Complete Stories (118 page)

“Wow,” said Jayson. “I’d pay plenty to see those ants.”

Hyperio got up and changed the record on his Victrola. “This is Lola’s favorite song,” he said. “‘Mambo del Pachuco’ by Don Tosti and his band. She could really mambo, my Lola. Back in the day.”

The syncopated strains of music poured over the woman on the cot, and she stirred. Hyperio helped her sit up. Lola was stick-thin, and her brown face was slack. She’d been sleeping in a kind of leather shift, hand-beaded with little snail shells. When Lola saw that guests had arrived, however, she rallied a bit. Swaying to the music from the Victrola, she threw firewood into the stove. She stirred a kettle of soup. She drank water from a big striped pot.

Then she doubled over with a racking cough. She spat up a mass of ants. The ants swarmed all over her hands.

Stefan and Jayson exchanged an alarmed look. But Hyperio wasn’t surprised. He herded Lola back into bed, patted her, wrapped her up.

“She’s working the Tongvan ant cure,” said Hyperio shaking his head. “They eat ants to get well, the Tongvans. Lola eats the ants, lots of them, but she’s still no good inside, not yet. That’s why she wants me to take her back up canyon.”

“Home to her people, eh,” said Jayson. “I’ve heard about that tribe. The Tongvans. They were Californians, but like, before Columbus, basically?”

“The first, yes,” said Hyperio. He reached behind a string of dried peppers near the ceiling and produced a leafy sheaf of cured tobacco. With the edge of an abalone shell, he chopped up the brown leaf, then twisted it in scrap of newspaper. “You boys want a good smoke? Have a smoke.”

Jayson snatched up Hyperio’s hand-rolled cig. “These ants. Is redwood-tree-legs the max size they go?”

“They go bigger,” said Hyperio. “The biggest ones live in a monster nest beyond the Tongvans. They say something is wrong with the ground there, like a tar pit. Lola still prays to those tar pit ants. Good cooking, praying to ants, that’s my Lola. But pretty soon she likes it better here. She likes the music.”

“How did your first wife Maria take it when you showed up with a prehistoric girlfriend?” asked Stefan. It was his fate forever to wonder how romance worked.

“All the way home I worry about that,” said Hyperio, nodding sagely. “It only felt like I left Maria a couple of days, maybe a week, but when I get back, Maria is dead! It’s twenty years later. I ask around—nobody remembers me. Not a soul. So I moved into Hormiga Canyon and built this little house for Lola and me. She gave me four kids.”

“Where are they now?” said Stefan.

“Busy with grandkids,” Hyperio shrugged. A metal pot danced and rattled on his iron stove. “Now we eat soup, eh? You want me to warm some tortillas?”

Raw wonder at the way of man and woman had relaxed Stefan’s fixation on science for one moment, but now his string-mania came vibrating back at him. “I know why this canyon exists!” he intoned. “There’s a fault in the weave of the cosmic strings that make up Los Angeles. And, yeah, that fault is this very canyon. The local Hormiga Canyon ants have co-evolved with the cosmic strings. That’s why L.A. ants are so sneaky! The ants of Los Angeles have a secret nest in that tar pit of cosmic strings.”

Jayson looked on him kindly. “Eat something, Stefan.”

They had a little of Hyperio’s squirrel soup—at least, the soup had some ratlike parts that were probably squirrel—and though the flavors of native Angeleno herbs like yarrow, sage and deer grass were far from subtle, they did seem to brace one internally.

Buoyed by his scientific insight, Stefan was feeling expansive. “You’re a fine host, Hyperio! Anything we can do to pay you back?”

Hyperio regarded the boys. “That motorcycle in my flowers—you got some gas in it? Lola wants to go back up canyon to her people. But I don’t feel so good about this big trip.”

“We can carry Lola in for you,” said Jayson grandly.

“Dude,” said Stefan to his friend in a low tone. “If we go deep into this canyon, we’ll never see our own era again.”

“So what?” said Jayson. “When we go up that canyon, we’re going to a simpler, cleaner time. No smog. No pesticides. No politicians.”

“I can give you boys an old map,” said Hyperio, rising from his dinette chair.

Suddenly the room seemed to warp and twist. The walls creaked loudly.

“Earthquake!” yelped Jayson. He bolted from his dinette chair and banged his way through the door.

“Antquake,” corrected Hyperio, unperturbed.

