by Rudy Rucker
Tad’s words sent a chill through my veins. With Harry so drunk, what chance did we stand against those guards? If I died here, would I really be dead? This was really just a kind of dream, wasn’t it? Yet what if you have a dream so bad that you die of a heart attack during the dream? Perhaps every time someone dies in his sleep of a heart attack, the attack is in fact coupled with a dream of overwhelming power in which the person experiences death in great detail. Who can tell?
The palace guards were only some fifty meters ahead of us now. They could see there was something fishy about us. As we drew closer, they raised their weapons and aimed.
“All right,” said Harry in his normal voice. He’d willed himself sober, just like that. He sat up straight and stepped on the gas. “Beam them, Fletch. You can shoot over my shoulder.”
I dialed my disintegrator ray to maximum fan and blasted away. I was already a murderer from smashing that supermarket manager’s spine-rider. Kill one, kill twenty. Most of the palace guards turned to dust. The survivors took to their heels. I retched up a mouthful of stomach acid. Killing wasn’t something I could learn to enjoy.
Harry kept the hammer down, and we smashed through a set of ironwork gates. There were marble stairs up ahead. We took them like we had square wheels. The lovely gardens were all around us, fountains and geometric beds of flowers. Some pretty women with bare backs were lounging on the lawns.
A hot beam of red laser light speared down from one of the palace’s slim watchtowers. The beam burned a hole in our Cadillac’s hood, and then the engine died.
“I’ll handle that,” said Harry. He aimed his time-reversing ray gun at the distant laser cannon. Our engine started back up, the hole in the hood sealed over, and the laser energy returned to its source. Smoke poured out of that slim minaret—smoke and screams.
Our car stumbled up a last marble staircase and coughed to a stop. The four of us jumped out, guns at the ready. We were standing under a huge, pillared portico. Before us was the palace entrance, a Moorish arch with massive bronze doors. The doors were open and unguarded.
I felt weak and sick, but Harry’s drunkenness was miraculously gone. Master of space and time.
Sondra was in high gear. “What’s your anti-self going to look like, Harry? Tad and Joe say it’s a giant slug. Let’s be sure to steal some jewels after we kill it. I guess you know it’s already eleven twenty-five? We better hurry. I can’t wait for my friend Donna to see my new look. Maybe I’ll go on TV. Do you think Dr. Bitter will approve?”
“That big Gary Herber’s in the central courtyard,” said Tad. “Let’s hang real tight.”
He went in first, then Harry and Sondra, then me.
Something dropped onto the nape of my neck just as I walked through the door.
Oh, no! The soft moist Herber-slug slid down between my shoulder blades and plugged itself into my nervous system. I felt a wild tingling.
“duck into the next doorway,” said a little voice in my head. The voice of the parasitic glob that had just taken over my will. I struggled to yell to the others, but instead I whipped in through the first doorway we passed.
“Fletch?” called Harry from the hall. “Where’d he go, Sondra? HEY, FLETCHER!”
I was running as fast as my legs would carry me. Through a cloakroom, out into a courtyard, through a door, and into a bedroom. There was a woman, a naked odalisque on a big mound of cushions. She had jet-black hair and lily-white skin. Almond eyes, a long straight nose, large nipples, heavy-duty thighs. I burrowed under her cushions like a rat taking cover. It felt nice down there: the silky cushions, the woman’s odor and weight. I tried to wriggle into a position where I’d be able to . . .
“be still,” said the voice in my head.
I stopped moving and thought a message back: “who are you?”
“i’m a scion of gary herber, thank you for your body.”
“i wasn’t really done with it yet.” For some reason I was kind of enjoying this. The parasite kept a pleasant tingle going all through my nerves, “you’ll have to release me, i’m from another world.”
“i know, we want to go there.”
“no! you can’t! it’s—”
“shhh!”
Footsteps sounded in the courtyard outside. Fat Harry, weird Tad, and sexy Sondra. They’d never find me here. I should have been screaming for help, but instead I felt like giggling. The slug had really taken me over.
