Hieroglyph (78 page)

“We'll get the teep snags ironed out,” said Rikki. “Once this line of qwet rats is established, we want to sell qwet treatments to people. We see a big market for teep, right, Gaven?”

“But if teep hits everyone the way it hit Joey—” I began.

“It won't,” said Rikki. “We've tested other people. Should I tell Zad, Gaven?”

“I really don't want to be talking business,” said Gaven. “And what you're telling Zad is supposed to be a secret. You signed a nondisclosure agreement, you know.”

“So what,” said Rikki. “Slygro is moving too slow. If we creep along, United Mutations is going to ace us. And our founder's stock won't be worth a cent. I'm telling Zad right now.” She stared at me, and I seemed to feel a tingle from the touch of her clear eyes. “I'm qwet already,” she said, nodding her head. “And so is Gaven. We made the change a week ago. It feels good. And I think we should start selling it as soon as possible. Like tomorrow.”

“I think I'm turning qwet too,” said Carlo, shaking his head. “Thanks to that screwed-up rat biting me. I have this, like, creepy free-floating feeling of empathy? It's like I'm a social worker. Is it teep, Rikki?”

“Palace revolution,” said Gaven, increasingly annoyed. “Am I the only one who's hungry? Come over here and check the food. Open up some of that German white wine for us, Loulou.”

Wordlessly she nodded and took a deep breath. My heart went out to her.

“I remember my family coming to a cookout, exactly here,” I told Loulou, wanting to lighten the mood. “Thirty years ago. One of my first memories. Thanks for all the help today.”

She mimed an expression of extravagant gratitude and interest. Probably sarcastic. I wasn't getting over at all at this party.

I skewered a hot dog with one of the supple green branches that Loulou had prepared. I held the thing out over the fire, enjoying the gentle bobbing of the weighted branch. The stumpy AC frogs made the heat of the fire bearable.

“I see this man knows the drill,” said Gaven.

“Be a dear, Zad, and roast some of those divine little sausages for Jane and me.” This from Reba, in a faux high-society voice. She and Jane burst into laughter.

“And I'll sizzle up a couple for Rikki and me,” said Carlo, pulling himself together. “Gaven here can handle his own weenie. As per usual.” The drinks were making us silly. The horizon was a dappled maze of gray and gold. Reba's flydino and my slugfoot were peaceful in the pond. Joey was still flat on his back.

“Something I just remembered,” I said. “Those cattails—they look like hot dogs on sticks, right? And when we came here when I was five, I was sure that if I could manage to yank one of those things out of the pond, it would roast up just as good.”

“I can make that happen for you,” said Gaven, feeling at the gizmo he wore dangling from his belt. “With my qwetter and a little teep.”

“You can turn a cattail into a hot dog right now?”

“You have no idea how easily I can do real-time wetware engineering now. Thanks to the qwet teep techniques. I invented this qwetter gizmo last month, by the way. It sends a thicket of branching quantum vortex fields into the target organism's cells. Makes it qwet. I used it on Joey and, yes, on Rikki and me. We'll be running it on walk-in customers before too long.”

“What does this have to do with the cattails?”

“Okay, I'm qwet already. I have teep. And if the cattails are qwet, I can wreak my will on them. I can look at them and tweak their internal biocomputations. Change the genes, the enzymes, the works. And their tissues reorganize immediately.”

The qwetter device had the rough outline of a pistol—but cobbled together from a hundred little parts. Fins, tubes, chips, condensers, magnets, mirrors, a tiny helium tank—like that. Gaven held out his arm and aimed. Unnerved by his gesture, the flydino and my giant slug splashed to the other end of the pond.

The qwetter hissed, and the air around the cattails got wiggly. And then Gaven stared at the cattails for a very long time. His lips were slowly moving. He made some mystic passes with his hands. It was like he was hypnotizing the cattails. And then he snapped out of it.

“I rule!” he crowed. “I'm the ascended master of qwet teep tweaks. Harvest time, Zad.”

“Here, Reba,” I said. “Hold my hot dog sticks for a sec.”

“I think not. Let Loulou do it. Could you, dear?”

Wordlessly, moving in slow motion, Loulou took over my sticks. Her hand brushed against mine, and I felt a slight thrill—followed by guilt at thinking about her that way with her poor husband all screwed up and lying on the ground conked out by the bodyguard's nod mist—followed by a weird sense that Loulou knew everything I was thinking.

