Everything Is Everything

by Rudy Rucker

Vi’s husband Wick has always been a good napper. He announces one, settles in, and a minute later he’s gone. Vi neither admires nor belittles the behavior—it’s just an aspect of how Wick is. But, okay, maybe his napping makes him seem lazy. Like a dog. Vi prefers to stay awake and keep an eye on things.

Wick and Vi are spending an August weekday afternoon on Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz. It’s windy. Wick is half an hour into his nap. As soon as they arrived, he had made a shelter by opening their beach umbrella, laying it on its side, and wedging the umbrella’s edge into the sand.

Vi walks down the beach to the lighthouse and back. The wind is strong enough that it’s the main thing she thinks about. Usually at the beach she thinks about the shapes of the waves, about where the pelicans are flying to, and about the possibility of sighting seals, dolphins, or whales. Also she likes to recall the bygone days she spent on this beach with their two kids when they were still at home. Damn the wind.

Vi sits down beside the inert Wick. As far as Vi is concerned, the umbrella isn’t hacking it as a wind break, not with her sitting on her beach chair. Her hair whips at her eyes. Her book pages flutter savagely.

“Wick.” Silence. “Wake up, Wick. We have to move.” Silence. “Wick!”

He makes a low noise. Moves his arm. He’s quick to sleep, and quick to awaken. Maybe quick isn’t the right word.

“I was in a dream,” he mutters. “I heard your voice. I hoped it was part of the dream.”

“Fraid not,” says Vi. “I’m real. The wife. We have to move closer to the bluff. Or drive downtown.”

“Lie flat on the ground like me. Next to the umbrella.”

“No,” says Vi.

Grunting with every motion, Wick sits up.

“I dreamed I was in a seminar room like the one in the Cal Berkeley math building,” he says. “On the top floor. Trying to understand the discussion. Lately I keep going back to the same dream. Or it draws me in.”

“Math seminar?” says Vi, fastening on that. She giggles. Wick’s thoughts amuse her. “Why not a wild party? Why not let your dreams be fun?”

Wick rises to his feet. He’s out of sorts. “The seminar would be fun if I could understand it. The speaker—well, the speaker is an alien.” Wick pulls down his straw hat as far as it will go. Peers up and down the beach. “The speaker has a whole lot of heads,” he continues “Like a sea anemone with a face on the tip of each feeler? And the heads are telling riddles. All of them talking at once.”

“Riddles about what?”

“Well some of the riddles are from math. Riddles about infinity. Like: Can you untangle Alexander’s Horned Sphere? Is the plenum larger than the class of all ordinal numbers?  What’s the square root of alef-one? Never mind. There were some children’s riddles too. Why is the Sun like a loaf of bread?”

“You used to tell that one to the kids,” says Vi. “It rises in the yeast, and it dies in the vest!” She pats her stomach the way Wick always does after he tells that joke. “You got it from your father, right?”

Wick nods. “Yes. In fact I saw Pop’s head on one of the sea anemone tentacles just now, and he was the one asking that riddle. So is Pop the Sun, and my dream is a loaf of bread? Or I’m the son of the Sun and I bred the bread to sandwich the plenum?” Wick shakes his head. “Probably I’m imagining the part about Pop. But the math is real.”

“You’re saying that every time you nap you have this dream?” asks Vi, feeling uneasy.

“It started last month. I didn’t want to tell you. I don’t think it’s really a dream. I have a feeling they picked me because of my papers about the plenum.”

“They?”

“The anemone and his friends at the seminar. They live in the plenum. Don’t look away, Vi, you’ve heard me talk about this a million times. The plenum is our world’s true, absolute, underlying, transfinitely smooth space. Like the old notion of the aether. I think my dream might be a door I can open—so these two plenum bums can visit our level.”

Vi shakes her head. “Stop it, Wick. I bet you had this dream for the very first time today— and you imagine all that about having it before. It’s a fake deja vu. A Wick glitch. Not a cosmic vision of aliens. Come on now. Can I see a smile?”

Wick sighs and gave Vi a loose hug. “I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for being you.” He hoists his pack onto his back. Folds up the umbrella. “So—screw the beach? We go downtown?”

“First let’s sit on the bluff,” says Vi. “It’s such a pretty day. Let’s not waste it being weird.” They start across the sand toward the stairs on the cliff.

“I was almost there,” mutters Wick after a bit. “I only needed a little more nap.”

