by Rudy Rucker
“Tunnel, anyone?” says Zoe, brightly holding up her forefinger like she’s proposing a parlor game.
“Tunnel to the stack,” echoes Villy. “Right. Mile-high stack to the sky.”
“I’ll lead,” says Scud, proudly bustling around. “Me and my wand.” He heads towards the low arch.
“Do it, bro,” says Villy. He takes Zoe’s hand. She’s his woman, he’s her man. They belong together. Romance for real.
The tunnel is a connected series of cellars mixed with arched culverts and cobblestone passageways. The walls are mostly dark, with occasional streaks of glowing fungus. Side alleys lead into alternate underbellies, but Scud never wavers from his route.
Along the way, they encounter some really big rats—knee-high, Szep City rats that walk on their hind legs. They wear little tassled caps and embroidered jackets, and they even carry walking-sticks, some of them. Zoe and Villy are fascinated by the rat people and want to meet them, but Scud hurries their party on.
“I think some of the rats are following us,” Zoe says to Villy after a while. “Hear them squeaking?”
“I bet they’re friendly,” says Villy. “They smell kind of good. A tingly musk. It makes me feel lively. Remember when Yampa sprayed that smell in the car?”
“We’ll win the rats over,” says Zoe, patting her guitar. It sheds a few notes, and the unseen rats mimic the sound with chirps. “Music charms the savage beasts.”
“If the rats come after us in a bad way, we’ll run like hell,” says Villy. “That’s Plan B.” Villy always likes to talk about having a Plan B. It makes him feel competent and organized.
Soon he notices a growing draft, a breeze blowing at his back and towards their as yet unseen destination. And then they step through a final arch and space opens up. It’s night, so there’s no light, but Villy can sense vastness. The stillness, the reverberant echoes, and the upward flow of air.
Scud sets his wand to beaming like a flashlight, and yes, they’re inside a titanic abandoned smokestack, with sandy ground underfoot. The stack is several hundred yards across down here, tapering to a smaller diameter as it rises—how far? At least a mile. Here at the bottom, the walls curve very strongly out, bracing themselves against the soil.
Looking back at the arch they came through, Villy sees glints of yellow in the tunnel darkness. The eyes of the rat people. Scud sees the glints too and he’s scared.
“I say we float up the stack right away,” goes Scud. “Goob-goob will take care of us up there. Like we’re going to heaven.”
“You sound like a brainwashed religious nut,” says Zoe. “And even if you’re right, I don’t feature floating around in the sky just now. What if there’s saucers? I’m so tired and hungry I can hardly think.”
“And how would we float up the stack anyway?” asks Villy. “Can your wand levitate?”
Scud’s quiet for a minute. “Skzx says she can levitate herself,” he finally reports. “But she’s not strong enough to lift us. It would be too much trouble. Also, she’s hungry.”
“I thought she’d be siphoning nourishment off you,” says Zoe. “Like a baby inside her mother. I thought she didn’t have to eat.”
“Not much in me to siphon,” says Scud. “I’m starving, same as you.” He shrugs. “So fine, we spend the night down here. We can lie on the sand over by the slanting wall where it’s low. We can take turns standing guard against the rats. I can use the wand to zap them if they come close.”
“Those cute rats don’t have to be our enemies,” says Zoe. “And I bet we can ask for food! I’ll be a Pied Piper with my guitar, Villy. I’ll charm the rats in their darling little coats—and they’ll bring us a feast.”
“Oh right,” says doubting Scud.
“Shut your crack,” goes Villy. It’s something he says to his younger brother a lot. Probably too often. Scud looks hurt. “Sorry,” adds Villy. “It’s just that I’m starving to death. Dim your light so the rat people aren’t scared. Make it yellow and cozy.”
So Scud does that, and Zoe leans over her guitar, lightly fingering a tune like a nursery rhyme, very thin and sweet. Villy joins in, adding frills and trills. And here come the rats, ten, twenty, fifty of them, skittish and ready to run away, but drawn by the delicate music.
Two rats hold hands—or paws—and begin dancing to the tune’s beat. A boy rat in an embroidered shirt, and a girl rat in a dirndl. Their furry little legs rise and fall in the figures of their dance. Another pair joins, and another, and soon there’s a whole circle of rat people disporting themselves, their feet light on the soft sand. Scud is softly beating time with his wand.
