by Rudy Rucker
“Don’t talk about my father that way,” snapped Frek, a little surprised at his temerity. Even though he wasn’t happy about Carb running off, he didn’t like other people to criticize him. “He’s not crazy.”
“I’m sorry, Frek,” said Sao, backing off. “That was insensitive of me. You must be worried sick about him.” The love of gossip glinted in her eyes. “Have you gotten any news about what happened up on Sick Hindu? I heard this googly rumor that three Crufters were abducted by aliens.”
“We haven’t heard a geevin’ thing,” said Frek with a sudden rush of fear. “Carb hasn’t managed to call us since he left. Mind your own business.”
Sao pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose. “How about giving me some fashion advice, then.” She pulled a blouse from the bags of clothes on the table. “With your fresh eyes.” She slipped the blouse on over her tight lace top and cocked her head. “How does it look, kid?”
It looked like a blouse. And Sao looked like Sao. Lively, thin, smug, theatrical, slightly unfriendly. What else was there to say?
Just then Sao’s uvvy made a wet razzing noise. It was under her pile of clothes, and it took her a few seconds to unearth it. “I’ll be glad when NuBioCom finally figures out how to put these things inside our heads,” she remarked to Frek as she pressed the uvvy’s patch of tendrils to her neck. And then she was into her call. Wordlessly she handed Frek the cookies, and gestured toward the stairs.
Frek thought he had a good hold on the cookie plate, but he didn’t. The next second, the plate and the cookies were on the floor and Wow was snarfing them down as fast as he could. Furious at Wow, and at himself, Frek poked Wow hard with his foot. It wasn’t exactly a kick.
Wow yelped a really nasty curse word and swung his body away, keeping his head down on the floor, eating.
Frek crouched to scoop the rest of the cookies onto the plate. He managed to save about half of them. Sao had set aside her uvvy call. She was looking at Frek with a mixture of pity and contempt.
“You drop things a lot, don’t you?” she said. “You need meds. Clumsiness is a type of attention deficit disorder, you know. Lora should take you to a tweaker.” She flashed her too-wide grin. “Nothing personal, of course.”
“Don’t need tweaking,” muttered Frek. His face felt hot. “I’m good the way I am.” Turning away, he hurried up the steps to Stoo’s room before Sao could pick on him any more.
Stoo had his window curtains closed and his lights turned off. He was perched on a big round cushion in the middle of the floor. He was a dark-haired, bright-eyed boy a bit taller and older than Frek, and with a crooked angularity to his jaw. He was handsome and very much his own person, a kid that the others looked up to. Frek wasn’t quite sure why someone as gaud as Stoo even hung out with him.
Right now Stoo was holding an imitation gun grown by a please plant. A prop gun. It didn’t need an uvvy-link. Because of all the eyes in a house tree’s wall, the toons could track Stoo’s hand motions closely enough to tell when and in which direction he meant to shoot.
“Yubba, Frek,” said Stoo. It was the standard greeting for kids their age, though it had sounded odd coming from Sao in the kitchen.
“Yubba you,” said Frek. “Here’s some cookies from your mother.” He dragged over a cushion and sat down next to Stoo. Wow lunged for the cookies again but Frek sharply blocked him. “No, Wow! You want to stay at home next time?” He felt around on Stoo’s floor and found a prop gun of his own.
The Skull Farmers were on all the curving walls of Stoo’s room. Their world was designed around an old-time Y2K theme. Frek could see at first glance that it was another Toonsmithy masterpiece. An oil refinery was burning in the distance, killer giraffes and elephants were silhouetted nearby, and six business-suited figures were flying across the sky on winged motorcycles. Loosely ranged across the foreground were three lively, individualistic skeletons in Y2K garb. Skull Farmers.
The three Skull Farmers noticed right away that someone new had come into Stoo’s room. Frek happened to focus on one of them, and that one got big; his bony face filled the whole wall.
Toons had a way of enlarging whatever aspect of their world you focused on. The toonsmiths called the technique “phenomenological autozoom,” but gamers just called it “pzoom.” The toons were letting Frek, and not Stoo, control the pzoom. They wanted to draw him into the game.
