The Big Aha

by Rudy Rucker

Jane made a waking-up noise and spooned against my back. My beloved mate, with me in my blanket burrow.

  “What are those things?” Jane asked, peeking past my head. “Nurbs?”

  “Toy soldier fairies!” said Sergeant Cobble with another snappy salute. “We live in a Christmas stocking beneath the stairs.”

  “Please no,” said Jane. “Too weird and twee. I was hoping we’d wake up in my apartment by the river.”

  “Still in Fairyland,” I said. “You can go now, Sergeant Cobble. We’ll be down in a few minutes.” Looking around the room, I saw that the elves who’d been sleeping on the pillows were gone.

  “At ease!” shrilled the Sergeant Cobble. He and his fellows leapt off the edge of the bed and buzzed off with abandon, each of them frantically beating a pair of insect wings. They were funkier and livelier than any nurbs I’d ever seen. Fairies were a whole different thing.

  “So Jeptha said that the people inside the myoor are alive,” said Jane, thinking things out. “In stasis. And it’s all so the myoor can turn two of them into gubs.”

  “Let’s finally have a look at this myoor,” I said, getting out of bed and walking barefoot to the window. “Wow.”

  The rain had finally stopped, and it was a sunny day. But the sun was bringing to life the myoor’s fetid smell. Instead of a lawn, the mansion and barn were surrounded by the creature. It formed a rippling landscape of dappled beige and yellow skin, like a giant mollusk, stretching as far as I could see. Glinting eyestalks projected upwards here and there, and the myoor’s skin was slit with toothy mouths.

  One of her mouths opened to unleash a peevish bellow, and a nearby mouth responded in kind. A relay of sour bleats flowed down into the gully and up over the hill, past the Heyburns’ neo-classical mansion, past the Carnarvons’ timbered lodge, and onward towards town. The myoor was a pool of life— but a dissatisfied one. She was obsessively worried that she might not find the two perfect people for the green gub’s reproductive needs. Hadn’t found them yet. And, like Jeptha had said, if she kept right on looking, she might end up swallowing everyone on Earth.

  “The myoor reminds me of lava,” said Jane, standing at my side. “The way she flows around the houses and barns. And she’s killing the bushes and the trees. See there?” Right behind the barn, the flesh carpet had humped itself up high, and a pair of its mouths were chewing a maple to a ragged rack. “She smells so bad.”

  “Jeptha said the myoor already stretches from here to downtown Louisville,” I said. “Supposedly she’ll grow and grow. All just to find two people for modding into gub eggs.”

  “What about all the people she’s already stored?” said Jane. “Do you think we can see them through her skin?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “There’d be a bunch of them near the ballroom, right? I see some bumps in the myoor’s skin down there.”

  “We should save those people right now,” said Jane, backing away from the window. “But I’m so afraid. I act strong, but I’m not. I’m horrible.”

  I put my arm around her waist, wanting to calm her. “First we’ll have breakfast with Jeptha and Stanky.”

  “What stupid names they have,” said Jane, twisting away.

  “You’ll feel better after we eat.”

  “I’m not eating a thing,” said Jane. “Don’t you remember the old fairy tales from when you were a kid? If you eat the fairies’ food, you can’t go home.”

  “I don’t know that these are the exact same kinds of fairies as in those old books.”

  “Sure they are,” said Jane. “The old tales—they’re racial memories.” She nodded, agreeing with herself, something she liked to do. And maybe she was right.

  The whole house was bustling with fairies. I saw them everywhere I looked. Some were the size of houseflies, some nearly as large as people. Briefly a group of wee sprites circled Jane and me, no bigger than hummingbirds. They looked like bathing-beauty angels, carefully coiffed and trailing specks of pixie dust that glinted like tiny gems. Tinker Bell fairies, you might say.

  A loose-lipped loitering gnome ran his hand over my shirt, as if wanting to steal it off my back. He didn’t smile at me, nor did he meet my eyes. A female elf sniffed curiously at Jane’s leg.

  Professor Wriggle’s voice was whistling in the sun-splashed living room. Things weren’t going so well for the Professor just now. He was arguing with two gnomes, Blixxen and another one. They were calling the big worm a cheater, and Blixxen had snatched the worm’s mortarboard hat. The Professor was piping that the gnomes shouldn’t get so excited over a gentlemanly game of cards. He said they were behaving like troglodytes, fit only to live in an underground cave.

