by Rudy Rucker
“Definitely,” said Zep, feeling unaccountably mellow. The sounds of his friends pounding on the doors seemed very far away. “Deep down, everything always fits.”
“You sound sure of yourself,” said Gidget. “I like that in a young man. And such a strong-looking fellow. A surfer, am I right? I wonder, though. What use would a simple surf-bum have for an advanced piece of computer technology like a million-dollar Systems Complex CAM8 chip?”
“You—you—what are you talking about, man?”
“I believe you know what I mean. Someone bombed and robbed the Systems Complex warehouse…six months ago, hmmmm? Systems Complex is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gidgetdyne.”
A picture of Chaos Attractor danced out of the little ball and began zooming around Gidget’s head. A small figure stood on the board, a small lean image of Zep.
“Look,” said Zep, abandoning any hope of wall-papering his crime. “You want your CAM8 back? I’ve only been testing it out for you, Mr. Gidget. I’ve got it in my truck outside. In my surfboard.”
“Oh no, no, no. The CAM8 is obsolete now. Six months ago it was worth a million. But now—now all any of our customers would want is the new CAM10. They don’t know this yet, but they will soon. At present there’s only two CAM10s. The CAM8 simulated a space that was, oh, two-and-a-half dimensional. But the new CAM10 handles five dimensions, one of which is time. That’s why it was so easy for it to find you. Look.”
Gidget pried up the base of Del’s ball to reveal a glowing red jewel. He snapped the base shut again and the hidden hinges disappeared. “What makes the CAM10 chip particularly effective is that it drives a holographic laser display. When we’re through testing these two prototypes, we’ll go into full production.”
“How did it find me?” asked Zep. If they could just keep talking, maybe everything would be OK.
“An interesting question. Do you know about chaos theory? Of course you do. Why else would you have put the CAM8 chip in a surfboard?” Gidget was warming to his topic. “The CAM chips are so information-theoretically rich that they act as strange attractors in the fact-space of our reality.”
“I’m keyin’ you, dude,” said Zep. “Wave on this: I call my CAM8 surfboard Chaos Attractor!”
“You know, Zep,” beamed Gidget. “Maybe our research end could use a mind like yours. Frankly I’d been planning to let Cthulha’s daughter implant her neonate into the flesh of the CAM8 thief. But maybe—”
There was the sound of gunfire, of yelps, and of running feet. The front doors swung open to reveal the same Uzi-wielding bodyguard from before.
“Ah, Logomarsino,” said Gidget. “Have you taken care of our other intruders?”
“Hard to get a fix on them with all the ghost images,” said the bodyguard. “I just chased some of them away from your door.” He reached out and pinched Zep’s arm. “This is some live meat at last. The kid you were looking for, right? Let me tie him up and take him out to Cthulha’s daughter in the pool.
“Bag that action,” said Zep. “I’m R&D. I’m a computer scientist, dig? And what is this Cthulha’s daughter, anyway?”
“The spawn of a Great Old One,” said Gidget. “Neonate of an evil goddess-creature from another dimension. The CAM10 drew Cthulha here; she appeared in my swimming-pool the day I brought the chip home. It seems our supercomputational process has become so sensitive that different levels of reality are able to tune in upon it and to realize themselves. It’s a two-way street, it seems. Without Cthulha’s influence, I don’t think our hardware would function. But she’s a rather demanding guest. Although she only lives forty-nine days, on the last day of her life she produces a neonate that she needs to implant in human flesh. Today’s the day for Cthulha’s daughter to die—and to reproduce. Yes, today’s the day for the third in the line of the California Cthulha.”
“Cthulha’s granddaughter?” said Zep uncertainly.
“A male will do,” said Logomarsino. “And it’s not going to be me or Mr. Gidget.”
A faint sound came from the mansion’s real door. Delbert yelling and kicking at the back door. “GODDAMN YOU ALL, I WANT WHAT’S COMING TO ME!” Gidget and Logomarsino nodded and smiled at each other. Safe here in their intoxicating dimensional image zazz, Zep had to fight back the urge to grin along with them.
A minute later they were all at the poolside. Logomarsino stripped Del nude, tied Del’s hands tied behind him with rubber surgical cord, and cut his screams cut off with a ball-gag. Gidget stood to one side with the Uzi, preventing Zep and Kid Beast from trying to stop things. Now Logomarsino strapped Delbert the diving board. The pool water was black and fetid, as if filled with backed-up sewage. Kid Beast raised his eyebrows and surreptitiously flipped on his tape-recorder.
