The Big Aha

by Rudy Rucker

  “Where are your glasses?” I asked.

  “I parked them in my nest. I’m traveling incognito.”

  “And the tunnel to the gnomes’ cave?”

  “Third stable on the left.”

  We pushed aside some straw and, yes, there was a capacious hole. Once I’d crawled in a few yards, the sloping tunnel opened up enough for me to walk erect. Professor Wriggle wormed ahead of me, speaking aloud and with his body faintly aglow, officiously guiding my way.

  We progressed downward for ten or fifteen minutes, and then Professor Wriggle came to a halt.

  “Their cave’s around the next turn,” he told me. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to wait here. I’ve never actually been inside.”

  “Are you scared of the gnomes?”

  “Very much so. They’re known to stomp on worms. Indeed, Blixxen was threatening to do precisely that. At the close of our argument about our card game.”

  “But Blixxen won’t get here before us,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said the worm. “The gnomes have many tunnels. They build for the glory of the dark gub god.”

  “Gub god?” I echoed.

  “Hasn’t anyone told you that the gubs are gods?” asked Professor Wriggle.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The being who created Earth and Fairyland—that’s the green gub goddess, born in an entirely different cosmos. The spotted gub and the dark gub are male gods from yet other worlds. Esoteric unseen aspects of reality abound, dear Zad. But, getting back to the matter of Blixxen…”

  Just then a hairy, barefoot figure dropped from a hole in the ceiling of our tunnel. It was Blixxen himself, lit by a glowing crystal suspended from his neck. Although only waist-high, the sturdy Blixxen projected a convincing aura of menace.

  “Stomp the worm,” he said in a deep, raspy voice. His beard bobbed with his chin.

  Professor Wriggle emitted a shrill whistle and collapsed, his body twisting in frantic loops, his posterior end dribbling waste, and his anterior end moaning for mercy.

  “You looking for the big clam?” Blixxen asked me, ignoring the abject worm.

  “Yes,” I said. “But don’t crush the professor.”

  “Not worth getting my feet dirty,” said Blixxen. “I want to show you our cave. We’ll settle our troubles. The gang’s expecting you.” Blixxen ran his callused hand across my face. “Soft and pink. You’re like a worm yourself.”

  “Shall I come as well?” asked Professor Wriggle, suddenly perking up.

  “Don’t want you,” said Blixxen. “You’re a crook. If you’re so damn curious, you can peek through a crack. Like you always do. Have a look at what happens to trespassers.”

  “Be careful, Zad,” warned the worm. “The gnomes are brutes.” Increasingly uneasy, I bade the professor farewell.

  * * *

  12: Spotted Gub

  The gnomes’ dim, dank cave was like the interior of a cathedral, but without a cathedral’s symmetry. Flowstone had bedecked the walls with frozen gray draperies. The rolling floor was set with squat stalagmites like drip-castle spires, reaching up towards the stalactites hanging like knobbly icicles from the limestone ceiling, abloom with popcorn-like growths. Glowing shelf-mushrooms were everywhere.

  Perhaps fifty gnomes were in the cave, males and females, all barefoot and garbed in drab colors. Many of the little men had beards, and the women wore kerchiefs. A flock of hammer-headed birds were rapping on the sides of the stalactites, sounding deep gonging tones. The slow, solemn music was endlessly elaborating a simple theme.

  I noticed a stream of luminous aquamarine water running down one of the wall’s motionless cascades of stone, and I thought of how thirsty I was. The water flowed into a turquoise pool, whose deep, intense shade showed it to be fantastically deep. Stanky and Jeptha’s tunnel clam rested upon a hummock of stone beside the eerie pool. The clam’s shell was partly open, and I could see the oddball within. Three gnomes stood by the clam, staring into the pool, their lips moving as if in prayer. One of them was a muscular priestess, and the other two were her acolytes. The priestess wore a glowing crystal like Blixxen’s.

  “You’re just in time to see us offer up the clam’s pearl,” grated Blixxen, still at my side.

  “Wait, wait! My wife Jane and I need the pearl to get home. Do whatever you like with it after that. We call it the oddball? It has a wormhole tunnel inside it.”

