Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online Page B

for a really good time?”
    The boys swooped and sang, savoring the sensual feel of raw thought—as enhanced by Gaian mind-tendrils.
    Now and then Jayjay felt something pricking at him—prongs? Surely that weird pitchfork wasn’t standing over him beside the stream? He didn’t have the will to leave his trance and find out for sure. If anything, the pitchfork’s prods were nudging him deeper.
    At some point during the night’s long, chaotic journey, Jayjay felt Thuy shaking him and walking him to their now pitiful-seeming honeymoon cabin. Waggish Gaia displayed a relevantarchetype: The Groom Drunk on His Wedding Night. Not that Jayjay was truly drunk. In principle, he could snap out of his Gaia trip and be with Thuy right now.
    But he didn’t. That was the addiction thing at work. Once Jayjay got going on a run like this, he found it nearly impossible to stop. He collapsed onto the living room floor and lay motionless, knowing full well there’d be a stiff price to pay. But it was still night. Hours to go. And the flow of time was so deliciously slow. The Groom Drunk on His Wedding Night—what a hoot, what a blast.
    â€œYou’re horrible,” said Thuy, and went to bed.
    Although Sonic was still lying on the rock by the stream, his virtual form hung nearby like a basking whale. “Yo,” he called to Jayjay. “Let’s go farther. Farther than anyone’s ever been. Maybe all the weird critters we saw today are aliens. Maybe we can contact another lazy eight planet.”
    â€œYaar.”
    Jayjay and Sonic labored in the unseen world, piling idea upon idea, energy upon energy, working their way high above the surface of the cartoony pig-eared icon that was Mother Earth. But they weren’t getting all that far.
    â€œYee-haw!” hollered a voice. Groovy, the pitchfork, was in the mind space with them. Very aggressive with his tines, he pried at the base of their junk-pile observatory, toppling it to one side. Jayjay fell at some impossible angle, plunged through the very fabric of space—and slid toward wakefulness.
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    He was alone, lying on his back, hearing the wind in the trees. Or, no, that sounded more like shifting sand. Or like a cyclone? In any case, it was way past time to get in bed with Thuy. He stood up and opened his eyes.
    He wasn’t in his living room. He was in a—desert? For a moment he had a sense that he was standing upside down—like a fly on a ceiling. But that impression faded away. He was in a surrealist desert landscape of hazy pastels. The dry ochre ground bore elegant washboards of ripples from the steady wind. Swirls of lavender sand drifted overhead, with a bright, chalky spot betokening the presence of a white light somewhere far overhead.
    Cactuslike plants were scattered across the parched plain, slowly moving his way, their roots like stealthy tentacles. Jayjay recalled Thuy’s tale of her journey into the subdimensions—for this was surely where he now found himself. Thuy said the thorny plantlike subbies liked nothing better than to devour a traveler’s flesh.
    Jayjay looked at his hands and slowly flexed them. Every detail in place. He was really and truly awake—but in a nightmare world. He pawed the gritty air like a blind man, not quite believing that his cozy honeymoon cabin was gone. What had he done to deserve this?
    â€œLet’s climb a vine,” said Groovy, suddenly at his side. The curious figure buzzed some mumbo jumbo and poked the ground with his tines. At that instant, a giant beanstalk appeared, so rapidly that it was hard to be sure if it had grown up from the ground or down from the sky. Be that as it may, it was solidly real, its stalk endlessly branching, and all of the branches draped with rustling heart-shaped leaves. The menacing subbies halted their approach and even began to drop back.
    â€œJust come on and climb a ways along this beanstalk, son,”