by Rudy Rucker
“Bye, Nunu,” calls Scud. “I’ll miss you.”
“Get the hell out of here,” hollers Zoe.
“You’re like the little dog that starts barking after the big dog walks away,” Villy says to her with a smile. Teasing her a little.
The three saucers rise into the dull sky, and Nunu settles onto the wide rim of her father’s disk, catching a lift. Rather than heading back towards Van Cott and Saucer Hall, the saucers fly over the Borderland Pass, veering to the left and towards, presumably, the New Eden basin.
“You’ll miss Nunu, huh?” Villy says to his brother. “Even if maybe she was planning to drain your smeel. Dangerous friends. For sure her uncle wanted to blitz Zoe.”
“Nunu’s nice,” repeats Scud. “I trust her.”
“I saw the tips of her fangs,” says Villy.
“Oh whatever,” says Scud. “I’ve already teeped your redneck opinions. Fact is, Nunu has no reason to bite me. She got what she needed by kissing me. A person’s mouth is full of loose skin cells, see. Nunu scored as much of my DNA as she needed.”
“DNA?” says Villy, not quite getting it.
“For fertilizing her eggs,” says Scud.
“Oh wow!” exclaims Zoe. “So you didn’t actually need to have sex with her.”
“I didn’t have sex with her,” says Scud. “Can you get that through your tiny head?”
Zoe’s loving the banter. She’s in a good mood again. “Those big saucers were stoked about Nunu’s eggs. Baby shower, anyone?”
“Maybe saucer-human blends are rare,” says Villy. “Maybe there aren’t all that many human males as funky as you, Scud. When the eggs hatch, you’ll be like a sixteen-year-old hillbilly with about forty kids.”
“I hope I see my saucerbabies,” says Scud, off in his own world. “Will they look like me? I wonder if it’s nice in New Eden.”
“That basin’s crawling with saucers,” says Pinchley. “Not my scene. But if you gotta go there, be sure to stay in Berky. A farm town with good saucers. And there’s skungy humans from ballyworld Earth mixed in. Freakers and seekers.”
“The weird thing is that I’ve heard of Berky,” says Zoe slowly. “Not only did my crazy father name his UFO group the New Eden Space Friends, he talked about Berky like it was a holy city. He had this T-shirt about it: Where swain / and saucer miss / share bliss. / Visit Berky. It’s like we’ve fallen down a rat hole to a land where my dad’s demented ravings are true.”
“Your father lives in Berky right now,” Pinchley now tells Zoe.
“How would you know that?” she cries.
“Mappyworld is mammoth, but words have wings,” says Yampa. “Dad is glad to hear you’re here.”
“We all expect you three to stop Groon and his slaves from trashing Earth.” says Pinchley.
“I hate how everyone keeps saying that,” says Zoe, kind of shrugging it off.
For just a moment Villy forgets all the crazy hassles and looks at Zoe. The wind is blowing back her hair, uncovering her brow. A high rounded forehead, full of thoughts. Her voice is sweet, slightly draggy, and full of force. He can’t quite believe she stood up to Nunu’s uncle.
“You’re on an epic quest,” Pinchley continues. “And we’re your helpers.”
All this brave talk makes Villy feel weird and shaky. Like he’s in a funhouse with mirrors that aren’t mirrors. Also the car accident has him pretty warped. Also he drove all night. Also he’s bummed about his broken red surfboard. He sits down beside a big rock, collecting himself. Zoe’s father’s lives in an actual saucer settlement in mappyworld?
Villy’s never felt so tired and wrung-out in his life.
Dear Zoe comes and sits beside him—strong, rapid, adroit. Her ears are like delicate shells. He loves her.
15: Maisie
ZOE
Zoe, Villy, Yampa, and Meatball rest in the lee of a boulder while Pinchley works on the car. He assures them he can get the whale back into shape, maybe better than ever, so they can continue the trip via Thuddland. Meanwhile they make good use of pillows and blankets. Villy’s asleep, his head in Zoe’s lap. Naturally Yampa takes a picture.
As for Scud, he’s at Pinchley’s side, working on the car, seemingly in tune with the Szep, exclaiming over the cool, animalistic tools that Pinchley produces from his ant-leather tool belt.
