by Rudy Rucker
Peering up at Ulla’s shiny dome, Frek could make out the sketchy form of a sky-jelly overhead. The creature had long since abandoned its fruitless attempts to blast Ulla with its laser ray; its energies were now focused upon lumbering out of the way. The jelly was pulsing and twitching, sending waves racing across its great unclean body. With so little air up here for its bell to beat against, the monster was making scant progress.
But just before Ulla would have smashed into it, the jelly spat a house-tree–sized gout of wobbly goo to its right, propelling its main body to safety on the left. They fell up past it, missing the unsavory behemoth.
Bumby wetly warbled a command to Ulla, then turned to Frek and Gibby. “She’ll open the door so I can shoot the jelly, and while I’m on the job, I’ll scour away the rest of your world’s so-called defense systems. The jellies defend the Govs only against their enslaved citizenry, against you and your people.”
“Fry the jellies!” exclaimed Gibby. “Yee haw!”
An equilateral triangle opened in Ulla’s lower side, a twin to the old door on top. Ulla’s subtle force fields were able to keep their air from rushing out, but the resulting turbulence buffeted Frek, Gibby, and the dogs from side to side. Woo began barking. Meanwhile Bumby had propelled himself to the doorway.
The sky-jelly was very clearly visible below them. Blandly, unthinkingly aggressive, the floundering jelly was turning over so as to shoot its laser at Ulla’s underside. If Frek still had any doubts about the reality of this trip, they were gone now. Earth hung below them, crystal clear, unimaginably huge, a vision of beauty blemished only by the ragged, evil disk of the Skywatch Mil jelly.
The jelly’s flesh glowed white at the center, as the monster prepared to lance a fresh laser beam their way. With the door wide open, Ulla wouldn’t be able to protect them. Holding onto the doorsill with two of his arms, Bumby stretched out his two long tentacles and his other arms. Was his strength equal to this task?
Ulla sent an excited avalanche of tweets down upon Bumby. Wifely advice. Bumby’s arms and tentacles began to shine and grow. The tentacles became ropes of fire, ten kilometers long. And at their touch the sky-jelly became a cloud of steam and ash.
Bumby wasn’t finished. Though Ulla was racing into the heavens at an even greater rate than before, his tentacles were lengthening faster still, growing to magic beanstalk lengths and branching all the while. The filigreed tentacles grew to hundreds of kilometers long, then to thousands and tens of thousands of kilometers in reach. It was hard to fully process the sight. Earth’s entire upper atmosphere was covered with the glowing mesh of Bumby’s branching tentacles. The space cuttlefish held the entire planet in his grasp.
“He zapped another,” exclaimed Gibby, peering out into the distance with squinted eyes. “And another. Poof! Another and another!”
Frek couldn’t make out the explosions, but he took Gibby’s word for it. And then Professor Bumby was done. His ramified arms and tentacles shrank back to normal, and Ulla’s door slid shut.
The alien cuttlefish had killed off every one of the Gov’s sky-jellies. The people of Earth were free of the constant threat of being laser-blasted from the sky. That was the good news. The bad news was that Earth now lay quite open to invaders from space. But when, in the entire history of humanity, had the sky-jellies actually stopped a single invader? They’d killed, rumor had it, any number of insurgent citizens; they were good at that. Yet when it had come time for the jellies to truly defend Earth against aliens, the “Anvil” had come and gone without a scratch.
“That felt good,” said Bumby.
“I can’t believe you made yourself so big,” said Frek.
“Comes natural to me,” said Bumby. “Back home, Ulla and I are a thousand kilometers long. When we yunched down to Earth, we overdid it enough to scrunch down to your size. Like you turning into a paramecium, you might say.”
“What kind of world do you come from?” asked Frek, trying to imagine a sea large enough for thousand-kilometer cuttlefish.
“You’ll see soon enough,” said Bumby.
The view on Ulla’s inner surfaces was bright and crisp again. Earth shrank to a very clearly defined ball: alive, vibrant, divine. The pocked Moon went flying past them; they sailed into the gulf between Earth and Mars.
Frek was bursting with more questions for Bumby, but he was a little leery of again being called an “ignorant boy from a boondocks dirt world.”
Fortunately Gibby was there to speak up.
