Mathematicians in Love

by Rudy Rucker

  In any case, by the time Sandoval arrived, Cammy was dressed and leaving Paul’s house, on her way to the train station herself, having turned down a ride from Paul, wanting, she’d told Paul, a little walk to clear her head. Paul said she’d looked tired and sad. Sandoval attacked her in the street with a hunt­ing knife.

  He stabbed her sixteen times, nearly severing her head. Cammy’s vlog continued for a half hour after she died, the cam­era on her finger broadcasting the unbearable images. Her paper-white face, her neck wreathed in gore. Her sunglasses ly­ing on the pavement beside her, one lens shattered. All the blood in her vital, wonderful body spilled out onto the gray pavement, making a shape like, oh, like a grove of beautiful trees, like a mass of swaying trunks leading to a pathetic noble crown.

  Poor dear Cammy. If only—if only.

  When my father died, it took a month until the tears came. But this time the storm came in fast and heavy. I felt terribly guilty. If only I could go back in time and protect Cammy from San­doval. If only I could kill him. Thanks to the vlog I knew his bestial face like a brother’s.

  I happened upon the murder videos right after I got back to Ratvale with Alma on Saturday. Alma was already getting on my nerves a little, so I surfed to Cammy’s vlog. It took half a minute of mounting horror to understand what I saw: the heaven tree of her blood upon the dry, uncaring asphalt.

  I got on the phone to call the cops, who already knew, and then I called Leni and screamed at her to take the images down, but she left them up for twenty-four more hours. She later claimed she had some kind of technical problem in removing public access to the files while at the same time preserving them as evidence for the police. But I’m quite sure her goal was to rake in big hitcounts. Business was what Leni was all about.

  The murder vlog files spread across the Web, with no-lifer dipshits casting the footage into their own weird obsessive cat­egories: art noir, splatter thrills, puke porno, sick humor, con­spiracy theory. And never mind that the images were of a suffering fellow sojourner in this vale of tears.

  A short-lived scandal erupted over the fact that Van Veeter had been at the crime scene. This was fueled by a clip from Cammy’s vlog that showed him walking past the camper van with an impish, knowing smile on his face. Probably he’d been embarrassedly trying to act cool, but in the hands of a mud- slinging pol, that odd smile could have been used to cast Veeter as a callous lecher, criminally negligent and utterly unfit to take office.

  But remember, Veeter’s political opposition was, sigh, the Common Ground Party. When the press asked Karen Barbara about Veeter’s recent actions, she eschewed the red meat, and instead questioned the propriety of the man’s huge chip op­tion purchase. Huh? As if anyone cared about commodity fu­tures when there was a televised sex murder in the news.

  Early Monday morning, Alma and I were watching network TV over breakfast. Thanks to Alma’s civilizing influence, we were eating granola and drinking a pot of tea.

  On TV, Veeter was in Washington, DC, emerging from a high-level security briefing with his new buddy, President Joe Doakes, who was of course thrilled to have a Heritagist con­gressman from California, and never mind any odors in the man’s wake. Facing the press, Joe and Van issued a joint state­ment stating that increased surveillance of vlogs and vloggers was vital. The TV anchorman liked this.

  “You see how they’re reporting this?” I said to Alma. “The murder’s the fault of vloggers? Veeter’s home free.”

  “We must fiercely oppose the lickspittle running-dog imperialist-lackey mainstream media,” said Alma with a gentle smile. “To use the traditional Humelocke rhetoric. I’d rather be here than Palo Alto, Bela. I don’t think I’d make a good Snod-fart wife.”

  And then the TV showed a clip of Veeter remarking that the still-dynamic research programs of Silicon Valley were on the point of bringing to fruition some truly twenty-first century technologies of terrorism prevention so as to combat the at­tacks of Tariq Qaadri.

  “He’s talking about the Gobrane paracomputer!” I cried. “He’s gonna hand it over to that crook Joe Doakes! Doakes will classify it as top secret and use it against his political enemies!”

  “Would that affect your consulting gig with Rumpelstilt- skin?” wondered Alma.

  “First thing they’ll do is fire me!”

  “Why Bela? They need your ideas.”

