Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Harry and I exchanged a glance. I could read his thoughts like neon signs: Who cares about the inertia-winder anyway? and I like the sprite, and How are we going to get back? and …

  There was a sudden screaming. It seemed to come from a great distance. One of the goblins disappeared and the other began to jabber.

  “Six furlongs ‘tis and most foully beaked. The squid draws nigh to seek her prey and snaffle down these miserable victims every one!”

  “The space-squid!” exclaimed the gnome.

  “Oh my,” said the sprite. “Already?”

  “Aaauuugh!” roared the mermaid, rippling in sloppy panic.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” said the sprite. “These men are going to kill the squid after it eats you, remember?”

  “Aaaaaaarrrgh! Yubba mmpf wow!”

  “What squid?” I demanded, but the question was suddenly superfluous. Looming up ahead was a huge, twisty, purplish form: the space-squid.

  It looked much like an ocean-going giant squid. Its body was a pen-shaped pod with a fluke at one end. The business end of the body sported eight tentacles and two extra-long arms, arms some thirty meters long and with broad sucker-pads at the ends.

  Watching us closely with its huge, intelligent eyes, the creature drew closer. Its method of propulsion was elegant: a flexible funnel sticking out of its body spewed a jet of glowing ions.

  Before any of us could really react (or perhaps the elementals had no will to alter a known future), the long arms’ sucker-pads had seized the mermaid. She gave a gurgling cry and was drawn away from us towards the space-squid’s bunched and writhing wreath of tentacles. I could make out a great hooked beak in the center, a beak like a parrot’s, and moments later this beak sank into the mermaid’s watery flesh.

  Her screams were overwhelming. Listening against my will, I felt the slash of the creature’s beak; I felt the grip of its tooth-ringed suckers; I felt the horror of becoming food.

  “Quick,” shouted Harry. “Let out the superslime!”

  Yes! The superslime! I zipped into our ship and opened up the toilet vent. At first there was no reaction, but when I stuck in my hand the slime came surging after.

  “Get under the car,” Harry told the elementals. “Go around behind it and wait till the squid tries to eat the superslime.”

  “We knew you’d do this,” said the gnome happily. “You humans are so delightfully sequential.”

  The slime was thickly feeling for me, its glistening surface athrob. I led it out through the broken windshield, out into space. As the slime was vacuum-adapted, this caused it no pain. It flowed out, bulking ever larger. Now the space-squid’s arms came reaching towards us again.

  A quick, inertialess twist and flip put me safe under the car with the others. Using my pixie-dust ESP, I could pick up the feelings of both slime and squid. EAT! GRAB! EAT! GRAB!

  The two met like long-lost lovers: tentacles seizing slime, slime engulfing tentacles. The hideous beak gobbled chunks of superslime while the slime’s acids dissolved great sections of the squid. In a matter of minutes, nothing at all was left; they’d consumed each other totally.

  “Like an electron meeting a positron,” marveled Harry. “Now will you three fix our spaceship?”

  “Even if they fix it, we’re going to have a hard time with no slime for food and air,” I worried at Harry.

  “We won’t fix it,” said the gnome. “We don’t want anyone coming back out here. What’s more, Harry Gerber is going to forget how to build inertia-winders.”

  “Zap,” said the sprite, tapping Harry’s head with her wand. “That does it.”

  I felt a sudden horror of the void of space stretching out on all sides of us.

  “Help us,” I begged the goblin. “Isn’t there a way for us to go back?”

  “Go slideways.”

  “We don’t know how.”

  “We can push you,” said the gnome. “Where do you want to land?”

  “And when?” added the sprite.

  “At Nancy’s sister’s house in Virginia,” I said.

  “June twenty-fourth,” said Harry. “Like it should be. Please send us back. I really don’t remember how to build the inertia-winder. I promise.”

  The goblin danced, the sprite waved her wand, and the gnome put his hands on our backs and shoved. We tumbled head over heels slideways fro, and crashed down onto Nancy’s sister’s dining table.