“Why do you even come to the beach if all you want to do is nap?” snaps Vi.

“A beach nap has twice the value of a couch nap,” intones Wick. This is one of his pet sayings. But he’s trying to be jocular, wanting to recover lost ground. He raises his finger like a merry wag offering a quatrain. “I feast on ocean roar / Old dreamer in the sand / Whose skull admits the sun / My subtle brain grows tan.”

“It’s like napping is your religion,” Vi dismissively says. “A religion for dogs.”

“The plenum bums say that once I’m fully attuned, they’ll bring me a magic egg,” says Wick

“What is this with plenum bums?” asks Vi. “Anyone but me would be worried about you, Wick.”

“Plenum bums is like ski bums,” says Wick. “It makes perfectly good sense.”

Vi doesn’t bother to answer. Too ridiculous. They trudge along in companionable silence. They’re used to each other.

Seabright Beach is nearly a hundred yards wide. Bi was hardly been able to believe their good fortune when she first saw it. Thirty years ago. Wick landed a job as a math prof at San Jose State. And after a few years, Vi became a research librarian at Stanford—with a fatter salary than Wick’s. They had good careers, and they retired last year. Wick is still writing papers about his absolutely infinite plenum. He thinks it’s everywhere. And now he’s even dreaming about it. Losing his shit.

Walking up the stairs, Vi admires the succulent, flowering ice plants on the slope. And halfway up she finds a stray wasp on the railing, preening herself, drawing her legs through her mandibles.  Vi admires wasps—their elegant functionality, their art-nouveau curves.  But she fears their stings.  She’s careful not to touch the wasp, and she warns absent-minded Wick.

At the top of the bluff, they stash their stuff in their car, parked on a lane that runs along the edge of the cliff, with a sidewalk and a railing on the ocean side. They sit on a bench by the car, enjoying the horizon, the wrinkled sea, the little sails.

“You see?” says Vi. “Perfect day.”

“The beach never disappoints,” agrees Wick. After a bit, his head droops and he slips back into his nap. Like a dog licking his balls, thinks Vi, exasperated with her husband. But she lets him doze.

Her mind drifts peacefully—but then comes a new problem. A man and woman parallel-park their white Mercedes in the space ahead of Wick and Vi’s car. The couple sits there with their windows open, looking at their phones, ignoring the view. They’ve left their engine running. Vi hates them. She elbows Wick.

He snorts, snaps awake, and peers at the Mercedes—on high alert.

“Hear the engine?” says Vi. “They’re EJs. Entitled jerks.” This  is a phrase Wick and Vi use. You need it a lot in California these days.

“I was talking to my seminar crowd again,” Wick tells Vi. He seems excited. “They confirm my work. We really do live in an absolutely continuous plenum. But we don’t notice.”

“Tell those two EJs to turn off their engine,” goes Vi.

“They’re from my dream math seminar,” says Wick. “They’re the plenum bums I was talking to. I hope they brought my egg.”

“I want that engine noise off,” repeats Vi, ignoring Wick. She doesn’t want him to talk crazy now.  “You’re not hearing me.”

“I hear,” he says. “But I’m shy about approaching those two.”

“Shy?” says Vi. “A brick shy of a full load! I’ll do it myself.”

Vi marches over to the Mercedes. The blonde woman passenger is turned slightly away from the window, looking down at her phone. The screen shows something like a super-intricate tribal tattoo.

The woman’s hair is in a bed-head do. Vi can see the curve of her cheek, but not the corner of her mouth, nor the tip of her nose. She must know that Vi is here, but she shows zero sign of noticing her. Entitled jerk that she is.

Vi walks to the other side of the car and glares at the driver. His strong, tan arm rests on the frame of the open window. Naturally he wears an expensive gold watch. Chunky and retro.

“Hey!” says Vi, maybe a little louder than she means to. The driver turns toward her.

Instead of a face, he has a smooth, undulating patch of skin that follows the contours of his skull. As if his face has been sanded away, and the eye/nose/mouth holes have been filled in, and a supple sheet of human leather has been laminated on.

Vi hears a throaty giggle from the EJ woman next to the guy. The woman has, Vi now realizes, a face like the man’s: a little Zen garden of blank mounds and blind hollows, framed by that extravagant blonde hairdo.

Vi’s stomach turns; she tastes acid in her throat. The mannequin-like EJs have their heads cocked at snotty, confrontational angles. And now the mouthless man speaks. He’s humming from his throat, or maybe he’s vibrating his skin.

