by Rudy Rucker
“I see you big,” she told Wow, and sniffed him. “Wow same now,” she concluded.
“Ulla unwinds your strings,” said Professor Bumby. “So the space inside her seems big. Like an air bubble in a flat pancake, a tasty bonus beyond what old Euclid would allow. Not that Euclid knew about string theory, hey? He wasn’t a Y3K professor.” Bumby took a bite out of a last twitching fish that he held with the suckers of the clublike tip of his left tentacle. Frek could see Bumby’s bloodstained beak down in the midst of his sucker-arms. It wasn’t exactly a sight that made Frek want to get into a sealed cabin with the space cuttlefish. But the trip had to be done; Frek had to get the elixir to restore Earth’s flora and fauna.
And there was also the task of bringing down the Govs. It was crazy to think that people had let these monstrous things become their rulers. Yes, Frek and Bumby had killed the Gov worm. They’d won a battle, but the war wasn’t done. There were govvy tyrants all over the planet, not to mention the orbiting jellies of Skywatch Mil.
Frek took a step toward the alluring orange-yellow light of the slobber-tweet’s door and stretched out his arm. It seemed to shrink—not again! But as soon as Frek yanked back his arm, it was the same as ever. He stuck out his leg next, watched it get small, pulled it back. It was as if the slobber-tweet were a magic suitcase that made things shrink small enough to fit inside. Above and beyond any chances of saving Earth, an adventure in this craft would be gog gripper. Frek just had to see this journey through.
He looked at Bumby again, disregarding the beak and focusing on the big golden eyes with their dark, wavy pupils, the eyes set into bumps on the top of the cuttle’s head. Taken all together, his head was shaped a little like a valentine heart: the two eyes on top, the pointy bunch of arms below. For the first time, Frek noticed that when Bumby put away his two long tentacles, he coiled them into springs and boing they snapped into pouches at the side of his face.
As if sensing Frek’s doubts, Bumby scrunched his eyes in a friendly way, and demurely bunched his arms to cover his beak. “Take the magic trip,” he urged. “To my sweet home Orpoly, comfortably near the galactic core. I’ll show you a tunnel to the Planck brane there. You’ll meet the branecasters, they’ll help you score your elixir, and then it’s back in a flash with the stash and a crash. Inward and downward, Frek, upward and out! Let me hoist you and your pals into Ulla. You’ll fit. She shrinks her passengers to ants on the front stoop.”
“Just a dang minute,” said Gibby from the riverbank. “You haven’t told us what’s in this for you, Bumby.”
“I’m a branecast producer,” said Bumby. “Throughout our universe certain, harrumph, highly evolved species enjoy themselves by snooping on others. Universal peeping tomfoolery—we call it esping. Ulla and I scour the galaxy for talent races suitable for esping by our fellow Orpolese. And, finding same, we produce exclusive Orpolese branecast arrangements. Now, thanks to the Unipuskers visiting Sick Hindu, the branecasters have already opened a channel on your race. You’re in play. Viewable by free read-only public access—until a producer is registered for you. So I want you to register Ulla and me as your producers.”
“We Grulloos don’t cotton to bein’ snooped on,” said Gibby. “I can tell you that.”
“I really doubt if the average Jezebel or Jamul will notice the branecast action at all,” said Bumby, giving Frek an odd look. “At most you’d feel a pleasant buzz.”
Frek remembered the golden glow he’d been getting lately, that feeling of experiencing his perceptions and thoughts as something completely fresh. The alien watchers that Kolder had been talking about.
“I’m already being esped by branecast viewers!” exclaimed Frek. “I keep noticing.”
