The Big Aha

by Rudy Rucker

  “Freeze!” yelled Grommet, jumping out of the car. Grommet and Lief were qwet like us, but they’d gotten over being mellow. They were back into being cops. Grommet held a leadspitter in each of his big hands. The leadspitters were tweaked bombardier beetles that shot metal pellets—like old-school pistols.

  “Why bother us now?” said SubZad. He walked up to Grommet, getting right in his face. “Your scene’s done. Asshole.” Grommet was holding his leadspitters leveled at SubZad’s gut.

  “Easy now,” said Lief, as much to Grommet as to SubZad. Understand that, at this point, Lief thought SubZad was me. SubZad was holding his face still, and was sending out a pretty fair approximation of my vibes. “Gaven tells us that your crowd spread the qwet,” continued Lief. “And that you brought in those alien eater things. So now you’re charged with treason and mass murder, Zad. Put your hands on the car so Grommet can frisk you. We have to take you in. Even if Louisville’s falling apart.”

  “No,” said SubZad. “No time for your tired bullshit. We’re on our way to Churchill Downs to kill off the alien invader. You should be grateful to us, Lief. You should be down on your knees sucking my dick.”

  Lief just looked at him.

  “We know about the Churchill Downs scam,” snarled Grommet. “Another qrude party. Like that’s going to fix anything. Promoting a riot. Gaven told us he knew where to find you, and he was right. Hands on the car.”

  Jane stepped out of Gurky’s door into a low shaft of light from the setting sun. “Give Gaven to us and go away,” she commanded. Gaven was cringing in the back seat of the Lincoln, his eyes darting from side to side. I was still in the shadows of Gurky’s shop, a few feet back from the door.

  “You’re under arrest too,” Grommet told Jane, his teep vibes like knives. He pointed one of his leadspitters her way.

  With a blindingly fast move, SubZad stripped the leadspitter from Grommet’s grip, tearing a wound into the man’s hand. Reflexively Grommet fired his other leadspitter into SubZad’s stomach. SubZad staggered backwards for a moment. But the leadspitter was tuned for working on human flesh, not on the doughy bodies of nurbs. SubZad regained his balance and came lunging back. He released his careful control over his expressions. His face was that of a decaying graveyard ghoul.

  Grommet’s leadspitter clattered to the sidewalk as SubZad clamped his hands around the man’s thick neck. Grommet was pounding on SubZad with his fists—but to no avail. Struggling and grunting, the pair dropped to the ground, Grommet on top, but with SubZad still choking him.

  Lief was out of the car and yelling—he wanted to intervene. He understood by now what SubZad was, and he had a firepig in his hands, but he couldn’t find the right angle for flaming the nurb without blasting Grommet.

  Suddenly Grommet went limp. SubZad hadn’t stopped at strangling him. He’d broken his neck.

  Perhaps, from the point of view of the myoor, Grommet’s dying brain flickers were akin to being in a cosmic mode. A wad of flesh appeared, flexing like an evil sock puppet. A wormhole. It opened its crooked jaws and swallowed the dead cop as handily as a radish.

  Lief pressed in with his firepig, covering SubZad with layer upon layer of flame. The doomed nurb beat his arms against his body and rolled to and fro, but Lief stayed on him until the flames were irreversibly out of control. SubZad dwindled to a sticky patch of ashes on the ground.

  While this was happening, I mustered my troop of Mr. Normals. Gustav and Bonk appeared as well, not that we needed them. The one thousand Mr. Normals streamed out the Gurky Movers door carrying their thorned whips, and they crowded around Lief and my Lincoln in a rough circle, six or seven nurbs thick. Jane and I pushed inside the circle, with Skungy perched on my shoulder once again.

  One of the Mr. Normals pointed his hand-claw and shot a crackling high-energy spark—a chaotic zigzag ten feet long. It knocked the firepig from Lief’s grip, then sparked again, fusing the firepig into a twisted scrap. Further sparks destroyed the other weapons that Lief and Grommet had brought.

  Gaven chose this moment to step from the Lincoln with his arms held high. “I’m sorry!” he cried. “Forgive me.”

  Jane walked over to Gaven, evilly swaying her hips. Lief and I watched to see what came next. Kenny and Craig were peering out from Gurky Movers as well.

  “Do you love me, Gaven?” said Jane, her voice raised as if she were on stage.

  “Yes, yes! I do!”