The crawling pancake fixes the engine again. A giant tongue heals the cracked windows by licking them. A twinkling green spider weaves a taut cover across the drilled-out hole in the roof. The skinny water-balloon creature reappears to freshen up the quantum shocks—he makes them twice as powerful as before, which lifts the whale’s body a full twenty feet off the ground. The bird with the black beak reworks the tires, expanding them until they tower high above everyone’s heads—and while she’s at it strengthens and extends the doors’ bungee-ropes. A six-legged trowel creeps about on the whale’s surface, patching the rips and buffing the finish. As a bonus, the trowel even fixes Villy’s broken red surfboard. The whale is a best-in-show monster surfmobile for true.
Zoe smiles, looking down at her Villy, fast asleep. There hasn’t been nearly enough laughter and fun so far. And not enough kissing. At what point did they decide their languorous road trip would have be an insane save-the-world rush? Because of the saucers? But the saucers have been a threat for centuries and centuries, right? Worrying about threats—that’s for old people. That’s all they do.
Oh, and they’re also hurrying because of the Iravs and the caraway seeds. So dumb. I mean—caraway seeds?
Why not just relax, and drive a million miles—and who cares if they arrive a million days late? Put that on your tardy reports, all you teachers and bosses. Zoe Snapp was one million days behind schedule! Idly she wonders if a person lives a million days. Maybe not. She doesn’t feel like doing the math. School’s out.
“Take a gander at that rock,” says Meatball, who’s puddled on the ground beside Zoe. She’s talking about a penguin-shaped boulder about thirty feet uphill. “It’s watching us. And it’s not the only one.”
Meatball’s right. Zoe can totally imagine that the big star-filled stones up there are watching them. It almost feels like the starstones are craning for a better view. Anything seems possible, once you accept the concept that this ridge is garnished with wadded-up light-years of space.
So far, nobody’s had the energy to walk up to the top of Borderslam Pass and see if there’s really a pair of basins on the other side. New Eden and the Thudd jungle, right? Zoe decides to go for it. She feels too hyper to sit around. She slips a pillow under Villy’s head, wraps a spare blanket around her shoulders, and, trumpet in hand, walks towards the penguin boulder. It’s fatter on the bottom than the top, and its cocked at an angle. The top is fully transparent, like a crystal, with swirls of stars within.
“Can you talk?” asks Zoe.
No spoken answer—but the starstone is putting out a nonverbal telepathic vibe. At first Zoe imagines it’s a warm greeting. Like, “Hello.” Or, “You’re important.” Or even, “You guys are the ones.”
As if. Would an entire sector of the galaxy be rooting for three particular Earthlings? Would an Earthling root for three germs? The stone’s vibe is one of serene indifference. Peaceful void. And Zoe’s just reading things into it. But let her read.
She glances back at the others—Scud and Pinchley fixing the car, Meatball lounging, Villy and Yampa asleep. Her crew. She feels a rush of love for them. For once she belongs. Here at the ass-end of nowhere.
As Zoe proceeds further up the hill, she encounters more and more of the starstones. Each of them has one or more clear crystalline patches with spills of stars within. It’s like she’s looking out through the portholes of an interstellar ship.
But when she reaches the top of the ridge, she forgets the stones. She’s standing at a triple point: the Earth basin behind her, the New Eden basin to her left, and the Thudd basin to her right. The Thudd basin looks maybe a little smaller than New Eden.
New Eden has oceans and cities and green fields, a little like Earth. Unlike the blocky boxes that humans build, the New Eden buildings are like vertical parking lots or multilevel birdhouses, consisting of open shelves. The rack-like structures are topped by towering spires with saucers tethered to them. Looking along the base of the ridge separating New Eden from Van Cott, Zoe can make out a farm town with a human-scale look on the New Eden side of the ridge. That must be Berky, where Pa Saucer wanted to take them. Supposedly Zoe’s dad has been living there since he disappeared. So strange.
The main thing about New Eden is of course the resident saucers. Thousands of them crowd the New Eden sky, in shapes and colors so various as to beggar description. It’s like seeing one each of every flying insect species in the world. To call them saucers is simply a linguistic shortcut. They’re spheres, dumbbells, donuts, cubes, snakes, zigzags—whatever. They nest in the cities, parade on the fields, and bathe in the seas. Zoe feels a little sickened by the sight of so many of them. Pinchley and Yampa insist that many of the saucers are good but, for Zoe just now, looking into New Eden is like seeing maggots on rotten meat. Ugh.
