Thuy felt a spinning sensation, as if she were being pulled down a whirlpool. And then she was skimming low across a foamy sea, following the curves of its undulating surface, flying with her arms outstretched, no land in sight. Surely the Hibrane lay upon the sea‘s far shore.
She felt vulnerable, tracing her way across this watery wasteland alone. It seemed unfair that the passage should seem to take so long, given that the Hibrane was supposedly less than a
decillionth of a meter off. Space and time were weird down so close to the quantum level.
A tuberous stub popped through the ocean‘s slowly seething surface. Thuy felt a faint tingle,
and now the rootlike stub took on the appearance of a glistening bird head, the head connected to a dimly visible humanoid form rushing along beneath the surface, pacing Thuy‘s progress. The bird head twitched this way and that, tracking Thuy‘s motions. Thuy had seen similar beings when she‘d inched back and forth through Luty‘s teleportation grill. Subbies. They scared the shit out of her.
This particular subbie was casting a spume of drops and bubbles in his wake. Thuy swerved a
bit, lest the spray touch her. She felt a nightmarish terror that any contact with the subbie could trap her here, world without end. As if in response, the subbie elongated his neck toward Thuy, blinking his yellow-rimmed eyes and clacking his down-curved beak.
Thuy reached deep into herself and drew power from the completed whole of Wheenk,
feeding the energy into an exponential spike of acceleration. And then— yes! —she was in the Hibrane.
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 p.145
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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.
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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.
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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.
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―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.
She landed next to a wet dog sniffing the doorstep of the clothing store. Or, no, that was
Azaroth, if you looked at him with your regular eyes. To the telepathic gaze, he was a white and tan collie-beagle with a saddle-shaped orange patch on his back.
Azaroth opened a pinhole window through his umbrella of illusion, letting Thuy see the
secret of telepathic camouflage. As a writer, she understood the mental trick right away, but—now Azaroth was telling her to imitate a rat? No thanks. Drawing on her memories of her family‘s
beloved cat, Naoko, Thuy began vibing like a Siamese. Mew.
Colorful, organic cars were rolling by in the light rain, no two of them the same. The battery-powered vehicles seemed alert and sensitive. Right inside the open garage doors of the auto repair shop, a man in overalls was in a wordless conversation with a purple car, assessing its vibes as he fit a knobby rubber tire onto one of its wheels. The shop had almost the feel of a veterinary clinic. The car-healer saw Thuy and slowly smiled. She teeped that he was one of Azaroth‘s friends.
Azaroth pointed toward the second-floor rooms above the auto clinic. Shrouded by their dog
and cat vibes, Azaroth and Thuy teleported up there.
And landed in a giant back room heavy with years of dust. For Thuy, the room was the size
of a concert hall. Rain ran down the expanses of a dirty rear window that faced the alley wall and a leafless city tree. The window looked to be some kind of plant membrane rather than actual glass. A single light-bulb in the room‘s upper recesses fought feebly against the gloom. Oversized organic auto parts languished on shelves that seemed to have grown right out of the walls, the parts marked with teep-tags instead of written labels. Water trickled from a tap in a great porcelain sink. Doggy Azaroth flopped down on a tired old couch: a puffball the size of a patio. Sitting next to him were an ant and a housefly.
Blinking her eyes, Thuy realized she was looking at Chu and Ond. She‘d never met them
before, but she knew them from a zillion news shows: Ond blond, awkward, middle-aged, slim; Chu blank-eyed with a cute, slightly sour mouth and a dark brown cap of hair.
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―Welcome, Thuy,‖ said Ond out loud. ―You‘re doing fine with that cat imitation. I like cats a
lot better than dogs.‖ Blessedly he spoke at the same speed as Thuy. ―Now grow your illusion to the size of this room. Make it like a cubical soap bubble that we‘re all inside.‖ In person, Ond‘s voice sounded warmer than in the orphidnet archives. But—cubical bubble illusion? Thuy wasn‘t sure what he meant.
―He means paint your cat-self onto the ceiling, the floor, and each of the four walls,‖ said
Chu, his voice thin and sulky. ―Also
the door and the windows.‖
―Watch us,‖ rumbled Azaroth.
Azaroth, Ond, and Chu pushed their vibes of dog, fly, and ant out to the fringes of the room.
Thuy studied what they‘d done, tracing the patterns of their minds, and then she followed suit, painting her emulation of Naoko the cat onto the room.
―That‘s glow,‖ said Azaroth in his slow, oozing voice, then switched to telepathy. ―We can
touch minds in here now. I don‘t think Gladax sees us under those animal shields.‖
―This is our secret lab,‖ added Ond. ―We come here to work on our video game and on our
plan.‖
―What about the guys in the garage?‖ asked Thuy. ―They‘re Azaroth‘s friends?‖
―Yeah,‖ said Ond. ―The local Hibraners have gotten used to us. We have the run of the town.
