by Rudy Rucker
They gave Silver a floor in the main Phizwhiz building downtown, and the next day Vernor was there. Half the Dreamers in town seemed to have gotten there before him. After waiting two hours to get into the building, he gave up and went back to the library. It might, after all, be wise to study some more science and ride out a few more heavy trips before putting his mind on the line. Maybe the whole thing was a hoax, a trick by the Governor to get acid-heads to volunteer for some kind of brain obliteration. Although LSD was legal, it was clear that the Governor disliked freaks.
But Andy Silver's feat was not a hoax, as became evident over the next few months. New gadgets began appearing in the stores. The shows on the Hollows improved greatly. There was a rash of exciting fads. The laws against gardening and painting were dropped, and many people took up these enjoyable, but slightly dangerous hobbies. One man went on a rampage, killing six with his gardening tools, and paintings and slogans which were not good for the public to see began appearing on the sides of buildings and in the walktubes; but Andy Silver prevailed upon Phizwhiz to let the gardening and painting continue. There was even talk of legalizing laboratory science again.
The Us was not entirely happy with all the changes in Phizwhiz's behavior which Andy Silver was bringing about. For his part, Silver made no secret of his revolutionary sentiments . . . occasionally going so far as to state that Phizwhiz should be destroyed. But the public was so enchanted with the life and excitement which he had brought, that it would have been politically impossible to arrest him—even if the Us had been sure it wanted to.
Silver had assembled a core of four other Angels from the many who had volunteered: three men and a woman. Most people never made it past the initial screening, and all the rest, except the four we're talking about, failed the actual machine test . . . losing their minds in the process. Applications for a position with the Angels dropped off drastically as the word of this got around, and Vernor could now have gotten in for a test easily enough, but he hesitated to do this. It would probably be better to get some ZZ-74 first.
A number of other people had heard Silver mention ZZ-74 on the Hollows. Lots of people, including the loach, were looking to score some, but there wasn't any around. The general consensus was that ZZ-74 must be a drug which was being manufactured in an underground laboratory . . . perhaps by the mysterious Professor G. Kurtowski.
Since the Us had not yet been able to obtain and analyze a sample of ZZ-74, they could not be sure that it was safe, so it was declared illegal, although the government was all too eager to legalize ZZ-74, if only they could find the formula and swing into production. A good demand for the stuff had built up on the strength of Silver's mention of it, and the Us was not adverse to making hay while the sun shines. They asked, then demanded, that the Angels surrender their cache of the illegal substance, but to no avail. Finally a raid was staged, but no unfamiliar drugs were found in the Angels' possession.
Vernor followed all this with interest, and he began looking into the writings of G. Kurtowski. His early papers were concerned with ironing out various imperfections in the Everett-Wheeler many-universe-interpretation of quantum mechanics. Toward the end of his publishing career, however, a number of surprising empirical predictions had begun to appear in his papers. Vernor was unable to discover if the experiments which Kurtowski suggested had ever been carried out, and Phizwhiz seemed to have no information at all on what the Professor had been doing for the last twenty years. Evidently Kurtowski was alive in an underground laboratory somewhere.
Again, Vernor was tempted to try to join the Angels, but again his caution held him back. He was twenty-three. He might have spent the rest of his life in the library, preparing for an ever-receding future, but one day Andy Silver came to see him.
Chapter 2: The Happy Cloak
Most days the library was practically deserted. There would be a few people viewing infocubes in the small Hollownests around the first-floor lounge, and maybe a couple of people punching questions into the Information Terminal in the middle of the lounge; but Vernor usually had the upstairs to himself. It was here that they had the microfiches with the marvelous access and viewing system that made picking out and reading any book in existence no harder than reaching across a desk and turning a dial.
On an average day the only interruptions were from the cleaning robots. Occasionally someone might wander up and spend a few hours at one of the other viewers, but never before had someone come up to read over Vernor's shoulder. He turned in some annoyance and immediately recognized Andy Silver's ethereally cynical face.
