Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  “CRAP!” Luanne threw her sheet over the TV screen and camera. “Come on, Garvey, help me figure out how we can get out of here and cash in on this!”

  “Did you hear that? They’ll put a policewoman in our house? Jesus. How long have we been here?”

  “It’s just noon. The kids are still in school. Do you feel all right now, baby?”

  Garvey got out of his bed and stretched. He felt good, very good indeed. It would be nice to get some lunch. A fast-food triple-burger and a milkshake, for instance.

  The air in front of his chest grew thick. There was a pale flickering, a slight buzz, and—plop, a burger ‘n’ shake dropped out of the air to splatter on the hospital-room floor!

  “Oh my God!” Luanne had been watching closely. “Can you do that again, Gar?”

  This time he stood next to the dresser. Make it two shakes and burgers. Nothing to it. Buzz, flicker, click—there they were.

  “Jesus, Garvey. How come I can’t do that?”

  “I got more of the gas than you did.” Garvey ate as he talked. “I always knew something like this would happen to me, Luanne. I’m Superman! I can do anything I like. And the I.R.S. can go straight to hell!”

  “Don’t, Garvey! You’ve got to be careful what you wish! Don’t wear it out on garbage!”

  There was a fumbling outside, and the inner door of their room’s air-lock swung open. It was a man in a baggy white decontamination suit. His face was obscured by bulky air-filters.

  “yrrnd shhhnnddt chuchufff mnnn krrrrdnnn!” The bulky figure reached for Garvey’s lunch.

  “Uh, Luanne, do you think …”

  “Yeah, baby. Let’s split.”

  The scene around them flickered like two intercut films and resolved itself into the Carrandine’s living-room.

  “Oh, Garvey! Make a lot of gold, man, I mean like hundreds of pounds! Quick before the pigs get here!”

  A small ingot of gold thudded to the floor. Then another and another and another—the rain of metal lasted a full minute. Garvey paused and regarded his riches with a vaguely dissatisfied air.

  “That’s good for a few million bucks, Luanne. Go hide it, and let me concentrate. I’ve got to do something much bigger. There’s not a whole lot of time left—I can feel my powers wearing off.”

  Obediently Luanne got her daughter Betsy’s wagon and began lugging ingots into the den. There was a fireplace in there with a trapdoor you could lift up to shove the ashes in. One by one, Luanne stashed the gold-bars in the hidden ash-barrel.

  There were sirens in the distance. Garvey lay on the couch with his eyes closed. As Luanne hurried back and forth with the heavy ingots, she saw girders rising up around their house, steel beams shooting up like fountains. Some vast tower was growing overhead, some eternal monument to Garvey’s power!

  Luanne hid the last ingot and went to stand by Garvey’s laboring head. “Can you hear me, baby?” A weak nod. “Are you done?” Another nod. “Can I have a chicken sandwich and a glass of red wine?”

  “No,” said Garvey, smiling a little. “You’ll have to buy it, Luanne. I’ve used up all my power.”

  The room was in shadow, darkened by the immense bulk overhead. Luanne laid her hand on Garvey’s cool forehead. “What did you make out there, baby?”

  “A tower. I saw it when I was in the hole. I don’t know what it means, but I had to make it. It’s sort of a giant clock. Let’s go outside and see how it turned out.”

  The structure overhead was inconceivably vast. Standing under it was like standing under the Eiffel tower. Garvey and Luanne had to walk a good five minutes till they could get a decent view of the thing. People were milling about like excited ants, but for the moment no one stopped the Carrandines. They reached a good vantage-point and feasted their eyes.

  “I drew that,” murmured Luanne. Garvey just smiled, happier than he’d ever been.

  The tower was a giant cone swept out by two linked spirals. Supported by a great spare lattice of strutwork, the spirals narrowed up to a point hundreds and hundreds of feet overhead. Inside the giant structure were four great glass jewels, four whole buildings suspended one above the other: a cube, a triangular pyramid, a cylinder, and a hemisphere.

  “They rotate,” said Garvey. “The cube once a year, the tetrahedron once a month, the cylinder once a week, and the hemisphere once a day. It’s never the same. A monument with moving parts.”

