And then, in the velvet darkness, he screamed.

"What?" cried Thuy.

"Nanomachine goo!" gasped Jayjay, his echoing voice seeming to come from every side. "The Ark of the Nants was booby-trapped! The stuff 's all over me! Oh, it tingles, it stings! Get back, Thuy! And don't forget that-" Jayjay gurgled and fell silent. In the local orphidnet, Thuy could see that her lover was fully enveloped by rippling nanoslime. He twitched, spasmed, and dropped motionless to the stone floor.

Thuy cowered at the far end of the cave, remembering Grandmaster Green Flash's skin with the rainbow sheen like rotten fish or rancid ham. Jayjay lay still beneath the iridescent slime. Thuy hated herself for being afraid to approach him. Tragic organ music swirled in her head. Her heart skipped a beat and seemed to explode.

And in that instant of ultimate despair, she finished Wheenk, the pieces of the metanovel coming together like a time-reversed nuclear explosion-everything fitting, everything of a piece-her adventures at the fab, her love for Jayjay, her worries about the nants, the dance she'd done down the rainy street that night exulting over her metanovel, the expression on her mother's face at her college graduation, her father's bare feet when he tended his tomato plants, the Easter Island boy who'd given her a cone shell today, her last kiss with Jayjay-Wheenk slamming together as heavy and whole as a sphere of plutonium, a perfected pattern in her local orphidnet.

Pain had produced artistic transcendence.

Thuy messaged a copy to the Big Pig lest the great work be lost. The Pig understood; kindly she passed it further, posting Wheenk across the global orphidnet.

And now, just as Azaroth had promised, Thuy remembered Chu's Knot. There'd been one final twist and wrap she couldn't visualize, but finally she had the knack; it was a bit like the time Kittie had showed her how to knit a pointed hat. Yes, the Knot was perfectly clear in Thuy's unaided mind, hanging there in three-dimensional glory, revolving at the touch of her will, a subtly woven bracelet with several hundred crossings.

Meanwhile the Pig was tending to a cloud of orphids surrounding the nant farm. And a second cloud of orphids was attacking the vile goo that enveloped Jayjay's inert form. Thuy hadn't thought about Jayjay for nearly a minute. She was such a terrible, self-centered person.

"I could go to the Hibrane now," she told the Big Pig. "But what's the use? I don't want to live without Jayjay."

A streamer of goo pushed across the cave, feeling for Thuy. Nimbly she moved out of its reach.

"You don't look quite ready to die," said the Big Pig, sounding amused. "Anyway, Jayjay's not dead. He'll be fine once the orphids clean him off. I'll be keeping him here to make sure you return. And meanwhile, I'll put him on a dark dream. He and I will be conducting a thought experiment, you might say. Go on with you now. And I'm open to whatever you learn. But, remember, I don't want to wait past midnight. You've got a little over six hours."

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.

Thuy sat on the cave floor, gathering her wits. It made her sick to be so far from Jayjay in his time of need. Was he really going to be okay? She was half tempted to jump right back to the Lobrane. Of course, then she'd have to run the gauntlet of the subbies again. Come on, Thuy, now that you're in the Hibrane, find Ond and invent a defense against the nants. That's what you came for.

The stone beneath her felt crumbly; she could poke her finger right into it. Might she tunnel to the surface? Although her orphids had disappeared when she arrived, the universal Hibrane telepathy had given her the ability to see through walls. The telepathic images were richer and more true-to-life than the orphidnet images had been.

Thuy found a thin spot in the cave wall right above a dog-sized boulder on the ground. A mere six inches of foamy rock separated her from a chimneylike vent leading directly to the surface. She pulled the sleeves of her red plaid coat down over her hands and began scraping at the wall; the friable stone gave way like styrofoam or cheese. As well as being less dense, the matter moved more slowly here. The chunks of rock were drifting to the floor in slow motion.

"Huh, huh! Dig, dig!" said Thuy, recalling the phrase from a comic strip Kittie had admired. If she'd been at home with the orphidnet beezies, she could have instantly located an archived copy of Mole . But the universal telepathy of the Hibrane was nothing like so well organized.

Thuy dug on, muttering and chuckling, happy to be doing something. The rocks chanted their transformations; the air exulted in its motion-eddies; Thuy's fingers gloated over their strength. In a minute she'd reached the chimney vent. Light spilled down from twenty meters above. She clambered up the shaft like an invading underworld gnome, her gold piezoplastic Yu Shu shoes finding purchase on the cracks and crevices of the shaft's overgrown walls.

Thuy emerged into a summer day. Hot, around noon. She doffed her plaid coat. A moai statue loomed overhead, five or six times as big as the ones in the Lobrane. The grasses and field flowers were level with her waist. Surveying the giganticized island landscape, Thuy deduced that in the Hibrane she was effectively one foot tall.