White Light (Axoplasm Books)

by Rudy Rucker

  In a few minutes I had it. The square root of 443,556 is 666. According to the Book of Revelations 666 is the number of the Beast, i.e. the Devil, i.e. the leathery-winged creature who had chased me out from under my desk Tuesday afternoon. It all fit.

  I took the scrap of paper out of my pocket and examined it closely. Could I have written it myself? Perhaps I really had an astral body, had read the tag, subconsciously taken the square root, imagined the Devil by association, and had written myself this note with my mirror-reversed astral body. I held the paper tightly. If it disappeared, I’d know I was crazy. That was the second possibility. And the third? It was unthinkable.

  When I heard the bell tolling nine o’clock I got up and started across the quad to Todd Hall. A fine rain was falling. On an impulse I crumpled up the triangle of paper and threw it in a litter basket. “You imagined the whole thing,” I told myself, “you’ve just been under too much stress.”

  As I approached the stone steps leading up to Todd, my thoughts fell comfortably into a familiar litany of complaint. Was this really my life? What had Levin said? “I never dreamed it would turn out so fucking poor.” Twenty-seven years of training, of hopes and dreams had led only to this, teaching arithmetic at SUCAS.

  I mounted the steps, face level with the ordinary denim butt of a student several steps ahead of me. Suddenly she let out a skirling cry, kicked out her right leg, and fell down in a fit, head nodding ecstatic agreement to that old-time nerve music.

  My feeling of alienation from the SUCAS community was such that I simply picked my way around her. Someone else would be eager to help…one of the most popular majors on campus was “Special Education.” As I neared the top of the steps the doorway swung open and a blind student came out. I stepped aside, and he tapped past me, only to trip over the epileptic and fall onto her.

  It hurt a little to see them bashing around on those stone steps, and I hesitated, on the verge of helping. Her brown hair was webbed across her spitty face, and her hand was beating his pathetically pale back, acned and exposed to light where his cheap plaid shirt had rucked up. He continued loudly to apologize. A husky blond girl came running across the quad, slipped, twisted her ankle and fell horribly at the foot of the steps. I went ahead into Todd, guilty and depressed.

  I was five minutes late for class now, and the halls were practically empty. I hurried past the open doors of the classrooms where my colleagues were already hard at work – collecting homework, giving quizzes, reading from their notes. Wildon spotted me and pointedly looked at his watch.

  As I neared my classroom I tried to remember what we had done in our last class, and wondered what I’d talk about today. My deaf student was waiting for me outside the classroom. “Hewwah,” she said. I smiled and nodded.

  “I haw a pwabwah,” she continued, turning her face up to me. She was touching, but understood almost none of the material. Of course she would pass. I smiled and nodded again, embarrassed to talk.

  “Yaw haw tah kahp yah han awah fwah yah math,” she said, acting out what she meant by covering her face. “I haw tah see tha lip.”

  “I’ll try,” I mouthed, and we went into the class. The class consisted of thirty girls and three dispirited males, one of whom was me.

  There were three key students in this class. One, named Melanie, was a creditable likeness of the young, confused-by- her-bursting-sexuality Marilyn Monroe. Karen, the second, looked like April as a depraved seventeen-year-old. Fina, the anchor-person, had a false tooth and was so deliciously greasy that I had gone so far as to have coffee with her the week before.

  Today only Karen was there, and her fat sullen lips seemed to whisper in April’s voice. “I’m so unhappy. You don’t love me. I want to live my own life.” This was not going to be a fun class. I was glad I’d at least thrown the paper away. It was better to be crazy than to be getting letters from the Devil.

  I walked over to the window, opened it, and leaned out to see how the big pile-up was progressing. I still couldn’t believe it… three people at once. What was I doing in this zoo? The steps were clear now, but as I watched a student with greasy black hair trotted past, slipped badly, and acted out an elaborate pantomime of shock at this chance mishap. He even looked at the sole of his shoe.