And we have jobs. I‘m Gladax‘s tutor and Chu‘s her good-luck nanteater.‖
―Nanteater,‖ echoed Chu, telepathically displaying an image of a long-snouted bushy-tailed
anteater while he talked out loud. ―When Gladax addled the jump-code in my head, she also saw my memory of Nant Day. So she thinks I‘m magic against nants. Hibraners don‘t understand digital
computers at all. Did you bring my jump-code?‖
―I have the code, yes,‖ replied Thuy. ―An image of your Knot. By the way, Jeff Luty‘s made
a new version of the nants. I‘m here to ask you guys to save Earth again.‖
―Teep me my jump-code right now,‖ demanded Chu.
―Okay, okay,‖ said Thuy. ―But don‘t instantly disappear. We need to make a plan.‖
―The nanteater already has a plan,‖ said Chu in his small, emotionless voice.
Safe inside the dog-cat-fly-ant box of this room, Thuy opened her mind and let the others
copy her image of the woven Celtic bracelet. To celebrate the handoff, Azaroth produced the sound of a crowd cheering.
―This seems right,‖ said Chu examining the Knot. ―I‘m glad to have it back.‖
―Thank you, Thuy,‖ said Ond, also studying a copy of the Knot. ―You say there‘s more
nants? Azaroth told us to expect this, and, yes, we‘ve made a kind of plan. But—are people still mad at me? They wanted to lynch me on Orphid Night.‖
―Everyone likes the orphidnet fine,‖ said Thuy. ―It‘s been almost a year and a half.‖
―Over here that comes to two months and twenty four days,‖ said Chu. ―Orphid Night was
the only time when the dates matched.‖
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―First the Lobrane was behind us and now they‘re ahead of us,‖ teeped Azaroth. Image of
two parallel time-lines with a matching time-zero, and with the days along the lower line more densely spaced. ―I saw time-zero coming, and I told Gladax,‖ continued Azaroth. ―The singularity.
That‘s why she jumped to the Lobrane and chased down Chu.‖ Image of Chu in a rubber net.
―Gladax worries about the Lobrane infecting us with nanomachines. Fortunately our smart air
currents ate your orphids right away.‖ Image of a microscopic tornado tearing a nanomachine
asunder.
―Gladax tied up Chu and blocked his telepathy with her harp, and addled the jump-code out
of him,‖ said Ond. ―I made a deal so she wouldn‘t do worse. I showed her how to erase the jump-code from the Lobrane orphidnet, and I‘m pretending to help improve her search abilities. Actually I‘m making her more confused. If Gladax ever got organized, it‘d be hell on the San Francisco
Hibraners. She‘d be nosing into everyone‘s business all the time.‖
―How come you know my Knot?‖ Chu asked Thuy.
―I was watching you when you did your first jump,‖ answered Thuy. ―At first I couldn‘t quite
remember the details, but eventually I did. It‘s a long story: a metanovel called Wheenk.‖
―Teep Wheenk to them,‖ messaged Azaroth. ―All of it. You‘re not really opening your mental gates, Thuy. Our telepathy band is broader than you realize. Sit down with us on the couch and relax.‖
So Thuy settled in and let herself do a full mind-merge with the others. They became like
four eyestalks on a single mollusk. Everything that Thuy had seen and done since Orphid Night
flowed over to Ond, Chu, and Azaroth. In return, she saw all the things that Ond and Chu had
experienced up here.
The images grew so vivid that Thuy quite forgot herself. She fell asleep and began dreaming.
At first she was dreaming about Jayjay back in the cave, and then she was over here with Azaroth, Chu, and Ond. They were skulking around in Gladax‘s big-ass rococo mansion with its treelike
pillars and curving halls, up on a hill above North Beach, the four of them trying to free a bungee-cord-bound prisoner from Gladax‘s exercise room and steal Gladax‘s magic harp. Ond and Chu kept disagreeing about the best way to tunnel into the exercise room from below. Waiting for them to break through, and hearing the same insistent harp chord in the background for the twentieth time, Thuy flashed that she wasn‘t dreaming anymore. She was playing a video game with the three guys.
She blinked, shook her head, and snapped out of it. Azaroth, Ond, and Chu were slumped
beside her on the giant couch, twitching their fingers as if using invisible game controllers. How long had she been here? What was Jayjay doing right now?
Thuy reached over and joggled Ond‘s knee. Ond fluttered his eyelids, sat up, and offered an
abashed grin. ―We play this game all the time,‖ he said. ―We‘re practicing. That running water tap over there, that‘s our game computer. We‘re the first computer programmers in the Hibrane.‖
―How can you use water for a computer?‖ demanded Thuy.
