by Rudy Rucker
“In a minute,” I said. “Right now I’m happy to look at normal things. Robotic grown-up that I am.”
“Did I tell you that I really liked your Mr. Normal nurb?”
“You told me. It made me glad. My nurb SubZad, he helped me design him.” We sat in silence on the couch for a minute. I longed to melt into cosmic mode and share some teep with Jane, but I didn’t dare. Instead I put my arms around her. Smelling her salt and honeysuckle. Almost as good.
“My poor Mom,” said Jane against my shoulder.
And poor Loulou, I silently thought. I felt bad that Loulou and I hadn’t parted as friends. She’d looked terrible inside the myoor.
“I don’t see how we’re supposed to handle the myoor without Junko and Joey to help,” Jane was saying.
“I wonder if Gaven’s going to be working against us,” I said.
“I heard on the news that he’s been arrested. They’re blaming the qwet and the wormholes on him. He’s locked up right here in Louisville. With everything in a panic, they don’t have a way of moving him out. Serves him right for helping Whit. Stupid turd.”
I didn’t want to think about Gaven. “We might get busted, too, now that we’re back,” I said. “We have to work fast. Jeptha said something about us luring the myoor down to Earth. And I have an idea—I guess I got it from the spotted gub. The myoor’s wormholes—they run from Earth up into pouches in the myoor’s body in Fairyland, see. If you got some kind of weird momentum going, the myoor might dribble down to Earth through her wormholes.”
“Fountains of stinky meat,” mused Jane. “And even if the myoor survived that, we’d have her on our own turf. And maybe we get the army to attack her.”
“I don’t trust the government,” I said. “The Department of Genomics trashed my store, and the Louisville cops were going to kill me. The spotted gub and us qrudes should take care of the myoor ourselves. And we’ll have to free the people who the myoor swallowed.”
Just then the spotted gub called to us from the bedroom. At first I heard his voice as a curly squeal, but then, prompted by Jane, I began picking up on the words within the sound.
“Cosmic Flip Trip zonk bomb fest,” the gub was saying. “I heard Zad thunking the myoor falls in her fishing hole. Good catch.”
Jane and I went into the bedroom. The spotted gub was resting with his fat end on our bed, with his snout sticking up like the root of a turnip. Jane’s little possessions were scattered around him. His body had made a yellow stain on our sheets.
“How long do you plan to stay here?” I asked. “You’re ruining the bed.” We might be allied with this bizarre, possibly divine being—but he didn’t have to share our apartment.
“Myoor see big crowd at Cosmic Flip Trip wacky wack leans too far and falls out seven hundred and seventy-seven windows eeek,” said the gub, his dark, shiny eyes twinkling. He seemed to be having a good time.
“Cosmic Flip Trip,” echoed Jane. “I feel like the gub found that phrase in my head. Can you see what’s next?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
I marshaled my thoughts. “All the qrudes in Louisville go into cosmic mode at once, see? And when the wormholes come swarming, we snap into severe robotic mode, and the baffled wormholes are fumbling around, and we yank on them with ropes, and the myoor breaks into pieces and we’re dragging her through the holes. Maybe she gloms back together down here. But, hmm, what then? How do we free the people she’s swallowed? How do we eliminate what’s left of the myoor when we’re done? Spotted gub, can you show us more?”
The gub let out a twirly squeal that set a stream of images to blooming in my head. Aha. Our path was a little less foggy than before.
At this point the spotted gub wanted to get back to chasing after the green one. The creator of our cosmos. The spotted gub wanted to fuck god. Go for it, qrude.
Still sitting upright our bed, the gub made his pointed snout disappear, and then his sloping shoulders and then his dirty-white brindle-spotted butt, and then he was entirely gone. Off in some higher dimension.
Jane got into some immediate and practical housekeeping concerns. “I can’t even look at those stains on the sheets. Good thing the bed’s a nurb. I’ll have it run its self-cleaning routine. No use trying to order a new bed nurb, what with everyone leaving town.”
“You’re down with my battle plan?” I asked, sending her some images of what I had in mind.
“Ready to roll,” said Jane. “Def! I’ll work out the campaign for the Cosmic Flip Trip, and I’ll get the ad online in less than an hour.”
“We won’t actually tell people that they’ll be bait for the myoor, will we?”
