Million Mile Road Trip

by Rudy Rucker

“Yeah,” goes Scud, nodding. “This movie I wanna see.” He makes his voice as deep and portentous as he can. “Teen Outcasts vs. Saucer Bagpipe: The Cosmic Beatdown. Can you tunnel us to Los Perros from here, Zoe?”

  “My puny little saucer pearl probably can’t reach Earth from this basin,” says Zoe. “And the bigger saucer pearls that we might find in New Eden—there’s no knowing where they’d tunnel to. We’ll walk over the ridge to Van Cott, take a look at the big unny tunnel they’re working on, then use my trusty saucer pearl to tunnel home from there.”

  “You don’t have to walk,” puts in Maisie. “I’ll drive you over the ridge. With my dune buggy.”

  “You have a car here?” says Zoe. “Awesome.”

  “I keep it in Dad’s garage,” says Maisie.

  “Ew,” goes Zoe. “I have to see him again?”

  “You should talk to our father a little more,” says Maisie. “He’s not completely brain dead. He just acts that way. We’ve got a little time before Groon lands. And like I was telling Yulia, making that giant unny tunnel is going to take them until tomorrow.”

  So Scud, Maisie, and Zoe walk over to Kirkland Snapp’s cottage, a shaggy, leafy cottage with a porch and a garage. Kirkland’s in a rocking chair on the low porch drinking a glass of tea. Meemaw the saucer isn’t around.

  “’Sup, Dad,” goes Zoe.

  Kirkland kicks right into a monologue. Maisie and Zoe pretend to listen, but Scud zones out on most of it. The one interesting part is when Kirkland talks about how he seeded the mud behind the high school with saucer pearl spore culture that he obtained from—well, this is wild. It happened when Zoe was one year old.

  Supposedly Meemaw the saucer appeared to Kirkland for the very first time one night, and she was flirting with him, and he was becoming obsessed with her, and suddenly she engulfed his right hand and pumped a couple of ounces of liquid spore culture into it. Kirkland’s hand swelled up like he had an allergic reaction to a bunch of bee stings—with milky liquid oozing out. Meemaw then told Kirkland to help the saucers by fertilizing the likeliest fungal-growth-type spot he might know of. So Kirkland ran and dribbled the yucky juice from his hand onto a muddy patch behind Los Perros High.

  “If it really was his hand,” Scud thinks to himself. “And not—” Well, never mind.

  Soon after that Kirkland became Meemaw’s lover, and she gave birth to Maisie in New Eden, and she brought the saucerbaby to Kirkland to raise in Los Perros like a human. Now at this point, Kirkland already had Sunny Weaver as his human girlfriend, so he got Sunny to pretend that she was Maisie’s natural mother. Then Zoe’s mom threw Kirkland out. Kirkland married Sunny and the two of them devoted much energy to their club, the New Eden Space Friends, living together for some fifteen years. But all along, Kirkland was seeing Meemaw on the side.

  At this part Scud drops off to sleep, lying on his back on the porch, snoring with his mouth wide open. When he wakes—after who knows how long a time—Kirkland is still talking. He’s up to the part where, a year or two ago, he turned against Sunny because she had thrown her allegiance to the leech saucers. The courageous Kirkland moved to New Eden to live with Meemaw, in hopes of finding a way to destroy Groon and to wipe out Groon’s legions of leech saucers.

  And then Kirkland gets around to Pinchley and Yampa. “They were looking for help,” he says. “I told them my daughters could pitch in! Maisie and Zoe! So if you kids bring down grim old Groon, it’ll be thanks to me!” Kirkland pauses, glowing with self-esteem. Before he can start again, the girls hop off the porch.

  Maisie chugs her dune buggy out of the garage. It’s a refitted VW bug with sparkly pink paint, glowon headlights, quantum shocks, and fat graphene tires, just like they had on the purple whale.

  By now Kirkland is holding forth again, not wanting to stop talking to his two daughters. Two hours wasn’t enough. And now, before they can finally get in the car and leave, Kirkland implores them to wait another moment. He strides long-legged into his cottage and returns with two large saucer pearls. Prize specimens, faintly luminous.

  “One for you, Zoe, and one for your sleepyhead friend—was it Spin? He’s Villy’s brother?”

  “Scud.”

  “Exceedingly valuable items,” says Kirkland, handing each of them a navel-orange-sized pearl. “If you have a big one, you can use it to fly, or to send out bolts of lightning. They’ll come in handy for the cosmic beatdown.”

