by Rudy Rucker
“Home,” said Wow at last, paw-tapping one more door.
When Frek pushed this door open he saw a screen that showed, not Earth, but a world of dogs. Dogs in trees, dogs in chariots, dogs herding chickens, dogs happily piled on each other with their tongues hanging out. The theater was filled with yips, snarls, growls, barks—and the rich, nose-tingling smell of canines.
“Oh, Wow,” sighed Frek. “I meant find my home. Find house tree. Find Lora.”
Wow wasn’t listening. He was crouched beneath the great rectangular display, nose pointed up, raptly savoring the air.
As usual the dark watcher was at the far corner of the front row, on his feet, about to go.
“Please help us,” called Frek, stepping toward him. “We’re desperate. Oh please! Maybe we can give you something you want.”
For the first time, the dark figure paused, seemingly looking their way. “Help us find the room that shows Earth,” begged Frek. “We can’t do it without you.”
“I been waiting for you to ask me polite that way,” came the figure’s voice, rich and rough-edged, vibrant with life. “Instead of yelling and grabbing like you got something coming. Your world’s been right next door all along, hear? Come on in, boys, it’s time. Top floor.”
The figure tapped a blank-looking spot on the hairy red wall. A shiny-framed door appeared and swung open. Pleasant yellow-green light spilled out, the color of sunlight reflected from leaves. Frek could see through to the room’s screen. Instantly responding to Frek’s unspoken wish, the screen showed Middleville, as real as looking out a window at it.
“Yee haw,” said Gibby to the dark man by the open door. “Thank you, friend. My name’s Gibby.”
The being stood silent, his expression watchful, calm, faintly amused. He wore a red T-shirt, skinny gold pants, and bulbous black shoes. His skin was the dark shade of an African’s in the days before humanity’s genes were monoculturized. Unlike the Hubs, he didn’t have an aura at all. He was neither human, nor Hub, but something different.
“I’m Carb,” said Dad, approaching the dark figure. “What’s your name?”
“Zed,” said the black-skinned being. “Zed Alef.” His hair was twisted into dozens of little pigtails arranged in a grid. Corn rows, they’d been called. “Might say I’m the brains of the Exaplex, the quintillion-world puppeteer, understand?”
“Are you friends with the Magic Pig?”
“Not hardly. I hate that bossy little grunter. I chased him outa here just before you came. He was nosing around in your time pool, as if I had to tell you. Maybe I oughta think twice about helping you boys. Especially since I still haven’t heard any kind of ‘please’ from you, Mister Carb Huggins.”
“Please,” said Carb, nodding his head. “Please help us. My son, Frek, wants to save Earth’s biome. Tell him the details, Frek!”
“I already know the particulars,” said Zed. “I been watching through your mind worm.”
Frek was back by the dog-world display, tugging at man’s best friend. “Come on, Wow, come with us now.”
“Aw, let the dog be,” called Zed. “Smart dog like that. He be fine. We’ll be right next door.”
“No,” said Frek. The way Zed had been able to directly open a fresh passage to the theater of Earth indicated that “next door” didn’t mean much here. If Zed Alef should choose to close the new door, Wow would be lost for good.
“You’re coming with me,” Frek told Wow, getting his arms around the dog’s middle and lifting him up into the air. Wow twisted and clawed, even snarled a few curse words. But Frek hung onto him.
Dad and Gibby had already stepped through to the screening room of Earth. Through the door Frek could see their silhouettes down near the display. Zed was waiting by the door. His skin was wonderfully lustrous.
“You said you’d give me something I want?” asked Zed in a low tone as Frek approached. The whites of his eyes were slightly yellow and his tongue was a vivid pink.
“Yeah,” said Frek. “If we can.”
“I was studying on keeping that dog, but you’re so mighty tight with him, I changed my mind. Now I’m wanting you or your old man. Me and the branecasters could use some nice fresh plain brane folks to get qubits from. You’d be tasty.”
“I can’t stay here,” protested Frek. “I’ve got to take the elixir back to Earth.”
“I expected you’d be saying that. And you know that means we keep Carb.”
“No!”
