{"id":4469,"date":"2012-11-30T17:16:10","date_gmt":"2012-12-01T01:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4469"},"modified":"2013-06-18T12:56:08","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T20:56:08","slug":"gubs-and-raths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/30\/gubs-and-raths\/","title":{"rendered":"Gubs and Raths"},"content":{"rendered":"

I want to write about some creatures called gubs in my novel The Big Aha. <\/em>A gub is a small green pig from the Higher World, about the size of a football, with floppy triangular ears, and in place of a curly tail, a writhing bunch of purple tentacles. One of them might appear in your room, go gub-gub-gub-wheenk! <\/em>Then streak across the room and disappear right before ramming into your wall. <\/p>\n

Thinking about the gubs, I remembered that I wrote about small green pigs once before, in the Freeware <\/em>volume of my Ware Tetralogy<\/em>, where they were called raths<\/em>.<\/p>\n


\n[Find paperback, ebook, or CC versions of The Ware Tetralogy<\/a>]<\/p>\n

So today I\u2019m posting a couple of passages from <\/em>Freeware dealing with the raths. By way of introducing the material, let me give you a little background on <\/em>Freeware. People have found a way to program lumps of soft intelligent plastic. The stuff can take on all sorts of forms, such as the large, smart descendents of robots who are now known as moldies. My character Corey Rhizome is making small programmed plastic toys that he calls Silly Putters. He\u2019s family friend of a woman named Darla, and her twin daughters Joke and Yoke. <\/em><\/p>\n

And now let the \u201creading\u201d\u009d begin…<\/b><\/p>\n

On the girls\u2019 eleventh birthday, Corey showed up with a set of six brand-new Silly Putters. Chuckling and showing his gray teeth, he upended his knapsack to dump the lively plastic creatures out on the floor. \u201cRemember Lewis Carroll\u2019s Jabberwocky<\/em>, girls?\u201d\u009d he cried. \u201cJokie, can you recite the first two verses?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay,\u201d\u009d said Joke and declaimed the wonderful, time-polished words.<\/p>\n

\u2019Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
\n Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
\nAll mimsy were the borogoves,
\nAnd the mome raths outgrabe.\u201d\u009d<\/em><\/p>\n

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
\nThe jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
\nBeware the Jubjub bird, and shun
\nThe frumious Bandersnatch!<\/em><\/p>\n

As Joke spoke, each of the six new Silly Putters bowed in turn: the tove<\/em>, a combination badger and lizard with corkscrew-shaped nose and tail; the borogove<\/em>, a shabby mop-like bird with long legs and a drooping beak; the rath<\/em>, a small noisy green pig; the Jabberwock<\/em>, a buck-toothed dragon with bat wings and long fingers; the Jubjub bird <\/em>with a wide orange beak like a sideways football and a body that was little more than a purple tuft of feathers; and the Bandersnatch<\/em>, a nasty monkey with a fifth hand at the tip of his grasping tail.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Joke and Yoke shrieked in excitement as the Jabberwocky <\/em>creatures moved about. The Jubjub bird swallowed the rath and regurgitated it. The freed rath gave an angry squeal that rose into a sneezing whistle. The Jabberwock flapped its wings hard enough to rise a few inches off the floor. The tove alternately tried to drill its nose and its tail into the floor. The borogove stalked this way and that, peering at the others but not getting too close to them. And the Bandersnatch snaked its tail behind Yoke and felt her ass.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t!\u201d\u009d said Yoke, slapping at the Bandersnatch\u2019s extra hand. The Bandersnatch gibbered, rubbed its crotch, capered lewdly, and then seized the back of Joke\u2019s leg, shudderingly hunching against the young girl\u2019s calf.<\/p>\n

