Million Mile Road Trip

by Rudy Rucker

  So it’s up to Zoe to be kind and noble, sigh. How deeply uncool. But someone’s gotta do it. She grabs the unhappy Scud and tugs him into the leather pita pocket with her and Villy.

  “Thanks,” says Scud very softly. He’s sniffling, nearly in tears. Zoe pats him on the shoulder and gives Villy a hard poke with her other hand. Why are men such dicks?

  Zoe turns her thoughts away from the psychodrama between the Antwerpen brothers—and makes an effort to understand what’s going on Yulia’s mind. The flat cow is acting like a psychic mirror, a little like Goob-goob had been doing. At any given moment Yulia’s mind seems like a blend of the minds of whoever she’s with. Maybe it’s a defensive tactic, a trick for disorienting anyone near her. If you teep into Yulia’s shuffled mimicry, it’s hard to maintain your own train of thought. But Yulia’s deeper inner self remains opaque.

  Be that as it may, Zoe manages to formulate and transmit a request to the flat cow. The kids have to be able to see, or they’ll go crazy in here. Obligingly Yulia forms transparent patches on her upper and lower surfaces. So now Zoe and the boys can press their faces against the skin and gaze out at, wow, so many saucers, they’re on every side.

  Yes, they’re already at the core of the jet stream. The saucers in here are riding the air current to New Eden. At some distance from them, the jet stream’s outer layer flows the opposite way—back towards Groon.

  The saucers around them are, variously, like sombreros, donuts, serpents, soup tureens, battleship turrets, and lemon meringue pies. Their tints include, to name only a few, crimson, chartreuse, magenta, gold, and ultramarine. Their color designs are solid, spotted, blended, striped, or zigzag. Their skin textures are metallic, slimy, leathery, scaly, warty, bristly, and more.

  In their protean variability, the saucers remind Zoe of the 3D moirés in Sky Castle. But they’re solid and they’re alive. Some of them are newly spawned slave saucers from Groon, and others are larger slaves—veterans of numerous cycles through Groon’s smeel-wringer. The slaves all have red eyes. But there’s an occasional dark-eyed saucer in the mix as well. Jet stream freeloaders. Like footloose hoboes on a freight train. And the others don’t much care.

  So okay. Zoe and her friends are riding towards New Eden inside a flat cow that resembles a flying saucer, a flat cow with little windows in her skin. The kids do their best to settle in. Zoe and Villy still have their guitars, who nestle against them. It’s a pleasant temperature inside Yulia, with a steady supply of air, and the smell’s not bad, once you get used to it. Those peepholes make a huge difference. The three can entertain themselves by watching the saucers, and looking at the many basins slipping by.

  Scud estimates their speed by counting how many of his pulse beats it takes for them cross a basin. Assuming that the basins are five thousand miles across and that his pulse rate is, say, a hundred, Scud comes up with a rough speed of a hundred thousand miles an hour. Same as they’d been doing on the way out, thanks to Zoe’s and Villy’s stratocasting. With any luck, they’ll be in New Eden before dark.

  At some point Villy starts caressing Zoe. They’re squeezed in as close as it’s possible to be, and Zoe has to admit it’s rather yummy to be making out in the dark like this. After an hour of kissing, Villy wants to go all the way—but, so sorry, darling, that’s a little out of the question—what with brother Scud so attentively silent nearby. Supposedly asleep. I bet.

  Zoe’s not expecting this long ride to go completely smoothly, not with the way their adventure’s been running—and she’s right. The attack comes five hours into the trip.

  A large gray saucer begins nudging Yulia. He’s a male, reminiscent of Nunu’s Uncle Boldog, but he’s not a slave saucer. His dark black eye betokens the fact that he’s acting on his own. He nips at the flat cow’s long tail with big, stony teeth. He bumps her from below and from above. And then, how horrible, a waggling tube emerges from the blocky, square-jawed saucer’s underside.

  A reproductive organ? A feeding siphon? Whatever function the unwelcome tube is meant to serve, the brutish monster thrusts it against Yulia’s body, feeling around with the tip until—oh hell—he locates the coin-purse slit along Yulia’s edge and manages to pry it open.

  So now here’s the throbbing tip of the gray saucer’s grisly appendage—right inside the secret, cozy pouch where the three kids are riding out the trip. The chilly air of the jet stream is trickling in, and with it comes the eerie sound of Groon’s incessant bagpipe music, part and parcel of the million mile flow.

