“So why can’t I ride the board?”
“Because, Delbert, because …” Zep gave a long, shuddery sigh and clamped the leash’s fangs into his own ankle. “Because you have a bad attitude and you’ll deal a mess and thrash the board before it gets burnt in. Because it’s mine. Because right now I’m plugged in and you’re not. Because …” Zep paused and smiled oddly. “I don’t like to say the word for what you are.”
“What word?”
“Ho-dad.”
Delbert’s tense frame sagged. “That’s really depressing, Zep.” In the distance a car had begun insistently to honk. At a loss for words, Delbert craned up the cliff at the N-plant parking lot. There was a girl up there, standing next to a car and waving and reaching in through the car window to honk. It was Jen! Delbert turned his back to Zep and waved both arms at Jen. “Come on down, baby,” he screamed. “Zep’s gonna break the board in for me and then I’ll shut down this beach for true!” Jen began slowly to pick her way down the steep cliff path. Delbert turned back to Zep. All smiles. “Be careful, my man. The Pilgrims’ll probably try to ram you.”
“I’m not afraid of Loach,” said Zep softly. “He’s a clone surfer. No sense of freestyle. We’re both ‘dads, man, but we’re still avant-garde. And you, man, you go and put some heavy physical moves on Jen while she’s standing here.”
Zep padded down to the water’s edge, avoiding the lurid, overgrown anemones. Clams squirted dark brown water form their holes. Sand crabs hid with only their antennae showing, dredging the slack warm water for the luminous plankton indigenous to the San Diablo break.
The N-plant made for an empty beach. There was plenty of room in the water, even with the five Stoke Pilgrims out there in a lineup. Floathead and Shrimp Chips were playing tic-tac-toe in the body paints on each other’s chests, and Squid Puppy was fiddling with a wristwatch video game.
Chaos Attractor lit up the instant it hit the water. Zep found himself looking into a percolating, turbulent lens. The board was a window into surfspace. Zep could see the swirling high-dimensional probability fluid, tiny torsion curls composed of tinier curls composed of tinier torsions. It made him almost high on life. Zep flopped belly-down on the board and began paddling out through the wavelets that lapped the shore.
“Hang ten trillion!” called Delbert.
Ripples spread away from Zep’s stick, expanding and crossing paths as they rushed toward the open sea. The water was laced with slimy indigo kelp. Zep thought of jellyfish. In this quap water, they’d be mongo. He kept paddling. The sun looked like the ghost of a silver dollar. He splashed through some parallel lines of number-three wavies. Stroke followed stroke, and finally he was far enough out. He let himself drift, riding up and down on the humping wave embryos. Chaos Attractor was sending out ripples all the time and now things were beginning to …
“Check the zon!” shouted Squid Puppy.
Zep sat up. Row upon row of waves were coming in from the zon, each wave bigger than the one before. The sea was starting to look like a staircase. Remain calm, carver. Nothing too big and nasty. A few even test waves would do nicely. Something with a long, lean lip and a smoothed-under ledge.
“Curl or crawl,” Loach called, glancing sidelong at Zep with a confident sneer.
Zep could feel the power between his legs. The surface of Chaos Attractor was flexing and rippling now, a faithful model of the sea’s surface. Looking down, Zep could see moving beads of color that matched the approaching waves. Wouldn’t it be great if …
The leash fed Zep’s thought to the CAM8. The CAM8 jived the imipolex. The imipolex fed a shudder to the sea. The surface band-pattern changed and …
“Mexican beach break!” screamed Zep.
The huge blue wall came out of nowhere and crashed onto Loach and his glittering board—all in the space of an exclamation point.
Zep aimed into the churning stampede of white foam, endured a moment of watery rage, and shot effortlessly out into calm tides. The real wave-set was marching in now. Zep decided to catch the seventh.
Loach surfaced a few meters off, all uptight. “Carve him, Pilgrims!”
Zep grinned. Not likely.
As the war-painted sea dogs huffed and puffed against the current, he calmly bent his will toward shaping that perfect seventh wave. The Stoke Pilgrims yelled in glee, catching waves from the set. Squid Puppy and Shrimp Chips came after Zep, dogsledding it in zigzags over the curl and down the hollow. Near miss. Here was Zep’s wave. He took his time getting to his feet after a slow takeoff, and looked back to see the prune-faced Mr. Scrote snaking after him, befouling the wave in his eagerness to slyve Zep.
It was time to hang ten.
Zep took a ginger step toward the nose and watched the gliding water rise up. Perfect, perfect…aaauuuuummmm. A shadow fell over Zep. He leaned farther out over the nose, and the shadow grew—like an ever-thicker cloud closing over the sun.
