by Rudy Rucker
“You don’t look tough to me,” the obnox Scud tells Meatball. “You’re a lumpy yellow balloon. Full of hot air.”
As if wanting to demonstrate her shapeshifting skill, Meatball molds herself into a very convincing dragon-head. She snarls so hard at Scud that he takes an abrupt step backward, trips over his own feet, and falls on his ass.
“Scud,” says Villy. “Do you have to be so—” He looks up at the Freeth. “Don’t be mad at my brother, Meatball.”
“A spirited lad,” says Meatball, turning all yellow and round, and smiling like a waiter.
“I want a gun so I can shoot Irav,” says Scud, bouncing back to his feet. “Making scary faces isn’t always gonna be enough, Meatball the blob.”
“Front me a caraway seed, and I’ll fetch you an atomizer right enough,” Meatball tells him. “An atomizer will make you a mighty man, eh?”
“How do you know I have caraway seeds?” asks Scud.
“Heard your Szep pals gabbing. Me lurking about, don’t you know. All ears.”
“Let’s back up a minute,” interrupts Zoe. “You’re offering Scud an atomizer? That’s for spraying perfume.”
“Do I mean vaporizer?” says Meatball, a little flustered. “Dematerializer? Death ray! I’m not fully on board with your patois.” Meatball has drifted so close to Scud that she’s touching him. “Give me that caraway seed now,” she purrs. “And then I’ll put the quietus on the foul Irav. You’ll be pleased as punch with me in your service. Contrariwise, I’m not one to be crossed.”
Zoe picks up an undertone of threat in Meatball’s last sentence. She glances at Villy, knowing he can be protective of his younger brother. And now, sure enough, with no warning at all, Villy grabs hold of Meatball, digging his hands into her flesh.
“Oh, the big bad Freeth tingles!” he says, seeming to think he has the Freeth at his mercy. “She vibrates against my hands. Scary, scary.”
“You’d do well to unhand me,” says Meatball, her tone brittle and cold.
“What’s your real game?” Villy demands, squeezing the Freeth so tightly that she takes on an hourglass shape. “Are you Irav’s partner? He threatens us, and you offer to help? It’s a protection racket, right? You think can push us around?”
The Freeth’s expression grows dark and strange. Little sparks race along the wrinkles in her skin. She forms one of her bulges into a sharp cone and—
“Look out!” calls Zoe—too late. Meatball extends the cone, and her body clenches in a spasm. A flash of light, a furious buzz, a tingle of ozone.
Villy manages the start of a scream—then drops heavily to the ground, silent, his muscles slack. He lies utterly still, blank eyes clouded, limbs askew.
“You see?” growls Meatball, rising higher in the air. Her flat eyes are unreadable. “You see what a Freeth can do?” She turns her attention to Scud. “Now, little lad, are you giving me that seed?”
Clumsy with fear, Scud takes off running down an aisle between the booths, knocking stuff over. Quickly he rounds a corner and disappears from view.
Zoe is numb with shock, all alone here with the lifeless Villy at her feet. He’s dead? And frikkin Scud is gone. She needs to bail. She sets her saucer pearl on the ground before her and raises her trumpet to her lips. She’s moving very quickly, but she’s so wired that from her point of view it feels like she’s slow.
The first note seems to drool out, with its sound vibrations like yawning gaps. Zoe pushes to play faster. It’s like she’s running in sand. Gradually her second note issues forth. Now comes the third. And to the locals listening, Zoe’s riff is coming out as a frenzied squawk.
Whatevski. The saucer pearl’s gate swells to the size of a plum, ready for action, hovering at waist level. And it’s turned transparent—meaning the gate is open. Zoe walks towards it, blatting her horn. The closer she gets, the bigger the gate seems.
9: Saucer Hall
SCUD
Scud hurries past the garish booths, randomly making turns, keeping his mind blank, not letting himself think about Villy. He finds himself in a more exotic part of the night market. The calla lights are red and orange here, the fungal booths are aglow. An alluring girl cavorts beside a hut-sized puffball with an arched door and lavender light within. She moves in the slow figures of a snake dance, her outstretched arms like anacondas. She wears flat live creatures as clothes—they creep across her skin like slugs or live tattoos. Her makeup is phosphorescent; her tongue is patterned with polka dots. And on her brow she wears a pink Flatsie teep slug.