"I've been thinking about you a lot," Vernor said, standing up. "You got any of that dope?"
Silver smiled at and through Vernor, "Vernor Maxwell," he said, "I came out here to find you."
"How'd you know I was here?" Vernor asked.
"The Professor told me. He keeps an eye out for people who read his stuff and ask about him. You want dope? You'll get it, don't worry." Silver felt in his pockets, "You got any seeweed on you?"
"Sure," Vernor said. "This is where I live. Just a minute." Vernor kept most of his possessions wedged under a couch's cushions. He lifted up a cushion and took out a stick of weed. "This is really good shit," he said. "I grew this under ultraviolet light."
"High energy," Silver said, lighting up and inhaling deeply. "You want to be an Angel, Vernor?" Just like that.
"I don't know if I can handle it," Vernor confessed, "That's why I haven't come in for a test."
"It's not as hard as you think," Silver said. "It's just the squares who can't handle it. You know how to trip, right?" He passed the reefer to Vernor.
"Yeah." Deep drag.
"Most people don't. I mean, hardly anyone does. They know how to get wasted, or how to get high, or how to feel good, or how to pick the nose, or bleed on the floor, or booga-loo, or WHAT," Silver suddenly shouted, "WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT?"
"Tripping," Vernor shot back.
Andy Silver chuckled through his smile. "You'll be O.K. Let's take a walk."
They finished the seeweed on the way out to the street. It was good stuff, and being with Andy Silver provided an incredible contact high as well.
They walked a few blocks in the gathering dusk. Vernor wanted to ask about the Professor Kurtowski, but the stoned silence was too comfortable to break. As they drew abreast of a staircase down through the sidewalk to the walk-tubes, Silver suddenly pressed something into Vernor's hand.
"Take this," he said. "It'll help you study," and then he was gone.
It was a small pill the size of an aspirin tablet. "ZZ-74," Vernor murmured reverently, and swallowed it.
He spent the rest of the night wandering the streets of Dreamtown. ZZ-74 was different . . . a new place. Around dawn, he returned to the library. It was locked for the night and he sat on the steps. What had happened during the last twelve hours? He recalled a phrase from a book called Ascent to the Absolute, " . . . of some of our packed thoughts it is as proper to say that they are very rich in distinct items as that they are wholly void of any distinct items at all . . . " What was ZZ-74? What was anything? That night, Vernor Maxwell became an Angel.
He spent the next day recuperating, and the day after he went in for his test. The Angels' operation had expanded to include a whole building, christened the Experimental Metaphysics, or EM, building. It was not that a building's worth of technicians, secretaries, data analysts, standing committees, etc. was in any way necessary for the Angels' activities. It was just that so little was happening in the Drones' lives that they came hungrily buzzing around when there was a scent of real action.
At the EM building, Vernor found a few other young Dreamers applying for membership in the Angels. Only one besides Vernor made it through the initial screening to be sent upstairs for a machine test. She was a pretty woman, and they rode up in the elevator together.
Vernor looked at her hungrily. They might both be dead in an hour. Sadly he compared their healthy young bodies, imaginin
g the delights they could give each other. He was practically a virgin . . . he'd had his share of playful romps, but never a real liaison. He could make out the shape of her privates through the taut fabric of her pants. He moaned softly.
"Are you scared?" she asked suddenly. He raised his eyes from her crotch to her face. She was looking at him pleasantly, openly. "Because I am," she continued. "I'm not going to do it. I just decided."
"You're not . . . " he said, breaking the eye contact. "Oh, I'll do it. I met Andy Silver. He told me it would be easy for me." As he said these words they sounded false to him. At the advice of a madman he was going to plug his brain into the world's biggest machine?
"You met him?" The girl was interested, "What was he like?" The elevator was coasting to a stop.
"Weird. We got high and he gave me some ZZ-74." Saying the name of the magic drug worked like a charm on Vernor. Suddenly his confidence returned and he stepped from the elevator. "What's your name?" he said, holding the door.
