by Rudy Rucker
Rather than flying along a straight path toward the unseen Exaplex, Guszti and Flinka zigzagged from hilltop to hilltop, as if finding their way by a chain of association. The hilltops were three or four kilometers apart from each other, and there seemed to be no end to them. They were flying very fast. Frek had the impression that, spread out as it was, the new Planck brane could be thousands of kilometers from edge to edge.
The buildings they passed resembled a wine barrel, the bust of Venus de Milo, a lion, a pool table, a bicycle, a tuba, a bed, and a curtain. It was strange to see these enormous sunlit structures beneath the starry night sky, each of them over a hundred meters tall. Tiny doors and windows pocked the buildings, the doors giving onto little landing pads from which the wingless flying Hubs launched themselves, lively as gnats. Like toons, the Hubs could tailor physics as they liked. For them, physics was a matter of Style—not Law.
But why were the buildings shaped like Earth objects? Why a stuffed lion the size of the Sphinx? Why a giant brass tuba resting on its bell? Why a skyscraping velvet curtain with its center pulled in by a tasseled tie? The Planck brane was unfathomable.
The Hubs waved and cheered, as if welcoming a rescuing army. Near an armchair-shaped building Frek saw the little family he’d seen on the tram, the girl with the parents who took turns being warts upon each other’s noses. They recognized Frek and shouted encouragement as he flew past in Gypsy Joker’s arms.
Onward Frek’s party raced, a sky-filling flock of Skull Farmers, Goob Dolls, Professor Bumbys, and more. The toons’ rate of multiplication was wholly out of control. Each of them was spinning off copies as fast as bubbles blowing off a wand, with the copies belching out copies of their own.
Frek’s party cruised past a building like a lady’s silver hand mirror balanced erect on its long handle. How odd it was to see a mirror that size, dizzying and unreal, especially with the hundreds of thousands of toons reflected in it. Beyond the mirror, Guszti swerved to the right and headed toward a hill topped by a hundred-meter candle, complete with a wavering flame. As they approached the candle, a tang of salt air blended with the waxy smoke. And now Frek heard the roar of waves.
Like some otherworldly lighthouse, the candle was on a promontory above the beach of a boundless sea. The ocean was limpid, sunlit, aquamarine. Above it was the starry night sky.
Hubs were darting in and out of the candle’s giant flame, quite immune to the heat. As Guszti and Flinka led the troop of toons past it, a single Hub flew out to them.
It was a woman with a round head, a stylized hank of yellow hair, and a vivid green line down the middle of her face. The two halves were different hues and were mapped from different angles, one side a profile and the other seen straight on. Dora from the tram.
“Hallo, Frek,” she called. As before, she had a large aura patterned with lightning bolts of bright gold.
“Pull over here for a minute,” Frek told Gypsy Joker.
“Okeydoke,” said the Skull Farmer giving his head an unsettling twist to look back at the trail of copies behind him. He dodged over to where Dora hung in the air.
“Hi, Dora,” said Frek. “As usual I’m looking for the Exaplex.”
“And losin’ our place at the head o’ line,” muttered Gypsy Joker, fingering his dice earrings. “I want to drop my bomb. Get that first punch in. That’s how we do it back in Kentucky, you wave?” The Skull Farmers had an elaborate back story.
“I know all about your mission,” Dora told Frek. “We Hubs have been expecting you all along. There’s such a level of interest in your case that it’s quite skewed our last few renormalizations.”
“Expecting me?” echoed Frek.
“Many of us have always known you’d bring down the branecasters,” said Dora. She pointed out over the sparkling sea. “The Exaplex is there. The branecasters are hiding inside it.”
Frek stared across the ocean. Near the horizon was—an island?
“During the last renormalization we Hubs pushed the Exaplex out of Node G,” continued Dora. “Its up to you to finish the job. Huggins versus Branecasters. Saint Frek slays the mind worms. You and your army of mind-children.” The ever-ramifying avalanche of toons was already flying out across the great water.
Again Frek thought of the shuggoths. “I feel gross,” he said. “Like we’re overpopulating your world.”
“Hardly likely,” said Dora with a little laugh. “The Planck brane is infinite these days. That ocean—it truly goes on forever.”