“You got some kinda hyperdrive on tap or what?” asked the Grulloo. “Sure we’re truckin’ along right smart, but this ain’t gonna get us to no galactic center.”
“Festina lente,” said Bumby in a calm tone. “Means hurry slowly. Ulla will yunch us soon.”
“Yunch?” asked Gibby.
“She winds up our component strings to make us the size of the galaxy,” said Bumby, curling his tentacles and puffing up his body. “Then we take a seven-league step to the center, Ulla unyunches us and forsooth! Behold! We’re in Orpoly, back to our own right size. Yunch, unyunch, plop.”
“Oh, of course,” said Gibby sarcastically. “Anybody would o’ thought of that.”
“We have to get to a nice clear spot before we yunch,” added Bumby. “If you yunch or unyunch near too much mass-energy, then you might pooperoo into the Planck brane. Entering the Planck brane through a branelink is one thing, the branecasters don’t mind that, it’s a business call, welcome and how do you do. But if you drop in on account of you goofballed a yunch trip, especially while they’re having lunch, well, they’re roaring demons then, they’re cruel and vengeful, they deal you a living death, and I don’t meant that as a metaphor, boys, it’s precisely and literally like being dead without being destroyed. Decoherence is what it’s called. Strains the brain, eh, Gibby? Festina lente. Do you know Latin?”
“What’s Latin?” muttered Gibby in a confused, resentful tone.
“Maybe it’s what they talk on Orpoly,” suggested Frek, trying to get in on the conversation. Wow glanced up at him, happy to hear his voice.
“Wrong and wrong,” said Bumby. “I’m starting to have the odd wee doubt about you, Frek. If the choice of an Earth’s hero had been up to yours truly, I don’t know as I would have picked a twelve-year-old small-town boy. But we had a strategic reason to pop your name from the hat. I’m talking about your father.”
Frek felt his stomach drop. “What do you know about him?”
“He was living with some others in a hollowed-out asteroid, yes? They call themselves Crufters, and they brag on avoiding biotech. Ulla and I caught their act on our way in. We’d unyunched ourselves into the far-flung vacuum outside your planetary system. Why so? I could talk all day! Snap my suspenders around the cherry-red stove. Wal, the point is, the more highly evolved solar systems have webs of force-field tubes connecting their worlds, which means that their interplanetary spreads aren’t really empty. If you unyunch near one of those tubes you can’t stop when you should. You keep on shrinking, help, help, help, and then our plain brane pinches you off and drops you down into the Planck brane, and you’re in Dutch or lowlander than that with the branecasters. We played it all cautious and egg-walking because we didn’t realize how bush-league your civilization is.”
They were sailing smoothly through space. Every one of Bumby’s arms was moving about, each one illustrating some arcane subtlety of his discourse, perhaps for the benefit of Ulla’s attentive tweets. Frek held his breath, waiting for the news about his father. “And the motion on the galactic table is that we’ve found solid branecast talent in your very home-sweet-home solar system,” continued Bumby unconcernedly. “Suffering struggling humanity, yes indeed, information-processing self-reproducing symbol-using communicating beings, very tasty. But, tsk, your levels are crude. No yunching, no force fields, no kenny crafting. Aside from a few barely eking space colonies, there’s nothing happening on your outer planets, nary a peep on your moons, and only the dullest
of spheromak loops inside your sun. And to top it off you’ve collapsed your biome! Blind, lost, benighted, tragically fumbling screwballs. I see great doomed, primitive nobility here. The branecast ratings could blast the roof. And your appearance and customs are wigsville, man, absolute maximum in alien oddness. So I’m here to pound the drum and shout that we Orpolese are the best independent branecast production group that—”
The maddening thing about listening to all this rigmarole was that Frek could feel the golden glow again. Some alien was tuning in on him sitting here listening to Bumby’s mumbo-jumbo, possibly relishing his anxiety about his father. Maybe the watcher was Bumby himself. “Tell me about Dad!” cried Frek, actually reaching out and giving one of Bumby’s writhing arms a yank. Though the tapering, leathery shape slipped quickly from Frek’s grasp, the gesture got the cuttlefish’s attention. At the same time, Frek clenched his mind in an effort to force the invisible watchers out.