  “Can we go in?”

  “Yeah. See that?” Garvey pointed to a great slanting shaft that leaned up along one side of the tower. A shaft twice the height of the Empire State Building. “There’s elevators in there. The cube is an exhibition hall, the pyramid is an auditorium, the cylinder is offices, and the hemisphere…the hemisphere is for us.”

  “There they are,” someone shouted. “There’s Carrandine and his wife! Get them!”

  The fat doctor and some other men came rushing up to Garvey and Luanne. “Did you build this thing?”

  “Uh …”

  “Sure Garvey built it! You should be down on your knees thanking him, man.”

  “Do you know what this tower is, Carrandine?”

  “I—I got the idea for it when I was stuck in that hole.”

  “No wonder. We found the Russian time-capsule down in the bottom. A Communist artist named Vladimir Tatlin dreamed up the design for this tower in 1919. Monument to the Third International. Fortunately the Soviets never had the funds to construct it. But now you …”

  “Talk about uptight!” interrupted Luanne. “What’s ‘the Third Inter-national’ supposed to be?”

  No one seemed to know. And once Garvey had promised to manage the monument’s rental and upkeep, no one really cared. The great tower stands in Killeville to this day—go see it next time you’re down South!

  ============

  Note on “Monument to the Third International”

  Written in 1983.

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December, 1984.

  Our Lynchburg friends Henry and Diana Vaughan did indeed own a dress-shop. I saw a model of Tatlin’s proposed Monument to the Third International in the Moscow-Paris exhibition at the Pompidou Center, and then I saw the model again in a TV documentary.

  Rapture in Space

  Denny Blevins was a dreamer who didn’t like to think. Drugs and no job put his head in just the right place for this. If at all possible, he liked to get wired and spend the day lying on his rooming house mattress and looking out the window at the sky. On clear days he could watch his eyes’ phosphenes against the bright blue; and on cloudy days he’d dig the clouds’ drifty motions and boiling edges. One day he realized his window-dirt was like a constant noise-hum in the system, so he knocked out the pane that he usually looked through. The sky was even better then, and when it rained he could watch the drops coming in. At night he might watch the stars, or he might get up and roam the city streets for deals.

  His Dad, whom he hadn’t seen in several years, died that April. Denny flew out to the funeral. His big brother Allen was there, with Dad’s insurance money. Turned out they got $15K apiece.

  “Don’t squander it, Denny,” said Allen, who was an English teacher. “Time’s winged chariot for no man waits! You’re getting older and it’s time you found a career. Go to school and learn something. Or buy into a trade. Do something to make Dad’s soul proud.”

  “I will,” said Denny, feeling defensive. Instead of talking in clear he used the new cyberslang. “I’ll get so cashy and so starry so zip you won’t believe it, Allen. I’ll get a tunebot, start a motion, and cut a choicey vid. Denny in the Clouds with Clouds. Untense, bro, I’ve got plex ideas.”

  When Denny got back to his room he got a new sound system and a self-playing electric guitar. And scored a lot of dope and food-packs. The days went by; the money dwindled to $9K. Early in June the phone rang.

  “Hello, Denny Blevins?” The voice was false and crackly.

  “Yes!” Denny was glad to get a call from som
eone besides Allen. It seemed like lately Allen was constantly calling him up to nag.

  “Welcome to the future. I am Phil, a phonebot cybersystem designed to contact consumer prospects. I would like to tell about the on-line possibilities open to you. Shall I continue?”

  “Yes,” said Denny.

  It turned out the “Phil the phonebot” was a kind of computerized phone salesman. The phonebot was selling phonebots which you, the consumer prospect, could use to sell phonebots to others. It was—though Denny didn’t realize this—a classic Ponzi pyramid scheme, like a chain letter, or like those companies which sell people franchises to sell franchises to sell franchises to sell …

  The phonebot had a certain amount of interactivity. It asked a few yes/no questions; and whenever Denny burst in with some comment, it would pause, say, “That’s right, Denny! But listen to the rest!” and continue. Denny was pleased to hear his name so often. Alone in his room, week after week, he’d been feeling his reality fade. Writing original songs for the guitar was harder than he’d expected. It would be nice to have a robot friend. At the end, when Phil asked for his verdict, Denny said, “Okay, Phil, I want you. Come to my rooming-house tomorrow and I’ll have the money.”

