Episode 9. The Sea Pig And the Sun: I Seem to Be an Eme
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Series Guide: List of All Episodes
“They’re dead,” says Vi, her voice breaking. “Those horrible emes killed a hundred people. That cute, lively trombone girl? The mayor? All of them laughing and watching the parade. I didn’t realize it would be like this.”
“They’re still patterns,” says Wick. “I saw them. Still going on.”
“That’s bullshit,” says Vi.
“You’re right,” Wick sadly agrees. “It is.”
“Maybe there’s a way to bring them back,” says Lilith.
“How do you mean?” says Vi.
“Like way that the emes came over here in the first place. Bring the people back into meaties.”
“Don’t want to go there,” says Qoph. “Not right now.”
“But later,” says Lilith. “If we’re still around.”
“And you’re in with Waama?” Vi asks Lilith. Trying to size her up.
“We’re old friends,” says Lilith. “My prior host was a little crab hiding under Waama’s sea pig. Ah, the lush glory of her ample curves. And, here and now, she’s still the same sea pig — not that you can tell. When I was in the crab, I didn’t know about people at all, you know. Waama was better informed.. I had no idea we’d be killing a hundred of you guys.”
“You’re not murdering Wick and me,” says Vi. “We don’t want to be swirls of fire and fog.”
“You have to make a promise if we help you anymore,” Wick tells Qoph and Vi. Trying to lay down the law. “We stay human.”
“Sure,” says Qoph, hardly listening. He’s got his mind on something else. The next step. “We need Vi very much, just as she is. She has friends at the Stanford Dish.”
Qoph is talking about the big radio antenna that’s on a hill next to Route 280 in Palo Alto. Vi did a lot of work with the Dish guys when she was a Stanford research librarian.
“I had a feeling this would come up,” Vi tells Wick. “I vibed hints when I was a wasp with Qoph yesterday .”
“It’s time for the Dish, yes,” declaims Qoph. “Carry us there, Waama! A hundred meaties and us three pairs. Vi/Koral, Wick/Qoph, Soxx/Lilith. I’ll vibe you the details, Vi.”
Waama shapes her sea pig body into, well, into a flying saucer — although actually it’s a shallow flying bowl, fifty feet across, glassy and transparent, with concentric rings of seats. Room for a hundred people. The rings are ledges in the side of the bowl, and the seats are depressions in the ledges, everything like glass.
The meaties hop into the low bowl and find places. Vi hates the emes. But she gets aboard anyway. She’ll keep playing along. She wants to see how this comes out. The craft cruises north over the yellow hills and the dark green oaks, over the mansions and cottages, up along Route 280. Wick is as upset as Vi. But Soxx the artist is on another plane.
“Would love to paint this,” she says, looking down through the crystal bowl. “If I get out of this alive.”
Soon they reach the parabolic Stanford Dish, considerably wider than Waama’s bowl. The Dish rests on a network of girders. Protruding from the Dish is a tripod of three supports. At the tip of the tripod is a small antenna called the feed horn. When broadcasting, the feed horn beams signals inward toward the parabolic reflector, and the signals bounce out in a tight beam.
Following Qoph’s instructions, Vi has contacted a friend in the Dish lab. And, by dint of insanely grandiose promises, she’s persuaded the man to aim the radio telescope directly at the Sun.
“That’s where it’s at,” says Soxx. “Old Sol. A new zone of gnarl for Waama and her crew of emes.”
“The Dish will beam them to the Sun?” asks Wick. “How’s that supposed to work?”
“Waama will mix the departed humans’ emulations with the vibes of emes in the meaties here,” says Qoph “She’ll take differences between the pairs of minds to get manageable superheterodyne signals. She needs to have those emotive human outputs.”
“Then Waama smushes all the signals together,” says Koral. “Waama the pregnant sea pig. Waama the Van de Graf generator. Waama the rulial wanderer!
“She wraps the signals around the feed horn,” says Qoph. “A cloud of plasma. And once the horn is fully stoked — Waama melts into the plasma.”
Koral throws up her hands. “The feed horn honks!” she whoops. “ Zow! Waama and the emes take off! Heading for Waama’s precious Sun!”
Wick expects Waama to glue herself to the inside of the Dish’s parabolic surface, but instead she hovers in midair, next to the feed horn. She extrudes a narrow walkway from her bowl’s top edge, running almost to the feed horn. Evidently you’re expected to walk the plank and jump into the feed horn — however that process is going to work.
