Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Howard was tugging his sleeve; he had something to say. “There’s a thread attached to the rope,” came the deafening whisper. “The little boy is pulling it up.”

  The kid was right. Sharp-eyed little devil. There was a grey thread leading up from the rope. The thread looped over a nail in the air over-head, and the little assistant was surreptitiously reeling the thread in behind his back. Ten francs for such a cheap…a nail in the air?

  The music squeaked, rose higher, and disappeared into the supersonic. The snaker laid down his flute. The end of the rope was up at the nail…it looked more like a thorn, really. With a single precise gesture, the African reached up and attached the rope to the thorn.

  Meanwhile the little boy was sitting on the cube-patterned cloth, binding a long thorn lengthwise to the bottom of each foot. The thorns stuck out in front like crampons.

  “Dix francs,” the speaker cried, pacing back and forth with his long fingers outspread. “Seulement dix francs de plus et mon fils va monter!”

  Quite a crowd had gathered now. Raumer and Howard were in the front row, but the people were three deep behind them. A few coins flew through the air and landed near the snakes. The cobra struck half-heartedly at a twenty-centime piece. The little boy was ready now, a thorn sticking out past the toes of each foot, and a third thorn clasped ice-pick style in his right hand.

  “Encore trois francs!” the father shouted after looking things over. “Encore trois!” One more franc piece landed on the cloth. And then nothing. They all waited. The breeze grew colder. Where was the sun? This was supposed to be June.

  “Lend me two francs, Daddy,” Howard whispered. It looked like no one else was going to cough up. With a sigh Raumer fished his last two coins out. All his family ever wanted from him was money.

  Howard trotted over and handed the coins to the snaker. The man’s hand whipped out and caught Howard by the wrist. He took the little drum from him, and then leaned over and whispered something. Raumer stepped forward, but Howard was already free. The snaker had given him a straw-wrapped package in place of the drum. He skipped back, his eyebrows high with excitement.

  The music started up again. The snaker was playing the flute with one hand and the drum with the other. His mouth remained fixed in the same mask-like expression. The little black boy made a stroboscopic series of gestures and began to climb.

  He held the rope with his left hand only. Foot by foot, hand by hand, he worked himself into the air. He would pull a foot loose, then set the thorn with a sharp kick. Slide the left hand up, reset the right hand, reset the feet. It was like watching a mountain climber kicking ice-steps for himself in a steep snow-field.

  When the boy reached the top of the rope he began pulling the rope up after him. The crowd was absolutely silent. The music wailed and pattered, the flute-tone flowing over the beats like a stream over round stones.

  The boy had the rope coiled over his left shoulder now. Holding himself steady with his right hand, he pulled loose the thorn that had held the rope. He reset it at shoulder level and paused, pressed against the aether like a tree-fog on a windowpane. His thin, wooden-looking limbs tensed.

  Suddenly the boy was gone. The audience broke into a wild hubbub of cheers and questions. Coins rained onto the African’s cloth. He bowed once and began gathering up his snakes. The show was over. People drifted off.

  “There you are. We looked all over.”

  “What did you buy for Howard? What’s he got in his hand?”

  “Dada!”

  Raumer turned with a smile. “We just saw the most incredible thing. This kid climbed up a rope, pulled it up after him and disappeared. The Indian Rope Trick! I’ve read about it for years. And now I understand how it works. I’ve got to ask that guy where the bush …”

  But when he turned back the snaker had disappeared, faded into the crowd, basket and all. Meanwhile Iris had unwrapped Howard’s package.

  “Four stickers!” she exclaimed. “Good for poking!”

  “Let me see those.” Raumer scooped the long, reddish thorns up. Testing, he jabbed one in the air. It dug in and stuck in something invisible.

  “What are you teaching the children, Charlie? They could put each other’s eyes out that way. Throw those things away!”

  Raumer released the thorn cautiously. It stayed fixed in the air where he’d jabbed it. Wonderingly, he looked at the tips of the other three. The tips seemed to bend…yet not bend. They weren’t quite fully there.

