Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker Page B

met you on the Lobrane,so he’s good to go. I called you here so’s you could remind me where to send him. Also I felt like givin’ you a nice funky strum.”
    â€œYou’re so crude,” said the harp irritably.
    â€œ
You
the one who got lost. Needle in a frikkin’ haystack.”
    â€œDon’t always criticize me!” The harp’s tone rose in a sharp crescendo. This was like listening to a married couple bickering—a spaced-out married couple who continually forgot what they were talking about. Speaking of spaced-out, Jayjay felt exceedingly high from the long rush of his ten tridecillion-leaf climb. None of this seemed serious, especially not the clownish pitchfork.
    â€œAw, I don’t mean nothing,” Groovy was telling the harp, leaning forward to give her strings a gentle flick. “Long as I can hear you, I’m happy.”
    â€œSweet,” said Lovva, dropping her ill humor and enjoying her mate’s caresses. She sang a sweeping arpeggio. Looking down, Jayjay let his eye do a zedhead speed-up of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 saccades, traversing the Art Zed beanstalk from the bottom to the leaf upon which he’d fetched up, not that he bothered to make note of the precise path. What mattered was that he was ten tridecillion levels down into the subdimensions. Forty-three zeroes. Far out.
    â€œYou on the beam now,” said the pitchfork, watching his mind. “Eventually you’ll get fully aktualized and hang with Art Zed. You’ll end up coming to our world to help aktualize Lovva and me. It’s all looped around.”
    Once again, Jayjay had the fleeting feeling of understanding the whole time-tangled pattern. “Will I remember this?” he asked.
    â€œSome of it,” said the pitchfork. “A little at a time. Okay, now, here comes our next mystery guest.”
    â€œGroovy, don’t!” said the harp.
    The pitchfork ignored her, setting himself to buzzing again. He was using his vibrations to make something. He was creating a physical object, one atom at a time—it was an ostrichlike bird, quite large, not yet brought to life. She lay limp as a butchered goose upon the leaf. But now an external burst of teep signals pulsed into her, whizzing down the lazy eight axis from infinity. The bird squawked, got to her feet, and raised her head. She was easily eight feet tall. Disturbingly, she had no eyes.
    â€œWoe,” sang the harp like a tragic chorus. “He’s made a physical body for Pekka of Pengö to control! This creature will serve as Pekka’s Earth-based agent.”
    â€œThere’s one of these things in the royal caves back home,” said Groovy. “It’s called a Pekklet.”
    The oversized bird came high-stepping across the leaf, her clawed toes sinking in with each stride. Her fuzzy, eyeless head swiveled, as if studying Jayjay via impalpable rays. Groovy twanged his tines in Jayjay’s direction, and a reckless wave of enthusiasm swept over him.
    â€œYoo-hoo,” yelled the besotted Jayjay, as if he had nothing to be afraid of. “Yoo-hoo!”
    He drew out that last
oo
, putting some teep into it, throwing in a zedhead image of himself reflected ten tridecillion times in a pair of mirrors, making a different silly face in each reflection.
    â€œOh, yeah,” said the pitchfork. “You do that gooood. You got her interested in you.”
    â€œRun, Jayjay!” shrilled the harp. “Pekka’s the planetary mind of a world of ruthless colonizers.”
    But the warning was too late. Pekka’s agent was already standing over him, probing his mind, her will unpleasantly strong, her two-toed claws deadly. She smelled musty. With adarting motion of her snakelike neck, she plucked off Jayjay’s sweat-stained shirt; with wet gasp, she swallowed it whole, working the bolus down her long neck.
    The alien being let out a series