Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  “Oxo, Silke.” Denny’s voice rose with excitement. “Are you there, Phil?”

  “Yes, Denny.”

  “Got a new pitch. In clear.”

  “Proceed.”

  “Hi, this is Denny.” He nudged the naked girl next to him.

  “And this is Silke.”

  “We’re doing a live fuff-vid we’d like to show you.”

  “It’s called Rapture in Space. It’s the very first X-rated love film from outer space.”

  “Zero gravity,” said Denny, reaching over to whang on his guitar.

  “Endless fun.”

  “Mindless pleasure.” Whang.

  “Out near the sun.” Silke nuzzled his neck and moaned stagily. “Oh, Denny, oh, darling, it’s …”

  “RAPTURE IN SPACE! Satisfaction guaranteed. This is bound to be a collector’s item; the very first live sex video from space. A full ninety minutes of unbelievable null-gee action, with great Mother Earth in the background, tune in for only fifty …”

  “More, Denny,” wailed Silke, who was now grinding herself against him with some urgency. “More!”

  Whang. “Only one hundred dollars, and going up fast. To order, simply leave your card number after the beep.”

  “Beep!”

  Phil got to work the next morning, calling numbers of businesses where lots of men worked. The orders poured in. Lacking a business-front by which to cash the credit orders, Denny enlisted Spiros, who quickly set up KoDo Space Rapture Enterprises. For managing the business, Spiros only wanted 15% and some preliminary tapes of Denny and Silke in action. For another 45%, Silke’s porno payvid employers—an outfit known as XVID—stood ready to distribute the show. Dreaming of this day, Silke had already bought her own cameras. She and Denny practiced a lot, getting their moves down. Spiros agreed that the rushes looked good. Denny went ahead and reserved the shuttlebox for a trip in mid July.

  The shuttlebox was a small passenger module that could be loaded into the space shuttle for one of its weekly trips up to orbit and back. A trip for two cost $100K. Denny bought electronic directories for cities across the country, and set Phil to working twenty hours a day. He averaged fifty sales a day, and by launch time, Silke and Denny had enough to pay everyone off, and then some.

  But this was just the beginning. Three days before the launch, the news services picked up on the Rapture in Space plan, and everything went crazy. There was no way for a cheap box like Phil to process the orders anymore. Denny and Silke had to give XVID anther 15% of the action, and let them handle the tens of thousands of orders. It was projected that Rapture in Space would pull an audience share of 7%—which is a lot of people. Even more money came in the form of fat contracts for two product endorsements: SPACE RAPTURE, the cosmic eroscent for high-flyers, and RAPT SHIELD, an antiviral lotion for use by sexual adventurers. XVID and the advertisers privately wished that Denny and Silke were a bit more…upscale looking, but they were the two who had the tiger by the tail.

  Inevitably, some of the Christian Party congressmen tried to have Denny and Silke enjoined from making an XVID broadcast from aboard the space shuttle which was, after all, government property. But for 5% of the gross, a fast thinking lawyer was able to convince a hastily convened Federal court that, insofar as Rapture in Space was being codecast to the XVID dish and cabled thence only to paying subscribers, the show was a form of constitutionally protected free speech, in no way essentially different from a live-sex show in a private club.

  So the great day came. Naked save for a drenching of Space Rapture eroscent, Silke and Denny waved goodbye and stepped into their shuttle-box. It was shaped like a two-meter-thick letter D, with a rounded floor, and with a big picture window set into the flat ceiling. A crane loaded the shuttlebox into the bay of the space shuttle along with some satellites, missiles, building materials, etc. A worker dogged all the stuff down, and then the baydoors closed. Silke and Denny wedged themselves down into their puttylike floor. Blast off—roar, shudder, push, clunk, roar some more.

  Then they were floating. The baydoors swung open, and the astronauts got to work with their retractable arms and space tools. Silke and Denny were busy, too. They set up the cameras, and got their little antenna locked in on the XVID dish. They started broadcasting right away—some of the Rapture in Space subscribers had signed up for the whole live protocols in addition to the ninety minute show that Silke and Denny were scheduled to put on in …

  “Only half an hour, Denny,” said Silke. “Only thirty minutes till we go on.” She was crouched over the sink, douching, and vacuuming the water back up. As fate would have it, she was menstruating. She hadn’t warned anyone about it.

