The Sex Sphere

by Rudy Rucker

  S: Can I turn out the light? It's after midnight.

  A: Sure. Yeah, look at that rain.

  S: Can we do the Forum tomorrow? After we go see the Pope?

  A: What about the police? Do you really think they're after me?

  S: They probably think the bomb blew you up with the others.

  A: Great. Wonderful. I can do anything.

  S: What do you mean?

  A: Well, if everyone thinks I'm dead, then I can take on a new identity and a new life.

  S: And if I killed you right now and got rid of the body, it would be the perfect crime.

  A: You don't want to kill me, do you?

  S: No. Actually, I'm glad you're back. You feel nice in bed. Happy Easter.

  A: You too. Do you want to fuck?

  S: Maybe. But I wish you'd take a shower first.

  A: Because of Giulia?

  S: And the giant ass.

  A: Did you take a shower? What if you're pregnant? Virgilio didn't use a rubber, did he? I'm probably the only man in the world who has to wear rubbers to fuck his wife. And then you let that goddamn greasy thug bastard . . .

  S: No, Alwin, he didn't use a rubber. But you don't have to get all red and worked up. My period's supposed to start tomorrow.

  A: It better. I'm not gonna raise Virgilio's kid. If you're pregnant it's abortion. Abortion or divorce.

  S: If you're going to get like that, how do I know you don't have VD? She looked like the type.

  A: She's dead. Keep your mouth off her.

  S: You sure didn't.

  A: Oh, shit. Let's just go to sleep.

  S: About tomorrow, Alwin. We'll give the children their Easter candy and then go see the Pope in St. Peter's Square. And do the Forum. OK?

  A: But then let's get the night-train back to Heidelberg.

  S: If we can get seats.

  A: Tomorrow would be good. With the holiday and the crowd they won't check the passports. In case I'm wanted by the pig.

  S: What about in Germany? You know how organized they are.

  A: I don't know. The main thing is to get out of Italy.

  S: Did you know that seeing the Pope on Easter makes up for one mortal sin?

  A: That's handy. What'd you get the children?

  S: Three big chocolate eggs with toys inside. And my mother got stuff.

  A: Give me a kiss.

  S: I wish you'd take that shower, Alwin. You smell funny.

  A: All right, I'll take the shower. But don't go to sleep on me. Is there any beer?

  S: Sure. See the fridge under the TV? My father got a lot of Heinekens for when we got you back. He's been so nice. Why don't you wake him up and tell him you're safe?

  A: In the morning, in the morning. Do you want one?

  S: OK. And bring me my cigarettes.

  A: I really wish you wouldn't smoke in the bedroom. That's like super-unhealthy.

  S: Look who's talking. The Anarchist Archimedes.

  A: Virgilio was standing over me with a gun when I wrote that, my callipygous Xanthippe. I'll have a cigarette, too. Move the ashtray. God, this beer's good. And there's a whole case of it.

  S: So you won't have to go roaming the streets.

  A: Yeah, that's how it started. I went out for a beer. Remember? We'd been drinking wine and doing sixty-nine and then you fell asleep. I hope you don't expect me to kiss you down there tonight.

  S: You'll have to take a shower first.

  A: I mean it.

  S: So do I. You know where we came out? In the penguins.

  A: I wonder if she'll be back? The sex sphere.

  Chapter Twelve: Ball, Ball, Ball, Ball

  Joe Bone threw the empty soda bottle high over the black dirt, and Udo fired a rock at it. Miss. Joe's turn.

  He looked for a good rock while Udo retrieved the bottle from the mounded rows of the asparagus field. In Heidelberg the farmers keep their asparagus white by making it grow up through half a meter of sunless mulch.

  "OK, Joe," Udo called. "Raketen los!" The big liter bottle arced up, twirling end-over-end and whistling. Completely in sync for that one second, Joe flung his clot of asphalt. He nicked the bottle, but it didn't break. Solid German construction.

  Just then Udo's mother started yelling from the house. Joe couldn't understand her dialect, but he liked her voice. She had strong legs and big breasts and red hair. Too bad he didn't have a mother like that. Too bad he didn't have a mother.

  "I must eat dinner," Udo explained in the clean High German they taught at school. "You can have the bottle since you hit it first."

