by Rudy Rucker
“Behold the Valley of the Ants,” she says, gesturing to the right. She’s chirpy and fey. Seems like for the moment she’s put her fears away. “How would you like to go down there?”
Villy sees hundreds of the ants from here, shiny colored critters crawling on muddy nests. Some of the anthills are shaped like sandcastles, and some have the form of gothic cathedrals with balconies and hidey-holes and lacy passageways, all of mud. Among the anthills are gardens of tan moss and fungus, edged by clusters of dun aphids. A wild twittering drifts up from the Valley of the Ants. Also the smell of pickles.
“Is there such a thing as brown light?” Villy asks Zoe. “Ant light.”
“But the ants themselves are like brooches made of precious gems,” says Zoe.
“They bite,” says Villy. “And four Iravs are down there waiting to jump us. I’m not going into the Valley of the Ants.”
Zoe laughs, unsurprised. She’s definitely in an up mood. “No ants? Well, that means you’re today’s radio KFJC dream surfari winner!” She’s using a college-radio-deejay voice. She gestures grandly to the left. “You’re going to Surf World, Mr. Villy Antwerpen of Los Perros, California!”
Yes. The Surf World basin is edged with huge, crumbly cliffs and a wide beach. And from there on out, it’s nothing but sea—filled with bizarre, unnatural surf. Monstrous glassy combers, lively pup-tent waves scooting off at angles, and—in the distance—waves like pyramids with staircases on their sides. And out past the horizon, if Pinchley is to be believed, they’ll find unimaginably high walls of water, thin and wobbly, steaming along like express trains.
“So—you and I will ride those on our boards?” says Villy, still not sure if Zoe is serious about going along with his big plan.
“Me, I’m staying in the car all day,” says Zoe. “It’s my turn to drive. But you, Villy, you’ve got to surf. That’s who you are. It’s why you’re here.” And she means it.
“Yaar,” says Villy, covering his fear and excitement with a facade of brain-dead surfer cool. “Tasty tubes.”
Their gang is gearing up to go. At the cliff’s edge, Yampa takes a picture of Scud and Pinchley standing under the massively tweaked purple whale. The car’s frame is nearly twenty feet off the ground.
Scud proudly tells Villy that he still has his starstone. He let it sit next to one of the sparkling elder starstones for a while this morning and, according to Scud, his pet stone made a personal decision to stay with Scud for now. Supposedly it likes him.
Meatball is gung-ho about crossing Surf World. “Far more suitable than the Valley of the Ants,” she opines. “Surf World is optimal.” She hovers high in the air, flexing her body against the steady wind. Big beaky birds fly by in lines, like biker gangs on a run.
“The waves are going the wrong way,” Zoe now observes. “Did anyone notice that?”
Um, yes, most of the waves are rolling outward from the shore to the open sea. Scary and strange. Catch one of those suckers, and you’re not coming back.
“No problemo,” intones Villy, masking his fear. “Easier that way. The idea is to get to the other side of Surf World, right?”
“Come see what we did,” calls Scud from under the car. “Pinchley made a rudder, and I got him to shape it like a skeg. Like the fin on a surfboard?”
“I hope it rotates,” says Villy. “We’d want to maneuver.”
“Pinchley knows that,” says Scud. “He’s been here before. Just come and look, Villy.”
Villy knows his little brother is hungry for praise. So why deny him? Why be a prick all the time? Especially if you’re about to die. The rudder is in fact very nice. It’s like half of a boomerang, a shiny, fifteen-foot rudder that sweeps back from the underside of the purple whale. Quantum vortex tubes connect it to the car’s steering system.
“Excellent,” says Villy.
“We rode through Surf World on the way here,” says Pinchley at Scud’s side. “Only we didn’t go through Galactic Pass.”
“Did you like Surf World?” asks Villy. “Do you surf?”
“At home, I ride the sky. We have this permanent gale, high above Szep City, a windy layer between us and a cloud that’s thousands of miles high. You can skysurf the gale when you’re there. And you’ll want to see the cloud above the gale too. That’s where Goob-goob lives.”
“One freakshow at a time,” says Villy, waving off the chatty Szep.
He makes the trek up to the whale’s roof rack so he can check the two surfboards. Villy’s red one has a funky crufty patch from Pinchley’s trowel tool. He pushes the patch hard, testing its strength.