“Well, the Crufters weren’t all open arms,” said Bumby. “They’d already slogged through some caustic psychodrama with the Unipuskers. Did I mention that a couple of Unipusker producers got here before us? Old rivals of ours. Hawb and Cawmb. We tracked their progress, sly sniffers that we are. The Unipuskers came in skittish same as us, a couple of weeks previous. They unyunched outside of your system and visited the same First Chance Asteroid as us. Being Hawb and Cawmb, they used up the good will, acted like ugly spooky saucerians, left a miasma of hard feelings. Unipuskers are scaly two-leggers with big clamshells for their heads. Monoculture missionaries. Yeah, when we showed up after Hawb and Cawmb, the Crufters actually shot off some kind of catapult at us.”
“What happened to Dad?” demanded Frek, his voice rising. “What did the Unipuskers do to my father?”
Bumby paused. Frek, Gibby, and the dogs were floating in front of Bumby’s twisty mass of arms. The dogs weren’t paying attention to the conversation, they were sniffing and licking each other, now and then batting each other about with their paws. Gibby was temporarily absorbed in loading and lighting his pipe, unconcerned about polluting their ship with smoke. Meanwhile Ulla was winging a steady stream of multicolored disks their way to keep abreast of the conversation, with some of the disks passing through their heads. Ulla’s walls continued to faithfully represent the space outside, black and empty, with the Moon and Earth shrunken to little disks, and the Sun still too bright to look at. Waiting for Bumby’s answer it occurred again to Frek that he was very hungry.
“Those two Unipusker producers snatched your father in their UFO,” said Bumby finally. “Hawb and Cawmb. Well, either they snatched him or they got him to volunteer. Space cadet number one. They no doubt promised some kind of reward to him or to his woman friend. Yessica Sunshine. But of course it wouldn’t have been a restorative Gaia-healing genomic elixir like we promised you. Hawb and Cawmb’s empty bivalve heads don’t know from diversity. Those Unipuskers, get this, they’ve whittled their biome down to three, I said three, species: a plant called rickrack, an animal called a vig, and the pullulating ’Puskers themselves. All the same. Not like Orpolese at all. Yes, they took your father.” Bumby gazed mildly at Frek, blinking his big, W-pupil eyes.
“What about us?” put in Gibby, exhaling a curling cloud of blue smoke. “Sure you’re promising us an elixir, but what good’s a promise from a face full o’ slimy grabbin’ arms? And I don’t get the point of this branecast stuff you keep talkin’ about, Bumby.”
“Don’t butt in,” snapped Frek. Then he caught himself and softened his words. “I’m sorry, Gibby, but I need to hear more about my father.”
“There’s not much more to tell,” said Bumby, making a blooming, expansive gesture with his sucker arms. A cuttlefish shrug. “As for Gibby’s last question—a rich vein of info there. The branecasters have you on open access to attract a production deal, sure as death and Texas. Branecast producers like Ulla and me—or like Hawb and Cawmb—the way we wangle the branecast rights for a newly contacted race is to get a representative of the talent race to register in person with the branecasters. To keep things simple, the branecasters fixate on the first representative they meet; they give them full negotiation rights for their whole race. Can you relate? That’s what Ulla and I have pegged you for, Frek, the human race representative for our branecasting deal. You’re the man, Frek, with Gibby as backup, assuming you can call him human, too. With any luck, you’ll yak with the branecasters before your father does, and you can register Ulla and me as humanity’s branecast producers with, harrumph, exclusive distribution to the Orpolese consumers. Yes indeed. So shoulder the load, face your fate, and pick the best producer with the wiggiest audience. An Ulla-Bumby production exclusively for the Orpolese. It’s a race for the deal. And your father, he’s the representative for the Unipuskers. Him and that woman and her daughter—a girl about your age called, um—what was her name, Ulla?”
A shape like a drum drifted down from Ulla’s wall. “Renata,” said Bumby as soon as he’d reached out a tentacle to touch the drum.
Though Frek didn’t think he’d ever heard the name before, it had a familiar feel to it. Like something he might have heard in a dream. He repeated the name to himself. An image of a girl popped into his mind: a pleasant-faced girl his age with pigtails. It was a little sad to think of Carb having a whole new family. A tweet drifted through his head.
