Million Mile Road Trip

by Rudy Rucker

  Zoe shrieks in fear and fury. Perhaps the saucer means to fire again, but for the moment it’s just wallowing there, halfway out of the water, off balance and bloated from feeding all day. Zonked on smeel. Doesn’t have its shit together. The kids have a chance to attack. A window of opportunity.

  “Kill it, Zoe!” screams Villy. “Ram the saucer!”

  And here to aid them are those alien narwhals, swimming towards the half-submerged saucer with their tusks held high!

  Zoe revs the paddle-wheels once again. The purple whale skims across the ziggurat terrace, goes briefly airborne, and tears into the saucer at two hundred miles an hour.

  At the moment of impact, the space inside the passenger compartment stiffens up again, same as it did when Villy rolled the car at Borderslam Pass. They’re safe inside a buffer of that Truban inertia gel. And once they’ve come to rest, the space relaxes. So, cool.

  Zoe’s getting all creative now, doing rapid donuts and figure eights on the body of the leech saucer, chewing up as much acreage as she can. Saucer lymph all over the place. A smell of fish and mold. The narwhals are in the mix too. They’re feeding within the monster’s flesh like two-ton worms.

  The mortally wounded saucer flaps in spasms. It lifts itself twenty yards into the air, shudders, collapses into the sea, goes limp. Zoe guides their car free of the remains. Meanwhile the ziggurat wave has chuffed far past them, leaving an empty wake. A random pup-tent wave ripples across the car’s roof and hood and across the surfboards, rinsing away the gore.

  Scores of narwhals are feeding upon the saucer’s deflated flesh, tearing off chunks of meat and fat. Great schools of smaller fish twinkle in the pellucid water, feeding on congealed tendrils of blood. Hundreds of hefty crabs busy themselves at the saucer’s center, devouring the tissues with mandible and claw.

  A twinkling cloud of smeel rises from the saucer’s exhausted remains and releases a fine mist of vivifying rain. A final bubble of gas blorps from the vast corpse. Slowly, and with an evil majesty, the great form heels to one side and descends into the abyss.

  Only one sign of the oppressive monster remains—an opalescent ball the size of a softball, bobbing upon the surface of the sea. The creature’s saucer pearl. Meatball—who’s been safely out of the picture—drops from the sky like a falcon, meaning to snatch the prize. But the narwhals are faster. A big one with dotted spots on his back seizes the pale orb in his mouth and swallows it whole.

  And then, how strange to see, the narwhal rises into the air and hovers, weightless, flapping his tail in glee. A large pearl really does grant the power of levitation. The narwhal’s fellows whistle their approbation. He twists, turns, and dives back into the blue depths. The rest of the horned whales turn flukes and follow.

  Villy and his party are alone in the great lagoon, with the living waves around the edges jostling in. Zoe slumps wearily in her seat, letting the car engine idle.

  “Zoe zoo zone!” says Yampa, unconcerned with making sense.

  “See now, honey,” Pinchley tells Yampa, wobbling his chin as if in senile glee. “It’s fun with no gun.”

  Meatball oozes in through the side window and resumes her perch in the back of the car.

  “What the hell were you doin’ up there?” Pinchley asks the Freeth. “Calling the shots for that saucer?”

  “I retreated as a matter of prudence,” says Meatball, going for a careless tone. “I confess I had some doubts about how the confrontation might play out. I must say I’m sorely miffed that I failed to acquire that large saucer pearl.”

  Villy isn’t much paying attention to Meatball. Zoe looks so beautiful to him just now, so smart and powerful, her eyes so full of life. He leans into the front seat and kisses her. “You’re a goddess,” he tells her. “I love you.”

  Maybe that’s more than is safe to say—but he means it.

  “So saucer pearls really are for flying?” Scud asks Pinchley, wanting to be the center of attention as usual. “As well as making unny tunnels?”

  “Whoops!” says Villy, dragging Scud over the back of the front seat and scrambling up there to take his place. “My turn in front!”

  “No fair!” howls Scud. Zoe and Villy are already sharing another hug.

  “You was asking about saucer pearls,” Pinchley says to Scud, who’s next to him now. “And, yeah, they’re good for unny tunnels, and for flying, and for the power of the zap.”

  “Where can I get one?” asks Scud.

