by Rudy Rucker
“Gimme.” Zoe’s brought a loose cloth purse along, and she stashes her supersize saucer pearl in there. Scud’s got his in his baggy pants pocket. She and Scud are amped on adrenaline, giddy with an insane undercurrent of tension. It’s like they’re climbing the steps of the highest diving tower ever.
“How soon?” Zoe asks Scud. “How soon do we go through?”
“Well, Maisie took me to look at the unny tunnel gate in the gym,” says Scud. “Ten thousand dead saucers in there by now. So rank. The whole gym floor is covered with them. Piled thirty feet deep in the middle. And on top of them is the spherical gate. By now it’s the size of an SUV. The smell in there—whoah. Like turds and turpentine.”
“Why aren’t there cops at the gym?” asks Zoe. “Or janitors or people just walking by? Isn’t anyone going to notice a giant pile of dead saucers? They’ve been piling up since yesterday.”
“Cloud of unknowing,” goes Scud.
“Huh?”
“That teep invisibility spell?” says Scud. “Maisie and I were looking in through the gym door at the dead saucers, and a normal-looking security guard walks by—and I can tell that all he sees in there is the shiny wood floor he’s expecting to see. An empty floor with the red and blue curving lines for the basketball courts. The gate and the saucers—they’re hidden in a cloud of unknowing. You and Maisie and me, by now we’re at a level where we can see through the cloud.”
“Still seems like the cops would know,” says Zoe. “From the smell.”
“I think by now a lot of cops are saucer zombies,” says Scud. “Getting their instructions from Groon and his saucers. And of course they’re being told not to interfere at the high school today.”
“Got it,” says Zoe. “And—are we supposed to fly into that horrible, creepy death-tunnel right now? Or can I graduate first?”
“Might as well wait till something’s actually happening,” says Scud. “Don your cap and gown. Claim your diploma. That’s what Villy would have wanted.”
“Don’t talk like he’s dead!” cries Zoe. “He’s not! He’s in the fourth dimension!” Suddenly she’s close to tears. She dreamed of Villy last night. Villy hovering near her bed, touching and kissing her.
Before long it’s time for the ceremony to start. Zoe puts on her flimsy gown and the flat hat, and finds her assigned seat among the other graduating seniors. The grads and the onlookers are in folding chairs on the high school’s huge, low lawn. The front end of the lawn slants up steeply to the 1920s neoclassical building. White stone steps run up the slope. Dignitaries are at the top, on a flat, grassy strip.
A speaker speaks, and then another. Zoe’s not hearing a thing. She’s scared to even think. And now someone’s calling the graduates’ names and they’re trooping up there one by one. From the A’s to the L’s to the S’s. Zoe Snapp’s turn.
§
Villy awakens at—well, it’s very hard to judge time out here in unspace. The 4D flat cow is floating near the tunnel between the worlds. Seen through Villy’s own eyes, the tunnel looks like the surface of a sphere that changes as he moves his head. There are patches of pink and blue on some of the spheres. And squiggly stuff like guts. What’s going on? Villy is energized enough that, just in his head, he’s able to sketch a fresh line drawing to explain it, a Figure 10.
Figure 10: Villy and Yulia Looking at the Unny Tunnel
The Square sees the circumference of a disk. Villy sees the surface of a sphere. The Square Cow with the higher eye sees the two-dimensional surface of the tunnel. And Yulia with her wondrous 4D eye, she sees the 3D hypersurface of the tunnel. Which means what?
Well, Yulia’s feeding Villy her image of the unny tunnel and it’s like a 3D space that kind of wraps around. The analogies are breaking down. This is just weird. Studying Yulia’s view of the hypertunnel, he sees it begin pulsing and flailing around. Like a snake that’s swallowing a wild pig. And the tunnel space has a pink glob and a blue glob inside it. Big creatures sliding along the hypersurface of the tunnel.
“Is that already Groon?” Villy asks Yulia. His pulse is sky-high. “Shouldn’t we hurry up and pinch off those two cross-sections? You do have the Neptune’s tablecloths, right?”
“That’s not the bagpipe in there, noooo,” the flat cow says equably. “It’s those mile-wide saucers, Poppo and Bomboooo. We’ll let them go throooough. You and I keep waiting for Groooon.”
Villy is worried. “The giant saucers will trash my hometown!”
“Los Perros is defended by Scud’s wand and Zoe’s hoooorn. Powerful tooools.”