Studying the overall motions of the saucers a little more closely, Zoe notices a curving band above New Eden. It’s a river in the sky, an air channel filled with saucers, a jet stream flowing into New Eden from who knows where. At the spot where the stream strikes the ground of New Eden, saucers boil outward across the landscape. Oddly, there’s a steady inward flow of saucers towards the spot as well. It’s hard to make out the details, but it may be that the stream is sucking up old saucers at the same time that it blows new ones out. Staring hard at the two-way river of saucers for several minutes, Zoe begins to imagine that she’s hearing an eerie tune—a thin, incessant piping.
Turning her attention to the steamy and more intimate Thuddland basin is a relief. It’s primeval and misty, with enormous trees and bright, splashy flowers. Really, really great light. Like full summer beside a fern-crowded stream. Sky vines snake into the atmosphere, buoyed by lighter-than-air pods on their stems. Leather-winged reptiles wheel in flocks, swooping among the trees and tendrils, their hoarse cries a cacophonous sonata. In the distance Zoe sees a colossal pink flying saucer, an intruder from New Eden, a mile wide and with a glowing red eye in her underside. The monster drags limp, dangling arms across the jungle, extracting smeel from plants and animals alike. Further in the distance is a giant blue saucer, presumably the first one’s mate.
An enormous toothy serpent swoops past like an airborne express train. Fat green dinosaurs reach into the trees with necks a hundred yards long. An unseen raptor roars a joyful thunder that vibrates deep within Zoe’s chest. Prehistoric raptors always have a nice day.
A broad dirt track slopes down into Thuddland, leading from the cold, windy ridge to the jungle and the rot and the green light and the bellowing and the mist. The path is dark and loamy, with fresh ruts—which suggest that the Iravs are somewhere ahead.
The wind is like an icepick up here on the eerie, stony pass with the starstones. Starting back downhill towards the purple whale, Zoe considers the fact that with each step she takes, she’s crossing untold light-years of emptiness in her native ballyworld. She steps carefully, holding her blanket tight around herself. She’s ready to rejoin her friends and to resume the trip.
But now one of the starstones blinks and lights up—as if it has an incoming call for Zoe, a call from someone who’s very much at home in the mappyworld. A call from Maisie.
Zoe studies the ghostly image of Maisie within the stone. She’s not naked anymore; she’s wearing yellow tights and a crop top, and she’s carrying a little clutch-bag cloth purse. Her dishwater-blond hair is in a ponytail. Her lithe seventeen-year-old body is outlined against the stars. She still has that floppy horizontal disk of skin jutting out from her bare waist, right above the tights. Maisie takes hold of her disk with one hand, gently bending it up and down. It’s like she’s waiting for Zoe to take the hint, but the hint is—what? The disk patterns itself with polka dots, then with paisley teardrops, and then it’s blank skin again.
Maisie’s thin voice vibrates from the stone. “Hey there, Zee. You and Villy and Scud are moving right along.”
“Where are you?” demands Zoe. “Are you following me?”
“I’m in New Eden right now,” says Maisie. “With Dad. I tunneled over a few minutes after you did. Right before our concert. And now I’m using teep to talk to you. I’m pretty good at telepathy. I learned from the saucers.”
“Why are you calling?” says Zoe. “What do you want?”
“The cosmic beatdown’s coming soon,” says Maisie. “You and I and the Antwerpen boys will fight. Those two Szep, Yampa and Pinchley, they showed up in New Eden looking for some likely human heroes, and they asked Dad and me about it, and we thought of you three. That’s why I gave you that saucer pearl and taught you the riff to open it. I took Yampa and Pinchley over to Van Cott to wait at the spot where your tunnel would come out.”
Zoe asks three questions closest to her heart. “Dad’s really in New Eden? How come you get to hang out with him? And how come you never told me?”
“I didn’t want to upset you,” says Maisie. “As for why he lives in New Eden, are you sure you want to know?”