Zep looked back, and he saw that the sky was green and alive with foam, a shivering vault of water. Floating amid that enormous green curved world, which looked like some fathomless cavern made from bottle glass, was a lurid, red-eyed giant—a Macy’s Parade Mr. Scrote.
Zep flicked around, banked back toward the behemoth, and cruised up the slick green tube until he was at Scrote’s eye level. The sight of the bulging capillaries sickened him, and he stretched his arms straight out ahead of him, gripping the very tip of the board with his naked toes. He had all the time in the world. The wave didn’t seem to be breaking anymore.
The green expanse spread out around him. The curve above flowed like melting wax, drawing him into it. Rationally, he knew he was upside down, but it felt more like he was sliding down one side of a vast, translucent bowl. Under the board he could see a shimmering disk of white light, like a fire in the water: Was that the sun? He stepped back to the middle of Chaos Attractor, tilting the board up for greater speed, plunging ever deeper in the maelstrom spiral of the tube. He was nearing the heart of pure foam: the calm, still center of the ever-receding void.
Suddenly, a huge stain came steaming toward him out of the vortex. Gelatin, nausea, quaking purple spots, a glutinous leviathan with purple organs the size of aircraft carriers. Mile upon mile of slithery stinging tendrils drifted behind the thing, stretching clear back to the singular center that had been Zep’s goal.
It was a jellyfish, and…Zep was less than a centimeter tall. It figured, Zep thought, realizing what was up—it figured that he’d shrink. That’s what he’d always wanted from the drugs he couldn’t quite kick: annihilation, cessation of pain, the deep inattention of the zero. The jellyfish steamed closer, lurid as a bad trip, urgently quaking.
Zep sighed and dug in his stick’s back rail. Water shot up, and Zep grew. The jellyfish zoom-lensed back down to size. Chaos Attractor shot up out of the tube, and Zep fell down into the warm gray-and-green sea.
He surfaced into the raging chop and reeled Chaos Attractor in by the leash. Mr. Scrote was behind a crest somewhere, screaming at Loach. “He disappeared, Lex! I swear to God, dude—I had him, and he shrunk to nothing. Flat out disappeared!”
Zep got back on Chaos Attractor and rode some whitewater toward shore. There were Del and Jen, waving and making gestures. Del had his arm around her waist. Off to the right was the stupid N-plant cooling pipe. Zep glared up at the plant, feeling a hot, angry flash of righteous ecological rage. The nuke-pigs said no N-plant could ever explode, but it would be so rad if like this one went up, just to show the pigs that …
Ripples sped over the cooling pipe, and suddenly Zep noticed a cloud of steam or smoke in the air over the N-plant. Had that been there before? And was that rumbling noise thunder? Had to be thunder. Or a jet. Or maybe no. What was that he’d been thinking about an explosion? Forget it! Think pro-nuke, Zep baby!
When Zep was near shore, Delbert gave Jen a big kiss, dived in, and came stroking out, buoyed by his wet suit. He ducked a breaker or two and then he was holding onto the side of Chaos Attractor, totally stoked.
“I saw that, Zep! It was awesome! It does everything you said it does. It made great waves—and you shrank right up like you were surfing into a zero.”
“Yeah, Del, but listen—”
“Let me try now, Zep. I think I can do it.”
Zep back-paddled, gripping the board between his thighs. “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”
Delbert reddened. “Yeah? You know, Zep, you’re a real wipe sometimes. What is this, huh? You get me to fork over all my savings so you can go and build a board that didn’t cost you a cent in the first place—and now you act like it’s yours! You took my money for a board you would have made anyway!”
“It’s not that, Del. It’s just that—it’s more powerful that I thought. We maybe shouldn’t be using it around here. Look at the nuke.”
“Oh, yeah, try to distract me. What a bunch of crap! Give me that board, Zep. Come on, and the leash, too.”
“Del, look—”
Another spurt of steam went up from the plant. Zep gave thanks that the wind wasn’t blowing their way.
“You two dudes are maka sushi!” yelled Loach.
The Stoke Pilgrims cried out in unison, “Shred ‘em!”
Zep looked away from the board just long enough for Del to grab it away from him. Delbert got up on the board and pushed Zep under, holding him down with his feet and reeling in on the leash. Zep’s foot surfaced, and Delbert ripped the leash fangs out of his ankle. By the time Zep got his head back in the air, Delbert had installed the leash on himself and was paddling away, triumph in his eyes.
“It’s my stick, dude,” called Del.