“Take the magic egg, Vi.” The voice is a damp flutter. “It’s in the back.”

With a machined thunk, the trunk of the idling white Mercedes pops open.

The EJ woman is throat singing. Her grainy croon rises and falls. To accompany her, the EJ man emits a warped, screwed recitative—too fast to understand. Like a spell.

“Wick!” calls Vi.

Wick, finally in action, is out of their car. He makes his way to the rear of the Mercedes and reaches into the trunk.

“Score!” he calls to Vi, holding up a leathery little ball like a turtle egg.

Vi runs to their car and throws herself into the driver’s seat. Clumsy with panic, she presses the gas too hard, and she rear-ends the Mercedes hard. As if weightless, the vehicle skitters forward, hops the railing, coasts outward, and hangs in the air, thirty yards beyond the edge of the cliff. It’s not really a car.

The Mercedes-thing swathes itself in translucent shells of colored light. It makes a sound like neon bacon in an X-ray pan. The faceless man and woman stick their arms out the side windows. Their fingers grow and branch, silhouetted like twigs against the sky and sea. The finger-tips sputter black sparks. The vehicle expands like an insubstantial mirage, like a trick image from a concave lens.

As the phantom passes through Vi’s body, she feels a sense of—exhilaration. Like an ozone gasp of Alpine air.

“A taste of the raw plenum,” babbles Wick, who feels it too. “The primeval quintessence of space. Foof!”

The tingly sensation fades, along with any vestige of the ballooning alien craft. Vi is alone with Wick in their car. Time to get out of here. She sets the car into motion, and finds her way to Ocean Street—which injects them into Route 17, bound for their home in Los Perros.

“So what happened?” Vi now asks Wick.

“It’s because I finally understood the math seminar,” says Wick, quietly exultant.

“Give me an answer with no math.”

“I opened the door of my dream and those two plenum bums came through. With the fake Mercedes. Can you frikkin believe they brought us a magic egg?” Wick keeps shifting the little ball from one hand to the other, as if weighing it. “Not literally an egg. More like a capsule. With special stuff in it. I think they call it smeel. It’s like a heavy gas. And once it gets out—” Wick’s voice trails off.

“This is a horrible,” says Vi. “A nightmare.”

“A dream come true,” says Wick.

—

Despite his show of bravado, Wick is afraid. His leathery ball has an adhesive quality against his palms. Like a barnacle wanting to settle onto a rock. Like a leech that’s ready to dig in.

He isn’t precisely clear what the smeel is supposed to do. Maybe the anemone or the entitled jerks told him—but he can’t exactly remember. Something to do with the plenum.

Wick has written several papers about the notion that our physical space is a transfinite, absolutely continuous, plenum, akin to John Horton Conway’s class of surreal numbers. Few read Wick’s papers, and fewer respond. Such is the fate of the solitary genius.

But the somehow the two plenum bums have noticed Wick’s work. That’s why Wick is their contact. That’s why their using his dream as a door. That’s why they came through. Are they here to stay?

Wick feels an almost overwhelming need for another session of deep meditation—what Vi would call a nap. But he doesn’t want to annoy her more than he already has. Nor, as a matter of fact, does he want to take the risk that the leathery ball’s tissues might, like, grow all over the surface of his body and transform him into a paralyzed stash of living food.

And so, during the half hour drive to Los Perros, Wick fills the car with what he imagines is cheerful chatter about his philosophy of the infinite. It doesn’t go over.

“Put that sick egg on the charcoal grill and torch it,” says Vi as they pull into their driveway.

“No!” cries Wick. “How can you say that?”

Their house is on a slope, with a carport and a guest room beneath the main house and its deck. In the yard, beside the carport, a small chicken coop houses a cock and a hen. Bamboo covers the slope below.

“Wrap the egg in newspaper,” instructs Vi as she kills the engine. “Drench it in charcoal lighter. Ftoom! I mean it.”

“It’s valuable,” protests Wick, keeping the egg out of her reach. “It’s full of smeel.” His lips feel numb and his voice sounds odd in his ears. And his body feels highly tuned. Maybe smeel is seeping through the egg’s rubbery shell.

Moving fast, Wick gets to the chicken coop before Vi. He nestles the magical egg on a clump of dirty straw.

The cock and the hen don’t like it. They squawk, flap, and scratch compulsively at the ground.

“You’re hopeless,” says Vi, nearly in tears. She stumps up the front steps to their house’s main door. Slam.

