by Rudy Rucker
“Go over to a parallel road,” says Zoe. “I see a street party up ahead of us. Mini Thudds. Look how they throw their heads back and roar. Why don’t humans ever have that much fun?”
“I do,” says Villy. “Especially when I surf.”
“I’m glad you brought two boards. You can teach me how to roar!” Zoe smiles over at him, completely happy. “Turn right here and then turn left, Villy.”
Villy enjoys the sound of her voice. “You’re so alert,” he says. “Dialed up high.”
“I’m glad I stuck with you,” says Zoe. “When Meatball knocked you out, I panicked and hopped back to Los Perros.”
“What was it like?”
“I went through the pearl and it led me back to the same spot and to the same moment that we left from. Hopped into the past, you could say. But I didn’t stay.”
“I don’t care about history,” sings cheerful Villy. “’Cause that’s not when I want to be.”
“With you is where I want to be,” says Zoe.
Villy burps the car’s accelerator, watching the lit buildings of Van Cott stream by. They go about twenty blocks on the parallel street that Zoe steered him onto—and now he spots another crowd in the street. Could the four Iravs be among them? Planning an ambush? The shoulder with a head and arm, the torso chunk with just an arm, the pair of legs, and the stray right hand. Grisly foes. What kind of creature was the original Irav if not a regular Szep?
To be on the safe side, Villy edges to the right and drives partly on the sidewalk. The whale thumpity-thumps over a couple of parked beetles and bombs past the dim group—it’s a party and not menacing after all.
“Buh bye!” Zoe calls to them, doing a teener accent. She and Villy laugh. They regain the street and speed on.
Van Cott is huge. Villy has his speed up to a hundred miles an hour, according to the thin wobbly needle of his revamped speedometer. Zoe leans against him. The city blocks strobe past. Insane, to drive like this in a town, but so far it’s going okay. The beetle cars scuttle out of his way, most of them, and the ones that don’t—well, Villy just rides over them, like he already did before. He’s springy and light on his quantum shocks, and probably he’s not damaging the beetles or their drivers. Everything’s cool, everything’s smooth.
The streets grow darker on the north edge of Van Cott, as there’s none of those tall streetlight lily-plants. But the streets and houses and empty lots do give off a bit of light on their own. Meatball says they have glowons stuck to them, whatever that means. In any case, by now Villy’s headlights are on.
Finally, they reach the open countryside. Low rolling hills, once again faintly luminous. An ocean somewhere in the distance to the left. An occasional settlement of mappyworld humans. Villy stays quiet, concentrating on his driving—and on Zoe. This is how the trip was supposed to be.
A bright dot appears far ahead. It grows, looms, and rushes towards them. Wary of a collision, and once again worrying about the Iravs, Villy edges onto the grassy shoulder of the road. His whale is rolling so steady that he doesn’t bother slowing down. A beetle car whizzes by, with headlights of its own.
Back on the road, Villy nudges the whale up to seven hundred miles per hour. The landscape is a dark blur. When they hit the top of the next rise, they fly quite some distance through the air. Like skating off a ramp. Zoe laughs a little too hard, edging towards hysteria.
The landing is gentle. The tires make a comfortable squeak as the whale regains its purchase upon the road. Villy cranks the whale up to eight hundred miles an hour. The sense of speed is insane. He has to maintain a pinpoint focus on the farthest reaches of the faintly lit zone ahead. If his gaze deviates even slightly, his attention will be swept into the cascading rush of dim fields on either side.
“Reckless driving,” says Zoe, trying to keep her tone light, but not quite managing. “Like those doomed stoners they always showed us in the driving-safety videos at school. You’re overdoing it, Villy.”
“If we crash and die, then at least the vampire saucers won’t get you,” said Villy, going for gallows humor.
“Slow. Down.”
“Not to worry, dear,” interjects Meatball. “You’re safe as houses.” She’s crept along the car cabin’s ceiling, making her body long and snaky. A yellow bulb of her flesh rests on the back of the front seat between Villy and Zoe, with an eye-spot and a slit mouth. “Your quantum shock absorbers have an aura,” adds Meatball. “Loom what may, we’re likely to go over or around or through. Do you call that the—nowhere principle?”
“I think you mean the uncertainty principle,” says Zoe, very dubious.
