The Big Aha

by Rudy Rucker

  The myoor was restoring herself, pushing her eyestalks and her dangerously toothy mouths out to her surface. Beneath her skin I could see the translucent flesh crypts in which she stored her sedated human captives from last night’s and today’s raids.

  By now the Bag Stagger stage was an island in a lake of myoor, marooning the band along with Jane, Mom, Dad, and me. Stubbornly and even maniacally, the three musicians were continuing their onslaught of sound. Kink’s bagpipe sounded like an alligator tumbling down an endless flight of stairs.

  Looking over at the stands, I saw a zonked hillbilly lose his footing, fall onto the myoor and get himself bloodily chewed in half. Much worse than being swallowed by a wormhole.

  Overhead, the wormholes were spewing out still more myoor meat, and the monster on the ground was getting thicker all the time. She’d be lapping across the stage before long. I felt uneasy about us trying to scamper across the myoor’s mouthy skin to safety.

  But, oh good, Craig and Kenny were in my slugfoot presidential-assassination-type Lincoln convertible, riding the surface of the myoor, driving over myoor mouths and past the translucent patches covering the myoor’s comatose captives. The boys were plowing into eyestalks, skidding around like old-time teenagers in a stolen car doing doughnuts in an empty parking lot. Kenny was at the wheel. Craig was whooping and giving everyone the finger, occasionally hopping in and out of the car. He was excited about having an adventure with qrude, sexy Kenny.

  I did everything possible to attract them, making repeated and extravagant gestures, trying to message Kenny on my wristphone, sending Craig please-help-us vibes via teep. Finally they slimed over to us at high speed. At the last possible moment, Kenny slewed the Lincoln to one side so it skidded sideways onto the bandstand. Bag Stagger fell silent. It was occurring to them that they needed to flee the stage as well.

  “Don’t like that tooth soup out there,” said Skeezix.

  “Getting lonely?” Kenny called to me, very devil-may-care. “This would be a good time to have a flying jellyfish, huh?”

  “Take us over to the grandstand, okay? These myoor mouths, they’re no joke.”

  “I saw the spot where Mother is,” Kenny told Jane, turning serious. “Were you watching? Craig got out and tried to hack through the myoor’s skin. To save her.”

  “I always carry a blade,” said Craig, displaying a hunting knife that, for whatever paranoid loner reason, he kept strapped to one of his calves. “I couldn’t make a nick in the myoor’s skin. And that skin has a temper. I was poking away and it sprouted a tentacle, yanked my legs out from under me and sent me skidding across the slime towards one of those mouths. You guys didn’t see that?”

  “I managed to rescue Craig,” said Kenny. “This is a good car. Even if he didn’t get Mother out, at least I know where she is. Zad’s girlfriend Loulou is right next to her. By the finish line near the far edge of the grandstand. But how do we get Mother out if we can’t cut a hole?”

  “I have this idea for using the Mr. Normals,” I said, wishing Kenny hadn’t mentioned Loulou in front of Jane. “But first get us off this stage.”

  So Craig and Kenny ferried us to the grandstand. Skeezix, Kink, Dharma, Dad, Mom, Jane, and I rode in the Lincoln convertible with them—the nine of us were piled into the ample cockpit, pinching and grab-assing. We couldn’t stop laughing. Hysteria? The cosmic mode?

  The mood was edgy in the stands. The qrudes may have been in cosmic mode, but they weren’t chill at all. They were scared. To further harsh the vibe, the myoor’s mouths had begun bellowing.

  Nobody knew how much higher the myoor meat might rise. And they were as stranded in the stands as we’d been on the stage. Working your way down to an emergency exit via the betting parlors beneath the stands wasn’t an option—because the myoor flesh had filled in those crannies. A few desperadoes had made a hole in the wall behind the highest rows of the grandstand, up near the iconic Churchill Downs towers. They were trying to rappel down the outside wall. But one of them had fallen and broken his neck.

  On every side, the floating wormholes continued gushing. The reek was overpowering. Like being inside an old-time sewage treatment plant.

  “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” said Craig, lifting a pinky. “The Seventh Wonder of the ancient world.”