  The phonebot was not the arm-waving clanker that Denny, in his ignorance, had imagined. It was, rather, a flat metal box that plugged right into the wall phone-socket. The box had a slot for an electronic directory, and a speaker for talking to its owner. It told Denny he could call it Phil; all the phonebots were named Phil. The basic phonebot sales spiel was stored in the Phil’s memory, though you could change the patter if you wanted. You could, indeed, use the phonebot to sell things other than phonebots.

  The standard salespitch lasted five minutes, and one minute was allotted to the consumer’s responses. If everyone answered, listened, and responded, the phonebot could process ten prospects per hour, and one hundred twenty in a 9 A. M. – 9 P. M. day! The whole system cost nine thousand dollars, though as soon as you bought one and joined the pyramid, you could get more of them for six. Three thousand dollars profit for each phonebot your phonebot could sell! If you sold, say, one a day, you’d make better than $100K a year!

  The electronic directory held all the names and numbers in the city; and each morning it would ask Denny who he wanted to try today. He could select the numbers on the day’s calling list on the basis of neighborhood, last name, family size, type of business and so on.

  The first day, Denny picked a middle-class suburb and told Phil to call all the childless married couples there. Young folks looking for an opportunity! Denny set the speaker so he could listen to people’s responses. It was not encouraging.

  “click”

  “No…click”

  “click”

  “This kilp ought to be illegal…click”

  “click”

  “Get a job, you bizzy dook…click”

  “Of all the…click”

  “Again? click”

  Most people hung up so fast that Phil was able to make some thousand unsuccessful contacts in less than ten hours. Only seven people listened through the whole message and left comments at the end; and six of these people seemed to be bedridden or crazy. The seventh had a phonebot she wanted to sell cheap.

  Denny tried different phoning strategies—rich people, poor people, people with two sevens in their phone number, and so on. He tried different kinds of salespitches—bossy ones, ingratiating ones, curt ones, ethnic-accent ones, etc. He made up a salespitch that offered businesses the chance to rent Phil to do phone advertising for them.

  Nothing worked. It got to be depressing sitting in his room watching Phil fail—it was like having Willy Loman for his roommate. The machine made little noises, and unless Denny took a lot of dope, he had trouble relaxing out into the sky. The empty food-packs stank.

  Two more weeks, and all the money, food and dope were gone. Right after he did the last of the dope, Denny recorded a final sales-pitch:

  “Uh…hi. This is Phil the prophet at 1801 Eye Street. I eye I…I’m out of money and I’d rather not have to…uh…leave my room. You send me money for…uh…food and I’ll give God your name. Dope’s rail, too.”

  Phil ran that on random numbers for two days with no success. Denny came down into deep hunger. Involuntary detox. If his Dad had left much more money, Denny might have died, holed up in that room. Good old Dad. He trembled out into the street and got a job working counter in a Greek coffee shop called the KoDo. It was okay; there was plenty of food, and he didn’t have to watch Phil panhandling.

  As Denny’s strength and sanity came back, he remembered sex. But he didn’t know any girls. He took Phil off panhandling and put him onto propositioning numbers in the young working-girl neighborhoods.

  “Hi, are you a woman? I’m Phil, sleek robot for a whippy young man who’s ready to get under. Make a guess and he’ll mess. Leave your number and state your need; he’s fuff-looking and into sleaze.”

  This message worked surprisingly well. The day after he started it up, Denny came home to find four enthusiastic responses stored on Phil’s chips. Two of the responses seemed to be from men, and one of the women’s voice sounded old…really old. The fourth response was from “Silke.”

  “Hi, desperado, this is Silke. I like your machine. Call me.”

  Phil had Silke’s number stored, of course, so Denny called her right up. Feeling shy, he talked through Phil, using the machine as voder to make his voice sound weird. After all, Phil was the one who knew her.

  “Hello?” Cute, eager, practical, strange.

  “Silke? This is Phil. Denny’s talking through me. You want to interface?”