Vi/Koral, Wick/Qoph, and Soxx/Lilith sit high on edge of the bowl, as far as possible from the feed horn. Waama’s seated crew of meaties rock their bodies back and forth as they ping-pong their eme vibes with the minds of their dead human partners. And now, one by one, like grads filing up for their diplomas, the chanting meaties teeter along the plank to the feed horn, hop off, and melt their emes into the lambent, growing ball of energy around the horn.
Watching from other side like flunkies at on graduation day, the six companions fret.
“Are you sure you guys aren’t planning to go the Sun too?” Vi asks Qoph, Koral, and Lilith. “Because if you are, you’ll want to kill us first and — ”
“We like it here,” insists Koral with a friendly smile. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“I might try being a Big Sur cow,” says Qoph. “I vibed someone thinking about them.””
“I’m not going to let Waama boss us around,’ says Lilith. “She’s a pattern in a sea pig, but I was a pattern in a crab. Crabs are very can-do.”
“Seems like Waama and her crew ought to be taking off by now,” says Qoph. “Brace yourself for when this bowl disappears.”
But that’s not exactly what happens.
Evidently, Waama feels like she might not yet have enough juice to fly to the Sun. She wants to eat Vi/Koral, Wick/Qoph, and Soxx/Lilith. Sensing this, they leap free of the bowl. Lilith helps them hover via her powers of vibe.
Waama drops her disguise. She’s a sea pig the size of a car. Like a twisted party balloon that’s slimy, glassy, and leather-tough. She has six pairs of stubby tubular legs, a twitching mouth of ten fronded stalks, plus four wagging feeler-legs on top. She has no eyes. Doesn’t matter. Her vibes see all.
“Let’s get out of here!” cries Vi. “Back to Los Perros!”
But it’s no use. None of the six can move. They’re nightmarishly frozen in place, held in thrall by the vibes of Waama’s will. They hang there like targets in a shooting gallery. Lilith isn’t as powerful as she claimed.
Cagey, ravenous, and obscenely fast, Waama caroms off the surface of the parabolic reflector, then bullets toward our heroes
Oh fuck.
Waama is full. She bops back to the feed horn, and melts into the pulsing plasma. The feed horn blasts the multiplexed energies against the great antenna’s dish.
Zow.
Waama and her 103 emes begin their journey to the fabulous scenes and mighty emes of the Sun.
Wick, Vi, and Soxx stay behind. In a certain sense they’re dead. Their bodies are utterly annihilated. But yet they live as patterns within natural phenomena.
Soxx Whitsett is a process inside a miniature crab that lurks beneath a sea pig in the deeps. It’s not Waama’s sea pig that she’s lurking under, it’s a different sea pig. Soxx is getting interesting views. Good stuff to paint, if she gets out of this alive. She needs help from her friends. And, vibing around, she finds Wick and Vi.
And where are Wick and Vi? Well, Vi is a recurring chaotic pattern in the fog over Seabright Beach, the fog which is blown in from the sea. Wick is a beach fire that comes and goes — sometimes ablaze, sometimes warm coals, sometimes cold ashes. Wick is the spirit of place for a fire ring on Seabright Beach — the very locale where, not so long ago, he had had his momentous dream of the multi lounge. Romantically enough, the Wick emulation is regularly fanned by Vi’s loving fog.
Wick and Vi are glad when Soxx vibes them. Soxx learned a few tricks from Lilih after all. She knows how to lead Wick and Vi to the multi lounge. There’s no other emes in the lounge just now, but Wick sees that same multifarious display as before — dioramas of scenes where minds live. Human minds. Their lost tribe. The tribe they want to lead home.
“We’ll do like Qoph and Koral, ” Vi tells Wick. “Find a live human dreamer and get into his head. Port ourselves into a couple of the guy’s cells, or, no, get one of the cells from his wife. Grow the cells into meaties. Then crank out a hundred eggs for the rest of the gang.”
“Me, I’ll do mine alone,” says Soxx. “I’ll find a painter and come in as her Muse! See you in Los Perros.”
Flickering and eddying in fog and fire, Wick and Vi wait. Soon — although what does soon mean? — they spot an ideal couple, lying on the beach, suffering the wind. Rudy and Sylvia. Rudy lies face down on his towel. Sylvia reads a book. She glances over at her motionless husband.
Sylvia’s husband Rudy has always been a good napper.
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