Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Just then something began happening to the surface of the door. It was like someone was projecting a slide on it, a picture all made of dancing spots whose speckling created the face of a boy. The light flashes, Zep realized, were caused by tiny laser-rays darting out of the base of the ball in his hands. As soon as he’d taken the image in, the laser rays turned back off.

  The bungalow door opened to reveal the same skinny dude the ball’s lasers had just drawn. He wore hightop sneakers, jeans, and an old mod black suit-jacket with no shirt. His straight black hair fell into his eyes. He wore faint black lipstick; or maybe he’d been sucking on a stamp pad. He had a leather thong around his neck with a little brass crucifix.

  “I’m Kid Beast. You here to audition for the new band?”

  Kid Beast flung the door open and stepped back. The room gave off a foul tidal stink, as of a dozen starfish left in a hot car trunk through the length of an August day. Half a dozen aquariums bubbled along the walls and corners of the room, and another half dozen sat dark and stagnant, with occasional sulfur farts bubbling up through the murky scum. There was a drum-kit and some amps.

  “Come on in,” said the Kid, picking up a carton of Friskees cat-food and pouring the contents into a black aquarium. The surface seethed with the frenzied feeding of opalescent beaks.

  “My friend found this ball on the beach,” said Zep, holding up the sphere. “I think you want to pay a reward for it? I’m Zep.”

  The Kid glanced up through the hair in his face. “On the beach, hug? I’ll bet. Gidget sent you, right?”

  “Gidget who?” said Delbert, taking the ball and pushing Zep ahead of him into the Kid’s house. “Did she sing with the Auntie Christs? We love their stuff, don’t we Zep?” He broke into song: “‘I am the Auntie Christ! I look like Vincent Price! Wear black latex hosiery! Surfer girl is after me!’”

  The Kid flicked them a nervous smile. His front teeth were broken, blackened, in need of caps. Zep was suddenly certain he had seen this kid many times…on the streets, or hanging out in front of the 7-11 at two in the morning, talking to the strangers who came and went, hitting on them for cigarettes and beer money. He repressed the dishonest urge to give the Kid a comradely clap on the back and reassure him that everything was going to be all right. Kid Beast was like a five-car pileup waiting for car number six.

  “No, man, I’m talking about Tuttle Gidget, the chip billionaire.”

  “Sweet,” said Zep. Everyone knew of Tuttle Gidget and his mansion on the hundred-acre estate on the top of a big hill north of town.”

  “Gidget had the Auntie Christs up to his place to play for one of his like society dinners,” continued the Kid. “I bit a live squid…that was part of the new surf-music act we were breaking in. You know, bite into it and wave my head around with the tentacles coming out…“

  “Did you get to see Gidget’s ‘48 Country Squire?” asked Del. I bet this ball is from him and he wants to give it to me!”

  “Yeah, I guess I saw it. I don’t remember a lot about the evening. Somebody dosed me right before our second set and when I faded back in, the party was over, and the fucking band—my supposed friends—had all gone home without me. I was flaked out on the lawn and Gidget didn’t even notice me. And then I heard the sounds. Wait.”

  Kid Beast started bopping around his living room, affixing little suction cups to the sides of his aquariums and hooking lengths of speaker wire to the suckers as he spoke. The wires all ran to a primitive mixing board, held together mainly by duct tape and rubber bands. Strange low noises began to ooze out of his speakers.

  “It went kind of like this,” the Kid was saying. “The sound was coming from his swimming pool, and I was seeing colors. Thins like color three-dee TV pictures…one of them looked like you, Zep, come to think of it, and another was like your little friend. What’s his name?”

  “My name is Del. I want what’s coming to me.”

  “For sure. Why should I see something like Delbert?” Kid Beast shook his head in wonder, his dirty bangs batting against his dark eyes. “Anyway I’m seeing like ghost images and I’m hearing this weird bubbling music from the pool. Check it out. I think would be a great main sound for a new band.”

  Kid Beast fiddled with the dials on his deck, and the room reverberated with aquatic belchings and bubblings. He was mixing up the aquarium sounds, wrenching them into obscene configurations that sounded like some mad punker vomiting into the gulfs of outer space.

