Million Mile Road Trip

by Rudy Rucker

  It’s because of Groon’s hideous bagpipe music. It worms its way into Villy’s head, and he begins playing his guitar in harmony with it—dippy jigs and manful marches and cornball choruses—it’s total crap, but Villy’s playing his ass off. And meanwhile Zoe’s playing a soaring soprano descant to accompany Villy’s bagpipe tunes, even though she’s rolling her eyes in frustration and disgust.

  Whenever one of Zoe’s hands is free for a second, she whacks it against the body of her little guitar. Like she’s trying to wake herself up. “Stop it!” she yells to herself as much as to Villy. “These songs stink!”

  Meanwhile Pinchley’s getting nowhere with the purple whale’s controls. “Groon’s slurping us towards his gullet,” yells the Szep. “He’ll eat us, and blast out our remains like turd scraps along the middle of his goddamn jet stream geyser.”

  This deep in the Pit, they’re hella close to the jet stream. It’s narrowed down to a couple of miles wide. A cascade of downward-bound saucers fills the outer surface of the stream—and a faintly seen plume of saucers flows up along the axis of the core.

  What makes the present situation truly hopeless is that Scud is in thrall to the ghastly bagpipe as well. Not only are Villy and Zoe helplessly circling the plume, Scud is allowing them to descend. And Pinchley’s best efforts with the rudder and the flaps are hopeless against the folly of the three kids. Nose first, the purple whale spirals ever deeper into the screeching clamor and the fetid gloom.

  “We’re doomed,” says Zoe. But she’s high enough from her music that she manages a laugh. “Doomed yet again, that is.”

  “We’ll make it past this frikkin bagpipe,” says Villy. “We’re cosmic mythic heroes, right? Isn’t that what you said?”

  Peering through the windshield of the purple whale, Villy sees a vast, ungainly sack at the bottom of the pit—a heaving, floppy bag the size of a mountain. Groon. He bears two great horns or chanters: one is wide and one is thin. The horns are nested within each other, the thin within the wide. The jet stream’s flows are nested as well—saucers spew forth from Groon along the jet stream’s core, and they drift inward along the outer circumference of the stream. The wide outer horn gathers up the incoming saucers, and the narrow inner horn one spouts them out.

  Entranced, Villy gazes at the monumental alien bagpipe, wondering at its odd design while obsessively humming the cheesy tunes that he and Zoe feel compelled to play.

  For a wonder, Groon doesn’t seem to notice them at all. He has a variety of feelers on his surface, but it’s not clear if any of them are eyes in the usual sense of the word. And even if the cosmic bagpipe can sense their presence, he may be oblivious to them, so deeply steeped is he in the ecstasy of his ceaseless piping. Or it may also be that, by their involuntary act of echoing the alien’s tunes, Zoe and Villy have made their purple whale seem like an ally. They reach the bottom of the Pit and circle the great sack quite undisturbed.

  “No Szep nor human has ever been this close to Groon before,” whispers Pinchley. “His hide’s kind of transparent, ain’t it? Like thin greasy leather. Look towards the bottom, where he stashes the saucers he’s sucking in. See those fleshy things like laundry wringers next to them? And the big pan underneath? Groon milks smeel from the new arrivals. And over there, see them long fingers massaging the milked saucers? Groon’s squeezing out their eggs. For growin’ a fresh crop.”

  “So—biological,” says Zoe, clearly repelled.

  “And look where the saucers go back out,” says Scud, getting into Pinchley’s spirit of zoological investigation. “He sends back the saucers that he’s milked and egged—and he launches baby saucers from his egg hatchery as well. The newbies and the retreads go shooting out through the thin horn that’s inside the wide one.”

  “Groon sucks and he blows,” blurts Zoe, and breaks into shrill laughter.

  Somehow, Zoe’s rude, despairing gaiety is enough to break the two musicians’ trance. Gathering the full force of her quirky personality, Zoe segues from her hideous bagpipe tune into a low-down hoochie-coochie vamp. And Villy’s only too glad to build a bed beneath Zoe’s rolling and tumbling line.

  Groon twitches, not liking these sounds. Sensing the evil bagpipe’s discomfort, Villy and Zoe play the harder. And now, energized by the musical rhythms of physical love, Scud regains his saucer pearl mojo. With a massive effort of will, he levitates the whale back to the mouth of the Pit. With Scud and the stratocasters back in control of themselves, Pinchley’s free to pilot the purple whale away from the jet stream saucer plume, over the Pit basin’s ridge—and into the overcast basin next door.