“You’re waving with it,” said Bumby admiringly. “Yes. Think of it like your old-time religion of God in His heaven watching the world,” he continued soothingly. “God as an invisible eye, so laid-back that people argue about whether He even exists. Though the more sensitive talent race members can wig to it. People like you, Frek. Once the branecasters locate a talent race, there’s no stopping them. Until you register for a producer, you’ll stay on open access like you are now. Aliens all over the galaxy peeking in on you for free, looking at your rock-star underwear. So you might as well hook up with a decent producer and get paid! I’m asking that you come along and take one tiny meeting with the branecasters. I’m sure they’ll give you your elixir. It’ll be no trouble for them at all. A sweetheart deal all around. Not only do you have the elixir, when the Orpolese esp you, you get those feelings of exaltation and importance. Yes, there may be the occasional Good Word or two of ‘guidance’ passed into the hearts of the talent race from the producer’s race. But it’s all happy pie in the sky. I’ll tell you more later, lad, but let’s depart this vale before that filthy sky-jelly finds us again. Get on me, and I’ll fly you through Ulla’s door.”
With a side-to-side wallowing motion, Bumby freed himself from the river water and floated into the air. Gently beating his fin, he drifted over to the bank and lowered his rear end like a boarding ramp. Fecklessly as children following the Pied Piper, the four travelers clambered aboard.
Bumby positioned himself above the slobber-tweet and descended. It took him nearly a minute to traverse what had seemed to be the last half meter. All the while they shrank. The anyfruit trees towered overhead like the now-extinct redwoods might once have done. Relative to the dwindling size of Bumby and his riders, the slobber-tweet became vast as Gov’s puffball, its triangular door a mighty arch.
As soon as they pulled inside, the door hissed and closed up behind them. Frek repressed a brief twinge of fear, a sense of being trapped. The inside of the ship was, after all, quite lovely.
The air was filled with flying colored shapes like living, toony toys. A flock of yellow pyramids darted toward Bumby and his passengers, then veered aside to orbit them. Acid green hearts flew among the pyramids. The swoop of shapes felt like a greeting, and perhaps it was, for Bumby made the by-now-familiar slobber-tweet noise and then added in English, “Hello, Ulla! Meet my friends.”
New clouds of bright forms came to swirl about them—cones and helices and saddle surfaces and cubes—four separate flocks, one to investigate each of Ulla’s passengers. A few of the lavender saddle-shapes brushed against Frek, but their touch was insubstantial, little more than a feeling of changed temperature in the air.
Bumby steadily rippled his fin, propelling them toward the center. Although from the outside, the starship appeared no larger than a dog, its inside was like the nave of one of those great stone churches Frek had visited on the history urls. A cathedral, with free-moving shards of stained-glass light.
Glancing past the lively forms to the curved walls, Frek observed a number of knobby little masts or antennae pointing inward. These spikes acted as fountains: They were bubbling over with bright blocks of color that flew into the air to join the others. Set in among the fountains were drains—whirlpools where the three-dimensional confetti spiraled back into the substance of the Ulla’s walls.
The shapes began as simple compounds of angled faces, little more than square balloons. As they aged and moved about, they gained smoothness and complexity. Some of them looked biological, like pieces of plants and animals; others were harder-edged and with a curious dimensionality that made them seem constantly to be turning inside out.
“What are they?” Frek asked Bumby.
“They’re what we call tweets,” said Bumby, making half of the noise that he used for Ulla. “They’re made of kenner, the stuff that your race calls dark matter. An Orpolese can do all sorts of things with kenner. And one thing is making tweets.”
“What about the slobber?” asked Gibby, not missing a beat.
“You’re not hearing me right,” said Bumby in a curt tone. “I’m saying ‘Ulla,’ not ‘slobber.’ If her name were Susanna, I’d call her—” Bumby made a noise that sounded very much like the same old slobber-tweet.
Fr
ek let it pass. Right now he was more interested in staring at the oddly patterned pale purple saddle-shape hovering near him. The design on it was like a sea of suns. Right about then the saddle flapped its lobes and flew right though Frek’s head.
Though it didn’t hurt, Frek shouted, and when he saw that his noise was driving the shapes away from him, he shouted some more. It wasn’t nice, having all those googly tweets come at him, right after the thousand-meter daredevil-dive from the sky to the riverbank. Gibby began yelling along with Frek, and then they went ahead and sang a little bit of another Grulloo song that Gibby had taught him on the ride to Stun City.
I’m a head with two arms,
But my arms are my legs,
And my head’s where my butt should be.
Folks treat me like dregs,
But they don’t know jack,
’Cause Grulloos live a life that’s free.
