she‘s my
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father‘s dead brother Charminder‘s widow. She‘s part Dutch and mostly Chinese. Bossy and picky, but she‘s always nice to me. I bet she roots out my memory record of this conversation.‖ He laughed recklessly. ―Good old Gladax!‖
And then Sonic came back to the apartment and Azaroth left.
***
Thuy popped out of her flashback. She‘d saved it all into the Wheenk database; it felt like a good, solid take. Thinking less formally now, and no longer for the record, she recalled the two other times she‘d seen Azaroth.
The second time had been back in September. Azaroth had slid ever so slowly down a
slanting sunbeam from a sunset-reddened cloud, behold! This time he‘d encouraged Thuy to start sleeping with Kittie instead of with Jayjay, which didn‘t turn out to be that great of an idea. But at the time, Azaroth had said the switch would give Thuy more to write about, also that breaking up with Jayjay would help Thuy beat her Big Pig addiction, which had been soaking up increasing amounts of her energy and time. Oh, and Azaroth had encouraged Thuy to start linking her scattered
metastories together into a single cohesive metanovel.
By then Azaroth had also talked Gladax into letting Chu and Ond range freely around the
Hibrane equivalent of San Francisco. They did no harm, and the Hibraners enjoyed seeing the tiny gnomes around town. And, just as Azaroth had hoped, Chu was helping him develop a telepathy-based game. Azaroth used the word ―teep‖ to mean ―do telepathy.‖ Apparently he and Chu somehow used a stream of water for their game‘s server-computer. And Ond was advising Gladax on efficient ways to access the vast pool of Hibrane teep info. Hibrane telepathy was based on some weird quirk of the brane‘s physics, and had no Weblike orderliness built in.
Ond and Chu were very interested in relearning the Chu‘s Knot jump-code for getting home.
Although it still wasn‘t quite safe for them to return to the Lobrane, they wanted to know that they could come home when the time came.
Azaroth assured Thuy that even if she hadn‘t yet written enough to remember the details of
Chu‘s Knot, she was surely getting closer. According to Azaroth, the windings and crossings of the Knot were implicit in everything Thuy wrote, so that even when she thought she was writing about, say, what her mother, Minh, used to pack for her school lunches, she was really, at some deep level, writing about the Knot. Maybe so. The Knot still hadn‘t faded from Thuy‘s mind; often as she was drifting off to sleep, she saw it hovering before her, every loop and twist intact—but when she tried to focus on the details, they always slipped away.
The third time Thuy had seen Azaroth had been last month, right after he‘d been leaning over
Grandmaster Green Flash, assessing the state of the nanomachines on the dead man‘s skin. At that time, Azaroth had hopped over to Thuy and messaged her the news that Luty was working on turning Lobrane Earth into nants again. He said the Hibraners would do what they could to help stop Luty, but the real work was up to the Lobraners themselves. He said it would be a shame if the nants won, p.98
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because then his people would never feel safe coming to visit again. He told Thuy to argue about any offers they made her in the Armory, because if she got into a fight, it would give her something heavy to write about for her metanovel, and if she found the Chu‘s Knot code, she could bring Ond and Chu back, and they might be the ones to turn the tide.
The weird events on the second floor of the Armory had indeed sparked a great Wheenk
chapter, ―Losing My Head‖— which Thuy was in fact due to perform at Metotem in about an hour.
More and more, Thuy believed that her labyrinthine path through this postsingular world
really was at some deep level tracing out the very design she‘d seen Chu weave. So the reference to Azaroth on the storefront church‘s window made perfect sense. With ample time to spare before her reading, Thuy cut inside to check if the rebelida ángel was gonna make a visita and pass her another clue.
Right away a silent, observant little girl toddled out from among the beat old metal chairs to stare at Thuy. The congregation consisted of working-class Latinos and Filipinos, many with families in tow. A glance into the orphidnet showed that only a few of them were kiqqies; Thuy could always pick out kiqqies by noticing who was using a lot of beezie agents—to Thuy, people‘s beezies looked like colored mushrooms on their backs and heads.
―Have some popcorn,‖ said a comfortably ample woman, tugging the little girl out of Thuy‘s
way. The woman wore purple lipstick and a shiny yellow silk dress. She handed Thuy a white paper bag she‘d just filled from a movie-theater-style popper in a glass case. Fresh puffed kernels were blooming and cascading out of the metal popper‘s pan, fragrant with hot coconut oil, gritty with salt.
A welcome treat. ―Take a seat and enjoy the good words of Pastor Luis,‖ said the woman. ―We‘re glad to have you visit. I‘m Kayla.‖
―Thanks,‖ said Thuy, stepping further in and taking a seat in a lightly padded chair in the
back row. Low-key gospel music was percolating from a three-person band: a languid shiny-haired dude with an electric guitar, a turbaned woman at a keyboard, and a classic mariachi guy strumming a bass.
Pastor Luis stood upon an inexpensive oriental carpet on the dais, a short man with thinning
black-dyed hair, rough skin, and horizontal wrinkles across his forehead. He wore a shiny gray suit with the pants pulled up high and held in place by a lizard-patterned belt with a too-long tip flopping down.
Pastor Luis was talking and gesturing without letup, his voice a rhythmic flow. At first Thuy
couldn‘t make out what language he was speaking, but that didn‘t matter, for despite the man‘s unprepossessing appearance, there was an infectious energy to his motions, a hypnotic pulse to his expostulations. He was a kiqqie, with beezies bedecking him like shelf mushrooms on a forest-floor log.
Thuy relaxed and enjoyed for awhile, eating her popcorn, but then Luis paused and stared
right at her, drawing info about her from the orphidnet.
―Welcome, sister Thuy,‖ he called in a sweet-accented tenor, speaking English now.
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by the rulers of the Hibrane, guiding us to revolt against Babylon, a sword against the Pharisees, ay, our counselor against the gobbling all-consuming nants. Show us your face, Azaroth, caress us with your love, ay, warm our hearts in this low, wounded world. Lead us in the invocation, Sister Kayla!‖
Broadly smiling, Kayla curvetted up the aisle, dress flashing. She took the microphone from
Luis and began a chant:
Innacun cunna gampamade nattoli.
Itannu si canayun udde ammem maita-ita.
Over and over, Kayla and the congregation repeated those same two lines, drawing out the
sounds. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found the phrases to be couched not in Spanish, but in the Gaddang language of the Philippine island of Luzon, not all that far from good old Vietnam. Thuy‘s grandparents had landed on Luzon when they‘d fled Vietnam in a leaky boat.
One of Thuy‘s beezies told her the lines were two folk riddles, meaning something like:
When he turns away he’s coming to you.
You stare at him but you never see him.
And, continued the beezie, the answer to the first riddle was ―a cuttlefish,‖ and the answer to the second was ―the sun,‖ although it could just as well have been ―a Hibraner‖ or, for that matter,
―Chu‘s Knot.‖ Everything was so very deeply intertwingled.
The chanted words overlapped, filling the air with vibrations like sacred Aums, calling
another order of being into the room. Warm air eddied across Thuy; the hairs on the nape of her neck prickled up. Luis kicked aside the oriental rug to reveal a pattern inscribed on the floor, an octagon with a square drawn on the inner side of each edge—a beezie agent whispered that the pattern was a flattened hypercube—and here came Azaroth, visible in the orphidnet, or the upper part of him
anyway, the lower half of his ethereal body beneath the floor. Azaroth, Thuy‘s self-appointed life-coach and muse, wearing a big-collared yellow shirt printed with green daisies, his arms moving as slowly as kelp drifting in a wave.