by Rudy Rucker
“Just in case the old man does care some tiny iota about his younger son’s whereabouts,” says Villy. “Even though the rat-ass younger son can’t be bothered to say goodbye.”
“We might not even be gone all that long,” says Scud, feeling ashamed for avoiding Pop. But mostly he’s glad to be setting forth on an incredible journey.
6: Unny Tunnel
ZOE
Zoe had expected to find baking chocolate in the kitchen, but Mom hasn’t been cooking much this year. There is, however, a big can of cocoa, nearly full. Yampa is utterly thrilled with the chocolate powder. She makes a clicking sound to take one of her mental pictures, then pries the lid off the can and sits on Zoe’s bed, dabbing up taste after taste with her thin, flexible fingers.
“Such a savor!” says the alien, trembling with pleasure. “So happily healthy. So smooth I feel—how sleek.”
“Glad you’re happy,” says Zoe noncommittally. She’s packing for the trip. Beads, threads, and wires. Jeans, pajamas, shoes, tops, sweaters. Her trumpet.
She’s still planning to do her number with the Jazz Prowlers at the talent show tonight—before they head off into the neverland of mappyworld. Or maybe just to Mexico and the Midwest. As long as it’s with Villy.
No way does Zoe want to look like a prissy groover in the pitiful white blouse and navy blue skirt that Mom laid out for the show. Instead she selects an outfit from her special Eff You mound, thank you very much. A thrift-store black cowboy shirt and orange toothpick jeans.
Just for kicks she gets Yampa to put on the clothes that Mom set out. And she hands Yampa one of her bead necklace creations—aquamarine glass spindles alternating with fake silver balls on stretch cord.
Yampa preens in front of Zoe’s mirror, very pleased with her white blouse, blue skirt, and necklace. She shoots a holographic mental 3D selfie of herself—or whatever it is that she does when she makes that clicking sound.
Zoe supposes that Pinchley thinks Yampa is hot. Even though the alien woman is like a child’s drawing of a person, so thin and crooked with her head way larger than it should be. Her lower jaw wags when she talks. But of course Pinchley looks that way too. Zoe hopes Yampa isn’t reading her mind.
“Your clothes hang high on me,” Yampa is cheerfully saying. “Glamour garb. May I haul them home?”
“Sure.”
“Be sure to pack your saucer pearl,” says Yampa.
“In my pocket,” says Zoe. “And I have my trumpet right here.”
“Perf,” goes Yampa.
Where does this alien get her vocab and her style of speech? Before Zoe can ask, she hears Villy’s car outside—oh god, he’s driving right onto the lawn, with his headlights raking across the house. She laughs to herself. Villy doesn’t care what people think. That’s yet another thing she likes about him.
It’s just about dark now. The purple whale’s body is fifteen feet in the air, somehow mounted above four insanely large tires. Like jet airline tires. So dumb—you have to use ropes to help you scramble in. As a final touch, Villy has two surfboards on the roof rack. Sweet. His favorite red one, and he’s brought his blue one for Zoe.
The whale’s horn is as comically weak as ever. Toot toot. Yampa hops out of Zoe’s bedroom window onto the lawn, still wearing Zoe’s outfit. The effect is jarringly strange. The clothes don’t fit Yampa at all—after all, her body isn’t much thicker than a human leg. The blouse hangs off one shoulder. Yampa wears the top of the skirt rolled, to keep it in place, but she keeps having to hitch it up anyway. She’s got the tin of cocoa in her hand.
At the last minute, Zoe decides not to bring her phone. Probably won’t work where they’re going. And she wants to make a full break anyway. She locks up the empty house and runs out the front door to the funny car, carrying her backpack and her trumpet. She grabs hold of a rope and—boing—it pulls her right in. Yampa and Pinchley get into the back seat, and Zoe is alone with Villy in front, with her pack and her trumpet by her feet. Villy is smiling, very stoked, utterly gorgeous with his dark tan and his long, streaked hair. He gives Zoe a high five. But—hold on. Scud is in the back seat between the aliens.
