by Rudy Rucker
“Just wait now,” Pinchley says to Villy and Zoe. “This here’s a fractal ant to help the car remember how it used to be. It’s gonna take us some time to get this trick straight.”
Meanwhile Scud and Yampa are staring into the closest of the new basins. Scud keeps his face blank, trying to hide how badly Zoe hurt his feelings.
“Bobbling ball beings,” says gnarly yellow Yampa, pointing.
It’s light enough for a good look at the Bubble Badlands. It’s a maze of spires and arroyos, vaguely Wild West, but more eroded and with sharper points. Colorful critters bob among the towers and cluster upon the mesa tops.
“Bubblers,” says Scud, wrenching his attention into the now. So good to have something besides Maisie and Nunu and Meemaw and stupid old Kirkland to think about. Focus, Scud. Get out of your head. Forget that Zoe hates you.
These new aliens, they’re just like that bubble man at the Borderslam Inn—he’d called himself Gunnar. The smaller Bubblers are like little balloon animals, and the larger ones are like Chinese dragon kites, made of a dozen or more bubbles each. Each of the bubbles swirls with colored gas, and each Bubbler has a “head” bubble with an eye inside it. Two of the larger Bubblers drift over to Yampa and Scud and, oh my god, one of them actually is Gunnar.
“Scood!” exclaims Gunnar. “Vhat you got to trade?” As before, his head sphere contains pale blue gas along with his wobbly eye. His voice is a sonorous buzz.
“It’s really you?” says Scud. “Gunnar? How did you get here so fast?”
“Qvantum qvick,” says Gunnar. “Please meet my vife Monika.” Monika’s headmost sphere is pink and glistening, like a very large salmon egg. Her eye is softer than Gunnar’s, more humane.
“Trade what for what?” says Scud after introducing Yampa. “In the Borderslam Inn you talked about trading something called a bubblegun?”
“Gotta get a gun,” says Yampa. “Kick crash bash lash.”
“Bubblegun!” exclaims Monika. Her voice is an octave higher than Gunnar’s. “I am toting vun in my hindquarter. Can’t trust vith my husband.” She wags her body and indeed there’s something shifting back and forth inside her rear-most sphere. Thumping her taut hide like a tambourine. She bats her warm eye at Scud. “Zo? Ve make deal? What you got?”
“I have a ballyworld fossil—”
“Wery many fossils here in our canyons,” says Gunnar, cutting off Scud. “Pinchopods, dungosaurs, blahceratops, squatoons, and bone-bones. No vanting more. You know vell vhat we vant.”
“A—a starstone?” says Scud, reluctant to give his up.
“Starstone!” trills Monika. “I am liking vun, yes, you sveet dumbbell, I vant.”
“Why don’t you just collect them from this ridge?” says Scud. He glances around, but now that he looks, there don’t seem to be any starstones here at all.
“Ve ate all,” says Gunnar. “Ve vent vild on the starstones for years, hey Monika? I already told you, Scood, I was supposed to bring new starstone from Borderland Pass this veek. I got vun from dot trapper vith beard, but, vell, I ate the whole starstone alone. Ate all the zuns inside it.”
“Wery greedy boy,” says Monika. “But now vith Scud’s starstone ve can party together like old time.” She’s cheerfully wriggling her chain of spheres.
So it seems like they’re set for a deal, but then a swarm of smaller Bubblers comes flying over from a nearby mesa, clamoring in high thin squeals, circling around Monika, nudging her as if wanting to nurse on her. They resemble toy balloon snowman-figures that a circus clown might make. Cute little guys.
Gunnar, however, is insanely strict with them. Swinging his tail segment, he whacks one of them so hard that the poor little fellow pops. Shrilling in terror, most of others flee. But one of them clings to mother Monika with all his might and main, pressing so hard against her that her skin makes a smorp sound, and then the baby Bubbler is inside one of Monika’s spherical body segments, with his muffled voice sounding through the sphere’s wispy yellow gas.
“Daddy bad!” shrills the tot.
“Too many tchildren,” says Gunnar, twitching his segmented body as if in a shrug.
“You are wery horrible,” Monika tells him. “Vhy I live vith you?”
“Give Scud your bubblegun, then he is giving you his starstone, hunky dory, and you are feeling happy, ja, Monika? Not hard to spawn wery many more small fry if you vant.”
“But that vas Sven-77 you popped. Alvays viggling so cute.”