  I pulled my head back in and glanced at the clock. It was ten after. If I let them out five minutes early that still left 35 minutes to kill. “Well,” I said, sitting down and leafing through our text, “Are there any questions about the homework?”

  A dead silence. The class stared at me dully without even any of the usual flickers of lust or contempt. None of us could remember if there had ever been any homework in this course. Why were we here? “Should we have a test soon?” I ventured in desperation.

  And that took care of the rest of the period. We set the test for Monday, and questions about it poured forth. Under the pressure of the situation I produced a philosophy of testing and a course outline. Finally we knew what we were there for. They left the room well-pleased.

  I spent the next hour teaching Calculus II, which I genuinely enjoyed. There is something beautiful about a science which enables you to compute the volume of an egg and the surface area of a beer bottle. The students responded well, and I got off some good one-liners.

  I had one other class, Foundations of Geometry, which met Tuesday and Friday afternoons. But today was Wednesday, so at 11:00 I was through for the day. It was pouring rain again, and I had to run across the quad to my office. Levin was sitting at his desk eating one of his strange-smelling sandwiches and looking through a stack of fat books.

  “Hi Stuart,” I said, “How’s law?”

  “The Law is just,” he answered. “I could stand it for thirty grand a year. I keep telling myself that I’m not selling out…just buying in.” He gave a short chuckle. “And you? Ready for one of your famous naps?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “No, no. No more naps, not after yesterday.” I went on to tell him about my lucid dreams and my astral body, about the creature I’d seen yesterday, and about the note I’d found this morning. Levin quietly finished his sandwich while I talked. “Well,” I concluded, “It’s a relief to lay it all out like this. I guess it sounds pretty crazy when you hear it all at once.”

  “It does,” Levin said, looking at me sympathetically. “I think if I were you, I’d try to get on a different track. Maybe even see a shrink. If you keep up like this you’re going to give yourself a heart attack. Die of fear while you’re sleeping.”

  “That’s really encouraging, Stuart. But don’t you think it might be real? What about the numbers?”

  He shrugged. “I notice that you got rid of the note before showing it to anyone else. Offhand, I’d just have to say you’re going nuts. On the other hand…” He thought for a minute. “I saw a book somewhere about dreams like that…some friend of Bernadine’s had it. It was by a guy called Monroe and was called Journeys Out of the Body. When you’ve calmed down a little, you might try checking it out.”

  I wrote the name and title down. Another question occurred to me. “You come in here late on Tuesday’s don’t you?” Levin nodded and I continued. “Did you see anything funny here yesterday?”

  “Well,” Levin said, his head splitting in that long smile, “there was this guy with red eyes and a barbed tail who wanted to see you. I told him to leave a note.”

  I had to laugh. “All right, all right. I’m going crazy. A lot you care.” I put my leather jacket and an old felt hat I’d gotten from my father. “I’m going to get lunch and walk in the rain.”

  “Think about math, Felix,” Levin advised seriously as I walked out. “It’ll take your mind off your nervous breakdown.”

  No. 4

  Bernco

  I toiled up the steep asphalt to Bernco’s main street, called Main Street. It was still raining hard, and water was flowing down the pavement in ruffled sheets. I had decided to eat at Sammy’s, a diner run by the present mayor of Bernco. He held court in a
cloud of cigar-smoke at the end of the counter while a fat woman with whiskers served the customers. This woman looked exactly like Sammy, even to the brilliantined hair. She ate things while she worked.

  My breakfast had worn off quickly, and on the walk up I had already designed the ideal sandwich for today. I sat at the counter near the grill and gave the fat woman my order.

  “I’d like a meat-loaf sandwich on white toast with butter and mayonnaise, lettuce and a slice of swiss. And a cup of tea.”

  “Mmmm, that sounds yummy,” she said, her voice sweet with saliva.

  She gave me my tea, served someone a cheeseburger and an order of fries, then built my sandwich. I watched her with absorption, feeling an architect’s pride. Finally it was ready, mounted on a little fluted paper plate with a spear of pickle and a handful of potato chips. I sat back with a receptive smile.