Oh well. By now I was pretty drunk. Drunk enough to wade into the pond with my shoes on, and to yank up three of the transformed cattails by their roots. And, sure enough the cattail bulges at the tips had turned to meat. Or something resembling meat. Pale, a bit like veal or chicken.

“No way am I eating that crap,” said Carlo. “I know better than to sample every single batch of the Slygro moonshine. Bad enough that I'm infected by that fucking rat.”

“Feed Joey Moon a cattail!” whooped Reba. She'd always had a bit of a mean streak.

As if roused by the sound of his name, Joey jumped to his feet and, moving unbelievably fast, pinwheeled over and snatched the qwetter from Gaven's hand.

“No!” roared Gaven. “Don't start spraying everyone! Guard! Artie! Stop him!”

“I'm already qwet!” cried Joey, brandishing the qwetter. “I'll show you how it feels!” He was teeping into his own body, doing something to his wetware, warping his body's configuration.

Slowly, and then faster, Joey took on the look of a child's awkward drawing. He had conical legs, an oval body, and a dome of a head with thick bristly lines for his hair. His mouth was a crooked slash, his eyes were wobbly, scribbled dots. His sausage arms waved frenetically, with the qwetter still clenched in one of his three-fingered hands.

Artie the security guard was almost upon Joey.

“Wheenk,” whooped Joey, whirling around just in time to spray the agent with the qwetter. Narrowing his eyes, Joey fixed the guard with the full force of his will.

Artie dropped to all fours—and became a crude cartoon of a pig—round, bulky, wobbly, pale pink with dark spots. The sketchy pig rubbed his snout across the ground, as if sniffing for acorns. He was crapping from his other end. My rat Skungy, frightened by the chaos, clambered onto my shoulder.

Moving slowly, regally, as if fascinated by his wobbly magnificence, Joey tumbled the contents of the horn-of-plenty nurb into his gaping maw of a mouth. As the food sank in, Joey grew in size—he was a saggy blob of perhaps three hundred pounds. He scowled at us, a sour meat mountain with waving spikes of hair, preparing to—

Cuing on some unseen signal of Gaven's, one of the big cooling frogs flipped his thirty-foot tongue and glommed the qwetter tool from Joey Moon's great paw of a hand. And then, in a flash, Gaven had retrieved the qwetter from the frog's mouth. Rushing forward, he fixed his eyes on Joey and the rooting pig, thinking at them, teeping into their bodies to restore the former states of their genetic codes.

“Undo, undo, undo,” cried Gaven, his voice shrill with the joy of winning. I remembered that tone of his from our schooldays—when he'd gloat about his perfect grades.

Moments later, Joey and Artie looked like their old selves. Joey collapsed to the ground, shuddering, with a mound of sloughed-off meat lying shapeless beside him. Despair radiated from him like a physical force. Artie the guard took on human form and rose to his feet.

“Put Joey under physical restraints,” Gaven instructed Artie. “And call in that psych clinic we were talking about. Have them send an ambulance. Why are you staring at me so hard, Artie? Are you okay?”

Artie ran a trembling hand across his features, checking that everything was in place. He had mud on his nose, and a bit of acorn in the corner of his mouth. “I—I can see into Joey's mind. And into yours, Gaven, and into Rikki's and—”

But now Artie was interrupted by Carlo screaming bloody murder. Right in my ear.

“What is your problem?” I snapped.

“My finger! It's splitting open. Oh my God, a tiny rat is crawling out. Shit, shit, shit!” The newborn rat dropped wriggling to the ground.

Skungy snickered. He was still on my shoulder. “Carlo said I couldn't make babies. He was wrong. That's my daughter. Call her Sissa. I grew her from a bud inside Carlo. And now I'm sending my personality into her. I'm making her just like me.”

“Oh hell,” moaned Carlo, holding his head, with blood dribbling from his split finger. “It keeps getting worse. The cattails are singing, but I can't hear the words. And Joey and Gaven and Rikki and Loulou—they're like cyclones of colored fog. I've been this way for an hour, but I thought I could—oh, shit. Help me, Rikki.”

Rikki Shimano wrapped a Voodoo healer leech around Carlo's finger. Carlo goggled at her, increasingly disturbed by his teep impressions of her thoughts. He cursed again and stumped across the grass to get himself another glass of bourbon.

