by Rudy Rucker
“I am getting a new stick,” cried Delbert furiously. “Chaos Attractor. Zep’s building it.”
“What does a junkie know about surf?” put in Shrimp Chips, a burly young guy with bleached hair. “Zep can’t even stand to take a bath.”
“Zep’s clean,” said Delbert loyally. “And he knows all about surf just from sitting here and watching.”
“Same way you know about girls, right, weenie?” said Loach. “Want to watch me and Jen get it on?”
Delbert leaped off the bench and butted his head right into the middle of the carroty washboard of Loach’s abdomen. Loach fell over backward, and suddenly there were kids everywhere, screaming, “It’s a fight!”
Zep pulled Delbert back before Loach could pulverize him. The Stoke Pilgrims lined up around their chief carrot, ready to charge.
“Wait a minute,” Delbert yelped, holding out his hand. “Let’s handle this like real men. Lex, we challenge you to a duel. Zep’ll have my new gun ready by tomorrow. If you and your boys can close us out, it’s yours. And if we win, you give me your wing squash turbo.”
Loach shook his head and Mr. Scrote spoke up for him, widening his bloodshot eyes. “I doubt Lex’d want any piece of trash you’d ride. No, Delbert, if you lose, you suck a sea anemone and tell Jen you’re a fag.” The Stoke Pilgrims’ laughter was like the barking of seals. Delbert’s tongue prickled.
“Tomorrow by the San Diablo N-plant where the surf’s the gnarliest,” said Lex Loach, heading into the Pup-Tent. “Slack tide, dudes. Be there or we’ll find you.”
Up on the cliff, the N-plant looked like a gray golf ball sinking into a sand trap. The cliff was overgrown with yellow ice plant whose succulent, radiation-warmed leaves were fat as drowned men’s fingers. A colonic loop of cooling pipe jagged down the cliff, out into the sea, and back up the cliff to the reactor. The beach was littered with fish killed by the reactor’s thermal pollution. Closer to the sea, the tide’s full moon low had exposed great beds of oversize sea anemones that were bright, mutated warm-water sports. Having your face pushed into one of them would be no joke.
“Trust me, bro,” said Zep. He was greasy and jittery. “You’ll sluice roosters in Loach’s face. No prob. And after this we stalk the big tournament moola.”
“The surf is mush, Zep. I know it’s a drag, bro, but be objective. Look the hell at the zon.” The horizon was indeed flat. Closer to shore were long rows of small, parallel lines where the dead sea’s ripples came limping in. Delbert was secretly glad that the contest might well be called off.
“No way,” shouted Zep, angrily brandishing the nylon case that held the new board. “All you gotta do is plug in your leash and put Chaos Attractor in the water. The surf will definitely rise, little dude.”
“It’s mush.”
“Only because you are. Dig it!” Zep grabbed his friend by the front of his brand new paisley wet suit and shook him. “You haven’t looked at my new stick!” Zep dropped to his knees and unzipped Chaos Attractor’s case. He drew out a long, grayish, misshapen board. Most of it seemed actually transparent, though there were some dark, right-angled shapes embedded in the thing’s center.
Delbert jerked back in horror. For this he’d given Zep two hundred dollars? All his saving for what looked like a dime store Styrofoam toy surfboard that a slushed druggie had doused in epoxy?
“It…it’s transparent?” said Delbert after a time. In the dull day’s light you could see Zep’s scalp through his no-color hair. Del had trusted Zep and Zep had blown it. It was sad.
“Does that embarrass you?” snarled Zep, sensing Delbert’s pity. “Is there something wrong with transparency? And screw your two hundred bucks ‘cause this stick didn’t cost me nothing. I spent your money on crank, mofo, on clean Hell’s Angels blow. What else, Delbert, who do you think I am? Yeah! Touch the board!”
Delbert stroked the surface of the board uncertainly. “It’s rough,” he said finally.
