Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Just then the river narrowed and entered a steep gorge. For the time, all philosophical enquiry was set aside in the necessity to bear Pythagoras intact past splintered branches and jagged stones. By the time they reached the calm pool beyond the final cataract, both Pythagoras and Nessus’s powers had flagged. Pythagoras settled down through the water’s surface to find himself standing knee-deep upon a spit of sand. It was dusk.

  “Your new number is a mystery to me, O Pythagoras,” said Nessus softly. His lips were as tiny ripples. “Good luck unriddling it. I leave you here. And when you step in me again, though we are different, may our friendship be the same.”

  “Give my regards to King Poseidon of the sea.”

  “I am with him even now, as am I also with Zeus in the springs of the highest hills. It’s a pity you know not the number of the Ocean. Poseidon could do much to help you.”

  “I daresay I’m out of Tarentum’s reach already,” said Pythagoras confidently. “I can settle into the next comfortable cave I find.”

  It was growing dark quickly. Pythagoras found himself shelter beneath a thicket and used the Tangled Tree’s handy Sheepskin Number to make himself a comfortable bed. He lay there, nibbling bread and cheese from his wallet, wondering if Eurythoë were safe. Perhaps she could still visit him once he’d resettled. Presently he fell asleep.

  Tonight it was the Braided Worm who addressed Pythagoras in his apeiron dreams. Fearfully bright, the Worm had but a few strands, surely no more than five, but these were, as always, too oddly linked to enumerate. The braid ended in a flat head at one end, with three bright eyes and a fanged mouth.

  “Why haven’t you started teaching of us yet, Pythagoras?” demanded the indeterminate Worm. “Why keep spreading the wishful lie that whole, finite numbers are the substance of all things? Aren’t you grateful for what the apeiron has done for you? My River Number saved your life today.”

  “Yes, and it was your friend the Beetle who spoiled my leg during your very first visit, you unclean thing,” muttered Pythagoras.

  “It is thanks to the adamantine gold of your thigh that you have the mind-power to understand numbers which approximate the unbounded essences of true things,” said the Braided Worm. “The thigh is, one might say, the wax and feather wing upon which you soar.”

  “But like any such a wing, it can melt,” whispered the Tangled Tree, which seemed to have replaced the thicket beneath which Pythagoras had bedded down. The Tangled Tree curved up through several levels of simple branchings, but at less than a man’s height above the ground, it split into a disordered gibberish of uncountable forkings followed by yet more layers of endlessly ramifying twigs. The Tree’s voice was a woolly drone, with a burred edge to it. “Remember the tale of Icarus,” said the Tangled Tree. “He flew too near the Sun.”

  Now there was a crashing noise and the Crooked Beetle forced his twittering mandibles through the chaos of the Tangled Tree. “My companions are too gentle with you Pythagoras. Know you this: before the sun sets twice, your flesh will die. Speak well of us while you have time, for the new number I gave you will save you from utter annihilation.”

  The crashing of the Tangled Tree’s twigs grew louder, and now the grinning Bristle Cat and the Swarm of Eyes appeared, pressing towards Pythagoras, the Bristle Cat performing its unsettling trick of turning itself inside out, changing smoothly from spiky fur to a pink wet flesh that no human should ever have to see. The Swarm of Eyes moved like a cloud of gnats or flies, with each wheeling member of the Swarm a tiny bright Eye. Yet whenever Pythagoras stared very closely at one of the dancing Eyes, the Eye dissolved into a smaller Swarm of smaller Eyes who were perhaps still smaller Swarms themselves—there was nothing solid at all in the Swarm and no end to its divisions, the Swarm of Eyes was apeiron in the very highest degree.

  “Praise us before you die,” chorused the five terrible forms. “And we will save you with the Beetle’s number.” The Crooked Beetle gave Pythagoras an admonishing nip, and now the terrified philosopher woke up groaning. Horribly, the crashing of brush continued. It was early dawn, with mist rising up from the pool of the river nearby. More crashing and heavy breath. A growl. Lions? No, worse, it was dogs, followed by the railing tenor voice of King Glaucas.

  “Keep a good lookout, citizens! The dogs smell something. I’ll wager the old goat is bedded down here.”

