Denver, Colorado, writer Erin Weinstock recently did an email interview with me for a forum she runs off her website Buck Rogers in the 26th Century. She originally contacted me because she’d read Frek and the Elixir, but I got her to read Postsingular, too.

Q 1: Did you start writing Frek and the Elixir back in 1999? I’m asking this because of eras being referred to as Y2K and Y3K.

A 2: I started writing Frek in June of 2001, and it took me two years to finish it. The phrase Y2K was indeed fresh in my mind, so it seemed natural to think about Y3K. You’ll notice that Frek is set in 3003, which is like an “upgraded” version of 2002, a year during which I was working on the book.

Q 2: You painted some interesting visions of the future in Postsingular and Frek and the Elixir. Would you ever like to see any of the tech or newbio made a reality?

A 2: Frek is about a maximally biotech future in which there’s no more machines at all. I used to read my children a book called The Fur Family, in which a little family of furry creatures lives inside a hollow oak tree, complete with windows and a little red door. I’ve always thought it would be nice to live in a house like that, so that’s where I put Frek’s family. I get sick of machines, so the Frek world is a happy dream.

In Postsingular, I pushed the other way, looking at worlds that are as mechanical as possible—the ultimate is when nanomachines eat Earth and everyone becomes a simulation in a virtual reality. I would despise living in that kind of world, it represents the aspects of modern life that I find the most boring and dehumanizing. In Postsingular, my characters are fighting against some planet-devouring nanomachines called nants. And at the end, as in Frek, all the machines go away. But in the Postsingular world, it’s not biotech that takes over. Instead every object in the world becomes intelligent and alive. This is such a strange idea that people are having trouble grasping that I’m saying it.

Q 3: In the sequel, Hylozoic, will we find out why, in Postsingular, the painting on the magic harp looked like it had Thuy and Jayjay on it?

A 3: You bet. I wrote that scene today, as a matter of fact. It’s in Chapter Seven of Hylozoic. Thuy and Jayjay end up hanging out with Hieronymus Bosch, who happens to have that particular magic harp visiting in his house, and Bosch uses them as models for a pair of lovers he paints onto it. When I put the magic harp into Postsingular, I didn’t really know what she was, and it’s taken me most of Hylozoic to figure that out. But that’s typical for epic and fantastic trilogies. You just have to proceed on nerve and throw down some really weird events in the early volumes and trust that you’ll find good explanations for them later on.

Q 4: When Thuy uses “incantatory programming” to break Jil of her sudocoke addiction in Postsingular, she says:

“Love cycles useless rain in the tea. Stun rays squeeze the claws of Flippy-Flop the goose mouse. Caterwaul hello, dark drooping centaur dicks. Are you good to go-go, gooey goob? Able elbow boogie brew for two in the battered porches of thine ears, Jungle Jil. Comb out and pray. Pug sniff the cretin hop lollipop of me and you, meow and moo.”

Did you use a board loaded with poetry magnets to come up with the wording?

A 4: This is Dada beat poetry, and no set of poetry magnets would be big enough to hold all the words teeming in my mind! It’s less random than it looks. I have private associations for most of the phrases. And it’s also about the music of the sounds.
I’ll try and explain it to you, what the heck. The first sentence begins with “Love,” because that’s what’s going to save Jil. And then it becomes a riff off a haiku by Jack Kerouac: “Useless, useless, / the heavy rain / Driving into the sea.”

“Stun rays” is a variant of “sun rays” and “sting rays.” I’m not sure where “Flippy-Flop the goose mouse” comes from, but it’s a phrase I like a lot, and I was saying it out loud in a weird falsetto voice for a couple of days. Sometimes I’m almost like a Tourette’s Syndrome person.

Maybe “centaur dicks” is a nod to John Updike who wrote The Centaur. Also I was thinking of Alfred Stieglitz’s 1923 black and white photo Spiritual America, which is a close up of the belly of a castrated work horse.

The next sentence merges “good to go” and “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” I like the word “goob,” a lot, I use it to mean an uninformed person, a hick, a noob. I used it in Frek, too, remember the Goob Dolls?

