Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  One of our Rutgers math professors, the short, ropy-lipped Harry Gonshor, was so amazingly off the norm that even the other profs were in awe of him. He wore extremely powerful glasses, and he kept his head perpetually tilted back, so that the glasses seemed to be staring up at you like a toad’s eyes. At all times he carried a briefcase filled with his scribbled math manuscripts.

  Someone told me that Gonshor had been drafted into the army a few years earlier, and that, all through base camp, no matter what the officers said to him, he’d refused to put down his briefcase, not even when he was crawling under barbed wire on the obstacle course. Finally the army gave up and released him as unfit for military service.

  Once Sylvia and I sat with Gonshor on the train into New York City, where he was headed for a meeting of the Game Club. As with most odd mathematicians—once you sat down and talked with the guy, he turned out to be fascinating and intelligent.

  Another memorably weird guy was my fellow mathematics grad student David Slater. Slater had extremely long hair and a tangled beard. He had black lines of dirt under his long fingernails. He often wore an opera cape. He had trouble remembering other people’s names, and would regularly greet me by holding up a wizardly finger and declaiming my middle name—which had somehow found a home in his densely packed brain.

  “Ah! Von Bitter!”

  Slater was the only one of us who bothered to learn anything about computers in those early years. The rest of us assumed we’d never have to deal with those lowly, infernal machines.

  By the spring of 1969, Sylvia had finished the course work for our Master’s degrees. Sylvia now had to take an oral exam to get her Master’s degree. Although she was one of the best students in the program, she was very anxious about the orals—in fact she postponed taking them by a semester. When the big day came, I waited for Sylvia outside the building where she was taking her exam. With nothing else to do besides worry, I focused on the beauty of the physical world. The sun was setting, illuminating the ivy on an old brick wall. And then Sylvia emerged, looking wrung out, but triumphant. When they asked her the first question, her mind had gone utterly blank. But the teachers knew her and liked her. They’d coaxed her along until suddenly she’d remembered everything. She’d passed.

  I was going for a Ph. D., but before starting my thesis, I too had to pass a set of oral exams—these were in the summer of 1969. The math orals were only given once a year, so there were a bunch of us sweating out the preparations. This one guy, call him Roper, had found some weird book of trick problems in higher math, and every time I saw him, he’d zing me with one of them. He was convinced the orals would be all trick questions. I wondered if I’d be able to pass.

  The morning of the orals, I saw Roper in the hall, white as a sheet, with his wife next to him, propping him up. He was vomiting every fifteen minutes. He didn’t pass the exams.

  The way the test was set up, we went from room to room, fielding questions about mathematical subspecialties by different little groups of professors. When I saw Harry Gonshor sitting in with the first group to grill me, I realized this was going to be okay. It was just a matter of talking with some crazy mathematicians. And by now I knew how to do that. I passed the exam.

  Despite all the warning flags surrounding his prickly personality, I asked Erik Ellentuck to be my thesis advisor. In some ways, I liked how unusual the man was. And I found his specialty, mathematical logic, to be the most interesting of the available areas of higher mathematics. I was particularly interested in the area of mathematical logic known as set theory. Set theory teases out facts about different levels of higher infinity.

  To me, set theory felt like mathematical theology—which was a perfect fit for those late Sixties times. And there were certain big problems in set theory that remained stubbornly unsolved. Now that I’d really started studying, I had dreams of becoming a famous mathematician.

  Perhaps, at the gambling tables of set theory, I could break the bank of the infinite.

  White Light

  Late in 1968, Sylvia got pregnant and her belly began to grow. It was amazing. Somewhat recklessly, in June of 1969, when Sylvia was in her seventh month, she and I flew down to visit Embry at his new home on the tiny island of South Caicos, near the end of the long chain of West Indies islands angling out into the Atlantic from the tip of Florida.

  After Embry had been released from the army, he’d gotten a pilot’s license. He was working for Caicos Airways, flying small planes among the islands. He’d met an Irish woman named Noreen who’d been visiting her sister down there. Noreen was wearing a bikini, and Embry proposed to her on the spot. Love at first sight.

