by Rudy Rucker
A recent version of Dad was sitting in the cockpit of a Unipusker flying saucer, gliding over the green wooded valleys of planet Earth. A river glinted in the setting sun—the River Jaya. Up ahead was Stun City, with the corkscrew Toonsmithy, the Kritterworks cube, and Gov’s NuBioCom puffball.
Standing beside the Dad were Hawb and Cawmb. Pilot Evawrt was flying the ship. The Dad was fiddling with his uvvy, tuning someone in.
“I have some information for Gov,” said the Dad. “The Anvil that’s coming down tonight is an alien ship intending to abduct Frek Huggins. H-U-G-G-I-N-S. He lives in Middleville with his mother, Lora. Be sure and stop them.”
“Don’t look!” shouted the real Dad at Frek’s side. With a convulsive effort, he managed to tear them away from this scene. And now they were drifting like dead leaves through the air above Stun City. Frek could hardly believe that his father had betrayed him.
Even though he was boiling with emotions, Frek didn’t let himself forget that he was here to find the elixir. If Carb’s betrayal distracted him from the quest then, in the end, the forces of monoculture would have won. So before Frek started in on Carb, he focused his mind upon the puffball and its NuBioCom labs—the place where the last samples of Earth’s diverse genomes would have been. Somehow Carb stayed right in synch with him.
Almost immediately they came to rest amid the square before the NuBioCom puffball in Stun City. People were walking backward across the square, this way and that, their clothes progressively more old-fashioned. Frek and Carb were fixed in this one space location, sinking steadily deeper into the time pool. Now there was a little time to talk.
“So you were the one who warned the Gov the Anvil was coming for me?” demanded Frek. “Thanks to you I got peeked! How could you, Carb?”
“I didn’t know it would come to that,” cried Carb. “I never wanted you to find out! Oh, why did I have to go straight to that memory?” A crowd of laughing 2900s women went skipping by, their reversed motions looking unnaturally lively. Carb kept talking. “I did it because it was my big chance to be important, don’t you see? I’ve never amounted to much, Buddha knows. I was supposed to negotiate with the branecasters for the whole human race. But the geevin’ branelink was down when we got to Unipusk.” A group of NuBioCom lab workers dressed 2800 style hurried backward out of the puffball.
“You weren’t on any Unipusk,” snapped Frek. “You were in that saucer telling Gov about me and the Anvil. Stop lying!”
“We’d been on Unipusk and come back by then. The open access branecast had already started, right, so on Unipusk we could see the people on Sick Hindu and Earth. We watched those nosy Orpolese finding out about me and the Unipuskers from Yessica’s sister Meshell in the Crufter colony. It was Meshell who told them that Carb Huggins had a son. Right away I guessed the Orpolese would try to get you. So Hawb, Cawmb, Evawrt, and me yunched back to Earth to give Gov a warning. We didn’t want to lose control of the humanity branecast channel. I had no idea it would end with—”
“You told them about the Crufter hideout, too, didn’t you?” said Frek, giving Carb a shake. Just now Carb seemed as weak as a puppy. “About the hideout where Lora tried to send me when I was running away from the Three R’s!”
“That was Hawb’s idea,” said Carb in a barely audible tone. “He saw the hideout location in my mind.”
In the scene around them a street-cleaner tongue was working over the square’s cobblestones. One of the earliest completely unnatural kritters, the oversize street tongues had been terminated back in 2700 after a series of unpleasant incidents in which they’d consumed un-watched babies and napping bums.
The puffball had changed into a faceted crystal dome, the original housing for the NuBioCom labs. Frek and Carb were closing in on 2666, the year of the Great Collapse.
“You know I’d never let Gov give you the Three R’s,” said Carb in a pleading, insistent tone. “You’ve got to believe me!”
“I hate you,” said Frek, the words bursting out by themselves.
Carb didn’t say anything back.
Right about then the sun stopped rolling across the sky and hung still. People began walking forward instead of backward. This was it. They’d reached the day of the Great Collapse. June 6, 2666.
