Million Mile Road Trip

by Rudy Rucker

  She aims her trumpet downward, directly at the vat of smeel, and toots a machine-gun arpeggio of soprano notes. Almost immediately the staccato tune softens the sticky stuff into yielding gruel. Yes! Zoe pulls her left hand loose, rips all fleshy tendrils away from her body, and clambers free of the quicksand vat of smeel. Now to find her way out. Hurry!

  Groon’s forward motion continues unabated.

  §

  “Noooow!” the flat cow commands Villy. “Pull the sacks cloooosed.”

  “Are Zoe and my brother still in there?”

  “Noooo! Don’t worry soooo.”

  Manfully Villy hauls away on the edges of the two Neptune’s tablecloths, constricting the exits on either side of Groon.

  §

  Peering out through Groon’s translucent hide, Zoe notices something very bad.

  The exit to Los Perros is shrinking. Fast. It’s already too small for Groon. The bagpipe throws himself at the shimmering ball and—bonk—he can’t fit through. He squeals in fury.

  Scud flies close to Groon’s translucent hide and gestures frantically to Zoe. Like—Come on! It’s time to bail! Fly out of there!

  Without her big saucer pearl Zoe can’t fly. But she’s doing her level best to hop and crawl and climb towards the hole where the horn leads out, scrambling through the tangles of Groon’s innards, through slimy channels, along the inner surfaces of his sack, grabbing onto muscles and tendons and veins. But over and over, the vengeful Groon finds ways to stymie her progress—he yanks her ankles with his tendrils, he bucks his walls to shake her loose, he pumps blasts of air to toss her about. It’s one step forward and two steps back—here in the mazy belly of the beast.

  At the same time, Groon is lurching back and forth in the tunnel. He rushes towards the Van Cott exit. But that end of the tunnel is shrinking too. Bonk. He turns and speeds once more towards the Los Perros exit. Bonk.

  Somewhere out there, Villy is tightening the Neptune’s tablecloths. And that can only mean that Villy doesn’t know that Zoe’s stuck in here. How can that be?

  Yet again, Zoe toots a wailing sob from her horn, hoping that somehow Villy will hear and understand. Not impossible. It’s not, after all, an ordinary horn. Perhaps the horn’s notes can travel through unspace?

  Meanwhile Scud is doing his utmost to free Zoe. Wand in hand, he’s blasting away at Groon’s hide, wanting to make a hole for Zoe. But it’s not working. Scud tries again, using the saucer pearl as well. He bears down, not wanting to stop. A minute passes. Groon’s skin won’t give way.

  The gate to Los Perros has grown very small—it’s not even three feet across. Scud’s face is anguished. He gestures to Zoe that he’s sorry. He can’t wait any longer. He wriggles through the gate to Los Perros. By now the gate is a tiny bright spot, only a few inches across.

  At this point it occurs to Zoe that she still has her tiny saucer pearl in her pocket, the one from before, the one she’s already used for hopping four separate times, and she ought to be able to open this pearl up into a tunnel once again, right? And maybe the tunnel would lead back to that intricate intersectional moment on the Los Perros night street where Mom’s SUV almost rammed them. Yes!

  With trembling hands Zoe sets her little pearl afloat before her. And she plays the proper honks on her horn. But—nothing is happening. This isn’t the right kind of space here, or Groon is spoiling the vibes, or the pearl’s energy is down—whatever it is, the grubby little pearl is as lusterless and inert as a cheap plastic bead. Zoe plays her magic tune again, just in case, and one more time—no go. The pinpoint light of the exit gate is gone.

  Groon thrashes, belches, howls, farts. The air is hot and foul. It’s like being inside a garbage bag in the trunk of a car in the sun. Zoe is going to die.

  Help me, Villy.

  §

  The flat cow now teeps Villy a clear view of how the tightening tablecloths have pinched through the narrowed necks of the tunnel. It’s done. The spaces of mappyworld and ballyworld have healed with no scars. In between them is a small world, a pocket universe, sealed in on itself, gradually dwindling in size, presumably with Groon inside—but the perverse Yulia is hiding any images of Groon.

  What bothers Villy is that he’s still hearing Zoe’s trumpet. High thin notes making their way through unspace. Like she’s calling for him from inside that ball?

  “Tell me Zoe’s okay,” Villy cries to Yulia.

  “She’s safe at hoooome.”

