White Light (Axoplasm Books)

by Rudy Rucker

  “You mean the Devil catches…”

  “Hist!” the old ghost interrupted, looking around frantically. “Don’t say it!”

  Nothing happened, and my companion started talking again. “I’ve stuck it out fifty years.”

  “How do you do it? Do you pray a lot?”

  “Praying’s for suckers,” the ghost said contemptuously. “I ain’t going up and I ain’t going down. I keep nice and quiet and he,” again he held out the two horns, “he don’t bother looking for me. He goes after the showboats.” The ghost paused, looking at me with disapproval. “The way you’re radiating…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “Well, I’m going to start up today,” I repeated. I had a sudden paranoid conviction that this ghost worked as a spotter for the Devil.

  “Where you taking off from?” he asked, as if to confirm my suspicions.

  “None of your business.”

  “That’s the way to be. You could learn to play it safe.” A note of entreaty crept into the ghost’s voice. “Why don’t you forget that Cimön baloney and come in with me? I could show you the ropes…”

  “Maybe later. Thanks anyway.”

  As I started off I could hear the old ghost repeating, “Up or down. Up or down.”

  I still had over an hour to kill until my meet with Kathy. My conversation with the ghost had put my nerves on edge. I wondered how long we could last here. It seemed best to keep moving.

  I went back downtown and sped up and down the bloogy streets. Here and there I saw tattered old ghosts, and once a fresh ghost sped towards me as if for help. I was scared of a trick and shied away into an apartment building.

  I angled through the building, cutting through floors and ceilings. On the top floor I chanced into a bathroom where a woman was about to take a shower. She had long coppery hair, big hips and full breasts. She was in her late thirties, and her body had a soft, broken-in look. I made myself small and followed her into the shower stall. As she washed herself I looked her over from every angle, finally coming to rest between her knees.

  I stared up at her dripping pubic hair, at her large and small curves. She rubbed herself there with a soapy hand, and I exerted all my will to make her keep rubbing. She seemed to feel my horny vibrations. She leaned back against the wall and began using both hands. On a sudden inspiration I took on her form and fit myself into her body. When she came, I felt like I was coming too. Then she started shampooing her hair. I left through the ceiling.

  In the next hour I managed to find several more attractive women in bed or in the bathroom. With the pressure of my disembodied will I was able to get two of them to masturbate while I luxuriated in their excited flesh. It definitely seemed to be possible for a ghost to influence the behavior of a person. I could see turning into a full-time incubus.

  At noon I was waiting for Kathy on top of the Prudential tower. Thirty minutes, an hour went by and she still hadn’t shown. Maybe she had decided to give me the slip? Or maybe she had just lost track of the time.

  I flew over Cambridge. I paused to admire the strange, polyhedral bloogs streaming out of the M.I.T. buildings, and then I began searching the streets, looking for a green seagull among the crowds of people and bloogs. Nothing.

  I decided to try something different. I flew up a few hundred feet and concentrated on what Kathy’s voice and vibrations had been like. I closed down my sensitivity to all other inputs and scanned all of Cambridge. Still nothing.

  Tuned only to Kathy’s wavelength, I swept back and forth over Boston. And then I caught something like a strangled scream. I homed in on the sensation and traced it to a storefront in South Boston. “Madame Jeanne Delacroix,” a handpainted sign in the window read, “Spirit Healing. Psychic Surgery. Secret Love Problems. Let the Dead Help You!”

  The large window behind the sign was covered with a dingy cream curtain. You could see where lettering saying “Gianelli’s Produce” had been scraped off. Beat-looking cars were parked along one side of the street, and there was a bar and liquor-store a half block away. In a rubble-filled lot between Madam Jeanne’s and the bar, some skinny black men were drinking wine on a bench they had made by ripping out a car’s back seat. The sunlight was pouring down on them.

  Kathy was definitely inside Madame Jeanne’s. I could feel her vibrations perfectly now. She was frantic, trapped. I tried to signal her, but she was too panicky to notice. I went into the vacant lot and cautiously stuck my head in through Madame Jeanne’s wall.