“Uh, excuse me, miss, have you seen my friend?” Harry’s voice.
The odalisque shifted about, but she didn’t answer.
“She won’t pick up on you,” said Tad. “Herber’s dollies don’t talk to strangers.”
“What would a giant brain want with slave girls?” asked Sondra.
“What Gary wants with women? He milks them, like. GABA fluid from their spines. You dig that plastic coupling down on her back?”
“Oooooo! Awful! Well, read her mind, Harry. You can do telepathy, can’t you?”
“Stap my vitals!” exclaimed Tad. “Telepathy!”
“Yeah, I can do it,” rumbled Harry, “but that would be too—”
“Harry, in less than half an hour, our magic door out of this place is going to disappear. And now something’s happened to Joe. Use your goddamn telepathy or I’ll—”
“Oh, all right.”
“. . . cushion . . .” was all that me and my rider were thinking. A masquerade. We held our joint consciousness in the mind-set of a “. . . cushion . . .”
The odalisque must have some kind of block up too. After a minute Harry stopped scanning. I could feel the difference. “I don’t find him anywhere, Sondra. But I think he’s hiding somewhere nearby.”
“Why would he hide?”
“Oh, Fletcher’s weird. He’s weirder than you realize, Sondra. People always say that I’m crazy, but Fletcher is much worse. He’s sneaky about being crazy. The guy needs help, I mean it.”
“. . . cushion . . .”
“Well, what are we going to do?”
“Let’s go ahead and kill that giant brain,” urged Tad. “You’ve got to do that for us before you leave.”
“But what about Joe,” protested Sondra. “We can’t just forget about him.”
“. . . cushion . . .”
“If he gets stuck here, it’s his own damn fault. He’s hiding from me, I tell you. He’s got a telepathy block up, and this woman has one too. I can’t read anyone’s mind but yours and Tad’s, Sondra.”
“Oooooo! What are we thinking, Harry?”
“You don’t want to know. Tad, which way is it to the central courtyard? I’ll teleport the three of us there. Maybe Gary Herber can tell us where Fletcher is.”
“That’s cool,” said Tad. “Joe’s probably wearing a brain on his back right now. The courtyard is—that way, about one hundred meters.”
“Okay.”
The voices disappeared. I crawled out from under the cushions and sat up. The big odalisque licked her lips. She had a large tongue and a cruel mouth. I sighed and laid my head down on her shoulder. She ran one hand over my face, and with her other hand she drew a few drops of spinal fluid out of the tap at the bottom of her back. Gently she rubbed the fluid into my spine-rider. I shuddered with pleasure. This was really living.
“where is the door to your world?” The slug’s sudden question caught me by surprise.
“i can’t tell you that.”
“you must.”
A silent struggle ensued. The spine-rider probed at my thoughts, trying to winkle out the precious secret. I sought to hide the secret in jingles, in emotions, in hebephrenic repetitions of random fact. But the parasite was too strong for me. In less than a minute I was beaten. The image of the street where we’d arrived formed in my mind. The spine-rider goaded me to my feet.
“Please call a taxi,” I heard myself telling the handsome dark-haired woman. “And make sure the driver has a Herber scion.”
She picked up a telephone and began dialing.
/> “And take this disintegrator ray,” my voice added. “It may prove useful in the fight against those three intruders.”
The woman took my gun and spoke softly into the phone.
“that gun isn’t going to help against Harry,” I thought to the bad brain on my back, “he’s master of space and time, if he gets mad he’ll wipe out big Gary and every single one of you scions.”
“all the more reason to send one of us over to your world, now, run!”
12
Midnight Rambler
I ran back out the palace the way I’d come in Some humpbacked guards were out on the portico, but since I too had a spine-rider, they let me pass. I ran all the way down to the street. I was exhausted and out of breath, but my scion wouldn’t let me stop.
Just as 1 got to the curb, a taxi pulled up. I jumped in the front, and we took off. The driver was a tall, muscle-faced man with round shoulders. Instead of addressing him directly, I pulled up our shirts and let our Gary-brains touch. Once the driver got the picture, he really stepped on the gas.
