Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  A knock sounded at the door of the Green Room, and the jubilant voice of Buckshot LaFunke sang, “We’re on!”

  -----

  Our stage was a metal mesh construction, cantilevered out from one wall of the Café Gastropoda. The bottom part of the room was essentially an aquarium, thronged with the dregs of Sadal Suud: gutter-squid, dreck-cuttles, and muck-octopi, all of them peering up through the interstices of the platform supporting us. The room’s three other walls were lined with boxes and balconies, a-twitter with mantises, ridge-roaches and crystal-ants—the cream of this world’s high society. Crab-like waiters scuttled this way and that, stoking the audience with their favorite fuels.

  “I’ll stand in front tonight,” said Mimi as we stepped onto the satisfyingly solid platform.

  “And you pair up with me, Basil,” instructed Anders. “We’ll be in center stage.”

  “I’m good with sitting on that chair over there,” said Buckshot. “I already wore out my legs warming up this crowd.”

  “You did a great job,” said Mimi, favoring him with one of her fetching smiles. “And now we’ll bring ‘em to a boil.” She raised her arms high and strode to the front of the stage, teetering on the very edge as if tempted to jump into the massed tentacles waving from the water, all pink and mauve and green. Slowly she lowered her arms, starting a fierce zeeply beat of polyrhythmic mental percussion.

  Off to the side of the stage, Buckshot chimed in with a psychic wail like a blues harmonica, a little voice wandering among the trunks of Mimi’s sound-trees.

  Anders elbowed me in the ribs. My cue. Feeling the power of the Piccolisima zeeps, I began flashing a series of three-dimensional mandalas into the room—glowing ghost-spheres that all but reached the walls. My zeepcast orbs were stained in red and sketchily patterned with images that were abstract echoes of the dead Bonze’s face. They vibrated with the sound of cellos and organ-music at a funeral mass.

  Anders was at my side, casually leaning his elbow on my shoulder, nodding and smiling as Mimi, Buckshot and I jammed together, feeling our way, blending and bending our soundshapes towards a perfect fit. And then our leader started in.

  He’d opened his mouth nearly wide enough to break his face, as if wanting to vomit up his heart intact. His metamusic began with a cloud of chicken-scratch guitar pops, each pop a tiny world. Each worldlet contained, incredibly, a mosaic mural of all that lay within some known planet. Sphere upon sphere appeared, the little balls clumping to form spiral skeins—and soon Anders was zeeping a full galactic roar. We three others were playing like never before, beaming our support, filling in Anders’s vision with gravity waves, stars and novae, and the planets’ living nöospheres.

  There’s no question that my mind was functioning at higher levels than ever before. Each time I thought we’d brought our metamusic as high as it could possibly go, the cloud of sight and sound would fold over on itself, leaving gaps for us to fill with still more voices of our frantic chorus.

  Usually I close my eyes while performing, but tonight I was looking around, wanting to witness the effects of our unprecedented “Surprise!” At first the pseudopods below and the chitinous limbs above were waving as if beating time. But as our modalities grew ever more intricate, the audience members fell still, staring at us with avid, glittering eyes.

  I’m not sure when I noticed that the room had incalculably expanded—I think it was after Mimi began mixing a keening scream into her zeep emanations, and surely it was after Anders began folding full galactic symphonies into single notes and dabs of color. The walls of the Café Gastropoda dissolved—not so much in the sense of becoming transparent nor in the sense of being far away—but rather in the sense of being perforated with extradimensional corridors and lines of sight.

  Faces floated in the far reaches of the endless hallways, just like in Anders’s Wassoon-altered apartment back in Lisbon. And now, more clearly than before, I knew that these faces came from the unreachable distances and previous cycles of our world. They crowded in upon us like memories or dreams, endless numbers of beings, each of them rapt with our metamusic, each of them intent that his or her own individual soul song be sung. And, impossibly, Buckshot, Mimi, Anders and I were giving them all voice, our minds speeding up past all finite limits, playing everything, all of it, all the stories, all the visions, all the songs.