  They were married in Ireland by a Catholic priest in 1968. Perversely, my father didn’t attend the wedding, and Sylvia and I couldn’t afford to go either. Loyal Mom was the only one at the wedding to back Embry up. I still feel bad about this.

  It was fascinating to visit Embry and Noreen on South Caicos—everything was slow-paced, and things often happened hours or even days after they were scheduled. Embry called it “island time.” Wild donkeys roamed around, eating people’s gardens. One of the neighbors owned a skinny, mean pig whom he’d named Embry.

  Near the end of our visit in the summer of 1969, we all went to stay with Noreen’s sister, who lived on the slightly more cosmopolitan island of Grand Turk. One of Embry’s friends there took us SCUBA diving—a spacy, otherworldly experience that I would come to love for the rest of my life. Diving is as close to magical flight or to drifting in outer space as we can get.

  I’m fascinated by undersea creatures—the sponges and corals seem like cross-sections of hyperdimensional beings. Often as not, when I need to describe some science fictional beings or settings, I fall back on images I’ve gleaned from snorkeling and diving.

  After our visit to the Turks and Caicos Islands, it was back to New Jersey. Sylvia’s pregnancy was coming to term. By now she was uncomfortable no matter what position she was in. The last night before the birth, I made us a little picnic, and we ate with Dave Hungerford in the park across the street from our apartment building. Sylvia was walking around in an A-shaped blue dress, peering at flowers, lovely in the gathering dusk.

  “She looks like Alice in Wonderland,” said Dave.

  None of our friends had babies yet, and natural childbirth was relatively unheard of—so when Sylvia went into labor on the night of August 22, 1969, we went to the hospital with no idea what to expect.

  It felt strange to be living out so basic and traditional a human scenario, Sylvia huge and in pain, me staring unseeing at magazines in the waiting room. And then a nurse wheeled out a bed with Sylvia—she was still alive! And a second nurse was holding our baby, a little girl, her skin a little waxy looking. Yes, she had ten fingers. One of her bright little eyes was open, and I felt she could see me. One of her pinkies waved. We named her Georgia.

  Sylvia was breast-feeding Georgia, but after we got home, to make things a little easier, every night at three a.m. I’d feed the baby a tiny bottle no bigger than a bottle of ink. That first night at home, it was wonderful to see baby Georgia resting on my forearm, the size of a small loaf of bread, slurping at the bottle in a disorganized newborn way. The moonlight came in through the window behind me, spilling silver over my shoulder and onto the white ink-bottle and the earnest round brow. This was our baby. Our lives had changed forever.

  As a grad student, I had plenty of free time, and I took care of Georgia quite a bit. Sylvia and I were a little unsure of ourselves—I wished the hospital had have given us a book of instructions. Before the nurses sent us on our way, all they did was show us how to change a diaper and how to wrap the baby in a blanket.

  But we had our baby care book by Dr. Spock. We were always thumbing through the index, looking up “crying: redness in, blueness in, shrillness of…” For some reason, Dr. Spock was on the Presidential ballot that year, running under the aegis of the People’s Party. Given how often I was consulting his book,
I went ahead and voted for him.

  Georgia was indeed a big crier for her first few months. Mom and Pop said I’d been the same way too.

  “But was I cute?” I asked Mom.

  “Of course,” put in Pop. “But mostly you cried.”

  I liked caring for Georgia—wheeling her around in her carriage, holding her up in the air, feeding her mushy cereal, bathing her, singing to her in her crib. Every day she seemed a little different. The child care was exhausting, but deeply rewarding. Often as not, as soon as we’d gotten Georgia to sleep, we’d sit down and start looking at pictures of her.

  There weren’t all that many other young fathers around with kids. Sometimes, when I was out wheeling Georgia, a Jersey mother would look at me suspiciously.

  “I don’t know if you have a job, or what?”

