by Rudy Rucker
The mind worms charred and blistered, their disk-mouths choiring a shrill screech. But the beams were making no lasting headway; indeed, fresh heads were growing from the mind worms’ fast-healing wounds. Frek whirled his blaster around over his head, steadily holding down the firing stud, hoping to sever the snake that led into his brain.
As Frek continued blazing away, his higher-dimensional vision picked up something else. There was a kind of tube running from Carb’s ring to Frek’s ring. A higher-dimensional tunnel. He should really get rid of the stupid ring. But he might still need it, so he avoided shooting the tube connecting the rings.
After a while, he actually managed to burn his mind worm in two. But a fresh one immediately took its place. Somewhere inside himself Frek heard the Magic Pig’s laughter. Without constant sky-air-comb vigilance, Frek continued to be subject to the cursed golden glow.
Wow was barking furiously. Frek was still firing. Clouds of greasy smoke billowed through the room and chunks of burnt, foamy material dropped from the ceiling—which was made of something very much like meat.
“Stop it!” yelled Carb, grabbing Frek’s arm. Traitor. He’d quit shooting and so had the Grulloo. “Help me, Gibby,” said Carb.
Carb bear-hugged Frek and Gibby got hold of his legs. But Frek kept his finger pressed down on his blaster, unwilling to stop trying to kill the worms, and especially not wanting to obey his no-good father.
The sweeping blaster beams had blown away large sections of the projection room’s walls. And now a crucial supporting section of wall tore in half. The floor lurched and tilted; the time pool sloshed from its basin and streamed onto the theater seats below. Frek hoped the dispersal of the mind worms’ pooled history of Earth wouldn’t have any odd back-reaction upon humanity’s actual reality. But still he continued firing.
His red-tinged blaster beam lit upon Li’l Bulb, or rather, upon the fan of Li’l Bulbs. Li’l Bulb no longer looked like a single creature at all. There were thousands, perhaps even billions of Li’l Bulbs, as many as the mind worms. They responded to the blaster’s heat with the same kind of high-pitched shriek. Indeed, with the pond gone, Frek could see that the Li’l Bulbs were a bundle of snakes that ran through the floor, up the rear wall and into the knot of mind worms on the ceiling. The Li’l Bulbs were nothing but a kind of mind worm output unit. Both were components of the great branecaster router-server complex that was the Exaplex.
Lights still blazing, the Li’l Bulbs stretched out their bodies, reaching through the blown-out projection room walls and into the cavernous Earth theater, modulating their screams into an endlessly chorused pair of names.
“Zed Alef! Zed Alef! Zed Alef…”
A deep chuckle rose from below.
With a startled clatter, Wow lost his footing and slid across the slanting projection room floor to bump into Frek’s legs. At the same time Carb finally ripped the blaster from Frek’s hand. Frek tried to get it back, but it was hard with Gibby wrapped around his legs. The struggling Earthlings staggered across the floor, fetching up against a broken fragment of wall.
Close up, the wall resembled singed flesh with bones sticking out. Yes, the entire Exaplex was a single Planck brane organism. Overhead the mind worms were writhing about the same as before, all signs of damage gone.
The Li’l Bulbs had fallen silent, but their lights shone on, casting multiple shadows across the theater. The floor was bulging up in the middle, and the seats looked pointier than before, like little haystacks. Puddles of time were gathered at the bases of some of them. The domed floor chuckled again. It sounded like Zed Alef.
“You’re gollywog, boy,” murmured Gibby into a brief moment of silence. He gave Frek’s leg a vengeful squeeze. “Look what you done stirred up.”
Somewhere overhead the largest object yet went crashing across the Exaplex roof. The roaring of the wind grew deeper, more powerful. It would take but one more jolt to snap their tilted platform loose—an unpleasant prospect, as the now-hemispherical theater floor was acting so very weird.
“Let’s play it nice and glozy,” Carb whispered to Frek. “You’ve still got the egg, right? Getting you out of here safe with your elixir is all I care about.” He almost sounded like he meant it. But how many times had he lied before?
Behind the noise of the storm, Frek heard something else. Memories of the Magic Pig’s insinuating grunts were playing in his head, telling him to fire his blaster at the theater ceiling.