  Villy wants to believe this. But he doesn’t. “Set me down in Los Perros so I can see her!”

  “First I want to savor the death of Groooon,” says Yulia. “Victory is woooon. I speak as Goob-goooob.”

  “I can damage you,” says Villy, goaded to fury. He feels around his leather-lined passenger compartment within Yulia’s body and once again he finds the lump that he’d earlier thought was a saucer pearl. He puts a hand on either side of it and begins squeezing. It’s quite flexible. Not a saucer pearl at all. An internal organ of some kind. Yulia flinches as he bears down on it.

  “I’m going to pop this thing,” Villy tells Yulia. “Unless I see Zoe.”

  “Low, hot-headed ruuuube,” says Yulia. “You must goooo.” With a quick twitch of her body, the flat cow sails down into the sunny reality of Los Perros and spits out Villy, Duckworth, and Villy’s Flying Vee guitar.

  The first thing Villy sees is his brother Scud. He’s on the front lawn of the high school, which has very definitely been trashed. Scud is sobbing, terrified, and he holds up his hands as if to stave off a beating.

  “Where’s Zoe?” Villy hollers at his brother. “Did you leave her in the tunnel?”

  “I tried to save her,” cries Scud. “I couldn’t. She got stuck inside Groon. My wand wasn’t strong enough. There wasn’t time. I’m sorry, Villy!”

  “Yulia!” shrieks Villy, turning around. “Take me back so—”

  The flat cow is gone. She doesn’t care about his problems. She’s lifted off into the fourth dimension and flown away. She’s part of Goob-goob. And Goob-goob’s war is won.

  §

  Zoe won’t accept that she’s going to die. Even though she’s locked inside the stinky Groon ball. It’s like being in a collapsing factory. Groon’s ick innards are falling apart. The bagpipe’s drone is but a hiss. Groon is giving up.

  But Zoe believes in Villy. He will save her. She visualizes his face and his eyes. The abrupt motions of his legs. His long, sly smile. His shiny hair. His urgent embrace. She raises her horn, willing the notes out through unspace.

  Is it a waste of time to be playing her horn? But—time—how can you waste time? You occupy, like, a cubic acre of it, or a kilowatt hour, or whatever. You have some given amount of time, and that’s that. No spending, no wasting, no earning. You have time, and then you don’t. End of story—or is it the start? Zoe’s feels mentally vast, what with death so near and her life passing before her eyes. She’s putting all of this into her song. Her bluest blues ever. For Villy.

  §

  “The sound of Groon,” says the desperate Villy, cocking his head. Still standing by the ruined high school with Scud. “It’s stopped. I don’t hear anything.”

  Scud pauses, listens, thinks. “You’re right. It was leaking through the tunnel, and now the tunnel’s gone. And Groon’s probably dead.” He’s rubbing at the shiny thing on his wrist, the head of the Aristo larva that’s been living inside him. Skzx. She’s crawling out. The wand floats in midair, contorting the bright rod of her body. She’s getting a little plumper than before. More spindle-shaped. And she’s popping out eyes on her side.

  “She’s turning into a pupa,” says Scud.

  “Tell her to go get Zoe,” says Villy.

  For a minute Scud silently teeps with the pupating wand. Then he shakes his head. “Skzx says she’s done with us,” he says. “She says she enjoyed me. And that’s it. Bitch. Goob-goob and the Szep and the Aristos—they’ve all been using us. It was just about killing Groon.”

>   Villy lunges forward, meaning to grab the slender pupa. Skzx giggles, bats her eyes, streaks away from them, and vanishes into a tiny, spherical gate in the sky. On her way to Szep City.

  “Poor Zoe,” Scud says and falls silent for a time. “At least we did kill Groon. Zoe didn’t die for nothing.” His voice catches. “She wasn’t like anyone else, Villy. I loved her too.”

  “Stop that,” says Villy, still cocking his head at odd angles. “Zoe’s not dead. I can hear her horn! You can hear it too, can’t you?”

  “I—I’m sorry, but I don’t,” says Scud. He’s backing off. Maybe he thinks Villy has flipped. Maybe he’s wary of the beating that, in Villy’s opinion, he so richly deserves. But Scud’s still trying to ingratiate himself. “Villy, if you can hear sounds from unspace, maybe that means you can fly there?”