  The Kid looked proud. “Like, it’s so much uglier than anything any other group has got.”

  “What happened after you woke up at Gidget’s?” asked Zep. “Did you get any more drugs?”

  “Naw, man,” said the Kid. “You’re missing the point. The thing is, Gidget had somebody strapped to the diving board, a chick named Becka. She had her head hanging down over the end, with her long blonde hair touching the water. She was naked, arms and legs all tan, and you could see her T & A regions shining white in the dark. Gidget was standing over her on the diving board, wearing a wetsuit and holding a shimmering ball of light. Like that ball you have. Which is the point of this story. Did Gidget send you after me?”

  “Becka?” said Zep. “I’d been wondering what happened to her.”

  “I see her,” said Del, smiling and peering into his ball. “I see the girl you’re talking about. She turns into a burrito.”

  “How right you are,” said Kid Beast with a bitter laugh. “Cause then the whole pool started to bubble and shake, and this huge orange-striped shell the color of a Creamsicle rose out of the water. There was a godawful smell. The shell tilted back under the diving board. It had tentacles—slithery orange tentacles, hundreds of ‘em. A giant nautilus. The feelers reached up and started writhing all over that poor Becka. It was planting something in her. When I saw that shit, man, I took off running. I wish I’d tried to save her. I bet Becka’s dead now. Her parents think she’s just run away. But the nautilus thing got her.”

  In counterpoint to his narrative, Kid Beast had been mixing a nightmarish track that sounded like the ruminations of fish-eaten sailors playing Wurlitzers in a drowned shopping mall. His story chilled Zep, but Delbert was in another world: totally obliv.

  “Gee,” said Delbert, glancing up and tossing the ball idly from hand to hand. “You think maybe we could get to meet Gidget?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Del? You remember Becka. Didn’t you hear what they did to her?”

  “I just know Gidget will give me that Woodie.”

  “You really found that thing on the beach?” asked the Kid.

  “Look for yourself,” said Zep. “It’s got your P. O. box number on it.”

  Kid Beast shook his head and refused to touch the ball. “This is some kind of trick of Gidget’s. He wants to get that ball into my hands—like, maybe it will mark me, put a smell on me, so that tentacle thing knows where to find me. But no way, I’m not touching it.”

  “That monster you saw with Becka,” said Zep, glancing down at his hands. “That was just a hallucination, right, Beast? Put the ball down, Delbert.”

  “But…but what about my Woodie? And the girl? And the money and everything?”

  “It’s called bait, Del. Put the ball in the trash. You’re better off without it.”

  But Delbert clutched the little sphere to his chest. “You don’t understand, Zep. You’re just jealous cause you can’t see what I can see. I want what’s coming to me!”

  Kid Beast gave Delbert a pitying look. “You know, Zep,” he said after a moment’s thought. “You guys should give the ball to Gidget. Not me. It’s Gidget’s anyway. Put the smell back on him before the nautilus wants to breed again.”

  “Shit,” said Zep. He could see this turning into a full-on pain in the ass. He just hoped it didn’t interfere with his evening’s plans. “You mean like take it up to Gidget’s place? He’d never let us in.”

  The Kid considered this. “Maybe not. But I know how to get past the gate. I’
d like the chance to confront him about Becka. That shit was wrong. And while we’re at it, I’d dig another chance to hear that swimming-pool sound. I’ll bring a deck, man, and sample it. Yaaar. I’m glad you’re here to help me.”

  “See, Zep,” gloated Delbert. He seemed to be hearing about every other word of what was said. “Let’s go to Gidget’s—he’s got my Woodie and everything. He’ll give me the big reward! That’s…that’s what the little shrimp things want. They’re telling me now, can’t you hear them? They’re telling me that Gidget wants to meet us. Especially you, Zep.”

  This was definitely the worst Delbert had ever been. To some extent, Zep felt responsible—it was his surfboard, after all, that had put Delbert out of whack. ” “I’ll drive you guys up there,” said Zep slowly. “But you and me, Delbert, we get in, give Gidget the ball, ask for the reward, and get out . That’s it. In and out. And what the Kid does there is up to him.”

