Million Mile Road Trip
Page 37
“Like a camel passing through the eye of a needle, noooo?” says Yulia, picking up on Villy’s thoughts.
“Where are you from anyway?” Villy asks Yulia. “And what are you, if you’re not a flying saucer? You still haven’t told me.”
“I’m a part of Goob-goooob,” says the flat cow. “Like a lure dangling from a deep-sea fish’s broooow.”
“Goob-goob’s a million miles away,” protests Villy.
“Distances can be shorter in the higher woooorld,” says the flat cow.
And now she shows Villy a 4D-rear-view-mirror-type image of her body. It turns out that her tail is a four-dimensional tendril or connector or umbilical cord that runs through unspace to the body of Goob-goob—who’s ever so faintly visible as a Mayan ziggurat whose eye pokes into 4D unspace as well. The eye winks at Villy.
“Got it,” Villy says and falls silent for a minute, absorbing the weirdness. Meanwhile, the little saucerbaby Duckworth is crawling around on his chest. Probably he wants to get out of the flat cow and fly around. Not yet.
Villy formulates another question for Yulia. “Why do you, or why does Goob-goob, if you’re really part of her—I mean, why do you guys even need me to help? Why don’t you trap Groon in the tunnel yourself?”
“You have a nimble boooody,” says Yulia. “And it makes a better story to have a human do the joooob.”
“Story?”
“The world is made of stoooories,” says the flat cow, getting into a divine wisdom routine. “Not atooooms. Words weave the cosmoooos. A tangle of gossip, archetypes, and jooookes.”
The moos echo in Villy’s head. He’s always imagined his thoughts to be images of the firm external world. But Yulia’s saying it’s the other way around. Villy tries to get to that state of mind. And for a few seconds he’s there. Reality is a sea of sensations, feelings, and tales, intricately linked, with everything alluding to everything else. And the stodgy, solid, kick-a-brick, normative world—that part is the illusion. That part is the dream.
As for the split between ballyworld and mappyworld—there’s really no difference between dreaming the world as a bunch of planets, or dreaming the world as an endless sheet of basins. Either way, it’s the same gnarly thing underneath. Feet on a welcome mat. A tangle of talk. Yeah. Villy feels high as a kite.
“Time for woooork,” says Yulia. She clenches her body, beginning to squeeze Villy out through the slit in her side.
“My brain will fall out!” cries Villy. “My organs and bones!”
“They woooon’t,” says the 4D flat cow. “I’ll put a coat of 4D smeel slime on yoooou. Like in my picture of the Square.”
“This year’s fashion look for the unspace surf crew,” says Villy, channeling his terror into a joke. “Why can’t I stay inside you? Why do I have to go out there alone?”
“Because I’m scared of Groooon,” Yulia softly moos. “And of the unspace tuuuube. I’m just a coooow. I leave the tube to yooooou.”
So here’s Villy, adrift in hyperdimensional unspace, with the folded-up disks of the Neptune’s tablecloths under his arm. He wears his guitar at his waist, and little Duckworth buzzes ineffectually near his head. There’s not any regular air out (in? under? over?) here, but Villy feels no shortness of breath. The milky light of the higher world fills him with energy. And his 4D-smeel-glazed body is holding together fine. Like an assembled and plastic-laminated jigsaw puzzle. A Square in higher space.
Looking towards Los Perros, Villy sees slices of houses, cars, and dirt. Images that change when he turns his head or moves his eyes. Two-dimensional cross-sections. And that unny tunnel he’s supposed to tie off, when he looks at that thing on his own, he sees something like a sphere with a big gnarly slices of mortadella salami on it. Presumably that’s a cross-section of his archenemy Groon.
Once again the flat cow begins teeping Villy a stream of immersive, holographic images, which include Villy and his surroundings. He watches his body’s fitful, four-dimensional motions as if watching a stranger have a seizure on a sidewalk. He feels fear and pity for that person.
Never mind. He keeps on twitching—bucking his bod like a frantic inchworm. In the process, he finds that his 4D-smeel coat contains—score!— higher-dimensional muscles that he can control. It’s like he’s inside a flexible 4D surfboard. And if he bucks and hyper-bucks in a particular kind of steady pulse—why, then he glides through unspace like an eel in a lambent tropical sea. Yah, mon.