  "Thanks. Why don't you come over to the base tonight? They're showing Grease." It was Joe's favorite non-science-fiction movie. Dark and wiry, he himself looked like one of Travolta's friends.

  "Schmiere? In English?"

  "Naturally. In Amerikanisch, man. It's at the Patrick Henry Village theater. I'll get you in." Patrick Henry Village was the name of the American Army base in Heidelberg.

  After Udo left, Joe walked into the asparagus field to get the bottle. It would be good for a twenty-pfennig refund, enough for a sweet-bun at the market he passed on the way to the US Army base where he lived with his father.

  The mounds of mulch over the asparagus were patted smooth. Here and there you could see a little bump where a ripe stalk was about to break through. The watery, insistent April sunlight brought a rich earth-smell up from the field. An occasional car whizzed past, emphasizing the silence.

  As Joe picked up the bottle, he noticed something shiny lying on the next mound over. A bright little sphere, like a big ball-bearing or a silvered glass Christmas-tree ball. An odd thing to find in an asparagus field. Yet somehow not surprising. An avid reader of SF, Joe had always imagined that he might some day find an alien artifact. Could this be it?

  He hopped over the intervening mound and leaned over the little mirror-ball. The sky was in there, and his face and the horizon and the field. Neat. But wait. It wasn't the same in there. The field in the little reflected image was pink and crowded with towering . . . machinery, beautiful high-tech alien machinery, tapering in toward the image's center. It looked sort of like the fairground where Joe and Udo had just spent the day . . . no school on Easter Monday.

  But if the ball was showing a fairground, it was an alien fairground with what looked like time machines and matter-transmitters and . . . God! Here came a woman, pressing her face up the ball's surface. She pursed her lips as if to blow him a kiss.

  Joe scrutinized her features. She had dark hair, a straight full-lipped mouth, high cheekbones and an elegant Roman nose. She was the woman of his dreams. It was as if someone had looked into his mind to design her.

  Smiling enigmatically, she beckoned to some moving shapes behind her, calling them. More faces crowded up. Two, three, five . . . small and distorted in the mirror's curve. Women. Naked women with pubic hair and big tits.

  Joe leaned closer, then gave the ball a test-poke with his bottle. It rolled off the mound. Nothing in the image changed. The central figure held up her hand and made signs. Her large breasts shifted. Nipples the size of silver dollars. Above her head, Joe could make out a tiny rocket plane moving across the curved sky, moving away and away, dwindling towards the infinitely distant central point. He could see a whole universe in there! This was a window between the dimensions, just like in a science-fiction book! The woman beckoned him closer.

  "Wait," Joe muttered. "I'll take you home. I can't stay here."

  But he wasn't ready to touch the sphere. Maybe if you touched it they could pull you through. He took out his wool scarf and laid it on the ground next to the shiny ball. He planned to use the bottle to nudge the ball onto the scarf. But he didn't have to. As if sensing his plan, the little SF sphere rolled right over.

  Joe picked up the scarf by its corners. The ball seemed very light. That figured, if it was really just a curved space bridge between two parallel worlds. Joe tried to remember the Analog article he'd read on Einstein-Rosen b
ridges. Back at the road, he stowed the sphere and the bottle in the knapsack he used for a school satchel.

  The bike-ride from Udo's to the Army apartment blocks usually spun past in a happy blur of physical power. Joe was good on his bike, a ten-speed his Dad had given him for his fifteenth birthday.

  But today the bike felt like an Exercycle. Like a pedal-powered generator feeding hidden movie projectors that were back-imaging filmed Heidelberg scenes onto a spherical plastic screen, a three-meter fake universe centered on Joe's head . . .

  KLA-BRANG-BRANNG-BRANNNNG! Ow. Almost hit by a streetcar. Easy there, Joe, you're freaking out. Wasn't he ever going to get home? It was like he just kept going half the remaining distance.

  Feeling too shaky to ride anymore, Joe dismounted and wheeled his bike down the crowded 4:00 P.M. sidewalk. Alien faces streamed past. All he could think of was the infinite universe in his knapsack. The fairground and the naked women.

  "Joey! Hey, Joey!"

  Vernice came skipping up to him, smiling and breathing hard. She was a preteen pest, a real Army-brat. She lived in the same building as Joe, right next door. Her father, Ronnie Blevins, Senior, worked as an MP with Joe's father, old Bing Bone.