  Delbert was pleased. He headed out the door toward the truck, hardly watching where he was going. The pitbull lunged, missed and fell over.

  “Do you want to be in my new band?” Kid Beast asked Zep, upping the volume on his aquatic inferno for a last savoring second before switching off the power.

  “I don’t play an instrument,” said Zep.

  “Neither do I,” said the Kid. “That’s why I left the Aunties. They were starting sell out, getting into chords and shit.”

  They drove through the narrow, winding hill streets of Surf City, past an endless repetition of miniature pastel-colored haciendas, each with a dwarf palm and a driftwood-and-bottleglass sculpture on the lawn. Zep didn’t trust Delbert to drive right now, and Del wasn’t interested in anything but the promises of his magic Sea Monkey sphere. Kid Beast sat between the two of them, giving occasional directions, though Zep already knew the way. Who didn’t?

  While they were driving Zep kept thinking he saw pedestrians out of the corner of his eye. They’d pop out of nowhere and lurch towards the car. Zep would swerve, but then there’d be no one at all. It happened so often that he started to pick up on what seemed like a pattern. He only saw the ghost pedestrians at certain kinds of intersections, the ones were the streets were curved and one was running uphill. The weird walkers all looked like Kid Beast. Zep figured that Delbert’s ball was doing it to him, flashing little glimpses of his passenger onto his retina and then scrambling them with the crazy lines of the curbs. Thank God they were getting rid of the thing.

  Soon the came to the pink stucco wall surrounding Gidget’s estate. Far ahead Zep could see the turreted roof of the mansion. The property wall held a wrought-iron gate decorated with dinosaurs. Long ago, when silicon was something that people were content to leave on beaches, the Gidget clan had made a tidy California fortune in oil. They weren’t the sort of people who forgot a thing like that. Zep had read somewhere that they’d even put Tyrannosaurus Rex on their family crest.

  “Right,” said Kid Beast. “Honk four fast and three slow to make the gate open. Don’t worry, there’s only a few servants, and they stay in the house. We’ll see that prick Gidget himself, and, man, I’m going to let him have it.” Zep’s horn was broken, of course, so the three of them had to scream, “Honk-honk-honk-honk! Hooonk-hooonk-hooonk!” like rutting dinosaurs. A wild-eyed metal pterandon and a dainty diplodocus disengaged from a primordial French kiss, and the gate swung open with a wounded, rusty shriek.

  Water sprinklers ran continuously all over the estate, and the grounds were lushly overgrown with exotic flowers and shrubs. It was more like a jungle than a formal garden—like something in one of those lost world movies. Kid Beast sat up, alertly shooting glances this way and that. “He’s got a whole maze of roadways here,” he said. They passed several side roads, and then the Kid pointed. “See the fork in the drive up there? The main entrance is around to the right. The pool and the garage are in back on the left. I’m thinking maybe it’s not so cool to confront Gidget. Turn left. We’ll throw the fucking bad-luck-ball in the pool, tape some sounds and split.”

  Zep started to steer, but Delbert shouted, “No!” and wrenched the steering-wheel around to the right. Zep had a momentary feeling of being pulled in two and then, dammit, they were tooling up the drive towards the big house.

  “Wrong way!” yelled Kid Beast, and pushed Delbert away from the steering-wheel. Zep hit the brakes and started to back up. He twisted around in his seat, staring out the pickup’s rear window. Just before he got back to the fork, a brilliantly polished ‘48 Country Squire Woodie came cruising out from the left fork that they’d missed. There were four people in the Woodie, one in back and three in front. At first all Zep saw was the beautiful blonde surfer chick sitting between the two guys in front. And then he noticed the faces of the others.

  “Whoah,” he whispered. “That’s us.”

  “There she is!” hollered Del. “My car, just like the shrimp things promised! Look, Zep, there’s beer in back and that glow on the dash is Jesus, and there’s three boards in back and everything. Don’t let them get away.”

  But they did get away…they disappeared around a clump of bougainvillea, their happy voices fading like radio static into the hiss of the sprinklers, the chunka-chunka-pfft of lawn birds. Before Zep could decide what to do next, a plump man in shades and white suit came pooting down the drive in a golf cart. He was holding a machine-gun.