“Duh! We tell them it’s, I don’t know, a civic reclamation ritual. A transdimensional squonk fest. Social healing. At Churchill Downs. Free beer and chicken. Whiskey and ham. I’ll get Skeezix and Bag Stagger to play. Or maybe Tawny Krush.”
“Bag Stagger is perfect,” I said. “They already conjured up the wormholes once, right? At the Funhouse party.”
“We don’t stress that aspect at all,” said Jane, and shifted into announcer mode, making her voice low and urgent. “The Cosmic Flip Trip. Win back your soul. Get as qrude as you want to. And raise the dead. Come on home, Louisville. It’s party time. Brought to you by Jane Says.”
“When is this party going to be?”
“Tonight,” said Jane with a shrug. “Why dilly dally? We’re facing the—what’s the word? Judgment Day. Apocalypse. No time to lose.”
“You can organize the Flip Trip that fast?”
“I’m Jane Says. I’ve got this town wired, Zad. You know that.”
“I’ll get cranking on the tech prep,” I said. “I want to make some special nurb vines for pulling down the myoor. And a thousand copies of Mr. Normal, ready to flash. The biggest strobe-light event of all time. We’ll use the flicker to corral the myoor in one spot. On the track. And then we’ll find a way to deal.”
“Love it,” said Jane. “Let’s build the yanking vines and the Mr. Normals downtown—instead of way out at the Funhouse in Glenview.”
“We’ll use Craig Gurky’s shop,” I proposed. “It’s huge, like a warehouse. We’ll need—sixty tons of nurb-gel? Can we get that from the Roller plant?”
“If anyone’s still in town. How big is sixty tons?”
“Maybe four elephruk loads? Darby and one of the elephruks can do it. Did I tell you the myoor spit her back out? After that first wormhole swallowed her in the barn? And Darby made herself a new leg.”
“Good old Darby,” said Jane. “Remember we were riding on her back at my eleventh birthday party, and I wanted you to hold my hand, and you were sneezing because of the hay?”
“I was pretending to sneeze,” I said. “I thought it was funny.”
“You were very immature.”
“I’ll hold your hand now.”
“That’s nice. And you’ll call Kenny about the gel, and I’ll work up my ad. By the way, I already said hi to Kenny while you were on the nod and the ants were patching you. Kenny and Kristo plan to keep living in the Funhouse.”
“Not pushing his luck with the jellies, huh? I’ll ask him to meet us at Gurky’s place. He can bring my Mr. Normal and my SubZad. And meanwhile Darby starts hauling gel. I hope everything clicks.”
“It will,” said Jane. “It’s fated. Written in the sands of time. I get the feeling that the spotted gub already knows everything that’s going to happen.”
“Magic pig that he is,” I said. “I can’t believe the weird shit that’s come down the last few days.”
“A kaleidoscope roller-coaster,” said Jane. “And wait till—” She paused and made an encouraging gesture. We intoned the tag line together. “Cosmic Flip Trip!”
I called Craig Gurky on my wristphone. It was reassuring to see his wide, homely face. “You still in your shop?” I asked.
“Sobbing, elated reassurances to you as well, Zad. I’m here, but Mom skedaddled to Aunt Effie’s in Chicago.”
“Jane and I are coming over right now, okay? And probably her brother Kenny. We want to use your space for, for—oh, it’s complicated. You’ll like it. I’ll tell you the rest in person.”
“Jane and Kenny? Ooh la la. I’ll put on nice clothes.”
“See you soon. Stay robotic, qrude.”
I checked in with Kenny, and he said that there were still a few people at the Roller plant, and that they’d send thirty tons of nurb-gel over to Craig’s, with thirty more to come. Like the rest of us, Kenny was ready to try anything.
“Zing!” said Jane, looking up from her wristphone. “I’m releasing my ad. It’s rough, but rough is more convincing. And it’ll evolve.”
“You already lined up Churchill Downs and the food and all that?”
“More or less,” said Jane, making a languid, high-society motion with her hand. “As long as enough people come—something’ll happen. It’s not like they’d be using the track for races today, with the city a disaster zone. Skeezix and Bag Stagger will be down with performing for sure. So let’s stride.”
