There were other differences. The nearby moai statue had wider eyes than the ones she'd seen before; the figure's lips were parted to show square basalt teeth. The star-shaped flowers in the grass were pink instead of yellow, the grass blades were more sharply curved. And the Hibrane Pacific waves were breaking in slow slow motion, with the surf 's sound dialed down to a deep bass boom.
Thuy glanced up past the dead volcano at the scattered clouds. These, at least, looked the same as before. It struck her that the edge of one cloud was quite similar to the border of a lichen patch she'd noticed on a wall of the vent she'd just climbed. As she formed this thought, she realized she'd acquired an eidetic memory for visual form. Each shape she saw was being stored intact in her Hibrane-expanded mind.
Curiouser and curiouser. Thuy used telepathic omnividence to view herself as if from outside. She was still wearing striped yellow-and-black tights, a black miniskirt, and her yellow sweater. Fine. But her hair! Finding a comb in her coat pocket, she undid her pigtail fasteners, combed out her dark locks, made a tidy part down the middle and restored her high pigtails to pristine form. She applied a little pink lipstick too.
She was hungry. She wondered if Hibrane Easter Island had a town of Hanga Roa with a Tuna-Ahi Barbecue. Reaching into the telepathic glow of the Hibrane mindscape, she located the island's town, which indeed had an unmarked restaurant very much like the place where she and Jayjay had breakfasted.
Given that she was the size of a gnome, Thuy didn't feel like walking all the way to town. Maybe she could teleport. She fixed her mind upon the target location and the source location: the restaurant and the grassy patch by the moai.
Whenever Jayjay had teleported, he'd invoked his specially designed interpolation agents. The interpolators compensated for the fact that orphidnet images didn't look quite as real as your immediate surroundings. But here in the Hibrane, you didn't need interpolators. Thuy's remote view of the village was utterly convincing.
Using her writerly sense of correspondences, Thuy let her attention dance back and forth between her images of source and target, pairing up features, crafting the sought-for transition as if writing a segue between two of a metanovel's scenes. As she withdrew from reality's insistent din, she seemed to collapse in on herself.
Where was she? Asking the question was enough. Pop –she was on the main street of the Hibrane version of Hanga Roa, carrying her coat under her arm. The locals had a few cars, even though they could teleport too. The cars were flimsy, as if cobbled together from organic parts: leaves, beetle wings, seashells. One car had dots like a ladybug, another bore yellow and white stripes. They all had solar cells and electric motors.
Relative to little Thuy, the single-story shops and houses were as tall as office buildings. The buildings looked to be assembled from naturally grown components as well. Overhead, shells and shiny seedpods hung upon lines stretched across the street; they'd been crafted into representational forms: a star, a candy cane, a cuttlefish holding a triangle-Thuy recalled Azaroth's mentioning that the cuttlefish was a symbol for a Hibrane religious figure. Perhaps these were ornaments to celebrate a holiday.
All these things Thuy noticed in the first flash after landing. But the bright-clothed Hibraners were taking the bulk of her attention. A dozen of them were in view: slow-moving giants, ethnically Chilean and Polynesian. All of them were staring at Thuy, raising their arms in slow-motion alarm and widening their mouths. And at the same time they were probing Thuy's mind. She tried her best to think pleasant, innocuous thoughts, but perhaps her worries about the nants leaked through. In any case, the Hibraners were scared of her.
The air rumbled with their low-speed cries, deep and draggy as sounds heard underwater. The Hibraners wheeled about in waltz time, fleeing from the alien gnome in the striped leggings. Their slow-motion panic was spooky.
Across the street was the place like the Tuna-Ahi Barbecue, its stony walls flowing smoothly from the soil. Although the building bore no written sign, it was telepathically emanating the image of a bluefin tuna. Thuy went inside. The inn was only approximately similar to its counterpart on the Lobrane.
The interior furnishings formed naturalistic curves, with each chair or table different from the others. The lumpish bottles behind the bar had no labels; instead they bore telepathic notes. Thuy picked up that the telepathic labels were called teep-tags.
Quite a few people were dining on the patio. The chairs were made of hardened kelp stems, and the tables were disks of mother-of-pearl with further kelp stems for their legs. A slender waitress in vibrant blue was just setting down pearly platters of rice, beans, and tuna steaks for a group of six: two women, a man, a boy, and two girls. Thuy yelled and charged toward them. As she'd hoped, the diners rocked back in their curved chairs. In two quick hops, Thuy was standing on the opalescent dining table.
She grabbed hold of a tuna steak the size of her torso; to her it felt like it weighed but a pound-as the matter here was less dense. The grilled fish was warm and savory, emanating faint images of its long, vigorous life in the deeps of the sea. Thuy tore into it; rapidly scarfing down the slab of fish and a mound of rice the size of her head.
The diners remained seated around the table, intrigued by Thuy's antics, and perhaps unwilling to abandon their food. The low burble of the three children's laughter became audible as Thuy took a frantic slurp from a bathtub-sized glass of thin-tasting cola. One of the women was frowning and her arm was arcing ever so slowly toward Thuy's head. Thuy stepped out of reach while loading some giant beans onto a tortilla the size of a pillow case. She strolled to the table's edge, gobbled the wrapped-up beans, called out a thank you, and hopped down to the crushed-shell patio.
Looking into the Hibraners' minds, Thuy could see that, for them, she was moving in a rapid blur. Her thank you had sounded like a shrill chirp. So now she sent the thanks telepathically and regarded the reactions.
The man's image of Thuy was tinged with hellfire; he was wondering if she were a demon. One of the girls was seeing Thuy as a cute doll; she was visualizing Thuy perched on a silky pillow in her room. The woman who'd tried to smack Thuy saw her as a pest like a weasel or a rat. The other woman regarded Thuy as a magical agent of good luck and was imagining trapping Thuy under a bucket-shaped shell that sat by the wall. As for the boy-he was simply marveling at how fast Thuy moved. A voice came at her, speaking clearly and at the proper speed.
"Thuy," said the voice in her head. "Get out of here fast. Crabby old Gladax is coming for you." Accompanying the voice was a brief image of a bearded young guy with a stocking-wrapped topknot. Azaroth.
"Where do I run to?" messaged Thuy. "Can I find Ond?"
"Teleport to our version of San Francisco," said the voice. "The sidewalk by the spot where you Lobraners have that storefront church."
Thuy focused on the mindscape location Azaroth was showing her. She saw a wet winter morning on a busy street, with little lights glowing in the window of a secondhand clothes store where El Santo de Israel had stood. A kind of auto repair shop stood next door. The buildings looked somehow like plants or like wasp nests. "Won't Gladax follow me there too?" worried Thuy.
"There's a vibby way to fool a telepathic snoop," messaged Azaroth. "It's like acting. You warp your self-image. Like how I made myself look like a moai when you and Jayjay were waking up? I'll show you how. Oh, oh, look out!"