  “I’m not feeling it,” sang Jane. “You’re jagged. In a frenzy. Make yourself calm, Gaven. Merge into the One. Teep with me.”

  “But, but—”

  “Do it for just a second, Gaven.” Jane’s voice grew low and caressing. “Show me you can be nice.”

  So Gaven slipped into cosmic mode, just for that one second, and then, yorrrk! The myoor popped out another wormhole and wolfed the man down, with Gaven kicking and screaming all the way.

  “Whoah,” said Lief, oddly unafraid. “Enter the Dragon Lady.”

  “I didn’t know you could be so ruthless,” I murmured to Jane, kind of appalled.

  She gave Lief and me a calm look. “You have to remember what Gaven did. He overwrote my mind. He helped Whit rape me. I won’t stand for that.” She paused, thinking. “And, Zad, if your theory about the myoor is right, then Gaven isn’t really dead, not even now. He’s in suspended animation. He’s one of the myoor’s candidates for making into a baby gub.”

  “And we might still bring him back,” I had to add. “When we drag the myoor down here and pull her apart.”

  “So maybe we’ll have to eliminate Gaven again,” said Jane with a shrug. “The treat that never grows old. Let’s go to Churchill Downs.”

  “What about me?” said Lief, kind of smiling. “I’m supposed to be the one in charge here.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “How could we forget? You want to come out to the track with us, Lief? Help save the world?”

  “Not my bag,” said Lief. “I’m just a cop. You save the world. You’re the artist. And forget all those bullshit charges against you. Clean slate.”

  “Can I keep my car?”

  “Sure, qrude.”

  Lief made a gesture vaguely like a salute, and headed off down the street on foot.

  * * *

  13: Churchill Downs

  So we rode the slugfoot Lincoln convertible to Churchill Downs. I was in the front seat with Jane. Skungy sat on the dashboard. Kenny and Craig were in back. Our squadron of Mr. Normals marched behind us, each of them carrying a thorned whip. We found an open gate at the side of the track, and we rolled in there like royalty, with Skeezix and Bag Stagger wailing on stage. Far off to one side, there were still some horses in the racetrack stables.

  Skeezix spotted Jane and announced us. The qrudes in the grandstand and on the track began cheering. The crowd looked skimpy amid the huge oval of Churchill Downs, but there might have been a thousand of them by now. They all knew about Jane and me—thanks to qwet teep and the Funhouse party fiasco. And they were counting on us to repair the damage.

  I took Jane’s hand and we stood up in the car to wave at the crowd. The slugfoot slimed along nice and slow. The Mr. Normals were brandishing their luminous whips, etching pale green figure-eight motion trails against the deepening dusk. It was awesome.

  When our car stopped beside the stage, Jane and I bounced up a flight of steps to join Bag Stagger. Craig and Kenny stayed in the car, but good old Skungy was on my shoulder.

  “Yeeeeeek!” yelled Skeezix, bopping sideways towards us with her gitmo in her hands and her mic nurb wrapped around her neck like a snake. She smelled like decaying fruit, but in a good way, like an apple orchard.

  Her mic and her instrument were linked via wristphone-style signals to speaker nurbs all across the Churchill Downs grandstand running along one side of the track. Two humongous squidskin concert speakers were draped over the edges of the stage as well, pulsing with thuddy bass.

  Skeezix put her face right up against Jane’s. She see
med stranger to me than before, but Jane was used to her. Her chestnut skin was papery, and she had a funny way of pulling up her top lip. She had nurb worms on her scalp that propped her curly hair into excited stalks, like antennae. Skeezix was definitely having trouble keeping herself in robotic mode. She was a full-on musician.

  Her backup guys Kink and Dharma came shambling in her wake, clearly jonesing for qwet merge as well. Big bearded Kink had his arms around his enormous nurb bagpipe like it was a besotted friend, with the slippery bagpipe squonking fierce and gnarly. It had three loose-lipped, puckered-out mouths—nasty.

  By way of greeting us, Kink leaned his slimy bagpipe against Jane’s bare shoulder. The thing pressed one of its mouths against her skin, kind of slobbering, and it blared a welcoming squeal.

  The third musician, skinny dark Dharma, was working a bird-shaped nurb that he held clamped between his teeth. It was his nurb mockingbird, spewing out sick scraps of sound from the man’s mental Akashic records. For a rhythm line, Dharma was slapping chaotic rhythms from the fleshy belly-beater nurb affixed to his gut.

