by Rudy Rucker
A branching fern of purple tweet floated past, barely visible amid the crooning, caressing cells of light.
“Tusky says I’m stewing an empty pot,” interpreted Whaler in a suspicious tone. More tweets followed. “She says the purple-on-pink couple just wanted to be friends,” he continued. “Yonny and Marta. Tusky wants us to float up there and ask them for news of the family tree. But I don’t trust them. That Yonny, he’s got a thing for you, Tusky, I can tell. And it’s two-way. I saw those pretty tweet blossoms you made for him.”
Tusky answered with a tweet of a swollen silver claw grasping a drooping gold ring.
“I am not a bully,” hollered Whaler. “But I don’t trust Yonny and Marta. We lie low until I think they’ve gone away. And that’s final. Relax, dammit!”
Tusky sent out a complicated, angry series of tweets. But again it seemed like Whaler had the power to control the pair’s motion. Though the silver-on-gold donut twitched and trembled, she/he stayed right where they were.
For quite a long time not much happened. A whiff of peach blossoms came to Frek, along with a fizzy feeling all along his legs. The sun was gently chiming. How lovely it was here, really. He hung there basking, now and then catching an overbold twist of loofy that ventured too close.
Eventually Frek and the others must have slept, for at some point he had the feeling of waking up. Blissfully he hung there, enjoying the gentle shifting of the currents of the sun, faintly hearing the waking mutters of the others. Idly he wondered if there were anything odd about his sense of time. They’d been in here—how long? And they had to go—where? Oops.
“Hey, Whaler,” called Frek. Buried in the beating light/sound/touch of the star, it would be so easy to forget the purpose of their quest. “You’re supposed to take us to the branelink. So I can get the elixir and take my guys home.” Home to Mom, Geneva, Ida, and Renata. Home to trees, grass, water, and the open air. Home to their cozy kitchen with the little yellow-and-white-veined marble statue of the Buddha. Earth was even more beautiful than the inside of a sun. “Come on,” clamored Frek.
“Those rassen will be on us like a murder of crows,” whined Whaler. “Handsome purple Yonny and his snotty Marta pecking first. You’ll be loofy sushi, Frek.”
“Stop stalling,” said Frek. “They didn’t hurt us before.”
Tusky sent out tweets of smiley faces, rainbows, candy canes, and flowers. Meaning that she was on Frek’s side. But Frek was starting to wonder about her motives. Maybe Whaler’s fears were justified.
Be that as it may, they had to get out of here. What if the rassen really were waiting for them? Thanks to the element of surprise, Frek had been able to push them around before. But maybe if there were a serious battle it would be a different story.
An idea came to Frek. “What if we grab our feet with our hands? Gibby grabs his tail of course, and Wow can bite his tail. If we’re curled around, we’ll look a little like Orpolese. So they don’t right away think we’re giant loofy.” Another idea. “And why don’t we ride out on one of those solar flares we saw? Didn’t you say something about surfing a tidal wave, Whaler?”
“Of course we’d ride a flare,” said Whaler in a sullen tone. “If we were leaving at all. Ouch!” A big pinch appeared in the flesh of the silver-on-gold donut, a thin spot that wobbled around and around the ring. “Don’t do that, Tusky. Hey!” Another dent appeared, and the donut seemed very nearly on the point of breaking into pieces. “All right, then,” snarled Whaler. “We’ll go.”
The six of them plowed through the synaesthetic gumbo of light/sound/scent/touch, the angry Whaler not bothering to watch if the Earthlings could keep up. And then Frek lost his bearings. Suddenly he couldn’t tell which way was up. If he drove himself forward, would he be burying himself yet deeper in the sun? But if he stopped moving he’d fall farther behind. You could lose your mind in here.
Your mind, my mind, in the sun’s rind find a bind, you mind? Unkind. My mind, your mind…
Something prodded Frek in the belly. Wow?
“Hey Frek!” Dad was right there too, a cool dark spot of reason. “Good boy, Wow, you found him. Come on, Frek, you’re drifting down. Whaler and Tusky are up that way, waiting with Gibby for a blast. I told those damned Orpolese they were going too fast, but stupid sulky Whaler wouldn’t even answer. You okay?”