Villy stops playing and lets Zoe carry the tune alone. “Nyum nyum,” he calls to the rats. He pats his stomach and makes chewing motions. Mimes putting things in his mouth. Ten rats lean their heads together, squeaking away, and they scamper off. By the time Zoe segues to the next tune, the ten rats are back, along with some new recruits. They’re carrying bundles. The air fills with the rats’ pleasantly musky smell.
Gaily squeaking, the rats lay out cloths and bedeck them with nuts, berries, tiny loaves of bread, and even some little wheels of yellow cheese. And this isn’t just a tasting sample—the rats are really getting into it, with swarms of them coming forth with more food. A banquet. When the three kids sit down and tuck in, there’s more than they can eat.
Zoe has stopped playing for now, but to maintain the convivial mood, Villy continues fingering notes on his Flying Vee—even while he’s gobbling handfuls of those tasty little breads and cheeses, and wetting his whistle with bunches of berries like red currants. One music-loving rat takes a perch on the neck of Villy’s guitar and scoots across the frets. Undaunted, Villy works the slide-guitar sound into his tune.
Villy, Zoe, and Scud try to get some teep going with the rat people, but that’s not happening. And it’s no use trying to winnow meaning from their squeaks. They’re simple folk, these Szep City rats. Eating and dancing and tail-waving—that’s as far as it goes, although at the end of the party, the little people manage to sing thirty-seven choruses of Villy and Zoe’s final tune, which is, naturally, “Three Blind Mice.”
“So now we quit while we’re ahead,” says Villy, laying down his guitar. Zoe thanks the rat people with effusive curtsies and bows. The rats gather up their possessions, and Scud urges them on their way by firing off a few airbursts from his wand. Looks like balls from a Roman candle, almost.
Villy and Zoe make themselves a comfortable hollow in the sand next to the slanting wall where the gigantic smokestack meets the ground. Scud politely beds down some hundred feet away from them, and it’s lights out.
Tired though they are, Villy and Zoe have some energy from breathing the attar of the Szep City rats, and from all that cute doll-sized food. Zoe’s teep is in fact torrid.
“Honeymoon,” she whispers in Villy’s ear.
Villy doesn’t mind the wedding reference. If it came right down to it, he’d be glad to marry Zoe. Not that there’s any immediate social pressure. They’re a million miles from home. Also, Villy has that pocketful of condoms, so no worries about pregnancy. With his guitar to hand, he teeps all this to Zoe.
She purrs and closes in. They have glorious sex and conk out—naked and nestled tight together. They’re tired enough that they sleep straight through the night. When Villy wakes, it’s light. He raises his head to make sure his and Zoe’s guitars are still there. Zoe, still in his arms, smells like nectar. Hooray for love.
Scud is standing out in the big patch of sand, a hundred yards off. He’s holding his hand in the air with his wand Skzx sticking out—he’s like a teen wizard summoning a dragon. Villy turns his head to the side so he can see up. High, high, high above them, the pale disk of the smokestack’s vent glows with light of the sky. Something’s up there—far and wee.
“Hi, lover boy.” Zoe smiles at Villy. She’s so cute—no, more than cute. Voluptuous. Gorgeous. He hugs and kisses her for a while. Eventually they sit up and s
tart assembling their clothes.
At this point Scud starts jumping up and down, whooping at the sky. Something’s landing.
“Is that a blimp?” Zoe asks Villy. “A zeppelin?”
“Gotta be an adult Aristo,” says Villy. “Look, it’s got tiny wings. And a bunch of tentacles at the back end. It figures Scud’s wand would attract an adult Aristo. What with the wand being an Aristo larva.”
“Totes,” is Zoe’s brief response. Like she’s reluctant to get back into the heroic-quest routine. Playing it cool for another minute. Villy likes it when Zoe acts like that. Not letting herself be stampeded. “Check this,” she goes, and produces a handful of about a hundred rat-baked bread-loaves that she’d stashed in her pocket. Each loaf is the size of a vitamin pill. They’re fresh and delicious. Yeasty and crunchy.
The great Aristo zeppelin-creature lands next to Scud, fluttering his comically small bat wings and gesturing with his tentacles. He’s teeping with Scud. He has half a dozen eyes scattered across his body like polka dots—not unlike Lady Filippa. The Aristo’s eyes are big, with black pupils and yellow irises. For sure he sees Villy and Zoe too.
