by Rudy Rucker
“Carb wouldn’t have thought of asking for a genomic elixir,” said Renata. “Yessica just wanted him to get her the access to branecast Crufter propaganda into everyone’s heads.”
“What’s wrong with the Unipuskers’ tunnel to the Planck brane?” asked Frek.
“They call it the branelink,” said Renata. “It feeds on the junk that the Unipuskers pipe in from Jumm through their transport tube. But a bomb from Jumm blew out the transport tube right before we got here. I hope the Unipuskers don’t freak out and hurt you. The whole reason they got us to ask you to land here was so you wouldn’t get to the Planck brane before them. Talk about a backfire.”
“You tricked me,” said Frek.
“Well, in a way. Not really, though. We asked you to come help us, and we do need help.”
“I wonder how we can escape,” said Frek, not really mad anymore. “It’ll be hard, with them watching our brains all the time.”
“Maybe something will come up,” said Renata, glancing around. “Maybe we can figure out a way to block them out.”
“I might as well try the flickerball,” said Frek. “See what it’s all about.”
“Do it,” said Renata. “I’ve tried it twice, but I don’t like it. It’s unny. But see for yourself.” She nodded her head, which made her pigtails bounce. “I should tell you that you twitch your left eye to change channels and you twitch your right eye to change the point of view. I’ll shake you if you get stuck. Meanwhile—” She put her fingers in her ears and added, her voice a bit too loud, “—it makes a sound that’s really annoying if you’re not the one esping it.”
Tentatively, Frek laid his hand on the flickerball. It was big, nearly the size of his head, a transparent glassy ball resting upon a smooth hole in the table. As soon as he touched the ball, the blue-edged cube with idiotically happy faces faded away. The flickerball began to hum. Light pulsed out of it, strobing faster and faster. Frek stared into the flicker, letting the buzz fill his ears.
And then he was on another world, watching a Unipusk-produced branecast channel. He was a giant lizard beneath a green sun. A creature like a velociraptor. His jaws were stained with blood. He’d just killed a hairy animal, something like a sloth. Before beginning to feed, he threw back his head and gave his victory roar. An error. The jungle trees shook and a lizard twice his size appeared. A creature like a tyrannosaurus rex. The monster sprang at him. Frek twitched his right eye to change viewpoint.
He was the attacking T. rex lizard. He’d already pinned the velociraptor creature to the ground and was about to tear open his neck. The captive lizard was hissing and squealing; its eyes were piteously rolling in their orbits. Let it go, thought Frek. Don’t kill it. The big lizard hesitated, wanting to kill, yet forbidden to by Frek’s branecast command. Run away, thought Frek. The great T. rex creature rose and wheeled about, heading off through the jungle trees. Frek twitched his left eye to change channels.
He was Spa of planet Zorg. He was a gout of metallic lava oozing down a gently sloping volcanic shield a thousand kilometers across. Powerful electric currents circulated within his molten body, maintaining the patterns of his thought. Next to him was a fellow gout named Fon. They’d been flowing down this slope for seventy years now; when they reached the bottom, they’d seep into a crack, percolate down to the One Great Magma, and rise up again. It was a predictable cycle, presently enlivened by Spa’s contemplation of the possible geometric forms to be found in seven-dimensional space. He thought a lovely stellated polytope pattern toward Fon, but, unbelievably, Fon wasn’t interested. Why? Fon was busy thinking of—how ghastly, how inane—arrangements for the branches of a three-dimensional tree. He’d been dulled by one of the parasitic esper minds that infested their world. Sadly, Spa contemplated his seven-dimensional polytope on his own. Fon’s lapse made his very ions ache. Frek twitched his right eye.
He was Fon, sliding along beside his old friend Spa. Spa was thinking a seven-dimensional shape toward him, but just now he was absorbed in a problem that an esper voice in his head had set him to working on. It was a design for a rickrack tree to serve as the living quarters for a hundreds-strong family upon the world of Unipusk. The Unipusker espers had been coming and going within their minds ever since the coming of the branecast to planet Zorg—two full flow cycles in the past. Fon sensed Spa’s frustration with him for not accepting the beautiful frozen music of his seven-dimensional polytope. But he had no choice but to obey the branecast voice that had spoken within his mind. He was bound and determined to search through every possible configuration of a particular seventy-three-branched rickrack tree to find the one form that maximized the comfort indices of all of its three hundred and eighty-eight rooms. Frek spoke into Fon’s mind. “Forget about the Unipuskers’ tree. Listen to your friend Spa.” Still sensing through Fon, Frek shared the joy of hearing an esper voice release him of his wearisome task! Gladly, Fon opened his mind to accept dear Spa’s intellectual treat. Frek twitched his left eye to switch to a different channel.