The face Frek had focused on was a goggy shecked-out skull with glowing red eyes, a gold front tooth, and a crumpled black top hat upon the deathly white pate. A rusty nail had been hammered into one side of the skull, with a pair of dice dangling from it like an earring.
“Welcome, Frek,” said the skull-faced toon. His voice was shrill and grainy, as if he’d been yelling all day long. “They call me Gypsy Joker. We need yore smarts and firepower. Seems we’ve got our butts into a bit of a situation hyar.” He hooked one thumb toward the sky, and Frek pzoomed out to view the background. “The six Financiers of the Apocalypse is a-comin’, just for openers. I cain’t promise you an easy run, but it could be hella fun. You wanna sign on with the Skull Farmers?”
Meanwhile Stoo fired off a couple of shots at the business-suited Financiers of the Apocalypse, who took the damage hits in a shower of green dollar signs and circled back into the distance.
“Right on, Stoo,” said the second Skull Farmer, and Frek brought him into view. He was wearing a red velvet cape and held an archaic electric guitar. He pushed himself into prominence and struck a chord of rich metallic-sounding music, sending images of roses spiraling out. “I’m Strummer,” he told Frek. Some of his teeth were black and he had an old-time British accent. He struck a pose and raised his voice to a warbling shriek. “Are you ready to rock and roll?”
“Hold it,” said the third Skull Farmer in a sharp tone. Frek was back to a medium view, now, showing all three of the Skull Farmers. The third one had a heavy ballistic-style machine-gun hanging from one bone shoulder, and his skull was burned black, as from a fire, with tendrils of singed hair and crusts of burnt skin. “Soul Soldier here. I’m just pickin’ up a message for new recruit Frek Huggins. Goob Doll Judy passed it to me. Groove on it, Skulls.” Soul Soldier flicked the joints of his spectral skeleton hand and blood-red urlbuds flew across the walls to the two other Skull Farmers.
“Whoo-eee!” said Gypsy Joker, catching a bud. “Frek Huggins got company comin’. Anvil fallin’ down at him.”
“Tell me more,” said Frek, pleased to have the toons drawing him into their game.
“Anvil’s what they call it,” said Soul Soldier in his dark, gravelly voice. “The Govs have had Skywatch Mil trackin’ it for a couple days. Came down through the asteroids. ANonymous Vector, IntersteLlar. Last night they found out it’s headed for Frek Huggins.”
“An anvil from the forge of God,” said Strummer in a cracked whisper. He plucked the strings of his guitar and crooned the phrase again, rounding it into a verse of song.
An anvil from the forge of God
Is falling toward a young man’s bod,
It’s coming closer night and day
He doesn’t think to run away.
Strummer’s papery voice gave Frek a chill. “What are you talking about?” he asked uneasily. Toons always mind-gamed you to get you into the play, but this routine seemed unusually gollywog.
“Lot of alien activity last night,” said Soul Soldier. “Your world’s gettin’ real funky. After the Anvil hit the atmosphere, the sucker darted around so swoopy that the Skywatch jelly-eyes lost it in the foo-fightin’ fog. And then a big fat flying saucer cruises over Stun City, with some kind of human voice on its radio sayin’ as how the Anvil’s addressed to Mr. Frek Huggins. What it is, Frek. Had any company this morning?”
“Kac, Huggins,” interjected Stoo. “The Skulls never ran a level like this for me yet. What makes you so gaud?”
“I don’t know,” said Frek, forcing a laugh. He had a sudden memory flash of that dark shiny shape he’d glimpsed in the far
thest recess of the space under his bed. But it couldn’t be. The toons were just playing with him was all. “I’ll handle that Anvil,” he said, making his voice firm. He aimed his prop gun and squeezed his trigger finger, expecting to see simulated bullets shoot across into the toons’ sky, expecting to see some Y2K saucer UFO icons darting away in response. But the toons were ignoring his prop gun.
“This is realtime,” said Gypsy Joker, watching Frek with his hot red eyes. “We ain’t jivin’ you. There’s something come down to Earth lookin’ for you, Frek, and don’t nobody know what it is or where it’s hiding.”