  Denny felt cold and sick to his stomach. XVID had scheduled their show right after take-off because otherwise—with all the news going on—people might forget about it. But right now he didn’t fell like fuffing at all, let alone getting under. Every time he touched something, or even breathed, his whole body moved.

  “All clean now,” sang Silke. “No one can tell, not even you.”

  There was a rapping on their window—one of the astronauts, a jolly jock woman named Judy. She grinned through her helmet and gave them a high sign. The astronauts thought the Rapture in Space show was a great idea; it would make people think about them in new, more interesting ways.

  “I talked to Judy before the launch,” said Silke, waving back. “She said to watch out for the rebound.” She floated to Denny and began fondling him. “Ten minutes, starman.”

  Outside the window, Judy was a shiny wad against Earth’s great marbled curve. The clouds, Denny realized, I’m seeing the clouds from on top. His genitals were warming to Silke’s touch. He tongued a snap crystal out of a crack between his teeth and bit it open. Inhale. The clouds. Silke’s touch. He was hard, thank God, he was hard. This was going to be all right.

  The cameras made a noise to signal the start of the main transmission, and Denny decided to start by planting a kiss on Silke’s mouth. He bumped her shoulder and she started to drift away. She tightened her grip on his penis and led him along after her. It hurt, but not too unpleasantly. She landed on her back, on the padded floor, and guided Denny right into her vagina. Smooth and warm. Good. Denny pushed into her and…rebound.

  He flew, rapidly and buttocks first, up to the window. He had hold of Silke’s armpit and she came with him. She got her mouth over his penis for a second, which was good, but then her body spun around, and she slid toothrakingly off him, which was very bad.

  Trying to hold a smile, Denny stole a look at the clock. Three minutes. Rapture in Space had been on for three minutes now. Eighty-seven minutes to go.

  It was another bruising half hour or so until Denny and Silke began to get the hang of spacefuffing. And then it was fun. For a long time they hung in midair, with Denny in Silke, and Silke’s legs around his waist, just gently jogging, but moaning and throwing their heads around for the camera. Actually, the more they hammed it up, the better it felt. Autosuggestion.

  Denny stared and stared at the clouds to keep from coming, but finally he had to pull out for a rest. To keep things going they did rebounds for awhile. Silke would lie spreadeagled on the floor, and Denny would kind of leap down on her; both of them adjusting their pelvises for a bullseye. She’d sink into the cushions, then rebound them both up. It got better and better. Silke curled up into a ball and impaled herself on Denny’s shaft. He wedged himself against the wall with his feet and one hand and used his other hand to spin her around and around, bobbin on his spindle. Denny lay on the floor and Silke did leaps onto him. They kissed and licked each other all over, and from every angle. The time was almost up.

  For the finale, they went back to midair fuffing; arms and legs wrapped around each other; one camera aimed at their faces, and one camera aimed at their genitalia. They hit a rhythm where they always pushed just as hard as each other and it action/reaction cancelled out, hard and harder, with big Earth out the window, yes, the air full of their sme
lls, yes, the only sound the sound of their ragged breathing, yes, now NOW AAAHHHHHHH!!!!

  Denny kind of fainted there, and forgot to slide out for the come-shot. Silke went blank, too, and they just floated, linked like puzzle pieces for five or ten minutes. It made a great finale for the Rapture in Space show, really much more convincing than the standard sperm spurt.

  Two days later, and they were back on Earth, with the difference that they were now, as Denny had hoped, cashy and starry. People recognized them everywhere, and looked at them funny, often asking for a date. They did some interviews, some more endorsements and they got an XVID contract to host a monthly spacefuff variety show.

  Things were going really good until Denny got a tumor.

  “It’s a dooky little kilp down in my bag,” he complained to Silke. “Feel it.”

  Sure enough, there was a one-centimeter lump in Denny’s scrotum. Silke wanted him to see a doctor, but he kept stalling. He was afraid they’d run a blood test and get on his case about drugs. Some things were still illegal.

  A month went by and the lump was the size of an orange.