“What is he doing here?” asks Zoe, her voice very tight and clipped. She can’t stand Scud. The kid is hormonally imbalanced. Like, he’ll see Villy and Zoe together and he’ll totally lose it and shriek some rude word like “boner!” or “booty!” in his horrible cracking voice. The most immature tenth-grader ever. He’s also known to be something of a perv with his drone camera—he’s been seen shooting pictures of the cheerleaders doing warm-up stretches and then drooling over the video at lunchtime with his pubescent tenth-grade friends, not that Scud has any friends, but he can gather a knot of fellow losers with a ripe shot of, like, Tawna Garvey leaning way, way over for a leg stretch, with her butt like a grotesque Halloween prize pumpkin against the sky.
Pinchley has filled the car with a stony alien smell—which may be why Zoe’s mental images are so vivid. Like when she rides with people smoking pot. Rides with surfers.
Zoe plays it cool. “Turn down the mind warp, Pinchley. And Villy, are you dropping off Scud somewhere? Or what?”
“I’m coming on the trip,” says Scud. Usually he’s totally unaware of other people’s feelings, but maybe he can feel the blast furnace intensity of Zoe’s loathing. The boy looks tentative. Like a feral mongrel longing for a kindly touch. “Villy and Pinchley said it’s okay.”
“I’m getting out,” says Zoe, hardening her heart. “I’ll walk to the talent show.” She reaches for the door handle, but the monster whale has already lumbered away from her house and is rolling down Los Perros Boulevard with traffic whizzing by. Boy, are they far off the ground. And the monster car’s engine seems to make no noise at all. All you hear is a gentle squeaking from, like, the Martian suspension and the Venusian tires, or whatever they are.
“Don’t bail on me,” says Villy to Zoe. He glances over at her, looking out from under his dark eyebrows all tender. He pats her hand.
“But—this was supposed to be about—the two of us,” blurts Zoe, with a silly catch in her voice. “I mean, no, I’m not saying we’re totally a couple, but I thought the trip would be for having fun, talking, being relaxed—and now we’ve got two aliens and your little—”
Scud makes some kind of noise right then. A suppressed giggle. Is he about to yell, like, “sexual congress”?
“I’ll kill you!” Zoe screams, twisting around so that she’s kneeling on the seat and glaring at the sixteen-year-old—who looks frightened and surprised.
“I’ve got a gun in my backpack,” rants Zoe, totally lying. “One rude word and I blow your brains out, Scud, and I’ll get away with it, too. These aliens are cannibals. They’ll eat every scrap of your corpse.”
“And gobble his fossils for dessert,” whoops Villy. “Teach the boy some manners!” And now Villy and Zoe are laughing and it’s starting to be the great crazy road trip it’s supposed to be.
Only now Scud has to ruin things by starting to snivel. Totally caving. “I’m sorry I’m here,” he wails. “I’m sorry I’m alive. I just wanted to have—to have an adventure.” Gangly and rangy as he is, nearly as tall as Villy, it’s odd to see him cry. You don’t quite realize what a child Scud is until you talk to him.
“Me, I like Scud,” puts in Pinchley. “He’s good for the mix, Villy. Zoe is a little dark. Like she’s carrying the weight of the world. Scud’s a screwball. A wingnut.”
“Don’t go putting Scud down,” says Villy. He gets edgy when people say things about his brother. But then he takes a dig at Scud himself, addressing him directly. “Can’t you ever tell when someone’s joking?”
“I’m sorry, Scud,” adds Zoe, not that she really means it. “We can be friends.” This is what she has to say. Life is an endless series of cages.
“Warning,” says Yampa just then. “A flying saucer. A male. His vile vibration is scraping my skin.”
“Pinchley was talking about saucers to
o,” chirps Scud, all perky and interested again. “Zoe’s father should be here with his New Eden friends.” His tears have disappeared. Zoe wouldn’t put it past him to have been faking.
“The saucer grubbed through Zoe’s pearly gate,” says Yampa. “Lousy leech from mappyworld. He’s formed like a fried egg. We’ll promptly pop him.”
“I’ll be the lookout!” cries Scud, crawling into the luggage-jumbled rear section of the purple whale.
“Are we still going to your talent show?” Villy asks Zoe. “The turnoff is pretty soon.”
“Yeah, we’re going,” exclaims Zoe, meaning I-can’t-believe-you’re-asking-me-that. “That show is the one single bright spot of my entire senior year. Pre-college dropout that I am.”
“Fine, fine,” goes Villy. “No problem.”
“Also we should talk some more about our trip,” says Zoe. “Is it really and truly a good idea to volunteer for alien abduction?”
“A rollicking romp,” says Yampa.