Frek turned away from Carb, struggling to focus on finding the elixir. It took only a slight push of will to launch himself into dreamlike flight, straight toward the center of the great glassy dome of the NuBioCom headquarters.
As Frek drew close to the wall, it melted away.
Three men and two women were sitting at an old-style round computing table. One of the men wore a turban. The table was made of computational plastic; its top was a beige disk with a dark hole in its center. A slight waviness in the air above the hole indicated that it was a memory shredder.
Upon the tabletop rested the translucent 3D icons of a planet’s worth of animal and plant species and subspecies. Elephants, squid, giraffes, monkeys, banana trees, whales, prickly pear cactuses, house-flies, morel mushrooms, rattlesnakes, swallowtail butterflies, crows, angel fish, sea snails—the whole Noah’s ark of Gaia’s diversity was ranged in concentric ranks around the table’s faintly humming central hole. The NuBioCom workers were herding the icons inward to destruction. As Frek watched, a narrow-beaked platypus icon hit the hole; it shriveled away with a pathetic queep.
“I feel gleepy doing this,” burst out one of the women at the table. She had an angular face with dark, vivid lips. “We’ve already deployed the knockout virions. Nothing but NuBioCom-authorized species can reproduce. Why can’t we at least hang onto the DNA of the species we’re making extinct? Just in case?”
“We’ve been over this and over this, Karla,” said a man sitting across from her. He had a wide mouth and a shaved head. “As long as any obsolete genomes survive, even in software, there’s always the risk of some anti-progress zealot bringing them back. Let’s get on with it. We’re going to erase them all, we’re going to do it now, and we’re going to share the responsibility. We five, the heads of the five NuBioCom divisions. If you’re going to go environmentalist on us, the company will find someone reliable to head up your unit.”
“No need to get huffy,” said Karla quickly. “I was only asking.” She nudged a little model orchid into the hole and it withered away with a barely audible rustle. Gone for good.
Though the turbaned man beside Karla pretended to be working right along with the others, Frek could see that, whenever possible, he was sneaking an icon into his lap. It was Sri-Sri Krisna, founder of the Crufters!
Though it was exciting to see Krisna, Frek well knew that the Crufters would only manage to save a few dozen species. Frek turned his attention from Krisna to a little red-breasted robin icon near the center of table. The robin would be one of the next to go. How to save it? It wasn’t as if he could sweep the icons off the tabletop and pocket them. The substance of the past was inalterable.
But it would be enough to remember the icons. The icons themselves were the data they represented. It was a standard interface trick. The genome data sets were arranged so as to resemble the plants, animals, and microorganisms they stood for. The robin icon’s appearance held all the information needed to generate its DNA.
In other words Frek could save the robin if he could remember exactly how the robin icon looked. First the robin, and then the tapir next to it, and then the raspberry bush and then—how many icons in all? At first Frek had thought there were a few thousand—but in fact the icons grew quite a bit smaller near the outer edges of the table, with more and more of them crowded in. There were millions of them. Impossible.
Someone nudged Frek’s elbow just then. Carb, looking like a whipped dog. “Hi,” was all he said. “I see it, too.”
“Don’t bother me,” mumbled Frek. He didn’t want to think about his geevey no-good father. But now of course he couldn’t stop. Carb had told Gov about the Anvil. He’d leaked the Crufter hideout info. He’d tricked Frek into c
rashing the yunch trip. He’d given his ring to Yessica to help the Unipuskers. He’d—
“I’m sorry!” cried Carb.
“No good,” snapped Frek. “Words don’t change what you did.”
“By Buddha, I’ll make it all up to you, one way or another,” blustered his father. “Now come on, what can I do to help here?”
“You can’t do anything, you loser,” said Frek. “You only make things worse.”
“Talk to me, Frek. Please tell me what’s happening.”
The old man was absurd. But he wasn’t going away. In exasperation, Frek went ahead and started explaining the problem. Maybe talking would help. “Every one of these icons codes up a genome,” he said. “The most I’d be able to remember would be ten of them or a hundred. But—” He waved his hand across the crowded table. It seemed like the harder he looked, the more tiny figures there were to notice by the rim. Meanwhile, at the table’s center, a tiny striped pig bit the dust. Wheenk!
