by Rudy Rucker
Zoe gestures at the space around them, taking in the fat-trunked trees, the jewel-like flowers, and the timid flying worms who are only now starting to reemerge. A nearby sky vine dangles from its mile-high hovering float, not far from skeenky Poppo, who is drifting away like a cloud.
“This is my real life,” cries Zoe. “I’m on a million mile road trip in a wonderful alien world. So don’t frikkin try to bring me down into your world of bogus bullcrap videogames, Scud!”
Scud teeps into their surroundings, testing out the feel of what Zoe says. This world is rich with smeel, incalculably dense and strange, filled with minds large and small, scattered like grains of sand. “Maybe you’re right,” he says. “But, still—”
“You said bullcrap twice,” Yampa remarks to Zoe, focusing on that for no real reason. “Not bullshit?”
“Bullcrap is flatter,” says Zoe, winging it. “A dry pie. Not as smelly.”
“Listen at the farmgirl,” goes Villy, putting on his country accent.
“So, okay, fine,” goes Scud. Giving in to Zoe. “Let’s suppose this is real. But why did we see those words on the mushroom? How can things get all meta like that if we’re not inside a videogame?”
“Simple,” says Pinchley. “The frikkin Irav wrote on the toadstool.”
“You shouldn’t keep saying the Irav,” goes Villy. “There’s four of them, okay? We cut up that first one and all the parts stayed alive. Get it through your head.”
“The Irav’s in four pieces, fine,” says Pinchley. “But probably he’s still got just the one mind, shared four ways. Whatever he is, he’s not a Szep.”
“Could he be a saucer?” asks Villy.
“I expect he’s in cahoots with them leech saucers,” says Pinchley. “But naw, he’s not a saucer. When you cut up a saucer, it dies. They have innards and all that good stuff, including a saucer pearl in their middle to help them fly. This chopped-up Irav is some special kind of shapeshifter alien.”
“Okay,” says Villy. “And why would the Irav or Iravs write the fake credits on the toadstool?
“To pique us,” says Yampa. “So we pursue them with pulsating passion.”
“And why do they want us to chase them?” asks Scud, always one for another question.
Pinchley sighs. “I figure they’re settin it up so we’re nice and far from home when they—or their friends the vampire saucers—ambush us and kill us. Not that we’re gonna let em do that.”
“If the bad saucers want to kill us, then one of them could have zapped us as soon as we showed up in Van Cott,” protests Zoe. “Or in the pass. Or they could tell Poppo to flop down onto us right now. Why stall and play cat-and-mouse?”
“They not sure how quick you are,” says Pinchley. “They don’t want Zoe Snapp making a last-second escape and warning the ballyworlders back home.”
“I hate to say it, but I sort of doubt if I could tunnel home from here,” says Zoe. “We’ve already come too far. If that’s what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe you can, maybe you can’t,” allows Pinchley. “Your saucer pearl’s mighty small. Pearl like that won’t grow no really long unny tunnel. Wouldn’t be much good for levitating neither. But you never know.”
“How does the levitation thing work?” asks Zoe. “If I can possibly switch our conversation’s topic away from my impending doom.”
“If you ever get hold of a decent-sized pearl, I’ll teach you to fly,” says Pinchley. “But for now we gotta drive.”
“Mount the jolly whale and drive like jiggly maniacs,” cries Yampa. “Further fun before Yampa dies!”
Right about then they hear a blast of hooting and honking. It’s the four misshapen Iravs themselves, peering back at them from a bend in the road ahead. They’ve been waiting there in their stolen car. Evidently, they want to gauge the effect of what they wrote on the toadstool. And they’re eager to goad their pursuers even more.
Scud can see from here that the disembodied pair of Irav legs has grown a pair of eyes in his thighs, and a mouth in his crotch. Call him the legs-Irav. The chunk of torso with an arm has formed a slit mouth and a pair of eyes in his chest. Call him the chest-Irav. The scrap of torso with a shoulder, an arm without a hand, and the original head—he’s the head-Irav. The free hand is still here too, the hand-Irav, looking pretty hefty. Perhaps the hand-Irav has grown an eye and a mouth? Hard to see, as he moves so fast—like a fat tarantula scrambling across the dash and seat-tops of the stolen Szep convertible.
