by Rudy Rucker
As if on a carnival ride, we were drawn out through a large, open window. The tentacle released its hold on the tower and we swung across the slate roof and into the void. As the tentacle began shortening itself, the castle walls dwindled beneath us in a queasy-making perspective view.
Now I could see Whit Heyburn’s home. My eyes hopped from window to window and—there! A blur of white and a touch of gold. Jane looking out! My poor captive wife. It was up to me to free her. Unless, of course, she was perfectly content after an exciting night of play. Was that really her? Hard to tell. Was she qwet yet? I reached out with my teep, and I seemed to feel her lively vibe, but I hesitated to attempt a teep merge. I could have called her on my wristphone of course—but then I’d just be the prying, jealous husband. Bide your time, Zad.
Back and forth we bobbed, oscillating ever more rapidly as we continued to rise. Loulou was moaning. And then—plurp—we’d been pulled into a chamber of the giant floating nurb. A comfortably furnished parlor.
“Willkommen ins Quallenhaus,” said Kenny. “Velcome to jellyfish house.”
Kenny was doing the accent because his boyfriend Kristo was German. Kristo had come to Louisville as a consultant regarding some Bayer AG chemical engineering processes that the Roller nurb chow plant used, routines involving krill oil and whey solids. Jane and I had laughed about the concept of krill oil when we first heard of it. Suddenly it was hard to go for more than a minute without thinking of Jane. Her date with Whit was definitely getting to me.
The floating house’s parlor had a bar, a horn-of-plenty nurb, and big windows, with shiny, jiggly furniture growing from the floor. We made introductions all around, and Kenny offered us food and drinks. He and Kristo were well into a pitcher of Bloody Marys, with merrymilk toddies and a couple of axelerate buds on offer as well.
The day was warm and pleasant. Great view up here—the elegantly proportioned Heyburn house clearly in sight, sunlight dancing on the Ohio River, the autumn leaves bright beneath the skeletal trees. A fresh breeze wafted in, dissipating the jellyfish’s faint smell of the sea. Laputa was bobbing, but not too much—her tentacles were springy enough to damp the vibe.
Kristo and Kenny wore matching iridescent nurbskin suits, one yellow, one green, very tight on their chests and thighs. Both of them were incredibly fit—they had muscle-sculpting nurb leeches living beneath their skins, an experimental release that Kristo had brought from the overseas Bayer labs. Kenny had tried to infest me with the sculptor leeches the last time I’d been here. I’d yelled at him, and that’s when he’d tried to shove me out the window. We’d never liked each other much, but never mind, we were in-laws.
“So here’s the deal,” Loulou was explaining. “We want to set up a qwettie commune in your mansion, Kenny. Nothing’s in there now but skungy nurbs.”
“You’ve seen the two love-making nurbs?” asked Kristo. His voice was clear, with little accent, even though his phrasing was odd. “I adore these fellows. So hale and grim.”
“We’ll be burning them,” said Junko. “After our qwet rats kill them.” She was acting fairly aggressive. “It’s about making this place livable again. Takes a firm touch to clean up a toxic nurb bloom. I’m a retrofitter with a Stanford Ph.D. you understand. And I invented qwet.”
“That gives you the right to destroy my past?” challenged Kenny. “To hell with that. And what’s all this bullshit that everyone’s talking about qwet?”
Junko reached into her pocket, itching to zap the obnox Kenny with her qwetter. Loulou waved her back. “Zad can do it,” she told Junko. “Watch.”
I used a cosmic logic routine to start up some nanoassemblers in my lungs. Like I’d done for Dad. I held my breath, filling my chest with a quantum-charged haze. I grabbed Kenny, hugging him like I wanted to kiss him on the cheek—and breathed my qwetting molecules into his face. Quantum weirdness percolated down into the man’s cells.
“I feel you, Zad,” said Kenny after the briefest of transitions. His voice was mild and kind. “It’s like I’ve never noticed you were human,” he added. “Sorry, man.” I myself was feeling some reciprocal empathy towards Kenny. Me at one with the ghastly Kenny Roller! Qwet teep.
“What are you making to happen?” Kristo asked me. He was puzzled, backing away, balling his fists.
“Making you,” said Junko. By now she’d drawn out her qwetter—the new version resembled a toy gun that a kid might improvise from a crooked potato or, more accurately, from a bent yam. “My turn.” With theatrical flourishes, she fanned her free hand back and forth across a wart on the yam’s rear—like a sheriff shooting up a saloon. Not only Kristo, but the entire floating jellyfish became qwet.
