Transreal Cyberpunk (25 page)

But there were no fast-food shacks to be seen in this idyllic landscape. The roads were mere dirt-tracks. No electrical pylons, no power cables. No big LA streetlights. No gutters, no concrete, no plumbing. Even the air smelled different; it had a viscous, sleepy, lotus-land quality, as if it were hard to suck the molecules through one’s nose-holes.

In this bucolic stillness, the pop-popping of the old Indian was loud as fireworks. An over-friendly yellow dog came snuffling up behind the slow-moving bike. Stefan turned to confront the stray mutt, and noted its extra, scuttling legs. It wasn’t a dog; it was, rather, a yellow ant the size of a dog.

The ant’s hooked feet skimmed across the valley floor, leaving neat little ant hoofprints. Intent on Jayson’s motorcycle, she moved like a Hong Kong martial artist on wireworks and trampoline.

Jayson hastily pulled his chopper into the gorgeous flowers of a local yard. He killed the engine and the boys leapt from the bike. The ant tapped the bike all over with her baton-sized feelers—trying to initiate a conversation. The motorcycle was, after all, remarkably ant-like in appearance, with its red skin, handlebar feelers, bulging headlight eye, and the gas tank like a thorax. Receiving no response, the yellow ant studied the boys with her compound eyes, then bent her rear end around to smear a drop of sticky ant-goo across the bike’s fat rear fender. She bent a bit awkwardly; judging from her lumpy abdomen, she’d recently had a big meal. And now, task done, she scuttled right along.

A weathered man in a white shirt, straw hat and chinos came out of the house and sat down on an old-style dinette chair. The vintage aluminum and vinyl chair was in much better condition than its age would suggest.

“Nice bike,” said the old man, beginning to roll a cigarette. “What’s it doing in my flowers?”

“Hyperio!” exclaimed Stefan. “I know you—I rent the cottage from Mr. Noor? I’m Stefan Oertel.”

“Okay,” said Hyperio peaceably. “I used to live in that cottage. Me and my first wife Maria. The gardener’s cottage, the owner called it.”

“Mr. Noor never told me that.”

“Not him. Mr. Hal Roach, fella helped make those fat-man thin-man movies.”

“Laurel and Hardy’s producer!” said Stefan. “Wow. Serious time dilation. It’s a real coincidence to find you here, Hyperio. I was looking for you because I have ant problems.”

Hyperio seemed to think this was funny. He laughed so hard that he spilled the tobacco out of his cigarette. It was an odd, desperate kind of laughter, though, and by the end it almost looked like he was in tears.

“I’m sorry, boys,” said Hyperio finally. “I’m not myself these days. My wife Lola is sick.” He jerked his head towards his door. “My Lola—she’s from way up Hormiga Canyon.”

“Canyon of the Ants,” translated Jayson. “What a great neighborhood. Can I live here? You got an extra room I can rent?”

“You’d pay me?” said Hyperio, looking maybe a little annoyed at Jayson’s seeming lack of concern over his sick wife.

“Um, I’m low on funds right now,” said Jayson, slapping his pockets. He looked around, sniffing the air for collectibles. “That Deco moderne dinette chair you’re sitting on—if I took that over to Silver Lake, I could get you two, three hundred bucks.”

“I brought this from the gardener’s cottage when I built this place for Lola,” said Hyperio. “And I’m keeping it. I like it.”

“Hey—do I see a wind-up Victrola through your window? You’ve got some old 78 records, right? You like that big band accordion sound?”

“You like conjunto, too?” Hyperio said, finally smiling. There was nothing for it but to step inside his house, where he proceeded to treat the boys to a leisurely wind-up rendition of “Muy Sabroso Blues” by Lalo Guerrero And His Five Wolves.

Grown hospitable, Hyperio produced a ceramic jug of room-temperature pulque. He gestured at a rounded lump under a striped Indian blanket on a cot. “My old lady,” he said. “My Lola. She’s got the real ant problems. Ants living inside her.”

“But—” began Stefan.

“They make themselves small,” said Hyperio, narrowing his eyes.

“Sure, sure, that figures,” nodded Jayson, tapping his booted foot to the music. “How did you end up in Hormiga Canyon, Hyperio?”