“I thought the edges wrap?”
“Everything can change during renormalization. Even the shape of our space. We’re due for another storm quite soon, by the way.” She swept her hands around the circle of her aura. “I, for one, am well prepped.”
“A storm?” said Frek uneasily.
“You’ll know it’s beginning when the sky breaks up,” said Dora. “Don’t frown like that! There’s enough time for your mission. Fulfill your destiny!”
“Yes.” But now Frek sighed, remembering the day he’d ridden the solar flares with Dad. Did the good times with his father outweigh the bad? Either way, the old man wasn’t coming back. “Let’s get going,” he told Gypsy Joker.
The Skull Farmer stretched himself out flat with Frek hugged against his ribs. “Adios,” the skeleton told Dora—supposedly he’d lived in New Mexico after Kentucky—and then they were off like a horizontal rocket, streaking across the warm, pale blue sea. Once they caught up with the swarm’s vanguard, Gypsy Joker decelerated with a theatrical screech.
“Oh, there you are, Frek,” said Renata from the arms of Goob Doll Judy. “We were starting to wonder. The Exaplex is that floating mountain of meat.” The Exaplex organism hung in midair—an enormous wobbly lump with battlements on top.
“How are we going to fight them?” asked Ida, steering Tawni closer to Frek. “What’s our plan?”
“There’s so many of us that we can overwhelm them,” said Frek, sounding more confident than he felt. “The toons will arm themselves—you know how toons do, just reach in a pocket and pull out slingshot or a blaster or a scimitar or a bingbong bomb. We’ll blast the Exaplex until Zed and the mind worms are in the open. And then we finish them off. You hear that, Gypsy Joker? Pass the word so we can get started. There’s gonna be a renormalization storm soon.”
“What’s renormalation?” asked Ida.
“Dora stirs up trouble for nothing,” interrupted Aunt Guszti in a tart tone. “You have a whole hour, maybe two. I vow to lead you back. Now press your attack.”
The Exaplex meat-mountain loomed up before them, big as a town. Its lumpy lower half was lit by the sun-glowing sea. On top, its soft turrets and walls were black against the starry sky. And above the castle writhed enormous ghostly tendrils like northern lights.
Nearly one billion strong and still growing, Frek’s party rose high up into the air, encircling the floating island of flesh.
“Rock and roll,” said Gypsy Joker, reaching for his earring.
“Spacesuits, Frek,” said Renata. This bombing was going to be realer than the one in the Goob Dolls’ alley. “Hurry.”
Moving fast, Frek crafted four reflective spacesuits and got the humans in his party covered up. Just as the mirrored surfaces came on, Gypsy Joker threw his bomb. And tens of thousands of other Gypsy Jokers did the same.
Flassssh.
After the light came the sound. It wasn’t so much something they heard, as a force that they felt. A shock wave that threw them back a few kilometers. The humans’ spacesuits shielded their ears from the overpressure of the blast. And the toons were of course indestructible.
They regrouped and, whooping with blood lust, they zoomed in on the Exaplex.
What was left of it. The battlements were gone and the mountain of flesh had been chewed down to the size of Gov’s puffball. The mind worms and Li’l Bulbs were exposed. They radiated out from the meat nexus like the arms of an evil sea anemone.
And now a puckered hole upon t
he Exaplex pushed out a glowering ogre, his feet firmly rooted in its flesh. It was Zed Alef, wreathed by the worms.
The toons dove in with machetes, flame-throwers, cannons, blasters, dark matter bazookas, Nguyen War singularity guns and, yes, wooden mallets and water balloons. For a toon, no means of attack was too farfetched.
At first they made little progress. Zed Alef was fending them off, batting them away like mosquitoes. And the mind worms were growing back as fast as they were killed.
“Pull Zed away by himself,” Frek told Soul Soldier.
The toons surged forward with a million lassos, buzz-saws, and tractor beams. Though Zed fought with abandon, the toons managed to bind him, cut him free, and pull him away from the great knot of mind worms, to isolate him from the Exaplex tissues that he controlled. The worms’ motions grew random and disorganized. And Zed began to shrink.