Wick lets himself in through the downstairs door and flops down on the spare bed in the guest room. He falls instantly asleep. He’s back in the seminar room. Break time. The semi-familiar figures were chatting. All along he’s been thinking of them as human. But their shapes and moves aren’t right. All of them are aliens.

The massive, purplish-green anemone squats against a wall, feeding on a large smoked salmon. The faces at the tips of the anemone’s feelers nibble daintily at the pink flesh. Wick’s father’s face isn’t there anymore.

Maybe the food isn’t salmon. Maybe it’s Pop’s body. Dies in the vest. Wick and Pop didn’t part as friends—and Wick still feels bad about it. He peers at the cured salmon that might be Pop’s corpse. But, nah, filter that out, Wick, it’s dream work. Focus on the math.

“A treat to your taste?” says the faceless and deeply tanned EJ man from the Mercedes. He stands there with the EJ woman at his side. Him with his gold retro watch, her with the expensive tousled hairdo. Wick wonders what they really look like. Or if that question makes sense.

“The egg you gave us,” begins Wick. “You say it’s full of smeel. I can’t exactly remember what smeel does.”

“Always happens when we make deals with low rezzers like you,” says the plenum bum woman in a purring voice. He face vibrates as she talks. “You guys understand the plenum while you’re in the dark dream, fine. But when you snap out of it—you’re all coarse again. You’re jaggy, voxelated tessellations.”

“I do too know what the plenum is,” protests Wick.

“It’s time we introduce ourselves,” interrupts the smooth-faced man. “I’m Qoph and she’s Fonna.”

“I’m Wick.”

“I know that,” says Qoph. “The anemone showed me those papers you wrote. You put it well. The endlessly divisible plenum. Down past the fractions and the irrationals, down into the infinitesimals, down past the reciprocals of the transfinite alefs. And upwards the same. Enough smeel, and you’re at wheel.”

“What is it that you two want from me?” asks Wick.

“We want to settle into your and Vi’s niche,” said faceless Fonna the EJ. “Move into your level of space-time-scale. So have to clear out. It’s the plenum law of balance.” She tosses her tousled head.

“Even more of us might come later,” says Qoph. “The anemone is pushing Los Perros. Thanks to your papers, Wick.”

Wick feels very uneasy. “What, ah, what would we get in return?”

“For you and Vi, a little keg of smeel,” says Qoph. “Fuel for wandering the plenum on your own. Happy bums like us! You’ll carry the keg with you. It’s round, with a handle and a nozzle. About six inches across.”

“This is a dream, right?” says Wick. “This isn’t true.”

“We’ll be with your chickens in the coop when you wake up,” says Fonna. “Ready to close the deal. We’ll peck open your sample egg of smeel. So you understand how it feels. It’s a gas.” She does that giggle thing in her throat.

“A plenum gas perfusing your home,” adds Qoph. “You’ll be slippery, jiggly, free. But to really get rolling as a smeel bum—you’ll need that little keg.”

“Should they shrink or should they grow?” asks Fonna, sizing up Wick.

“Big is small,” observes Qoph with a shrug. “Small is big. The plenum has no standard unit size.”

“Main thing is that Wick and Vi are clearing out,” says Fonna. She glares at Wick—or surely she would be glaring, if she had a face and eyes.   “O. U. T. Out!” 

“Wait, wait, wait!” cries Wick. All the creatures in the so-called seminar room are laughing at him. Including the anemone, waving his stalks in merriment. They’ve conned him good. This isn’t a math department at all. It’s a travel agency.

Fonna the plenum bum flips into some totally fake flirtation. She puts her arms around Wick. “Don’t worry, dear Wick,” she buzzes from her throat. “It’s like Qoph said. Each scrap of the plenum mirrors the whole thing. As above, so below. I’m glad I’m here and now—meeting you.”  She moves closer, as if meaning to kiss him. But she doesn’t have lips. She’s a skin-covered skull with big hair.

Wick wakes with a strangled scream. Outside in the coop, the chickens are going wild. Crowing and cackling. An extra hen and rooster have appeared, and these two are going after the leathery egg. Pecking the hell out of it. It pops with a tiny sound, very clear, very precise. An echo of the universal Om.

The egg’s skin sags. A a heavy, amber gas oozes forth. It curls through the air like whiskey in water, an exquisite tangle of fanciful swirls. The zone spreads—taking no notice of the house’s walls—and engulfs Wick.