  Desperately Pythagoras invoked the Cloud Number given him by the Swarm of Eyes. This added greatly to the mist that filled this little glen, but the new dampness seemed only the heighten the sensitivity of the dogs’ noses. By the time Pythagoras could fully get to his feet, the hounds were upon him, baying and slavering as if the great philosopher were a cornered fox. The men’s rough, ignorant hands bound him at wrists and ankles.

  The trial before the Senate and the priests of Apollo took place in the town forum that very afternoon. Pythagoras’s announced crimes were sedition and blasphemy—and not adultery, for Glaucas had no wish to publicly wear the cuckold’s horns. The charges averred that Pythagoras was teaching things contrary to the beliefs that underlay the established orders of heaven and earth.

  “Do you deny that King Glaucas’s power is divinely ordained?” demanded Pemptus, his fish-lipped mouth a self-righteous ellipse.

  “Of course I deny it,” said Pythagoras. “There is nothing more absurd than an aging tyrant.” The only one who dared to cheer this remark was Alcibedes, standing well back in the crowd, one hand on his sword.

  “And do you teach that all things are numbers and that mathematizing mortals may hope to comprehend the divine workings of the world?” asked the head priest, a bullying blockhead named Turnus.

  “This is what I have ever been teaching. But—”

  Pythagoras’s followers were there in a mass, and now Archytas rose to his feet. “Father Glaucas, may I speak?”

  Glaucas shook his head, but when Eurythoë, at his side, gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs he sighed, “Yes, my son.”

  “If it be a crime to believe that numbers are all things, then execute me and these other young savants with our wise, though imperfect, teacher. All of us follow his noble precept that to understand numbers is to understand all things. Be this capital blasphemy, Glaucas, then your son too must die. Rather than persecuting the pursuit of truth, O Father, why not let Pythagoras go into exile? And we adepts of his secret teachings will be free to follow along.”

  The priests and senators conferred. Eager not to sow further dissension among the polis, they soon approved this notion of exile for Pythagoras and his band.

  “Very well then, let them travel away and start a new colony,” intoned Glaucas. He, for one, would be happy to have his young and vigorous heir far from the scene.

  Thinking this to be the salvation the Crooked Beetle had promised him, Pythagoras now felt impelled to honor the requests of his apeiron helpers. He stood and raised his hands for silence. “Good people, I have indeed been teaching for many a year that all things are a play of little numbers. I have taught that God is 1, Man is 2, Woman is 3, Justice is 4, and Marriage is 5. And my followers know that numbers embody solid shapes as well: consider how subtly a mere eight vertices can limn a cube. My researches have revealed that there five and only five regular solids to be formed by small dot patterns, and it has been my teaching that these solids form the essences of all material things.” There was an approving murmur of excitement. Archytas looked startled and pleased, and even the hard-faced Alcibedes allowed himself a smile. The Master was finally sharing his noble truths with all! Even the thick-headed priests of Apollo seemed intrigued by the great precepts. Pythagoras paused till silence returned, then continued.

  “Yes, I have taught that Earth is the cube, Air is the octahedron, Fire the tetrahedron, Water the icosahedron, and the Cosmos the dodecahedron. Well and good.” Pythagoras drew a deep breath and gathered the courage to continue. “But now I must tell you that these teachings are nursery rhymes, childish fables, the fond pratings of an old
fool. The apeiron runs in and out of every earthly object, and, lo my little ones, the infinite even inhabits our minds.” A furious hubbub threatened to drown him out. Pythagoras raised his voice to a shriek. “Everything is crooked, irrational, unlimited, apeiron—”

  Loudest among the voices was Archytas. “Pythagoras has gone mad!”

  “Kill him!” cried the crowd.

  “No!” screamed Eurythoë, but Pythagoras had no firm defenders other than this single, fair voice.

  “He will die on the morrow!” rang Glaucas’s fruity tones.

  “Behold what the apeiron can do!” screamed Pythagoras in desperation.

  He invoked his four familiar power-numbers to make a mound of Sheepskins, to set them reekingly on Fire and burn off the bonds that held him, to shroud the forum in a Cloud, and to call the River to overflow its banks and rush into the streets of Tarentum. He’d expected to use the confusion to escape, and until he found himself pinned in the arms of Pemptus and Turnus, he thought perhaps he’d succeeded. But the confusion in the forum eventually abated, and he was once more a captive on display.