“I thank you,” said a resonant voice from the room’s walls. The jellyfish sounded like a woman with mucus in her throat. “Help me more, Junko. Make me smarter than these ungrateful men. Teep me a copy of your mind.”
“Like that’s a small thing?” said Junko, shaking her head in wonder. “Casual reincarnation. Why not.” She raised her two hands in an ecclesiastical gesture of blessing. “You’ll be me, yea, as the Skungy rats are like unto Joey. And I saw that it was good. Lo, a flying jellyfish is become alter ego.”
“I well feel Junko’s wings of thought,” said Kristo. He put his arm around Kenny’s shoulders. “And I well feel your mind, my beautiful man. We’ll make good fun with our qwet, is not?”
Kristo and Kenny stared into each other’s eyes, immersing themselves in a glow of shared teep, temporarily blind to the rest of us.
“I’m like Junko Shimano, yes!” boomed Laputa the jellyfish. “A nurbware engineer. I’m hacking myself free of the United Mutations sterility constraints. I’m fecund! Here we go! Launching larvae!”
Flup, flup—two chunks tore loose from the walls and reshaped themselves into flat wriggly shapes like oval kites. Furiously undulating, the pair writhed off across the mansions and hills of Glenview, crossing the Ohio River, heading for Indiana.
Flup, flup, flup—three more pieces came free—not from the walls, but from the floor beneath our feet. They left really big holes, two meters long and a meter across. Further flups were sounding from every part of the jellyfish, frenetic as hail on a roof. Flying jellyfish larvae wheeled about us on every side, some of them the size of surfboards.
“Someone get us out of here!” hollered Loulou, dancing sideways across the sieve-like floor.
“Listen to me, Laputa!” ordered Junko. “Lower us to the ground!”
“You save yourself,” said the jellyfish. “I’m multiplying. My fine Junko Shimano mind is in every flying larva. With my old low memories as well. I’m immortal! I want to explode this old body before I lose my precious gas. I’ll make a fireball to erase the stink of Kenny Roller.”
“Even nurbs hate the guy,” I said with a wild, unkind laugh. I’d dropped my sympathy-inducing teep with Kenny. I was throwing all my mental energy into finding the best way out of this rapidly escalating fiasco. If I could catch hold of a dangling tentacle—
“Stand aside!” yelled Kenny, snapping out of the reverie he’d been sharing with Kristo. He shoved past me, climbed out a window and began sliding down a tentacle—just as I’d been imagining. Maybe he’d plucked the plan from my mind.
But the tactic proved not to be a good one—at least not for Kenny. Laputa the jellyfish hadn’t liked Kenny to begin with and now, with her personality enhanced by a copy of Junko’s mind, she liked Kenny even less.
“Surprise!” burbled the giant jellyfish, and pinched off the tentacle that Kenny was shinnying down. The poor guy was still at least fifty feet above the ground. So now he’d fall to his death.
Even though I felt weary and disgusted at the thought of aiding Kenny, I did the qwet and empathetic thing. I leapt out of the open window, timing my jump so that I landed flat on the back of one of those flappy jellyfish larvae. Like a comic-book superhero, I steered my flying surfboard down—and scooped the flailing Kenny from the air. I angled off to one side t
o set Kenny on the ground, then rocketed upwards to save Loulou.
Turned out I didn’t need to rescue Loulou. By the time I reached the level of the now-ragged jellyfish, Loulou and Junko were riding larval flying surfboards too, with the bewildered Kristo sharing Junko’s board. Junko landed Kristo on the ground beside Kenny. And then as if on a sudden whim, Junko’s flying surfboard burrowed one of its ends into the ground, taking root.
Joey was still watching us from the third floor window. For the moment I had the merry, pink-cheeked Loulou to myself. For a lark, we flew skywards together, circling each other in a joyous double helix, fully into the cosmic mode. Drawn in by our vibes, the other flying jellyfish larvae circled us, making piping noises that may have been laughter.
Higher and higher we climbed, up into the cooling air, seeing the sweet Kentucky countryside of Skylight, the gray sprawl of old Louisville, and the gracefully bent Ohio River. The Roller and Heyburn mansions were far, far beneath us. And for the moment I stopped worrying about Jane.
By now the mother jellyfish consisted of little more than her translucent hydrogen bladders and a dangling net of punched-out flesh. Her voice rose faintly.