  We edged past them all, and went into the kitchen, where Stanky offered us an oversized steamed beet that was filled with something resembling cheese. “Real good eatin!” she exclaimed, cutting off a couple of fat slices. “That’s curdled gub juice inside. I spit up some of what I drank last night. It’s a seldom treat.”

  “Just some bread and water will do,” I said.

  “Don’t rightly have no bread,” said Jeptha, offering us a yellow shelf-mushroom the size of a steak. “This roast fungus is what we got. Them gnomes brang it up from their cave. It lights up at night.”

  “We have golden apples!” piped a pair of elves, watching us from the kitchen door.

  “No food!” said Jane, giving me a poke.

  “We’ll just have some water,” I agreed. “You think that’s okay, Jane?”

  “Maybe. I’m dying of thirst.”

  “Okey dokey,” said Jeptha, carefully pouring us two glasses of water and holding his long wings out of the way.

  Looking into the glass before raising it to my lips, I noticed motion in the water. Something like whirlpools, but more substantial than that. Thread-like serpents, translucent squid, miniature merpeople—nearly invisible, definitely there in my glass. Thirsty Jane was on the point of drinking when I stopped her.

  “What?”

  “The water, Jane. It’s full of fairies.”

  “Oh hell. And I’m parched. We need to get home.”

  “Let’s get to the dang point of your visit,” said Jeptha. “We want you bumpfs to get rid of our myoor.”

  “How are we supposed to do that?” I exclaimed. “How big is she exactly?

  “A mile wide and seven miles long,” said Jeptha. “A monster.”

  “The spotted gub wants you to lure the myoor down to Earth where the dark gub ain’t so likely to find her,” confided Stanky once again. “You do recall that it’s all about them two wanting to fertilize the green gubs’ eggs, right?”

  “We fairies want to get the myoor outta here any way we can,” added Jeptha. “She’s tearin’ our place up. Once she’s on your all’s home turf, I reckon you savage bumpfs might even kill her. Most of us fairies ain’t all that bloodthirsty, see. Except for the gnomes.”

  “What if we forget all this weird crap and say to hell with you?” said Jane, clearly fed up with it all.

  “Do nothing, and the myoor’s gonna keep on swallowing bumpfs till Earth’s a ghost world,” shot back Stanky. “And it’ll serve you right.”

  “Maybe we can learn to hide from the myoor’s wormholes,” I proposed. “The myoor and her wormholes can barely see us unless we’re in a special state of mind, right? We could avoid getting into that state.”

  “And what state is that?” said Jeptha, as if he already knew, but wanted to hear us making fools of ourselves.

  “Ecstasy,” said Jane, practically spitting the words in Jeptha’s face. “Joy. Cosmic harmony.”

  “So Zad’s plan is that you bumpfs stays dull and flat a hunnert percent of the time forever?” said Stanky. “Boy, that’s a winner.”

  “Or maybe we just evacuate Louisville,” I said, grasping at straws.

  Jeptha shook his brown little goblin’s head. “We’ve had space fairies tell us what the green gub and her myoor’s done on other planets. Every time the green gub is fixin’ to h
atch a new litter, she whomps up a myoor, see? And the myoor slimes all over a planet, sucking up bumpfs. Sometimes that green gub is mighty particular. She might let her myoor stay at it for centuries if that’s what it takes. The longer it goes on, the worse things get. So we asking you to rustle up the gumption to kill off this here myoor, or maybe you offer up a pair of bumpfs that the green gub happens to like.”

  “Why don’t Zad and I go home through my oddball and think this through?” said Jane brightly. As if she were brushing off an undesirable client. “I need food and coffee and a glass of water before I kill someone. And that someone could be you. So, Jeptha, tell me—my oddball—it still works?”

  Stanky and Jeptha exchanged a glance. “It would work,” said Stanky.

  “If we could find it,” added Jeptha.

  “The oddball’s a pearl inside that giant clam in the ballroom!” I exclaimed. “Clams don’t go anywhere.”

  “Wal, a clam might go somewhar if someone was to carry it,” said Stanky cautiously. “It’s them all-fired gnomes. The air fairies saw two of em making off with our tunnel clam last night.”

  “What!” cried Jane. “I knew it! You’re complete fools.”

  “The gnomes took it down to their big cave,” said Jeptha calmly. “That’s how those dang critters are. Thieves. I expect it’s up to you two to fetch the oddball back.”

