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Chapters (23)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. Part I
  6. Chapter 1
  7. Chapter 2
  8. Chapter 3
  9. Chapter 4
  10. Part II
  11. Chapter 5
  12. Chapter 6
  13. Chapter 7
  14. Part III
  15. Chapter 8
  16. Chapter 9
  17. Chapter 10
  18. Part IV
  19. Chapter 11
  20. Chapter 12
  21. Tor Books by Rudy Rucker
  22. Acknowledgments
  23. Copyright

Thuy focused on her mental image of Chu’s Knot. Nothing happened. Calming her panic, she remembered to do like Ond and Jil had done. She let go of her internal voice and interrupted her endless narration of her life story. She saw the spaces between her thoughts. She saw the space between the worlds.

She was off.

Part IV

Chapter 11

The Hibrane

Thuy felt a spinning sensation, as if she were being pulled down a whirlpool. And then she was skimming low across a foamy sea, following the curves of its undulating surface, flying with her arms outstretched, no land in sight. Surely the Hibrane lay upon the sea’s far shore.

She felt vulnerable, tracing her way across this watery wasteland alone. It seemed unfair that the passage should seem to take so long, given that the Hibrane was supposedly less than a decillionth of a meter off. Space and time were weird down so close to the quantum level.

A tuberous stub popped through the ocean’s slowly seething surface. Thuy felt a faint tingle, and now the rootlike stub took on the appearance of a glistening bird head, the head connected to a dimly visible humanoid form rushing along beneath the surface, pacing Thuy’s progress. The bird head twitched this way and that, tracking Thuy’s motions. Thuy had seen similar beings when she’d inched back and forth through Luty’s teleportation grill. Subbies. They scared the shit out of her.

This particular subbie was casting a spume of drops and bubbles in his wake. Thuy swerved a bit, lest the spray touch her. She felt a nightmarish terror that any contact with the subbie could trap her here, world without end. As if in response, the subbie elongated his neck toward Thuy, blinking his yellow-rimmed eyes and clacking his down-curved beak.

Thuy reached deep into herself and drew power from the completed whole of Wheenk, feeding the energy into an exponential spike of acceleration. And then—yes!—she was in the Hibrane.

As she arrived, her mind bloomed; every particle of her body unfurled. She found herself in a copy of the same lava cave, the space velvety dark and utterly still. She was alone—yet not alone. For everything was telepathic here.

The walls of the cave were singing a chorus; Thuy’s body parts were speaking to her; the air currents were sensually describing their kinetic flows; and twenty meters above, a moai statue was happily basking in the sun. All across this world the minds of Hibraners pulsed like musical flowers.