Curtis’s help. We were able to piece together a long section from one of the
engravings.”
Kane wondered if Curtis should have been involved. Curtis was clever &
authoritarian & the less he knew the better. Kane sensed a primal conflict
between himself & Curtis, building toward a violent release.
Reese moved through the translation, pausing frequently to fill in gaps,
suggest explanations, grapple with alien concepts. Kane found himself moved,
almost against his will, by the story. He gazed out the windows of the
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LEWIS SHINER
auditorium, seeing past the verdant languor of the trees to the desert beyond.
Always poor, always dry, feeding a few vastly alien creatures just enough to
keep them in perpetual warfare. Reese offered no physical description of the
Martians & Kane could only conceive of them in grotesque, cartoon terms.
If anything, he thought, they must have been like Reese. Large, powerful,
but carrying an aura of defeat & doom. What culture could have reached the
peak that Reese described & left so little behind? A single devastated city, the last refuge of the artists & scientists fleeing the final war. Where they waited for the catastrophe of their own making to wipe the oxygen from the
air, boil away the water, lacerate & blister the very stone. The translation made compelling poetry, full of strange pairings & cryptic emphases. In it
Kane saw again the equanimity that moved him so strongly in Molly & Reese.
They had given Kane his own house & Molly came to him there. The
sexuality of their attraction had withered & Kane had come to see in her the power & competence he saw in Reese. His own nature, prone to extremes of
apathy & violence, was in perfect opposition. In the darkness they sat on
Kane’s bed without touching. As Kane listened, she drew him into the power
struggles of the colonists. Without hesitation or encouragement from him
she talked of the panel, taking his knowledge of it for granted. He wondered
if she took his motives for granted too, or if she even cared.
Curtis wanted the panel to power the generators of the colony, to expand,
to solidify. Kane had heard the arguments before, on another world; more or
less, they were the same as his uncle’s. Plodding, methodical, a denial of
impulse or creativity. Molly—& others—wanted the panel to power a ship
that could reach Jupiter, Saturn, beyond. Kane listened in silence, allowing
Molly to engulf him with her dreams, the way she’d engulfed him earlier with
her body. She knew as if by instinct how to reach him, tantalizing him with
the inhuman beauty of the outer planets.
Molly & the void of space were linked by the same relationship as Reese & the ruins. In Reese’s case it was a destiny of annihilation, the merger of his
lost career with the fate of the lost Martians. For Molly it was something
more vital, but still a gesture of despair. Both were prisoners, deprived of the frontiers they needed by an accident of time.
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SOLDIER, SAILOR
After Molly left, Kane took the pistol out of the bottom of his flight bag & stared at it. The voices sang in his mind.
Kane, Molly & Reese went out to the shipyard. Here the remains of the big
ships that had brought the colonists from Earth lay in shining disarray. Broken down in orbit, brought piece by piece to the surface in shuttles, converted
into furniture, tools, decorations. What was left over stretched for five
hundred meters across the pale sand. Kane walked through huge rings of
metal, lightly touching them with gloved hands. It was an edited & polished scrap yard, free from the violence of oxygen & rain.
“From this you’re going to build a ship?” Kane asked.
“There’s still one ship in orbit,” Molly said. “Not that we can get to it, of
course. But yes, between it and the parts here and the panel, we could build
a ship.”
“If,” Kane said, “Curtis were not governor of this colony.”
She didn’t answer. Kane thought about Jupiter. Massive, inhuman,
constructed on a different principle than Earth or Mars. With moons like
worlds, floating under the huge red Eye. He found his breath coming short. His
hands tingled & he heard a roaring in his ears. It didn’t seem important. Reese called his name. Kane tried to answer but couldn’t seem to get his breath.
“Hypoxia,” Reese said.
Molly was standing behind him. “Pressure’s all right.”
“It’s the mixture,” Reese said. “Look out . . .”
Kane sat down. He was aware that Curtis was trying to kill him, gently &
from a distance. Reese disconnected his own tank & traded it for Kane’s. In the moment of the exchange, without air for a second or two, Kane had a
particularly intense occurrence of the vision.
His mind gradually cleared. Molly was driving them back to the base, Reese
lying quietly, living off the air inside his suit. Eyes closed, Reese whispered:
“Don’t talk about this.”
Molly showed Kane where the panel attached to the city power grid, nestled
in wiring like a flat egg. Kane had begun to feel the pressure of time & wanted 267
LEWIS SHINER
as many pieces of the puzzle within reach as possible. Soon he would have to
make his decision.
After sunset Kane sat on his porch & watched the rain. It fell almost
hesitantly, without thunder to announce it or wind to carry it. Puddles of
light from neighboring windows illuminated the grass & trees.
Reese’s suit was missing. Kane did not doubt he’d gone to the ruins. Curtis
had noticed as well. Kane felt the wheel turn under him, exposing a new
segment of the Circle.
When they stole the ship from Canaveral, with the help of his uncle, Kane
had known that Reese was following some elaborate purpose of his own.