  Szep City. It’s a single metropolis five thousand miles wide, but sparsely populated, from what Villy can see. Some sections are in ruins, and other districts are burned out. Red-eyed leech saucers cruise above the empty streets.

  Villy and Zoe’s stratocast has them moving too fast to land right away. The whale flashes across the planetary city like a flaming jet liner with insane terrorists at the controls. Zoe and Villy slow their tune, and Pinchley bends their path into a circling loop. They’re homing in on a sweet spot.

  Overhead, the Sky Castle cloud is a low, dark thunderhead, ruffled by an endless gale and flickering with lightning. A mile-high smokestack stretches towards the sky. It has indecipherable lettering on its side. Squalls of rain spatter against the whale’s windshield.

  Villy and Zoe go ever lighter on their guitar strings, and Scud reduces their altitude. The smells of the city drift in the purple whale’s open windows. The dusty scent of a summer storm. Deep-fried food. Tobacco smoke, gasoline, roast meat, magnolia blossoms, coffee grounds, sour curry, sewer gas.

  Carefully Pinchley guides them down. And now, the long journey over, they’re beaching the whale, touching down a million miles from home. Thump and bounce. Szep City.

  23: Wand

  SCUD

  The buildings of Szep City are pink, gray, and tan—smooth and rounded, like porcelain baked into retro-future shapes. Towers with raygun-style fins. Egg-shaped halls with domes on domes. Walls banded with deco tiles bearing alien glyphs. Apartment blocks like Archimedean solids, jazzy with polygonal facets.

  The streets are full. Crowded sidewalks, faces in windows, transport tubes of heavy green glass. Aerial roadways swoop from tower to tower, teeming with cars.

  The purple whale rests in a public square, a social space alive with voices. Rain-wet benches, flowers, cafes, pancake trees, oily communal tubs—and old-school metal and plastic cars around the plaza’s edges. Three red-eyed leech saucers loaf overhead. Patrolling the square. Their upper surfaces are mirrored, as if to fend off zap-rays from the sky.

  The thronging Szep have warm-colored skins, ranging from creamy lemon to baked terra-cotta, with occasional shades of blue. They’re a spindly race, with thin limbs, puppet-like jaws, and big lips and eyes. Some of them have such short legs they resemble freestanding hat racks.

  “Do you think this place looks like San Francisco?” unworldly Scud asks his older brother. They’re still inside the car.

  “A little, maybe,” says Villy. “Or LA.”

  “The roast reds are Rubtans,” says Pinchley. Again, he seems overcome by grief. “The lovely lemons are Trubans. Poor Pinchley and yesterday’s Yampa are Trubans.” It’s like landing here has flipped him back into his nutso Yampa imitation.

  “Stop that!” says Scud, his voice tense and low. He grabs Pinchley’s skinny shoulders and shakes him. “You’re Pinchley.” The Szep’s big jaw wobbles and clacks. His arms are like a disjointed doll’s. Scud keeps at him. “You, Pinchley, you made us come a million miles. And now we’re here. Help us finish. Don’t act crazy.”

  “Small boy, big dream,” mutters Pinchley, turning his head back and forth, taking in the scene. Like he’s waking up. Some of the Szep seem to be moving in on them, a mixed gang of Trubans and Rubtans. They’re grim and glassy-eyed.

  “Hey!” Scud yells at Pinchley, giving him another shake. “I said we need
help!”

  “I’m Pinchley, yaar,” the Szep finally says, slow and mournful. “They killed my wife.”

  “We’ll avenge her,” says Scud. “You’ll get us a wand at Lady Filippa’s place, right? We’ll make friends with the wand, and we’ll find our way home to save Earth. And along the way, I want to visit Nunu and my saucerbabies in New Eden.”

  “Meanwhile it looks like we’re facing a lynch mob,” puts in Villy. “And three hostile saucers.”

  A Szep bungees up onto the hood of the car. She’s thin and has a baked-red skin. A Rubtan. She has stubby legs. She peers in at them through the windshield. She moves her arms in exaggeratedly feminine gestures, greeting them. She’s not an enemy. She wears a small crown, a gold coronet whose projecting spikes are tipped with pearls.

  “Behold the intrepid Pinchley,” she flutes, her voice very upper crust. “Returned with his recruits.”

  “Flipsydaisy!” Pinchley calls out through the driver’s side window. “Did you know I was coming?”