  Nancy was, on the whole, glad to see me. I moved into her bedroom, and they let Harry sleep on the couch. Our plan was to lie low for a few weeks. Everything would have been fine if Nancy’s sister hadn’t asked Harry to fix her TV set. But that’s another story.

  ============

  Note on “Inertia”

  Written in Spring, 1982.

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January, 1983.

  “Inertia” has one of the more complicated and interesting scientific premises I’ve used. I got the idea for it when hanging around with my Lynchburg friend, Mike Gambone, who did indeed have a peeling paint ceiling and an electric gyroscope in his basement. After I wrote “Inertia,” Mike gave me the gyroscope, and I kept it with me until we left Lynchburg. The transreal identities of my Fletcher and Harry characters vary, but when I was writing “Inertia,” I thought of Fletcher as Mike and Harry as me. Later I wrote a whole novel about these two characters, Master of Space and Time.

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  Religious fervor filled the air. Twenty or thirty rows of mutants ringed the torch-lit dais where Pally Love was holding forth. The dais was set up in the middle of what had once been a gymnasium. The gym had been part of a YMCA summer camp located on an island out in the Thomas River. The island was called Love Island now. It was the seat of Pally Love’s Millennial Church of the Mystical Body of Christ. Pally was a doughy little man with a plain face. But what a voice!

  “They call you gunjy mues.” he shouted. “The Montviews, the Pigyears, the Arkers…they want to kill you, yes they do. They set themselves up as mighty ones, and they seek to trample you beneath their feet. They see fit to tamper with Lord God’s new dispensation. Oh, sweet Jesus, what a time we’re having here. Oh, what a time we are having on God’s gray earth in these, the last days. And these are the last days, my brethren, make no mistake about it. I’d like you to pause…and look around, dear friends. Look at your neighbors, look at each other, and ask yourself one simple question. One simple little question. Does Pally love me? Can I let Pally into my heart? Can Christ, through Pally, bring me to a brighter day? Dear friends! If you say yes, if you say yes Pally, then you have received the greatest gift that man can receive. You have received the love that Christ has given me to give unto you. And this love …”

  Meg Crash stood off to one side, watching Pally work out. Pretty good crowd of mues tonight, and most of them had brought something. The offerings were piled beside the dais: records, pieces of metal, liquor, car batteries, bags of food, even some tanks of gasoline. Pally was one of the only men in Killeville who managed to still drive a car. Pally Love, king of the gunjy mues. Not that Pally himself was a mutant. No way. Pally was fat and sleek and healthy as a prize stud-hog. That was part of his appeal to the mues: the fact that even though he was everything the mutants were not, Pally still loved them.

  And why shouldn’t Pally love the mues? They took good care of him. They took good care of Meg Crash, too, for that matter, not that Meg could bring herself to really love them any more than Pally could. It was a rough job being Pally Love’s head deaconess, especially rough ever since her brother Tab had left.

  “Yes,” Pally was shouting. “Come forward my darlings, drag your poor twisted bodies here and merge with the love of Christ, Christ the Son of God, the Christ whose body-cells are us. Join Him now, come join Him here and now!”

  This was Meg’s signal to start helping mues up onto the dais. A kid with no legs was already out in the aisle, so Meg helped that one first. The kid’s head was all wrenched aroun
d to one side and his tongue was hanging out, but you could sense a keen intelligence in there anyway. One thing, mues weren’t stupid, even if they did fall for Pally’s line. Who could tell? Maybe he was helping them more than they were helping him. The whole giant leech business made Meg nervous…it was like the mues were using Pally to set the thing up.

  “Flubba,” said the kid, rolling an eye up at Meg. “Flubba geep.”

  His body tapered to a sort of point around the waist, but his arms were big and strong. She grabbed his hands and lugged him up to the dais. That’s it for you, gunjy mue, Meg couldn’t help thinking. Time to become part of Pally’s giant leech. He was probably skrenning her thoughts but it didn’t seem to bother him.