  But then that fat waitress turned her back to me, leaned over the sandwich, and ate it all – rapidly and in silence.

  I entered a fog of rage. Expressionlessly I choked down my eventual sandwich – a juiceless cardboard replica of the consumed masterpiece. Without so much as a raised eyebrow I watched a man bring his dog behind the counter for raw hamburger. The fat woman fed it with her spatula. Numbly I paid the check and left. The dog was barking for another round.

  The rain was coming down so hard I just stood under Sammy’s awning for a minute. There was a big puddle on the sagging sidewalk, and the fat drops pounded into it. Quick circles of ripples flashed into existence, moiréd, damped out. I stared into the puddle, losing myself in the patterns.

  There was a bookstore down the block. A curly-haired hippie who called himself Sunfish ran the store, deserted today. He sat near the window in a beat old lawn chair shaped like two scallop shells. He was visibly depressed.

  “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, Sunfish?”

  “Felix! Got any textbook orders for me?” Business glinted in his pale bloodshot eyes.

  “No, I’m just…”

  “A useless parasite!” Sunfish cried heatedly. More New Yorker than hippie, he made a habit of starting arguments with his customers. It added texture to his life.

  “I don’t know why nobody seems to think I have a real job,” I complained. “Just worrying about what I’ll do after I get fired takes so much…”

  “Listen to him! Next week he’ll have an ulcer.”

  I sighed and turned to look at a rack of fantasy books. Sunfish loved fantasy. Suddenly I felt him standing right behind me.

  “That’s a good one,” he said, pointing over my shoulder. He had dog breath.

  “How come you’re standing so much closer to me than I am to you?” I rapped out cuttingly.

  Sunfish threw his hands up and walked back to his chair. “Eh! The guy is touchy.”

  I felt ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry. I have a lot of problems.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “You got any books on astral travel? There’s one by a guy called Monroe?”

  “In stock,” Sunfish said, waving towards the back of the store. “Last shelf on the right.” He went back to staring at the rain.

  I spent the better part of an hour in the back of the store. A few customers came and went – mostly students seeking out this or that recommended reading. Sunfish made short work of them.

  I read some of Monroe’s book – particularly the passages on how to get back into your body once you’re out of it. But he didn’t seem to have the same problems with this that I did. There were three copies of Monroe’s book, and I almost didn’t notice the little pamphlet wedged behind them. I fished it out, wondering at its curious title-page:

  Cimön and How to Get There

  F.R.

  That was all. No publisher’s imprint and no date. The pages were flimsy and slippery.

  The significance of the initials was not lost on me, and I looked into the pamphlet with a numinous feeling of expectation. “Cimön is the land of dreams and departed spirits,” the first part began.

  A detailed description, with diagrams of Cimön, filled the first half of the pamphlet. It was too much for me to absorb, but the diagrams stick in my mind. One was like a thermometer. My head was swimming when I got to the second part. I hadn’t moved for half an hour and my legs were cramping.

  “In normal space,” the How to Get There part of the pamphlet began, “Cimön is infinitely far away. For the dreamer this poses no problem, but for the fully discorporate…”

  “You still there, Felix?” Sunfish shouted in a friendly voice.

  I was ready for a break. I took the pamphlet up to him. “How much is this?”

  He studied it for a minute. “What’s Cimön?”

  “It was behind the Monroe books.”

  He handed it back to me. “Is yours, amigo. I never saw it before.”

  “Then how did it get here?” I was thinking of the scrap of paper I’d found on my desk that morning.

  Sunfish finished a yawn and leaned back in his pale-green lawn-chair. “There’s always weirdos leaving stuff in here. Or the shipper threw it in.” He paused, then remarked, “The Dead are going to be in the City tomorrow.” Sunfish’s one real enthusiasm was going to Grateful Dead concerts.

  “You driving down?”