In the sentence after that, I’m playing with sounds able/elbow boogie/brew/two, and I have the Shakespeare thing of “porches of thine ears” set in contrast to the mass culture vibe of “Jungle Jil,” which sounds like the name of a comic strip.

“Comb out and pray,” is the kind of pun that James Joyce uses in Finnegans Wake, it’s like “come out and play,” but it’s also telling Jil to comb the nanomachines out of her neurons and to pray for help.

In the last sentence, “cretin hop” is there in honor of the Ramones, and “lollipop” is for my fellow cyberpunk John Shirley, whose books were called “lollipops of pain” by a hostile reviewer. And the hop/lollipop is a rhyme of course. The end of the sentence is kind of rhyme between “me and you” and “meow and moo.” And the rhyme is kind of saying, “we seem like separate people, but we can make friendly noises and be like peaceful animals together.” The “Pug sniff” at the start is maybe to have a god echoing the cat at the end, but it’s more about the sound of “pug,” so short and abrupt, and matching hop and pop. Oh, and I used to read Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop to my kids, too.

It all meshes, it’s not random at all, it’s just a deeper level of meaning. But if you write a whole page like that, nobody’s gonna read it.

Q 5: Have you ever been to Easter Island?

A 5: I’ve wanted to go there my whole life, ever since I read Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl fifty years ago. I hope I make it. It’s a long way from anywhere, but if you could combine it with a visit to Chile or Tahiti.

Q 6: Do you believe there are real higher planes of existence?

A 6: I’m agnostic on this. As an SF writer, I very often write about higher planes or alternate realities. For me, in a transreal sense, these alternate worlds are in fact the novels that I write.

But in actual sure-enough reality, yeah, I’d be surprised if there weren’t some other levels. Something huge and staggering that we don’t know about yet. I mean, it seems very unlikely that the whole story is this particular worldview that we monkeys happen to have come up with more or less as a result of a series of historical accidents. It’s as if paramecia were talking to each other and laying down a theory that the universe is a drop of water with algae in it, and that’s all.

SF is a way to crack your head open a little so some light can shine in.

Q 7: If you wrote a sequel to Frek and the Elixir what might you put in it?

A 7: I was thinking of launching right into the sequel after Frek, but I didn’t get paid all that much for Frek, considering how long it was. And although it did quite respectably and it wasn’t a Harry Potter type best-seller like I’d imagined it might be. So I was a little disappointed, also I was tired of doing the young boy’s voice and of being all sweet and good.

So I wrote Mathematicians in Love, which is about a character who’s closer to being like I am as an adult. And then I got interested in the idea of the Singularity, and I wrote a short story, “Chu and the Nants,” that ended up dragging me into this whole psipunk trilogy of Postsingular, Hylozoic and (maybe) Transfinite, which is about people a little badder than me. In these books I’m being wicked again—like in my Ware tetralogy—with plenty of sex and drugs.

But everything goes up and down, and I’m beginning to want to go back to Frek and his world. Frek is me, too, only twelve years old.

I wouldn’t necessarily put the word “Frek” in the title of the sequel, but for the purpose of discussion, I’ll refer to it as Frek 2 here. I talked it over with my editor, David Hartwell awhile back. Hartwell said a Frek 2 should have both Frek and Renata, also a lot about the Grulloos. Maybe we don’t have a galactic quest in Frek 2, we just set it all on Earth, some people said they’d wished I’d just stayed on that biotech Earth. Possibly I write some of the chapters from Renata’s point of view, instead of always just from Frek’s point of view.

I’d probably hold back on heating up the possible love/sex thing between Frek and Renata. They’d keep being close friends with just a touch of romance. Hartwell points that that among young adolescents, perhaps half are uncomfortable with sex, and half do want to hear about it—but the ones who read fantasy and SF are all, natch, from the “uncomfortable with sex” camp.

Perhaps I’d find a way to bring Gibby back to life; a lot of people were really bummed that he died. If you’re writing science fiction, there’s always a way! At first Gibby’s son will be Frek’s enemy, but after Frek brings back Gibby, they’ll be friend.

One possibility for the action of Frek 2 might be a conflict with the toons, kind of a replay of the real vs. virtual reality conflict that I had in Postsingular. Or maybe some toons become incarnated in flesh to see what it’s like. Or maybe their software is invading animals and plants.