He was a bobblie on the surface of Jumm. He hated the Unipuskers with all his might. Their vile, intrusive transport tube was sucking away the substance of his home world. Their snooping branecast technology peered into the noble souls of the bobblies and dared to try to influence their behavior. And now he sensed the presence of a bossy esper within his mind again. His shape just now was a ragged crescent covering most of Jumm’s largest red and yellow spot. He was sinking down into the atmosphere, his body a chain of raging storms. He’d nearly caught a Unipusker saucer a little while ago. He had to do something against those brutes. Perhaps he could feed another bomb into the filthy force field vortex of their transport tube. But probably the esper in his mind wouldn’t let him. “Go ahead,” said Frek silently. “Bomb the Unipuskers. Go for it. Goggy indeed.” The bobblie’s mind registered pleasure and surprise. He sank deeper, his winds howling, searching for the tube’s bottom end, fashioning a supercritical mass of sulfur and helium on the way. Frek twitched his left eye.
He was Lora Huggins, wondering about her missing son. She was sitting in her kitchen, feeding her two daughters, having a little trouble keeping her mind focused. She felt like someone was watching her. The talk around Middleville was that something had happened to Gov in Stun City, some kind of attack upon his puffball. But the news shows said the puffball was merely undergoing renovations. And seemingly new images of Gov had appeared to address his subjects. The talk was that he’d fully restored himself from backups. Had Frek been responsible for the attack? He was nowhere to be found. Lora sighed, wondering and worrying. Frek reached out, trying to put some words of reassurance into Lora’s mind. But the flickerball wasn’t transmitting thoughts to humans. This must be because Bumby and Ulla hadn’t yet been able to bring their production on line. The branecasters had spoken of open read-only access. This seemed to mean that any race at all could esp humanity, but none of them could influence the humans. Frek twitched his right eye to jump to another person’s mind, hoping he might get to check the state of mind of his father.
But now the flickerball turned in on itself. Frek was esping himself, Frek esping Frek Huggins in a Unipusk saucer esping Frek. The pattern grew more and more involuted, forming a kind of inward-curling spiral. Frek’s mind was chasing its own tail. His arm and leg muscles began clenching and unclenching in a rapid rhythm. The shuddering moved into his chest and stopped his breath—
“Frek!” It was Renata, breaking his connection to the flickerball. Frek collapsed back into his chair, gasping for air, his eyes weakly roving over the lavishly appointed saucer room. The flickerball was back to innocently showing that same ad: the turning cube with the six happy faces. Frek noticed now that one of the ad faces was a grinning Unipusker, another was a glowing donut, somehow a very stupid and self-satisfied-looking donut. Unlike the live “talent” aliens Frek had just been esping, the images on the ad cube were taped loops of happy users, forever delightedly chortling over their flickerballs.
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The golden glow of the other espers was still upon Frek, feeling through his mind. The Unipuskers. It wouldn’t do for them to see Frek’s memory of helping the bobblie send another bomb into their transport tube. And now, for the first time, Frek made a successful effort to block the glow. Having experienced the flickerball himself made the difference. He understood what he was fighting against.
Rather than trying to push the golden glow down, or to block it out, he blew it up to the size of a sky. He put himself inside the espers, so to speak, and in this fashion he became too small to watch, like a minnow invisible within the currents of the water. Rather than resisting, he was giving way; rather than being felt by the alien minds, he slid around them. He was safe; he was free. Incredible.
With the pressure of the espers gone, he felt like his old self, like the same old messy, vague, indeterminate Frek, more likely to stare at the shape of a cloud than to tell you if he thought it might rain.
Looking up, Frek saw Hawb standing in the doorway. His tail cover was fastened a bit askew. Having just experienced the flickerball, Frek now understood how terrible it would be to have the Unipuskers giving people orders inside their minds. Could other people learn to free themselves as Frek just had? But how could he ever explain the process? And, for all Frek knew, the golden glow and the espers could reconquer his fragile newfound independence any time.
“Observe that you’ve learned more about the branecasting process,” said the Unipusker. “Repeat my demand that you and your father go to the Planck brane to cancel the Ulla/Bumby deal and register Hawb/Cawmb as your sole producers. Threaten you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Frek, deciding to try insulting Hawb. He was a little giddy over having learned how to avoid the espers. The minds were still reaching for him, but he was continually sliding away, elusive as an air current. Why not try to rattle the Unipusker enough to expose a weakness? “It looks like another of those ’Pusker babies is about to drop off your nasty tail. Or is that a piece of dirt from the floor? Go spawn in private, you gross shell-head.”