“Yes,” says Meatball. “And it means we won’t ram those trees up—ahead!” Her voice shoots up high on the last word, but by then the dark redwood grove is already behind them. “With quantum shocks, even a thousand miles per hour is tea and crumpets,” insists Meatball. “We wave and we don’t matter.”
“Hear that?” says Villy. “I’m not slowing down, Zoe.”
“Wishful thinking,” says Zoe, who’s taking a dislike to the overbearing Freeth. “We missed the trees because you didn’t steer into them. And if we hit a rock, we hit a rock.”
“I’d not care to test that,” admits Meatball. “But do keep in mind that we want to cover a million miles.”
Villy races onward, hypnotized by the unseen landscape’s rushing flow. A forest flies past, a mountain, a lake, endless fields. Everything is faintly aglow, as if in a winter snowscape. The surfboards on the roof vibrate, sounding a matched pair of treble tones.
A squadron of large saucers flies past overhead, perhaps fifty them, bizarrely shaped and wildly colored. Commuting to one of the neighboring basins? Villy has a distinct sense that the saucers are aware of him and the others—including Nunu, who’s totally making out with Scud in the pig’s nest.
Oh, never mind that. One thing at a time.
For the moment, Villy’s just grateful the saucers in the sky don’t approach the whale. He bombs onward, and Zoe falls asleep against his shoulder. They really are becoming a couple. Worth the trip.
12: Weird Dream
ZOE
Zoe has an unusually strange dream, and no wonder, considering this has been the weirdest day of her whole entire life.
At first she’s imagining the dark landscape streaming past with little blips of color off to the sides—random faces, shiny cars, flying saucers—and then she flashes on the head-on crash with Mom’s car. Cut.
She’s onstage at the jazz performance. She’s supposed to play her trumpet solo, and she’s naked, and the idiot behind her is bumping her with the slide of a disgusting trombone. It’s half-sister Maisie. Maisie is naked too, and Zoe sees that Maisie has a flap of skin around her waist. Like a skirt. That’s what Maisie’s been keeping rolled up under her blouse for all these years.
Maisie’s skin flap has images on it, like on a squid. Letters of the alphabet. HI ZOE. Zoe has a sense of stepping backwards off a ledge. Thud. An electric jolt goes up her leg.
Maybe this isn’t a dream. Maisie is focused and intent. The bell of her trombone rests on Zoe’s shoulder.
Everyone is quiet. Zoe’s supposed to play but she’s blank. Maisie hums, prompting her. It’s that stutter-stop riff Maisie taught her yesterday. Zoe raises her horn. Her notes—she can see them—they’re tiny glider planes, like origami. They drift out and rock their wings, wanting to fly to the crowd—but they’re sucked into the hungry brass bell of Maisie’s horn.
Maisie followed Zoe up here, and she’s teeping to her. This is real. And—
“Uuuunnh!”
Zoe comes awake with a groan. She’s lying on her side on the seat. Villy pats her leg.
“You okay?”
“Um, yeah, it was just that I saw…” Zoe trails off. She’s not quite ready to talk about her creepy dream. The car tires hum. The others are asleep, except for Meatball. In silence Zoe looks out the car windows, contemplating the unimaginable place that she and Villy
have come to.
“We should talk about Maisie,” she finally says. “We haven’t talked about Maisie yet at all.”
“What’s to say?” goes Villy.
“She gave me that magic pearl, and she taught me the riff that opened it into a tunnel to mappyworld? And Yampa claims she saw Maisie up here? And she says Maisie told her where to look for the gate of the tunnel I made?”
For a moment Zoe can’t tell if Villy even hears her. He’s staring straight ahead, out into the indistinct landscape, gently controlling the steering wheel to keep them on the road.
“I wonder if we’re going to find her here,” Villy presently says.
“Maisie’s been coming to mappyworld all along,” says Zoe. “She’s not a regular human. That lump around her waist? It’s a rolled-up flap of skin.”
“How do you know that?” asks Villy.
“I saw Maisie just now. In my dream. We were trying to play the Jazz Howlers concert, and everything was wrong. We were naked, and I didn’t know the music, and Maisie told me what to play. My notes flew out of my trumpet and into her trombone.”
“Some dream,” says Villy.
“Worse than that,” says Zoe. “I think Maisie teeped it to me. A message.”