Stefan rose and peered through the door, clutching his laptop in both hands. Jayson was hastily rolling his bike away from Hyperio’s house. Certain Angelenos were unnerved by ground tremors, but the pitching earth beneath his feet had never much bothered Stefan. In a hyperinflating cosmos made of humming strings, it was crass to expect stability.

As Stefan stepped outside, it occurred to him to wonder how much time had already passed in Los Angeles, that city of fast fads, that pen of frantic chickens with their heads cut off. Although the Hormiga Canyon air was as luminous as ever, when Stefan peered upwards he saw the night sky canopy, with a full moon bob-bob-bobbing along, rather like the bouncy ball in a sing-a-long 40s cartoon.

If Stefan and Jayson went deeper, the spacetime warp would be even stronger. They’d be visiting a real-world laboratory of dimensional wonders. Yes, Stefan wanted to go. There was no choice about that, really.

Up near the dark, blurry lip of the canyon, a black ant the size of a 1950s prop-job airliner was hard at work. With an ant’s busy clumsiness, her six legs grappled at the fibrous dirt, setting off little slides. She was groping around in the fabric of reality with her monster feelers, tugging at the substance of the canyon wall, pulling stuff loose: it looked like ropes or pipes. Cosmic strings. This ant was causing the tremors.

As she worked the fabric of the cosmos, distant houses shrank and grew as if seen through a shimmer of hot air. The black ant trundled down the valley wall, carrying a string in her jaws. The tangled bights of string glowed and shimmered; the lucid air hummed with a kind of music. The ant was unsteadily shrinking, first to the size of house, then to the size of a car, and then to the size of a cow—and now Stefan realized that those “livestock” upon the hillsides of Hormiga Canyon were all ants, too.

A herd of them gathered around the big black ant in a companionable fashion, fiddling with her string, helping with some dim nest-building agenda. They worked off instinct and smell.

Lola appeared in the door of Hyperio’s shack. She had a hand-woven string-bag over her shoulder. She still looked peaked, but with the promise of a journey home, hope had returned to her haggard face. She and old Hyperio engaged in a tender, rapid-fire farewell in Spanish. She kissed him, and Hyperio picked a red ant from his mustache. With a scowl, he flicked it from his fingertip.

The ant hit the ground scrambling, bounded up and was the size of a panther. It sniffed the fender of Jayson’s motorcycle, where the other ant had left its tag of sticky dew. Jayson doubled his fists.

“It’s harmless!” Stefan called.

But Stefan was wrong. With an abrupt lunge and a twitch of her big head, the rangy red ant snatched Stefan’s laptop from his unsuspecting grasp. She smashed the computer with the clashing machineries of her mouth; the pieces disappeared down her gullet. And then she trotted on her way.

Livid with rage, Stefan took a step or two in pursuit—but then, surprising even himself, he halted. This cosmic-string ant was paying him a compliment by eating his laptop. Somehow she’d sensed the seeds of the One True String Theory within Stefan’s flat gray box. Why else had they invaded Stefan’s home in the first place? They were there to celebrate the fact that he was King of String!

Weak-kneed with his turbulent flow of emotions, Stefan leaned against the bike.

Jayson began messing with the motorcycle, hiking up the saddlebags to make a platform that could support Lola. “You’ll be happier on the open road,” he told Stefan. “Without that idiot box leeching your psychic energy.”

“Is this bike gonna be big enough?” said Stefan.

“Down in Mexico a family of
six
would ride,” said Hyperio. He laid a board and a folded blanket across the saddlebags, and Lola curled up on it, making herself small. She showed her teeth in pain, then gave the boys a brave smile.

“I bet she used to be beautiful,” said Jayson. “I bet she used to look a lot like Lupe.”

“You mentioned a map?” Stefan asked Hyperio.

Hyperio handed over a heavy yellow roll of dense, spotted leather. It had a few strands of coarse fur on the edges. It was buffalo hide.

“The Seven Cities of Gold,” said Jayson, eagerly unfurling the scroll. “Quivira and Cíbola.” Jayson’s chain mail wristlets glinted in the light like the armor of a conquistador. “The Spanish never found those ‘lost cities.’ I bet anything they’re in this canyon.”

“Los Angeles is the true lost city,” said Stefan, peering over Jayson’s shoulder. Hyperio’s map left a lot to be desired. It had been drawn in blood and berry-juice by some guy who didn’t get it about longitude.

The three travelers bid Hyperio a last goodbye.