Suddenly Sao Steiner walked into the room. Her voice was cold and all business. “Frek, I just got a message from Lora. There’s two counselors over at your house to see you. Go talk to them before they have to come over here to get you. Kolder’s furious. What on Earth have you been up to, you odd little boy? Stoo—he didn’t ask you to do anything geevey, did he?”
2
The Thing Under Frek’s Bed
A watchbird appeared as soon as Frek got back in the air, and it followed him all the way home. It was a gray, beady-eyed little thing, a tweaked hummingbird kritter with the slick bump of a tiny uvvy on the back of its neck. The watchbird’s one color accent was its narrow, scarlet beak.
A man and a woman were standing by Frek’s garage waiting for him. They wore uvvies and powder-blue overalls. Counselors. Mom was standing next to them. Geneva and Ida watched round-eyed from one of the house tree windows. The counselors’ shimmering teal blue lifter beetle was nibbling on the grass of the lawn.
“Hi there, Frek,” said the counselor woman. “I’m PhiPhi and my partner here Zhak. Gov sent us to help you.” Zhak and PhiPhi had round, calm faces and pleasantly full lips. They looked like dull-witted siblings. It was said that Gov did something to the brains of those who signed on to be his counselors—Gov being the person, or the simulated person, who ran things around Middleville. The watchbird fluttered down and perched itself on PhiPhi’s shoulder.
“When’s the last time you talked Carb Huggins?” asked Zhak, helping Frek out of his angelwings.
“Don’t bother him about his father,” snapped Mom. “Carb left us last year, and that was that.”
Frek was glad to have his mother stick up for him. These days it upset him to think about Carb. Sometimes he worried that it hadn’t just been Gov’s persecution that drove away his tough, wise-cracking father—maybe Dad had left because of something Frek himself had done. Like asking too many questions about how toons were made. Carb hadn’t liked toons at all. Or maybe Frek had brought too many glypher slugs home from school.
Toward the end, Carb had always had a headache. Gov had put the peeker on him because of the Crufters, and he’d never fully recovered. He’d get confused sometimes. Gov had started talking about giving Carb this kind of brain therapy called the Three R’s. And then Carb had quietly gotten hold of a space bug and flown away. Maybe it wasn’t fair of Frek, but was still mad about it. Shouldn’t a father stick with his family, no matter what?
“We must know,” said PhiPhi, smiling blandly and fixing Frek with her eyes. “Necessary for you to answer. Otherwise we peek, most unfortunate. When was the last time you talked Carb, Frek?” She said all this as flatly as if she were reading it off a message board in her head. Counselors let Gov do a lot of their thinking, and they used Gov’s ugly, gobbledygook style of speech.
“Don’t you dare talk about peeking him, you Gov-skulled stooge,” said Mom evenly. Somehow she’d managed to wedge herself in between Frek and the counselors.
“It’s Frek’s decision,” said PhiPhi, holding her eye contact with him.
“What my mother said,” muttered Frek. “One night I saw him at supper and the next morning he was gone.”
“Do you know why we’re here?” asked PhiPhi, taking a different tack.
“About the Anvil from space,” blurted Frek.
“Yaya,” said Zhak. “Now we get somewhere.” Zhak had an extra uvvy in a mesh sack on his belt. A twitching, bright-yellow peeker uvvy. Getting peeked could mess you up for good. A regular uvvy took the words you deliberately thought at it, and sent them off to other uvvies, but peekers dug their tendrils in deep and took whatever they could find.
“The Skull Farmers told me,” said Frek, the words tumbling out of his mouth. “Some toons I saw on Stoo Steiner’s wall skin. They heard it from the Goob Dolls. They said something from space landed last night. They called it the Anvil. They said that someone on a flying saucer told them the Anvil was looking for me? At first I thought the Skull Farmers were making it up. And then Sao Steiner told me I should come see you. That’s everything I know, honest.”
“I can search the house?” Zhak asked Mom.
“Search for what?” she demanded. “Maybe Frek knows what this is about, but I sure don’t. We cleaned up today, by the way, and I can tell you right now there’s nothing unusual to see. Maybe you should stop busy-bodying. You should leave honest people alone.” Her voice grew a little louder. “You think it’s easy being a full-time facilitator and raising three children? With my husband gone? And now you Gov zombies have to come here and threaten my poor son? Because of something that a stupid game toon said?”