Villy slides his eyes over to Zoe for just a second and smiles. “Calm down? We’ll figure out Maisie later. For now, I mean, this is already the craziest trip ever.”
“You and me,” says Zoe. “Do you mind when I sit close to you? You won’t think I’m sleazy and desperate and a clinging vine?”
“I won’t think that,” says Villy. “I like being near you.”
They ride along in a companionable silence, with Zoe’s leg touching Villy’s. They’re not worrying about seatbelts. Pinchley’s installed some better kind of safety feature, which Zoe doesn’t quite understand, but Pinchley says it will work. Zoe’s heart rate settles down as the memory of her dream fades. She’s really here, really on a giant road trip with—can she think of Villy as her true love? Okay, sure, but keep that to herself.
“It’s getting light,” is all Zoe says.
“That figures,” says Villy. “It had just gotten dark when we came yesterday, and it feels like I drove all night. Can you see the sun? I can’t take my eyes off the road.”
Villy’s got the whale goosed to a steady eight hundred miles an hour, but Zoe isn’t even going to think about that. At least the road’s straight and level. They’re way up north in Canada. Or someplace like that. It’s getting brighter all the time. The fields are a fresh green, speckled with wildflowers, and there’s he sees sawtooth mountains on the horizon. Shiny ocean waves far to their left. But nothing in the sky.
“No sun,” Zoe tells Villy. “I mean, how would it rise and set, if this world is flat and endless? Would it drill through the surface? And you’d need lots and lots of suns for such a big world. Like grow lights in a warehouse.”
Once again Villy doesn’t immediately answer. Sometimes when he’s so quiet for so long, Zoe wonders if there is, in fact, anything at all going on in his head. Wonders if he’s dumb. But then he’ll say something interesting, and, yes, his stream of consciousness was flowing all along, like an underground river.
“Maybe the light’s in the air itself,” is what Villy says now. “Like we’re inside a neon tube.”
“I like that,” says Zoe. “Remember how Meatball mentioned—glowons? I figure they’re particles of light. Like phosphorescent plankton. The glowons float around all day, and at night they settle onto the ground and go dim.”
Zoe cracks open her window, sampling the fresh dawn air. The slipstream rustles the scraps of paper in the car, stirs Zoe’s clothes, tousles her hair—and clears away her images of Maisie.
Feeling more like herself, Zoe smiles at Villy. “Dare I utter a ladylike yee-haw?”
“Our special road trip,” says Villy in a really nice way. Zoe snuggles up to him some more. It’s fun being kittenish, and clearly Villy digs it. Zoe is silk-spinning him into her web.
“You have to turn left rather soon,” puts in Meatball. She’s got her nosy bulb-head atop the back of the seat again.
“What’ll we find in the next basin over?” Villy asks the Freeth.
“I’m not quite sure,” allows Meatball.
“I thought you said we don’t need a map because you always know exactly where you are,” says Zoe.
“I was building myself up,” says Meatball. “Beating my own drum. I’m prone to doing that.” Somehow this admission makes Zoe like Meatball a little better.
“What are you Freeth doing in the human basin anyway?” asks Zoe. She touches Meatball’s yellow skin, pushing it in and out, playing with it.
“Scrounging for scraps,” says Meatball. “Hoping to profit from the cosmic beatdown.”
Zoe shakes her head. “You aliens keep coming on all heavy and meaningful, but—”
“But we have no frikkin idea what you’re talking about,” says Villy, his eyes continually fixed on the road. “Or whether you’re putting us on.” They’re among mountains now, some of them with snow on top. The mappyworld Alaska.
“Allow me to expand upon my remarks,” says Meatball. “The parasitic saucers plan to escalate their forays to Earth. They want to open a huge unny tunnel between the worlds. With one gate near Saucer Hall and the other gate in your Los Perros. Motivation? Their ruler, Groon, wishes to emigrate to your planet Earth, and to mastermind a full-on invasion. I share this emerging information as a token of my good faith.”
“Invade Earth?” says Villy. “Pinchley and Yampa were talking about that. Somehow we’re supposed to stop the invasion.”
“Curious that you’re now driving a million miles in the wrong direction,” says Meatball with a short laugh. “Away from the upcoming war. But perhaps it’s not entirely idiotic. The Szep Aristos are well connected with Goob-goob.”