  “I’m a known troublemaker,” I sighed. “And Veeter’s gonna want to distance himself from the Cammy connection.”

  “I thought he promised to pay you for thirty-six months. Let me look at your contract. I’m good at deciphering legal rhetoric.”

  Of course I had no idea where I’d put the contract, in fact I couldn’t recall having seen it again after Veeter handed it to me. I’m forgetful about business-type things; they don’t engage my imagination. For all I knew, I’d let the contract flutter out the rear window of my car, or maybe I’d recycled it with the accumulated paper trash of my apartment.

  Galled by the evidence of my impracticality, I subconsciously chose to flip my mood from depression to anger. This kind of transition is what catastrophe theorists call a chaotic bifurcation, although a universal dynamicist would prefer to regard this type of abrupt mood swing as a bend in a geodesic worldline along the tines of a knotted rake. To put it less technically, instead of giving Alma a straight answer, I threw a hissy fit.

  “It’s high time someone shot that moron Joe Doakes,” I rapped out. “They say that if you don’t care about your own life you can always kill someone. I’ll take out Doakes and, hell yeah, I’ll die in a hail of the Pig’s bullets. I don’t care. I deserve to die.”

  “Why do you deserve to die, Bela?” asked Alma, an edge in her voice. All weekend she’d been nice, tidying up the apart­ment, comforting me, making meals, like that. But now I was pushing her too far. Well and good. I craved a scene. I wanted the outer emotional weather to match my insides.

  “I’m telling you, it’s my fault that Cammy died,” I said. “I gave her the vlog ring. And—I might as well tell you now—I egged her into seducing Paul. That was my master plan to get you back, see. First I’d get famous, and then I’d get Paul to cheat on you. It worked. But I shouldn’t have left poor Cammy on her own at Paul’s. She died to make me happy. I should shoot Joe Doakes.”

  “Back up,” said Alma sharply. “You planned that with Cammy? You told her to fuck Paul in the driveway? You two big bad-ass rockers were, like, laughing about needy little Alma?” Her lips were drawn very thin. “I’m just a shuttlecock in some weird power-badminton game between you and Paul? Maybe you should be fucking him instead of mel” She was standing over me, her face distorted, once again in tears.

  “It’s you that matters, Alma,” I said quickly It was very easy to visualize her leaving me again—and I didn’t want that. “Cammy was jealous of you,” I continued. “I almost slept with her Friday night after the concert. But you phoned me. And I was glad. It’s you that I want. I love you. I told Cammy. She got mad. And, yes, maybe at some level she went after Paul to help me. But she also did it to spite me. And to get back at you. And to spice up her vlog. Cammy was a complex person, Alma.”

  “Don’t romanticize her, Bela,” said Alma, looking a little mollified. “She wasn’t all that stable.”

  “She was a great bass player.”

  “I think maybe she had a death wish. Vlogging yourself hav­ing sex is like: calling all stalkers.”

  “You’re blaming her for getting murdered?” My voice shook with a fresh gust of passion. Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control. “You never worried about stalkers when you were doing your news reports for Buzz," I said heatedly “Nobody said I should worry about stalkers when I was vlogging The Crazy Mathematician. Why should Cammy be different? Just because she’s a woman who does what she likes?”

  “Oh—all right,” said Alma, relenting. “And of course that
vile creep should have left her alone. It’s typical, though. This is such a sick country. If I stay with you—if—then maybe we should move. Like Canada. Or Hungary?”

  “Where I want to go is backwards in time to stop Sandoval,” I said. “I have this feeling there might be a way to change the past by using the new tech that Paul and I are inventing. As­suming Joe Doakes doesn’t send some agents to seize our magic teapot.”

  “There’s only one way that people change the past, Bela. They stop thinking about it. They move on.” Alma’s face was kind, intelligent, deeply concerned. She really cared about me.

  “I should forget about Cammy, huh?” I could have left it at that. But, God help me, a part of me wanted to fight some more. “That’s fine for you. You won.”

  Alma sighed, but didn’t answer. Instead she began walking around the kitchen collecting her stuff. I watched in silence, al­ready starting to regret my behavior.