  "What are you doing off base?" asked Joe.

  Vernice's eyes glowed. "Mama sent me to baah some waaahne. Ah'm allowed to in Germany! How was German school today, Joey?"

  Joe was one of the few Army kids who didn't go to Army school. He had hopes of growing up cosmopolitan. With a full-blooded gypsy for a father, he had a leg up on it. Vernice already thought he was an international playboy.

  "The Germans don't have school on Easter Monday. I spent the day at a fair. It was highly stimulating. Will you watch my bike while I go in the market?" He could have locked it, of course, but if Vernice was watching it, then she couldn't follow him into the store.

  "Sure, Joey. Ah was already in theyure. Look!" She held up her shopping bag. "Real waahne, and ah bought it!" She stuck out her bud-breasts and pursed her pinkened lips.

  Joe walked past the bright vegetables and into the shop. Little did Vernice realize that he, Joe Bone, was perhaps the most important man in the universe. He selected a twenty-pfennig sweet-roll and opened his knapsack to get out the empty soda bottle.

  A face filled with womanly pleading stared up at him. The scarf had come undone. The other universe had its own light . . . . Joe could make out the bright pinpoint of a distant sun. Some antigravity hover-cars were driving around on the field behind the woman. Out, she gestured, holding her hands together and rapidly parting them. Her jutting breasts pointed at him. Take us out of the bag!

  Joe vibrated his hands in front of his face in the calm-down gesture. He tapped his watch and held up a just-a-minute finger. Smiling and waving good-bye for now, he took out the bottle and rebuckled the knapsack.

  "Do you have a little animal in there?" asked Frau Weiss as he traded the bottle for the sweet-bun. She was a pleasant skinny lady, who liked Joe for knowing German. Most other Germans didn't trust him because his skin was so dark. But ever since Frau Weiss had wormed out of Joe that his mother was a suicide, she'd treated him like a grandson.

  "Ja," Joe nodded, thinking fast. "Ein Meerschweinchen." A guinea pig.

  "How nice," Frau Weiss beamed. "Take yourself another sweet-roll."

  "Thanks."

  On the sidewalk, Vernice was acting her age for once . . . staring blankly at the traffic and picking her nose. Feeling like a big brother, Joe gave her the extra bun. He wondered what it would be like to have a sibling, someone close enough to share his secret with. Maybe he could show it to Udo tonight . . . if Udo's parents let him come. But they probably wouldn't. They didn't like the Army.

  He said good-bye to Vernice and rode the rest of the way home without any trouble. He was learning to control his excitement over the sphere. This was a terrible responsibility he'd been given, and he'd have to handle it like a man.

  * * *

  The apartment was a pigsty, an empty pigsty. Joe's Dad usually went straight to the noncoms' bar when he got off duty. He was a guard at the Army jail these days. Joe checked the fridge . . . nothing but milk and his father's beer . . . then went to his room.

  Joe's room was the one nice spot in the apartment. He had a good stereo from the PX, travel posters on the wall, a couple of plants, and his model rockets. The furniture was GI, but at least it was neat.

  His heart pounding, Joe rolled the science-fictional sphere onto his bed. The woman waved her hands in greeting, then began staring this way and that, taking it all in. She could only see half the room from the side she was on, and Joe was about to turn the ball so she could see the rest. But then she . . . turned it herself.

  It was strange to watch this happen. One of the woman's hands came closer and closer to the ball's surface, and the image of her fingers covered almost everything. The fingers seemed to hold and turn the ball, universe and all. The fingers let go, the hand drew back and the woman was on the other side of the ball. Joe could see the back of her head.

  He leaned over the ball and looked down at her from above. Her black hair flowed halfway down her back. She had a lovely behind. Fully humanoid. Amazing. How had she turned the ball? Joe could almost grasp it. She wasn't inside the ball any more than Joe was. The ball was just the region where their two spaces touched. They could see each other through it as through a lens. If he could move the lens, then so could the woman. This was really incredible; this was the greatest scientific discovery of all time.

  The woman could see Joe's bookcase from where she was now, and it seemed to be of particular interest to her. She raised an arm and pointed. The arm-image curved halfway around the ball.