Possibly there’s a civil war between the humans and the Grulloos; maybe the Grulloos throw in their lot with the toons. Perhaps the toons and Grulloos are being egged on by some aliens from a non-biotech world.

There might be some bad consequences of opening up the biome again and releasing all those old organisms. Maybe the house trees catch oak-blight; they’re dying and falling over, roots pulling out of he ground. In that case, Frek and his family might be blamed.

Maybe some unemployed “counselors” (remember, they were the dumb, vicious stooges who worked as agents for the evil government that toppled at the end of Frek ) would come after Frek’s family, and they’d have to flee to Stun City under assumed names. And maybe they’d be tracked down and have to move on to a misty ocean-port city, something like Seattle or Vancouver—call it Mistport—where vaalships (whale-based kritters) are bringing in odd things.

And one of the things will play a key role in blocking the burgeoning Grulloo-toon-alien-counselor revolution! And Frek wins the Grulloos back over to the good side. Yaar.

Q 8: When inventing the different species of kritters and aliens for Frek and the Elixir, did you come up with them on the fly when needed during writing, or all at once before starting the book?

A 8: Both. I work out some things before I start a book, but a lot of it I invent as I go along. I’ll finish a scene and see that I need new stuff for the next scene, and then I’ll work on my notes for awhile to try and figure it out. I post these huge Notes documents as PDF files on my writing page, www.rudyrucker.com/writing. There’s a Notes document for each of my Novels. Lately the Notes is longer than the Novel. You can go to that site and study the Notes if you really want to try and figure out my process. Let a thousand theses bloom!

Q 9: Do you think there are leaders out there as corrupt as Dick Dibbs in Postsingular and Gov in Frek and the Elixir?

A 9: I don’t think “corrupt” is a strong enough word here. Note that I also describe these kinds of leaders in Mathematicians in Love and in Hylozoic. All these books were written during the years 2000-2008. Hmm. Does that suggest anything to you?

I think that the U. S. is suffering through a very dark time. We’re being run by people so stupid that they think we’re as stupid as they are. They treat us with contempt, as if we were their pawns to be lied to and used. The tide will turn soon. As an author I’ve been doing what I can to raise the public’s consciousness. We can have our country back if we want it.

Q 10: Cuttlefish come up in both novels and I remember you saying in a podcast you like them. What do you find special about them?

A 10: I like the name; it sounds like “scuttle.” And they’re not fish at all, they’re really just short, fat squid. I love their tentacles, and the hula skirt around their fat butts, and the way they can change colors and even pattern themselves, and the fact that they’re all soft and gooshy except for this scary parrot-beak in the middle of the tentacles. They don’t live in the ocean around where I live, but now and then I go visit them in the aquarium. I ate some cuttlefish sushi in Japan recently, it’s terrible, it tastes like white plastic, they just slip it into your order to save money. H. P. Lovecraft’s famous evil alien Cthulhu has a face that resembles a cuttlefish. Gotta love someone whose face is covered with tentacles!

I’ve been busy working on my novel Hylozoic. I finally got into Chapter Seven, my second chapter set in Bosch’s home town. (Part of the first chapter set in Bosch’s town was in Flurb #4). It’s bawdy and medieval and funny and I’m happy to be writing and polishing my words. But I’m not having much time to blog.

[A 200 pound yam on Ponhpei in Micronesia: objective correlative for my Chapter Seven.]

Sooo, for today, here’s a nine-step argument that everything is conscious (panpsychism) and that everything is alive (hylozoism). While getting ready for Chapter 7 I wrote up this argument for my paper for the published proceedings of the “What is Life?” conference I went to in Kyoto in Fall, 2007. You can see a PDF of a draft of the full paper online, or just examine the bare-bones outline of the argument here.

[Nick Herbert at his house last week, wearing his “indescribable hat.”]

(1) Universal Automatism. Every physical entity is a computation. (See The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, scroll to Chapter 1 on p. 4).

(2) Moreover, every physical entity is a gnarly computation. (See my YouTube “What is Gnarl” video, below.)

(3) Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence. Every naturally occurring gnarly computation is a universal computation. (See A New Kind of Science, p. 715.)

(4) Consciousness = Universal Computation + Self-Reflection.