“Sven-78 is yust as good,” says Gunnar. “Now make vith giving Scud the bubblegun, okay?”
“All right!” yells Monika, angry with Gunnar. She flips her tail forward like a scorpion’s and—the bubblegun flies straight at Scud’s face, going about sixty miles an hour. Fortunately, he’s so wired that he catches the gun in midair.
It’s a plump little derringer, a good fit for his hand, almost like a toy. It’s made of a flexible yellow material like soft plastic, and the yellow is patterned with varicolored polka dots. Scud aims the stubby pistol out over the Bubble Badlands and gives it a squeeze. A firework-gush of bubbles whizzes out, maybe thirty of them, glowing hot, like balls from a Roman candle. On the way down, one of the balls bumps into the cliff below, and it explodes with a heavy concussion that shakes Scud’s feet. Not taking a chance with another collapse, Scud and Yampa scramble over to the midline of the ridge.
“My turn to toot the root,” says Yampa, holding out her hand. Zoe is watching too. Yampa levels a shot at a boulder on the ridge some fifty feet off. The festive bright bubble-sprinkles dynamite the rock to dust.
Meanwhile Villy is over by the car with Pinchley. The trashed whale has its charred passenger cabin in place and its mammoth rear wheels intact. The engine and hood and the front wheels—they’re gone. And the vaunted fractal repair ant is sitting on Pinchley’s hand thinking.
The exploding boulder gets Villy’s attention. “Yah mon,” he whoops. “We’ll be ready when we see Meatball again. Can I try the bubble gun too?”
“Don’t you guys be beatin’ up dust and making a hoo-roar,” says Pinchley. “This here ant’s a-ponderin her specific moves.”
“Aw—”
“You vandering wandals should know dot a bubblegun only shoots five times,” puts in Monika. “You got three shots left.”
Scud quickly recovers the gun from Yampa.
“Fork over starstone now to my vife!” Gunnar tells Scud, going so far as to nudge him with his tail segment. The Bubbler’s touch is unpleasant—it’s like his body carries an electric charge that tingles against Scud’s skin.
Scud fishes the stone out of his knapsack—he’s a little sorry to let it go, given that this sparkly pebble is in fact a mega-light-year volume of star-sprinkled space, warped and twisted into a tiny package. But before he can mull this over any further, Monika has snatched the starstone out of his hand—kind of pinching onto it with a fold in her head sphere. Toothlessly biting it, you might say.
“What will you do with it?” Scud asks. “Use it for jewelry?”
“Hah!” says Monika with her resonant membranes. “Ve gobble it up like smörgåsbord. And have some bliss.”
Monika now makes a gesture that’s hard to understand—it’s like she turns the starstone inside out. In a flash, the entire vast Bubble Badlands basin is filled with bobbling—suns. Little suns. Fortunately, some beneficent mappyworld force is keeping things under control. That is, the unpacked suns aren’t insanely large and hot, no, they’re quite manageable, with each sun about the size of Scud. There’s at the very least a thousand of them, scattered like grains of sand, decorating the Bubble Badlands from hither to yon.
Villy, Zoe, and Yampa stand by Scud’s side, goggle-eyed. But Pinchley is still busy conferring with his crooked ant.
Bubblers emerge from every cranny of the creased Bubble Badlands landscape. A mighty legion of Bubblers. They join in a mass feeding frenzy, pouncing upon the starstone suns, draining energy from the bouncy orbs, growing fat
and bright. Gunnar and Monika are in the thick of it.
One by one, the drained suns shrivel, go dark, and wink out of existence. Scud has to wonder about the mirrored effects of these events on his home universe. Swaths of stars becoming black holes? Nebulae deliquescing to dark dust?
Once the starstone suns are quite gone, the Bubblers switch gears and begin a wild orgy—mating in pairs and triplets and n-tuples. Glittering drifts of spawn spread from the amorous clusters, comprising tens of thousands of new “tchildren.” Slowly the passion ebbs. Scud spots Gunnar and Monika resting upon a nearby mesa. Languidly Monika waves.
“Looks like the party’s over,” says Zoe.
“Wait,” says Scud. “I got a question.” He raises his voice to reach Gunnar. “Did you say you ate a starstone all by yourself at the Borderslam Pass Inn?”
“Ja. Dot’s vhy I vas tired.”
