Skronk threw open the escape hatch and dropped to the cloudsand.
“Everybody out!” he thundered. “End of the line!”
* * *
—
The Black Glacier’s relentless expansion northward piled towering mountains of ice on the flattened corpse of the Dripping Lands. The ice spilled west and north and east, submerging the fringe colonies. The scene was one of chaos and horror. The hanging purple smoke from the blob cannons…The whinnying of terrified yak-dogs…The clatter of the junk strainers on their rumple wagons…The piteous cries of the partially transformed.
Mercifully, the avalanche was brief. When the flurries of black snow finally settled, the entire continent was interred beneath the glacier. Despite this, Empress Alba’s northward journey in the clutches of King Skronk was still in progress.
Alba’s head must have dozed off. She blinked open her eyes and returned to her woozy senses. She was bobbing along in the brisk sea air, rotating this way or that as she dangled by her hair from Skronk’s tool belt. The sunbubble was just setting into the sea, painting shades of crimson across an oversky pale as paper. Skronk seemed to be walking along the crest of a serpentine ridge of humped-up sand. The Secret Piano hobbled along behind, as rapidly as it could manage on three legs. Something huge seemed to have taken a bite out of one corner of it. Skronk was breathing heavily. There was no sign of Young Gumsnot or his tank crab.
Skronk took a running start and leapt a great distance. Alba looked down and saw streaks of sky between parallel sandbars, like sky reflected in puddle water. Skronk landed on the crest of a different ridge. Then Alba realized where they were, and her scalp tingled with fear. Skronk was crossing the Sea of Cirrus. Madness! The man must have a death wish.
“Come on,” Skronk called to the piano. “You can make it.”
By telescoping its legs to their full length, the piano made itself taller than the tallest albino giraffe and gingerly stepped across the gap between cloudwaves. But the commission had to keep moving, because the waves kept moving. If you tarried too long in one spot, they were liable to evaporate out from under you.
“Help!” Alba squeaked.
“You’re awake,” said Skronk.
“Apparently. What happened to Gumsnot?”
“Papier-mâché. As far as I know, we’re the only ones left. Are you in shape for another music recital?”
“Will you be shutting me up in the piano again?”
“No. Something much worse.” He stamped a foot on the cloudsand. “Let’s stop here. This wave should last a while. Long enough for us to save the world anyway.”
Skronk turned around to face the piano and the shoreline. The Black Glacier was massed high on Caravan Beach, but it didn’t dare cross the sea. It would fall right through if it did. One of the disadvantages of being gigantic. Skronk sat down cross-legged on the cloudsand. The piano fell to its knees, panting and wheezing.
“Is this the last piano roll?” asked Alba.
“The very last,” said Skronk. “The bitter end. You’ve regressed through all four of your false memory complexes.”
“Four?”
“Don’t forget the one you woke up with this morning. That one’s been in force for more than two centuries. Alba the rightful monarch. We don’t have a piano roll punched for that one. Not yet anyway.”
“If my delusions are all destroyed, why play me another recital?”
“True memories,” said the Secret Piano.
“What if I don’t want to know them?” asked Alba.
“Oh, you won’t want to know them,” said Skronk. “But you’ll have no choice. Would you mind a little brain surgery before we start?”
“You can’t be serious. Brain surgery? Certainly not, you filthy barbarian. You keep your spiny fingers off of my brain.”
“Relax,” said Skronk, jamming the stump of her neck down into the sand. “It’s all covered in the Secret Manual. Anyone can do it.” Beads of perspiration slid down the cactus king’s thorny face.
“Keep away from me, you ugly troll!”
Skronk removed a tool from his belt and held it in front of his long pointed nose. “This,” he told Alba, “is the Secret Glass Cutter.”
“How thrilling for you.”
“It works on skulls as well as glass. I’ll show you.” Skrankrash began an incision over Alba’s left ear and extended it horizontally around her scalp. “Now hold your nose and blow out your cheeks,” he instructed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Close your eyes, hold your nose, keep your mouth shut, and blow.”