“Command you to proceed to cockpit to be under the surveillance of Pilot Evawrt,” bellowed Hawb. “Forbid your further use of our flickerball. Condemn your insulting demeanor.”
“You’re ugly and you stink,” riposted Frek.
“You tell him, Frek,” said Renata loyally, though she looked a bit uneasy.
“Inform you that we are likely to kill both you and your father and let Yessica Sunshine negotiate a fresh deal with the branecasters,” trumpeted Hawb. So there it was, the Unipuskers’ backup strategy. Frek had goaded Hawb into revealing it. But now Frek immediately saw a way to pick a hole in it.
“You don’t dare kill me because your crummy, gumpy branelink is broken,” said Frek, staying on the offensive. “Kill me and my father, sure, but then some third group of producers is likely to bring a different person to the branecasters way before you get Yessica to the Planck brane. You need me alive, and I know it, you low-tide piece of muck. Treat me right and I just might have another talk with the branecasters and give the production deal to you. Bully me and you won’t get any help at all.”
“Assure you of our support,” said Hawb in a sudden about-face. “Remark that I couldn’t help esping some of your plan about a genomic elixir before you became so hard to read. Guarantee that if you throw the humanity channel’s production rights to Cawmb and me, then we will obtain for you this elixir.” The Unipusker parted his shell-head edges in an expression meant to be a smile. It was a terrible thing to see.
Frek make a shooing gesture with his hand, and Hawb went back down to the lower deck to rejoin Cawmb, Gibby, the new Unipusker babies, and the imprisoned dogs. And then Frek and Renata climbed to the summit of the saucer, a large room with a transparent dome.
Pilot Evawrt sat upon a jewel-encrusted throne in the room’s very center, one eye stalk staring out through the dome, and the other eye stalk looking down at his hands. He was a lighter and more graceful Unipusker than Hawb and Cawmb, with a more angular jut to his clamshell head. He was guiding the saucer’s flight by moving a luminous model of the saucer about in his lap, now and then tapping its little feelers. He paused from his piloting to greet Renata in a friendly, if somewhat sarcastic, fashion. Renata introduced Frek.
“Remark that my people will enjoy esping your race on branecast,” said Pilot Evawrt. Perhaps he’d managed to listen in on Frek’s discussion with Hawb. “Observe that the Unipusker public is always craving new shows. Diffidently remark that Unipuskers are somewhat dull and ordinary. State that they love the input of a colorful new race like yourself.” Evawrt had a tenor voice that seemed odd coming from his dark, powerful form.
“What ends up happening to the races you guys watch?” demanded Frek. “Doesn’t it have a bad effect on them?”
“I bet it does,” chimed in Renata. “It’d be like having your mother always breathing down your neck and poking into everything you do. But with a complete alien instead of your mother. Even more of an alien.”
“Distinguish myself from the mass of Unipuskers,” said Evawrt in his light, mocking voice. “Brag that I am a saucer pilot and not a vegetative consumer whose primary excitement in life derives from esping brane and manipulating alien creatures such as you. Frankly question the morality of esping brane. Admit that the process saps the vitality of the peoples whom we esp. Gruffly state that, nevertheless, I make my living by helping Hawb and Cawmb find talent races like yourself. Shrug off the degenerative consequences of our projected activities upon your race. Self-forgivingly observe that there are, after all, trillions upon trillions of talent races in the galaxies. Compare you to a single ripe berry in an endless forest of rickrack trees. Terminate our conversation ostensibly to concentrate upon my piloting duties, but primarily to make you feel weak and unimportant.”
And with that Evawrt stopped talking. With one stalk eye studiously directed toward the dome and the other studying the model saucer in his lap, he gave every indication that he had no further time for chitchat. Frek almost wondered if the pilot had been kidding him. Or were the Unipuskers somehow unable to do anything but state their exact thoughts? Frek tried asking Evawrt about this, but the pilot wouldn’t say any more.
Frek and Renata sat down together on a soft bench at the edge of the cockpit’s large deck. Both of them started to talk at the same time, then said, “You go first,” at the same time, and then tried again.
“Do you really think they might kill us?” Frek got out. “Are you scared?” He could feel that he was still successfully blocking out the espers. They might be watching Renata, but his own thoughts were free.