Scud would really, really like to kill that hand. The hand-Irav is the one who stole the caraway seeds that were supposed to pave their way when they got to Szep City. Which is still one hell of a long way off. Hard to believe they’ll ever get there.
As before, the Iravs make rude gestures. And now they’re hollering what must be curses. They have very high voices.
“They’re talkin’ Szep,” says Pinchley, cocking his head. “But they got a weird accent. And they’re makin’ filthy insults.”
Focusing on his teep, Scud can just manage to decipher what Pinchley hears the Iravs as saying. They’re telling Pinchley that he’s a parasitic intestinal worm perched atop a fresh-laid turd.
“Skorkers!” cries Pinchley, losing his cool and dropping into the Szep tongue himself. “Drive, Scud! And Meatball, get ready to zap those sneevers where it hurts!”
“Why we no got gun, Pinchley?” Yampa asks Pinchley. “No sneever-shooter in our stash, for why?”
“I did bring a poison toad,” says Pinchley.
“Guns are snug,” says Yampa, pointing one of her fingers. “Boom! Why we mooch along so mild?”
“This way it’s more of a—challenge,” says Pinchley. “Doing a million mile road trip unarmed. This way we have to do wilder moves. I like that.”
“Irresponsible idiosyncratic irresistible idiot,” says Yampa. “My partner Pinchley.”
They’re in the whale and rolling again, and the Iravs have sped another few bends down the road. The giant saucer Poppo is gone. The car comes to a miles-long straightaway through a grassy prairie. Way up ahead the Iravs pause, flaunting themselves and making obscene signs. Scud can teep the slyness and the low cunning in their minds, but he can’t make out what precise trick they’re planning to pull.
Meatball is ready to help the kids—her body crackles with dark energies. She has a fat pseudopod sticking out of the roof’s hole between the surfboards. She’s prepared to pulse a jolt at anything that physically attacks the car, anything that’s smaller than a giant saucer, that is. The chase is still on. Scud rockets forward, the Iravs take off, and the jungle closes in on both sides.
Now it’s time for a giant jungle Thudd. He steps forth from the tree ferns beside the road ahead. He has high thighs, a restless meaty tail, and finicky forelimbs folded high on his chest. His head is like a tractor-trailer truck with saber-sized alligator teeth. In anticipation of a tasty kill, he leans back his head and does his roar.
Scud gooses the purple whale’s engine and shoots past the Thudd before the monster can fully block the road. “Lost him!” Scud prematurely cries.
“You’ll be surprised how fast the damn animals can move here,” says Pinchley, looking out the back window. “We got our own kinds of natural laws.”
Thus begins a five-hour chase across two thousand miles. As the end nears, full night has come on. The glowons dim as they settle onto the dirt and the plants. The jungle and the interspersed savannahs are pale ghosts of themselves. The only spots of color are in creatures’ eyes—luminous eyes in the trees, on the vines, under the bushes, on the prairies. Yellow, puce, and violet eyes.
Scud depends heavily on his teep slug for navigation. He avoids the minds to the sides of the road and aims for the thoughts of the fleeing Iravs. Not that he can see very deeply into their minds. They have a mirrored, reflective quality that, Scud now realizes, reminds him of Meatball’s consciousness. Might the Iravs be shapeshifting Freeths? But the Iravs don’t fly, and Meatball does. Things make less sense a
ll the time.
Be that as it may, for now Scud’s main job is to stay ahead of the relentless Thudd. The monster guides himself by sound and smell, and perhaps he has night vision. Now and then he stumbles off the path with a crash and a chagrined bellow, and when that happens, Scud is able to gain some ground. In the occasional stretches of savannah, Scud extends his lead by driving a frenzied, reckless thousand miles per hour, at least for short bursts, with the car all but airborne, bouncing from tuft to hummock to swale.
But the Thudd always catches up. He’s like a monster in a nightmare, like a lumbering Frankenstein who never sleeps. The Thudd is obsessed with them. It’s like having a kaiju chase your car from New York to San Francisco. Soothed by the fact that Scud has his teep working for him, Villy ends up sleeping through the whole thing, but Zoe and the others stay alert. There’s one particularly close call when the Thudd actually claws the back of the car. Meatball sends an arm of slime through the hole in the roof and past the surfboards. This time her zap has its intended effect. The Thudd collapses with a meaty shriek of pain—wonderful sound. But half an hour later, the alien dino’s on their butt again, and it’s only Meatball’s power of zap that keeps them alive.
