by Rudy Rucker
And where was the branelink? No sign of it yet.
Just then Frek noticed a really odd-looking sun. This star had somehow been turned into a giant flickerball. It was displaying—you guessed it—the same old branecaster logo, the boring cube with blue pipes for its edges and an esper’s face on each of the slowly tumbling cube’s six sides. It gave Frek a sick feeling to see a star turned into an advertisement. The branecasters had brought this profound desecration of Nature to the very heart of his home galaxy.
Frek thought of a word he’d heard from both Bumby and Yonny. “Monoculture.” Bumby had used the word to describe the Unipuskers, and Yonny had applied it to the branecasters. Monoculture was exactly what was wrong with Earth. Monoculture was what NuBioCom had brought to the biome. And monoculture was what Gov and his cohorts were planning to spread across people’s minds with their ooey internal uvvy—assuming people still had any minds after the branecasters and espers had taken hold.
A sudden shoal of Orpolese converged upon the star with the logo. The tamed sun switched to full flickerball mode, beaming out images of alien landscapes. No, wait, those were images of—Earth.
Frek stared, mesmerized. As an interface, the star was great enough to readily fold together millions, even billions, of images at once. Frek was looking at the head of each person on Earth, all of them, everybody overlaid on top of each other to make one supernal image of loving, suffering, weeping, laughing, feasting, starving humanity, men and women, boys and girls, morphs and bis, gumps and Grulloos, every size, every shade, every age.
Frek felt a rush of universal love for his fellows, and a shy joy that it was his lot to make their world better. He was glad to be seeing this, it was important. He’d never forget it.
One of the Orpolese changed the channel.
So much for Frek’s vision of humanity. It hadn’t really been a vision, it had been a product. Yes, it was universal love, but it was love in slop buckets. The branecasters had made the very soul of mankind into just another piece of slick entertainment. Frek’s raw, whipsawed emotions settled upon a grim determination to end the branecast.
Following Dad’s lead, the four Earthlings caught a flare off the flickerball star and proceeded on their way among the great procession of stars circling the central black hole.
They passed perhaps a dozen more flickerball stars. Each was attended by a rapt coterie of Orpolese users, none of them aware enough to notice the four real Earthlings in their midst. Meanwhile, in the background, the insane grandeur of the galactic black hole’s light show played on—with only the Earthlings watching.
By now Frek was wondering if they’d ever find the branelink. Would he recognize it? But then he saw something that took his doubts away.
Though he wasn’t sure at first how it looked to the others, to him it was a star resembling that same old yellow-and-white marble Buddha, the comfortable beloved figure from their kitchen shelf. Just as Tusky had predicted. The subtle color shadings of the star’s convection cells mapped out the giant, blissful face, set with a great green emerald in his forehead, and surrounded by a gently tinted halo.
“The Bodhisattva,” said Dad, who must have been seeing about the same thing as Frek this time, instead of some personal ego-boosting statue. All at once he recited a half-remembered bit of scripture.
“He wears a crown of eight thousand rays, in which are seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty,” murmured Carb. “The color of his body is ivory and gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each fingertip has eighty-four thousand gem facets and each facet has eighty-four thousand colors and each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these hands he draws and embraces all beings. In his towering forehead gleams the eye of wisdom, eight thousand kilometers tall.”
“The branelink,” murmured Frek. The Bodhisattva’s green third eye rippled like a jungle in a windstorm. Now and then you could glimpse the warped Planck brane landscape behind the green scrim. They were supposed to fly in there.
“I don’t see nothing like that at all,” said Gibby. “I’m just seein’ my front door, though it’s hella big. Got a little green light up in the window.” He paused, then continued. “If we really gotta fly in there, Frek, what about the bribe? No point goin’ off half-cocked. You gotta make that gold asteroid for ’em like you said.”
Frek was a little glad for the delay. They and the Bodhisattva-star were orbiting the black hole fast enough not to fall in. There was no rush. He’d take his time and vaar the gold, yes. Making a ten-kilometer gold asteroid shouldn’t actually be that hard. After all, Frek was still a thousand kilometers long. The ball of gold only had to be as big as the tip of his finger.