Zoe glances back at Nunu, wondering what she thinks about this conversation—but the saucer’s eye is closed and she’s plastered against Scud’s body like an overcoat. Asleep. Or pretending to be.
“You’re losing me again,” Villy tells Meatball. “Right now, all I want is to catch those Iravs, and get our caraway seeds, and find the monster waves that Yampa was talking about.”
“Stout fellow,” says Meatball in a hearty tone. “Soldier on. No need to fight in every possible battle, eh? You’d do well to sit out the cosmic beatdown. We can journey past Szep City to Freeth Farm.”
“Have you been there before?” asks Zoe.
“I must confess that I’m a gutter Freeth, a third-generation immigrant, born in that manky parking lot beside the night market, and compelled, as I say, to beg for boons. A Freeth of low estate. I’d gain renown, were I to divert you from the cosmic beatdown. If not—” The Freeth pauses, as if embarrassed. “Well, otherwise, Pinchley and Yampa say you’re destined to become intergalactic heroes.”
This is when Zoe realizes that Meatball isn’t really their friend. But Villy’s not picking up on that. He’s sleepy and amused. He goes, “Talk about heavy, bogus, primo-grade gibberish—”
And just then Meatball’s eye-spot bulges and her whispery voice rises to a shrill buzz. “Turn left, turn left, turn left!” They’re rocketing towards a sharp fork in the road—with a solid wedge of rock straight ahead.
Villy cranks the steering wheel, and the whale goes into a prolonged skid, barely making the left turn. Zoe clings to him for dear life. Momentum sends the whale rolling along the face of the bare, rocky bluff—thumpity-bumping across ledges and scrubby pines, a hundred feet above the ground, the passengers held in their seats by centrifugal force.
Everyone’s awake and making noise, especially Yampa and Scud, but Zoe’s screaming the loudest, and it feels good. She’s got a lot of scream bottled up inside her. Especially after that trippy dream. But then Yampa raps Zoe on the back of her head with her knuckles, and she shuts up.
Villy angles back down to the road, and they’re speeding along between t
wo cliffs, with the other end of the cut in view. The ocean is out there, and a crooked thin island, and beyond the island, a mountain range that towers into the pale blue sky.
“We’re driving over that?” asks Scud. He’s clambered forward from the pig’s nest to join Yampa and Pinchley. Enough room for everyone. Scud pushes Meatball’s bulbous tendril to one side and shoves his own head into the front seat. “God, you’re going fast, Villy. Give it a rest. It’s time for a stop.”
“Not yet,” says Villy, unwilling or unable to look away from the road. Zoe’s seen him get like this playing videogames.
Zoe turns around so she can see what the others are up to. That floppy, sneaky Nunu is glued to the ceiling now. Pinchley and Yampa are rubbing their faces, looking hungover. And Scud looks weirdly content. What was he doing with Nunu during the night? So nasty. She breaks into wild giggles.
“What’s your problem?” Scud snaps, probably using his teep slug to read Zoe’s mind. “Slow the hell down, Villy!”
Finally Villy eases up. The tires’ frantic whining abates. What a relief. The whale coasts out of the canyon into an open landscape. Up ahead is a rickety frontier town with inns and outfitters. A cold, rough sea lies beyond—deep green with lacy whitecaps. The thin island splits the strait into two channels, the first one narrow and the second one wide. On the other side, foothills and bluffs rise into the highest mountains Zoe has ever seen. The range runs north and south, as far as she can see. It’s a wall between them and the next basin.
Villy drives another quarter mile and then, with a spray of gravel, he slews the whale to a halt beside a ramshackle establishment called Borderslam Inn. It has a porch, but nobody’s on it. Villy seems dazed from the long drive, but he smiles at Zoe and helps her clamber down from the high seat. It’s majorly cold here. The thin, dry air feels good in her nose and lungs.
Nunu and Meatball hover by the car, working their surfaces against the icy ocean breeze, with Meatball pretty much giving Nunu the cold shoulder, not that Meatball has a shoulder. Yampa and Pinchley swing down their door-ropes like pirates, skinny and gnarly as a pair of fresh-dug roots. The Szep don’t look excited—they’ve driven across lots of basin ridges before, even if this particular one is new to them. They’re sharing one of those food mints, a kippered-herring one. Maybe Zoe should look for her roast beet one. Meanwhile Scud wants to pee on the ground by the car, but Pinchley warns him not to.