“He's messed up like Joey Moon,” said Rikki. “I have the worst taste in men. But Joey's more artistic, don't you think? Those qwet tweaks he did on his body were stark. He'll be a grand master if can learn to enjoy his teep. And he does have some shares of Slygro founder's stock.”

“Thank God this is a private party,” said Jane. “I've never seen such a fiasco.”

“But you like the excitement I bring,” said Gaven. “Right?”

Jane studied the man. She seemed midway between attraction and disgust. I caught her eye just then, picking up her vibes. Married-people telepathy. I could tell Jane wanted to get what she could from Gaven. A strategic decision. It disgusted me and made me jealous, but for now I had to let it go.

Down at my feet, the new little rat Sissa was shaking her body—letting the Skunginess stink in. And now the wised-up baby rat made as if to climb my leg like her father had done. Skungy scampered down my leg and bared his teeth at her.

“Zad's mine,” squealed the older rat. “You be Loulou's helper. That woman right here.”

Loulou was at my side, as if magnetically drawn by my attraction to her. “Get me out of here, Zad,” she said in a low, vibrant tone. “It's too crazy.”

All right! I led the mysterious woman to my car, followed by our two qwet rats. The Lincoln's slugfoot was back in place beneath the chassis.

“We're outta here!” I whooped, mania in my voice. “Thanks for everything!”

And now I was speeding away from the Trask farm with a woman again—just like with Jane, ten years ago. Ah, Jane. The voices behind us rose in remonstrance and complaint. And then Loulou and I were out the driveway and heading for River Road.

WE RODE IN SILENCE
for about ten minutes, letting the night air beat against our faces, each of us gathering our thoughts. It was a moonless September evening—the air hot, moist, luscious. A night of mystery and promise. I was picking up a lovely musky scent from Loulou, and with it came little pings from her personality. Carlo had said that Loulou had qwet teep too.

“Pull into the next road on the left,” she said in her husky voice. “That clearing behind the old Ballard school? Nobody will bother us.” She nodded, emphasizing her plan.

Synch beyond synch. The Ballard bower was exactly where I'd gone with Jane on that night I'd just been thinking about. The first place where Jane and I'd had sex.

As soon as we stopped, Loulou started kissing and rubbing on me. Five minutes later we were naked and fucking in the backseat of my car. It was romantic to be doing it outdoors, behind the Ballard school, a return to the glories of youth.

On the hood of my car our two qwet rat helpers danced in celebratory glee, savoring our rich sensations.

After sex, Loulou and I lay on the smooth old leather of my car seat, looking up at the sky, with Loulou nestled naked on my chest. I felt very close to her and to the world around us. Closer than close. Close like never before.

It was more than Loulou pinging me now—I was blending with her thoughts, right inside her skin. I was feeling the minds of our qwet rats, and, in some undefinable way, the shapes of the gently swaying trees and the scuttling of the insects in the rotting leaves on the ground. Nothing specific, everything loose and impressionistic. Like the hues in nurb paint before you tightened them up. All the walls were down.

“I see the I's—” I stammered, having trouble with my words. “I see you.”

“Please don't freak,” whispered Loulou, her lips against my cheek. “Please get used to it.”

“You're teeping too? You've been that way all along.”

“I caught it from Joey. They switched Joey over to quantum wetware last week, right? So he could merge his mind with your rat's.”

“And you made me qwet just now? By having sex?”

“It's contagious if you're intimate. You might say that—telepathy is a sexually transmitted disease?” She let out a warm, two-note giggle, higher on the second note. “Teep can be good, Zad. You heard what Rikki said. You don't have to go nuts like my husband.”

“Are you sorry for him?”

“Sure I am. But Joey and I were done, even before this happened. And now he hasn't washed for a week, yuck. You're my knight. Maybe we'll be right. Relax into it, baby. Qwet is like a magic power.”

Easy to relax, but a little scary. I didn't want to drown, didn't want to be a piece of dust in the cyclone of the minds. But like it or not, I was merged with Loulou, and with our two qwet rats, and now, like sensing lights in the distance, I was feeling the minds of Carlo, Joey, Rikki, Gaven, and Artie the guard as well. Gaven was drooling over Jane. Carlo was putting the move on Reba Ranchtree, and Joey—he was in a straitjacket inside the shell of a road-turtle about to take him to a clinic downtown. Rikki Shimano was riding in there with him. Artie was staring up at the sky. All their little voices were in my head, blurred and unclear.