"Alice," she said. "Alice Gajary."
He hesitated a moment longer. "And you're going back down?" She nodded. "If I make it can I come see you tonight?" She nodded again, and as the elevator doors closed she told him her address.
"32 Mao Street. Come for supper." And then she was gone.
A white-coated lady beckoned to Vernor and he followed the coat down the hall. The guide nodded at the various rooms they passed, explaining their functions. The artificial intelligence laboratory caught his eye, it was a whole roomful of marvelous looking technical devices. A man was sitting at a bench cutting a thick sheet of plastic with a heavy-duty industrial laser. Safety precautions seemed to be minimal here.
"And here," the guide was suddenly saying, "is where you . . . drool or fly." She opened a door and he entered to find two men waiting for him. One was a technician bent over a bank of dials, the other was a Japanese man wearing street clothes.
"My name is Moto-O," the latter said, stepping forward. "I am newest Angel and will supervise test." No smiles.
Vernor sat down in the chair they indicated. He started violently when the technician slipped a plug into the socket at the base of his skull, but Moto-O gestured reassuringly.
"Phizwhiz not turned on, Mr. Maxwell," Moto-O said. "You decide when." He indicated a rheostat dial on the panel in front of Vernor. "You make it to five, and you are Angel," he added, finally smiling.
The switch was a dial with the numbers zero through five on it. At present it was set at zero. Moto-O and the technician moved away from Vernor, and he was alone with the machine. Clearly the idea was to inch up to five, hang on for a minute, and whip back to zero.
Cautiously, Vernor turned the dial just the tiniest bit towards one, and then, feeling only a slight tickle, jumped it to two. He closed his eyes to savor his impressions. "A garden of light," Andy had said, and that wasn't far wrong.
Patterns formed and dissolved faster than Vernor could objectify them. That is, he would experience a certain train of thought with its concomitant association blocks, but the whole mental structure would turn into a new one before he could step outside of it and record it. As yet, however, the thoughts did not feel much different from his ordinary thoughts, though it was hard to be sure. It felt pretty good, actually.
He felt light-headed, reckless. He reached out and turned the dial up to five with one motion. Only after they unplugged him ten minutes later did he have time to try to form a description of what full brain interlock with Phizwhiz felt like.
As he told Alice at supper that night, it was like suddenly having your brain become thousands of times larger. Our normal thoughts consist of association blocks woven together to form a network pattern which changes as time goes on. When Vernor was plugged into Phizwhiz, the association blocks became larger, and the networks more complex. He recalled, for instance, having thought fleetingly of his hand on the control switch. As soon as the concept hand formed in his mind, Phizwhiz had internally displayed every scrap of information in his memory banks related to the key-word hand. All the literary allusions to, all the physiological studies of, all the known uses for hands were simultaneously held in the Vernor-Phizwhiz joint consciousness. All this as well as images of all the paintings, photographs, X-rays, Hollows, etc. of hands which were stored in Phizwhiz's memory bank. And this was just a part of one association block involved in one thought network.
The thought networks were of such a fabulous richness and complexity that it would have been physically impossible to fit any of them into Vernor's unplugged brain. Once Moto-O disconnected him, they were gone.
"Wait," Vernor cried, "I was just about to get the whole picture." He had a feeling that some transcendent revelation had been cut short.
Moto-O laughed in delight, "You were almost gone to be whole picture. One more minute and . . . wearing the Happy Cloak."
Suddenly Vernor remembered that this had been a test. "I'm an Angel now?"
"Oh yes," Moto-O replied, "I welcome you." He shook Vernor's hand.
The technician looked up from a bank of dials and nodded at Vernor. "The system is definitely energized, Mr. Maxwell. You do good work."
"That's what I don't get," Alice asked after Vernor related the experience to her over the supper she had prepared. "If you have so much better associations and so much more complicated thoughts when you're plugged in to Phizwhiz, why does he even need you? I mean it's not like you're adding a whole lot of brain space to the machine."