  There’s no way of knowing what the cryptic Yulia thinks of the attack, nor can Zoe judge what retaliation Yulia might be capable of. For the moment the flat cow is simply running her mirror mind routine: reflecting a mixture of the aggro saucer’s greed and lust, plus Zoe and Villy’s passion curdling to horror, plus Scud’s powerful rage over the intrusion.

  Scud is the one who takes action. With a deft snap of his wrist, he extrudes his Aristo wand—and sends a jolt into their abusive attacker’s probing tube. This is no mere warning tickle, no. Scud delivers a powerful burst of dark energy that reduces the intrusive organ to ashes. The rogue saucer flounders wildly in the air, loses control, and, trailing smoke from his charred flesh, spirals through the two-way saucer traffic and down to an ocean basin populated by sea monsters. A spiky kraken launches himself high into the air, swallows the gray saucer in mid-flight, and splashes hugely down. That’ll teach him.

  “You’re an animal,” Villy admiringly tells Scud.

  “I saved us, and I get to pick where we land,” says Scud, very smug. “It’ll be Berky in New Eden. We’ll check out the human colony there. And Nunu. And my saucerbabies. And maybe Maisie will be there too.”

  Villy’s ready to argue about all this, but Zoe shuts him down. “Scud’s right,” she says. “It fits with the plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “Goob-goob teeped me details at the Sky Castle,” says Zoe. “The plans are deep in my head. I can feel them, but I can’t reveal them. You should think of the plan as an egg that’s not yet hatched.”

  “Lady Filippa teeped me the plans too,” goes Scud.

  “Oh, what bullshit,” says Villy. “If you two know something, tell me.”

  “Everyone already knows the general idea,” says Zoe. “There’s good saucers and bad saucers. Groon is the master of the bad saucers. They’re gearing up for an assault on Earth. We’re going to stop them.”

  “Yeah yeah, but what else?” says Villy. “Drop the self-important secrecy routine, will you?”

  “No, I’m not telling you,” says Zoe. “Not with so many of Groon’s slave saucers around. They might be teeping us.”

  “If they were teeping us, we’d be dead,” says Villy. “These dumb-ass saucers, they didn’t notice us at all when we were inside Groon. And I seriously doubt their teep can reach us inside this flat cow who might in fact be a saucer herself.”

  “I’ve decided Yulia isn’t a saucer at all,” puts in Scud. “None of the saucers are this weird.”

  “I can feel a big round thing inside her meat with my feet,” says Villy. “I’m thinking that could be a saucer pearl. But maybe it’s too soft. An internal organ. Tell us, Yulia, are you a saucer?” As usual, no answer.

  “Main thing is that Yulia’s our friend,” says Scud. “And Goob-goob sent her to help us in the cosmic beatdown. Our final battle.”

  “There you go with the know-it-all routine again,” says Villy. “Come on, guys. Stop holding out on me. Tell me what the frikkin beatdown will be like.”

  “Oh, all right,” says Zoe. “The idea is to imprison Groon inside the unspace tunnel from mappyworld to ballyworld. Someone will pinch off the two ends while he’s in there, and that way Groon is like a pig in a poke. Love that expression. It means a pig in a sack? And the sack will shrink. Or something.”

  “Oh,” says Villy with mock calm. “I get it. Someone is going to pinch off the two ends of an unspace tunnel while there’s a hostile bagpipe the size of
Half Dome in there. Let me take a wild guess who the someone’s gonna be.”

  “Villy, you should trust the judgment of your intellectual superiors,” says Scud. “Let the brains lead the brawn.” Zoe can’t stop herself from laughing.

  Villy gets mad. “Go to hell,” he snaps. “Both of you.”

  The second half of the ride isn’t as mellow as the first. Weary and anxious, the three kids don’t talk. And Yulia makes no sound as she glides along the jet stream’s current. In the prolonged silence, Zoe can hear the faint, ongoing strains of Groon’s piping.

  27: New Eden

  SCUD

  Just like Scud hoped, Yulia lands in New Eden. It’s where the Groon jet stream leads anyway, so it’s just a matter of Yulia going with the flow. Scud stares down through Yulia’s peepholes at the checkered farmland of New Eden. Much of it seems to be inhabited by the honest non-leeching faction of the saucer race. Scud sees hay fields and apple orchards, pig pens and cattle herds. His guess is that the saucers use the crops to fatten up the livestock—who provide meat and smeel.