“Quark bonds,” Pinchley says from below. “The best.”
“I just hope my board’s soul didn’t leak out,” says Villy. He’s half joking, but he kind of means it. “I’ve ridden it so much that I feel like it’s alive.”
“Got you covered,” says Pinchley. “I honked some smeel outta my nose and rubbed it onto your board’s repair patch. This red mofo’s soul is whole.”
The Surf World light is a honeyed gold, like the light you get in Santa Cruz an hour before sunset. As for the surf—the waves keep looking bigger, though from up here it’s hard to judge their size, given that their shapes are so strange.
There’s no consistent swell, and the waves surge through each other, with no apparent regard for physical law. Staring at them does something unpleasant to Villy’s head. In the weirdness of the moment, he feels like everyone’s voice has gone high and tiny, and like he’s seeing through binoculars turned the wrong way.
“Too gnarly?” says Pinchley, waggling his lower jaw in a savage Szep grin. “Know something else about them waves? They alive.”
“You mean alive in the broad, stoner sense that everything is alive?” says Villy, trying to sound all ironic and calm.
“Alive in the sense that the Surf World ocean is ten percent smeel,” says Pinchley. “A cocktail of consciousness, old son. Trippiness a la carte.”
Zoe is perched in the driver’s seat, looking cute and petite. “Let’s go!” she calls. “Meatball spotted a track that goes down to the beach.”
“Hey, I’m supposed to be the driver!” yells Scud.
“Not today,” says Zoe calmly.
“I want a picture of the boys with the boards,” says Yampa, holding her hands by her head and rocking her skinny body back and forth. “Surfari shot. Get the blue board, Scud, and stand with your brother.”
So they do that. Click.
“Scud’s going to suuuurf!” calls Zoe from the car. Sweetening her voice and warbling the last word. Mocking Villy’s little brother again. “This is going to be such the epic day,”
“Not going to ride,” Scud mutters to Villy. “Don’t want to learn. I’ll navigate. Me and my teep.” He drops Villy’s blue board roughly onto the ground and scrambles into the front seat of the car next to Zoe.
“I doubt I’ll ride either,” Zoe calls down to Villy. “Not in this mess.”
“So I’ll surf,” says Yampa, inquisitively bending over the blue board. “Stand center? Eee-Zee. I’ll virtualize viggy visuals.”
“You mean shoot videos?” says Villy.
“Teep tracks,” says Yampa. “For Lady Filippa’s rug.”
Villy puts the boards back on the roof, and ends up stuck in the back seat with Pinchley and Yampa. At least he gets a window. Meatball squeezes into the pig’s nest. Scud is annoyingly happy to be in front with Zoe. Triumphant almost. Villy would like to choke him from behind.
The winding road down the cliff isn’t bad, given that the cliff is an insane two thousand-foot drop. But others have traveled this path before. And the whale’s immense tires get superb traction. They descend through a series of vegetation zones—lichens, grasses, shrubs, ferns, and fat-leaved succulents akin to ice plants.
Seen from the beach, the waves are ungodly big. Much larger than Villy had estimated from the top of the cliff. The ones he’d been thinking of as pup tents are the size of barns. The combers a
re a hundred feet tall. And the staircase pyramids—they’re the size of villages. There are puffball waves too—great churning spheres upon the water. But he doesn’t yet see the wall waves that Pinchley mentioned. The waves huddle, jostle, consult, and rush out to sea.
Villy and his crew open the car doors. The wall of sound rushes in. The cliffs echo the clashing chatter, doubling its force. Louder than a rock concert. The friends have to yell to talk to each other.
“It’s two or three thousand miles to the pass we want,” Pinchley tells them. “We’re not going straight across the middle of the basin, so it’s not as far as it could be. The place we’re headed is called Flatsie Pass—on account of the Flatsies have a village there. You don’t see them much on this side of the Surf World basin. Too close to New Eden. I’m gonna tweak the tires one more time. Shape all four of em into paddle-wheels. Like we did last time, hey Yampa?”
“Frontwheeler sternwheeler,” sings Yampa. “Waterwheel.”
While they stand on the forlorn beach, Pinchley produces a tool critter shaped like a large clamshell with black edges and runs it across the treads of the tires. Graphene shelves pop out. Not that Villy’s focusing on this. He’s busy staring at the sea.