“Kenneee!” Her vibe was stern. Qwet or not, she had no mercy for my brother-in-law. Feeling a premonition of what was to come, Kenny was already running across the castle’s rolling lawn.
Wobbling and farting, the tattered flying jellyfish dropped her elevation to fifteen feet and stayed right above Kenny, dogging his steps. Pale blue sparks danced along the fringes of her scalloped remains.
I had little desire to play the superhero again, but I teeped a strong emotive warning to Kenny. He signaled back that he knew what was coming—and that he could take care of himself. Wanting to be in on this, Loulou and I swept downward, landing at the corner of the Roller mansion.
With a poot and a pounce, the jellyfish ruptured her hydrogen bladder and ignited the gas with her sparking halo. The explosion was anticlimactic—little more than a pop and a sizzle. A puffball of fire enveloped Kenny, but it was weak and watery. The flames scattered upward into the heated air. Kenny was down.
Our group ran across the lawn, converging on the blackened patch of grass where Kenny lay on his stomach. Small flaming scraps of jellyfish flesh lay scattered to every side. But by the time we reached Kenny, he was back on his feet, hollering defiant curses, shaking out the kinks in his arms and legs, throwing back his head and whooping.
“You’re a god, Kenny,” said the admiring Kristo.
“I used my qwet,” jabbered Kenny. “I jacked into my cells and they shrugged off the flames.”
“And yet you resemble an overcooked pretzel,” marveled Kristo.
Indeed, Kenny’s hair and eyebrows had been singed away, his clothes had been vaporized, and his skin was black with soot. But he had no actual burns.
Junko pushed up to Kenny and delivered her punch line: “This is what happens when you call me a geek,” she said. “Get it?”
Kenny laughed. Thanks to our qwet, whatever happened felt basically okay. “I lost some good stuff with that floating house,” Kenny said. “Like my axelerate buds.”
“Don’t you get it yet?” said Junko. “With qwet you can stay in cosmic mode until you’re as high as you’d ever want to be. Or, if you’re good at plant empathy, qwet might help you steer a regular prickly pear cactus into turning Tunisian—so it pops out some of those axelerate buds. But that’s enough about grubby druggie schemes.”
“I can’t believe that big jellyfish killed herself,” I said. “Just for a silly grudge.”
“None of you understands anything,” said Junko.
“Doctor Shimano’s on her high horse,” said Joey, laughing. “Our Stanford prof.”
Junko waved her hand for silence and continued her info dump. “The jellyfish larva that’s rooted in the ground over there? It’s in polyp mode. Do you know the jellyfish’s life cycle? No? The larva becomes a branching polyp like a wiggly tree. New jellyfish bud off from the polyp’s chubby branches. If one of those new baby jellyfish gets enough chow, she can grow big in a few days.”
“Where’s the immortality?” I said.
“Every one of those jellyfish will have the old jellyfish’s mind patterns,” said Loulou. “Not to mention the patterns that Junko copied onto Laputa right before she went wild.”
“Free house jellies and free axelerate,” said Joey. “I’m liking this real good. You’re gonna back us a hundred percent, right, Kenny?”
“Maybe,” said Kenny with a frown. “But if all these new jellyfish are like their bitch of a mother, they’ll hate me too. What have I ever done? It’s not fair. To hell with jellyfish. Kristo and I will move back into the mansion. If you qrudes can really clean up. I’ll take the third floor—it’s more or less livable already. I’m going up there for a shower right now.” Kenny ran his hands over his stubbly head. “Do I look like hell, Kristo?”
“Good hell,” said Kristo. Arm in arm, the lovers headed for the castle.
“You’re okay, Zad?” said Dad, coming around the corner with Weezie Roller at his side. “We heard a pop?”
“Kenny!” wailed Weezie, catching sight of her son.
“I’ll be fine,” said the crispy, sooty Kenny. “Let’s have all these qwet freaks live here for awhile, okay Mom?”
“I’m one of them now,” said Weezie, smiling at us all. “I’m qwet too.” She definitely had the cosmic glow. I could feel a merge settling onto us. “We’re going to annoy my snotty neighbors like never before,” added Weezie with a silvery laugh. “The crusty Carnarvons and the hyena Heyburns.”
“You’ll have our entire commune on your side,” said Junko.
“Does commune mean orgies?” said Weezie, all mock innocence.
“No!” I cried, aghast at the prospect.
Dad burst into laughter. Why was I playing the fuddydud?