  “Yes, and I know you’re single again,” replies Flipsydaisy. “My sympathy, dear friend. I’ll come aboard?”

  Pinchley nods. Flipsydaisy slides in through Scud’s window, nimble and knobby. She lands on Scud’s lap, with her tidy crown still atop her head. The Szep has a smell of onions and fresh-cut grass. She studies Scud, then plants a thin-lipped kiss upon his cheek—possibly just to bug him. Scud wipes the kiss away.

  “No doubt Flipsydaisy’s here to collect the gifts for our Lady,” says Pinchley. “Understood. But I don’t like all them others milling around.”

  “Goob-goob, Lady Filippa, and I are the ones who engaged Yampa and Pinchley to fetch you heroic humans,” Flipsydaisy tells Scud. “Yours truly being the field agent. There was talk of you arriving with a stash?”

  “You mean those freaking caraway seeds?” says Zoe. “For Lady Filippa?”

  “Hsst,” goes Flipsydaisy. “Ixnay on her amenay. There’s been another coup. This crowd around us—most of them are saucer zombies. Drained of their smeel by the flying leeches, and destined to be meat for the Tollah dogs.”

  “Oh hell,” says Pinchley. “But our Lady is alive?”

  “Lying low, don’t you know,” says Flipsydaisy.

  The crowded Szep are rhythmically tugging the door cords, rocking the car as if wanting to turn it over. One of the three leech saucers hovers directly overhead, glaring down with its red eye, in control of the zombies. Pinchley frowns, produces one of his tool-belt critters, sets it on the dash, and hollers a warning out the window, using the Szep tongue.

  “Nincs itt skorkers!”

  The tool critter on the dash is a tiny man made of lightning bolts. He reminds Scud of the old-school power company cartoon character named Reddy Kilowatt. Little Reddy flicks his fingers, shedding dark energies. The outer surfaces of the car begin to buzz and crackle. One of their attackers catches a jolt and unleashes a lurid scream. The other saucer stooges edge back.

  The saucer overhead makes as if to attack the purple whale herself. With a certain sense of entitlement, she lowers towards them, like a duchess preparing to feed. The leech saucers have been in power for a long time here.

  Almost without even thinking about it, Scud shoots a really juicy dark-energy bolt from the saucer pearl. It arrows out the window and into the flabby belly of the leech saucer, who at this point is only ten feet above the roof of the car.

  Bingo! The saucer’s flesh explodes into red scraps that patter down onto the heads and shoulders of the crowd. Neither of the other two patrol saucers seems interested in getting involved.

  “I say,” exclaims Flipsydaisy, coming on all British. “Well done, Scud. That’s showing the rabble some grit.”

  Villy congratulates Scud too. And, better than that, Zoe hugs him. A first. “Can you give us some context?” Zoe asks Flipsydaisy. “The darker Szep are Rubtans, and the lighter ones are Trubans, and therefore—?”

  “Most Trubans work for Rubtans like me,” says Flipsydaisy. “We’re wealthy and we run things. Our Truban friend Pinchley was Lady F’s chauffeur, and Yampa made image-clouds that the Lady used for, well, for curtains and slipcovers and scarves. I was the Lady’s interior decorator. Still am. Wait till you see how I’ve outfitted her new hidey-hole. Chic and lavish.” Flipsydaisy pauses. “Chic if viewed a certain way.”

  “How will we get there?” asks Scud, keenly aware of the jar of caraway seeds in his pants pocket. “We need to meet the Lady in person.”

  “I’ve hatched a strategy,” says Flipsydaisy. “My methodologies are famously baroque. I’m really much more than a decorator, you see.”

  “Tell us about Groon,” interrupts Scud.

  “A parasitic bagpipe thing who slithers from world to world,” says Flipsydaisy. “Currently he lives in our neighboring basin, the Pit, worse luck. He sneezes out saucers like a puffball sprays spores.”

  “We saw him just now,” says Scud. “We were all the way down in his hole.”

  “Truly you and your companions may be our long-awaited saviors,” Flipsydaisy tells Scud with a grave nod. “Did you bring chocolate for me?”

  “I’m holding the caraways,” says Scud. “Not sure where the chocolate is.”

  “Here you go,” says Pinchley, extracting the battered cocoa tin from a pile of rags and handing it to Flipsydaisy with a bow. “Maybe—maybe you and I can get together for a session after this hoo-rah damps down,” he tells her.