  “I don’t need this bullshit, Bela,” she announced when she’d filled her purse. She was standing by the door to my bedroom. “I’m sorry for you, but I’m almost thinking it’s a mistake to re­new our relationship. You and Paul aren’t normal. You’re pods. Crazy mathematicians.”

  “I hear that all the time,” I said wearily. "Crazy means illogi­cal. Paul and I are logical. Therefore we’re not crazy. Note that a system can be at the same time logical and unpredictable. But, yes, I’m acting like a jerk. I’m sorry. I’m stressed out. Too many things at once. Don’t give up on me, Alma.”

  “I’m going to clear out of here for a few days,” she said. “And then we’ll see. I might as well visit Pete and my parents down in Cruz. I just have to pack a few things.”

  “Okay,” I said, following her into my bedroom. “Remember, I’m going to Palo Alto today. I have to give a statement about the murder. That’ll be horrible. And once I get past that, I want to try and organize a Washer Drop concert for Wednesday. A benefit for Cammy? K-Jen and Naz want to do it, and Thuggee says that Rubber Rick will let us use his space. The Globo Club. He says the place is usually blank on Wednesdays. Would you want to come back up for that?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Alma with a little shake of her head, folding a skirt into her suitcase. “Let Cammy have her own night.”

  “What if I pick you up in Cruz the next day? Early Thurs­day. I’ll bring my board and we’ll go surfing in Big Sur. Splash off the blues.”

  “Now that I’d like.” She smiled up at me. “I’ll have enough of Pete and Gary and Sarah by then.”

  “Pete’s living with your parents?”

  “Sad but true.” She snapped her suitcase closed. “You can kiss me good-bye, dear pod.”

  I did that. Our bodies always liked each other, no matter what dumb things our heads said.

  “You need a ride to Cruz?” I asked after the kiss. “I could go by there on the way to Palo Alto. It’d just be an hour-and- a-half out of my way. I’d still get to the courthouse in time.”

  “I’ll get a ride with Leni and Lulu. They’re going down to Watsonville today to see the guy they picked for the next Buzz vlogger. Henry Nunez, the chief engineer at Membrain. I’m gonna go meet him too. Actually he might not vlog for long. Leni’s thinking about doing that One in a Million show that you and Paul talked about the first night you met her. It looks like Veeter can steer her to this really huge sponsor. He’d sell a lot of vlog rings that way, and I think the Heritagists would use the data.”

  “That’s cool.” I didn’t ask for details, didn’t repeat my recent rants against Leni and the government, didn’t go there. I’d had enough fighting for now.

  So I drove to Palo Alto and did my thing at the courthouse, and when I walked out, I encountered a pale middle-American couple, dressed in black, squinting against the California sun.

  “Hello, Bela,” said the man. “I’m Klaus Vendt and this is my wife Dagmar. Cammy’s parents.” He looked gently baffled, like nothing made sense to him anymore.

  I took his hand. “Cammy was wonderful,” I said. “I can’t be­lieve she’s gone. It’s breaking my heart. It must be terrible for you.”

  “She phoned us and told about the band,” said Dagmar, man­aging a bright, off-kilter smile. Her cheeks were blotchy. “She liked working with you, Bela. And Cammy’s cousin showed us the Washer Drop concert on his computer. Cammy looked so strong, so bouncy. She was having fun.” And then Dagmar’s voice changed, the ragged bird of anger taking wing. “Why did you give her that horrible ring, Bela? You made it so easy for that monster to find her! And then you left her alone to find her way home on her own.”

  “I’d do anything to change what happened,” I said. “I’m sorry all the way through. I even—I even wish I was dead.”

  "That wouldn’t help anything,” said Dagmar, giving me a fierce look. “If we crumble, the killer wins even more.”

  “We think Cammy would have wanted you to come to the funeral,” put in Klaus. “We’re having the ceremony in San Fran­cisco tomorrow. We think she’d rather end up here than back in Ohio.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “And the next day, Wednesday, our band—Washer Drop—we’d like to give a memorial concert for

  her. Would that feel right? I thought we’d donate the money to a charity in Cammy’s name. Or give it to you for funeral expenses.”

  “A charity,” said Cammy’s mother. “I like that idea.”