It’s near the end of the long summer day. The most gorgeous day Wick has ever seen. The four chickens are calm. He looks around the makeshift guest room. Perfect in every way, beautiful beyond imagining. He hears Vi moving around upstairs, perhaps making supper, perhaps not angry at him. Her sounds are intricate, delicate, refined. He’s in paradise.

Here comes a sharp knock on the guest room’s door into the yard. A man and a woman in business-casual summer attire, their voices a bit garbled. It’s Qoph and Fonna They have faces now—like standard-issue clean-cut ruthless entitled jerks who might be stock traders or high-end realtors. They’re the extra chickens from the coop. They’re the EJs from the Mercedes. They’re the plenum bums from Wick’s dream.

“We’re ready to move in,” says Qoph. “We attracted by your—vintage charm? That’s the anemone’s phrase.”  He hefts an amber plastic sphere with a hand-grip and a screw-capped snout. Like a weird watering can. About a half a foot across. “Smeel keg!” the man says. “Right? So you and Vi can be plenum bums too. We’re very good about resettling our hosts. Have to be. It’s the law of the plenum.”

“This house isn’t anything like what the anemone said,” gripes Fonna, frowning and looking around. “Shoddy. Grubby. The ceiling is low.”

“Why not try living here anyway?” says Qoph. “A starter. Get us into the scene. Maybe we’ll grow ourselves some human souls. I understand they’re fractal Baire sets of cardinality alef-three. Might be amusing”

Fonna is still scowling. “I’m telling you now, if we move in, we raze this dump and we rebuild.”

“Agreed,” Qoph equably says. “How about you, Wick? Ready to close? Go ahead, take the smeel keg now. With that in hand, you and Vi can rove the plenum.”

“We don’t really have to give them the keg,” Fonna says to Qoph. “We could just kill them. That’s what the low-down plenum bums do.”

“Not us!” Qoph heartily tells Fonna. “Don’t spook our man. I want to see him and his wife zooming the scale trail like a waterslide. Once we close our deal. But first we’ve got to sell him on it.  You’re not helping me, Fonna.”

Fonna switches gears and makes her voice bright. “There’s especially nice pickings when you hit one-divided-by-alef-two,” she trills. “Today’s tip! Go homesteading amid the wee!”

 “Look for planet Zoor down there,” adds Qoph. “But what am I saying! Your chances of finding it are subinfinitesimal. Here’s what you do—you take your smeel keg to the old anemone, pay him a squirt, and he’ll send you straight there. He knows the way.”

“What’s Zoor like?” asks Wick, curious despite himself.

“Mostly water, with lush islands. No cities. Maybe a little like your South Pacific used to be. There’s some local humans. Lovely people. Fonna and I lived there at one time. We were flying jellyfish.”

“Sounds fun,” says Wick, his voice flat. “But, um, Vi might not like all this.”

“Buk-buk,” squawks Fonna, as if annoyed by Wick’s hesitation. She doesn’t have her human behavior fully together. She clucks and scratches at the guest room floor with her foot. As if hoping to turn up some worms. Worms like Wick and Vi. Wick wishes this wasn’t real.

Meanwhile, Qoph’s face begins to flow. He’s remodeling himself to look like Wick. And Fonna—she changes into Vi.

“Does this work for you?” Fonna asks Wick. “As a mating trigger? Do you want to make love?”

Wick emits a sob of terror. He was a fool to have gotten him and Vi into this. He swears he’ll never, ever dream about the anemone again.

“What’s happening?” calls the real Vi from upstairs.

“You wait here,” Wick tells the plenum bums. “I’ll talk to my wife. We’ll see what we can work out.”

He runs upstairs. The unwanted guests stay downstairs, waiting, mildly amused.

—

Giddy from the smeel, Vi is taking Wick’s ideas to heart. She likes them. Space is a glittering plenum that runs up and down the size scales, with stars twinkling within and without our bodies, like phosphorescence in the sea, like spangles on an enveloping scarf. Yes.

Wick stumbles up the basement stairs, carrying a yellowish six-inch ball of something. He trips on the top step, and falls flat on his face, still clutching his ball.

“What if I sink right through the floor?” says Wick, lying there. “It would only take a little more smeel.”

“Stand up, Wick. It’s scary when old people fall.”

 Laboriously he gets to his feet. “Those entitled jerks want to take over our lives. We’re supposed to trade our slots for this mini keg of smeel.”