  “You fuckers brought us here to die,” a guy with long matted hair yelled at me, making himself heard above the myoor’s roars. He grabbed hold of Craig and started shaking him. Somehow Craig was always the first one in our group whom strangers attacked. It had been that way ever since high school.

  “You don’t want to mess with us,” warned Kink of Bag Stagger. He was cradling his gross nurb bagpipe as if it were an alien bazooka. “See the mouths, you gunjy hairfarmer? You ever heard about the kiss of the bag?” The nurb instrument released a nasty, burbling squonk. “I’m gonna count to two,” intoned Kink. “One—”

  One of the hairfarmer’s buddies raised his whiskey pumpkin, ready to crack it over Kink’s head, but just now the gushers of myoor began dying down, and the men got distracted from their fight.

  The myoor-flow stopped and, one by one, the hovering, knotty wormholes smoothed over and were gone. Everyone was cheering in relief. This phase was done. The whole damn myoor had drooled through hyperspace wormhole tunnels from Fairyland to Earth.

  “Myoor’s not gettin no deeper no more,” I brightly told the matted-hair guy and his friends. “Kick back, qrudes.”

  Just in case they still wanted to argue, Skeezix strummed a venomous sound on her gitmo, kind of a maraca noise, like a rattlesnake buzzing its tail. The hairfarmer crew backed away.

  The myoor had maxed out at something like fifty feet deep, all across the track and infield of Churchill Downs and bulging partway towards the barns beyond the track. And my Mr. Normals were keeping her corralled like the hardest-ass cowboys you ever saw.

  “Can you rescue my mother now?” Jane softly asked me. “You said you would.”

  I got into wristphone contact with the Mr. Normals, sent a bunch of them to the spot where Weezie lay, and set them to blinking like crazy. I had a notion that it might be possible to precipitate the myoor into something like premature labor. Given that a strobe light can drive some people into seizures, it seemed like wildly flashing lights might make the myoor twitch so hard that she’d birth out her human captives.

  For a good measure, I set all thousand of the Mr. Normals to strobing wild jagged rhythms for half an hour. Oddly inspired, Kink set his big bag to tootling along. Any folks in the stands who were prone to seizures—or who, at this point, felt like they might be—they covered their eyes and waited for the brain-breaking lightshow to stop.

  But the effort was a false path. The myoor ignored the flickering—lobster pinches and electric sparks were the only things that got her attention. Jane’s mother and the rest of them were still immured.

  The myoor had her own agenda. She was settling in here, preparing to spawn. She wasn’t even trying to flow out of the gates anymore. She was consolidating her body mass, withdrawing it from where it had been lodged under the grandstand, making herself a little deeper. And, as the myoor tightened herself up, her smell was damping down. Her vibes were more focused than before.

  The myoor had abandoned any overzealous plan of swallowing every human on Earth. Although there was no sign of the green gub or the spotted gub just now, it might have been that they were messaging the myoor from N-space. The myoor was ready to hatch some gub eggs whenever those two arrived.

  With the back exit stairs open, many of the qrudes were leaving. After all, we’d accomplished much of what we’d come here to do. The Cosmic Flip Trip! We’d lured down the myoor. And now we qwetties could be as cosmic as we wanted to—without the myoor’s mouths pouncing on us from the fourth dimension.

  Not everyone was bailing. The more hard-core elements of our crowd settled in for the night. The party continued. Bag Stagger got into meditative, wee-hours jazz. Some of the qrudes
looted liquor from the racetrack bars, not that you really needed that, when were as deep into cosmic mode as we all were.

  The looters went ahead and busted up the nurb wood chairs and tables in the track’s fancy restaurants, using the scraps to build a couple of bonfires in the stands. There was a sense that, at least for now, the old rules didn’t much matter anymore.

  Now and then someone would throw a flaming stick down onto the myoor, just to hear her bellow in surprise. And then the myoor would grab the stick with one of her tendrils and throw it back up at us. Or crunch it to bits with one of her mouths.

  Jane and I were sitting with Mom and Dad, talking things over. We could see everything pretty well—it was a clear night, and the moon was three-quarters full. A little ways across town I could see the conglomeration of glowing house jellies that they were calling Wobble Manor.