  “That’s Logomarsino, Gidget’s bodyguard,” said Kid Beast, sinking down under the dash. “Don’t let him see me, man.”

  “What are you worried about?” Zep asked sarcastically. “Guy’s only got an Uzi.”

  Del leapt out of the car and waved his ball at the bodyguard. “Hey! How about my reward?”

  The man in the golf cart, startled by what must have looked like a threatening gesture, squeezed off a burst. The bullets whizzed overhead, and the boys became studiously still. After the shots, the man stepped out of the cart and stared at them uncertainly. “You’re not real,” he croaked finally.

  “Yes I am!” said Delbert indignantly. “You’re just trying to get out of giving me what I deserve.”

  “I don’t think you’re real,” repeated the bodyguard. There was a noise in the distance: four short honks and three long ones. The bodyguard hopped back on his golf cart. “Now that sounds real!” he said, and sped off downhill.

  “I want my reward,” said Del, plaintively. He started up the driveway to Gidget’s house. Zep took the precaution of turning his truck around, and then the and Kid Beast followed. On his way up the hill, Zep saw a couple more of the fast false images amidst Gidget’s jungle shrubbery—this time it was Del and the blonde girl. The images had a way of congealing out of flecks of color. There’d be like bright dots in the air, and then the dots would slide together in some filthy hyperdimensional way, forming a slightly grainy image of someone or something which would soon deconstruct itself into dots that drifted away like gnats.

  “Hey Kid,” Zep finally thought to ask. “You see what I see?”

  “Naw,” said Kid Beast. “I don’t see none of them freaky demonic manifestations, dude.” He lifted up the crucifix that hung from his neck and gave it a kiss.

  Obviously Delbert was seeing the images, as he kept trying to talk to the ghosts, asking them when he’d get what he had coming. “Give it up, Delbert,” snapped Kid Beast, but now the mansion’s great madrone doors were swinging open to reveal a trim taut figure, all sheathed in shiny black. He held a glowing crystal in one hand, and there was a static of false images crowded around him like a ragged aura.

  “Murderer!” screamed Kid Beast, flipping into a frenzy. “You killed that poor girl!”

  “Hell, Beast, the dude’s wearing a wetsuit,” said Zep. “How bad can he be if he surfs?”

  Seeing the weirdness and wealth, Zep was also flashing that no doubt Gidget had a monster stash somewhere. A pile of coke like in Scarface, right, a mound that you could just lower your snoggering face right down into. A fucking sandpile, man. Just thinking
this, Zep could see the coke—or maybe it was acid-laced meth—sitting on a silver tray on a little three-legged table right at Gidget’s side. Zep gave Del a sharp jostle, grabbed the magic ball, and sprang first up the manse’s marble steps.

  Delbert’s ball and Gidget’s ball picked up on each other. Little laser beams shot out of them, dancing off Zep and Gidget and the images around them. The billionaire frogman extended his one empty hand as a focus for the skittering beams, and within seconds all the little lines of light from Zep” ball had woven together into five brilliant strands, each one of them ending at one of Gidget’s fingertips.

  Then Gidget closed his fist and the ball flew forward into his palm, carrying Zep with it. Now Zep was surrounded by the miasma of duplicate images which clung to Gidget like body odor; in fact, he was shaking the billionaire’s hand while a wiry tycoon arm slipped around his shoulder and gave him a friendly squeeze, leading him through the big doors and into the mansion.

  “Get out of there, man!” he heard the Beast calling.

  “Gimmie my ball, Zep, you weenie!”

  But those were dim sounds, fading as he basked in the proximity of inconceivable wealth. Wealth, yes, it poured from the man. “Well, well,” Mr. Gidget was saying. “You’ve finally come to see me.” The madrone doors slammed shut, leaving Zep’s friends outside. He glanced around, looking around for that tremendous stash, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  Gidget tossed the two balls from hand to hand like a juggler. “I’m quite pleased, yes. I sent my second sphere out on an errand this morning, and I’d wondered if it would really return. But I should have known better. These things pull the dimensions together so nicely, and all through the marvelous power of circumstance. There are no accidents, don’t you agree?”