Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  Zep has a workaround. “If I crank up the gain to an insane level, I think the Wobble Gobble break can draw power from the ambient wireless radiation,” he says. “Thanks to the entropy gradient. That way Loach can’t shut us down. Macho Lex with his triple-K cups.” Zep is pumping his thumb to move his virtual controller’s wheel. “I’m setting it to ten thousand, Del.”

  “Are you freaking nuts?” cries Del, as the virtual water begins rearing into frantic spouts.

  “Ten thousand degrees of weirdness is just where it starts gettin’ good,” says Zep taking an unsteady stance on his rapidly twitching board. Del has no choice but to join in.

  They can hear Loach bellowing outside. He’s unlocking the electrical cabinet, turning off the Cheezemore Ratt circuit-breakers one by one. The lights wink out across the room. But the Perfect Wave cave stays alive. Yes! The high-entropy simulation is drawing energy from the global funk of wireless info waves. If anything, the sim images are brighter than before.

  Loach pounds into the restaurant and snatches up the billy-club from behind the bar.

  “Oooo, Wova wikes to wub the wood,” whoops Kaya, standing by the Perfect Wave dome. With a shriek of laughter she nips inside.

  “And now get on your board,” Zep tells her. “We gotta jam!”

  “I’m too high to surf those humpty water eggs,” says Kaya. The bright shapes are coming loose from the walls, the air itself is dancing with globs. “I’ll just sit on the back of your board, Zep. Oooo, here comes Wova Woach!”

  Hoarsely roaring, Loach is beating the club over and over against the dome of the Perfect Wave cave, breaking down the walls.

  “We’re going all the way to a million now,” says Zep, sweating and bending over his virtual controller. “We’ll be drawing in even more stuff from the outside world.”

  “The perfect wave,” raves Kaya. “You’re gonna crank up the uncertainty of the planetary wave so high that we’ll end up somewhere totally—” She breaks off, suddenly concerned, holding her hand to her throat. “My tiki string just snapped! I heard my little goddess bounce off your board.” Kaya lies on her stomach across Zep’s chintzy wave cave board, peering at the floor.

  A piece of the dome breaks loose and—melts. The cubic wave simulation is absorbing material reality. The dome, the nearby tables and chairs and even the walls of the restaurant merge into the growing blue wave.

  Loach throws himself through the warped, glowing air, grabbing for the third board. And misses—just. But he’s made it into the pudding intact; he’s power-paddling like a merman.

  Del, Zep, and Kaya slide away, Del in the lead. The world is hanging sideways, like a wall whose floor is a million miles below. They’re surfing across a washboard of shelf-like ripples on the face of the vertical wave—and they keep getting higher, climbing the wave like stripes on a barber pole.

  Del looks back past Zep and Kaya, wondering if his procedural kiwi bird is still in place. The kiwi is nowhere in sight—it’s been replaced by a tiki goddess—armless, legless, with a blunt chiseled head that’s been gazing out over this sea for a trillion years. The tiki is riding that empty third board, which has morphed into a kahuna’s mahogany longboard. Far in the rear, Loach is doggedly paddling in the tiki’s wake.

  For his part, Zep flashes that the Polynesian goddess is, yes, the very amulet that had once hung from Kaya’s neck. Putting it another way, the amulet has been pulled into this more expansive version of reality, along with everything else. This perfect wave is drawing in the entire material substance of planet Earth.

  Zep, Kaya and Del look down, watching the world melt into their mighty simulation. Rivers and lakes, pastures and mountains, baseball stadiums, ocean liners and suspension bridges—all are stretching, turning liquid and surrendering to the pull of the perfect wave, dribbling into the flow like fresh wet paintings on a spinning platter, feeding their colorful blotches into the omnivorous mound of blue.

  Reveling in its plenitude, the wave lofts higher and higher—and Del shoots up towards the supernal crest.

  “We’re a planetary wave in probability space!” murmurs Kaya. “But what happens when it breaks?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to break,” says Zep, working his double-loaded board up the face of the watery slope. “It’s the perfect wave, right? We can ride it forever.”