It’s not remotely like anything he’s ever seen. And the waves do seem alive. Quirky, willful, and no two of them the same. Shape, shade, speed, size—everything’s up for grabs. These waves do what they want.
“I’m teeping them,” hollers Scud. “No words. Feelings and motion. Like body gestures. They sense the car and our boards. They want us.”
“Great,” answers Villy. “I’ll be a tuna in a shark tank.” Increasingly wired, he jounces up and down. The amped Yampa leaps into the air and does a double flip. And Meatball soars back to the top of the cliff. Checking things out.
At Villy’s side, Zoe holds her pearl and plays her trumpet, which is barely audible through the ocean’s roar. Obviously, she’s testing if she can open her unny tunnel. And obviously she can’t. She shakes her head and shoots Villy a look. Looks at the ocean. Looks back at him.
“Don’t,” she shouts. “Let it stop here. We get back home, regroup, and drive to Iowa.”
“Apple pie,” says Villy, halfway to agreeing with her. “Ice cream.”
“Car’s ready!” yells Pinchley, extremely loud. He can puff up his throat like a bullfrog’s. No end to this guy’s weirdness. He’s put fins onto all of the wheels by now. “Them waves aren’t so bad,” he booms. “They’s good old boys and gals. They only act rough cause they shy.”
“Heard that line before,” Villy says to Zoe, putting his mouth right by her ear. The wave sounds are stacking up inside his head. And that last line of Pinchley, it reminds him of the bad time last year after his mother died. He sings a little song, pumping himself up, inventing the words on the spot.
Kid in school picked on me, teacher said bullies are shy.
Kid said I was a mamma’s boy, because he’d seen me cry.
It had only been a month, a short long month, a month since poor Mom died.
I didn’t hit the bully cause that’s not my style, I’m a quiet loner on the side.
But now I’m in the open and I’m ready for a wave.
I’m rocking with my girlfriend and Mom’s one year in the grave.
I’m gonna face the reaper and help my posse rave.
I’m an epic bad-ass surfer who’s gonna make the save.
Villy pauses for breath. He’s got himself so stoked that he’s shaking.
“You’ve got nothing to prove!” Zoe yells at him. “You’re already my hero!” Awkwardly she embraces him, and they’re kissing with their mouths off-center.
And this is when Meatball comes spreading panic, bobbling down from the cliff’s edge. “Saucers up there!” the Freeth booms. “And the giant Thudd got past the starstones! We’ve no choice but to press on, chaps. Do or die!”
“We’ll cross the water!” Villy yells to Zoe. “We can do it. We’ll make it to Flatsie Pass. And then we’ll drive back to Van Cott along the ridges and hop home. I promise!”
He can’t really hear Zoe’s answer above the waves, but her expression is answer enough. She’s on his side. She’s morphing her fear into fire and grit. It’s like Villy and Zoe are undergoing chaos-driven catastrophe-theoretic personality transformations—this being lingo that Villy knows not from science class but from videogames. Zoe flashes a wild smile and makes a steering gesture with her two hands. She’s gonna drive.
Then they’re all in the car again, with the roof hole closed and the windows rolled up tight. Pinchley offers Zoe his carefully thought-out advice about how to launch a paddle-wheel car into massively chaotic surf: “Bomb in there like you batshit crazy, Zee.”
Zoe unleashes a long, rising scream and revs the dark-energy engine to a quark-busting level that sends them tearing across the beach and well into the sea, plowing a gully through the waves. And then a gigundo pup-tent wave blindsides them like a brutal enforcer at a scurvy roller derby. They’re on the point of capsizing. Wearing a thin, abstracted smile, Zoe swings the rudder like she’s been a sailor all her life. She rights the ship—that is, rights the car—then speeds through a jiggly stretch of lively puffball waves and slopes up onto the backside of a monstrous comber rolling away from the shore.
“When you get to top, drop and ride,” counsels Villy, leaning forward from the back seat.
“Yeek yeek!” goes Zoe. She’s laughing and bobbing her head. She looks batshit crazy-as-a-fox, fully into wild-girl mode, and feeling the better for it.
“We’re on,” cries Villy. “Riding the now.”