  “These are thorns from the legendary bush of Shanker Bhola, Cybele. Aether pitons. I always thought it was only a …” Raumer sat down on the pavement and unlaced a shoe. “It’s as if those coins on the table had little needles to dig into the wood. Then they wouldn’t have to just slide wherever the forces pulled them. They’d be free to climb against gravity through empty space.”

  Raumer had both shoes off now. He laid one of the long thorns inside each shoe and pushed them forward, through the leather. They stuck out the front like toe-spurs. He began lacing the shoes back on, his feet squeezed in over the thorn-shafts.

  “What’s Daddy doing?”

  “I don’t know, Iris. I don’t know what’s the matter with your father.”

  “He wants to climb through the air like the little black boy,” Howard explained. “Those thorns can stick in the air.”

  A few passers-by had gathered to watch Raumer putting his shoes on. “Dix francs!” Howard shouted, getting in the spirit of the thing. His mother had taught him a few words of French. He held his little hands up for attention. “Dix francs!” A few more people stopped. American street-performers were a rarity.

  Cybele shushed Howard. Jimmy started crying for an ice cream. Iris had one of the thorns and was practicing jabbing it into the aether. “This is swell, Dad! Can I try it next?”

  “We’ll see, sweetie.” Raumer patted his daughter’s blonde head and kicked a raised foot tentatively. The thorn dug into the air. He reached up and set another thorn overhead. He was able then to pull himself up off the ground, resting on his anchored left foot and right hand.

  He drew his right foot up a little higher than the other and kicked it in. Iris handed him the fourth thorn, and he set that up higher with his left hand. Like a human fly climbing an office building with suction cups, he began working his way up. A few coins rang on the pavement beneath him. “Dix francs!” Howard shouted again.

  Cybele had just gotten four ice cream sticks from a vendor. Now she saw him and stared up, fear and joy fighting for possession of her features. “Don’t go too high, Charlie!”

  He did another few meters. He was high enough to break a leg now if he fell. His hands were sweating and it was hard to keep a good grip on the thorns in his hands. The shafts of the other thorns were digging into the soles of his feet. He couldn’t go much higher. But he didn’t want to go back down to his family either.

  The most puzzling thing was that the aether didn’t seem to be moving relative to normal space. Using the sliding-coins analogy, a person would be a small, irregular coin riding the rim of a huge rotating disk…Earth. But since Earth is rotating, then it should zip out from under any piton fixed in the motionless aether. Of course maybe the aether wasn’t quite solid after all. Maybe a thin sheet of it was dragged along with the Earth. Given the right kinds of length contractions that would just about jibe with relativity. Raumer wondered if he could set a thorn hard enough to reach the lower levels of the aether.

  Holding fast with his left hand, he pulled his right hand back and slammed the thorn forward as hard as he could. There was a sudden wrench, the sound of glass breaking. His right hand was bleeding. The thorn had ripped out of his grasp and sped across the plaza to break a window in the Pompidou Center.

  There were a lot of people under Raumer now, pointing at him and at the broken window. He was ten or fifteen meters up. Cybele and the kids seemed peculiarly unconcerned about him. They were just eating their ice creams and staring. Howard and Iris had managed t
o fill their pockets with small change from the crowd. Across the plaza Raumer saw a flic, a young nattily-uniformed policeman. He was heading his way. Raumer wondered how that African kid had managed to disappear.

  He was standing on two of the thorns and holding the other with both hands. Now the flic was close enough to start shouting at him. Calling him a terrorist. He was going to have to do something. Before, it had looked as if that kid had just jumped backward…out through hyperspace. He’d done it himself that morning. But what if he landed wrong? Suddenly he didn’t care.

  Raumer tensed all his muscles and jumped backwards, pushing off as hard as possible with the three thorns. He slipped sideways as he took off.

  And a sort of wafer floated to the ground.

  “Qu’est ce qu’y a, alors?” the flic asked, effortlessly pushing his way through the crowd. His handsome dark eyes flashed back and forth, searching for the man who had broken the window. But the villain had escaped.