Carb had the blaster out at arm’s length where Frek couldn’t reach it. Frek wanted to start wrestling him with all his might, but he was afraid that too rough a motion might send them all tumbling down.
“Give it to me,” said Frek.
“Don’t let him, Carb,” hissed Gibby. “No indeedy!”
“I won’t,” said Carb.
So Frek lunged for the blaster, and sure enough the floor gave way entirely, sending the four of them tumbling down. It was a soft landing. The theater seats were springy—like big tufts of hair.
“Cooties on me!” said Zed Alef’s enormous voice. The theater seats were Zed’s pigtails and the floor was the top of his head. The theater walls drew back on every side. The room became a giant stall with Zed standing inside it.
Over to the left, Frek could see one of Zed’s enormous arms stretched out, with his hand grown right into the wall’s foamy flesh. Frek recalled how Zed’s feet always touched the floor. Zed was part of the Exaplex. The mind worms were inputs, the Li’l Bulbs were outputs, and Zed Alef was—the controller. What had he called himself? “The soul of the Exaplex.” Zed’s other arm came snaking upward, undulant and boneless, his fingers feeling for the Earthlings.
“Me and the branecasters are changing the game,” boomed Zed. “Being as how you messed up on the rules. You plain braners are here for good. We’ll decohere you and siphon off your qubits. Good for our wham.”
The giant hand grabbed for them. Its fingers had branched into smaller fingers that branched two more times again; it seemed like they were everywhere.
Atop Zed’s head, Frek and the others were like kids playing hide and seek in a cornfield. They splashed through the puddles of time, each splash sending a thousand images flying. It could have been fun—but it wasn’t. Frek was as frightened as he’d ever been.
And he still hadn’t gotten his blaster back from Carb! Twice he tried to stop and kenny craft himself a new one, but he couldn’t focus, what with Zed’s creepy crawly fingers continually after him.
And then all at once Frek was nabbed. A wad of baby-sized sub-subfingers was clamped around his neck, and another bunch of the fingers took hold of his waistband. But Zed hadn’t reckoned with faithful Wow, who snarled and bit, over and over, till Zed had released the boy.
“Here,” said Carb, appearing around a hair stack to finally return Frek’s gun.
“Shoot the ceiling!” roared Frek, firing straight up just like the Magic Pig had told him. Carb and Gibby let fly, their beams hot white, with green and purple auras, focused upward on the same spot as Frek’s.
The result was smoke, fire, a hail of singed scraps of meat, a whistle—and a sharp, cold current of air. And then, with a sound like the end of the world, the gale caught hold of the punctured roof and pulled the whole thing to pieces. Gibby linked arms with Frek and Carb, who used their free hands to grab hold of Wow. The storm whirled in, furiously snatching them up into the sky.
Sharp spatters of rain stung Frek’s cheeks. The air was acrid. Parts of Node G were in flames, tinging the smoke with an orange glow. On Earth it might have been morning by now, but here it was still night. Frek had the feeling that it might stay dark here for many days to come.
Below them was the congeries they’d called the Exaplex, lit by its own dancing bulbs of light and by some burning rubble nearby. It was nothing like a movie theater anymore. The illusions had fallen away, and he could see it as it really was: a vile mound of interlinked mind worms and Li’l Bulbs arcing off in bundles toward eldritch
vanishing points. The worms led to talent race brains, the Li’l Bulbs to subscribers’ flickerballs. Time pool data bases glinted amidst the evil, writhing mass. And there, humped up like a tumor, was the wobbly dark controller organ who’d worn the face of Zed Alef. The Exaplex was a huge organism controlled by Zed Alef. Zed and the Exaplex were the brain and body of branecasting.
The rain-sprinkled wind tugged Frek and his companions still higher into the sky. Gibby kept his leg-arms locked around Frek and Carb, who had their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders. Frek had tucked his blaster inside his shirt to free up his other hand to hold Wow against his chest. And Carb was holding Wow, too. The four of them tumbled along together like a fan of leaves.
Through the smoke and rain, Frek could see that Node G was utterly changed. Buildings were burning all across the city. The structures that remained had turned uncanny, arcane. Frek saw: stone castles with long wind-whipped pennants; fanciful assemblages of transparent domes and marble cones; organic shapes resembling insect parts hybridized with plants; long spiky feelers bedecked with berries and pods; tall masts with apes in the rigging; crystal spheres dangling from iron chains.