  “That tiki is so beautiful,” says Kaya, turning her attention to the craggy face just behind them. “She looks green, now, doesn’t she? Maybe she stands for Gaia. The planetary eigenvector.”

  The tiki hears her; she makes just the slightest of funky moves, tottering a few inches further forward on her oversized longboard. The beetle-browed goddess’s motions are sheer understated elegance, drawn from the racial memories of Mother Earth.

  “Dig it,” says Kaya sketching invisible energy lines with her fingers. “The tiki’s still entangled with me—like by an astral cord around my neck. Everything’s gonna work out for the best.”

  Surfing well above them, Del is happy, knowing he’s at the top of the tournament ladder. Indeed, he’s somewhere above the topmost rung of any conceivable ladder. The seas and mountains of planet Earth are folding into the perfect wave like rich loam opening up before a plowshare. The planet’s mantle and its fragrant, sizzling core flow into the wave; vast whirlwinds suck the planet’s atmosphere into the every-mounting peak of ultramarine blue. So awesome. Only now it occurs to Del that—if this is as real as it seems—they’re annihilating everyone on Earth.

  A shadow falls over him. The highest edge of the wave has begun to curl over, occluding its face from the full glow of the atmosphere’s light. In the nearly transparent sheet of water, shapes are moving, darting, dancing, chirping. They flip into the air, twist, and dive into the wave again, laughing. Dolphins by the thousands, millions, more.

  One of them cuts in close to Del, chattering, and as Del speeds up his brain, the sounds congeal into human speech. It’s still a simulated dolphin, yes, but it’s also a storage module, holding one of the billions of human minds now folded into the flowing mountain, minds waiting for the planetary wave equation to settle into its new configuration so they can don their reborn forms.

  “Your fuddy foe has tagged the tiki,” says the dolphin with utterly grave hilarity.

  Sure enough, Loach has caught hold of the third board’s skeg—the fin that projects down into the water from the base of this board, a board so big that it might have been shaped from a single ancient mahogany tree. Climbing onto the tiki’s longboard, Loach doesn’t look the least bit intimidated.

  His physical form is a churning mixture of Lova Moore and Lex Loach. Huge breasts emerge and wobble away, detached Dali blobs that surround him for a moment, try reattaching to his chest, find it unyielding and merge with the water instead. His lips puff up like botox worms, then shrivel away to show zombie skull fangs.

  Loach crawls forward along the board, unable to find his balance. In order to drag himself to his feet, he wraps his arms around thegoddess from behind, blinding her lidless eyes. The stonefaced tiki’s expression shifts; her tightly pursed lips part in a warrior-woman’s grimace. The tiki is enraged by Loach’s sacrilege—but armless and legless as she is, she has no way of shaking him free. The great board wobbles.

  The loss of poise spreads through the entire planetary wave. A period-doubling quiver of chaos percolates down through the quantum fluid. And now it seems the once-perfect wave is scraping across a subdimensional version of a reef, a crystalline ur-reality that was previously hidden beneath the cozy warmth of the natural world. The dark underlayment sends up the sinister tendrils of degenerate fixed-point computations, threatening to crystallize the entire wave-mountain into something dead and dull.

  Del watches helplessly from above. The subdimensional reef is eating into the living water; it’s killing the information flow.

  Down in the crisis zone, Zep hears a horrible humming sound coming off the water, like brake drum linings peeling metal. It’s a hars
h scream that no board should make. Sparks are coming off the tail. The instability-fueled spikes of reef matter may snag him soon. And all around, the dolphins are screaming in fear. As he imagines the whole wonderful womany wave crystallizing into the dead fixed-point computations of the senile subdimensions, Zep feels deep grief. He should have loved Kaya while there was time. Marrying her wouldn’t have been so bad. Their eyes lock.

  “We can’t let it set up like this,” says Zep. “We can’t let the boring crud win.”

  “I can help,” says Kaya, solemn beneath her hand-drawn eyebrows. “Me and my tiki.”

  Standing erect on the rear of Zep’s board, Kaya stretches her arms along the curve of an invisible circle whose far perimeter rings the tiki goddess. Kaya undulates her arms with a snaky wriggle and then—she’s teleported herself to the longboard, replacing the tiki in the embrace of Lex Loach, with the tiki herself once again an amulet hanging from a bright red thread around Kaya’s neck.