“Okay, before Lola, I was living with my first wife Maria in the gardener’s cottage,” said Hyperio. “One day I found the way in. Yeah, hombre, I had good legs then. I walked the canyon very deep.” Hyperio held out his fingers, branching in ten directions, with his cigarette still clamped between two of them. “Hormiga Canyon, it don’t go just one way. The rivers run in, the rivers run out. But I didn’t stop till I found my Lola. She’s a real LA woman. The original.” He sat on the creaking cot beside Lola and patted her damp brow.

“So you found Lola and—?” coaxed Stefan, eager to hear more.

“I was crazy in love with her at first sight,” said Hyperio. “She was living with this indio, Angon was his name. From the Tongva tribe. Lola was too good for them. The Tongva people, they pray to the ants. They got some big old giant ants back there with legs like redwood trees.”

“Wow,” said Jayson. “I’d pay plenty to see those ants.”

Hyperio got up and changed the record on his Victrola. “This is Lola’s favorite song,” he said. “‘Mambo del Pachuco’ by Don Tosti and his band. She could really mambo, my Lola. Back in the day.”

The syncopated strains of music poured over the woman on the cot, and she stirred. Hyperio helped her sit up. Lola was stick-thin, and her brown face was slack. She’d been sleeping in a kind of leather shift, hand-beaded with little snail shells. When Lola saw that guests had arrived, however, she rallied a bit. Swaying to the music from the Victrola, she threw firewood into the stove. She stirred a kettle of soup. She drank water from a big striped pot.

Then she doubled over with a racking cough. She spat up a mass of ants. The ants swarmed all over her hands.

Stefan and Jayson exchanged an alarmed look. But Hyperio wasn’t surprised. He herded Lola back into bed, patted her, wrapped her up.

“She’s working the Tongvan ant cure,” said Hyperio shaking his head. “They eat ants to get well, the Tongvans. Lola eats the ants, lots of them, but she’s still no good inside, not yet. That’s why she wants me to take her back up canyon.”

“Home to her people, eh,” said Jayson. “I’ve heard about that tribe. The Tongvans. They were Californians, but like, before Columbus, basically?”

“The first, yes,” said Hyperio. He reached behind a string of dried peppers near the ceiling and produced a leafy sheaf of cured tobacco. With the edge of an abalone shell, he chopped up the brown leaf, then twisted it in scrap of newspaper. “You boys want a good smoke? Have a smoke.”

Jayson snatched up Hyperio’s hand-rolled cig. “These ants. Is redwood-tree-legs the max size they go?”

“They go bigger,” said Hyperio. “The biggest ones live in a monster nest beyond the Tongvans. They say something is wrong with the ground there, like a tar pit. Lola still prays to those tar pit ants. Good cooking, praying to ants, that’s my Lola. But pretty soon she likes it better here. She likes the music.”

“How did your first wife Maria take it when you showed up with a prehistoric girlfriend?” asked Stefan. It was his fate forever to wonder how romance worked.

“All the way home I worry about that,” said Hyperio, nodding sagely. “It only felt like I left Maria a couple of days, maybe a week, but when I get back, Maria is dead! It’s twenty years later. I ask around—nobody remembers me. Not a soul. So I moved into Hormiga Canyon and built this little house for Lola and me. She gave me four kids.”

“Where are they now?” said Stefan.

“Busy with grandkids,” Hyperio shrugged. A metal pot danced and rattled on his iron stove. “Now we eat soup, eh? You want me to warm some tortillas?”

Raw wonder at the way of man and woman had relaxed Stefan’s fixation on science for one moment, but now his string-mania came vibrating back at him. “I know why this canyon exists!” he intoned. “There’s a fault in the weave of the cosmic strings that make up Los Angeles. And, yeah, that fault is this very canyon. The local Hormiga Canyon ants have co-evolved with the cosmic strings. That’s why LA ants are so sneaky! The ants of Los Angeles have a secret nest in that tar pit of cosmic strings.”

Jayson looked on him kindly. “Eat something, Stefan.”

They had a little of Hyperio’s squirrel soup—at least, the soup had some ratlike parts that were probably squirrel—and though the flavors of native Angeleno herbs like yarrow, sage and deer grass were far from subtle, they did seem to brace one internally.

Buoyed by his scientific insight, Stefan was feeling expansive. “You’re a fine host, Hyperio! Anything we can do to pay you back?”