Looking out the window I tried to tell which of the pedestrians wore a scion on his or her back. Only about one in ten. Yet the others were so beaten down by Herber’s rule that they might just as well have had one of the parasites plugged into their nervous systems. No one smiled; there was no sense of play. This was a city of statistics, of interchangeable bodies carrying out Gary Herber’s tasks. I felt like a cockroach in an anthill.
Yet all the while the tingling in my nerves continued to fill me with a sort of secret pleasure. I may have looked like a zombie, but on some level I was having fun. It was perhaps a little like being a wirehead. I watched the scenery whip past and tried not to think about what came next.
The taxi pulled up to the spot where this whole adventure had started. There was the mirror image of Harry’s shop. The driver and I hurried inside. The copy of the blunzing chamber was still there: a big metal box, two meters on a side.
“send him through and then destroy it!” said the voice in my head.
Send him through? I took a good look at the driver. He was a strong, mean-looking character with short black hair. Send him through and let the Herber-scions invade Earth? “no” I protested, “please not that.”
A lash of pain swept up my spine and into my skull. I fought it as long as I could and lost again. Numbly I watched myself open the blunzing chamber’s door. Over on the other side I could see upside-down Antie, still waiting for her master.
The Gary-brained driver took a running jump and leaped through the magic door. He flipped, landed smoothly on the other side, and took off at a run. Tears welled out of my eyes and streamed down my cheeks. My arms swung the door shut.
“now let’s smash it,” said the voice in my head, “i want my brother brain to be safe from harry.”
My body hurried across the room to pick up a sledgehammer I’d noticed before. My arms put all their strength into the first blow, and the hammer smashed a hole in one of the chamber’s sides.
It was the side that led into the Micro world. A pseudopod lashed out from the hole I’d made and ingested the head of my hammer. When I managed to pull it free, my sledgehammer was just an axe handle with an acid-charred end. The giant Microworld amoeba pushed another pseudopod out of the hole and felt around. My spine-rider and I backed off in some confusion.
Just then there was a pop and a rush of air. It was Harry and Sondra. I raised my axe handle and charged at Harry. My Herber-slug wanted me to smash Harry’s skull in. But Harry and Sondra had been expecting trouble. Sondra raised her pink demotivator ray and froze me in mid-lunge.
“It’s Fletcher!” exclaimed Harry. “My worst enemy? Here we’ve been over at the palace killing that giant brain and here’s my so-called pal Fletcher trying to tear down our magic door!”
Harry walked around behind me, careful to stay out of Sondra’s beam. I felt my shirt slide up.
“Wearing a brain, sure enough,” Harry rumbled. “Well, I’ll just—”
A wave of murderous agony began to build inside my skull. That bad brain was going to kill me with it. I prayed a last prayer and prepared to merge into the One. But then—phht—the pain and the spine-rider were all gone. Harry had simply willed it out of existence.
“Turn off the ray, Sondra. He’s clean.”
Slowly I arched my back. My body was my own again.
“Oh, God, Harry, it wasn’t my fault. That—thing was part of Gary Herber. There’s thousands of them all over the city.”
“It’s eleven fifty-six,” Sondra called tautly.
“It’s okay, Fletch, I know it’s not your fault. Too bad you had to give that Arab-looking woman your disintegrator ray, though. She killed poor Tad, and almost got Sondra and me, too.”
“But you took care of the big brain?”
“Yeah. And now I’m going to get all the little ones.” Harry reached into his coat pocket and took out the thumb-sized “echo” of himself that the blunzing chamber had produced. He snapped the little fellow in the air like a handkerchief, and an endless swarm of smaller Harrys appeared as well.
“Okay, boys,” said Harry. “Search and destroy. I want every single Herber scion on the planet to disappear in the next minute.”
“Roger!” piped the tiny ones, and teleported themselves away.
“And meanwhile I’ll fix this.” Harry beamed his time-reversal ray at the hole I’d made in the side of the blunzing chamber. The giant pseudopod slid back, my sledgehammer was whole again, and the rent in the chamber’s side healed over.