“I can’t hold my nose, Skronk. No hands.”
Skronk scowled. “Oh. Of course. Shall I do it?”
“Do you see anyone else around here with hands?”
Skronk held Alba’s nostrils closed while she blew out her cheeks. The top of her skull popped from her head, rolled cheerfully off the cirrus strand, and fell from sight into the undersky. It is undoubtedly falling still.
“My,” said Alba. “That feels refreshing. Perhaps brains need airing out every few centuries. Like pillows.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.” Skronk unhooked a small tin doodad and a stainless steel rectangle from his belt.
“What are those?”
“This is the Secret Cookie Cutter.”
“Of course. I feel silly for asking. And that?”
“Oh that’s just a cookie sheet.”
“And what does that do?”
“It keeps the cookie from getting sandy.”
“And is this part of the brain surgery, or have you suddenly taken up baking?”
All the while the cirrus strand had been shrinking. Now it was no wider than a tree trunk. Skronk wrapped his legs around it, digging in his thigh spines. The piano was perched in a precarious knock-kneed stance on the three rubber tips of its legs. “Hold still,” Skronk told Alba.
“This is going to hurt like hell.”
“Am I properly sedated?” she asked him brightly.
“Not really.”
Skronk pressed the cookie cutter into Alba’s cerebrum, wiggled it a little, and pulled it out again. Alba’s face went slack. Her sapphire blue eyes went as dead as a pair of buttons. Skronk tapped one edge of the cutter against the cookie sheet. Without a sound, a little gray gingerbread girl flopped from the cutter. (Except that instead of gingerbread, the cookie was made of gray matter.) The brain cookie lay supine on the cold steel and showed no sign of life. Skronk picked up the head and shook it. It rattled. Skronk tossed it over his shoulder. It fell into the undersky. (And will continue to fall for an eternity, so they say.)
Skronk took a pouch from his belt, rummaged in it, and extracted two raisins. He poked the raisins carefully into the head of the brain cookie. Then he sang the cookie a song. Waking up on a strange cookie sheet to hear Skronk the cactus king attempting to sing was arguably the strangest thing that had happened to Alba all day.
“Wake up, wake up, my precious pearl. You must save the world. You’re the Angerbread Girl.”
The cookie sneezed, sat up, and rubbed her raisins. Then she sprang to her feet, took a wide hands-on-hips stance on the cookie sheet, and opened her mouth fissure wide.
“I am Alba Angerbread!” she declared in a booming voice. “I am the Angerbread Girl, and this is my personal world. Who petitions the cookie goddess?”
The Secret Piano breathed a sigh of relief. The regression had succeeded.
Skronk bowed as deeply as he could from a sitting position. “Your Grace. At last.”
“What’s the problem?” demanded the cookie. “Bring it on! I’m ready for anything!”
“Your Grace,” said the cactus king, “Aphasia is on the ropes. A great black glacier has completely buried the cloudlan
ds.”
“To battle!” shrieked the Alba cookie. “Where are my millipedes?”
The cookie dashed between the piano’s legs and bounded south along the cirrus strand, shouting imprecations at the glacier. Skronk took a flying leap over the piano and another leap over the Alba cookie. She ran right past him. Skronk ran after her, begging her to stop. Eventually he managed to coax her back to the spot where the piano stood shivering in the wind.
The piano cleared its throat. “Your Grace, before you ride to battle, we humbly beg that you listen to piano roll alpha. This sacred music will increase your already staggering power and thus ensure our victory.”
“Are you implying that I’m too short to win a battle?” the cookie asked suspiciously.
“Not at all, Your Grace, but—”
“Fine then. I don’t mind a little music before a battle.”
“Play the damned music,” Skronk whispered to the piano. “Before she changes her mind.”
The piano unfolded its screen, while struggling to keep its balance on a writhing shrinking tree branch of cloudsand. The screen was catching a lot of wind, but it had to be unfolded. It was a required component of the regression program. The piano steadied itself, took a deep breath, and began to play. It was a modern piece called “The Boy With the Empty Brain.” There were few pieces the piano liked less. The composition was formless and asymmetrical, with no dominant chord, no resolution.