“Hush,” said Zed with a confidential wink. “Don’t tell him yet.” And then, before Frek could protest any further, Zed hurried off into the dark recesses of the Earth theater. Again Frek noticed an oddness in the way Zed moved. His feet never left the floor; in fact it looked as if the floor bulged up a bit to merge with his big, rounded shoes. Frek promised himself to keep a close eye on his father.
And then Frek carried Wow from the dog theater to the Earth theater. Behind him the door to the dog-world disappeared. Of course Wow had to frantically claw the throbbing red wall for a while, and then try pushing open one or two doors. But finally Frek managed to interest the dog in the scene showing here. It was, after all, home.
Yes, the flickering block of space floating at the end of the room was filled with the swaying house trees and bindmoss-covered paths of Middleville. With the natural perspectives and familiar homey colors it seemed realer than the Planck brane. Earth was a world where things made sense.
A sigh of homesickness welled up from Frek. How nice it would be to step into the picture. The view panned across the rolling sunlit lawns set with roseplusplus bushes, past the anyfruit trees, and through a little garden of yams, tomatoes, carrots, chard, rice, and red beans. Seeing the familiar plants made him hungry.
Frek and Wow joined Gibby and Carb, staring up at the solid screen of Earth images. Frek let his hand rest on his father’s shoulder. No way was he going to leave his old man behind in this gollywog world.
Frek’s view of the 3D screen zoomed out from the garden, showing a damaged turmite mound, a turmite-paper garage and—the Hugginses’ house tree. The outer wall of the tree melted away and he saw into the kitchen. Briefly Frek wondered what Carb and Gibby were seeing. But he didn’t bother asking them. There was too much for him to take in.
Lora, Geneva, Ida, Yessica, and Renata were in there together, with Woo lying on the floor. It was perfectly real, with every hair in place, all the sounds of everyone breathing, the faint scent of Lora’s perfume, even the scuff marks on Ida’s shoes. Renata was still wearing the green fern-patterned ribbons that Frek had crafted for her.
Yessica was putting some food on the table, a dish made of whole anyfruit-tree raspberries and ground-up carrots, the raspberries lined up on the watery little mounds of orange paste. She was holding forth about the perfect balance of this dish that she’d just now concocted from fresh ingredients found in the Huggins garden. She called it vitamash. Yessica explained that the vitamash was to help welcome herself and Renata into their temporary new home. She said the raspberries were like chakras, and that vitamash exemplified the Crufter way.
Lora told Yessica not to talk about Crufter stuff because Gov and the counselors were always watching and listening through the walls of the house tree although, added Lora, Gov had taken a big damage hit last week, and been replaced by a clone, with a few memories lost in the transition, thank goodness, but even so you shouldn’t be waving a red flag in his face, not that he had a face, being in fact a parasitic worm, as was clearer than ever, given what people had seen in the blasted-out hole in his puffball that those alien attackers from the Anvil had made.
Meanwhile Geneva and Ida were getting Renata to tell about the Unipuskers and about how Frek had scared the aliens with the ickspot costumes. Renata was showing them some of the drawings she’d stored in her turkle. To keep Gov from getting interested, they talked like the story was a made-up plan for a toon show Renata wanted to invent, and instead of saying “Frek,” they were saying “Roarboy
,” which was what Geneva sometimes called Frek to tease him.
And then Lora asked Yessica how “that man” was doing, and Yessica said that man was okay, except he’d let Yessica down in not helping her arrange to make daily broadcasts into the minds of everyone on Earth. “And how would that be?” wondered Lora, and then Yessica started to tell about the branecasters and about how she’d wanted to kill Frek so she could become the branecaster representative. Yessica was saying this flat out as if she didn’t see anything wrong. And then Lora emptied the carrots and raspberries over Yessica’s head.
Renata started crying and ran outside, but Geneva and Ida went after her to tell her to come back in, and that even if their moms fought, Renata was welcome anyway since she was a friend of Roarboy’s. Renata whispered, “I have a goggy crush on Roarboy,” and that made Geneva laugh, but Ida shushed her.