  “From dead saucers is a good place,” says Pinchley. “Like you just saw. Also, believe it or not, folks can harvest saucer pearls from a certain spot back in your Los Perros. They grow like mushroom puffballs on muddy ground. Or, yet again, a saucer might give you a pearl. If you was an agent workin’ for them.”

  Yampa cranks her weird neck around and glares into the pig’s nest. “A mercenary mooch like Meatball maybe.”

  “I’ll thank you not to nose into my personal affairs,” says Meatball, very snippy. “As for you, Yampa, I rather doubt you’d have the mental capacity to use a saucer pearl for any of its higher functions. If you had a saucer pearl you’d be like a dog chewing the leather cover of a book.”

  “I raise my longest finger in salute, oh, Great Lady of the Royal Buttbite,” Pinchley says to Meatball. “And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

  “So sorry,” says Meatball in a frosty tone. “I’m not ready to leave. I’d like a ride to shore. But I’ll keep mum if you find me so galling.”

  “What was that big saucer doing here in the first place?” Scud asks Pinchley. Once again he’s into his robotic question-asking routine.

  “Them tanker-leech saucers sneak over to Surf World from New Eden and guzzle smeel from the Flatsies’ sea,” says Pinchley. “They slosh around in the water and tank up. The smeel gets them buzzed. When they rise up and go to wallow home—the Flatsies say that’s a good time to rip into one.”

  “Why?” persists Scud.

  “Wake up, kid. Everyone hates them parasite saucers.”

  Villy and Zoe are tuning out most of this. Villy’s staring into Zoe’s face, drinking her in. Zoe takes Villy’s face in her hands and kisses him.

  “I’d so hate for our lives to end,” she says. “Just when we two are getting started.”

  “Faint heart never won the battle!” butts in Meatball from the back of the car. So much for her keeping mum. “Soldier on, Zoe Snapp.”

  “What a crock,” says Zoe to Villy, not even bothering to turn around and look at the Freeth. “According to Meatball, it was gonna be safer down here than up on the ridge. According to Meatball, there were saucers and a Thudd on the cliff.” Her voice is rising. “Know what? I call bullshit on that. And—how convenient—Meatball was way up high in the air when that big vampire saucer down here was trying to blast us.”

  Meatball addresses her next remark to Villy. “Your sweetheart has a case of the heebie-jeebies, young man. The whim-whams. Quiet her down.”

  “You have a stupid accent,” Villy tells Meatball. “And I hate you.” The car falls silent.

  “That line is destined for the Cambridge Compendium of Clever Comebacks,” Zoe remarks after a bit. “So vitty he is, my Villy!”

  Meanwhile the purple whale is still adrift in the calm patch left behind by the giant saucer.

  “Which way is Flatsie Pass?” Villy asks the group at large.

  “That way,” says Scud, pointing somewhat towards the right. “I can just barely teep the Flatsie village. Really far. But my teep slug works better here than in Van Cott. More ambient smeel.”

  “You the man,” says Villy, reaching into the back seat to give his brother five. “Sorry about unseating you.”

  “You’re not sorry at all,” says Scud. “Never mind. Have you guys noticed there’s teep slugs in the water here? Pastel slugs with feelers at one end. Some of them are pretty big.”

  “Surf World is their home,” says Pinchley. “That’s why you see the Surf World Flatsies
selling those slugs in Van Cott.”

  “Why don’t you and Yampa wear teep slugs like me?” asks Scud.

  “Pinchley can’t bear being bothered by my musings,” says Yampa. “He shields his self.”

  “And why no slug for you?” presses Scud.

  “A slinky seductress has sex secrets,” says the rawhide-tough Szep with a toss of her thin head. It’s very hard for Villy to visualize her involved in sly passionate love affairs.

  Anyway, with the ziggurat and the saucer gone, waves are moving into the smeel-rich waters around the becalmed purple whale. Combers, pup tents, puffballs, ziggurats, and—

  “A corkscrew?” says Zoe. “Look at that. It’s like a corkscrew lying on its side. And those slanting waves are its blades. All made of water?”

  “Ride it!” says Pinchley. “Those twisty suckers can carry you a thousand miles non-stop express. Get the car up to speed, Zoe, and edge onto a blade of that corkscrew while it’s drilling by.”