[Nick’s outdoor bathtub.]

(5) Any complex system can be regarded as having self-reflection.

(6) Panpsychism. Therefore every physical entity is conscious.

(7) Walker’s Thesis. Life = Universal Computation + Memory. (See Walker’s online paper.)

(8) Every physical entity has memory via its interactions with the universe.

(9) Hylozoism. Therefore every physical object is alive.

Q.E.D.

[Professor Rucker demonstrates the “rolling buffalo” yoga asana at Nick’s.]

Thursday morning I went to yoga class in Los Gatos, and the teacher, Jan Hutchins, was talking about styles of breathing. He said “Breathe in Mountain, breathe out Solidity. Let the solidity of the mountain fill the cracks in your body where pain can seep in.” He also suggested “Breathe in Space, breathe out Freedom.”

And I was thinking these were good models for hylozoic thought modes. You could do a five element version (including the Chinese fifth element: wood).

Earth====Strength, solidity, groundedness. calm.
Air====Freedom, looseness, non-attachment, driftiness.
Fire====Alertness, intelligence, glow.
Water====Flow, grace, wiggliness.
Wood====Growth, liveness, expansion, socialization.

Thinking in terms of telepathic contact with living objects, this gives me a feeling about how it feels to be in touch with the five elements. What if even here, on our world objects really are conscious, drawing their memories from the One Mind?

I always like class with Jan, he’s a hip and funny guy who often coaxes me into a deep meditative zone. Today, at the end, I was seeing the most beautiful spreading patch of blue with my eyes closed.

The yoga room is mirrored on one wall, and Jan often asks questions of the class at large, and often as not nobody answers. So today he says “Sometimes I imagine I’m under observation in a psychiatric hospital, and those are one-way mirrors with doctors on the other side, and there aren’t really any students here at all, I’m only hallucinating them, and the doctors are watching this crazy guy who thinks he’s teaching a yoga class.”

I had a hallucination like that in 1965, I was a college student, and an upperclassman had given me a couple of peyote cactus buds he’d gotten by mail-order from a Texas garden supply company. I’d eaten the buds and puked them up, and I was over at some friends’ house, and I imagined their kitchen was amphitheater-like classroom full of students, and that I was giving a lecture on Special Relativity—a subject about which I then knew almost nothing. It was a precognitive hallucination, for in 1977 I was in fact a professor lecturing on the mathematics of Special Relativity in an amphitheater-like classroom at SUNY Geneseo. The wisdom of the spiny bud.

Near the end of Jan’s class, I was tired, and so was the guy next to me, we were off in the furthest corner of the yoga room, and we were slacking, lying on our mats instead of doing yet another pose, and Jan walks over and says, “What are you guys—the hoods? Lying low in the back of the classroom?” And he pokes me. I was delighted. In high-school I always feared and admired the hoods—and at Swarthmore I more or less was a hood—at least relative to my gentle, intellectual classmates. Actually I don’t think anyone uses “hood” in the sense of juvenile delinquent anymore. But Jan’s nearly as old as me.

I was out at Four Mile Beach in Cruz again on Saturday, I started a new painting of this tower (I think twenty years ago it was a natural bridge), as seen from a nice little spot in the bluffs. It was paradise to be there, communing with the five elements, and I felt like I was getting a good picture going—although when I got home and looked at the daubs I’d actually made, it was sort of shocking how rudimentary they were. I’ll just have to go back!

It rained a lot last week. The rain is good. It’s a sign that we’re nearly at the end of our country’s painful eight years under the whip and lash of those who hate us. The flooding is a living I Ching sign: Overflow.

This morning I woke up very early; it was still dark; I was awake because my wife was bustling around packing for a trip. I laid low with my eyes closed for about forty-five minutes, and in my head, I went over all of my as-yet-unwritten Chapter Seven, scene by scene. It was like dreaming while awake. I thought of a propaganda phrase from my novel, Spacetime Donuts, “Dreamers Are Us!”

When I was done, I told my wife what I’d been doing, and she was like, “Poor Rudy, that sounds like so much work!” And I said, “But I like doing it!”