The screen was showing both the inside and the outside of the house tree. In the kitchen, Yessica was acting surprisingly calm, wiping off the pureed carrot with a cleaner tongue, saying that Lora didn’t have to be such a mother lion, and asking, by the way, if Lora minded if Yessica left Renata here while she had a look around the area. Lora said no, and then she carefully added that if Yessica wanted some excitement, then Stun City was the place to go, and that if Yessica needed money, then maybe Lora could lend her a little, and that Yessica shouldn’t feel she needed to hurry back.
All of this was as interesting as anything Frek had ever seen.
“Yo!” shouted Zed from somewhere back behind them. “C’mon up!”
“He’s in the projection room,” said Dad, pointing toward the rear wall of the theater. Visible through a square hole was a glaring light. “This is how old-time movie theaters worked,” said Dad. “They had a little cubby in back with a projector that uses a film ribbon or maybe a digital file. I know because we had a theater on Sick Hindu. That projector light is what’s putting out the different pictures we’re seeing. And the projection room is where we’ll find Earth’s past. If Zed Alef helps us.”
Gibby and Wow went to investigate.
Suddenly Frek remembered Zed’s threat. “Zed says they want to keep you here,” he whispered to Dad. “Be careful!”
“Why would Zed want me?” exclaimed Dad, sounding almost flattered.
“Sssh! He said he and the branecasters could, like, feed on us. We can’t let him trap you.” And then Frek came out and said something he hadn’t quite realized he’d been thinking. “I want to bring you back to Middleville, Dad.” Somewhere deep down Frek was hoping to get Carb and Lora back together and patch up the Huggins family.
“Kill me now,” said Dad in that odd way he had of mixing a joke with something serious.
“I found the stairs,” called Gibby from the rear of the room. Wow came running back for Carb and Frek.
In and of themselves, the stairs were no big deal, just a single steep, dark flight of steps. But Frek felt strange. The display at the front of the room was indistinguishable from reality—which meant the projection room held the underlying pattern of the world. Going up the stairs was like pushing behind the curtain of a puppet show. What hidden forces might Frek find in the projection room, what puppeteers?
The room was a largish cube, some four meters on a side, with a thick spongy floor that shook underfoot. The very first thing Frek noticed was a knot of meaty vines upon the room’s high ceiling, slowly writhing shapes, evil eels. With immediate conviction, he knew that the eels were the conduit to humanity’s watchers. And with the same certainty, he knew that the eels were the mind worms Chainey had warned him to stay away from. If humanity were ever to fight free of the branecasters, the unny grayish tubes on the ceiling were the shackles they’d have to cut. But not yet. Finding the elixir would come first.
An oily, iridescent pool was set into the floor beneath the projection window, and standing in the pool was a kritter or Exaplex organ of some kind. He resembled a chess piece with spindly arms ending in white-gloved hands. The number of arms was impossible to determine: they moved very rapidly and they left trails in the air. The creature’s head was a lightbulb or, more accurately described, a glass pod with a tiny sun at its center. The lightbulb head was opaque and shiny on the side toward Frek, while the clear front side of the bulb was beaming three-dimensional images into the theater.
Zed Alef leaned against the wall by the shiny pool, fingering one of his little pigtails, watching them with that same half-smile on his face. His feet were wholly merged into the soft floor.
“Hi boys,” he said. “This here’s Li’l Bulb and your time pool.”
Wow trotted up to the pool and tried to drink from it, but the sparkling time stuff was more like tar than like water. When the dog pulled up his head, a taffylike strand of time stretched briefly from the pool’s surface to his nose—and snapped back, sending out some sluggish ripples. Wow gave a little yip and went to sit by the projection room’s door.
Meanwhile Li’l Bulb was steadily hauling a thick column of time from the pool with his right hands, shaping the translucent mass into a squarish animated block that he held in front of his blazing “eye” to project the scenes of Earth. The used-up time passed through Li’l Bulb’s left hands and back into the pool. The time strand was continually feeding the magic theater before Li’l Bulb’s glowing eye.
The motions of Li’l Bulb and the time strand left afterimages, like you’d see if you waved a burning stick in the dark. It almost looked like there were multiple copies of Li’l Bulb.
“Your elixir’s waiting in there,” said Zed, pointing at the pool. “Get down on it.”