Zoe reaches her breaking point. She gets out her saucer pearl, brings her trumpet to her lips, and toots her special tune. Observing her via teep, Scud senses that the connection isn’t there. The pearl doesn’t turn transparent. It doesn’t become an unny tunnel gate. They really have come too far. Scud senses Zoe’s sense of despair. But then the Thudd trips over a herd of wildly squealing pig-tapirs and the great beast pauses to devour them. Maybe fate’s on their side.
Finally, they’re tear-assing up the final steep patch of road that leads to Galactic Pass—at the far side of the Thuddland basin. Scud hopes something is going to change up there. The Thudd thunders at their heels. Meatball pokes a pseudopod body out through the car’s roof hole yet again, and fires more bolts of dark energy. But these zaps don’t amount to much. Meatball’s power is running low. All Scud can do is drive faster.
Steering mostly on instinct, Scud wallows the whale past a stand of especially large starstones and into the saddle of Galactic Pass. Gigantically, ponderously, the Thudd leaps through the air towards them, ready for the final kill, and—
He slams into an invisible wall. A beautiful crunchy thud, a heart-warming bellow of pain. The starstones have thrown up a force field. They’re more than wadded-up star fields. Just as the Szep and that guy in the Borderslam Inn had hinted, the starstones can function like club bouncers, barring the most obstreperous guests.
“Thank you!” says Scud, pulling the whale to a stop. He’s numb and shaky. Up ahead of them, the crazy, misbegotten Iravs are already driving down into another basin, like a car full of evil, indestructible clowns. Scud just stares after them, his body slack. He’s utterly wiped. Jungle landscapes stream inside his eyes. He can’t drive another inch. But he doesn’t like to admit it. Using his teep, he nudges brother Villy—who’s been asleep for about five hours.
“Let’s stop for the night,” is the first thing Villy says, and that’s just what Scud wants to hear. “I need some peaceful sleep,” says Villy. “We don’t want to barrel into some other goddamn basin in the dark, do we?” He stretches and looks around. Once again, the air is thin and cold. “You did good, huh, Scud?”
“What’s in that next basin?” Scud asks the two Szep.
“Alien ants,” says Yampa, sniffing the air. “Smell them? Like vinegar. Alien ants and aphids and anteaters with white patches like diapers.”
“We’ll be taking the other basin, though,” says Pinchley. “This is another three-way junction, you understand. A monkey saddle.”
“Monkey?” goes Villy.
“He’s talking about a shape,” says Scud. “It’s math. A saddle with, like, a third trough for an imaginary monkey’s tail.”
“Wait,” says Villy. “I thought we were chasing the Irav to get back our caraway seeds.”
“Screw the Irav for now,” says Pinchley. “The point is to get to Szep City. And it’s shorter through that third basin. Also I don’t like ants. And you know those frikkin Irav are hell-bent on messing with us. For sure we’ll see them again. And that’s when we’ll get back our seeds.”
“What’s in the third basin?” asks Zoe. “The one that’s not ants.”
“You’ll see tomorrow,” says Pinchley, doing his stupid mysterioso routine. “Your boyfriend’s gonna flip.”
“Who says he’s my boyfriend?” says Zoe, shooting Villy a look.
Villy isn’t paying the right kind of attention. “Zoe and I will sleep in the car’s front seat,” he says. “Pinchley and Yampa in the back seat. Scud and Meatball in the rear. Move it, Scud.”
“I am not going in the pig’s nest,” wails Scud. “It would be sad there with no Nunu. Anyway, I drove all day. I deserve the front seat all to myself.” He knows he sounds bratty, but he’s not going to be pushed around.
“Oh god,” says Zoe. “Let’s just sleep outside on the ground, okay Villy?”
“Backpacker-style,” says Villy. “Could be rad. Keeping in mind that it’s like the high Sierras in these passes. We can expect insane wind, and subzero cold, and we’ll be lying on sharp stones. But that’s fine—just so precious Scuddy is happy.” He pauses. “I wonder if Pinchley here can—”
“Yaar,” goes Pinchley, as if reading Villy’s mind. “I got the kit. My water-balloon worm will make you a quantum-shock pad, and my spider tool can weave you a tarp for a tent. We’ll make a lean-to against one of those starstone sentinel rocks. Won’t take but a minute. You’ll see a glow from, like, the Horsehead Nebula inside that rock, no doubt.”