  “So he wants the oddball,” sneered one of Blixxen’s fellow gnomes, stepping forward. This fellow was thicker-limbed and lower-set than Blixxen. He’d been at Blixxen’s side when they’d been arguing with Professor Wriggle this morning. “I’m Staark,” the gnome told me, giving my hand a painful squeeze.

  “I’ll trade you my pants for the tunnel clam’s pearl,” I offered. “I can throw in my shirt as well.”

  “Fancy material,” said Staark, feeling my clothes like a tailor. “But no dice. The dark gub wants that oddball. He wants to use it for contacting Earth in case he needs to. So he sent us up to the house for that oddball clam last night.”

  “A gub told you to steal the oddball?” I exclaimed. “Look—gubs are crazy pests that make no sense. Even if you and Professor Wriggle think they’re gods. I am taking that special pearl, guys. Whether you like it or not.”

  “Nix,” said Staark. “You’re through.” He and Blixxen were blocking my way.

  The two gnomes may have been acting like thugs, but I was double their size, and my teep powers gave me the ability to throw them off balance with an unexpected mental jolt. I zapped them, bonked their heads together, and hurried past. My plan was to dive directly into the oddball’s slit, and to take things from there.

  Meanwhile, the priestess and her two acolytes had raised their voices in an urgent chant. “Great gub! God gub! Dark gub!” In synch with the chant, the gnome cave’s funereal marimba music was rising to a crescendo.

  I reached the edge of the pool, and the clam with the precious oddball was nearly within my reach. But just then all of cave’s glowing mushrooms went dark. The sole illumination was from the gnomes’ necklaces, and from an aquamarine shaft of light beaming vertically from the pool.

  With a smooth and sinister motion too quick to follow, the dark gub rose from the water and into the air, blocking my way. His darkness was velvety, as if he were absorbing light. He was larger than the gubs I’d seen so far. Portentous. As imposing as—a god. Yet when he turned sideways, he all but disappeared. He was as flat as a sheet of paper, with a single eye set into one edge. All around me the gnomes joined in the priestess’s chant.

  “Gub of gubs! All-knowing gub! Mighty flatness!”

  The dark gub was as big a bull. The silhouette of a bull, that is. He gave me peremptory shove with his snout, pushing me away from the pool. He was flat, but there was considerable force behind his gesture. There was no way I could get past him to the oddball.

  “Can you talk to me?” I asked the dark gub. “Can I explain?”

  The dark gub curved his body and cocked his head to one side, as if wondering at my temerity in addressing him.

  “Indeed I can speak,” said he, his voice a sinister whisper from his flat snout. “Get thee hence, foul phantom.”

  “Why call me phantom?” I protested. “I’m real. I come from Earth. It’s on the other brane of this cosmos.” I held my hands palm to palm, few inches apart. “Two parallel sheets of space? Do you understand space at all? The oddball is a tunnel.”

  “A delusional fancy,” said the dark gub. “I wit that any cosmos must be, a priori, a unitary and undivided whole. The most proper form is an endless plane.” He twitched his snout towards the oddball. “Yon sphere is a scrying orb, akin to a sorcerer’s crystal ball. You are a baseless fragment from a soothsayer’s fantasia.”

  The big gub’s glittering eye was devoid of empathy. My audience with the Great One was over. With a self-satisfied grunt, he balanced the oddball on his snout and sank into the aby
sses of the glowing pool.

  Jane and I were screwed. Marooned in Fairyland. Could things get any worse? Sure they could. Coming up on me from behind, Blixxen and Staark kicked my legs out from under me and seized my arms. Their minds were in a blocked, impervious state, and I had no hope of zapping them.

  “All right,” I began. “You’ve all made your points. The dark gub is god. And I’m nothing. So let me go and I’ll leave you alone. I’ll walk back through that dirt tunnel to the barn. And, hey, you can keep my shirt. Okay?”

  This wasn’t going anywhere. The priestess gnome was leaning over me, a curved knife in her hand. A scimitar.

  “The dark gub wants your unnatural life to end,” Blixxen hissed into my ear. “An oblation. We’ll spill your blood into his pool.”

  “What are you talking about?” I cried. “I’m no harm. I don’t even exist!”

