Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Following this, Professor Raumer described to me how the thought-clouds rain lower-dimensional simulacra of themselves upon the infinite Aether sea, dimpling and rippling the sketchy forms of our lowly three-dimensional space.

  He told me of how the clouds merge and split, and of the great SUN beyond it all, the SUN which drives the eternal process of sublimation and precipitation. The SUN, the goal of every mystic’s quest…I cannot understand how anyone could ever wish to leave it.

  And now, these few notes written, we set off, I know not whence, in search of the sacred bush of Shanker Bola. With its thorns I will lever Professor Raumer back. With the same thorns I shall set myself free. Peace, my brothers.

  ============

  Note on “The Indian Rope Trick Explained”

  Written in Spring, 1980.

  Changes, Ace Books, 1983.

  One of the great things about living in Heidelberg was that we could get in the car and drive to Paris. This story was inspired by a trip there with my wife Sylvia and our three children Georgia, Rudy Jr., and Isabel. I should add that we had a lot more fun on the trip than this story might indicate. Raumer needs to be something of a jerk so that his wife will be glad to get rid of him. “Transreal” doesn’t mean “true.”

  A New Experiment With Time

  The first thing the citizens of Bata notice is a greasy place in the street. A fat man slips on it. Bill Stook comes down in the yellow pickup with the smashed fender and throws on a bucket of sand.

  A week later the patch begins to stink. The stuff is thickened and drawn together. There’re lots of flies that come and land on your face afterwards. The kindergarten teacher twists her ankle. Black high-heels and a thin summer dress.

  Stook comes back with a shovel, but he can’t get the stuff loose. A few idlers—daytripping feebs—give their advice, spit-talking about glare-ice and mineral oil. Finally Stook throws on some more sand and goes home.

  Under the arc-lights the patch is elliptical, four by eight feet. It cuts across the crosswalk and both lanes of traffic. The tire-marks on it extend out into straight smears in either direction. A dog has dropped a bone in the middle.

  Maisie Gleaves lives in a Buffalo rooming house. She is black and white, with red lipstick and a christmas-green raincoat. Every night she lies on her bed looking at her Bata High School yearbook. Two years now. Somehow she will go back.

  Workmen are putting up a banner saying, BATA SIDEWALK SALE DAYS. Meanwhile a group of men, shopkeepers, inspect the stinking patch of pulp. One of them tries to pick up a bone. His fingers slide off it. It’s an outrage. Bill Stook is called and threatened with dismissal. He covers the patch with sawdust and puts a refreshment stand around it. SIDEWALK SALE DAYS. In the hot sun, people order hot dogs, catch a whiff of decay and put on more mustard. Stook mans the booth, nipping whiskey from a pint bottle. The flattened lump underfoot feels springy.

  A white sunset slides under low clouds. They dismantle the booth and the sawdust blows away. Mashed arms and legs, tooth cracklings, scraps of green cloth. The tire tracks are gone from the flattened corpse. The state police take Stook away.

  Maisie watches Buffalo TV in a silver diner. Trouble in Bata. She remembers all the lost faces. Ron. She pays for her tea. Back in her room she stares into the mirror for two hours. Her image is moving closer.

  Sleeping or waking, it’s all the same now. No more boundaries. Something is coming nearer, growing to connect. She lives on air and thinks only of Bata. She will return.

  Bit by bit the corpse grows whole. Slowly the bones link up, imperceptibly the flesh crawls back. One night the face is finished. In the dark it begins to twitch unseen.

  Stook is out on bail. He is driving a stolen truck, the pickup they used to let him use. All his rage and bitterness is focused on the corpse in the street. He speeds towards it, past the guards, through the sawhorses. A screech of brakes, a thud. Suddenly his crumpled fender is smooth. The corpse walks off backwards.

  Stook runs after the skinny corpse, a woman. She minces backwards towards the bus stop, glaring at him. He catches up as she climbs into the bus to Buffalo. He tries to grab her, but it’s impossible. He cannot alter her past.

  Maisie leaves her room and walks. A block ahead she sees a black and white woman in a christmas-green coat climb off the bus from Bata. She is walking backwards, this woman. Maisie hastens to meet her.