And then, brushing my teeth, I wondered if I could remember all the thoughts I’d had. Odd to think that I can remember such intricate scenarios by means of—what?—circulating patterns of excitation in my neurons? Bulked up synapse connections? Biochemical trails?

I always feel safer after I’ve written it down. I forget so many things.

Later that morning I went to the physically whipped, but very congenial, Caffe Pergolesi (“The Perg”) in Santa Cruz and typed in my already fading memories of dawn’s lovely waking dream.

And then I went to Four Mile Beach with my old pal Jon Pearce. A lot of seagulls standing around on the beach. Jon agrees it would be great to be reincarnated as a California brown pelican.

Several nice new reviews of Postsingular came out lately, see the excerpts and links on the Postsingular page.

Here’s today’s outline for Hylozoic, “Chapter 7: To the Gibbet!” This chapter will be from the point of view of good old Thuy Nguyen.

(7.1)

When Thuy and Azaroth leave Jeroen “Hieronymus” Bosch’s house in the Hibrane (the local year is 1496), they go out the back door, get his boat, and row to the Muddy Eel. Thuy really wants a bath. She meets Anja in the bathing area. Anja is a cute, lively prostitute, formerly a housemaid. She claims she’d slept with Bosch—but only once—as he insisted on pouring out the contents of his chamber pot upon her naked body before they had intercourse.

Thuy is savoring how it feels to once again be in a world without telepathy. Enjoying the low hubbub from the marketplace. The old-school hive mind. She has dinner with Azaroth, they sit around talking to some jugglers and conjurers. An older fortune-teller woman reads Thuy’s palm, she has a weird prefiguring of Thuy’s impending trip beyond infinity. Magic is real. The seer tells Thuy she’ll be give birth to Mother Earth.

Wine is passing around; Thuy begins dancing on the table top. She’s enjoying the spoken-word medieval hive mind. Groovy, the aktual pitchfork, shows up and hangs around a little. He tells Thuy that the beanstalk where he took Jayjay is actually in the subdimensions. Thuy says a little about the trip that she took to Subdee back in the first volume. The pitchfork says that if she’d gone deeper, she’d be a zenohead capable of ten tridecillion thoughts in a second—or maybe even an aktual, capable of infinitely many thoughts.

Groovy talks about how to think of the subdimensional land of Subdee as underlying the Lobrane, the Hibrane, and the interbrane Planck sea between them. He says to think of a city with two buildings on either side of a street: the buildings are the branes, and the ground level is the Planck sea. Although we see the sea exposed in between the buildings, this dividing interface continues under the buildings. And in the underground is a continuous maze of passages and carnival-like spook stuff: Subdee.

Bosch’s ill-tempered, drunken, alderman neighbor, Jan Vladeracken arrives late in the evening. He grabs Thuy—who’s one-foot tall compared to him—and shoves her doll-like head and shoulders inside his smelly, baggy trousers; she wrestles her way out, giving him a solid punch in the stomach that doubles him over. Azaroth smacks Vladeracken on the side of the head, knocking him to the ground, and the worthy says he’ll see them all dangling from the gibbet. Anja cools things out, calling him Mijnheer and leading him off to the baths.

Thuy crosses the square, enjoying the bustle. People are getting ready for the procession; actors are rehearsing tableaux of bible scenes; musicians check their instruments. Jugglers practice in the dark.

Thuy beds down in Bosch’s basement, wondering where Jayjay is.

(7.2)

In the morning she awakes to yelling and then she feels lazy eight unfurl. All the Hibrane objects are waking up and everyone is getting omnividence, telepathy, and endless memory—although the locals don’t yet realize they’re capable of teleportation. The bricks on the floor talk to Thuy. The silps aren’t so verbal as in the Lobrane, as they aren’t incorporating the knowledge of any ambient orphids. They speak in images rather than in words.

Reaching further and further out, Thuy contacts Hibrane Gaia, the newly accessible planetary mind, but this Gaia is quite inchoate and non-verbal, something like the traditional notion of God as a numinous glow.

Thuy teleports up to Jayjay in the attic. The harp says Jayjay and Thuy are supposed to become aktuals, too, pretty soon. She asks them to remember exactly what she looks like. And then she turns into a green woman with three eyes—Lovva from planet Pepple. She stretches out her arms and disappears, flying home to Pepple.