  “It’s so gawky you can see it through my pants,” complained Denny. “It’s giga ouch and I can’t cut a vid this way.”

  But he still wouldn’t go to the doctor. What with all the snap he could buy, and with his new cloud telescope, Denny didn’t notice what was going on in his body most of the time. He was happy to miss the next few XVID dates. Silke hosted them alone.

  Three more months and the lump was like a small watermelon. When Denny came down one time and noticed that the tumor was moving he really got worried

  “Silke! It’s alive! The thing in my bag is alive! Aaauuugh!”

  Silke paid a doctor two thousand dollars to come to their apartment. The doctor was a bald, dignified man with a white beard. He examined Denny’s scrotum for a long time, feeling, listening, and watching the tumor’s occasional twitches. Finally he pulled the covers back over Denny and sat down. He regarded Silke and Denny in silence for quite some time.

  “Decode!” demanded Denny. “What the kilp we got running here?”

  “You’re pregnant,” said the doctor. “Four months into it, I’d say.”

  The quickening fetus gave another kick and Denny groaned. He knew it was true. “But how?”

  The doctor steepled his fingers. “I…I saw Rapture in Space. There were certain signs to indicate that your uh partner was menstruating?”

  “Check.”

  “Menstruation, as you must know, involves the discharge of the unfertilized ovum along with some discarded uterine tissues. I would speculate that after your ejaculation the ovum became wedged in your meatus. It is conceivable that under weightless conditions the sperm’s flagell3/4 could have driven the now-fertilized ovum up into your vas deferens. The ovum implanted itself in the bloodrich tissues there and developed into a fetus.”

  “I want an abortion.”

  “No!” protested Silke. “That’s our baby, Denny. You’re already almost half done carrying it. It’ll be lovely for us…and just think of the publicity!”

  “Uh …” said Denny, reaching for his bag of dope.

  “No more drugs,” said the doctor, snatching the bag. “Except for the ones I give you.” He broke into a broad, excited smile. “This will make medical history.”

  And indeed it did. The doctor designed Denny a kind of pouch in which he could carry his pregnant scrotum, and Denny made a number of video appearances, not all of them X-rated. He spoke on the changing roles of the sexes, and he counted the days till delivery. In the public’s mind, Denny became the symbol of a new recombining of sex with life and love. In Denny’s own mind, he finally became a productive and worthwhile person. The baby was a flawless girl, delivered by a modified Caesarian section.

  Sex was never the same again.

  ============

  Note on “Rapture in Space”

  Written in Fall, 1984.

  Semiotext[e] SF, Autonomedia, 1989.

  Dennis Poague, a.k.a. Sta-Hi, was the inspiration for this story; he really did spend his inheritance on a phoning machine. I wrote this story shortly after seeing the IMAX movie, The Dream Is Alive, which featured pictures of the sexy astronaut Judy Resnick sleeping in zero-gee. The Challenger shuttle blew up with Judy in it a few months later, definitively deep-sixing whatever slim chance “Rapture in Space” had of getting into a normal SF magazine.

  Semiotext[e] SF was an anthology which Peter Lamborn Wilson and I co-edited. Originally we’d planned to call the book Bad Brains, but Peter felt doing this would conflict with the band of the same name. At the time, Peter rented an apartment upstairs from the apartment of my friend Eddie Marritz in New York City, which is how I happened to meet him. Eddie appears in the story “Tales of Houdini,” in “Drugs and Live Sex—NYC 1980,” and in the novel Master of Space and Time.

  A funny Dennis story. When we moved to San Jose, it turned out Dennis lived here, so we started getting together a lot. I was supposed to give a reading at an annual San Jose SF convention called Bay Con in 1987, and the day before the reading I was in a bicycle accident and had a huge black eye. I didn’t want to appear in public looking so bad, so I gave Dennis my manuscript of “As Above So Below,” and told him to do the reading. I figured he would enjoy this free taste of fame, and I was right—remember that one of Software Sta-Hi’s big obsessions is how to become famous.

  Although I’d already made friends with the San Francisco SF writers, none of the fans knew at Bay Con knew what I looked like, so when Dennis appeared in a corduroy jacket and read my story, they assumed he was me. The funny thing was, when I came and did my own reading at Bay Con a year later, several people came up to me and said, “You know, I saw your reading last year and it was wonderful. You made the material so fresh and new…it was like you’d never even read it before!”