The pool water roiled, little pieces of garbage and algae floating up like a small red tide, and in the center of the filth flower appeared strands of green-yellow hair and a face—a heart-stopping beautiful California Girl face, ah, noble straight nose and lips thick enough to toothlessly peel a Sunkist orange! The face of Becka.
The nude Becka—or Cthulha’s daughter—slipped out of the foul water. She held a knife, a big black anodized diver’s knife, and in an instant she was at the diving board, the great blade poised over Delbert’s genitals. Zep covered his eyes. The poor little dude was about to get what was coming to him.
There were sproings and a splash. Zep had to look. The girl had cut Delbert free and thrown her knife in the pool! She was kissing Del’s cheek! Before anyone else could react, Zep shoved Gidget and his gun into the pool, and then Beast had done the same to Logomarsino! Like a complete pinhead, Del scooped up his magic ball, floating in the water at Gidget’s side and then they were on their way.
In a trice, the chick and three caballeros had run around the house onto the driveway. Where Zep’s truck had been, there now sat the green ‘48 Woodie, laden with the three new surfboards and Chaos Attractor, too. They jumped in and burned rubber, slaloming down Gidget’s hill, through the back streets of Surf City, and onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
The summer air beat in the windows. The ocean was on their left, the PCH was clear. It was late and calm and the sun was setting west over the slick tubes and all the fudds and foobars had gone home.
“Twist up a fuckin’ jay from that key, Del.”
“For true.”
The close-mouthed naked girl watched them, stroking Del gently on the upper arm. When he’d made the jay, she took it from him and lit it with the Woodie’s built-in butane lighter. She smoked oddly, just opening her lips far enough to slip the reefer tip in, and then exhaling the thick blue smoke sharply through her nose. She did this three times and then she silently proffered the stick to Kid Beast in the back seat.
“Later,” said he. “Right now I want this.” He handed up DAT tape. “These are the Auntie Christs’ best sounds. Is it really you, Becka? Do you remember what happened at the party? How did you ever get away from that big whacked-out nautilus?”
But Becka only smiled and didn’t answer. She’d never been a big talker anyway. She looked OK, even if Logomarsino had called her Cthulha’s daughter. Zep slotted the tape into the player. Del took a hit of the dope and passed it to Zep. Everything was wonderful. The water was beautiful; the red tide was gone. Stokin’ tubes were breaking in long freight-train crashes. The energizing surf sound interlaced with the wasted plangent music wafting out of the Woodie’s mighty sound system.
Zep smiled to feel the smooth-running Woodie roll them along so well. The pre-Populuxe Studebaker shape of the car reminded him of a car he’d thought he’d seen an ad for when he’d been a little boy. A car that had wings tucked under its fenders so that if you jerked the right lever the car would zoom off the crest of a hill, stubby and heavy as ever but with the engine roaring and making ti fly and you driving with the steering wheel. Whoah, dude. Maybe that dream too was about to come true. And, thinking of dreams, it was about time to meet Penny. Bitchen Kitchen would be booming just
now. One more mile on the PCH, cut left onto the Point, and then they’d be carving for true.
The four of them were awesomely well-gunned, mused Zep, what with Chaos Attractor safe in back with the beer and the three bitchin’ new boards. What a car! Del had been right! This was magic, and no kind of black magic at all, as you could plainly see by the mildly glowing plastic Jesus on the dash.
“Hi, Jesus,” said Zep. “Thank you.”
Now they were past the crater-site of the old San Diablo N-plant and freewheeling down the long last slope before the road bottomed out and jogged right. The long slope down to the sea was empty.
Zep could see the Bitchen Kitchen parking spot down there past the turn, a beige patch between road and sharp cliff-edge with the surprisingly distant ocean collaged in behind. Bitchen Kitchen, where the gnarliest nudists, perverts, and surfers hung.
Zep loved skidding into the lot here. It was a sport. Local legend said that if you gathered enough speed and went straight, you could actually shoot up off the low ski-ramp of the sheer bluff and, if the waves were right, splash down safe in a deep, surging kettle. A tourist called Tuck Playfair had actually done it in ‘68.