“Yeah!” Zep wanted to get the whole story out, how he’d immediately spent the money on crank, and how then in the first comedown’s guilt he’d laid meth on Cowboy Bob, a dope-starved biker who hung around the meth dealer’s. Zep had fed Cowboy Bob’s head so Bob’d take him out breaking and entering: First they hit the KZ Kustom Zurf Shop for a primo transparent surfboard blank, then they barreled Bob’s chopped hog up to Oakland to liberate imipolex from the I. G. Farben research labs in the wake of a diversionary firebomb, and then they’d done the rest of the speed and shot over the Bay to dynamite open the door of System Concepts and score a Cellular Automaton Machine, the CAM8, right, and by 3:00 A. M. Zep had scored the goods and spent the rest of the night wiring the CAM board into the imipolex-wrapped blank’s honeyheart with tiny wires connecting to the stick’s surface all over, and then finally at dawn Zep had gone in through the back window of a butcher shop and wedged the board into the huge vacuum meat packer there to vacuum-sputter the new stick’s finish up into as weird a fractal as a snowflake Koch curve or a rucked Sierpinski carpet. And now lame little Delbert is all worried and:
“Why’s it so rough?”
Zep took a deep breath and concentrated on slowing down his heartbeat. Another breath. “This stick, Del, it uses its fractal surface for a realtime surfspace simulation. The board’s surface is a fractal CA model of the sea, you wave?”
“Zep, what’s that gray thing in the middle like a shark’s skeleton? Loach is going to laugh at us.”
“Shut up about Loach,” snarled Zep, losing all patience once again. “Lex Loach is like a poisonous mutant warty sculpin choked by a plastic tampon insert at the mouth of an offshore toxic waste pipe, man, thrashing around and stinging everybody in his spastic nowhere death throes.”
“He’s standing right behind you.”
Zep spun around and saw that Delbert was more or less correct, given his tendency toward exaggeration. Loach was striding down the beach toward them, along with the four other Stoke Pilgrims. They were carrying lean, tapering sticks with sharp noses and foiled rails. Loach and Mr. Scrote wore lurid wet suits. The younger three had painted their bodies with Day-Glo thermopaints.
“Gonna shred you suckers!” yelled Loach.
“Stupid clones!” whooped Zep, lifting Chaos Attractor high overhead. “Freestyle rules!”
“What kind of weird joke is this?” asked Loach, eyeing the new stick.
“Care to try it out?”
“Maybe. I’m gonna win it anyway, right?”
Zep nodded, calm and scientist-like now that the action had finally begun. It was good to have real flesh-and-blood enemies to deal with. “Let me show you where to plug it in. This might sting a bit a first.”
He knelt down and began to brush sand from Loach’s ankle.
“What’re you doing?” Loach asked, jumping back when he saw Zep coming at him with a wire terminating in sharp pins.
“You need this special leash to ride the board,” Zep said. “Without human input, the board would go out of control. The thing is, the fractal surface writhes in a data-simulation altered by the leash input. These fang things are a parallel nerve-port, wave? It feeds into the CAM8 along with the fractal wave analyses, so the board knows what to do.”
Mr. Scrote gave Zep a sharp kick in the ribs. “You’re gonna stick that thing in his ankle, you junkie, and give him AIDS?”
Zep bared his teeth in a confused grin. “Just hold still, Lex. It doesn’t hurt. I’d like to see what you can do with it.”
Loach stepped well back. “You’re whacked, dude. You been over the falls one too many times. Your brain is whitewater. Yo, Delbert! See you out at the break. It’s flat now, but there’ll be peaks once the tide starts in—believe it!” Loach and the Stoke Pilgrims hit the mushy warm water and began paddling out.
Zep was still crouched over Chaos Attractor. He glanced slyly up at Delbert. “You ready?”
“No.”
“Look, Del, you and my stick have to go out there and show the guys how to carve.�
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“No way.”
“Get rad. Be an adventurist. You’ll be part of the system, man. Don’t you remember how I explained about waves?”
“I don’t care about waves,” said little Delbert. “I want to go home. It’s stupid to think I would ever be a major surfer. Who talked me into this, anyway? Was it you?”
Zep stared out at the zon. Loach and the Stoke Pilgrims were bobbing on the mucky water, waiting for a set. Suddenly he frowned. “You know, Del, maybe it’s not such a great idea for you to use this board.”
“What do you mean? It’s my stick isn’t it? I gave you two hundred dollars.”
“You still don’t have the big picture. At any moment, the relevant sea-configuration is ten trillion bits of analog info, right? Which folds up to one point in the ten-trillion-dimensional surfspace. As the ocean dynamically evolves, the point traces out a trajectory. But Del! The mind, Del, the mind is meanwhile and always jamming in the infinite-dimensional mindscape. Mindscape being larger than surfspace, you wave. My good tool Chaos Attractor picks up what you’re looking for and sends tiny ripples out into the ocean, pulsing them just right, so that they cause interference way out there and bounce back where you want. The coupled system of board and rider in the mindscape are riding the surfspace. You sketch yourself into your own picture.”