While all this has been going on, Pinchley’s crooked ant has been standing on his fingertip, poised on her six little legs, twitching her feelers, and letting her compound eyes play repeatedly across the remains of the purple whale.
“So how about it?” Villy says to Pinchley. “When’s that ant going to frikkin do something?”
“It’s a matter of refining the quantum vibe, is what you gotta understand,” Pinchley tells him. “It’s like—what’s missing from this picture? This here ant is teeping with the matter-wave souls of me and the car, you see. She’s grooving on our entangled quantum-space history, and—whoa Nellie, here we go!”
The little ant chirps, makes a funny little wiggle—and her antennae thicken up and become small, second-order ants. The antennae of the second-order ants shape themselves into third-order ants, whose antennae plump into fourth-order ants, and they’re off to the races.
In seconds the one ant has turned into a branching fractal tree of—maybe not infinitely many ants, but sure enough a huge buttload of them. It’s like a wobbly broom. Delicately, Pinchley pinches the rear gaster segment of the original ant between thumb and forefinger. The multiply branched antennae of the ant are like a tiny whiskbroom that Pinchley now brushes across the ruined front end of the purple whale. It’s like Pinchley’s holding a magic paintbrush made of quantum matter-printing ants—a purposeful formic fractal.
A few minutes later, the engine is going vooo-don and va-vooo-don again. Just like back in Villy and Scud’s garage. It’s all good. The narwhals killed Uncle Boldog, Scud has a cool gun with three shots left, the Bubblers ate a galactic subsector’s worth of stars, and the purple whale’s standing proud on four fat tires, ready to run the ridge. And Pinchley’s even cleaned those bumpy paddle fins off the tires and removed that ocean-going rudder he’d had under the whale.
Scud gets back into the back seat with Pinchley and Yampa. Zoe is still driving, with Villy in front with her. The two of them are all lovey-dovey again. Zoe follows the ridge’s narrow track away from Surf World, with the festive Bubble Badlands on the right, and Crab Crater on the left. Big, thoughtful crabs wander around in there, lugging pieces of wood and stone, and mounding them into intricate crab-logic designs. The crabs give off a salty low-tide smell, with a touch of decay.
“Let’s not get into anything with those guys,” says Zoe. “I’m worried they’ll know that we ate two of them last night.”
“Crabs don’t know anything,” says Scud, in a mood to contradict whatever Zoe says. “They have no minds.”
“That’s so wrong,” says Villy. “You were too drunk to notice, Scud, but these particular crabs are incredibly advanced and intelligent. We’re, like, savage unclean cannibals to have eaten them. I don’t even like to think about it.”
“Hell, everything’s intelligent,” Pinchley says carelessly. “You eat what you catch.”
“I hardly know where to begin with that kind of—” Zoe loftily begins. But then she breaks off, staring forward along the ridge. “What’s that up ahead?”
Leaning forward, Scud sees a figure standing in the road. A woman, it looks like. Insidiously familiar. Waving to them. She wants to flag them down. Her face is warm, tired, kind.
“No,” says Villy. “Impossible.”
Scud feels like a bomb’s exploding in his head. “Mom!” he yells. “It’s Mom!”
20: Not Mom
VILLY
Villy is suspicious. And scared. This whole scene—it’s like a scary surreal movie. The godforsaken ridge, the featureless sky, the giant crabs and talking bubbles, the gnarly Szep, the saucers with zap-rays—and now an alien creature is posing as his dead mom.
Zoe glances over from the driver’s seat. “Should I stop?”
The mother-thing points at Villy, calling to him. Her face isn’t right. A stiffness around the eyes. An odd tilt of her head.
“A trap,” says Villy.
But Scud won’t stop hollering, and Zoe slows down. Scud tumbles out of the car while it’s still moving, regains his footing, and starts hugging the—woman? By now the car has come to a halt. The mother-thing is talking to Scud, embracing him, and keeping a weather eye on Villy, obviously hoping to put her emotional hoodoo on him as well.
The creature’s voice is just like Mom’s, chirpy and excited, bursting with love. The sounds pluck at Villy’s heart. Resonant vibrations. He lets out a deep sigh that’s almost a sob.
“Yampa and I have figured something out,” says Pinchley from the back seat. “Meatball and Irav—they’re both Freeth, and they’re working for Groon and his slave saucers. The saucers paid Meatball with a saucer pearl back in Van Cott, and the split-up Iravs are trying to earn pearls too. The Freeth are shapeshifters, remember? This isn’t your mother, Villy. It’s Meatball.”