  A big black woman in a purple robe and a dirty pink turban was sitting at a card table with her back to me. She wore several rosaries around her neck, and lying on the table in front of her was a black rooster with his throat torn out. The rooster’s blood was in a bowl. Something about the warm blood was very attractive to me. I had a strong urge to bathe myself in it.

  I could sense that Kathy was in a round box which rested on the table. It was decorated with Christian symbols. I guessed it was a pyx stolen from some church. Apparently she couldn’t get out of it. To me, and probably to Madame Jeanne, the sound of Kathy’s struggles filled the room.

  Across the table from Madame Jeanne sat a slender young black woman with a limp child in her lap. A boy, about three. He seemed to be in some kind of coma or catatonic state. His breathing was even and his eyes were open, but all his muscles were slack.

  “I have obtained the requisitory spirit driver for your firstborn son,” Madame Jeanne was saying in an island-accented voice. “Lay him down on the altar of Baal.”

  The young woman laid her son on the card table, which sagged but held the weight. Madame Jeanne prepared to put Kathy into the boy’s body. She dipped a long silk cord into the rooster’s blood. Using a pair of plastic chopsticks she led one end of the dripping cord in through the boy’s left nostril, down his throat, and back out his mouth. She attached the two ends of the cord to opposite points on the circumference of a round two-sided mirror.

  Humming tunelessly, Madame Jeanne lit a candle between the pyx and the boy’s head, then lifted the mirror up by the cords to a point over the candle. She pulled the cords into a taut horizontal on either side of the mirror, and began rolling the cords between her fingers. The mirror spun. The reflection of the candle danced inside the spinning mirror like a firefly in a glass sphere.

  Kathy was supposed to fly into the mirror and be permanently absorbed into the little boy. Somehow I was sure it would work. Madame Jeanne looked like she knew what she was doing. I was going to have to take action.

  There was no doubt that Madame Jeanne would be able to see me. But she hadn’t looked my way yet. I would hide until the crucial instant when she opened the pyx.

  Madame Jeanne was talking to the young mother again. “You will handle the radiation gem, sister.” She handed the mirror over. “Do as I have done and likewise.” The young woman began twirling the mirror over the candle flame. I came all the way into the room and edged up behind Madame Jeanne.

  She was swaying slowly now and mumbling, “Amen. Ever and forever, glory the and power the, kingdom the is thine for. Evil from…” She was reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards. I made myself small and darted past her to hide inside the candle flame.

  “Heaven in art who Father our,” she concluded, and reached down to open the pyx. The mirror over the candle was spinning steadily. I couldn’t look at it without being drawn towards it. Silently I prayed for help.

  When the pyx opened, there was an instant when Kathy was too shocked to move. Quickly I formed myself into a wall between her and the mirror.

  “Come away, Kathy, come away.”

  She began moving through me, but then Madame Jeanne noticed me and screamed. I projected some ugly claws out towards her to make it louder.

  The noise surprised the woman holding the mirror. Her spinning faltered, and the wet cord slipped out of her fingers. The mirror fell on the table and broke. Kathy was flying around the candle flame like a moth. I kept talking to her, but it wasn’t
sinking in.

  Madame Jeanne was screaming still, but now it was words. “Black father, hah, I say to you, yeah, I say rider of the sea, the superbest blossom, be with thy servant, hah, at the altar, yeah, I priestess of the night…” I could see something beginning to materialize at her side. She saw it too and began screaming louder and faster. “I will it, yeah, jumby you are coming in the domicile…”

  The form grew clearer, developing like a print in a safelit bath of chemicals. It was going to be the Devil. Kathy was stuck in the candle flame. I surrounded her and pulled.

  “Frank?” she said faintly. “Can I go home now?”

  “Kathy!” I blasted. “The Devil’s coming. Go straight up!”

  Just then he solidified next to Madame Jeanne. He bent to sniff the bowl of blood, and then he spotted me. His thick lips parted slowly.