“Romance,” says Zoe with a hopeful smile. “About time.”
“Have fun,” says Scud, trying to sound like he understands that other people have feelings. Wearing that teep slug on his wrist continues to make the process easier. But Scud’s own comfort still comes first. “Toss me a blanket and a pillow, will you, Yampa?”
Scud conks out on the front seat and dreams of Nunu.
17: Surf World
VILLY
It’s dark on the ridge, with exquisite glows of starry light from the stones. Exciting. And in the distance, off to the left, Villy can hear—
“Surf?” he asks Pinchley.
“You know it, brah. You gonna get some extreme action when the light comes up.”
“Big waves?”
“Planetary, my man. They got wall waves a mile high.”
Villy has half a mind to go stumbling towards the roar, but Zoe wraps both arms around his waist. Like she’s anchoring a zombie. The cutting wind is back.
“Make our tent?” Zoe says to Pinchley.
“You got it,” says the friendly Szep. He hunkers down beside the most imposing of the stones. Villy catches a glimpse of the balloon thing and the green spider.
And then Pinchley’s done, and Zoe leads Villy into a freshly assembled lean-to. They lie down on the invisible mat of a quantum shock absorber. The starstone and the shaped spider silk shield them from the wind. They have their quilts from the car. The bower is gently lit by the Horsehead Nebula. Or whatever you want to call that apparition inside the crystalline rock. The quantum-shock mat is firm and warm. Score.
“You’re beautiful,” Zoe whispers to Villy, smiling up at him from within the circle of his arms. But, as always, there’s something a bit sly about her. Awaiting his move. Two or three steps ahead of whatever he plans. Never mind.
He kisses her for a while, and it’s good. He slides his hand under her shirt, and that’s okay. She’s with him when they slip off their jeans. But when he puts his hand between her legs, she says no.
“We’ve got time, Villy. Don’t spoil it.” Girl talk. Spoil? Her breath is warm in his ear.
“What if we die tomorrow?” goes Villy. “Fried by the saucers.”
“Then it won’t matter either way.”
Villy doesn’t reall
y mind being pushed back. Obviously, he has to try. And he’ll try again tomorrow. But right now, relax.
“This trip,” says Zoe after a bit. “It’s so much more intense that I could have imagined.”
“Too true,” says Villy. “I thought we’d be eating corn and fried pork chops in Kansas. Camping by a bend in a lazy river.”
“Maybe we should turn around now?” says Zoe. “We went over the Borderslam Pass like you wanted, and we saw all of Thuddland today, but couldn’t that be—”
“I don’t want to bail,” says Villy. “I mean, I’ve given up so many times in my life. And there’s gonna be surf tomorrow, right? And there’s this angle that we might save the Earth. And—”
“It’s so insanely dangerous here,” says Zoe. “And if we do the whole crazy million mile drive to Szep City, that means we’ll hit, like, two hundred more basins on the way.”
“And we barely survived the first two basins,” says Villy. “I get your point. But you can always save us, right? With your trumpet and your pearl?”
“Not from this far,” says Zoe. “I tested it in Thuddland. You were totally asleep, but when the Thudd nearly caught up with us, I tried to open up the unny tunnel, and it didn’t work at all. I’m really not suicidal, you know. That’s a pose. Please understand that.”
“If you had crawled back through the tunnel would you have taken me along?”
“I think so. Sure. But right now, that’s not an option. We’re too far. So now I’m thinking maybe we drive back to Van Cott?”
A fresh wave of fatigue hits Villy like a heavy drape. “Hush and cuddle,” he says. Zoe wriggles onto her side, and he spoons himself against her back. “Gotta do the Surf World basin at least,” he says.
“We’ll talk,” says Zoe, her voice rising at the end. She’s clearly jazzed about being in bed together. “We’re two bad mice,” she murmurs. “In a cute dollhouse. We’ll chew up everything in sight.”
“Squeak,” says Villy. And then he’s asleep.
When he wakes, the glowons are doing their thing, shedding pale daylight across the Galactic Pass. Zoe’s standing outside the lean-to, playing a bebop reveille on her horn. Villy rises and joins her beside the slanting sheet of spider silk. Zoe stops playing and hands him a food mint.