Frek cast a wary glance at the snaky gray things on the ceiling. One of them seemed to be watching him. It had a disk face of concentric rings of teeth around a raspy central tongue. Like a lamprey eel’s. The lamprey had the same higher dimensional quality as Li’l Bulb, that is, the lamprey’s sluggish motions sketched ghostly spacetime veils, and sections of it were continually disappearing and reappearing, folding in and out of higher spaces unknown to man.
Frek went and knelt by the pool of time. Dad quickly joined him. Wow remained by the exit door, while Gibby squatted against a side wall, his knife in one hand, staring watchfully at the shapes on the ceiling.
Frek tapped the pool’s shimmering surface and pulled out a strand. Little figures moved within it. The whole pool was full of reality animations.
“That’s our past and our future?” Dad asked Zed. “How do we find what we want?”
“Gotta stick your head in there,” answered Zed.
“There’s something bothering me,” said Frek. “The branecasters only started watching the human race a couple of weeks ago, right? The Unipuskers made first contact when they abducted Yessica, Renata, and Carb, right? In other words, your Exaplex has only been projecting Earth’s reality since the first Monday in May, 3003. So why would your time pool have the Great Collapse of June 6, 2666?”
“It’s like pulling up a yam,” said Zed. “You yank on the leaves—and the roots, shoots, and patoots come along with it. Once we get one day, we got ’em all. It’s hyperdimensional, son.”
Brave Dad took a deep breath and dipped his whole head into the time pool. For a long minute his head was invisible, two minutes, maybe three. Frek couldn’t stand it; he grabbed Dad’s shoulders and pulled him out.
Dad’s face was dripping with glittering time, droopy shapes running off him. Frek could make out the forms of a chair, sagging windows, a bed, a woman with a great stomach, a bony Mohawked man—the melting shapes of the man’s youthful dreams.
“Frek!” exclaimed Dad. He didn’t seem at all out of breath. “I saw myself on that night I told you about! It felt like I was there for an hour. Lora was lying on her back with her stomach domed up like a beach ball, feeling some pains, wondering whether to wake up her husband yet, and there he was, young Carb Huggins, lying next to her having his vision. What a night that was. The night my son was born. I could see right inside my dream,
Frek. The Magic Pig’s a Planck brane revolutionary. In the dream back then he knew you’d be here now. That’s why he came! The Magic Pig says—”
“Enough about him!” interrupted Zed. Up above, the hyperdimensional lampreys were lashing about faster than before. Large new sections of them were in motion, leaving trails like blurry gray fans.
“Stop pussy-footin’ around, boys,” added Zed, gesturing at the pool. “It’s time. Do your thing.”
Dad didn’t hesitate to stick his head back into the time pool. Frek followed suit. A recent scene from the past sprang into life before Frek’s eyes: Mom telling him to pick up his room.
“Your room is a mess,” said Lora Huggins, standing in her son’s doorway. “A dog den. You’re not going anywhere until it’s straightened up. Poor Snaffle doesn’t know where to begin.”
The boy on the floor sighed and finished pulling on his soft leather shoe. “My room’s not a mess,” he said. “I know exactly where everything is. Snaffle’s too stupid to understand. I have more important stuff to do, Mom.”
Frek could hear the chatter of the Goob Dolls on the walls of the family room, with Geneva and Ida shouting things back at them. It seemed like so long since Frek had heard his family—Lora’s slow warm voice, Geneva’s clipped, cheerful tones, and Ida’s bursting quack.
Right about then somebody, probably Zed Alef, shoved Frek’s butt really hard, and he fell all the way into the time pool. For the moment he still saw his Middleville bedroom, but then Dad appeared, hanging in midair, overlapping the image of Lora. Zed must have shoved Dad in, too.
It occurred to Frek that they were breathing. As far as his lungs were concerned, the time stuff was like colored air. They could stay in here for quite a while.
Dad wasn’t seeing what Frek was seeing, he was seeing something different. Something he didn’t want Frek to see. For when Frek reached out to touch Dad, Dad twitched and tried to push Frek away. But Frek had caught hold of Dad’s arm, and now Dad’s motions spun Frek sideways into the scene his father was watching.