  Still leery of actually touching the SF sphere, Joe went and got a book and brought it over . . . a tattered copy of Heinlein's Starman Jones. The woman held up what seemed to be a camera, and he riffled through the pages for her. Her machines would be able to learn English and translate for her.

  Excited by this idea, Joe showed her all his science-fiction books and then . . . of course! . . . the dictionary. At the end of an hour he was feeling hungry and weak from excitement. The boobs on those chicks!

  Right now they were busy setting up something that looked like a TV set. Probably the translator. Joe took the opportunity to go into the kitchen for some milk.

  When he came back the women had the TV screen working. Funny how they were all naked. Funny how there were no men in that other world either. It was almost too good to be true. Suddenly some English words appeared on the little TV screen . . . English, but with some peculiar misprints.

  HELLO. MY NAME IS BABS. VHAT IS YOUR NAME?

  Hands shaking, Joe fumbled out a pen and one of his little blue school notebooks.

  HELLO, BABS, he printed. MY NAME IS JOE. WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

  I AM IN A ZPACETIME CONTINUUM PARALLEL TO YOURS. VHE ARE COMMUNICATING ZROUGH A HIGHER-DIMENSIONAL TUNNEL. I AM ZO GLAD YOU ARE ZERE. ONLY A MAN LIKE YOU CAN HELP US.

  WHAT DO YOU NEED?

  ALL OF ZA MEN IN OUR VHORLD HAVE BEEN KILLED BY ZA RULL. VHE NEED YOUR ZEED, CHOE. VHOULD YOU EVER CONZIDER MATING VIZ ME?

  Babs reached out and pressed two fingers against the ball's surface. Then she . . . picked up the surface and moved it around. The images in the ball swept and curved. Now he saw the top of her head, now the cheeks of her ass and now . . . oh now . . . now she set the ball down and stood right over it. Joe could see clear up to her crotch, plain as day. In his innocence, he'd never realized that women have their pussies quite so far down between their legs.

  Just then the apartment door slammed. His father!

  "Joe?" the drink-blurred voice called. "Are you here?"

  "Yeah, Dad." Joe put his handkerchief over the ball.

  "What a day," continued his father. "What a bitch of a day. The Heidelberg police arrested that guy Bitter who set off the A-bomb day before yesterday. And we have to put him up in our jail."

  The voice trailed into
a mumble. The fridge door opened and a beer-can popped. Light footsteps approached. "What are you doing in here?"

  Bing Bone was a slight man, a bantamweight gypsy with a metallic voice. He was an alcoholic, a lifer retread sergeant, a lonely man who had never forgiven his wife for escaping into suicide. His eyes looked flat behind his flesh-colored GI glasses. Flat but observant.

  "What's all the books for? And what's that under the hankie? You're not smoking pot, are you?"

  Joe snorted contemptuously. "Sure, Dad, that's all kids these days do. I'm loaded on smack. And meanwhile I'm writing up a report on science-fiction for my literature class."

  "So what's with the snot-rag, already?"

  Before Joe could stop him, his father had flipped off the hankie. There was Babs—her face, thank goodness—and another woman, a tired-looking woman with reddish hair.

  Bing grunted like a man punched in the heart. "That's her," he croaked. "That's your no-good traitor mother who left me all alone."

  The tired-looking woman pushed Babs aside and stared intently out at Joe's father. A mocking smile played over her lips.

  "You're crazy," Joe said, shaking his father's shoulder. "This has nothing to do with you."

  Bing grabbed his son and stared at him. "Was it your Aunt Rose taught you the black art? But where'd you get the crystal ball?"

  "This is science," Joe protested. "This isn't gypsy mumbo-jumbo. That's a parallel universe in there."

  "It's not," shouted Bing. "That's your mother, safe in heaven and sneering at me."

  The tired-looking woman made as if to spit at Bing.

  "I'LL GET YOU ARLENE!" shouted Bing, suddenly maddened with rage. He snatched up the ball and threw it against the wall. The wall seemed momentarily to bulge out at them, and then the little sphere was gone.

  "I busted it," said Bing with satisfaction. "I busted your crystal ball. Smashed it to bits."

  Joe wasn't so sure. To him it had looked as if the concrete-block wall had . . . made way for the ball and let it through. What was on the other side? He groaned inwardly. Vernice's room.