  Our parents were thrilled to have a granddaughter, and we all visited each other a zillion times, even flying Georgia over to Geneva in 1969 for her first Christmas. Sylvia and I went out to play in the snow while her parents watched the baby.

  “But you are still children, too!” exclaimed her father when we came in from the snow. “How can you have children?” I was twenty-three.

  With Georgia on the way, we’d moved to a slightly larger apartment in Highland Park. Hungerford, Roger and Eddie helped us with the move. The apartment was basically a retrofitted attic, but the price was right. Georgia’s room was about the size of a VW van, and very dingy. “Looks like the room Dostoevsky grew up in,” I remarked to Hungerford. To cheer it up, I painted the floor blue, and the walls red and white.

  We liked dressing up Georgia in her baby clothes. One particular outfit amused us; it was a pair of pale blue hand-knit overalls that we’d pull over a long-sleeved T-shirt. We’d call her Elmer when she was wearing these particular pants. We liked to bathe her, dress her in her Elmer overalls and lay her on our bed, cooing over her as she looked up at us, wide-eyed and pink-cheeked.

  Sylvia was always pointing things out to Georgia, so much so that her first word was “See!” Before long, Georgia was walking and talking, although not always in familiar words. Once, when she found a nasty-looking root in the sandbox, she told me it was eggpop. I liked that word. For some reason she took to saying the name Malcolm, and just for the sound of it, I’d sometimes call her Malcolm X. She utterly silenced the man behind the deli counter when she told him that was her name.

  Sylvia was wonderful with Georgia, reading to her and teaching her things. She liked showing me the baby’s latest tricks when I’d come home from working on my thesis.

  “Find Quack-Quack!” Sylvia might say to the baby, referring to a particular worn cloth book that Georgia loved. And Georgia would toddle around the room, chattering and smiling, and eventually she’d find the book where Sylvia had hidden it amid a sheaf of newspapers.

  And I remember a magical day in 1970 when we drove Georgia out to the Jersey shore and watched her riding on a tiny little kiddie ride, a toy fire-engine, sitting there ringing the bell. Our hearts nearly burst.

  My mathematical study of higher infinities dovetailed nicely with my growing fascination with mysticism as expressed both in the Western tradition starting with Plato, and in the Eastern teachings of Zen Buddhism. I was fascinated by the concept that I might somehow be able to meet directly with the One Mind.

  I got my meeting on Memorial Day in 1970, when Greg Gibson appeared at our doorstep, on leave from the Navy. He’d brought a dose of the new drug LSD for me. He himself had taken the drug the day before, and hadn’t enjoyed it very much, even though he’d seen the Zap Comix characters Flakey Foont and Mr. Natural, not to mention the Great White Whale. Greg was depressed in any case because he’d just gotten a Dear John letter from his college girlfriend—written in dark purple ink on pale purple paper. But despite Greg’s caveats about the acid, I took my medicine.

  My mind blew like an over-amped light-bulb. There was no evading the ego-death. I was immersed in white light. God. The One. All of a sudden, my theoretical high school notion of merging with the life-force pool had become literally true.

  “I’m always here, Rudy,” the voice told me. “I’ll always love you.”

  I never really recovered from that experience—and I mean this in a good way. Even now, forty years later, I still feel more comfortable about the world, more confident that there is indeed a divine presence that glows in every particle of being. I see the One as sunlight shining through a huge stained glass window, or like a cosmic giant whose body cells we temporarily are. The One is everywhere.

  Although I profited spiritually from my acid trip, I didn’t see much point in taking psychedelics again. It was a one-time door that I’d passed through. I didn’t want to risk ruining my brain. I needed to keep it together to be a husband and a father. And I was hoping to become a big-time mathematician, or maybe even a science fiction novelist. I was becoming ambitious.

