by Rudy Rucker
Scud has set his own starstone on the dash for good luck, the one he got from Hungerford. And now he’s driving past a really big starstone with those glints of light inside it. He slows down to stare at the thing—kind of gloating over the wild concept that there’s stars and light-years and nebulae inside of it. He notices a kind of flaw in the shiny surface of the rock, as if a little piece of it is missing. And then comes a wild clatter.
It’s his starstone going apeshit. It’s bouncing around inside the closed-up car like a bird looking for a way out. The little starstone caroms off the windshield, off the seat, off the ceiling, off the side of Scud’s head. Before it gets any wilder, Scud manages to catch it in both hands and stuff it way down inside his pants pocket.
“That starstone was lookin to go home,” says Pinchley. “That’s how they do. Hard to keep one for long. Especially when you’re crossing a ridge. Good snag, Scud.”
So okay, fine, and on they roll. Scud’s awed by the jungle basin—it’s the best thing he’s ever seen. Toothy airborne reptiles, utterly primeval. An armored creature like a living tank, with a spiky club at the end of his tail. A flying green manta ray. A foul-smelling flower devouring a wildly squealing pig. Well, sort of a pig. More like a tapir, maybe. Its snout is a short, flexible trunk.
“Watch the road,” cautions Pinchley.
They coast down along the black dirt road into Thuddland and—hooray!— it’s Scud who’s driving. What with all the tweaks, the car’s hella smart. You barely have to steer, and Scud’s managing a decent speed. Palms, tree ferns, and sky vines arch overhead. The leaves glow like stained glass in the Thuddland light.
“Keep a lookout for the Iravs,” says Zoe from the back seat. “I don’t think they’re that far ahead. See how fresh the tire tracks are?”
The double-rutted trail winds on. By now they have the roof hole and the car windows open. Thanks to Pinchley’s slipstream supershine treatment, there’s no clamor of beating wind. The rich jungle speaks to them—an articulated chorus of life in full bloom. The humid air is laden with rich scents. Gardenia, cinnamon, and fig. Rot, dung, and blood.
The Thuddland creatures walk, crawl, and flap—six-legged deer, fist-sized spiders, tiny flying worms, naked rodents, striped pig-tapirs, waddling moa birds, lizards with beaks, leather butterflies, and a carnivorous puffball like a collapsed house beside a mound of bones.
“So sick,” says Zoe. “I love it.”
“Somewhere in your ballyworld there’s a planet like this,” says Pinchley.
“Did you guys say it’s Goob-goob who makes your basins match our inhabited planets?” asks Scud, still hoping to get a straight answer.
“Nobody makes everything do nothing to everybody,” says Yampa. “Mappyworld and ballyworld are two views of the same face.”
“Hea-veeeee,” says Zoe, drawing out the second syllable. Kind of mocking Yampa down. Villy laughs at the Szep too. The three kids are tired of never knowing what the hell is going on here. But what can they do? It’s part of the trip.
Scud drives for several hours, doing his best to maintain a good pace. It’s a kick, having these huge tires with the quantum shocks. The hulking car is as nimble as a rabbit. And thanks to his teep slug, Scud’s aware of everyone’s feelings. A big change for him. Pinchley’s impatience that they aren’t going faster is in balance with Zoe’s worry that their speed is too high.
Not that Zoe’s worrying all that much. She’s mostly focused on Villy, who by now is too excited to sleep. He and Zoe are happy together, and they’re holding hands. But Scud’s not going to tease them. What with the Nunu business, he’s in no position. He keeps wondering what his and Nunu’s hatchlings will be like.
Meanwhile he’s hearing an insistent gurgling, and now it grows into a splashy roar. A jungle river, easily a hundred feet wide. Sandbars and stony rapids separate the stream into channels, some shallow and some deep. Lively, muscular flows of water out there. Scud halts on the bank, not sure what to do.
“Let’s take a break and go for a dip!” says Zoe. “I keep thinking we’re throwing this whole trip away. Can’t we relax and forget the Iravs?”
“I got a bad feeling them Iravs not gonna forget us,” says Pinchley. “But, sure take a break. Not that swimming would be a cool move. Bound to be some biters in here.”