Observing Villy’s moves, the equally smeel-coated Duckworth learns to navigate in unspace as well. In this fashion our hero and his mascot approach the hypersolid unspace tunnel whose hypersurface contains Groon. With his bare eyes, Villy can’t tell if Zoe and Scud are in there with Groon or not. What he sees is like a big ball with an intricate anatomy chart on it. Yulia’s feed isn’t all that much help because, Villy now realizes, she’s editing the images that she sends him. He’s liking this less all the time.
“Be ready to wrap those disks around two of the spots on the tunnel,” orders the flat cow. “You’ll want to have them in place by the time Groon’s in the middle. And then I’ll tell you when to tighten them.”
“I dill ston’t see why cou yan’t do this instead of me,” mumbles Villy, so disoriented that he’s stumbling over his words. “I’m coo tlumsy.”
The flat cow starts laughing at him, like moo-hah, moo-hah, but really it’s Goob-goob laughing, given that the flat cow is Goob-goob’s sock puppet. Eff Goob-goob and eff the 4D flat cow.
§
Clutching her big saucer pearl, Zoe sails towards the hundred-foot-tall mouth of the giant tunnel, with Scud close behind. The spherical gate rests upon the bombed-out rubble of the gym surrounded by the tens of thousands of dead inside-out saucers who gave their all. Meanwhile, the zombie cops on the lawn are firing their guns. Saucer stooges that they are. Pop, pop, pop.
Zoe does jiggly evasive swerves. Then they’re safe in the tunnel, and the world of Los Perros dwindles to a luminous ball behind them. And ahead of them—
“Here we go,” says Scud.
Groon is in there, as expected. A bagpipe who’s the size of a mountain. He still has that giant saxophone-like horn bell with the narrow honky second horn in the middle of it. Thanks to the unny tunnel’s curvature, Zoe sees ghostly duplicate images of Groon and, for that matter, of herself. Another effect of the tunnel’s warp is that Groon’s body seems to bend around to touch itself in back. Like a dachshund on a rug beside a fireplace.
The monster bagpipe wasn’t expecting to meet anyone inside the tunnel. He greets Scud and Zoe with an angry squall of wheenks and squeals. Zoe pays close attention to the sounds. She purses her lips and fingers her trumpet’s valves, thinking about how to imitate Groon.
Beyond Groon lies the exit to Van Cott—it resembles the exit to Los Perros. Both are airy balls with worlds inside them, each still looking about a hundred feet wide. Zoe reminds herself that when the exit balls begin to shrink, she and Scud need to get the hell out of here.
Groon may not have eyes, strictly speaking, but his teepy, wriggly feelers can sense the kids’ every move. His squawking horn is homing in on them like a radar-aimed cannon. But Scud’s already in battle mode. The boy raises his wand and—
Ka-fooom!
A blast from Skzx the Aristo wand. Zoe half-expects to see the big brown bagpipe dissolve into manure dust. But no such luck. For a few seconds, a reticulated network of sparks plays across the monster’s hide—and then he shakes it off. Quite unfazed, the bagpipe finishes aiming his nested pair of horns and—
Squa-whonk!
The pulse of air is so narrowly focused that it hits only Scud. The supersonic stream propels the boy back out the Los Perros end of the tunnel—tumbling ass over teakettle. Quite unexpectedly, the blast’s residual eddies have the effect of drawing Zoe closer to Groon. Making the best of it, Zoe flies directly at the bagpipe, meaning to park herself beside the base of his horns, there to find safety from his stormy blasts.
Frantically Zoe looks around. She’s in a vaulted chamber amid the fleshy tubes and jaw-like wringers and squeezy-hands that make up Groon’s saucer-milking operation. Nearby are the glowing bladders of his saucer-egg hatchery. And next to that is a loamy, fungal bed that grows saucer pearls. The vat she landed in is a storage vessel for Groon’s smeel stash. Oh, why does this stuff have to be so sticky? Fruitlessly she tries to extricate herself, but the harder she struggles, the deeper she sinks.