  “They know about the pearls, Dad,” says Maisie. “But thanks. That’s great.”

  “Do you want one, too, dear?”

  “Duh?” says Maisie. “I’ve had a saucer pearl like that since last year. I carry it in my purse.”

  “Ah, yes,” goes her dad. “Of course.”

  28: Going Home

  ZOE

  At this point Zoe figures they’re done, but even now Kirkland isn’t through. He begs her for one last word, in private.

  “About what?” goes Zoe, feeling totally impatient.

  “I still didn’t explain the main thing,” says Dad, leading her away from the car to his rickety porch. “I always talk all around what I mean to say, and I never get to the point.”

  “You know that about yourself?” says Zoe, a little surprised.

  Kirkland makes a dismissive gesture. “It’s a habit. All these years of cheating on my wives. And scheming against Groon. I need to tell you plain and clear that I’ve missed you, Zoe. And I’m proud of you. And I’m completely on your side.”

  “Why don’t you come home?” bursts out Zoe. “Maybe Mom would take you back. She’s lonely.”

  Slowly Kirk shakes his big head. “Too much water under the bridge. I’m used to life in New Eden. I belong with Meemaw.”

  “Okay then,” says Zoe, her voice turning tight. “I gotta go.”

  “One more thing,” calls Kirkland as she walks away. “Look out for that Sunny Weaver. She’s flipped to the leech saucers’ side.”

  “Got it.”

  And then Zoe’s in the dune buggy sitting in front next to sister Maisie with Scud in back. On the road again. What a relief. Two million miles and counting.

  Seventeen-year-old Maisie turns out to be a reckless driver, throwing up gravel with her bulbous tires and laughing gaily whenever she makes too tight a turn and the car spins out. Scud cheers her on, and pretty soon Zoe’s laughing too. What the hell.

  Even in the dark, the drive up the ridge isn’t bad. They have headlights, and the road is a well-worn track that’s been driven by a thousand expat Earthlings. High in the sky, saucers stream towards Van Cott. There isn’t much action on the road, although at one point a chubby gray leech saucer darts out from a bend in the road where it’s disguised itself as a boulder. Scud and Zoe give the hostile saucer a pair of zaps from their fat new pearls, and when the alien still shows signs of life, Scud turns him to dust with a crackling bolt from his wand.

  At the top of the ridge they pause for a break. Unlike the other passes that Zoe’s driven through, this isn’t a three-way intersection. It’s just a straight ridge with New Eden on one side and Van Cott on the other. The lights of downtown Van Cott beckon. And then Zoe notices she’s hearing bagpipe music in the sky again. Loud and getting louder.

  “Duck,” yells Maisie. “Under the car.”

  The three kids scramble under the dune buggy. Zoe manages to lie on her back with her head sticking out. She wants to see their enemy fly by.

  So, yeah, it’s Groon the bagpipe, cruising past like a flying mountain, blatting a march-type song, already slowing for his landing glide, seemingly oblivious to the three humans atop the ridge. He’s got his size tightened down to about a mile across. He glows from within, his vast hide lit in shades of ocher, beige, and umber. His nested doubled chanter horn bobs like a cheerful snout, and his feelers are combed back by the force of his passage through the air.

  Zoe crawls out from under the car to watch the monster land. On the way down, he circles over the city of Van Cott, his song rising to a festive jig
. Glowing leech saucers rise up and swarm around him like bees around their queen. The great pink and blue saucers they saw in Thuddland have arrived as well, wobbly behemoths as wide as the bagpipe who spawned them. What were their names? Something silly, Zoe can’t remember.

  The giants hover while Groon and his slave saucers converge upon Van Cott’s core. A dust cloud rises when the mountainous bagpipe crushes the greater part of the night market. Straining her eyes, Zoe can see he’s settled beside Saucer Hall.

  Driving even more recklessly than before, Maisie careens down the slope into the basin, roars along a feeder highway, and slaloms into Van Cott via its grid of city blocks. She passes the remains of the night market and comes to rest by a freshly grown thorn barricade around Saucer Hall. Beyond the fence, Groon’s mile-high bulk hulks against the night sky. His vile, exultant piping fills the air. The three kids get out of Maisie’s car and work their way closer.