“Got it,” says Zoe.
A herd of squat, peevish dinos can be seen downstream, looking ready to charge. Closer in, the surface of the water is rippling with the motions of—Scud’s teep helps him make out the shapes. Eels with legs, leeches with fins, and nautilus-like ammonites with tentacles and shells. A leathery turtle head darts out of the water and snaps a dragonfly from the air. Not exactly a turtle, more like a halibut with legs. And not exactly a dragonfly. It’s one of those flying worms. The worm screams in a horrible, tiny voice as it dies.
“Whets the appetite, eh?” says Zoe, doing her gallows-humor thing. “Let’s skip the swimming and have a picnic.” Villy obligingly gets out their food mints, hands Zoe the roast beet, takes a tom turkey for himself, and gives the other tom turkey mint to Scud. When Scud puts his mint in his mouth, the surface melts off and turns into, well, slimy jelly. But the jelly tastes like meat, and it’s easy to swallow. Scud eats another layer, then stashes the rest in his pocket with his starstone.
A flock of small winged reptiles skims along the river’s surface, screeching, clacking their beaks, and devouring the tiny flying worms. Something pokes out of the stream near where they’re standing—two extravagant feelers and a substantial pair of eyestalks. No, this wouldn’t be a good place to swim.
Scud focuses his teep on the submerged creature and gets a sense of its mind. Slow, writhing, implacable. Its vision is in black and white. It’s thinking of crawling out of the water and scrambling into their car. Crude fantasies of bathing in gray blood.
Upstream, the trees by the river begin to sway.
“Something big,” says Pinchley. “We better roll out.”
“The jungle Thudds aren’t civilized one bit?” says Scud. He’s teeping, but he can’t make out for sure what’s shaking those trees. “The Thudds in Van Cott were almost like people. They wore clothes. They had families. They talked.”
“They was mini Thudds,” says Pinchley. “Like I told you. Traders and diplomats. A different species, really. A full-size jungle Thudd—there’s no chatting with that fella. Big appetite. Back in the car, guys, seriously. Then drive on across this stream, Scud. Crank up the power if we bog down. Whatever you do, don’t stop.”
“Rushing me again,” grumbles Zoe, getting in the back seat with Villy. “Tonight’s going to be different, okay? When we’re out of this jungle.”
“We’ll cuddle up in private,” Villy assures her. “We’ll find a way.”
“I’m not saying we’re going to be sexually intimate,” cautions Zoe in a low tone. Scud has to use his teep to hear her. “I’m not that easy.”
“Nobody’s every going to say you’re easy, Zee.” Villy is punch drunk with exhaustion. But even now he won’t let up and go to sleep. Scud can tell Villy doesn’t like to see his kid brother drive. Bossy know-it-all that Villy is.
Brutally Scud slams the car into gear, and they crunch over whatever was waiting for them in the water by the river bank. The thing writhes, snaps a supersized scorpion tail out of the water, and expires in a flutter of gassy burbles. Scud rumbles into the main part of the stream. It gets steadily deeper, rising to the top of their enormous tires. But the water’s not coming in the windows.
Scud feels damn good about how well he’s doing. And then those trees upstream part, and out charges a monster that’s—not a Thudd after all. It’s a giraffe with a giant beak, and with leather wings between his body and his long front legs. Like on a flying squirrel, of all things. The creature takes a few long-legged steps, bends his knees, and glides low along the river, plopping down in front of the purple whale.
Sound effects: ker-splash and a huge, discordant caw.<
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Reflexively and foolishly ignoring what Pinchley told him, instead of speeding up and veering around the attacker, Scud halts the car. It stalls. The raptor’s beak is the size of a rowboat. Naturally he aims a hearty peck at the whale’s windshield—which shatters into bits. The zillion tiny pieces of glass shower onto Scud and Pinchley, safety-glass cubes tumbling in a slow-motion cascade.
“Smooth move,” jeers Villy, slouched in the back seat.
Scud is a devoted amateur student of dinosaur science, and in his opinion the ungainly assailant is akin to a little-known Earth dinosaur known as a hatzegopteryx. Scud’s always wondered how it would be to meet one. And here it is—no, it’s something even better: an alien hatzegopteryx! The tip of the monster’s beak is in the front seat between him and Pinchley. It smells like rotten garbage.