  Craig Gurky was still with us, but Kenny had gone back to the Rollers’ place to be with Kristo, taking my Lincoln with him. Skungy was snuggled in my lap. Now and then someone would stop by and thank us, or congratulate us. Like we were stars.

  A few people asked me what was going to happen next, and I told them we’d probably see two flying gubs by morning, and maybe the gubs would fertilize some gub eggs inside the myoor, and maybe then the myoor would release her captives, and maybe then…well, that was hard to know.

  Really, I wasn’t even sure why the gubs hadn’t been here all along. Maybe they’d been watching from N-space, with the spotted gub telling the green gub that we were doing a good job.

  “Change after change,” mused Dad. “Never a final answer.” He was very clearheaded tonight, not really drinking at all.

  “There’s always the big aha,” said Mom. “Remember, Lennox?”

  “My old slogan,” said Dad.

  “I was never sure what it meant,” I said. “But I think about it a lot.”

  “For awhile Lennox said the big aha was everywhere,” Mom recalled. “Back when he was painting those very loose landscapes. With a palette knife. Beautiful, delicate shades.”

  “They didn’t sell,” said Dad.

  “Too much aha?” said Mom, smiling. “The bowl I made yesterday has big aha. A bulge in one side. A perfect goof.”

  “Zad knows big aha too,” said Dad. “Even if he doesn’t know he knows. My son the artist.”

  “When I’m working, I’m outside of time,” I said. “That feels like big aha.”

  “Vast,” said Jane. “It’s good sitting here.”

  “Waiting for the end of the world,” said Mom. “I haven’t stayed up so late in years.”

  “Love the moon,” said Jane.

  “Gibbous,” said Craig Gurky, who been quietly listening. “That’s a real word. A gibbous moon resembles a butt sticking through a hole in the sky. Why don’t you two guys paint that?”

  “You paint it, Craig,” said Dad. “And we’ll be furniture movers.”

  “Look down there,” interrupted Mom, pointing. “Two people on the myoor. Crazy drunks. Or are those the—”

  “Gnomes!” I exclaimed.

  Little guys in the slanting moonlight, casting long, puddled shadows. Blixxen and Staark, fifty yards apart, calling to each other in guttural tones. I saw glints of metal.

  “They’re cutting into the myoor,” I said. “With Fairyland scimitars. Sharper than anything on Earth.”

  Moments later, two newly freed men were standing on the myoor beside Staark and Blixxen. They looked wobbly, stunned, pale. The gnomes took the men’s hands, and skipped across the surface of the myoor with them, weaving past the mouths, heading towards other side. Somehow I knew the men were Gaven and Whit.

  “Oh no,” said Jane, sharing this realization. “That’s all we need. And nobody can free my mother?”

  “I’ll keep trying, but—”

  A ball of green light burst on the scene. It was the green gub, aglow and aflutter. I could teep her mood—she was pleased with how the myoor had settled in here. She was impressed by our labors, and she’d decided to be satisfied with the relatively small sample of humanity that her myoor had bagged.

  Another burst of light, mostly yellow, and the spotted gub popped out of the aether as well. The pair of gubs circled above the myoor, calling to each other like birds with a nest. They were bigger than ever, the size of trucks, and shaped like legless pigs with pointy snouts, tiny ears, and bright black eyes.

  The spotted gub levitated over to us. He stretched down his waggy saggy snoot and released a juicy wheenk.

  “Duffie says that the dark gub can’t figure out how to get down here,” interpreted Jane. “Duffie’s really glad about that.”

  “Duffie?” said Mom.

  “That’s what they call the spotted gub in Fairyland,” said Jane. “He’s ready for sex with the green one. He’s just hoping that the green gub and her myoor can decide on which two people to use for gub blanks. The spotted gub has two people in particular in he’s pushing for.”

  For a long minute the spotted gub hung there, wobbly and piebald, studying us four with his bright glassy eyes.

  “Don’t even dream of using Jane and me!” I said, making a shooing gesture with my hands.

  “I think the gub-blank gig sounds—interesting,” said Dad softly. “A new existence. A step beyond. Perfect for an old man.”

  “Hush,” said Mom. “That gub is listening to every word.”