“Not sure,” says Zoe uneasily. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is starting to dawn on her. But no. She glances downhill towards her crew. Villy’s awake, sitting next to Yampa on the ground, Meatball’s watching Zoe, and Scud’s behind the wheel of the purple whale, joyfully revving the engine. The car is twice as tall as before, and it’s shiny all over. Pinchley makes last-minute checks. Inside the purple whale is where Zoe wants to be.
“Your father’s second wife—Sunny Weaver—she’s not my mother,” Maisie is saying. “That’s what you have to understand. My real mother—well, she has some connections over here in mappyworld. That’s why I can work both sides. And that’s why we four will be so important in the cosmic beatdown. You guys should hurry. Fetch that wand from Szep City!”
This is a lot to process, and really Zoe should talk to Maisie some more. But Zoe has had it with being guilt-tripped by her half-sister’s lonely little voice. So she loses her temper and yells—that’s what she does when she feels trapped. It’s not a nice way to be, but it’s how Zoe is.
“Don’t tell me to hurry!” she shouts, more or less at random. “I am so frikkin tired of hurry!”
Without waiting for an answer, Zoe turns her back on the glowing starstone and picks her way down the slope. Down to her boyfriend. That’s what Villy is by now, right? Even though they haven’t really had a chance to say it. He’s looking towards her, like he’s wondering what she was hollering about just now.
“Let’s go!” calls Zoe, trying to sound all upbeat and enthusiastic. She waves her trumpet in the air. “Let’s ace this gig!”
On the hill above her, Maisie’s image goes dark.
16: Thuddland
SCUD
Scud’s turn at the wheel,” says Pinchley as they bounce—it’s sort of a reverse-rappel now—up into the car. “You need a rest, Villy. And, ahem, don’t forget you just now wrecked us. Don’t want that again. Not with our car as shiny as it is.”
“Yeah, I’ll drive,” says Scud, thrilled to be helming the monster-truck purple whale. “Even if I haven’t gotten my license yet, we had a traffic-safety class at school. You sit up front with me, Pinchley.”
“Reason the car’s so gleaming bright is that I gave it a slipstream supershine,” says Pinchley, settling in. “Meaning that we won’t hear no air beating at us no more
, even if the windows are open. We smooth as silk. We’ll overhear whatever tryst or fracas or hooty squonk we’re passing by.”
“It’ll be like we’re riding an electric car through a talking diorama,” says Scud.
“Just about,” says Pinchley. “The way I’ve doctored up this car, she practically drives herself. But keep in mind the diorama has teeth. Be glad I finally fixed that driver side window so it’s easy to close.”
Villy and Zoe get in the back seat, and Yampa crawls past them into the way-back.
“The soiled, sordid swine nest for me,” she says. “Yampa and Meatball—the voluptuous vixens of vengeance.”
“I’m more what you’d call the bouncy blob of bulge,” says Meatball. “With a zing of a zap.” She thumps a pseudopod against the taut spider silk covering the hole in the roof. “What say we doff this lid, Yampa? That way I can be a pop-up tail-gunner.”
“Not now,” says Yampa. “It’s cuttingly cold.”
“I saw the Thudd jungle from the top of the pass,” announces Zoe. Scud can tell that she’s happy sitting in back with Villy. “It’ll be hot down there. Teeming. And I had a conversation with Maisie, but to hell with that. I want to go, go, go! I hope you drive better than your brother, Scud.” She winks at Villy, but he doesn’t think it’s funny.
“The accident wasn’t my fault,” he mutters. “I got distracted because I thought Nunu was about to bite Scud.”
“There there,” says Zoe, teasing Villy and babying him at the same time. “Put your wittle head on my shoulder and get some more sleepy-bye.”
“Not yet,” says Villy fighting back a yawn. “I want to see.” He turns and looks at Yampa. “Can you do something to pep me up?”
“I’ll exude some attar of Szep City rat,” says Yampa, extending a gnarled, witchy finger. Tingling musk fills the cabin, and everyone catches a lift.
Thanks to Pinchley’s stretch-lobster, the whale’s interior is so big that Scud needs to lower the seat so he can reach the pedals. But his view out the windshield is still fine. He drives slowly up the stony slope to the pass. They roll over one waist-high boulder and then another—poomp poomp. Thanks to the gigantic tires and the maxed-out quantum shocks, the whale barely even tilts. Scud steers extra carefully around the larger starstone sentinels at the top of the pass.