  At first I hadn’t noticed the starspiders, but at the height of our infinite fugue, I realized the creatures were everywhere—as the spaces between the faces, as the shadows among the sounds, as the background of the foreground. The Piccolisima zeeps were showing me that only the transfinite sea of starspiders was real. Everything else was, in the end, only an illusion, only Maya, only a dream.

  The starspiders clustered around us, and space itself began to bulge. Mimi, then Anders, and then, very slowly, LaFunke disappeared. A starspider had hold of my leg and was tugging at me too, ever so gently, ever so irresistibly. My leg was a trillion light-years long. I was about to let go, about zeepcast the final mantric signal that would propel our tired old world dissolve into the cleansing light of a new Big Flash. But something hung me up.

  What was it that Anders called me? A nervous Nellie. I pulled my leg back, and with a dissonant sqwonk, I changed keys and hues, turning my incantatory dirge into a kind of demented party music, a peppy ladder of shapes and chirps that led the watching minds back from the edge. I kept up the happy-tune until the drab sets of consensus reality had propped themselves back up.

  I ended my solo, standing alone on a stage in a pretentious nightclub on the jerkwater planet of Sadal Suud.

  A moment of stunned silence, and then the audience began to applaud, in growing waves of sound. It lasted for quite a long time. Anders had taken them into the jaws of Death—and I’d brought them back.

  -----

  By the time people comprehended that Buckshot, Mimi and Anders had truly disappeared, I was already aboard the luxurious Surry On Down, bound for home.

  For a few days, nobody was holding me up for blame. But then they found the Bonze’s body and head in my Lisbon apartment.

  The police met me at the spaceport this morning, when we arrived. I wasn’t in the right mental shape to put together a defense. I’m too distracted by my zeeps. I’m seeing infinity everywhere, infinity bare.

  Only an hour ago, I was convicted of murdering not only the Bonze, but Mimi, Buckshot and Anders as well. I’m due to be executed by plasma ionization in just a few minutes.

  And so…I’ve been using my last hour to zeepcast my exemplary tale into the ever-vigilant quantum computations of the ambient air. Those who seek my story will surely find it.

  And now comes the final clank of my cell door. No matter. Never mind. I’ll be with Anders and Mimi soon.

  ============

  Note on “To See Infinity Bare” (Written with Paul Di Filippo)

  Written March, 2009.

  PostScripts magazine, 2011.

  One of my inspirations for this story was the movie Amadeus, in which the elder composer Salieri resents the young genius Mozart. Another influence is the 1954 story, “Beep,” by James Blish—in which the characters find information about the future encoded with the seemingly extraneous beeps found in their faster-than-light communications. I was, once again, trying to make actual infinities seem real. Paul Di Filippo, one of my favorite collaborators, thickened up the story line with betrayals, and added a rich texture to the musical scenes.

  Bad Ideas

  One rainy, early-dark January evening, Bea Malo was sitting on a rickety couch in the tiny living-room of the cottage near San Francisco that she and her husband Nils Mundal rented. She was drinking a cup of chamomile tea, watching a broadcast of a ballet, relaxing from her day at work, letting her mind drift with the music and the shapes. The room was cozy from the wood-burning stove.

  Bea freelanced as a Spanish-English interpreter for the state courts, mostly working with deportation cases. She was fond of her clients, but not
of the lawyers—in general she disliked officials of any kind. They frightened her. A mean dancer with a bone-white face chased the ingénue across the screen.

  Bea’s Wyoming rancher parents hadn’t spoken Spanish—far from it. She’d learned the language at college, and then from living in Seville for a year. She’d fantasized that she might find her way into the bright little world of flamenco dancing, that charmed eggshell of scorn and abandon. She’d made some inroads—she was beautiful, bright, sensitive. But she’d been thrown off-stride by an unexpected pregnancy.

  She’d fled home to the ranch for help, somehow forgetting just how judgmental her parents were. Dourly, they watched Bea reach her term and give birth in her old bedroom at the ranch. The golden afternoon hour of her son’ s delivery had been lovely—Bea had felt like a star in a Fellini movie, with the radio’s tinkling sounding like a worldly Nina Rota score. But a week later, she’d given the boy up for adoption. She was, when it came down to it, unwilling to try and make it as a single mother.