Villy’s guitar twitches at the mention of Zoe’s horn, perhaps missing the stratocast duets.
“Let’s at least keep an eye on what’s happening in Los Perros,” implores Villy. “And if things get bad, we pop out of unspace and help them. Okay?”
“We’ll looook,” says Yulia. “But our target is Groooon.”
§
So here’s Zoe walking across the patch of lawn in front of the columned Los Perros High facade. She’s wearing a white mortarboard and a white nylon rental robe. Her purse with the saucer pearl is under the gown, and her flexible living trumpet has twined himself around her leg.
Mr. Clark the principal hands Zoe a scrap of paper with a number on it. She’d been expecting a rolled-up parchment with a red ribbon around it, like in Archie comics. The numbered scrap merely symbolizes her hard-won diploma—which is to be picked up at the school office next week, assuming all her fees and documents are in order at that time.
Right in that moment of slight disappointment, the gym behind the high school explodes. Bursts like a steel, wood, and stucco bomb, scattering the unsavory remains of the leech saucers who died to make the tunnel. A mile-wide saucer slithers out of the rubble, expanding on the fly. Bombo. And here comes his mate, Poppo.
The two monsters jostle companionably, with the light aqua Bombo a bit higher in the air than pale red Poppo. He’s half-resting on her back. They’re like apocalyptic jellyfish, blotting out the heavens. Each of them has an evilly glowing red eye in their underside’s center. They dangle a thousand oral arms—slimy, sticky, suckerless tentacles. Eager to feed upon the plentiful human prey, Bombo and Poppo set to work dragging their strands across the sidewalks, parks, and patios nearby. Poppo herself is combing the verdant front lawn of Los Perros High, which is dotted with imposing thick-trunked palms, arrayed with chairs, and crowded with the chic, well-off friends and families of this year’s graduating class—who by now are stampeding in wild panic.
Oddly detached, Zoe gazes down from the hillock that serves as the graduation’s stage. It’s totally like a vintage ’50s sci-fi flick, she thinks. Like, The Attack of the Giant Saucers. Why do aliens always have to attack? Can’t humans and saucers be friends? I mean, look at Scud and Nunu, or at Dad and—well, never mind.
Bombo is silent, but Poppo is singing—Zoe recognizes the icky, saccharine voice from hearing it in Thuddland. The tuneless wavering notes overlay the desperate shouts and screams of the crowd. Most of them can evade the slowly swaying oral arms, but Zoe can spot five or six victims on the ground, each with a dangling tentacle fastened to their flesh, siphoning away some portion of that person’s smeel, or élan vital, or soul. This isn’t a movie. This is real. This is the start of the cosmic beatdown.
“Scud!” hollers Zoe, and maybe she teeps her call as well. And here he comes, geekishly calm, hurrying up the high school’s grand front steps to Zoe on the raised part of the lawn. He’s carrying his navel-orange-sized saucer pearl, and Zoe’s got hers out of her purse, and Scud’s flourishing the cryptic wand that lives within his arm.
“Power up your pearl!” yells Scud. “And put your free hand on mine—we’ll do like batteries in series. We need hella dark energy for this first jolt. Disintegrate Poppo before she sees us! Shock and awe, Zo-zo!”
Scud’s voice is level and surprisingly strong. Maybe the boy does hold some promise, as Maisie seems to believe. But how can Zoe possibly thin
king about Maisie’s flirtations? Zoe and Scud are supposed to be saving the world. Focus!
Oh, oh, here comes Maisie with her weird stepmother Sunny Weaver on her heels, toiling up the steps to join them. Sunny’s expression is truculent, but Zoe doesn’t give her time to interfere.
Moving fast, Zoe unwraps her trumpet from her leg and tucks him under her arm, while holding her big new pearl in her hand. She lays her other hand on Scud’s shoulder. Teeping into her pearl, Zoe powers it into zap-mode. And then, heedless of the risk, she turns her body into a dark-energy amplifier—and funnels the zap-juice across her body and into Scud, who’s feeding all of it into his wand.
Scud’s normally callow face has taken on a hard and solemn look. He raises his wand. Glowing dots sparkle around its tip, and—
Ka-fooom!
It’s like a skyrocket exploding above Zoe’s head. The blast knocks her flat on her butt, and she damn near drops her pearl and trumpet. Her ears are ringing, but she can tell that Poppo’s ooky song is gone. And what about the humongo pink saucer herself? She’s dust, she’s drifting down like pastel soot. Good one, Scud.