  The two figures merge and are no more. A cabbie sees them disappear into each other. For Maisie it is different. She walks through the flash and down the street.

  Everything is running backwards. Maisie is going back through time, back to Bata. The bus backs up to where she’d seen herself get out. Ticketless, she climbs in the exit door and sits down. She is nervous. The bus is going forty miles per hour in reverse.

  As the bus backs out of Buffalo onto the Thruway, the man sitting next to Maisie begins staring at her. He says something backwards, a drooling gabble. She answers anyway. He turns and stares out the dark window. She spoke because he spoke; he spoke because she spoke. He picks off a wad of gum from under his seat and begins chewing it.

  When the bus leaves the Thruway and backs past the old filling-station, she walks to the door. It opens, and she goes down the steps. Bata. She’s glad she waited so long. She’ll get a room here, and in two years she’ll be back in high school. Ron. This time it will work out right.

  A short, red-faced man is blocking her way. She sets her face and walks towards him. He backs off, drawing farther and farther away. There are police around a pickup parked in the intersection. But there is no traffic.

  The little man scuttles crablike into the cab of the pickup. Just to scare him she walks right up to it, right up to the fender. There is a sudden jolt. The pickup squeals its brakes and backs away.

  ============

  Note on “A New Experiment with Time”

  Written in Spring, 1980.

  Sphinx Magazin, #16, Spring, 1982.

  I got the seed idea for this story while driving from Geneseo to Buffalo in 1978. I was looking in my rear-view mirror and imagining that I was driving backwards. Two years later in a Heidelberg street I saw a woman with red lipstick and a green raincoat, and the story clicked. It’s kind of a retake on the time-reversal diagrams that appear in “Schrödinger’s Cat.” The story’s first publication was as a German translation in a hipster European magazine edited by Udo Breger, my German translator at that time.

  The Man Who Ate Himself

  Harry enjoyed driving, even though he’d never managed to get a license. He had a whole theory of it, a system of simultaneous differential equations which told him how fast to turn the wheel for a four-wheel skid on a tight turn taken too fast. “Controlled drift,” he called it.

  I drew my safety belt a bit tighter. “I’m driving on the way back to the airport, Harry. I only said you could drive on the way to Marston’s. Remember that.” It wasn’t always easy to have a genius for a partner.

  We were going at least fifteen miles per hour too fast. Harry was slouched back in his seat, stiff arms outstretched. He wore a forgotten smile and kept giving the wheel abrupt, precise little twitches. I had to think of Mr. Toad’s wild ride. At least we were in open country.

  We hadn’t encountered another car for about five miles now. Harry was taking the curves wider and wider…brushing across them and fishtailing out. Humming unhappily, I studied the map Marston had sent us. Great Crater. We should be almost …

  There was a wild squealing. I cried out something of a religious nature and threw my hands up to protect my face. The car bounced like a skipped stone, slewed and shuddered to a stop. The engine died. The sun was bright and hot.

  “Pretty flashy, boys. And ah’d always thought you scientist fellas were a bunch of ribbon clerks. Welcome to Great Crater!”

  A limited-function android with a TV-screen face pulled open the cyclone-fence gate Harry had stopped for. The android was dressed like a gunslinger. Van Marston’s familiar featur
es grinned at us from the screen.

  Immediately beyond the gate, the road slanted sharply downwards…dropping a hundred meters to the floor of Great Crater. The crater was a few kilometers across. A mist clung to the heavily irrigated grounds. I couldn’t quite make out the mansion I knew lay at the center.

  As soon as the gate was fully open, Harry revved up the engine to a chattering scream and peeled out, kicking cubic meters of gravel up into a roostertail. When the road dropped out from under us we actually left the ground.

  “YEEEEEHAW!” Marston’s amplified voice whooped. The android drew a six-shooter and fired two shots down the slope after us. Presumably it had aimed to miss.

  Marston had made his bundle in oil and uranium. He wasn’t what you’d normally think of as a Friend Of The Earth. But now that he’d retired, he’d tried to fix up his Great Crater estate like one of those wild animal parks. Some giraffes were stalking through the tall grass to our right, and down where the driveway leveled out, a tremendous snake lay sunning himself.