“The search doesn’t take long,” said PhiPhi, in a soothing tone. “Calm calm.” She patted Mom’s shoulder and displayed a big, warm smile. “What it is, Lora, the Anvil is real. It might be some kind of alien? Or it’s from the Crufters? We’re uncertain. It came down last night, simultaneous with a warning message regarding Frek Huggins. The message came from an anomalous unidentified vehicle, now vanished. This makes possibles. Maybe just a prank same time as a meteorite, we hope. But, Lora, for your good, and Frek’s good, Gov has to be sure. Zhak and I assigned to stay and watch your home for one or two days. If you kindly permit, we plant a little shelter for ourselves—over here? It remains afterward for your guest room or perhaps shed.” PhiPhi was pointing to a spot between their house tree and their garage.
“Not so close to my garden,” said Mom, not entirely displeased. Recently she’d been talking about needing money for an extra room, with the three kids getting so loud and big. But house tree seeds were expensive.
“Those are all standard plants?” asked PhiPhi, peering at Mom’s vegetables. “Carb not sending down crufty oldbio seeds, huh?”
“As if oldbio could live on Earth anymore,” said Lora. “Don’t you know anything? Second of all, Carb and I are unwebbed as of three months ago. There’s no link between us anymore.”
Unwebbed? Mom hadn’t told Frek about this. The news hit him hard. Not only was Dad never coming back, it was as if he’d never been here at all. Frek had no father. His face felt so odd and stiff and silly that he turned away so nobody would see. He coaxed his angelwings into the garage and petted them. They made soft kvarring noises, which made him feel better. He stepped back out just in time to see Zhak go slipping into their house. Mom was so distracted by PhiPhi’s chatter that she didn’t notice. For the moment, Frek felt too upset with Mom to warn her.
In any case, there was nothing for Zhak to find. Or was there? Frek was still thinking about the lumpy shiny purplish-black object he’d glimpsed under his bed. The Anvil? A UFO come to rest under his bed? Impossible. But what if? If the counselors found it, they’d punish him for not telling them. And if they didn’t find it—what then? What was the Anvil really? Frek’s stomach felt cold and hollow.
PhiPhi wasn’t looking at him right then, which was good. Even though counselors were dumbed down, they had uvvy access to special Gov routines for reading people’s thoughts from their expressions.
PhiPhi was busy trying to push a house tree seed into the ground. The seed was pointed at one end and flat at the other, about five centimeters long. She was trying to push the seed in sideways. It was like she was impaired. Mom squatted down and helped PhiPhi get the seed properly into the ground, point first. Lora Huggins knew how to do everything right. Frek was lucky to have h
er for his mother. Even if she had unwebbed from Dad.
“Where did Zhak go?” said Frek, so that Mom would look up from the seed and notice their house was being searched.
“What?” said Mom, standing up. “He’s already started?” She brushed the dirt off her hands and rushed inside to supervise.
PhiPhi gave Frek an angry look. But all she said was, “Will you get water? The seed needs water.” She tore open a pod of fertilizer-pollen and sprinkled it on the ground.
Frek attached a snakeskin hose to their house tree’s spout and asked the tree to set a steady trickle of water flowing into the muddy patch where Mom had pushed PhiPhi’s seed into the ground. In a matter of minutes, a pale green sprout appeared. It worked its way upward and unfurled into a tiny, lobed house tree leaf set upon a shiny gray-green twig. The leaf-bedecked twig twitched as if sniffing around for light, then angled itself out away from the Hugginses’ house tree. Three, five, seven more shoots appeared from the ground near the twig. Soon a little thicket was growing upward, the sticks getting fatter as they rose.
PhiPhi stood off to one side, her face blank, listening down into her uvvy, communing with Zhak and Gov. Though she didn’t talk out loud, her lips were moving and she twitched her hands a little. Meanwhile her lifter beetle was hungrily edging toward Mom’s garden. Frek herded it away. Presently Zhak appeared in the window of Frek’s room, holding up Frek’s wooden top. The watchbird was hovering next to him, its little wings a blur.