On the way to Craig Gurky’s we saw Ned White from the jewelry store get eaten by a myoor wormhole. It was terrible. Some people had looted Ned’s jewelry store on their way out of town, and Ned was drunk, standing in the empty street with a pumpkin of whiskey, yelling that he was the last man standing, and that Louisville was still his town. He looked over at us with a unhappy, open-mouthed grin, holding up the pumpkin, offering to share. The air got a little wriggly. I thought it was the alcohol fumes, but then a ball of leathery meat formed behind Ned.
Somehow he knew the ball was there—he heard it or teeped it or felt a breeze. He ran towards us, dropping the pumpkin. It split open with a splash. Just as Ned passed us, the myoor mouth caught up with him; it opened wide and clamped over his head. Ned fell awkwardly to his knees. Jane and I tried to pull back on his legs, like the others had done for me on the terrace last night. But the wormhole was determined. With two or three jerking gulps it swallowed him whole. Like a rattlesnake eating a mouse. And then the clenched myoor mouth disappeared.
I heard a grating voice from a second floor window. Two short men were up there, half in the shadows. One had a beard, and the other, even shorter than the first, had unnaturally thick arms. Blixxen and Staark from Fairyland. Blixxen crooked his finger at me, beckoning. He was trying for a friendly smile, but it wasn’t working. Staark made a broader come-on-up gesture. The gnomes wanted us for something. A deal? After nearly cutting my head off?
“Those are the gnomes from the cave!” cried Jane, standing stock still. “How can they even be here?”
“Let’s not find out,” I said, taking her by the arm and urging her forward. I was half-worried the gnomes would leap down from the window and come after us. But when I glanced back at them, they were just watching us, with Blixxen’s beard moving as he murmured something to Staark—whose lips were twisted in a nasty smile.
Staying robotic, moving stiffly, walking as fast as we could, jumping at every sound, Jane and I made our way down the block to Gurky Movers.
“Stupid greeting!” exclaimed Craig as we walked into his echoing, empty warehouse with its ancient brick walls. Craig was amusing himself with one of his metalanguage routines. “Brave and humorous aside. Unrealistically hopeful speculation. Stout affirmation of solidarity. Lewd sexual innuendo directed at your mate.”
Jane and I looked at each other and laughed—a little hysterically. We were so glad to be away from Ned getting eaten, away from the sinister gnomes, and here with our harmlessly weird old friend. We’d made it to Craig’s and we had a chance of saving the world.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you, Craig?” said Jane, just to be talking. “Why don’t you ever find a woman to date?”
“I’m not really interested in women that way,” said Craig, suddenly serious. “I’ve been living a lie. For my mother’s sake.”
“She’s gone now,” I said, eyeing Craig to see if he was going to crack. I was in a wild, abandoned mood. “Mom’s in Chicago. Go wild, qrude. Shed your character armor. Let yourself ooze.”
“It’s Kenny that I crave,” murmured Craig. He stared at Jane and me, his expression blank. “There. I’ve said it.”
And then Kenny arrived, along with SubZad, Mr. Normal—and Skungy the rat. They’d ridden from the Funhouse on three road spiders.
“No Kristo?” said Craig, his eyebrows twitching out of control.
“Kristo figures there’s more wormhole danger downtown than out in the country,” said Kenny carelessly. “And maybe he’s right. The myoor has a way of focusing her attention on crowds.”
“We’re right here,” said Craig, moving closer to Kenny. “You and I.”
Kenny looked Craig in the eye, assessing him. “Did you wave on Zad’s Mr. Normal yet, Craig? He has a completely average personality, but with a blinking lightbulb in place of a head. Kind of like you.” Kenny paused, smiled. “You never told me you were queer.”
“I’ll compose my response,” said Craig, backing away.
Meanwhile Jane and I were greeting my nurb twin SubZad. “Glad to see you,” I told him.
“Likewise, qrude. Can you tell us apart, Jane?” The question was kind of a joke, as the excited SubZad was cycling from robotic to cosmic and back, now like a whittled carving, now like a Galaxy-Z slime-mold man.
Jane smiled. “I think Zad’s skin is warmer, right?”
“What about me?” shrilled Skungy, crawling up my leg. “Aren’t you excited to have me back?”
“Sure I am,” I said. “I could have used you in Fairyland.”
“Next time take me along.”
“Where were you when I went into the oddball?”
“Hiding.”