On-screen was a static video image—the feed from a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera. Nothing moved except for the streaming digits of the time code at one corner of the screen. The camera looked down at a hospital room with two beds. A fat little boy lay in one of the beds. He had bandages around his head, a respirator tube down his throat, an IV tube taped to the crook of his arm, and pacemaker wires running into his chest. His eyes were open, and his chest was rising and falling, but Alba had never seen anybody so dead.
“Who’s that supposed to be?” the brain cookie asked itself.
The piano answered her as it played the piece which it liked so little. “We call him Patient Alpha. At this very moment, a cookie-sized area of his brain is the staging area for the Aphasian cosmos. Five hundred years of Aphasian history have already come to pass inside his skull. He’s a lot like the drowned girl, but his brain death is better maintained. A few minutes between concussion and drowning aren’t sufficient for the building of an ectoid civilization. But twenty-four hours of life support is an eternity. And the doctors are required to keep him breathing that long. Afterwards they’ll be allowed to harvest his organs. Now this particular moment we’re coming up to here—” The time code digits froze. The image froze behind it. “—corresponds to this exact moment in Aphasian time. That twelve-year-old boy on that screen is alive right now. Viewed from the noosphere, you can hardly tell he’s moving. But he is alive. And if he dies, Aphasia dies with him. This is not a history lesson, Alba. This is current events. He’s the key to the glacier, Alba. And you’re the only person in the world who can prolong his miserable life.”
“Why should I do that? I don’t even know him.”
“Why?” echoed the piano. “Because you are him.”
“You’re saying I’m not even a girl? You’re telling me I’m that? I can’t be! He’s gross!”
“The two little girls at the day care center didn’t like him either. They teased him pretty ruthlessly.” Photographs of twelve-year-old girls cross-faded over the freeze-framed video image. The background image was moving now, just barely—a glacially slow zoom toward the face of the little boy with the empty eyes.
“Did he want to get even?” asked the cookie.
“Very much. And he did get even.”
“What did he do? I bet he got in trouble.”
“That’s putting it mildly. He borrowed a power tool from his father’s workshop. He took it to his day care center in his backpack. He only wanted to scare the girls. But in the heat of the moment, he shot at them.”
“Shot at them? With a power tool?”
“A nail gun.”
“Oh dear. I don’t feel well.”
“Luckily the nails produced only flesh wounds. But there was blood just everywhere. And the girls got hysterical of course.”
“He must have run and hid. He must have felt terrible. I feel a little queasy myself.”
“He was deeply ashamed. He knew he’d done something unforgivable. And he had seen enough war movies and crime movies and spy movies and samurai movies and so forth to know the proper course of action for a gunman in such a situation.”
“He…uh…”
“He shot himself in the head. There were articles about it in all the national magazines. He certainly was one twisted little cookie.”
Strangely familiar voices were calling to Alba from hidden fissures of her brainy flesh. They were the voices of the hypothetical people that Alba might have been, and might have preferred being. The dowager empress. The naiad from Saturn. The farm girl. The drowned girl. They wouldn’t leave her alone. Which made sense. She wasn’t alone. She had all these falsified people running around her head. They were insisting that she remember some stupid jingle. They wouldn’t tell her what it was. She had to remember it.
Blue Slime Nest Aphids Can Torture Test Wizened Old Horses. Cold. Buy Some Nasty Apricot Clams Then Taste Wet Oozy Harelips. Warmer.
Boy Shoots Nails At Children Then Turns Weapon On Self.
That’s it. That’s the one. The film provided a montage of newspaper headlines. SEATTLE PARENTS STRICKEN BY DAY CARE TRAGEDY. 12-YEAR-OLD SHOOTS TWO GIRLS THEN SELF WITH NAIL GUN. LINGERS IN CRITICAL CONDITION.
“Right through the roof of the mouth,” said the piano. “With a four-inch nail. He was the perfect spot for the founding of Aphasia. He’s lasted five hundred years with no major disruptions. Then the Black Glacier showed up.”