\u201cI better do some more work on him,\u201d\u009d wheezed Corey, grabbing the Bandersnatch and stuffing the struggling Silly Putter back into his knapsack. \u201cI put so much of myself into each of them that I\u2019m never quite sure how they\u2019ll react to new situations. Quit staring at me like that, girls.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cUncle Corey\u2019s a frumious Bandersnatch,\u201d\u009d giggled Yoke.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was so sick how that thing was pushing on my leg?\u201d\u009d said Joke.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoing it<\/em>,\u201d\u009d whooped Yoke. \u201cOh, look, the Jubjub bird is going to swallow the rath again and make it outgrabe!\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe present tense is outgribe<\/em>,\u201d\u009d corrected the literate Joke. \u201cIt\u2019s like give <\/em>and gave<\/em>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[Now we jump to five or ten years later. At this point, a kind of mind-virus is infecting such soft plastic creatures as the larger “moldies” and the small toy Silly Putters. You need to know that an uvvy is a soft plastic telephone. And Corey Rhizome is worried about a Silly-Putter-like toy dog called Rags that some enemies had sent to attack Darla. And now Darla and her daughters phone Corey.]<\/p>\n

Joke told her uvvy to call Corey, and moments later Corey picked up. With their uvvies linked, Darla and her daughters could channel Corey together.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d\u009d screamed Corey. \u201cWho the f*ck is it?\u201d\u009d Instead of using his uvvy, Corey was yelling at an ancient tabletop vizzy phone with a wall-mounted camera and a broken screen. The brah\u2019s only incoming info was audio. The vizzy\u2019s camera showed Corey slumped at a filthy round kitchen table with the rath and Jubjub bird on top of the table, scrabbling over mounds of tattered palimpsest. The table was further cluttered with ceramic dishes of half-eaten food, a clunky Makita piezomorpher, some scraps of imipolex, and, of course, Corey\u2019s vile jury-rigged smoking equipment.<\/p>\n

The Jubjub bird opened its mouth hugely and clapped it down on the rath\u2019s curly tail. The rath outgrabe mightily, combining the sound of a bellow, a sneeze, and a whistle. Corey winced and leaned forward into his smoke filter to take a long pull from his filthy hookah.<\/p>\n

\u201cCorey,\u201d\u009d spoke up Darla before Joke could say anything. \u201cI\u2019ve been worried about you.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cDarla?\u201d\u009d Corey drew his head out of the fume hood and, shocking to see, there was thick gray smoke trickling out of his nose and mouth. \u201cWhat happened to Rags, Darla? They took my uvvy away. Things are f*cked-up beyond all recognition. How did you deal with Rags?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cI killed him with the needler, no thanks to you. At least the two Silly Putters that I can see in your place look normal.\u201d\u009d The rath extricated its tail from the Jubjub bird\u2019s beak and reared back to drum its green trotters on the Jubjub\u2019s minute, feathered cranium. The Jubjub bird lost its footing and slid off Corey\u2019s table, taking a stress-tuned lava cup with it to clatter about endlessly in the low gravity. The rath outgrabe triumphantly, and the Jubjub bird let out a deep angry caw.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s funny about those two,\u201d\u009d said Corey. \u201cWhenever the others try to infect them, they shake it off . They\u2019re stupid, of course, but certainly no stupider than the Jabberwock or the borogove. I think maybe they\u2019re immune because Willy used a cubic homeostasis algorithm on them instead of the usual quadratic one. It\u2019s been a while. I made them for Joke and Yoke\u2019s eleventh birthday, remember?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou and your gunjy Bandersnatch,\u201d\u009d uvvied Darla nastily.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bandersnatch is bad news,\u201d\u009d said Corey. \u201cI admit it.\u201d\u009d On the floor, the Jubjub bird and the rath were vigorously playing a game of full-tilt leapfrog; repeatedly smacking into the walls and then bouncing around all over the kitchen floor, cawing and outgribing and biting at each other.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So that’s it for the reading. Check out the whole Ware Tetralogy<\/em> if you like. And meanwhile I’m looking forward to having fun with my gubs. Raths redux!<\/p>\n

Gub-gub-gub-wheeeeeeeeeeenk!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want to write about some creatures called gubs in my novel The Big Aha. A gub is a small green pig from the Higher World, about the size of a football, with floppy triangular ears, and in place of a curly tail, a writhing bunch of purple tentacles. One of them might appear in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-the-big-aha"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4469"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4728,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469\/revisions\/4728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}