  “Look at him, Eurythoë and Archytas,” called Pemptus, tightening a rope around Pythagoras’s neck. “Look at the dirty old goat. We’ll put him under a door and crush him tomorrow. Each of us will add a stone. And I’ll see to it there’s no shirking.”

  “Well said,” chortled Glaucas, appearing through the smoke and fog.

  Archytas drew close. “Have you then become a sorcerer, O Master? Only to befoul the noble truths of mathematics? Nevertheless, I shall spread your earlier teachings.”

  “And what if my power is such that your fool of a father is unable to kill me?” demanded Pythagoras. “What then, Archytas? I have certain assurances from my apeiron familiars that—that —”

  “That what?”

  “O, Pythagoras,” cried Eurythoë, her voice breaking. “Where has your madness brought you?”

  Pythagoras spent a sleepless night penned in a dusty boulder-walled granary. His thoughts during the night were not of death but rather of mathematics. He felt he was about to die with something great left undone.

  Pythagoras was proud of his analysis of the five regular polyhedra, eternally grateful to the One for his discovery of his noble theorem about the right triangle, and well-pleased with the philosophical frills and furbelows he’d embroidered around the properties of the smaller numbers. But something was still missing, some key consequence of his theorem of the right triangle—and he couldn’t quite pin down what it was. It had, he was sure, something to do with the apeiron, for surely this was the reason why God had sent the mentors to him. During the very wee hours of the morn, he became absorbed in contemplating of the nature of the ratio between the diagonal and the side of a square. He sat lost in thought till the crowing of the cock.

  Wakeful as he was all that night, Pythagoras remained unvisited by any of the warped denizens of the apeiron. But, wait, at the exact moment when the pompous Pemptus came to lead him away to his doom he thought to detect, impossibly, the perpetually leering face of the Bristle Cat peering at him from a shadowy corner of the storeroom. The fearsome feline features, composed of a myriad thorny projections, appeared to wink at Pythagoras, who stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Superstitious about a granary cat?” laughed Pemptus. “Crazy dreamer. Better to worry about something real—something like a rock.” Pemptus kicked at a loose stone the size of a melon. “Bring this along for me, would you, Pythagoras? It can be the first one placed upon your door.”

  Pythagoras hesitated and the cat—seemingly a real cat after all—ran across his path and out the door. But how complex and richly structured the beast was, how subtle were its motions. And just as it passed from his sight, the cat seemed to perform the Bristle Cat’s loathsome trick of turning itself inside out—but surely this was impossible.

  “Carry the rock, you,” grated Pemptus’s muscular centurion.

  Pythagoras kept his head high and his gaze level as he was led through Tarentum, ignoring the jeering crowd. A large open-air altar of slate, already warm from the rising sun’s embrace, awaited the hapless body of the old philosopher. Thrown on his back onto this unyielding pallet, Pythagoras sought to compose his mind while a wooden door was laid upon him. Glaucas himself set the first of the stones onto Pythagoras’s chest, the very stone which Pemptus had forced him to carry. The door pressed down as if Pythagoras were the pan of some insensate scale, or the conclusion of a sum whose components were the killing weights.

  The citizens pressed forward, each carrying a stone, a few of them leaning close to hiss curses of execration, bur surprisingly many whispering words of comfort. The rebellious Alcibedes was missing from the line of citizens, but Eurythoë and Archytas were there, forced forward by a soldier with a drawn sword. Their stones were no larger than hens’ eggs, yet they of all the weights felt the heaviest of all.

  Breathing was quickly becoming an impossible task for the old man’s frail chest. Letting the air out was easy, but drawing the air back in—ah, there was the bring-down, there was the drag. The sun blazed in Pythagoras’s eyes and a buzzing filled his ears. Something shiny came at him—a fat beetle, landing on his chin. The citizens filed by, still placing their rocks. The omen of a glistening insect upon the tortured man’s face was so inauspicious that each of them felt impelled to look away.

  The beetle gave a modulated buzz, and Pythagoras let himself imagine he could hear it as words. “Use the number I gave you, fool,” the beetle seemed to say. “Focus!”