Becka was all over Del by now, she was unbuttoning his shirt and even putting her hands in his pants. Del had never looked happier in his life. Even Kid Beast in back was happy, though he couldn’t stop staring nervously out the wagon’s open back tailgate. All dudes present sensed this could be the start of a righteous and functional partnership.
“I tolk you,” said Del, his voice actually choking up, so great was his joy. “I…I tolk Zep I’d get whak’s c-coming to me. And right now—” Delbert fought back his emotion by raising the volume and the pitch of his voice. “Right now! It’s happening!”
The silent blonde Becka—or Cthulha’s daughter—slipped Del’s shorts all the way off, cast them to the winds and leaned slowly forward, finally opening her mouth. Kid Beast was still staring out the back, and Zep was watching the road, so at first only Delbert could see the appalling structures in the girl’s mouth. There was something majorly wrong in there…instead of teeth she had like two hard cartilaginous skin-covered ridges. Delbert started pushing her away, even as she strained forward, opening her mouth wider and wider and making a noise like Patty Duke playing Helen Keller by imitating a person taking a shit.
“Wuuuh. Uuuuuunnnnuuuunnnh. Nnnnnggggggggh!”
“Hold on,” Delbert was saying. He sounded worried, but Zep was too polite to glance over. “Wait a minute. HEY, ZEP—”
There was a popping noise far behind them. A white Mercedes back there, coming up fast. A sudden spiderweb appeared in the windshield’s glass. “It’s Gidget and Logomarsino!” screamed Kid Beast. “They’re coming up fast!” Another gunshot, another hole in the windshield.
Out of the corner of his eye, Zep could see the girl’s mouth open wide and some like beak come pushing out—”
And Del is all, “AAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGHHH! WHAT ARE YOU—”
And Cthulha’s daughter is all, “Yeeeeeek. WurraWurraWurra. Yeeeeeek. WurraWurraWurra.”
And Kid Beast is all, “Floor it!”
And the cliff edge was coming right up and now, before Zep could even get his foot off the gas, Cthulha’s daughter snaked her surprisingly flexible leg over and mashed on his foot sending them out, up, and into the air two hundred empty feet above the sun-gilded surf. And then there was this like click, and the Woodie changed back into Zep’s pickup. It was Zep and Del and the girl in the front seat of the pickup, with Kid Beast in the bed of the truck with Chaos Attractor in back. And now Cthulha’s daughter was like coming apart, unfolding her hands and arms into feelers, there was a striped shell on her back for a moment, but that shattered and split —
“It’s an alien nautilus!” screamed Kid Beast, peering in through the pickup’s rear window. There was a flicker of light; Del’s sphere was shooting rays back towards Gidget’s car. And now Logomarsino and Gidget behind them drove off the cliff too.
Zep hung onto the steering wheel as if it were a lifesaver-ring. The pickup that had been a Woodie was bucking in heavy air turbulence, in a froth of three-dimensional chaos surf. The primordial mollusc girl threw herself against the pickup’s rear window, and it popped out clean and went tumbling away. She went flapping and wriggling out the hole, throwing herself to the wind. She fell away from the truck, but somehow evaded the pull of gravity, caught in the lines of force that had snarled pursued and pursuer somewhere outside of time. The pickup and the Mercedes hung impossibly suspended in midair. The waves far below them had stopped moving; the water was frozen in its endlessly various shapes.
A trumpet blast deafened them. Cthulha’s daughter was still unfolding, her hair thickening into long prehensile tendrils; her body turning orange and white, unfolding and expanding. She seemed to be caught in a slipstream which drew her swiftly and steadily toward a point midway between the two cars. As she hit that point, her whole cephalopod body shuddered. Her tentacles whipped out in either direction, half of them snarling in the bumper of Gidget’s Mercedes, the other half clutching the tail of Zep’s pickup. Her feelers came slithering across the bed of the truck, past Chaos Attractor, rustling among the empty beer cans and clam shells, feeling for Kid Beast.
“Here, Del,” gasped Zep. “Take the wheel.”
Delbert grasped the wheel, and Zep took Delbert’s magic ball.
Zep squeezed out through the pickup’s rear window and—beautiful surf music filled the sky.
“Stomp on these tentacle things!” cried the Kid. “She’s trying to get me!”