  Meanwhile Skeezix’s gitmo was chiming skewed arpeggios of god-chords while she shrieked a song.

  Ye godda ye godda ye godda!

  Runnin dry

  I know why.

  In my head

  Myoor meat bed.

  Ye godda ye godda ye godda!

  Dharma’s metamockingbird made a sound like a choir of throat-singing monks. “Brother Zad Zad! Dormez vous?”

  “Co cosm, co cosmic, co cosmic flip!” went Skeezix. “Trippity trippity trip trip trip!”

  Her snake-like mic uncoiled its tail from her neck and wriggled along her outstretched arm to drape on me, with its little head just below my chin. Skungy curiously sniffed at it, daintily twitching his whiskers.

  Kink made a sudden, savage gesture with his sodden instrument and—just like that—the band’s avalanche of sound came to a full stop.

  “Testing,” I said into my mic, like a complete goob. My voice echoed across the terraced stands by the track. I was stiff with stage fright. And now, making the scene even more like an uncomfortable dream—I saw my parents in the crowd. Mom and Dad, standing side by side, not holding hands or anything, but together. Sally and Lennox Plant. Looking at me. My lips began working, with no words coming out.

  “We need help, Zad and Jane!” hollered someone in the box seats. A coarse, bullying voice. Oh oh, it was Blixxen the gnome. “You’ll help the dark gub! Or die!” A gnome’s notion of proposing a deal. I shook my head at him.

  He glared and pointed at me as if taking aim. His sidekick Staark was holding—oh god, what was that? A leather sling? Scimitars dangled from both their waists. Clambering onto Blixxen’s shoulders, Staark began swinging the sling in a circle around his head. Where did these guys think they were?

  Staark’s rock very nearly hit my head. It could have knocked me unconscious or even killed me. Skungy squeaked for help, and in seconds a Mr. Normal was on the case. Bulb flickering, he vaulted into the stands. The unsavory gnomes from Fairyland melted into the restive throng, crouching low to conceal themselves behind the rows of seats.

  What exactly did they want? No time to think.

  “Time for the Cosmic Flip Trip!” cried Jane, leaning into me to use my mic. “Time to be high again, qrudes. Our thousand lightbulb men will catch hold of any wormholes before they can hurt you. It’s party time!”

  No response from the crowd. Anxious glances. Grumbling. “You go first!” hollered someone, and others took up the cry. “Zad and Jane first! Zad and Jane show us how! Zad, Jane, Zad, Jane!”

  I should have seen this coming. But I was so into my own plans that I’d only been thinking in terms of me coaching the assembled qrudes into going cosmic, and of me directing my army of Mr. Normal nurbs to save the crowd when the wormholes showed up.

  “Zad, Zad, Zad!” chanted the crowd. Yeah, they were sparse amid the grandstand’s rows of seats—but they were plenty loud.

  All right then. I held up both my arms, calling for attention. “I’m doing it,” I cried. And if I ended up inside the myoor—oh well!

  Two Mr. Normals were on the stage behind me with their whips, like some crazy dictator’s personal guards. Skeezix fired up her gitmo and began strumming a tension-building ostinato rhythm, sliding up the scale. Kink and Dharma chimed in with nurby bleats and groans.

  I squeezed Jane’s hand and went for it. Slammed myself into full cosmic mode. The objects around me took on a fine, honeyed glow. I could teep a sea of emotions there—fear, lust, excitement, and the simple joy of being in a crowd. For the first time since yesterday or maybe the day before, I wasn’t worrying. But that didn’t last long.

  I heard a whisper behind my head. Something in the air. Oh fuck, a wormhole, dull brown, with that same smell of bad medicine. Moving towards me. But then—whip! And whip!

  My two Mr. Normals had sunk the thorns of their whips into the meat of the myoor wormhole and they were pulling on it like mad—crouching, bending their knees, falling off the edge of the stage and pulling some more. The wormhole neck was getting longer and longer. At first it was like the siphon of a clam, and then it was like a strand of dough flowing into a mound on the ground. There seemed to be no end to how much myoor meat the Mr. Normals could pull through.

  “Me me me!” sang Skeezix. Her face was happy; she’d flipped to cosmic mode too. Grunk, here came a greedy wormhole—but, whip, a new Mr. Normal caught this one as well. Skeezix danced ever more wildly, singing her heart out, exhorting the crowd.