  Another stone descended, followed by yet another, and that one by a third and fourth. Pythagoras felt his ribs compress and snap, pain flooding him like liquor from Hades. Into his blood-buzzing ears came the noises from the crowd of watchers: taunts and shouts and a lone female sob.

  “Enough now,” yodeled Glaucas, who’d been closely watching the torture from one side. “The man is broken. Remove the rocks. You three slaves over there, carry him to the riverside midden to expire. It will be fitting for Pythagoras to exhale his soul into the fumes of human waste. That should be apeiron enough for him.” Glaucas raised his voice to a yet higher pitch. “Let this be a warning to any who would challenge my might! I am as a God, and all must bow down before me.”

  Far from prostrating themselves, the citizens simply stared at Glaucas. This unpleasant execution seemed to be doing the King’s popularity no good. And many were the hands that reached out to remove the rocks and the door from Pythagoras.

  When the weight went away, Pythagoras’s punctured lungs snatched whistling breaths of sweet air. At some far remove he witnessed himself lying uncovered in the forum, saw the weeping Eurythoë and Archytas bid him farewell, and saw his bloody form tossed onto a rude cart and trundled through the streets by three slaves. He was beyond pain now, well into the tunnel to the Elysium. He was ready for the end.

  Yet his progress into the final ecstasy kept being thwarted by something nipping at him, buzzing, tickling. Either it was the bug upon his face, or it was a vision of the Crooked Beetle. At this point inside and outside were the same.

  “You did well to speak for us, Pythagoras,” said the bug or the Beetle. “You are a worthy man. Now use my number.”

  “Hhhhhow,” came Pythagoras’s faint sigh.

  Emerging from within the Crooked Beetle’s very mandibles, the Bristle Cat said, “We can’t tell you what the number means, because if you don’t know it yourself you don’t know yourself to know nohow. Contrariwise if I tell you to know there’s no you knowing, you know?” The Beetle pinched irritably at the smirking Cat, but the protean beast drew its head down into its body, sending a commensurately-sized pink bulge out from its rear.

  The shock of Pythagoras’s body landing in the dump caused his eyes to flicker open. He was fully anaesthetized and paralyzed by his body’s collapse. His filmed eyes stared dully upwards. The slaves who’d had brought his corpse thither walked away, laughing at the lot of the only citizen worse
off than themselves.

  Pythagoras tried to inventory his pitiful condition. He lay beneath a dead tree of bare polished wood beside a sparkling filth-choked rivulet worming through the dump. A swarm of glistening flies buzzed around his chest wounds, tasting of the fresh blood. And there was a beetle crawling on his nose; from the corner of one eye he could see it. A tufted yellow cat came ambling up, leaning over to taste, like the flies, of his hot, sticky blood.

  His vision grew fainter; his heart beat as weakly and erratically as an infant drummer; his lungs drew in only the most shallow of painful draughts; his broken bones jabbed like a thousand daggers. From these incredible wounds, he would never heal. This was the end.

  Pythagoras could feel his densely cultivated mind beginning to disintegrate. Strange, to imagine that such a unique individual as himself could disappear, that a being composed of such hard-won constituents could simply dissolve. His golden thigh began to throb then, as if to remind him of all the ways he differed from other mortals. Focusing on that preternatural portion of himself, Pythagoras was reminded of the great magical numbers that this memory enhancement enabled him to store. The numbers for Sheepskin, River, Fire, Cloud and —

  A great revelation struck the dying philosopher with titanic force. The fifth number-form represented the quintessence of Pythagoras. Of course! Summoning all his vaunted powers of concentration and willpower, Pythagoras took mental control of the fifth number, then projected it outward from inside his dying self with explosive force —

  He had a moment of dual vision. On the one hand he was dying, moving forward through a tunnel towards an all-encompassing white light. On the other hand, he was standing in the dump, looking down at the tormented form of poor old man.

  Pythagoras held up a vigorous, apparently normal arm before his eyes, and laughed heartily. Triumph, even over death! Such were the godly rewards of his brave explorations of the apeiron. He took a deep breath into easily working lungs, then swung a fist to thump himself on his chest.