  “I am pleased by this prospect,” says Flipsydaisy, dipping her hand into the tin and a savoring a taste of the powder. She smiles beatifically, and the tin disappears into her purse. “And now?” she says.

  “Don’t ask me,” says Scud. “We have no idea what we’re doing.”

  “I say we disperse the rabble,” goes Flipsydaisy. She makes a contemptuous gesture towards the crowd of Szep around the car. Something flashes on her wrist.

  “You’ve got a new Aristo wand?” says Pinchley, noticing the twinkle. “And there’s an extra wand at Lady Filippa’s—all set to meet the kids?”

  “Shhh!” goes Flipsydaisy. “I already warned you. Don’t say her name in full.”

  “Nobody’s listening,” snaps Pinchley, quite incorrectly, as events will very soon reveal. Perversely he makes his voice louder. “Here’s the story, kids. The Aristos produce these special wands. And you guys will get a chance to adopt one. Up at Lady Filippa’s.”

  Pinchley has now said Lady Filippa’s name once too often. It’s like he’s triggered an alert. A ululating howl blasts from a nearby tower, which is attached to a vast domed arena-like building. The saucer-zombie Trubans and Rubtans around the car hold their arms high as if in prayer. But they’re not praying. They’re preparing a mass attack. As for the pair of leech saucers still on patrol—they’re hanging back, expecting their zombie slaves to do the dirty work.

  “Had to run your mouth, eh, Pinchley?” says Flipsydaisy, kind of enjoying herself.

  One of the saucer stooges tosses a grubworm into the car. The thing humps along the dashboard at about ninety miles per hour, pounces on the Reddy Kilowatt zapper, and eats him whole. The saucer-zombie Trubans and Rubtans are all over the car by now, preparing to assault the passengers. The shrilling from the tower goes on and on.

  Flipsydaisy makes a regal gesture with two fingers of her left hand—the hand with the twinkle at its wrist. Immediately there’s an explosion on the other side of the square: a concussive crack followed by screams and a prolonged sound of concrete chunks thudding onto the ground. A stone waterfall of rubble is streaming down the side of the tower where the evil voice wails. A raised roadway up there is collapsing, a section at a time.

  “Our local Saucer Hall,” says Flipsydaisy. “I’m teaching them some manners.”

  “There’s lots of saucers inside, aren’t there?” says Scud. “Are they coming out?”

  “Unless they’re wearing mirror-shields on top, they tend to lie doggo in the daytime,” says Flipsydaisy. “The Aristos up in
Sky Castle shoot them on sight.”

  Meanwhile a platoon of armed Szep soldiers rushes out from a low arcade. A loyalist anti-saucer counterforce. They beam tightly focused energy rays at the rabble of saucer zombies surrounding the purple whale. The victims scream as the beams cut them into pieces. A smell of ammonia and burnt flesh.

  The yowling from the tower above Saucer Hall has continued all this time, and now it redoubles. It’s more like the sound of an animal than the voice of a Szep. The saucers are loath to emerge, but in their place a squad of saucer-controlled Szep troops streams out of the great dome. The zombies wear mirrored armor, and each of them wears a helmet formed into the traditional flying saucer shape.

  The zombies set upon the loyalist Szep troops, using sabers and electrified morning stars, that is, spiky balls tethered to sticks. A loyalist hurls a grenade into a crowd of saucer zombies. They toss back a grenade that sets a recreational oil-bath vat alight. Greasy flames gutter to the sky, wreathed in plumes of sooty smoke. It’s total anarchy. Scud looks up, following the smoke. He’d like to see some of those high-flying, saucer-killing Aristo snipers that Flipsydaisy was talking about.

  Meanwhile a Rubtan saucer zombie wielding a long-handled battle axe is chopping at one of the purple whale’s tires. Scud flattens the assailant with a spark of dark energy from his pearl. A zombie soldier with a spark-buzzing morning star makes it onto the hood. He positions himself to shatter the windshield. Just in time, a pulsed energy beam stitches a row of holes across his chest, laying him low, but also puncturing the purple whale’s windshield. The voice in the high tower shrills on, a threnody of empty menace. A grenade explodes about twenty feet away, and shrapnel thuds into the panels of their car.

  And then a raygun beam drills a hole into Scud’s saucer pearl, extinguishing its inner light. By some stroke of luck, the ray fails to damage Scud’s hand. But there will be no more levitating or zapping from the pearl. Its surface is crazed into an intricate maze of cracks. The pieces drop to the car’s floor. It’s time to bail.