“But what has this awful little boy got to do with a glacier?”
“What a good question! How clever you are! Do you see that intravenous tube? That’s how they’re feeding him. Without that glucose, he’ll starve. In fact he is starving. There’s a big black blood clot blocking his needle. But the nurses don’t know. He could die right in front of them. There are monitor alarms for pulse and breathing, and a motion detector as well. But they don’t take his blood sample until two a.m. That blood clot is the Black Glacier, Alba. Now ask me what you can do about it.”
“You’re very smart for a piano.”
“Ask me what you can do about the blood clot.”
“What can I possibly do about a blood clot in the real world?! I’ve been hiding from the real world for the last five hundred years!”
“You can gurgle. You can squirm. You could gag. You could twitch. Anything. Anything that might get the attention of a nurse.”
“Out there?! Are you insane?! Aphasia has no connection with the physical plane!”
“Ah, but we do,” interrupted King Skronk. “We have you.”
The piano screen displayed its final title card: HERE ENDS TRUE MEMORY ALPHA: “THE BOY WITH THE EMPTY BRAIN.” THANK YOU FOR WATCHING.*4 The piano delivered its final scherzo with a bravura verging on bombast, and with all possible speed.
“If that little brat dies,” said Skronk, “thousands of innocent ectoids will be cast adrift. And as for you, Alba, you’ll just croak. One more disadvantage of being real.”
“Well, that hardly seems fair.”
“It’s the boy we’re concerned with, not you,” snapped the piano. “The boy is dying as we speak. Aphasia is ending.”
At this point the piano’s rhetoric carried it away and it stamped one of its legs for emphasis. The tip of the leg slid off the cloudsand. With a horrible fading scream, the piano fell into the undersky. (And you know what that means.)
Skronk crossed his a
rms over his chest and struck a pose of noble outrage. “Now, great goddess, you must defeat the evil blood clot. If you fail, then the Secret Piano has died in vain.”
“Relax,” said the cookie. “I know just what to do. I’ll make the boy gag and choke.”
“How will you manage it?” Skronk queried worshipfully. He was hanging from the cirrus strand by the crook of one arm at this point, and the wind was blowing like a mad thing all around them. “Has a small gray cookie such power?”
“Of course I have! I’m Patient Alpha, Empress of All Aphasia! I may not have created it, but I was sacrificed to it, and that ought to count for something.”
“What will you do, great cookie goddess?”
“I’ll vomit. I’ll puke all over that ugly glacier. That will teach it. I’ll fill up the little boy’s brain with vomit. He’ll have to gag and choke.”
“A brilliant plan, great goddess. I am awestruck. I am like unto the dust at your feet.”
And so he was. Somehow she was towering over Skronk and over the glacier as well. She must have grown larger during the music. In fact she could see all the way to the far side of Aphasia. Except that it was the far side of this rude glacier that was so rudely lying prone on top of her clouds without her permission. She was taller than the Plateau of Stratus! Yet she was balancing on a cloud filament no thicker than a twig.
Skronk was hanging from the cloud twig by his sharp green fingers. “Well?” he snarled. “Getting impressed with yourself? What are you waiting for? Save the damned world!”
The bile of Alba Angerbread’s rage swelled her brain belly. It filled her brain legs with bitter yellow syrup. Her cookie head inflated with rage gas, bugging out her raisins. Her body shook with barely contained lightning. Her legs felt like mile-high slabs of brain that were rooted in the undersky. Somehow it was supporting her. It wouldn’t let her fall.
“I’ll save everything! I will! I’ll drown this whole cosmos in vomit if I have to! That glacier has got to go!”
Alba jammed her giant brain hands like blunt mittens down her giant brain throat. Up came the luminous boiling vomit of anger. The world-preserving vomit gushed out of her like magma, like a thousand Niagaras, like a tidal wave of hatred. It rushed across the Sea of Cirrus, and somehow not a drop of it fell through the cracks.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 135