To make things worse, several hundred baby saucers are in here with Zoe. The great bagpipe isn’t spewing them out through his thin horn just now. So the babies are at loose ends, buzzing around at random. And now the little guys catch Zoe’s scent. Being leeches, they flock around her like mosquitoes in a swamp.
Thinking fast, Zoe puts her horn to her mouth and begins imitating Groon. Enchanted by the tune, the baby saucers fall into sync with each other and begin flying in formation. Skillfully shaping her notes, Zoe sends them out of Groon’s narrow central horn.
The great bagpipe honks in irritation. But all the while he continues moving forward through the tunnel. His goal is, after all, to reach Los Perros. Zoe figures Villy should be tightening his Neptune’s tablecloths around now. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. The sizes of the Los Perros and Van Cott exits are holding steady, hanging there like house-sized Christmas tree balls, each with its own alternate world inside.
§
Weirdly weightless, Villy flounders and flaps in the 4D unspace as he and Duckworth prepare to wrap the first Neptune’s tablecloth around what he sees as a blank spherical cross-section of the unny tunnel. Annoyingly, Yulia isn’t showing Villy a full holographic picture anymore. And the jumble of spheres that Villy sees on his own isn’t really worth jack shit. Some of them have the big salami slice on them, and some don’t. Groon is indeed nearby. Villy can even hear the foul bagpipe’s squeals.
Yulia has switched to feeding Villy images of mental models of the tunnel instead of straight-on holographic video. Like, she shows him a time-lapse movie of a weather balloon breathing in and out—with a capital letter G on its side for Groon. And then she switches to showing the tunnel as a cubist comic strip, featuring a cute high school teacher lady who’s making love to conic sections. The woman, Villy is meant to understand, is his Los Perros High math teacher, and she represents the grisly Groon, and Villy has to be sure to trap her in between the two Neptune’s tablecloths. Sigh. He gets on with his job.
As Villy unfolds the first tablecloth, he’s waving his arms in four separate dimensions, which means his hands are flickering in and out of sight. Disturbing. He worries his protective coating of 4D smeel might peel loose, and that he’ll see his forearm’s bones go spinning away like some crowd-pleasing drummer’s tossed drumsticks.
Duckworth is a definite help. The basic move is that Villy clamps onto a spot on the circumference of this Neptune’s tablecloth disk, and Duckworth latches onto a spot on the opposite side of the disk, and then the saucerboy wriggles all the way around the unny tunnel, dragging the disk with him—and he brings his edge back to Villy. And then Villy is holding two opposite points on the edge, with the tunnel now partially wrapped in the tablecloth. You’d think the tablecloth wouldn’t reach, given that Groon is supposedly a mile wide, but as Yulia says, in unspace, distances tend to be shorter than you expect.
Villy and Duckworth do their wrapping move six times and end up with the first tablecloth fully wrapped around one of the tunnel’s cross-sections that doesn’t seem to have any Groon in it. Villy’s got the tablecloth’s entire outer edge scrunched into his hand. So he effectively has that particular section of the tunnel in a sack. When he’s ready to squash that part of the tunnel, he’ll tighten the sack by tugging out on the edge all the way around. But first he has to move over a bit and wrap the second tablecloth. Again, you’d think he might have to move a whole mile—the size of Groon—but, again, a relatively small motion in unspace goes a long way.
To make Villy’s task significantly more unpleasant than it has to be, the tunnel keeps zapping him with hair-thin sparks, as if from a buildup of static electricity, only it’s not electricity, it’s dark energy, or perhaps it’s some even gnarlier unspace force. Each time a spark hits Villy, he experiences a jump-cut in his perception of so-called reality. That is, he loses about a second or two of his personal mental timeline. It’s like the tapestry of his life is blemished with pocks of nothingness. A horrible sensation.
“I’m glad you’re handling this so well,” teeps Yulia, watching from a distance, all calm and fatuous.
“Can you tell that I’m having gaps?” asks Villy.
“You’re like a stone skipping across a poooond,” moos the flat cow.
“Which part is the water?” asks Villy, more than a little annoyed with Yulia by now.
“The water is the whoooole,” says Yulia. “Life’s floooow.”