Thanks to phenomenological autozoom, Frek could pick out the individual Hubs as well. They’d altered along with the buildings. He saw chimerical drolleries like a harp with a human head, a knife with two enormous ears, and a lobster with clamshell wings. Crawling over everything were fat black frog-bellied demons with their fanged little mouths agape. Everything that moved was edged by a glowing aura.
Meanwhile the great dark wedge of the pie-shaped city park was receding from Frek’s view. That was where the branelink to their home universe was supposed to be. But the raw, turbulent wind was blowing them the wrong way.
Two silvery shapes wiggled down at them from the flame-lit, cloud-wracked sky—supple forms that moved too fast for Frek to even think of trying to shoot them with his blaster.
“Fear not!” fluted one of them. They were a pair of large fish, surrounded by luminous auras, sailing through the air like birds. “My aunt’s an enemy of the branecasters,” said the one. “I am Flinka.” She resembled a ten-meter trout; her voice was a soprano singsong with a middle-European accent.
“And I am Flinka’s aunt Guszti,” said her companion in an equally accented contralto. “She forgets to introduce me.” If Flinka was a trout, Aunt Guszti was a catfish, with floppy barbels on her back and around her mouth. “You can ride us,” continued Aunt Guszti. “We help you go home.”
The wind raged ever stronger, bearing them out past the borders of the surreal cityscape that had been Node G. Ahead of them lay only dark fields and ragged mountains. Riding the flying fish seemed like the best option by far.
“Let’s divide up,” suggested Gibby. “I go with Frek, and Wow goes with Carb. You Huggins guys can always find each other with your rings.”
“Good,” said Frek. “I don’t want to ride with him.”
So Carb and Wow mounted Flinka, while Frek and Gibby settled onto Aunt Guszti. Aunt Guszti’s glowing yellow-brown back was slippery in the rain; Frek grasped her barbels like a bridle. Gibby sat behind Frek with his leg-arms linked around him. For his part, Carb clamped Flinka’s narrower body between his legs, cradling the damp Wow against his chest.
With a powerful slap of her tail, Flinka went darting toward the dark mountains. Aunt Guszti followed in her wake.
“Wrong way!” hollered Frek. “We need to go to that park back in the city!”
Aunt Guszti’s eyes were so high up on her head that she could roll them back to look at Frek. “This storm blows stronger than even we can fight,” she said. “But not make a worry. Today’s configuration of Planck brane wraps around.”
“How do you mean?”
“Mountains ahead of us are same as mountains behind us. As soon as you sail off one edge of Planck brane today you come back the other side. We’ll land by Pig Hill with your branelink before you know it. Unless reapers catch us. They come out above fields during renormalization storms. Nearly all of them die during each renormalization, so they become frantic to eat and breed. They breed very fast, the filthy things. Is good that Flinka and I are faster than the reapers.”
As if in response to this last remark, something fierce came whistling toward them. Aunt Guszti dodged it with a quick snap of her tail that nearly sent Frek and Gibby a-tumble. Hugging the fish and squinting his eyes against the cold rain, Frek could see Flinka rapidly weaving, too.
Another attacker went screaming past, briefly visible in the light from Guszti’s aura. The creature resembled an ordinary pottery jug, with two leathery arms holding an old-fashioned reaping scythe. Instead of wings, it propelled itself with a jet of steam from its rear end. It was such an unlikely apparition that Frek didn’t fully absorb the image until the reaper circled around and came at them a second time.
The reaper handled its scythe with the smooth expertise of a professional hockey player wielding his stick. Even though Aunt Guszti bent herself nearly in half to dodge it, the reaper managed to cut a nasty gash in her tail. Frek let go of one of the barbels he was clutching and fished his blaster from inside his purple shirt. To his satisfaction, he was able to nail the next reaper that came after them. Even though the blaster beams hadn’t had much success against the mind worms, the reapers were small and three-dimensional enough to vaporize effectively.
A green explosion ahead showed that Carb was shooting reapers, too. Gibby unlimbered his blaster and opened fire as well.