“It’s eleven fifty-nine,” said Sondra.
She pulled the magic door open. The view was as before: hyperspace below, moon robots above, microorganisms on the left, and endless hills to the right. There on the other side was our own world, seemingly upside down, and with good old Antie still waiting.
The zillions of tiny Harrys came suddenly swarming back, chattering like schoolchildren. They’d done their job: this world was clean. Tad Beat had not died in vain. The cloud of Harrys settled down on big Harry like flies on cowflop.
Somewhere a bell was tolling twelve. Time to go. Sondra and Harry grabbed me under the arms and flew me through the door.
I crashed to the floor of Harry’s real workshop and shuddered with relief. The bell outside finished tolling midnight, and then the blunzing chamber was just an empty, copper-covered box.
“I can still fly!” exclaimed Sondra. Blond and shapely, she was floating in midair.
“Sure,” said Harry. “It’ll last a few years. I changed the quantum responsiveness of your atoms. As they’re replaced, in the normal course of things, you’ll slowly lose the power.”
“And my money?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Don’t worry. It’s under your bed. I suppose I could have gotten myself something too, but I guess I didn’t want to.”
“Don’t you know what you want, Harry?”
“No. Do you? Does anyone? What’s good today is bad tomorrow, and this year’s disaster is next year’s golden opportunity. I got what I needed—an exciting adventure. I saved that whole planet from the brain-slugs.”
Suddenly I remembered the driver. “Harry, the experiment had one lasting effect you don’t know about. A man jumped through to our world just before you—”
“What?”
“Yes, a man with a spine-rider. With one of the Gary-brains on his back. I wanted to stop him, but—”
“Dr. F.’s right,” volunteered Antie. “A man came through the blunzing chamber just before your return. He ran out onto Suydam Street.”
“Joe!” Sondra wailed. “How could you?”
“I—it wasn’t my fault. Do those special guns still work, Harry?”
Harry threw his ray gun on the floor. “No, I unwished them at the end. I thought they’d be too dangerous to have around. But we’ve got to stop that man before his slug can reproduce! They could take over our whole world!” And then, shockingly, Harry began to laugh, fi
rst in high squeals and then in sloppy guffaws.
I stepped forward and shook him. “Don’t get hysterical, Harry. Sondra! Call the police!”
“I’m not hysterical,” said Harry, still chuckling a little. “I’m just excited. You’re a real pal, Fletch. Who else but you would have found a way to bring Gary Herber back with us?”
“It’s not a game, Harry. This isn’t some wild fantasy anymore. Your superpowers are all gone! Do you have any kind of gun?”
“There’s a flare ray by the cash register,” said Harry, sitting down and wiping the laugh-tears from his eyes.
I found the flare ray and ran out into the street, hoping to spot that taxi driver. The sleazy New Brunswick street was empty, save for a drunk leaning against the wall outside the Terminal Bar.
“Did you see anyone go by in the last five minutes?” I demanded. “A big strong guy with round shoulders?”
The drunk gestured vaguely at the door to the bar. I braced myself and went inside. There were a few drifters and a lady of the night, but no trace of the man I was looking for.
“What’ll it be?” said the bartender, a stocky man with a gray mustache.
“I’m looking for a big guy with round shoulders,” I said. “He just came in here a minute ago.”
The bartender favored me with a look of contempt. “He’s already found his friend for tonight. I think they went to the John. And I’m just trying to run a decent place to drink.”
“Thanks,” I said, and headed for the men’s room. There was a good chance I’d find two men with spine-riders in there. I held my flare ray at the ready.
But the men’s room was empty. There was nothing moving except the air that swept through the open bathroom window. I jumped up on the toilet seat and wriggled out. There was an alley back there, an alley leading out to the main drag. I ran out the alley as fast as I could, but I got to the street too late. A gray car with two round-shouldered men in it was just pulling out. I chanced a shot with the flare ray, but a flare ray’s not much good on plastics. The car sped off, headed toward the turnpike.