“Where’s our new gun?” asks Zoe.
“Scud has it,” says Villy.
“I’ll get it from him,” says Zoe. “Scud has a thing for me. He’ll give me the gun, no problem.”
Villy looks at Zoe, so smart and poised and beautiful. The most important person in his world. “Please stay in the car,” he tells her. “You’re the one they’re really after.”
“Zoe and I stay in the car,” orders Pinchley. “Villy takes the gun from Scud. And Yampa helps Villy.”
Zoe accepts this. “Don’t waver,” she tells Villy. “That mother-thing has to die. I’m sorry that sounds so weird. I’d never talk this way about your real mother. But—”
“Got it,” says Villy, not yet moving. The mother-thing keeps smiling at him. This is like the worst nightmare he’s ever had. But if it was a nightmare he could wake up. And he can’t. Why are they even here?
Yampa pokes him. Get going, Villy. Villy and Yampa hop out of the car and slam the doors tight.
“My darling Villy,” says the mother-thing. Her expression is utterly and completely wrong. How can that idiot Scud be going for this? “You look gloomy,” she says. “Aren’t you a tiny little bit glad to see me?”
“I—” Villy can’t manage to produce a sentence. Too many emotions. Love, nostalgia, grief, pity, loneliness—and fear.
“It is too her!” yells Scud, as if willing his words to be true—even though he knows the others don’t believe him. Scud’s staring up into the mother-thing’s eyes. He begins babbling questions like he’s ten years old. “How did you stop being dead, Mom? Did you fly over here like a soul going to heaven? Or were you always here, even before you died? How did you know to wait for us on this road? Can we bring you back home?”
Slowly, steadily, Villy edges closer to Scud. Yampa is fully in tune with him—it’s like when they surfed the wall wave together.
Villy sees a bulge in Scud’s left pants pocket. The bubblegun. All he has to do is lunge and grab. But what if he’s too slow? Meatball will zap the crap out of them. Kill all five of them, maybe. Perhaps the only reason she hasn’t started is that’s she’s not quite sure if they’re armed. Or maybe she’s slightly worried that Zoe can still tunnel to Earth from here.
“Yeek!” screeches Yampa and tumbles over like a collapsing ladder. A classic
distraction move. Faster than it takes to tell, Villy has the squishy little bubblegun in his hand, and he’s holding it pressed tight against his imitation mother’s chest. Tearful Scud starts pummeling Villy, but Yampa grabs Scud and, with surprising strength, flings him away. For good measure, Yampa knocks the mother-thing off-balance as well. Alien judo. Villy flops onto the fallen Mom.
So here he is, kneeling on the chest of a very accurate replica of his mother, holding a stubby polka-dotted gun against her head, trying to get the nerve to pull the trigger and kill her in cold blood.
“Do it!” calls Zoe, getting out of the car.
Mom/Meatball begins to blubber. “We Freeth aren’t to blame,” she says. “We’re in hock for the saucer pearls that we need so we can zap and fly. In days of yore, we could pay for our pearls. But our resources ran out and now—now we’re slaves of the saucer-master Groon. I’ve been a slave since birth. You and I—we’re not meant to be enemies, Villy. I’m jolly and you’re sweet. I’ll find a way to postpone killing you.”
Villy is almost beginning to waver. Meatball/Mom stretches a supplicating hand towards Zoe. “Talk to this boy. You’re a woman too—”
Villy notices a wiggle around the outstretched hand’s fingers. Like the wavering air above a hot summer road. Dark energy gathering for a zap. God help him, it’s time. He presses the gun tight and pulls the trigger.
Villy’s surrounded by smoke and sparks and exploding bubblegun balls. Meatball’s remains are on fire. He rolls away from the flames and lies on his face, groaning.
A minute later, all that’s left of Meatball/Mom are wispy ashes and a shiny sphere the size of a softball. Villy can’t help but think of his real Mom’s ashes after they cremated her. He feels like a fist is squeezing his heart.
“Looky there,” says Pinchley, joining them. “The saucer pearl that the leech saucers gave Meatball when she was born in Van Cott. Our jolly pal. Yampa had Meatball’s number all along.”
“The pearl is mine!” yells Zoe, rushing forward to scoop up the iridescent ball. It’s hot to the touch, and she has to juggle it—so in the end she holds it with the tail of her shirt.