  Storming the Cosmos

  (Written with Bruce Sterling)

  I first met Vlad Zipkin at a Moscow beatnik party in the glorious winter of 1957. I went there as a KGB informer. Because of my report on that first meeting, poor Vlad had to spend six months in a mental hospital—not that he wasn’t crazy.

  As a boy I often tattled on wrongdoers, but I certainly didn’t plan to grow up to be a professional informer. It just worked out that way. The turning point was in the spring of 1953, when I failed my completion exams at the All-Union Metallurgical Institute. I’d been working towards those exams for years; I wanted to help build the rockets that would launch us into the Infinite.

  And then, suddenly, one day in April, it was all over. Our examination grades were posted, and I was one of the three in seventeen who’d failed. To take the exam again, I’d have to wait a whole year. First I was depressed, then angry. I knew for a fact that four of the students with good grades had cheated. I, who was honest, had failed; and they, who had cheated, had passed. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t communist—I went and told the head of the Institute.

  The upshot was that I passed after all, and became an assistant metallurgical engineer at the Kaliningrad space center. But, in reality, my main duty was to make weekly reports to the KGB on what my coworkers thought and said and did. I was, frankly, grateful to have my KGB work to do, as most of the metallurgical work was a bit beyond me.

  There is an ugly Russian word for informer: stukach, snitch. The criminals, the psychotics, the parasites, and the beatniks—to them I was a stukach. But without stukachi, our communist society would explode into anarchy or grind to a decadent halt. Vlad Zipkin might be a genius, and I might be a stukach—but society needed us both.

  I first met Vlad at a party thrown by a girl called Lyuda. Lyuda had her own Moscow apartment; her father was a Red Army colonel-general in Kaliningrad. She was a nice, sexy girl who looked a little like Doris Day.

  Lyuda and her friends were all beatniks. They drank a lot; they used English slang; they listened to jazz; and the men hung around with prostitutes. One of the guys got Lyuda
pregnant and she went for an abortion. She had VD as well. We heard of this, of course. Word spreads about these matters. Someone in Higher Circles decided to eliminate the anti-social sex gangster responsible for this. It was my job to find out who he was.

  It was a matter for space-center KGB because several rocket-scientists were known to be in Lyuda’s orbit. My approach was cagey. I made contact with a prostitute named Trina who hung around the Metropol, the Moskva, and other foreign hotels. Trina had chic Western clothes from her customers, and she was friends with many of the Moscow beatniks. I’m certainly not dashing enough to charm a girl like Trina—instead, I simply told her that I was KGB, and that if she didn’t get me into one of Lyuda’s bashes I’d have her arrested.

  Lyuda’s pad was jammed when we got there. I was proud to show up with a cool chick like Trina on my arm. I looked very sharp too, with the leather jacket, and the black stove-pipe pants with no cuffs that all the beatniks were wearing that season. Trina stuck right with me—as we’d planned—and lots of men came up to talk to us. Trina would get them to talking dirty, and then I’d make some remark about Lyuda, ending with “but I guess she has a boyfriend?” The problem was that she had lots of them. I kept having to go into the bathroom to write down more names. Somehow I had to decide on one particular guy.

  Time went on, and I got tenser. Cigarette smoke filled the room. The bathroom was jammed and I had to wait. When I came back I saw Trina with a hardcore beatnik named Starsky—he got her attention with some garbled Americanisms: “Hey baby, let’s jive down to Hollywood and drink cool Scotch. I love making it with gone broads like you and Lyuda.” He showed her a wad of hard currency—dollars he had illegally bought from tourists. I decided on the spot that Starsky was my man, and told Trina to leave with him and find out where he lived.

  Now that I’d finished my investigation, I could relax and enjoy my-self. I got a bottle of vodka and sat down by Lyuda’s Steinway piano. Some guy in sunglasses was playing a slow boogie-woogie. It was lovely, lovely enough to move me to tears—tears for Lyuda’s corrupted beauty, tears for my lost childhood, tears for my mother’s grave.