“Hang loose, Kid,” said Zep. The surf music was flowing down his spine, into his hands and legs. He knew what to do.
Kid Beast made a muffled, grunting sound, battling a thinly writhing weave of bloodworm tentacles that kept trying to creep like a living Persian carpet down his throat. Zep grabbed hold of the thin black fin of his surfboard and tugged. The tentacles overlaying it recoiled. Dragging the board after him, Zep knee-walked to the back of the truck and pulled the board halfway off the truck-bed edge.
“Where the fuck are you going?” cried Kid Beast. “Help me, man!”
Zep poised himself upon Chaos Attractor. “I am.” He gave himself a little push and out he went, Del’s magic CAM10 ball clasped in one outstretched hand.
The music was blaring, a deep descending scale of bass notes that continually verged on some archetypal core of surf sound. The free-floating shelless nautilus was singing high-pitched harmonies. Her tendrils were sweeping up and around in either direction, forming a vast figure eight, an infinity loop. The frozen world glistened beneath them. Zep started the long slide down towards the core of the nautilus. The beast saw him coming and opened her beak. With a well-aimed gesture, Zep threw the ball right into her mouth, dug his board into the air, and up around the loop towards the Mercedes.
That idiot Logomarsino leaned out his window shooting his machine-gun. Zep slyved this way and that, faking the guy. The bullets streamed past Zep and past the nautilus, arcing up along the curve of the loop, swarming back down again towards their origin, shattering the windshield of the Mercedes. Gidget hollered in fury. Zep surfed down upon them, and snatched Gidget’s CAM10 ball from his grasp. Zep air-surfed another trip around the great ribbon of the chaotic tentacle pattern, and threw the second magic ball into the beak of Cthulha’s daughter.
The effect was dramatic. The magic that had pulled the Great Old Ones into our world was neutralized now, merged back with its source. There was a furious flicker of images, like time running backwards. The nautilus tentacles pulled back into the central form, and Cthulha’s daughter was once again a girl named Becka.
The only catch was that all of them were still high up in the air above Bitchen Kitchen: Zep, Delbert, Gidget, Logomarsino, Kid Beast, Becka, the car and the truck, all dropping down towards the big basin of surf. The water was deep, but known for its sharp rocks. Zep dug the nose of his board downward, shooting to get beneat
h the others, and as he dived, he sent up a spiral of force, an invisible sliding board. Glancing up, he saw the others being pulled into his helical wake, their free fall softened into a safe glide.
Even so, the water rushed up fast enough to send Zep spinning. The black water scrambled Zep’s mind; the hungry waves pulled his board away from him. He heard a watery humming, that same old surf music, and then Delbert was pulling him to the surface.
They’d all made it, and Becka was her same old self, albeit once again way too good for Delbert. Zep had saved them all!
And there, on the shore, cheering and waving, stood Penny and Del’s real girlfriend Jen. They’d witnessed every one of Zep’s awesomely stoked moves.
“Penny!” called Zep. “Hey, Penny!”
“Zep! Let’s fuck! I love you!”
============
Note on “Chaos Surfari” (Written with Mark Laidlaw)
Written in 1988.
Interzone, March/April 1989.
Marc and I definitely wanted to do another surf story, and this ramshackle piece was the result. The form that the nautilus stretches herself into is supposed to be the classic chaotic form known as the Lorenz Attractor. At the time we wrote it, Marc and I didn’t have the ending quite straight, and we got the notion of “ending” the story by taking the last third of it and breaking that into pieces that would be printed upside-down, backwards, and/or mirror-reversed, these pieces to be set into the earlier parts of the story. Interzone actually printed the story that way for us, but we ended up not feeling really happy with the way it came out. Trying to make your text physically resemble a Lorenz Attractor is not in fact a good way to communicate a tale! For this reprinting I reworked the ending enough that it’s OK to just print it normally.
The CAM8 and CAM10 chips mentioned in this story and in “Probability Pipeline” were inspired by a special piece of computer hardware called the CAM6 which I was using for cellular automata simulations. The CAM6 was designed by a brilliant pair of guys called Norman Margolus and Tom Toffoli. I remember seeing them at a cellular automata conference in Los Alamos and telling them that I was working on a story in which a CAM10 attracts a giant squid-creature from another dimension. In his Italian accent, Toffoli said, “We are already expecting the giant squid with the CAM7.”