  Readily forgiving herself, and out for more adventure, Bea became a cross-country skier, drifting across the Western states, working low-end jobs, spending her free hours on winding forest trails, loving the rhythm of the path. She met Nils while waitressing at a Nordic ski resort in Montana—Nils was a low-paid guide, a recent immigrant from Finland. For Bea he came as a relief from the penny-pinching resort owners and the yuppie guests. Nils had hardly gone to school, and he’d never learned proper English. It didn’t matter. He was a wonderful man with a brilliant soul, tall and lanky with a friendly mustache.

  The rain drummed on the roof, the fire hissed in the stove. The dancers on the screen capered to the beat, their limbs like crooked worms. Bea moved her arms gently with the music, dancing the flow of her thoughts, remembering the very first ski that she and Nils had taken together, one evening in Montana, the time they’d fallen in love.

  Just then the man himself emerged from the bedroom, where they kept their computer. These days Nils liked pricing things like music-players, bicycles, and power tools online. Tonight he was obsessed with a particular second-hand camera. He described some of the device’s enticing qualities, none of which made any sense to Bea.

  “I think this camera is a very good one,” concluded Nils, his voice rising with his same old enthusiasm.

  “You should watch this ballet with me,” said Bea. “It’s wonderful. Look how the woman in white is spinning from one encounter to the next.”

  Nils sat with Bea for a few minutes, exclaiming over the height of the dancers’ leaps. But soon he grew impatient. Despite his inner spiritual qualities, he’d never been any kind of intellectual. He made his way back to the computer.

  He probably wouldn’t buy the camera anyway. Tomorrow he’d be onto something else. The only things he’d actually purchased this year were a pair of nearly identical beige Mazda cars, each with hundreds of thousands of miles on its odometer. Nils thought the first car was such a great deal that he’d immediately gotten the second, arguing that whichever of the twin cars broke down first could be a parts-bank for the other. No matter. He made a good salary these days, working in a high-tech shop that built machines for making machines. He didn’t understand the science, but he had genius-level hands.

  The onscreen ballet dancers spun and gestured. There was something increasingly odd about the lighting, an obtrusive flickering that made Bea’s eyes twitch. Beset by crackles, the music was rising and falling in a ticklish, irregular beat. The show was making Bea dizzy.

  “The TV is breaking,” she wailed. “Can you fix it, Nils? Is it the cable wire?”

  “My computer is going screwy, too,” replied Nils, his voice soft in the next room. “I see everything is flashing and whirling like…” He trailed off.

  And by now Bea was speechless too. The television screen’s image had become a whirlpool spinning inwards from the edges, absorbing her entire attention. She saw a vision. She was skiing though the woods at dusk, among totem poles that reached to the heavens, the graven faces watching her in solemn disapproval. Like her parents. She felt herself as dirty, ragged, a blot upon the hill’s smooth curves. Beams were streaming from the totems’ eyes, punching into her like pins into a cushion, the delicate points knitting a design within her skull.

  The pattern grew, unfolded, took on life—and suddenly Bea felt a new capability within herself. She—she could turn her thoughts into visible objects. All the steps were somehow clear.

  And now the ghostly totems began telling her to cleanse herself, to spit out her bad ideas. All right. So what was her worst garbage? Bea had always worried she was too timid. Okay then, why not do something about it? With a wide-eyed grimace and a whoop, Bea expelled—something.

  Her vision cleared. The totems had receded into the background. She was in her living-room. The TV screen was intensely black. And creeping across the rug at her feet was—a cringing little orchid flower, pink and lavender, making soft weeping noises. Immediately she knew it to be her timidity. Her whole intricate neurosis had been externalized and concretized into this wretched little thing.

  Wanting to be done with her weakness for once and for all, Bea snatched up the twitching petals. The flower was slippery and tingly; it moaned louder than before. She almost felt sorry for it. But, no, said the ghostly totems. She had to go through with this. She crushed the orchid of timidity into a dead, mute bean, and threw it into the woodpile by the stove.

  “That’s amazing,” said Nils, standing in the bedroom door, somehow understanding exactly what Bea had done.

  “Do you see it too, Nils? The totem poles? Can you make thoughts?” She could feel that her strange new power was still active.