  “Yah, mon,” goes Zoe. “Even though I have the whim-whams.”

  Meatball remains silent. She’s sulking. Villy is glad.

  The corkscrew wave is a half-submerged helix, with its central axis on the surface. A low bulge runs down the axis of the corkscrew, like the shaft of a ship’s propeller, and the helix is like a ship propeller’s screw. The slanting, rotating faces are linked by powerful underwater currents. The visible sections of the blades form a wave-train many miles long.

  Zoe has more than a little trouble getting the whale onto one of the blade-waves. At one point the car is totally submerged again, tumbling at random like a surfer in a wipeout.

  Villy itches to take the wheel, but he lets Zoe persist. And, who knows, he might not do any better. Eventually Zoe finds a sweet spot. The car is endlessly sliding down a glassy face whose vortical motion is lifting them as fast as they descend. It’s like trotting down an up escalator. Zoe puts the paddle-wheels on idle, and they zone out for three or four hours, covering well over a thousand miles.

  “Is rudeboy ready to ride?” says Yampa eventually. “Wall waves coming up.” She’s leaning forward from the back seat to put her head right into Villy’s face. She’s parroting Villy’s surf slang. As usual, she smells like curry and gasoline.

  “I guess.”

  “Buk-buk-bwawk,” goes Yampa, imitating a chicken.

  And now Villy sees the giant moving walls of water. This is it. “Okay,” he tells Yampa. “We’ll do it. Zoe can tow us in.”

  “Righteous,” says Yampa. “Ready the ropes, Pinchley mine.”

  Pinchley produces his green spider, and the indefatigable tool critter spins out a pair of lines that Pinchley rolls into two coils, each with a spider-woven tow handle on one end.

  “Need foot straps, too,” says Villy.

  Pinchley’s tire-making marker bird pops his head out of the tool belt and coughs out four excellent padded foot straps with sticky fasteners. Easily on par with primo Dakine tow-board gear.

  They’re approaching those towering wall waves very fast. In fact, the first of them fills the entire horizon. Although it’s moving away from them, the forward-drilling corkscrew wave is faster. Indeed, up ahead of them, the foremost part of the corkscrew wave has already drilled through the first wall wave.

  Villy forms a plan. He and Yampa will jump into the water before the wall wave, and the car can sling them onto the great wall. They’ll shoot upward, and the car will ride the corkscrew through the base of the wall.

  “That wave is gonna to have a tube on its front side,” says Villy. “Up at the top, where it curves over. We’ll shoot that tube, right, Yampa? Mucho smeel in there. The one true light.”

  “Yah, mon,” goes Yampa. She tosses the two loops of spider rope over her shoulder and grabs the foot straps with one of her complex hands. She gives Pinchley a hug and opens her window. With surprising nimbleness, she crawls onto the roof of the car with the boards.

  Meanwhile Zoe’s holding a steady course on the slope of the corkscrew wave. Only minutes till they pass through the wall wave’s base.

  “So, uh, goodbye for now,” Villy tells Zoe. “Right before you punch through the wave, be sure to veer. So that you, like, slingshot us?”

  “You’ll fall down off that big wave. It’s too steep to climb.” She gives a nervous giggle. “You’ll be skittish as a hog on ice.”

  “The wave will have a current in it,” says Villy, hoping this is true. “And, um, surface tension. We’ll be water-striders on an upwards waterfall. The wave is alive. It’ll want to carry us. For kicks.”

  “Don’t go.”

  Villy can think of no better response than to quote his song. “I’m gonna face the reaper and help my posse rave. I’m an epic bad-ass surfer who’s gonna make the save.”

  Again Zoe giggles.

  “Too corny?” goes Villy.

  “No idea,” says Zoe. “My head is exploding.” She’s flicking her eyes between Villy and the nearing wall wave. “How will we find each other afterwards?”

  “No sweat,” says Pinchley from the back seat. “Yampa and Villy ride that gigundo wobbler as far as they can. Meanwhile Zoe and the rest of us ride the corkscrew to shore. And we meet at the Flatsies’ village. Beach party.”

  “I’ll be able to locate everyone with my teep,” says Scud.

  “And if there’s a prob, the gingerbread men can round us up,” says Pinchley. “Them Flatsies surf these smeely waves real slick.”