  The jet stream angles down towards New Eden. On all sides, fat slave saucers are being swept up into the into the outer, Groon-bound layer, whizzing upward past the descending flat cow. The inner, Eden-bound core of the current—including the flat cow—is directed straight at the ground—they’re going to crash!—ooof.

  Fortunately, the flat cow contains a supply of Truban inertia gel, and the high-speed collision does no harm to Scud’s party, nor to the flat cow herself. Yulia bounces across the plain of New Eden on her bottom, slows, rolls on her edge for a bit, wobbles, and comes to rest. With an annunciatory moo, she unzips her edge. Scud and his fellows sit up straight like royals in a convertible limo.

  The faint sound of Groon’s music can still be heard. It’s like a delicate ringing in Scud’s ears, and he can’t even be quite sure that he’s hearing it. But yeah, it’s there. Presumably the music tells the slave saucers what to do. All around them stunned, newly arrived saucers come to rest, gather their wits, pick up on Groon’s tune, and head for a nearby ridge that presumably separates New Eden from Van Cott. Scud supposes they’re massing for the intended invasion of his hometown Los Perros via the giant unspace tunnel that’s being built near Van Cott’s Saucer Hall.

  Yulia cruises over to an oak-shaded oasis near the base of the basin’s steep red clay ridge. The flat cow settles down by an overflowing fountain beside a stream under a tree. Scud, Villy, and Zoe step to the ground and prepare to have a look around. All this time, Yulia never actually said anything to them—all she ever did was moo. Nor has it been possible to teep what lies in her mind. Hard to know exactly what she’s up to.

  Be that as it may, here they are in the hamlet of Berky with its tidy shacks and its expat Earthling colony. As they walk, Scud looks around, hoping to spot Nunu. It’s a mixed crowd here beneath Berky’s swaying trees. Along with friendly saucers and saucer-human mixes, Scud sees a fair number of expat Earthlings hanging out. They look like hippies and unkempt hermits, although some of them may have been professors, writers, artists, or techs before they moved to Berky.

  Nobody bothers to keep up appearances here. Life is easy. It’s a community of brooks and ponds, shady trees, cottages with soft beds. Scud notices a public picnic table laden with peaches, apples, pitchers of milk, loaves of bread, steaming tortillas, a grilled salmon, and a roast pig. New Eden indeed. But with the ever-present danger of the leech saucers catching hold of you and draining you dry.

  And then Scud spots what he’s been looking for. It’s a simple wooden bungalow at the edge of Berky, with Nunu’s car-sized father Pa Saucer sunning himself in the yard. He has a green dome and a yellow rim like Nunu. By way of being roomy enough for Pa Saucer, the house’s ceilings look to be twenty feet high, and the front door is like a garage door. Cute little Nunu is on the wide wooden porch, resting in the shade, possibly asleep. A few little creatures buzz above her. Can those be—

  Before rushing to Nunu’s side, Scud checks in with Pa Saucer. Scud is a bit nervous, not entirely sure he’ll be welcome.

  “The eggs hatched out fine,” booms Pa Saucer as soon as he recognizes Scud. “Thirty-six! Half boys and half girls. We set a tiny saucer pearl into each one. The pearls took hold, and all of my Nunu’s kids can fly!” The old saucer is very much the proud granddad.

  “Scud!” flutes Nunu from the porch. She alerts her children. “Father here!”

  Many of the saucerbabies were resting on Nunu’s rim. The full swarm heads for Scud. They look like tiny naked humans with saucer rims around their waists. And they have reddish hair like Scud’s. And yes indeed, they fly.

  “Daddy!” they shrill in their tiny voices. “Paw, Pops, Dada, Vovo, Scud Antwerpen!”

  Scud’s thrilled, and Villy likes the saucerbabies, and Zoe waves them off. Scud and Villy play with the little ones for a while. They vary in size from paper matches to the joint of a thumb. The very smallest ones buzz at the boys’ nostrils and ears, the larger ones crawl about in their hair as if in two haystacks, and one of them dares to catch hold of Scud’s upper front teeth with his hands and swing to a perch on Scud’s lower lip, hollering into the cavern of Scud’s mouth like a mountaineer—until Scud gently brushes him off. And now the saucerbabies begin a spirited game of tag, using Scud’s shoulder as home base. Reluctantly amused by the frolic, Zoe picks out a tiny nursery tune on her Gibson SG.

  Scud is flooded with unexpected affection for his offspring. He makes faces at them, widening his eyes, bobbing his head, and wagging his tongue. Villy gets one of the larger saucerboys to land on his finger, and he’s coaxing the little fellow to call him Uncle Villy.