  I recall a solitary hike that I took while visiting with Sylvia’s parents in Zermatt that summer. I was an extremely exalted state from the intense exercise in the thin air. I’d been thinking about time and the fourth dimension—a topic that had become dear to me from my repeated readings of Flatland and of the columns of mathematics-writer Martin Gardner. I was beginning to dream of writing about higher dimensions. I felt on the verge of a new approach that nobody had quite nailed down before. I was going to clarify the ways in which time both is and is not like the fourth dimension of space that we talk about in science fiction. And I was going to explain my ideas with new stories about Flatland’s A Square.

  As I walked and thought, alpine beauty ringed me on every side. Coming upon a raging stream, the water gray with the dust of ground-up stones, I realized that, by flicking my eyes from side to side, I could speed up my perception to the point where I could see the instantaneous shapes of the water’s curled, forking claws.

  Just then a quiver of birds darted past, only a few feet from my head. To my ears, they seemed to be squawking a divinatory message from the gods.

  “Genius! Genius!”

  My destiny? I sat by the stream, filled with the promise, happy to be living my life.

  Rutgers was only about twenty miles from Princeton University. Sylvia and I occasionally went over to Princeton to look at the chic stores, bringing Georgia in a stroller. It was always a treat to look at things through her baby eyes.

  Sometimes we’d leave Georgia with a sitter and go to see a show of some kind at Princeton. The Princeton concerts were in a beautiful little wooden theater. Compared to pimply Rutgers, the place was unbelievably posh. I recall an epic performance by the Firesign Theater—this was a group of four or five crazy guys whose comedy act took the format of a radio show, complete with ads and sound effects, liberally sprinkled with left-wing politics and drug references.

  I liked the Firesign Theater more than Sylvia did—in fact I’d listen to their albums with my stereo earphones, absorbing the details as intently as if I were auditing a reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their 1971 masterpiece, We’re All Bozos On This Bus, was essentially a science fiction novella, composed very much in the style that I wanted to use—loaded with street-humor jokes and with what I’d begun to call SF power chords.

  With this term, I was thinking of a literary equivalent of heavy musical riffs that people instantly respond to. A more formal word would be “tropes”. Literature at large has its own tropes or power chords: the unwed mother, the cruel father, the buried treasure, the midnight phone call, the stranger in town and so forth.

  I was beginning to amass a mental list of SF power chords that I loved. Eventually I’d use many of them in my novels and stories. Blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, immersive virtual reality, robots, teleportation, endless shrinking, levitation, the destruction of Earth, pleasure-center zappers, mind viruses, the attack of the giant ants, and—always, always—infinity and the fourth dimension.

  The i
nner heart of Princeton’s intellectual Vatican was the Institute for Advanced Study, where the mighty Einstein had spent his later years, and where the great mathematician Kurt Gödel was now housed. Professors could obtain grants to spend a year or two studying at the Institute, and while I was working on my thesis, my adviser Ellentuck was there. He’d published exceedingly many papers, quite a few of them first-rate.

  In 1970, Ellentuck got me into a set theory seminar at the Institute being run by the visiting mathematician Gaisi Takeuti. I liked Takeuti at first sight, he seemed sly and devil-may-care. Seeker that I was, I asked him a question about Zen.

  “Oh, for us, Zen is very boring,” said Takeuti. “It’s like you feel about going to church.” He wagged his finger, imitating a lecturing priest. But he had a teasing, insolent glint in his eyes that made me wonder if his remark was in fact a deep teaching.

  “Zen is very boring.” Yes!

  There were a couple of Princeton mathematics grad students in the set theory seminar with Takeuti and me, but eventually they dropped out. One of them was such a know-it-all that I imagined his abilities to be far ahead of mine. But he was all talk. When it was this boy’s turn to present a paper to our seminar he botched it—and he didn’t come back.

  “He has lost his face,” said Takeuti.

  A high point of my visits to the Institute was having lunch with Takeuti in the cafeteria. The food was great—you could order up a steak if you wanted—and it was free. Takeuti always ate a lot. He could be bitingly sarcastic about other mathematicians. Once a respected older mathematician joined us for lunch, and eloquently told me that intellectual discourse needed the farfelu—a French word meaning eccentric, weird, or far out. I heartily approved of that.