Scud is thunderstruck. He can’t stop looking at her and wondering what she’s like. Underneath all the makeup, she might not be much older than him. Like maybe seventeen. Weird, though, that she’s working as a dancer at the night market. He’s staring so hard at her that she comes to a full stop.
“Hello?” she says. “I’m a person. You got a name?”
“I’m Scud. I’m—I’m from Earth in ballyworld? We came here through unspace.”
“Very fresh. Meno teeped me a message about you. There’s this thing about the parasite saucers, see. A cosmic beatdown coming soon. If you ballyworld humans can work with us it’ll be so—” The girl breaks off and laughs. “Info overload! I’m Eekra. Come into my floopsy den. I like your spiky hair.” She lets out a throaty, musical laugh and makes a sweeping gesture, as if to usher Scud into her hut.
“I—I wish I could say yes,” says Scud. His heart is going a mile a minute and his throat is parched. “But right now, I mean we just got here, and I’m—”
“Paranoid? Afraid of girls? A virgin? Come on, Scud. I might be the most important person you meet tonight. Nothing happens by accident in the cosmic script.”
“Can—can I kiss you?” The words leap unbidden from Scud’s lips.
“I don’t think so,” says Eekra, striking a pose, one hand on her hip. “Not out here.”
Scud backs away, his face frozen in a stiff, embarrassed smile. “Sorry. I gotta go, Eekra.”
“Maybe another time.”
Hardly seeing where he’s going and hating himself for being so shy, Scud stumbles further into the market. The next thing that catches his attention is a booth that sells cactus plants. Two teenage mappyworld boys are mashing lobes of the cactuses in a bowl and rubbing the cactus slime on each other’s bare chests. The air tingles with the scent of the pulp—like ink and incense. The skinny woman running this booth warbles mazy Egyptian tunes on a crooked little horn.
As Scud turns away, still thinking about Eekra, a gingerbread man plucks at his sleeve. The little Flatsie wants to sell him one of those teep slugs; he’s holding it in his hand. The slug is lemon yellow with a red stripe around its edge, and a bunch of green feelers on its back. The Flatsie has a teep slug of his own on the middle of his chest, a purple one.
“I seek a boon, young sir,” says the gingerbread man. He bows. “And in return, I, the humble Filkar, offer this intrepid slug in return. I am honored to address a ballyworld trader of your ilk.” Scud waves him off, but the Flatsie is not going to give up that easily. A group of the yellow slug’s brethren lounge in a bowl of water at the booth nearby. The booth is run by a Flatsie woman, Filkar’s partner. The two of them begin chorusing that Scud should strike a deal for the excellent yellow slug with the red stripe around its edge.
Egged on by the Flatsies, the yellow teep slug flutters out of Filkar’s hand and undulates through the air towards Scud’s face. It keeps itself airborne with cunning twitches of its edges, banking and gliding against all-but-imperceptible currents of the air. It’s no bigger than a small leaf, and it carries a scent of the sea.
All of a sudden the slug lands on Scud’s cheek and stings him. Hard. As if taking a sample of his flesh. And then it goes back to fluttering around Scud’s head, making a high, thin sound, like an ultrasonic song. Scud can feel a bump on his face, as if he’s been bitten by a spider. At this point he snaps—he swats the nimble slug to the ground and stomps it, or tries to, but it’s to
o fast and slimy. It rises above him once again and continues its aethereal piping. The gingerbread woman is railing at Scud, but she isn’t going to do anything more. Scud has the scary aura of someone who’s running amok. He’s ashamed to be acting this way near Eekra’s hut.
Looking for a way out, he pushes his way between the cactus merchant and the Flatsies’ booth—and finds himself in a field bordering the market. The sky remains completely, totally, utterly black—but even so, it’s not fully dark in the field because the grass gives off a bit of a glow. Also, there’s some light from the marketplace, and from the buildings lying beyond the meadow.
A few mappyworld locals are meandering around—chatting, doing deals, possibly connecting for sex. High in the air, two Freeth drift past. They don’t seem interested in Scud, not that it’s easy to read a Freeth’s intent.
Scud’s on his own in the soft night. The scene has a medieval feel. He likes it. Everything is alive, nothing’s a machine, and the air is threaded with unfamiliar scents. He wouldn’t mind staying here for quite a while—if he could. But mappyworld seems to be a dangerous place.