  “Jeptha and I don’t mix with gnomes if we can help it,” explained Stanky. “They’re a crooked bunch.”

  “Crooked!” I exclaimed. “You two are burglars yourselves.”

  “Oh, we’re just collectors,” said Stanky. “Them gnomes are criminals. And they worship the dark gub.”

  “There’s a door to the gnome cave in the barn,” put in Jeptha. “All you need to do is pick your way across the myoor without getting bit.”

  “I’ll help ensure their safe passage,” said Professor Wriggle, poking his pink head into the kitchen. “I’m well loved by all and one.”

  “Lord take me now,” said Jane quietly. This was one of her and Reba’s ironic lines. They’d been saying it ever since high school.

  “Is that a—prayer?” inquired Professor Wriggle, writhing the rest of the way into the room. “I’d enjoy making a study of the bumpf—religions? Quite colorful and outré, I’m sure. We know so little of your race’s customs, Jane. I wonder if I might transcribe a series of interviews with you while you’re here? Perhaps we could produce a monograph.”

  Jane didn’t deign to answer. The gnomes had snapped the stiff top of Professor Wriggle’s mortarboard, and it hung down rather pathetically on either side. He was still wearing his empty-framed glasses.

  Raising the front third of his body over the edge of the kitchen table, the professor rubbed his underside across a slice of the steamed, gub-juice-stuffed beet. A corrosive fluid oozed from the fairy worm’s skin, turning the food into a purple puddle. Professor Wriggle began slurping up the liquid through the tiny hole at his anterior tip, dribbling bits onto his stiff white collar.

  “A once-in-a-lifetime treat, Stanky,” he whistled between inhalations. “Superbly prepared.”

  “Is the worm blind?” asked Jane. “Those aren’t real glasses at all.”

  “I’m all eye, from head to tail,” said Professor Wriggle. “That is, my entire surface is photosensitive. The glasses are a prop, a distraction, a yuk. The gnomes weren’t taken in. They sussed out that I can see with the skin of my tail. So they accused me of cheating at their pawky game of cards. I quite reasonably observed that only a fool plays fair with gnomes. And then Blixxen broke my mortarboard.”

  “Jeptha’s the fool,” said Jane. “He lost my oddball.”

  “Indeed,” said Professor Wriggle. “I took the liberty of eavesdropping on your recent conversation. If you venture towards the gnomes’ cavern, you’d do well to travel in the company of a sly old snake like me. And bugger this fancy dress.” With an impatient twist of his body, Professor Wriggle cast aside his collar and his mortarboard. But he retained his fake glasses, which were now the sole decoration on his long, mauve-pink body. “Shall we embark?”

  “I’m not going down in any cave,” said Jane. “You get the oddball, Zad. And hurry.”

  “What if we lose each other?” I fretted.

  “I’ll be waiting here. In my family’s house. Or, no, it’s the Fairyland version of our house. I’m so hungry and thirsty I can hardly think. Just go.”

  “Can I bribe the gnomes?” I asked Jeptha. “What could I trade them? Gold?”

  “You might offer them your clothes,” said Jeptha. “Bumpf pants. A good sight rarer than fairy gold.”

  “It pleases Jeptha to jest,” said Professor Wriggle in a lofty tone.

  “He ain’t funning!” said Stanky. “Jeptha knows his gnomes.”

  “I know the gnomes rather well myself,” said Professor Wriggle, putting on an air of wounded dignity. “I am, after all, a fairy worm from the subterranean kingdom.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Let’s find that hole in the ground in the barn.”

  The five of us made our way to the ballroom door. Jeptha and Stanky buzzed along with their dragonfly wings, Jane and I followed after them, and Professor Wriggle slithered at our side.

  The myoor’s body reached right up to the terrace outside. As soon as we approached her, a fresh eyestalk sprouted and a slit mouth opened. That same ghastly stench wafted forth. And once again I felt the aura of the myoor’s teep. A steamy, tangled vibe, as if from a jungle.

  “The myoor don’t mummify folks with her mouths on this end,” warned Jeptha. “Just does that with her wormholes down below. When she swallows someone up here, she flat out chews them for chow. Poor ole myoor might catch a bellyache from eating Zad. When she’s got her mouth all set for a horrible gumpy fairy.” Jeptha and Stanky released a fizzy buzz of laughter.