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” said Renata, overlapping him. “But, okay, I’ll answer. I think we’re like ants to them. So, yes, I think they could kill us. And no, I don’t want to die. But Crufters teach that we live in the Now moment, and that death is a part of life that happens to everyone, and that when you die you merge back into the Brahman, so there’s nothing to worry about. I kind of like that, even if some of the Crufters are nuts.” Renata bobbed her head and one of her hanging pigtails bumped against Frek’s hand. “We’re alive right now, is the main thing, right? Let’s keep on making friends, Frek, and keep on thinking about ways to escape. Don’t let the stinking, ugly Unipuskers stampede us into feeling all tense and doomed and guuuh.” Renata illustrated the meaning of this last sound by making a grimace and clenching her fists beside her head and whirling them in little circles. Then she relaxed her face and sighed. “I wish I could think of something humdrum for us to talk about, though.”
“Ants,” said Frek at random. “You mentioned ants. We don’t have ants. Do you have ants on Sick Hindu?”
“Yes,” said Renata. “They’re one of the species that came in Sri-Sri Krisna’s founding ark in 2666.” Sri-Sri Krisna was a high-ranking genomicist who’d broken free of NuBioCom and helped found the Crufters, a group dedicated to trying to bring the old ways back to Earth. He’
d escaped from Earth in a spaceship right after the Great Collapse with a few dozen obsolete genomes that he’d saved.
“He brought ants on purpose?”
“He brought whatever he could. The official teaching is: The ants came with Krisna, and we Crufters are blessed to have them. Sri-Sri’s seeds are sacred.” She gave an odd little laugh, then continued. “The ants do keep the hummingbirds from wearing out the trumpet vine flowers. If the birds hang around drinking nectar for too long, the ants crawl up their bills and bite the corners of their eyes. Show the picture of the ants and the hummingbird, turkle.” The plate-sized little creature displayed another of Renata’s drawings, with orange flowers, green hummingbirds, and pinching purple ants. Renata cocked her head at the picture and poked one of the ants’ mandibles with her fingernail to change its angle. “Save it like that, turkle.” She turned her attention back to Frek. “The ants get into our honey and our flour and they spoil a lot of things.”
“It must be fun inside Sick Hindu,” said Frek. “We have turmites instead of ants, and watchbirds instead of hummingbirds. And the only kind of flower we have any more is roseplusplus.”
“I’d take Earth any day,” said Renata. “Sick Hindu is a hollow rock that’s like ten or twenty kilometers across. It’s run by a religious cult that forbids realtime Net access and won’t let me see new toons. Did I mention that my stress-fest mother is a high poobah in the Crufter cause? But tell me more about how the turmites make your clothes.”
Frek and Renata chatted the rest of the way to Unipusk, with Renata showing him a turkle picture every now and then. Their topics of conversation included: parents, friends, first memories, dinosaurs, stars, the fear of falling, types of human-powered flight, weightlessness, the force of gravity, kenner and the other kinds of matter, famous physicists, famous musicians, the superiority of the magnetic guitar over its predecessor the electric guitar, the Skull Farmers toon character Strummer, Goob Doll Judy, the current Earth fashion for ear-painting, Frek’s previous experiences with girls, Renata’s previous experiences with boys, the difficulties of being a socially awkward smart kid, the possibility of having a successful career without a formal education, the current state of toonsmithing tools, Frek’s experiences with the Merry Mollusks url, how real-world squid and octopus suckers had worked, the legendary rivalry between sperm whales and giant squid, speculations about the intelligence of the extinct whales, attempts to estimate the number of intelligent species in the universe in light of the new evidence gained from Frek and Renata’s experiences with the flickerball, pimples, breakfast foods, hot baths, swimming on Earth versus swimming in zero gravity, the different greens in the leaves of plants, estimates of the total number of colors that a person might see, speculation about aliens’ additional sensory organs, favorite and unfavorite smells, the cause of sneezing, the highest note that a human being might conceivably sing, whether a high and pure note could actually shatter glass, learning to play virtual instruments as opposed to real instruments, Lora’s job as a facilitator, Yessica’s former job as an ethical analyst, Yessica’s current standing in the Crufter party, Yessica’s bad habits, Carb’s bad habits, the nature of reality, loneliness, the institution of marriage, the ideal number of children to have, the size of the premium paid to mothers willing to have more than two children, the painfulness of childbirth, the qualities of tank-grown children, the best hair colors to have, Frek’s haircut, Renata’s pigtails, types of braids, and more.