Zoe churns to the top of the hundred-foot comber, teeters on the lip, and slips onto the tube’s clean, smooth face. With the engine on idle, the purple whale skims endlessly down the self-renewing hill of water. It’s like she’s riding a titan at Mavericks, with no shore-break in sight. Sweet.
For a while all is mellow—the big wave is swallowing everything it hits, sweeping a path through the living sea. The greens and blues of the ocean are beautiful in Surf World’s golden light. The whale rides the wave for nearly two hours and, if you can trust the car’s tweaked speedometer, they’re moving at five hundred miles per. They’ve already covered a thousand miles.
At Zoe’s side, Scud’s got his window wide open, and he’s hanging out like a tongue-lolling dog on a car trip. “Blub, blub, bloo!” yells Scud, wanting to be a cool surfer too. “Here comes a pyramid covered with rice paddies.”
Yes, it’s an immense Incan ziggurat made of smeely seawater, a water-pyramid with stairstep escalators for its sides. It’s five times as high as the enormous comber, and it moves much faster. As the pyramid angles into their big wave, vicious eddies swirl towards the purple whale. The water’s surface is so turbulent that it’s, like, pocked.
Skillful Zoe trims their rudder and jiggers the paddle-wheels until—behold! She’s maneuvered them off their disintegrating wave and onto the rising terraces of the epic ziggurat.
“I say,” Meatball says to Zoe from the pig’s nest, meaning to commend her. “Well done, missy.”
“We’re champions!” screams the overexcited Scud, still hanging out the window. “The wave-tamers.”
“Ride the terraces to the peak,” Villy advises Zoe from the back. “Then gun it down the other side.”
“What a lift,” says Zoe, shooting him the briefest of glances over her shoulder. A pert devil-may-care smile. Okay, fine, Zoe’s not suicidal, but she does have a reckless side. Which is, of course, one reason why she hangs with Villy.
“All set for you and me to surf?” Yampa asks Villy. “We’ll crawl atop the car and go bonkers on our boards.”
“Not yet,” says Villy, feeling a visceral twitch of fear. “Too, um, blown-out. Let’s wait for those big clean walls that Pinchley talked about. Ultra surf.”
The ziggurat picks up speed, swallowing a platoon of mammoth combers. Cathedral-sized pup-tent waves spawn off and come pinballing up the py
ramid’s terraced steps. Zoe is riding the stairs to the top as well.
“Rock it, sock it,” says Pinchley approvingly, “By the way, y’all, we’re flat-out unsinkable with these fatso tires. No matter how deep we sink, we’ll bob back up. But a wave could wash a dumb-ass out one of our car’s windows—if they was greenhorn enough to have the window open and to be leaning out. Talkin’ to you, Scud.” Pinchley pronounces the name like Scuuuuud. He’s steadily amusing himself with his country accent routine.
Scud closes his window just in time. For when they get to the top of the ziggurat, it turns out that the very highest level—the square on the tippy-top—well, it’s a hole, an insane suspense-movie elevator shaft running down into the dim, churning core of the ziggurat. Villy glimpses some things like whales down there, each with a single long horn. Narwhals.
“Jump it!” shrieks Zoe. She floors the accelerator and the responsive dark-energy engine spins the paddle-tires like buzz saws. They rocket upward and arc through the air across the ziggurat’s central hole—
And, um, nosedive into one of the blocky pyramid’s terraces on the other side. They spend a full two minutes underwater, tumbling in the grabby currents. When they bob up, they’re on that same terrace—descending towards sea level at an escalator’s stately pace.
“I’ll nip out and gander what’s in the offing,” says Meatball. She slits Villy’s window partway open and oozes through, drifting high into the air.
As far as Villy can see, the waters ahead hold—not much of anything. It’s a curiously calm zone, the size of Los Perros. Ranged along its edges there lurks a menagerie of living waves, peering in like hungry animals. The pool’s dark, cryptic surface is marked with folds and puckers. Definitely something under there. A giant squid? A primeval kraken?
As if piqued by their arrival, the submerged form flounders upward and—oh shit—it’s a leech saucer that’s nearly as big Poppo and Bombo. A flying, red-eyed, green-bodied, vampire jellyfish. It lurches towards them, rocks back, and fires a white-hot ray that turns the water beside them to steam. The saucers are done with holding back. They know Zoe can’t hop from here.