  Two others were at the edge of the platform already, and Meg helped them up. She glanced out at the crowd…no one else was coming up tonight. The next thing was to undress these three. The boy with no legs wore only a long T-shirt, which came off easily enough. The next mue had a fairly normal body, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, but it didn’t really have a head. There was just a sort of cavity-riddled hump between his shoulders. No telling which hole was for what. The jeans came off smoothly, but the T-shirt snagged on the ragged head-hump and Meg had to pull really hard. The last mue was perhaps female, very pale and wearing a night-gown. Stripping this off, Meg saw that its body was like a soft porcupine, with flesh-fingers sticking out all over. How did these things stay alive, anyway?

  “Are you ready to join Christ’s mystical body?” The veins in Pally’s neck were standing out; his face was slick with sweat.

  “Weddy, Pawwy!”

  “Open the tabernacle, Reverend Crash!”

  Meg walked over to the side of the gymnasium and threw open the door that led to the locker room. The giant leech lived in there, a sort of group-creature made up of the merged bodies of scores of mues. It wouldn’t do to let the thing near you…not unless you were ready to join it for good. A sweet, wet smell drifted out of the locker room door. Meg could hear a heavy slithering, a sound like wet canvas bags being dragged across the cement floor. Taking no chances, she hurried across to the other side of the gym.

  The rest of the mues, the ones not ready to merge tonight, followed Meg across the gym floor, dragging and flippering themselves along as fast as they could. Meg stood protectively in front of them with an electric cattle prod in one hand. Pally used his car’s generator to keep the prod charged up.

  The gym floor was clear now, clear except for the little, round platform in the middle. Pally was still on the platform, still yelling, with the three naked mues at his feet.

  “Can you feel it?”

  “Guh fee it.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Bluh weddy!”

  “Do you want it?”

  “Wah wanna!”

  The tip of the giant leech poked out of the locker-room door now, and the crowd moaned with excitement. The giant leech ritual was still relatively new. Meg’s twin brother Tab had invented it more or less by accident one night…the last night before he’d taken off for some other part of Killeville. Pally had always ended his services by having some mues get up on the dais with him. Once they were up there, he’d sprinkle water and oil on them and say they were blessed. But that last night, Tab, drunk and disgusted, had filled Pally’s water and oil pitchers with concentrated battery acid.

  Now the one thing about mutants was their fantastic ability to recover from wounds. If you stuck a knife in a mue and pulled the blade back out, the cut would just close up. They healed like dough, no matter what. To kill a mue you had to practically cut it in half. Their ability to regenerate tissue was one of their two big survival traits, the other survival feature being enhanced psi powers. They could read minds and see things far away. “Skrenning,” they called it.

  When Tab’s acid had burned four mues’ skins off that last night, the skins had taken a few minutes to grow back. But by then the flayed parts, where the mues touched, had already grown together. Presto, a group-creature, a newborn giant leech, a grex made of four mutants. Technically, a grex is a slug-like object formed by a group of slime-mold cells. Each of the cells has an independent existence, yet for purposes of reproduction they are able to join together, crawl about, and form a fruiting body. The combination of tissue regeneration and psi power enabled the mues to form just such a grex, a leech-like creature that lived and acted as a single organism.

  Pally and Meg and been doing the ritual a few times a week now for several months. The giant grex held some sixty mues. Blessedly, it seemed satisfied with its life, though there was no telling what it thought about while resting in its locker room. One thing for sure, no one was going to investigate. Just throw a bunch of food in there once a day, and keep the door shut.

  Now the huge group-mutant was slithering across the gymnasium floor, sliding closer and closer to the dais holding Pally and the three mues. There were eyes scattered all over the grex’s surface, and there were bunches of hands here and there. Towards the front was a moist slit, the thing’s tooth-filled mouth.

  “The body of Christ,” bellowed Pally. “The mystical body of Christ!” Not wanting to take the chance of being eaten or absorbed, he shouted a last blessing and hurried over to Meg’s side.

  “Kwa,” cried the porcupine-flesh-fingers mutant on the dais, “Bah Kwa!” The one with no real head made a sort of high whistling sound and now the grex was at the edge of the dais.

  Each time they did the giant leech ritual, the leech looked more developed, more integrated. At first it had been easy to pick out the individual members of the grex: they’d been like the constituent parts in one of those old paintings where an allegorical face, say “Harvest” or “Spring”, is made up of the fruits and flowers of the season. The giant leech had started as “Radiation”, made up of dozens of skungy freaks. But now the grex was fully integrated, all smoothed out.