For a second, Frek thought they’d already won. But then Zed slipped his restraints, locked into human size—and flew straight at Frek. A wild strength filled Frek; he was eager to join this final battle. Buoyed by his spacesuit, he shot forward to meet his enemy. He and Zed met with a thump.
Immediately the dark controller of the Exaplex wrapped his arms around Frek’s chest and began to squeeze. His fingers grew tendrils that found their way through Frek’s suit, into his muscles, and now into the nerves of his neck. Frek felt an unbearable torrent of information rushing into him—realtime data about every living being in every world under the branecasters’ control.
Furiously Frek sky-air-combed himself, desperately he wrestled with the Exaplex’s organic mind. The data flood rolled back. Yes, Frek could win. Somewhere he seemed to hear Carb cheering him on.
Frek pushed harder, driving back the tendrils of Zed’s mind. Remembering the sight of Stoo’s tormented face, Frek hit Zed with a blast of will. Momentarily stunned, Zed faltered.
Frek snapped his knee upward into Zed’s belly; he twisted free of Zed’s grip and pounded his elbow into the creature’s temple. Zed’s mouth popped open—and Gypsy Joker shoved in one of his earring-bombs.
Everything went white, then black. For a timeless period, Frek saw nothing. And then he seemed to be looking at—drawings, one after the other.
Ants and a humming bird. Yessica with a snake’s tongue. Goob Doll Judy juggling planets. Cawmb with the cover falling off his tail. Gibby and a baby Unipusker. A rickrack tree blueprint. A map of Unipusk. Frek’s profile. A Unipusker with ickspot. The Huggins’s house tree. Renata with ribbons in her pigtails. A row of artigrows in the Kritterworks. A gene wasp. The Toonsmithy. Frek and Renata together.
“Come on,” came a voice. A sweet voice, a kind voice. “Snap out of it. These things are real.”
Frek blinked. He was—floating? Floating on his back in the Planck brane sea. Still wearing his spacesuit. Staring up at—Renata hovering over him, suspended in the arms of Goob Doll Judy, with Gypsy Joker at her side. Renata had been holding her turkle in front of Frek’s face, showing him pictures.
“You and me done finished Zed,” put in Gypsy Joker. “He died and just about took you with him. Your girlfriend here’s been helpin’ your body latch on to your soul.”
“Renata,” said Frek, reaching toward her. “You always help me come back.”
“You can count on me,” she said, taking his hand. “I like having you around.”
They flew up to rejoin Ida. “You lit off a big bomb,” observed Ida. “Renata said I had to stay up here and watch for those branecasters. We can’t let them get away.”
Meanwhile the toons’ singularity guns were snuffing out the Li’l Bulbs and mind worms. With Zed gone, the evil eels weren’t growing back. In a few minutes the only remnant of the mighty Exaplex branecasting nexus was a chunk of meat resembling a skinned elephruk.
With the mind worms gone, Frek’s brain felt private, fully his own, not under attack. No espers pried at his head; he no longer needed to sky-air-comb the parasites away. Finally he could begin to relax.
Throughout the whole galaxy, the flickerballs and esper shows would now be on the blink as well. Untold numbers of talent races were awakening from slavery. All thanks to Frek and his gang. They’d killed off the Govs, they’d healed Earth with the elixir, and now they’d finally crashed the branecast. Unbelievable.
Frek had a sudden painful memory of the melting pictures tumbling from Dad’s shroud. He wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t been for his father. What had Dad said? “As long as you’re around, I’m still alive.” It was all right.
“Can you feel the difference?” he asked the others.
“Yes,” said Renata, understanding exactly what he meant. “It’s good. But we’re not done. It’ll come back unless we get rid of them.” She pointed to the floating lump of Exaplex flesh.
Perched on the singed meat were the six branecasters and—the Magic Pig. They looked annoyed, put out, angry, but not terrified. Their gold auras were strong.
“Nothin’ we throw at them makes a difference,” said Soul Soldier. “They’re tough as toons. Best we can do is keep them from flying away.”
“Right,” said Frek, with a quick glance up at the calm, starry heavens. “If only we could drain their wham before the storm hits.”
“Why does wham matter?” asked Ida.