The hole where I live
By the bank of a stream
Is all mine with no ads bothering me.
I’m out in the woods
And off of the grid
’Cause Grulloos live a life that’s free.
Frek had only learned these two verses, so they sang those through three or four times. When they were out of breath and couldn’t bawl out the words anymore, Frek glanced down at Wow and Woo for comfort. The colors were reflecting off the dogs’ eyes, but they didn’t seem disturbed by the phantasmal shapes. The tweets had no smells attached, and the dogs didn’t take them seriously. Wow and Woo looked up at him, each with a half-open mouth and a lolling tongue, quite at ease—even though a glowing orange shape like a skinny pointy pyramid stuck straight through Wow’s head, and a pale blue cube protruded from the back of Woo’s skull.
“Fella could just about lose his marbles in here, I reckon,” said Gibby. His lizard tail was trembling. He was even more frightened than Frek. “I wish I hadn’t of drunk so much moolk last night. Tell me you’re seein’ all this too, Frek. That orange arrowhead pokin’ through your dog’s head, I ain’t dreamin’ it, am I?”
“I see it,” said Frek. “And that spring coming toward us, too.” A shape like the wound-up tip of a vine tendril was bouncing across Bumby’s back, with its free tip disappearing and reappearing as it moved. Taking a final off-kilter boing, it passed right through Gibby, then flew up toward one of the little tornadoes feeding into the walls.
“I feel like I’m goin’ gollywog kac crazy,” said Gibby staring after the green helix. “Didn’t your overgrown squid friend say this trip wasn’t gonna take no time a-tall?” He raised his voice querulously. “You hear me, Bumby?”
“If you lose your marbles, Ulla can round them up,” said Bumby, not sounding very concerned. He made a little gesture with a twisting tentacle. “She’s got photorealistic mental images of you four by now. Commemorative coins in the old memory bank. These tweets are how Ulla talks and finds things out, you understand. She puts out kenner that’s lean and hungry for info exchange. Her tweets are words that listen.”
“I’d say she talks too geevin’ much,” said Gibby. “Tell her to pipe down, would ya? She’s makin’ me sick.”
“Ulla is divine,” said Bumby. “She knows—ah, compared to Earthlings, you can flat-out say she knows everything. She’s my wife, did I mention that before? Ulla and me.” He’d stopped undulating his fin; they’d reached the center of his ship’s interior.
“How can Ulla be your wife?” blurted Frek. “You two don’t match at all.”
This remark seemed to annoy Bumby very much. “You pipsqueaks got no inkling of my own true face,” said the green cuttlefish in a snappish tone. “Nor any clue of Ulla’s secret form, nor of how deep-twined a pair of soul-mates we are. You’re a clod from a boondocks dirt world. You came aboard of your own free will, and we’re going to wheel and deal you fair and square, but don’t ever dream you’re on some high horse to sling stones at the marriage of Ulla and Professor Bumby. And don’t you be hinting that a pure rassen like her is all muddy and low for linking with a znag like me; I bet that’s exactly what’s in your monkey mind.”
It was hard to grasp exactly what had set off Bumby like this. Evidently he wasn’t going to act so nice anymore, now that he’d gotten them inside of Ulla. What kind of idea was it to let this eccentric cuttlefish’s race have branecast access to the minds of humanity? A terrible idea, that’s what.
Frek spoke up. “If you want to just put us back down on Earth and tell the branecasters to leave humanity alone, that would be—”
The alien gave his back an impatient twitch that sent them tumbling into the space near his body. But they didn’t drift away. Some kind of gentle force field kept them near the center of Ulla. The bizarre shapes began congregating around them again, arcing inward along writhing paths. Gibby let out a despairing moan.
“Oh, maybe you better lay off trying to confab with them, Ulla,” said Bumby, relenting a bit. “We don’t want the passengers flipping their wigs. Better just mime the view. That’s something their little minds can digest.”
And instantly the walls of the slobber-tweet began to show the outer world. It wasn’t like the walls had turned transparent, nor were the images like a wall skin’s video. The pictures were coarse; they were made of tweets irregularly tiled upon the domed inner surfaces of the star craft. The tiles weren’t in any kind of orderly grid; they arranged themselves so as best to fit the various parts of the image.