So, just as Gawrnier had taught him to do, Frek held out his hands and let his mind merge into the space between. Empty space, with nothing to say about it. Frek breathed evenly and gazed at the Bodhisattva, then pushed that perception away.
The space was part of Frek’s breath. Emptiness. The space was breathing. Nothing.
“Something’s there!” shouted Dad.
Frek snapped out of his trance and looked down. There was kenner between his hands, but it wasn’t solid. It was a wispy cloud.
He imagined solid gold, he gilded the image onto the perimeter of his thoughts, let the center of his mind merge with the cloud of kenner, and turned his perceptions inside out.
A ball of gold hung in space. But the ball was tiny, nowhere near as big as Frek’s fingertip. It was a mere speck, maybe a kilometer across, a tenth as wide as what he needed. Remembering the old volume-varies-as-the-cube thing from school, he figured he’d need about ten-cubed of these balls. And, oh man, that was a thousand. Wishing that much nothingness into gold was going to take a long time.
“Can I help?” asked Dad, leaning his tattooed head forward to study the tiny dot of gold. Just now his tattoos were depicting suns with solar flares. “Show me how you do it,” added Dad.
“I already tried to teach it to Gibby and Renata,” said Frek wearily. “It’s no use.”
“Try me,” urged Dad. “Maybe I’ve got some powers, too. Don’t forget, I’m the one who saw the Magic Pig!”
And, yes, Carb was able to craft kenner, too. Even though Frek couldn’t explain it very well, Dad got the knack right away. In fact his first ball of gold was twice the size of Frek’s. Dad managed to make his two-kilometer glob look a little bit like a pig with a Mohawk. Gibby, who had the keenest eyes of any of them, used his powerful fingers to tweeze the two lumps into one.
In a couple of hours they were done. They’d made a ten-trillion-ton asteroid of pure gold, a ball ten kilometers across. Gibby cradled it in his enormous hand, using his powered suit to nudge the massive lump around.
Wow began barking. A really big pink and yellow Orpolese donut was swooping in toward them, a male-female pair bent on making a post-flickerball snack of them. Without even saying anything, Dad kenny-crafted himself a hundred-kilometer long Nguyen War singularity gun and fired a stinging swarm of space-cusps that sent the couple howling for safety, their donut surface roiled into untidy peaks.
“Carb boom,” exclaimed Wow.
“Spaceman with a shotgun!” hooted Gibby.
“How did you make something so big?” cried Frek.
“It’s hollow,” said Dad, happily brandishing the great, finned tube. “There’s no more mass in it than in one of those tiny pinches of gold. I studied the designs for these suckers one time. I always wanted one.” He glanced over at Gibby. “Do we go off alien-hunting or do we finally go in?”
“We go in to get out,” said Gibby. “Like Frek said.” He clenched his fingers around the asteroid of gold and held his arm in front of his face. “Might as well do it now. I think we’re drifting into a cloud of, like, cinders out here.”
“Ready, Wow?”
“Wow ready.”
Dad tossed away his singularity gun. The four of them arrowed to
ward the Bodhisattva’s third eye.
11
The Exaplex
Frek thought he heard branches breaking as they shot through the green veils of the idol’s eye. It was as if they were crashing through the canopy of the world’s largest tree. Not that he saw a tree. And then they were falling through a pearly gray sky.
They fell for a while, and as they fell, Frek started absentmindedly thinking about the Skull Farmers game and its old-time decor. But then finally he was able to see the Planck brane world below—far, crooked, and shining. It had the feel of an artificial construct, like a three-dimensional painting, with every detail put in by hand. Zigzag lavender mountain ranges ran all along the horizon. Damp green and pale yellow foothills rose in abrupt bulges, some of them wind-carved into beetling bluffs. Farm fields rolled out of the hills, patterned with loamy stripes of brown and dotted with orchards in pink bloom.
A city was set amidst the fields, a sprawling metropolis with mansions mixed in with city blocks of apartments and office buildings. On the industrial fringes, factory chimneys puffed rhythmic balls of smoke. Radiating out across the enormous city was a pie-slice of park with a freeform lake and tens of thousands of trees. The park’s tip was at the city’s center, its leafy avenues ran clear out to the countryside. At the center was a great concrete-paved square with ugly old-style glass-box buildings and a stone gingerbread City Hall—presumably Bumby and Ulla were jailed in its basement.