“Why not make copies of them,” suggested Carb. “Like how we made the gold. We’ll kenny craft copies and take them home.”
“Not a bad idea,” admitted Frek after a long pause. “Do you think there’s dark matter in the Planck brane?”
“Only one way to find out,” said Carb, holding out his cupped hands.
Sure enough, the Planck brane was loaded with kenner. In a moment, Frek and Carb were each holding a colorless ball of the stuff.
“Let’s start copying the icons,” said Frek.
He and Carb hovered right over the table, with their legs harmlessly projecting through the insubstantial heads of the NuBioCom workers. Frek stared down at the little robin on the edge of extinction. Moving his head from side to side, he absorbed every detail of the image and zapped it onto a pinch of his kenner.
“Lemme see,” said Carb, setting down the model he’d just made and looking at Frek’s. “You nailed it, kiddo! Every detail in place. Mine didn’t come out so good.” Carb’s copy of the tapir icon was missing a leg.
“I think the copy has to be exact,” said Frek. “Each little bit of the image probably codes a piece of the genome.”
“Tell you what,” said Carb. “You make the copies. I’ll keep the kenner coming and accumulate our stash.”
Frek hovered above the table gathering his strength, studying the table. The tabletop reminded him of one of those round stained glass windows in the old-time cathedrals. A rose window. Each species was a gemlike fragment, each was a spot of color in Gaia’s holy wheel of life.
Frek began crafting kennies, eidetically copying the little plant and animal icons one after the other, his mind unbelievably clear and sharp. Some of the icons were bacilli capsules and viral squiggles. Frek considered leaving these out but, after all, the former ecosystem had been a whole, a web delicately tuned by millions of years of evolution. And if he tried starting to make case-by-case decisions he’d never finish. The only option was to preserve it all. He started with the inner, more endangered, species and worked his way out, going faster and faster. All the while Carb was murmuring encouragement, continually feeding him fresh bits of kenner and taking the copies Frek made. From the corner of his eye, Frek could see Carb’s long tweaker fingers fitting the pieces together like bits of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Time passed, perhaps a lot of it—though who can say how long ten hours or a hundred years might be, played out so far beneath the surface of time’s pool? Now and then Frek would pause to craft some food and drink to keep him and Carb going; he lost track of how often. They were getting tired, but they didn’t sleep. Frek was afraid that if he slept inside the time pool, he might never wake up. Finally the point came when Frek encoded the last icon—a scorpion—and each and every species on the NuBioCom table had been faithfully preserved.
Frek’s father held up the result for Frek to admire. He’d nestled the myriad copies together into a smooth, intricately patterned egg.
The elixir.
Part 3
Earth’s Fate
12
All Hell Breaks Loose
“Finally,” exclaimed Gibby when Frek and Carb emerged from the time pool. “You were in there must have been half an hour. Wow and me were startin’ to get worried.”
“Where’s Zed?” asked Frek, wearily looking around the projection room. For the moment, he and Carb lay sprawled on the floor at the side of the pool, too tired to stand.
The overlaid copies of Li’l Bulb were taffy-pulling time strands through their light beams, and the sinister hyperdimensional mind worms were slowly twitching, the same as before. The rear door of the projection booth was open, and Zed Alef was gone. Wow trotted over to sniff at the elixir egg. Even though it contained millions or billions of the little genome models, the talisman fit in Carb’s palm.
“Look at that!” exclaimed Gibby, ignoring Frek’s question in his eagerness to examine the egg. “All them little shapes fitted together.” He peered closer. “I’ve heard of some o’ these. A toucan, a daffodil, a guinea hen, a dung beetle—you boys done good! You gonna just plant this in the ground and everything’ll come back?”
“Where’s Zed?” repeated Frek, unwilling to start thinking about all the steps that lay ahead. Buddha was he beat.
“Oh, he slipped off to take care of something else,” said Gibby. “Says he’s the only one watchin’ over this whole dang theater. Even asked me if I’d like to be his assistant. No thanks!”