―The flow is sufficiently gnarly to function as a universal emulator, yes. Back home that
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for useful computation. The crucial difference is that Hibrane systems remember all their previous states. It‘s like every single location here has an endless memory chip plugged in. I already told you about this while we were merged. Focus, Thuy. Take a mental inventory.‖
Come to think of it, Thuy could indeed remember every detail of the extensive telepathic
exchange she‘d had with the boys before the dreamlike video game session. But now she became
distracted by her powerful memory for visual forms. Glancing at Ond, for instance, she could match the little vertical wrinkle between his eyes to a crack she‘d seen in the sidewalk outside and to the edge of a shell fragment she‘d thrown at Gladax. Everything she saw remained accessible to her mind; it was as if her memory had become unlimited.
Savoring the feel of this strange world, Thuy looked around the room, taking in the auras of
the furnishings. Although the objects didn‘t exactly speak English, they too remembered everything.
The auto parts carried the vibes of the farms and fields where they‘d been raised, of the telepathic growers who‘d cajoled them into their current shapes, and of the men and women who‘d handled
them. The jumbo lightbulb on the ceiling had a dark-and-light ribbon memory of all the times it had been off and on, with the bright stretches patterned by subtle shadings that mirrored the wavers of past electrical currents. And when Thuy studied the beat old couch, it wordlessly teeped her the touch sensations of all the butts that had sat upon its cushioned pads in the last twenty years. Noticing this, Chu had a rare fit of giggles.
―We‘ve been thinking that if we could give Lobrane matter this kind of built-in memory,
there‘d be no reason to turn Earth into nants,‖ said Ond. ―Everything would already be like a
computer.‖
―So come home with me and tell that to the Big Pig,‖ said Thuy, still very worried about
Jayjay. ―Let‘s go right now!‖
―Telling isn‘t enough,‖ said Ond. ―We have to be like Prometheus and steal fire from heaven.
Put more formally, we need to seed the Lobrane with the Hibrane‘s paranormal branespace
topology.‖
―Huh?‖ Although Ond had already sent Thuy these words during the hour they‘d been
merged, the meaning still hadn‘t sunk in.
―Use pictures, Ond,‖ suggested Azaroth.
―I believe that a single ubiquitous Hibrane factor causes telepathy, omnividence,
teleportation, and expanded memory,‖ said Ond. Image of a space-filling glow. ―I find it simplest to suppose that this factor has to do with the shapes of the unseen extra dimensions of Hibrane space.‖
Image of ten axes crossing each other at strange angles; four of the axes are endless lines and the other six bend around into tight circles. ―I call the Hibrane‘s configuration the paranormal branespace topology. ‖ Image of one of the circles unrolling to make an endless line. A bundle of lines appears parallel to this new line and, oddly enough, they narrow in on each other to meet at a not-too-distant vanishing point. ―We need to nudge the Lobrane over to the paranormal branespace topology.‖ Image of a snowflake dropping into supercooled water that freezes into a block of ice.
―Unfortunately I‘m not enough of a physicist to give more details. But—‖
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―Chu and I think Gladax‘s harp is the key,‖ teeped Azaroth. Image of the same gold harp
they‘d been seeking in the video game. Its strings were luminous and strange. Its sound box was decorated with a curiously detailed oil painting. Medieval?
―Remember that when Gladax strums her harp a certain way, people can‘t teep,‖ said Chu.
―She strummed it in the room where I was tied up. Our idea is that if someone carries Gladax‘s harp to the Lobrane and strums it there, the opposite might happen. The right chord could unroll one of the dimensions of our brane‘s space so that everything has telepathy and endless memory.‖
―And then there‘d be no reason for nants,‖ repeated Ond. ―Once the harp unrolls that extra
dimension in one spot, it‘ll spread.‖
―But why are you sneaking around?‖ said Thuy, recalling Gladax‘s remarks at ExaExa.
―Gladax knows you want to steal her harp. She said, and I quote, ‗Ond and Chu have a wild plan to steal my harp and unroll your lazy eight.‘ You heard that too, didn‘t you, Azaroth?‖
―Maybe she knows,‖ said Azaroth, looking embarrassed. ―But that doesn‘t mean we can‘t
outfox her.‖
―Gladax knows our plans?‖ said Ond angrily. ―And you guys already have a word for the
special dimension? You call it lazy eight? Why did you hide this from me, Azaroth? Are you setting us up?‖
―It‘s complicated,‖ said Azaroth with a sigh. ―Gladax wants you to take the harp but she
doesn‘t. If she thought you could really unroll your lazy eight, she‘