Moments later an identical woman appears, clueless. It’s Lovva, just arriving from Pepple. Her sojourn on the Lobrane and Hibrane Earths will be a closed loop. Thuy tells Lovva she is supposed to look like a harp and hang around here for 500 years.

“A long time,” says Lovva, then laughs. “Or not. I see, I see.” Apparently she has some kind of internal time control, so that she can psychically whiz through centuries, seemingly just sitting there. Embarking on her loop, she turns into the harp, copying its pattern from and Thuy, and learning the all-important lazy-eight-unfurling Lost Chord from Jayjay.

Bosch pokes his head up into the attic, he’s both delighted and terrified scared. He is wondering if he’s gone mad, or if demons have taken over the town. Is it the end of the world? Thuy and Jayjay reassure him. His wife Aleid and the maid Kathelijn are hysterical, inconsolable.

Alderman Vladeracken shows up from next door, angry, blaming Jayjay, Thuy, and Jeroen Bosch for the change, wanting to arrest them. Eager to escape this tedious bully, Jayjay shows Jeroen how to teleport. Nobody here knows this trick yet. The three hop to the market to enjoy the scene.

The marketplace is crowded with merchants, country people, city people, musicians, beggars, conjurors, magicians, acrobats, pickpockets, cutpurses, soldiers, guilds, images of saints, actors pretending to be biblical figures, floats, litters, canopies, painted banners. Everything’s talking, including the items on sale: sheets, shoes, stockings, leather shoelaces, hats and caps, pins, baskets, kettles, pots an pans, twine, vegetables, fruit, flour, meat, butter, cheese, cloth.

The locals are bewildered. They’re trying half-heartedly to carry on, glaring at the talking objects and shaking their heads, each person kind of wondering if it’s just them alone going crazy like the beggars who’ve eaten too much ergot-tainted bread.

Vladeracken is pushing through the crowd, yelling. Thuy remembers the art of teep camouflage—she shows Jayjay and Bosch how to do it. And now they look (via teep, but not face to face) like a hunchback with a cat and a dog. A group watching a cockfight disperses; nobody can handle the direct teep experience of the roosters’ pain. In the hubbub, Thuy, Bosch and Jayjay get out of Vladeracken’s direct sight and now he can’t find them by teep.

‘S-Hertogenbosch is known for knife making and for bell making. Casting a bell was a dangerous thing; the big bells for churches had to be cast on site, as they were so heavy. To kick off this year’s annual procession for the Virgin, the locals are casting a special bell.

Distracted by the burbling voice of the molten iron, a guy falls into it and is hideously burned to death during the casting. The guy and his body let out hideous juicy screaming. The silps of the molten iron and the charring human flesh sing an antiphonal anthem.

The crowd’s mood shifts to a mass freak-out. The superstitious locals begin flagellating themselves, rubbing ashes on their faces, and looking for someone to blame. The soldiers and monks are arresting people in droves: the beggars, the actors, the magicians.

An orgy of punishments springs up sway before town hall. Flogging, mutilation by sword, breaking on the wheel, beheadings by the sword. Jayjay and Thuy feel sorry for the victims, they start teeping them the secret of how to teleport away, and the docket empties out.

Vladeracken spots the cause and points an accusing finger at Jayjay and Thuy. “These devils have ensorcelled our town! Bosch and his familiars!”

Soldiers with cudgels descend, laying out the three of them unconscious before they can teleport to safety.

(7.3)

When Thuy comes to, they’re imprisoned inside the cathedral. The cathedral’s dour silp is willing to block teleportation and teep so that people can be tortured and executed in here. (A good symbol for religion’s dark side.) The incense-wafty, waxy-feeling, body-odorous air of the cathedral is blocking the teep and teek of whoever is inside. It’s like being packed in cotton wool.

The execution frenzy has been moved in here. The floor runs with blood. Azaroth, Thuy, Jayjay, and Bosch are to be hung from a makeshift gallows or gibbet above the pulpit. Thuy and Jayjay are shackled with heavy chains, the Hibraner-sized shackle rings around their waists. Even though they have the six-to-one brane-to-brane power advantage, they can’t readily break loose. And they’re scared to try, as two soldiers with cross-bows are standing over them, a fat one and a thin one, keeping the crossbow bolts aimed at their throats.