  “You’re making trouble,” said Blixxen, his breath hot and meaty. “The dark gub wants to father the green gub’s children. He doesn’t want you helping the spotted gub with sneaky plans.”

  The mushroom lamps had amped back up. All the gnomes could see the show. The harder I struggled, the tighter Blixxen and Staark held my arms. The priestess’s two acolytes had taken hold of my feet. And the priestess herself stood at the ready, flexing her powerful arms, her scimitar raised. I sensed that the plan was to decapitate me as soon as my captors had leaned me over the pool—or had at least gotten me reasonably close to the edge.

  As long as I kept struggling, I could postpone the climax. The priestess was kept dancing around me, preparing for the coup de grace, and then I’d manage to roll over, flinging myself this way or that and, with luck, rolling a foot or two further from the glowing blue water.

  The gnomes watching our struggle were cheering and enjoying themselves. Mad with terror, I had the strength of three men. But I couldn’t shake loose the four gnomes holding me. They were raining blows on me with their free hands whenever they had a chance. I was starting to fade.

  Somewhere nearby I heard a faint whistle. Professor Wriggle’s voice, from a tiny crack in the ground beneath my ear. Staark was punching me in the stomach with one of his fists, trying to soften me up for a final push.

  “Hang on, Zad,” the professor seemed to say. “Help is on the way.” Was I imagining this? Was the voice the pipe-dream hallucination of a dying man? In any case, it gave me strength. With a savage final effort, I raised my arm high, and flung Staark away. Maybe if I dove into that pool I’d find a submerged passage to—

  “End it now!” the enraged Staark yelled to the priestess with the curved blade, and she darted towards me, very poised, very powerful—

  “Gub, gub, wheenk!” cried the spotted gub, bouncing into the gnome’s cave like a cartoon Gloucestershire hog. He was larger than before, easily the size of the dark gub. Not that I could see him very well. My eyes were puffed to slits from the beatings.

  Filled with superstitious awe, the gnomes panicked and fled, taking my clothes with them, leaving me bare and bloodied on the smooth stone near the glowing pool with the now-emptied clam to one side.

  In a trice the spotted gub was upon me. His body split open along the seam of his gut. For some odd reason I thought of a carnivorous pigskin change-purse, and it made me laugh, although the laughter hurt my bruised lips.

  “Zad!” called Jane, now visible inside the gub. “Get in here with me! It’s safe. Hurry, darling.”

  I was too banged up to stand, but the spotted gub crouched over me, lipping me with the rounded edges of his split belly—and then I was ensconced in there with my wife.

  “He’s taking us back to Earth,” Jane said as the spotted gub’s stomach-slit sealed over. “He’s our friend. Oh, Zad, what have they done to you!”

  No way to see where we were going. And I was on the verge of unconsciousness. The spotted gub was feeding me images of parallel sheets with tubes connecting them. Like two soap films with a connecting bridge. Some kind of analogy. Patterns sliding across the films and through the smooth throats of the tubes. Too much to think about just now. I relaxed into the spotted gub’s kindly aura. A few minutes later, his stomach opened up again. Jane slid right out, then reached back and gently pulled me free. A moment later she was holding a glass of water.

  “Dear Zad. Those gnomes almost killed you.” She dribbled water into my bloody mouth. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted. “I’ll get some medical nurb ants,” continued Jane. “I keep a colony here.”

  “Where—where are we?” I was so bruised and exhausted that I didn’t have the strength to look around.

  “We’re in my apartment, thank heavens. Wait right here. And remember to stay robotic. We have to worry about those wormholes now that we’re back on Earth.” I heard Jane’s footsteps padding across her floor—and everything went black.

  The nurb ants did their work. An hour later I was my old self, safe in Jane’s round housetree condo, with cozy light filtering through the living walls, glowing on the antique wooden furniture and oriental rugs.

  But I couldn’t fully bask in the pleasure, given that I had to stay robotic—lest I provoke a renewed wormhole attack. Conversing with Jane in this state felt stiff.

  “Should we have sex?” I asked, as if discussing a traffic route. “Now that we’re together again?”

  “You’re moving in?”

  “If you let me.”