Meatball enters the fray. She surges forward like rubber lava, envelops the point of the flying dino’s beak, and feeds it a blast of dark energy that drops the behemoth to his knees, leaving him draped across the hood of the car. Meatball delivers a second zap and now the hatzegopteryx-thing is lying on his side in the river, possibly dead, with joyful, many-legged scavengers setting their pincers and feelers to work.
“Drive on, my man,” says Pinchley, making a chilled-out gesture with his hand. Doing a billionaire-in-his-limo routine. “Don’t linger to gawk at the rabble. We need to exit this jungle before nightfall.”
“Um—how far is it to the next pass?” asks Scud as he rolls over the neck of the poor hatzegopteryx.
“Maybe three thousand miles,” says Pinchley. “They call that gap Galactic Pass—on account of so many starstones there. You want me to take the wheel, kid? Or we could bring in Villy again, or let Zoe drive.”
“I can do it,” insists Scud. He can sense that Villy is eager to resume control, but no. This is Scud’s chance to shine. He lurches and splashes across the rocky river, finds his way back onto the rudimentary dirt road, and powers the whale up to a completely reckless three hundred miles an hour. He uses his teep to do a quick mental scan on the passengers. Everyone except Zoe is fine with his driving. All of them want to be on the move.
It’s annoying, however, to have those crooked little chunks of glass all over his lap, and to have the wind intensely beating in through the hole where the windshield used to be. Flying worms keep splatting onto Scud’s face and bursting, leaving a foul-smelling residue of venom and blood.
“Not a tenable situation,” says Scud.
“I’m on it,” says Pinchley, all smooth and urbane. “Don’t need to slow down one tit or jottle, son. I’ve got me a deluxe model glassblaster beetle. Better than the healer tongue I used for the cracks after your brother rolled the car.”
Pinchley draws yet another tool critter from his belt. It’s like a transparent glass cockroach, but with too many legs—like everything else around here. It scurries around the car seats and the floor, gobbling up every bit of the windshield glass. By then it’s the size of a bowling-ball, kind of scary almost, like a fat tick after a big meal. The glassblaster beetle drags itself onto the dashboard, and—
“Do it!” says Pinchley.
Ting—the beetle makes a move that’s almost too rapid to follow. It pops out a sturdy little transparent umbrella and, bracing itself against the wind, twirls the umbrella very fast. The umbrella spreads out like tossed pizza dough spinning in the air. Its edges take hold of the windshield frame. The sheet oscillates back and forth like a drumhead and then—second ting—it locks into shape, having analog-computed its optimum surface curvature. The beetle glass is stronger and clearer than the windshield they had before. Pinchley feeds the glassblaster beetle a treat, then returns it to his tool belt.
Scud bombs on. He uses his teep to sense the myriad of minds in the jungle and, equally important, he senses the relatively empty zone wherein lies the road ahead. He can do this so well that he feels he could drive with his eyes closed, not that he actually tries it. He doesn’t want to freak out the others, not when he’s blasting along at four hundred miles per.
A humane bonus to Scud’s teep technique is that he can telepathically warn off all the minor critters that remain in their path—such as the clueless six-legged fawns and the ubiquitous flying worms, not that all of the worms listen.
“Why winged worms?” says Zoe around now. More and more of them are appearing, and despite Scud’s efforts, they’re splattering against the windshield at a growing rate. “What do flying worms have to do with the Age of the Dinosaurs?” Zoe adds.
“Remember that this isn’t actually prehistoric Earth,” says Scud. “It’s Thuddland. It matches an alien planet that’s twenty light-years across our galaxy.”
“Oh.”
Pinchley supplies an additional fact. “Those two sloppy mile-wide saucers that we saw from the ridge, those guys are not Thuddland natives. They slipped over from New Eden. I think they’re called Bo and Peep?”
“Poppo and Bombo,” corrects Yampa. “Groon’s goons. Here from New Eden to scavenge stacks of smeel. Their oral arms ooze burning slime.”