“He told me he was going to try to keep Carb,” said Frek. “I’d like to be out of here before he comes back.” But why was he still worrying about Carb after all his betrayals?
“How would we leave?” said Carb, lying propped up on one elbow at Frek’s side. “Zed led us into the Earth theater through a special door that’s closed back up. How would we find our way out of here without him?”
“So forget it,” said Frek, flopping down flat on his back.
“You boys need to sleep,” said Gibby. “Wow and me too. I’m right peaked, tell you the truth. Anyhow if Zed or Li’l Bulb or them worms on the ceiling was gonna kill us, seems like they woulda gotten around to it by now. I’d say there ain’t no kac-a-brick rush to get outa here. And—before we snooze, Frek, could you kenny craft me some food and some stim cell truffles?”
“Eat food,” echoed Wow.
So Frek thought about nothingness and made a nice lump of kenner, and then he turned the kenner into water and anymeat and stim cells. And then he was really and truly too tired to think of leaving.
The very last thing Frek did was put the elixir egg in his pants pocket.
They slept.
Much later a noise woke Frek, a thump and clatter as of something sliding across the building’s roof. The moaning sound of high wind filtered in.
All was still calm in the little room. The overlaid versions of Li’l Bulb were projecting, Frek’s companions were asleep, and Zed wasn’t around. Frek could feel the reassuring lump of the egg in his pants pocket. Lying quite still, he stared up at the mind worms.
For some reason he was seeing them and Li’l Bulb in a new way. The mind worms’ motion trails seemed to persist for longer than before, and he could make out some previously invisible loops of their bodies. It was as if, during his rest, Frek himself had become a little hyperdimensional.
Jiggling his eyes brought more and more of the gray lampreys into focus—revealing something dreadful. Slowly writhing tubes led to Wow, to Gibby, to Carb—and, yes, to Frek. Even though Frek had often felt like he was blocking out the watchers, the branecasters had a mind worm permanently attached to his head.
He slapped his hand against the spot where it seemed the gray tube must plug in. But his fingers felt nothing. The parasitic thought-suckers were hyperspatial; they came in from a direction he couldn’t touch or normally see—they were four- or even five-dimensional. The lampreys were like fingers poking down into the centers of gingerbread men.
And now Frek remembered something about a dream he’d ju
st had. The Magic Pig had been grunting to him, talking, telling him that he was going to have a five-dimensional vision for a few minutes when he woke up, the Pig saying Frek would see how the mind worms enslaved humanity. And then the dream Pig had more or less branded two follow-up commands onto Frek’s brain: Kill the mind worms, and shoot your way out of the Exaplex. Now?
Looking up at the mind worms, Frek’s vision grew yet more inclusive. There weren’t just a dozen or a hundred of the sluggishly coiling things. They numbered—Buddha help him—in the billions, each of the lampreys looping off through the fourth and fifth dimensions to plug into one particular person back in the plain brane. Each and every person on Earth had an individual mind worm siphoning off their thoughts. That’s what it meant to be a talent race. The Magic Pig was right; Frek should kill the worms.
Kill. The word echoed in Frek’s mind, colored by the memory of the Pig’s grainy oinks. Kill. Suddenly there was no room for anything but that one thought in Frek’s head. Kill. Without even the slightest pause to consider the consequences, Frek went ahead and kenny crafted one, two, three blasters.
The gale outdoors was monstrously shrieking. Things thudded into the Exaplex roof and went scraping and rolling across it.
“Wake up,” said Frek, poking Carb and handing him a blaster. “Kill.” He leaned across to give the third blaster to the Grulloo. “Wake up, Gibby. Kill.”
“Huh?”
One of the gray mind worms turned its dreadful eyeless face toward Frek, exposing concentric circles of teeth and a raspy, flickering tongue.
“Kill!” screamed Frek and fired his blaster. Although they couldn’t see the evil worms quite so clearly as Frek, Carb and Gibby had no choice but to fire as well.
The blaster rays were gorgeous—hot white in the center, with auras of red, green, and purple, a different color aura around each beam.