  As I’ve already mentioned, the myoor’s skin was light brown, with irregular patches of pale yellow. Seen close up, the yellow areas were somewhat transparent, with the sun lighting up the myoor’s jellied inner flesh. Her body wasn’t more than a foot thick, and the preserved people within made lumps. I could glimpse part of the face of one of the stilled human forms—but it wasn’t someone I knew. Or maybe he was the husband of the woman with the six boobs. His face was stiff and weird.

  The myoor mouth near the terrace door made a sound, a quieter version of the sour bellows I’d heard before. The myoor wanted to eat us. Up here in Fairyland, when the myoor swallowed you, she chewed you up for food, as opposed to paralyzing you for possible use as an egg. The myoor could see us with her stalk eyes, and she was vibing us with her teep.

  “We just glad that ole myoor don’t crawl inside our houses,” said Jeptha.

  “Yadda, yadda,” said Jane impatiently. “How’s Zad even supposed to get across to the barn? Will you and Jeptha fly him there, Stanky?”

  “You bumpfs is awful heavy,” said Stanky. “We fairies is made of finer stuff. Don’t reckon we could carry him.”

  “Zad can zoom!” said Professor Wriggle. “Spring and twist, slip and slide, nimbler than the sluggish myoor.”

  “You’ll zoom too?” I asked the worm. “You’ll show me the way?”

  “I’ll, ah, burrow,” said Professor Wriggle. “Do you see that little hole in the dirt between the terrace flagstones just here? That’s my back door. I can make myself exceedingly slender, you see. I’ll slip through and await you in the barn.”

  “Zad’s gonna run across like a hog on ice,” said Stanky. “I want to watch this.”

  “You two are the biggest jerks I ever saw,” said Jane, glaring at Stanky and Jeptha. “Stupid hillbillies. Gumpy bugs. I bet you gave the gnomes my oddball on purpose.”

  “Don’t listen to Jane,” I quickly said. “She’s upset.”

  “Yeah, I’m upset. That lump in the myoor right there is probably my Mom. And I bet the one next to her is my best friend Reba. And now Zad’s about to get chewed into a myoor-burger! Look at the big fl
at teeth in that disgusting mouth. And it smells like—I don’t know what. A bloated dead cow floating in the river.”

  “We’s glad you hate the myoor,” Stanky told Jane, unfazed by her insults. “You and Zad gonna be the ones to drag her down to Earth. You gonna be a Fairyland hero, girl. And the spotted gub’s gonna be your pal. Now step aside and let Zad make his run.”

  “Bumpf man bump!” cheered Jeptha.

  “I’ll be back for you soon,” I told Jane. What with the stench in the air, we weren’t up for a kiss, but we gave each other a tight hug. Jane’s body always felt like the perfect fit for mine. Balm to my senses.

  I backed off some distance, then took a running jump across the myoor’s first open mouth. The myoor’s hide was slicker than anticipated. I immediately lost my footing and fell on my ass. The nearest stalk eye focused on me, and—oh no—the tough skin beneath me was opening up a slit. Postponing any effort to stand, I crawled hurriedly towards the barn on all fours, moving at, it felt like, about fifty miles an hour, my arms and legs a total blur. Mouths and eyestalks threatened from every side. I was lunging and gliding, bopping and jiving, too fast for the myoor’s traps.

  But then I hit a transparent patch of the myoor’s skin, and I saw something that threw me for a loop. It was the once-vibrant Loulou in there, pressed against the underside of the myoor’s hide like a frozen match girl peering through a window, her open eyes glazed, her face stilled in an expression of sad surprise. Blindsided by grief, I lost my focus. What if the myoor turned Loulou into a gub? And she’d hated the gubs so much…

  Behind me a myoor mouth caught hold of my foot. Galvanized, I pulled away and managed to stand. I began moving even faster than before, shuffling my feet like an Olympic cross-country skier, finishing my final sprint in world record time.

  Safe on the barn’s homely plank floor, I turned and waved to Jane, Jeptha and Stanky, who were cheering me from the ballroom’s terrace door. And now the dirt by the barn’s entrance shifted—and here came Professor Wriggle, writhing out and plumping himself up—a naked four-foot-long pinky-brown earthworm, with annular ridges all along his length. He felt around with his lively, twisting front end, sensing the sounds, the smells and the—sights.