“Oh, no, Delbert. Please, I swear I’m not goofing. If you do it, you’d better stay really, really cool. Go for the little waves. And don’t look at the N-plant. And if you do look, just remember that it can’t possibly explode. No fancy tricks, dude.”
“Bull!” screamed Delbert, shooting over a small peak. “This gun was built for tricks, Zep, and you know it. That’s the thrill, man!
Anything
can happen! That’s what this is all about!”
Delbert was belly to the board, stroking for the horizon. Back on the beach, Jen had noticed the N-plant’s activity, and she was making gestures of distress. Zep dog-paddled, wondering what to do. Suddenly four of the surf punks surrounded him.
“He looks kind of helpless down there, don’t he,” said Floathead.
“Watch him close,” said Mr. Scrote. “He’s slippery.”
“Let’s use his head for water polo,” suggested Squid Puppy darting the sharp end of his board at Zep.
Zep dove to the bottom and resurfaced, only find the Stoke Pilgrims’ boards nosed in around him like an asterisk with his head at the center. “Mess with my mind, I don’t care,” said Zep. “But just don’t put Delbert uptight.”
“We won’t bother bufu Delbert,” said Mr. Scrote. “He’s Lex’s now.”
“I know this is going to sound weird,” Zep began. “But …”
“Holy righteous mother of God,” interrupted Floathead. “Check out the zon, bros.”
“Far, far, faaar outsider,” someone whispered. The horizon looked bent in the middle, and it took an effort of will to realize that the great smooth bell-curve was an actual wave of actual water. It swelled up and up like a droplet on a faucet, swelled so big that you half expected it to break free of the sea and fly upward into great chaotic spheres. It was far enough off that there still might have been time to reach the safety of the cliffs…but that’s not what the surfers did. They broke formation and raced farther out to sea, out to where they guessed the monster wave would break.
Zep power-stroked out after the others, out toward where Loach and Delbert were waiting, Delbert bobbing up and down with a dismayed expression as Loach kept shouting at him. Just as Zep got there, Loach reached over and smacked Delbert in the face.
Delbert screamed in anger, his face going redder every second. “I’m gonna kill you, Loach!”
“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” cried the Stoke Pilgrims, forming their lineup. “Delbert is a ho-dad!”
“You can’t always bully me, Loach,” continued Delbert. “If you get near me one more time—if you snake in while I’m riding this super wave,
my
wave—it’s all over for you.”
“Oh, I’m shaking,” Loach said, slapping the water as he laughed. “Come on, paddle boy. Do your worst—and I do mean megaworst.” Loach grinned past Del at the other Stoke Pilgrims. “Contest’s over, guys! Let’s take this dip’s board right now!”
Zep watch Delbert’s face run through some fast changes, from helpless to terrified to grim to enraged to psychotic. It was as if some vicious bug had erupted from shy caterpillar Delbert. Some kind of catastrophic transition took place, and Delbert was a death’s head moth. All the while Chaos Attractor was churning out a moiréed blur of weird ripples, making the oncoming wave grow yet more monstrous.
Zep felt himself sucked up into the breast of a mountainous wall of water, a blackish green fortress whose surface rippled and coiled until it formed an immense, godlike face glaring down on all of them. Zep had never seen such cold eyes: The black depths of space had been drawn into them by the chaotic attractor. Sky had bent down to earth, drawing the sea up to see. Del and the Pilgrims and Zep all went rushing up toward a foamy green hell, while below …
Below was the rumbling, and now a ferocious cracking, accompanied by gouts of radioactive steam. Sirens and hooters. High up on the god-wave, Zep looked down and saw the N-plant rocking in its bed, as if nudged from beneath by a gigantic mole. Blue luminescence pulsed upward through the failing N-plant’s shimmering veils of deadly mist, blending into the green savagery of the spray trailing down from their wave. Frantic Jen had flung herself into the surf and was thrashing there, goggling up at the twin catastrophes of N-plant and Neptune’s wave.
Looking up, Zep saw Delbert streaking down the long beaked nose of Neptune while Loach and the Pilgrims skidded down the cheeks, thrown from their boards, eating it.
Zep felt proud.
Delbert, I didn’t know you had it in you. Shut the beach DOWN!
Cracks crazed the surface of the N-plant. It was ready to blow. Way down there was Jen, screaming, “Save me!” like Olive Oyl. Del carved the pure surfspace, sending up a rooster of probability spray, jamming as if he’d been born on silvery, shadowy Chaos Attractor. He looked like he’d been to the edge of the universe and back already. He raved down deep to snatch up his Jen and set her in the board’s center; and then he snapped up the wall to wrap a tight spiral around floundering Zep.