  Still accelerating, Harry detoured around the snake, knocking a cloud of winged insects out of the elephant grass. The unexpected lurch made me smack my head on the edge of the window. Suddenly I’d had enough.

  I reached my left foot over and stepped on the brake. Hard. At the same time I took the key out of the ignition and pocketed it. Far above us, the android fired another shot. You could hardly hear it over the steady chirping of the insects.

  “Harry, the car’s rented in my name. And we’ve got some delicate machinery in the trunk. What are you trying to prove?”

  We’d skidded to a stop half off the road, some hundred feet past that huge snake. It was watching us with glassy black eyes, and seemed to be nibbling its tail. Marston’s house was still out of sight.

  Finally Harry answered. “You know how I feel, Fletch. I don’t like Marston. He’s stupid. He’s a bully.” Harry’s hands clenched and unclenched on the wheel. “I knew a kid just like him in eighth grade. Donny Lyons. Every day Donny Lyons would knock me down and steal my dessert. Until one day I hid one of my father’s false teeth inside a Twinkie.” Harry let out one of his weird giggles.

  “Look, Harry. Marston wants to give us a lot of money to help float his corpse in outer space forever. We’re going to take the money. We need it because for some crazy reason you wouldn’t let me market that waste disposal device of yours …”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I know, Harry. Just let me finish. The point is that we can take Marston for a lot of bucks. You told me you don’t see how his capsule can avoid crashing…sooner or later. So just remember that we’re screwing him. But, please, for God’s sake, don’t tell him. Then everyone’ll be happy.”

  “Everyone except his wife.”

  “Look, how’s she going to know if Marston’s capsule falls into a star somewhere? As if she’d care anyway. She’s not even thirty! Now, will you trade places with me and let me drive?”

  Harry opened his door and got out heavily. It was hot, and the plastic seat was sweaty where he’d sat. I waited a minute before sliding over. Harry stood next to the car and stared back at that snake.

  “Isn’t there some myth?” he said when he got back in. “About a snake who swallows his own tail?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know.” I rolled up my window. There was something moving towards us through the tall grass on our left. It would be typical of Marston to have lions loose to handle intruders. I started up the engine and drove on.

  There was a second fence around Marston’s house and lawn. The old man was out in front, leaning on a hoe and waiting for us. I couldn’t believe how skinny he’d gotten. Lung cancer. He pushed one of the buttons set into the hoe handle. The inner gate opened for us.

  “Welcome, boys! Welcome to my little Garden of Eden. Let me show you mah plot!” His diseased voice had a grainy, raucous quality.

  I got out and went over to gladhand our pigeon, but Harry just sat in the car, ostentatiously picking his teeth.

  “Y’all wouldn’t have to do that if you’d stop eatin’ flesh!” Marston called out to him. “Live and let live. It’s Mother Nature’s law!” Marston had been one of America’s most vocal vegetarians for several years now.

  Harry examined the end of his toothpick. “That’s not what you said when you closed down the solar energy companies, Mr. Marston.” He spoke without looking up. “Back then it was eat or be eaten.”

  Marston looked back at me with a genial smile. “Guess ah’ve always wanted to see me a real genius. Now ah know.” He hooked his thumb towards Harry and stage-whispered, “Looks lahk a cross between a cow-flop and an albino toad, don’t he?”

  “Really, Van.” A melodious voice came from the shady porch. “That’s no way to talk about the author of The Geometrodynamics of the Degenerate Tensor?” In true Southern belle style, each sentence ended as a question.

  “Well, point mah head and call me Doctor,” Marston chortled. “Ah had no ideah!”

  Evangeline Marston walked down the steps, a graceful arm outstretched. She wore a jiggling T-shirt and skintight red lamé jeans. I had to bite my tongue to keep from moaning.

  “Don’t listen to Van, Dr. Gerber. We’re really so happy to meet you?” Harry pocketed his toothpick and got out of the car with alacrity. He was as much of a horny bastard as the next man.

  “I didn’t realize you were abreast of current cosmological theory, Mrs. Marston.” Harry’s big livery lips stretched in a wet smile. “I’d be happy to send you some preprints.”