“Come on!” Scud screams to Villy, his voice shrill and cracking with excitement. Weird receding echoes off the high, cylindrical walls. Come on, come on, come on!
“Can yew understand what that thar boy is a-sayin?” drawls Zoe.
“Blub blub,” goes Villy.
Cheerful and moving slow, the lovers finish dressing, then amble over to Scud and the Aristo, carrying their guitars.
“His name is Stolo,” calls Scud as they draw near. “Stolo, this is my brother Villy and his friend Zoe.”
“Uneasy,” Zoe murmurs to Villy as she assesses the size of the Aristo. It’s about 150 feet long, a miniature version of the classic Hindenburg, pointed on one end and blunt on the other. With tentacles on the blunt end.
The creature’s body is translucent, ribbed, and filled with gas. Villy can see twisty intestines within, and feathery gills, plus all the usual kinds of shaped and rounded organs, everything bobbling around inside Stolo’s taut hide.
Strange and powerful teep emanates from Stolo—an alien collage of color, scent, and sound. Basically, Stolo is urging them to ride on him.
“I don’t like the tentacles,” Zoe tells Villy. “You just know there’s a nasty-ass killer beak in the midst of that squid-bunch bouquet.”
“We won’t go near that particular spot,” says Villy. “We’ll be sitting on top. Like on the back of an elephant.”
“Sitting in a howdah,” says Zoe.
“You’re losing me there, Zee.”
“The little benches they used to put on Indian elephants?” says Zoe. “Those were howdahs.”
By now they’re close enough to smell Stolo. A fishy odor, mixed with lavender and wax and latex rubber. The giant Aristo makes a wet blatting noise.
“That’s his voice,” says Scud. “He says he’s glad to meet you. He’ll fold a special wrinkle for us on to sit in. He says we should hurry. He doesn’t want them to catch us on the ground.”
“Them?” goes Zoe.
“Just hurry,” says Scud.
“Where’s he gonna take us?” she asks.
“To Goob-goob,” says Scud.
Villy hears a sharp crack and a bullet tears past, ripping at the air. Shit. It’s a party of the local Szep City zombies. Boiling out of the tunnel entrance at the base of the stack—twenty or thirty glassy-eyed slaves, armed with rifles and rayguns.
Stolo says something—that is, he makes another fart-like noise—and then, quick as a flash, he wraps three tentacles around the kids, one tentacle for each, and tucks them into a crease on his back. They rise like a helium balloon.
The belligerent saucer followers keep shooting at them, but Stolo’s leathery underside is impervious to their bullets and rays. And then Stolo and his riders are a third of the way up the mile-high stack. Stolo isn’t exactly using his little wings to fly—it’s more like he’s levitating, and he braces his wings against the air to steer. They’re rising so fast that Villy has to yawn and waggle his jaw to equalize the pressure in his ears. Scud’s exultant, and Zoe’s laughing with relief.
The air cools as they continue to climb. An odd, wavering tone sounds from the top of the stack. As if a giant were blowing across a bottle. When they actually drift out the top, they encounter a howling, gale-force wind. The rushing storm separates them from that vast, intricate cloud the locals call Sky Castle. The great cloud’s bottom is another thousand feet above them, with its underside ruffled and torn by the frigid blast. The gale is a thousand-mile-wide sheet, an interface zone.
Stolo is flying with his pointed end in front and his tentacles in the rear. His body vibrates in the wind—he bucks and shudders—and it feels like he might begin a wild tumble any time. Yet Stolo’s teep indicates that he’s not alarmed by that prospect. His body is designed to weather the tumultuous ascent through the gale to the Sky Castle.
Borne by the fierce wind, they’re rushing along at several hundred miles per hour. Stolo plies his tiny bat wings, tweaking their pitch, roll, and yaw. All the while he’s flexing the airfoil of his bulky body, steadily working his way closer to the Sky Castle cloud above.
Villy, Zoe, and Scud keep their legs tucked under the crease in Stolo’s skin. Since they’re moving with the wind, they don’t even feel it that much. They’re as safe and secure as if they’re sitting in a bed. Or maybe not. A particularly strong gust flips Stolo to a vertical position, with his pointy front end down. If he was a boat you’d say he was pitchpoling, that is, about to do a flip.