  In the center of the circle the flic found only a sidewalk artist…a charming French-American woman with three children. They were standing around an astonishingly detailed cross-sectional picture of a man’s insides.

  Strictly speaking, the flic should have arrested the woman for painting without a license. But suddenly, inexplicably, the picture seemed to slide off down the street. The policeman covered his confusion by asking the woman for a date.

  *****

  The following selected passages, and the accompanying illustrations, are taken from Transdimensional Avatar by Revell Gibson (Ten Pound Island Press, 1982).

  *****

  And how did this living avatar come into being? How is it that, Christ-like, one man can span the gap between Heaven and Hell…yet remain here on Earth with ordinary mortals?

  Professor Raumer has suggested that I explain his physical transmogrification by the time-honored technique of analogical reasoning. So let us imagine a flat universe, a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants would contemplate the idea of a third dimension with the fear and trembling we normally accord the fourth.

  We are three-dimensional solids that move about on a certain surface, the spherical surface of Earth. Think of a Flatland whose inhabitants are two-dimensional figures that move about on a certain line, the bounding line, if you will, or a disk which they call their planet.

  Just as gravity limits us, as a rule, to two degrees of freedom in our mundane peregrinations (East-West plus North-South); just so we imagine that the Flatland gravity limits most Flatlanders to one degree of freedom in their motions (Left-Right) along their planetary line. Of course, if a Flatlander had wing-like projections which he flapped, then he could also move in the additional Up-Down dimension, just as a bird does.

  Now suppose that the whole sheet which makes up Flatland is actually lying on something. Think of a vast sheet of wax paper floating on a sea. In the sheet itself are scratches…shapes which move about…the Flatlanders bustling back and forth on their planetary line. The analogy, of course, is to our space as a vast hypersheet nestled on the breast of the endless Aether main.

  And what a noble vista that must be, the endless sea of Aethery! What strange demons swim beneath, what angels fly above! Our thoughts, Professor Raumer tells me, float above this sea like joyous, sun-bathed clouds…but beneath the hypersurface crowd clotted emotions: shining, stinging, slimy jellyfish!

  Our avatar, our Professor Raumer, is wedged at right angles to our space. He is half above the hypersurface of space…and half below. Half-demon and half-god, he intersects our space in a single two-dimensional cross-section…a section too thin and feeble for speech, but immanent enough for hand-signals.

  It fell upon me to be the first to recognize him for what he is, though so seemingly like a beer-stain on the floor…the floor of the Coupole Café to be precise, in the Montparnasse district of Paris. A marvelous place, crowded with merry-makers late into the night. I was there, part of the happy throng, eating my second dozen of oysters. Claires No. 1 (the best in my estimation) were the oysters, and I gave this living food an agreeable environment in the form of a bottle of excellent, but cheap, Muscadet.

  Full of food, full of peace, I gazed with interest at the floor. There were cigarette butts, women’s ankles, streaks of sawdust and!!! A large, man-shaped stain, lightly tinted, a perfect silhouette sliding along! The arms were waving in semaphore, I realized proximately, still remembering my youthful experience as a signalman. “H–E–L–P!” they said.

  Without wishing to attract undue notice, I moved my feet about on the floor, also in semaphore patterns. “W–H–O A–R–E Y–O–U?” An animated conversation ensued. Raumer had been sliding all over Paris looking for someone who would a) notice him, and b) understand his arm signals. I was, or am, the man, and will be, yet even in the face of scorn from those myopic fools who say they cannot see Professor Raumer.

  But I digress. Professor Raumer’s rotation was, he told me, the result of an ill-conceived and badly executed attempt to move out along the Aether, above the surface of the Earth, and against the gravitational force.

  His technique was to use special thorns as Oars or Pitons, reaching out of our space and into the Aether, thus exerting a force to act against gravity. This worked well enough, but when he attempted to jump free of the Aether and back to the ground, he slipped somehow sideways.