Frek gratefully let his father lead him to the others. The sun-stuff was madly surging, with tornados of loofy tearing past.
“Hang onto us, you selfish turkeys,” yelled Dad to Whaler and Tusky. “Net us in a force field so you don’t lose us on the way out.”
“Ready!” called Whaler, sending out a fairly weak force field to help them. “Everyone blast up as hard as you can when I give the signal!”
A stench of burnt sulfur, an avalanche roar, a sleet of needles—a rush of sun stuff came at them.
“Go!” yelled Whaler.
Frek jetted his suit as hard as he could. He was catching up to the rolling space wave of the solar plume, he was getting up on top of it, Whaler was still in sight, but—
“Wipe out!” yodeled Dad, laughing a little.
“Circle back, Whaler,” yelled Gibby. “We missed the son of a gun. You gotta drag us stronger, you lazy cuss. Wow don’t get the picture a-tall.”
Frek skittered off to one side and let himself drop back down to his companions. In a bit Whaler reappeared.
“Another one’s coming right up,” said Whaler. “They pulse in threes.”
The second time around Dad and Wow caught the plume, but Gibby slipped and knocked Frek off the rushing shock-front.
“If we miss the third one, we’ll be dog-paddling here for another hour,” scolded Whaler. “Not that I mind but—don’t pinch again, Tusky, you shrew! Front and center, cannon-fodder. Catch this wave or I’ll turn off your spacesuits.” Whaler made his voice into a hoarse, scary whisper. “I’m not kidding.”
This time they all caught the wave. It was incredible, a Nantucket sleigh ride through rough seas of sound, a romp up the blossom-scented stairway to heaven, a barefoot scamper across a million-note chrome xylophone.
Frek wished there were a way he could have recorded his sensations to play for Stoo Steiner and the other guys. That would geeve up their minds! And, as he thought this, he realized that the espers were in fact relishing his inputs. At some point during the jangling chaos of his trip into the sun, he’d let down his branecasting block. The golden glow was on him stronger than ever before. So once again, Frek pushed the glow out into the distance, made his thoughts as unresisting as air, and “combed his brain,” getting back his normal modes of thought. And then he entangled his thoughts with those of his companions and did sky-air-comb with them as well, to keep the espers from seeing through their eyes. Thinking about your adventures in your own way felt better without other minds leeching onto your feelings and your thoughts.
And now they were up in interstellar space, entering the open gulfs of Orpoly. The plume they’d ridden had spent its force; it was guttering back into the sun they’d just left. They were free, in the black, their suits a little pocked and iridescent, everyone intact, and no rassen in sight.
But Whaler and Tusky were still quarrelling.
All at once Tusky poofed out a spore-cloud of ten thousand tiny shiny red tweet hearts. Messengers. The hearts buzzed off in every direction, and it wasn’t long till one of them must have found its target—for here came Yonny and Marta, a growing dot against the endless bright star, pink Marta bucking and struggling, Yonny throbbing on her surface like a web of varicose veins. They looked ready to rumble.
“Come on, pretty boy!” yelled Whaler aggressively. He peeled himself loose from Tusky to hang free. “You want a piece of me?” He floated up above his wife’s gold donut, his body an angry tangle of silver strands and stalks. Yonny too tore free of his mate, ready for battle.
The two male Orpolese circled each other, tightening up their shapes. Whaler drew much of his mass into a flattene
d central wad, leaving about a dozen tentacles writhing from his forward end. In their midst was a large, sharp beak. Whaler resembled a cuttlefish, like Bumby, only a thousand kilometers long. For his part, Yonny looked more like a giant crab, with much of his purple mass formed into a menacing pair of claws.
Moving fast, Whaler darted forward, slung a two-hundred-kilometer-long tentacle around one of the immense claws, and tore it off. He whisked the purple mass into the furious tangle of his feelers and devoured it with his beak.
“Dig it, Tusky!” roared Whaler. “Who’s your man, baby? Who’s your man?”
Glancing over at Tusky, Frek noticed something new. Tusky had extended a kind of snout, a tube like an elephruk’s trunk, and she’d managed to dig the proboscis into the flesh of Marta. Lumps were moving up the trunk. Tusky was eating Marta! But Marta was extruding her own tube-snout and—
A bellow from Whaler brought Frek’s attention back to the two males. Yonny had snipped off half of Whaler’s tentacles, and he’d grabbed the silver Orpolese’s body with his remaining purple claw! A snaky knot of Whaler’s tentacles surrounded the great pincer, struggling to pry it loose.