  “I’ll be an observation blimp,” declares Meatball. “A spotter.” She synthesizes a jolly chuckle, but nobody responds. “Villy, I pardon you for your rude remark,” Meatball adds after a bit. “It won’t do to part on a sour note—if this should be the end.”

  “Whatev,” says Villy, completely uninterested in Meatball’s mind games. He levers himself out his window. Take one last look at Zoe. Sees stark sorrow on her face.

  “Hey,” he says to her softly. “I’m gonna shred this wave. And tonight we’ll sleep together. For real.”

  “If only,” says Zoe. Her hair flutters in the wind. She fastens her eyes on his. “My Villy.”

  At this point Yampa grabs Villy’s hand and yanks him onto the roof. The skanky Szep is stronger than she looks. And more organized. She’s already attached the straps to the boards and she’s tied the two tow lines to the whale’s roof rack. The big wall is coming up fast.

  Scud leans out the window for a farewell look at his older brother. “You’re brave,” he says.

  “Thanks, Scud.”

  Villy snugs his feet into his foot straps, grabs one of the spider-woven tow handles, and—yeek—he hops off the tilting roof of the car.

  The water hisses beneath his speeding board. He hunches and sways, feeling for the one true line of optimal motion. He’s tobogganing down the steep pitch of the corkscrew wave, with the purple whale still ahead of him. Behind him, Yampa lets out an exultant, ululating cry.

  Even in this intense moment, the Surf World light makes things look mellow and somehow nostalgic. As if this scene is something he’s remembering back home, years from now, a doddering forty-year-old. The greatest ride of my life. Glancing down at his feet, Villy sees that a sizable teep slug has just now affixed itself to his ankle. An orange nudibranch with a cluster of lavender feelers. Let it be.

  The plan is to have the car’s tow rope fling them off the edge of the helix blade so fast they’ll coast onto the big wall. The otherworldly wall wave makes a creepy sound—a deep, endless roar, like the soundtrack in a horror film just before some mind-destroying monster appears. But that’s just a sound. The teep, on the other hand, is good.

  Thanks to his new slug, Villy is mentally in touch with the waves. The corkscrew is purposeful, gleeful, and happy about drilling through the immense wall. As for the wall itself—it’s chanting a single cosmic Om, or some such—a sacred syllable with no beginning and no end. Like the starstones. Also, Villy senses that, beneath the Om, the wall wave is mildly amused. Like a woman noticing two ti
ny ants on her nail-polished toe. Ants with nearly invisible antennae.

  Focus! Villy tells himself. Hold the tow handle tight!

  And just as he thinks that, zonng, the slack plays out and the tow rope is like a steel cable, with drops of water flying off it. Zoe is accelerating outward across the blade of the wave. Villy clings to the tow handle for all he’s worth. It feels like it’s pulling his arms from his sockets.

  He catches a glimpse of Zoe’s determined face glancing back at them from the car up ahead. He can’t wave, but he nods. He can’t believe he’s doing this. Zoe is rushing down the corkscrew blade’s slope, steadily angling away from the corkscrew’s axis. In her wake, Villy and Yampa sluice up great fountains of water.

  And now the surfers are approaching the edge of the helical wave—nearing its sharp cusp, woven from a hundred thousand flow lines. Abruptly Zoe cuts back towards the axis of the traveling wave. Like she’s cracking a whip. The whip is Villy’s tow line, and the tip is him. As he reaches edge of the wave, he bends his knees and jumps, carrying his board with him. He releases his hold on the tow line. Yampa does the same. They’re on their own, thrown like stones from catapults.

  Villy sails through the air for maybe a hundred yards, then slaps down and goes skimming across the eerily calm patch before the sky-high water wall. The patch slopes slightly upward. He’s is going faster than he thought humanly possible. His brain can’t keep up. His body is doing the thinking.

  Come to me, says the mighty wall wave.

  Villy crouches low. It’s hard for him to see, what with the stinging spray in his eyes, but his teep is helping. He feels and hears a rapid chatter of pulses from the water’s washboard surface. The sound is echoed by Yampa’s board nearby.

  And then they’re on the vertical face of the spooky Om wave and it has a flow to it, and a special kind of surface tension—just as Villy hoped. The wave’s internal currents raise him up and up and up, like a mother lifting her child. And Yampa’s still beside him.