“I savor the pang of the father-son bond,” said Bumby as if reading his mind. “It’s fresh. We have a different parent-child pattern on Orpoly. We’re cloners. It’s easy enough to divide off a new one, eh? Could your parent-child emotions run so high precisely because you’re not identical?”
“Don’t ride him, you slimy squid,” said Gibby. “You kidnapped Frek because the other guys took his Dad? Tell the dang story and don’t beat around no bush.”
Bumby primly bunched together his arms and tentacles, collecting his thoughts. The tentacles had a cute clockwise twist like a cowlick, or like the top of a soft ice-cream cone. “When Ulla tweeted the Crufters, we found out about the Unipusker producers taking Carb Huggins. So, yes, Ulla and I integrated the inputs and hatched the plan of snatching Carb’s son, Frek. If you get a father’s son, you’ve got psychic judo. But somehow it must have been that the Unipuskers found a way to tip off the Gov worm about our plan, because, as we noticed, the counselors were after us as soon as we got to your house, Frek. And Ulla and I were still too bone-weary from the big yunch to fend them off.”
“The flying saucer that came when you landed, that was the Unipuskers?” asked Frek.
“Must have been,” said Bumby. “I was surprised they got it together so fast. But all’s well that ends. Ulla and I are hale and hearty now. We’re scheme-dreaming that maybe Frek will talk some sense to good old Dad.” Bumby thinned one of his arm tips down to the size of a worm and tapped Frek’s ring with it. Frek yanked his hand out of the cuttlefish’s reach.
“Oh, Ulla and I know your father has a ring like this,” said Bumby in a smug tone. “We know all your secrets. And we know what these rings are for. They’re connected by a higher dimensional tunnel. We godlike aliens use them to communicate. At any rate, the Unipusker scout ship took your father and Renata and Renata’s mother, I think I mentioned her? A person named Yessica Sunshine. Took them all to Unipusk, which is an Earthlike moon circling a gas giant called Jumm. Welcome to the Strangers in Unipusk show!”
“Will it be safe for Dad on Unipusk?” wondered Frek.
“Any place is safe as houses if you’re with Orpolese,” said Bumby, not quite answering Frek’s question. “What your race grovels to as the Laws of Physics—well, for us, those so-called rules are local ordinances, and the fat cop is asleep. Don’t litter, keep off the grass, no spitting—ha!”
Professor Bumby stopped talking and carried out a rapid sequence of miraculous transformations. He tripled his tentacle count, turned inside out, transmuted his flesh into something very like chrome metal, shrank to the size of a thumb, burst into flame, and the
n grew a fresh green cuttlefish body from the thick smoke. “We advanced beings can keep you Earthlings alive just about anywhere,” said the reconstituted Bumby.
Frek didn’t say anything. It sounded like Carb was okay for now. He started thinking about the golden glow again. He was being esped almost continuously. Again he struggled and failed to drive the intruders from his mind.
“Don’t tense up, it ruins the empathy,” said Bumby in a low tone. “And, yes, we’re taping you. Ulla’s got a flickerball inside her. I’ll get out of your way and let you have some lunch.” Bumby rippled his fin, flying out to fasten himself to a spot on Ulla’s ceiling.
A flurry of bird-shaped tweets swooped down from Ulla’s walls. The shapes circled tantalizingly close to the dogs, causing them to snap and bark. The tweet birds slowed down and drew closer. Wow finally caught hold of one, and then Woo had one too. At the dogs’ touch, the tweets changed form. They looked and smelled like pieces of anymeat. Apparently the Orpolese had the power to transform invisible dark matter first into tweet and then into solid, familiar food.
“You really think they watchin’ us?” Gibby was murmuring. “All kinds o’ weird lobsters and slugs lookin’ at us right now from other planets?” Either the vast alien branecast audience out there wasn’t interested in Gibby—or the Grulloo was too coarse-natured to sense the watchers within his mind.
Frek’s sense of a golden glow was, if anything, getting stronger all the time. Bumby might not be the only one watching Frek. Creatures could be tuning in on him from all over the galaxy and, who knew, from other galaxies as well. Frek imagined the numbers spinning on a popular url’s hit-counter. The Frek site.
“Gundo goggy,” said Frek, distancing his faint sense of panic by acting gaud. “Way shecked-out.” It would be better, really, not to think about the branecast at all.