But Bombo’s still here and, as Zoe can reasonably assume, he’s upset about the loss of his mate. He’s vibrating his body like a bass speaker, pulsing out dark notes and subsonic vibrations that Zoe senses as resonant vibrations in her gut. She feels like throwing up. Sparks are crackling from Bombo’s edges towards the great red eye at the center of his mile-wide underside, like he’s a wheel on a science-fair spark machine. His gaze sweeps back and forth across the lawn. His freaky throbbing rises to a crescendo.
“Here they are!” Sunny Weaver screams to the great saucer. Her voice is harsh and grainy. She’s pointing at Zoe and Scud, and staring up at Bombo. It’s not yet clear if Bombo hears her. Sunny’s jaw is jutting out at a weird angle. Every scrap of her plastic-surgery glamour is gone. She’s acting like an evil toad. “Shoot here, master, shoot here! These two! They killed Poppo!”
Bombo falls ominously silent. His red eye’s glow grows. Zoe and Scud sprint away from the stage and onto the flat part of the lawn.
Ka-raaack.
Again Zoe finds herself knocked off her feet and, oh my god, there’s a fifty-foot-deep crater in the place of the Los Perros High front steps. The result of Bombo’s zap. Surely it’ll take the saucer some time to power up for his next shot, but now—creak, creeak, creeeak—oh shit, the school’s elaborate, columned, pediment-topped facade is wavering, leaning, looming, and…falling forward in a slow-motion collapse.
Zoe uses her big saucer pearl to fly down to the lawn, with the tuned-in Scud at her side. The neoclassical facade comes down with an accelerating rumble and screech, ending with thudding chunks of masonry, a roiling cloud of dust, and sad, anguished cries.
At least a dozen people were on that strip of lawn up there. Prosaic, stoic Principal Clark, Ms. Boot the enforcer, Chau En Lai the valedictorian, handsome Coach Simmons, Amparo Quinonez from the Los Perros city council, and Zoltan Nemeth the photographer—all of them murdered by the giant saucer. Crushed to pulp. Tears spring to Zoe’s eyes.
Bombo has lowered himself to a hundred feet above them. His hateful ruby eye is directly overhead. His mile-wide body covers the entire sky. He’s making that creepy booming noise, slowly rocking back and forth, feeling for the presence of Zoe and Scud. Preparing to fire again.
Zoe pulls herself together. She’s standing at Scud’s side with her pearl in her left hand, her trumpet under her left arm, and her right hand on Scud’s shoulder. “Quick!” she says, “Take down Bombo!”
“If I can get my mojo back in time,” whispers Scud. “I’m trying. But—oh shit—he’s already running sparks across his bottom again. And his eye, it’s flaring up—look out, Zoe!”
A second blast strikes the rubble and the lawn, making a crater that overlaps with the first one. The hit is blessedly wide of Zoe and Scud.
“Do it now!” Zoe screams. “Shoot!”
Okay, the dark energy is flowing through Zoe’s body to Scud’s, and he’s raising his arm, and the evanescent fireflies of power are buzzing around his wand, and—
Eeek! It’s that goddamn Sunny Weaver. She’s got her hands around Scud’s neck from behind and she’s—are you kidding?—she’s frikkin choking him.
“Leave the saucers alone!” Sunny yells. “It’s the new dawn! Hail Groon!” Sunny cocks back her head. Her hair is sticking out on all sides, like from static electricity. She’s locked into a master-slave teep loop with Bombo. “Here they are, Lord!” she yowls.
To make thing worse, saucer zombies are hurrying across the lawn towards Zoe and Scud. The latest zombies are people whom Poppo slimed. They’re not dead, they’re up and on their feet, twenty or thirty of them. And, oh god, it looks like there’s a pair of zombie cops down by the street, getting out of their patrol car with pistols drawn. All of them following the mile-wide saucer’s orders.
The immediate problem is to make Sunny Weaver stop choking Scud. Maisie is dithering, not quite able to take action against her stepmother of so many years. But Zoe has no such qualms. She raises her horn to her lips and sends a supercharged wake-up blast right into Sunny’s spiteful marshmallow face—with the bell of the trumpet physically touching her. Sunny reels back with her hands over her ears. Scud is free.