  “Like where?”

  “My room?”

  “Is it small? It sounds like your room is small. I like small rooms.”

  “You got it. 1801 Eye Street, Denny’ll be in front of the building.”

  “What do you look like, Denny?”

  “Tall, thin, teeth when I grin, which is lots. My hair’s peroxide blond on top. I’ll wear my X-shirt.”

  “Me too. See you in an hour.”

  Denny put on his X-shirt—a T-shirt with a big silk screen picture of his genitalia—and raced down to the KoDo to beg Spiros, the boss, for an advance on his wages.

  “Please, Spiros, I got a date.”

  The shop was almost empty, and Spiros was sitting at the counter watching a payvid porno show on his pocket TV. He glanced over at Denny, all decked out in his X-shirt, and pulled two fifties out of his pocket.

  “Let me know how she come.”

  Denny spent one fifty on two Fiesta food-packs and some wine: the other fifty went for a capsule of snap-crystals from a street vendor. He was back in front of his rooming-house in plenty of time. Ten minutes, and there came Silke, with a great big pink crotch-shot printed onto her T-shirt. She looked giga good.

  For the first instant they stood looking at each other’s X-shirts, and then they shook hands.

  “I’m Denny Blevins. I got some food and wine and snap here, if you want to go up.” Denny was indeed tall and thin, and toothy when he grinned. His mouth was very wide. His hair was long and dark in back, and short and blond on top. He wore red rhinestone earrings, his semierect X-shirt, tight black plastic pants, and fake leopard fur shoes. His arms were muscular and veiny, and he moved them a lot when he talked.

  “Go up and get under,” smiled Silke. She was medium height, and wore her straw-like black hair in a bouffant. She had fine, hard features. She’d appliquéd pictures of monster eyes to her eyelids, and she wore white dayglo lipstick. Beneath her sopping wet X-shirt, she wore a tight, silvered jumpsuit with cutouts. On her feet she wore roller skates with lights in the wheels.

  “Oxo,” said Denny.

  “Wow,” said Silke.

  Up in the room they got to know each other. Denny showed Silke his phonebot and his sound system, pretended to start to play his guitar and to then decide not to, and told about some of the weird things he
’d seen in the sky, looking out that broken pane. Silke, as it turned out, was a payvid sex dancer come here from West Virginia. She talked mostly in clear, but she was smart, and she liked to get wild, but only with the right kind of guy. Sex dancer didn’t mean hooker and she was, she assured Denny, clean. She had a big dream she wasn’t quite willing to tell him yet.

  “Come on,” he urged, popping the autowave foodpacks open. “Decode.”

  “Ah, I don’t know, Denny. You might think I’m skanky.”

  They sat side by side on Denny’s mattress and ate the pasty food with the packed in plastic spoons. It was good. It was good to have another person in the room here.

  “Silke,” said Denny when they finished eating, “I’d been thinking Phil was kilp. Dook null. But if he got you here it was worth it. Seems I just need tech to relate, you wave?”

  Silke threw the empty foodtrays on the floor and gave Denny a big kiss. They went ahead and fuffed. It seemed like it had been a while for both of them. Skin all over, soft, warm, skin, touch, kiss, lick, smell, good.

  Afterwards, Denny opened the capsule of snap and they split it. You put the stuff on your tongue, it sputtered and popped, and you breathed in the freebase fumes. Fab rush. Out through the empty window pane they could see the moon and two stars stronger than the city lights.

  “Out there,” said Silke, her voice fast and shaky from the snap. “That’s my dream. If we hurry, Denny, we can be the first people to have sex in space. They’d remember us forever. I’ve been thinking about it, and there was always missing links, but you and Phil are it. We’ll get in the shuttlebox—it’s a room like this—and go up. We get up there and make videos of us getting under, and—this is my new flash—we use Phil to sell the vids to pay for the trip. You wave?”

  Denny’s long, maniacal smile curled across his face. The snap was still crackling on his tongue. “Stuzzadelic! Nobody’s fuffed in space yet? None of those gawks who’ve used the shuttlebox?”

  “They might have, but not for the record. But if we scurry we’ll be the famous first forever. We’ll be starry.”