"It's not my memory or switching circuits that Phizwhiz needs," Vernor responded. "It's my consciousness . . . my ability to discriminate. Inside Phizwhiz it's like a sea of information. The whole time I was in there I was picking out pieces and putting them together into patterns. It was sort of like listening to static until you hear voices."
"Can't Phizwhiz form patterns of his own?" Alice asked.
"Only the ones which follow logically from his initial program," Vernor explained, then added, "actually he can pick out random patterns as well. But he can't do what a person can do . . . put together thoughts which are neither so predictable as to be boring nor so random as to be nonsensical."
"So he just needs your good taste?" Alice was smiling warmly. "I taste pretty good, you know."
Vernor knelt by her chair and began kissing her open face.
Chapter 3: Alice Swims
Vernor moved in with Alice and began working with the Angels. Once a week he would go in for brain interlock with Phizwhiz. The next few days would be spent in trying to remember what had happened, and then he would start preparing for the next session.
As far as Phizwhiz was concerned, no preparation on Vernor's part was necessary—all that was needed from Vernor was his ability to form thoughts. Vernor, however, liked to try to use the sessions to work on his math and science.
The first few times he went in to the EM building, he had prepared a mental structure of facts and speculation, a perfectly built fire awaiting the kindling sparks of ZZ-74 and brain interlock. Since, however, he remembered so little of these mental conflagrations, Vernor's preparations became increasingly desultory.
At first he spent most of his extra time doing things with Alice . . . going to museums, youth orgies, outdoor Hollows, or just wandering around the City . . . but as the months wore on he began spending the larger part of his time getting high at the Angels' hang-out, Waxy's Travel Lounge.
One place Alice loved to go was to the City's Inquarium. On the six-month anniversary of their meeting, Vernor pulled himself together and took her there. Their relationship had begun slowly to erode, and it seemed important to have a good time on this outing.
They paid at the Inquarium's entrance and left their clothes in the dressing room. Vernor wore rented swimfins, but Alice had her own custom-made fins, yellow with red stripes and long trailing edges.
"I want to look like a guppy," Alice explained, fastening yellow and red streamers to herself. Mesmerized, Vernor reached towards the streamers.
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p; "No, no," Alice said, dancing away and flipping into the tank. Vernor jumped in after. The Inquarium was a huge tank, some thirty feet deep and three hundred feet square. The tank was filled with salt water and stocked with fish of every type and description. It was possible to rest on the bottom of the tank watching the fish and dallying with your mermaid, since breathing masks were bubbling at the ends of their hoses all over the tank's bottom.
Under the water Vernor looked around. His vision was clear, as he was wearing special full-eye contact lenses. The breathing masks were like a field of dandelions gone to seed, far below him. Alice was kicking down past a large grouper and through a school of parrot-fish. The streamers from her body flowed back like fins, luring Vernor closer, delicately tugging at her in a way that he longed to emulate.
Before he could catch up with her, down at the bottom with the air masks, he realized hadn't taken a big enough breath. He shot up to the surface, gasped a full lungful and dove again.
Without Alice nearby, Vernor paid more attention to the full tank's appearance. It was as if he had shrunk to a few inches in size and jumped into a twenty-gallon home aquarium. There were kelp plants the size of trees. Dolphins whizzed to and fro, filling Vernor's ears with their squeaks and clicks. Schools of smaller fish darted and wheeled like multi-celled organisms. A large, pug-nosed fish seemed rather too interested in Vernor's swim fins.
With a last mighty kick, he scared off the fish and reached the bottom. He grabbed a foaming air mask and pressed it to his face. Pure oxygen with perhaps a hint of nitrous oxide. Exhilarating! Hanging on to a convenient coral branch, Vernor looked around for Alice.
Soon he was rewarded with the sight of yellow and red swirls behind a nearby reef. He pushed off and swam over to find lovely Alice lazing there, her breasts floating, and a school of fishies darting in her lap. She took a hit from her air mask and passed it to Vernor, her lips parted in a slowly bubbling smile. He followed her streamers forward.