  “There’s a musicians’ networking group called Fugue,” said Klaus. “In San Francisco? We were already talking to them about starting a fund in Cammy’s name. One month, when she didn’t have a place to stay, they let her live in their office.”

  “And she used their computer,” said Dagmar. “Two or three e-mails a day, while it lasted. It was nice to know what she was doing for once. Well, of course right at the end, with that hor­rible vlog, we knew more than we needed to know. I just won­der why—”

  “I’ve heard of Fugue, yeah,” I interrupted. “That would be perfect.”

  “Would we be welcome at the concert?” asked Klaus awk­wardly. “Not too old?”

  “Of course you should come,” I said. “It’ll be at the Globo Club, it’s a place in the outer Mission district. We’ll be onstage starting about ten or ten-thirty Wednesday night.”

  “Yes,” said Dagmar, pushing her hair out of her face. “We’ll be there.”

  I’d promised a lot, considering that I hadn’t personally talked to Rubber Rick yet. Nor had I figured out who to get for a new bass player.

  I split from the Vendts and phoned Rubber Rick from my parked squinty whale and yeah, man, Rubber was already a Washer Drop fan, he’d talked to Thuggee, and for sure we could use his club, and I shouldn’t feel alone, man, because everyone on the scene was way bummed about Cammy, and Rubber had already been talking up our show, man, he had a concert sound system and lights lined up for us, and for sure he’d dig to pass our cut of the door receipts to Fugue for a Cammy Fund, what a beautiful idea, and get this, of all the incredibleness, Jutta Schreck the bassist for AntiCrystal wanted to sit in with us, yeah man, Rubber had talked to her after her show at the Warfield last night, Sunday, it was synchronicity, man, what with AntiCrystal being in the city from Warsaw to play three sold-out gigs, and Jutta totally knew about Washer Drop, she’d seen our webcast when she was loaded in her room at the Grand on Saturday night, and our sound got so good to her that she and AntiCrystal covered “Oil Pig” as an encore for the Sun­day night concert, for true, Rubber had been there and seen it, Jutta doing this amazing Cammy-riff solo, and making a speech about the murder, a little hard to understand since Jutta’s En­glish isn’t so good, but the feeling came through, and Rubber had actually talked to her about Washer Drop at the after-show party at the Cave, Jutta had been there and the lead singer Waclaw Smorynski, too, what a party, man, Rubber had seen the synchronicity coming together and he’d all but asked Jutta to sit in for the Globo gig, man, there wasn’t gonna be no prob­lem, and Rubber had the cell-phone number of one of
Jutta’s roadies, although maybe it was a little early in the day just now to try and raise her, what with Jutta being, you know, a junkie vampire, she only comes out at night, but Jutta’s guest spot was gonna happen, man, visualize-realize-actualize, and in that same karmic vein, Rubber Rick was picking up some totally off-the-hook art for the concert from the cartoonist Howler Monkey this afternoon, and the Rick’s club dogs were goin’ out to paper the city tonight, stickin’ up little miniposters every­where, like Washer Drop with Special Guest Jutta Schreck at the Globo Club in a Memorial Concert for Cammy Vendt to Benefit the Fugue Musicians Rescue Fund, it’s gonna happen, Bela, you got Rubber Rick pimpin’ for you, know what I mean?

  “Yeah,” I said, kind of stunned by the torrent of plans. That was Rubber Rick all over. "Absolutely.”

  It was awesome that our single San Jose concert had earned Washer Drop acceptance as a real band. Cammy would have loved it. If only. A lump constricted my throat. I free-associated to an I Ching throw I’d gotten the day that I learned both that Roland Haut was willing to be my thesis adviser, and that Haut had no idea about how to prove the Dynamical Classification Theorem: “One pushes upward into an empty city.” The only thing that had ever been blocking my way to success had been my own limited expectations. I’d cast my doubts aside and be­come a mathematician and a rocker. Loud in the empty city. I took a deep breath.

  “About Jutta,” I told Rubber Rick, “tell her just come by my apartment when she wakes up. We’ll start rehearsing maybe five or six. Gotta wait till Naz, K-Jen, and Thuggee get out of school. It’s their last day of class.”

  “After school special, man. Jutta Schreck meets the crazy mathematician and his savage skate-dreggers. Can you even be­lieve it?”