By way of confirming that, here comes a buzzing mini saucer the size of a bug. It lands on Scud’s forearm, and with no preliminaries at all it bites him, just like the teep slug had done. Damn! Scud manages to swat the thing hard enough to pop its nasty little body.
Meanwhile, what about the overwhelming issue that Scud’s been blocking out? Meatball may have murdered his brother. Villy may be lying dead on the ground right now. Scud was a rat to run off. Rats are the ones who survive. They squeal and scurry for the nearest hole. It makes sense to be a rat. But—oh, poor Villy.
Scud finds a dim spot beside a tree, where he leans against the trunk and easefully pees. His body still works. Even though he ate those alien germs and all that fruit—and got bitten by that flying yellow teep slug and by the mini saucer. Maybe he’ll live through this. And maybe Villy’s okay—maybe Villy’s sitting up and rubbing his face and cursing, the way he always does in the morning. What tales Scud and Villy can tell when they get home.
Assuming they do get home. Assuming Zoe hasn’t totally bailed on them. Right when Scud ran off, it looked like she was about to raise her trumpet. Scud was in too much of a squealing-rat panic to wait and see.
Maybe he’ll go back and look for Zoe and Villy. In a minute. Give the crisis some time to play itself out. Wait for Yampa and Pinchley to get back into the mix too. If everyone’s still here and alive, and they’re still going on the road trip—well, then they’ll wait for Scud, right? So what’s the rush?
Looking out past the tree he’s leaning on, Scud sees a decent-size flying saucer cruise by. This one is gold with a pale purple rim. It’s fleshy and alert, like a round stingray, six or seven feet in diameter. There goes another and another, each of them a different color. Like tropical birds heading for their roost. Each of them seems to have a red eye or a black eye—not something often mentioned by human saucer fanciers. And their bodies’ diversity of form is also something that’s not well known.
Yes, many have the classic sombrero shape, but he also sees one like a lime-green pyramid, and one like a flying snake, and yet another is shaped like a short flight of stairs. “Saucer” is a catch-all category, it seems, with varying contents. Scud is excited and pleased to be observing all this.
The saucers’ roost is a big old building across the field from the market. An impressive, even pompous, structure—like the US Supreme Court building, or the Parthenon, with fluted columns and a triangular pediment on top. The triangle is ornamented with glyphs that glow in gentle pastels—yellow, peach, pale red. At first Scud thinks the symbols might be Arabic script or Korean ideograms or Egyptian hieroglyphs—but, naw, they’re even stranger than that.
So large is the building that its looming pair of bronze doors are a hundred and twenty feet tall. They gape wide open, spilling a soft blue glow that highlights the surfaces of the saucers gliding in and out of the hall. Scud hears a low, rhythmic sound from within. Music.
Surely this is the Saucer Hall that Meatball mentioned. With saucerian inscriptions on the pediment. So awesome. Scud longs to go inside—even if a goodly proportion of the saucers are vampiric, soul-sucking leeches. Scud is such a geek that he finds Saucer Hall less intimidating than Eekra’s hut in the marketplace. His main question about Saucer Hall is simple: How is he going to sneak in?
Keying right into Scud’s thoughts, the gingerbread man from the marketplace draws near. Filkar. He’s wearing his purple teep slug on his chest, and he’s still carrying that yellow one with the red stripe and the green tuft of antennae. Rather than walking erect, the Flatsie slides across the ground, his soft body undulating across the meadow’s lumps.
“The boon I beg is but one caraway seed,” chirps Filkar. The Flatsie comes to a halt upon the damp spot at Scud’s feet. “In return I’ll plant this teep slug upon you. Having tasted you, the slug is in readiness. You’ll peer into others’ minds, yes. And you’ll learn to craft a cloud of unknowing. No saucer will ken your presence.”
Another shoal of colorful, multiform saucers glides by overhead. Scud has to see their lair. Filkar’s teep slug is kind of sick, but it’s sick in a good way. Like skateboard art. But—
“What about my brother?” Scud has to ask. “Shouldn’t I go back to help him?”
“Via my teep slug, I wit your brother was laid low by a Freeth.” says Filkar. “And you took a coward’s way out. Here’s solace: oft a Freeth seeks only to stun, and not to slay. Let us therefore suppose that Villy is hale. How do you regain face? Return bearing the benison of a teep slug.”