“Orgies are halal with me,” drawled Joey. “Zad, you hide out in the tower and paint, if you get all prudish. But I do agree those skungy old sex nurbs oughta go.”
“No need for things like that anymore,” said Weezie, her smile approaching the trillion-watt level. “What with hot young qrudes like Joey and Loulou in our scene. Not to mention the legendary Lennox Plant.” She smooched a kiss onto Dad’s cheek.
“Reba and Carlo will be coming too,” said Junko. “I could go for some Reba. I like that languid Southern thing. Creamy white skin, ladylike, no muscles—mmmm. But, truth be told, I’m more of a mind-merge girl than an orgy dog. Demure like Zad.”
Weezie gazed at me, her smile drying up and cracking. She’d never really thought I was good enough to be Jane’s husband—and now I was picking up the vibe that she didn’t think I was good enough to be my father’s son. Whatever I did, I was in her way.
“Why aren’t you with Janie, Zad? You’re letting that horrible Whit Heyburn have free rein. Hop on your roadspider and—”
“Let’s talk about us cleaning up the mansion,” interrupted Junko.
“I’m teeping for my qwet rats right now,” said Joey. “I’m the pied piper, qrude. I can think a weensy-whiny note so high that can’t nobody pick up on it but my ratty bros.” Silently he opened his mouth all the way, tensing his neck muscles, showing his yellow, uneven teeth. I couldn’t hear any sound in my head, but Loulou did.
“Don’t do that,” she said, wincing. “It’s like a horrible parasitic worm tunneling through my brain from ear to ear.”
A nurb pelican coasted down to the lawn a few minutes later, a delivery bird, too small to carry a person, but with a biggish bill. And riding on his back were Skungy and Sissa.
“Hey, Joey!” squeaked Skungy as the delivery pelican landed. “Heard your call just now. Yo, Zad!”
“You done broke free of them cops?” Joey asked Skungy.
“I made a mental stink that stunned them. They unlocked the doors. In a fog. Couldn’t see me at all. And I never bit nobody.” Skungy twitched his nose, showing off his yellow te
eth.
“Then what?” I asked.
“Little Sissa found me in the alley behind the cop shop. My baby rat who you sold to Whit Heyburn. She cruised down to my alley on this here bird.”
“I broke out of the United Mutations lab the hard way,” bragged Sissa. “A killer frenzy. A rampage. I’m tough, yeah.”
“Did you bite Whit Heyburn?” I asked, not quite sure if wanted to hear a yes or a no. “Is that blood on your fur?”
“Naw,” said Sissa with a squeal of laughter. “It’s poo. I stank my way out, just like pa. Reeked them folks real good. Someone opened my cage. I gnawed into Whit’s office. He weren’t there. He’d gone off for a date with Zad’s wife.” Sissa twitched her whiskers provokingly and now Skungy laughed as well. A grating series of chirps.
“So where’d you get the nurb pelican?” asked Joey.
“Being as how I was in Whit’s office, I used his desk to order me up a delivery bird. I saved pa. And by the time you called for us, Joey, we’d fetched the big litter from Gaven’s farm, and was homing on you anyhow.”
The parcel pelican opened his bill and out scrambled—whoah—a dozen qwet rats, squeaking, scritching, scrabbling.
“What’s this?” cried Dad, getting confused. “What’s this?” He didn’t like rats. They scurried around the Rollers’ lawn, looking for things to eat. They worried the charred scraps of jellyfish, sniffed out spilled crumbs of nurb chow—and then they found the shed where the chow supply was stored. In moments they’d chewed through the door and swarmed inside. A symphony of squeaks.
“Rabid rats,” said Junko. “They were in stasis on Gaven’s farm, right?”
“Yeah,” said Joey. “I knew that, so Skungy knew it too. All these rats are me. And ready to clean the castle. Talk about your process art!”
“I don’t know about having filthy vermin in my home,” said Weezie.
“Think of them as fairytale maids and coachmen,” said Junko. “Like in Cinderella. They’ll polish your palace from the lowest cellar to the highest aerie.” She put some heavy teep behind her words, passing her vision to Weezie. “All that dead crud on the ceilings—gnawed away by tonight. No more vines on the second floor. Those pushy beets and the carrots on the third floor? The three creepy sex nurbs? Gone. We’ll do the job this afternoon. Then we’ll stage a big dinner to celebrate, and the qwet rats will put on a show. I’m sure they’re full of song. Right, Joey?”