“So why can’t I ride the board?”
“Because, Delbert, because …” Zep gave a long, shuddery sigh and clamped the leash’s fangs into his own ankle. “Because you have a bad attitude and you’ll deal a mess and thrash the board before it gets burnt in. Because it’s mine. Because right now I’m plugged in and you’re not. Because …” Zep paused and smiled oddly. “I don’t like to say the word for what you are.”
“What word?”
“Ho-dad.”
Delbert’s tense frame sagged. “That’s really depressing, Zep.” In the distance a car had begun insistently to honk. At a loss for words, Delbert craned up the cliff at the N-plant parking lot. There was a girl up there, standing next to a car and waving and reaching in through the car window to honk. It was Jen! Delbert turned his back to Zep and waved both arms at Jen. “Come on down, baby,” he screamed. “Zep’s gonna break the board in for me and then I’ll shut down this beach for true!” Jen began slowly to pick her way down the steep cliff path. Delbert turned back to Zep. All smiles. “Be careful, my man. The Pilgrims’ll probably try to ram you.”
“I’m not afraid of Loach,” said Zep softly. “He’s a clone surfer. No sense of freestyle. We’re both ‘dads, man, but we’re still avant-garde. And you, man, you go and put some heavy physical moves on Jen while she’s standing here.”
Zep padded down to the water’s edge, avoiding the lurid, overgrown anemones. Clams squirted dark brown water form their holes. Sand crabs hid with only their antennae showing, dredging the slack warm water for the luminous plankton indigenous to the San Diablo break.
The N-plant made for an empty beach. There was plenty of room in the water, even with the five Stoke Pilgrims out there in a lineup. Floathead and Shrimp Chips were playing tic-tac-toe in the body paints on each other’s chests, and Squid Puppy was fiddling with a wristwatch video game.
Chaos Attractor lit up the instant it hit the water. Zep found himself looking into a percolating, turbulent lens. The board was a window into surfspace. Zep could see the swirling high-dimensional probability fluid, tiny torsion curls composed of tinier curls composed of tinier torsions. It made him almost high on life. Zep flopped belly-down on the board and began paddling out through the wavelets that lapped the shore.
“Hang ten trillion!” called Delbert.
Ripples spread away from Zep’s stick, expanding and crossing paths as they rushed toward the open sea. The water was laced with slimy indigo kelp. Zep thought of jellyfish. In this quap water, they’d be mongo. He kept paddling. The sun looked like the ghost of a silver dollar. He splashed through some parallel lines of number-three wavies. Stroke followed stroke, and finally he was far enough out. He let himself drift, riding up and down on the humping wave embryos. Chaos Attractor was sending out ripples all the time and now things were beginning to …
“Check the zon!” shouted Squid Puppy.
Zep sat up. Row upon row of waves were coming in from the zon, each wave bigger than the one before. The sea was starting to look like a staircase. Remain calm, carver. Nothing too big and nasty. A few even test waves would do nicely. Something with a long, lean lip and a smoothed-under ledge.
“Curl or crawl,” Loach called, glancing sidelong at Zep with a confident sneer.
Zep could feel the power between his legs. The surface of Chaos Attractor was flexing and rippling now, a faithful model of the sea’s surface. Looking down, Zep could see moving beads of color that matched the approaching waves. Wouldn’t it be great if …
The leash fed Zep’s thought to the CAM8. The CAM8 jived the imipolex. The imipolex fed a shudder to the sea. The surface band-pattern changed and …
“Mexican beach break!” screamed Zep.
The huge blue wall came out of nowhere and crashed onto Loach and his glittering board—all in the space of an exclamation point.
Zep aimed into the churning stampede of white foam, endured a moment of watery rage, and shot effortlessly out into calm tides. The real wave-set was marching in now. Zep decided to catch the seventh.
Loach surfaced a few meters off, all uptight. “Carve him, Pilgrims!”
Zep grinned. Not likely.