The road running up the canyon was a much trampled ant-track. The little wooden shacks gave way to simpler dug-out huts and lean-tos. It seemed that the locals had never seen—or heard—a motorcycle before; at the machine’s approach, they ran around in circles with their hands over their ears.

Pools of water stood here and there in Hormiga Canyon’s dry river, more pools all the time. In certain dank and sticky patches—mud, maybe—huge bison had mired-in hip deep and been butchered by the locals. The boys had to dismount and coax the roaring cycle around these dicey spots, with unsteady Lola grimacing at the jolts.

The beach-ball sun and bouncing moon picked up the pace. The travelers reached a cross-marked spot on Hyperio’s map. It was a settlement of low, adobe houses, with a big stone church. The central square smelled of corn tortillas and roast pumpkin seeds. The locals, in dented straw hats and serapes, looked like extras from the set of the Fairbanks silent production of
Zorro
, except that they were in color, they lacked histrionic gestures, and they were audibly talking.

Eager to mooch some chow, the boys approached the stony well before the church. At the banging sound of their engine, the padre appeared at the church door. Shouting in Latin, he brandished a crucifix and a horse-whip. Jayson cranked up the gas and they rolled on.

They then entered what appeared to be a nature reserve, or, to put it more accurately, a no-kidding primeval wilderness. The human population, what little there was of it, vanished into the trees and scrub. The paths bore bear tracks, cougar tracks, deer tracks, and enormous Jersey-Devil style ant hoofprints. And the river had water in it now.

“One thing bothers me,” said Jayson as a ground sloth lumbered by, leaving tufts of reddish hair in the blackberry brambles. “Seems like the ants should get tiny when they come around us humans. Everything else matches our size: the chairs, the tables, the trees. But the ants—the ants are all kinds of sizes.”

“The ants can scale themselves to any size they need,” said Stefan. “It’s because they’re in control of the subdimensional cosmic strings.”

“Well, how come
we
can’t do that?” said Jayson. “We’re special-effects wizards, and ants are just a bunch of insects.”

“Twine dimension seven, loop dimension eight,” said Stefan thoughtfully. “If we could get hold of some of those strings, we just might find a way.”

The glowing air of the Hormiga Canyon air never quite dimmed, so it was up to the travelers to decide when to bivouac. They gallantly let Lola set their pace, since she was frail and weary. To judge by the way she kept spitting off the side of her little platform, the ants were churning within her.

They made camp atop a little hill above much-trampled edge of river pool. To judge by the fang-marked pigs’ knuckles buried in the mud, the pool was an excellent hunting spot.

Stefan gathered dry twigs and Lola expertly stacked a campfire. Jayson had somehow misplaced his cigarette lighter, but thanks to his multitool, he was able to conjure up a bowstring and a drill. Amazingly, a sharp stick spun fast in half-decayed wood really did smolder and ignite.

There were trout in the burbling river, fat and gullible. Stefan was able to harpoon the naive fish with the simplest kind of barbed stick. The boys ate two fire-roasted fish apiece, and when Lola only nibbled at her tasty fish, Jayson ate that one too.

An orgy of ferocious grunts and squeals drifted up from the river pool. Nobody felt quite ready to sleep. Lola lay on her side watching the fire, now and then brushing an ant from her lips. Jayson kept obsessively adjusting the screws on the carburetor.

“I’ll stretch out our fuel for as long as possible,” he explained. “Us city boys will be in trouble if we run out of gas.”

“Did you ever see
Mysterious Island
?” said Stefan, staring dreamily into the flames.

“Of course. If you mean
Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island
from 1961, with the giant bird, the giant crab and the giant bees. That’s a Ray Harryhausen flick. Harryhausen is the FX god!”

“Precisely. So, you know, the heroes are stranded on a wilderness island with monsters and pirates. They have to, like, totally scrounge for basic food and shelter, and also craft some really hot home-made leather clothes for the female lead…”

“That tight leather dress she had was bitchin’.”

“It sure was. So, maybe we run out of gasoline, but I don’t see how we have any big problem. I mean, we’re FX guys—basically, we
are
Harryhausen.”

“Huh. Maybe
I’m
like Ray Harryhausen,” said Jayson. “But you’re all digital.”

“Don’t sell my conceptual skills short, Jayson. We’ve spent our careers creating lavish fantasies on a limited budget. Working together, we’re full capable of scaring up tools, shelter, food and clothing in a trackless wilderness.”

Jayson narrowed his eyes. “What kinda fantasy-adventure costume you need? Nylon, spandex?”

“Antskin would suit our parameters.”