  “I was wriggling all over the place in unspace, yeah,” says Villy, continually twitching his head. “I was coated with 4D smeel that I could flex. Probably it’s still on me. I was like an unspace eel. Maybe that’s why I can hear what you can’t. But—”

  “Wriggle like an eel again,” exclaims Scud, his tormented face brightening. “Do it! Peel out of our world and be in the fourth dimension. Go get Zoe, Villy! Save her!”

  Villy flexes his body in that same weird way he’d been doing in unspace. He’s holding his Flying Vee. One more twitch and the Los Perros landscape becomes a thin plane of dirt and cross-sections of houses. Villy’s come unstuck. He’s in 4D unspace.

  The unspace void is dark. But when Villy strikes a chord on his guitar—it lightens. Zoe’s horn calls out to him. Villy sees—a dim ball. (As shown earlier in Figure 5.) It’s a cross-section of the shrinking pocket universe with Zoe inside. Hard to keep his eye on it. The flat cow’s not here to help. But Villy’s got something else to guide him. Zoe’s music. Again he twangs his guitar. Again she answers. Call and response. Ships in the night. They’re going to meet.

  §

  Groon is weak now, past caring about Zoe, and there’s no more grabby tendrils. Zoe is pointlessly dragging herself along the inner side of Groon’s hide. She’s a lizard on a wall in Nowheresville—which is getting smaller all the time.

  And then she hears Villy’s guitar. She sounds a response. She hears him again. He’s coming for her. Wily Villy. Zoe visualizes her lover once again. She’s drawing him closer with her music and her love.

  A spot in front of her goes funny. It’s a slice of Villy’s head, floating there, it’s like what she saw when he was inside the flat cow. The slice wobbles, rotates ninety degrees in the fourth dimension, and here’s Villy’s face, and then—hooray—the whole of him.

  She floats into Villy’s arms. He wriggles against her. They peel loose from Groon, loose from Groon’s shrunken death world, and they swoop away. Well, not exactly swoop, it’s more like spasmodic bucking, maybe even like sex. It gets the job done.

  Looking back towards the horrible little Groon world, Zoe sees—is that a piece of Groon reaching out after them? Trying to follow them through unspace? Zoe hits the monster’s tendril with an Armageddon-strength, Gabriel’s-trumpet-type blast that flips Groon back into his tomb, his womb, his funeral coffin. And a moment later, pffft, Groon and his ball are gone.

  Meanwhile Villy keeps writhing against her and then, oh yeah.

  They’re on the lawn in front of the collapsed high school building. Kissing. With Scud and Maisie cheering, and happy Duckworth buzzing around.

  Here comes Sunny Weaver with two zombie cops who want to arrest them.

  “Wake up,” Zoe tells them. “It’s over. No more Groon. No more leech saucers.”

  The blank, sullen faces lighten. As if a spell’s been lifted. “Oh! Sorry to have bothered you!” Sunny and the cops walk away.

  Zoe and Villy and Scud and Maisie hold hands and dance in a circle.

  Celebrating.

  Afterword

  I’ve always wanted to write an SF novel about a motley group of characters taking a long journey to visit a lot of planets, some of the travelers human, and some of them alien. To make it more fun, I wanted them to be riding in a car.

  Why a car? Well, we already have plenty of SF novels about tourists in spaceliners, emigrants in generation starships, and troops in the space navy. In a car, there’s no captain, and you can ride with the windows open, and you stop wherever you like.

  Real-life road trips end before you want them to. You run into a coastline. The road stops. I wanted a road trip that goes on and on, with ever new adventures, and with opportunities to reach terrain never tread upon before. But how to do that in a car?

  I peeled Earth like a grape, snipped out the oceans, shaped the flattened skin into a disk, and put a mountain range around it. Then I laid down a bunch more of these planetary rinds, arranging them like hexagonal tiles on a floor. Behold mappyworld! All set for a Million Mile Road Trip.

  How did I decide on a million miles? Well, the edited-down Earth disk has a diameter of about ten thousand miles. And if we’re generous and say our roadtrip will run across about a hundred similar planet-like disks—then we’ve got a million miles. 100 × 10,000 is 1,000,000. Nice and tidy.

  By the time I was two-thirds done with my novel I realized I’d only traveled through six worlds. I needed to pick up the pace. The acceleration part was easy. I introduced an invented-on-the-spot SF technology that I called stratocasting (for the Fender guitar). The hard part was actually imagining a whole lot of worlds. I figured describing thirty of them would be enough, and the rest could be a blur. But I was having trouble getting thirty unique worlds together.