  “Follow me, Kathy,” I shrilled, and rocketed through the ceiling. I didn’t look back, and I didn’t stop for a long time.

  No. 8

  The Speed of Light

  Kathy caught up with me somewhere near the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.

  When I heard her calling me, I stopped. I was tense and ready to flee. The girlish seagull perched on my shoulder. I looked down through the empty miles of space beneath my feet. Nothing but bloogs following each other along invisible lines of force. It looked like the Devil hadn’t bothered to chase us.

  “I’m not going back there, Kathy.”

  She gave a delicate shudder. “But what about that poor little boy?”

  “Madame Jeanne will find another soul. Or his mother will try a different doctor. I don’t know.” She had distracted me from the point. “We are not going back to Earth,” I said firmly.

  “I shouldn’t have trusted her,” Kathy said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “She was yellow. A yellow bell, and her voice echoed. I met her in Cambridge and we flew over to South Boston together. She was going to show me where she stays.” Kathy’s voice was distant. “She took me to Madame Jeanne’s, and then they cut the rooster’s neck. I was so thirsty…”

  I interrupted. “I didn’t see any yellow ghost at Madame Jeanne’s.”

  “She lived inside Madame Jeanne. She said it was safer for a ghost to be inside a live person.”

  I told her about my conversation at the museum. “It seems,” I concluded, “that if you’re a ghost, you’re supposed to leave Earth for Cimön.”

  “How?”

  “Cimön is alef-null miles from Earth. Alef-null is the first infinite number. It’s like One, Two, Three,…Alef-Null. The three dots stand for forever.”

  “How are we supposed to get past forever?” Kathy asked impatiently. “No matter how fast we fly, we’ll never be infinitely far away from Earth.”

  “We keep accelerating. The first billion miles takes us 2 hours. The next takes us 1 hour. We do the third billion miles in a half hour. Each billion miles takes half as long as the one before. We can go alef-null billion miles in 2+1+½+¼…hours. That adds up to four hours.”

  “I thought no one could go faster than light,” Kathy challenged.

  “Neither will we. All we’ll really be doing is accelerating up to the speed of light.”

  “Then how come it looks like we’ll be going so much faster?”

  “It’s all in the relativistic time dilation. Don’t worry about it.”

  Kathy was doubtful. “In four hours we’ll be infinitely far away from Earth? Milestone alef-null?”

  I nodded.

  Kathy perched on my back and spread her wings. Her body trembled like a taut bow. I put my arms out ahead of me Superman style. We put the hammer down and were off in the direction of the galactic center.

  The first part of the trip was dull. Although we were accelerating steadily, it still took an hour to get out of the solar system. And then we had an hour and a half of vacuum till the next star.

  About three hours into our trip it began to get interesting. Objectively we were doing about .7 the speed of light. Because of our distorted time and length standards, it felt like we were doing three times that. Weird relativistic effects began setting in.

  It seemed like we were looking out of a cave. All behind us and on both sides of us there was the dead absolute nothing called “Elsewhere” in relativity theory. The stars had somehow all scooted their images around to in front of us. We accelerated harder.

  The thousand light-year trip across the galaxy only seemed to take half an hour. But what a half hour. I would be looking out our speed-cone at the vast disk of stars that lay ahead of me…most of them clinging to the edge. Slowly one of the stars would detach itself from the clustered edge and accelerate along a hyperbolic path towards the center, then zow it would whip past us and go arcing back out to the edge of our visual field.

  There was a pattern to the flicker of passing stars, and I began to get into it. It was like listening to the clicking of train wheels. Everything but the swooping pulses of light faded from my attention. I pushed to make the flickering come faster.

  There were patterns to the flicker…star clusters…and as we accelerated more I began to see second- and third-order patterns. Suddenly the stars stopped. We were out of the galaxy.

  Our visual field had contracted so much that I felt myself to be looking out of a porthole. There was dark on all sides and I knew fear. My back was a knot of pain, but I drove myself to accelerate more and more, to make the porthole smaller.