By now, of course, Bombo knows exactly where they are. In fact he’s beaming down a laser spotter beam that seems to be locked onto, um, the crown of Scud’s head. Nowhere to run, no place to hide. Once again Bombo ramps up his beats, and his central eye lights in a deadly glow.
Zoe slips into panic mode. “Run!” she yells to Maisie. She’s fully ready to abandon Scud. Who says Zoe has to be a hero? But Maisie grabs her arm, and Zoe can’t get away, and Scud’s expecting the help.
“Feed me your energy,” yells Scud. “Do like with Poppo.” The nerdy younger brother raises his wand. He’s ready to face the mile-wide killer saucer in a final shoot-out. And Zoe has to go along.
“Okay,” says Zoe after the briefest of pauses. “I’m in.” Once again she channels the energies of her horn and of the saucer pearl to her friend. And Maisie’s powering Scud too. Zoe wonders if Villy can see her from the fourth dimension. Oh darling, if only we’d had more time.
Scud and the saucer unleash their energy-bolts at the same moment. The beams collide in midair, sputtering into a painfully bright light. Like a welder’s arc, like a miniature star. Scud doesn’t let up; he stands there, silhouetted against the smoke and the sparks, urging his beam higher—up, up, and up towards floppy Bombo.
And then Zoe adds a touch that’s all her own. She takes her trumpet in her right hand and blows a frantic solo, a clarion call that could tumble a castle wall. This tips the balance.
Fa-tooooom.
Bombo the mile-wide saucer is a fogbank of blue dust, softly settling onto the lawns and homes of Los Perros. Sirens wail—emergency vehicles, some on their way, some already here. Firemen dig for survivors in the rubble pits. Medics carry off the wounded and the dead.
Precious few others remain on the lawn. Empty, tumbled chairs—and fifty saucer zombies closing in on Zoe, Scud, and Maisie. Bombo had been urging the zombies to block the kids’ attack. But now, with the saucer gone, his followers have fallen back on residual programming—which may or may not include orders to kill Zoe and Scud. At least they’re being slow about it.
Sunny Weaver sits on the ground, dazed and confused. She looks dowdy, her years of flashy flirting long gone. An aging woman, sad and alone. For the first time ever, Zoe feels pity for her.
“You’re my big hero,” Maisie is saying to Scud. She’s kissing him all over his face.
“Not done yet,” says bashful Scud.
“We still have Groon,” adds Zoe. “The main event.” If they don’t stop Groon, all this has been in vain.
With so much of the high school turned to rubble, Zoe can see through to where the gym was. The gate of the unny tunnel has grown to a hundred feet high. Zoe c
an see into it, a little bit. A dark, floppy shape is in there. Like a tadpole in a frog egg in a pond.
“You can do it,” says Maisie, giving Zoe a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll tunnel over to mappyworld and do what I can from over there.”
“I’m terrified,” confesses Zoe. “I’m sick with fear.”
“Yeah, we’re totally doomed,” says Maisie, oddly cheerful. “Saying that out loud gets your energy up, hmm?”
“Wait,” says Zoe. “In Surf World you told me that we’re cosmic mythic heroes. So we can’t lose, right?”
“That was just something I said,” goes Maisie. “I said it to pump you up and keep you on the team. And that’s why Pinchley and Flipsydaisy said it too. We could die any second. It’s been that way all along. There’s no guarantee. Goob-goob was running out of options. That’s why she went ahead and enlisted us. A last-ditch kind of move.”
“Sir! Ma’am! We have to ask you to raise your hands.” A voice through a bullhorn. Oh god, it’s one of those zombie cops, still standing by the patrol car. He has a rifle.
“Don’t stop now,” Maisie tells Zoe and Scud. She fashions her saucer pearl into a one-person tunnel gate—and she’s gone.
“Raise your hands or we’ll have to shoot.”
Fat new saucer pearls in hand, Zoe and Scud swoop into the tunnel gate where the gym had been.
30: Cosmic Beatdown, Part 2
VILLY / ZOE
Yulia streams images of Los Perros to Villy, and he witnesses much of Zoe’s and Scud’s battle against the giant saucers Poppo and Bombo, although it’s confusing because Yulia sees everybody’s insides as well as their outsides. The action scenes are intercut with immersive images of the great Groon slowly making his way into the tunnel. The warped space at the tunnel’s mouth is making room for him, but even so, it takes a while because the bagpipe is so big. Villy thinks of a baby’s head pushing out through a woman’s birth canal. He’s never quite understood how that’s even possible.