“The Planck brane has these weird storms every fifty-two days,” said Frek. “The Hubs with the most wham survive a storm, the others don’t. The Planck brane’s like a shared dream the Hubs make up together. A storm is a fresh start. A Hub’s in the new dream if enough Hubs remember him. Or her.”
“I’ve got it!” exclaimed Renata. “Disrespect the branecasters. Make them ridiculous. Show how plain and boring they are. And then stop thinking about them. I bet the Hubs will follow along.”
So as not to hide the branecasters beneath a struggling dog-pile, Renata sent only a few toons after them. It seemed likely that the far-flung Hubs would have some way of perceiving what happened here. Even without esping, distances didn’t mean much in the Planck brane.
As the humans and toons laughed and cheered, the Space Monkeys tore off the struggling branecasters’ spiffy clothes. Da Nha Duc pasted feathers to Chainey’s bald head and bare butt. Mean Queen scrubbed off Jayney’s pancake makeup and painted her nose red. Gypsy Joker darted in to bag the branecasters’ gold jewelry and pry out their gold teeth. Goob Doll Judy used her lipstick to scrawl “KICK ME” onto Sid’s hairy back. Fax Frog shoved a red apple into Cecily’s mouth and trimmed her ears with parsley. Professor Bumby put dunce caps on Batty and Bitty and asked them Latin questions they couldn’t understand.
But somehow nobody managed to lay a finger on the Magic Pig. He was always standing somewhere different than where his would-be tormentors reached.
Now Strummer played a song, with Soul Soldier singing along.
Branecasters, taskmasters, gold graspers—
You take and you never give.
Slave masters, down-casters, world blasters—
You don’t let real people live.
It’s a brand new road—you’re forgettable;
And none of us think it’s regrettable.
Let the storm come down, we won’t think of you.
When the brane grows back it won’t stink of you.
Farewell, adios, you’re gone, you lose;
Nobody’s watching your daily news;
I don’t remember who I’m singin’ this to.
All I see is my friends and the sky above;
It’s a new Planck brane for Hubs in love.
They sang the verse a few more times. Hubs all over the Planck brane joined in, the sky echoing with their massed voices. The branecasters tried to interrupt, but nobody listened to them. They made as if to fly away from the chunk of Exaplex meat, but the toons pushed them back. The longer the laughter and the singing continued, the fainter the branecasters’ auras grew.
Though the Magic Pig was hemmed in with the others, his halo remained bright and strong. Nothi
ng at all seemed to get to him. He always zigged whenever anyone else zagged.
Just then a kilometer-sized cube of starry sky tumbled down and fell into the ocean. What a splash! And here came a block with the moon, followed by another splash and another.
At this first touch of the renormalization, the branecasters faded away, leaving the Magic Pig on his own. The Pig seized the moment of confusion to fly off as fast as he could go. And Soul Soldier used a Nguyen War singularity gun to blast the last remaining bit of the Exaplex into glowing wisps of plasma.
Meanwhile more cubes were splashing into the sea.
“Lead us to the branelink, Guszti!” cried Frek. “Hurry!”
Guszti and Flinka sped across the ocean, closely followed by the four humans on their toons. The billion other three-dimensional toons stayed behind to take their chances. There wasn’t room for them in the wall skins of Earth.
Frek and his party rocketed past the candle—its flame had been doused by waves from the falling blocks. They passed the hilltop mirror, avoiding its shattered shards of glass. It was turning to night. Not only was the moon gone, the dropping blocks were spilling blackness, as if covering the landscape with ink. Somewhere in the darkness Frek heard the slow snipping of giant scissors.
It was good that Flinka and Guszti glowed. Frek and his companions safely followed them to the hill with the giant leaf. The luminous fish hovered by the branelink tree’s stem, shedding enough light to see.
To Frek’s horror, the Magic Pig was busy there, furiously digging with his trotters. He’d covered up the entrance hole with a big pile of mud!
Ida ran over and kicked the Magic Pig in the butt so hard that he rolled down Pig Hill, squealing all the way. Meanwhile Renata used her blaster to burn the dirt away from the branelink entrance.
Hearing a rush of air, Frek looked up to see a cube of sky falling straight down upon them. The hill and the giant leaf rocked and shuddered under the impact, but Frek felt only a puff of wind. And then he realized their protective spacesuits had dissolved.