Hyperio regarded the boys. “That motorcycle in my flowers—you got some gas in it? Lola wants to go back up canyon to her people. But I don’t feel so good about this big trip.”

“We can carry Lola in for you,” said Jayson grandly.

“Dude,” said Stefan to his friend in a low tone. “If we go deep into this canyon, we’ll never see our own era again.”

“So what?” said Jayson. “When we go up that canyon, we’re going to a simpler, cleaner time. No smog. No pesticides. No politicians.”

“I can give you boys an old map,” said Hyperio, rising from his dinette chair.

Suddenly the room seemed to warp and twist. The walls creaked loudly.

“Earthquake!” yelped Jayson. He bolted from his dinette chair and banged his way through the door.

“Antquake,” corrected Hyperio, unperturbed.

Stefan rose and peered through the door, clutching his laptop in both hands. Jayson was hastily rolling his bike away from Hyperio’s house. Certain Angelenos were unnerved by ground tremors, but the pitching earth beneath his feet had never much bothered Stefan. In a hyperinflating cosmos made of humming strings, it was crass to expect stability.

As Stefan stepped outside, it occurred to him to wonder how much time had already passed in Los Angeles, that city of fast fads, that pen of frantic chickens with their heads cut off. Although the Hormiga Canyon air was as luminous as ever, when Stefan peered upwards he saw the night sky canopy, with a full moon bob-bob-bobbing along, rather like the bouncy ball in a sing-a-long 40s cartoon.

If Stefan and Jayson went deeper, the spacetime warp would be even stronger. They’d be visiting a real-world laboratory of dimensional wonders. Yes, Stefan wanted to go. There was no choice about that, really.

Up near the dark, blurry lip of the canyon, a black ant the size of a 1950s prop-job airliner was hard at work. With an ant’s busy clumsiness, her six legs grappled at the fibrous dirt, setting off little slides. She was groping around in the fabric of reality with her monster feelers, tugging at the substance of the canyon wall, pulling stuff loose: it looked like ropes or pipes. Cosmic strings. This ant was causing the tremors.

As she worked the fabric of the cosmos, distant houses shrank and grew as if seen through a shimmer of hot air. The black ant trundled down the valley wall, carrying a string in her jaws. The tangled bights of string glowed and shimmered; the lucid air hummed with a kind of music. The ant was unsteadily shrinking, first to the size of house, then to the size of a car, and then to the size of a cow—and now Stefan realized that those “livestock” upon the hillsides of Hormiga Canyon were all ants, too.

A herd of them gathered around the big black ant in a companionable fashion, fiddling with her string, helping with some dim nest-building agenda. They worked off instinct and smell.

Lola appeared in the door of Hyperio’s shack. She had a hand-woven string-bag over her shoulder. She still looked peaked, but with the promise of a journey home, hope had returned to her haggard face. She and old Hyperio engaged in a tender, rapid-fire farewell in Spanish. She kissed him, and Hyperio picked a red ant from his mustache. With a scowl, he flicked it from his fingertip.

The ant hit the ground scrambling, bounded up and was the size of a panther. It sniffed the fender of Jayson’s motorcycle, where the other ant had left its tag of sticky dew. Jayson doubled his fists.

“It’s harmless!” Stefan called.

But Stefan was wrong. With an abrupt lunge and a twitch of her big head, the rangy red ant snatched Stefan’s laptop from his unsuspecting grasp. She smashed the computer with the clashing machineries of her mouth; the pieces disappeared down her gullet. And then she trotted on her way.

Livid with rage, Stefan took a step or two in pursuit—but then, surprising even himself, he halted. This cosmic-string ant was paying him a compliment by eating his laptop. Somehow she’d sensed the seeds of the One True String Theory within Stefan’s flat gray box. Why else had they invaded Stefan’s home in the first place? They were there to celebrate the fact that he was King of String!

Weak-kneed with his turbulent flow of emotions, Stefan leaned against the bike.

Jayson began messing with the motorcycle, hiking up the saddlebags to make a platform that could support Lola. “You’ll be happier on the open road,” he told Stefan. “Without that idiot box leeching your psychic energy.”

“Is this bike gonna be big enough?” said Stefan.

“Down in Mexico a family of six would ride,” said Hyperio. He laid a board and a folded blanket across the saddlebags, and Lola curled up on it, making herself small. She showed her teeth in pain, then gave the boys a brave smile.