  Get a Mr. Normal and step outside your mind

  Everybody loofy cause it’s myoor whippin time!

  And thus began the avalanche. It was a humid twilight scene, lit by the Mr. Normals’ bulbs and their eerie green whips—taking control of the wormholes as fast as they turned up. The qwet and increasingly confident crowd waxed ecstatic. People had brought reefers, whiskey pumpkins and streamlined purple axelerate buds. Everyone was cosmic by now, and they were freely sharing their stashes around. The rougher hillbilly-biker-type Kentucky qrudes stripped off their shirts to display their living tattoos.

  Everywhere you looked, the wildly flickering Mr. Normals were hauling down larger and larger mounds of myoor meat, the stuff giving off a sewer stink that people pretty much ignored. Bag Stagger was jamming a bluesy raga that rose and fell, never quite coming to an end.

  Meanwhile Jane and I were still onstage, qwet and teeping, hugging each other. Skungy was dancing on our shoulders, hopping from one of us to the other, letting out tiny, cheerful squeaks. Craig and Kenny down on the track, standing next to the Lincoln, bopping with a crowd of men. And now Mom and Dad came onstage to join Jane and me.

  Our wristphones and teep links made it possible for us to talk, after a fashion—despite the chiming frenzy of the band and the roar of the crowd as, all across the grandstand, the thousand Mr. Normals continued hauling away at their strands of myoor.

  “You’re friends with Dad again?” I asked Mom. “And you’re qwet?”

  “I got qwet yesterday morning,” answered Mom. “Like everyone else. It helped me throw a wonderful pot. The best bowl I ever made. No need for more, really. But now we have those disgusting wormholes gobbling people. As for your father—yes, we’re on speaking terms again. He’s moving back in, right, Lennox? And you-know-who is gone.” Mom smiled in a relieved kind of way, and it was good to feel her emotions.

  “You-know-who was my mother,” said Jane sharply.

  “Weezie might come back,” I quickly put in. “She’s still alive. Inside the myoor.”

  “Nothing against Weezie at all,” Dad told Jane. “Weezie is a wonderful, vibrant woman. But I missed Sally. Did you hear her say that maybe she’s thrown her last pot? Well, after I went home to her last night, I painted what could be my last picture. The clouds around the moon.” Dad gave Mom a soft look. “We’re ready to join our muses on Mount Parnassus. However we get there.”

  “You’
ve always been my favorite,” Mom told Jane. “It’s so nice to see you back with Zad.” She paused, glancing around at the hundreds upon hundreds of wormholes being stretched out like giant snakes. “What’s this racetrack party about? We heard your ad and of course we came. You two are trying to fix the—”

  “Oh, wait, we have to tell them about the little men,” interrupted Dad. “The ones who threw a rock at Zad?”

  “The gnomes?” I said, more than little distracted by everything that was going on around us. The band was still playing, the thousand Mr. Normals were hauling away on their thorned vines, and the crowd of onlookers were on the verge of a riot.

  “Nasty little thugs,” said Mom, still talking about what she and Dad had seen. “Foreign. With curved swords. I heard one of them talk about kidnapping Jane. We thought you should know.”

  “The gnomes are obsessed with that oddball thing that Jane used to have,” I said, not wanting to think about this. “But—”

  “Oh my god!” broke in Jane. “Your plan is working, Zad.”

  The legion of wormholes in the stadium had become floating fountains. It was the tipping point I’d hoped for. All this time the thousand Mr. Normals had been continuously pulling down taffy-strands of myoor flesh from Fairyland and now—now they didn’t have to pull.

  It was like when you suck on a hose to get a siphon started, and eventually the water begins flowing on its own. Huge stinky lava gouts of myoor-flesh were rushing through the wormholes—with the occasional paralyzed human tumbling through like a sodden log.

  Dismay and repulsion in the crowd. They were backing away, shoving each other over, moving higher and higher in the stands. Meanwhile the cascading myoor flesh was running down past the rows of seats and puddling on the track, rising like Ohio floodwaters. As always, the myoor was giving off teep vibes of protean, teeming life.

  As per my earlier instructions, the Mr. Normals fanned out to the edges of the mass and kept the myoor’s outward flow confined, zapping her with megawatt sparks and pinching deep into her flesh with their heavy-duty lobster-claw hands. Rather than reverting to the form of a seven-mile-long slug, the myoor was being forced to pile up deeper and deeper upon the grounds of Churchill Downs.