  With a quick, efficient motion, Kaya elbows Loach in the solar plexus. His hold weakens and just then one of the boob-blobs, hovering like a satellite around its former owner, flattens and goes hard. It catches Loach in the face, rocking him back on his heels. Kaya reaches out and gives Loach a graceful one-finger shove. He slides off the board and hangs in mid-air like cartoon shock personified: a fixed expression of gaping eyes, open mouth, raised eyebrows. And then he begins to fall, not quite touching the face of the nearly vertical wave.

  It’s up to the three surfers to find a new home for the human race. With a supreme effort of will, Zep morphs his dinky Perfect Wave cave board into his good stick Chaos Attractor. The board’s oddly adhesive surface seethes with sharp-cornered cubic waves. With a grim smile, Zep ups the simulation chaoticity yet again.

  Feeling the fresh burst of energy, Kaya swings her massive longboard about, sending a square-humped wake towards Del, passing him that last extra bit of force that he needs. And now Del flies up the glassy cliff towards the very peak of the wave, streaking like a shooting star, sliding across the still-living liquid crest.

  “Lead the wave, Del!” calls Zep.

  Looking down from his vantage point, Del sees Zep and Kaya stuck at the edges of a boring opaque stain that’s turning to obsidian, to coal, to black ice. And below that is—something worse. Del hears the crystals forming far below, the dull sound of degenerate matter clanking into place. But he knows better than to dwell on that.

  “Tubeleader Aspect!” he cries, his personal war-whoop.

  There’s still just room for him to ride, a thin, curling edge of dancing water. He crouches, feeling the outlines of the subdimensional reef viscerally through his feet, lowering his center of gravity to shift the moving mass of the wave.

  The tipmost wave tube constricts and closes him in. But in a sense, he and his friends have designed this break. He knows what awaits them on the other side, for they’ve designed that too. Del’s creating it even now, sculpting it into being as he carves the planetary wave towards a new solution

  “Surf into the light,” he tells himself, and laughs. And then he’s through the final tube.

  -----

  Lex Loach wakes as he always does, with an abrupt twitch that startles him out of sleep with a gasp. It’s always the same, the dream of an endless fall that ends the moment he hits the sand. His eyes gape and he chokes back a groan at once again finding himself curled up with a ratty old beach towel for a blanket, groggy under the boardwalk. Same old, same old—the scuffing footsteps of morning joggers overhead, the sand in his eyes and mouth and hair and all the creases of his skin. He drags himself out on hands and knees, squinting at the Inner Sun burning through the glary fog. Sandpipers patrol the wet strip just above the tide.

  A cold shower in the public restrooms removes most of the sand. He blots himself with his sandy, sodden towel, then hits the hot air blower three times to dry his pubes, and a fourth time just because it is one of the day’s few pleasures.

  As he trudges back down the beach toward his job, he glares at Zep’s mural—considers hawking phlegm on it, but he’s been caught at this before by the Surf Shack’s proprietor, with heavy consequences. The boss is a beast.

  Lex rounds the corner of the restaurant, pushes open the back door, takes up the broom propped there and goes out again to sweep the parking lot. The trash bin reeks. Later he’ll be cleaning it out. Something to look forward to. As he’s brushing sullenly at spilled cornmeal and soda-straw wrappers, he hears a commotion down on the beach, and pokes his head around the corner.

  There’s a platform under construction on a paved stretch near the playground, just above the sand. Giant speakers, a mike stand, and huge banners going up:

  “SURF CITY WELCOMES TUBELEADER DELBERT!”

  Frikkin’ Delbert, Loach thinks. Frikkin’ hometown homecoming for the hero, back from his epic journey across the interior of the earth, sweeping every tourney. Every night the TV in the Cheezemore Ratt Surf Shack is tuned to Delbert accepting some giant golden cup, or some enormous golden check for a million bucks, with golden babes hanging off his shoulders. While Lex is slaving here, living off discarded crusts and soda dregs, sleeping in the sand.