All this was visible to Frek even though they were incredibly far up in the endless, empty, glowing sky—at an altitude of perhaps a million kilometers. But as Frek had noticed last time in the Planck brane, he had only to stare at something for its image to get as big as he liked. It was the phenomenological autozoom feature, the pzoom.
Pzooming on the town, Frek saw humanoid figures pointing at them and running about. One oddity was that the figures had spherical auras surrounding their heads, big bright auras for some, small faint ones for others. Not that this was heaven. In fact the city was set up like early times on Earth, like the Y2K era, with a somber palette and finely modeled forms.
The marble statues in the park had been heavily graffiti-tagged, perhaps by the skateboarders practicing beside boom-boxes with fanciful little music notes pulsing out. Automobiles crowded the streets with honks and fumes. Women with auras pushed strollers past people getting paper money from cash machines. Men with auras sold waffles and pig meat sandwiches from holes in the walls, hawking their wares over the din of leaf-blowers cleaning the pavement. Farther from the city center, a tram rattled past a soft, deserted building with a three-story lit-up yellow sign saying EXAPLEX. Frek had a vague memory of Chainey mentioning something about finding the elixir at the Exaplex, so seeing the building made him feel good.
And then, pop, Frek pzoomed his view back to normal. Though it was hard to be sure, he had the feeling that the Planck brane city was scaled like a city on Earth, which meant that Frek and his thousand-kilometer-tall companions would be giants here. And they were falling right toward the middle of town, closing in faster than seemed possible.
“Use your suits to steer out to those hills!” Frek called to the others. “Hurry!”
Dad moved forward, but Wow didn’t get it. And even though Gibby’s suit was humming with the strain, the Grulloo seemed unable to make any progress.
“The gold!” called Gibby. “It’s too heavy!”
Frek darted over to his side and gave him a shove. Gibby swung around, but the hand with the asteroid held him in place. The gold ball was linked to its trajectory like a bead sliding down a wire. There was no deflecting it from its predestined path to the heart of the branecaster’s sprawling city park.
“Leave it!” yelled Frek, getting hold of Wow. Gibby abandoned the asteroid and followed. They sped a few hundred kilometers, just in time to land in the cartoon foothills. It was an easy, springy landing; the hills felt like rubber.
Using his pzoom, Frek watched the gold asteroid smash into the branecaster’s park, throwing up an iconic cloud of spirals, five-pointed stars, exclamation points, and X-eyed fish from the lake. And then the asteroid was at rest, ringed by the tidy ridge of an impact crater. Above the golden orb floated dollar signs and wavy lines of gleam. A swarm of tiny figures were already crawling upon the great nugget, their bright auras bobbing like fireflies.
Wondering what might happen next, Frek, Dad, and Gibby shifted about uneasily, their enormous feet scarring the bumpy carpet of hills. For his part, Wow lay down and began scratching himself through his spacesuit. The thumping of his leg sent tremors rippling across the fields.
Fifteen minutes later, the gold asteroid was completely gone, like a cow-pie dismantled by dung beetles. Immediately thereafter, a jet came whining toward Frek and the others from the city, a plump gold-plated cigar-shaped jet with stubby wings. It did a quick exploratory loop around them. An arched door appeared in its side, and with a quick series of pops, six tiny branecasters appeared with parachutes. The plane sped off; the branecasters floated to the ground and discarded their chutes.
Peering down, Frek could see them milling like excited ants. Unless he was mistaken, these were the same six as before. Sid, Cecily, Batty, Bitty, Chainey, and Jayney, humanoid figures with intense gold auras. Sid ran toward Frek’s foot and gave it a series of kicks.
Bam! The sound traveled though Frek’s vast, airy body, echoing off the inner curves of his glassy suit. Bam, bam, bam! The final kick triggered a prolonged whistle that slid up the scale into inaudibility. Fweet!