  Gravity, weakly acting on that of his cross-sections still in our space, keeps him glued to the ground. He floats, as it were, on his back. By sticking a leg or an arm down into the swirling currents of the Aether sea he is able to slide about Earth’s surface at will. Yet, such is the nature of the Aether-stuff that Professor Raumer is unable to exert the force to turn him-self sideways. His own efforts cannot bring him fully back into our space.

  Immediately after the transformation, Professor Raumer slid away from the crowd at the Pompidou Center. He tells me that he was by some higher vision certain that his wife, a practical woman, would take up with the first replacement for him which she found. He could not have been more prescient.

  These inquiries finally led me to an apartment above a miserable café in the Monceau district. Professor Raumer had so manipulated himself that only a cross-section of his head and eyes remained in our space. I carried this cross-section tucked between the pages of these very notes.

  Throned behind the zinc bar was the inevitable concierge, a termagant, a virago. No, she had never heard of a Madame Raumer. I gave her twenty francs. Oh yes, I must be looking for the woman with the American children. She lived upstairs with her fiancé, a fine young man employed by the police force.

  “That’s not my husband,” cried Mrs. Raumer, an attractive but somewhat hard-looking woman. “My husband is dead!”

  The cross-section of Professor Raumer’s head lay on the table between us. Suddenly the shapes of his two hands appeared on the table-top as well. The fingers moved in agile silhouettes, spelling out the words of his plea: “C–Y–B–E–L–E I S–T–I–L–L L–O–V–E Y–O–U. D–O Y–O–U H–A–V–E T–H–E T–H–O–R–N–S?”

  Mrs. Raumer started back from the table. She seemed angry with me. “Get out of here, you pompous blimp! Take your creepy magic tricks with you! No, I don’t have the thorns, the thorns disappeared with my husband! He’s gone and I have a new life!”

  As she railed in this way, one of her children, the littlest, pressed forward and poked a finger into the center of the cross-section on the table. This direct palpating of his brain must have been uncomfortable for Professor Raumer, for he slid off the table, floated to the floor, and disappeared beneath a rug.

  The unpleasantly handsome young flic seemed to take me for his rival in Mrs. Raumer’s affections. If I were not a man of generous bulk, the situation might have gone very badly indeed. As it was, I was forced to leave so precipitously that I was unable to retrieve Professor Raumer from beneath the rug. There was nothing for it but to install myself in the dreary drink-shop downstairs and await further developments
.

  I spent a miserable two hours there, with only a few pinball players for company. The café’s menu was utterly without interest, and their wine was not even deplorable. I regretted having aided Professor Raumer in his fool’s mission of revisiting his family. I had helped him only because of his promise to later reveal certain higher truths to me.

  I was on the point of leaving when Raumer’s three children suddenly appeared, trooping down the stairs. Iris, the oldest, was spokeswoman for this pathetic delegation.

  “Can you make my Daddy get fat again?” she inquired.

  “Perhaps I can help. But not unless he comes away with me.”

  “I want him to stay under the rug,” protested Howard. “We can talk to him with our fingers.”

  Talk? About what? How absurd to waste so great an avatar on children’s prattle! I controlled myself with difficulty. “Your father belongs to humanity. With my help he can bring us unheard-of knowledge. Tell him he must come to me.”

  It was almost midnight, and I was quite dizzy from the many glasses of cognac. The children had long since gone back upstairs. Bleakly I wondered how Professor Raumer could prefer their uncultured company to mine. Just then I saw the familiar stain come sliding down the stairs like a hesitant man’s shadow.

  The scene was painful in the extreme. Not having a family, and not wanting one, I cannot pretend to understand his motives. But in the end I promised to help him “get fat again,” and for his part, Professor Raumer shared with me all that he had learned. I give here only a partial summary of what he told me that night before our long journey began.

  Thoughts are definite forms…permanently extant, yet in some way parasitic upon human existence. Parasitism is too strong a word. Let us say, rather, symbiosis, reserving the term “parasitism” for those low and slippery entities which do deserve such a name. I speak, of course, of human emotion, or, to be quite blunt, the ties of love which can make an avatar shrink from his destiny.