  A few squashed disks of light tumbled out from infinity and whizzed back. Then more and more came twisting past. Galaxies. I felt like a gnat in a snowstorm. We flew through some of the galaxies. Inside was a happy blur. We were going much too fast to see the individual stars hurtle past.

  We pushed harder, harder. We hit a galaxy every few seconds now, and as before I began to detect higher-order patterns in the stroboscopic flicker.

  From then on that was all I could see…a flicker which would build and build to an almost constant flash, abruptly drop in frequency, and then build again. At the end of each cycle we reached a higher level of clustering and the light became brighter.

  I was on the ragged edge of exhaustion. The strobing was building castled landscapes in my mind. My lucidity was fading fast as I stared into the more and more involuted blur of light before me. I tried to make it come faster.

  There was still a certain depth to the pattern of light ahead of us, but I noticed that the harder I pushed the accelerator, the shallower and more two-dimensional the scene in front of me became. I concentrated on flattening it out.

  The energy to push no longer seemed to emanate from me or from Kathy. It was as if I were somehow ram-jetting the incoming light right through us…applying only a certain shift of perspective to move us ever faster.

  “Come on Kathy,” I cried. My voice warped and dragged. “It’s just a little further. One big push!”

  With a final effort we turned the universe into a single blinding point of light. I stopped pushing and the point unfurled into a flat vertical landscape. An infinite half-plane. The lower edge was sea and the upper half was an endless mountain. It looked like a tremendous painting, like Breugel’s Fall of Icarus.

  We crashed into the landscape like a starling into a billboard. And landed on a green hillside. The ground was soft, and it giggled when we hit. Thop. Gli-gli-gli-hi-hi.

  My body was solid. I sat up. Kathy hopped off my back and fluttered awkwardly to land a few feet away. She needed her wings now.

  There was a tingle of salt in the steady breeze. In the distance I could see a shimmering blue line of water. A sea. Was that prickly smudge a harbor?

  There was something funny about the perspective here. The sea seemed to be tilting away from us. It was as if it were just a continuation of the slope we found ourselves on.

  I turned and looked behind us, half expecting to see only blackness. But instead there was a mountain. Mount On. Green and yellow meadows humped and reared themselves up towards th
e heavens. Here and there large boulders lay in the grass. Higher up, outcroppings of rock poked through the meadows, which grew ever steeper. I peered higher. Way up there I could see jagged peaks, painfully sharp, piled one atop the other. There was no end. The mountain stretched forever into the luminous blue sky.

  To the left and right were more hills leading from more sea up to more mountain. The overall perspective was very strange. It was as if the whole landscape were somehow flat, with all those cliffs and peaks an illusion. It was only that the force of gravity was trying to drag everything out to sea.

  A mile up the slope from us I noticed a building. It looked like one of those huge old European resort hotels. As I stared at it I could make out more and more features. Terraces, balconies, painted window frames and whitewashed walls. Something about the upper floors seemed peculiar. It was as if there were too much there. I had noticed the same thing about the pattern of rocks and grass on the mountainside beyond. If one stared at certain spots, more and more new details kept appearing.

  “Let’s go look at that hotel,” I suggested to Kathy. She had been staring down the slope towards the distant sea, and I had to repeat myself to get her attention.

  “Seagulls don’t climb mountains, Felix,” she said softly. “My path is down there. I can feel it…” Her voice trailed off in a jumble I couldn’t make out.

  I thought back on my conversation with Jesus. Had it only been 12 hours ago? I had promised to save Kathy, to bring her up from Earth. I was going to climb Mount On. Was I supposed to drag her along?

  I sank into thought, and before long I had an answer. Once you had escaped the Devil, you still had to find your way to God. But there were many ways.

  I reached out towards Kathy and she flew up and landed on my hand. Her feet were strong and her claws pricked into me. I held her against my chest and stroked her feathers. I could feel the rapid beating of her heart.