  At this point, in January, 2016, real life intervened. I had to go into the hospital for an especially traumatic hip operation. Here’s an excerpt from my Notes for Million Mile Road Trip.

  The third night the pain ramped up again. They gave me meds. I fell deeply asleep at 6:30 pm, and woke, soaked in sweat, in a state of delirium at half-past midnight. My bed seemed like the edge of an alleyway, and I was like a wet rag of clothing lying there, a wadded shirt. A nothing. Pathetic. Lost. Undone.

  I was awake, but unable to remember who I was, or where, or what my significance was, or what ordeal I was undergoing, or what I was supposed to do. A wet crooked rag in an alleyway. I heard sounds from beyond a curved wall, which was the curtain across my door. I hoped someone would come in. They didn’t. Eventually I found the ringer-button to call a nurse. I told her I couldn’t remember who I was, and that the pain had gotten to me. She was sympathetic.

  On the table by my bed, I found the paper scrap with my marked up draft of the “Stratocast” chapter for Million Mile Road Trip. I tell the nurse the scrap is from a science fiction novel I’m working on, and that I’m a writer, and that I’ll now try to recover my personality by thinking about my book. She approves. I have all the time in the world here, anonymous in the middle of a hospital night.

  After a few minutes I got the courage to call for a nurse again—a different one came, and she got me my laptop from my knapsack across the room. A few minutes later I called yet another nurse, and she fetched my reading glasses. And then I got to work, writing on till 3 am. The nurses didn’t question what I was doing. I was happy to be writing in such an extreme situation, and I think the material came out pretty well. I ran twenty or thirty basins as a single block. A surreal mural.

  By the way, you can read the complete Notes for Million Mile Road Trip online at the novel’s webpage (see the URL at the end of the Afterword), and you can buy the Notes as an ebook or paperback. The Notes are a bit longer than the novel itself, which is typical for me.

  That hospital experience reminds me of a sentence in a short story, “Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension,” written by Robert Sheckley, the SF-writer-hero of my youth, and later my mentor. He was a wise, hip guy, and deeply funny to boot. Here’s Sheckley’s line:

  A genuine writer is a person who will descend voluntarily into the flaming pits of hell for all eternity, as long as they’re allowed
to record their impressions and send them back to Earth for publication.

  I ended up rewriting my delirious draft five or six times over the following year. I always think a lot about what I’m writing. I’m a perfectionist. On the days when I can’t get anywhere on my current novel, I work on my notes for it, thinking about my world and about the invented logical explanation behind it.

  Speaking of which, there’s a series of three moves that science fiction writers like me use. First, we cast off the surly bonds of fact and imagine a world we want to spend some time in. A place like mappyworld. Second, we use our finely honed bullshitting skills to craft an explanation for our world. A rubber physics, if you will. Third, as we’re writing, we work back and forth between the vision and the explanation. On the one hand, the explanation prompts new ideas for the vision. On the other hand, the expanding vision adds fresh elements to the explanation.

  If you happen to be Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel’s great-great-great-grandson (like me), you might call this a dialectical process. The thesis is the fantastic vision, the antithesis is the pseudoscientific explanation, the synthesis is ramifying linkage between the two, and the process is the the act of shuttling back and forth, repeatedly adding to the vision and the theory.

  Of course Million Mile Road Trip is no ponderous work of phenomenology. It’s light and playful. The heroes are three high-school kids with bad attitudes. And the aliens they encounter are, to say the least, flaky.

  At one point I thought we might market my novel as YA book, but it seems better to call it literary SF. But, psst, if you are a YA-type person, this novel is perfect for you. Trust Professor Rucker.

  Another element that influenced my composition is the style of Thomas Pynchon. I wanted to write a novel in the present tense like he does. Often readers don’t consciously notice what tense a novel is written in—like, is it past or present? But for writers it’s a fraught decision. I found that using the present tense gives a chatty feel, like someone recounting a tale. Another Pynchon move is to rotate the point of view from chapter to chapter. And he writes very close-up to the current point-of-view character, producing an effect like a real-time stream of consciousness. I did both these things, and I put the name of the current point of view character at the start of each chapter. I like to make things easy for the readers. In yet another nod to Pynchon, I often used very long sentences, with phrase after phrase being added on, like a carpenter working his way out on an increasingly rickety scaffolding that he’s assembling as he goes along.