Darby and a fellow elephruk arrived and they dumped out the first thirty tons of nurb-gel we’d be getting. I led Mr. Normal over to the two piles of gel and I set him to crafting copies of himself.
It was safer to let my nurb helpers get into cosmic mode and do the genemodding. The myoor wasn’t attracted by nurbs who were in cosmic mode. But if I risked cosmic mode, a wormhole would be likely to appear almost immediately.
I told SubZad about the luminous whips I wanted us to use against the wormholes, and began crafting those, using biomodding to grow them from the gel. The whips were slender, incredibly strong vines, fifteen or twenty feet long, reinforced by monomolecular protein filaments. Each whip had a handle on one end, for pulling. And the business ends had curved thorns, for catching hold of the wormholes’ flesh.
Jane was steadily monitoring the reactions to her online ad, repeatedly tweaking the ad as it reproduced and spread. To pass the time while she did this, she rode Darby back and forth between Craig’s place and the Roller plant while the elephruks fetched the second load of nurb-gel.
Jazzed about having company, and about having more-or-less revealed himself to Kenny, Craig was pacing around his big space, alternately rubbing his hands and scrawling on a paper with an ancient pencil. Craig’s four-foot-tall mover golems Bonk and Gustav strode the old stone floors with their owner, mimicking his hand gestures and the abrupt, quizzical motions of his head.
By the time we were done crafting our army the sun was going down. A squadron of a thousand Mr. Normals stood in formation, a twenty by fifty array, bulb after bulb lined up, like in a carton of eggs. I’d rigged it so the bulbs acted as eyeballs too.
To bring them up to maximum power, we got one of the Roller elephruks to bring in two loads of Roller chow, filling the warehouse with the smell of fine, Kentucky tobacco. Skungy ate as much of it as he could, but he was no match for the thousand Mr. Normals. With their green-glowing whips in hand, the Mr. Normals were kind of scary.
While all this was going on, we were doing our damndest to stay robotic. No spacing out, no staring into the distance, no merging into a comfortable vibe with your pals. Everything strict and precise, and everyone at an arm’s length.
I wanted some kind
of kicks, so I got the Mr. Normals to start flashing. No two of them were exactly in synch, and they dialed their strobe speed up and down the frequency scale until they’d located a maximally corrosive vibe. Disco fever. Craig Gurky dug it, indeed he started dancing a hip-hop jig. But Kenny started yelling he was worried he’d have a seizure. And Jane said the strobes might zone us out and turn us cosmic. So out went the lights.
“We are so ready to herd that myoor,” said Kenny. “Right, Craig?”
Craig offered a courtly bow. He hadn’t uttered a word for several hours.
“Plenty of people at Churchill Downs already,” said Jane. “A few hundred, anyway. Every qrude who’s still alive and still in town is heading there. They knocked down the racetrack gates and they’re inside. Bag Stagger’s starting to play.”
“Is there food for the people?” I asked. “Free beer and chicken? Like you said?”
“Don’t be so petty,” said Jane dismissively. “I just said that for flash. And then I changed the party to a potluck. People have whiskey pumpkins and beer dogs and horns of plenty. Everyone’s looted all sorts of crap.”
“End times, qrude,” said Kenny. “Let’s hit it. Jane and Zad, you can use the two spiders that the nurbs rode over on. And, Craig, you can ride on my spider with me.”
“I’d like that,” said Craig, beginning to relax for about the first time in his life. “Here.” He handed Kenny the square of paper he’d been revising all afternoon. Kenny studied it, smiled slightly, and put the scrap in his pocket. I never did find out what it said. Maybe it was a love poem. Or, who knows, a hopeful drawing of Craig and Kenny hugging each other.
But I had no time to think about this. We heard people outside. I went to the door with Jane and SubZad. Golden Louisville twilight. A heavy automobile had pulled up in front of Gurky Movers—my slugfoot Lincoln convertible, the one the cops had impounded. And, yes, Lief Larson and his bullying deputy Grommet were in the front seat. Gaven Graber was riding in the rear, seemingly at liberty, but I had the feeling Grommet would shoot Gaven if he tried to run away.
“I’ll front for you,” said SubZad, pushing past me, wearing a face of stone. “You hang back. Make a new copy of me one of these days. Or not.” Nurbs didn’t care as much about dying as people do. SubZad started towards the Lincoln, head held high.