  A web of veins lay under the pink, wet skin. There were eyes all over…like raisins in a pie. The bottom of the thing was covered with hair. Everyone’s scalp had migrated there to give the grex something to “walk” on. The hairs all pointed backwards for traction, like mohair on the bottom of a cross-country ski. There was a row of ears along the grex’s median line, and bunches of hands both fore and aft.

  Meg’s stomach was hardened from two years’ work with Pally and the mues, but the sight of the giant leech always made her retch. Its muscular symmetry was somehow worse than the ragged deformities of the mues. Meg leaned forward, gagging, hoping she wouldn’t actually vomit.

  “Stop it,” muttered Pally, right at her side. “Control yourself, Meg.”

  The grex was on the dais now. It arched itself up over the three waiting mues like a croquet wicket. The long slit-mouth was only for feeding…the thing had another method for absorbing new members, a disgusting, vaguely sexual procedure. As the grex arched over the three naked mues, the one with no head began whistling louder, whistling like a tea-kettle. Perhaps it was in pain.

  The hair on the grex’s bottom was suddenly wet, wet and dripping. Some of the constituent mues’ stomach tissues were down there to produce hydrochloric acid. The acid drizzled on the three naked forms, eating at their skins. Just as his face began to burn off, the kid with no legs shot Meg a hard glance, a look that said, “I know why you’re sorry for me, but you’ll never know why I’m sorry for you.”

  Once again, Meg wondered who was really using who. In a sense, she and Pally were the mues’ servants…even though Pally thought it was the other way around. More than anything, Pally needed power and adulation. The normals, the people in the clans, thought Pally was a fool, a liar and a bully. Pally needed to have the mues worship him. The clanspeople didn’t think about Pally very much. If they spoke of him at all, it was only with weary contempt. The clans didn’t hate Pally, but Pally hated the clans. Oh, did he hate the clans! The less they cared about him, the more he hated them. Sometimes he would preach to the mues about leading a crusade, a holy war aga
inst the unbelievers. Until now it had all been just so much talk. But with the giant leech…or with ten leeches …

  The skin was pretty well gone from the three mues now, and the grex began slowly to lower itself down on them. Its wet bottom-hair parted to expose a long red welt, a strip of naked tissue that the new mues could merge into. One of them cried out something like, “It is finished,” and then it was. The great leech lay flat on the dais, calmly pulsing.

  They all sang a hymn then, and the leech swayed to the beat. Standing well over to one side of the gym, Pally gave a closing harangue and sent the congregation on its way. Meg handed him the cattle prod and went to stand by the exit door, trying to get a few more donations from the mues as they left.

  “Okay, Meg,” called Pally as soon as the hall emptied. “Help me herd it back.” Pally didn’t like getting close to the big leech. He held the cattle prod out like someone holding a crucifix up to a vampire.

  Just as Meg started towards Pally, the leech shuddered and slid off the dais, its long supple body flowing like water. Pally jerked convulsively, knocking loose the plug of the cord that led from cattle prod to his car outside. Moving faster than it ever had before, the leech flowed over the prod and put itself between Pally and the exit. Pally froze and shot Meg a desperate glance.

  “Back to your room, guys,” shouted Meg, putting some iron in her voice. She strode angrily towards the leech. “Turn around and go back in. We’ll feed you double rations tomorrow.”

  The leech raised its front end up in a questioning way. Its broad mouth was slightly parted, revealing two carpets of teeth. Its eyes shifted from Pally to Meg and back again.

  Meg took another step forward, and stamped her foot commandingly. “BACK! Go back to your room, and I’ll get you a whole pig to eat tomorrow!”

  Pally picked that moment to scream. His scream was lurid and juicy. The leech went for the sound. Moving so fast that it blurred, it darted over and clamped its mouth over Pally’s head and shoulders. His screaming stopped almost right away. The leech humped itself up and bolted the rest of Pally down into its gullet. It was like watching a snake swallow a rat.