Postsingular

Light from the store windows made warm trapezoids on the shiny sidewalk, gilding the rain puddles, their surfaces wrinkled by the gusty wind. As always when she noticed gnarly natural patterns, Thuy thought of Jayjay. She missed his lean body, his voice, his smell, his physical presence. He was still living on the Merz Boat.

According to Kittie, who'd taken to watching every freaking second of Founders, Jayjay had had a little affair with Jil Zonder in November, although Jil had broken it off pretty quickly for the sake of her kids. Kittie said Jil wouldn't have gotten into the affair at all if it hadn't been that, right after his affair with Nektar, Craigor had started humping that slutty Lureen Morales up the hill. And now it looked like poor, heartbroken Jil might be drifting back into sudocoke.

Back when Jil and Jayjay's affair had actually been going on, Kittie had kept wanting to tell Thuy about the couple's intimate doings: who put what where how often, like that. For sure Thuy didn't care to process that type of info. No more than she cared to peep at Kittie and Nektar making the two-backed beast. Or, for that matter, Craigor and Lureen. Grunt, grunt, moan, moan. Thuy had given up on sex, at least for now, although she and Kittie were still roommates and fairly good friends. Oh, Jayjay, where are you?

Thuy drew even with El Santo de Israel, an evangelical storefront church that had preaching and a crowd most evenings. It was next to an auto repair shop. The church name was in the serif-heavy Old English font that some Latinos liked, and the windows were decorated with poster paints: a man wrestling an angel, a six-pointed star with Hebrew letters around it, the Christian fish symbol with an eye in the middle, and numerous chapter-and-verse scripture references. Fresh red writing on the window read: "Visita Del Rebelde Бngel Azaroth Hoy." Rebel Angel Azaroth Visiting Today.

Azaroth again. Thuy's ears began ringing as if she had a fever. The busy street scene became remote, "in quotes," a grimy surreal diorama behind shatterproof glass. Was Thuy writing her metanovel, or was the metanovel writing her?

Until now, Thuy had held back from mentioning Azaroth in Wheenk, but it was time to write him in. She mentally replayed her memories of her very first meeting with him, going over the events slowly and precisely, blending them into the material she already had.

It had happened shortly after Orphid Night, when the ethereal Hibraners had become visible, thanks to the airborne orphids adhering to the aliens' insubstantial forms and bedecking them with meshes of graphical vertices.. . .

***

As part of her then job at Golden Lucky, the Vietnamese restaurant-supply wholesaler, Thuy was researching the possibility of starting to deal in the meat of the locally caught Pharaoh cuttlefish being processed by AmphiVision, the San Francisco company that made display devices using organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores. AmphiVision was discarding the cuttles' really quite tasty flesh, and Thuy's boss, Vinh Phat, sensed a business opportunity. There was a good demand for grilled cuttlefish in the local Asian communities. Vinh had set Thuy to tracking data on the cuttlefishers, giving her access to a dragonfly spy camera.

So as it happened, Thuy was watching Craigor, Jil, Ond, Nektar, and Chu on the Merz Boat the night that Ond released the orphids. She dipped into Chu's cuttlefish datastream; she accessed the blue spaghetti link; and she paid close attention when Chu wove his Celtic-style jump-code knot from a piece of string. The knot intrigued, even fascinated, Thuy. Looking through the dragonfly, she examined it quite closely during the penultimate instant after Chu tied together the string's two loose ends, right before he disappeared into the Hibrane.

Thuy was investigating all these things with a sense of doing a job for Golden Lucky, alone with the family cat Naoko in her frilly bedroom at her parents' house, working online after hours, not immediately understanding the transformative impact of what was going down. But then she looked out her window past her parents' neighbors' identical houses; she saw the orphidoutlined hills of San Francisco; and suddenly she got the picture. Game over. Everything was changed forever, and Thuy no longer needed to play the good girl. Not quite letting herself think about what she was doing, she packed a bag and headed for her high-school boyfriend, Jayjay. Thanks to the orphidnet, it was easy to find him. He was living with Sonic in a shell of a house in the Mission-some developer had gutted it for a retrofit and had then run out of funds.

Azaroth manifested himself to Thuy three days after Orphid Night. By then the Big Pig had emerged, and Thuy, Jayjay, and Sonic had learned about suckling on the pig, which meant that Thuy woke up woozy. She sat up in bed, looking around Jayjay's ugly, junked squat, and then, in the orphidnet, she saw a glowing eye the size of a melon peering in the window. It was a Hibraner, a thirty-foot-tall man of light. He wore flashy clothes: purple bell-bottoms and a green shirt with yellow stripes. He reached through the wall to caress Thuy; she felt his ethereal body as a warm air-current.

"It's glow to talk with you," Azaroth messaged, his voice coming through the orphidnet co

"Thuy," she said aloud, causing Jayjay to stir in his sleep. Sonic wasn't around; he'd already gone out to look for food. Thuy switched to subvocal speech. "Should I be scared? What kind of name is Azaroth, anyway?"

"My grandparents were from Ludhiam in the Punjab. They worked in a bicycle factory. As he prepared to emigrate, my father, Puneet, made a hobby of studying the world's religions. He named me after a Babylonian demon. Azaroth is a starky god. Good name for starky me." Azaroth pushed his head and shoulders into the room as well. He had dark, liquid eyes and a beaky nose. He wore his long hair in a topknot enclosed by a pale green stocking that matched his shirt.

One of Jayjay and Sonic's now-outmoded game consoles was ru

"Do you want something from me?" Thuy asked.

"Chu's Knot," Azaroth said. "You know, that vibby tangle of string the boy tied off before he jumped to our world? That's Chu's Knot. You saw it. I saw you seeing it. I was here stealing Craigor's cuttlefish. We like to eat them."

"Chu's Knot," echoed Thuy, not really surprised. She'd been thinking obsessively about the Knot lately, even in her dreams. It seemed reasonable that a Hibrane alien would want to know about the most fascinating thing she'd ever seen. She settled her pillow against the wall, ready for conversation. "Why exactly do you need it?"

"I want to help Chu come home."

"He's still in the Hibrane? Why not ask him about the Knot?"

"My Aunt Gladax caught Chu on Orphid Night and made him forget," said Azaroth. "Chu's father Ond got away. For a little while." Azaroth flashed Thuy a vision of Chu wrapped in a rubber net suspended by bungee cords in the middle of a very large room-it seemed to be a personal gym or exercise room in a hilltop mansion with a view of nighttime San Francisco and the twinkling Golden Gate Bridge. The vision was accompanied by a mind-numbing hum. "Bouncy Chu. Aunt Gladax is very paranoid about your nanomachines-even though we're sure that all the orphids on your boys were crushed by our smart air as soon as they arrived. You'd be better off if your air