“Not a butt-probe,” adds Pinchley. “We’re stoked to have three new ballyworld human friends. We might help you save Earth from a giant saucer invasion. And you’ll do mappyworld some good too.”
“Tell me more about saving Earth,” goes Zoe. She’d dearly love to do something big. Without having to plan it and all. Just to have the big thing happen, with her in the center of it.
“You three will win a wiggly wand from Szep City,” says Yampa, fiddling with her blouse.
“Aristo wand,” adds Pinchley. “You’ll have to show the wand some class.”
“Are you sure it’ll work?” asks Scud.
Pinchley and Yampa look at each other. Yampa shrugs and says, “It’s your optimum option.”
“These three are the chosen ones, right, Yampa?” goes Pinchley. “These kids are hero material.”
“Whack-a-doodle wham,” says Yampa, who keeps eating dabs of the brown cocoa powder, giving tastes to Pinchley as well.
“You’re making no sense,” says Zoe sternly. “You’re slushed and delusional.”
“Words fail us,” says Pinchley. “Furds wail us.”
“Will there be surf?” puts in Villy. “On the million mile road trip?”
“Yah, mon,” goes Pinchley. “Living waves mile high.”
“Corkscrew caves and zonked ziggurats,” adds Yampa.
“I’m down with it,” says Villy. “Are you good, Zoe?” He gives her a nice private smile.
“Maybe,” she says, wanting to be wooed. At least Scud isn’t butting in and yelling. He’s busy staring out the whale’s rear window. “Just don’t forget that my talent show comes before the trip, Villy. If you don’t want to see it, you can wait in the parking lot. Chew tobacco with the other monster-truck boys.”
“Oh, of course I want to hear you play, Zoe. You’re the—”
“Here he comes!” shouts Scud. The rubbery flying-egg saucer thumps onto the whale’s hood. He’s four feet across by now, a rich yellow dome set onto a twitching white disk. The headlights of the oncoming traffic glisten on the swollen saucer’s bulge. Whoa. His eye is a glaring red orb, greedy and mean.
“I foretold he’d be fat,” says Yampa. “Swollen with smeel. Wind shut the windows!”
“What’s smeel?” asks Villy.
“Raw mind stuff, supposedly,” says Zoe. “I’d call it hippie jive.”
“No call for that,” says Pinchley. “Consciousness ain’t imaginary. It’s real. It’s smeel. Mind is a physical thing like atoms or electricity, even if your crude techs don’t know that. Saucers eat smeel. Folks like us grow our own smeel, but certain lazy-ass vampire saucers leech it from people’s bodies and brains. Battle alert!”
The saucer slides from the hood onto the windshield, possibly meaning to edge over to Villy’s window, which is still wide open. This is the window that sticks, even with the whale’s new upgrades.
Through the windshield Zoe can see the saucer’s underside, which holds a nasty little mouth with a ring of raspy teeth. It’s like the mouth of a lamprey or a sea skate. Horrid.
Villy’s having trouble seeing the road, so he scoots over towards Zoe. At the same time, he’s slowing down, even though the driver to their rear is tailgating them and honking his horn like a crazy person.
Pinchley crawls up into the front seat, reaches out Villy’s window, and flails at the saucer, wanting to pop it. He’s bunched his fingers into a sharp hook—but the hook is bouncing off the saucer’s skin. Meanwhile the saucer’s leaning his dome over to one side so that his glaring red eye can see into the car.
Here comes the spot where the road bends to the right, just before the high school. Zoe can tell that the visibility-impaired Villy isn’t turning the steering wheel far enough, and then—oh shit—they’ve veered into the oncoming traffic. A big-ass white SUV heads towards them with its brights flicking, and the uptight Los Perros woman at the wheel isn’t slowing down one bit, no, no, she has the right of way, she’s entitled. They’re bound to collide. Zoe’s so stressed that at first she doesn’t recognize the woman, but of course it’s—
“Toot your trumpet!” yells Yampa. Zoe has a visual flash of Yampa’s words bright red with halos of jagged yellow lines. “Honk the horn! Take us in the tunnel!”
The trumpet is by Zoe’s feet. She snatches it up and plays that vibrant Maisie riff with the special stutter-start flutter. Can her saucer pearl possibly become an unny tunnel so big that the whole car can drive through? Even as Zoe thinks this, the pearl in her pocket is swelling and warming, as if it knows what it’s supposed to do. Things are happening very, very fast. Zoe plays harder. The responsive pearl wriggles its way out of her pants and hangs in the air.