For the next few minutes they were busy picking off incoming reapers, their blasts red, green, and purple. And then things quieted down. Frek focused his attention upon his ring and right away Carb’s head appeared.
“Everything okay?” asked Carb.
“Gaussy,” said Frek, momentarily forgetting to be mad. “Aunt Guszti says we’re gonna wrap around and come back into Node G from the other side.”
“Flinka told me,” said Carb. “How many reapers did you bag?”
“Seven,” said Frek.
“And four for me,” put in Gibby, peering around Frek’s side.
“This is fun,” said Carb. His head lurched to one side and a dog-muzzle appeared by his cheek. “That’s right, Wow, I’m talking to Frek. Now calm down. Stop it! I better sign off, Frek.”
The black fields sailed by beneath them, marked here and there by the guttering orange flames of burning barns. Up ahead were the fantastically carved foothills, and beyond them the mountain range that rimmed this world.
“Tell me about the Magic Pig,” Frek said to Aunt Guszti. “Who is he? What does he want?”
“His name is Rundy,” said the flying catfish, rolling back her eyes. “He claims to be ordinary Hub like rest of us. But nobody remembers a time when he was not. He is often with the branecasters, but he says he is against them. He is very ancient, very strong.”
“So he’s against the branecasters?” said Frek.
“I like to think so,” said Aunt Guszti, twitching the barbels beside her mouth. “But I am not, how you say, brightest bulb on Christmas tree. I wish to get rid of the branecasters. And I dream the Pig can help. The branecasters amass so much wham that fewer normal Hubs survive each storm. Yesterday Rundy called on me to fly him to the Exaplex. He says you four plain-braners are bringing us the liberation. And that you would break the Exaplex. That was Plan the A.”
“Rundy’s advice nearly got me killed,” said Frek. “Shooting up the Exaplex hardly made any difference at all.”
“Where’s that Magic Pig now?” asked Gibby.
“In his burrow under Pig Hill,” said the flying catfish. “It’s at the end of the park with the branelink. The branecasters built their link tree right atop Pig Hill. Our Magic Pig claims this angers him. He has always been beneath Pig Hill. Maybe you make with Rundy a Plan the B.”
“I’m not really sure he’s on our side,” said Frek.
“Rundy will talk all this with you. Meanwhile I fly.”
/> Aunt Guszti was vigorously beating her tail, driving them higher and higher, with a view to sailing over the dark, jagged mountains. The air grew increasingly frigid, and the spatters of rain turned to snow and ice. Hearing Gibby’s teeth chattering behind him, Frek suddenly thought of making a cape to wrap themselves in. In a minute he had one.
“How you do that?” asked Aunt Guszti, who’d been keeping an eye on him.
“Kenny crafting,” said Frek, settling the cape around him and Gibby. “Don’t you know about it? I thought you Hubs had super-powers.”
“I am not brightest bulb,” repeated Aunt Guszti. “Which is why my hopes run so high for you. Advise your father to make cape, too. Flinka says he’s soon keeling over.”
So Frek dutifully used his ring to remind stupid Carb he could use kenny crafting to warm himself. And not a moment too soon. Carb was quite blue, and there was ice in the bit of Wow’s fur visible above the ring.
Still higher they rose, driven up the inky mountain slopes by the wind and the steady beating of the fish’s tails. The mountains were darker than the sky. The silvery gleam of Flinka stayed fifty meters ahead of them, Carb a dark spot on her back. It was hard to gauge just when the moment of the wrap would come.
Finally the ridge began sinking beneath them. And then Flinka disappeared.
“Dad!” shouted Frek to his ring, at the same time wishing he could stop caring about his father.
“It’s fine,” said the little image of Carb’s head above his hand. “I can see Node G up ahead.”
Frek felt a prickling in the skin of his face. The front part of Aunt Guszti disappeared. And then Frek, Gibby, and the rest of the flying catfish had passed through the singular surface that glued one end of this Planck brane configuration to the other.
Lights gleamed in the vast plain below. Node G, seen from the other side.
As they neared the outskirts of town, a fresh wave of the jet-propelled pottery jugs came for them, each with its insect-thin arms wielding a scythe. Again, the Earthlings’ blasters made short work of the little monsters.