The Aristo seems unconcerned. Perhaps he’s even doing this on purpose. Villy picks up an odd image from the living zeppelin’s mind. A man in a boat on a lake—fishing? In what way does this image apply?
Zoe doesn’t like that Stolo’s about to pitchpole. She’s screaming they’re about to die. Scud is catatonic with fear. Stolo doesn’t care. He gives his wings a reckless twitch that sends them into full tumble mode. They flip, roll, and spin. The air currents have turned vicious. Scud and Zoe are hanging on for dear life.
But Villy—Mr. Surf King, Mr. Wise Man of Los Perros, Mr. Debonair—Villy loses his grip and—oh no, this can’t be—he jolts out of his seat, bumps along Stolo’s ridged hide, skids across the bulging cornea of one of the leviathan’s eyes, fails to catch hold of Stolo’s ragged wing—and goes into frikkin freefall, leaving his guitar with Zoe and Scud.
He’s over a mile above Szep City, which stretches out beneath him as far as he can see. His one bit of luck: the wind is so insanely strong that, rather than falling, he’s skimming along horizontally, bowling along like windblown trash, still at the same level as Stolo. And Stolo is in teep contact with him.
Gathering his meager wits, Villy surfs the wind instead of fighting it, yes, he’s riding the gale, stabilizing himself with leaping-salmon-type bends of his body, keeping his arms at his sides, controlling his motion with subtle, fin-like movements of his hands. This is working, kind of, but the air is so brutally cold that Villy’s going to be dead pretty soon.
That’s when three flying saucers launch an attack. Weirdly calm about this, Stolo calls Villy’s attention to the spot far below where the evil trio are rising from the Szep City Saucer Hall far. They’re moving quite fast.
Villy remembers Flipsydaisy saying that the Aristos are good at killing saucers. But evidently their three approaching foes are willing to take a risk. Perhaps they’re frantically excited by the chance to kill the freefalling Villy. They fire pale-yellow zap beams as they come, aiming some of the rays at Stolo and his riders, but most of them at Villy.
Via Stolo’s teep, Villy can overhear that Zoe and Scud are imploring Stolo to pick Villy up before it’s too late. But Stolo doesn’t want to. Not yet. And then Villy picks up another of those odd fisherman thoughts from the alien zeppelin. It’s an image of an angler tossing bait off his boat to attract large fish from the deeps. What do they c
all that again? Chumming the water. Villy is chum. A saucer ray sizzles past his feet, close enough that he feels the heat.
And now Stolo finally prepares to makes his move. With crafty gestures of his wings, the Aristo stabilizes his careening progress. Deeply focused and in a state of Zen-like calm, Stolo aims his tentacles. A sweeping grim-reaper saucer ray is about to put the quietus on Villy. With thoughtful aplomb, Stolo projects a fusillade of quick, efficient blasts from his tentacle tips and—thip thip thip—the three importunate saucers are dead, charred meat, and their grim-reaper rays are no more.
Moving with alacrity, Stolo swoops down to gather the dead saucers before they can drop from the sky. He seizes the corpses with his tentacles and—typical behavior for mappyworld—he devours them with his great, curved beak. Just like Lady Filippa with the Tollah dog. One, two, three.
Sated and pleased, Stolo spreads his tentacles with a flourish. Scud and Zoe cheer, their voices tiny in the roaring wind. Villy’s teeth are chattering very hard. He’s feeling bitter. Stolo pitched him loose on purpose, just to attract those tasty saucers. A stiff price to pay for a ride to Cloud Castle.
The now-genial zeppelin angles over to intersect Villy’s path. Zoe reaches out and catches hold of Villy’s ankle. She pulls him aboard and nestles him into the skin fold with her and Scud. She showers kisses on his face. His heart pumps warmth once again.
By way of celebrating Villy’s rescue, Scud beams his wand’s light through Solo’s translucent skin and into the Aristo’s great, airy body—illuminating the creature like a lantern. Perhaps there’s some goading flow of dark energy from Scud’s wand, or perhaps the meal of three saucers has strengthened the Aristo, or perhaps it’s just that he’s through fishing for saucers, but now at last Stolo rises the rest of the way through the layer of racing winds.
And so they enter the interior of Sky Castle, the thundercloud that’s more than a thousand miles tall.
26: Flat Cow