Azaroth actually does get hung before Thuy and Jayjay can think of any way to stop the horror. Some real sorry over losing this friend. And Jayjay is to be next. Thuy is shackled up next to Bosch. “Help me,” Thuy whispers urgently to the great artist. “Make a distraction.”

Bosch flips a painting rag into the air, tossing it with such kiqqie lazy-eight-mind-enhanced precision that it looks for all the world like a ghostly devil. The distracted soldiers track the rag with their cross-bows.

Meanwhile the executioner has shoved Jayjay off the pulpit; he’s arcing down toward the floor, with the slack of the rope about to run out. Thuy bursts her shackle, grabs a sword from a soldier, races across the floor, cuts Jayjay’s rope, kicks down open the cathedral door, and shrills the Hrull whistle. Jayjay and Bosch join here.

(7.4)

But there’s no sign of the alien manta ray for a moment. Just as the soldiers are about to recapture our three heroes, the pitchfork belatedly appears—he says he was in between the branes, scouting out the best path back to the Lobrane Earth. And now, blessedly, Chu and the giant manta ray Duxy glide in to save them, homing in on the beacon of Bosch’s upheld brush.

Duxy flies back across the Planck Sea bearing Thuy, Chu, Jayjay, Glee, Bosch, and the pitchfork. They’re drawn into a maelstrom, deep into Subdee. Partway down, Glee, Bosch, Thuy and Chu have become zenoheads like Jayjay, capable of speeded up thought.

Thuy looks out from Duxy at Subdee. Walls of it around them, like the walls of a tunnel leading into the Hollow Earth. Last time Thuy visited Subdee, it looked like ancient Egypt to her, but that was only because the subbies had recently eaten the Egypt-obsessed Jeff Luty. This time Bosch’s thoughts seem to be driving the subbies antics. For Thuy is seeing Boschian scenes, perhaps something like Bruegel’s Bosch-influenced The Fall of the Rebel Angels. Thuy is scared.

Suddenly the pitchfork shoves Jayjay, Thuy, and Bosch out of Duxy’s mouth. They’re free-falling towards the infinity at the base of the great whirlpool vortex. Due to Bosch’s influence, infinity looks like a triangle holding the eye of God. Looking upwards, Thuy sees Groovy, the pitchfork, jump free of Duxy, the manta. The pitchfork cackles, turns into a lanky hillbilly, and speeds home towards Pepple. Lightened and freed of Groovy’s influence, Duxy spirals upwards and wings towards Lobrane Earth, taking Chu home.

(7.5)

And now they pass through infinity, though the Eye of God. The interface is like a cotton candy cloud. And on the other side they see—Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, all three panels. Thuy, Jayjay and Jeroen are aktuals now. They can alter their bodies at will. Thuy forms herself into an egg—for womb (she’s pregnant), for incubation (she’s working on a metanovel called Hive Mind), and to act as a resonant gong. Jayjay becomes a corkscrew; Bosch a flying bagpipe.

The three stick together and carry out four tasks. Bosch, as squalling bagpipe, brings lazy eight to the paradise panel on the left and to the hell panel on the right. These prove to be Pengö and Hrullwelt a million years ago. Jeroen is blowing Last Judgment blasts. Sqwooonk! And, again, Sqwooonk! Two tasks down, two to go.

They focus on the central panel, which is Pepple. Thuy brings lazy eight to Lobrane Pepple a thousand years ago, she’s a gonging egg. Digging beneath the panel, she does the back side of it as well, which is Hibrane Pepple. It isn’t so complicated for her to unfurl lazy eight as it was for the harp. She has a better idea of what she’s doing. And she doesn’t have such a fuss about handing both branes. The harp didn’t even know about the other brane before she became an aktual. One more task to do.

Time waves are sloshing around them. Fish fly in the sky. Jayjay, as corkscrew, takes a stab at the central panel, at Pepple, he drills in and aktualizes Groovy and Lovva, bringing them here to the glowing white-light land of infinity. An infinity of mirrors, and multiple images.

Bosch says farewell and returns to Hibrane Earth. Jayjay and Thuy return to Lobrane Earth