Scud goes for it. The slug is an add-on. A power-up. He extracts the dusty spice jar from his jeans and drops a caraway seed onto flat Filkar. The gingerbread man bucks and shudders, absorbing the seed’s fragrant biochemical essence and, very clearly, feeling the better for it.
“Thankee, Lord Scud.” Beaming with good will, the Flatsie peels himself up from the ground. “And your fine new sensor shall be implanted—where?”
“Uh, here?” says Scud, tapping his left wrist. “Like a watch. And does it have to be so big?”
“Teep slugs seek ever to please their hosts,” says Filkar. “Think only of what you want.” Filkar utters a command in a burbly, low-pitched tongue. In harmony with Scud’s wishes, the teep slug reshapes itself into an elegant hemisphere, little more than an inch across. Scud sets the thing on his wrist.
The teep slug writhes delicate tendrils into Scud’s flesh, connecting to his veins and nerves. The boy feels a joyous singing in his veins, a delicate flutter in his forearm. His surroundings take on an altered look. The people and aliens in the dark field, the saucers and the Freeth overhead—each of them wears a halo of aethereal light, and each halo has a unique individual hue. They’re visible to Scud even when they’re behind him.
The situation reminds him of a time when his science teacher made him to pretend to be blind for two days, walking about with his eyes covered. Scud learned he could build up a full mental image of the world even when he couldn’t see. He patched his world-model together from the things he touched, from his memories, and from the rich cues to be found in ambient sounds.
Now, with his teep slug working for him, Scud forms a unified holistic sense of the beings around him in the mappyworld night. He knows where they are, and he knows what they’re thinking.
“Sixth sense,” says Filkar’s voice inside Scud’s head. “Omnividence.”
“I like,” says Scud without moving his lips. He doesn’t even think the words. It’s more like he broadcasts the feeling. This is good. He examines the minds around him.
The Flatsie is fifteen thousand miles from his homeland, which lies three basins away. Filkar and his partner—in fact she’s his wife—have come to Van Cott to make deals.
Nearby, two dog-sized ants are conversing via scents and by taps of their antennae. Their thoughts have a geometric quality—like colored wooden bloc
ks in a mound. The blocks stand for things like sugar, sex, larvae, and smeel. Apparently, ants like smeel as much as the saucers do. But they’re not parasitic about it. Instead they gather those scraps of smeel that humans have freely cast aside—forgotten thoughts, abandoned plans, discarded dreams. Once they’re formulated, ideas and emotions have a wispy independent existence of their own. And the ants—who have teep powers of their own—the ants scavenge for psychic scraps like for crumbs beneath a dining table.
A mappyworld boy and girl are lying on the ground a few hundred feet away, fully dressed, arms around each other in an embrace. They’re cooing and kissing and giggling. Scud tastes the contents of their minds. Glowing lava, ferns in the wind, inner song. This is the first time these two have gone off together. They’re happy and proud.
A mini Thudd is in a ditch, eating the corpse of a dog, crunching the dead animal’s skull and bones, deeply satisfied by his meal. Scud can see the Thudd’s recent memories as well. It was just a few minutes ago that the Thudd found the dog, drawn by the odor of its decomposition.
Tentatively Scud extends his awareness to one of the passing saucers. The saucers seem to have gender, and this one’s a girl. Her name is Nunu. She’s small, maybe four feet across, with the traditional saucerian shape. She has a green dome with a floppy yellow rim. There’s a thickened spot in her rim.
Nunu’s mind is like a concentric nest of glowing shells, each shell a different shade, each shell softly playing a musical line in harmony with the others. Her dome bears her single cartoony eye—a personable black dot set in a white oval. She has teep. Telepathy seems not to be unusual over here. Nunu senses Scud, and her eye rolls downward, assessing his scrutiny.
Scud withdraws his mental probe and crouches in the cover of the tree. He’s playing way out of his league. Really, he should be using his new teep to check up on brother Villy—instead of obsessing about saucers. But when Scud turns his focus towards the night market, he finds that his teep slug’s powers reach no further than Eekra’s hut. That beguiling mappyworld denizen is still trolling for an audience—dancing, sculpting shapes in the air, milling her hands around each other like a cheerleader.