  For some reason there’s no other gawkers here—although there are some of those horsefly-sized saucers that want to bite you. By now Zoe and Scud know how to swat them as fast as they land, and Maisie has some kind of half-saucer vibe that keeps the mini saucers away from her.

  Meanwhile Groon’s leech slave saucers are crowding into Saucer Hall, flying in through the 120-foot-tall front doors. Zoe can’t make out what’s happening inside. One thing for sure—none of those saucers is coming back out.

  “They’re building the gate inside Saucer Hall,” says Maisie. “The gate of the unny tunnel they’re working on. The gate will be a sphere. They’ll trundle it out through those big front doors when it’s ready for Groon. Like rolling a giant ball out of an airplane hangar.”

  “If the tunnel’s gate fits inside Saucer Hall, how can it be big enough for Groon?” asks Zoe.

  “You must have noticed by now that you seem to shrink when you move into an unny tunnel,” says Maisie. “Or you can say the space around the gate is stretched. From what I know, if the new gate is a hundred feet across, the space warp effects will be enough for Groon to fit. Even though he’s a mile wide. The same size as those two giant saucers. Poppo and Bombo? They’ll send those two big saucers through the tunnel first—to make sure it’s wide enough for Groon.”

  Zoe glances upward. Somehow she hadn’t yet grasped that the smooth, even lighting near Saucer Hall was emanating from fleshy pink Poppo and aquamarine Bombo. As before, with their hundreds or even thousands of dangling tentacles, they remind Zoe of flying jellyfish. Rather than devastating Van Cott on the spot, they’re waiting to visit Los Perros. What a bad scene that will be. Does this really have to happen?

  “How exactly are the slave saucers making the big tunnel?” demands Zoe.

  “I bet I know!” exclaims Scud, wanting to impress his potential new girlfriend Maisie. “The leech saucers flying into Saucer Hall—each of them uses his or her internal saucer pearl to make a thin unny tunnel. And the tunnels merge together, one by one. Like stalks making a sheaf. Like whirlpools joining to become a maelstrom. Like tiny bubbles merging into a fat wobbler.”

  “Don’t get it,” says Zoe wearily. “And don’t feel like you have to tell me. Not now.” Today feels like it’s lasted forever. Riding Stolo up the smokestack, visiting with Goob-goob, surfing the jet stream inside the flat cow, doing the scene with her father in New Eden, driving over the basin ridge, and finding their way to Saucer Hall.

  “Can I draw on you again?” Scud asks Maisie, quite undeterred. “I want to show Zoe how the tunnels merge.”

  “Feel free,” says Maisie, unlimbering her flap of skin.

  Scud gets right to work. “My Figure 7 will be a pair,” says he. “To show how the tunnels merge.” The little threads smush together to make a thicker one.

  Figure 7: Unny Tunnels Merge

  “Yeah,” says Maisie. “But there’s a kicker. It kills those little leech saucers when they use their pearls to grow those thin tunnel threads. Even before the merge. That’s why it’s so horrible. They’re sacrificing their lives for Groon. If you have a saucer pearl inside your body, and you grow it into an unny tunnel, then space’s surface tension sends you sliding into the tunnel, and momentum carries you all the way through. And when you come out on the other side you’re inside out. And that kills you.”

  “Stop it,” says Zoe. “I’ve had enough.”

  “Wait, wait!” cries Scud. “I’ve got to visualize this.” He falls silent for a full minute and then, in a burst of activity, he rapidly draws a series of six frames on Zoe’s skin. “Behold Scud Antwerpen’s mighty Figure 8!”

  Figure 8: Turned Inside Out by Sliding Along a Wormhole Inside You

  “Those drawings make no sense whatsoever,” says Zoe. “And did I mention that I’m tired?”

  “Look harder,” insists Scud. “The visual logic is quite compelling. Read across the rows and work your way down. It’s what happens when a saucer goes through an unny tunnel that starts inside its body. I’ve drawn the saucer as a Pac-Man-style profile, with a wedge mouth and a hole in his middle to stand for the saucer pearl that turns into a tunnel. If you watch the mouth, you can tell when he’s inside out.”

  “Go to hell,” says Zoe.

  Maisie cuts to the chase. “Zoe, the basic fact is there’s going to be a hella pile of dead saucer meat over on the Los Perros side.”

  “Bizarre,” says Zoe, finally intrigued. “What are people going to think?”