  “Hey, Lex, whatcha doin?” Here she is, bugging him again.

  “Hey, Jen,” says Lex with a shrug. Jen makes him nervous. He can’t figure out why she’s nice to a loser like him. Obviously there’s something wrong with her. “I got work to do,” he says. “He’ll be all over me if I stop.”

  “Oh…okay, well…you know Delbert’s coming by in the afternoon? He’s in town for Zep and Kaya’s wedding anniversary? There’s gonna be a party at their beach cottage on the North End, and I was thinking, maybe, if you wanted to, you know, come with me, I could get you in?”

  Lex stops moving, grabs onto the broom handle as if it’s a lifeline, a crutch, putting his whole weight into it. What the fuck is going on with him? Are those tears? His belly is spasming. He’s a crybaby now, on top of everything else?

  “Sorry, Lex, if you don’t want to…”

  “I don’t know, Jen, all right? Let me think about, okay? Jeez!”

  She steps back and if she says anything else, it’s drowned out by the sound of the screen door slamming. The boss is coming after him. As usual.

  “You done sweeping, Loach? Then get out the bleach and go after the dumpster.”

  The voice is so harsh it cuts through Lex’s general despair and makes his base-line resentments seem like dreams of paradise. But what can he say? The old bastard has legally indentured Lex via some unsavory deal that Loach Senior could never bring himself to speak of—and then Loach Senior died. Lex has no choice but to live with the unbreakable contract. Under the boardwalk.

  “Almost, yeah,” he mumbles.

  “What’s that?” says the Surf Shack’s owner, coming in closer, leaning over him, the smell of melted cheese on his breath making Lex wilt away as if from one of the pizza ovens.

  “Almost done, sir,” says Lex a bit louder.

  “Squeak up, boy!”

  Lex draws himself upright, to his full six foot two, from which height he still has to look up another foot or so to meet the black beady eyes of his employer.

  “I said yes, sir, Mr. Ratt, sir, I’m almost done with the work,” barks Lex.

  “That’s the right attitude,” says the shopkeeper, adjusting his tall silk hat. “That’s how it’s gotta be. Maybe someday, when you’ve paid off your debt, say five or ten years from now, I’ll let you call me Cheezemore. Like my friends do. Till then you’re mine, boy. I own you.”

  The screen door slaps shut. Lex waits a moment, till Ratt is gone for sure, then sags against the broomstick he clutches. Jen comes to him again, gently rubbing his aching back.

  Lex looks look out at the waves, wishing they could carry him away, but it’s hopeless. The ocean curves up and up into mist, offering no chance of escape. As far as he might sail, the great seas of the Hollow Earth would wrap around and bring him right back
here.

  It’s Del, Zep and Kaya’s world—at least for now. But perhaps there’s hope.

  Maybe someday the perfect wave will break.

  ============

  Note on “The Perfect Wave” (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

  Written May, 2007.

  Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, 2008.

  This is the fourth of the Surf City stories that Marc and I have co-authored over the years, following on “Probability Pipeline,” “Chaos Surfari,” and “The Andy Warhol Sand Candle.” In a loose transreal sense, I am Zep and Marc is Del. When we wrote “The Perfect Wave,” Marc was working at the game company, Valve, and he had some good ideas about the gaming environment. It takes a bit of effort to bring something new to the theme of video games merging with reality. I was happy how Marc worked in a reference to the Hollow Earth at the end. The tale got a great cover on Asimov’s.

  Tangier Routines

  Quite recently my antiquarian bookseller friend, Revel Gibson, came into possession of five previously unpublished letters written by William Burroughs in Tangier, Morocco. The letters are variously addressed to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and to Burroughs’s father, Mortimer. The letters date from December 20, 1954 to December 25, 1954; the first two are hand-written, and the final three are typed. The muse of history agreeably grants that these letters sketch out a sequel to the events I describe in my report, “The Imitation Game.” I am presently researching the history of the Burroughs Corporation’s Special Systems Research Lab in Paoli, Pennsylvania, 1954-1958, to see if further traces of Alan Turing’s hidden career can be found. — R.R.