  The coarse voices of the gnomes drifted up from the track. Whit and Gaven were gone, but the gnomes were back. They were busying themselves near the spot where the finish line was buried. It seemed they’d extracted another of the myoor’s captives. Jane’s mother? No, no—it was Loulou, pale and bald.

  She crawled a short distance across the myoor and into the stands. She still had her teep, and she homed right in on me. Moments later, Loulou flopped down into a seat at my side. She kissed me in a familiar way. She was still wearing her same unglamorous pants and blouse from Weezie’s party. She smelled like mold and rubbing alcohol. Jane made a sound of distaste.

  “Thirsty,” said Loulou blearily. “How long have I been out?”

  “Here,” I said, handing her a pod of water. “You missed a day and two nights. It’s nearly dawn.”

  “What about Joey?”

  “Still inside the myoor. We’ve got her corralled right here at Churchill Downs, see. I think the gubs will use the myoor to make two babies pretty soon. And I’m hoping the myoor will be releasing everyone after that.”

  Loulou shook her head, recalling her just-ended ordeal. “Being paralyzed inside the myoor—it was like being gone for a million years. At first I was into the myoor’s mind, if you can call it a mind. A slime-pool of life. I tuned out of that, and then I was a speck inside my body, tooling through my veins. Like roads. I had this hallucination that I’d been invited for a tiny sit-down dinner inside every single one of my body’s cells. As if they were apartments, and the cell nuclei were the hosts. It was boring. All we ever talked about was DNA.” Loulou cast a sideways glance at Jane. “I can’t remember if we’re mad at each other or not.”

  “I’m still mad,” said Jane. “About you and Zad.”

  “Like he’s such a prize?”

  “Look out!” said Mom. Blixxen and Staark had jumped into the stands. They were running up the steps towards us with blades in their hands. Everyone was scooting back, making way for them.

  “Need to talk to you, Jane,” puffed Blixxen. Seeing the fear on our faces, he slid his scimitar into his belt. “The deal is that, if you like, we can free your mother for you. Weezie Roller, right? Just come down with us to make sure we carve out the right bumpf.”

  “Why would you suddenly be helping me?” asked Jane.

  “It’s about your oddball,” said Blixxen, making his voice sound exaggeratedly frank and honest. “We’re having trouble using it. If you’ll help us, we’ll help you. And don’t worry about Zad. He just wants to be with Loulou anyway.”

  “Not true!” I cried. “Don’
t go with them, Jane.”

  “Oh, yes I will,” she said, jumping to her feet. She’d lost her temper again. If only Loulou hadn’t kissed me.

  Oh man. I was too worn out to respond. Did I even want Jane at all? She was so much trouble. Always asking for something more. Dejectedly I watched her flounce down the steps. Let her go, Zad. Hell, if Weezie was entombed where the gnomes had cut out Loulou, then Jane would be in sight anyway. I could run and help her if something happened.

  “Do I look horrible with no hair?” Loulou was asking me, running her hands across her bare scalp.

  “You look great. Especially for someone who’s been dead for a million years. You’ll always look good to me, Loulou. You’re smart and you’re qrude. I’m glad we had our time together.”

  “I can’t remember why we broke up. Did the three-way thing bother you that much?”

  “Oh, it was more that I missed Jane. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Jane is really nice to me. When she’s not mad about—about nothing.”

  “You ought to go down there and keep an eye on her,” said Loulou. “I can teep that’s what you want to do. You’re like a compass needle pointing her way.”

  “Loulou’s right,” chimed in Mom. “Go.”

  “I’ll help you,” squeaked Skungy.

  “All right,” I said, pulling myself together.

  It goes without saying that, by the time I’d clattered down from our perch in the stands, the gnomes had kidnapped Jane. They’d clamped their cave-dweller mitts onto her arms and legs, and they were carrying her across the expanse of myoor. She was screaming and struggling.

  Meanwhile the Mr. Normals were so hung-up on containing the myoor, that they weren’t doing anything about Jane. For the moment I didn’t care. I thought it would be qruder to save her on my own. I wasn’t thinking very clearly—what with my fatigue, my raging emotions, and being in cosmic mode.