Without him Kane would have been helpless; Kane himself seemed to make
little difference to Reese beyond his ability to provide the ship. Still Reese
had taught him to navigate, led him through rigorous physical training,
controlled the mission from the first. Now Kane sensed a shift in the power
balance. His own time had come, his phase, his moment. Or perhaps Reese
had simply diverged, entered the final stage of his own compulsion.
Kane had rejected the idea when it first came to him. But it continued to
haunt him. He thought of Reese, out in the ruins, his labors, his feats of
courage & strength. He thought of the Circle & the great fourth-dimensional being outside time. Of the salt spray & the shining cup & the others who had come before him. And then he knew.
In the darkness Kane lost sense of his own body. His limbs seemed to shrink
& swell as if in a fever dream. Over it all he smelled the stale salt of the sea
& high harmonies rang in his ears.
He dressed in darkness & tucked the pistol into his jeans. Out under the
dome the rain had ended. The stars were smears of brightness behind the
plastic. The lights flickered as Kane switched over to the auxiliary generator, but stayed on. He disconnected the panel with a few precise gestures,
hampered by the pressure of the pistol in his waistband.
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SOLDIER, SAILOR
He sat in the wet grass outside Curtis & Molly’s house until the lights
went out. Curtis finally emerged & headed for the air lock. Suited up, the
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panel in one hand, the pistol dangling from the other, Kane followed him
across the desert. Taking huge strides in the reduced gravity he slowly
gained on Curtis’s headlamp, now almost halfway to the ruins.
At night the desert became an ocean. Freckles of white froth sprayed the dune
tops. Imaginary ships sailed off its edge. The desert seemed to exist in all
dimensionalities, to form a link or stepping stone to the incomprehensible.
“Curtis.”
Curtis turned, startled & Kane shot him through the helmet. Curtis’s face
exploded & a fine spray of blood hissed through shattered glass as the body crumpled to the ground. Kane’s hand throbbed slightly from the kick of the gun in the low pressure. He tossed the weapon into the dirt beside Curtis’s body. Carrying the panel like a shield in his left arm, he noticed the voices had become quieter.
Once he was into the central pit, he had little trouble finding his way. He
went through the airlock & sat down beside Reese.
“How much have you figured out?” Reese asked, not looking around. His
hands rested on the carved circles as if they were dials & knobs. Perhaps
they were.
“Most of it,” Kane said. “I just came to say goodbye.”
Reese turned, nodded. “You took the panel. Have you decided what to do
with it?”
“Not yet.”
The doorframe now surrounded a shimmering, luminous area of force.
Rainbow colors ran off it, reminding Kane of an oil slick or a huge fire opal.
“Will you be able to come back?” Kane asked.
“I don’t care to, either way,” Reese said.
“Good luck.” Kane reached up from where he sat & took Reese’s hand. He
felt the link between them that had never been realized.
Reese nodded & stepped through the shimmering gateway, across billions
of miles of nothingness to a new world, just as the last of the Martian builders 269
LEWIS SHINER
had, while the city above was pounded into rubble. Kane continued to sit &
stare at the shifting pattern. At last he got up & stood beside the opening, hesitating. He stuck one finger into the pulsing glow, felt the summer warmth
beyond. And then he turned & walked away from it, the colors fading to
chilly stone behind him.
Passing the nadir of descent, Kane felt the insistent tug of the Return, a
conceptual rebirth. His pattern nearly finished, he thought of the others who
had walked it. Most of all Jason, the obsessed & broken sailor, whose creaking ship & brine-scented voyage had haunted his dreams. Of Percival, the soldier maddened by his realization of the Pattern, ending his days in futile
subservience to a nameless God.
Kane knew that each of them, the single being they made up & the single
act they performed outside time, would continue. To each of them was a
unique moment, a contribution, a change. Kane knew what his had to be.
Molly was asleep & he was relieved that she did not wake up when he
entered. His voices silent now, Kane set the panel beside her bed. Her Pattern
was yet to come; Kane wondered if Odysseus would sing to her on her
voyages.
Kane’s point of view had begun to shimmer & bleed, like the gate that
Reese had used. Only a force of will held his perceptions together as he suited up & began the walk back to his ship, back to the Earth, back to his kingdom.
270
THE JACK KEROUAC DISEMBODIED
SCHOOL OF POETICS
By Rudy Rucker
I got the tape in Heidelberg. A witch named Karla gave it to me.
I met Karla at Diaconescu’s apartment. Diaconescu, a Romanian, was
interesting in his own right although, balding, he had a “rope-throw” hairdo.
We played chess sometimes in his office, on a marble board with pre-Columbian
pieces. I was supposed to be a mathematician and he was supposed to be a
physicist. His fantasy was that I would help him develop a computer theory of
perception. For my part, I was hoping he had dope. One Sunday I came for tea.
Lots of rolling papers around his place, and lots of what an American would
take to be dope-art. But it was only cheap tobacco, only European avant-
garde. Wine and tea, tea and Mozart. Oh man. Stuck inside of culture with
the freak-out blues again.