As the war-painted sea dogs huffed and puffed against the current, he calmly bent his will toward shaping that perfect seventh wave. The Stoke Pilgrims yelled in glee, catching waves from the set. Squid Puppy and Shrimp Chips came after Zep, dogsledding it in zigzags over the curl and down the hollow. Near miss. Here was Zep’s wave. He took his time getting to his feet after a slow takeoff, and looked back to see the prune-faced Mr. Scrote snaking after him, befouling the wave in his eagerness to slyve Zep.
It was time to hang ten.
Zep took a ginger step toward the nose and watched the gliding water rise up. Perfect, perfect…aaauuuuummmm. A shadow fell over Zep. He leaned farther out over the nose, and the shadow grew—like an ever-thicker cloud closing over the sun.
Zep looked back, and he saw that the sky was green and alive with foam, a shivering vault of water. Floating amid that enormous green curved world, which looked like some fathomless cavern made from bottle glass, was a lurid, red-eyed giant—a Macy’s Parade Mr. Scrote.
Zep flicked around, banked back toward the behemoth, and cruised up the slick green tube until he was at Scrote’s eye level. The sight of the bulging capillaries sickened him, and he stretched his arms straight out ahead of him, gripping the very tip of the board with his naked toes. He had all the time in the world. The wave didn’t seem to be breaking anymore.
The green expanse spread out around him. The curve above flowed like melting wax, drawing him into it. Rationally, he knew he was upside down, but it felt more like he was sliding down one side of a vast, translucent bowl. Under the board he could see a shimmering disk of white light, like a fire in the water: Was that the sun? He stepped back to the middle of Chaos Attractor, tilting the board up for greater speed, plunging ever deeper in the maelstrom spiral of the tube. He was nearing the heart of pure foam: the calm, still center of the ever-receding void.
Suddenly, a huge stain came steaming toward him out of the vortex. Gelatin, nausea, quaking purple spots, a glutinous leviathan with purple organs the size of aircraft carriers. Mile upon mile of slithery stinging tendrils drifted behind the thing, stretching clear back to the singular center that had been Zep’s goal.
It was a jellyfish, and…Zep was less than a centimeter tall. It figured, Zep thought, realizing what was up—it figured that he’d shrink. That’s what he’d always wanted from the drugs he couldn’t quite kick: annihilation, cessation of pain, the deep inattention of the zero. The jellyfish steamed closer, lurid as a bad trip, urgently qua
king.
Zep sighed and dug in his stick’s back rail. Water shot up, and Zep grew. The jellyfish zoom-lensed back down to size. Chaos Attractor shot up out of the tube, and Zep fell down into the warm gray-and-green sea.
He surfaced into the raging chop and reeled Chaos Attractor in by the leash. Mr. Scrote was behind a crest somewhere, screaming at Loach. “He disappeared, Lex! I swear to God, dude—I had him, and he shrunk to nothing. Flat out disappeared!”
Zep got back on Chaos Attractor and rode some whitewater toward shore. There were Del and Jen, waving and making gestures. Del had his arm around her waist. Off to the right was the stupid N-plant cooling pipe. Zep glared up at the plant, feeling a hot, angry flash of righteous ecological rage. The nuke-pigs said no N-plant could ever explode, but it would be so rad if like this one went up, just to show the pigs that …
Ripples sped over the cooling pipe, and suddenly Zep noticed a cloud of steam or smoke in the air over the N-plant. Had that been there before? And was that rumbling noise thunder? Had to be thunder. Or a jet. Or maybe no. What was that he’d been thinking about an explosion? Forget it! Think pro-nuke, Zep baby!
When Zep was near shore, Delbert gave Jen a big kiss, dived in, and came stroking out, buoyed by his wet suit. He ducked a breaker or two and then he was holding onto the side of Chaos Attractor, totally stoked.
“I saw that, Zep! It was awesome! It does everything you said it does. It made great waves—and you shrank right up like you were surfing into a zero.”
“Yeah, Del, but listen—”
“Let me try now, Zep. I think I can do it.”
Zep back-paddled, gripping the board between his thighs. “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”
Delbert reddened. “Yeah? You know, Zep, you’re a real wipe sometimes. What is this, huh? You get me to fork over all my savings so you can go and build a board that didn’t cost you a cent in the first place—and now you act like it’s yours! You took my money for a board you would have made anyway!”
“It’s not that, Del. It’s just that—it’s more powerful that I thought. We maybe shouldn’t be using it around here. Look at the nuke.”