  “Oh, you would? I have the nicest little professor at Austin who’d be so delighted? And do call me Evangeline.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Evangeline,” I sang out, and basked for an instant in her warm gaze. Harry grunted something similar.

  “Y’all just have to come see mah crops now,” Marston said, waving us on around the house. “Ole Eva and me have been living off the land, ain’t we sugar?” He gave the gorgeous red apple of her rear a lingering pat.

  In back of the house Marston had his famous garden. He always had his TV spots filmed with him standing in it…usually leaning on that goddamn hoe. All his companies had ever done was to rip the Earth off, but now the fact that he had a garden was supposed to make us forget all that.

  For all Marston’s talk about Mother Earth, you could tell that he had a crazy fear that the old girl was going to get back at him. He was so scared of ending up underground that he’d hired us to help him launch his corpse into outer space. According to his letter he had only a few weeks left.

  Evangeline walked in among the plants and tossed Marston a ripe tomato. He caught it and bit in thirstily, the juice running down his knobby old chin.

  “Why don’t you just let Eva bury you in the garden?” Harry suggested with deliberate cruelty. “I’m sure you’d make good fertilizer.”

  A pulsing snake of a vein sprang into relief on Marston’s forehead. “That is just,” he wheezed angrily, “what ah do not want to happen. As you verah well know, Mr. Genius author of Tense Jamaican Degenerates. As you verah well know!” His dull old eyes brightened with fury.

  I stepped in. We’d come here to close a deal, not to trade insults. “I’m sorry, Mr. Marston. Dr. Gerber has only been involved with the technical design aspects. I’m sure he was not aware that …”

  Gasping for breath, the old man went on as if I hadn’t spoken. Harry had struck a nerve. “Ah, Van Marston, am not going to rot in the ground. And ah am not going to burn in no fire. Ah am going to stay just as ah am fo’evvah and a day!” He glared at Harry with pure hatred.

  “Yes, sir!” I said with an ingratiating smile. “And Fletcher & Company is going to make it happen for you. Your guidance system is in our car. All systems go! I’ve got the plans right here.” I patted my briefcase. “If you’d care to …”

  “I’m sure that you distinguished gentlemen must be absolutely famished?” Eva said, drifting out of the garden. The contrast between her sw
iveling hips and her refined, magnolia-blossom voice was exquisite. Those pants could have been painted on. Briefly I let myself imagine licking the paint off.

  At lunch I was polite and shared Marston’s stewed corn and zucchini. Harry and Evangeline had TV-dinners of Mexican food.

  “Eva doesn’t like vegetables,” Marston confided in me. “Ah have to eat just about everything that garden grows.” A TV-screen-faced android cleared the dishes away.

  The screen was playing an old-South movie staring Shirley Temple and Mr. Bojangles. “Oh my goo’ness,” the android murmured, and set a bottle of bourbon on the table. Happily, I poured myself a drink.

  There really had been something special about the vegetables. Eating them had filled me with an unusual sense of…completeness. “The soil is special,” Marston was saying. I listened with a patient smile. “Mah plot is right on the spot where the meteor struck.” He leaned across the table with an expression of senile cunning. “We found part of it, too. The remains of an alien spaceship. Ah made it into mah sarcophagus.”

  Harry had been busy watching Evangeline chew, but this last remark drew him into the conversation. “Chariots of the Gods, Mr. Marston? Fact is stranger than fiction, eh?”

  That little vein on the old man’s forehead popped out again. He stood up angrily. “You just come on out to the barn with me, toad head. Ah have nevah …” A wet, heavy cough cut him off.

  In an instant Evangeline was at his side. In between the brutal coughs Marston was gasping air with pathetic little whoops. His face was red, and his eyes bulged out. Suddenly a thick gusher of blood vomited out of his mouth. The eyes went out like lights. He was dead when he hit the floor.

  Evangeline looked wild-eyed from him to me to Harry. “You …” she got out in a thin strained voice. Then she began throwing things. A metal trivet caught Harry in the temple, but I managed to grab her wrists before she got the carving knives. I had been wrong when I’d said she wouldn’t care if Marston died. I don’t know why, but she loved that scrawny old earthraper.