“The EJ’s are downstairs?” says Vi.

“Yeah,” says Wick. “They’re shape-shifters. At first they didn’t have faces. Then they were extra chickens in our coop. And now they’re people who look like you and me. Plenum bums. Their names are Qoph and Fonna.”

“They want to live our lives?” says Vi. Even now, she’s not fully taking this seriously. “It’d be a laugh to see them try and do Christmas with our kids. No mean feat.”

“And to make room for the EJs, you and I are supposed to move down to planet Zoor at size level one-over-alef-two,” says Wick. “I don’t want to.  I’m scared.”

Vi looks out the window, thinking things over. And she gets an idea.

“Look,” she says. “If the entitled jerks can look like us, and they can look like chickens, then probably they can look like anything at all. Why should they have to replace us in particular. To hell with them. I’m not running off to bum around a zoo divided by fafa-two—or whatever they said.”

“You go tell them that,” begs Wick. “I’m scared of them.”

“Vi will fix it,” says Vi. “Mathematicians shouldn’t try to negotiate.”

“I’d be lost without you,” says Wick. They go downstairs.

“You look like crap,” says Vi, starting right in on the fake Wick and the fake Vi. “Like plastic Halloween masks. Uncanny Valley. Nobody’s gonna go for it. People will snub you. Being like Wick and me is harder than you think. We’re very deep and cool. You should imitate something easier. More your speed.”

“What if we came here as chickens?” says Qoph, taken aback.

“Are you crazy?” says Fonna. “The chicken coop is even worse than this cruddy house.”

“So rude,” says Vi. “You’d never make it in Los Perros, Fonna. But listen to this option.” Vi holds up both hands, leans forward for emphasis, and stares into Fonna’s bogus face.

 “Wasps!” Vi intones. “The most gorgeous creatures on our globe. Shiny and lethal. Like flying motorcycles. Amazing colony scene. We have three underground burrows in our patch of bamboo. Wasps’ bodies are striped, and their wings are iridescent. Ultra-chic.”

“Show them to me,” says Fonna.

“I’ll lure some to our deck,” says Wick. “Come on upstairs.”

Wick brings a chunk of smoked salmon from the fridge and sets it on a saucer on the railing.

 It’s dusk, the time of day when the wasps fly back to their nests in the bamboo. They notice the salmon smell right away, and five or six of them land on the pink flesh. The wasps are dainty, with elegantly bulged abdomens, cool compound eyes, intricate legs, expressive antennae.

“I love them!” exclaims Fonna.

“You can replace the queen of a wasp colony in our bamboo,” says Vi. “The queen’s a little larger than the others.”

“What about me?” says Qoph.

“You can be a sexless drone,” says Fonna, needling him. “Or a male who dies after inseminating his queen.”

“No, no, Qoph can be the queen of his own colony,” says Wick. “Give the man a break. I told you there’s three colonies in the bamboo.”

“Yes,” says Qoph. “Fonna and I can have wars with each other. Instead of just arguing.”

“Sting, sting, sting!” goes Fonna, loving it. “We’ll invade that third colony and take slaves. Summary executions!”

“Sweet,” says Qoph. His eyes play across the house’s rickety, unpainted deck. “I hope you’re not disappointed, Wick and Vi. I know it would be signal honor to have plenum bums replace you. But your house, it’s—”

“Beneath us,” says Fonna, flipping into entitled jerk mode.

“Boo effin hoo,” says Vi. “How did you two ever get so snotty?”

“Well, after we were whales on Zoor, we were really, really big cosmic strings,” says Qoph. “They’re alive, like giant worms.”

“Giant?” brags Fonna. “I was alef-one miles long! But that’s enough about me. Gotta go!  Farewell, low peasants.”

The odd beings’ bodies flex and flow; they shrink and warp. And now they’re wasp queens. Vi has a fleeting urge to swat them, but surely that would end in tears.

The two queens rise with the other wasps, angling through the dying rays of sun, threading through the bamboo shoots to their new homes—in neighboring comb-filled burrows in the dirt. They’ll kill the resident queens, and begin their own reigns.

“I can still feel that smeel,” says Vi. “A little bit.”

“Everything is everything,” says Wick. “Right?”

“You and me,” says Vi. “In our substandard home.”

“And look,” says Wick. “They left that little keg of smeel.”

“Maybe we use it when we’re we’re about to die,” says Vi.

“But that’s not yet,” says Wick.

They go inside and make love.