Looking back at the two female Orpolese, Frek was shocked to see Tusky suddenly shrunken to a tenth of Marta’s size. The pink donut’s trunk was deeply embedded in Tusky’s flesh. Bolus by bolus, Tusky’s body was traveling up Marta’s steadily pulsing snoot. Though Tusky continued sucking at Marta’s body with her own trunk, she was losing the race.
A scream from Whaler and an obscene alien twitter from Yonny signaled the denouement. The attacker had torn Whaler in two! Whaler was done for!
The huge one-clawed purple crab stuffed the silver fragments into the churning machineries of his mouth.
Meanwhile Tusky was nearing her own end; she was little more than ten kilometers across. But Yonny saw, and raised his claw, and struck his wife a fearsome blow.
The great dent in Marta’s pink flesh threw off her sucking rhythm. Tiny Tusky seized the opportunity. Cubic hectokilometers of Marta-stuff surged up Tusky’s greedy golden snout. Marta never did manage to get back into the groove. In minute it was all over. Marta was no more.
Yonny stretched himself into a comely purple tracery and settled onto the plump gold body of his new bride. The two forms quivered in sensual delight.
“Lordy lord,” marveled Gibby. “What’s gonna happen now? They gonna eat us too?”
“Yonny pinch,” said Wow, impressed by how the Orpolese had used his giant claw.
“I wonder what’ll happen when Yessica meets Lora down in Middleville,” mused Dad. “I’m glad I won’t be there for that.”
“What in the world are you nasty beasts?” said Yonny all of a sudden.
“We’re from Earth,” said Frek. “I’m Frek, this is my father, Carb, my sidekick, Gibby, and my dog, Wow. I made a deal with the branecasters to let the Orpolese produce the Earth channel. You’re supposed to help us get to the branelink so we can work some details. Like us getting paid.”
“I ain’t no sidekick,” protested Gibby. “I’m the brains.”
“I despise branecasting,” interrupted Yonny in a lofty tone. “Tacky, tacky, tacky. Turning our stars into idiot-balls to show branecast advertisements and to display disgusting creatures like you? Spare us the details of your utter degradation. I most certainly won’t help you. In fact—” The purple veins of his body drew together, reconstituting his fearsome claw.
Tusky began tweeting, explaining the situation to Yonny. An image of Earth, of a flickerball, of the branecasters, of Ulla/Bumby.
“Branecasting is contemptible,” intoned Yonny. “It’s as simple as that. These soulless beasts are better off dead. I say put an end to their wretched—ow!”
Once again, Tusky had thrown a pinch into the flesh of herself and her current mate. The toothy bulge of Yonny’s claw melted away.
“Very well then, I won’t harm them,” said Yonny quickly. “You’re a passionate one, my little Tusky.” He was really pouring the honey into his tone now. “It’s lovely to be with someone so vivacious. But don’t you think we could simply send these revolting vermin on their way?”
Tusky tweeted the image of captive Ulla/Bumby once again.
“But that’s not our job, don’t you know,” said Yonny in a nasal tone. “Let this—this what’s-his-name—this Frek thing, let him clean up the mess he’s made. We mustn’t waste a single minute of our honeymoon in the monoculture wasteland of central Orpoly, dear Tusky. I’m keen on whisking you off to a special spot I know. A marvelous binary dwarf star near the outskirts. You’ll find the most extraordinary loofy there, and the shapeliest gravity waves you’ve ever seen. It’s quite unspoiled; the znag and znassen rabble haven’t ruined it yet. Do let me take you there, my sweet. We’ve no need to watch these spit-talking fools rush into their dreary branelink. Surely it’s enough to point them on their way.” His veiny purple body was kneading Tusky’s golden flesh as he talked.
Tusky hesitated, then tweeted out a single, large, pointing hand. Just as Frek might have expected, the forefinger was directed toward the brightest region of the Orpolese environs. Toward the center of the galactic core.
“Fine, but what does the branelink look like?” demanded Frek.