  He nodded with a smile. “They’ll play all night. It’s for Halloween. You ought to come.”

  I shook my head and folded the pamphlet into my coat pocket. “My brain’s already falling out.”

  It was still raining too hard for a walk, so I decided to go to the Drop Inn. I had enough money left for two beers. The Drop Inn was on Bernco’s only non-residential side-street, and enjoyed a certain notoriety. All the heads in town drank there…which still left plenty of room for the odd derelict.

  The only other patron at the Drop Inn today was a wizened farmhand with gum boots which reached his knees. He seemed to be chewing something.

  The barmaid had a Jackson Browne record on, and was watching the rain like everyone did in Bernco. “Aren’t you a math professor?” she asked me after I’d ordered a large dark draft.

  “I didn’t think it showed.”

  She smiled. “I’m Mary. I have a friend who’s in your Geometry course. Tom Percino. He says it’s really far out.”

  I didn’t know my students’ names yet, and tried to guess which one this girl would be friends with. She had lank dark hair, and a kind oval face made plain by some quarter-inch displacement of the chin. Something about her made you think of the Great Depression, the Dustbowl, Ritz Cracker Pie. I had only one Geometry student who looked like an Okie.

  “Is your friend tall and with a little black mustache?” When Mary nodded I added, “Yeah, I know him.” I had been talking a lot about the fourth dimension in the Geometry course, and Percino wanted to do his term paper on UFOs. He said he’d seen one that summer in Bernco.

  I pulled at the tingling beer. “He’s into UFOs, isn’t he?”

  Mary leaned across the bar. “He says you said they all come from the fourth dimension.”

  I chuckled cautiously, “I’m not sure I said that.” My position here was precarious enough without people saying I taught about UFOs. “I don’t really like UFOs,” I continued. “They’re too materialistic. It’s like, sure, there’s more to reality than just this…” I gestured at the barroom, the rain, Earth, “But to take your idea of something higher and just turn it into a guy in a machine, a machine from outer space… That’s so pathetically materialistic. The beyond is right here all the time…” I ran my hand along the wooden bar, looking at the grain. I felt light-headed.

  The barmaid enjoyed the rap, but was by no means converted on the spot. “Yeah,” she said. “For sure. But Tom and I really saw one this summer. Up on Temple Hill.”

  “You mean the graveyard?”

  She nodded and continued. “We were sleeping-out there when we saw it. It started out like a mushroom and then grew big and flew away.” She threw her hands in the air. “It
was so beautiful.”

  I pushed my empty glass forward and she brought me another beer. “That’s not the most reliable sighting I ever heard of,” I said. “Or maybe you both did see something, but why does it have to be another damned machine? Why couldn’t it have been God or an angel or living energy from dimension Z?”

  “It sounded like a machine,” she said and made a whirring noise. We both laughed. A group of students came in then and she went over to serve them. The old farmhand was still propped against the middle of the bar, staring into a shotglass of whiskey and repeatedly pursing his thin lips. I took my beer and sat down at one of the tables.

  The first beer had warmed my stomach and my brain was ticking over nicely. I remembered Levin’s advice and decided to think about math, about the Continuum Problem…a problem whose hundredth birthday was just around the corner.

  On December 13, 1873, the 28-year-old Georg Cantor brought the Continuum Problem to light by proving that there are more points in space than there are natural numbers. The problem is how much more?

  Any continuous piece of space is called a continuum. A line segment, the surface of a balloon, the space inside your head, the endless universe…all these are continua. Cantor discovered that viewed as sets of points all continua have the same degree of infinity, which he called c. The degree of infinity of the set of all natural numbers is called alef-null, and the next larger degree of infinity is called alef-one. In 1873, Cantor gave the first proof that c is greater than alef-null. Even if you lived forever and a day, you would not be able to assign a natural number to each and every point in space. The Continuum Problem is to decide how much greater c is than alef-null. Cantor thought c should be alef-one, the next infinity. But no one knows if he was right.