  “I see the Northern Lights,” he said slowly. “They’re teaching me something.”

  “Get rid of the things you don’t like,” urged Bea. For a moment she wondered what was happening to her. But the changes were so fast and exciting that there was no time to think. And Nils was in on it too. It was as if the two of them were in the Montana Rockies again, schussing though a steep forest with the dawn sky all joyous patches of blue and gold.

  “I want to get rid of my father,” said Nils. “He was really crazy, you know. I’d like to forget him for good.”

  “Do it,” said Bea.

  Nils flipped one of his long-fingered hands as if shaking off water. A gnarled little old man appeared on the floor, the size of a thumb—angrily shaking a tiny fist.

  “I hate you for beating me!” said Nils, leaning over the icon of his father. Taking out a pocketknife, he chopped the shrilly shrieking figure into scraps—and the pieces melted into a puddle of something darker and shinier than blood.

  “Serves him right,” said Bea, in case Nils was feeling guilty.

  “Who?” said Nils. “What’s happened?”

  The lust for cleansing was still upon Bea. “I’ll kill the horrible bogeyman God that my parents bullied me with!” she cried.

  Focusing her attention inward as if crossing her eyes, she expelled a form from the center of her forehead. It plopped to the floor, a green transparent pyramid with a yellow eye glowing in its center, and a little gray beard trailing from one corner. Stupid old Jehovah. Bea stomped on him as if crushing a roach. And in that moment all her hateful memories of childhood religion were gone.

  “I have too much computer junk in me,” said Nils. He leaned forward, opening his mouth as if vomiting, and out streamed a mound of gizmos and doohickeys, all winking lights and gears and chips. Mouth wide open, Nils retched again—and here came a rush of, oh my, lubricious naked figures, vulgar little women with their legs spread like Y’s.

  Bea opened the door of their wood stove, and shoveled the nasty things into the flames. They screamed and writhed like the damned souls of a medieval Hell.

  Not liking her jealousy over the porno women, Bea spit that out too—a fat green toad with eyes all over it. She drowned it in the sink. Nils spit out the jabbering monkey of his restlessness a
nd tore it limb from limb. Bea threw her fear of death into the food-processor, and ground the little skeleton into twinkling dust. On and on went Nils and Bea, laughing and sobbing by turns.

  Somewhere in this frenzy of self-annihilation, Bea found the presence of mind to save off her special memory of that one particular Montana dawn when she and Nils had gone off together to ski before the day’s duties . That’s when their real lives had begun. The icon took the form of a tiny man and woman on skis, holding hands, like a minute Christmas tree ornament. She nestled the amulet among the sachets of chamomile tea in her kitchen drawer. This moment, above all, was to be treasured. It was the key.

  And then it was back to wild demolition of her personality. By midnight, Bea and Nils were quite blank. They undressed and dreamlessly slept. In the morning they mechanically ate food from the fridge, and all day they sat naked on the couch, gazing at the TV’s dead screen. Nobody phoned, nobody stopped by—if Bea had been in a mood for thought, she might have deduced that the cleansing plague had hit their neighbors too. But on this day she wasn’t thinking at all.

  It was pleasant, sitting with the nice-smelling man beside her. Now and then they got up and stretched, took food from the fridge, or used the bathroom. Once they had sex, as if testing it out. Late that afternoon, the electrical wires outside began shaking, and a humming issued from the walls.

  “Here comes more,” said Bea, quite unafraid.

  With a chirp and a chitter, a pair of slugs writhed out of the nearest electrical socket. The first one crawled up Bea’s bare leg, the other one up Nils’s. Despite the cold, Nils and Bea were still naked. The little glob left a tingling trail upon Bea’s skin. She sensed that the thing was filled with information, much like the little icons that she and Nils had been decimating last night.

  But Bea didn’t feel any urge to kill this particular slug. The totem poles—never quite absent from her mind —were telling her that the wriggler was filled with wonderful things. Bea wondered if it might teach her to be a ballerina, or remake her into a great painter. She watched the shiny creature crawl as far as her navel—whereupon it pirouetted and sank into her skin. Meanwhile Nils was letting the other slug merge into him.