For some reason the question provoked a mocking laugh from Yonny. But Tusky helpfully formed one last tweet for them, an mind-entangled form that would turn out to look different to each of them. For Frek, the tweet resembled the friendly creamy marble Buddha that sat on their kitchen shelf back home, rounded into a sphere, and with an emerald in his forehead.
“The branelink shapes itself to lure the rubes in,” said Yonny in a condescending tone. “We’ve done enough for them, now, Tusky. Forget these wretched beings and their trashy home world. Let our nuptial celebration begin.”
Tusky made a nodding gesture that must have meant yes. The Buddha tweet disappeared and the floating tweet hand waved goodbye. Tusky and Yonny flew off, swooping outward past the nearby star.
“Let’s catch another flare,” said Dad. “Get a boost toward the core. There’s a good set about to break over there.”
“Did you see the Buddha just now?” Frek asked his father. “The statue from our kitchen?”
“Well, um, to me it kind of looked like a statue of me,” said Carb, sounding embarrassed. “I wish I’d seen Buddha. Maybe next time.”
“I saw the nice round door of my burrow,” said Gibby. “With firelight glowing in the windowpanes.”
“Wow saw vig meat,” said the dog.
“That Yonny’s right negatory on them branecasters,” mused Gibby. “Maybe he knows somethin’, even if he is a toff. Maybe we shouldn’t oughta go in that branelink at all.”
“Look, the only hope of stopping the branecasters is to talk with them and learn more. We gotta go all the way in to get out. Anyway, I didn’t come this far to go home without the elixir.”
“Let’s do it,” said Dad.
So they used their suits to jockey themselves into a line-up above a particularly active region of the star, and, yes, they caught the next good solar flare toward the mass of light at Orpoly’s core. Frek’s suit fed him a sound of breaking waves.
The trip was like liveboard surfing, sailfish riding, angelwing gliding—and more. Whenever they’d slow down too much, they’d swing near a sun and get a slingshot boost off its gravity, sometimes catching a fresh flare wave as well. Carb was especially good at riding the interstellar energies. Cheerfully he showed Frek and the others how to improve their style. The old man was at his best out here. He made their urgent quest into play.
As the suns grew denser, Frek saw some Orpolese in the distance. He murmured a warning, and the four curled themselves into hoops and used the power of their suits to race away.
Frek had to grin at the way Wow looked, with his teeth clamped onto his two-hundred-kilometer tail, the tail continually about to slip away, his great snout twitching as he readjusted his bite, his eyes rolling back so
that their whites showed, his legs twitching as if to run across the empty vacuum, his expression strained and grim.
Noticing Frek’s smile, Carb began clowning: wagging his Mohawk, bucking his long body and acting like he was having trouble holding onto his toes. Finally Frek started laughing so hard he couldn’t stay curled at all anymore. But it didn’t matter, the Orpolese weren’t following them.
Fewer suns lay ahead now, tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. The missing suns had gone into a black patch that covered a third of the sky: a great wobbling dead zone, a giant black hole at the galaxy’s exact center. Lively lines of light wound around the vast nucleus. The lights were a bit like chrome wires around a lump of coal, though more smeared out than that, more like chaotic strange attractors. A deep ghostly chant echoed from the dark central void, a sound like a chorus of the damned. Frek’s suit was using all his senses to model this strange place.
A nearby star faltered after a near miss with another star and veered toward the dark zone. As the star fell, it screamed; and as it dropped, its voice grew deeper and slower. The titanic black hole kneaded the falling star, squirting out a hot jet that added to the bright traceries upon its dark surface. The doomed star’s remaining shreds faded into a deep orange, then red, dimmer and dimmer, never quite going away. Its death cry merged with the never-ending plainsong of the millions of other stars who’d crashed here since the dawn of time.
The suns in this neighborhood had to step lively to survive, racing around the galactic doom-egg to postpone falling in. Frek and his party blended into the flow out on the lip of the whirlpool. Circling the core, jostled by suns, they encountered more and more Orpolese donuts.
The Earthlings did their best to look like hoops. Frek avoided looking at Dad lest he start laughing too hard to stay curled. Even in the face of a galactic black hole, Carb made things funny. The man was completely irresponsible.