The sunlit overhanging branch of the anyfruit tree was represented, for instance, by a mounded ridge of granular tweets; the leaves of the tree were mimed by green tweets that twisted and turned in their own private dances, yet managed, as if by a serious of miraculous coincidences, to continually outline exactly the shapes of foliage upon a tree. For Ulla, imitating Earth’s shapes was a trivial task, as easy as holding your hand in front of a light to make a duck-shaped shadow, and she was amusing herself by doing it in complicated ways.
The branches of the tree waved languidly in the breeze, seamlessly imaged by Ulla’s hyperintelligent color shards.
Seeing the lush fruit on the trees, Frek wished he’d eaten some when he had the chance. He was very hungry. A little bird came flying right up to the outer surface of the walls, the bird’s image as vast as a toon upon the electronic billboards of old Tokyo.
It was a watchbird.
“Look out, Bumby!” shouted Frek.
The anyfruit tree burst into flame. A blinding red beam swept toward the slobber-tweet. The sky-jelly had found them.
6
Yunch!
Ulla made her outer surface like a mirror. She continued putting images of the world on her walls, but the colors grew fainter than before. Frek could make out the silhouette of the blasted anyfruit tree and the red glow of the laser beam rebounding into the sky. The Skywatch Mil sky-jelly could do the cunning Ulla no harm.
“Fall up now, Ulla,” said Bumby in an unhurried tone. “Fall sky high into the Govs’ jellyfish, yes. Follow that aggro red line.”
Ulla answered with a flock of tweets; Bumby concluded the conversation with a gargle in his native tongue.
Then came a brief shuddery feeling, as if from an earthquake, with a blank instant at the center of the shake. The starship fell upward.
They were accelerating into the sky, repelled by the entire mass of planet Earth. Ulla had reversed the effects of gravity upon them.
Looking downward, Frek watched his homeland drop away. Stun City shrank to a spot beside the River Jaya. A few bends upstream lay Middleville. Frek strained to make out his home tree. As if reading his mind, Ulla briefly made that particular spot of green bigger, tweeting extra kenner to bulge Frek’s part of Middleville into bold relief.
“Bye, Mom,” said Frek softly. “I hope you’re okay. Bye, Ida and Geneva. I’ll be back soon.” Wow nudged him with his nose, recognizing the familiar names. Frek ran his hands over the dog’s smooth head, hoping everything would be okay. He wondered if, somewhere out in space, he might
find his father.
“Wait for me, Salla,” added Gibby, staring down at his patch of the Grulloo Woods. Ulla didn’t bother to magnify the spot that Gibby was looking at. Frek was starting to notice that nobody ever liked Grulloos. That was all the more reason for him to be loyal to Gibby. He gave his little friend a pat on the shoulder, that is, he laid his hand upon the thick spot where the Grulloo’s arm or leg came out of the side of his head.
Their upward motion continued apace. The countryside around Middleville and Stun City unfurled like a map, revealing the hamlets beyond the Grulloo Woods, the town behind Lookout Mountain, and the winding course of the River Jaya toward the sea.
Soon they’d risen high enough to see the wrinkled sea itself and, in the other direction, the inland mountains. They fell higher, faster. The sky above turned dark purple, then black. Finally Frek could see the actual curve of Mother Earth. Seeing it in person was different from hearing about it, different from seeing a picture on a wall skin.
An uneasy thought struck Frek. He wasn’t truly seeing Earth from space, he was looking at shifting patterns of Ulla’s tweets. Suppose Ulla was tricking him, kidding him along so he wouldn’t realize, say, that this cavity was her stomach and that she was about to digest him!
Frek pushed the fear away. Far better to believe that he was the size of beetle, at the center of an antigravity pumpkin falling into the sky. Godzoon googly indeed.
“There’s the killer jellyfish,” said Bumby. “Twelve o’clock high. Try to splatter it, Ulla.” A fresh shoal of tweets came spiraling down from Ulla’s fountains, the bright shapes passing through Bumby and back out to the wall.