Pinchley speaks again. “Anyway, Poppo is feeding nearby, and she’s the one stirring up the flying worms. I hope you kids kill Groon and Poppo and every one of those vampire saucers. I hate parasitic crap that flies.”
“Do keep in mind that the flying Freeth are kind and noble,” puts in Meatball. She’s bulged part of herself out through that now-open hole in the roof. She has to push the surfboards apart a little so she can fit. “Poppo’s off to our right and drawing closer!”
“Pink Poppo will waft past our party to be with blue Bombo,” says Yampa. “Perhaps we lie low.”
“Hell, if we keep takin’ breaks and screwin’ around, then Groon’s invasion will be a done deal by the time the kids bag that Szep City wand and drag-ass it back to Van Cott,” says Pinchley.
“If your famous wand is so great, then maybe it can fix things no matter when we get back,” snaps Zoe. “I, for one, would like a good look at Poppo. Let’s stop, Scud!”
As if on cue, one of Poppo’s damp, dangling tentacles sways out of the undergrowth and slaps blindly into their car. Meatball goes ahead and zaps the oral arm, but the behemoth saucer couldn’t care less. The goo on the tentacle is sticky, and the car is pulled a little way off the road before it lets go. Scud skids to a stop just in time to miss crashing into a tree.
“There’s a clearing right over there,” says Villy. He leans into the front seat, pointing. “See that really dense tree? Let’s hide under there until the monster is gone. I don’t want her to get interested in us.”
“Fine,” says Scud, doing his best to sound put-upon. But he’ll be glad to take cover. He inches the car onto a sandy spot under the big tree. They lower themselves to the ground and stretch, enjoying the break from frantically zooming at hundreds of miles per hour.
The tree has numerous trunks, like a banyan. There aren’t many animals to be seen here just now—the sloppy, titanic saucer’s oral arms have drained the smeel from most of the critters in grove, which was furiously active just minutes ago. Meanwhile they can track where Poppo is because she’s—singing. It’s a hideously sweet sound, like the soundtrack to a namby-pamby kiddie cartoon featuring rainbows and unicorns. Weird to have the song emanating from a slobbering tent of death, up there in the sky with a red eye in her underside.
The many-trunked tree has a huge crown, which is still dripping with stinging saucer mucus in certain spots—but that just means you have to watch your step a little bit. The light is a luscious shade of yellow-green. It’s interesting to study the crazy little flowers and mushrooms that grow around here—the ones that the avid saucer didn’t happen to destroy.
Scud goes behind a tree trunk to take a pee. And that’s when he spots the weird toadstool. It’s waist high, a glistening shade of pale orange. And—how random is that?—it’s got bunch of glowing words on its top surface. Like a credit screen.
“Hey!” Scud yells to the others. “
Look at this!”
And here’s the text they see:
Cosmic Beatdown
Presenting
Zoe Snapp, Villy Antwerpen & Scud Antwerpen
Versus
Groon & His Flying Saucers
Co-Starring
Maisie Snapp
Yampa & Pinchley
Meatball and the Iravs
And a Cast of Hundreds of Thousands
Directed and Produced by
Goob-goob
A big, snot-like gout of saucer slime dribbles from the tree onto the toadstool and it withers. The words on its surface are gone. For a moment nobody says anything—their minds are too blown.
“For real?” says Zoe. “A tweaked, sinister credit screen for a show with us in it—and we see the credit screen on a luminous toadstool in a jungle in a parallel world?”
“Maybe this world is talking about itself,” says Scud. “And that means we’re in a virtual reality. Like in one of those movies where—”
“Screw that stale you’re-inside-a-game bullcrap,” yells Zoe. “Look!” She tears off a chunk of the toadstool where it’s not withered from saucer snot. She crumbles the chunk open, and within a hollow in the toadstool flesh are three tiny striped bugs, sitting around a berry that they’re eating for dinner. The bugs stare up at them, twitching their damp feelers, not overly alarmed.
“This is not some lame-o cheap-ass videogame,” continues Zoe, as if vindicated by the sight of the bugs. “Not some feeble piece of code, drawing piles of colored blocks inside a dipshit digital computer.”
“You go, Zoe,” says Villy, enjoying the rant.