  “You haven’t begged enough,” said Jane, then laughed, her red-gold hair flashing. “Oh, of course I want you back. It’ll be wonderful. But no sex just yet. I’m still freaked about the nasty stuff with Gaven and Whit. And maybe we’re too rational just now. We’re like…like grown-ups.” Jane laughed again, a happy sound, filling our beloved apartment.

  “If...if we get back together...” I began.

  “Yes?”

  “We could finally start our family,” I said. “If you’re still up for that. All this running around and nearly getting killed—it makes me think. I mean what’s it all for?”

  “Life’s great and subtle wheel,” said Jane, her eyes soft. “I know what you mean. I’m glad you’re going to be okay. We’ll talk about all that stuff later.”

  “Loofy med-ants,” I said, touching my face. My bruises were gone. “So what’s going on in Louisville anyway? What day is it? You’ve checked your wristphone’s news feed?” In the back of mind I was intensely thinking about the vision the spotted gub had shown me, and about how I might use it against the myoor.

  “Today’s the day after Weezie’s party, just like up in Fairyland. Everyone’s in panic mode. Thousands of people have been swallowed. Qwet’s all over the world, but the wormholes are only here in Louisville. You and I know that’s because the myoor only reaches from Glenview to downtown. People have been streaming out of the city like they’re leaving a war zone. Take a look off the balcony.”

  As always, the view was stunning—the living buildings, the lacy bridges, the Ohio and its irregular ledge of falls—everything preternaturally sharp and clear. A perfect fall day once again, crisp and sunny, everything washed clean by yesterday’s heavy rain, and all the leaves off the trees. The streets were empty, other than a few wandering nurbs. The myoor wasn’t bothering with the nurbs.

  But, wait, if I looked harder, I could see some people down there after all. Skulking along the edges. They were into their self-protective robotic modes, and their vibes didn’t jump out at me, but they were there. Hardcore downtown-scene folks—artists and craftspeople, bums and grifters, qrudes and the poor. People with no place else to go.

  Jane leaned on the balcony railing, thinking things over. “The clean wind,” she said after a bit. “It was so horrible in the gnomes’ cave. Were they really planning to kill you?”

  “They were into a trip about the gubs and the myoor,” I said. “It’s complicated. How did you end up inside the spotted gub anyway?”

  “He popped out of nowhere in the ballroom,” said Jane. “He started talking to me.”

>   “Talking out loud?”

  “Yeah. If you pay attention, you can hear that the gubs put words inside their squeals. Like the qwet rats, only more so. The spotted gub began talking to me like an excited kid trying to say a lot of different things at once. And he was sending me a bunch of glyphs. Like with a web connection. Clearer than teep. He wants to make babies with the green gub. But I’m confused about the rest of it.”

  “Supposedly the gubs are gods,” I said. “The green gub made our universe, all of it, including Earth and Fairyland. The spotted gub and the dark gub are competing to mate with her. And the dark gub thinks I’m on the spotted gub’s side. So he told the gnomes to kill me.”

  “A god wants you dead?” said Jane, oddly amused. “That’s so Zad. The ultimate outsider.”

  “The artist’s fate,” I said, glad to have Jane making this funny. “What else did the spotted gub tell you?”

  “He says the green gub is stalling and playing hard to get,” said Jane. “Being too fussy about where she’ll lay her eggs. I happen to remember the spotted gub’s precise words. I’ve been, like, pondering them in my heart. Want to hear?”

  “Sure.”

  Jane made her voice high and squealy. “I take missy past air-bite mouths we get Zad Zad before throat slit very fast we wow beauty green gub whoops to Louisville drool dazzle green gub’s myoor we use holy man and woman I picked. I drip drops we make gub babies for hatch next cosmos and wheenkity wheenk to the dark gub.”

  “A rigorously precise plan,” I said, smiling now myself. “I like the drool dazzle. It’s giving me more ideas. Where’s the spotted gub now?”

  “In our bed. Did I forget to tell you? That’s another reason we might not want to have sex yet. The spotted gub is in there, kind of wallowing around. He’s made himself small again. He’s interested in my knickknacks and my underwear and my jewelry. Touching everything with the pointy tip of his snout. You can go talk to him yourself. For whatever good that’ll do.”