  Meanwhile Nunu is everywhere, riding herd on the saucerbabies and planting kisses on Scud’s cheeks. But somehow Scud has started feeling awkward about kissing a flying saucer. What was he thinking when he got himself into his affair with Nunu? Easy answer: reptile brain.

  For Nunu’s part, her flirtations also seem artificial—a bit too sunny and bright. Slowly it dawns on Scud that he has a rival. A dark male saucer of Nunu’s size is resting on the porch as well. A young saucer named Krampus.

  “Hope you don’t mahnd I’m seein’ Nunu,” Krampus says to Scud, speaking in something like a farmboy accent. His dome is the dark green shade of an alligator, with shiny bumps. His rim is a paler green. He’s got the dark eye of an honest, non-leech saucer, but he has two rows of fangs snaggling out from his rim. The rim is seemingly capable of opening up like a set of jaws.

  “Oh, it’s fine if you spend time with Nunu,” Scud responds.

  He’s maybe a little surprised at himself. But, yes, he is in fact relieved to have Krampus in the picture. Krampus offers a way out. Scud doesn’t really want to spend the rest of his life in New Eden married to a flying saucer. I mean, dude! Get a grip!

  Fact is, Scud’s been obsessing over Maisie ever since Surf World. Ever since he heard that Maisie likes him. He’d much rather have Maisie as a girlfriend than Nunu. Maisie will be a senior and Scud will be a junior. That could work. According to Zoe, Maisie is half flying saucer. And Scud does likes saucers. But a girlfriend who’s only half saucer is enough.

  Nunu interrupts his musings. “Krampus my boyfriend now, but you Scud always father of first batch my kiddies.” Another kiss from Nunu, right on his mouth, a deep one, like when they were together in the back of the whale, a kiss to remember her by. She giggles as she breaks away.

  And then Nunu and Krampus drift off with the thirty-six saucerbabies in tow. Well, no, just thirty-five. One of them, a saucerboy, is perched on Villy’s shoulder like he means to stay. Villy looks glad to have the little guy.

  “Maisie’s right over there,” Zoe tells Scud right around then. Scud reacts with a relieved grin.

  Yes, Maisie is standing by a sparkling fountain some sixty yards away, chatting with Yulia the flat cow, still resting right where they left her. Evidently the brindle-spotted alien can in fact speak English when she feel
s it. Scud has a feeling that Maisie is watching him out of the corner of her eye. He waves to her, but she acts like she doesn’t see him. In his chagrin, it occurs him that he’s facing an entire lifetime of not understanding women.

  Meanwhile, at Scud’s side, Zoe is talking earnestly to an old man with a deep tan—oh, wow, that’s Zoe’s father from Los Perros, Kirkland Snapp, founder of the New Eden Space Friends. Kirkland is in a tall state of excitement, and his elbows bounce in and out, lanky old coot that he is.

  Floating at Kirkland’s side is a curvaceous female saucer who resembles a slightly larger version of Nunu. Soft pink skin, a large attentive eye, and full red lips. Zoe introduces Scud and Villy to her father and to his saucer consort, who is of course Meemaw and, let’s keep this straight, both Nunu’s mother and Maisie’s mother. So effin’ weird. Pa Saucer seems a little embarrassed by the introductions, and he goes inside his house. Meemaw makes much of the saucerbaby on Villy’s shoulder. Her grandson.

  Kirkland has an old-sounding voice, with a reverberation to it—as if there’s a soap-film-like membrane of mucus stretching across the back of his throat. Scud remembers Kirkland from a few years back. The old man and his human wife or girlfriend Sunny Weaver came to the Antwerpen home for dinner and Kirkland talked all evening, not letting anyone else get in a word edgewise. As Scud recalls, no matter what idea anyone proposes to Kirkland, his response always begins with “No,” followed by an extensive exposition of Kirkland’s opinions on these affairs. And the only time Kirkland smiles or laughs is when he’s marveling at the magnificence of his own self. A total jerk.

  As for Sunny Weaver, she seemed desperate. Even with his ignorance of the ways of the world, Scud could tell that Sunny was clinging to Kirkland like a drowning woman grasping a floating log. She’d laugh really hard at Kirkland’s unfunny witticisms about how wonderful he was, and she’d keep her mouth open in a rictus of good humor for way too long, with her anxious eyes darting around to make sure some of the others were laughing too. Also Scud could tell that Sunny Weaver hated Zoe Snapp. As if Zoe were competition for Kirkland’s attention.