Zoe plays with all her strength. The pearl swells to the size of a basketball and stops for an instant. Not enough. Her notes a rapid blur, Zoe gestures with the bell of her trumpet. The pearl zooms out of Villy’s side window, gets out in front of car—and turns transparent. It’s the gate of an unny tunnel. As the car approaches the gate, the transparent sphere of the pearl seems to expand—or maybe the car is shrinking? Either way, the tunnel’s gate is the size of a garage door. The unflappable Villy tools right in, veering into the fourth dimension. All of this takes less than a second.
Inside the unny tunnel, their old ballyworld Earth dwindles to a distorted image. The unny tunnel is in some sense perpendicular to the workadaddy world. Zoe can see it through the transparent gate, which now lies behind them. Presumably their mappyworld goal is somewhere ahead. Zoe’s still playing her horn. The whole amplified whale and its five passengers—Zoe, Villy, Yampa, Pinchley, and Scud—Zoe’s transporting all of them with the lumpy, bumpy bebop of her trumpet’s sound.
And—so refined is Zoe’s touch—she’s able to exclude that disgusting fat leech of a saucer that was on their windshield. The parasitic saucer isn’t piggybacking onto them through the tunnel, nope, he’s flying along on his preordained trajectory to—
Splat!
Yeah. Peering back at the warped image of her home world, Zoe sees the engorged saucer hurtle into the grill of the white SUV and burst in a spray of—what? It’s like water, or mucus, or lymph—clear and glistening, deeply organic, evaporating into wriggly mist. Smeel. Raw consciousness, dissipating in the Los Perros night air.
For the fortunate occupants of the purple whale there’s no crash, no collision, no contact with the white SUV. They’ve made a sharp turn into unspace. They’re on their way to an alternate universe. Mappyworld. Riding the burble of Zoe’s horn. Stutter-stop, stutter-stop, jump-cut, jump-cut.
“You can quash the crooning now,” Yampa tells Zoe. “We’re on our way. The tunnel won’t turn tiny.”
So Zoe sets down her horn and catches her breath. Way up ahead are some lights. To their rear is a last tiny gleam of Los Perros. As for what’s around them, here in the middle of the tunnel, well, it’s most peculiar.
Like, Zoe is looking out her window—and she sees a purple station wagon that’s keeping pace with them, a
nd the driver is Villy, precisely and to a T. When she whips around to see if Villy’s still driving her car—yes, he is. But when she looks past Villy and out through his window, she sees another image of the purple whale, and in the front seat there’s a dark-haired girl who’s looking away. And she definitely resembles Zoe. Zoe waves her arm, and that girl waves her arm in sync. Zoe turns her head and looks over at the purple whale on their right, and looks past the Villy to the wheel to see that same girl in the front seat with him—same hair, same clothes—but this other girl has her face turned away too. She’s looking out her side window. It’s like Villy’s car is inside a rolled-up mirror.
“I see an idol ahead!” interrupts Scud.
“Goob-goob,” says Pinchley quietly.
Zoe still sees those faint lights in the distance, but closer than that is an archaic figure, staring at them. She resembles a carving from a Mayan ziggurat, a primitive goddess with scrolled hair and curly fingers, a weathered, centuries-old glyph, but she’s intensely alive, with an aura of supernal power. The august personage unfurls one of her hands and makes a gesture, pointing onward. Towards mappyworld.
“This way to the party, amigos!” goes cloddy Scud. “Cerveza fria means cold beer!”
“I hope Goob-goob lets us come back home when we’re done,” murmurs Villy. His face is serious, his mouth straight, and his tangled blond hair frames his eyes. He’s gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles are white.
Gradually the mirror images of the purple whale fade away. The road warps back to normal. The ghostly Mayan goddess is gone. They’re cruising into a town. A shape like a shiny basketball tags along after them. It’s Zoe’s saucer pearl, still transparent. She calls to it with a bleat of her trumpet.
The pearl flies in through the car window and perches on Zoe’s lap. She plays a diminuendo passage on her horn. Slowly, smoothly, the pearl shrinks down to the size it was before. Zoe ends the process by playing Maisie’s riff backwards—and the saucer pearl is transparent no more. Gates closed. Zoe shoves the pearl into her pocket. It’s their path home.