Karla had a shiny face, like four foreheads clustered around her basic face-
holes. All in all, it occurred to me, men have nine body-holes, women ten. I
can’t remember if we spoke German or English—English most likely. She was
writing a doctoral dissertation on Jack Kerouac.
Jack K. My main man. Those dreary high school years I read On the Road, then Desolation Angels and Big Sur in college, Mexico City Blues in grad school and, finally, on the actual airplane to actual Heidelberg, I’d read Tristessa:
“All of us trembling in our mortality boots, born to die, BORN TO DIE I
could write it on the wall and on Walls all over America.”
I asked Karla if she had weed. “Well, sure, I mean I will soon,” and she gave me her address. Some kind of sex-angle in there too. “We’ll talk about the beatniks.”
I phoned a few times, and she’d never scored yet. At some point I rode my
bike over to her apartment anyway. Going to visit a strange witchy girl alone
was something I’d never done since marriage. Ringing Karla’s bell felt like
reaching in through a waterfall, like passing through an interface.
She had a scuzzy pad, two rooms on either side of a public hall. Coffee in
her kitchen and cross the hall to look at books in her bedroom. Dope coming
next week maybe.
RUDY RUCKER
Well, there we were, her on the bed with four foreheads and ten holes, me
cross-legged on the floor looking at this and that. Heartbeat, a book by Carolyn Cassady, who married Neal and had Jack for a lover. Xeroxes of
letters between Jack and Neal, traces of the long disintegration, both losing
their raps, word by word, drink by pill, blank years winding down to boredom,
blindness, O. D. death. A long sliding board I’m on too, oh man, oh man, sun
in a meat-bag with nine holes.
Karla could see I was real depressed and in no way about to get on that bed
with her, hole to hole, hole to hole. To cheer me up she brought out something
else: a tape-cassette and a cassette-player. “This is Jack.”
“Him doing a reading?”
“No, no. It’s really him. This is a very special machine. You know how Neal
was involved with the Edgar Cayce people?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know.” The tape-player did look funny. Instead of the speaker there was a sort of cone-shaped hole. And there were no controls,
no fast-forward or reverse, just an on-off switch. I leaned to look at the little tape-cassette. There was a tape in there, but a very fine and silvery sort of
tape. For some reason the case was etched all over in patterns like circuit
diagrams.
“. . . right after death,” Karla was saying in her low, hypnotic voice. “Jack’s complete software is in here as well as his genetic code. There’s only been a
few of these made . . . it’s more than just science, it’s magic.” She clicked the tape into the player. “Go on, Alvin, turn Jack on. He’ll enjoy meeting you.”
I felt dizzy and confused. How long had I been sitting here? How long had
she been talking? I reached for the switch, then hesitated. This scene had
gotten so unreal so fast.
Maybe she’d drugged the coffee?
“Don’t be afraid. Turn him on.” Karla’s voice seemed to come from a long
way away. I clicked the switch.
The tape whined on its spools. I could smell something burning. A little
puff of smoke floated up from the tape-player’s cone, and then there was
more smoke, lots of it. The thick plume writhed and folded back on itself,
forming layer after layer of intricate haze.
The ghostly figure thickened and drew substance from the player’s cone.
At some point it was finished. Jack Kerouac was there standing over me with
a puzzled frown.
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THE JACK KEROUAC DISEMBODIED SCHOOL OF POETICS
Somehow Karla’s coven had caught the Kerouac of 1958, a tough, greasy-
faced mind-assassin still years away from his eventual bloat and blood-
stomach death.
“I was afraid he’d look like a corpse,” I murmured to Karla.
“Well, I feel like a corpse—say a dead horse—what happened?” said
Kerouac. He walked over to the window and looked out. “Whooeee, this
ain’t even Cleveland or the golden tongues of flame. Got any hoocha?” He
turned and glared at me with eyes that were dark vortices. Everything about
him was right except the eyes.
“Do you have any brandy?” I asked Karla.
“No, but I could begin undressing.”
Kerouac and I exchanged a glance of mutual understanding. “Look,” I
suggested, “Jack and I will go out for a bottle and be right back.”
“Oh all right,” Karla sighed. “But you have to carry the player with you.
And hang onto it!”
The soul-player had a carrying strap. As I slung it over my shoulder, Kerouac
staggered a bit. “Easy, Jackson,” he cautioned.
“My name’s Alvin, actually,” I said.
“Al von Actually,” muttered Kerouac. “Let’s rip this joint.”
We clattered down the stairs, his feet as loud as mine. Jack seemed a little
surprised at the street-scene. I think it was his first time in Germany. I wasn’t too well-dressed, and with Jack’s rumpled hair and filthy plaid shirt, we made
a really scurvy pair of Americans. The passers-by, handsome and nicely
dressed, gave us wide berth.
“We can get some brandy down here,” I said, jerking my head. “At the
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