  “They’ll be saying it’s the rankest senior-class prank ever,” says Scud, geekishly smiling at the idea. “The dead saucer meat’s gonna look like, I don’t know, like the garbage pile at some cowschwitz feedlot slaughterhouse? As if some kid ordered up a truckload of that stuff. Intestines and cartilage and veins and gross organs nobody wants.”

  “I can almost imagine one of Tawna Garvey’s boyfriends doing that,” says Zoe.

  “And it would totally impress her,” goes Maisie.

  “For sure,” goes Zoe. “Tawna would be like, ‘Ew! You’re so crazy!’ And then she’d laugh with her mouth open really wide, kind of wiggling her tongue, like a deep-sea blub-fish luring prey.”

  “Tawna Blub-fish, yes!” echoes Maisie, and the two girls do a high five.

  Their moment of cozy gossip is abruptly ended. A hostile leech saucer is bellowing at them from the thorn fence.

  “Hey! You! Get outta here!”

  The bullying saucer is a misshapen, red-eyed wedge with a crooked rim. By way of backing up his words, he fires off a zap jolt that barely misses them. They jump back into Maisie’s dune buggy and retreat a block or two.

  “I can use my teep slug to make us invisible,” suggests Scud. “If we want to get back close to Saucer Hall and spy.”

  “Don’t bother,” says Zoe. “It’s time to hop to Los Perros. That way we’ll be on the scene when Groon tries to come through.”

  “I keep telling you people that won’t be till tomorrow afternoon,” says Maisie. “That tunnel’s got a lot of growing to do. And those poor slave saucers don’t add all that much apiece.”

  “I’m ready to go home anyway,” says Zoe. “Are you coming or not, Maisie?”

  “I’ll be there,” says Maisie. “There’s a few underground rebels here in Van Cott I ought to get in touch with first. Eekra the dancer and that farm kid called Meno? If Villy really kills Groon, the humans will have a chance to wipe out the leech saucers for good. A sudden strike could do it. The good saucers will be on the humans’ side. I have to tell Eekra and Meno to get ready. And then I’ll jump to Los Perros. I’ll be there sooner than you think.”

  “Meanwhile Scud and I need to rest,” says Zoe. “Because tomorrow we fly into the tunnel from the Los Perros end—to slow down Groon. We’ll hinder him with my music and with Scud’s wand.”

  “We will?” goes Scud.

  “Yes,” says Zoe like a strict big sister. “If we distract Groon, Villy has more time to pinch off the ends of the tunnel.”

  “I hope you come to Los Perros soon,” Scud tells Maisie. “I
want to be sure I see you some more.”

  “That’s nice,” says Maisie, shooting Scud what’s meant to be a smoldering look.

  “Can—can I kiss you before we go?” says Scud, totally going for it. “Even though I’m sixteen, I’ve never kissed a girl before at all. Yes, I know that means I’m a loser. But if I end up getting killed by Groon, it’d be shame never to have—”

  “Don’t try and push your argument too far,” says Zoe with a laugh. But Maisie and Scud aren’t listening. They’re locked in an embrace. In the background, Groon’s music plays.

  Zoe has the big new pearl that Kirkland gave her for zapping—she’s tied it into the tail of her shirt. But for the hop home, she feels safer using the trusty little saucer pearl she’s got in her jeans pocket. She gets it out and breathes on it, waking it up. For sure this pearl knows the way home. If she can activate it.

  She does still have her guitar, and maybe she could use it to play the riff that transforms the saucer pearl into a tunnel. But it makes her impatient to think of fingering strings. She’d so much rather blow her horn. She holds up her black Gibson SG and talks to him.

  “You’ve been an amazing guitar for me,” Zoe says. “But—can you be a trumpet?”

  No sooner said than done. The living guitar flexes, wads himself up, and unfurls into , yes, a shiny, brassy, honkable horn. Zoe holds him in her hands and grins. The horn is nothing less than a B-flat Martin Committee trumpet, just like Miles himself used. And Zoe’s horn is alive.

  “Ready now,” says Scud, flushed and rumpled from kissing Maisie. “Done with the goodbye.”

  Zoe toots her stutter-step riff while holding her little saucer pearl. Great tone and awesome valves on this new trumpet. The pearl turns translucent, twitches, and gets a little larger. It’s a gate to Los Perros. It’s almost open, but not quite.

  “I’ll set it on the ground and play the whole riff,” Zoe tells Scud. “Then we back off, and we run into the tunnel. Don’t spaz out and fall. Go in there full-tilt, and run out even faster.