Another tiny spark zings Villy around then and he undergoes another jump-cut. When he comes back, Yulia has just finished mooing something else. But he didn’t hear it.
“The air,” says Villy. “If I’m a stone skipping over the water of life, what does the air stand for?”
“Nothing and noboooody,” says Yulia. “I dread such a metaphysical zeroooo. That’s why I make you do this joooob. I guide from aboooove. You’re sturdy and loooow—”
“Kiss my ass,” cries Villy. “I mean—you’re snobby about me doing something too dangerous for you to try? I’m touching the unny tunnel because you can’t? And you’re saying I won’t die because I’m, too—stupid?”
“Finish your woooork,” says the pompous, controlling cow. “Wrap the second tableclooooth.”
“I want to know what’s really going on inside the frikkin tunnel,” cries Villy. “I can hear the bagpipe and I think I can hear Zoe’s horn. I need to see what you see.”
“Noooo.”
Villy nods his head up and down, scanning through the cross-sectional layers of Groon. Every time he thinks he might see a slice of Zoe, a hair-thin spark leaps joyfully from the tunnel and digs a divot in his mind. Somehow the awfulness of this engages and even amuses the surfer side of Villy. Now this, this is a sick trip, my man.
Wearing a stark grin, Villy plows through the unceasing stutter of the insufferable jump-cuts, drawing heavily on little Duckworth’s help all the while. And then the second Neptune’s tablecloth is wrapped around a second Groon-free section of the tunnel. Villy now holds, in effect, the ends of the two sacks in his hands.
As it happens, the tablecloths are a little bigger than they needed to be, so some of the material overlaps above his hands. It’s like when Uncle Scrooge grabs a money-bag and there’s a floppy flounce of cloth above his ducky fist.
The plan? When Yulia gives the word, Villy will squeeze the sacks. He’ll work more and more of the material past his hands, leaving smaller and smaller volumes for what’s inside.
By now Villy is panting with exhaustion—not that panting matters much when there’s no actual air. It’s only the mysterioso light of unspace that’s keeping him alive. But he’s not letting himself think too deeply about this. And now that he’s done with the wrapping, the sparks from the unny tunnel have stopped.
Yulia eases over to Villy’s side, and—even though by now he hates her—he gets partly back inside her to be comfortable. He’s still holding the necks of those bunched sacks in his hands.
“When?” he asks
the flat cow.
“Soooon,” says Yulia. “I want Groon to move just a bit moooore. And then Zoe and Scud fly to safety and—boooonk. You close the doooors.”
Once again Villy twitches his head, unsuccessfully trying to catch a glimpse of Scud or Zoe amid the balloons-with-salami-slices that his eyes can see. He can hear Groon’s squawks—and the clear tones of Zoe’s trumpet. Meanwhile the frikkin flat cow is feeding him is a bullshit cartoon of a cowboy with two lassos.
“You’ll truly make sure that Scud and Zoe escape?” begs Villy.
“No woooorries. Trust Goob-goooob.”
§
Zoe’s feet are still stuck in the vat of smeel. Wanting to distract Groon before he progresses much further through the tunnel, she puts her trumpet to her lips and plays very loud. Groon hesitates, not quite sure what’s going on. And now Scud comes flying back from Los Perros with his wand extended.
Fa-tooom!
Another blast! Groon flinches, rocked by the hit. And Zoe’s blatting solo is shaking the monster’s belly like the worst stomachache ever. Seeking surcease, the noise-bag sprouts fleshy tendrils from the inner skin of his bag—he grows feelers to grope for his tormenter. As one of the tendrils approaches Zoe, she ducks and loses her balance and—oh shit—her left hand goes down into the vat’s smeel and gets stuck as well. She’s like a mouse in a glue-trap.
Desperate for Scud’s aid, Zoe switches her trumpet-calls to plaintive bleats, wanting him to crawl inside the intricate bag and help her. But the boy holds back. Scud is leery of Groon. And he’s worried about running out of time.
A fresh Groon tendril twines around Zoe’s waist and starts towards her neck. She snaps it off with her free hand, only to have two more tentacles appear at the broken tip. If only she could get loose. Suddenly she has an idea.