With the whistle, Frek shrank, his body finally finishing the unyunching process that the Orpolese had halted in mid-stream before. When he reached his old hundred-sixty-centimeter size, his body locked in on it with a bing. Fine, but the bing was followed by crash and tinkle—the sounds of Frek’s spacesuit popping off him and shattering like a shell of ice, the suit’s pieces spinning through the air and melting away.
The air was nice; it smelled of rich soil and grassy meadows. It felt great to be out of the suit. Frek heard three more sets of bam-fweet-bing-crash-tinkle sound effects. And then the others were back to normal, too. The four Earthlings faced the same six frowning, selfish branecasters as before.
This time, instead of coarsely painted wall-sized faces, the branecasters were three-dimensional figures, none of them taller than Frek. They were somewhat realistic now, but not entirely so—like caricatures brought to life.
“You ruined the branecasters’ picnic!” Batty shrieked. Oh Buddha, thought Frek, that routine again? Batty was dressed like a mental patient, with a white gown that had long, dangling sleeves. His legs and feet were bare. He’d pushed the sleeves back so that his knobby, purplish hands could show. His fingernails were gilded, and he held a gold-handled carving knife.
“You wrecked our park,” hollered Sid, starting right in at a fever-pitch of fury. He was bald, with orange highlights along his thick, twisting lips. Drops of spit flew from his mouth. “You’ll have to pay damages! Make us another asteroid!” He wore an old-fashioned black suit with a white shirt and a gray tie. He was sporting a massive gold watch.
“He’s actually serious,” said chunky pink-jowled Cecily in her gravelly voice. She was wearing a gray suit as before, livened up by a heavy gold necklace.
“I think it ought to be two more asteroids,” put in thin-lipped plastic Jayney. Her face was as peach-colored and glossy as before. Beneath her pastel blue suit was a creamy blouse with a strict, tight collar. She had thick gold hoops in her ears.
“Get them, Batty,” chirped Bitty, a wild-eyed thin woman dressed in a rumpled red suit. She had a hot red spot on each cheek. Her mouth sparkled, for she had a gold tooth and a massive gold stud in her tongue.
“I’m afraid we may not be able to honor your attempted ransom of Ulla and Bumby,” said gray Chainey, patting his necktie. He pushed back his gold-rimmed glasses with his finger and cleared his throat. Like the others, he had a fine big aura like a bubble of light. It was obvious the
y’d made good use of their share of the asteroid. “It seems there was an irregularity in—”
Good old Dad broke the set. “You forgot to say thank you,” he snarled, stepping forward and punching Batty so hard in the stomach that the branecaster dropped his knife.
At the same time Wow bit Sid in the leg. Gibby yanked Chainey’s legs out from under him and held Batty’s knife to the bespectacled branecaster’s throat.
“Free our friends,” said Gibby.
“You fool,” said Chainey. “I could decohere you right now.” But in point of fact he looked worried.
“Call off this damned dog before someone gets hurt,” yelled Sid. Wow was up on his hind legs, snarling and snapping near Sid’s face. Meanwhile, Bitty had jumped on Dad’s back and he’d hurled her into Jayney, sending the two branecaster women to the ground.
Frek strode toward the swinelike Cecily. Was she modeled on a person or a pig? It was hard to be sure. Her ears were triangular flaps, clearly outlined against her gold aura. She took a step back. She actually seemed a little scared of Frek.
“I admit we’re acting greedy,” said Cecily, making a placating gesture with stubby arms that ended in pig trotters. She glanced over at Sid. “Don’t you think we better play fair, honey? I don’t see why we can’t spring Ulla/Bumby if that’s what it takes to get these thugs out of here. Right, Chainey?”
“And don’t forget our elixir,” yelled Gibby, digging the point of the knife right into the skin of Chainey’s neck.
“Let him go!” shrieked Jayney, getting back to her feet. “You can have what you want.”
“Now you’re talking,” said Gibby, releasing his grip on Chainey.
“Here Wow,” added Frek. “Leave Sid alone.”
“Take them downtown, Chainey,” said Sid, brushing the dog hair off his suit.
“New frame,” said Chainey.
And with no transition at all, Frek, Dad, Gibby, and Wow were standing with Chainey on the steps of the City Hall. The other five branecasters hadn’t bothered to come.